Former South Dakota Governor Harvey Wollman has died.
His family said in a statement he died of natural causes on Tuesday.
Wollman became governor in 1978. He succeeded Richard Kneip, who left office after he was appointed U.S. Ambassador to Singapore.
He was the last Democrat to serve as governor in South Dakota. Wollman lost the 1978 Democratic primary to State Senator Roger McKellips, who was later defeated in the general election by Republican Bill Janklow.
Wollman grew up in Spink County. He served in the U.S. Army, and worked as a teacher after graduating from Huron College. He was also a lifelong farmer. He was elected to the state legislature in 1968 and joined Kneip’s ticket as lieutenant governor in 1974.
Wollman was inducted into the South Dakota Hall of Fame in 2017. The audio and texted attached to this story is an interview with "In the Moment" host Lori Walsh on June 27, 2017. He was also interviewed for the 1980's series South Dakota Scrapbook.
Wollman was 87 years old.
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In the Moment - June 27, 2017
Lori Walsh:
Welcome back to In the Moment. I'm Lori Walsh. Since 1974, more than 200 South Dakotans have been inducted into the South Dakota Hall of Fame. The 2017 inductee have been announced. We're introducing them to you on In the Moment.
Today, we welcome Hall of Fame Inductee Harvey Wollman. His life in public service to the state includes time as a state senator, president of the Senate, lieutenant governor, and governor. He sponsored legislation creating the State's Investment Council, Building Authority, Education and Health Authority, Housing Development Authority, and degree-granting medical school. Harvey Wollman joins us now from Frankfort, South Dakota. Tell us where Frankfort is.
Harvey Wollman:
Frankfort is 12 miles east of Redfield, which is our county seat. Which is 40 miles south of Aberdeen, about 40 miles north of Huron, right along the James River. And we're on Highway 37. Does that help you?
Lori Walsh:
It absolutely does. How far away from where you grew up? Because you grew up on a farm as well, correct?
Harvey Wollman:
I live in the house I was born in. I was born in this house 82 years ago. And I've been here farming all of my life, with some interesting side trips that you referenced in your introduction of me. So this is where I've spent my life. I hope to be here the next 20 years. And then after that, we don't know.
Lori Walsh:
All right. Give us a history lesson. Then you succeeded Governor Kneip, is that correct? Put your governorship in context, and then we'll talk about some of those accomplishments.
Harvey Wollman:
Oh, okay. Well, when I grew up here, obviously just in a rural school. And I went to Doland High School and then I went to college, and then I went back to Doland High School to teach school. And while I was doing that, a couple of people came and encouraged me to run for the State Senate. I had no idea that I would ever do that, but I was successful in 1968 and served three terms in the State Senate as a senator. Governor Kneip invited me to run with him when he ran for his second term of a four year term. So I became lieutenant governor then.
And when he left his fourth year of his second term to accept an ambassadorship to Singapore ... Governor Carter appointed him. Then I became the governor because I succeeded from the lieutenant governorship. I ran then on my own and I was defeated, in a primary, of all places. And then after I served until 1979, I came back to the farm and have been farming here ever since. So that gives you a little bit of a context.
Lori Walsh:
Are you South Dakota's most recent Democrat governor? Do I have my facts correct? Is that possible?
Harvey Wollman:
That's correct. There've only been about four in the history of the state, and I was the last one. And we've run some wonderful candidates since then, but none of them have been successful. One of the inductees into the South Dakota Hall of Fame, along with me, Jim Abbott, who's president of the university, was a candidate at one time. Jim Biddle, president of the Dakota Wesleyan University, ran at one time, was unsuccessful. And Scott Heidepriem, a great lawyer from Sioux Falls, friend of mine, he ran and he was unsuccessful.
So it isn't that we haven't put up wonderful candidates, it's just tough to elect a Democrat governor in South Dakota. I'm not sure why that is true, but I guess that would take a long time to unravel that mystery.
Lori Walsh:
Dig into that. Were those conversations you were having back then with Governor Kneip and others, about the role of the Democratic Party in the state? Where it was at that particular time and where you wanted to take it? Or were you just doing the business of the state at the time, that wasn't necessarily the big picture look you were talking about?
