O.H. “RED” FRIESEN

O.H. “Red” Friesen was, to put it bluntly, one of the finest people to ever walk the earth! I am lucky to have had his friendship, and both surprised and saddened to learn of his recent death at the age of 87. I had always thought he’d make it to the 100 mark if anybody could.

            Red was a very handy individual who could build or fix almost anything. He’d grown up on a farm in Minnesota and learned to get by for the most part with what was at hand, and it was a skill that served him well all his life. At one point in the late 1990’s, Bill Baker, Brian Alexander, and I were in the process of building a roll-back bed on a Mack truck so that we could haul our tractor pull sled on that instead of having Bill drive it to the pulls. The bed was going to slide back about 22 feet on telescoping rectangular tubes, and we had to cut a slot in the bottom of the outside tubes to clear the hinge where the bed would tilt. When we did cut the slot (with a torch), the tubes warped badly, and we had no luck at all in trying to get them straightened out. Bill called Red, who jumped in his truck and headed down to give us a hand. With the aid of the truck frame, a couple chains, a hydraulic jack, a sledge hammer, and Red’s directions, we had both tubes straight again in about an hour. I asked him where he’d learned that trick, and he told us that when he worked for the construction company where he spent most of his working years,  someone had rolled one of their large off-road haul trucks (essentially one of those huge mining haul trucks) and bent the frame. They needed the truck, so Red and one of his mechanics stripped the truck to the frame and used those same tools to get it straight again, and had the truck back in operation in 3 days! It was very typical of Red to be willing to help out whenever he could.

            Red had been in B24 Liberator bombers during World War II and was shot down on his second mission. He was the last of the crew to get out of the plane and he once told me that the cows he could see on the ground were nearly full sized when his parachute opened. The landing  had injured his back, and it hurt him throughout his life. After our second year of pulling with our sled, we took it to Red’s place and Red and I removed the engine so another member of the ownership group could overhaul it for us. Red had told me to be there on the appointed day at 9:00 am, and when I got there he was sitting in his shop with 2 rolling carts full of tools ready to go. We each took one side of the engine and began removing all the connections and accessories. The truck was a 1963 International cab-over, and the radiator had to be removed to get the engine out. When I was removing the radiator bolts on my side, I discovered that there was one underneath the radiator that required you to lay over the front tire and the top of the engine and the radiator and reach down in front of the radiator to get at it. I knew Red’s back was being particularly painful at the time, so I told him as I came up with my bolt that I would get the one on his side, too. But as I said it and looked over at him, he was coming up with his bolt in his hand, and he looked at me and grinned and said “This getting old isn’t for sissy’s you know!” As I’ve grown older myself, I’ve thought of that incident many times and got another chuckle from it and thought how true it is! Red always had a great attitude and a smile was on his face more often than not for all the years I knew him.

            I’ll miss Red for these and many more reasons than I have space to relate here, and I know all his friends and acquaintances feel the same.