THE STUDENTS’ VOICE SINCE 1887
The Volante
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OC TOBER 8, 2014
capturing one hundred years
Alumni, students reflect on the Dakota Days centennial, its evolution Megan Card
Megan.Card@coyotes.usd.edu
To “Live the Tradition” at the University of South Dakota, seniors Kate Turner and Taylor Vavra had seven months to find out what 100 years of Dakota Days represented. This led the two, who are overall chairs of the Dakota Days Committee, to meet with alumni whose stories date back to when female students had week-day curfews and the British Invasion surged onto campuses nationwide with the release of the Beatles’s first U.S. single, “Please Please Me.” “I had my first Dakota Days nightmare a week after we were picked for overall chairs,” Vavra said. “How do we bring back 100 years in a week? It
wasn’t an easy question.” After looking through faded posters and pictures from past D-Days, the two seniors said they knew as early as February that honoring traditions needed to be a focus of the 100-year anniversary. Their guide to pull this off: binders that contain the tips, checklists and general guidance from chairs of years past. Months of D-Days planning and running events by the student executive board comes to an end the third quarter of USD’s football game against Northern Iowa Saturday. But Turner and Vavra said they hope students do not treat the week-long event as any other homecoming and instead learn about where and why D-Days began. “A lot of the dignitaries and alumni
are coming back, and we want to make sure they know how appreciative we are,” Turner said. Once referred to as South Dakota Day when it began in the fall of 1914, then-USD President Robert Slagle encouraged the creation of the celebration after he helped initiate the first Hobo Day at South Dakota State University. A Volante article published Nov. 24, 1914 read, “It is the first time that anything of the sort has ever been staged here. By all who witnessed it, it was pronounced a howling success.” A hundred years later, some USD graduates who planned D-Days while they were students in Vermillion still remember their year’s theme, major activities and the current events influencing the mood on campus.
1962: The folk revival Folk music. That’s what Jim Beddow, 72, remembers of the year he was D-Days chair in 1962. “It was the revival. ‘Peter, Paul and Mary,’ they were all really big. It was the very beginning of Rock n’ Roll, which was just starting to capture the SEE D-DAYS, PAGE A6
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Check online throughout the week for full coverage of everything D-Days.
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Early engagement Volunteers give hope through Local medical essential in native building homes, community professionals ready for Ebola student success, advocate says Megan Street
Cristina Drey
Megan.Street@coyotes.usd.edu
Christina.Drey@coyotes.usd.edu
Megan Card
Megan.Card@coyotes.usd.edu
The key to Native American student success on a college campus begins in elementary school, says a long-time South Dakota educator. Lionel Bordeaux has been president of Sinte Gleska University, one of the first tribal colleges in the country, since 1973, but he was at the University of South Dakota Monday to talk about challenges faced by Native American students pursuing a degree in higher education. “We need to come together and sit SEE GLESKA, PAGE A8
University of South Dakota students are bettering their community by spreading kindness and fighting poverty through Habitat for Humanity, transitioning into a new partnership with the Yankton HFH-SD branch. There are 12 official branches in South Dakota. In the 14 years it has been active, HFH-SD has built 435 homes — 26 in 2012 alone. Habitat for Humanity is an international Christian organization founded in 1976 which aims to build affordable housing for low-income families and combat poverty, according to the Habitat for Humanity South Dakota website. The unofficial branch of HFH at SEE HOME, PAGE A7
MEGAN STREET I THE VOLANTE
Maxwell Swanson, senior and President of Habitat for Humanity at USD, and Raven Blahnik, first-year install a roof joist at a new home in Yankton Saturday.
In the largest Ebola epidemic in history, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention reports the mortality number to be more than 3,400, the majority stemming from multiple countries in West Africa. On Sept. 30, the CDC confirmed the first travel-associated case, Thomas Eric Duncan, to be diagnosed in the United States. Several patients have been treated for the infection around the U.S. after contracting the disease, including two who were kept at the Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. SEE EBOLA, PAGE A8
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