By John Kubal | The Brookings Register
BROOKINGS — “I’ve been living on borrowed time since 1960,” Loran Perry said. “I survived a car crash that would have killed anybody else. I got up and walked away from it. That got my attention.”
Perry, now 89, has had an eventful life during his past 66 years of borrowed time, with much of it shared with Carol, his high school sweetheart and wife, whose funeral was on their 59th wedding anniversary. Their dozen children — nine of their own and three adopted, are still alive. Add to those 25 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren.
Perry, who has a ready smile and sense of humor punctuated by frequent easy laughter, has written his life’s story in “The Black Sheep.” He shared some of its highlights with The Brookings Register for the newspaper’s continuing look at Brookings men and women who have reached their biblically allotted three-score years and ten — for Perry, almost four-score years and ten — and are still doing something meaningful with their lives, either still on the job or in retirement.
Looking back to the beginning, Perry jokes about being named after his mother, Loran (but pronounced “LOORAIN”): “I get lingerie catalogs in the mail addressed to Mrs. Loran Perry and last week I was invited to join a women’s Bible study.”
Perry grew up on a farm near Bruce. Following graduation from Bruce High School in 1954, he and Carol eloped and married. “We went to North Dakota and I worked in a butcher shop for six months,” he said. “I went up there to Tioga to get in the oil fields, but I wasn’t old enough; I was only 18 years old, so they wouldn’t let me on. So I worked in a butcher shop for six months. I came back to South Dakota and took a job running a TV store in Estelline.”
They would move back to Bruce because his father still wanted him to go to college. He attended classes at South Dakota State University, majoring in electrical engineering and operating the TV store in the afternoons. And in the evenings, he performed with a band he had formed. “Music has been a big part of my life,” he noted.
He attended SDSU for three years, but did not graduate. “My family got too big,” Perry noted. “By the time I was 25, I had five kids.” He took a job at Sands Electric in Brookings and worked for him for about two or three years. He then left and started his own business — Perry Electric — in 1963 in his garage on Eighth Street. He later moved to a bigger garage on Third Street and then to a garage on West Seventh Street.
With the boys in high school, he wanted something for them to do, so he took on a snowmobile dealership. A commercial location was needed for that, so he moved to a shop on Western Avenue. And finally came the move to 100 Main Avenue South. Several of Loran’s sons and brothers, plus faithful employees, grew the business , adding heating and cooling in the early 1980s. In the 2000s, Keven Perry and his wife, Deb, took over the operation gradually grew into what is now Perry Electric, Air Conditioning and Heating. Two of Loran’s sons also also gave to the community with public service: Keven with 30 years as a volunteer member of the Brookings Fire Department; Joel Perry with the Brookings Police Department for 26 years.
Perry name goes on
In 2024, Joel came back to the family business. Along with him, Loran’s grandsons — Derek Biteler and Matt Perry — will bring the business name to the next generation.
As the business continued growing, so did the Loran and Carol Perry family: “She gave birth to nine and we adopted three, so we had a dozen.”
Six boys and six girls. The first adopted child was a girl from Brazil; following her came a boy and a girl, both from Calcutta, India. Loran credits Carol with doing all the work demanded by the adoption process for their three children: “All I did was pay the bills,” he said, smiling.
At one time seven of the children worked in the family business. Over the years the business grew, but some children “went their own way.” For awhile, Keven, who began working with his father “right out of high school, ran the business by himself; then when Joel Perry retired from the Brookings Police Department, he began “stepping in while Keven’s stepping out.”
While Loran still does some work in the family business, he works at Lowe’s three half-days a week in the “electrical aisle.” And when he has some time away from work?
“Music is a big part of my life. I have a little recording studio at home. I make tracks at home,” he explained, noting that he has his own YouTube channel.
“I still do concerts at the nursing homes,” he continued. “I go over and sing with them. I do most of my stuff on a keyboard now. They have keyboards that imitate everything. You do your background music on that.”
Perry’s love for music goes back to his high school days. Remembering those days, he noted, laughing, “I always said that Elvis and I started at the same time. The only difference is that he made it and I didn’t.” He did some gigs using the name “Perry Loran.”
“We played in some places where Lawrence Welk played. A lot of our dances and stuff were up in North Dakota.”
Keven shared a memory, too: “I remember as a kid, probably 4 years old, they’d come home in sequined cowboy outfits,” he recalled. “I’d just be getting up and they’d just be getting home. That sticks in my mind. They had a blind piano player.”
“The first band that I took over was the C Bar X Rangers,” Loran explained. “That’s what I started out with. We found out some of these fancy places wouldn’t let us in because we were cowboys. So we changed our name and put on red vests and went in as the Heartbeats. We played country music like they wouldn’t believe.”
— Contact John Kubal at [email protected].
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