2024 Community Health Service Awarded to Maxine Johnson
Each year Dakota Hospital Foundation recognizes a community member with the Community Health Service award. This year’s Community Health Service award was presented to Maxine Johnson. The Community Health Service Award recognizes outstanding contributions of time, talent and resources benefiting the health of the community. We are pleased to present this award every year to someone in the community who we feel encompasses these values.
Jill told me I needed to send her a typed bio – that turned out to be one of the hardest tasks I’ve ever been assigned. Why would anyone want to know that I was born lots of years ago in Minnesota and then when I was four, my family moved to rural Wisconsin. Life was lived pretty close to home, and I spent my life living close to lots of cousins. After finishing eighth grade at a country school named Bluff Siding School and high school at Winona Senior High School, I walked three blocks more each morning and, by paying $50 per quarter for tuition as an out-of-state student, finished college in Winona. A teaching job in the best little town in Minnesota – Mapleton – marrying in 1955 and moving to Minneapolis so that new husband could finish up graduate school while we added three littles to our life and shared some wonderful times with great friends also living in University Village in Army surplus metal barracks. During those 8 years we shared lots and lots with fellow students – childcare, concerns, big dreams, lots of coffee, and finally the culmination of those school years when the degrees were awarded. Well, in 1964, life had some big changes in store for the Johnson family.
We had big plans to go somewhere except we just didn’t know for sure where that somewhere was going to be. After some interviews and visits to various campuses, Allen was offered a year-long position in the Department of Biology here at USD while the chair was on sabbatical. The comments from everyone were absolutely priceless as so many times we were asked “now, where is Vermillion – are you sure you don’t mean Brookings?” My mom just solved all the location problems by telling everyone that we were moving to Dakota. She never gave us a direction and in her last years when she suffered from the dementia that haunted her family, she informed Allen on one of our visits that she ‘used to have this nice daughter but she moved to Dakota and married a Swede’. By the way, what a surprise when we got here, and Allen’s office was in an Army surplus metal barracks!
A Special Thank You Message
Anyway, in the fall of 1964, we packed up our U-Haul and hitched it to our 1956 Ford and came to this someplace safe with lots of good people for nine months – we thought. At the end of the year, bless his heart, the chair of the department didn’t return so we proceeded to dig our rut wide and deep and have called Vermillion home for all these years. This beautiful group of people has walked with us through our life’s journey – this town has shared sorrow, gratitude, and great joy and satisfaction with us. We have been fortunate to come to know so many good folks who are engaged in living a good life. We’ve lived in three neighborhoods since moving here and each time, I have been overwhelmed at those wonderful folks who live across the street, next door, down the road a little way or across the field – especially after one of our epic snowstorms blocks the driveway.
I have thoroughly enjoyed participating in the things that I do – a very precious friend once told me that “man does not live by bread alone but deserves hyacinths for the soul’ and I hope that is what I have done - I like to think that I helped to provide some good times like fun events at the W.H. Over Museum for everyone, including our super fun Rhubarb Day as well as helping to keep the bread on the table at the Welcome Table every week. I am very humbled to be honored with this recognition because whatever I have done, I have had lots and lots of company while doing it and am so very blessed to have come to know so many folks as friends. My husband, who was always my most faithful cheerleader, always referred to ‘my causes’ and whatever I have done as a member of this community has been a pleasure and I thank you all for the opportunity.