- Date Of Death: January 30, 2007
- State: Minnesota
Howard Palmer Degerness
Howard was born July 08, 1915, in a log cabin on the farm his parents Anna Wold and Emil Degerness homesteaded near the south banks of the Missouri River in Northwestern North Dakota. He died January 30, 2007 in Sheltering Oaks nursing home in Roseau, Minnesota, the town he chose as home in 1956.
As a child, he helped his parents work the farm with his three younger brothers (Marley, Ervin, and Arnold) and rode horseback or skied to a one-room schoolhouse near the Missouri River, once followed by a mountain lion up from the Missouri Breaks.
As a young man, Howard attended Concordia College in Moorhead, MN, where he paid dormitory fees with labor, awakening every two hours each night to stoke the furnace–leading to a lifelong appreciation for modern appliances. A year later he returned to North Dakota to teach in a one-room schoolhouse, eventually moving to Grand Forks, ND to attend business school. After graduation, he found work as a bookkeeper in Grand Forks; met and married a local girl, Lorraine Newark, in 1941; and started a family. Following three years as a sergeant in the Army Air Force during WWII, he returned to Grand Forks and began work as service manager for Valley Motor Company.
In the Twenties, Howard had been fascinated by the barnstorming pilots who reached the Western North Dakota prairies, and in the years following the war, he pursued a private pilot’s license. He and a few friends combined resources to buy an open cockpit plane and learned to fly it at the Grand Forks airport. Throughout his life, flying was a source of great pleasure.
