That’s Going Some!

I walked into Harvey C. Jewett IV’s office many times over a quarter century. No matter how successful the fundraising ask was, the visit was always interesting. He and his ancestor Harvey Jewetts have led fascinating lives as they’ve built businesses and fortunes and impacted life in Aberdeen in ways that make it hard to imagine what things would look like without having had four Harvey Chase Jewetts over the past 140 years.

It’s impossible to tell the story of one person, much less four people, adequately in a magazine article, even an extended one. This one aims to cover some of the more significant events in the business careers of four men who shared the same name—to the almost complete and unfortunate exclusion of their family members.

Despite being a founding family of Aberdeen, the first Aberdeen Jewetts retained a close connection to the family hometown of Newark, Ohio, from which Harvey C. Jewett I embarked. They took many trips there, including final ones. Some early arrivals also returned for burial there.

The first Jewett immigrants to America were two men descended from Lowland Scots-Irish along the Irish Sea, who came from northern England to Boston in 1638 along with their whole church just before the English Civil War. That transplanted church “basically founded the town of Rowley,” Massachusetts, Harvey said. Visting the cemetery there, he found many Jewetts from every American war, recalling, “There was a Jewett at the second Lexington battle and some officers in the Civil War Black battalion.” There were probably some on the other side of that war too. In the 1970s, stationed in the army in what was then Fort Benning (now Fort Moore) in Georgia, Harvey saw a sign for the Jewett Plantation. Recognized as a historic site, the plantation’s manor house is now the base commander’s home.

Despite a heritage in class-based society of inheritance of wealth and title, the building of major businesses in Aberdeen was hardly just a simply matter of handing things on to the next generation. Each succeeding Harvey Jewett dealt with challenges and opportunities. Their work helped build the city as well. The first four generations of Jewetts also got involved in activities in and far beyond the Hub City. These took them far and wide, often intersecting with the lives of the rich, famous, and powerful—encounters that usually brought benefits back home.

I – Harvey I—August 5, 1863-July 22, 1937

Born in Newark in 1863, Harvey Chase Jewett I quit high school after one year, but his mother instilled in him a love of books. Still, he wasn’t interested in formal education—that is, until he became Aberdeen’s school board president and sent his children away to private school.

Seeking his fortune in the west, Harvey Sr. lived briefly in Chicago with his brother Charles “C.A.” Jewett, who worked in wholesale grocery. They came to Aberdeen together in 1881 when Harvey Sr. was about 18, choosing the Hub City—a nickname their business would reinforce—because, Harvey said, “it was as far as the railroad went.”

JEWETT BROTHERS

The brothers opened the Red Front grocery store at Fourth Avenue and Main Street the year they arrived. It was mostly retail, then they added wholesale groceries. In 1882, Harvey Sr. sold the store, and when his brother Robert arrived in 1883, they opened Jewett Brothers, a grocery and wholesale shop across from the previous store. Before long they shifted entirely to wholesale. It was the first wholesale house in Dakota Territory. By 1885 gross sales reached $800,000, the equivalent of about $25 million today.

The growing businesses had rapidly changing space needs. After moving across the street two years before, in 1885 they constructed a new building across from the old one that included a balcony and elevator. A year later, they built another one at the southwest corner Main Street and Fourth Avenue. At the turn of the century, a still-standing four-story building rose at Kline and Railroad Avenue next to the railroad tracks.

In 1887 the business expanded to Sioux Falls when brothers Rollin and D.C. went there to open what became Jewett Brothers and Jewett. New buildings went up in Aberdeen and Sioux Falls in 1889, the latter still serves as an office building near the downtown Holiday Inn. A location in Iowa came later. For good measure, Harvey Jr. also started the Manchester Biscuit Company in 1902.

The business kept four salesmen on the road visiting customers and prospects, a practice that continued for a century even as the business changed industries. Service was always a focus—a point of pride for Harvey 140 years later—and it had impact. By 1890, a newspaper asserted, Jewett Brothers had “led the fight to make Aberdeen a terminal point on the Milwaukee railroad.”

