WINONA, Minn. (AP) - A plate of cookies and binders full of town history sat between Bennett Onsrud and Cletus Casey.
The homemade and store-bought cookies were arranged in perfect lines, reflecting the tidiness of the kitchen they sat in, while piles of town history and news compiled by a friend and history buff flanked them. The quietness of a small town in autumn seeped into the home Onsrud shared with his wife for more than 50 years.
“He kept the station just as the house is,” Casey told the Winona Daily News .
“I had a good teacher,” Onsrud said with a wholesome smile. “She was fussy.”
“They were both fussy,” Casey responded.
Casey’s quick wit and confident voice filled Onsrud’s home on Main Street in Ettrick. Onsrud often would reply with equally as quick of wit, a small laugh and a soft tone.
It’s not the first time the two have met at a table, sharing food and conversation. It’s been a lifetime of friendship for the two men who have always called Ettrick home. There’s no real story as to how the two met; after years of friendship, brought about by a small town and the seemingly different lives they led, it’s a moot point. The stories and adventures they shared happened all the same.
(For curiosity’s sake, Onsrud said they met in early grade school.)
Born in 1925, Onsrud is three years older than his friend, who was born in 1928. Onsrud was one of six children on an 80-acre farm in Ettrick. It was a classic small-town farming lifestyle, walking a mile to school every day and living on what they had, which was all they needed.
“We didn’t have everything that people have, but we survived real good,” Onsrud said. “I think we had a good life on the farm.”
In town, Casey grew up in one of the approximately 50 homes inside of Ettrick’s town limits, according to his numbers. His family paid $5 per month for rent, while his father earned $20 per month walking to a farm.
“So we lived on that balance,” Casey recalled, “which was nothing.”
His father was eventually hired as the school’s custodian, bumping his pay to $33 per month when he started.
Ettrick at the time had a two-year high school for its students to attend, but Casey remembered principals from the nearby Blair and Galesville school districts coming to Ettrick’s two-year school to entice the students to finish schooling at their respective schools.
Most country kids didn’t attend school past eight or 10 years, Casey said, but Onsrud finished, attending high school in Blair. Meanwhile, Casey went to Galesville.
Both men finished high school during or near the end of WWII. Older friends were returning home, but when the Korean War began in 1950, their classmates began getting drafted, Casey recalled. He was married with two kids at the time, classifying his status in a different category and saving him from being drafted.
Neither men served in the military, but Onsrud’s family has been impacted by the service of his siblings.
His youngest brother, Edward, was killed in the invasion of Guam in WWII. Another brother, who was a merchant marine, was killed in 1956 when he fell off a pike and drowned Buffalo, N.Y. And his sister, an Army nurse, was on her way to Guam, when a suicide bomb hit the boat and burned her severely. She came back to the area and worked as a nurse in La Crosse for 25 years.
Back in Ettrick, Onsrud stayed on his family farm for three or four years, working and farming like he always had.
He then found work driving a truck and in the warehouse of a fruit company in La Crosse, moving there for three or four years, including the beginning of his marriage to his wife, Helen - the “fussy teacher” from before.
The couple met at the Acorn Ballroom in Centerville during Onsrud’s senior year of high school and Helen’s sophomore year. Immediately, Onsrud was hooked.
“Right away when I saw her, I fell for her right away,” Onsrud said. “I asked her for a date for New Year’s Eve, and that started it. We had a real good life together. We always got along good.”
The couple was married on May 6, 1949 and lived in La Crosse, where Helen worked as a bookkeeper for a lawyer, and Onsrud worked at the fruit company.
During a span of six weeks in his stint in La Crosse, Onsrud was laid up sick and could not work. When he started to feel better, he knew he didn’t want to return to his old job. He and his wife were ready to go home to Ettrick.
Instead, he bought a service station in Ettrick, repairing vehicles and pumping gas as the station’s owner for 42 years. He moved back to his childhood hometown with his wife.
“For the first five, six years, she worked all the time, and I worked the station,” Onsrud recalled about the beginning of his business. “She paid the bills, and I was paying for the station. And after five years we built a house, this house.”
the Onsruds built their house in downtown Ettrick in 1955 on a lot they paid $400 for, about five years after moving back to Ettrick. Ben exchanged electricity, carpentry, painting and other services on the house for work at his service station.
