Oldest resident takes trip down Memory Lane

(Editor’s note: This is the first of two feature stories about long-time members of the American Legion in Sartell. The other, featuring Duke Knafla, will be published soon.)

by Dennis Dalman

editor@thenewsleaders.com

At the age of 92, not only is World War II veteran Rollie Weis the oldest living member of the American Legion in Sartell (70 years), but he is also the longest-living resident (83 years) of the city he loves – Sartell.

Born in Clear Lake on New Year’s Day in 1925, Weis was only a very young boy when his parents, Phil and Hazel, moved to St. Cloud and then to Sartell in 1933. There, they became the operators of the city’s post office, located where Marnantelli’s Pizza now stands.

In those days, Sartell was a village of 400 people. It had an elementary school but no high school and so Weis, like other older Sartell students, took the school bus daily to Tech High School in St. Cloud. There, he met his high-school sweetheart named Janette Almer, whom he later married three years after his 1942 graduation.

Weis signed up for the military draft on his birthday after high school, and two months later he was drafted into the U.S. Navy. That was about a year after his only sibling, Philip, joined the U.S. Army.

On a home furlough from the Navy in 1945, Weis married high-school sweetheart Janette in 1945 but had to return to war duty in the South Pacific. Meantime, Janette taught fourth grade at Sartell School and waited anxiously for her husband’s return home. Finally, after the war, with the defeat of the Japanese, Weis came back, happy to reunite with his wife in Sartell where they began to raise a family.

During a Jan. 24 interview with the Sartell Newsleader, Weis shared some of the memories of his long and satisfying life.

Early Sartell

Weis’s family lived on Sartell Street when he was growing up. He remembers how he, brother Philip and friends used to play along the area of the Watab Creek and what a pleasure it was to be raised in a city where everyone knew one another in an attitude of small-town togetherness.

Back then, Weis said, “when we’d say we’re going to town, we meant we were going to St. Cloud.”

Later, Weis, his wife and two daughters would live in a house along the Watab, and Weis still lives in that house, along with one of his daughters.

“I may not be the oldest resident living in Sartell,” Weis said, “but I’m sure I’m the oldest one who lived in the town the longest time.”

Through the decades, especially the two most recent ones, Weis has been constantly amazed by the growth that occurred in Sartell.

“I’ve always liked Sartell,” he said. “I still like it. Even as it grows, I like it a lot.”

Weis is often overcome by sadness when he sees the vast empty space that used to be the site, for more than 100 years, of the Sartell Paper Mill. Right after high school, until he was drafted, he worked in that mill in the finishing room. After the war, he worked there again, sorting logs from the log pile until he heard about a chance for another job – at a printing plant in St. Cloud called Security Printing.

World War II

For two years, from the age of 19 to 20, Weis served on the U.S.S. Hopewell, a destroyer roaming the South Pacific during the war against the Japanese who had entrenched themselves in so many islands there. The names of those islands are still used sometimes as synonyms for “bloodbaths” – Guam, Corregidor, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima.

Weis was at most of them, off-shore, as the Hopewell pounded the islands with artillery shells, softening up the Japanese defenses to allow American troops to fight on the islands. Weis was one of 300 men on the ship. Ten of them, including four buddies of Weis, died during various attacks by Japanese lobbing shells at the ship.

“War is hell,” Weis said. “Destroyers, like the one I was on, were very vulnerable targets. We saw a lot of war, especially in the Philippines. It was terrible.”

At one time, Weis spent 54 straight hours in a battle station as the destroyer fired five-inch shells ashore, and the Japanese returned shell fire. He was so busy he didn’t have time to be very scared.

“That’s something that hits you later,” he recalled.

Brother Philip

While Weis was fighting in the South Pacific, his older brother Philip was fighting the Nazis during the Battle of the Bulge in northern Europe.

That long-grim offensive followed the Allied invasion from England into France (D-Day). Allied soldiers, led by Americans, pushed toward Germany, forcing Nazi soldiers back into their country, eventually leading to dictator Adolf Hitler’s and his country’s utter ruin and collapse in spring 1945.

