This is where it started: my first visit to the first community: Rugby, North Dakota, January, 2003. Why does one go to Rugby in January, you ask? If you want to see what a town is made of, you have to see it in the tough season, as well as the sweet, and January in Rugby is the tough season.
Yesterday at 8:15 a.m., as planned,
I met Wanda Nielsen at her house. She greeted me with coffee and warm crumb cake. I think that in Rugby, as across much of the middle west, food is love. Wanda is a widow. She is wise and she is giving. I'd been told she is Rugby's "bird lady," and so she is. You can see the bird feeding stations just outside the window of her breakfast nook, and a bird bath with heated water that stays open even in the below-zero temperatures of Rugby's winters. Soon enough three bossy blue jays appeared at the feeders, all of them wanting to be in charge of business, then came a chickadee feeding upside down. As we talked of her interest in birds, Wanda mentioned that in spring Baltimore orioles come through Rugby; when she hears of their first appearance she'll put quarters of an orange in the back yard. If she has six or eight pieces of orange out there, she'll have six or eight Baltimore orioles feeding at them. Wanda has taught a lot of Rugby people about birds - Boy Scouts and school children and senior groups and just about anybody who asks her. Her interest spills out and she has to share it. The American Birding Association lists Wanda's phone number for its members looking for more information about birds that summer in Rugby or that pass through in spring and fall migrations. People can call her with questions and sometimes they can get her to lead them on bird-watching expeditions to the J. Clark Salyer National Wildlife Refuge north of Rugby.
Wanda is a transplant to Rugby from Iowa. She was born in Des Moines. Her father was a sheriff there, he was killed in the line of duty when Wanda was four years old. Wanda attended Iowa State University, which is where she met her husband. He was studying in the Food Sciences program. They married and she followed him to Rugby. They raised a family in Rugby while her husband operated the Rugby Creamery. The business had been owned by the Nielsen family since 1915. When it was sold in the latter part of the last century, that was the end of the independent dairy in North Dakota - Rugby Creamery was the last of them.
To be continued....
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