interested party remembers Stan Adelstein

The late Republican former South Dakota State Senator Stan Adelstein's ancestors owned a store in Kadoka adjacent to the Pine Ridge Reservation and was vested in mining interests from gold to gravel on stolen treaty lands. But Stan Adelstein became ten times the man Denny Sanford was and screwed way fewer people. 

In 1997, I performed my first of six seasons as Mother Ginger in the Black Hills Dance Theater’s production of the Nutcracker; Vanessa Short Bull danced the Sugar Plum Fairy. One of her inspirations was Maria Tallchief, America’s first major prima ballerina who was an Osage Tribal member and danced the Sugar Plum Fairy. Stan Adelstein was always at our productions even sometimes backstage.

My only personal interaction with Mr. Adelstein was in 2005 after he bought the Black Hills Fort Pierre Roundhouse in Lead. After losing the Ross Compressor Building bid to the now-defunct outfit that was casting the giant presidential heads my business partners and I turned our attention to rehabilitating the roundhouse. I made an appointment with Stan at his office in Rapid City and met with him after spraying texture so I was coated from head to toe. But after tracking drywall mud all over the carpet he sold it to Dr. Duane and Phyllis Sander of Brookings in 2007. 

Fast forward to 2010 in response to journalist Kevin Woster showing sunlight on the hiring of South Dakota War College propaganda peddler Pat Powers to the office of incoming Republican Secretary of State Jason Gant, Sen. Adelstein, also a Republican, exposed the War College blog as likely defamatory and called for an investigation of Gant and the SOS's alleged collusion with former employee, Pat Powers to engineer an ALEC-inspired red map strategy. 

In June 2012, Sen. Stan Adelstein formally asked Attorney General Marty Jackley to investigate the arrangement. Adelstein and critical journalists highlighted that Powers was running a private political vendor business, the Dakota Campaign Store, while drawing a $65,000 taxpayer salary to run the state's neutral election systems. Adelstein openly blasted the partisan weaponization of the office and went so far as to ask the Attorney General if impeachment or gubernatorial removal was warranted. Amid the mounting legal pressure and scrutiny over potential conflicts of interest, Powers resigned from his state post in July 2012.

Stan Adelstein gave generously to every cause, paid countless school lunch arrears and his estate probably still will.