From her home in Deadwood, South Dakota Kate McGraw plans parties all over the country. She’s part of a new breed of professional meeting and event planners. She organizes conventions in Miami, conferences in Hawaii, celebrations in Las Vegas. She books charter flights, reserves blocks of hotel rooms, and plans meals for thousands of people. In an average year this 94-pound long distance runner sleeps more nights in a hotel room than at home. She could live anywhere in the country. She chooses to live in the Black Hills.

As a child growing up in Rochester, New York McGraw didn’t see much of the world. Her father worked for an office supply company and her mother was a homemaker. Her grandmother was an entrepreneur who made awnings and decorations for parties. When Kate graduated from high school in the late 1960s, she thought she would go into human resources and work in a school or a nursing home. She didn’t imagine herself as a jet setter.

McGraw’s life took a turn in the late 1970s after her first husband was transferred by Kodak from New York to Colorado. Living in Windsor, about halfway between Fort Collins and Greeley, she took care of the children and worked a couple of part-time jobs in bookkeeping and banking. When she and her husband divorced in the early 1980s, she moved with the children to Las Vegas. Thinking she might pursue a career as a travel agent, she took a course in travel planning.

With a new interest and new skills, McGraw got a job in reservations at Heavenly Ski Resort at Lake Tahoe. Over the next eleven to twelve years she worked for a variety of ski industry associations creating and booking winter vacation packages in California and then back in Colorado. Working on commission made her increasingly entrepreneurial.

Since summers were slow, Kate followed the suggestion of a friend and contacted a “destination management company” based in Chicago. DMCs organize and manage large events for corporate clients. From her home in Colorado, McGraw began traveling to sites all over the country.

One night in Hawaii she realized that she had arrived. Amid a crowd of Pepsi bottlers celebrating the Pepsi centennial she stood listening to The Rolling Stones, Lord of the Dance, Kool and the Gang and Ray Charles. She realized: “I was working, seeing all of this, getting paid to fly to Hawaii, to be in a beautiful place and to see all of these people. That was my job.”

The job gave her incredible freedom, and the flexibility to live anywhere she wanted — as long as there was an airport nearby.

Kate jokes that appliances brought her to South Dakota, but actually it was her second husband. By the late 1990s, Kate had met Hugh McGraw. They were both living in Windsor. He had friends who were building a house in Canning, South Dakota in the rural countryside northeast of Pierre. One weekend, he helped his friends transport appliances from Colorado to Canning. A Nebraska native, he felt an affinity for the landscape. When he discovered a small house for sale down the road, he decided to buy it.

Kate and Hugh made trips to Canning to fix up the house. To some of the farmers in the community, the site of Kate running on the gravel roads was a surprise. As they got to know the neighbors, however, Hugh and Kate liked the community even more. When Hugh retired, they moved. Married at the St. Charles Hotel in Pierre in 1999, Kate remembers the disbelief of her relatives from New York. “They thought they had come to the ends of the earth.”

But air travel out of Pierre was a challenge given Kate’s line of work. On a visit to Deadwood, she and Hugh were charmed by the history of the town. Deadwood was less than an hour from Rapid City’s airport with more airlines and options for flights east and west. In 2000, Kate and Hugh bought a house to fix up and moved to this historic gold rush town.

Most of the people she knows in Deadwood aren’t quite certain what it is she does. As one woman recently remarked, “I know you get to travel everywhere, but I don’t really understand what you do.” Kate explains. She plans parties — for 20,000 people at a time.