DEATH ANNOUNCEMENT
WENDELL ARTHUR HAGEN
2 November 1940 – 14 May 2024
Winneshiek County farmer, Army veteran and the neighbor whose coffee pot was always on
It rained the morning Wendell Hagen was born, in November 1940, and his mother liked to say that was why he never worried about weather: he had seen the worst of it before he could crawl.
He was born on the family farm outside Decorah, in Winneshiek County, Iowa, the grandson of Norwegian immigrants who had broken the same ground in 1884. He raised calves for FFA at Decorah High School, took a short course in farm management at Iowa State, and in 1961 was drafted into the US Army and sent to West Germany, where he spent two years repairing trucks near the Fulda Gap and learning that the Cold War was mostly mud and waiting. He came home in 1963, married Marilyn Jorgensen that autumn, and took over the farm from his father: eighty acres, a dozen Holsteins and a borrowed tractor.
Over sixty years he stretched those eighty acres to four hundred, moving from dairy to corn, soybeans and a few beef cattle, and kept every fencepost straight by stubbornness. When the Upper Iowa River rose in June 2008, he drove a hay wagon through knee-deep water to move a neighbor's calves, then went back and did it for another neighbor, and he never mentioned it at church. He did not lock his kitchen door. The coffee pot was always on, and a seed salesman, a lost tourist and a grieving widow all got the same cup and the same unhurried listening.
He made lefse every Christmas, fished for walleye on opening weekend, followed the Minnesota Twins with patience bordering on faith, and planted a hundred oak seedlings every spring for thirty years “so somebody's grandkids can climb them.” He was officially retired in 2015, in the sense that his son Eric did the driving.
Wendell died on 14 May 2024, aged eighty-three, on the farm where he was born, in the middle of planting season, which his family agrees was the one time he would have chosen. He is survived by Marilyn, his wife of sixty-one years; his daughter Karen and son Eric; five grandchildren; and his brother Orville. He will be buried with military honors in the churchyard at Trinity Lutheran, a mile down the gravel road.
“Plant the oaks anyway. Somebody's grandkids will want to climb them.”