The family lived in St. Louis Park and that's where Carol met David Schaefer.  They met at the St. Louis Park High School which they both attended. 
"He had those blue eyes and wonderful smile," said Carol," but he was a mighty senior, Class of 1949, and I was a lowly freshman, Class of 1952, and I thought he never noticed me.  But I was wrong.  Four years later, when he was discharged from the Marines, he called me.  The rest is history."
Anything memorable about that first date?  "Yes," replied Carol.  "He showed up with a friend who was in a leg cast.  We went to a drive-in movie together, with me in the middle of them in the front seat.  David had a big scab on his face from the motor-cycle accident." 
After Carol graduated from St. Louis Park High School in 1952, she went to work for a AAA Automobile Club as a travel counselor.  "That's where I got my desire to see the world," she says.  "Then I got married."
She and David were married on August 6^th, 1954, at Holy Family Catholic Church in St. Louis Park, but not until she took six months of in-structions to become a Catholic.  Said Carol, "I was raised a Methodist, but I can't imagine not being Catholic, I've been one for so long."
The couple lived in an apartment first, then built a home in St. Louis Park where David worked in the police department.  Carol stayed home with the kids. 
"I was extremely busy," she said.  "I hardly had time to think.  There were no disposable diapers in those days and I had three in diapers at the same time.  And David always worked a part time job driving school bus, in addition to being a police officer, so I was home alone with the children much of the time.  When I had ques-tions I'd ask my mother and she'd always say she forgot.
"But my husband and I made a point of traveling a lot together - and with our children," she continued.  "We camped when our children were little because we couldn't afford otherwise.  But in 1973 we took our three youngest with us to Europe for six weeks."
How does a police officer get six weeks off?  "He had accumulated vacation days plus took a short leave of absence to do it," said Carol, who easily remembered their itinerary.  "We went to Amsterdam, Belgium, Rheimes, Paris, Normandy Beach, south France, Spain, Rome, Pompeii, Florence, Salzburg, Munich, Dachau ... which was very sobering for my son ... Oberammergau, Switzerland, the Rhine, and back to Amsterdam."
Also in 1973, as the six children were in school, Carol went to work part time at Pillsbury in Minneapolis where she coded and interpreted sur-vey responses and also worked in the corporate library.  "What is your favorite cake mix?"  "Where do you buy groceries?"  "Have you tried our new cookies?"
David, too, was looking for a little change in his routine.  Together they found it.
"We always wanted to live on water," said Carol, "and we wanted to move farther west.  I can still remem-ber the day we first came out to Vic-toria and found Kirke-Lachen.  It was a rare November day.  One of the attractions of this lot was that it had sewer and gas.  So we bought it and started talking about what kind of a house we wanted to build."
At the same time the Schaefers placed their St. Louis Park home on the real estate market.  "When we put our house up for sale," she said, "interest rates were 13% and 14% and nobody bought it.  The market was terrible.  That was in 1980, so we put it aside for a while."
It was in 1982 that the world of David and Carol Schaefer was forever changed.
"People don't realize the stress of a police officer," said the devoted wife.  "People know what they read in the paper and that's about it.  The doc-tors said his heart attack was from stress.  I think it was also related to rotating shifts and not having a normal schedule.  After 1982 he couldn't continue that job."
That same year is when Carol turned to full time work at Pillsbury.
"My husband had always been a sportsman," she said, "like his father who founded the St. Louis Sports-man's Club, and he wanted to enjoy whatever life he had left, so in the fall of 1986 he contracted the house himself and we moved to Victoria."
Their home in Kirke-Lachen, located on Kelzer's Pond, accommo-dates a sportsman ... as well as a reader and lover of music ... and someone who would end up living on a fixed income.  "It's a super insulated home," said Carol, "and with prices today I have to say, 'Thank you, David, bless your heart.  What you did, worked.'"
After living in their new Victoria home less than one year, the Pillsbury company downsized, and Carol's job was eliminated.  "They were a take-over candidate by a British company but it stayed known as Pillsbury.  I was able to retain my health care coverage, and I am grateful for that.  When I turned 55, I officially retired."  That was in 1989.
Meanwhile, David became pro-gressively weaker until, in 1993, his name was put on the heart transplant list at the University of Minnesota hospitals.  His death in the fall of 1995 meant Carol would live without her sportsman in this home overlooking wildlife and open spaces.
"After David died, my youngest son moved back in with me for three months," she said.  "He dropped out of college that quarter to stay with me.  And now he just helped me set up a computer this spring in my new com-puter room where I'm researching genealogy.


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