Dorothy Boes, a 77-year-old retired special education teacher from Bonesteel, S.D., lives 20 minutes north of Butte. She’s in a coffee group with Walz’s mom, Darlene, who still lives in the community and enjoys planting flowers and playing games like Mexican Train dominoes with friends. Friends described Darlene as sweet and energetic, a rare Democratic activist there who has been involved in the local county party.
Boes, a lifelong Republican, said they generally don’t talk politics — that’s the way in this small town — and while she wasn’t certain she’ll vote for a Harris-Walz ticket, she surprised even herself that she was considering it.
“I’d vote for him in a minute, I would,” Boes said. “They’re decent people. For the longest time leading up to this election, I thought I wasn’t going to vote. Forget it. I was so sick of all the fighting.”
Next to her, a conservative friend who declined to give her name just shook her head: “A lot of prayers, a lot of prayers.”
Born in West Point on the eastern edge of Nebraska, Walz was mostly raised in Valentine a few miles from Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge. It was the type of town where you could bike down the street and always run into kids to play baseball or football, said Pat Donovan, who grew up there playing sports with Walz and said the now-governor seemed to get along with everyone.
It’s also a “cowboy town,” as locals say, where Young’s Western Wear takes up nearly a block of Main Street. Cherry County, where Valentine is located, is larger than Connecticut but has about 6,000 people in its 6,000 square miles — and 140,000 breeding cows, more than any county in the United States. The Sandhills region upends Nebraska’s pancake-flat stereotype; grass-covered dunes rise and fall while never-ending skies loom over vast grasslands of grazing cattle. Valentine has a thriving motel industry welcoming bikers who stop here en route to Sturgis or tourists on golf outings or canoe trips down the Niobrara River.
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Publish date : 2024-08-10 02:30:00
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