Makenzie Huber/South Dakota Searchlight – When legislators criticize Lt. Gov. Larry Rhoden for his heavy-handedness during South Dakota’s legislative session, they’re being literal: He raps the gavel so loudly that people jump from surprise.
When Rhoden slammed the gavel down to bring the Legislature to order last Tuesday ahead of Gov. Kristi Noem’s budget address, the gavel snapped in half, the head tumbling and thudding to the floor. The room erupted with laughter a half-second later as Rhoden sheepishly smiled, chuckled and banged the gavel again (just the head this time) before raising the broken handle for everyone to see.
It wasn’t the first time he’s broken a gavel.
“Two years in a row,” Rhoden said to the legislators gathered on the House floor. “There’s something about the House.”
Rhoden, who presides over the Senate during the annual wintertime legislative session, broke a gavel last year as well — a gavel he’d received from the governor when they were elected four years earlier, but hadn’t yet used. A piece of wood chipped off that gavel.
This year, House Speaker Hugh Bartels, R-Watertown, replaced the House speaker gavel with a new one crafted by a Lake Area Technical College alumnus. Rhoden said Bartels forbade him from using that gavel at the budget address.
“I’ve seen what you do to gavels. You’re not touching mine,” Bartels said, according to Rhoden.
The gavel that Rhoden broke last week was one he crafted himself in 2018 from a tall black walnut tree that stood in his family’s pasture. He grew up in its shadow, helping his mother in the garden and completing chores around the family farm and ranch. When the tree died, he cut it into lumber for wood crafting projects — a hobby he takes pride in, creating gifts for friends and family. Rhoden’s wife, Sandy, wrote a poem to accompany such gifts, explaining the importance of the tree to the Rhoden family.
“That wood holds the memory of my mother and my childhood, and that’s why I used it all these years,” Rhoden said.
The gavel’s accompanying “sound block” — which is used to accept the strike of the gavel and amplify its sound — is made out of the black walnut’s root ball.
Within days of returning to his western South Dakota ranch near Union Center after the budget address, Rhoden repaired the gavel with the “stereotypical rancher-type fix”: He glued it back together and wrapped it with baling wire.
He had no intentions of retiring the gavel like he had with the governor’s gift (which sits safely in its box, chipped piece of wood included). He said his handmade gavel and block serve as a reminder of the values he learned as a child, and a reminder to bring those values to the Capitol.
“The work ethic and values I learned growing up on that small family farm where everyone worked together as a unit is really in the fabric of what makes South Dakota such a great state,” Rhoden said.
That said, he’s going to be gentler with gavels in the future.
“I’m going to be a lot more cautious from this point forward when presiding over joint meetings of the House and Senate,” Rhoden laughed.
Rhoden and Bartels joked that Rhoden may need something sturdier — perhaps a metal gavel crafted from Lake Area Tech’s welding shop. Bartels told South Dakota Searchlight he’ll have his own gavel hidden in his office this legislative session so Rhoden can’t use it.