By Tom Hintgen

Otter Tail County Correspondent

Kevin Wallevand, Vining native and award-winning reporter for WDAY-TV, Fargo, was the 2024 Bigwood Lecture Series featured speaker Wednesday evening, April 10, at M State, Fergus Falls.

Wallevand, a 1980 graduate of Henning High School, spoke about his “Small Town Stories” series that have appeared on WDAY-TV for more than four decades. He provided video and audio of several of his TV stories to a packed audience at Legacy Hall on the M State campus.

Wallevand has won multiple Emmys and is a recipient of four national Edward R. Murrow Awards, named in honor of the late American broadcast journalist and World War II war correspondent.

“Growing up in Vining, we had one TV channel in our house. I set up a cardboard box and pretended to read the news,” Wallevand said. “I would also pretend that I was a TV reporter.”

During college at what was then Moorhead State College, now Minnesota State University, Moorhead, Wallevand took broadcast journalism classes from the late Marv Bossart who also was a TV news anchor at WDAY-TV, Fargo. Wallevand joined WDAY in 1983 and, as the cliché goes, the rest is history.

Over the years Wallevand’s TV series and documentary work took him all around the two Dakotas and Minnesota, other areas of the United State and overseas.

On April 10, during his address at M State, Fergus Falls, he provided video and audio of TV stories that included Canada geese, mail carriers in Underwood, a retired teacher in Battle Lake, a small-town school cook in North Dakota, a woman from Ada who was born in Germany and married a U.S. soldier who served during World War II and Wallevand accompanying some military veterans back to a battleground in Vietnam.

His series documentary work also took him to Africa, Haiti, Kosovo, South America, Mongolia, Mexico and the Middle East.

Wallevand, during the Covid pandemic, teamed with WDAY-TV photographer Andrew Nelson to follow Sanford nurses, doctors and respiratory therapists who dealt with the strain of the surge of infections, hospitalizations and deaths.

Fargo-based WDAY-TV won the award for “Best News Series” in the Small Market Television Division for its “Life on a Covid Floor” series.

The Vining native said he and fellow employees at WDAY-TV have worked hard over the years to use TV journalism as a service to communities and rural areas of the Upper Midwest.

Wallevand never forgot his growing up years.

His father, Jim Wallevand, first worked for a gas station owner in Vining. Later, the elder Wallevand started his own service station in nearby Henning, naming it Jim’s Service.

His son, Kevin, pumped gas, changed oil and flipped hamburgers over the noon hour next door. Jim and Ginny Wallevand sold the gas station to their nephew, Pete Wallevand, in the late 1990s.

Wallevand was introduced as guest speaker, on April 10 at M State, by Senior Judge Wally Senyk who has known and admired the Vining native and WDAY-TV reporter for many years. Senyk referred to Wallevand as a man “with high ethical standards and integrity.”

Otter Tail County residents have appreciated that, for the past four decades, Wallevand has stayed close to home, where his roots are still firmly planted, and that he has the freedom to do the stories he loves.