this is dakota county

Al Welcher and Mary Hagen shared the first dance after being crowned king and queen at the Senior Prom held April 18 for residents at The Timbers senior living community in Apple Valley. The event, which included dinner and live music, sought to capture the spirit of high school prom dances of yesteryear. And guests at the Senior Prom didn’t have to guess which of the punch bowls had been spiked — the one with peach schnapps was clearly marked.

Sun Thisweek is happy to receive visitors at its Apple Valley offices — especially visitors bearing interesting homemade contraptions. The newsroom received just such a guest last week when Werner Frankamp stopped by with a box full of hand-crafted curiosities to show the newsroom’s staff. The 84-year-old Apple Valley retiree does a fair amount of tinkering at his home; among his recent creations are a bird sculpture made from a golf club, golf ball and tee, a toy tractor built from odds and ends picked up at the hardware store, and a giant tower structure for his cat to climb on. He also brought in a geological specimen: a slab of limestone rock adorned with clam shell fossils that he found at the farm in Kansas where he grew up. In the winter months, Frankamp does his tinkering at the kitchen table, but moves his operation to the garage in the warmer months, leaving the door open so neighbors can peek inside while he works.

Leah Andrews has become something of a sounds-effects specialist. For her role in Apple Valley High School’s winter one-act play “Eurydice,” the musically talented 12th-grader is literally surrounded by instruments — 11 in all, including her primary instrument, the viola, along with a gong, hi-hat, snare drum and others. It falls on her to produce all the sounds, live, as the drama unfolds. She uses finger cymbals to create an elevator ding, symbolizing characters losing their memory; a wavedrum, to imitate a thunderstorm; a woodblock, to signify knocking on a door. As the music director for “Eurydice,” Andrews has a certain amount of leeway in the sounds she creates. “I can test out different sounds and musical pieces to see what feels right,” she explained. “Then, once I’ve found the sounds that work for the show, I simply get to repeat and polish them, so they add exactly the right emotion to a scene.” Andrews has studied viola at the MacPhail Center for Music for 13 years, and is involved in marching band, pep band and other music activities at her high school. “I used to participate (as an actor) in the plays,” she said, “but I love playing music, so I generally choose to participate in the musical aspect of theater.”

Craig MacIntosh’s career change is evident in the writing room at his Rosemount home. A backup computer now sits on the cartoonist-turned-novelist’s old drafting table, and two towering stacks of drawings for “Sally Forth” — the syndicated comic strip MacIntosh illustrated for many years — are hidden away in a metal storage cabinet along the wall. MacIntosh has been logging long hours in the writing room in recent months as he puts the finishing touches on his fourth book, “Wolf’s Vendetta,” a mystery-adventure novel slated for publication later this year.

When he’s in the mood for a game of pinball, Brian M. doesn’t have to venture far. The Farmington resident and longtime pinball enthusiast has converted the basement of his home into a subterranean arcade spanning two rooms and boasting more than 30 games. His fascination with the classic coin-operated amusements was kindled at an early age; his dad and uncle were big-time fans of pinball, and his interest in the machines grew during his time working at the now-defunct pinball arcade on the fourth floor of the Mall of America. Over the years his collection of games has gotten so big that even his spacious basement is unable to accommodate all of them, and he’s ended up enlisting friends and relatives to store some of his machines. The home arcade is something of a gathering spot for his buddies who share an interest in pinball, and friends who stop by on weekends for a beer and some pinball needn’t bring any quarters — all the games are set to “free play” mode.

Mike Jetchick was his usual affable, businesslike self last Thursday — except, of course, for the unspeakably garish monstrosity adorning his upper body. Jetchick, sales manager at Sun Thisweek newspaper in Apple Valley, was an eager and willing participant in the Ugly Sweater Contest held as part of the office’s annual holiday party, and he pulled out all the stops in bringing to life his vision of tawdry Christmas couture. Using tape and safety pins, Jetchick affixed an assortment of odd and mismatched items to an otherwise respectable green wool sweater — a faux-felt Santa stocking, Christmas bows of various colors, plastic decorations intended for display in windows. The winner, by consensus, of the Ugly Sweater Contest, Jetchick noted that his wearable objet d’art was only temporary. By simply unfastening all the horrid holiday-themed tchotchkes, he’d once again be in possession of a suitably unostentatious sweater fit for public presentation, unlikely to cause grave offense.