Jewett Brothers won a government contract to sell food in West River Native American reservations. In his office, Harvey has containers of Jewett’s Indian Girl brand spices sold there. Over the years, he has come across Jewetts on the Cheyenne Indian Reservation. His father believed the reorganization of reservations in 1889 required Native Americans to have a first and last name, so he speculated some people picked Jewett because it was the brand name on many of the goods they consumed.

In 1909, on page 1 of the Aberdeen Daily News, “The Hub City: As Seen By the Cartoonist” feature praised the roughly 25-year existence of Jewett Brothers. Accompanying a laudatory column, a cartoon depicts Harvey Sr. taking a giant step from the company’s 1883 Main Street building to its 1903 Railroad Avenue building. Flying by, a crow (who is a regular feature of these cartoons and no doubt a representative of the cartoonist whose last name was Crow) observes, “That’s Going Some!” (a roughly Jazz Age era slang for accomplishing a lot). The adjacent article praised the firm: “today the name Jewett Brothers in the two lines of business [wholesale grocery and pharmaceuticals] is second to none in this part of the county.” It adds, “it is by no means a small advertisement for Aberdeen that such a firm is located here.”

KATE KENNEDY JEWETT

After starting his businesses, Harvey Sr. returned to Ohio in 1883 to tell his father about the wholesale business, and he met Kate Kennedy, who was visiting from Wheeling, West Virginia. They spent considerable time together during Harvey’s visit and eventually got engaged. In 1886 they married in Wheeling.

Maybe in exchange for marrying in her hometown, the staunchly Catholic Kate agreed to a wedding in an Episcopalian church, Harvey Sr.’s faith. It might have been her last such concession. Their children were raised Catholic. The first two, Angela (born 1887) and Marie (1888), for whose births Kate returned to West Virginia, attended Mount de Chantal Visitation Academy, the same Wheeling Catholic high school as their mother. Harvey Jr., born in Aberdeen in 1895, would attend a Catholic school in New Jersey. Her impact was felt through generations.

Besides running his own businesses, Harvey Sr. had the good luck—or foresight, according to his great-grandson—to get appointed to some corporate boards that improved his business interests and the community. He became a director of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad, which “really founded Aberdeen and all the cities on Highway 12,” Harvey said. “The company made Aberdeen the hub of its employees and administration in Dakota Territory.” With eight railroad companies intersecting in the area, “Aberdeen was a commercial and shopping hub.”

Beginning around 1900, Harvey Sr. and Kate lived in Florida several months a year. He met both Henry Ford and Alexander Graham Bell there. The latter put him on the board of Bell Telephone Company, the precursor of AT&T, which had much of its South Dakota operations in Aberdeen into the 1970s.

Harvey Sr. was also president of the Aberdeen school board, including when the original Central High School was built (still used by the Aberdeen Parks and Recreation Department). When he stepped down in 1914, a newspaper lauded his service. Not bad for a high school dropout.

Also president of the Commercial Club (forerunner of the Chamber of Commerce), his best known community role was as chair of the Brown County Red Cross. Appointed shortly before World War I, he had to deal with both the Spanish Flu pandemic and efforts to support war. President Herbert Hoover also appointed him to head local federal relief efforts early in the Great Depression.

In 1928, Harvey Sr. bought land on Pickerel Lake. Having his pick of locations, he chose a point with sand beaches. There, Harvey says, he built a “breathtaking place,” complete with six bedrooms and maid’s quarters. The couple began spending several months there each year in addition to Florida.

After turning the business over to his son, Harvey Sr.’s health declined. A lung abscess confined him to bed, and he eventually moved to St. Luke’s, where he passed away in June 1937. That was a difficult year for the Jewett family. Two months earlier, Harvey Jr.’s wife Eleanor had passed away, and in October, Kate, the matriarch, died. All three were buried in Newark, Ohio’s Episcopalian cemetery.

