BY ROGER LARSEN
OF THE PLAINSMAN

HURON – When Marilyn Hohm Hoyt believes strongly in a project she knows will be good for Huron, she doesn’t say no when asked to lead the team to make it a reality.
From her family’s dedication to Huron College to the Huron University Foundation, from the Nordby Center for Recreation to the Crossroads, the Huron Event Center and the Spirit of Dakota award honoring South Dakota women, she has been front and center in successful efforts in greatly enhancing the quality of life in her hometown and state.
“The reason that I don’t say no is because I have been fortunate to have been asked to be involved in projects that I have a passion for,” Hoyt said.
She is one of 10 men and women being inducted in the South Dakota Hall of Fame Sept. 7-8 in Chamberlain/Oacoma. Since the hall was established in 1974, more than 700 people have been inducted.
The oldest of three children born to Dr. Paul and Carol Hohm, her family is well known for its contributions in the medical field. Like their father, her brothers, Robert and Richard, are physicians as well.
“I am an extremely blessed individual in that I grew up in an extremely loving family,” Hoyt said. “My mother and dad made marriage look really easy.
“They were so in love with each other and treated each other with respect,” she said.
Each of her parents came from large families. He grew up on a farm north of Huron and she was raised in Wolsey.
Dr. Paul, as he was known, went to Huron College and then left his hometown for medical school. But he always said he would return to establish his medical practice.
“He wanted to come back to his roots,” Hoyt said. “I’m sure that influenced both me and my brothers growing up, in that he was so very loyal to where he started.”
Despite having a father and both brothers in medicine, Hoyt said the profession never interested her. Instead, she said she inherited her mother’s organizational skills.
Dr. Paul not only was loyal to Huron, he was loyal to its liberal arts college.
As a young girl, Hoyt said she would wear her father’s letter sweater to the college basketball games, which he filmed for the coaches. She knew all the words to the Huron College fight song. She and her brothers decorated their bikes for the homecoming parades.
“We were a big part of that college family,” she said.
Her own family was honored as the “Centennial Family” when the college celebrated its 100th birthday. When they added up the numbers, they realized that almost 75 members of the Hohm clan had either graduated from or attended Huron College.

So it’s not exactly a giant leap to accept how natural it would be for her to spend so much of her adult life working at the college and for college endeavors. However, her parents might have questioned her loyalty to the school when her high school graduation was approaching and she adamantly refused to stay here for college.
She wanted to leave home, and did so, graduating from the University of South Dakota.
“But, obviously, still in my heart Huron College must have been there because when they came and asked if I would be on the board of trustees I wanted to do it,” Hoyt said.
It was the first of many such experiences that have driven home the fact that no one can accomplish great things alone. It takes everyone on board to make them happen.
“It’s always a team, because who can do this, and who can do that?” she said. “And it all comes together.”
But that philosophy was tested, and harshly, not even a year after she became a trustee when the college was facing bankruptcy. Still, the financial troubles were worked out and the school made it through another 20 years with several different owners before its doors were closed in 2005.
That was a dark time for someone whose family was so devoted to the school. When the college buildings, empty and crumbling, came down she knew it had to be.
“I knew it was right, but to knock down those buildings … I did not go over there. I think I maybe drove by, but that was a very, very tough part for me when all those buildings went down.
“There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t lament that the college is not here any more,” she said. “But it’s gone, and that’s history.”
She brightens when she explains how, despite the fact that the physical buildings and campus as they were for more than a century no longer exist, the school lives on in other ways.
The Huron University Foundation is one of them.
She and other members of the foundation, a separate entity from the college, have invested more than $2 million in the South Dakota Community Foundation. Each year, they can distribute $80,000 in interest earned from the fund for education in Huron.
For the first few years after the college closed, the foundation board gave scholarships to Huron High School students.
Then, once the Huron Community Campus was started, the foundation became involved with that entity. With foundation dollars paying the salaries of Northern State University professors, the students, many of them non-traditional, can take classes at an unheard tuition rate of $40 per credit hour.
She encourages students to get their general education courses out of the way while remaining home in Huron or in area towns so they aren’t saddled with huge debt.
“It’s a wonderful thing that we have post-secondary education available in our community,” she said. “The Huron University Foundation is the reason that we can do that.”
Central Park and Splash Central now occupy the former college campus. Those familiar with the old Voorhees Hall’s architecture will see similarities at the bathhouse. Picnic shelters are named after the college buildings, and rooms in the Campus Center are named in honor of college faculty and benefactors.
It doesn’t bring the college back, she said, “but there’s still a lot of the college there.”
For years, residents had tried to come up with a plan to establish a health and fitness center in Huron. Hoyt said yes when asked by the late Earl Nordby to chair the committee that led to the Nordby Center for Recreation.
“I had a passion for it because I knew it was something that would improve the quality of life in our community to have that, and now that’s 20 years old,” she said.
Then there was the $2 million renovation of the Crossroads, and the effort that built the Event Center, linking the hotel and the Huron Arena.
With all of the major projects in Huron over the years, one of the lessons Hoyt said she has learned is that it’s vitally important to lay out all of the details up front, pulling no punches, when public money is a key factor in the financing.
“You take it to the people,” she said. “And you let them decide. You present your story, you put your facts together, this is what it will be, and let them decide.”
The Crossroads was new in the late 1980s when Dale Lamphere’s Spirit of Dakota sculpture was placed near an entrance to the hotel.
It inspired the formation of a commission to honor South Dakota women. Donna Christen was chair and Hoyt was her vice chair. Then-First Lady Linda Mickelson became the first of the governor’s wives to be members.
This is the 32nd year of the Spirit of Dakota award recognizing those who exemplify the prairie spirit.
Hoyt, chair of the commission, emphasizes that each year’s winner is chosen by women from all over South Dakota.
“This is Huron’s gift to the women of South Dakota,” she said.
It could be said for Hoyt as well. She is a gift for all of the people of South Dakota.

PHOTO BY ROGER LARSEN/PLAINSMAN
Marilyn Hohm Hoyt, who will be inducted into the S.D. Hall of Fame this weekend, poses before the Spirit of Dakota sculpture near the Huron Event Center. Hoyt has been a driving force in the Spirit of Dakota Award, which recognizes a woman of extraordinary spirit each fall.