TERRY WOSTER

Many great news stories packed into a short stint

To say Terry DeVine and I worked together in the AP bureau in Pierre for a bit more than a year is to stretch things. We were assigned to the same bureau at the same time. We were rarely there together.

March 13, 2010

Opinion: Free-flowing Missouri thing of past — and that’s good

Back on the farm, my folks tended to do their medical business in Chamberlain, but my aunt and uncle often traveled to Pierre to such appointments.
I can recall one year when I was invited to ride along with my cousin and his family. I was pretty excited, because a trip to Pierre seemed like a pretty exotic thing back then. My excitement was for nothing. Before the day of the scheduled appointment, the Missouri River flooded, and the bridge across the Bad River in Fort Pierre was closed to traffic. Whether the bridge washed out or simply went under water, I can’t remember. I just know I didn’t get to travel with my cousin to Pierre, and the flooded river was the reason.

March 10, 2010

Nothing beats aroma of an old burger joint

The world is full of hamburger joints, but they lack the incredible aroma of those old-time cafes you could find along the side of the road in almost every town in South Dakota when I grew up.
I remember most the smell of hamburger patties frying on a grill as broad as the deck of an aircraft carrier. At a corner of the grill, hamburger buns browned slowly. While the burger fried, the cook cut a huge pickle into thin slices to toss atop the patty. The finished burger came to the table with the edges fried black and the center deep brown and oozing juice.

March 06, 2010

Opinion: Cell phones don’t necessarily make life better

Time was, a telephone brought people closer to each other.
The old party-line telephone network stretched across the prairies of South Dakota when I was a kid. It was the social bridge in a country where driveways sometimes ran off over the far horizon.

March 03, 2010

For the blooper reels

If we’d had sports highlight reels back when I was playing basketball for Chamberlain, the time Roger Miller knocked me flat on the court surely would have gotten some air time.

February 27, 2010

Opinion: Hopefully, flooding won’t be nearly as bad as ’97

Some years ago, the water softener in our basement popped a valve in the middle of the night, and water sprayed across the room for three or four hours.
Our basement stairs descend four steps, then make a right angle and go down another seven steps. When I made the turn at the first landing that morning, I saw water covering the bottom step. It isn’t easy for the mind to comprehend that sight first thing in the morning.

February 24, 2010

Opinion: Is your future charted? It’s not easy to decide what you want next in life

One of the first people I met when I transferred from Creighton University to South Dakota State College in the fall of 1963 was a Hermosa kid named John Meiners.
John had just transferred, also. He’d spent two years at the School of Mines and Technology before he decided he had no interest in becoming an engineer. We were thrown together on the fourth floor in Brown Hall, and we became fast friends.

February 17, 2010

Opinion: Tenuous drive home: Wet conditions made for long ride after ballgame

I’ll admit that when the light-colored Ford sedan blew past me last Saturday evening halfway between Reliance and Kennebec on Interstate 90, I was tempted to kick the accelerator down a notch or two and follow the taillights through the fog.
I was driving my pickup, heading home from a Chamberlain-Winner basketball doubleheader in which the granddaughters played the nightcap. I went to the armory with my son Scott about 3:30 that afternoon to watch a ninth-grade game. We stayed through a JV match and the boys’ varsity before my girls took the floor for the Lady Cubs varsity.

February 10, 2010

Captain 11 is gone, but not soon forgotten

Sometime in the mid-1970s, Captain 11 made a personal appearance at Burke Real Estate here in Pierre, and I took Jennifer and Scott down to see him in the lot across the street from the old junior high school. We can prove we did it, because somewhere in the albums in the basement, we have a photo of the Captain, the two kids and me, standing there mugging for the camera.

February 06, 2010

Opinion: RIP, Buddy Holly: 1950s rocker set an example for kid from Reliance

This is the anniversary of the day in 1959 when Buddy Holly died.
He was 22, and had been a rock and roll superstar for a couple of years when the airplane carrying him and two other rock musicians from Clear Lake, Iowa, to Moorhead, Minn., crashed in a cornfield. Ritchie Valens was 17, while the singer they called the Big Bopper was 28.

February 03, 2010

Opinion: Human nature exposed in '50s show 'The Millionaire'

Back in the early days of television, when folks in Lyman County were proud to have a television tower right there on Medicine Butte, one of the most popular series was a show called “The Millionaire.”

January 30, 2010

Opinion: Headline writing no easy task; clunkers are bound to appear

How a person arranges words is important, regardless of how informal the world of communications is becoming.
I know I harp on this point, but: I was reading a story the other day about a study that concluded people who sit a lot, whether at work, at home or somewhere else, have greater chance of health risks that would lead them to an untimely death. What the headline in at least one publication said, though, was, “People who sit a lot have a greater chance of dying.”

January 27, 2010

Legislator Curt Jones, and all of his old-time stories, will be missed

Art Jones was a Marshall County farmer whose last year in the South Dakota Senate coincided with my first year as a legislative reporter. Art was a Democrat and a staunch supporter of the rural electric cooperatives. I met him during that 1970 session, but I didn’t have regular contact with him.

January 23, 2010

Opinion: Even older brothers-in-law have a Facebook ‘thing’

The whole social media thing has me pretty much baffled.
I understand texting, I guess, although I tend to write too long and don’t find the abbreviations that are in vogue to be particularly helpful. I work better on a full-sized, normal keyboard with normal functions and operations, but I can adapt — if at a snail’s pace — to the three-and four-letter keys on my cell phone and the quirks of my Blackberry. The fact that I carry a Blackberry at all is a quantum leap in my personal technology.

January 20, 2010

Beatles were no Carl Perkins, but ...

My little sister was the first person I ever knew who thought the Beatles were totally fab. I’ll never forget a trip home from college in mid-winter of 1964, a trip during which I first heard of the lads from Liverpool.

January 16, 2010