The host site of the banquet offered a first glance at the renamed Valley View Villa, which was previously a multi-million dollar mansion a few miles west of Lake Mitchell owned by the Kelley family.
Print article In April, the deadliest month of the pandemic, an elderly New Yorker in assisted living couldn’t grasp why she was suddenly forbidden to see her friends. In May, two sisters in Michigan, one Republican and the other a Democrat, watched their aged parents suffer from covid-19 and wondered why so many people refused to cover their faces against the virus. In Florida in October, with 200,000 Americans already dead, a strong young man questioned how dire - how real - the whole crisis was. In wintry South Dakota last month, as the coronavirus hit home with an icy clarity, a man who understood the risk chose not to wear a mask. He just didn’t like being told what to do, his family said.
A rural S.D. community ignored the virus for months. Then people started dying. Annie Gowen Maskless residents walk past storefronts in Mitchell, S.D., on Nov. 22. A day later, the city council voted on a citywide mask mandate. (KC McGinnis for The Washington Post) MITCHELL, S.D. A cold wind whipped through the prairie as they laid Buck Timmins to rest. Timmins, a longtime coach and referee, was not the first person in Mitchell, S.D., pop. 15,600, to die of the coronavirus. He was not even the first that week. As the funeral director tucked blankets over the knees of Timmins’s wife, Nanci, Pastor Rhonda Wellsandt-Zell told the small group of masked mourners that just as there had been seasons in the coach’s life basketball season, football season, volleyball season Mitchell was now enduring a phase of its own.