Tri-State Neighbor: South Dakota Farm Newspaper

One of my best friends is a guy named Larry Johnson. He just retired as band teacher at Riggs High School in Pierre, S.D.

Larry and I met 30 years ago, when we each joined the folk choir in Pierre’s Catholic Church. He plays string bass and electric bass, and he has a powerful voice that lends itself to the low notes of church hymns.

Our association in the church choir led us to collaborate in a four-piece dance band called the (sensational) Standbys, with Virge Mikkelsen on drums and Mal Hinckley on lead guitar, keyboards and accordion. I played a passable rhythm guitar, but I made the band because I knew lyrics to just about every rock, country or swing song from the last 60 or 70 years.

Larry came by his musical talent naturally. His dad, Juell Johnson, is a keyboard wizard. He spent his working life as a highway maintenance guy in Lemmon, S.D., for many years, then in Pierre. He knew hard work, snowy highways and sweltering construction zones. He also knew almost any song anybody mentioned, and those he didn’t know, he could play by ear if they hummed a couple of bars.

He did sing-alongs at the old Falcon Lounge during legislative sessions for many years. The place had songbooks, but Juell seldom used them. People in the audience would shout out the number of a tune, and he’d rip out an introduction on the piano or organ.

I mention Juell and Larry because Father’s Day is nearly here, and that makes me think of fathers and sons. For a number of years, Larry and his dad were two-thirds of a jazz trio called “A Touch of Class,’’ with Larry’s brother-in-law John Clausen on drums. They were a highly gifted and entertaining trio, and sometimes when I watched them make their music, I envied my friend for the opportunity he had to share something so special with his father.

Such opportunities don’t come along often enough in life, and I know from a couple of conversations with Larry as we were driving home from our own late-night dance jobs that he appreciated the time he and his dad spent doing something they both enjoyed.

I had a few of those opportunities with my dad, as most farm kids do. They mostly involved hard work, heavy lifting and unruly calves, as we went about the routine business of operating a cattle and wheat farm in Lyman County.

I often drove grain trucks while my dad ran the combine through the wheat, rye or oats. I kept a lumbering old Ford truck close to the silage cutter as he pulled it through a field of stunted corn in the cool mornings of September. I handed hot branding irons to him as he stood next to the chute in the corral and stamped one calf after another with the WB of the Woster Brothers farm partnership. And I rode with him, and often my uncle, Frank, in a pickup from town to the farm and back on weekends during the school year, listening to their conversation about weather, markets and the order of things to be done that day.

My dad was 56 when he died back in the summer of 1968. I was 24, a college graduate with a pregnant wife, one daughter and a job at a newspaper. I was just beginning to reach the age at which I would appreciate the constant presence of my dad in my life, and he left. He didn’t get to see our second child, a son, or any of the other children and grandchildren of my generation of Wosters.

Looking back, I see that I had countless hours of time with my dad, all those early breakfasts before the work day began, the pauses for water or lunch in the hay fields, the evenings as he watched the local news and I read one of an endless stream of library books.

I wasn’t old enough to appreciate the time. I am now, and hardly a week goes by all these years later than I don’t wish there’d been just a little more of it.

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