A license to drive

Having recently gone through the anxiety of preparing for an examination to get my driver's license renewed, I immediately appreciated the following column written by Lorraine Collins. As visitors to this site well know, Lorraine is a Spearfish neighbor who writes regularly for the Black Hills Pioneer newspaper. She graciously allows us to use her material on Black Hills Monitor.

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I stopped in at the drivers licensing station recently to check on all the new requirements to get or renew a South Dakota driver's license. When I read of everything I would need to prove I am who I claim to be, I was really glad that my license is good for another three years and that my passport doesn't expire for four years. With a passport, at least I won't have to try to find my birth certificate and marriage certificate.

Several other things will be required, though, because of new rules that came into effect last December as the result of federal regulations. I believe this is the result of the fact that the driver's license has commonly been used for identification in various business transactions including the purchasing of airline tickets. This has led to some catastrophic events in our recent history. So I guess it makes sense to say that people getting a license to drive must demonstrate that they are who they say they are and live where they claim to live.

This does mean a lot of inconvenience. In addition to the Identity Document, we need to provide proof of a Social Security number and two documents to prove our residential address. These might be utility bills, rent receipts, phone bills, bank statements, and so forth.

People who have changed their name over the course of a lifetime, such as women who chose to use their husband's name after marriage, need the marriage certificate to show why their name is different from their birth certificate. Later, if they get divorced and revert to their previous name, they have to bring the divorce decree to their next licensing session. A rather ominous note in the instructions says that "If you have had multiple marriages you will need to bring similar documents providing legal proof of each name change." That's certainly an incentive for long term monogamy.

I learned to drive before South Dakota required a license to drive. It may surprise many people to know that South Dakota was the last state in the union to require a driver's license, not doing so until 1954. The actual driver's license examination wasn't instituted in South Dakota until 1959. I remember those pre-driver's license days because it was very awkward to be in some other state and not have a valid driver's license. All I could say if some law officer asked to see my license was, "Uh, I'm from South Dakota." I finally went to visit my sister in Colorado, drove her car and passed a driver's test in Denver. I therefore had a driver's license with a completely bogus address. So I do understand the desire of the government to know that drivers actually live where they claim to.

When we left the U.S. to move to Singapore my husband and I had International Drivers Licenses based on being licensed to drive in South Dakota. When we moved to London three years later we used our International Drivers Licenses for a while but eventually---I'm not sure why---I thought it would be a good idea to get an English license. Amongst Americans it was said that the Brits didn't like giving us drivers licenses and no American we knew had ever passed the test. I thought that was a challenge.

I studied. I drove with a driving instructor. I showed up for the test properly meek and humble with a big "Student Driver" sign on the car roof. I did everything the manual told me to do no matter how dumb I thought it was, including putting on the parking brake at every stop sign. At the end, the instructor said he thought I'd been overly cautious, so he wanted to know how long I'd been driving.

"Thirty-six years," I said. He burst out laughing and gave me the license. That license was good until I was 70 years old, but I suppose the British have changed things by now, too.

Lorraine Collins is a writer who lives in Spearfish. She can be contacted at collins1@rushmore.com.

Public art and argument

Spearfish writer Lorraine Collins is a regular contributor to the Black Hills Pioneer newspaper, and we're delighted that she shares her column with us for Black Hills Monitor. She's touched upon a wide range of topics, and this time she reflects upon art.....and how it can often create a bit of disagreement among local citizens. Here's her latest offering.
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The first time I realized there could be controversy in connection with public art was when I innocently agreed to be president of the Spearfish Area Council for the Arts and Humanities 20 or so years ago. I had been involved with SACAH only a short time and didn't know the organization was embroiled in a lawsuit about a sculpture. Since then I've heard of public controversy about statues in several other towns, most recently Sturgis. I've come to realize that whether the public is paying for public art or not, the public has an opinion about what they want to see on their streets or in their parks.

Oddly enough, two of the controversial works of art involved fish, including the one in which I became inadvertently involved. A group of citizens decided to enhance Spearfish by raising money to commission a sculpture and after they had pledges of several thousand dollars, they realized they could get a matching grant through the National Endowment for the Arts to make an even bigger prize.

The trouble was, to do that they needed to work through the local arts council and to open up the contest to sculptors nationwide. SACAH agreed to cooperate with the citizens group and sent out invitations to submit a proposed statue to artists around the country. I don't know who the judges were, but the winning artist was a fellow from Ohio who proposed a sort of abstract sculpture called "The Hungry Fish."

When they saw what he had in mind, quite a few people hated it and refused to have it in their park. The citizens committee wrote a letter to the Ohio artist informing him that he had been deselected. He didn't sue them, he sued SACAH, which had been totally uninvolved in either the selection process or the rejection. As I recall, it took a couple of years and $2,000 to settle the suit. We all learned a lot, including that public art causes public controversy more often than not.

In 1995 a sculpture titled "Rapid Trout" was put in Founder's Park in Rapid City. Since it was partly funded by the Cement Plant, it had to be made of concrete and the commission was given to a professor at the University of South Dakota. The sculpture consisted of huge slabs with the fish head carved on one piece, the torso and tail on others. There have been a lot of jokes about the fish but I guess people learned to live with it and perhaps even appreciate it by now. Or maybe they just don't pay much attention to it any more.

The greatest controversy generated about public art may be the sort that Sturgis is now experiencing. Two of the 14 sculptures recently installed on Main Street and elsewhere for the Sturgis Sculpture Walk are unclothed human forms, that is to say, nudes. Some people have protested that these are unfit for children to see. This is reminiscent of what Sioux Falls went through back in 1971. That year a wealthy philanthropist named Thomas Fawick donated to the city a full size replica of Michelangelo's "David". The original has been on display in Florence, Italy for 500 years but some Sioux Falls people felt it was "in bad taste and would have a bad effect on the moral values of citizens."

The statue was placed in a park named for the donor but facing away from traffic. Trees were planted to screen it from the street. Later, when the park was being renovated, the statue languished in storage for several years and then was replaced in the park in a more open location. The Sioux Falls website now brags about it.

It's not surprising that public art causes public argument. Art helps us define who we are and what we value. That isn't always easy to agree on, even in small towns where we might think everybody sees everything the same way we do. Actually, they don't.

Lorraine Collins is a writer who lives in Spearfish. She can be reached at collins1@rushmore.com.