It was a crisp November afternoon in Lindsborg nine
years ago, Sunday the 9th, fresh and clear, and had it
turned wicked with a raging storm, all those people would
be there anyway. Scores flowed into Bethany Church fellowship
hall, one or a pair or a cluster at a time, every one
of them eager to wish The Rev. Martin Ringstrom a happy
birthday on his 100th.
He was vibrant, natty in dark suit and collar, gracious as
well-wishers, some with families – at times three or four
generations – surrounded him and moved in to shake his
hand, to remark on how well he looked. He took in the
handclasps and hugs, a hundred years straight as a rod and
looking far better than a lot of the younger grandpas.
I had met him several years earlier, and as we encountered
each other about town our chats became conversations,
evolving to longer ones at the newspaper office. In
time we began to meet at his little house on South Main.
We discussed history, the great philosophers, literature,
even politics. The meetings were for me a kind of tutorial,
at times haunting but ever challenging, enlightening. His
home was a library, and at a large table piled with stacks of
letters, mounds of books and folders and notes, Ringstrom
was the tutor and I the young disciple and polemicist.
It wasn’t all esoteric. Once, when I asked him about
Louise, his late wife, he remembered with a fleeting grin
the first time he met her: “I was attending a (Lutheran)
conference meeting at McPherson and at a meal, three
Segerhammar sisters were sitting at a table across from
me. The one in the middle looked kind of special – don’t
get me wrong, the other two were nice – but Louise was
special. That was the first time I felt the spark.”
That was in the late ‘30s – 1938 or ‘39 – about a year
before Louise was working summers in Colorado; later, a
Bible camp at Estes Park would bring them together again,
and they would become inseparable and marry later, in
1942.
Ringstrom had thrived over ten decades, a span of
countless wars, depressions and recessions, of 18 presidents
from William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson
through George W. Bush and into Barack Obama. He
witnessed and embraced inventions from the telephone
through the micro-chip. He learned to surf the first radio
dial and then the Internet, and could recall the dates of his
confirmation and the exact years of parish service in five
states – and with all that gone by, he remained fixed on
curiosities to ponder, questions to ask, a man who, at 100,
remained busy beyond any norm.
If there were a message from Martin Ringstrom, his
firm voice, his exhaustive and catholic recall, his grace, it
was that faith and intellect are beyond the changing strictures
of politics and slippery codes of technology. A good
brain, he might have said, will temper the best software
any day.
This Lutheran pastor and scholar had mastered Hebrew,
Latin and Greek among the requirements at Augustana
Theological Seminary in 1931, at Rock Island, Illinois.
His long, elegant fingers ran over a photograph of his
class at that seminary. He recalled each name – his best
friend, a roommate, a Chinese student, a black student, the
instructors, the bishop, a pastor, wives, other faculty and
staff. Every name: There were Hilmer Larson and Leroy
Broberg, both from Lindsborg, and Herbert Johnson,
whose son, Herb Jr., pastor at Bethany Lutheran Church,
asked Martin to officiate at his father’s funeral. (“I’m
96, preaching at the funeral of a 97 year-old,” Ringstrom
recalled.)
He was born Nov. 9, 1908 at Bertrand, Neb. Ringstrom’s
father was a rural mail carrier and a farmer, and his mother
was an elementary public school teacher before their
marriage. Ringstrom was ordained as a Lutheran pastor
on June 10, 1934, at Bethlehem Lutheran Church in
Minneapolis, Minn., and served parishes in Montana,
Colorado, Kansas (First Lutheran Church, Manhattan,
1949-54), and in Nebraska and Michigan.
“I was in the ministry eight years before I got married,”
Ringstrom said. “My first call was to Helena, Montana,
in 1934. I was there until 1939, when I went to Highlands
Lutheran in Denver.”
Here things got interesting. Colorado was part of
the Kansas Conference, and Louise’s brother, Carl
Segerhammar was pastor at Longmont. “About 1940 or
41, Louise was working in Colorado during the summers.”
She was in charge of the Kindernook in Estes Park, where
the American Lutheran Conference also had a Bible camp;
in the evenings, Louise came to the camp. She and Martin
fell in love. They married on June 18, 1942, at Bethany
Lutheran Church in Lindsborg.
Martin and Louise Ringstrom retired in Kalamazoo,
Mich., in July 1973. In retirement Martin served a number
of interim pastorates including, as he quickly recalled
(without notes) Prince of Peace, Portage, Mich. (seven
months); Our Redeemer, Kalamazoo (a year); “occasional
Sundays here and there in Michigan when pastors were
gone.”
Their son, Stephen, died in December 1987. The
Ringstroms lived in Kalamazoo until September 1988,
when they moved to Lindsborg. Ringstrom would conduct
services at Bethany Home when The Rev. Don Hawk was
hospitalized, or on vacation. Louise died in March, 2001.
Ringstrom was delighted with his life. “Oh, sure, I
have some regrets in what I call sins of omission, things I
wanted to do but was unable to accomplish…”
His mother was fiercely passionate about poetry, its
meaning, its magic. He recalled this as he ran his fingers
over the photograph of his seminary class. He was the sole
survivor – “the last leaf,” he said. “I have to think about
that wonderful poem from Oliver Wendell Holmes …”
And then Martin Ringstrom recited all 48 lines, eight
stanzas, word for word, a poem that concludes:
And if I should live to be
The last leaf upon the tree
In the spring,
Let them smile, as I do now,
At the old forsaken bough
Where I cling.
Ringstrom then cut a sly wink. “That pretty much says
it, I suppose.”
It was later, a couple of months after that grand birthday,