II – Harvey Jr. – July 7, 1895-February 17, 1953

The first of Harvey Sr.’s children born in Aberdeen, Harvey Jr. spent part of his youth in New Jersey, attending Newman School for Boys, a Catholic prep school in Hackensack. There, he might have bumped into another Midwesterner, fellow student, St. Paul native, and future literary icon F. Scott Fitzgerald. Not long after his graduation, the United States entered World War I, and he served in Europe as a Red Cross ambulance driver. Future mogul Walt Disney served under him, and his sister Marie was also with the Red Cross. When a live round in a campfire exploded, it took out one of Harvey Jr.’s eyes. He had a glass eye for the rest of his life, which he would take out to scare his grandson.

After the war, he graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts in 1919. Then he went back to Aberdeen to learn the business and, in 1921, married Aberdeen girl Eleanor Porter at Sacred Heart Church. They had four children, Harvey III, Jack, Sara Jane, and Eleanor.

JEWETT DRUG

In 1922 Harvey Jr. was elected vice president of Jewett Brothers, which Harvey said was still the largest wholesale business in the Dakotas, and he eventually began running the business — just in time for the Great Depression.

The downturn required some changes. In 1941 Jewett Brothers sold the wholesale grocery business to Nash-Finch, which had opened in Aberdeen in 1915. The sale included the biscuit company and the Sioux Falls and Iowa locations. This shifted the focus to wholesale drugs and Jewett Drug.

The New Deal’s Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (1938), which updated 1906’s Pure Food and Drug Act, forced drug companies to conform to federal requirements and helped establish the wholesale drug business, making it more serious and profitable. This was a period of increasing professionalism in medicine, which was good for the pharmaceutical business. “The king was Eli Lilly,” Harvey said. “You couldn’t be a wholesaler if you weren’t selling Eli Lilly.” Therefore, he added, Jewett Drug’s license was “first blessed by Eli Lilly” then certified by the Feds. It wasn’t just pharmaceuticals. Local drugstores also served as a general store selling radios, razors, and other retail in addition to pharmaceuticals. So Jewett Drug carried whatever drugstores sold.

PARTY POLITICS

Harvey Jr. wasn’t satisfied with just a business career, however, and he began to pursue a passion for politics. In 1934, he was elected state chair of the South Dakota Republican Party and moved up the ladder quickly, joining the Republican National Committee two years later and serving on it until 1948. He also became friends with Al Smith, who had been the 1928 Democratic Presidential nominee. The first Catholic nominated by a major party visited the Jewett lake cabin several times.

After the Republicans lost the 1948 Presidential election, Harvey Jr. helped recruit General Dwight D. Eisenhower to run for President as a Republican. Previously, Ike had never voted or registered for a party following the principle that he served the country, not a political viewpoint. A team including Harvey Jr. traveled to Europe, where Eisenhower commanded NATO, to convince him. The two became friends, and the general visited Pickerel Lake.

When Harvey Jr.’s wife Eleanor died in 1937, they had four children. A year later, after meeting her on a sea cruise, he married Laura Stowe from Illinois. The young Harvey III liked his stepmother. They were “buddies,” Harvey remembers, and in later years, Harvey III stopped every day to see her on his way home from work.

Also active in community organizations, Harvey Jr. followed his father’s footsteps as president of the Chamber of Commerce (the first time both a father and son had had the role). He also took over Red Cross leadership from his father, chairing it for 30 years.

An original appointee to the Airport Board, Harvey Jr. headed it for 25 years, retiring in 1952. Commercial air service started during his tenure, and according to the newspaper, “progressed from a small landing strip to the fairgrounds to a spacious field with paved runways, concrete apron, modern lighting and a new administration building.”

Late in his relatively brief life—at 58 years, the shortest of the Harveys—Harvey Jr. had a heart attack. Harvey said he lived as “a kind of homebound invalid for his last year.” After months of ill health, he died while visiting his daughter in Arizona in 1953. Like his parents, Harvey Jr. was buried in Ohio. The family took the train to Ohio, joined by a contingent of Aberdeen Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men’s fraternal organization, to escort the casket.

