PHOTO OF THE DAY: PUBLISHER’S PERSPECTIVE
The following is Jeremy Waltner’s “Publisher’s Desk” from this week’s Courier.
What Doc Brown said
Almost weekly, I come across something in our newspaper archives that makes me stop whatever it is I’m looking for and take a closer look. Maybe it’s a picture. Maybe it’s a headline. Maybe it’s a letter to the editor. Or maybe it’s an an advertisement; did you know that in 1974 you could get three cans of Van Camp’s Pork and Beans for 88¢?
Last week’s page stopper was announcement that also came in 1974 — that Freeman Junior College and Academy was planning to build a museum to house the school’s collection of artifacts that had been growing since a professor of agriculture invited students to bring interesting rocks and fossils to the school starting in the late 1920s.
The new building would be built in conjunction with the centennial of the Mennonite migration from Russia and Ukraine to Dakota Territory beginning in 1874, and also the 75th-year anniversary of the founding of South Dakota Mennonite College in 1900.
A rendering of the building published 75 years ago this week shows the name of the museum as “Centennial Hall.”
Of course, there is no “Centennial Hall” in Freeman. Instead, we have Heritage Hall Museum & Archives. And that’s not the only difference between what was proposed back in 1974 and what actually came to be.
The rest of the story comes from my dad, a retired newspaper publisher who taught me what it takes to be a community journalist and today works as an education and communication coordinator at the very museum we’re talking about.
“One of the most interesting details — and extraordinarily significant, as things turned out — was the location for the new museum,” he wrote me in an email. “The area directly north of Frontier Hall was considered initially but it was deemed as being too low. Then in 1974, the area immediately northeast of the Administration Building was selected as the museum site; in fact, the land was cleared and leveled in preparation that summer.
“But then in August, FJC/FA purchased the Klasi land south of the campus at a public auction; 43.3 acres for $34,000. And that sparked an abrupt change of plans, and the decision was made to build the new museum on the northern edge of this sprawling open area that had been added to the campus.
“That decision was fortuitous; it enabled the museum to expand in the decades that followed in ways that would have been unlikely — or impossible — at the two locations originally considered.”
That’s valuable insight and a powerful reminder that our present is rooted in history, and that decisions we make today will have an impact on what happens tomorrow.
As Doc Brown says at the very end of the Back to the Future trilogy:
“The future is what you make it, so make it a good one.”
Indeed.
