Special Edition.
BOWMAN COUNTY PIONEER ESTABLISHED 1907, VOL. 110
CITY OF BOWMAN, BOWMAN COUNTY, NORTH DAKOTA, FRIDAY, JULY 24, 2015.
NO. 30. $1.00 PER COPY.
WELCOME, BOWMAN ALUMNI! By BRYCE MARTIN Pioneer Editor
Man Dies in Tragic Train Accident
Clemens Schaaf
By BRYCE MARTIN Pioneer Editor
An 89-year-old man from Bowman was killed the afternoon of July 16 when his car was struck by a train six miles east of Bowman. Clemens “Clem” Schaaf was en route to a rural residence, heading northbound on 139th Avenue Southwest around 1:40 p.m. July 16, according to a release issued by the North Dakota Highway Patrol. A Burlington Northern-Santa Fe train was traveling eastbound to Hettinger, from Forsyth, Mont., when the man’s vehicle failed to stop for the train crossing and was struck, according to the release. The train crashed into the front driver’s side of the vehicle, which came to rest in the southeast ditch along the tracks. The man was not wearing his seatbelt, according to police, and was pronounced dead at the scene. The crash remains under investigation by the North Dakota Highway Patrol.
Angel Gowns: A New Purpose for Old Gowns
The Pioneer Trails Regional Museum in Bowman set up a display that boasts a collection of Bowman school memorabilia just in time for the reunion. (Photo by Bryce Martin)
Big Crowds Expected During All Class Reunion, Summerfest By BRYCE MARTIN Pioneer Editor
Many months ago amidst the hills of North Dakota’s Emerald City, two Bowman alumni shared their undying passion for the place from which they graduated high school. While the old adage from Thomas Wolfe is that you can never go home again, Kelly and Peggy Binek of Minot disagreed. Their intentions were quite the contrary. An estimated 1,000 people, almost half the city of Bowman’s current population, are expected to come home again to be part
of this year’s Bowman County High School All Class Reunion. That total doesn’t include the families already in the area that come out for Bowman’s Summerfest. A school reunion is hardly such cause for an entire city to leave a big red box that weekend on its calendar, but Binek and his group of volunteers are pulling out all the stops. It was Binek’s hope to find and invite as many Bowman County alumni he could find. So he did what anybody would in the present era of rampant social media: he turned to Facebook.
From there he inadvertently created the basis for a working catalogue of the community’s vast history. Along with the frequent posts from friends reconnecting and alumni posting their memories, an oral and pictorial history of Bowman began to emerge and served as a springboard for reminiscing. There wasn’t much to the Bowman High School reunions that Kelly attended in the past. Fellow alumni would meet downtown or at the golf course. If extra money was available, they’d throw together some type of meal. They would MORE ON PAGE 5
‘A BUSTLING TOWN’
By AMY WOLFF For the Pioneer
After the wedding bells fall silent and the dancing is done, after all the food has been eaten and the gifts unwrapped, after the “I dos” and “good lucks,” there is almost always one thing that remains, the bride’s wedding gown. Some women carefully pack them away in the hopes of having a daughter who may one day dawn their beautiful dress covered in lace and memories. While others throw wedding gowns back into their dress bags and shove them in a closet or tote, not thinking much of them for years down the road, Angel Gowns of Casper, Wyo., has given women a different option. The branch of the organization based out of Casper, Wyo., is just one of many throughout the country under the NICU Helping Hands that provides the opportunity to women to make a difference with their dresses. With the donation of these bridal gowns, volunteers create beautiful outfits for infants who never make it home from the hospital. The loss of a child is something that hopefully most will never know, but for those facing such a deep loss, this is one less thing they need to think about in their time of grief. It’s a way for others, even as strangers, to let these families know that they care. MORE ON PAGE 14
The team from Carrington—Casey Murphy, Denise Schuchard, Stacey Rzaszutak, Laurie Dietz, Dr. Vern Anderson and Joel Lemer—spent 24 hours in Bowman May 18 as part of the LinkND program.
