Tom Brokaw born February 6, 1940, in Webster, S.D. Raised in a small town with his two brothers, becomes interested in broadcasting while still in high school. After a brief attendance at the Univ. of Iowa, Brokaw studied political science at the Univ. of So. Dakota. He moved from radio to television, when he landed a job in Omaha after his graduation. Brokaw started out with a $100 salary in his days in Omaha, a far cry from the 7-figure salary he commands today as the managing editor and sole anchor of NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw, He joined NBC in 1966. As the White House correspondent for NBC News during Watergate, Brokaw moved up the ranks as anchor of "Today on NBC" and then became sole anchor of the top rated "Nightly News" in 1983. Brokaw was the first American journalist to secure a one-on-one interview with Mikhail Gorbachev and the only network anchor to personally cover the fall of the Berlin Wall. He's also the first to have an exclusive interview with the Dalai Lama, and the first anchor to report on human-rights abuses in Tibet. Brokaw has taken the Nightly News to Beirut, the streets of Kuwait & Somalia, and to the White House lawns. He has covered every Presidential election since 1968. He is presently contributing anchor for Dateline NBC and program anchor for MSNBC. He has won almost every journalistic award out there, including 2 DuPonts, a Peabody, and 7 Emmys. To add to the many articles he has written in publications like The New York Times, and Newsweek, Brokaw became a best-selling author in 1998 with the release of his book, "The Greatest Generation", dedicated to the Americans who were raised during the Great Depression, fought in WWII and built the America we know today. Brokaw has three daughters Jennifer, Andrea and Sarah. He lives with his wife Meredith in New York and on a ranch in Montana. Brokaw does share his wealth, as he volunteers for Habitats and donated $250,000 toward a hiking and biking trail in his former hometown, Yankton, South Dakota.
Tom Browkaw Update... On December 2nd, 2004...Tom Brokaw after nearly 23 years in the "NBC Nightly News" anchor chair, steps down & hangs out the "Gone Fishing" sign... two months shy of his 65th birthday.

Joe Foss a South Dakota farm boy whose years of hunting paid off tremendously in the South Pacific. Joe was smitten by the aviation bug while at Sioux Falls College and when graduation was over at the U. of South Dakota he headed for the Marine Corps. He arrived on Guadalcanal with VMF-121 in October of 1942. Though his two combat tours lasted only sixty-three days Foss made the very most of them and became the first American pilot to tie the magic twenty-six victory score of Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker of WWI fame. Several times he had to crash land and once he had to ditch at sea, but he was never touched by a Japanese bullet. By the middle of October he was getting one victory a day and by the end of the month he was averaging three a day. Foss had his biggest days on the 23rd of October when he got four Zeroes and on the 25th when he added three afternoon kills to the two of the morning to come up with a total of five. One Zero's downed that day came when a Japanese pilot pulled in front of him after having downed another F4F in his squadron. Foss downed the celebrating Zero in the middle of his victory roll. Foss and VMF-121 left the combat zone on January 25, 1943. The squadron had destroyed 132 of the enemy in the air for a loss of fourteen pilots. Joe Foss went back to the U.S. to stay. His combat days were over. The post-war years brought Joe Foss even more prominence than his Medal of Honor. He was elected Governor of his home state of South Dakota, became a Brigadier General in the Air Force Reserve and served as President of the American Football League. (Gov in 1955)	Medal of Honor Site Arlington Nat'l Cemetery

Ernest Lawrence born 8th August, 1901, at Canton, South Dakota to Carl Gustavus and Gunda Lawrence, Norwegian immigrants, his father being a Superintendant of Schools. His early education was at Canton High School, then St. Olaf College. In 1919 he went to the University of South Dakota, receiving his B.A. in Chemistry in 1922. The following year he received his M.A. from the University of Minnesota. He spent a year at Chicago University doing physics and was awarded his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1925. He continued at Yale for a further three years, the first two as a National Research Fellow and the third as Assistant Professor of Physics. In 1928 he was appointed Associate Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and two years later he became Professor, being the youngest professor at Berkeley. In 1936 he became Director of the University's Radiation Laboratory as well, remaining in these posts until his death. During World War II he made vital contributions to the development of the atomic bomb, holding several official appointments in the project. After the war he played a part in the attempt to obtain international agreement on the suspension of atomic-bomb testing, being a member of the U.S. delegation at the 1958 Geneva Conference on this subject. Lawrence's research centred on nuclear physics. His early work was on ionization phenomena and the measurement of ionization potentials of metal vapours. In 1929 he invented the cyclotron, a device for accelerating nuclear particles to very high velocities without the use of high voltages. The swiftly moving particles were used to bombard atoms of various elements, disintegrating the atoms to form, in some cases, completely new elements. Hundreds of radioactive isotopes of the known elements were also discovered. His brother, Dr. John Lawrence, who became Director of the University's Medical Physics Laboratory, collaborated with him in studying medical and biological applications of the cyclotron and himself became a consultant to the Institute of Cancer Research at Columbia. Lawrence was a most prolific writer: during 1924-1940 his name appeared on 56 papers (an average of 31/2 papers a year), showing his exceptional breadth of interest. He was also the inventor of a method for obtaining time intervals as small as three billionths of a second, to study the discharge phenomena of an electric spark. In addition he devised a very precise method for measuring the e/m ratio of the electron, one of the fundamental constants of Nature. Most of his work was published in The Physical Review and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Among his many awards may be mentioned the Elliott Cresson Medal of the Franklin Institute, the Comstock Prize of the National Academy of Sciences, the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society, the Duddell Medal of the Royal Physical Society, the Faraday Medal, and the Enrico Fermi Award. He was decorated with the Medal for Merit and was an Officer of the Legion of Honour. He held honorary doctorates of thirteen American and one British University (Glasgow). He was a member or fellow of many American and foreign learned societies. He died on 27th August, 1958, at Palo Alto, California.	Lawrence Labs Nobel Laureates Role in A-Bomb