COMMUNITY
My parents, Bernie and Myrna Hunhoff, started South Dakota
Magazine here in Yankton 30 years ago. We were living in Gayville at
the time. I remember dad doing page designs on the kitchen table.
Within a year or two, they bought a big old brick building at Third &
Pearl and we’ve been there ever since.
A big part of my childhood was spent in those offices - and I saw
the many changes in technology that have shaped our publishing
industry over the years. We were one of the first publications
to have a website, thanks to Brian Walton who was a local tech
pioneer in the early 1990s. Today we shoot digital photographs, we
communicate every day with readers around the world and we send
the magazine to the printer by hitting a key on the computer.
But throughout the last three decades our mission has never
changed - to tell the stories of the people and places in South
Dakota in an entertaining and engaging way. Over the years the
magazine staff has learned that those stories have worth beyond
entertainment - they tell us who we are as South Dakotans. “Reading
the magazine should be like seeing your reflection in the lake,” my
dad wrote for the magazine’s 20th anniversary. “The man in the
water grins and you grin. He squirms and so do you. He grows sad
and you know why.”
After growing up in Yankton and working at the magazine a
little during high school, I left for the University of Minnesota. I
returned to Yankton and to the magazine in 2001. Since then we’ve
celebrated three anniversaries (we like celebrations!) - our 20th in
2005, our 25th in 2010 and now our 30th. This latest milestone is
perhaps our most sentimental because we recently had the biggest
change the magazine has yet seen: my good friend Heidi Marsh and I
purchased the magazine from my dad in September of 2014.
Heidi has been at the magazine for 6 years and before that
was our intern during her college years. We knew each other
long before that, though - we showed horses together in Yankton
County’s Boots and Saddles 4-H club as youngsters. Besides our love
for horses, we both grew up with an appreciation for this place we
12vHERVOICE JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2015
call home and the stories that we believe help define who we are
as South Dakotans. Heidi oversees our marketing and advertising
departments. Over the last three decades our magazine readers
have steadily grown to over 44,000, which in marketing terms, Heidi
often reminds me, is over 180,000 readers.
Fortunately, we were able to hire my dad on as a writer and
photographer. He’s handy because he never gets lost in South
Dakota - though he’s been known to get turned around in Rapid City
some times.
Heidi and I are often asked what changes we are going to make
at the magazine. It’s a hard question for us. We love the magazine
and our goal right now is to try to make every issue better than the
last.
But we do have some new and different projects in the works including about four book ideas that we would like to do in the next
few years. We are especially excited about the possibility of working
with Yankton photographer Dave Tunge on an aerial photography
book.
We may also expand our collection of map prints. We
persuaded world-renowned map artist Mike Reagan to create a
topographical map of the state several years ago. Last year he added
a beautiful map of the Black Hills. We sell prints of both maps and
plan on adding a map of the Missouri River in the future.
But before we publish any more books or maps we have some
celebrating to do. We plan on kicking off our 30th anniversary year
with a special “Collector’s Edition” for our March/April issue. The
issue will feature 20 of our favorite stories throughout the years,
a collection of humorous stories throughout our state’s history,
some great South Dakota foods and a special section on surprises
we’ve encountered during our travels throughout the state. We
also will include a list of every staff member we’ve employed at the
Pennington House. Whether they stayed a month or a decade, each
person helped make the magazine what it is today.
This summer we will be tuning up the magazine’s “delivery