The other day, there was a three-car accident on State Avenue next to Dickinson High School.
I don’t remember exactly what day it was, but does that really matter? This happens far too often for it to be news.
Is it time for accidents like this to be a thing of the past?
A little crowdsourcing says it is.
Like many people in southwest North Dakota, I’m a Lutheran who is friends with a lot of Catholics.
For me, it goes back to high school when I met a handful of Trinity kids and found that, despite what us small-towners had heard, they weren’t the arrogant “big city” kids some thought they were. A few of those guys have become lifelong friends and, through them, I’ve met many other great friends and people along the way.
One of those guys woke me up Monday with a text message while I was laying in a hotel bed on vacation. He asked if I had heard about the fire at Trinity High School. He didn’t have many details but knew school was canceled. Wondering just how serious it was, we theorized it was something small — maybe an electrical fire — that could probably be dealt with. He had driven by and said the outside of the building looked OK.
So, I assigned the story to one of our reporters and got back to the last day of my vacation.
Mike Gayda tried going to college.
After attending Dickinson State University for a short time he acknowledged, “College wasn’t for me.”
So, knowing he had a talent for welding, he took jobs with Steffes Corp. in Dickinson and at the Case IH Steiger plant in Fargo. It was at the latter that the Dickinson native had a chance conversation with a co-worker who tipped him off about welders running their own service trucks in the burgeoning western North Dakota oil fields.
So, in 2006, Gayda decided to move home and start his own business.
“It was perfect timing,” Gayda said.
When he was 20 years old, Gayda started Iron Works Welding with one service truck. He worked out of a heatless quonset on Dickinson’s south side by himself.
By 2008, before the true onset of the oil boom, he had found enough work to hire two employees and build a 6,800 square-foot building on a little less than an acre of land on a space just north of Dickinson in the industrial park off Highway 22.
Continue reading “Sculpting success: Oil boom helps Dickinson native’s welding business take off”
Everywhere one looks, Dickinson and southwest North Dakota is changing and growing.
There are new people living in new homes and apartments, new stores alongside new places to eat and recreate, a new school and another likely in the works.
No matter which way you look at it, the city is in the midst of massive changes. Most of all, we’re making progress.
Newspapers can be one of our greatest learning tools. I am convinced three things taught me how to read: The Berenstain Bears, Little Golden Books and newspapers.
One of my earliest memories is from when I was 4 and my older brothers would spread the sports pages of The Dickinson Press and Bismarck Tribune out on our kitchen table so I could read basketball box scores.
A few years later, one of my favorite parts of Mrs. Rita Greff’s sixth-grade classroom at Regent Elementary was her newspaper clippings board, where students could read snippets of the newspaper that Mrs. Greff felt pertained to us. She would clip out The Press and Tribune for us to read. If we wanted to claim the clipping, we were to write our initials on the clip.
Continue reading “Helping the next generation of journalists”
Dustin Monke 