Rollie’s and Philip’s parents, the postmasters in Sartell, did not know where their sons were at any given time or how they were faring. It was a nerve-racking time for so many soldiers and families of soldiers.

Then one day tragedy struck when Phil and Hazel Weis learned that Philip, 20, had been killed in the Ardennes forest in Luxembourg, a small country nestled between France, Belgium and Germany. His body was buried in Luxembourg.

In an extraordinary coincidence, 35 years after Philip’s death, a man and woman walking in the forest, looking for war artifacts, found a military dog tag on the ground in the heavily wooded area. The dog tag was Philip’s, one of a set of two he was wearing when he was killed. The other had been found right after the military had discovered his body in 1945.

The couple who found the dog tag did some research, discovering the cemetery in which Philip had been buried. The Weises in Sartell were contacted and were astonished by the coincidence, especially since Philip died within just three miles south of the very home from which Philip’s great-grandfather had emigrated to America in 1871. Philip had been aware of his Luxembourg ancestors but had no idea, before an enemy shot him, he would die just two miles from that ancestral home. Weis descendants still live in that small home, Rollie Weis noted. Three times, he and Janette visited that area and the cemetery where Philip is buried.

The DeZURIK valve plant in Sartell also reminds Rollie of his brother, Philip. One of Philips’ last letters to his parents contained a paragraph about how, one day with his G.I. buddies, Philip pointed to a battle tank and said, “See that part on that tank? I helped make that kind of part when I worked at a place called DeZURIK in my home town of Sartell, Minnesota.”

“Small world,” Rollie remarked after sharing that anecdote.

Post war

After the war, back home, Weis worked at the Sartell Paper Mill for a brief time again, then was hired by Security Printing in St. Cloud.

After the war, in the late 1940s, wife Janette quit teaching to work at the Sartell Post Office with her father-in-law and mother-in-law, a job she held for several decades.

Meanwhile, Weis worked at Security Printing for many years and later taught printing at the St. Cloud Reformatory, now known as the St. Cloud Correctional Facility (prison). After retirement, Weis worked part-time for 25 years for Dingmann’s Funeral Home in Sauk Rapids.

Rollie and Janette attended two reunions of the crew of the U.S.S Hopewell, one in Louisiana, the other in California. Both always expressed their abiding loyalty and respect to veterans and veterans’ causes.

The Weises had two daughters – Sue Primus, who now lives with her father in the old house by the Watab; and Sandy Weis-Freier, who died at age 69 on May 13, 2016 – just two weeks before the death of her mother.

Rollie’s beloved wife, Janette, died at age 93 on May 28, 2016, after 71 years of happy marriage to Rollie. Janette was known for her lively conversation, her kindness, her love of family and for her mischievous humor and wit.

Rollie has three grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

American Legion

Rollie Weis was recently honored with a plaque of honor for his 70 years of membership in the American Legion in Sartell.

He joined it shortly after his marriage in 1945. Since then, he has served as post commander and in just about every conceivable capacity, including helping to raise funds for many good local causes. He has also participated in scores of Memorial Day and Veterans Day ceremonies, as well as parades.

Of the 16 million Americans who served during World War II, only about 600,000 of them are still living, according to the Veterans Administration. Rollie Weis is proud to be one of them, part of what newsman Tom Brokaw called “The Greatest Generation.”

In recent years, Weis has slowed down some. Most days, he’ll have a beer or two at Bubba’s in Sauk Rapids or stop for one at Winners’ Bar in Sartell. He still reads two newspapers every day.

“I like to stay informed,” he said, noting that staying connected to the world at large helps people live longer.

“I eat well, have my couple of beers and get plenty of sleep,” he said. “My health is good. I get a check-up every three months.

As for any plans for the future, Weis commented: “Stayin’ alive,” he said with a chuckle. “I don’t do that much anymore, but I feel good.”