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• "Since this will potentially be my last official mission in the Army, I think every step along the parade route will resonate with memories of the things I've been afforded and the blessings that have been bestowed upon me," Ellwein told KELO television before the event.
• Ellwein is a South Dakota State University graduate who has been on active duty for a decade. He's been deployed twice to Iraq.
• The corps averages about 500 performances a year, including welcoming heads of state and foreign dignitaries to the White House. The musicians don American Revolution attire in remembrance of the musicians who served in Gen. George Washington's Continental Army.
• Monday was Ellwein's third inauguration.
• In 1981, he was the drum major for the South Dakota State University Pride of the Dakotas marching band when he marched in President Ronald Reagan's inauguration. He remembers someone wearing an Air Force jacket running through the mall area yelling, "They freed the hostages," said his wife, Dianne Ellwein, a sergeant major in the Chaplain Corps.
• During President George W. Bush's inauguration in 2005, Fred Ellwein was the parade's merge officer, managing the flow of the event's hundreds of floats, bands, horses, and security personnel.
• "It's meticulous," Dianne Ellwein told the Rapid City Journal. "Every 30 seconds another band or float goes by. He had to keep everything in time."
• Fred Ellwein plans to retire from the Army in the next 12 months and return to South Dakota.
• "I would never have dreamt that I would end my Army career commanding one of four Army special bands," he told the Argus Leader. "It's a bit unbelievable to me."
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• RAPID CITY, S.D. (AP) -- Some 50 students from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology are collecting food and money for the less fortunate in honor of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday
• The students are working Monday afternoon at Family Thrift Centers, Safeway, Don's Valley Market, Prairie Market and Walmart stores around the city. Donations also are being collected around the School of Mines campus.
• It's the third year that students have conducted the food drive.
• In 2012, students collected 1,182 pounds of food and $700 in donations for Feeding South Dakota, a hunger relief organization working to end hunger in the

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