Thorpe family returns to its fair roots

Inez Thorpe took her kids to the Steele County Free Fair last week, like a lot of moms did.

And like most children, it was their idea, Inez said.

“I think they wanted to bring me back here one more time before I pass on,” she smiled. “They always enjoyed coming to the fair.”

Her children looked aghast.

“I think we’d say we wanted to do it while traveling is relatively easy,” said Mike Thorpe, her oldest. “She’ll be around a while.”

Inez, who turns 91 next month, traveled from Massachusetts with her daughter, Janelle Tiernan; her other daughter, Valvette Thorpe, drove from her home in Indiana.

Mike Thorpe flew in from his home in Bellingham, Wash.

“We haven’t been here for 11 years …” started Valvette.

“…together,” finished Mike.

“It took just a little nudging” to convince their mother, Janelle said. “Then I just booked it” and told the siblings when to arrive.

The return trips are their chance to see “all of our family,” Valvette said. “They’re all here.”

It only made sense for their first stop to be lunch at the Aurora Diner.

“This is the church I belonged to,” Inez said.

They planned to attend services at the church Sunday and had been “going down Memory Lane for two days now,” Mike said.

His mother’s trip halfway across the country likely came as no surprise to any of her extended family – and it’s a big one.

Inez Prestegard was born to Irwin and Alma (Jensen) Prestegard at Owatonna Hospital in September 1932. She grew up on a farm about three miles southeast of Pratt with her parents and brother Olin. She attended a one-room country school through eighth grade, then graduated from Owatonna High School in 1950.

In a world of Prestegards and Jensens, it would have been natural to stick around Steele County.

But Inez wasn’t like the rest of her family.

“In country school, I was looking at ‘National Geographic,’ and I thought, ‘I want to go to Alaska someday,’” she said.

After a year at Gandy Company in Owatonna, Inez made plans to go to Montana.

That didn’t work out, so she spent a year working at Cashman Nursery – until she heard from a cousin who was in the Army.

He was stationed in Alaska, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Inez and her cousin’s wife drove from the Alcan Highway from Seattle, Wash., to Fairbanks in 1952.

Her parents, she said, “thought I was crazy, but I had the (travel) bug. I wasn’t going to marry a farmer, I knew that.”

Soon after she arrived in Alaska, Inez met Warren Thorpe, a California boy who was in the Air Force.

“He left just a few days after we met,” Inez said, “and I was there for about a year or more.” That includes a winter when the thermometer hit 57 below.

She came back to Minnesota, and Warren came to visit.

“Then he sent me train tickets to Colorado Springs,” Inez said. “My parents knew me by that time, and knew they weren’t going to stop me. They knew I was different from the rest of the relatives; the rest of them stayed around here.”

She and Warren were married in September 1953. Their son, Mike, was born in France, where they were stationed.

After Warren’s discharge from the service, the family moved to Mason City, Iowa, where he worked as an electrician. Their daughters were born there.

Still, Inez stayed true to her Steele County roots.

As a child, she was in 4-H.

“I showed a Holstein heifer,” she said, laughing, “and I took her to the state fair. I also made clothes and did embroidery work” for other 4-H projects.

As a young mother, “whenever we would come back to visit, we would take the kids to the fair.”

Those are the memories that have remained with her “kids,” too, who described their mother as “the wild child. She was the only one who left here.”

That makes the visits even more important, they said.

“When we were little, we came every year,” said Janelle.

“All of our cousins had cows and pigs,” said Valvette. “I remember going through the barns and seeing the Prestegard names.”

She also remembers doing her part for the Aurora Diner.

“We’d go to the church basement and boil potatoes to make potato salad for this diner,” said Valvette – who also worked her share of summers serving that potato salad.

“She would come in here and tear this place up,” said Janelle.

“She’s also the keeper of the artifacts,” Janelle said of her sister, who has the photo of a young Inez and her award-winning Holstein heifer.

“I have the picture – and I have the ribbon,” Valvette said. “They’re memories that I have, too.”