BROOKINGS Over the years, Ive been asked on occasion when my interest in becoming a journalist was piqued and, honestly, Im not entirely sure, other than the fact that it wasnt when I was as young as Sioux Valley third-grader Chance Johnson.
He delivers The Brookings Register to classrooms on Tuesdays and Fridays; its something he does of his own accord because he finds it to be fun. When I was in third grade, I was more interested in train sets, my Atari 2600 gaming system and Hasbros Transformers toy line.
Beyond that, what I do remember is writing. I loved to write, and I had the imagination to go along with it. One example ties into my love for trains, when I ran my own railroad. Id take a map of the rail lines in South Dakota, bold the ones I owned, and from there would write a log describing daily operations on those rail lines the frequency of the trains running on them, what freight they were hauling and so on. I even abandoned lines when they werent making enough money to cover the maintenance costs; after all, replacing ties, tie plates, and repairing trestles doesnt come cheap!
Exciting stuff, right? Yup, I can already see you guffawing at that observation. What can I say? My 10- to 12-year-old imagination had to fend for itself back in the 1980s; there was no publicly accessible internet back then let alone social media for it to latch onto.
Anyway. From there things only got bigger, but in a much more practical way. I graduated from writing railroad logs to sketching out newspaper designs on sheets of paper and writing in tiny story descriptions within those sketches. I had headlines, subheads, paragraphs why, the whole kit and kaboodle.
As I got a little older, into my middle school years, I can remember racing some of my Sioux Valley classmates into the school library to see who could grab a newspaper first. Back then, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader was a popular choice for a first read, along with The Brookings Register. The sports section usually got the first read, followed by the comics and, finally, the news and opinion pages.
I didnt always win those races to the library, but I did win the one race that counted (at least for me): When my family moved to Sinai in 1989, there wasnt a newspaper in that community of 130 or so souls. Being in an entrepreneurial mood and on the cusp of entering high school, I decided to give Sinai a newspaper, and thus the Sinai Pioneer was born in 1989.
I ran it until May1993, when I graduated from Sioux Valley High School. I did everything a reporter, editor, publisher, ad rep and circulation person would do wrote and edited stories, visited with advertisers, kept up with what folks were doing. I even expanded operations into Nunda and changed the name to the Sinai-Nunda Pioneer.
My last issue was a tough one. Not only was I ending my first foray into journalism, but I was doing so on a sad note, acknowledging the tragic death of South Dakota Gov. George S. Mickelson in a plane crash. The tribute wasnt anything fancy like what a real newspaper with a paid staff could do, but it wasnt too bad for a soon-to-graduate senior in high school.
From there, my years at South Dakota State University and my time as a campus beat reporter for the student newspaper, The Collegian beckoned. After that, well, were approaching the more modern era of my life: My life in Aberdeen began in May 1998 when I started my professional career as a copy editor with the Aberdeen American News. I spent 23 years there before returning home to the Brookings area, where Ive reported on happenings here since May 2022.
Whether young Chance sticks with journalism is still to be determined. For all I know, he might want to be an astronaut, or perhaps something more grounded, like a police officer or a car mechanic. But this much is certain his future remains wide open and his to choose.
As for me, well, Ive been doing what I love since 1989 roughly 36 years now and dont plan on putting away my keyboard just yet. After all, when theres downtime away from work, someones got to make sure the trains arrive on time.
Contact Mondell Keck at [email protected].
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