Obituary of Donald Carlyle Aamodt

Donald Carlyle Aamodt

May 17, 1935 – September 20, 2021

 

Donald Carlyle Aamodt died at Unity Hospital in Fridley, Minnesota, 10:52 a.m., Monday, September 20, 2021, with wife Karen and daughter Britt at his bedside and daughter Jennifer there with a little help from FaceTime.

He died but he wanted to live right up to the end, even with a stooped back, aching hips (particularly the left one with the old fracture), dental partials, hearing loss, poor balance, heart failure, kidney failure, diabetes, anemia, atrial fibrillation, aortic stenosis (propped open by an artificial valve), a partially amputated left foot, reduced movement in the left hand from a stroke, a wonky bladder that left him dependent on catheters and some other stuff. Then came the old man’s friend, pneumonia, and possibly another stroke that very morning of September 20.

That’s when Don decided to call it a life, at the respectable age of 86, and take flight to parts unknown. He left no forwarding address. So, if you find him guzzling lattes and working through his acrostics book at your local coffee shop, please let us know. Oh, and remind him to brush those crumbs off his shirt.

Don’s origins are easier to pin down.

One day, a worker from a CCC camp wandered into a store in downtown Chisholm, Minnesota. He was Ludvig George Aamodt, the son of Norwegian immigrants, on a hunt for something sweet. Along with jars of candy, he discovered the store clerk. Julia Catherine Champa was the third oldest of ten children born to Eastern Europeans drawn to Northern Minnesota by the prospect of work provided by the booming iron mines.

Julia couldn’t miss Lud. He was from somewhere else, which was a plus. They married August 17, 1934, and moved to Bagley to be near Lud’s family.

Don appeared nine months later, May 17, 1935. Born prematurely, he was just over two pounds when his parents brought him home. They nestled him in a shoebox and slid him in a cooling oven, where the radiant heat sustained his small, struggling body.

March 21, 1937, the Aamodt family was complete when brother Jerry was born.

The Great Depression had the country in its grips. One of Don’s earliest memories was of his father returning in the evening and his mother asking, “Did you find work?” The couple shared a look. Don, barely three, read the desperation that hung between them.

The brothers lived a boy’s adventure tale when their father became caretaker of the Bagley fairgrounds. For hours on end, they lost themselves in the small woods tucked inside the grounds, spying bird’s nests, uncovering beetles and worms under rolled logs and building forts. In quiet hours, Don also lost himself in books, particularly his beloved collection of animal tales Old Mother West Wind.

The best time of year was summer when the carnies and musicians rolled into Bagley. The fairgrounds came alive with the barnyard holler of prize-winning animals and the stink of their pens. Delicious food smells floated over the jostling crowds. Music thumped into the night. Lights spilled out of doors and twinkled on coins plunked down for lemonade and games of chance.

As the fairgrounds’ resident boys, Don and Jerry were pampered by the carnies and traveling entertainers. And as a perk of their cleanup duties, the brothers adopted kewpie dolls and other treasures cast away in corners and trash bins. These were magical days.

Lud’s search for work led the family to Glenwood. Then for a time, the boys lived with their formidable Grandma Kate in Chisholm, while their parents established themselves in Minneapolis. The family of four squeezed into an apartment on Spruce Place near Loring Park, until Julia landed a job at University Hospitals (University of Minnesota) and was able to set aside the nest egg that purchased their first home in nearby St. Louis Park.

Don had a keen intelligence and insatiable thirst for knowledge that left him bored with the plodding pace of school, and sometimes at odds with teachers that mistook his indifference for lack of ability. At home, he absorbed every volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and with Jerry often scrambled across the road to explore the creek and woods.

On a bicycle, he could go anywhere. That anywhere often led to Minneapolis with its majestic cinemas and the castle-like Central Library. Don hustled up the library’s marble steps to the second floor museum. He goggled at the pickled octopus, giant sea spider and fossils, before descending to the stacks on the first floor and the children’s section in the basement for books, books, books. The Oz books. The Andrew Lang fairy stories. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Maybe even eventually Thomas Carlyle’s three-volume The French Revolution, seeing as the British historian had supplied him with his middle name Carlyle.