At the station, Onsrud primarily worked on fixing cars and servicing vehicles. He recalled his family helping and being involved with the business. Helen washed and waxed the floors, while his son, Richard, helped his father on vehicles, acquiring his own passion for fixing and servicing cars. Richard worked for Ben for 20 years following high school graduation.
Now, Richard owns his own service station in rural Ettrick, and Onsrud returns his son’s favor.
“(Richard) worked for me for 20 years, and now I work for him for 20 years,” Onsrud said.
The life the farm kid and his wife had built together after moving into town was filled with the joys of parenting a son and a daughter, becoming grandparents to two girls and eventually six great-grandchildren, and, naturally, plenty of smiles.
“All her life she was a smiling lady,” Onsrud recalled about his wife.
Helen was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease 10 years ago and has been in a nursing home for the last seven. Onsrud visits his “smiling lady” every afternoon he can, returning afterward to the home they shared for more than 50 years.
“Now, it’s pretty hard to get a smile from her now,” Onsrud said with a crack in his voice. “It hasn’t been any good to her. … We used to do everything together.”
As the childhood friendship grew to include their wives, Casey had had a front row seat to Onsrud and Helen’s life together.
After graduation, Casey hauled milk and did other general truck driving duties, much like his father, who was at that time in the trucking business. He worked with Marigold Dairies in Winona from 1950 to 1956 before hauling milk into Blair until 1960.
He then decided to switch careers, selling insurance for five years. But he was still pulled to trucking.
Casey ended up buying Holmen La Crosse Truckline, running the business until he retired in 1990. The business is still running, operating out of Galesville, Cletus said.
“That’s mostly what I spent my life doing,” Casey said. “I didn’t like selling insurance.”
In the meantime, Casey had also met his wife, Lois.
One of six girls in her family, Lois had a sister in Casey’s grade at his school in Galesville, so they knew each other when Lois was in grade school. Casey also admits to possibly dating one of her sisters once or twice, but by his senior year, Lois was the only one on his mind.
Lois graduated two years after Casey in May of 1948, and the couple was married the following January, in 1949. Together they have three sons, two daughters, 10 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren. With family spread out across the U.S., Casey said it’s a chance for a family photo every time the whole clan can get together.
Yet, some of his family has stayed in the Ettrick area, including a son, granddaughter, three great grandchildren in Ettrick and another family member in Blair.
Much like their fathers, Casey and Onsrud’s kids were also close, with Onsrud’s daughter, Jolene, and one of Cletus’ daughters, Debra, born one day apart and the best of friends.
“That must’ve been quite a party we were at,” Casey said to Onsrud with a laugh.
Despite their fondness to return home to Ettrick, the two couples traveled across the U.S. together, including down to Texas and up in Alaska. And while Helen now lives with Alzheimer’s in a nursing home, her friends still visit with her, knowing who she always was.
And with a lifelong friendship in one town, comes a lifelong memory of what used to be.
Going up and down the streets of Ettrick, Casey had a list of the businesses along Ettrick’s streets and how the town has changed, asking Onsrud to read the list for him. Casey said he cannot see as much anymore, to the point where he can no longer drive.
The list prompted the two friends to talk about the local lumberyard that used to be a horse barn and the office space that used to be a bowling alley and night club. Onsrud remembered the space being storage for a while, and Casey remembered a meat market in town.
The duo recalled the old Etco factory that produced kitchen and metal items and where Helen worked for a period of time. The factory re-opened at one time with a company in Winona but has been closed for more than a decade.
While business names and old friends’ monikers were flying throughout the conversation, a stranger to the area would need a map and reference list to follow along, but old or young, anyone from Ettrick could follow.
“When you lived in Ettrick for a long time it was like a big family for a long time wasn’t it?” Casey asked Onsrud. “Everyone knew everyone, and everyone looks out for everyone.”
At that point, a stranger should not have bothered them with street names - they could try a family homestead name instead.
“People would come to town, and they’d ask for such and such streets and I couldn’t remember the streets,” Onsrud said. “So I’d ask, ’Who are they, what’s their name?’ And then I could tell them. … Now I don’t know 10 percent of them.”
But that doesn’t deter Ettrick from remaining home.
Each house has a story, each remaining downtown business has resiliency and history of what it used to be, and each afternoon spent around an old friend’s kitchen table with cookies and cool autumn air is just another memory added to nearly a century of friendship that began with no real story in particular.
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Information from: Winona Daily News, http://www.winonadailynews.com
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