Willard Beaudoin, 97, Dickinson, died Friday, February 26, 2021 at St. Benedict’s Health Center, Dickinson. Willard’s Mass of Christian Burial will be at 10 a.m., Friday, March 5, 2021 at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, Dickinson. Interment will follow at St. Patrick’s Cemetery. Military honors will be provided by the Dickinson American Legion Post 3 Honor Guard. Visitation will be on Thursday from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. at Ladbury Funeral Service, Dickinson with a rosary & vigil at 7 p.m. The family will be hosting a luncheon following the Mass at the Heart River Retreat. They look forward to greeting guests there. In lieu of flowers, memorials may be given to Dickinson Catholic Schools.
James Willard Beaudoin was born December 7th, 1923. He lived with his parents, William and Rose, on their ranch south of Belfield. He began his education in a one-room school house, as was common at the time for children of country people. At 10 years of age he was sent to Dickinson to live with paternal grandparents, Alex and Cena Beaudoin, while he attended Saint Patrick’s Elementary School, beginning with the fourth grade. Shortly thereafter his parents moved to Dickinson as well, turning over the management of the nine-section ranch to Sam Kessler. “Jim”, as he was called in his earliest days, was an excellent student, an attribute common to pupils who began their education in country schools, as they seemed to be instilled with an extra degree of earnestness, reflecting the rugged, no-nonsense character of rural life. Although the attraction would take another twelve years to mature, it was at Saint Patrick’s that Jim first laid eyes on the beautiful, young Joan Steffes. After graduation from Saint Patrick’s, Jim’s parents were determined that he continue to receive a quality education, preferably a Catholic one. They chose Saint John’s at Collegeville, Minnesota. There, beside his studies and consistent with his natural leadership abilities, Jim established a Boy Scouts Troop. When Jim turned 15, the William and Rose Beaudoin family had grown to eight children. Being the oldest, it was soon evident that his strong arms were much needed at home. The following Fall he enrolled at Dickinson High School. After graduation from high school Jim eventually enrolled at Dickinson Normal School, the forerunner to the State College and University. Jim’s relationship with Joan had begun to blossom. But it was Joan’s turn to go to Collegeville, where she enrolled as a freshman at the College of Saint Benedict. The year in that collegiate environment had a formidable influence on the young woman. It prepared her for a motherhood of self-denial and the wherewithal to raise fourteen children while keeping them on the straight and narrow. The Twenties had long since ceased to “roar” and the “dirt” from the Thirties had more or less settled. But Hitler had his own plans and so did the Japanese. On Sunday, December 7th, 1941, the first Sunday of Advent, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. It was Jim’s eighteenth birthday. After being rejected by the military enlistment board the first time, because of his poor eyes, his second attempt was successful—Uncle Sam also needed men with good ears. Jim enlisted in the United States Navy. After boot camp he was sent to the University of Wisconsin at Madison to undergo his Radio Technician training. He became a Morse Code specialist. He and his colleagues called themselves “Ditty-Chasers”. Shortly thereafter he reported to Orange, Texas to board the newly built Edsall class destroyer escort, U.S.S. Fessenden, commissioned to proceed to the Atlantic theater, to provide protection for the larger, more vulnerable and prized gun-ships by tracking and eliminating enemy submarines. The U.S.S. Fessenden proved its effectiveness most illustratively by sinking a German U-Boot on September 30th, 1944. After several port calls, including those in New York City, where Joan joined him, and Guantanamo Bay, after Jim had contracted Yellow Fever, he received his discharge in the most unlikely port—the Port of Pearl Harbor. At his final port call in New York, shortly before completing his tour of duty, he went back to Dickinson and married his sweetheart Joan, who had been saving all his love letters, including the one with the encrypted information of his whereabouts, the true cypher for which she alone had. It was during this period that Jim began to prefer the name Willard, although one nickname, “Muscles”, acquired after having boxed at Navy “smokers” onboard ship, remained popular with some friends. After his discharge from the Navy, Willard and Joan were invited to make their home at Joan’s mother’s house, the beautiful, threestory, brick edifice at 221 First Avenue West bordering the downtown district. After purchasing three used automobiles, Willard and Joan started the Dickinson Cab Company. After the Cab Company had run its course, Willard became a partner in Home Furniture Store on Villard Street, later renamed Home Interiors. Thereafter began the greatest task of their long lives together—the rearing of fourteen children. In reflecting on the achievements in Willard’s long life, there are several decisive factors to acknowledge here. Willard’s