ABOVE SELF’

Karen Tolkkinen Wadena Pioneer Journal

WADENA — If anyone decides to create a “Mr. Wadena” title, Roger Folkestad might well deserve the honor.

The 97-year-old is one of the oldest residents of Wadena. A Wadena native, he was born during the Roaring 20s and grew up during the Great Depression. At age 11 or 12 — he can’t recall exactly — he was bloodying his knees crawling across fallen acorns in order to uproot dandelions at the local hospital, for which he was paid 10 cents an hour. It was his first paying job.

“I didn’t know anything but work. Of course that was the Depression,” he said. “I don’t remember never working.”

This year, the Wadena Rotary Club is feting him for 65 years of service to the club — such a rarity that even the Duluth-based Rotary district office, which covers multiple states, acknowledged his anniversary.

“It’s a remarkable tenure for our club,” said Nate Loer, president of the Wadena club. “It’s not something you see every day.”

Folkestad’s personal story is also remarkable in a time of relative ease and plenty. His own father traveled from Iowa into Minnesota in 1898 via covered wagon, and their family survived by hunting rabbits and selling blueberries. Folkestad’s father opened a used furniture store before adding a mortuary business. Finances were so tight during the Great Depression that the family converted their big house into lodging. Their parents turned the living room into their bed- room. The dining room doubled as a living room, which is where Folkestad and his older brother, Howard, slept, which meant they couldn’t go to sleep until visitors left.

Like many families of the time, they kept huge gardens. His mother, Christine, insisted on an immaculate house, and Folkestad can recall crawling under the Davenport every week to clean and polish the baseboards. She also required them to scour the basement with hot, soapy water not once, but twice each weekend.

“I bet you could have eaten off the floor,” he said. He teared up talking about his mother, who would get on her knees and pray for her children. She did this not so her children would see her, he explained, but so that they would turn out OK. Normally she would pray while they were at school, but at times she was still praying when he came home.

Growing up in a strict, religious family, Folkestad said he tithed one penny of every dime he earned. The rest, he probably spent on candy, he said. When he was still a preteen, he had dealings with the bank on his own. He had his own independent bank account — his parents were not on it — and also got a loan.

He worked not just at home but at his father’s businesses, where he got to know many of the townspeople.

“It was quite a business town,” he said. “There were grocery stores, automobile dealers, machinery dealers, dry goods — name it, we had it,” he said. Wadena had two creameries, mills, elevators, warehouses and quite a few small restaurants.

When World War II was underway, his parents left town for a month to

The Rotary International logo. Roger Folkestad has been a member of the Wadena Rotary Club for 65 years.

Contributed image visit his brother in Seattle. That left the teenage Roger in charge of not just the furniture store, but the mortuary service. His aunt helped run the furniture store, but at times she needed his help, so he would be called out of class to the superintendent’s office, where he would handle the business over the phone. His uncle, a licensed mortician, came to town to help with the funerals, but Folkestad made the funeral arrangements.

During the war, about half the class moved away because their parents left to work in defense plants or went into the service. He graduated with a class of 47, about half the normal class size. After high school, he tried to join the service himself, he said, only to be rejected because of his asthma. At a time of high patriotism and reverence for those who served, his medical status didn’t shield him from criticism. One customer whose five sons were in the service informed him that he should serve too. When he told her he was 4F, military shorthand for being disqualified from service because of a serious medical condition, she scoffed and said there was nothing wrong with him.

With a faint smile, he acknowledges that he has lived to age 97 despite the asthma.

After the war, he and Howard went into business with their dad. They added a line of appliances, but found that there wasn’t a business locally to hook them up in customers’ homes. So they connected them themselves, driving to Brainerd to buy two regulators and four canisters of gas for the

Folkestad

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