By John Kubal | The Brookings Register
BROOKINGS — Delmer “Del” Lonowski, who turned 80 on Feb. 3, noted that he can relate to Ron Dobesh, 78, whose story was told in the Feb.13 issue of The Brookings Register. Dobesh is in the auto repair business. Lonowski operated a service station in Nebraska before going into the world of academia.
Lonowski was born in Loup City, Neb., a town on the Loup River about 200 miles west of Omaha. The town then had a population of about 1,500. Now it’s down to about 1,000. He lived the first three years of his life on a farm near Loup City.
“Then Dad moved into town and worked for the John Deere dealer for a while,” Lonowski explained. “Then he bought out a great-uncle of mine, and he ended up with four (service) stations that he supplied.”
He graduated from Loup City High School in 1964. A family across the street from where he lived had a son who was a Foreign Service officer. “And that was my goal: to be a Foreign Service officer,” Lonowski said.
He asked a teacher where he should attend college to attain that goal. She recommended George Washington University, in Washington, D.C. Lonowski, however, attended University of Nebraska (Lincoln) on a scholarship. He would then finish up at GWU, studying international affairs in his fourth year. An episode about three weeks before graduation still brings a hint of laughter.
“I went to pick up a female friend — not a girlfriend, just a friend, at a dorm,” Lonowski recalled. “And another girl came in crying, because her pet squirrel was up in a tree.
“Well, I went up in the tree after the pet squirrel. He jumped out and I fell and injured my back. I walked to the hospital and spent 10 days there as a patient.”
The injury left him disqualified for military service. And while he wanted to work for the government, he was also unfit for that. With his bachelor’s degree in hand, he returned to Nebraska and took over the operation of one of his father’s service stations. He did that from 1970 to 1979. And a year after he took over the gas station, he married Mary. They have one son.
He admitted that he made “a pretty good living to start with and then the energy crisis hit in 1973 and the bottom dropped out of sales. It was so bad that I rationed gas to $2 per customer. Gas was selling for about 30 cents a gallon.”
“It took all the profit out of it. I was running about 35,000 gallons a month; it dropped down to about 16,000. So from about 1979 to 1985, I went to work for my dad. Then I decided to go back to graduate school.
“I started out at Kearney (University of Nebraska campus). I got a master’s in social science education there. I wanted a Ph.D. in political science, so I went to Nebraska-Lincoln; they wouldn’t accept my master’s from Kearney and made me get another master’s. And then I got my Ph.D.” Soon after that came a job offer from South Dakota State University.
“Bob Burns, acting political science department head, called me up and asked me if I wanted a job.” Lonowski accepted the offer, even though the posting “was temporary because they hadn’t searched for a dean yet” for the college under which political science then operated. Since his position was temporary, Lonowski searched on his own to find a job.
He applied to schools across the country, turning down a job offer from a college in Georgia because he sensed a misogynistic atmosphere in the town and thought Mary would not like to live there. Then came an offer from SDSU and he became a regular faculty member there in 1991. He stayed until retirement in 2013.
He taught a variety of courses that included: state and local government; comparative government; international relations; international law and organizations; European government; and tribal government.
Lonowski sees retirement as “being boring if you didn’t do something.” He’s a voracious reader. As a retired SDSU professor, he prizes his unlimited access to SDSU’s Hilton M. Briggs library. He looks to reading lists for books about those world nations that didn’t come to the fore in courses he taught about governments and their institutions here in the United States and in Europe. Those nations he now looks to learn more information about include China, Iran and Venezuela. He also reads what he can when “hot issues” hit the news and the international scene.
“I’m still learning, I guess,” he said, smiling and laughing.
When asked if he’s active in politics, he pauses for a few seconds before he replies, “Not directly. I’ve been participating in the (Brookings Area) Indivisible group. That’s one thing. I’m not being politically motivated. I’m looking for situations where I can interact with younger people and understand the younger generation. That way I can get to understand what they’re doing.”
“Just sitting around and talking to old people can be boring,” Lonowski said, laughing heartily.
Incidentally, former students seeing Lonowski today might not immediately recognize the man some affectionally referred to as “the Polish cannon.” He’s not quite a mere shadow of the man he used to be — and that’s fine with him. For health reasons, he lost about 100 pounds.
— Contact John Kubal at [email protected].
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