HURON – Harvey Wollman was a 29-year-old history and government teacher at tiny Doland High School when he snagged the first interview Sen. Hubert Humphrey gave after his nomination for vice president more than half a century ago.
It was a 10-minute conversation that changed the course of Wollman’s life.
Less than a year after President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Democrats convened for the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, N.J.
They chose 1929 Doland High School graduate Humphrey to be their choice for vice president.
Wollman is a 1953 graduate who had met Humphrey when he came back to Doland for visits.
“The reason I’m a Democrat is because I was just absolutely enthralled with this guy,” he said.
For his work to pass landmark legislation that has built the state, Wollman is one of 10 men and women to be inducted into the South Dakota Hall of Fame Sept. 8-9 in Chamberlain.
Shortly after delegates had nominated Humphrey to run with President Lyndon Johnson, Wollman called Humphrey headquarters, identified himself as a political science teacher at Doland High School and asked for an interview with the candidate.
In a return phone call to Wollman, he was given a number to call the next morning, and told that Humphrey would talk to him then.
Wollman and the school superintendent set up a reel-to-reel tape recorder that evening in anticipation of the conversation.
“This is Hubert Humphrey. How are you Mr. Wollman?” the future vice president said in his greeting.
“I’m fine,” Wollman answered. “I just wanted to congratulate you in being chosen.
“Well, I guess we have to settle for being vice president,” Humphrey replied.
Wollman asked him what message he might have for the young people in Doland.
“He must have talked to us for 10 minutes … and that was that,” he said.
At least he likely thought so at the time.
When he went back to his classroom, the school’s phone started ringing. Calls were coming in from newspapers from around the country, from San Francisco to New York. Reporters had learned of the interview, and wanted to know what the newly chosen nominee had to say.
Wollman also shared Humphrey’s message at a special gathering of students and townspeople in a full school gym.
A year later, the chairman of the South Dakota Democratic Party and the chairman of the Spink County Democratic Party came to his classroom with a question.
Publicity Wollman had gotten for being identified with a national party figure had state Democratic leaders interested in him as a candidate, too, although on the state level.
Would he consider running for the state Senate, they wanted to know.
Frankly, he answered, he had never thought about it, he didn’t think he was qualified and he didn’t think he had ability.
But he agreed to run. He lost, but tried, much harder, in 1968, and won the seat.
For the next 10 years, South Dakotans witnessed a remarkable run of many major initiatives approved by legislators.

Early life shaped him

Wolllman, 82, was the middle child of five born to Edwin and Katherine Wollman in rural Frankfort in Spink County.
Of all of his siblings, he has always been closest to his brother, Roger, who is just 50 weeks older.
But it was the 1930s, and times were tough.
“When Roger was born, my mother said it was the worst year they ever had,” he said. “They raised zero crops in 1934.
“My parents were dirt poor. They owned no land,” Wollman said. “And we lived in a house that my widowed grandmother had built, so there would be a home for her family.”
It’s the home he and his wife, Anne, live in today along Highway 37.

