Excerpts from Like a Train in the Night
April 1948 – Becoming Mayor the First Time
When summer came, despite her marriage, Viola Dusek once again returned to Chicago to see her family and continue her studies. After she returned to South Dakota, she took a teaching job at Colome High School, 27 miles southeast of Witten, and continued to use her maiden name. Meanwhile, Fred Dusek launched his career as…
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January 1972 – Before He Was a Hero
Staff Sergeant Sam Roach was more than frustrated with the elected town council of Box Elder. All he wanted was a license to sell beer, and the council refused to give it to him. With his close-cropped black hair, a thin moustache over his lip, his penetrating brown eyes, and most of all his dark…
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December 1925 – Fred & Viola Dusek
Long before the government betrayed him, Fred Dusek believed in the essential fairness of American democracy. A child of the new century, he was born in a sod house in Nebraska on May 31, 1900, the first of his parents’ eight children.[1] His father James had come to the United States from Bohemia in 1889…
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January 1951 – “I Am No Red!”
On Monday morning, Ben American Horse and his wife Julia, also known as White Cow Woman, sat with the other tribal elders in the waiting area of the new Rapid City Municipal Airport. Despite the radiators ticking away under the windows and in the corner of the room, cold air emanated from the north-facing glass…
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Summer 1954 – Exhale Under Water
In the summer after her junior year, Millie and her sister Bernice, who had just finished her freshman year at Wartburg, were offered jobs painting archery targets and making bow strings for a man who supplied sporting goods companies in Chicago. They worked out of his home. It was tedious piece work, but not very…
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May 1950 – Engineer in a Bomber Jacket
When the two men walked over holding their beers, Stella Maris Buthe didn’t think much of them. As the only daughter in a family with five boys, she knew something about men and boys. The one in the leather bomber jacket was full of himself. Her body language and expression communicated her lack of interest,…
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April 1948 – Race and Beauty in Rapid City
Atlantic City was eighteen hundred miles away. But distance was not a barrier to a Lakota girl aspiring to be crowned Miss America. Race was the issue. Shortly before the arrival of the Freedom Train in April 1948, the Rapid City Musicians union announced that it would sponsor the first-ever “Miss Rapid City” beauty pageant.…
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April 22, 1948 – The Freedom Train Arrives
The first curious patriots arrived just after dawn and began to form a line. Standing near the low, wood-shingled, hipped roof depot of the Chicago and North Western railway, they felt the sun rising, casting its light westward onto the grass and ponderosa pine-covered Black Hills and the hogback ridge that split the city like…
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Like a Train in the Night 