This summer promises to be one for the North Dakota history books.
As communities across the nation prepare for America’s 250th celebration, commemorating the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, North Dakota also eyes the July 4 grand opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora.
Though President Theodore Roosevelt called New York home, he was an intermittent North Dakotan. And he ate like one, too.
“The president lives very plainly. He prefers plain, wholesome food to the most elaborate menu,” the former White House chef Henry Benoit told The Lafayette Sunday Times in 1903.
One of his favorite dishes? A sirloin steak, potatoes and gravy. As a sportsman, he was also fond of all types of game, especially quail and venison. And, he had an affinity for his mother’s cooking. Relatable, right?
Bill Lowman says there are two kinds of cowboy poets.
There are those who love the life, but don’t have an opportunity to live it.
“We call (them) the wannabes. They’ll write the perfect cowboy poem every time to prove that they belong,” Lowman says.
The other ones live the cowboy life. Their routines are all too common.
I tell people I have the best job in North Dakota.
I get to tell stories about North Dakotans, about rural people and rural places, about co-ops and co-op people.
I grew up drinking the co-op Kool-Aid. My family was a Farmers Union family, which meant we were a co-op family.
My mom, Pam Musland, was even the magazine’s local pages editor for KEM Electric Cooperative when I was a little girl in Ashley. My name was first mentioned in the magazine when I was 2½ years old.
“It’s such an interesting and unusual and walled-off world for independent newspaper owners. They’re the only people in their community who do what they do, and very few people understand the sacrifices that are made and the slings and arrows that have to be dodged in order to do that for very low pay,” says Cecile Wehrman, executive director of the North Dakota Newspaper Association (NDNA).
When you walk into Velva Fresh Foods, it feels like a small-town hug. You’re greeted by smiling staff and good smells – bread baking, meat smoking or whatever homemade lunch owner Brenda McCasson is whipping up that day.
McCasson and her husband, Matt, bought the grocery store in 2019 from former state legislator Shawn Vedaa, who first hired Brenda as a meat cutter in 2016.
“(Shawn) said, ‘Well, you’re basically doing everything anyway. Why don’t you just buy it?’” Brenda recalls.
Sara Vollmer is living out her dream.
“You can’t not love the ranch,” she says.
The Leonard native met her husband, Troy Vollmer, while both were obtaining animal science degrees at North Dakota State University (NDSU).
“We both had the same advisor,” Sara recalls. “(The advisor) told Troy, ‘I’ve been to Wing, Troy. You best find a wife before you leave Fargo.”
Troy, it turns out, was a good student.
I don’t remember ever watching my mother, grandmothers or great-grandmothers (how lucky am I to have memories of each!) use pressure cookers. I don’t have a lived traumatic pressure-cooking experience. Yet still, I am downright terrified of pressure cookers!
Why?
I hypothesize we suffer from the generational trauma of pressure cookers. Although I never directly experienced a traumatic pressure-cooker explosion, it’s possible the fear has been passed down from one generation of my family to the next.
