Ronald Schreiner

Ron Schreiner, 85, of Fort Pierre, died August 24, 2025, after an eight-month battle with bone cancer. CLICKHEREFORGRAVESIDESERVICE CLICKHEREFORCELEBRATIONOFLIFE
Schreiner was well known as a tireless public servant throughout the Pierre-Fort Pierre area, his home for 55 years. But his life, expertise and career took him around the globe and across the state and nation.
That career spanned decades as a Russian-language specialist in military intelligence, an expert in government tax, finance and revenue policy – including decades of service in South Dakota state government – and later stretches as a consultant in several foreign countries.
But among Ron's friends he was mostly known for his keen and whimsical sense of humor, his love of hunting and the outdoors, his passion for gardening and his love of telling stories about his experiences and laughing along as others told their own stories.
In duck blinds, in community projects or in an office, Ron was a loyal companion, determined worker and respected boss. In retirement, as a longtime master gardener, he taught many area gardening newcomers how to grow vegetables, and he made better gardeners of those who knew the basics.
While living in Pierre, Ron improved the output and beauty of the city's community garden; after moving to Fort Pierre, he established and managed the successful community garden there. In the final days of his life, he helped Fort Pierre elementary students and teachers establish a pollinator garden and milkweed test plot, and he cut the ribbon at its unveiling ceremony.
He was a soil conditioning master and loved making compost for his gardens, so much so that – sometimes to the embarrassment of his family and friends – he gathered food scraps and shrimp shells at restaurants and friends' homes to include in his compost bins. Of all of his accomplishments, he might have been most proud to be known as the "Compost Nazi."
Ron's passions for hunting, fishing, gardening, nature and improving life came together when he joined his brother Terry in buying and operating a farming/hunting property in Tripp County. He was behind the vision that resulted in the planting of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of trees on the property, which today is the gathering spot for his extended family every October.
He was a wood carver and carpenter all of his life. He built a home in Pierre from the ground up, and in recent years, he carved a wall-sized scene of walleyes swimming in the river. He was working on his version of the famous Sioux horse effigy of 1880 for his wife when he died.
Ronald Jay Schreiner was born January 26, 1940, in Aberdeen to Melvin and Ellen "Ella" Schreiner. Despite his pride in being a North-Sider, a neighborhood known as Little Odessa, he attended Sacred Heart, the Catholic school on Aberdeen's south side for elementary and junior high, then Central High School, graduating in 1958. He attended his many CHS reunions and was the master of ceremonies at every one.
Known as "Squid" among his school friends, Ron alternated his college loyalties and attendance between Northern State College and South Dakota State University, enrolling in NSC in 1959 and '61, and SDSU in '60. He showed a talent for tending bar, and was appreciated by classmates and patrons as the man who could listen to great stories as well as tell them.
From an early age, and throughout his life, he was eager to accomplish his goals, so he stopped treading water in college and decided instead to get an education in the Air Force. With a proficiency for languages, he attended military intelligence training at Longfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas, before mastering Russian at Syracuse University. (He hurt his back while at Syracuse, and although most people never noticed, the injury affected him for the rest of his life.)
After learning Russian, Ron served in intelligence at Darmstadt Air Force Base in Germany, then moved to Peshawar, Pakistan, where he intercepted and translated the communications of Russian military aircraft pilots during the time of what was then called the Cold War conflict with the former Soviet Union.
Mustered out of the military in 1966, Ron decided to pursue a more traditional education back at NSC. Officially, he ended with a degree in public administration, but because of his many hours hunting and fishing during that time, he liked to say he got a degree in wildlife biology.
Ron's degree led to a job in the relatively new computer center at the State Capitol. The IBM360 computer was room-size and had less computing ability than one of today's cellphones. Using his bartending experience, he organized an office party for one of his bosses; at that event, Ron's gregarious personality and reputation for competence led the governor to ask Ron to join his budget office.
That new job changed Ron's career trajectory. He became the chief budget analyst in the budget office and worked on financing relief efforts during the devastation of the 1972 Rapid City flood. He later served as budget officer in the state health department (where he also served for a time as director of maternal and child health), and subsequently worked as budget officer in the transportation department, where the budget was 10 times the size of the health department. He served for decades on the board of the South Dakota state retirement system, for a time as its chairman.
