90 years of life, 70 years of marriage
BY ROBERT WILLIAMS Perham Focus
PERHAM — Robert
“Andy” Andersen, a Korean War veteran who turned 90 on Aug. 8, has accumulated quite a few interesting stories since he was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1934. He and his wife Donna were married in 1954 and they celebrated 70 years of marriage together on June 12.
Andersen turned 17 years old in 1951 and joined the military on his birthday that year.
“When I went out and got sworn in, I went out to Fort Omaha and they had a room full of guys and the guy in charge pointed and said ‘Now you, you, you and you are marines.’ And one of those guys passed out.
I’ll never forget that,” Andersen said while laughing.
Growing up in Nebraska, Andersen’s father ran a small grocery store and would do the meat cutting there. When he got on a bus to leave home, Andersen said the bus drove by his family’s store and his family stood outside so they could wave to each other before he left. That was the last time he saw them for quite a while. He found out he could
stories of service, life
go to Hawaii for basic training, so he volunteered to go there thinking it might be nicer. He also found out later that infantry training does not take place in the nice areas of Hawaii.
“We crawled up and down every bad spot on the island,” Andersen continued. “They didn’t train us in the good sections. They trained us in the bad sections. In the muck.”
But it wasn’t all bad. While recollecting his time in Hawaii, Andersen laughed and said he did have a funny story from that adventure. He was too young to drink at the time, so when they would go into town to have some fun on leave, he was the one who’d get everybody back to camp. One time they had a runin with the Hawaii Air Shore Patrol.
“We were down there walking the street, and here comes this little drunken sailor. And he was not very big, but he was just all over the place,” Anderson said. “Well the HASP got him. They started to put him in the back of the van and all of a sudden he turned and laid all three of those guys out cold. He was a lightweight champion boxer in the navy, come to find out. So
we just got out of there.” Andersen agreed that’s one of those things you probably couldn’t get away with these days. After basic training, he was sent to Japan to go to cook school for 30 days because he was only 17. After that, he rode on a train across Japan to a place where they loaded soldiers onto landing craft bound for Busan, South Korea. From there he rode another train that went through Seoul.
“I went through Seoul and I think the biggest building I saw there was maybe a corner and a half of one side of a building,” Andersen continued. “Everything else was blown away. Nothing was there. And then they ran us up into North Korea and I went into the 987 Armored Field, which was self-propelled howitzers.”
Despite being in a war zone, Andersen did remember a couple of funny stories from his time there. One was about a fellow soldier who decided to use the restroom shortly after an intense firefight. Well, the fight wasn’t totally over, and the North Korean forces started shelling their base while he was on the toilet.
“They started shelling us, he got his drawers up,
he’s running like mad and they’re dropping shells right in behind him as he’s running up,” Andersen said. “He got up by our tent and I jumped out, grabbed him and pulled him in behind the sandbags.”
Another story Andersen told involved their medic tent blowing up after some incoming fire set the tent ablaze. The explosion wasn’t from the incoming fire, but rather the tent exploded because of some homemade booze that was being stored inside. The containers the booze was stored in got so hot they blew up.
“We had a bunch of incoming fire one time and it hit the medic’s
tent. The tent was burning like crazy and we’re trying to get it out,” Andersen continued. “All of a sudden it blows up and the colonel jumps all over this doctor saying, ‘What’s going on! You’re not supposed to have any explosives in there!’ Well, the medics had been coming up and taking the leftover fruits or whatever we had and were making raisin jack in 5-gallon cans.”
After the war was over, Andersen came home to Omaha in January 1953. He said it took him a week to ride a ship to Japan from Korea, then a three-week ride on a ship to Hawaii before another two-week trip to Seattle, Washington. From there
he boarded a train to Carson, Colorado, where he met a sergeant from Iowa.
That sergeant had just bought a brand new 1953 red-bottomed, black-top, big V-8 Buick convertible. He gave Andersen a ride back to Omaha in that car, and Andersen said he drove about 100 miles per hour the whole way. Once he finally made it home, Andersen said he met his wife Donna shortly after.
“When I got home, Donna, her sister and her brother had been taking my two sisters to church and that’s how I met her. She reminded me of Daisy Mae, always barefoot,” Andersen said.
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Wellness in the Woods: Transforming wellness into reality
BY NICOLE STRACEK Wadena Pioneer Journal
WADENA — With a heart for serving people and a background in human services, including running a detox center, founder and CEO Jode Freyholtz-London established Wellness in the Woods alongside her husband Tom London in 2013 after she recognized the need for mental health support in Greater Minnesota. As a nonprofit organization, Wellness in the Woods provides peer
Business provides mental health resources to underserved individuals
support services for individuals facing mental health and substance use challenges, particularly in rural Minnesot,a with services that focus on advocacy, education and expanding statewide peer support networks. Armed with lived-experiences and a passion for serving others, Freyholtz-London said that initially finding funding for the wellness-based organization was a challenge.
