Al Bernard Chisholm Senior passed away at his beautiful home in the hills.  He was 79 years old.  He has been married to his beautiful wife Barbara for 54 years and they have one wonderful son Allan Bernard Chisholm Jr.

Al was born in in 1938 in Altadena, California which is located in the foothills above Pasadena.  He attended school there through high school and went into the Army.  When he got out of the Army he attended Pasadena City College obtaining an Associate in Arts Degree then went on to attend Menlo College near San Francisco for a BS degree “very appropriate he would say” in Business Administration.

Upon graduation he went to work for Pacific Crane and Rigging Co. of Paramount California as an expediter installing steam turbines for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in Huntington Beach. At the same time he also worked for the Brown Bovery Corp. of Switzerland as an industrial investigator.  These turbines were the first foreign turbines to break into the US market and the Swiss wanted someone undercover on the sight to report directly to them.

After completion of the project, he went to work for the American Totalisator Co. of Baltimore MD working out of the Arcadia CA. office as a field service manager installing and servicing betting systems for race tracks whether it was horses, dogs, trotters, anything with numbers on them and moved.  He worked the west coast and the Midwest circuits.

One of his accounts was Sodrac Dog Track outside Sioux City, IA where he met his lovely wife to be.  Barbara was a school teacher that worked at the track during the summer racing season.

Al and Barbara were married in Menlo Park, California in 1963.  In 1968 they were transferred to Phoenix, AZ where they purchased their first home.  Al serviced the Arizona tracks during the winter and the Midwest in the summer.  Al was going to be promoted back to California but decided that it was time to drop anchor.   Their son, Allan was in school and the traveling was getting difficult so they looked for where they wanted to go and find a business that they could get into.  They settled on Rapid City, SD where they had been coming during the summers since 1966 servicing Black Hills Greyhound.  In 1974 they moved to Rapid City and purchased Erickson’s Flower Box on 1818 Main Street.  They changed the name to just The Flower Box and built a new building on Jackson Blvd. in 1976 where they continued until their retirement in 2008.  After retirement he was a crossing guard at Corral Drive Elementary.

His son Allan went to school in Rapid City through Robbinsdale, Canyon Lake, West Junior High School, and Stevens High School.  He then went to USD in Vermillion and the School of Mines as a computer science major then went to work for Sodak Gaming, International Gaming Technologies, and Atronics Americas, an Austrian Company.

Al loved the outdoors, animals and his family.  He will be missed by many.