Woster: – Mitchell Republic | Information, climate, sports activities from Mitchell South Dakota

Perhaps because I spent most of my newspaper career covering politics, elections and government, I always jumped at assignments that let me talk to just plain folks.

Politics and elections and government were my beat, the reason I got hired for a newspaper job in Pierre. Those activities were important. Still are. Politics and elections are part of the process used to choose the people we will count on to serve us in this state and country. Government is about what those leaders do for us and to us. That’s big stuff, certainly worth assigning reporters to cover and file stories on their deliberations and actions.

Truthfully, though, covering those topics sometimes got old. Now and then, it seemed like the issues and debates were the same, and nothing changed but names of people involved.

That said, I liked the hard news part of my beat. That’s the politics and the elections and the government. I didn’t often take vacations. I guess you could say the plain folks were my way of vacationing. Those were assignments to “go around the state and find some interesting people.’’ That was my way of taking a break from the important stuff. I’m an introvert by nature, but it was fun to drive into a random town, walk into a coffee shop and say, “Who is the biggest character around?’’ I met a lot of fascinating people that way.

One thing I liked about plain folks was that they seldom took themselves seriously. Politicians I covered took themselves terribly seriously. Plain folks took life as it came. They lived through the day and did it again the next day. The lives they described to me were simple but fascinating, remarkable.

The plain folks didn’t seem to find it remarkable that they ranched 10,000 acres, that they ordered their first house through Sears, Roebuck and had it delivered by train to a bare piece of prairie next to the tracks, or that at age 6 they sold an extra edition of their dad’s newspaper from a city street corner when a major earthquake hit San Francisco in 1906. Such things were just part of living. I loved how nonchalant such folks could be about such amazing things.

I didn’t consider visits with the plain folks to be interviews. They were conversations, just two people talking, frequently about the old days. Some of my conversation partners referred to those times as “the good old days.’’ Other disagreed.

One who disagreed was Mel Gibbs from Custer. He was 90 when I met up with him at one of the town’s busy breakfast places. When I mentioned the good old days, he shook his head.

“Bah. There was nothing good about the old days. Who’d trade a new car for an old wagon? Who’d give up television and plumbing and electric lights? I say leave the good old days where they belong, a long way in the past.’’

During our coffee conversation, he asked where I was from. When I said Chamberlain, he brightened. He had started his teaching career north of there, in a country school not too far from Gann Valley.

In the heyday of one-room rural schools, he said, a teacher often operated by the seat of their pants, adjusting the course work to fit the needs of the students who came from nearby farms and ranches. He told of the parents of a ninth-grader who wanted to keep the boy close to home. Gibbs said he earned a certificate that allowed him to be “an accredited one-year high school.’’ The next year that student boarded in town for high school. Gibbs went back to just being a grade school teacher.

I remember suggesting that, in 90 years, he must have seen incredible changes. Not many, he said, unless you mean the telephone, or the automobile, or the airplane. Well, yeah, things like those, sure.

In the end, he gave me a quote that summed up why I liked meeting plain folks, especially the older ones.

“If a person lives long enough, he just about has to have some experiences that other people would find interesting – not spectacular, you know, but interesting.’’