The Wollman children attended a rural school two and a half miles away on a dirt road. They often walked. The school house had no running water and no electricity. It had outdoor toilets. There were never more than 10 kids at a time. Wollman remembers six different teachers; none had a college degree.
“But we did manage to learn reading, writing and arithmetic,” he said. “And that’s the way we were raised, very, very humbly.”
He grew up with a brother and sister who were older than him, and a brother and sister who were younger.
“I was the middle one, and being a quiet, shy person I had to do something to draw attention to myself. So that’s what I’ve been working on ever since,” he said, laughing.
When he was a young man, Wollman’s dad, Edwin, had a little sister who was still in grade school, and he’d take her to the country school. It’s where he met Katherine Kleinsasser, who was from Beadle County, rooming at a nearby farm and teaching at that school. They were married about a year after they met.
Wollman said his mother played piano, sang in a ladies’ group, read poetry and memorized scripture. Memorization was something she insisted her boys Roger and Harvey do, too. They also inherited her singing talent.
“Roger and I could sing duets in harmony when we were five and six years old,” he said.
His parents instilled in their children the importance of church, hard work, learning, discipline and humility.
“I tell the story that before we were teen-agers, my dad would send Roger and I out to pick rocks,” Wollman said. “We had some rocky land. We still have rocky land.
“And I guess he must have thought that that would be good training for whatever lay ahead, and he was absolutely right,” he said.
“We never rebelled against that,” he said. “That’s as down to earth as you can get, figuratively and practically. And we were kind of proud of the work that we did because we were making the land better.
“That discipline, and just accepting the model that our parents made, had a lot of influence on us,” Wollman said.
His father didn’t attend high school. But Wollman said he was very bright, and in his quiet way, very articulate.
“When he got up in front of a church business meeting, or anywhere else, people would listen to him, because he was calm and usually knew what he was talking about,” he said.
When they got to high school, Roger and Harvey Wollman joined the debate team. It would serve them well in their careers. At a young age, the brothers viewed it as an opportunity to better themselves by participating and not being afraid to stand before an audience.
“We would sing in front of people, we’d speak in front of people, we’d recite our poems in front of people, sometimes in German, sometimes in English,” he said.
After their father died, their mother moved to Huron and joined the Bethesda Church.
One Sunday when a layman was asked to come up and read scripture, their mother went up to the pulpit, but without a Bible.
She was in her 90s at the time. She recited a chapter from John from memory.
“And she turned to the pastor when she left and said, ‘And I can do it in German, too,’” Wollman said.        
It may sound to some like subtle arrogance, he said.
“But it isn’t that. If you discipline yourself to do something, you have confidence and it’s not arrogance, it’s a comfortable confidence, and I think that certainly carried over to Roger and I,” Wollman said.

Landmark legislation

A graduate of Huron College – and its Distinguished Alumnus in 1979 – Wollman taught at Doland High School from 1961 to 1966. He coached the debate team to three state championships.
While farming, he began his legislative career with his 1968 victory, He went on to become lieutenant governor under Gov. Richard Kneip, then governor when Kneip left early to become U.S. ambassador to Singapore in 1978.
In that 10 years of working with Kneip and the Legislature, Wollman said 21 major initiatives were passed and implemented in South Dakota’s own version of Camelot.
It included creation of the state’s Investment Council, Building Authority, Education and Health Authority, Housing Development Authority and the degree-granting medical school.
For 50 years, South Dakota had had a basic science school. Students would attend four years of college and two years of science school and then had to transfer elsewhere for two years for their medical degree.
But it was becoming more difficult to find those slots for them at other schools. A first attempt at a bill, but with no hearings and with little if any work, to create a medical school only received 13 votes when Wollman was in his first term in the Senate.
When Kneip came in as governor, he decided to take a more serious look at it and legislators authorized an interim study committee. Wollman was chairman.
With open minds and no definite plan, the panel went to work. They eventually hit on a concept, patterned after an Illinois school, of a medical school without walls. Some of the larger hospitals around the state agreed to participate. The Senate passed the plan on a 35-0 vote.
Forty-three years later, more than 1,800 men and women have graduated from the medical school and have gone on to practice medicine, he said.
In his first term in the Senate, Wollman served on an interim study committee charged with looking at state government’s financial assets. They discovered that there were millions of dollars in a number of different funds.
“I said I would never accuse anybody of mismanaging those funds, but I thought they should be professional managed,” he said.
The bill he wrote didn’t attract much interest at first, but Wollman worked to gain support around the state and it was successful.
The fund began with less than $100 million, and today has more than $10 billion in it.
“He is a steward of the land, a valued member of his church and community, a committed family man and a visionary public servant,” a Hall of Fame summary states.
“Our state and its people are better off because of his intellect, tenacity and leadership.”