A Visit With The Mayor

I was led into a room with an oversized table, and chairs with name tags, for the Mayor and his council. "My job," Mayor Glenn Dalling told me, "is to oversee their conversations, and have a final word or two." Black and white pictures scattered the walls, one taken of the City from a helicopter during the Teton Damn Flood of 1976. The building we were in looked nearly covered with the muddy water.
"My family was trapped inside the city limits, and I was out," he said. Mr. Dalling was a Bishop over an LDS ward in the area at the time. When he arrived from an assignment to the flooded city he was refused by police authority, who’d stopped incoming and outgoing traffic. Luckily his family survived, and in fact, the flood killed no person immediately. The 11 deaths happened in the aftermath, during the rescue efforts and the waiting it out.
I was able to speak one on one with the Sugar City Mayor, Mr. Glenn Dalling. I recognized him from the Rexburg Temple, where he is a regular volunteer.
He was born and raised in the small, quiet town, and he's left only to serve a mission for the LDS church, to South Dakota for two years, and to the old Rick's College. He also worked as faculty for Rick's for a number of years. He has been Mayor now for just over 9 years.
He is the father of 8 kids, most of them living within 30 minutes of sugar city. And there are 54 grandchildren, 54 of them, scattered about the United States.
When I met him, I walked into the city offices a little after closing time. He was with the secretary as they locked up and readied to leave. He said "thank you for the sugar cookies" as she left and I stayed.
"How can I help you?" He asked. He showed me around, first to his office, where we sat and talked. The only more-modern-than-cassettes thing about the office was a security camera installed only weeks earlier.
There are four school in the city, he said, and the population is taken from Sugar and 12 miles in all directions. The High School competes like any other, for various sporting activities, for music and for theatre.
Old Newspaper headlines from the old city paper laid on his desk. They were blown up and laminated for an upcoming event. "They tell our story," He said, pointing to the headlines. "We had a sugar cane factory," he said, "that's why the name."
A bacteria appeared in the small town, making sugar cane farming impossible, forcing residents to find another means for having means, potato farming.
"Today," he said, "industry is from residents working outside, at BYU-Idaho and other places, and from individual and family businesses, then farming. We're growing.”
In fact, a couple of areas of construction will triple the physical size of Sugar City, to be finished in the next 5 and 6 years.
He sat with his legs crossed and his arm rested on his desk, full of papers and a bag of sugar cookies from the secretary. There was an older computer on his desk and a window that allowed me to see the beautiful concrete wall just outside the building.
I said "bye, thanks." I should have said, "see you at the temple."