Tolkkinen: 65 years ago, city girl met farm boy

BIRD ISLAND, MINN. - Judy Schindler had always wanted to marry a farm boy.

But when the farm boy finally showed up at her home for a blind date, the city girl was less than impressed.

“He had spent the afternoon at a baseball game and had a few to drink,” she said.

Still, his name was Bob — her favorite name for a boy — and the date wasn’t terrible. They went to see “No Time for Sergeants,” the 1958 Andy Griffith comedy. He laughed at her jokes. By the second date, she’d begun to fall for him, and on the seventh date, he proposed. She told him he was crazy. They married a year later and last summer celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary.

On the surface, Judy and Bob seemed like polar opposites. He had grown up cleaning chicken pens and milking cows in Chaska — when it was rural — while she grew up in northeast Minneapolis surrounded by small shops and lots of cars and people. He always had chores to do, while she played the piano and spent time with friends.

But they shared a sensibility forged by the Great Depression, the war years and 1950s optimism. She had always been jealous of her city friends who got to visit relatives' farms in the country. Farm life seemed fun. When she was 20, an old family friend asked if she wanted to meet a farm boy and she said yes.

Bob, 22 when they met, had bought his first dairy farm near his parents’ place. After they got engaged, her future mother-in-law offered to raise the chickens for their wedding lunch, on one condition: Judy had to help clean them. To the astonishment of her mother, Judy, who wouldn’t touch raw poultry at home, agreed. She loved and trusted Bob and figured she could do anything he and his family could do. She also didn’t want to let him down. So together with Bob, one of his sisters, and his parents, they killed and plucked 50 chickens two days before the wedding, storing them in milk cans with ice until the big day.

They got married in the morning on a hot June day, ate chicken dinner with their families and friends, and then carried chicken dinners to two special men who had not attended the wedding: the Eitel brothers, Adolph and William, who had saved Bob’s father from losing the farm during the Depression.

As Bob tells it, the brothers, who never married, were so frugal, “They still had the first nickel they earned,” even scrounging fallen coal from the sides of the railroad tracks. Still, they couldn’t bear to see Bob’s father, their neighbor, lose the farm to foreclosure when he couldn’t pay the mortgage. It turned out they had enough stashed away to buy his bank loan from the bank, and so he paid them every month until it was paid off.

Used to fending for herself — she paid for her own piano lessons, for instance, and put herself through two years of college — Judy appreciated the kindness she encountered in farm country. When she was on bed rest during a pregnancy, a neighbor found time in her busy day to come over and help with her other young children. This was at a time when most people still scrubbed clothes in a washer/wringer and made everything from scratch.

Steadily, the city of Chaska grew and spread close to their farm, so they sold it. (It’s now part of the city’s golf course.) They wanted to raise their children in a farm community so they bought another in Hector, in Renville County. They chose the farm because it had good soil and, more importantly, it was near a K-12 Catholic school. Both Judy and Bob had gone to Catholic schools and wanted their four kids to have that experience too.

The trouble was, on the very morning they were showing their parents their new farm, the Catholic church announced it was closing its high school.

“God has a sense of humor,” Judy said, laughing.

About five years ago, they sold their farm and moved to nearby Bird Island, home to about a thousand people and surrounded by vast reaches of flat farmland. According to the city, it got its name from a nearby 60-acre patch of high ground surrounded by wetlands. The so-called island was home to trees and birds until the wetlands were drained to make way for farmland.

Sixty-five years after their wedding, Judy and Bob say they’ve endured because they never went to bed angry at each other. For many years, they said an evening prayer together that was given to them during premarital counseling. They still say the morning prayer. Judy still adores Bob’s laugh and how he can remember details she forgets. They attend the local Catholic church and on Wednesdays, they play bridge at the community center.

The city has steadily lost population, and Judy wishes for new residents. It’s a wonderful community, she says, full of remarkable people.

They are, in a way, living how Judy grew up. In town, surrounded by neighbors and conveniences. Still, never far from the land that sustained them for 60 years.