By Gil Gullickson, Executive Editor, Crops Technology, Successful Farming; 2019 AAEA First Place Human Interest Winner; 2019-2020 AAEA President
Click here to read Hometown USA
A banker friend of mine told me a story about a career military officer eyeing retirement in his northeastern South Dakota hometown inquiring about housing.
“Oh, you could get a house in Andover (his hometown) for about $1,000,” said my friend.
“1,000?” responded the officer. “That’s not a bad monthly payment.
“No,” said the banker. “$1,000. Period. $1,000 and the house is yours.”
I thought of that conversation as I drove through many of the small towns in the next several years. Dilapidated houses. Opioids and methamphetamine. Poverty. These are subjects I never wrote about in my crops technology beat. Subjects like seeds, fungicides, and dicamba (at that time, mainly dicamba!) filled my day.
Still, I thought these were important topics when I pitched a story at an editorial planning meeting tentatively titled Life in the Rural Hood.
I considered several ways to tackle the story. Finally, I decided to check out the changes in my hometown of Langford, South Dakota.
Sure enough, some things had changed for the worse. The sheriff of my home county, Dale Elsen, pointed out that methamphetamine was still ripping apart the lives of some of the county’s residents. (It coincided with an internet joke about a Midwestern town I found during my research:
Q:
How can a blind person tell for sure that they are in this town?
A: They stand outside, take a deep breath, and
say, “There’s nothing like the smell of anhydrous ammonia coming off the meth
labs in the morning.”
Marshall County was also rocked by five residents charged with multiple sexual abuse charges, including rape and possessing, manufacturing, or distributing child pornography.
Still, there was lots of good news. Langford may not return to the Saturday nights of my early grade-school years, when cars packed Main Street and local residents filled its two grocery stores, drug store, meat market, and pool hall. Still, it’s maintaining pretty well.
The school superintendent, Monte Nipp, graciously showed me the school and proudly pointed out a new bandroom and wellness center addition that the community was building. I had so much fun visiting with a high-school classmate of mine, David Planteen. David is the banker in Langford in addition to farming. We laughed so hard at all the at some of the characters who populated the town of our youth. We also were thankful that social media was not around to record for posterity some of the bone-headed things we did. (Mild by today’s standards, but still a good thing that they’re just locked away in our memories!)
People sometimes ask me how to find an angle for a story that sets it apart. I knew I had the lead and the angle when one of the town’s leaders, Paula Jensen, asked me if I had ever read the book Hollowing Out the Middle.
The 2009 book details the reasons young people leave rural areas. Often, it’s the community’s adults who encourage it.
“Basically, the straight-A students are told to go away and never come back,” she said. It’s only the losers who stay, right?”
Paula stayed, and she and her husband and family thrived. Ditto for Mark Nelson, who works in economic development in the area. Then there’s Kris Tobin, whose father Larry Wattier served as the school’s superintendent for 36 years. If there was ever a Mr. Langford, it was Larry Wattier.
This story spawned several other staffers on our Successful Farming team—Dave Kurns, Jodi Henke, Janis Gandy, Betsy Freese, David Ekstrom and Natalina Sents—to either write reviews of their hometown or work on video and podcasts.
The usual topics I write about didn’t go away either. While I was filming a video of Mark Nelson on Langford’s Main Street, his father Mike—my former 4-leader—pulled up in his pickup. After the customary “Hi Gil”, he quickly followed up with, “Oh, about that dicamba………”