Welcome  - I'm Dennis Odin Johnson, Odin's middle son.

It's not going to be easy for me to keep my talk about my Dad short, because he told so many stories about his past.... (luckily, I wrote down lots of them.) However, I will do my best.

He had a wealth of detailed information about our family's history and now we are the ones who have to pass it down to our own families. 

Tessa and I receive inspirational quotes via email from a friend of ours.   We have picked out a few that we think are just right for Odin.

George Elliot said "It's never too late to be what you might have been."  
That's true for all of us here today.  We should never give up trying.  

But now it is too late for my dad.  The good news is that he lived his life being what he might have been.

As we said in the obituary, Odin was a very special person not because he lived 100 years, but because of the way he lived that century.  

I want to highlight a few of the most significant events in his life.

Odin really was born on Friday the 13th, 1913.  I guess his living to be 100 and living a great life, dispels the rumor about 13 being unlucky.

He grew up in Alice or South Hibbing, where Hibbing is now.   He was the 2nd of 5 children, 2 boys and 3 younger girls.

His dad A.B. Johnson was a building contractor. During his childhood they lived in 3 of the houses his dad built along St. Louis Ave, now called 4th Ave West,  between the 2100 and 2300 block. Many uncles and aunts lived around them.

He spoke Norwegian until he started school at the Alice School,  which happened to be during World War 1.

He attended the brand new Hibbing High School as a 7th grader in 1925. Think about what that must have been like!

In 10th grade his father passed away from pneumonia at age 47, 4 days after Christmas.

In 11th grade, at 16 1/2 years old, at the start of the Great Depression,  Odin quit school and got a job at the Standard Gas station on 1st Ave to help support his family.

The next year, on December 20, 1929, he started working for Andrew Gohres grocery store. He delivered groceries, sometimes as many as 25 stops per day. He worked from  7 AM to 6 PM Monday thru Friday and 7 to 9 on Saturday.  Add that up and it's 63 hours per week  -   at $16 per week.

I asked him how do you sustain yourself when you work all those hours? He said he would buy a quart of milk for 10 cents, a dozen sugar doughnuts for 15 cents and proceed to eat 4 to 6 donuts with a quart of milk for lunch!

He met Marie Forslund around 1931. He was 18, she was 16 and a junior in high school. After she graduated, she worked in the office of Central Laundry and at Montgomery Wards and Odin continued at Andrew Gohres Grocery.

This was the depression but they both had jobs In 1936, when Odin was 23, Marie was 21,
they traveled 3 days on a Greyhound bus to Washington, DC, where Marie's sister had lined up an office job for her.  My dad found a job with the help of a Hibbing friend at a gas station in Georgetown.

On January 9th, 1937, at 24 and 22 years old, they married in DC. In September, Odin and his brother-in-law, Al, came back to Hibbing because Al’s dad was in an accident. The girls followed 3 months later.

In March, 1938 at 25, Odin borrowed his brother-in-laws suit coat and interviewed with 10 other men for a route salesmen job with Manchester Biscuit company and got the job based on his 7 years experience working at Gohres grocery store. Years later, Manchester is bought by Keebler.  He becomes the Keebler Elf. 

At 25, my dad started a career that spanned 37 years to his retirement at age 62 in 1975.

The stability of that job, which he grew to love,  Where he talked to all those people along the Iron Range and up to International Falls, provided the opportunity to raise 3 kids, and build a house at 36 years old.

World War 2 started and in 1943, the same year I was born, the draft called up my dad.  The day the busload of men were supposed to leave for basic training, they pulled 6 men from the bus and told them they did not have to go - my Dad was one of those men.

Flash forward thru 17 Presidents (4 of whom he saw personally), 9 grandchildren, 17 great grand-children and,  thanks to Larry and Patsy, 6 great-great-grandchildren,    thru anniversaries, birthdays, graduations and the like.

In 1996, after 66 years together, Marie passed away from dementia.  During her last 3 years, Odin took care of her,  promising she would not go into a nursing home.

At 96 years of age, my dad bought a new Ford (yes, he has been a Ford guy all his life - except for that one 1969 Plymouth station wagon) a new Ford Escape Hybrid - all black, heated seats, with Sirius Satellite Radio, playing Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett.

Last year, at age 99, he walked into the license bureau, took off his glasses for the eye test 
and renewed his driver's license.

Albert Schweitzer said:   
Success is not the key to happiness. 
Happiness is the key to success. 
If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.

My dad was generally a very happy person and he was successful.

Of course, we all have our grouchy times and he did too, but his happy disposition rubbed off on his family, his friends and whoever he came in contact with.

That's one of the things we loved about him.

One thing that made Odin especially happy was being at our Aunt & Uncle's cabin on Lake Kabetogama.  Whether it was ice fishing, hunting ducks in Tomcod Bay, skiing on the frozen lake behind his 1929 Model A Ford snowmobile, building things, or sitting on the dock fishing for walleyes, he was happy and had a smile on his face.

The cabin will stay in our family and we know his legacy of fun times will be passed on for generations to come.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said:  
The purpose of life is not to be happy. 
It is to be useful, to be honorable,
to be compassionate, 
to have it make some difference 
that you have lived and lived well.  

My dad did all of the above and was a happy man.  

Odin died peacefully on July 14, 2013.

Today, July 20th, is 100 years from the day he was baptized at Our Savior's Lutheran Church 
  
We will all miss him but we are so happy we had him for 100 years.