BROOKINGS – At 100 years old, Brookings resident Gordon J. Mydland can look back on a life that put service before self. Along the way, he would leave a legacy of public service and carve out a niche in the judicial and political history of South Dakota.

Mydland was born on May 12, 1922, and grew up with three sisters on a farm near Hetland. He attended Lake Preston High School, boarding during the week with a family there. Following graduation in 1940, he went on to Augustana College (Sioux Falls) and was there when the United States entered World War II following the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

From Augustana, even though he had not graduated, he would go to Columbia University (New York) for midshipman training en route to commissioning as an ensign in the United States Navy. However, he contracted mumps and was set back in his training schedule. So he was then sent to Northwestern University (Chicago) to complete his training.

Following his commissioning in 1943, he was sent to Guadalcanal, in the Pacific Theater. He was assigned to Flotilla 6, which consisted of several LCTs (landing ship, tank), each with two officers and a crew of about eight to 10 sailors.

“They didn’t have docks for ships,” Mydland explained. “We spent most of our time unloading cargo ships.” He would serve in the Navy until 1946.

Following the end of the war, he spent some time in San Francisco. When he returned to South Dakota, he found his parents had moved off the farm and into Brookings. He attended South Dakota State University and earned a Bachelor of Science degree.

Mydland then opened a music shop with a cousin, Robert Madsen, in Brookings. He later sold his share of the store to his cousin and moved to Pierre and opened a store there, where he sold musical instruments and stereo hi-fi equipment. But following a short career in business, he was ready to move on to the law and then on to a career in politics.

‘Old boys’ network’

Mydland would do one year at Stanford Law School in California. However, and with a letter of recommendation in hand from then South Dakota Gov. Sigund Anderson, he gravitated toward law school at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion.

“I didn’t want to practice law in California,” Mydland said. “I wanted to practice in South Dakota.” 

Home-grown conventional wisdom told him a law degree in South Dakota would lead to a collegiality with other lawyers in the state, via what might be deemed a sort-of “old boys’ network.” He would go on to practice law with local attorneys H.O. Lund, “our next-door neighbor,” and Bill McCann. Lund, who would later become a judge and unsuccessfully run for governor, became Mydland’s mentor. Mydland would go on to carve out a judicial and political career.

Following some years as county attorney for Brookings County, he served in the state Senate representing District 13 from 1963 to 1966 and the District 6 from 1967 to 1968.

Then, according to Mydland’s son, John Gabriel “Gabe” Mydland, then-Gov. Nils Boe (1965-69), near the end of his term, summoned his father into his office and told him, “You’re going to run for attorney general.”

He did, was elected and then re-elected, serving two terms, from 1969 to 1973. Following that stint of public service, he was in 1973 appointed to be a circuit court judge for the Third Judicial Circuit; he would remain in that post until retirement in 1987.

However, prior to that appointment would come Mydland’s political last hurrah in 1972: a bid for the U.S. Senate, precipitated by incumbent Republican Karl Mundt’s suffering a massive stroke in 1969 which ultimately took him out of a run for re-election.

1972: An interesting year in S.D., U.S. politics

“He got in late,” Gabe Mydland recalled of the GOP primary. “The other four candidates were pretty well established.” 

They were: Robert W. Hirsch, former South Dakota Senate majority leader; Chuck Lien, a contractor from Rapid City; Tom Reardon, a Sioux Falls banker; and Kenneth D. Stofferahn, a farmer.

The results were: Hirsch, 27,322 (27.37%); Mydland, 22,297 (22.34%); Lien, 21,995 (22.03%); Stofferahn, 16,615 (16.65%); and Reardon, 11,592 (11.61%). Hirsch, however, would lose the election to Democrat James Abourezk. 

But the Democrats would see that victory offset by Sen. George McGovern’s crushing defeat in the presidential election by incumbent Republican President Richard Nixon, with McGovern losing his home state by 8.6 percentage points.

Gabe, 10 years old at the time, said he was involved in his father’s political ambitions. 

“Not by choice. … My life was in the back seat of the car, going from place to place. Staying with family friends maybe three, sometimes four nights a week, away from my parents. Or going with them to an event. I remember being in Wounded Knee one night and you could see the tornadoes coming.

“The last six weeks of the campaign, right after I got out of school, I was sent to my aunt and uncle’s in Grand Island (Nebraska), where I could stay with my cousins,” he recalled. “They had a lake cabin.”

Mydland’s primary campaign headquarters was here in Brookings, at 101 Main Ave., in the building that now houses King Insurance Agency.

Gabe noted that in all of these happenings, his mother had to be factored into the equation. The former Lorrie Grange, she had married Mydland in 1958. They adopted Gabe at his birth in Sioux Falls; he was their only child.

“She was very political; she was very outspoken,” he said of his mother. “This was a woman who was telling everyone in 1970, two years before Watergate, that Nixon was a crook.

“That didn’t go over very well for a guy who wants to run for the U.S. Senate in 1972.” Nixon wasn’t well-liked by a lot of people, but they “didn’t think he was a crook. However, she was very supportive of her husband’s campaign.”

Gabe went on to explain that his parents “did spend too much money on the campaign and they went into debt.”

Perhaps there’s a twist of political irony in that Democrat James Abourezk would win the Senate seat, defeating Hirsch by a vote of 174,773 (57.04%) to 131,613 (42.96%). 

In the 1968 bid for South Dakota attorney, Mydland had defeated Abourezk: 148,366 (55.69%) to 118,045 (44.31%) votes.

Politics was now behind him, but a career dedicated to judicial service would stretch out until retirement in 1987.

In retirement, the judge loved horses. 

“We started out with one Shetland,” his son Gabe noted. Later there would be a Tennessee Walker stud and big draft horses, such as percherons and Belgians, as many as four to five teams.

“At one time we had over 40 horses,” Gabe recalled.

Contact John Kubal at jkubal@brookingsregister.com. Several Wikipedia articles contributed to this report.