Grandma, 87, Too Busy Cutting Meat to Quit

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

Of the editorial/opinion page staff

published by the StarTribune

March 10, 1968

                   Jeffers, Minn.

   BUTCH WESSELL is 67 and retired.  His mother is 87 and still working.

   What's more, she has no intentions of quitting work and it would surprise nobody in this town of 500, located in the corn and soybean flatlands of Cottonwood County, if she still were on the job a decade hence.

   Her mane is Laura Wessell, but nobody calls her Laura, just as nobody calls her son Alfred.  She is Grandma and he is Butch, and so it has been these many years.  

   GRANDMA lives in an apartment above the store of her grandson-in-law, Loy Storey, and she works in the store six days a week and asks no favors of anybody.  The meat department is her special love and most of the time she's there in the back cutting and trimming meat, making bologna and sausage, and wrapping beef for the lockers.

   If work is a  hobby she has one.  She enjoys her unique role as a lady butcher.  She also enjoys cooking--and counts no calories.  "I like to make stuff rich," she chortles.

   She also likes to come out front and chat with the customers.  This helps keep her abreast of what's going on in the community.  One of her chief interests is the Jeffers school, where her daughter, Mrs. Maybelle Bigbee, is secretary.  Grandma reads the papers and watches television but her enjoyment of the latter is dimmed by partial deafness. 

   THE LONGER you're around this unusual woman the more you wonder at her strength and agility.  She can lift a box of meat as easily as a young housewife can lift a pork roast, and she wants no help in getting in and out of a car.  She is short and stocky, with a sense of humor, a merry eye, a big smile and limitless energy.

   From the store to her apartment is 22 steps up.  She makes the trip without breathing hard.  "When she has bread in the oven," Loy Storey laughs, "Grandma goes up there every 15 minutes."  Currently she also is caring for an ailing sister, Ella Schall, who lives with her.

   Grandma was married at age 20 in Windom to Henry Wessell.  They started in the meat business at nearby Bingham Lake.  All they had going for them at the time, Grandma recalls, "was a cleaver, a block, a saw and a knife."  Her husband did the butchering in farm pastures.  She helped process the meat.

   When they moved to Jeffers in 1918 they branched out into groceries and soon Butch, 18 at the time, became a partner.  Some time after his father died in 1948, Butch sold out to a partnership which included Storey.  Later Butch bought out Storey's partner and went into business with his son-in-law.

   IN ALL THOSE years Grandma Wessell kept whomping up sausage and hamburger, sawing and cutting meat and otherwise making herself indispensable.  This left no time for bridge, fancy luncheons and other functions so dear to most female hearts but Grandma has no regrets.  

   She has five grandchildren, 14 great grandchildren and one great-great grandchild.  And she's confident that she'll live long enough to see the tribe of great-great grandchildren increased substantially.

   WHAT motivates this woman who never takes a vacation and who works six days a week when she could sit back and take it easy?  Why does she push herself so when it isn't necessary?

   "But it is necessary," says Butch, who retired in 1966.  "Work is her life and it keeps her going.  She couldn't live without the job, the store and the apartment.  They're home."

   And she'll only leave home, says Grandma, "when they carry me out."

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