The RFD News
By Chuck Cecil
$8 (tax included)
plus $2.50 S&H
This 210-page book has stories from South Dakota’s small towns and rural routes, from back roads and out-of-the-way places where good people live and carry on the work ethic and traditions passed along generation to generation.
Meet a man who makes brooms, the best in the world, he says.
There’s a story about a village smithy, who in his spare time during WW II crafted and welded together a tractor he named Hitler. It was ready for use when his older brothers returned from the war.
Get to know a man who makes “farm calls” treating old barns worn down and blown a-kilter by Dakota winds, coaxing them back to their original, upstanding position. You can hardly find a good barn straightener anymore.
Read about a former hotel elevator operator who became a recluse and lived and died in a cave on Punished Womans Lake, spending his time with his few possessions and his herd of friendly goats.
Follow the path of a ponderous glacier that glided down on thick ice to help form the Couteau de Prairie, and in its wake left calling cards along the way, some as big as haystacks. And one monster now resting in Moody County.
Enjoy a tongue-in-cheek account of a West River rancher who came to Eastern South Dakota to raise pygmy goats; and take a walk through one of South Dakota’s most unusual country stores.
Enjoy page upon page of quick South Dakota facts and history, and some trivial and some important dates, too. There are penny post cards galore, all from the old days.
Nick’s Hamburger Shop
By Chuck Cecil
$6 tax included
plus $2.50 S&H
When Nick came to Brookings, South Dakota, in 1929 to start his unusual hamburger shop, no one gave him much of a chance. The Great Depression was just kicking in, and there was plenty of dust in the air as the drought and the grasshoppers lined up for a turn at the lushness of South Dakota.
But Nick’s hamburgers, which originally sold for a nickel each, are still around on the Main Street of Brookings, although costing a bit more than the 1929 price.
The little hamburger shop has become a big legend. Locals, visitors and former residents flock to Nick’s whenever they’re in the area. Young and old gather at this common meeting place. This 70-page story of how the shop got started, and what’s going on there now, is the story of a little corner shop that doesn’t use plates and limits its fare to hamburgers, with an occasional homemade pie thrown in.
Read about the young man who holds the Nickburger eating record and what he’s doing now. It will surprise you.
Several times in the last thirty years, national polls of America’s best hamburger joints Nick’s Hamburger Shop high on the list.
A quick read garnished with pictures old and new, all packaged in a little book more than five times the size of one Nick’s hamburger paddy. You’ll relish it!
Pony Hills
By Chuck Cecil
$5 tax included
plus $2.50 S&H
The book has nothing to do with horses, ponies or hills. It’s just a name picked by author Chuck Cecil in honor of his hometown of Wessington Springs, which is along the eastern slope of a range of little hills locals call Pony Hills. Some of the memories he writes about originated there.
The book contains over three dozen mostly humorous “Stubble Mulch” columns written over the years about the author’s recollections growing up in South Dakota.
He makes a suggestion for a Dakota Winter Olympics event and writes about the ubiquitous slop pail under the kitchen sink, and having to take it out to the hog pen, calling that perilous journey the “Slop Pail Shuffle.”
He writes about auctioneers and rug flogging in the annual neighborhood spring clean up. There’s a story about ice fishing and the “weathered wazoos” that waddle out encased in insulated clothing to participate in this winter pastime.
There’s a recollection of his “bark-O-lounger” and all of its conveniences. Another explores school lunch servings of “loose meat.”
And then there’s the story of the evolution of soap, which has been “new” and “improved” every year since Jody was a pup, but still isn’t apparently perfect. There are dozens more, mostly dabbing on a pleasant touch to dreary South Dakota necessities, like cleaning bullheads.
A Brookings Album:
1879-2004, Celebrating 125 Years
By Chuck Cecil
$8 tax included
plus $2.50 S&H
To purchase by money order click here
This collection contains nearly 300 old and vintage photographs of Brookings, including a rare snapshot of the State College campus before the Campanile, Sylvan Theater or the Lincoln Memorial Library.
Author Chuck Cecil has selected some of the town’s oldest buildings featured in the book and set out to find the same building as it looks today. Do you remember the cupola atop the old City Hall, with its fake clock face and the hands always pointing to three-forty?
The old Wind Mill Station is gone, but its picture is here in this interesting collection. Churches, schools, people and streets and alleys, each with a story. Remember the original White Spot Café west of Brookings on what is now the curve for a four-lane highway leading to Highway 14? You’ll see the one calling itself the White Spot Café today. The Sawnee Hotel is there, along with Montgomery-Ward’s store (now a bar and lounge) and there’s Perfection Flour manufactured at old Sexauer elevator.
You’ll find a memory on every page.
Myron Lee and the Caddies By Myron Wachendorf & Chuck Cecil
$8 tax included
plus $2.50 S&H
To purchase by money order click here
If you were hitting the famous dance halls of the upper Midwest in the 1960 and 1970s you’ll know who Myron Lee is, but chances are you also know who Myron Wachendorf is. They are one and the same.
