Members of the Forest Lake and Scandia-area Good Cheer Club have kept the group going for more than 90 years.
On a sunny October afternoon, eight senior citizens chatted and joked around a bulky wooden table at the Old Log Cabin restaurant on Highway 97. Eventually, a waitress hailed the group and took their lunch orders, but the seven ladies and one gentleman took their time placing orders amongst a dozen side conversations and stories.
When the Good Cheer Club gets together, it’s less about the food and more about the time spent together.
If those seated around the table seem like old friends, that’s because they are – in some cases, very old friends indeed. The Good Cheer Club, which pulls its current members from Forest Lake, Scandia and the surrounding area, has been around for 93 years. One of the group’s oldest members, Edryce Lund, is only a couple of months older than the group itself. She attended her first Good Cheer Club as an infant, brought by her mother and original club member Esther Johnson.
“That was always kind of a highlight of (Esther’s) month,” recalled Ruth Vogt, Edryce’s younger sister and fellow Good Cheer Club member. “She kept going until her early 90s.”
Though the club no longer has any of its original members, most of the folks at the Oct. 15 gathering have been attending for a long time. Solveig Huerstel has been a member for 55 years, and Janet Olson has been attending off and on (with an extended break to raise her kids) for about the same length of time. Evie Kalsnes’s membership dates back to 1970, and Pat Johnson has been attending for the last 15 years. The other two people at the table were Mary Wagner, who is not in the club but who came to lunch to visit with some old friends, and Janet’s husband, Duane, who doesn’t count himself as a full member but enjoys the women’s company and occasionally acts as their driver on RV trips to regional places of interest.
“I just kept with it throughout the years because you just couldn’t find a nicer group of ladies,” Kalsnes said.
Though it’s now primarily a social group, the Good Cheer Club was once a prominent charitable and community driver in the Forest Lake area. In 1922, the group was organized around the area served by the old Hay Lake School in Scandia.
“The school was really important to the community back then,” Johnson said. “It was really the heart.”
At the time, the school building was about midway through its life as an educational facility (it opened in 1896 and served its last students in 1963), and the group of local mothers wanted to help students succeed and better their community.
“The mothers were helping students if they could not afford pencils or paper or clothes,” Huerstel said.
Over time, the group transitioned from a school focus to an interest in general charity and community aid. Huerstel and her mother joined in 1960, only a few years before Hay Lake School closed, but the group continued to draw large numbers at monthly meetings throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The club met in the Scandia Community Center and could draw as many as 40 or 50 people.
“One thing we liked: Nobody smoked,” Huerstel said with a smile.
The club regularly held fundraisers and donated to groups like the Salvation Army and the Washington County Historical Society. The society now holds the club’s old meeting minutes, and the society-backed book “Scandia: Then and Now,” includes the club’s impact on local life in the area.
Club members would set up shop at home sales and auctions, selling sandwiches and coffee. The money raised would go right back to a charitable cause.
“I remember making scrapbooks that we gave to the Cambridge (State) Hospital,” Kalsnes said, adding that the books’ purpose was to provide visual stimulus and calming effects for residents at the mental institution.
Over time, the group’s numbers started to dwindle. The Hay Lake School was no longer a unifying institution for those involved in the club, and original members began moving away or dying. Members once cast ballots annually to select the leadership positions of president, secretary and treasurer. Eventually, Huerstel became the de facto leader for organizing meetings, with Janet and Duane running the occasional “field trip.” What was once a large group of younger, energetic ladies became a tight-knit group of elderly friends.
“As time changed, everything changed,” Janet said.
In 2015, the Good Cheer Club will only meet a couple of times a year. Members no longer hold fundraising events, and they no longer frequent community gatherings to sell sandwiches. However, Huerstel, Lund, Kalsnes and the rest have found that after years of investment, they’ve been left with a group of special people, friends who only need to get together once in a while to fall back into their old rhythms and conversations.
“It’s the friendship, I think, that keeps it going – and it’s fun to go out to lunch,” Huerstel chuckled.
And though they aren’t as organized as they used to be, they still pass a collection cup for charity each time they get together.
“We do some good,” Lund said.