Dan Dakota Man

With divine intention, I believe, roots go deep into the land.  A son was born to Joseph and me in North Dakota, Daniel Martin by name.  In 1967.  It happened generations after Sioux tribes established their non-establishments in Dakota, believing intrinsically that the land is not to own but to participate with as partners of nature.  Even so, the roots of the native Americans are there from pre-history.  Likewise, the Vold and Elstad roots are Dakotan, certainly beyond the happenstance of Joe and Marilyn with 4-year-old Jonathan trekking to Maddock, North Dakota in 1966.

This groundwork must be laid, because the central figure of this narrative is not particularly enamoured with North Dakota, barely claiming to be a true North Dakota native.  But he is, he is, a Dakotan, by roots, by birth, and by God!

God may have tossed creation into being with a Word, with a big bang, with an evolutionary design but the Father/creator most definitely also is involved in the playing out of individual lives, whether those lives are stationary or on the move.  It didn’t just fatefully happen that Dan became a Dakota man.  God had a plan for that man and here’s how it ran!

In the state directly to the west of North Dakota, Montana, the call and urge to go to the seminary became strong for Joe.  He was a reporter for Dun and Bradstreet, having graduated from Concordia College with a political science major three years earlier.   Billings was our home for just one year.  A visit from college and army buddy John Haakenson pushed the still small voice of God calling into a clearer direction, and by August, 1964 Joe was finishing his reporting days and Marilyn was interviewing and accepting a teaching job in the Robbinsdale, Minnesota school district.  Off to the seminary it was!  But only for the theological education it would provide, not with the idea of “going into the ministry”.  That was not for him, regardless if his father was a Lutheran pastor, his oldest brother was a Lutheran pastor, and one brother-in-law was a Lutheran pastor!

The young family lived in a 39-foot trailer in Little Canada, Minnesota.   Fortunately several other seminarians lived in that trailer court also, so they could carpool to Luther Seminary across the northern border of St. Paul.  Teaching was an exciting challenge for Marilyn, and classes in Greek, systematic theology and the Bible stretched Joe’s always-searching mind.  Two years went by quickly.  They were pretty confident that after three classroom years at the seminary, a vocation would open up, perhaps in teaching for Joe, but he didn’t know.

What he did know was that by spring of 1966, there was a baby on the way.  How did that happen?  It had seemed that getting pregnant was not going to be easy, thus not an option, even though a sibling for Jonathan would be good.  And then….

Game plan had to change.  In that era, a woman did not teach late into pregnancy or six weeks after the baby was born; it just wasn’t done.  With Marilyn’s teaching employment in limbo, the family income was non-existent.  What to do, what to do??

After two years of seminary, the normal route was that the third year be “internship”.  Thus it was that Joe began to consider and be considered for internships, and the one he accepted was Maddock Lutheran churches in Maddock, North Dakota under the Reverend Elmo Anderson.  The Volds arrived in August and moved into the old parsonage, a large, square, drafty two-story frame house on the corner.  Next door was the new parsonage, a tan brick ranch house.  The church was three blocks south and downtown about four blocks away.  A tiny hospital was a block north of our house.  As a matter of fact, when we first arrived in town and stopped to ask directions to “the old parsonage”, all we were told was, “Go east on this street for two blocks, turn north, and you will find that house a block before you get to the hospital.”  Good directions!

Getting to know the folks in the Viking and North Viking parish was a delightful and absorbing task, and Joe plunged in with both feet.  He loved ministry!  He finally realized the eternal reward of standing alongside people in their hurts and griefs and joys, bringing concern, God’s Word and prayer to people needing to hear and needing to be touched.  This was where he belonged.  Preaching wasn’t such a strong gift for him, but entering people’s lives to minister and serve was.  The Call was taking on new form.

Meanwhile, the three Volds as well as many new friends plus Elmo, Norma, Joel, Robbie and Beth Anderson next door were eagerly awaiting the new baby due at Christmastime.  But he did not arrive until January 12, 1967, and that only, Marilyn is convinced, because she insisted Joe take her out riding on an unplowed field after an evening spent at the church in Bethel Bible Study.  However it came down, teeth-crunching bumpy ride or just IT WAS TIME, they came to the hospital and were given first-class treatment as the only expectant parents there.  I wanted to walk as much as possible during labor but that got old, and the final minutes of delivery I recall receiving laughing gas from the only doctor in town, Filipino Dr. Mimay, who was attending us. It is not surprising that Dan still causes us to laugh with his quirks and twists on life!

On the afternoon of Dan’s birth, Joe came to the hospital and duct-taped a baseball to the front of the nursery window with “Daniel Martin Vold” printed on it.  (I think Dan was the only baby born in Maddock that entire month, and he was the 39^th baby born in the whole state of North Dakota in 1967!)  Joe was setting Dan’s athletic propensity early.  Marilyn was getting acquainted with this very red-haired son, and diligently trying to get his right ear to stay closer to his head – seemed to stick out just a little too far.   But that didn’t last long, and he was perfect, anyway!

