Steve Young: On the beat

Hiawatha remembered

The Argus Leader’s stories on May 5 about the Hiawatha Indian Insane Asylum at Canton struck a chord with a Florida woman who remembers her youth spent visiting at the center long ago.

Clarice Juel Mikkelson lives in Fort Meyers, Fla., today. But 80 years ago, she lived in Canton and resided next door to a couple, Clifford and Polly Vickerman, who worked at the asylum.

He was in maintenance. She worked in the kitchen. It wasn’t unusual for the Vickermans to take their little 11-year-old neighbor to holiday parties and other events at the institution where townsfolk could mingle with the patients.

Though promoted as the only insane asylum for tribal people in the country, many of its patients had no mental health issues at all.

Some were simply thorns in the side of a white society that wanted to assimilate the Native Americans and grew frustrated when they resisted. Others had epilepsy and other medical conditions with no connection to mental health concerns whatsoever.

One of the patients young Clarice befriended was a woman from the Pine Ridge Reservation named Lizzie Red Owl. “She was not insane,” Mildred Juel of Brookings said of Red Owl, recounting stories told her by her sister-in-law, Clarice.

“Lizzie had gone to Carlisle College in Pennsylvania,” Mildred Juel said. “Clarice had no idea why she was there in the asylum. If Lizzie had seizures, maybe they didn’t know how to handle her. But Clarice didn’t ask questions.”

As she recounted those days to her relatives, Clarice did recall a Christmastime event when Lizzie Red Owl was asked to be a caller at a square dance. Shy and reticent, she only agreed to do so when her young friend said she would stand beside her.

During the course of their friendship, Lizzie made four dolls for Clarice. The largest was crafted from rough fabric in a traditional Indian garb.
There were also beaded moccasins that were made from chamois skin purchased in town and brought to Lizzie to use.

Lizzie gave the little girl a colored painting of an unnamed chief as well and placed it in the frame that originally held her college diploma.
She also braided three cotton rag rugs that she gave to Clarice’s mother to use in the Juels’ bedrooms until they wore out.

In time, Clarice turned the four dolls over to the Canton Library, as well as the image of the Indian chief and a note that Red Owl wrote to her young friend. They remain there today.

At 92, Clarice tells family members that she still remembers those days vividly. And there are questions that remain.

“We have no knowledge of what happened to Lizzie Red Owl, whether she was sent to Washington (D.C.) or to the reservation or perhaps was buried under a different name,” Mildred Juel said. “I think (Clarice) has always wondered about that.”

Snowiest April on record?

For those cursing Mother Nature these days and mumbling about the audacity of multiple snowstorms in April, consider this:

This probably won’t end up as the snowiest April on record in Sioux Falls.

Heading into this morning, Sioux Falls had 10.2 inches of snow for the month, according to National Weather Service records.

That’s a long way from the record snowfall for the month, which was 18.4 inches in 1983.

We’ll have to wait for the meteorologists to add in the Monday (April 22) snowfall to the monthly tally to see if this April comes in with the second most snow. Right now, that mark belongs to April 1994, when 14.9 inches of snow fell.

And of course, you remember a year ago, when the 70-degree days started early in the spring and barreled right into a boiling summer. The National Weather Service recorded no April snow in 2012.

Understanding the pain of suicide

One of the themes the Argus Leader wanted to track in its series on suicide in March was how much those contemplating death thought about the heartache they would leave behind with their acts. Or if they thought about it at all.

That apparently touched a chord with Lori Welling. The 49-year-old Sioux Falls woman called after the stories ran. She wanted to talk.


Welling’s rollercoaster ride in and out of despair has wreaked havoc in her life and the lives of those closest to her, she said. Damaged relationships, lost jobs, inexplicable and unforgiveable acts – it has been a painful and ugly carousel for her.

“We have such a stereotype in society about depression, and that’s a hard thing,” Welling said. “Oh, you’re a psycho, a wacko.’ No I’m not. With the proper medication and right support system, I can function as well as anyone else.”

The problem has often been the search for those proper meds. It takes weeks and months to build up the proper levels of an antidepressant, she says. And if it doesn’t work, it takes a similar amount of time to wean yourself off of it and start again.

In those long valleys in between, her irritational behavior has been almost catastrophic. Triggered by abusive relationships, or by her own despair, she said she has tried to kill herself three times – with pills, with a rope around her neck, with a car running in a closed garage.

In the darkest places, Welling said, she wasn’t thinking of what her death might mean to others.

“You are in such a narrow, black tunnel that has narrowed to this small hole,” she said. “You honestly think you would be doing everyone a favor because you’re such a burden to them, and no one understands because you feel so alone.”

In her last attempt, in 2010, she grabbed a soda, a bottle of pills and went into her garage. With the car windows open, the garage door shut and Carpenters music playing around her, she washed the pills down with the pop and decided to go to sleep forever.

At some point, she must have called a friend, though she insists there was no cell phone in the car and she doesn’t remember doing it. Later, in a hospital bed, she learned in the most powerful and poignant terms the impact of her attempt on others.

