Irv Schroeder was one of a kind. He lived to age 90 years and packed a lot of life into all of them.
I learned to know him after he and his family first moved to Hillsboro when he bought the Chevrolet-Oldsmobile dealership on North Main where Hillsboro State Bank is now located. It was 1962. A few years later he built a new facility where USD?410 District central office is now.
He was one of Hillsboro?s biggest boosters wherever he went. He never met a stranger, and more people in this area knew Irv than anyone else I can think of. He was a people person in every sense of the word.
Promoting his business was at top of the his list and he never missed an opportunity. Even after his retirement, he still dabbled in selling cars.
On one occasion, probably in the past 10 years, I heard a cell phone ring during church. Then I heard a rather quiet, ?Hello.? Not long after I heard Irv say, ?No, I sold that one yesterday.?
He was the ultimate sports fan and seldom missed a game if one was going on. One thing I know, he was always very proud of his part in the state high school basketball championship won by Buhler in about 1940.
His bigger-than-life personality and gifted sense of humor will be missed for sure.
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Son Dan is taking classes at Central Oregon Community College to obtain his certification in Auto Cad drawing. Since he already knows how to build things he has decided to draw plans so others can build things from his drawings.
This year he landed an internship at a company in the area that constructs buildings for landfills around the world that recover methane as a fuel source.
Believe me, I am going somewhere with this if you will be patient. It is about the Menno?nite game.
An engineer with whom he worked went to lunch one day. The fellow?s last name happened to be Friesen. So it was a natural question to ask if the guy had a Mennonite background.
The answer was yes, but that the family had drifted away, starting with his parents? generation. Then he added that his grandparents had met at a little college in Kansas.
When Dan asked where in Kansas, the guy said Tabor College. It is amazing what one can find out if one just asks.
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This Memorial Day issue containing our twice-a-year Veterans Salute is different than past ones.
After publishing ?Our Nation Called? last year, we decided to compile all of the names that were included in the book, plus the ones we have been publishing already. By combining the lists, we had about 5,600 names in the new list.
I spent the past four days going through the lists to pull out the duplicates, but not remove any names that were already in our list. I don?t know if any of you have gone through that many names line by line, but it was a formidable task. So now the list contains a few more than 4,100, up from the 2,300 we already had.
If you find mistakes, I would appreciate hearing from you. The intent was perfection, but I am a little short of that, I believe. I tried to err on the side of caution, so there may be more than one version of a name for the same person, but I would rather have that situation than to leave someone out.
If you wish to share your comments or ideas, my e-mail address is joel@hillsborofreepress.com.