Within a day a huge blizzard hit the state, and the town lost electricity and as a result the old parsonage was really cold.  Marilyn and Dan had to stay in the hospital for a week until the storm passed.  That, incidentally, was a very stormy winter.  Uncle Dave and Elaine were supposed to come from Hatton, North Dakota the last Sunday in January for Dan’s baptism – but they couldn’t because of the snowy, icy roads.  In May the Volds took their first trip to visit Marilyn’s parents at their brand new home on Lac La Belle near Carlton, Minnesota, and that week, several people perished from icy snowy winds sweeping them off the wharf in the famous Duluth harbor, twenty miles from Grandpa and Grandma Elstad’s.

Grandpa Elstad.  Let’s go back to roots!  When George Martin Elstad was six years old, he was adopted by Rev. Ole and Mathilda Elstad.  George was the son of Mathilda’s sister, Lena and an Irish longshoreman Lena had met while visiting her sister Josephine in Duluth in 1904.  Soon after George was born in 1905, Lena met and married Christian Neuman, a house painter.  Ole and Mathilda were determined that the little boy not be raised in their “pagan” theosophist home, so George, even though he had been living with his grandmother Inga Jensen in a Minneapolis apartment, was adopted by Mathilda and Ole in 1911.  At the time the Elstad family had moved from the Osseo, Wisconsin Lutheran parish to the Lutheran church parish in Lodi, Wisconsin, but the family lived in the town of Morrisonville, ten miles closer to the state capitol of Madison.  There George had his first three years of schooling.   Then Ole was called to serve the church in Minnewaukan, North Dakota.  There were some whispers that they were forced to leave Wisconsin because George was the “love child” of Ole – that was a rumor his jealous brother John started.  John was on the old family farm near Franklin, Minnesota.  (Want to talk about returning to one’s roots?  George and Berenice Elstad moved to Franklin from Wadena in central Minnesota in 1952, as the principal job in the school had opened up.  Not only was Franklin the home address of the Elstads after immigrating from Norway, but Berenice’s parents, Andrew Loftness and Palma Nelson Loftness had grown up a stone’s throw away, on the Minnesota River which flowed right below Franklin.)

So George became a Minnewaukan boy.  Where is Minnewaukan?  Merely the next town over to the east from Maddock, toward Devil’s Lake, North Dakota.  Not only that, but the town directly to the west of Maddock, Esmond, was the home town of Thelma who eventually became the wife of George’s oldest brother, Alvin.  While at a church women’s meeting in Esmond, Marilyn was visiting with a lady who had gone to school with George in Minnewaukan.  She said, “We kids used to call him ‘bastard’.  Now that I think of it, that wasn’t very kind of us, was it?”

Maybe it isn’t surprising that George was also pretty lukewarm toward North Dakota.  He graduated from high school, went to St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, and never came back to the state.  Of necessity he had to occasionally drive through it to reach the West on myriad camping trips, but the drive always seemed interminable to George.

Volds are more entrenched in the Dakotas.  Joe was born in Clark, South Dakota, where his father John was a pastor and where he and Sylvia Bernice Hogstad met and married.  Joe’s mother, Bernice, died when Joe was eleven, and his father died the first year he was at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota.  After that, Joe claimed Carrington, North Dakota as his home address, as that is where his oldest sister, Connie Strand, lived.  Three of Joe’s siblings still live in North Dakota: Harold and wife Eunice, and Connie in Grand Forks; and Dave and wife Elaine in Hatton.  The middle child of the seven children of John and Bernice, Paul, was mentally and physically retarded, and he died in a nursing home in Northwood, North Dakota.  Bruce, Harold and Eunice’s son, is also a Lutheran minister, and serves in Carrington, North Dakota but started his ministry where his father also started, in Edgeley and Ellendale, North Dakota.

So for Joe and Marilyn to come to Maddock, North Dakota to serve an internship, and give birth to a son while living there, was simply a matter of returning to roots!  I started off talking about the roots of native Americans but also alluded to the trekking that peoples do, whether moving to where the ground is more fertile and hunting more abundant, to escaping scourges of ice or enemy.  Dan has been a trekker.  He wrote his first novel as a picaresque story that started in Cut Bank, Montana but moved ever eastward, based partly on his time spent with a Concordia College singing group, “Found by Faith”, touring churches in the summer of 1988.  After graduating from Concordia, Dan served for two years in a “tent ministry” in Luck, Wisconsin.  From there he returned to Park Ridge, Illinois and finished his first master’s degree at DePaul University in Chicago.  More adventure was a thirst, and Dan joined the Peace Corps, spending two years in the remote former USSR country of Turkmenistan.  From there he moved – not back to the United Stated, but to Prague, Czech Republic irresistibly lured there by the lovely Katerina Vackova whom he met while teaching English as a second language at Wright College in Chicago.  And there, so far, the trek has stopped, as the Lamkens have lived in Prague (now in Roztoky, a suburb) for eighteen years.  Dan’s journeys now involve traveling to major capitols of the world giving seminars on the International Baccalaureate program.

A person with deep roots in a land can go anywhere and be an influence for good.  That’s Dan.  What a Dakota man!