Winter 2007

James Van Nuys Paints Black Hills Skies

Digital Version

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Paperback Version

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With one final brush stroke, Black Hills artist James Van Nuys declares the painting a success.We’re standing in his studio, which on this unseasonably warm mid-November day, happens to be on a high bluff in the Buffalo Gap National Grassland south of New Underwood. The object of his aesthetic affection is the Black Hills horizon, as it crescendos toward crown jewel...

Dave Oyler: Boys to Men

If you plan on sitting down for a chat with Dave Oyler about his 40-year tenure at the Rapid City Club for Boys, don’t forget your box of Kleenex. I defy even the most hard-hearted of souls to spend even a half-hour with Dave, listening to him talk about “his boys,” without shedding a tear or two.Dave doesn’t mean to make you snivel like an emotional fool. It’s just that he’s the kind of rare individual whose passion for his profession has absolutely not dimmed...

Dr. Larry Agenbroad: Them Bones are Gonna Rise Again

On a cold, stormy day in October of 1971, a professor and his group of college students were on their way to explore a bed of bones discovered more than seven years earlier by Albert Meng, a Crawford, NE rancher. Meng had uncovered the bones while excavating a watering pond for his cattle in 1954. He was convinced that his discovery was important, but he couldn’t find anyone who agreed with him — certainly not anyone with the academic and scientific background to appreciate...

Edith Weber Runs for her Life

Marathons are a spectator’s sport for about five hours. The crowd waiting at the finish line begins to thin out after that. The majority of runners have crossed the finish line, and race organizers start calling it a day. If you’re Edith Weber, your day isn’t over yet. You still have a few miles to go. But you’ve learned not to expect people to stick around to watch you finish. That this 76-year-old Piedmont woman would attempt such a feat is enough to defy most...

Jean Wise: Gone to the Dogs…and loving it

It’s a bit like riding in Santa’s sleigh.This is what pops into my mind after climbing behind Jean Wise on her four-wheeler and taking a fast and furious ride around “the patch”—which on this frosty early-November Monday morning, happens to be the Pactola-area neighborhood near Jean’s home.Funny thing is, the four wheeler is not even turned on, and we’re traveling at speeds of at least five miles per hour. And instead of Dasher, Dancer, Prancer and all those reindeer...

Kenny Walker: From the Ghetto to the Gym

Fortunately, Kenny Walker doesn’t remember the first dramatic event of his life. He was only six months old when his mother stormed into the Akron, Ohio hospital where he was staying, took a few solid punches at the nurse who was holding him in her arms, grabbed her son and ran for her life. As Kenny tells it, she never looked back.This was 1956, and in those years—in that place—had Tommie Lee Walker been caught on her way out of that hospital, she would have likely been...

Lucy Graesser: A Long Distance Courtship for the Long-Term

If you ask Lucy Graesser what it was like to grow up under Communism, how she got to America, the cultural differences between the Ukraine and the United States, she may smile and say: “It is all in my book. ”It’s not that Lucy doesn’t like questions or that she’s being rude or impatient. The answers really are in her book, From America With Love, published in 2006.The problem is that the book is in Russian. Take the question about what it was like to grow up under...