It was a big day for Terry Mayes. Presidentially big.
On July 3, 1991, President George H.W. Bush stopped at Mount Rushmore National Memorial for the 50th anniversary celebration of the completion of the mammoth sculpture. Bush 41 gave a speech and did the tourist gaze up at the granite images of previous presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.
Bush also did some fishing at nearby Horse Thief Lake, which was generously stocked immediately prior to the president’s arrival, of course. He reportedly reeled in five trout. His wife, Barbara, apparently wet a line, too, but I couldn’t find any record of how she did.
Terry Mayes loves to fish. But he wasn’t flipping spinners or dunking worms that day. Nor was he engaging in any memorial gazing, beyond a glance or two between more serious business.
Then a captain in the South Dakota Highway Patrol in Rapid City, Mayes was too busy overseeing law-enforcement officers who were managing traffic flow within 15 or 20 miles of the memorial to worry about bites or sights. The Secret Service had the president and his wife and entourage covered. Mayes worked to make sure wheels went where they were supposed to, when they were supposed to.
“Normally the Highway Patrol was kind of the lead agency in traffic control, especially outside Rapid City,” Mayes said earlier this week from a socially distant position across a coffee shop table outdoors. “We weren’t involved in moving President Bush. He was going up there by helicopter. But the traffic control along the way, especially in Keystone and Hill City, that was pretty important. Because we wanted to make sure everybody could get to and from the speech if they wanted to.”
Prior to the 1991 visit, Mayes attended a dignitary protection seminar by the Secret Service in Washington, D.C.
“It was to help those who would be supervising people during a presidential visit,” Mayes says. “You learned how the Secret Service worked, what their techniques were and how you blended into that.”
There was heightened concern about security because of Operation Desert Storm earlier in the year, where coalition forces drove the Iraqi military out of Kuwait and crossed over into Iraq before the Iraqis surrendered.
“There were Humvees in the grass with heavily armed soldiers, so that was different from anything I’d seen in situations like that before,” Mayes says.
According to news reports, there was a crowd of about 3,500 people at Rushmore for Bush’s visit, less than half of the total likely to attend the planned July 3 fireworks display at the memorial that President Donald Trump says he will attend.
That’s a lot of people to get in and out of a relatively cramped location. And in 1991, they didn’t have to worry about fireworks, either, or forest fires the pyrotechnics might cause.
The Mine Draw Fire in Custer State Park, not far from Mount Rushmore, started Wednesday morning and the first report I saw on social media said it was 15 to 20 acres. To which I said, “Uh-oh.” Usually, if fire crews don’t get to a new blaze in time to 10 acres or less, it grows pretty quickly to more than 10 or 20. In this case the official report was 60 acres before it became 100 percent contained.
It’s good that the fire didn’t blow up overnight. Rain helped. So we’ll see how much the storm system moving into the hills today does for the dry conditions in the southern and south-central hills, and the wildfire potential.
Apparently, today’s fireworks are safer than those of the past, and less likely to start fires. But they’re still fireworks. And far from being nothing but stone, Mount Rushmore is in a forest, with trees. So wildfires are a real danger, depending on the conditions.
Gov. Kristi Noem loves Trump, loves Mount Rushmore and loves the idea of getting them together under the red-white-blue of pyrotechnic explosions. But Noem has said the decision on whether to go through with the fireworks display — which has not been held since 2009 because of fire concerns and other issues — will come in the final days before July 3, depending on weather and fire conditions.
Fireworks were not a factor back in 1991, when the memorial was a much different place — down on the ground, at least — than it is today. The $56 million upgrade in the 1990s and subsequent improvements that expanded the amphitheater, reconstructed the parking lots, upgraded visitors facilities and widened the Avenue of Flags approach to the Grand Terrace viewing area made for a roomier place, with better ingress and egress.
The amphitheater went from a capacity of about 800 to almost 2,400, including a balcony. The parking lot was expanded from a 500-vehicle capacity to 1,200. And there’s a parking area across Highway 244 near the entrance to the monument that apparently will be used for viewing, too.
I don’t know how that all fits into visitor capacity overall. But it’s smart of planners this year to close Highway 244 at the 16A junction to the east and at Horse Thief Lake to the west for July 3, so that only those with a ticket — 7,5000 out of 125,000 entries in a drawing — can get in.
Even so, there will surely be some problems, even some surprises, if the event goes off and the rockets sizzle up over the forest.
Looking back almost 30 years to the day he was in charge of traffic control for a presidential visit to Mount Rushmore, Mayes has this advice for those planning this presidential visit:
“Whatever you’re planning for, double it,” he says. “Never discount possibilities. Plan for the worst and hope for the best.”
Mayes and others working on traffic flow and control did that in 1991, and things went well overall.
“When it was all over with, the traffic flowed,” he said. We never really had any complaints about the movement of traffic. A lot of people had to park quite a ways from the monument to get there. It was kind of like the regular evening lighting ceremony on steroids. Traffic was slow through Hill City and Keystone, but it moved.”
When it was over and Bush was preparing to leave the memorial, a Secret Service agent came to Mayes and told him the president wanted to greet him before he left.
“I had a lot going on right then. And I said I had a lot of my guys who would love to meet the president, and would defer to them,” Mayes said. “And he said specifically, ‘the president wanted to speak to you.’”
So Mayes went and shook Bush’s hand and had a brief chat, while a White House photographer snapped pictures.
“He just wanted to say ‘hi’ and that he appreciated our efforts,” Mayes said. “He was very cordial, and said he really enjoyed being back in the Black Hills.”
It wasn’t the first time in the Black Hills for Bush. Or his first meeting with Mayes. A few years earlier, Vice President George H.W. Bush was running for president when he made a stop at the Fort Meade VA medical facility near Sturgis. Mayes was part of the local security team and got to talk to Bush before he flew off.
Mayes did the same during the presidency of Bill Clinton when Vice President Al Gore made a stop at the Fort Mead VA.
“I was with him, usually within 10 feet, during his whole visit. So we got a chance to talk about things,” Mayes says. “He was a consummate southern gentleman, just so smooth and so nice.”
Handling a visit from a vice president to Fort Meade is a lot different than a presidential stop at Mount Rushmore. And unlike the coming visit by President Trump, where the memorial and approach roads will be closed to all but those with tickets, the 1991 visit was open to all who wanted to tolerate the crowds and delays.
Before and after President Bush spoke, people from across the world were coming, as usual, to see an American icon.
“So you wanted to manage traffic to make sure people could have their more regular tourist experience, too,” Mayes said. “It wasn’t just about the president. It was about them, too.”
