An Otter Tail County Original

Author Cecil Femling plugged in to the past of Otter Tail County

By Dave Forster, Forum of Fargo-Moorhead
dmforster@forumcomm.com

PELICAN RAPIDS, Minnesota
–Ask Cecil Femling about growing up here in Otter Tail County, and he might talk about the farmhouse parties of Prohibition, the ever-present threat of bedbugs or how his first car cost $42.50.Since 1988, Femling has written about his upbringing for a monthly column in the Lake Region Electric Cooperative newsletter. Much of that work is now available in “Down The Road A Piece … with Cec,” a 380-page collection of his writings on rural life, lessons learned and the changing times. “I have had the greatest opportunity to enjoy life that anyone could ever imagine,” said Femling, a spry 85-year-old who likes to laugh. “It has not been a wealthy life, but it has been a life working with wonderful people. ”Femling combines a sharp memory with a voracious appetite for history to bring readers back to his childhood. His living room holds stacks of reference books, including two volumes of 1,700 pages on the history of Otter Tail County, published in 1916. In one column, Femling tracks down one of his favorite rural schoolteachers more than 60 years after she taught him. “She was pretty. She was neat. She never used a stick,” Femling wrote. Other teachers were less patient. Femling, as a first grader in an all-ages schoolhouse, watched a young female instructor chase a boy out of the schoolhouse with a stove poker. “The last we heard of him was his horse galloping down the road headed for home,” Femling wrote. After high school, Femling went to the University of Minnesota, where a battery of career placement tests told him to become a vocational agriculture teacher. He listened and got a job teaching in southern Minnesota. After five years of that, he sold animal feed until a job opened up back home with Lake Region Electric. Femling returned to Pelican Rapids in 1962 and worked as director of information for the electric co-op until 1984. In retirement he joined the Otter Tail County Board of Adjustment, which brings him back to the countryside he learned so well as a child. His daughter, Cindy Oliver, drives him to the inspections. “Every mile of the way he can tell me, ‘So and so lived here, and we had to thresh(there), and the wife was a very good cook,’ ” Oliver said. Femling, who has six children, was widowed in 1996 with the death of his wife, Elaine. Now he spends much of his time on one of his two favorite pastimes. “I either got to read or be with people,” he said. Six years ago, Oliver and her daughter began gathering Femling’s Lake Region columns for a book. “Fans were just asking for it,” Oliver said. The project culminated last fall in a printing. The books, which cost $21.25, are available at the Otter Tail County Historical Museum in Fergus Falls and in several locations in Pelican Rapids, including the Chamber of Commerce. Femling is tentatively scheduled for a March 28 book signing and talk at the Otter Tail County Historical Museum.

OTC Judge Thomas Stringer dies

By Brandon Stahl, Fergus Falls Daily Journal

A longtime judge chambered in Otter Tail County died of a heart attack while on vacation in Cancun, Mexico with his family.
Judge Thomas M. Stringer died yesterday at 4:30 p.m., according to Judge Waldemar Senyk, who confirmed the information with the American consulate in Cancun. Senyk said the county's court administration was informed of the news earlier this morning by a family friend who said that Stringer died of a heart attack while on the beach.