“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.
The story of a professional chef in New York City moving to small-town North Dakota for love seems the perfect plot for a Hallmark Christmas movie.
Except it’s not so far-fetched for Sheri Shockman.
When Sheri joined an online dating service about 15 years ago, she was not looking for a relationship. Rather, she wanted to help a loved one who had fallen victim to an online scam.
“I went on (the online dating site) to find this scammer. Instead, I found my husband,” she says.
“They needed people, and we were just kind of a link in a food chain,” Westhope native and Vietnam War veteran Dennis “Denny” McKechnie says. “I didn’t have a choice. I got No. 19 in the lottery, and my buddy got 18. … We knew where we were going, right?”
They were just boys when their country called them.
“I didn’t want to be there, but yet, here I am with 30 guys. They don’t want to be there neither,” Denny recalls of the plane ride to Vietnam in May 1971.
He was only 20 years old.
