If you were “painted blue” in the 1970s, you were set for life. IBM dominated the computer market in the era before the PC, and people who worked for “Big Blue” usually stayed until they retired. Graduating from the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology (SDSM&T)with a degree in computer science in 1984, Don Roby thought he had been given the golden ticket when he landed a job with IBM. But Don didn’t know that the forces leading to a flat world were already eroding IBM’s dominance of the digital landscape.

Don grew up in Watertown, South Dakota, the youngest of five boys. The last to graduate from Watertown High School, Don played football, ran track and served as president of his senior class. He chose SDSM&T for the in-state tuition and on the recommendation of one of his older brothers who had already become a Hardrocker.

IBM recruited Don to the sales side of the business, using his technical expertise to help customers understand the potential uses of IBM’s systems. Over the next 11 years, he moved around the Midwest with assignments in Sioux Falls, Sioux City, Denver, Omaha and Minneapolis. Benefiting from IBM’s superior management training programs, he deepened his technical knowledge, improved his management skills and gained expertise in sales and marketing. Along the way he was climbing the corporate ladder. ”At IBM, your name was in a box on an organizational chart,” he says. ”The goal was to get your name in the box above.”

Unfortunately, IBM was in trouble. Continue reading this post…

At 25, Sharlet Brown loved Chicago. She was young and “still incredibly immortal.” Getting mugged once and hit by a cab didn’t dampen her enthusiasm for Lake Michigan, skyscrapers, elevated trains and crowds of people downtown. And why not? As a girl growing up on an isolated ranch in northwestern South Dakota, Sharlet heard her mother say: “get an education and see the world.” Chicago was the world and what an education it gave her.

She didn’t intend to move home. But then her father contracted Lou Gehrig’s disease. In the mid-1990s she made the roundtrip from O’Hare Airport to Rapid City once a month. The two-hour drive north gave her a chance to think about the pace of life in Chicago and the importance of her family.

On one of these trips home, she met John Teigen. He was a rancher with a place south of Camp Crook just across the Little Missouri River and into Montana. He was older than Sharlet with children from a previous marriage. She liked him. On her trips home they began to date.

John was serious enough about the relationship that he visited Chicago and “got a sore neck” from looking up at the buildings. She introduced him to her former colleagues and current clients at the National Cattleman’s Beef Association, and he got a better understanding of her work as a freelance marketeer. But she knew he would never leave the ranch. “This is what he was born to do,” she says.

When they talked about getting married, Sharlet explained that she couldn’t be the traditional ranch wife. Continue reading this post…

Annette Slaba faced a tough choice. She loved teaching. The pay supplemented the income from the ranch that she and her husband operate with the help of their kids in the remote northwestern corner of South Dakota. But in 2003 her new school assignment meant driving 40 miles one way on gravel roads in all kinds of weather. The travel would cut into the time she needed for ranch chores in the pre-dawn and late afternoon hours, especially during lambing and calving season. Common sense dictated that she would have to quit.

After turning in her resignation, Annette had an idea. A couple of years earlier she had a attended a workshop where she heard about Sylvan Learning’s online tutoring program. They were looking for teachers. Through Sylvan, she could continue to do what she loved and supplement the family’s income. She could do it on her own schedule because Sylvan had students in a dozen different time zones. The only challenge she faced was getting connected. Continue reading this post…

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. Continue reading this post…

Michael Cales wanted to be a rock star. He had grown up in Southern California. His dad was a hard-working entrepreneur who laid carpet for a living. When Michael was in high school, the family moved to a small town in Utah to get away from the tensions of urban life and get closer to the land. After graduation, Michael tried going back to California, but he didn’t stay long. Relationships pulled him back to Utah and necessity kept him in his father’s line of work. When his parents moved to Chadron, Nebraska, he joined them on the Great Plains.

He had played guitar in high school. In his early twenties in Chadron, his play turned serious. He spent long hours teaching himself and practicing. “I learned a discipline then that paid off years later when I began telecommuting.” He played with several rock bands, and it was through one of those bands that he met his wife Betsy. In the early 1980s, they moved to Fargo/Morehead so Michael could join a band that seemed to be going somewhere.

 After months on the road playing in clubs in Minnesota and the Dakotas, the rock star dream began to fade. Betsy convinced Michael to go back to school. He applied and was accepted to the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City. Ten years removed from his last high school class, he was surprised to discover how much he liked math, chemistry and the other classes he took at Tech. He decided to major in computer science.

When he graduated in 1986, there were no jobs in Rapid City for someone with his skills. With a brand new baby, Michael was anxious to find something. Continue reading this post…

When Tom Unterseher and Heather Bohr moved from Pasadena to Mobridge in 1994, they imagined a short stay. It was a cost saving relocation to reduce their overhead while they worked to make their publishing business successful. When the World Wide Web suddenly became popular over the next several years, their business was transformed. They gave up publishing in 1999 to focus on “third party fulfillment,” shipping orders for companies with virtual storefronts. 

Drawn back into the life of his hometown, Unterseher joined a loose coalition of leaders hoping to revive Mobridge’s economy.  Appointed to the City Council in 2000, he led efforts to clean up the city park, redevelop the area close to the river and revive Main Street. All of these projects cost money. Employing two young grantwriters from the East, Mobridge sought help and brought in hundreds of thousand of dollars of grant money over the next several years.  Throughout this period, Unterseher was outspoken, chiding the naysayers and encouraging those who dared to change.

