Ernest Lloyd Wahlen

family who lived in a farmhouse on the west side of Scandinavian Lake, in Pope County, Minnesota. The area was predominantly inhabited by Swedes, Norwegians and Danes to such an extent that Norwegian was commonly spoken in addition to English. Ernie was the youngest and longest-living of six children. He was named in memory of two cousins, Ernest and Lloyd Sather, who drowned in the lake. His siblings, in order of age, were Harry, Mildred, Chester, Kenneth, and Vernon. Not long after Ernie was born, the family moved to a farm directly south of the farm belonging to Uncle Henry Sather, Mabel’s

brother.

The Wahlen home had no indoor plumbing, so water had to be carried into the house and the family utilized “outdoor facilities” until 1939, when they bought the Olai Hitman farm. This property had a 65-foot windmill with a large tank on the hill behind the barn, and water was piped down to the barn

and the house. There was also a well 60 feet deep, equipped with a sandpoint—a piece of steel with holes that allows water to come in but keeps gravel out. The approximately eight to ten feet of water above the sandpoint was used for refrigeration, keeping the five or ten gallon cans of milk cool. Inside

the house was an ice box for other perishables. In the winter, ice was cut from Scandinavian Lake and kept in the ice house which was insulated with straw bales.

Ernie slept upstairs, which he described this way: “It was an unfinished room with cardboard fastened to the rafters to in sulate it a bit. I had an airtight stove in my room,” he said, “made of thin sheet metal, that I burned corn cobs in to take the severe chill off the air in the room. My room was furnished with a cast iron bedstead that had a straw tick mattress and homemade quilts.” His father Joel was up first in the morning and made a fire in the heating stove downstairs, so when Ernie woke up he would grab his clothes and run down to the parlor furnace and dress quickly by the warm stove. His favorite food growing up was mashed potatoes and his mother canned a number of vegetables from the garden, including corn, peas, and green beans. They raised wheat and corn but also had farm animals including sheep, some of which were killed by wild dogs. They also sold milk and eggs, and through much work and saving money they were finally able to install indoor plumbing in the house.

The Great Depression and the dust bowl days of 1933-34 nearly wiped them and other farmers out. Ernie remembers that the dust was so thick on the windows it had to be swept off regularly. Since he was the youngest, his older brothers often played tricks on him. For example, in playing hide and seek, he would count to 100 and the older boys were nowhere to be found because they had run off to the neighbors’ house.

There was always family worship to open and close the Sabbath hours on Friday and Saturday evenings. Mom played the pump organ and Chet played the piano while everyone sang. At church, his mother Mabel played the organ most of the time and his brother Ken sometimes preached.

During the winter there was always plenty of snow. Ernie remembered being confronted on one occasion by a snow drift about fifteen feet high in front of the Sather home. Just getting to their door meant passing through a sizeable snow tunnel that had been dug so as to go in and out. For recreation during the winter, sometimes several families, who all lived near by, would come over to the Wahlen farm for a skating or sledding party. A steep hill located on the east side of the property made for pretty good sledding. Having no money for toys, the children would improvise a sledding device from one of the tires or any other material that came to mind. They skated on Scandinavian Lake using clamp-on blades fastened to their boots or shoes. When they went to church or to town in the winter, it would be by bobsled, using the work horses to pull it. They all wrapped up in blankets and kept their feet warm with flat irons that had been heated on the stove.

Ernie attended the one-room Gilchrist Church school, attending first, third, and fifth grades there, usually walking the one mile from their house. Since the church school didn’t have upper grades at that time, he went to public school number 14 for seventh grade. The next year, when the family moved, he attended school number 34 for eighth grade.

Ernie, like some of the other Wahlen boys, had no problem going to sleep no matter where he was. He told of one time when, while driving home from Glenwood, he woke up to find that the

car had gone off the road and got stuck in a swamp five miles from home. He went to some neighbors and spent the night, and the car was pulled out the following morning.

In 1941, the year Pearl Harbor was bombed, he attended Maplewood Academy and graduated from there in 1942. His brothers were drafted into the war in 1943 but, being the youngest son, Ernie was not drafted to serve in the war and worked on the farm.

In the fall of 1943, Ernie moved to Lincoln, Nebraska to attend Union College where he studied for two and a half years. He went to church there with Einer Berlin, a friend he had met at the combined picnic that the Gilmore and Wilmar, Minnesota churches held once a year. He also worked as a cab driver

and making sandwiches at a sandwich shop. Since the college didn’t offer engineering, he entered the mechanical engineering program at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, working part-time repairing watches at Elgin. The $40 per week he made there was considered good pay but it also led him away

from his spiritual upbringing.

One evening, when he was 25, he went on a double blind date with two sisters—Edna and Leona who were sharing an apartment. Ernie was attracted to Leona and not many months passed before there was a small wedding at the courthouse in February of 1950. He began working full time at Elgin and it was during this time that Debra and Brenda were born, though he continued to take some night classes at the university. In 1958, at the encouragement of Edna and her husband Tom, the family moved to Portland, Oregon, where Clinton was born. Ernie had asked Tom, “Doesn’t it rain quite a bit in Portland?” to which Tom answered, “Yes, but it’s dry rain— you don’t get wet!” Ernie knew better but always got a laugh out of that. After passing his board exam, his first engineering job was at the Pump, Pipe, and Power Company in Portland.

At one point the family lived on a hill a few houses down from the Tabernacle SDA Church. On one occasion, the parking brakes of their 1949 Pontiac weren’t fully engaged and the car ran down to the end of the dead-end road, lodging between two trees which kept it from going over the cliff and falling twenty feet below.

The three children attended Hosford Elementary School, which was only one long block from their house in Southeast Portland, and later all three graduated from Cleveland High School. Some years after Ernie and Leona divorced, he had a reconversion experience and was rebaptized into the Tabernacle

Seventh-day Adventist Church.

After spending a number of years living and working as an engineer in Willits, California, he moved back to the Northwest, settling in Vancouver, Washington where he attended

the Hazel Dell Church. It was at this time that, while working as a literature evangelist selling books door-to-door, he met Wanda. She was taken with the books—and the bookseller— and was soon baptized. The two were married on August 6, 1982. While attending the Hazel Dell church, Ernie served as head elder, preached and often taught the Sabbath School class with Wanda serving as treasurer. It was also, to some extent, through his influence some years earlier that both Debbie and Clinton, when they were college-aged, decided to become Seventh- day Adventists.

When the Ridgefield and Hazel Dell churches were merged into the Whipple Creek Seventh-day Adventist Church, Ernie and Wanda attended there regularly, with Wanda serving as treasurer. One of his granddaughters, Heather Grace Wahlen, remembers Ernie this way: “He was kind and genuine, stubborn in a good sense, and proud of his children and grandchildren. I loved him very much and wish I could have known him more and spent more time with him. He was very special. He always had the sweetest sparkle, shine, and twinkle in his eyes. He had sincere hands and would never harm or hurt anyone or thing knowingly.”

On Friday evening, November 20, 2020, at 7:20 p.m., Ernie went to sleep in Jesus to await the resurrection morning. He is survived by Wanda, his wife of thirty-eight years, children Debbie, Brenda, Clinton, step-children Christy, Rusty, Mike, twelve grandchildren, and ten great-grandchildren, all of whom he loved dearly. And the members of these two blended families will miss him very much. He would invariably conclude his prayers with this request: “. . . and at last save us all in Thy kingdom.” It was his hope and fervent desire to see Jesus come and that his family would be together with him in heaven. May God grant this persistent prayer of his.