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Grace Coolidge, 1924.
June 7, 2011 08:48 PM
Stylist to Mrs. Coolidge

When President Coolidge announced that he and his wife Grace would move the summer White House to the Black Hills in 1927, an enterprising hairdresser from Denver wrote to Mrs. Coolidge offering to attend to the First Lady’s hair. Mrs. Coolidge agreed. The hairdresser moved to Rapid City. One a week a car carried the hairdresser from Rapid City to the Game Lodge in Custer so that she could give the first lady a shampoo. While flappers of the twenties cut their hair short in a “bob,” Mrs. Coolidge kept her hair long in deference to her husband. When he was no longer president, she cut her hair, sporting “a sleek trim neckline of coiled braids."

January 2, 2012 09:37 AM
Stylist to Mrs. Coolidge

When President Coolidge announced that he and his wife Grace would move the summer White House to the Black Hills in 1927, an enterprising hairdresser from Denver wrote to Mrs. Coolidge offering to attend to the First Lady’s hair. Mrs. Coolidge agreed. Once a week a car carried the hairdresser from Rapid City to the Game Lodge in Custer so that she could give the first lady a shampoo. (“Mrs. Coolidge Now Sponsors Shorn Tresses,” Washington Post, August 9, 1931, B3)

July 8, 2011 07:59 AM
Disney Buys "The Family Band"

Laura Bower Van Nuys was well into her seventies when she sat down to write the story of the family band. As a child in the 1880s she lived with her parents and seven siblings on the Dakota frontier. For holidays or political rallies, the family made extra money by performing for the assembled crowd. Laura played the drums and later the alto horn.

When she was done writing, she sent her manuscript to the University of Nebraska Press in 1961. The press sent her a rejection slip, but two years later a different editor read the manuscript and decided to publish it. At the age of 83, she seemed to have a new career ahead of her.

Then Hollywood came calling. Walt Disney Productions bought the movie rights to The Family Band in 1965.

Van Nuys visited the set in 1967 with an entourage of 17 friends and relatives. They met the cast including stars Janet Blair, Walter Brennan and Lesley Ann Warren. “They’re doing a good job and all these people are so friendly and nice, just as common as an old shoe,” she told a reporter from the Los Angeles Times.

Asked if the movie would make her rich, Van Nuys said no. She might get some money from a re-publication of the book and record sales. “But what have I got to splurge on,” she said. Her house was paid off. “And I’ve already traveled,” she answered. She was just anxious to get home to her little white cottage in Rapid City with the snapdragons growing out front.

See a picture of Van Nuys' family published in the Argus Leader.

June 25, 2011 03:47 PM
Woman Pathbreaker in the Mining Industry

She was not the typical mining engineer of the 1960s. Wearing pearls and sporting a strawberry blond bouffant hairdo, Peggy Keenan spent one week a month in New York City raising money and making deals. The rest of the time, she was in the Black Hills supervising the work of her company,

Northwest Defense Minerals (also known as Northwest Beryllium).

Born in San Francisco, Keenan's interest in rocks and geology began at a young age. Her father developed mining properties and took her on frequent expeditions to the Sierra Nevada mountains when she was a girl. She came to the Black Hills when "it was real, raw frontier."

A professional pianist, Keenan started studying music around the same time she became interested in geology. She attended the University of Southern California where she majored in music. In the mid-1950s, she married Canadian naturalist and author John Stanwell-Fletcher. The pair traveled to India and were slated for the North Pole in 1955, but the scientific expedition they were on to determine the thickness of Artic ice turned back because of supply problems.

Keenan organized her mining syndicate in 1956 with hopes of beginning operations in the Black Hills the following year. At the Holy Terror Mine near Keystone, her employees used flotation methods to extract feldspar, mica, beryl and other minerals. Her company was the first in the world to develop a mechanical process for producing beryl concentrate. At the height of the mine's success, she employed 65 men.

William Howard Taft campaigning in South Dakota.
June 17, 2011 09:41 PM
President Taft Visits the Black Hills

Seeking to drum up support within his own party, President William Howard Taft arrived in the Black Hills in October, 1911. In Edgemont, Custer City, Deadwood, Lead, Sturgis and Rapid City,  crowds of 500 to 600 people appeared, many of them from the countryside, to catch a glimpse of the 27th President of the United States.

