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Community Voices

A fellow traveler

During my previous life as an advertising salesman I would regularly stop at Koehn Marketing, located at Watertown, South Dakota, and chew the fat with owner Jeff Koehn. I would generally kick things off by asking, “How’s it going, Jeff?” and he would generally reply “Good, good! How about yourself?” Last winter when I stopped at Koehn Marketing and posed my usual opening question, Jeff threw me for a loop by answering, “Not so good. I just found out that I have tonsil cancer.” I told Jeff that I was sorry to hear this news and that I had never even heard of tonsil ...

‘Who’ll stop the rain’

Columnists rummage around in the closets of our lives looking for things we share. Those become leaping off points to write about. I didn’t have to look hard this time: water. If you’re reading this, you’ve had too much rain. For a few weeks, friends from further away asked if we had too much rain. One week, north of us got three or four or more inches. The next week south of us had four or five or more inches. Meanwhile, we were getting less. “We’re doing pretty good; we’ve missed the big rains,” I said. My response became officially obsolete last Saturday when four ...

Preliminary budget challenges

I wanted to take a moment to share some important information regarding our district’s preliminary budget for the 2024-25 academic year. As many of you are aware, we have been anticipating a tighter budget due to the full expenditure of our COVID funds and the rising cost of education. It is with a sense of responsibility that I inform you that our projected general fund budget deficit will indeed exceed $1 million for the upcoming year. This will mean that our future planning for financial stability means we’ll need to review potential cuts resulting in things like increased ...

COVID: it remains an important global health issue

It’s been four years since the height of the pandemic, but COVID is a sickness that still affects many lives. My own life has been impacted in the past week. That’s because of the COVID cases at a Marshall assisted living, facility, the home of my 86-year-old mother. I’ve been getting many good updates by email. The last of them said there were six cases out of 16 residents on my mother’s south unit. There was only one case on the north side. So far mom is not one of the cases. Hopefully she’ll continue to steer clear of it. I’m keeping my fingers crossed. COVID has ...

Collective efforts in city make way for success

The city of Marshall has started the summer with much activity and below is a snapshot of some of our work: The Addison downtown parking lot reconstruction was completed and ensured a much-improved traffic flow along with a stronger and safer surface. The weather cooperated for the city’s Juneteenth event with over 200 people attending the Food Truck event on 3rd Street and the evening performances held at Justice Park. The event was a success and made possible by donations from Avera, Southwest Initiative Foundation, SMSU, Hy-Vee and Visit Marshall. In late May and early June, ...

Pet scanned

I celebrated the first full day of my retirement with a PET scan in the morning and a tonsillectomy in the afternoon. People have asked me over the past several months what my plans were for retirement. I had a few ideas, but none included dealing with tonsil cancer. A week prior to these procedures, I met Dr. Jameson, my otolaryngologist (today’s challenge is to say “otolaryngologist” three times as fast as you can) and his physician’s assistant, Leslie Smith. I tried to tease Leslie about being the baddie Dr. Smith in the TV series “Lost In Space,” but she was ...