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Perky 95-year-old “instigator” ages well

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Though depression knocks at the door for many in dwindling Lake Lillian, Minnesota, where businesses and farms close regularly, feisty, faith-filled reformer and retired turkey farmer Gladys Bjur will have none of it.

At 95, Bjur (pronounced Byoor) still mounts her “horse,” a red, ‘97 Ford pickup, splitting a seam between her soy and corn fields and leaving a cloud of dust behind her, making her daily mark on this remote country town.

“I’m an instigator,” said Bjur, who has the credentials to back it up. “I tried to retire from writing my news column, but people say, ‘Don’t you dare. It’s the first thing I read.’”

You can credit Bjur with helping to bring Lake Lillian phone service, launch the Lake Lillian News, and build a retirement home and senior center, but her most notable contributions may be her progressive optimism, mayor-like vision, and contagious laughter.

As a committee member, she helped lead the merger of the town’s Swedish and Norwegian Lutheran churches, which didn’t happen until the mid-2000’s.

“We talked about it for seven years! I was so disgusted. I said, ‘Enough talk. Let’s do it.’ If it were up to me, we’d have done this years ago! But since Martin Luther, church people have been good fighters.”

Bjur has no tolerance for parochial pettiness. “Any time someone wants a change, there’s always someone who wants to squelch it,” she says.

Case in point: “At one time the only place for seniors to meet was the fire station. We played cards among the fire engines, for crying out loud!”

“One day the bank president and his wife offered to renovate a building into a real senior center. One lady said, ‘No, no, we’re fine here.’ I was so mad!” Bjur doesn’t go for Minnesota Nice. The next week she brought a team before the town council, and it was a done deal.

Despite her spunk, Bjur has had reasons to lose heart – such as when her farming husband Arleigh lost his arm in their corn picker, and when the 10,000-turkey farm was on the brink of closing, and again when Arleigh died. But instead of sulking, she has always made a setback an occasion for a second wind.

“Long time ago I decided that if I get down, I’d make a plan to do something constructive and fun, and not wallow in the mud,” said Bjur, a devoted Minnesota Twins fan whose television during baseball season is always set for the next game.

Seeming determined to get the most out of life, Bjur has planted or tended hundreds of flowers around her remote farm, traveled to every state in the US but Alaska, and now has even attracted an 88-year-old boyfriend, Harlan. “You don’t go places alone, ya know,” she said wryly, as if that ever stopped her.

She’s rebounded from vocational setbacks as well. Unhappy with the office work she’d been pegged for earlier in life by her bank president father and again by 3M, she proved at age 55 that she was not over-the-hill and would not be left behind.

“I hated office work. I’m a people person.” Bjur got training and took a job helping the developmentally disabled at Willmar Regional Treatment Center for 13 years and loved it, she said.

Bjur used her retirement, which is not a word in Bjur’s dictionary, as a chance to start Lake Lillian’s town newspaper. “We can’t afford a big-press publication so we’ve worn out every copier at the library,” she said smiling.

Everyone in town can quote her column’s mantra: “Every day in every way, I’m getting better and better,” originally from positive-thinking French psychologist Emile Coue, but attributed by Bjur to the “enjoy life” preacher Joyce Meyer who she watches on television every morning.

“A small town can be so negative. The loudest voices will take a proposal and ground it down to nothing.” Bjur avoids that attitude like the plague, saying the Christian faith helps her “rise above all that stuff.”

Column writing keeps her mind sharp much to the chagrin of a younger friend who visits to play her at Scrabble. “Can you believe that last week she got three eight-letter words in one game? Latrines, scanners and laudings! She’s amazing. So alert, and sharp as a tack!”

Bjur has stayed in remarkable shape physically as well, somehow finding time to lead exercise classes three times a week at the Senior Center.

“At first I made exercises up, and had quite a following. We marched and I was like a pied piper. It was lots of fun. Now we’re led by Richard Simmons on video.”

“She’s more spry than I am,” said her son Gary, as she lifted herself four feet up into the cab of his jumbo truck after their weekly Friday lunch at Mel’s Corner restaurant. “This is my favorite day of the week. I should have never left home,” he added.

At age 90, Bjur drove down to Mel’s to get a fishing license. “No one that old had ever come in and tried,” said the clerk. After several failed attempts to process her payment, with a line of customers waiting, he scratched his head and called the state licensing bureau.

“’Is she handicapped?” they asked. The clerk answered, “Maybe she should be, but she has more piss and vinegar than anyone I know.”

The problem was, based on a new regulation (and this is not an Ole and Lena joke!), Minnesota senior citizens now fish for free, but not until age 90! “The state employee had only one other experience with this!” explained the clerk.

But that’s how rare Bjur is, and even more, her way of aging. In a recent column she wrote: “At twenty we worry about what others think of us; at forty we don’t care what others think of us; at sixty we discover they haven’t been thinking about us at all!”

Actually, Gladys, we’d do well never to forget you.

© 2012 Todd Svanoe. Unauthorized reproduction of this copyrighted material is prohibited.


Todd can be reached via the Contact page.

 

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