Group from Carrington Shares Thoughts on Bowman After Visit By BRYCE MARTIN Pioneer Editor
An outsider’s view is sometimes best to discover something that goes unnoticed. At least that’s what Bowman County Development Corp. Director Teran Doerr thought when she became part of the state’s LinkND pilot program aimed at learning and improving between communities. The program, using the cities of Bowman and Carrington as its guinea pigs, consisted of a group of people from one town heading out to explore and report on a list of different aspects of another town in the state.
The program aims to match up North Dakota cities with similar population and demographics. Carrington’s population stood at 2,065 at the time of the 2010 U.S. Census. Its area measures roughly 2 sq. miles and it serves as the county seat of Foster County, located approximately between Jamestown and Devil’s Lake on Highway 52. Six representatives from Carrington quietly toured Bowman on May 18—Doerr said the Bowman group would head out to the eastern North Dakota city next month for their tour. That tour would ultimately translate into a 25-page report of the group’s findings.
Doerr said the program, so far, was a success. “(The program) really encouraged you to look at the community from a different aspect,” Doerr said. The results of Carrington’s 24 hours spent in Bowman were released during the July 20 Bowman Area Chamber of Commerce membership meeting. It was a moment of suspense for the crowd, eager to hear what the group—a diverse group of participants mostly unfamiliar with the city of Bowman—had to say about the area. The tour portion of the program was kept under wraps to dissuade from any MORE ON PAGE 2
Consider it a rather large step back into time. The overly dated, sepia drowned front page of this week’s Bowman County Pioneer has been painstakingly redesigned to mirror exactly what the very first edition looked like, which was published on May 16, 1907. Down to the last detail of the curly serif fonts, the design is from the 1900s while the news is current. It was no easy task for me, but I thought it would be a perfect bit of nostalgia for the Bowman High School All Class Reunion to be held this weekend. Thanks to the Pioneer Trails Regional Museum and their meticulous mission to preserve our community’s history, I was able to view the albeit crumbling and torn first edition. It was truly an experience nonetheless as I was able to flip through the pages of a document that is more than 100 years old. My staff and I hold the Pioneer close to our hearts and I consider my duty as a journalist as one that is important and necessary, so to actually see the progress that this publication has made over 108 years was outstanding. Mr. Wells, the editor at the time of the Pioneer’s first edition, was clearly prolific in his dedication to diction and word choice. Such detail has long since gone by the way side, transposed with more modern grammatical and journalistic style. Looking through the historic first edition, and in many decades following, the news was far more than just “hyperlocal” — Henry Roen was seeing the sights in Stillwater Thursday last, Mrs. Will Bouschelle’s father is visiting her from West Virginia, Mr. Botoger is visiting Mrs. J. Brennan while waiting for the completion of his house. That type of journalism, being the all-seeing-eye of the community has faded (though we’re happy that you’ll still find some of that in Mrs. Josephine Kaczmarek’s weekly “This and That” column on our editorial page). But detailing the personal lives of people that aren’t necessarily in the public eye is unethical journalism for the current era; I believe many people would find it far too intrusive and an invasion of their privacy to print such events in the modern day. But the Pioneer is still true to its community with local coverage each week and every day on our website. The most striking piece to the May 16, 1907 front page was a scribe on the top right side of the paper that eloquently laid out the Pioneer’s mission statement. Most of it has remained unchanged to this day with the exception of our political affiliation—we take no official stance on political views so as to report the news without bias. Here is what Mr. Wells wrote, hoping to inspire the community to remain knowledgable of what was happening around them: “With this issue the Bowman County Pioneer comes out upon the journalistic stage and makes its bow to the intelligent citizens of Bowman County, the best and most progressive county in the state of North Dakota, and as the custom now is and has been in the past, and the people have the right to demand it, that we should state the platform upon which the enterprise stands, and asks for the patronage of the people, so we will state briefly— That the Pioneer will always be MORE ON PAGE 2