1951 FHS grad maintains connections

By Lori Fischer Thorp

Correspondent

Mary Patricia “Pat” Ebeltoft Pfeifer was born 90 years ago, in the upstairs apartment of her parents’ City Drug Store on Main Avenue in Frazee.

Though the years have taken her to other communities, Pat, who’ll turn 91 this month, cherishes recollections about the place she first called home, and the people she has known here.

Dr. Arndt, whose nurse was Katherine Ketter and whose clinic was where the current dental clinic sits, attended at her birth. In later years, Pat said, both the clinic and the City Drug Store building—which became home to later generations of businesses—were claimed by fires.

“That building was added on to so many times,” Pat said of her birthplace, which her parents William H. Sr. and Matie Ebeltoft purchased from Casey M Jones in 1928, “They’d have had a heck of a time stopping that from burning.”

Pfeifer is a wealth of information about the community. 

“I was thinking about Frazee, about all my landmarks,” said Pat in a recent phone interview from her home in Kennewick, Wash. 

The dam she often crossed on the way to a nearby lake where her parents later owned a home is no longer there; the schools she attended and taught at have been demolished and rebuilt, and the water tower is a different one from what she grew up with.

Even “the Methodist Church where I was married” has had its building repurposed, and Pat said “I think that’s wonderful. It serves a need” with the new Cornerstone: Frazee Community and Youth Project being housed there.

Changes are inevitable, and throughout her very busy life, Pat has kept abreast of her hometown’s transformations through visits and her subscription to the Frazee-Vergas Forum newspaper. 

Sometimes, she said, weekly copies are delayed “and sometimes I don’t even get it. I do enjoy getting the paper because I have such a fond remembrance of Frazee, because I grew up right there on Main Street.”

Pat chuckles at memories of her early childhood, when she’d pay regular visits to neighboring businesses such as the grocery store, tailor, and the Baldwins at their insurance agency. 

“I certainly enjoyed growing up there,” she said. “I have quite a history in Frazee. I grew up above the drug store, waited on customers, went to school there, and later taught there.

“My childhood was a very happy childhood,” she continued. “I love Frazee, it’s a wonderful place to have grown up.”

She recalls those times in the 1930s and 40s as “safe, not the controversy and dealing with some of the stuff that’s currently in society where people talk negatively, it was very positive.”

Frazee is also where she met Irvin Pfeifer, FHS Class of 1950, who later became her husband and lifelong adventure partner. The couple had three children, Mike, Tom and Sue, whose families have provided eight grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, with another, a boy, due early in 2024. 

“I found out his middle name is going to be Irvin,” she said with pride. Of these additions to her family through the years, she said, “They’re such a joy.”

Pat has captured the pieces of her life on Storyworth, which Mike gave her as a gift one year. The system includes weekly writing prompts, and the family had Pat’s answers published into a number of copies.

One of the prompts was “Who do you admire?” to which Pat answered three Frazee people, her mother-in-law Olva Albertson, her sister-in-law Rose’s brother Martin “Bud” Fischer, and the couple’s good friend, Tony Dretsch.

Each of those individuals were faced with daunting life obstacles but maintained positive, inspirational outlooks through whatever they encountered. 

Dretsch and Irv were part of a group of friends who “drank too much beer one night,” decided to enlist in the military, and “nobody would back out” so they all ended up doing stints in the service. Dretsch was later paralyzed in an accident.

Fischer contracted polio at age 4, but managed a thriving resort into his late 80s.

Albertson was widowed, with a step-daughter and three children, when Irv was just 2 ½ years old. Her husband was suffering abdominal pain but insisted on doing one more round of the field. His appendix burst and the resulting peritonitis was “before they had antibiotics,” Pat said.

Pat said she got to know so many people in Frazee through the family business and going to school here, as well as “in college, I was the lifeguard at the Frazee beach. I got to teach swimming, and I got acquainted with more people” such as the Watson family, she said. 

“It’s nice to see how people are doing back there,” she said of newspaper articles. “It’s fun to associate the names, and who is married to who.”

Pat attended what was then called North Dakota Agricultural College for her teaching degree. 

“It was the cow college,” Pat said. “Irv’s joke was I was elected the girl most likely to sack seed because by the time he graduated they had changed the name” to North Dakota State University.

After earning her 1955 degree, she “came home to Frazee and taught home economics.” She and Irv married after her first year teaching, she taught a second year and “then Irvin got the GI bill and was going to engineering school” and the couple started their family and lived in Fargo.

After Irvin’s graduation, he entered the nuclear industry and they moved to Idaho Falls, Idaho, “where he had a job at the nuclear test site there.”

Then “we moved from Idaho Falls to Las Vegas where they were working on the nuclear powered rocket engine for interplanetary travel.”  

The program failed after six years, and the government pulled funding. 

“There’s a lot of stainless steel out there in the desert,” Pat said.

Irv transferred to a division of Westinghouse and the family moved to DePere, Wis., just south of Green Bay, from where he worked on a nuclear power plant in Point Beach, near the Michigan border. There, the family enjoyed having a horse and three ponies, and when Irv’s project there was finished, the Pfeifers moved to Hopewell Junction, N.Y.

“We were about three years max in one place,” Pat said. “I just hated the sight of a moving van,” she said. “The company moved us always. We knew we were going to be transient for a while.”

Through the family’s relocations, Pat would volunteer as her children’s classroom mother. 

“I wanted the teachers to know their names before we moved again,” she said.

Finally, when Mike was going to be a ninth grader, Tom a seventh grader, and Sue a fifth grader, Irv got a job with Westinghouse that transferred him to a Richland, Washington test site.

With the move to Washington, Kennewick became the family’s permanent home. 

“Irv was interested in bees,” Pat said, and that “was sort of an anchor. You can’t put a bunch of bees in a moving van.”

Pat returned to college, earned her Early Childhood Education degree, and spent 15 years teaching first grade. 

“I got to teach them to read. It’s just a joy when the light goes on,” she said.

The Pfeifers stayed busy with their many interests. 

“We both enjoyed the process of building,” Pat said. 

The family constructed a cabin on Priest Lake, Idaho, which they later sold and then bought different property on which they again started to build. 

“We didn’t quite complete it,” Pat said, before Irv passed away. “It’s ready to be finished off.”

Mike makes his home in Seattle, Tom is in Cocolalla, Idaho, and Sue, a retired teacher, lives about a block and a half from Pat. 

“She comes by every day and does my grocery shopping. I’m still living in my home that we had built here in ’73,” Pat said.

She boosted her independence recently with an electric scooter, and she still maintains contact with her classmate, Ruth Dunn Morrow. The pair are the only two surviving classmates out of a group of six friends who had stayed in touch through the years. 

Ruth married Gerry Morrow, who was “one of Irv’s attendants” at the Pfeifer’s wedding. The couple “had known each other but had never really gone out with each other,” Pat said, until the Pfeifer’s pre-wedding dinner “was the beginning of their romance.”

Pat and several family members made it back to the Frazee area to visit friends and local family this past summer. 

“My big trip this year is to try to get me to Grand Junction, Colorado, to attend the wedding of one of my grandsons,” she said. 

Her son Mike is making flight and other travel arrangements.

Pat loves connectedness, including visits with the great-grandchild who lives closest to her.

“I just love to have her come over,” she said. Keeping contact with family and friends, “Just gives you perspective.”

She’d also enjoy seeing the currently discontinued column of the police chief return, because she thought it was funny, entertaining and educational.

“Let’s look at the positive,” she concluded.