Retiring… again
Retiring… again
By ALLAN TINKER
After leaving farming in 2007, Jerry Lauer retired from his job as mail delivery person for the Goodrich route.
This retirement was probably less painful than leaving all the farm “stuff” that people make part of their lives and love to use while they work their land. When he decided to quit farming, the kids said “Now we have our dad back.”
This retirement was leaving a job that paid better, or at least more reliably, than farming but health had become an issue. His back, with a compressed spine and pain from the many hours of bouncing on farm machinery, hurt and various treatments hadn’t worked. It was a drain on his health to be up all night in pain and then leave to do his route work in the morning, every week, all year long.
With wife Barb working at North Country Bank as a teller also, there wasn’t a whole lot of free time, even after they quit farming. But they learned from what they did, as they told people five years ago. “Follow your heart; listen to your financial advisor. Don’t let work affect your health.”
Even with high stress off from not having farming issues to fret about, any work is wearing when one is in constant pain.
Jerry and Barb can continue to enjoy the sunshine and rain; birds will sing and plants will grow as they watch from their home.
Jerry and Barb left Minot to farm, where son Shannon was in kindergarten, and moved home to McClusky to farm when his brother quit. Their children, including Jeremy and Brandon, completed the family cycle of being raised on the home farm and attending school in McClusky.
As their farm retirement story noted, the farm was purchased by father Theo and Emma Lauer, and sheltered their family of five: Leslie, Inez (Krein), Gerald (Barb), Betty (Allen) and Rodney.
Barb also graduated from McClusky High School, traveling to the area with her parents when her father was employed as a soil conservationist.
