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David Barsness, CPCU Chaska 952-448-5028 |
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July 2012 |
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“ … Before it was Carver Park it was going to be Jonathan. Bill Maple called me at the fraternity to come and work for him -- he was working for Mc-Knight -- and so I got a bunch of fraternity brothers together to join me. Sounded a lot better than cleaning the Student Union." Who was Bill Maple? Replied Fred, "I knew him through a mutual friend from Excelsior in my college freshman year." The outside workload was taking its toll on Fred's school work. "My grades were not too good because of the working and also buck euchre," he admitted. "So halfway through my senior year, I called my dad and told him I couldn't make it any more, and my dad said, 'Why don't you call George Yetzer?' So I went over there and knocked on his door -- he lived on Rose Street, next to the folks -- and told him my sad story of woe. Then he went into his bedroom and I could hear him fumbling around, and he came out with $500 for me. He wrote it down in a little ledger. I think he loaned money to a lot of people." Why didn't Fred's own dad help with the college education? "I think my dad was land rich and cash poor," he replied. In fact, E.B. Plocher had purchased the little Lymon English lumber business and buildings in Victoria back in 1918, purchased the family homes in Victoria over the years, owned a farm on lower Lake Auburn, and built the Post Office Building on Main Street Victoria in 1962. Clarified Fred, "My dad did not own the Victoria Lumberyard where Fresh Seasons is now located. He must have bought the little old lumber store that used to be between the Notermann Building and Braunworth's Implement. There's a road there now." (That road, which is Stieger Lake Lane, was the old Highway 5.) In any case, Fred graduated from Hamline in 1962 with a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration and Economics. Then it was off to the United States Army for three years. "You could enlist for three years and have a choice of what you wanted to do and where to do it, or get drafted for two years and go where they wanted you to go," he said. "You were either going to enter on your own or be drafted. This was right before Vietnam. The draft didn't end until 1973. I was in Army Intelligence and worked in Frankfurt, Germany. I was two years in Germany and one year in the States. I joined in October of 1962 and got out in October of 1965." Then he entered the work force back home in Minnesota. "I was always three years behind everyone else who didn't have to go into the Service," said Fred. "I'm still mad about that, how some kids got deferments for various reasons. It wasn't fair. My anger about it comes out in a book I'm writing." Fred's penchant for writing is evident in his annual Christmas letters, and for years he also wrote a real estate column for the Victoria Gazette. Fred's novel is "a fiction thing," and could be done in a few months.
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Posed near the "Tudor-looking home" on Rose Street, Ruth Plocher, center, and five of her children (l-r): Wilfy, Jeanne, Fred, Marion, and Pat. Dorothy is the one missing. Photo taken on May 9th, 1943, probably Mother's Day. |