Music camp founder Utgaard gets North Dakota’s top honor – KNBN NewsCenter1

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — Worldwide Music Camp founder Merton Utgaard will obtain North Dakota’s highest honor, Gov. Doug Burgum introduced Friday.

Utgaard, who died in 1998 at age 84, is the forty seventh recipient of the Theodore Roosevelt Tough Rider Award. A ceremony shall be scheduled later.

Utgaard, a local of Maddock, based the music camp in 1956 on the Worldwide Peace Backyard that sits astride the North Dakota and Canadian border, north of Dunseith. He served as director for 28 years.

On the time of his loss of life, greater than 90,000 college students from greater than 60 nations had attended the summer season camp.

Utgaard was a instructor and director of bands on the College of Minnesota, the College of South Dakota, Ball State College, Northern Illinois College and the College of Manitoba-Brandon earlier than he started to work full time on the Worldwide Music Camp within the mid-Nineteen Sixties.

Utgaard’s portrait will grasp within the North Dakota Capitol with these of the opposite 46 individuals who have acquired the award, established by Gov. William Man in 1961.

Some others who’ve acquired it embrace bandleader Lawrence Welk, New York Yankees slugger Roger Maris, NBA participant and coach Phil Jackson, western writer Louis L’Amour, singer and actress Peggy Lee, and newsman Eric Sevareid.