“Although everybody thought it was a wonderful idea, there wasn’t any
money to go along with that,” said FreyholtzLondon. After applying for and receiving a $95,000 grant from the Minnesota Department of Human Services, Freyholtz-London was able to continue growing the network of peer-support professionals that work to help individuals who are struggling with mental health issues.
“Those funds allowed us to start building some capacity and gave us the label of a statewide consumer network,” said Freyhotlz-London.
Today, Wellness in the Woods has 63 peer support professionals who work virtually throughout Minnesota with an emphasis on region five counties including Cass, Crow Wing, Todd, Morrison and Wadena counties. The mission is to support individuals with mental health challenges that often co-occur with substance use. “But no matter who we serve, we don’t do any billable services,” said FreyholtzLondon, who said her goal was to employ peer support specialists with
lived experiences.
“I knew in my heart that I wanted all of my staff and board members to be people who have had a lived experience with a mental health challenge, oftentimes substance use. Many of my staff have experience with incarceration,” said Freyholtz-London. Wellness in the Woods offers paid training for employees and helps to develop a wellness plan that focuses on how to best serve those who need it
WELLNESS: Page 4
the most. port program provides access to mental wellness from the comfort of home. Offered seven days a week via Zoom the Vir tual Peer Support pro gram is open to anyone in Minnesota and is facil itated by certified peer or recovery specialists
Wadena
Contributed / Robert Andersen Andy and Donna dated for about a year and a half before they tied the knot at a small church in Omaha. She was 18 years old and he was 19 years old.
Robert “Andy” Anderson shares
Contributed / Robert Andersen Andy joined the Seattle Police Department in January 1959 and stayed there until being medically retired in 1972 following a bad motorcycle accident while he was on duty. Before he retired, Andersen rose through the ranks to become a sergeant and a detective.
Contributed photo / Jode Freyhotlz-London Founder & CEO Jode Freyholtz-London speaking after receiving an award for the work done by Wellness in the Woods.
Last Wensman brother retires from Wadena seed business
BY FRANK LEE Wadena Pioneer Journal
WADENA — Jon Wensman retired in July from the seed business his father started, but his two brothers he worked with retired years ago.
The 68-year-old resident of Alexandria is a husband and father of four grown children and knows all about the importance of family and ended his career with the Westfield, Indiana-based AgReliant Genetics, which has a facility northwest of Wadena on U.S. Highway 10.
“I’ve pretty much done everything that I’ve wanted to do, and I wanted to spend more time with my wife and travel and do things that I haven’t been able to do in the past,” he said of his decision to retire as the northwest production supervisor.
Founded in 2000 by global seed companies KWS and Limagrain, AgReliant Genetics benefits from direct access to a global corn germplasm pool and has a top-four corn research program.
“We sell seed corn and soybeans and we’ll condition that product for sale for farmers,” Wensman said of AgReliant Genetics.
Wensman said his decision to retire was five years in the making, before he followed in the footsteps of his brothers Jeff and Jim.
“I wanted to make sure that my successor was confident and in all the attributes that I had, and he is. He is very good,” Wensman said of Marty Irons, who has worked alongside Wensman his entire career.
The three Wensman brothers grew up in Wadena and started the Wensman Seed Co. in Wadena in 1996. They bought the PetersonBiddick Co. in Wadena from their father Al.
“There were 30 shareholders and my dad,” Wensman said.
Peterson-Biddick Co. was raising, processing and selling seed corn under the Peterson-Biddick Co. label and for another regional seed label, according to Dan Sartell, who worked for the Wensman brothers as the marketing manager for Wensman Seed Co. for 21 years.
“Peterson-Biddick Co. was also raising turkeys and had animal feed operations in Bemidji, Thief River Falls, Crookston and Wadena,” Sartell said.
Sartell said when the regional corn seed label was bought out, the brothers had to decide: be a third-party producer without a direct sales operation or start a brand new corn label.
“Against the advice of many in the business, they opted to start their own company –Wensman Seed,” said Sartell, who grew up with the Wensman brothers as a next-door neighbor.
Jeff Wensman led the sales division, Jim Wensman was a top salesman and Jon Wensman handled the growing/processing/delivery systems at the plant just west of Wadena.
“We bought the business in 1985 – PetersonBiddick Co. – through a leveraged buyout with a bank. … In 1990, my dad retired .. and at that same time that he retired, we exited the turkey business … which was two-thirds of our revenue,” Wensman said of the gamble.
“We had to divest a lot of the turkey assets.
… And we did that over a period of seven years, all the while running the seed business … so we took the turkey business and we turned that into irrigation land up by Park Rapids and sold it to R.D. Offutt in 2008.”
