By Gregory Scolieri (ACE#579)

It is not every day you see a Viking wearing armor featuring the ACE hardware logo.  When I saw such a character on a postmark I was intrigued.  This interesting postmark commemorated the Danish Days Festival in Viborg, South Dakota.  I reached out to the Danish Days Festival Committee to find out more about this Viking postmark.  Kayla Mehlhaf, the Chair for the Danish Days Committee provided me all the details on this postmark.   This is what Kayla had to say:

“This has been an annual tradition for Danish Days for many years. This year the artist was Maria VanDriel... Each year, the committee selects a business, family, or organization as our "Friends of Viborg" for Danish Days. This year we recognized our local hardware store in Viborg: Dakota ACE Hardware. Maria based her drawing off the hardware store being recognized along with keeping a Danish theme.  We work with our local postmaster each year to get the postmark approved and she places the order for the stamp. The artist signs a release along with submitting information on how the elements of the artwork were obtained (from imagination, purchased online, etc). Maria's art was original.  Danish Days is our annual town festival, and a form of Danish Days has been happening since the founding of Viborg. We have several activities over a 4-5 day period to celebrate. This includes traditional Danish food, such as aebleskiver (like a round pancake), Smørrebrød (open faced sandwiches), and Danish desserts. We have lots of music throughout the long weekend, Danish dancing, and a large parade, to name a few events. We even have a ping pong drop for the kids where a pilot drops ping pong balls out of a plane and children grab them up. Local businesses offer prizes, so the children go around town with their marked ping pong balls of the various businesses to collect their prizes. You can check out our website: danishdays.org to see all the events we had in July.”