Raymond Magstadt (Ray)

Tripp, SD

1939, 2754, Wind Cave, NP-1,

Information and photos provided by Raymond Magstadt's daughter Karen Buchholz.

Ray Magstadt (now 105 years old) was born on August 17, 1918 while his father served in the Army in France during WWI. He grew up in the Great Depression and remembers searching for work. In 1939, he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps and was assigned to work at Wind Cave in the Black Hills.

"We made blocks, rock blocks for steps to get into the cave. We dug rocks from the fields," Magstadt recalled.

He was drafted into the Army in WWII and worked stateside at a North Carolina parachute camp. After the war, he worked in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore before coming back to South Dakota. There he took a job as an accountant for the Bureau of Reclamation. In the 1950s, he was transferred to Bismarck. He and his wife Sylvia raised their children here. She passed away in 1998; he has slowed down a little, but he’s still living independently.

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