David Simpkins would tell this story every year to a group of struggling junior high school kids in Sauk Centre.
When he was in eighth grade, he told them, he failed his reading test — he was reading at a second-grade level. Every day after that, he had to walk from the high school across the athletic fields to the elementary school on the other side to take reading lessons.
He started to read everything he could get his hands on, and one rainy day the librarian found him on the floor of the local library surrounded by books. She didn't yell at him. She just gave him a library card and became the first of the many mentors who helped him become one of rural Minnesota's best-known journalists — a columnist, photographer, editor and eventually publisher of many small-town newspapers and other publications.
Simpkins died Feb. 23 at age 70 on his farm in Vining, Minn. — the same one his grandparents once owned and where he spent many summers in his youth.
Simpkins' love of Minnesota small towns and the people who lived in them provided his purpose in life — both as a newspaper man and as a community activist, friends said.
It began with his experience on his grandparents' farm, said Linda Simpkins, his wife.
"He loved all the Norwegian bachelor farmers, who were very unsophisticated," she said. "Dave managed to retain that purity of heart and simplicity, yet went on to master many things."
Simpkins was born in Minneapolis and grew up in Wayzata. He joined the Army, and the GI Bill paid his way through journalism school at the University of Minnesota, where he recruited a professor as another mentor.