III – Harvey III — September 4, 1922-July 31, 1988

Harvey Jewett III attended Campion Jesuit High School in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, then Williams College in Massachusetts, his father’s alma mater. World War II interrupted college, however. He volunteered in December 1941 and served in the Pacific on a destroyer-sized radar picket ship, which tracked Japanese warplanes, including suicidal kamikazes aimed at Allied ships. After the Japanese surrender, Harvey III’s ship visited Hiroshima. The men weren’t told anything about atomic bombs or radiation, but years later the military checked on his health. When he finally returned to Williams after the war, “they gave him his diploma without requiring more courses,” Harvey explained. Not long after he got to Aberdeen, he married Virginia Daulton in 1946.

FAMILY BUSINESS

Back home, he quickly threw himself into work at Jewett Drug. In his later youth, Harvey remembers, his dad left for work at 6:00 AM every day, kicking Harvey’s bed on the way out and saying “Time to get up, sport”—especially if Harvey had partied the night before.

Harvey III soon began running Jewett Drug in practice. He told his son that Harvey Jr. rarely came into the office—perhaps because the top floors had no heat or air conditioning. On his watch, the company sold the Railroad and Kline high rise warehouse and moved to 521 Railroad Avenue East. In part, the taller building’s lack of air conditioning violated federal law that required it for storing pharmaceuticals. At the same time, relations with the railroads were changing too, due both to disagreements over service and a gradual shift to truck transportation.

These challenges didn’t stop Jewett Drug from being a major player in combatting the polio epidemic in the 1950s, as they helped deliver first the Salk then the Sabin vaccines to afflicted people. At the time, Aberdeen was the smallest city in the country with full-line wholesale drug company.

Harvey III’s later years with Jewett Drug also saw significant changes in competition. Local drug stores were facing competition from large discount box store chains as well as from prescription plans and mail-order suppliers. This also affected wholesalers like Jewett Drug and would come to roost in the next generation.

Harvey III wasn’t entirely nose-to-the-grindstone. An avid golfer and bridge player, he was noted for his “pointed sense of humor and unique laugh,” Harvey recalled. He also participated in other business and community activities, serving on the National Wholesale Drug Association board, the St. Luke’s advisory board, the First National Bank board (today’s Wells Fargo, then one of the area’s largest banks), and the original fundraising committee for the Aberdeen Development Corporation. He was active in and served as president of the Aberdeen Chamber of Commerce.

Harvey III and Virginia divorced in the late 1950s, when their children were young. Although Harvey had gone away to high school in 1962, he was there when his father married Dawna Hansen in 1966. Harvey always had a very good relationship with her.

The couple moved to Florida in 1974, where after a long illness, Harvey III died in 1988. When Harvey had previously asked him if he wanted to be buried in Ohio, he firmly said no, opting for Aberdeen’s Riverside Cemetery.

IV – Harvey – October 7, 1948

Born in 1948, Harvey has lived almost all his life in Aberdeen. Asked if he always thought he would live here, he replied, “I did think I would. I liked Aberdeen, even as a kid.” It’s a life he’s made the most of, impacting his hometown well beyond the family business.

After his parents divorced and his mother moved to Minneapolis with his sister Catherine, Harvey lived with his father beginning in junior high. “It was just the two of us, and we traveled the world together,” he recalled. His father loved the casinos in the Caribbean, and Harvey always went along. “I do not remember a time in which we did not get along,” especially after Harvey got serious about school. He concluded his dad “was a great influence on me.”

Like his father and uncle, he attended Campion Jesuit High School in Wisconsin, riding some of the last passenger trains out of Aberdeen. High school—”my time with the Jesuits”—was a critical period for him. “The Jesuits taught us that we alone are responsible for our conduct.” He took moral and ethical philosophy courses for four years, studying major world religions and moral and ethical philosophers. His time at Campion was “one of the defining experiences of my life and largely made me who I am.”

When he wasn’t at school, he worked at Jewett Drug pulling freight, putting away returned goods, and sweeping. After high school, he was promoted to filling in for sales representatives when the full-timers went on mandatory vacations. Later, he would work in Montana and North Dakota.

