Tom Dempster – Author and Photojournalist

“The book is a Masterpiece.”

I read once that a politician’s life always ends in tragedy.  High dreams and aspirations turn into dust, then the dust reconstitutes into higher dreams and aspirations, flags fly, bands play, and people cheer.  I still remember standing on the trampled poster of McGovern at the Coliseum in ‘72, and can recall the shock of the afternoon at Edison Junior High when a life ended in a convertible in Dallas.
Same too with coaches, I learn.  about Coach Bob Burns, I couldn’t help but think….Winston Churchill.
I talked to a bass player at the Symphony the other day.  He said his job is to establish pace and rhythm. Mr. Whitney, your pace and rhythm of the book are perfect. Furthermore, you absconded with at least three of my afternoons  when I had only an hour to attend to your book.  I couldn’t stop reading.  Two hours, three hours, and more. So not only rhythm, pace, but drive. Is this what a quarterback does?
I’m a sailor and when the wind slots  between the jib and the mainsail, it creates a foil where the boat is not pushed by the wind but pulled  by the wind.  It creates a moment of weightlessness, of transcendence.  If my google doc comments work, you will see the word “perfect” over and over again.  It’s because you have created this moment of weightlessness, this transcendence time and time again.
You have breathed life into an era, into a city, and into the earnest faces of people willing to submit themselves to a man who single-handedly won World War II.
At first, I didn’t like the title, The Great Burns.  But then I remembered the Great Santini. Very quickly you have LaVerne sighing “the Great Burns.” Perfect.
And the Lindberg baby?  My grandmother who at her homestead at the confluence of the Missouri and Cheyenne Rivers had all 50 volumes of the Harvard Classics (underlined) passed on her love of Annie Morrow Linbergh’s books to me.  The kidnapping was her generation's JFK assassination….a great way of marking an era.
I had known that  Bob Burns had a war record, but also knew the heat of that aura was either too hot, too personal, or too distant for me to see much less understand. Thank you for Carentan, Operation Market Garden, A Bridge Too Far, and the Battle of the Bulge. And boxing? Well, what would you expect?
As I mentioned above, especially for one not much interested in football, your pacing and drive are perfect. The reader is the football that gets carried along game by game, team by team. One wonders whether the coach would have been the coach without the WWII battles until you remember, oh yeah, the boxing, the checkers, the Silver Congo, the beautiful sisters. Damn. I keep saying perfect.
I grew up in Sioux Falls. Reading your book was like watching my own personal Back to the Future.  I could see my rusted fender on my ‘56 Chevy, could see Minnesota Avenue as the two-lane highway where I once led a snake dance. I know, knew of, or knew of the reputations of just about everyone in your book. I’m not a jock so I was never privy directly to that world, but I knew it existed. I knew Al Schock better than Ozzie, saw how the McDowell’s moved around town, and can see Chris Christopulos’s $100 bills in his pocket. (I think).
I can see the boys of WHS run across the viaduct onto a playing field where I got cut in midget league baseball, but I didn’t know there was a time before Howard Wood Stadium.
I had known that John Simko was something before he was somebody; can see the faces of Jim Luce and Dick Ronken. Your book is a celebration of Sioux Falls as Dr. Stavig, Danny Olson, Dick Flynn, the Donohue’s, Bud Walling, Tom Wilka, Tom Walsh, Monsignor McEneaney, Bill Hall, Steve Kueter, Mike Rost, Ken Kessinger, Father Cimpl, and Ted Thoms all parade by.
And the boys walking by the Coach’s casket saying “Get up, get up.”
Stu, you got him up. Congratulations.