WEDNESDAYS WITH WOSTER

Opinion: Though only for a night, post-proms worth effort

After the grand march to open the Chamberlain High School prom last Saturday evening, a school official made an announcement that drew a round of applause.
Every student who took part in the grand march, he said, had signed up for the post-prom party. The applause was for the students, but it also could have been for a group of parents. It takes a lot of parental involvement to put together a party that teenagers don’t mind attending. At Chamberlain the other evening, and in other communities across South Dakota this spring, groups of parents have been putting forth that kind of effort.

By Terry Woster , April 21, 2010

Opinion: Without kids in school, priorities tend to change

I spent last Saturday in Brookings again, watching a granddaughter in oral interpretation competition.
No, this isn’t about the granddaughter, although Lara did really well in the humor division and although her Grandma Widman sent a message that I didn’t give the child enough praise when I wrote about her reading an original story at the Great Plains Writers Conference last month. I’m in awe of the kids who compete in oral interp, I’ll say that. Never in my young life would I voluntarily have gotten up in front of a group – whether parents, other adults or simply my school peers – and recited poetry or given a dramatic or humorous reading.

By Terry Woster , April 14, 2010

Opinion: Kids learn the darndest things

I don’t know how the Easter egg hunt went at your place on Sunday, but around the Woster household, one 2-year-old girl set out looking for six dozen eggs.
If that seems like unfair odds, well, don’t feel too sorry for the eggs. She didn’t mess them up too much.

By Terry Woster , April 07, 2010

Opinion: Times have changed with special sessions

Electronic storage has eliminated much of the need for clip files, but in my early days with The Associated Press, a couple of beat-up, battleship gray cabinets held decades of South Dakota’s history as written by wire service reporters in Pierre and Sioux Falls.

By Terry Woster , March 31, 2010

Opinion: Health care: Take charge, make decisions

Health care is much in the news these days, and if you think I’m touching that one, you don’t understand the Lyman County will to survive.
However, this week marks 15 years since a guy named Lawrence Strawbridge cut me open and sliced out a cancerous prostate gland. The procedure was barbaric. It took several hours, I lost some blood (although not as much as some guys do when they have the same procedure) and the recovery process took weeks. I didn’t have any other treatment, and I’ve had no other treatment or procedure in the 15 years since. As far as I know, based on the most recent test for prostate specific antigens (PSA), I’m cancer free — or at least prostate cancer free.

By Terry Woster , March 24, 2010

Opinion: Irish eyes are weeping

My mother would never forgive me if I had a column scheduled for March 17 and the topic didn’t involve the Irish and St. Patrick’s Day.
Marie McManus has been gone these five years now and a bit more, resting next to a Bohemian farmer named Henry J. Woster in St. Mary’s Cemetery just north of Reliance. It isn’t coincidence that the marker for their resting place was crafted from stone with just a touch of green in it. That sounds garish, I suppose, but the shading is subtle, the setting is rural, and somehow it all works.

By Terry Woster , March 17, 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.

By Terry Woster , March 10, 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.

By Terry Woster , March 03, 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.

By Terry Woster , 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.

By Terry Woster , 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.

By Terry Woster , February 10, 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.

By Terry Woster , February 03, 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.”

By Terry Woster , January 27, 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.

By Terry Woster , January 20, 2010

Opinion: Dads can't help but worry in frigid, snowy weather

The Weather Channel told me the temperature in Pierre at mid-afternoon on Sunday was 36 degrees.
That was 50 degrees or so higher than it had been at the end of the Wednesday-Thursday snowstorm last week. I had done the bare minimum in sidewalk shoveling during that storm, so on Sunday I did some touch-up work — knocking a path to the street where there’d just been a mound of snow, clearing the porch and back deck, hacking away at the packed snow on the driveway where I’d been too busy getting in and out during the storm to worry about finding concrete.

By Terry Woster , January 13, 2010