They met on the waterfront of Lake Minnetonka on a warm spring evening in May of 1958.  It was the Excelsior Amusement Park that called them and their friends to this waterfront location, but the rides and cotton candy quickly became a secondary attraction.
Said Dalles, "I was there with Dave Kaufhold and we saw these two girls.  It was one of those things where we said you take one and I'll take the other one.  I said I'll take that one."
Dalles and Karen went on a boat ride that evening in Excelsior Bay - "I was a big spender," he said with a smile - and before they parted that evening he asked for her phone number, but he didn't write it down.
"He was tall and handsome and we could talk about everything," said Karen.  'But I didn't think I'd ever see him again.  I lived so far away."
Karen lived up in Robbinsdale with her parents and younger sister.  Dalles lived down in Victoria.
"She was very attractive," said Dalles, "and I sort of remembered her phone number.  I kept calling until I got it right.  If I would have given up, we'd have never gotten together."

Karen was born on December 14^th, 1940, to Emery and Eunice Webber in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.  Her sister's name is Bonny.
"My mother was from Bemidji," said Karen, "and one day she said get me out of Iowa!  So they moved up to Minneapo-lis.  My dad had a variety of skilled jobs including working for the City of New Hope."
Karen graduated from Robbinsdale High School in June of 1958, just a few weeks after meeting Dalles Notermann at the Excelsior Amusement Park.  Then she went to work at the Butler Building in downtown Minneapolis where she operated a comptometer.  "It's an adding machine," explained Karen.  Dalles put it in different terms.  "It's the horse and buggy of the computer," he said.

Dalles was born on January 24^th, 1938, to Raymond and Lorraine Noter-mann of Victoria, the fourth of nine children.  In birth order, the siblings are Dorleen, Walter, Marcia, Dalles, Muriel, Joyce, Raymond, Marguerite, and Linnea.
Dalles grew up in a home on the waterfront of Stieger Lake, one of the three homes that was purchased by the City of Victoria about five years ago and demolished in order to make way for the 45-condominium building by Wensmann Homes.  It's called The Shores of Stieger Lake.
Next to the family home on Stieger Lake, just to the east of it, was a factory.  "My dad was an entrepreneur," said Dalles.  "We made all kinds of products - kite sticks, tens of millions of kite sticks, yard sticks, fencing, trellises ... That factory building burned down in 1950 and left our family in financial ruin.  In addi-tion to absorbing the loss of the business, I was also saddened by the loss of our family dog in the fire."
"We lost 100 electric motors that did the work for us," he continued.  "I had to take off a lot of school time to help build new equipment.  Then we got into making paint sticks and emery boards and expand-ed to the point where we rented space at the Creamery.  Actually, we were renting at the Creamery before the fire."
"Then my Dad bought those four acres east of town and built the Ski Factory," said Dalles.  It, too, is located on the waterfront of Stieger Lake, just down the shoreline east of where Dalles grew up.
"I helped my dad build it and then two add-on buildings.  It was 18,000 square feet of space - the warehouse, paint conveyor room, press room, boiler room.  All those products were being made and we built that factory about the same time that Highway 5 was going in.  Must have been around 1951.  Today the place is down to 5,000 square feet.  It's the original building there now.  It's concrete and so it lasted.  The curved roof was Dad's idea.  We made the round rafters ourselves, on the slab floor of the building that burned down."
For the last ten years, until 2006, that curved-roof building near the Welcome to Victoria monument, was home to Nature's Bounty, a nursery and gift shop.  This summer the building is scheduled to be remodeled into a commercial business for Polaris equipment. 
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