These family friends turned out Sunday for Mom's 90th birthday. From left, Helen and Murrae Freng and Lavina Martinson. Murrae directed the high school and church choirs in Alexandria until leaving in 1965 to head the Minnesota State High School League for many years. Lavina's family was even larger than the Rolfsrud Eight. She loves to tell the 1950s story about driving a carload to our rural homestead to butcher 100 free-range chickens in a grisly all-day assembly-line operation. We killed, scalded, plucked, gutted and preserved the flock in one day, sharing the result with the Martinsons. Swept up by the excitement was a luckless neighbor kid from the city, John Helgeson. He was not at all happy, Lavina recalled Sunday. "I didn't know we had to PICK chickens," grumbled the reluctant volunteer. "I thought we were just driving out to the Rolfsruds to PICK UP chickens."