“The look on my mom and dad’s faces when they walked through the door at Avera, that broke my heart,” Welling says, her voice dissolving into sobs, her eyes filled with tears. “They just started talking. … they were blaming themselves. ‘Maybe we weren’t good parents. Maybe we should have done this.’ ”

Her father was never one to tell her he loved her, Welling said. She has since learned that love for him was spoken through hard work, through food on the table and a roof over their heads – and not through words.

But in the hospital room that day, “he told me how much he loved me, and how proud he was of me when I hadn’t given him any reason to be proud of me,” she said. “He wanted to see me in heaven, and he really believed that God wouldn’t let me in heaven if I killed myself.”

Her father has died since then. But Welling has not forgotten what he said. Now that she’s on what she considers to be the right medication, and with a good support group of friends and a counselor in the Sanford health care system that she idolizes, she feels empowered to talk about the dark places of depression and the first-hand knowledge of what suicide might mean to others.

“I would end my pain; I understand that. I wouldn’t be hurting anymore,” she said. “But now I understand a little bit more. I would hurt so many others, and I’ve seen that pain in others. I don’t ever want to see it, to know I caused it, again.”

A suicide postscript

Our series on those left behind to struggle after suicide that ran March 17-18 in the Argus Leader brought some poignant and powerful responses to my email afterward.

You know that publicizing the act will only lead to more deaths, some admonished me. But what I heard more often was gratitude for having turned a spotlight on a subject that too often is stigmatized and hidden away as too painful to broach.

Craig Peterson is in that latter group. Peterson and I worked together 30 years ago in the sports department at the Argus Leader – me as a young sportswriter not long out of college and he as a part-timer still in high school.

I have to admit the name sounded familiar to me even if our time together didn’t. But the story he shared with me isn’t one I’ll soon forget.

Forty years ago, Peterson and his best friend were 8-year-olds growing up in central Sioux Falls, more like brothers than pals, moving through Jefferson Elementary together, then on to Edison Junior High and, eventually, Washington High School.

“We always laughed about when, in high school and college, his mother would yell down to me in the rec room, ‘Pete, do you want a sandwich?’ ” Peterson recalled.

After college, his friend found a job with an international engineering firm in Kansas City. Why don’t you move down there, too, he asked his friend. They’d share an apartment together.

Peterson gave his two-week notice at Citibank and jumped at the chance. It was July of 1989.

Roommates for nearly five years, they each found love, married and started having families. They got together less often as their careers took off, maybe seeing each other once or twice a year. But they still emailed each other constantly, reliving the hilarious memories of two rambunctious kids growing up on the streets of Sioux Falls.

“Those notes would make a mundane and stressful work day enjoyable and fun,” said Peterson, who works in investment management. “We always said we couldn’t have possibly had more fun and laughs growing up, pitying those who hadn’t behaved as crazy even if we did regularly take everything too far and got into trouble.”

His friend was intelligent, having obtained a master’s degree in mechanical engineering. He was hard working and successful. And he always seemed happy, with such a positive attitude, and Peterson couldn’t have respected or admired him more.

And then just like that, around Christmas Eve in 2009, everything changed.

“One day I came home from work to find several emails from friends in Sioux Falls asking me about his death,” Peterson wrote me. “I was stunned. I called his sister and was so completely crushed, I could barely talk or even stand. It was by far the very worst moment of my entire life.”

Though they emailed each other all the time, his friend had never mentioned that he had been going through a stressful divorce that past year, Peterson said. He had grown angry and depressed, yet there was nothing ever revealed in any communications with his friend.

Or was there? Now Peterson isn’t so sure.

“He mentioned something once,” Peterson said. “I just about picked up the phone. It sounded real odd, real out of character. I was busy at work and didn’t call.”

In the spring after his friend’s death, Peterson had an oak tree planted in the northeast corner of Spellerberg Park in Sioux Falls, close to their childhood homes and to where they spent countless summer days together. His friend’s mother can see it nearly every day, and his sister can walk by it with her daughter and their dogs.

In September 2010, Peterson also participated in a suicide awareness walk in Kansas City, helping to raise more than $1,800. “It’s funny,” he said, “but the more money that came in, the better you felt. The more people that contributed, even if it was a small amount, it just added up in my mind to the fact that there were others out there who thought his life was worthy of it.”

There are similar events in South Dakota, hosted by the HelpLine Center here in Sioux Falls and other groups, activities that just have to be beneficial and therapeutic, Peterson believes. In his mind, there is a healing quality in those efforts that could benefit anyone left suffering after the intentional death of someone close to them.

Still, this is not a pain that ever totally goes away – not for family, and certainly not for friends, he said..

“It gets better over time. … a little,” Peterson wrote. “I still miss my friend, miss our emails, regularly. I am not sure if a day has yet gone by that I haven’t thought of him. I never once had an ounce of anger. … just an overwhelming sadness for him and what he went through during that period.”

A sadness, too, that he will never be able to answer the question that haunts everyone left behind after someone commits suicide: Could I have done anything to prevent it?

Surviving Mengele’s experiments

You have to wonder, as I did when I was talking to Eva Mozes Kor the other day, how a human being comes through the horrors of an experience like the Holocaust unscathed emotionally and psychologically.