After graduation, Harvey attended the University of South Dakota, majoring in government and English. He most remembers an independent study course he took with USD’s Dean of Arts and Sciences, who gave him a list of books to read. “I would read them, talk with the professor about them, then go back to read them again,” he laughed. His final was over dinner with the dean and his wife, a science professor, at their home.

In 1970 after meeting her in college, Harvey married Selby native Cynthia Ann Manke three months after they graduated from USD. They would have four children. After their wedding, they lived in Yankton, where she taught school and in reach of his next step.

LEGAL CAREER

The only attorney among the Harveys—and the only with an advanced degree—Harvey attended USD Law School, “another truly defining experience.” Prepared by high school philosophy classes for the rigor of law school, he did very well, finishing first in his class all three years and serving as editor-in-chief of the USD Law Review. In his third year, he argued two South Dakota Supreme Court cases—perhaps the only USD law student ever to do so. His summer jobs at Davenport Evans, the well-known Sioux Falls law firm, were “very good to and for me,” he recalled. Then in Rapid City, he clerked for Federal Judge Andrew Bogue, “a wonderful man and teacher,” for whom he wrote the Rosebud Sioux Tribe vs. Kneip opinion.

Harvey tried many cases, but not surprisingly, he talked most about the one that reached the U.S. Supreme Court, a case that has echoes of his great-grandfather’s business. When Harvey Sr. arrived nearly a century earlier, the railroads stopped at the Missouri River because all of West River was Native American land, and the rail companies couldn’t get land title to lay tracks there. In 1889, however, as a result of statehood legislation that reduced reservation size, much of West River opened, so the railroads moved in, and Harvey Sr. sold goods there. Several decades later, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe challenged the idea that the lands covered by the statehood acts ceased to be “Indian land” after statehood and sued the state in the name of Richard Kneip, the Democratic governor in the 1970s.

In 1974, Bogue assigned Harvey to draft the opinion on the case. Tom Tobin of Winner, an attorney for the state who was Harvey’s law school classmate, found railroad company and Congressional records. Harvey’s research in them revealed that the purpose of the statehood-related acts was in part to reduce the size of certain reservations. Therefore, he wrote Bogue’s opinion to say Congress intended that the lands in question were no longer Native American lands with the exception of “allotted lands.” The tribe appealed.

In the meantime, Harvey enlisted in the army but cracked his back in a tank accident. He was discharged to the army reserve and returned home to join the Siegel, Barnett, Schutz, O’Keefe and Ogborn law firm. Governor William Janklow, who succeeded Kneip, hired Harvey for the team defending the Rosebud ruling in the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals and later the U.S. Supreme Court. In the high court, Janklow insisted he would argue the case as governor, and in 1977 he won. Harvey observed, “It is a landmark case in Native American jurisdiction cases.” (Another of Harvey’s cases as the judge’s clerk concerned the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation and Lakota activist Russell Means, a defendant in a case before Bogue at the time. Janklow, a close friend of Means, introduced the two, and Means often visited Harvey in his offices in Rapid City and Aberdeen.)

FAMILY BUSINESS

Somehow, at the same time, Harvey also returned to the family business. Not long after his son came back to Aberdeen, Harvey III moved to Florida, and Harvey made a deal to buy the business. As he assumed control, he recalled, the company’s “great general manager,” Jim Erickson, “made the entire transition seamless”—a situation that made him comfortable Jewett Drug “was in good hands.”

Harvey’s period at the helm might have been a parable for the postwar story of consolidation in American business, the need to compete and succeed–at least as shareholders might see it—and the need to get bigger by gobbling up competition.

Jewett Drug expanded to new areas, ultimately serving South and North Dakota, Minnesota, Wyoming, and Montana, but competition intensified. Insurance companies started buying mail-order companies to cut out local pharmacies, Harvey explained. Jewett Drug also couldn’t sell to discount chains, which covered large areas, so in 1999 Harvey found partners. “It was very hard to do,” he said, “but it was the right thing.”

