Dottie Dekko, who brought Chico’s clothing and professional soccer to Minnesota, dies at 95

Customers lined up at the cash register in one of the nation’s first Chico’s stores to pay for items that had been unpacked by workers only moments earlier. Dottie Dekko was enthralled.

“It was a little bit of a buying frenzy,” her daughter Gigi Dekko Goldman recalled. “She stood there and watched what was happening and turned to me and said, ‘Honey, there is something really important going on here, and we need to find out more.’”

It was a pivotal moment for Dekko, whose accomplishments included bringing the Chico’s franchise to Minnesota, establishing a professional soccer team and publishing several cookbooks.

“She was a visionary. She saw what was coming,” Goldman said, and she used those abilities throughout her life.

Dekko, of Excelsior, died Dec. 15 at age 95. But she kept that number closely guarded throughout her life, joking with friends and family that “if a woman will tell you her age, she’ll tell you anything.”

She was born Dorothie Alm in Minot, N.D., in May 1929, just months before the stock market crashed, ushering in the beginning of the Great Depression. She developed her entrepreneurial spirit on the family’s dairy business.

When Dottie was a child, she saw an ad for an ice cream maker in a magazine and convinced her father to buy it. She added nuts and caramel and chocolate chips. The family set up an ice cream shop across from a local high school and eventually expanded to five locations.

“I think this is really where mom, at a very formative age, discovered the power of innovation and entrepreneurship,” Goldman said.

Dekko earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Dakota, moved to Minneapolis and landed a job demonstrating new electric appliances for Northern States Power Company.

She met Thomas Dekko on a blind date and the two married in 1953. After business practices of the era forced her out of her job a couple of years later when she was pregnant with the first of her four children, Dekko grew restless.

She started an investment club and quickly developed a reputation for outperforming men in the area. One of her earliest investments was in pull-down stations that parents use to change babies' diapers in public restrooms.

“She had this nose,” Goldman said. “It was obviously the right thing in the right time.”

In the 1970s, as soccer was gaining popularity among American children, Dekko gathered local businessmen and pitched to them the idea of bringing a professional team to Minnesota. Her plan was so detailed some compared it to a thesis.

“I talked ten men into giving me money — lots of money. And it was fun," she told the Star Tribune in an interview decades later.

That, friends and family say, was quintessentially Dottie.

“You could never say no to Dottie,” said friend Mike Mulligan, who knew many of the men who invested in the Minnesota Kicks. “It wasn’t as if her charm wouldn’t have gotten her by, but she never relied on that.”

In the years that followed, Dekko also published several cookbooks, including some aimed at promoting the Minnesota Kicks. She brought the Chico’s franchise to Minnesota and worked on several philanthropic projects, including serving as chair for the March of Dimes Gourmet Gala.

Dekko told her children and grandchildren that maintaining their curiosity and earning an education were superpowers. Time spent at the beach turned into a competition, with children racing to see how many shells they could identify and present to Dekko. When her first grandson turned 10 or 11, she started a reading club with him — with books focusing on history and philosophy.

Sometime after her husband died, Dekko told her children she had two choices: She could stop living, or she could grab onto whatever was left of life. She fell in love with Richard Frey and the pair were married for 18 years.

“It was an inspirational move,” Goldman said. “I think that she wanted to show us: Don’t ever give up on life and, if you don’t give up on life, life won’t give up on you.”

Dekko is survived by Frey, Goldman, and her other children Danna Dekko Atherton, Lezlie Dekko Bork and Jeff Dekko, as well as eight grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Services have been held.