Discovering The Mature Lifestyle
Golden Valley vet spends 33 years giving back Page 5
Veterans
May 14, 2015
May Issue
Track and cross-country, blood donations keep Vietnam vet busy BY SUE WEBBER CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Steve Fossen’s 34 months of service in the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade kept him busy during the Vietnam war. Fossen, who grew up in Cottagewood, graduated from Minnetonka High School and now lives in St. Louis Park, enlisted in January 1968 and served until October 1970. He’d just spent one year at Minnesota State University Moorhead. “I decided college wasn’t for me, and the Army was,” he said. His basic training was at Ft. Campbell, KY, and then he went to Ft. Knox, KY, for tank training, Ft. Benning, GA, for jump school, to Ft. Riley, Kans., and then to Germany for six weeks. He was a paratrooper, a tank commander and served on an armored personnel carrier. “The last four months the motor sergeant pulled me back and said they were short on mechanics, so I would end up fixing tanks in the field,” Fossen said. When he got back from the service, Fossen earned the nickname “Sparkplug,” because he was in charge of supplying sparkplugs for snowmobile teams and “grass drags” (snowmobile racing during the summer). “I spent a year in Indianapolis
Steve Fossen (Photo by Seth Rowe - Sun Sailor Newspapers)
when I was working for a paint company there, and I got to talk to a lot of the drivers in ‘Gasoline Alley,’” Fossen said. ’Sparkplug’ became ‘Sparky’ when he was working at Cargill, Fossen said. “We had many Steves,” he said. Fossen retired in December 2014 from a 24-year career as senior main-
tenance engineer at Cargill. He has a compassionate hobby of sorts, a continuation of what he started while he was in the Army. He has donated nearly 81 gallons of blood to the Memorial Blood Center. “I do platelet apheresis,” he said. “They take only the white blood cells and they can treat six to eight people who have
leukemia. I do that every two to three weeks.” The procedure “doesn’t even slow you down,” Fossen said. “You get all your red blood cells back.” It takes just short of two hours, enough time for him to watch a movie, he said. STEVE FOSSEN - TO PAGE 3