Glenn and Wilma Ruppert’s display of Department 56 holiday collectibles is a sight to behold. Each December, the Rupperts host an open house for friends, neighbors and co-workers to come share in the wonder of the miniature world they’ve created in the basement of their Apple Valley home. It’s no mere tabletop display — they began collecting Department 56 pieces about 15 years ago, and they’ve amassed more than 180 houses and other items for the Christmas village that’s set up on a series of 12 connected plywood platforms in their basement. There’s also model trains and a snow machine that sends down white powder from the ceiling; when too much snow accumulates and jams up the train tracks, Glenn leans over the platforms to the trouble spot and disperses it with a turkey baster. The display stays up all year, though Glenn, a software design engineer by profession, does a new layout every other year, working with a blueprint he’s put together on his home computer. “It took a month, month and a half to take down the old display and do the current layout,” Glenn explained during this year’s open house on Dec. 7. “The big reward of all this is the people. The smiles on their faces, the kids ‘oohing’ and ‘aahing’ — that’s the fun part for us.”

Sam and Nancy DiPasquale’s front-yard Christmas display was a labor of love that took two years to build. Outside their home at 14036 Flagstone Trail in Apple Valley is a choir of penguins rigged with colored lights that flash along to a holiday music mix broadcast from an FM transmitter in the couple’s home; a sign outside tells motorists to tune in to 91.9 FM for the full spectacle. An engineer by profession, Sam DiPasquale designed and assembled the choir of 32 penguins from scratch, vacuum-forming each penguin and then tying it all in to a computerized sound and light program. The soundtrack is mostly Christmas music, though Nancy DiPasquale added a few rock classics to the playlist to spice things up, among them “Eye of the Tiger” and “My Sharona.” “The whole purpose of this entire effort was to give people a smile — that’s the only reason,” Sam DiPasquale said. “Our hope is that everybody pauses for a moment to just enjoy the season and listen to a few songs.”

Dave Laursen is a quiet presence during theater rehearsals, but those familiar with the props he’s created over the years regard him as something of a magician. For “Seussical Jr.” at Valley Middle School in Apple Valley last spring, he whipped together a surreal piano fit for a garden party hosted by Salvador Dali. And last month, for a production at Shakopee High School, he built probably his most extravagant prop ever: a 16-foot-long biplane with a rotating propeller. An insurance agent by profession, the Apple Valley resident and his wife, Nancy, have been teaming up to produce plays and musicals at Valley Middle School for about 15 years, with Nancy directing and Dave serving as tech crew director. They began volunteering in theater productions there when their daughter, now in her 30s, attended the school. In fact, it was theater work that first brought the couple together. “When we started dating, she was acting in plays and if I was going to ever see her, I had to be part of it,” Dave explained. “So I volunteered to do the carpentry.”

It’s Thursday night at the Apple Valley American Legion, and the regular who’s been having a run of bad luck at pull-tabs jestingly pins the blame on pull-tab vendor Sheri Hornnes. Handing her some cash for another stack of gaming tickets, he explains to an onlooker, “She’s usually pretty generous, but tonight she’s being —”; at which point Hornnes interjects with a playful smile: “Stingy.” Hornnes is a familiar face to patrons at Legion Post 1776. She’s worked 19 years at the local watering hole, and she loves her job. Part of it is where the money goes, with all proceeds from the pull-tabs she sells being put toward charitable efforts. But the best part, she says, is the people: “The people that come in here are wonderful. It’s all walks of life, veterans, non-veterans. It’s like a family here.”

Devin Everaert works his magic behind the scenes. As the backstage manager with Apple Valley High School’s theater department, the detail-oriented 12th-grader does a little bit of everything — making sure actors enter the stage at the correct times, leading the crew that moves the sets between scenes, operating the hydraulic lift that’s known to tech crew members simply as “the Genie.” Everaert’s been the backstage manager since his junior year, a rarity at the school — the job is usually given only to seniors — and he’s perfectly content being the hidden hand helping to facilitate a glitch-free production. As an underclassman, Everaert toyed with the idea of acting, but only briefly. “There was one show, ‘Lord of the Rings,’ where I had a small role, but I ended up hating acting,” he recounted. That same production, however, also foreshadowed his future as a behind-the-scenes presence in the theater: “I was also the puppeteer for Smaug the dragon in ‘Lord of the Rings,’ so it was all good.”

Meticulous attention to detail during the pre-flight inspection gives way to childlike wonder as Jerry Goodrich’s Cessna 182RG light aircraft lifts off from Airlake Airport in southern Lakeville. “Into the wild blue yonder” is a phrase that passes his lips more than once as he navigates his plane over Northfield, Prior Lake and Savage, and when he says it, the phrase carries more than a little bit of joy — joy at the freedom of sailing through the cloudless azure sky on a crisp fall morning. A retired U.S. Air Force colonel, Goodrich averages about six flights a month, with how often he goes up largely a function of weather. “The more I fly, the more I want to fly,” he said of his enthusiasm for aviation. And he’s given an affectionate nickname to the blue-and-white Cessna that facilitates his regular forays into the skies: “I call my airplane my ‘bluebird of happiness.’ ”