Kor is coming to Brookings Wednesday to speak about her nine months at Auschwitz in 1944 and the beginning of 1945. While there, she and her twin sister, Miriam, were experimented on by the Angel of Death, Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele.

She talked about that experience for a story we ran about her in Tuesday’s Argus Leader.

Kor, 79, would tell you that she walked out of Auschwitz with more than just her Jewish identification — A-7063 — branded into her flesh. She brought horrific memories with her as well, of children lying dead in her barracks, or of Mengele and his staff injecting her with all kinds of germs and diseases to see if she could survive.

Kor went to Israel in 2011 to speak with other twins who, like her, had survived Mengele’s atrocities. She was hoping to communicate with 60 to 65 surviving twins living there. She got to speak to only three.

Many wouldn’t answer their telephones or come to the door. “I’d say half of them you can’t talk to because they are taking tranquilizers and antidepressants and they can’t really function very well,” Kor said.

It’s sad, she continued. If survivors could only learn to forgive — as she has publicly forgiven Mengele and the other Nazis who perpetrated their inhumanity on her — then “they might be able to function much better, rather than be so angry at the world,” she said.

As for how a 10-year-old like her survived the hunger and the rats and the disease and the humiliation, Kor tells this story.

When her mother was expecting their third child, her father desperately wanted a son to go along with the two daughters they already had. As her twin sister emerged first, her father asked the midwife what sex the baby was.

The midwife said apologetically, “it’s a girl. But don’t despair. Another one is coming.”

To her father’s disappointment, Kor said, the son never came.

When she was 5, maybe 6, she said her father started picking on her. He told her she should have been a boy.

When her mother would go across the street to visit a pregnant neighbor, the two women would talk about when “the stork was coming.” Little Eva, maybe 6 or 7 at the time, wondered how a bird knew how to bring babies to people’s houses. It must be a very smart bird. She told her father that she didn’t think it was her fault that the stork brought her instead of a son.

“From there on, he was at my throat and putting me in situations where I was always failing,” Kor said. “When he had a chance to belt me, he did, daily. I learned to develop a mentality of outsmarting my father and defying him.”

That outsmarting and defiance came in handy at Auschwitz, she said. Who knows, she says 70 years later. It might have saved her life.

Sanford gets ahead of Super Bowl ad questions

Sanford Health’s interim vice president of marketing sent an email out this week about an advertisement the health care giant intends to run during Super Bowl television coverage Sunday, wanting to get ahead of the eyebrows that are sure to be raised.

It’s no secret that a national 30-second television spot during the Super Bowl can cost as much as $4 million, Cindy Morrison said.

But before the jaws start dropping, sending chili cheese dip and nachos spilling into people’s laps when the Sanford ad begins appearing during the telecast, Morrison decided to give her organization’s management a heads-up.

In that email to managers, she explained that local advertisers have access to a number of ad slots before and during the game at a fraction of what the Budweiser’s and the Chrysler’s and the Go Daddy’s will pay.

“The national Super Bowl spot has been reported to cost $4 million for 30 seconds,” Morrison said. “If you think about it locally, that same 30 seconds would be less than $5,000 per spot, but you get four times the viewership than you do at other times. So for a fraction of what it costs, you get the coverage of hundreds of thousands of people who are compelled to watch the Super Bowl.”

This is roughly the 10th Super Bowl in which Sanford will have an ad, she said. And it has never paid the big bucks.

Sanford’s focus this year is on orthopedic and sports medicine,

“The ad involves a surgeon and a football player,” Morrison said. “It’s a comparison of a football player being prepared and a surgeon being prepared. And if you watch close, I think you’ll see some subliminal messages.”

The Super Bowl Sunday showing of the advertise is basically its unveiling, she said, and it will continue to be shown in the weeks ahead.

Passenger removed from plane in Sioux Falls

An odd thing happened Sunday morning on an airline flight from Sioux Falls to Minneapolis.

Delta Flight 3653, operated by Pinnacle Airlines Corp., was supposed to depart for Minneapolis at 9 a.m. when it was required to return to the gate.

According to Minnehaha County Sheriff Mike Milstead, who did some checking on the incident, someone on the flight apparently believed they saw a passenger who was wanted by law enforcement officials.

“Our people didn’t get sent on that call, but the way I understand it, it was someone on the plane that they thought was a wanted person from seeing a picture somewhere,” Milstead said. “I believe someone from the airport had them deplane, and they checked on them and it wasn’t the person who was wanted.”

Though he can’t confirm the exact circumstances, Milstead believes the passenger was allowed to take a later flight to the Twin Cities.

Officials with the Sioux Falls Police Department said they sent officers to the airport, but that they weren’t involved in removing anyone from the plane.

Joe Williams, director of corporate communications for Pinnacle Airlines Corp., said in an email that “I can confirm that Flight 3653, operated by Pinnacle Airlines, returned to the gate at (Sioux Falls) this morning and that a passenger was removed.”

Beyond that, he referred any other questions to Milstead’s office or to local police

Flight 3653 was about a half hour late in leaving and arrived in Minneapolis about 15 minutes late.