own life sprang from already strong, well-attended roots—from parents and grandparents, pioneers in the purest sense of the word, imbued with a sense for survival. They were creative, ingenious, nimble, resourceful, self-taught, and wise. Willard’s approach to life grew from lessons learned from these forebears. He realized that his greatest responsibility was to continue promoting these lessons by example. Through this model behavior, his immediate family, friends and acquaintances would come to appreciate their value, adopting them to create tight-knit and enduring social bonds. His was not a concocted scheme, nor was it ever forced upon anyone. He simply projected it in all that he did, while his Catholic faith provided him with the structure necessary to support his every endeavor. He encouraged fairness, cooperation, and honesty, but also individualism, well-informed personal choice, and even non-conformity if it were constructive. Fairness and cooperation were tested with sports, which he encouraged and supported with each of his children. Well-informed choice required reading and getting the best education possible. He promoted political activism and debate. And his most constant affection was for music, because he fully recognized its innate ability to unite and elevate any atmosphere regardless of its mood. Besides numerous choral groups, both secular and religious, the well-known “Unclassified Four” Quartet were prime examples of his perpetual love of music. Each of these traits, talents, attributes and qualities he bequeathed to his daughters and sons. And so, the roots from which he grew matured and flourished into a vigorous tree, tended to by him personally at first, with hands-on supervision, and later, due to its proliferation, remotely, by fatherly council and constructive advice. What began as Willard and Joan’s sapling, has grown and continues to grow into a flourishing, multi-branched arbor, with the most colorful and varied foliage. In attempting to measure Willard’s personal happiness or satisfaction with life, we only have to recall his constant and diverse occupations, either his routine, animated accounts of a current project or his detailed plans for the following one. He was continually attended to by the loving and generous children and partners living close by—lifting his spirits at each appearance and sharing recent experiences with one another. Of late, Willard was particularly dependent on the loving care of Diane Auch, whom he truly appreciated. Nevertheless, since losing his dearest partner, Joan, he had frequently sought comradeship with distant friends and family. This wish corresponded well with his persistent wanderlust and love of train travel. Trains had a nostalgic factor attached to them—for they awakened memories of his youth, when riding boxcars to the West Coast was an adventure like no other, or his annual furniture buying trips to the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. So, whether it was a journey from Zürich to Rome, through Germany and the Scandinavian countries, or one of his numerous Amtrak expeditions circumnavigating the contiguous United States, he retained a wide-eyed enthusiasm over every kilometer and mile. And at every station he was met either by one of his 13 daughters and sons along with their partners, or one of his 47 grandchildren along with their partners, (just wait, we’re not done yet) or one of his 74 (and counting) great-grand-children—at least those who can walk. His arrivals were always celebratory, his departures melancholic. But these sojourns served a dual purpose: they allowed Willard a change of scenery and a mollification of his wanderlust. But more importantly, they renewed or reaffirmed any near-etiolated, paternal ties, before they could wither from disuse or malnourishment. And what a delightful array of amusing, talented, charismatic progeny Willard had to choose from: professionals in various service industries, health care specialists, nurses, several experienced, astute, much-lauded teachers, a lawyer, photographers, several talented home economists, agriculturalists, artists, mapmakers, musicians, pharmacologists, designers, Catholic priests, commissioned and non-commissioned military officers, architects, social activists, scientists, chemists, dieticians, vocalists, instrumentalists, songwriters, entrepreneurs, product designers—all spread out across the United States and Europe. For Willard, these women and men represented the obvious consequence of what he and Joan had set out to do some seven decades earlier. He was delighted. He was satisfied. And, in turn, he was deeply admired and loved. Willard saw life as a gift, a unique and exclusive opportunity to explore the meaning of being alive, along with a desire to share it with others. And that is exactly what he did. It was early in the morning of February 26th, 2021 when Willard, lying peacefully, eyes closed, his energy slowly diminishing with each heartbeat, took the hand of the one son who could make him laugh more unrestrained than any other, and squeezed it with the very last bit of his fading strength, and then simply let go. But, true to the phrase, as it is applied to any old sailor or veteran of war, Willard did not die, he simply faded away.