The merger joined four companies under D&K Health Care Resources in St. Louis, which traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Becoming a wholly owned subsidiary, Jewett Drug operated under its own name. The resulting company ultimately served 42 states.

Then Walmart got in. Harvey says his favorite marketing gimmick is the withdrawal of Coca-Cola from the market and the introduction of New Coke. The disappointing replacement was ultimately dropped for Classic Coke, with the original formula, prompting suspicion the purpose was simply to boost the latter’s sales. “They claimed they were never taking off the market the highest selling product in the world,” he said. His second favorite, he observed ruefully, is Walmart’s $5 a month plan for prescriptions. The $5 plan was a loss leader, and “It was really successful,” he lamented. “It aimed at the retail pharmacy market.” He recalled driving through small South Dakota towns and seeing decimated Main Streets, where drugstores had closed as a result of Walmart’s competition.

These closings also hurt wholesalers. One of the last “hangers on,” as Harvey says, Jewett Drug still had sales reps who called on accounts at their stores at least once a month. “I thought it was critical to distinguish us from other companies since we were all selling the same drugs.” Besides, “they were the face of the business.” The 100-plus-year-old business was still dealing with customers as people—but that wasn’t enough to save it.

In 2005 drug giant McKesson-Robbins acquired D&K. Most locations, including Jewett Drug, were able to stay open for several years. But selling Jewett Drug was hard, Harvey admitted. “I just hated it when it closed.”

Finally in early 2008, after what was, essentially, a decade-long vigil, McKesson announced it was closing Jewett Drug due to an “overabundance” of distribution centers in the upper Midwest. Only 30 people were still working there.

Reflecting in a news story on the end of an era, Harvey said Aberdeen had been the hub of Dakota Territory when his great-grandfather arrived. In his father’s time three-quarters of a century later, “there were more than 80 multi-state wholesale distribution houses of all kinds in Aberdeen after World War II.” Several railroads served Aberdeen, and U.S. Highway 12 became the main route from Minneapolis to the West. But Aberdeen’s wholesale business “dwindled and dwindled” with the decline of the railroads and shift to trucking that led wholesale houses to move where the interstates intersected—Sioux Falls and Fargo.

Harvey still sees employees from “the old days, and it always warms my heart when they tell me how much they enjoyed Jewett and how much they miss it.” He added, “It’s always a bittersweet experience.” In a certain kind of company legacy, he is sometimes “asked to be a pallbearer, which I am happy to do, but it is a hard experience.”

SUPER 8

Harvey would go through it again, although the next time maybe felt less personal. In the mid-1970s, he met with Ron Rivett and Dennis Brown to review a matter related to the land they were about to buy for the first Super 8 hotel, Harvey’s law school course in franchising paying off. They came back, and he began assuming executive duties with Super 8 while he was also a partner in the law firm and running Jewett Drug.

Over a decade or so, Harvey took on more responsibilities, becoming general counsel and moving to the Super 8 offices in northeast Aberdeen. By the late 1980s, he was president and chief operating officer. At the time, the chain had nearly 600 hotels and was considered the largest “pure” economy lodging chain as well as Aberdeen’s fifth largest employer with 319 employees.

Hong Kong investors offered to buy Super 8 in 1990. That fell through, but in 1993, Hospitality Franchise Systems, Inc. (HFS), the franchiser for Ramada, Howard Johnson and Days Inn, purchased Super 8 for $125 million. Super 8 leadership stayed generally intact, and the local ownership group, Super 8 Inc. (which became the Rivett Group), kept its 48 hotels. At the time of the sale, the chain had more than 1,000 motels in the United States, Canada and Mexico. Some operations continued in Aberdeen, and the reservation center closed in 2015.

The Super 8 motels in Aberdeen were a group of their own. As for the original Super 8 at Roosevelt and Sixth Avenue, “We continued to give it love and care,” Harvey says.