After graduating from St. Louis Park High School, Don hit a roadblock in the shape of his mother. Julia had her sons’ lives mapped out. Don would pursue engineering and Jerry the seminary.

Don’s tactic for dealing with the strong-willed matriarch was to retreat into himself and quietly plot his own path. Only he still found himself at the University of Minnesota sinking in a morass of engineering classes. Fortunately, some well-timed failing grades and the worst toothache of his life provided an escape hatch.

By the way, Jerry never did put on that pastor’s collar. He applied to West Point, got in and that was that.

Don landed in the U.S. Army. He’d already spent a couple years in the Minnesota National Guard, 151st Field Artillery Battalion. So the transition to active duty was as easy as blousing fatigues. That was 1956, the same year as Gogi Grant’s “Wayward Wind,” a song that spoke to him: A restless wind that yearns to wander.

Boot camp was at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, in the flaming heat of July, which melted the mess hall butter into pools. Dad sawed through the toughest steak of his life, and went out on maneuvers with southern boys who thought he was from a foreign country because of his Minnesota accent.

He met his share of characters too. At Fort Chaffee, it was Screwdriver. Screwdriver got his name from screwing everything up, including losing his night patrol while on point. At Fort Huachuca, it was Conway and Brian, the battalion drunks, who used Don to bankroll their binges in Nogales. They were always punctual at paying him back, even if they hit him up again the next day. Don loaned money to a lot of guys at the fort, and only lost money once when his client pulled a scam at a bank and went to prison.

September 30, 1961, with his honorable discharge, Don returned to Minnesota for another stab at the university. This time he indulged his passion for history and anthropology—and found true love.

His mother got him a summer job as an orderly at University Hospitals. He was walking down the corridor when his companion, Roger, another orderly, swatted a nurse’s aid on the rump. Roger kept walking. But Don, flabbergasted, rooted to the spot. The woman shot up and scorched him with her eyes.

That was it for him. He tracked down this fiery redhead and asked her on a date. Karen Marie Mauritz thought, why not? After all, it was only a movie. But getting a seat proved something of a challenge. Don walked up and down the aisles, up and down. What was he doing? Ah, there it was. He guided her down a row to the only love seat in the theater.

June 15, 1963, Don earned his Bachelor of Arts degree and a month later, July 13, married his redhead from North Minneapolis.

The newlywed years were spent in Kansas City, Missouri. The barbecue was excellent. Then came Woodlawn, Maryland, and Don’s new job at the Social Security Administration’s headquarters.

Their daughter Jennifer was born, September 15, 1969, when the country was still abuzz with the Apollo 11 moon landing and Woodstock. Jennifer was perfectly happy being the center of their universe, so it came as a shock when a little sister, Britt, popped up a mere year and six days later. What next?

Well, there was another move, this time to rural Woodbine, Maryland, where the kids could romp in the backyard peach and apple orchard and Don could mow it. And Karen could plant two very large gardens and the whole family could weed them—to the relaxing cadence of the girls’ incessant complaining.

By now, Don had a fine beard and a bigger belly. Like his father, he had a yen for sweets. Chocolate-covered peanuts. Burnt peanuts. Chocolate sponge candy. Rum cordials. Black licorice. Black jellybeans. Those awful pink wintergreen lozenges.

Nights, Don could be found in his basement writer’s studio in the company of spiders and a humming electric typewriter. Books had been his great companions. He’d read Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars books and Robert H. Howard’s Conan and Solomon Kane stories so often they’d become a part of him. When J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings published in America, Don was first in line for his copies.

His secret wish was to write his own fantasy novel. He published two: A Name to Conjure With (1989) and A Troubling Along the Border (1991).

He found his crowd at the dozens of science fiction and fantasy conventions he attended over the years. He was the guy so excited to chime in with what the authors on the panel were discussing that he blurted out whatever he wanted to say. Wait. You mean I was supposed to raise my hand? Don had read every book they’d read and a thousand more. What could be better than talking books and movies?

