50 years ago
September 1969
• Eighty acres of farmland owned by the Striepke family, several hundred yards upstream from the Redwood River dam, was chosen as the site of a new Redwood Falls High School.
• Just before Morton High School was about to have its first football game of the season, groundskeepers discovered the chalking machine didn’t work. Their solution: they used several sacks of Robin Hood flour from the school cafeteria to mark the out-of-bounds and yard lines.
• Lenny Ostenson, a Montevideo auto body shop owner, took a basic 1928 Plymouth body and added a 40-coat, $1,000 paint job, smoked amber windows (including sun roof), French carpeting, television, air conditioning, hand-made bucket seats and $250 rear tires.
• The elementary school kitchen showed off its latest piece of equipment: a huge floor-model beater with attachments for vegetable slicing. An electric stove with a griddle top was added the previous year.
• Slightly more than 26,000 people used the public swimming pool during Summer 1969.
• The first week of in-town school busing went well, with most elementary-school children at the pickup spots on time after a few days.
25 years ago
September 1994
• A Renville County-based group of farmers formed Heartland Fibers to encourage the use of corn as a material for making paper and cardboard products.
• A report by the Action for Children Commission ranked Redwood County 10th among Minnesota’s 87 counties in attempted teen suicide and 34th in known instances of sexual abuse.
• More than 2,200 letters were sent out to RFHS alumni, fundraising for the new public library. Within days, alumni had already donated $12,000.
• Jim Estum of Clements returned from a 16-day mission trip to the Soviet Union.
10 years ago
September 2009
• Donna Bahr, wife of former Redwood Falls resident George Bahr, reminisced about growing up in Nashville, Tenn., during the 1940s, when her neighborhood paperboy was a young man named Elvis Presley.
• Alexis Dahmes of Redwood Falls claimed to have seen a rattlesnake in his son’s garage in the hills above the City of Morton.
• Jaclyn Dingels, of the Redwood Rainbows 4-H Club, showed the state fair’s overall grand champion black face market lamb.