EDUCATION

The 1970s were a busy time in Harvey Jewett’s life. In 1978, besides the law firm, Jewett Drug and Super 8, he helped four partners establish Education Assistance Corporation (EAC). “The federal government was getting out of the student loan business,” he explained, and their answer was guarantee agencies. A commercial bank would make a student loan, and EAC guaranteed it with federal backing. After adding Harvey to the board, the group also founded Student Loan Finance Corporation (SLFC), which bought loans from banks that didn’t want to service small loans. Formed as a nonprofit corporation, SLFC later converted to a for-profit employee-owned firm, which resulted in the formation of the Great Plains Education Foundation (GPEF) in 1999, an $85 million foundation to make grants for educational purposes in South Dakota.

GPEF has awarded about $160 million in grants over a quarter century.

While Harvey was in the business of financing college educations, Gov. Janklow invited him on the inside by appointing him to the Board of Regents in 1997. Succeeding governors reappointed him until he retired in 2017, serving as president 1999-2009. He served longer on the board and longer as president than any than any other regent. Not bad for the great-grandson of a high school dropout.

During his service, more than $1 billion in public and private funds were invested in South Dakota’s six public universities. Of this, only $40 million involved state general funds, and the rest came from student fees and generous individual and business contributions. In the early 21st century, the regents considered a plan for a Sioux Falls higher education campus, approved construction on all campuses and dealt with needs on the Northern State University campus in Harvey’s back yard.

Harvey focused on NSU improvements—attention the University returned by naming three places on campus for him, including a Spafford Hall conference room and the Johnson Fine Arts Center’s main theater, renamed the Harvey and Cynthia Jewett Theater. During a 2018 regents meeting, Harvey had noted that NSU hadn’t opened a new academic building in half a century. In recognition of that fact, a new science building was fast tracked, and in 2019, NSU dedicated the Harvey C. Jewett IV Regional Science Center.

All this omits Harvey’s service on local and state boards, committees, task forces and all varieties of public involvement. The two he notes are his chairing Gov. Janklow’s Commission on the Reorganization of K-12 Education and of the Catholic Foundation for Eastern South Dakota. There’s hardly a major charitable fundraising campaign in Aberdeen to which he didn’t make a significant gift and agree to solicit for them.

At 76 years old, Harvey has outlived his predecessor Harveys. Maybe he needed more time for such a multifaceted life with a variety of significant vocations and avocations that have impacted Aberdeen so considerably. He summarized, “I pretty much achieved what my plan entailed.”

V

In the American way, off to make their own path as their great-great grandfather had 140 years ago, the members of the next Jewett generation all live somewhere else. There is a fifth Harvey Chase Jewett, although he is not formally a “V”— “Cynthia and I had never met anyone who was beyond ‘IV’,” Harvey explained. Nor is there a “VI.” The fifth Harvey—who goes by Chase, as his father had in his youth—has a son. Chase Henry Jewett was named after Harvey I’s twin brother, who died as an infant.

The fifth generation’s migration started after (following family tradition) graduating from Aberdeen’s Catholic Roncalli High School. “I was on the Board of Regents, which meant that none of my children would even think of attending a school governed by their dad,” Harvey smiled. Among the four children, three undergraduate degrees came from Minnesota Catholic institutions and the fourth from Kansas University. Three of their four graduate degrees come from Catholic universities and the fourth from Northwestern University.

At 140 years and counting, the Jewett family’s is an exceptional story in ways that can only be partially glimpsed in a brief piece like this. One way they stand out is in intergenerational durability. The people who research such things assert that of wealthy families, 70% will lose the family wealth by the second generation, and 90% by the third generation. The assumption is a lack of initiative prevails in succeeding generations. Jewett Drug may be gone, and the family fortune may have shifted laterally in the fourth generation, but it remains strong, thanks to a resourceful ingenuity.

Looking back more than a century on an early assessment of the Jewett enterprise in Aberdeen, it’s easy to conclude that it has “gone some.” Additionally, it was serendipitous for Aberdeen that Harvey Sr. stopped here in 1881, but given the Hub City’s history of entrepreneurship, it’s fair to think maybe that luck went both ways.