Minnesota to California, Fred and Joan Asche came to Mantorville

Fred Asche grew up on a farm in the Clara City area in a family of three boys and four girls. Joan lived in rural Montevideo with three siblings. Fred and Joan grew up living 17 miles apart and they met while roller skating in Montevideo.   
They say people do not remember things when they are very young but Fred remembers an incident when he was two years old. He was along with his dad while doing chores and when dad was doing something else for a short time Fred crawled up into the wood cattle water tank.  
His dad found him hanging onto the edge of the tank and scooped him out and brought him to his mother to get the wet clothes off and dried off on the porch. Fred said he observed a similar incident years later while talking to a neighbor at that farm when a young child needed to be rescued from a stock tank they had crawled in.  
Fred said his mother had an old wood chair that his dad had cut off the back that was used it to hold the rinse tubs when washing clothes with the ringer washer. Fred said he kept pounding shingle nails in the chair seat, so after a while the seat top almost looked like a metal chair.  
Fred graduated from high school in 1951 and helped farm with his dad plus also did some carpentry work. He volunteered for the draft and went into the Army in 1954 being stationed for six months at Ft. Knox, Ky. The army found out he was pretty good at carpentry so Fred was given a packing and crating specialty but he said he was mostly a truck driver while stationed there.  
He was then assigned to the army base at Kaiserslautern, Germany for 13 months so he spent two Thanksgivings, two Christmas and two New Year’s there. Joan said she quickly learned how to spell that German name when writing letters to Fred quite often. 
Joan’s dad was on the local school board and he thought it would be a good idea if she became a teacher to follow in the same career as her mother. Instead Joan started training for a lab tech position at Miller Hospital in St. Paul but found out when it was time to draw blood from patients that was not for her!    She started working at 1st National Trust in St. Paul and would walk a mile to work from where she was living in the area of the State Capital and St Paul Cathedral.  
Fred and Joan Loken were engaged before he went to Germany and they were married in May 1956 after he came home from the service.
The Asche’s started farming and they bought out his dad and raised beef, hogs and 1,000 chickens plus crops. The first tractor purchased was a IH 400 Farmall tractor and they stayed with the red line of machinery after that.  
The year his brother’s wife developed cancer, they were having a real struggle to get the crops harvested that fall. Fred organized the neighbors to finish up the harvesting and they plowed all the tillable crop acres on the 320 acre farm in one day. 
Joan said she had plowed on their farm many times and since they had two tractors and plows she was the only lady helping in the field, but many other women were at the house getting the food ready for the big volunteer crew!
The Asche’s four children were involved with school activities and 4-H projects and Fred and Joan were also 4-H club leaders and made yearly trips to the Minnesota State Fair with their projects.  In 1977 Fred came down with Guillain-Barre syndrome from a reaction to the swine flu vaccination.  
He said he had no strength in his arms and for a time he could not even lift a hymn book or pass a bowl of mashed potatoes at the table. Their children helped out with the farming operation whenever they could. 
Eventually Fred  regained strength in his arms, but it has had a lasting effect and eventually one of the reasons they got out of farming.
Joan was busy at home with sewing, meals and other work at their farm. They would go for appointments to a chiropractor in Redwood Falls and she would ask them if they were going to open an office in Willmar, which would be much closer for them. During a 1981 office visit they mentioned they were going to open a new Willmar office, and the chiropractor asked if she was interested in a job and Joan said she was. That was her job interview and she worked at the office for the next five years until they moved to Stockton, Cal. in 1986.  Joan’s parents had retired and when they moved to California in 1975, Fred drove the U Haul truck to Lodi, CA to their parents new home.  
While living in California, Fred worked for a Ford New Holland dealership as a mechanic for five years fixing choppers and hay balers. The next five years he did maintenance work for the owners of commercial businesses and apartments and said he did his share of painting covering over graffiti on the building exteriors. Joan worked for the St. Joseph Association, which was a group of doctors, doing medical billings, for the next 10 years.
After visiting Minnesota during a family gathering they decided to return to Minnesota as three of their children lived here and they were missing seeing their grandchildren growing up even though it was hard to leave her mother back in California.   
They moved to Kasson in May 1997 as their son Mike and family were living here. Fred started working for the local elevator and his first job was cleaning out the bunker filled with corn since they knew he could handle a bobcat. He started mixing and hauling fertilizer.  The spring of 2020 was the first time he did not do any hauling of fertilizer since they moved back to Minnesota. Joan worked for Mayo in the medical billing department and did this for 10 years until she retired.
Fred is a very accomplished wood worker as he makes hundreds of fantastic scroll sawed ornaments from walnut and oak each year in his shop. He has also turned out many wood bowls using a lath. When they moved from town to their present home, Fred said he did much of the work on the house except for the sheet rock installation.   
They moved into the new rural Mantorville house on May 17, 2008 as their family members had time that day to get the move done even though it was on the Norwegian Independence Day! Fred said he got his interest playing with wood between his junior and senior year of school when he bought a circle saw and that interest has continued for decades. 
Their son Mike, also makes a lot of great wood projects during the winter when the cement plant is shut down since cement is not delivered during those months. During that time he makes good use of the shop equipment. Joan used to do a lot of canning, baking plus sewing and crochet work for many years but gave up the needle work as arthritis in her hands makes it much harder to do.
Fred and Joan have been very active through the years with many church activities wherever they have lived and that has continued at St. John’s Lutheran in Kasson.  
Fred has been a member of the KM Lions since they moved to Kasson and has used his skills on many of the club projects.
Three of their children live in Minnesota with Mike living next door to their house and shop, a son lives in Stewart and a daughter at Rush City while another daughter lives in Texas. They have nine grandchildren, 11 great grandchildren and one great great-grandchild. Fred scroll sawed a wall plaque design showing all the names of members in their family which took him 40 hours to make but said he needs to add a few more names to bring it up to date.