President Emeritus Roland Dille and James McLaughlin were honored at the Fargo-Moorhead Chamber of Commerce’s annual meeting with the Legacy Leader Award. This is the third year for the award, which recognizes the important role and contributions of long-time leaders in shaping and serving the Chamber, the community, and the region. Dille is MSU Moorhead’s longest serving president (1968-1994). He received standing ovations before and after his address, which is printed here in its entirety.
Roland Dille’s Legacy Award Remarks
FM Chamber of Commerce Annual Meeting
November 12, 2009
Response to the Chamber Legacy Leader Award
For nearly half a century, people in Fargo-Moorhead have seen me approach a microphone and looked at their watches. I will probably not disappoint your expectations tonight.
I am honored, deeply honored by the award. Of course, at my age, I feel honored when people remember my name. But this is a special honor. And I am further honored that President Edna Szymanski is here, with two tables of her colleagues and my friends to support me; and by the presence here of two dear friends from Concordia, President Pam Jolicoeur and Tracey Moorhead.
And I am honored to have my name joined to the names of those others who have received this award, men who exemplify, as I do not, the spirit of commerce, recognized in the name of the organization. I represent those others: teachers, preachers, choir directors, poets and painters, story tellers, directors of charities. Those who have built no cities but have, in important ways, shaped them.
In a way, I married into Fargo-Moorhead. I first saw the Valley in June, 1947, when I drove Beth Hopeman from Dassel to Moorhead. She had spent the year teaching in my home town and I, back from the war, had spent the hear courting her. In Moorhead I met a very Moorhead family, her father, who had come here in 1907 as Moorhead’s first city engineer, and her mother, who had graduated from the Normal School and had been principal of Sharp School, named after the man regarded as the father of the Moorhead schools. A wise old man once told me to marry a girl from North Dakota, because she wouldn’t expect much. Now I learned that my Moorhead girl friend had been born at St. John’s Hospital in Fargo. So I proposed to her. Incidentally, the wise old man was wrong.
But you cannot really belong to a town through marriage. It was some years later, when Moorhead State College offered to deliver us from California that I came to terms with Moorhead. We bought a house without seeing it and mortgaged it by telephone. This was my kind of town. With the help of the First National Bank and assorted relatives, we put together the $18,000 to buy the house we have lived in for 46 years. I suppose that if we had known that it would soon serve as a college president’s house we would have paid more.
A good place to raise children everyone said so it was, and, as it turned out, a good place to grow old in.
The last time I gave a speech at a chamber annual meeting was many years ago, when I turned the gavel over to my successor. Beth and I had been in France Where I was part of an educational mission. We had been promised that the next day we would go to Versailles. I had to break the news to Beth that the next day we would not be going to Versailles, but to Moorhead, for the annual meeting. On the way to France we had stopped briefly in England and had visited a village named Grantchester, about which a poet, Rupert Brooke, had written a poem. He was homesick, remembering that villages In Moorhead I read part of that poem. That’s the sort of thing we do in Moorhead.
Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
…Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? And Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, the truths, the pain?… oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea? [*The Old Vicarage, Grantchester by Rupert Brooke (1912)]
We stood in front of the house he had lived in, and to which he would not return, for he died in the First World War. I have though of that poem this week, for 65 years ago this week I sailed with my division, the Black Panthers, from New York, bound for the war in Europe. And it is this very week, so many years later, that our son reached Baghdad, on a year-long assignment for the State Department.
We live in a world of wars, and the 35,000 diplomas that I have signed claim that our graduates are ready for the world we live in. But ready, also, because you and so many others, in these cities and in towns and villages, have given to the young the faith and values that will guide them through the lies and pain.
I thank you for that.
