Public Service and Plane Crash
Mickelson served as South Dakota State Assistant Attorney General (1967–68) and South Dakota State Attorney, Brookings County (1971–74). First elected to the South Dakota House of Representatives in 1974, he held office there for six years, serving as Speaker for the final two years. Mickelson successfully ran for governor in 1986 and was re-elected four years later.
On April 19, 1993 Mickelson was one of eight people aboard a state-owned airplane returning to South Dakota from a lobbying effort in Ohio. The plane, a Mitsubishi MU-2 turboprop, reported engine trouble while flying near Dubuque, Iowa and crashed into a farm silo about nine miles south of that city. All aboard the aircraft were killed. After the crash, Mickelson was succeeded as Governor by then-Lieutenant Governor Walter Dale Miller. Coincidentally, the crash took place on the same day as the end of the Branch Davidian siege near Waco, Texas, which overshadowed the crash in national news coverage.
Read more about this topic: George S. Mickelson
Famous quotes containing the words public, service, plane and/or crash:
“The Muse is mute when public men
Applaud a modern throne.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“We could not help being struck by the seeming, though innocent, indifference of Nature to these men’s necessities, while elsewhere she was equally serving others. Like a true benefactress, the secret of her service is unchangeableness. Thus is the busiest merchant, though within sight of his Lowell, put to pilgrim’s shifts, and soon comes to staff and scrip and scallop-shell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“As for the dispute about solitude and society, any comparison is impertinent. It is an idling down on the plane at the base of a mountain, instead of climbing steadily to its top.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“At the crash of economic collapse of which the rumblings can already be heard, the sleeping soldiers of the proletariat will awake as at the fanfare of the Last Judgment and the corpses of the victims of the struggle will arise and demand an accounting from those who are loaded down with curses.”
—Karl Liebknecht (1871–1919)