Wensman Seed Co. grew its market share in Minnesota, the Dakotas, western Wisconsin and northern Iowa and soon added soybeans to its products, according to Sartell.
“On the seed side of the business, we knew that proteins were coming into the world of seed corn,” Wensman said. “They were basically biotech proteins that were going to be added to the chlorophyll of seed corn. And we saw that coming.”
The company’s growth ultimately resulted in its sale to AgReliant Genetics, according to Sartell, and the affiliation with a larger corporation gave Wensman Seed Co. access to a well-rounded research program and better genetics.
“Business continued to grow and Wensman was one of the better-performing companies in the AgReliant system,” Sartell said. The Wensman brothers’ children, however, did not follow in their parents’ footsteps.
“The kids are all a generation removed from being able to run a company we felt, age-wise. They wouldn’t be old enough by the time we wanted to leave the company,” Wensman said.
Jeff and Jim Wensman retired several
years ago, about the time AgReliant merged the Wensman, Great Lakes, and Producer’s divisions into the LG Seeds brand, according to Sartell, and Jon Wensman continued as the plant manager in Wadena until his retirement.
“The reason that we got out of the poultry business was it vertically consolidated, and so if you weren’t one of the big guys, you’re going to be squeezed out, and we saw that in the poultry business,” Wensman said. “And we also saw that in the seed business.”
As for working with his 69-year-old brother Jeff and 66-year-old brother Jim, Wensman had few if any complaints it seems. His siblings retired in 2018 while he chose to remain working. “It was actually fantastic because we all thought alike, and we made change our best friend,” Wensman said of working with his brothers. “And that’s how we were able to be very successful. We were willing to change all the time.”
Contributed / Dan Sartell
Jeff Wensman, left, Marty Irons and Jon Wensman celebrate the latter’s retirement at a surprise party in July.
BY TRIS ANDERSON Perham Focus
PERHAM — Are you 55 and older and something of a planner? Then the Celebrating Aging Expo in Perham is perfect for you.
The new, free offering from Elevate, which takes place Wednesday, Sept. 18, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Perham Area Community Center, will help connect those 55 and older with services and opportunities.
“It’s a great opportunity for our aging population to come and see what services exist in our communities that will help people to age well,” said Mindi Larson, Elevate general manager.
Attendees will have the opportunity to speak with vendors about things such as long-term care options, home health services and services related to certain medical conditions such as Alzheimer’s, dementia and osteoporosis – to name a few of the vendors. In addition to health-related services, attendees can learn about volunteer opportunities or home-related services such as lawn care.
There will also be health screenings and interactive breakout seminars and demos.
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Daisy Mae was a character in the old comic strip Li’l Abner. She had blond curly hair a lot like Donna’s. She and Andersen dated for about a year and a half before they tied the knot at a small church in Omaha. Eventually, they moved out to Seattle after Andersen’s uncle got him a job at a grocery store there.
After working at the grocery store for a while, Andersen joined the Seattle Police Department in January 1959 and stayed there until being medically retired in 1972 following a bad motorcycle accident while he was on duty. Before he retired, Andersen rose through the ranks to become a sergeant and a detective.
“I was coming up to a red light, coasting the bike just waiting. So the light turned green and I started through the intersection,” Andersen continued. “A lady had come down the hill and she was trying to beat the light. She couldn’t see me and I couldn’t see her. All I saw was a green blob coming out of the corner of my eye, and boom that was it.” Andersen was badly injured by the accident. He said his eyes popped out of his head from the impact. He also suffered a broken cheek, shoulder and leg. He added that he was unconscious for a while so he doesn’t remember much from immediately after the accident, but said he was told that the officer who first arrived just popped his eyes back into the sockets on the spot.
After recovering from his accident, Andersen got a job working on an oil pipeline in Alaska for a while. Eventually, his father was ready to retire and sell a fishing resort he owned in Perham, and Andersen decided to buy his father’s resort and move his family to Perham. He and his wife already had their four
The goal of the expo, as Larson puts it, is to make aging easier and more enjoyable.
“It’s a great way for people to learn about local opportunities, services that exist here and I think our overall goal is to make sure people are educated on what exists here before they’re actually in need of any types of services,” Larson said. “Whether it’s services in their home or something that they would like to get involved in in terms volunteerism, it’s important for people to be educated and ready.”
The expo has been held in neighboring communities, such as Detroit Lakes, to much success. Larson said it was important to bring an event like this to Perham.
“When we think about Detroit Lakes and Perham we know there’s a population size difference, but our community here at Perham does attract so much traffic from outlying communities that do have a retirement age population, so it really made sense for us to welcome this type of expo to our community for everyone to enjoy.”
