This is the third and final part of our report of a tour of Redfield, South Dakota, with Craig Johnson, Economic Development Director for Spink County. I have just finished visiting with Mike Rohrbach, manager of the second shift at Synergy Solutions. Craig and I have gotten back into his pick-up; he's driving and we're talking. The day is getting hot.
Craig stood by patiently
at Synergy Solutions while I talked with Mike Rohrbach about the call center. Now Craig and I are back in his pick-up. He's showing me more of Redfield; and he's talking about health care in the community. "They're just finishing up a million-dollar expansion at the clinic and hospital, which has four doctors and two Physician's Assistants." he said. "We've got the Eastern Star Nursing home, Beverly Health Care, and Lakeside Assisted Living. People will move to a small town to retire if you have the medical facilities."
Redfield is also home to the South Dakota Developmental Center, which employs about 435 people caring for some 200 persons with severe mental/physical handicaps.
We drive past some of the Redfield Housing Authority's new "moderate income" housing - apartments of 1150 square feet renting for $640/month plus utilities. In Spink County, $640/month for rent is towards the high end of "moderate income." Housing in Redfield usually goes for about $450/month.
We drive past the Save Smart shop, owned by a young couple from Cambridge, Minnesota. The store sells discount items. The business had previously been a second-hand shop and the owner retired. Instead of an empty building, there's an on-going business. The new owners have moved to Redfield and their three girls have entered Redfield's school system. The wife's parents have moved to Redfield as well, and bought a house in town. This is how a community survives, I think - adding a little here, a little there, while holding onto what you've got. Nothing dramatic and glamorous, but essential.
"It is typical small town stuff that I do," Craig admitted. "It wouldn't make the paper in Des Moines."
As it had gotten to be "the hottest day we've had all year," Craig and I stopped for a cold beer at Chrystal Palace, a long-established drinking place in town. There were card games going on inside, and you could tell they were serious games - nobody put his beer on the table. Some young men, some old men, some middle-aged men. Some of those in the place were stopping for a beer after work, like Buck Robinson, manager of the Wheat Growers elevator I'd seen at Tulare. I can give him a call any time I'm back in Redfield and set up a tour of the elevator. I met a hair-dresser who rides a Harley. We may have seen the same motorcycle accident in the Black Hills near the Sturgis Rally several years ago. You wonder how you find such a point of common experience, but you do.
Craig asked if I'd be interested in having a steak for supper at Terry's downtown; he called his wife, Corrine, to see if she would too. We'd pick her up in ten minutes.
And so we did.
You have to go into Terry's from the alley, the same as going into Alley Cuts for a hair cut. When you enter from the rear, the place looks like the bar it is; the entrance to the dining room is near the front end and we had to walk all the way through the barroom to get to it. We took the table with a view - looking out onto the new concrete of Main Street Redfield.
Craig told me that it took the contractor one day to pour concrete for a block of Main Street from curb to curb. It was one continuous pour. Two cement trucks at a time would dump their loads into the $900,000 machine which kept edging forward and left a smoothed and leveled new surface behind it. The contractor was a man wise to the ways of public relations: he set up a table with coffee and doughnuts for the three hundred people who stopped to watch the work.
Corrine comes from a German background, and the family is in contact with relatives back in Germany. Some of those German relatives came to Redfield to visit Corrine and Craig. I suppose if I lived in South Dakota and had foreign visitors, I'd take them to the Black Hills to see Mount Rushmore; that's where Craig and Corrine took their visitors. When they got in the car to head back to Redfield, the Germans asked Craig to "take the short way home."
You have to understand, there is no "short way" across South Dakota. It is nearly three hundred miles from Redfield to Rapid City; by comparison, it is 240 miles from Berlin, Germany, to Copenhagen, Denmark; 320 miles from Berlin to Warsaw; 360 miles from Berlin to Amsterdam; 385 miles from Berlin to Zurich, Switzerland. Those Germans were not used to such distances as Dakotans find customary.
Craig and Corrine and I ate and we talked for a bit about the challenges of Economic Development in a community like Redfield. There are a lot of ideas that don't work out, for whatever reason; there is a lot of rejection. "You can't take the rejection personally," Craig said. "You can't let it get you down. You have to get up the next morning and go back at it." Craig seems to have the right mix of buoyant optimism and clear-eyed realism need for a job like his.
Craig works by himself as Director of Economic Development; he likes that. He gets judged on his results; he likes that, too. He is well-read and has an interest in local history and local stories; and though Corrine said he'd probably "like to have a job like yours," Craig doesn't think he writes well enough.
Craig and Corrine bought my supper, the seafood platter that was the day's special in a restaurant about as far from the sea as you can get. Thanks, you guys!
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