Transcripts

LEIF ENGER: Beverly Rolfsrud lives in a weathered gray house with green trim on a steep hill some miles West of Alexandria. Far below lie the twisting shores of Little Lake Rachel. The scene is distinctly fjord-like, a fitting place for Beverly and her husband to pursue what they loved best.

Erling Rolfsrud was a writer. Beverly is a musician.

[PIANO MELODY]

BEVERLY ROLFSRUD: We met in 1939. We were both taking a music course at the Concordia Conservatory of Music in Fargo. We laughed and we fooled around on our dates and had fun on a nickel ice cream cone. He wanted to have fun all the time. I thought, well, gee whiz. I was serious-minded. I was earning money to get myself through college. And here he was-- he had a job and he was just spending money. And [LAUGHS] oh, he was free, it seemed like to me. And it lightened my life quite a bit.

LEIF ENGER: Beverley married Erling Nicolai Rolfsrud in 1941 and learned something his readers and students would later discover. Erling was a compulsive observer of his own life and surroundings. Raised on a North Dakota farm by Norwegian parents, most of his books told the stories of prairie settlers. Beverley says Erling feared the way of life he'd grown up with would be forgotten if he didn't preserve it.

Yet, his stories were more than historical portraits. Often, they showed the conflict he'd felt as a born communicator raised by stoic Scandinavians, as a barefoot farm boy with literary ambitions.

BEVERLY ROLFSRUD: He hated farming, which he had to help with. His father died when he was only seven, so his 14-year-old brother became the boss. And he and his sisters had to help the brother and mother to survive. But he did not like. The dust was in the boy's eyes. And he describes how he was following the plow with and the horses. He didn't like it.

He wanted to go to college. He wanted to be educated. And he wanted to write. And he wanted to stun the world with a wonderful novel.

LEIF ENGER: Rolfsrud did write a novel as a teenager, a book he later described as A Melodrama About People I'd Never Met in a Place I'd Never Seen. The novel was rejected. And thereafter, Rolfsrud work turned inward.

He went to college, learned to play the organ, and wrote regional columns and articles. He moved his growing family to Minnesota, and wrote full time for five years. Beverley says his determination to write from experience gave his work a candid eloquence that had won him a small loyal readership while denying him the wider acclaim he wanted.

BEVERLY ROLFSRUD: We had to publish our own books. I think we averaged about $1,800 a year on all those books. Then I said, we got six children. They're going to have to be educated. Can't you get a job? So he did. He went teaching high school. And he taught 18 years at Alexandria.

He used to quote this saying, "A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country." But you know, in his home county, they are buying his books like hotcakes. And they bought them before. They were very loyal to Erling.

LEIF ENGER: When Beverly refers to Erling's own country, she's talking about North Dakota, that's where most of his books are still sold. And orders keep coming in for the dozen titles Beverly keeps in print.

Rolfsrud continued writing while teaching full time. In 1963, he published A History of North Dakota, his television documentary series, Red River Land, won a prestigious Ohio State award in 1969. He retired in 1978 and immediately commenced writing a column for the Alexandria newspaper.

By the time he died last year of cancer, Erling Rolfsrud had published 31 books. And he left behind an unfinished manuscript, which was like nothing he'd written before.

BEVERLY ROLFSRUD: When he died, a week beforehand, he had said, finish the book. And he had a small account with some money in it. He said, take that and pay for it.

LEIF ENGER: Rolfsrud's ruud's last book, Closed The Door Gently, records the final months of a dying man, a man sustained by friends and family and his Christian faith. Beverley delivered the incomplete manuscript, as Erling had asked, to the Douglas County Historical Society, along with some notes.

To finish the book, the society turned to Minnie Osterholt. Minnie had taken writing classes from Rolfsrud, had known him for 20 years, and at 82, felt she could slip into the story almost as easily as Rolfsrud himself.

MINNIE OSTERHOLT: I do believe that when he sent that book here, that he expected my hand to have something to do with it. He knew that I could do some writing and that I would be sympathetic to what he was trying to say. As I say, I feel as if it was an assignment that I was supposed to do, so I had to do it.

LEIF ENGER: Minnie Osterholt says, when Rolfsrud started Closed The Door Gently, she thought it was a bad idea. A man at the end of his life, writing about the end of his life, she worried the job would depress him. She was surprised on getting the manuscript to find not sorrow, but courage and humor, and the grace, Beverley Rolfsrud says, her husband never lost. Erling wrote the last chapter himself. He knew how he wanted it to end, simply and with dignity.

Erling Rolfsrud died August 21, 1994. Close The Door Gently is published by Lantern Books and available from the Douglas County Historical Society in Alexandria.

Leif Enger, Mainstreet Radio.