I’ll never forget where I was when I learned about the terror attacks on the World Trade Center towers in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001. I was a senior in college, walking to a Tuesday morning journalism class at South Dakota State University. On the way, I stopped by my campus job at the Instructional Technology Center inside Pugsley Hall. I met two of my bosses on the front steps.
“Did you hear about the planes?” one of them asked.
I had not, but when I arrived at the building’s second floor television studios, the scope of the tragedy was immediately evident. At the ITC, we broadcast classes on local access channels and facilitated classes held through the Digital Dakota Network, which connected classrooms at campuses and high schools across the state. But none of those classes were happening. Instead, public broadcasting had commandeered our video systems and showed a steady feed of the towers as they burned.
For my generation, September 11 was the cataclysmic event that became seared in our memories, just like Nov. 22, 1963 was for our parents. Sixty years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, memories of that day are as clear as if they’d happened yesterday.
Kennedy’svisitstoSouth Dakota were few, and he lost here to Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election by a vote of 178,017 to 128,070. But as Paul Higbee writes in the November/December 2023 issue of South Dakota Magazine, South Dakotans were impacted by his life and untimely death.
Bill Walsh was a 22-yearold seminary student from Mitchell who went on to a long career within the South Dakota Democratic Party, largely due to Kennedy and his family. “I do think John Kennedy as well as his brother Bobby inspired a whole generation of people like myself to become more involved politically,” Walsh told us. “It was a big reason why I quit the priesthood. I saw an opportunity to do more good in the political realm than I could in the realm of the church.”
President Kennedy’s finest hour in South Dakota came on Aug. 17, 1962, when he flew to Pierre to dedicate the new Oahe power plant. “The key to this century is power — power on the farm as well as the factory,” Kennedy said that day. George McGovern was present, but he didn’t speak because the dedication program was billed as nonpolitical, and McGovern was running for Senate. Kennedy nonetheless worked McGovern into his remarks, noting his far-sighted vision for agriculture. McGovern won the 1962 Senate race, launching his 18year Senate career. He anticipated a long association with President Kennedy in Washington; sadly, it lasted less than 11 months.
South Dakotans watched and listened in horror to those faraway reports from Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, but one South Dakotan was in the middle of the chaos. Dr. Earl Rose, who grew up on a ranch on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation, had been named medical examiner for Dallas County in June of 1963. He was at Parkland Hospital that day and immediately became embroiled in a controversy. Rose wanted to follow state law by performing an autopsy, while the Secret Service wanted the president’s body taken to Washington. There are many more stories and connections that you can read about in Paul’s fine article. They may even trigger your own memories, but if you were alive on Nov. 22, 1963, I suspect you don’t need any help remembering.
