Taking time to smell the roses

Ted Lund, the Whitefish Chamber's citizen of the year, spent a lifetime smelling the roses and just about every other flower imaginable.

The retired owner of Whitefish Floral loved every day of the 32 years he spent nurturing flowers in the greenhouse as his wife, Connie, now deceased, tended to floral arranging.

"Connie was a terrific designer," Lund said. "About the only time I came in the shop was for funerals."

Although he retired from the flower business, Lund never quit gardening or caring about the community that crowned him its King Ullr IV during 1963.

"Ann Betzman was my queen," he said. " She was so pretty - still is."

Colorful blooms surround a thick carpet of grass behind Lund's new home on Kalispell Avenue in Whitefish. In spite of a bad back, he wages war on weeds, yanking out intruders as he sits on a small stool.

Lund, who turns 88 during August, spent years working on the Whitefish Winter Carnival and the town's annual Christmas decorations. But pain from his aging back finally forced him to cut back to an advisory role.

"I made up my mind that I would go until I was 85," he said. "None of the old group is left."

Brandi, Lund's 12-year-old sheltie, found a shady spot away from the July morning sun as her master recalled his path from a farm in a tiny North Dakota town to Whitefish's adopted favorite son.

He bears the name of his Danish father as the last of nine children.

"I have one sister alive," he said. "She'll be 93."

His mother immigrated from Germany when she was just 13. Lund recalled his mother telling about looking back to her home as her father, carrying her trunk on his shoulder, walked her to the boat.

"She kept looking back at her mother crying," he said.

Lund said his parents, anticipating dark days ahead for Germany, wanted their children to go to the United States. To repay her $60 passage, his mother worked for an old aunt in Minnesota.

"She had to work two years for that," Lund said, shaking his head.

At 19, she married Lund's father. Their union produced six girls and three boys.

"Six of us went to college," Lund said. "I was so lucky I came from a good family. There were never any problems."

He earned an AA degree in horticulture from the North Dakota School of Forestry. It was an interest he carried from a boyhood spent tending a farm house yard full of flowers.

"I can remember so well I talked my folks into putting in a spirea hedge," he said. "It kept the cows out, but of course, the chickens walked right through."

After graduating from high school during 1934, he got a job with the Works Progress Administration as a recreational supervisor for the little town of Sherwood, N.D. He earned $60 a month, a virtual fortune during the Depression.

Lund was one of the few people in town to own a Ford Model A.

"I flitted around town in that with my friends in the rumble seat," he said with a laugh.

Lund and his pals would take his Model A to dances at the town's pavilion. He developed quite a reputation among the town's ladies.

"My friends would say 'Lund, you're the best dancer, you homely bugger,'" he said with a laugh.

World War II ended those carefree days. Lund was crushed when he was rejected during the first military draft because of an abnormality in his left eye. He overcame the problem during the second draft.

"The happiest day of my life - next to the day I married Connie - was the day I was accepted into the military," he said.

He landed on Omaha Beach in Normandy, France, but the front had moved on by that time.

Lund remembers that a group of German prisoners of war were assembled there, ready for transport. He was stunned as one tried to escape and was knocked down dead with a single, pinging shot.

The reality of war began there for Lund.

"I became a master sergeant," he said. "It was a medical unit."

He rose to sergeant major in charge of deciding which soldiers, from high-ranking officers to enlisted men, had enough points to ship home from war.

After nearly four years of active service, Lund's turn to return home came during 1946. He spent another 20 years in the Reserve, earning the Army Commendation Medal when he retired.

Before he left Germany, he received permission to visit his mother's family, provided he took a buddy and a weapon.

"We loaded the Jeep up with butter and eggs - we had a load when we go there," he said. "They were already partying when we got there."

Lund got discharged from Fort Dix and placed a call to his mother as instructed by his superiors. The operator found her at a Ladies Aid meeting.

He recalled his mother just went wild when the operator informed her that he was on the phone. She began shouting, "Sonny boy is home!"

His next stop was New York City with a soldier friend who knew his way around. Lund had the food he had dreamed about for years: a real lettuce salad and a milkshake.

Then the celebrating began.

"I got so drunk," he said with a laugh.

A stopover in the Flathead Valley while Lund was in the service convinced him he wanted to live in Montana after the war. He first got here when he landed a job at a greenhouse in Great Falls.

It proved a fortuitous choice of employment besides bringing him to Montana - he met a woman there who shared his last name before he married her.

He dated Connie for four years before he gave up his wild single life. He married Connie Lund during November 1951.

He laughed about having a wedding in which his bride had the same name as his best man, his brother Constantine "Connie" Lund.

A few years before the wedding, Lund had purchased - "for a pittance" of $15,000 - a house, greenhouse business and shop on Wisconsin Avenue in Whitefish.

"That was 1947," he recalled. "It was tough times here."