An Extracurricular Post: Holy Rosary Mission, Pine Ridge, 1940s-1960s

I don’t usually post on weekends at all, so I figured I could go ahead and put up a completely (so far as I know) non-Rice related post, just because I’d like to.

Here is Father Doll. It doesn't show very well here, but he is standing in front of an enormous (and apparently fabulous) new printer.

Most of you don’t know this, but I am a very lucky person. I’ll give you an example of what I mean. I went to visit my daughter and son-in-law in Omaha this weekend. (For all you baseball fans, the scoreboard is now up at tdAmeritrade Park and it looks like all the seats are installed!) When I got into town on Friday, I went to go pick her up at Creighton, where she works as an archivist for the wonderful photographer, Father Don Doll, SJ. (You can see some of his work here. For anyone who has gone on one of Rice’s Lewis and Clark trips, be sure to check out his images taken along the trail.)

Just by chance, Father Doll had recently returned from one of his frequent trips to Pine Ridge, this time bringing with him three remarkable scrapbooks full of pictures taken at Holy Rosary Mission and around the reservation from the early 1940s through the 1960s. I was absolutely elated and still can hardly believe my good fortune in getting to see these pictures. I was also lucky in that I had a digital camera in my pocket and could take snapshots of some of these images. So please squint, excuse the poor quality of my pictures, and try to imagine the joy with which I discovered them. (They look better if you click on them and zoom in.)

In a final bit of luck, I seem to be on a bit of a roll in terms of discovering pictures of Kennedys. Some of you might be old enough to remember that Robert Kennedy visited Pine Ridge during the 1968 presidential campaign, not long, in fact, before he was killed in California. There were a couple of pictures from that visit in one of these scrapbooks. Here is my favorite–not really a great photograph, but the little girl with the scissors made me laugh. It looks like she’s fixing to cut up his coat tail.