Harvey Wollman:
Always saw the big picture. You have to remember now, at one time, we had ... all our representation in Washington were Democrats. My heavens, George McGovern, the icon of the Democratic Party as far as I'm concerned. A close personal friend of mine, a wonderful guy. We met all the time, we talked all the time. He ran for president of the United States. He was defeated badly, but I think history treats him very, very well. Jim Abourezk, a young congressman who ran for Senate was successful. He was in Washington then. Frank Denholm, who just passed away last year, was a successful congressman, Democrat. And then Tom Daschle, for heaven's sake, he was majority leader in the United States Senate. The senator fourth in line for the presidency, and the South Dakota voters turned him out.
I've never understood that in South Dakota. When you get really success ... the reason I became a Democrat at all is Hubert Humphrey graduated from Doland High School. The same high school I went to later. When I was a senior in high school, he came and gave a speech. And I decided that day I wanted to be a Democrat and I wanted to be like Hubert Humphrey. And when he ran for the presidency ... he was vice president under Lyndon Johnson. But when he ran for the presidency, South Dakota didn't even support him. Now I don't understand why we would have all this greatness among us, and South Dakota voting for ... making other choices. It's always been a bit of a mystery to me, to tell you the truth.
Lori Walsh:
Tell me, what was it about Hubert Hubert Humphrey's speech that made you want to be a Democrat versus just being in public service?
Harvey Wollman:
Well, when he lived in Doland, he was a high school performer. A debater, as I was. And he came back with a very emotional speech telling what it was like to grow up in Spink County, 18 miles here from my house. Where he went through the Depression with his dad, who was a drugstore owner. They went around and treated hogs, for heaven's sake, with erysipelas or some kind of disease. He was handing serums to his dad when he was 10, 12, 13 years old, helping the farmers in Spink County. And he just gave a history of that.
And then how he moved on and went to Macalester College, became a professor. Became the youngest mayor of Minneapolis, the youngest senator from the state of Minnesota. And he was just exuberant and excited and had tears in his eyes with emotion. And I said, there's my kind of guy. And you had to be there, I guess. But he has always been a personal inspiration to me, and his memory still inspires me.
Lori Walsh:
So I don't want to go off too far on this tangent, but what I'm curious about is if people are drawn ... excuse me. To a political party because of leadership and a strong character, or if they're drawn to a political party because of the platform?
Harvey Wollman:
I would say, platform probably not as important, because most people don't even know what they are or pay much attention to them. But I think it's mostly out of tradition. For some reason or other, we had a big boon in the Democratic Party during the Depression years, when Roosevelt helped us through the 30s and those dark days. And then successfully through World War II. And a lot of that generation were very friendly to the Democrats because of the attention that was paid to the unfortunate things we were living through. It seems like the more prosperous and the less dependent we become, the less sensitive we are to the role of the federal government.
So it is a mysterious love and hate relationship in politics. I've often seen with my own children and kids that I had in school, the younger people tend to be more open to new ideas and more liberal, if you like to use that word. And I do. And less conservative. A word I don't like to use, but I do. And so a lot of our young people have left the state, a high percentage of them. So not that we're left with lesser people necessarily, but we're left usually with the ones that are more traditional and satisfied with the lifestyle and calmness that South Dakota represents.
You got to remember, when I was in high school, there were 800,000 people in South Dakota. Now 60 years later, there are still 800,000 people in South Dakota. So we don't even keep up with our natural biological growth. We lose people, and they tend to be the more grounded, more traditional, the landed aristocracy, if you will. And I think that's one of the reasons. It's complicated, but we all tend to be pretty conservative in our outlooks. Last in the country, sometimes, to adopt more progressive things. But I think we're starting to catch up now. And I'm certainly not being critical, I'm just trying to be descriptive. Because I wouldn't live here if I wouldn't be happy here. It's a great place to live. Great place to live.
Lori Walsh:
Let's talk a little bit about legacy. When you look back at three terms as a state senator, lieutenant governor, governor, what are the things that you remember now that you're proud of that you feel like we got that right?