When George S. Mickelson was elected governor in 1986, he asked Ron to be his secretary of revenue, which meant he was the state's tax collector – a job not always viewed with fondness by the public. (He had been elected to the Pierre City Council two weeks before, but his new cabinet position required that he resign the council post before he even took office.) His goals in revenue were to renew the department's reputation with the business community and to make the staff more professional. By all accounts he was a good boss and a successful cabinet member, and he was elected national president of the Federation of Tax Administrators (FTA).
After the death of Governor Mickelson, and the election of Gov. William Janklow, Ron retired at age 55, the youngest retirement age allowed at the time. He laughed when he talked about the phone call from the new governor. "How long have you worked here not counting tomorrow?" Janklow asked, letting Ron know that he would be replaced.
Ron had retired from state government, but his experience with the FTA and his knowledge of Russian led to more work. It was the mid-1990s. The breakup of the Soviet Union led the newly free republics to ask the United States for help in dealing with independence, democracy and public financing.
"The FTA and the State Department were being contacted by the Russians themselves, to see if Russia could look more like us," Schreiner said. His first assignment was Kazakhstan, the former Soviet republic that had been the center of Russia's space program, its equivalent of Cape Canaveral.
Transparency was almost non-existent. "Whole communities were not on the map," he said at the time, and "budgets didn't appear anywhere." He helped establish budget, revenue, accounting and government procedures.
A Russian state was the next assignment. Because farming was on his biography along with finance work, Ron helped huge collective farms north of Moscow that needed increased efficiency and reorganization. They operated without budgets, crop rotation, soil conditioning, proper fertilization, electricity or – surely to Ron's horror – compost. He thought he could help.
After two years in Kazakhstan and a year in Russia, Ron spent one year in Armenia and another in Moldova – the last in an effort to assist the Moldova parliament in establishing something akin to our three branches of government.
Between international assignments, Ron served briefly as vice president for finance and administration at Dakota Wesleyan University. In 2003, he was diagnosed with cancer and given six months to live. As was the case often in his life, he set a goal – to overcome this obstacle – and he did.
"'Retired' Schreiner Volunteering Hard at 81," was the headline on a Capital Journal feature story about Ron in 2021.
In addition to his work in extension services and community gardening, he has served on the South Dakota Parks and Wildlife board and local Extension board. He is a member of Ducks Unlimited and Pheasants Forever, the Pierre-Fort Pierre Rotary Club, the Pierre and Fort Pierre Arbor Boards, and the Healthy Hometown Committee. He is a member of the Fort Pierre American Legion Post 20, the board of Countryside Hospice, and the Fort Pierre Civic Pride Committee.
"There is a time you've got to focus," he said in 2021. "You can't be everything to everyone." But he tried anyway, because he saw the need.
Unbeknownst to many who celebrate his public service, Ron quietly helped many local families by supporting their children's education and sponsoring them when language differences made communication difficult.
Ron is survived by his loving wife and best friend, Gloria (Caldwell) Hanson, the mayor of Fort Pierre, who helped and nursed him through his terminal illness; by his three sons Andrew (Andrea) of Rapid City, Nicholas (Becky) of Helena, Montana, and Joe of Carnation, Washington; by his grandchildren Lily and Jack Schreiner of Rapid City; by his former wives, Iann (Holmes) Collins of Rapid City, the mother of his three sons, and Jeanne (Feldhaus) Simpson; by his brothers, Terry (Nancy) of Cleveland and Tim (Ruth) of Vermillion, and his sisters, Janice Frink of Aberdeen and Deborah of Eagan, Minnesota. He is also survived by 11 nieces and nephews and many more grand nieces and nephews.
He was preceded in death by his parents and by a sister, Kathie Maloney of Vermillion. And he would also like us to say that he was also preceded in death by his faithful hunting labradors, Jody, Indy, Rocky, Haus, Mikey, and Moose. He once said that every person deserves one great hunting dog in their life, and he was blessed with several.
Ron and his family prefer memorials in the form of donations to the Pierre Area Referral Service (PARS), 110 W. Main, Pierre, which helps feed people in need, and Future Fort Pierre, P.O. Box 1194, Fort Pierre, which helps fund civic projects, especially those celebrating the rich history of Fort Pierre.
Burial will be Friday Sept. 19 at 9 a.m. (MDT) in the Black Hills National Cemetery, 20901 Pleasant Valley Dr., Sturgis, SD 57785. A celebration of life for Ron will be held at 5:30 p.m., Friday, Sept. 19 at Drifters Bar & Grille, 325 Hustan Ave., Fort Pierre, SD. CLICK HERE TO VIEW RON'S CELEBRATION OF LIFE