Eminent Homemaker
County: Fall River
Pauline Hageman, Oral, is being recognized because she has lived up to her conviction that “if you want a better community, get involved in trying to solve its problems.”
Pauline Gorr, the fourth of seven children in the L.A. Gorr family, was born in Fillmore County, Nebraska, in 1906. She married Edward Hageman Oct. 3, 1924, at Lusk, Wyoming. Edward Hageman died as the result of an automobile accident in 1952.
She and her son, Curtis, are in partnership in a 300-head, cow-calf operation near Oral and grow feed crops on 200 acres of irrigated land. A daughter, Barbara (Tom) Landers, Hot Springs, also lives on a ranch. Landers is South Dakota Stockgrowers Association president. Hageman is also a member.
Hageman has been interested in Extension work most of her life, mainly because “people who are interested in homemaking and 4-H are interested in making homes for their families.”
She completed high school when she was 16, attended normal school and taught rural schools in Nebraska and Wyoming.
During World War II, Hageman, Violet (Joe) Biever of Oelrichs and Floyd Haley, Fall River County agent in the 1940s, were instrumental in keeping county Extension programs operative. Hageman is in her second term as Fall River Extension Homemaker’s Club Council chairman, past secretary of the South Dakota Association of Extension Clubs and was “bus mother” to the 1956 National Association of Home Extension Clubs convention at Columbus, Ohio. In addition to being active in church work, Hageman also was an originator of a community council, a member of the county school board, a long-time member of the local school board and a charter member of the board for the new Hot Springs hospital. Hageman was chairman of the Fall River County Centennial Committee in 1959 from which was born the idea for the Fall River County Museum now in Hot Springs.