In Lead, with snowflurries blowing at the surface of the mine, the big man braved a steel cage and was lowered to the 1,100-foot level in the Homestake Mine. Following one of the drifts, he and his entourage encountered miners working in a cave with 15-foot high ceilings. Smoldering calcium paper attached to the sides of the cavern illuminated the room. 

"How are you, Bill?" one miner called down to the President.

"Pretty good," Taft responded from the shadows. "How are you away up there?"

"Fine, old boy," yelled the miner. "Glad to see you."

Taft spent 45 minutes in the mine before he reappeared at the surface and stepped out of the elevator cage. He gave a speech in Lead explaining his controversial vetoes of the tariff bills. Congressman E. W. Martin, on behalf of the citizens, presented the President with a small gold brick worth over $300 ($6,765 in 2011 dollars). 

Journalists thought the trip helped strengthen the President's support in South Dakota against an insurgent movement in his own Republican Party led by Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette and former President Theodore Rooselvelt. In 1912, however, the state turned against Taft. After he was renominated by the national Republican Party, local operatives managed to keep him off the ballot in South Dakota. Taft's supporters were furious, but their anger made little difference.

In November 1912, Taft was overwhelmingly defeated by Woodrow Wilson in a race that included Roosevelt as the nominee of the Progressive (or Bull Moose) Party and Eugene V. Debs as the candidate of the Socialist Party. Roosevelt won South Dakota with 52.3 percent of the vote.

June 11, 2011 12:43 PM
World War II Closed Homestake Gold Mine

The community of Lead was devastated in 1942 when federal officials ordered a halt to gold-mining operations across the country.  Most of the 2,000 employees of the Homestake Mine lost their jobs.

Many joined the armed forces or were forced to move with their families to find other work. Homes were boarded up for the duration of the war. Retail businesses throughout the region suffered from the loss of customers.

The closure also had a huge effect on the State of South Dakota. In 1941, as the most productive gold mine in the country, Homestake's output was valued at $19,529,080 ($288.7 million in 2010 dollars). The company paid $1.125 million in taxes, an amount equal to one sixteenth of the state's total tax revenues. Although the Federal government directed new defense spending into the region to build and operate the Rapid City Air Base and a munitions depot outside of Edgemont, this money was less than half of one year's production at Homestake.

Despite the wartime shut down, Homestake and the community of Lead recovered. Once the war was over, production resumed, miners and their families returned and the community enjoyed an era of prosperity.

June 7, 2011 07:37 PM
Inviting Al Capone to the Black Hills

Maybe Dan Evans wanted some publicity or maybe he thought Al Capone, the famous Chicago gangster, would make a good neighbor. In March 1930, barely a year after the Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago, Evans sent a letter to Capone inviting him to move to the Black Hills. As the president of the Rapid City Chamber of Commerce, Evans told Capone that in the Black Hills "the stranger is not judged by reports of his past record."

South Dakota Governor W. J. Bulow was not pleased with Evans' efforts to bring Capone to the state. "We don't want Capone or any of his kind in South Dakota," the governor told reporters. "We have a law abiding state as far as the gang racket goes and we propose to keep it so."

Capone, who was being investigated by Eliot Ness and the Bureau of Prohibition, said he appreciated the invitation, but he had no desire to move to the Black Hills. A year later, he was indicted for tax evasion and eventually landed in the Alcatraz federal penitentiary. (Source: Chicago Daily Tribune, March 29, 1930.)

June 7, 2011 01:43 PM
Crookedest Railroad in the World

The Rapid Canyon rail line was called the “crookedest railroad in the world” in the 1920s. A train on this route traveled 35 miles between Rapid City and the town of Mystic, although the two communities were less than 20 miles apart as the crow flies. Along that path, the line crossed Rapid Creek on bridges 105 times. Although the road was built to carry mining and agricultural freight and traffic, the operators found that it was extremely popular with tourists and sportsmen who went upstream to fish.