The Delegation Speaks

Long ago, in another life, I was a reporter and copy editor for The Dickinson Press. My main job was to “put the paper to bed” five nights a week, but we only had one full-time reporter, so I also spent much time taking phone calls from people with prospective news stories. Some were legitimate tips: there’s a big fire at the Farmers Union Elevator, or a semi loaded with hogs just tipped over on the Interstate and there are pigs everywhere. Some were people just seeking a little free publicity.

Some of the most frequent callers were the three members of the North Dakota congressional delegation—at the time, Senators Milton Young and Quentin Burdick and Congressman Mark Andrews. Actually, they didn’t call themselves—they had staff press people who called. Usually they were calling with news of a special project benefiting North Dakota that had received some positive Congressional action.

Most of that Congressional action involved grants or loans to rural electric cooperatives. In those days, the early to mid-1970s, there wasn’t really the profusion of earmarks like we have today. But a $300,000 low interest loan from the Rural Electrification Administration to Slope Electric in New England, North Dakota, to upgrade electrical service in Hettinger County was a pretty big deal then. From time to time there would be highway projects, like approval of a $100,000 grant from the Federal Highway Administration for a new bridge over the Cannonball River. Those are the kind of projects that grew into the earmark system we North Dakotans have enjoyed for the last couple of decades when “Team North Dakota” was running a full-court press to fund energy corridors or research corridors or rural water systems.

In the ‘70s, there was no quicker form of communication than the telephone. These were the days before e-mail, before even fax machines, so I would sit at my typewriter (remember those?) with the phone scrunched between my ear and my shoulder, and take dictation from a Congressional press aide. The only other alternative would have been Air Mail (remember that?) from Washington to Bismarck and then next day postal delivery to Post Office Box 1367 (all these years later, I can still remember that box number), zip code 58602.

Of course, all three members of the delegation wanted to take credit for the special project, so when something happened, it was not unusual for my phone to ring three times in the space of a few hours with the same news. I didn’t want to have to take dictation on the same story three times, so I developed a policy that whoever called first was the one who got his name in the paper. “Senator Milton Young today announced . . .” News is news, the first time you hear it. The second and third times, it is not news. So if Andrews’ guy called first, when Burdick’s and Young’s guys called, I would just say “Thanks, I’ve already got the story.”

Eventually the press aides, who subscribed to the North Dakota Newspaper Association’s clipping service, figured out my policy. They’d get this big envelope full of clippings of stories with their boss’s names in them once a month (today of course, their job is much easier—they just read the online versions of each paper each morning), and if it looked like one of them wasn’t getting his fair share in the Dickinson Press, maybe they’d move me up their priority list for calls. Instead of calling the Forum or the Tribune, or KFYR first, they’d think about calling me first. I used to just chuckle at the thought of these press aides running through the halls of Congress to get to a phone (no cell phones in those days) to call this damn reporter out in the boondocks of western North Dakota so their boss would get in the paper.

This was all brought to mind last week when I read a story in the Tribune about a federal loan guarantee for a new Holiday Inn in Williston to accommodate oil field workers. The story began:

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) - North Dakota's congressional delegation said the federal Agriculture Department's Rural Development agency will guarantee a $4.7 million loan for the construction of a Holiday Inn Hotel in Williston.

Adequate housing has been a problem in western North Dakota because of the booming oil fields. Sens. Kent Conrad and John Hoeven and Rep. Rick Berg said North Dakota's oil producing counties have 23,000 more people today than they did a decade ago.

Now, that would not have been unusual between 1986 and 2010, when the North Dakota’s delegation was all Democrats. But we’ve got a mixed marriage down there now, like we did in the 1970’s, and I guess I didn’t expect to see joint press releases from Senators Conrad and Hoeven and Congressman Berg. That just wouldn’t have happened in the days of Burdick, Andrews and Young. I remember that there wasn’t much love lost between those three at any time in their joint service, which ran from 1963, when Andrews came to Congress to join Burdick and Young, through 1980, when Young stepped aside and Dorgan joined the ranks.

So I was pleased to see that the cooperation that started in 1987, when Conrad joined Burdick and Dorgan, and ran through the end of last year with Dorgan, Conrad and Pomeroy, is continuing with Berg and Hoeven joining Conrad. At least I hope that is what is going on. It could be that they all three e-mailed a similar press release to the AP office in Bismarck and the reporter just combined them into one story. But I hope that’s not the case. I hope this cooperation is real. There’s talk about Republicans and Democrats sitting together at the State of the Union speech next week. Wouldn’t it be nice to see our three guys sitting together? I’ll be watching.

Footnote: I emphasized zip code 58602 a few paragraphs ago. I want to tell you a short story about that zip code. Zip codes were implemented in the early 1960’s. The way it worked in North Dakota was that all North Dakota zip codes started with 58, and then the urban centers were given the third number, starting in the east, (hence 580 for Wahpeton, 581 for Fargo, 582 for Grand Forks, all the way across the state to 588 for Williston. Then, the postmasters in those urban centers were assigned to dole out the 4th and 5^th numbers to the small towns in their geographic region, generally based on the alphabet. They had some discretion on how many they wanted to reserve for their own towns. An old friend of mine, C. Ray Culver, was the postmaster in Dickinson at the time. So C. Ray started assigning numbers. Amidon was 58620. Beach was 58621. Belfield was 58622. Bowman was 58623. And so on. But Dickinson was 58601 for home delivery, and 58602 for post office box delivery. The numbers 58603 through 58619 went unassigned, and remain so today. Why? Because in 1963, C. Ray was one of Dickinson’s greatest boosters, and he was absolutely convinced Dickinson was going to grow and grow and grow, and would eventually need that many zip codes. Today, Fargo, for comparison, has 15 zip codes and Bismarck has 7. Dickinson still has 2. But hope springs eternal. There’s a big oil boom going on out there. C. Ray’s been gone for a long time, now, but I’m still cheering for him.