The women of Stearns County live longer than women in any other place in the United States.
But, befitting their characteristic modesty, they are loath to brag about it. They don’t give up their secrets of long life easily.
“I have no idea why it is,” said Marie Heidgerken, a chipper 89-year-old, while finishing up her hearty breakfast of eggs, toast, fruit and oatmeal in Charlie’s Cafe, in Freeport, Minn. “We just get pretty old here.”
Heidgerken may not have an explanation, but her lifestyle may be explanation enough. She eats well–at least once a day at Charlie’s Cafe, owned by her son. She exercises often, never using a car when her feet can work instead. She has access to quality health care. She has a watchful family who would not allow any health problems to go unnoticed.
Even more important than those physical characteristics is her attitude. According to gerontologists and the feeling common in Stearns County, the belief that one can still live well as one grows old is crucial to long life.
These are the secrets of the long-lived women of this rural county, deep in dairy country, 100 miles northwest of the Twin Cities.
In Stearns Country, lives like Heidgerken’s are fairly typical. In most of the United States, they are not. It is difficult to generalize over all the disparate lives of the American elderly, but few live as well and as long as the women here.
Census numbers show the results of good living: 116 of the 556 people who live in Freeport are past retirement age. That’s 21 percent, far above the Minnesota average of 12 percent and the national, 15 percent.
At Charlie’s Cafe, the local institution where everyone gathers to exchange gossip and gather news, those numbers translate into many tables with gray-haired diners. One recent afternoon the cafe, owned by Heidgerken’s smiling 64-year-old son, was filled with spry women who had long since seen their 80th birthdays and multiple generations of Stearns County women: children, mothers and grandmothers.
At Charlie’s, a feeling of community prevails. The waitresses call Heidgerken “Grandma.” Her gregarious son, Charlie, greets all diners at the door. The patrons all know and care about one another.
Donna Walberg, executive director of the central Minnesota council on aging, said community spirit in Stearns County makes sure elderly women are cared for. And that caring makes a difference to the older women’s health and longevity.
She has another theory on aging, however.
“Being frozen half the year, you live twice as long,” she said. “There might be something to that.”
Although being frozen probably does not really extend life, international studies have shown that demanding climates can contribute to longer lives. Battling the elements keeps bodies strong.
On average, women of Stearns County live more than 83 years, according to the data generated by epidemiologists at the Harvard School of Public Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The national average life expectancy for women is just under 79 years, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
The findings are part of a comprehensive survey of the United States intended to document local survival rates, cause of death, years of life lost, morbidity and a variety of projections. The survey on longevity is the most thorough of its kind for the United States.
Some segments of the U.S. population, such as urban black males and Native Americans, have alarmingly low life expectancies, said Dr. Christopher Murray, the Harvard professor who released the longevity data. In South Dakota, male Native Americans have a life expectancy of just 56.5 years, and black men in Washington, D.C., live to just 57.9 years old, on average.
Although women on average live longer than men, there is still a huge discrepancy between places with the lowest life expectancies and those with the highest, like Stearns, Jackson, Nobles and Rock Counties in Minnesota. In four counties in South Dakota, women can expect to live to just 70, and in Baltimore and Washington, women, on average, live less than 74 years.
The aged women of Stearns County and a few other scattered counties in the Midwest, however, are not the result of a random miracle, said Murray. Rather, like Heidgerken, they live well, with both physical and mental resources to help them age gracefully.
“They do well on all fronts,” Murray said. “This should be the norm.”
Doing well for these women is quite different from most Americans, who in recent decades have grown fatter, less active and more isolated as they’ve grown older.
With 32 children, 71 grandchildren, 65 great-grandchildren and 355 years of living among them, there is a lot of wisdom on aging from five women living in St. Benedict’s Center, a Catholic health care and housing facility for older adults in St. Cloud.
“Hard work on the farm helped us,” said 81-year-old Susan Kuhl, who only left Stearns County a few years of her life and was overjoyed to return. “We had to take care of the animals, milk the cows, hand feed the chickens and everything.”
Matilda Burns, 93, who also grew up on a Stearns County farm, added that carrying wood and helping in the field were also daily chores.
“We also had to say our rosary every night and go to mass on Sundays,” she said, to the nods of the other women there. “I think the Lord has a lot to do with it.”
But with 98 years under her belt, perhaps Betty Lauer summarized it best. The key to longevity, she said, is keeping busy. She leads an exercise class every weekday, beads about 2,000 rosaries a year for charity and bakes cookies, cakes and candies for her friends and neighbors. Until very recently she was active in her gardening club, took care of her polio-stricken sister, who died a few years ago, and produced boxes of intricate crafts to be sold at her church.
“You have to keep busy. We grew up with something to care for all the time, and I wouldn’t know how to live any other way,” Lauer said.
Her philosophy seems to have worked. Lauer walks almost unaided, has a clear memory and although she takes a pile of medications every day, she rarely complains about her aging body.
Norbert and Theresa Goebel, at 85 and 80 years old, are also still keeping busy, taking care of their 58 cows.
Theresa Goebel wakes up at 4 every morning, walks across ice and snow to drag a red-metal wagon loaded with buckets of feed to the barn and feeds her massive and beautiful Holstein cows.
To explain her extraordinary lifestyle, she said simply, “We are dairy people. That is what we do.”
She and her husband have spent the last six decades as living proof that working with the cows and consuming their products does little harm, contrary to the advice that high-cholesterol dairy products should be avoided.
Theresa Goebel has been feeding cows since she and Norbert got married in 1939, and in a very real way time stands still on the Goebel farm.
“We keep our own time here. You have to for the cows,” said Norbert Goebel, explaining why when the rest of the world changes an hour for daylight savings time, the farm does not. Although the technology on their farm is as modern as they can afford, little else seems to have changed since Norbert bought the farm in a Depression foreclosure sale.
Their house would fit well in a sepia photo from the turn of the century, and their attitudes were passed down through generations. Ask another farmer for directions to the Goebels’, and they will come peppered with landmarks like “turn left onto the tar road,” and “look for the blue silo.”
Such antiquated, demanding and isolated lives may seem contrary to the modern precepts of healthy living, but the Goebels’ reliance on each other, for entertainment and companionship, and their cows’ reliance on them help keep them active and healthy.
Stearns County is also home to another kind of family strength and another tradition of longevity. St. Cloud boasts two retirement homes for nuns from the Benedictine order.
Many of the nuns living in St. Rayfields and St. Scholastica Convents, the two retirement centers, were born and raised in Stearns Country and also believe that busy lives and religious belief have kept them alive.
Sister Cecile Gertken, 96, a resident of St. Scholastica, summed up the Stearns County experience well.
“I was born in a log cabin, and I’ve worked hard but I have had a calm dedicated life,” she said. “I have always cared for people and in return, I am now well cared for.”