When a team from the South Daktoa Rural Development Council visited Mobridge in 2004, many of the city’s projects were either partially completed or stalled for lack of federal appropriations. Continue reading this post…

Throughout history writers and artists have retreated to the countryside to think and work. Maybe they have always been New Pioneers. The age of the Internet makes it easier. Yesterday I drove to Howes Corner at the intersection of highways 34 and 73 in western South Dakota to interview writer and teacher Joan Wink. Joan and her husband Dean are natives of the Great Plains. They met the first day on campus at Yankton College in the early 1960s. They married and graduated four years later.

Over the course of a remarkable life, Joan has been a teacher, a teacher of teachers and a prolific writer on life and learning. She is passionate about her work and able to honor the passion that others feel for their vocations, even when it makes her life difficult. In 1991, with two children grown and graduated from high school, Joan finished her Ph.D. at Texas A&M. At the same time, she and Dean had the opportunity to buy the ranch that had belonged to her grandparents in this remote section of western South Dakota.

A cattleman for most of his career, Dean wanted to buy the ranch. Joan wanted to take what she had learned and become a teacher of teachers at a university. There was no opportunity for her close to Howes Corner. So they agreed to live at a distance from each other. They bought the ranch and Dean went to work. Joan joined the faculty at California State University, Stanislaus in Turlock, 1534 miles away. Over the next 15 years, Joan spent her summers and holidays on the ranch. Dean visited in California. After she had taught enough years, she was able to take a sabbatical. She spent it in South Dakota helping Dean with the chores and writing the second edition of her book CRITICAL PEDAGOGY in a tiny space on the second floor of their small ranch house.

This year, after a tough battle with cancer, Joan is beginning the next chapter of her life, which will include some teaching, more consulting, and lots of writing. She and Dean have added onto the house. From the desk in her new writing room, she looks south across the prairie, feeling the exquisite isolation of the landscape and the connectedness of her world.

To visit Joan’s website, go to www.joanwink.com.

In the final weeks of 1981, lawyers for the federal government and for AT&T, the largest corporation in the world, negotiated the break up of the historic Bell System. One major premise guided the lawyers for the government. The telecommunications industry was ready for competition, especially in the markets for equipment, long distance, and information services. These markets should be separated from the monopoly of the local exchange, and after the breakup the local exchange should provide plain old telephone service (POTS) and not much else. Neither the government nor AT&T expected these local exchange companies to be innovative, and in their negotiations, they paid little attention to the future of rural telephone companies in sparse states like South Dakota.

Over the next quarter century, rural phone companies in South Dakota responded to the threats and opportunities of deregulation and competition in a variety of ways. Many were remarkably innovative, seizing opportunities to expand into new markets and lines of business in an effort to survive and thrive in the new era. Some aggressively grew by mergers and acquisitions to create economies of scale that made them more competitive. The companies also reacted defensively, banding together to resist efforts in the regulatory arena to reduce their revenues or promote competition in their markets. All of these efforts helped shape the marketplace for telecommunications in South Dakota today and the environment in which the deployment of broadband is taking place.

One of the chapters in THE NEW PIONEERS looks at the history of rural telephone companies on the northern Great Plains since the break up of AT&T. Follow the posts on this category to focus on telecommunications issues.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – Most New Pioneers have a divided identity. Tonight, after landing at San Francisco International Airport, I rented a car and drove north. Coming round the northbound turn on 101, the skyline of the illuminated city bloomed out of the night. Memories of childhood and the years we spent on the oceanside of the city when our children were small came back to me. The smell of the fog and eucalyptus. Yet as I approached the entrance to the Bay Bridge and headed east, I thought of the conversation I had yesterday afternoon with Sharlet Teigen. Sharlet is an agricultural and food products marketing professional. She lives 17 miles from paved road in a remote area along the Little Missouri River near the border of South Dakota and Montana. She is part of a partnership of women scattered throughout the Midwest who all work from their homes. Most of the time, she telecommutes by satelite Internet and fax. Even though she grew up on a ranch in northwestern South Dakota, Sharlet says she is still an outsider to many people in her community because she has lived in the big city (Chicago), and a part of her still loves the urban life.  Like many digital immigrants, living with these divided affections presents a challenge to her relationships with her rural community. It’s a challenge we all have to figure out if the Internet era is going to bring prosperity to rural America.

RAPID CITY, SD – Adam B. grew up in Rapid City, South Dakota. Today, he’s a senior at Black Hills State University in Spearfish forty miles away. After visiting with friends or hitting the books, when it’s time to go to work to pay the bills, Adam doesn’t go far. He sits down at the desk in his apartment, logs on to his employer’s virtual private network (VPN), and within minutes he’s taking calls from customers around the country who need help with their internet service. As one of a handful of remote call center employees working for Golden West Telecommunications, Adam appreciates the convenience and comfort of working from home. His supervisors can track his productivity online. They can listen in to his calls to offer tips or advice afterwards. If the caller needs specialized expertise, Adam can easily forward the call to someone who can help. On the weekends, when he’s home visiting his family, he likes to work his shifts at Golden West’s call center in Rapid City for the camraderie. Telecommuting gives him tremendous flexibility. “I could work from anywhere,” he says. Already he is calculating the ways in which telecommuting might fit into his career in business in the future and give him the opportunity to join the ranks of New Pioneers.