There’s a lot to look forward to, but Larson is most excited about how the expo furthers Elevate’s mission.
children by that time. Their oldest son, Robert, joined the military when they moved to Perham. But their other three children, Christine, Dave and Don, all went to Perham Schools and graduated from Per-
“What I’m most excited about for this event is that it really ties into the mission of Elevate as a whole,” she said. “Our goal is to connect adults with opportunities to age well.”
As for other Elevate offerings, Larson highlighted the Connections program held at the PACC.
“This is a meal we serve Monday through Thursday, the meal is served at 11:30 (a.m.) and everyone 60 or older is welcome to come and join us for our meal,” Larson said.
She said that some come early or stay after to socialize and play cards. The suggested donation for the meal is $4.
“We just want people to come and be together,” Larson said. “I think making sure that our seniors do have a healthy meal option each day is really important. That’s really the beauty of this program, it makes sure they are getting the nutrition that they need, but also the social aspect and the human connection is really important … we hope more people will continue to utilize it.”
To learn more about Elevate, visit elevateotc. org.
ham High School.
Now Andersen and Donna have 24 grandchildren and 83 greatgrandchildren. They still live in Perham in the summer but move down to Arizona for the winter months.
who have lived experiences including those who have suffered from mental health issues or substance use challenges. The virtual meetings provide individuals who are struggling with a safe, small group setting that offers valuable tools and support with a focus on how to lead a happier and healthier life.
In addition to the Virtual Peer Support services, Wellness in the Woods offers a statewide warm line. FreyholtzLondon said they receive around 2,800 calls per month.
“And people call, not when they’re in crisis, but when they just need somebody to talk to. The warm-line from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. where individuals can call to speak with a peer support professional,” she said.
Wellness in the Woods also provides in-jail peer support programs in nine county jails. “A big part of our job really is identifying gaps in services to see if there’s a place that we can serve people,” said Freyholtz-London.
In July, Wellness in the Woods received a $50,000 grant through Sourcewell’s Community Impact Funding. Freyholtz-London said the funding will go towards implementing the Program to Encourage Active, Rewarding Lives (PEARLS) specifically meant for seniors in the region.
The PEARLS program was designed to be integrated into organizations seeking resources to help older adults who struggle with depression and isolation. The program focuses on education on what depression is and what it isn’t, and helps seniors develop the skills they need to
live happier and more active lives. Developed by the University of Washington, PEARLS is an evidencebased program that can be implemented in a community or home setting. Freyhotlz-London said her staff will be going through training on how to implement the PEARLS program. “And so what PEARLS does is allows us to go in and have a conversation in people’s homes to use language that’s not stigmatizing. We can then help them identify what they need to bring to their care providers to help with treatment options,” she said. Through PEARLS, seniors can find help to combat social isolation and loneliness from trained coaches and counselors who help seniors with problemsolving, activity planning, and connections to additional services and resources.
Freyholtz-London said implementing PEARLS will help further the overall mission of Wellness in the Woods.
“Well, what we know is that seniors, even more so since COVID are more isolated, more depressed and do not have support networks,” said Freyhotlz-London, who also noted that in rural areas many senior centers are no longer available or have closed down.
Monica Yeadon serves as the Director of Improvement and Communications for Wellness in the Woods and said many seniors live with loneliness and it’s a silent killer.
“Without support, seniors can feel isolated, which can lead to a decline in mental health. Additionally, through my work I have personally observed that without social stimulation, seniors tend to cognitively decline,” said Yeadon.
Contributed photo / Jode Freyholtz-London Jode Freyhotlz-London, alongside her husband Tom London and employees receiving recognition through the state for the work done through Wellness in the Woods.
Yeadon oversees the All Peer Network through Wellness in the Woods, a project dedicated to bringing all peer professionals across the state together. Yeadon said this is done through advocacy, education and connectivity. “The mission with this program is to help the peer workforce feel empowered, supported and confident in the work they do,” said Yeadon.
In addition to the virtual peer support, warmline, and PEARLS, Wellness in the Woods also provides individuals who struggle with substance abuse disorders with recovery support through their Recovery in the Woods program. The recovery program provides participants access to weekly virtual sessions that focus on different stages of
recovery led by people who have lived experiences with mental health and substance abuse. With a focus on transparency, respect and supporting employee well being, FreyholtzLondon said it helps with staff retention as well, as nearly 80% of the staff that started with her in 2013 are still with the organization. “Our main values include non-judgment, meeting individuals where they are in their recovery journey, and celebrating successes,” said Freyholtz-London. Wellness in the Woods provides accessible, affordable and helpful peer led resources with compassion and non judgmental support, advocacy, and opportunities for those experiencing or have been affected by mental health and substance use challenges. For more information visit mnwitw.org.
Joseph & Meg Schuller - Owners