Splashing “Wachendorf” on posters and dance bills proved a difficult task, so the name of South Dakota’s best known and most famous rock and roller picked Myron Lee, and brought along his buddies with whom he’d worked as a kid caddying for Sioux Falls golfers.
The book tells of Myron’s life from the beginnings in Parker and Sioux Falls, and the music he heard that set him on a show business course that took him and his fellow golf caddies nearly to the top of the charts. You’ll read about their tour with the famous disc jockey Dick Clark.
It’s all there, including some interesting recollections of his times on and off stage with the music world’s rich and famous. There are also pictures of the old dance halls where he played, including Gene Grebin’s Startdust Club in Sioux Falls. He made his debut there. And some will remember Ruskin Park and the Groveland Park Pavilion near Tyndall.
Perhaps you don’t remember exactly what the Hollyhock Ballroom in Hatfield, Minnesota, looked like in its prime. In this 146-page book, you’ll find a glimps the old Hollyhock.
Becoming Someplace Special: The Brookings Story
By Chuck Cecil
$20 tax included
plus $2.50 S&H
(nearly out of print)
This 316-page book tells the story of Brookings and the area from 1900 to the present, with the author ferreting out both the ridiculous and some of the sublime about how this community became what it is today.
The period from 1920 to 1940 was particularliy interesting for the author to research and write about because of the progress and the devastating setbacks experienced along the way, from the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and Hopper Mania to the great war in Europe and the Pacific and the brave souls from Brookings County who went off to war, many never to return.
Especially enjoyable to write about, the author says, were the 1950s and early 1960s, when he came to town to enroll at the university and enjoy collegiate life and the Brookings community.
Fire The Anvils, Beat the Drums
By Chuck Cecil
$15 tax included
plus $2.50 S&H
In the more than 240 pages of text and pictures, author Chuck Cecil tells the thrilling tale of Brookings and Brookings County from about 1860 up to 1900.
It all started in the little town of Medary on the Big Sioux River south of what would become Brookings. Tenacious Norwegians settled there and except for brief periods when Indian scares sent them scrambling to safety in nearby Flandreau, they held their ground, only to be defeated by the Iron Horse, which didn’t arrive in Medary where they thought it would, but chugged straight from Elkton to Volga, leaving Medary to wither in the dust. Today it isn’t even a wide spot in the road.
You’ll read about politics in those early days, about the battle to build a courthouse and about Brookings’ winning the county seat election, albeit with some sleight of hand and a few votes uncounted.
There’s a chapter on the beasts of burden that helped break up the native prairie lands, and another on the county’s scofflaws and ne’er-do-wells, especially those who kept the law huffing and puffing to locate all of the illegal stills and moonshine drops during prohibition.
The author has researched city and county celebrations, especially the Fourth of July, always an exciting time and occasionally an explosive period that caused a “lively scatteration” as the local newspaper described the night when the town’s fireworks accidentally went off all at once.
Author Cecil has assigned all of the income from this book to a fund within the Brookings County Historical Society to help in its efforts to ferret out, preserve and display the artifacts and remembrances that are so important to the history of Brookings and Brookings County.
Daktronics-And the Man Who Lit It Up
By Chuck Cecil
$12 tax included
plus $2.50 S&H
It was just an idea and a dream by a pair of creative electrical engineering professors at South Dakota State University in Brookings, but Daktronics, Inc., has grown to become a world-leader in visual communications and entertainment systems. Daktronics designs, manufacturers, sells and services these systems for customers throughout the United States and in nearly 100 foreign countries.
It was founded in Brookings in 1968. Today is it recognized as a world leader in arena and stadium scoring systems and is listed on the NASDAQ. If you watched a sporting event on television or in person recently, chances are you checked details of the game on a Daktronics board.
From its beginnings in a tiny, 250-squre foot facilty shared with a tire repair shop on a side street in Brookings, Daktronics, under the leadership of Dr. Aelred Kurtenbach and Dr. Duane Sander, today provides the most complete line of scoreboards and displays of any company in the industry. Annual sales approach $400 million.
From that shared, watch-fob-sized tire repair shop, the company now has more than 2,800 employees working in several plants on the Daktronics campus in Brooking which has a combined 700,000 square feet. Daktronics also has atellite production facilities in nearby Sioux Falls, SD, and Redwood Falls, MN, that together exceed 900,000 square feet.
Read about the growth of this company and about the life of Al Kurtenbach, whose vision and untiring efforts grew what has become one of South Dakota’s all-time industry success stories.
The Sky’s the Limit: South Dakota State University’s Coughlin Campanile and The Man Who Made It Possible
By Chuck Cecil
Soft cover, $10 tax included, plus $2.50 S&H
Hard cover, $13 tax included, plus $2.50 S&H
The story of what was once the tallest structure in South Dakota, and what remains today one of the most beautiful structures in the state. How the idea came about during the beginnings of the Great Depression, how the 165-foot high structure was built, the man who made it possible and student and visitor remembrances and reactions to the dominating structure on the state’s Land Grant University in Brookings.
