Obituary: Actor Richard Holmberg was longtime Santa at Bachman's

He was a truck driver, a scoutmaster and a chemical dependency counselor, but it was Richard Holmberg's career as Santa Claus that gave him a starring role in many Minnesotans' childhoods.

Holmberg, an actor who starred in Bachman's Christmas play for 21 years, died April 3 at the age of 83.

A regular performer in community theater, Holmberg was cast as Santa in a 1981 television ad for a sale at Dayton's. A big guy with a full beard and a twinkle in his bright blue eyes, Holmberg eased into the role, which gave him years of work in both print and television ads locally and nationally.

"He always wanted to do new things," said son Peter Holmberg. "As he got older, he reinvented himself."

He also reinvented what it meant to be Santa when he took on the role that would make him famous among Twin Cities children. Holmberg lived in Richfield, where he was a longtime family friend of the Bachmans, the flower proprietors. In 1987, he began circulating through Bachman's satellite stores to read stories as Santa. That gig quickly developed into something bigger.

"My dad never wanted to be considered a department store Santa," Peter Holmberg said. "He didn't want to sit in the chair and have kids sit on his lap and tell him what they wanted for Christmas. He was an actor."

In the theater, Holmberg had performed in great American plays. At Bachman's, he created his own — a full-blown 20-minute production with original music that changed every year. In the mid-90s, local director and actor Kevin Dutcher joined Holmberg as his enduring sidekick, Albert the elf, and the pair wrote the skits together.

"It reminded me a lot of Hal Holbrook doing Mark Twain," he said. "You couldn't see where the person ended and the character started. It was just total immersion."

Holmberg, a former trucker, brought a rough edge to the role. He had originally viewed his relationship to his elf "as a Laurel and Hardy type of thing," Dutcher recalled. They were playfully adversarial. One time, Holmberg even made a raunchy joke about a reindeer.

"And I just looked at him with big eyes," Dutcher said. "I said, 'We cannot go there!' And he just laughed his butt off."

The pair reined in the humor and softened their characters' relationship. The show was a hot holiday attraction.

"I think because of Dick's talent, it became such a tradition," said Dale Bachman, the company's CEO. "It was always about the play and the storytelling."

Holmberg devoted years to Troop 262 of the Boy Scouts, leading fishing trips in Wyoming and beyond. Those experiences laid the groundwork for his later-in-life role.

"When he told me he was going to play Santa, I was like, 'Of course you are,' " son Jeff Holmberg said. "As a scoutmaster, he was always trying to get kids to do better than they could, and he always did a really good job with them. Every campfire had to be better than the last one." Becoming Santa "was another extension of what he had done his whole life."

Holmberg retired from Bachman's in 2007, spending part of the year at his cabin on Long Lake in Aitkin, Minn., and winters in the St. Pete Beach, Fla., area.

"When he left, that was very hard for him," Dutcher said. "The feeling of being magical, of seeing that look in people's eyes, where they believe."