Many opt for life overseas

By Tom Hintgen (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published 12:00 p.m., November 9, 2009

Wyonne Maack Long, a 1960 graduate of Fergus Falls High School, has been working and living in Norway since about 1988. Long is among many graduates of high schools in Otter Tail County who enjoy living and working overseas.

Long went to school at Fairview Nursing School in Minneapolis after high school to become a Registered Nurse. She worked in nursing for a time, including time spent working for Northwest Airlines. Very active in her local Sons of Norway lodge, she also worked in alcohol and chemical dependency for a time in the Twin Cities area before moving to Norway.

“Wyonne also worked in chemical dependency there,” said her cousin, Gary Wigdahl, “in a nursing home and as a tour guide in the city of Oslo. She’s currently serving on a committee to call another pastor to the church she belongs to.”

Wigdahl said there are some things about the Norwegian health care system that Wyonne likes and there are things she isn't so fond of.

“Wyonne enjoys family history and has been instrumental in helping me and others track down genealogy and the like,” said Wigdahl. “She likes to spend time in the mountains of Norway with friends and relatives. Having spent all this time in Norway, she’s fairly fluent in Norwegian.”

Wigdahl said there was a time when he spent a good deal of time with both sets of grandparents growing up.

“I was much more fluent in Norwegian than Wyonne, but times change,” he said. “I appreciate what Wyonne has done in her life, here in the states as well as overseas.”

Wigdahl also is a 1960 high school graduate who, unlike Wyonne Maack Long, graduated from Rothsay High School. He was a reporter for the Daily Journal when he attended what was then Fergus Falls Junior College, now MSCTC, from 1960 to 1962. He was in the first M State graduating Class of 1962.

He later attended the University of North Dakota and the University of Missouri School of Journalism. WigdahI was among a group of 12 Missouri journalism students to take part in Missouri's Washington Reporting Program in Washington, D.C. Later, he worked as editor of the Grant County Herald in Elbow Lake and the Cambridge Star in Cambridge, Minn.

Wigdahl wrote and published “Twixt Hill and Prairie,” a centennial history of Rothsay, in 1982.

“Rothsay is sort of located between the hills to the east, and the flatness of the prairie to the west,” said Wigdahl, “hence the inspiration for the title.”

Currently, he volunteers in Rothsay at PARTNERS and the Rothsay Library Link. PARTNERS is an organization that’s part of the Living at Home/Block Nurse Program that assists people 60 and over. The goal is to help them live safely and as independently in their own homes for as long as possible.

Rothsay Library Link is beginning its sixth year of operation in affiliation with the Lake Agassiz Regional Library headquartered in Moorhead.

This coming year, in 2010, it will be great for high school classes from 1960, all around Otter Tail County, to gather for their 50th high school reunions. Amazingly, memories of friends and activities are fresh in the minds of many, even after five decades.

That’s certainly true for Wyonne Maack Long and Gary Wigdahl.

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