Naming public places after private people

The highest point east of the Rocky Mountains until you get to the Alps is Black Elk Peak near Custer, South Dakota. Prior to 2016, the mountain with its distinctive fire tower was called Harney Peak. 

The name change was overdue. The Black Hills are considered sacred to the Lakota Sioux and replacing Harney’s name with that of tribal leader Black Elk is appropriate, especially since General William Harney is reported to have led the massacre of Native women and children in Nebraska in 1855.

Over the past few years, there has been a great “renaming” of many public places. Here in Minnesota, Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis is now Lake Bde Maka Ska. Sibley High School is now Two Rivers High School. There are rumblings in Mankato MN about renaming its Sibley city park.

There is a Justice Alan Page elementary school in suburban Maplewood MN. Mankato schools named its newest elementary school after Rosa Parks. There is now a Barack and Michelle Obama Elementary School in St Paul. This morning's newspaper reported a movement to name a federal building in downtown Minneapolis after Senator Paul Wellstone who died in a plane crash 20 years ago. 

I suspect the naming and renaming of public buildings, streets, parks, and natural features will continue. I can think of no persons more worthy of such recognition than Page, Parks, the Obamas, and Wellstone. Of course others of a different political stripe may disagree. 

However I wonder if someday the worm might turn. Might our “heroes” of today be less heroic to tomorrow’s activists? Might some dirt be uncovered about Rosa Parks? Might the Obamas be reviled for being non-vegetarian? Could a MAGA-controlled government seek to obliterate the memory of notoriously liberal Wellstone? 

Given the controversy over naming buildings, streets, parks, schools and the expenses involved when renaming them, let’s just agree not to dedicate any public resource to a human being, no matter how honorable they now appear. 

I know I would rather live on Oak Street than on Butt Street anyway.

Back to the Black Hills

My son Brady at Crazy Horse Monument, 1995

When I was a child, my dad took the family on only one road trip to an exotic place - the Black Hills. One summer in the early 60s, Mom and Dad, sister Becky, and Aunt Pat, took an old Ford Fairlane and my grandpa’s walled tent west, crossing through southern South Dakota from northwest Iowa. 

Among the highlights of the trip were seeing Mount Rushmore (of course), swimming in Evans Plunge, touring Jewel Cave, riding the Terry Peak chairlift, and climbing on the dinosaurs atop the hills in Rapid CIty.

Grandson Paul shows the peak he summitted.

My trip last week to the Black Hills of South Dakota was my seventh. In 1969, a couple of my high school buddies and I drove to the Black Hills Playhouse to see Miss Nelson, our drama coach on whom we had a crush, in a play. I took my son there for a week in the mid nineties as well as my grandsons in 2011. I stopped for a couple nights driving back from a conference in Denver in 2015.

Grandson Miles poses for his portrait on Mount Rushmore.

Perhaps the reason I go back to is not because the area is a new experience, but because it has changed so very little in the past 60 years. Sylvan Lake is still a gem. While Harney Peak is now renamed (appropriately) Black Elk Peak, the challenging climb to the firetower is still the same. Zero progress has been made on carving Crazy Horse The bison and elk and deer and bighorn sheep and wild donkeys still flourish. Deadwood is as big a tourist trap as ever. Wind Cave’s geological wonder.

I conquer Black Elk Peak - again.

On this trip, my friend Heidi and I did more hiking than usual. We spent a few hours walking Medicine Loop in the Badlands, nearly a day tromping up Trail 4 to Black Elk Peak, and a morning looping past Lover’s Leap in Custer State Park. Sadly the Sylvan Lake Lodge where I usually like to stay was closed for renovation after a fire, but we managed to get by in a small cottage at Legion Lake. We took a wildlife safari Jeep tour, visited the Mammoth site in Hot Springs, and walked the streets of Deadwood. We economized by eating breakfasts in the cabin and packing lunches.

Perhaps the one thing I’ve noticed these last couple trips is how politicized travel has become. T-shirts now scorn politicians. Road signs for political candidates are everywhere. Casual conversations too often become political. South Dakota makes no bones about being a “red” state. On the last trip to the Hills, I bought a t-shirt in Sturgis that had a graphic of Donald Trump and Sarah Palin riding a Harley motorcycle. That summer of 2016 it was pretty funny, I thought. Now it lies, unworn, in the bottom of my t-shirt pile.

Not wearing it to the Y

Were I asked to give the South Dakota Tourism Department advice, I’d suggest changing nothing about Custer State Park, the Needles or Iron Mountain Highways, or managing the bison. But I’d tone down the obvious attempt to lure the bikers and MAGA types. It’s getting almost uncomfortable for more rational individuals.

Oh, my favorite t-shirts this trip read “It’s not a beer-belly. It’s a fuel tank for an amazing sex machine.” and “Decaffeinated coffee is like a prostitute who only wants to snuggle.” No, I didn’t buy either of them…

The public library comes through again

VHS conversion station in the iLab at Wescott Library in Dakota County MN

The “hot” technology of the mid-1980s was the VHS camcorder. At least it was for me as the father of a baby son whose grandparents lived halfway across the world and who I felt needed to experience the joy of his arrival. Using a camcorder I purchased in Hong Kong, I taped my son Brady’s antics and mailed a tape back each month from my home in Saudi Arabia to his grandpas and grandmas in Iowa.

Over the five years I taught for ARAMCO schools, I accumulated over two dozen VHS tapes. For the past 30 years or so, they have quietly languished in a box buried in a closet. But I ran across them a few days ago and felt both curious about what they contained and guilty for not making them accessible to others.

I knew that to convert these tapes to a digital format, I would need a VHS player, conversion software, and a place to store the digital conversions. It’s been a while since I’ve owned a VHS tape player. I don’t own the conversion software. I’d need a computer with fairly fast processing power to do the job as well. 

As a supervisor for many years, my first inclination was to find someone else to do the work for me. A quick stop at a local business that does such work eliminated this option. They wanted $30 a tape to make the conversion (Hmmmm, $30 x 30 tapes - there goes my wine budget for this month.) I could buy the equipment for a third of that cost and, being retired, my hourly pay rate is zero.

Next I stopped back in my old tech department at the school district. None of the staff there remembered us having the equipment to convert tapes (although a couple kind folks offered to let me borrow the VHS tape players they still owned.) My sister also remembers a VHS player among the lovely stuff inherited from one of our aunts. 

I had decided to pick up this old VCR player on my next visit to my sisters when a memory of something I had read tickled my mind. Don’t our public libraries now advertise “makerspaces” for anyone to use and might they not include VHS conversion equipment?

A call to the Dakota County Library office confirmed that a number of branches did indeed have this equipment and I was walked through the online scheduling website. So yesterday, I had an “iLab” to myself nearly all afternoon. 

The conversion process could not have gone better: the library staff made sure the equipment was up and running; they gave me a quick verbal tutorial on the Roxio software; and they gave me a notebook of simple, step-by-step instructions for doing the work. I converted my first two tapes and had the digital copies uploaded to my GoogleDrive in just a couple hours. Hours pleasantly spent watching my then two-month-old son learn to smile…

Not to sound grim, but one of my goals is to leave as few tasks for my children to do as possible after I go to the great recliner in the sky. This includes digitizing these videos and paper photographs. Thankfully the public libraries around here recognize the need for services that go beyond checking out print books and having a place to read a magazine*. 

Once again, I am proud to have been in the library profession.

* I’ve written before about Libby being a fantastic public library resource for ebooks.