In 1988, Don took a position with Society Security in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. He and Karen wanted to return to their roots. They made a home in Elk River.

Don Aamodt had a sense of adventure that translated in a love for travel and for getting up and going. He carried his own atmosphere of contentment wherever he went. He rarely lost his temper with people. He saved his tantrums for pens that went zinging off into space, cups that slipped out of his fingers, shoes that jumped off his feet, remotes that took him to the wrong channel and tipping ladders. Because the other thing about him: he had absolutely no coordination. Ever.

When the opportunity arose, Don took an early retirement and never looked back. Only sleeping in was not his bag. Every morning, he woke at the crack of dawn and sped to his new office, the coffee shop. He grew his hair into a ponytail, for a while anyway, and became Papa Don to the grandchildren he squired to lakes and fishing holes and Dairy Queens.

Don and Jerry lost their father in 1991 and their mother in 2012. After his mother’s service, Don examined his black suit. “The next time I wear this,” he said, “it’ll probably be my own funeral.”

Don took to old age with the same equanimity he brought to every other age of life. It was all good. He had a heart bypass. Then other health troubles cropped up. He had to give up sugar and salt. He had to give up driving. But his daughter Britt was around to chauffeur, even if she qualified for an Olympic medal in dilly-dallying and navigated roads like a stunt driver.

Instead of coffee shops, he was now going to clinic appointments and emergency rooms and rehab facilities. But then his health would stabilize and life went on.

“You know one thing I did right,” Don told Britt one afternoon as they drove home from a day of errands, “was marry Mom. We’ve always got along.”

Karen asked him not so long ago, “Where would you like your ashes scattered?”

He thought about it. “Bagley,” he said.

“Bagley? Why Bagley?”

“I don’t know. When we lived on the Bagley fairgrounds, that was a really happy time.”

In his last months, which he didn’t plan to be his last, he had a goal to re-read every Parnell Hall novel. Mysteries were his comfort books. He was also reading J.A. Jance and John Sanford, and doing his acrostics puzzles.

Those same months, he was shuttling in and out of hospitals and trying hard not to get impatient with his health, which after every hospital stay seemed to diminish just that much more. Britt was the cheerleader, encouraging him to get better and investigating options, and Karen the calm presence, providing nourishing meals and accepting what was.

Don went into the hospital, Friday, September 10, 2021. He wanted to get home. For a time it looked like he might. But then a stomach ulcer bled out, requiring an operation and five units of blood. Then he developed pneumonia. Then came a stroke on September 20.

Britt woke that morning to the most wondrous light, a pale orange that softened to yellow.

Don’s wife and two daughters were with him when the oxygen was removed. His eyes were half-open though not tracking movement. But he could hear.

“Hey, Dad, it’s Jennifer. It’s Jennifer,” his oldest told him. “I just wanted to tell you how much I love you. Okay? I love you very much. You’re the best dad ever.”

“All right,” he breathed out, which was totally him. And not bad for last words. He didn’t have to say I love you. He lived it.

As to that black suit, Britt fished it out of his closet and drove to the Cremation Society of Minnesota. “This is what he wanted to be buried in,” she told them. “It’s really huge now. He lost a lot of weight. But I think he’ll be flattered.”

Don Aamodt is survived by his wife Karen and daughters Jennifer and Britt. He has eight grandchildren: Tom (Sydney Youell) Lally, Brianna (Pavel Wlodarczyk) Lally, Nick Lally, Tim Lally, Nate Smith, Elizabeth Ehemann, Josh Ehemann and Adria Ehemann. And he has three great-grandchildren: Alice Lally, Ryot Lally and Florian Wlodarczyk

He is also survived by his brother Jerry (Pat) Aamodt, nephew Phil Marechal and family, niece Cheryl Pittman and family, nephews Stephen and Eric and their families, his aunt Gladys Groshel and his many cousins inside and outside Minnesota.

* * *