Harvey Wollman:
Well, I think you mentioned some of them very briefly. I would think that one of the big accomplishments in my lifetime, I was chosen to serve on the Constitutional Revision Commission. States don't revise their original constitutions very often. It's the only time we did it. I served on that for a couple years, and that did a lot of things. It reorganized the executive branch of government, so we created a cabinet type of structure. And The interesting thing was I helped write that and develop that, and then I got to the legislature and helped enact it. So that was very, very exciting for me.
We unified the state's judicial system. We used to have a hodgepodge of state court systems, where every county elected a judge. Some of them weren't even lawyers ... not that they were bad people. But they weren't highly trained to do a highly specialized kind of work. So we created that unified judicial system under the supervision of the state Supreme Court. And I haven't heard anybody now in the last 40 years criticize our judicial system because it's such high quality.
We had a great need of meeting the need of graduating our basic science students that were working on medical degrees. We didn't offer a MD degree at that time. I worked very hard, and have been given more credit than I deserve, in creating the degree-granting medical school. I just spoke at the 40th anniversary of that alumnus. I spoke at the first graduation class, the 25th one, and now they invited me back a month or so ago for the 40th. We've trained about 1800 of our best and brightest young men and women to become medical doctors. We've kept about over half of them in the state. A wonderful thing.
We unified the state retirement system. We used to have a hodgepodge of retirement systems, firemen, policemen, state workers, teachers and so on. We unified that. I saw the need of managing our state monies better. We had about 65 to a hundred million dollars that were just laying in demand deposits, for more or less. So I put in a bill, Senate Bill 51. I authored it. I was a sole sponsor of it. We got it through, to bring professional management to our monies in South Dakota. And now after 40 years, we're managing over $10 billion instead of 100 million.
So that's been a huge success, thanks to people like Steve Meyers that we hired to run that program. And he's going to be at the Hall of Fame ceremonies because I'm getting inducted. He just wanted to celebrate that with me. That's how close we are, how hard we work together. We created the Health and Education Facilities Authority to give a bonding power to the states so we could build hospitals and that sort of thing. We eliminated the personal property tax, a tax everybody hated. And could replace that with the growing tax base that we have because our economy has grown. There are about 21 major initiatives in those eight years that I don't have time to talk about.
But that was probably the most exciting time in South Dakota history, in my opinion. Where we had 10 years of great gubernatorial leadership under my friend, Dick Kneip. He died 30 years ago this year, at age 54. I was present three days before he died. And I think about him at least once a day because he was the right man at the right time for the right set of reasons. And we changed the nature of South Dakota for the better, for eternity, as far as I'm concerned. So I'm pretty proud of what we did. It was a great time and I had a tiny role in it, obviously, but did my best. I wished I could have done more.
Lori Walsh:
Let's close with this. What is being inducted into the South Dakota Hall of Fame mean to you at this time?
Harvey Wollman:
Well, it's a very nice award. My brother Roger was inducted 25 years ago. He's going to be honored as a 25th year recipient. We grew up on this farm together, hauling rocks together. He was much more of an academic than I, but we're still close and he's still on the bench in the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. So to be in the Hall of Fame with him is kind of unique. There are not many siblings on that board, I checked the list. And that means a lot to me. But it is kind of humiliating ... not humiliating. But it makes you humble.
Lori Walsh:
Humble, yes.
Harvey Wollman:
Because you see the other 700 people, and I probably recognize half of them. Only 200 are living now, but I know many of them personally. And to be included in that group really makes you look in the mirror and say, I'm really, really lucky to be there. So I feel very good about it. It's a nice honor.
And I hope that the whole experience serves as some sort of inspiration to our generation coming up. That if you really focus on things, if you really put in the extra effort, that its rewards might not be financial, but they certainly are very, very large in personal satisfaction. And that our lives have meant something. Just not filling space here, but actually doing things that are meaningful and worthwhile and lasting. I guess that would be the best summary I could give it without having one written down here. I should have worked on that little harder.
Lori Walsh:
Put in the extra effort, it is worth it. Former Governor Harvey Wollman is a 2017 inductee into the South Dakota Hall of Fame. The honors ceremony for all 10 inductees at the Hall of Fame in Chamberlain, September 8th and 9th. Tickets are on sale now. Governor Wollman, thank you so much for your time. We appreciate it. Thank you for your service to state of South Dakota.
Harvey Wollman:
Yeah, you all come. You're welcome to come to Chamberlain in September.
