With a Song in Their Hearts: Clayton and Anella Southwick

There are a lot of reasons why Clayton and Anella Southwick are planning a quiet, understated retirement at the end of the 2008 school year—and interestingly, these “reasons” will be walking out of Stevens and Central high schools themselves.

“We don’t want to take anything away from our seniors’ last year experiences,” Anella says. 

“Our teaching is and always has been about what is best for the kids,” adds Clayton, almost in unison.

Their simultaneous responses—Anella’s rich mezzo soprano and Clayton’s deep tenor—have elements of perfect harmony about them, fitting for a pair who has been singing and bringing music to Rapid City’s two high schools for the past thirty years.

This “marriage of music” metaphor is not new to the Southwicks, who came to Rapid City as newlyweds in 1978 when Clayton accepted the choral music position at Central and Anella filled a position at North Middle School teaching English, reading, German and choir when a teacher left after the first nine weeks.

“Anella really built up the vocal music at North and groomed those kids to come to Central,” Clayton explains.

She was in her fifth year at North when the Stevens choir director suddenly quit in the fall of 1983.  “I walked into Stevens on January 2, 1984 and haven’t looked back since,” she jokes.

(Read the rest of this story in Spring ‘08 FACES)

Jane Hewett: The Face of History – by John Lind

Abraham Lincoln once said “It’s not the years in your life that count, it’s the life in your years.” Had the president been delivering these famous words a century later, he might have been referring to Ms. Jane Hewett of Rapid City. For those who are counting, Ms. Hewett has recorded 100 fabulous years, living almost half of them here in the Black Hills.

To be truthful, this interview was a “dream come true” for me. To have the opportunity to speak to someone who lived throughout the entire 20^th century is a propitious opportunity compared to sitting in a U.S. History Class. Why read about the great happenings of the 1900s from a book when you can hear about them instead?

Jane has not only lived out the past one hundred years, she has recorded them too. Jane has consistently kept a running journal from her early teens through her early 90s. If my math is correct, it adds up to over 80 years of journaling. Many people have trouble keep a journal past high school, let alone throughout their life. Ms. Hewett has 12 large binders full of her journaling she keeps bound together “in case there should ever be a fire.” She has also categorized the journals into ten different phases of her life. The history found between those pages is nothing short of museum-worthy itself.

(Read the rest of this story in Spring ‘08 FACES)

 

*Editor’s Note: Mrs. Jane O’Rourke Hewett died on April 30, 2008–a month before she would have turned 101–and the same day the magazine with her story appeared in her mailbox.  We at FACES Magazine wish to extend our condolences to the Hewett family during this time of loss.  What a wonderful lady!

Swiss Bliss: Charly Juchler

It took him 20 years, but Charly Juchler finally made his way home to the Black Hills.

This may seem like an odd statement to make about a native Swiss, but Charly has a long and compelling story to back it up.

Born in Winterthur, Switzerland (roughly the size of Rapid City) in 1963, the third of his Swiss father and Italian mother’s three sons, Charly, describes himself as a quiet and introverted young lad who loved to run and play with his toy guns in the woods near his home.

He was given the Christian name Karl, but was fondly called “Carlo” by his mother and became Charly to the rest of his family and friends.

“My brothers were 14 and 10 years old than I, so I was pretty much raised an only child,” he says.  “I had friends but I loved playing by myself.”

With his brothers out of the house, Charlie’s best friend was his father, a real estate inspector whose message to his son was to “live your dreams.”

Charly’s dreams, incidentally, often centered on his favorite books, which he found at the school library and spent hours poring over.  These were not books typical of boys seven or eight years old—not fairy tales, adventure stories or Hardy Boys mysteries–they were books with characters like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse who lived in a magical, sacred and faraway place called the Black Hills.

(Read the rest of this story in Spring ‘08 FACES)

Learning Curve: Guitar Hero 101

Every year, along about October or November, those of us with young children receive notification of the current year’s mandatory Christmas items, which all middle class parents are required by law to purchase. These objects are referred to as “toys” but I can never help thinking of them as “landfill’ because even if they survive the manufacturer’s carefully engineered disintegration schedule, they are quickly superseded by the next year’s must-have gadget. Nevertheless, I always line up at the money-toilet and flush along with the rest of the parents, otherwise my children are legally entitled to call a government agency and have themselves removed to a foster home where the new Dad is willing to play by the rules.

(Read the rest of this story in Spring ‘08 FACES)

Cover Story – Dick Termes Juggles Art and Mathetmatics

Walking into his studio is a bit like entering a planetarium, learning about different worlds and how the universe fits together.  The domed structure is filled with pictures, drawings, books of assorted subjects, science magazines, and spherical wonders in varying degrees of completion—a cornucopia of visual delights almost hiding the soft-spoken man with a youthful expression eagerly attending to his newest creations. He’s got whole worlds in his hands, or at least when he’s working on Termespheres, his signature ‘total canvas’ works of art on spheres. 

“Diving into the sphere, it just keeps opening up,” artist Dick Termes says.  “It’s like a porthole that I go into and it opens into whole different worlds all the time.”

A Spearfish resident, Dick has a long family history in the Black Hills.  Both sets of his grandparents lived in the area, his Termes grandparents moving from the Netherlands around 1918.  His parents lived in Spearfish, returning from California where Dick was born and where his father worked in the shipyards during WWII.  His father, a carpenter by trade, built over 30 houses and two motels in Spearfish, and his mother would handle the decorating, the family moving in and selling the house before starting to build the next. 

(Read the rest of this story in Sprin ‘08 FACES)