Kaneville’s Werdin celebrates 100 with an honor flight parade

Having grown up around farming, Kaneville’s Dave Werdin realized at an early age that he wanted to spend his life doing it.

He’s still doing it today and has done it for a long, long time. Werdin, a U.S. Army veteran who fought in World War II, celebrated his 100th birthday a day early Sept. 21 with an Honor Flight led parade followed by an open house at the Kaneville United Methodist Church. Dozens of family members and friends also celebrated later that Saturday at Werdin’s home.

“I’m the farmer and some people I know come to me and I tell them what I want to do,” he said. “Custom farming is what it’s called. I have two young fellas who have taken over as tenants and they are doing the planting and stuff and have other jobs, too, about what gets raised.”

Kaneville United Methodist Church is where Werdin and his wife, Lynnette, married on Feb. 7, 1948. The couple began celebrating their 76th year as husband and wife earlier this year. Lynnette is 2 1/2 years younger than Dave.

They wrote to each other often while they were falling in love yet separated by more than 6,000 miles. Little did they know what the future had in store for them. Their letters to each other, full of emotions, weren’t instantaneous communication. It was far unlike the conveniences of today, when, thanks to technology, someone could take a photo of Werdin enjoying a piece of birthday cake on his special day and text the photo to someone in Japan and they would receive it seconds later.

On Sunday, Sept. 22, his birthday, the lifelong Cubs fan was recognized on the Chicago Cubs’ TV broadcast during the fourth inning. Werdin lived long enough to see the Cubbies finally win it all in 2016. It took the Cubs 108 years to win that title after previously winning in 1908, 16 years before Werdin was born.

“People came from all over and we had probably 100 to 150 people come out to the open house and to the farm,” said Carol Alfrey, one of Werdin’s four daughters. “We had nephews and nieces from Oklahoma and Indianapolis. Grandkids from St. Louis and Minnesota. People came from all over. We had the choir director from church in the 1990s and people who have worked on the farm. People who Dad had met through all walks of life through his various positions.”

It didn’t take Werdin quite as long to open up all his birthday cards as it took the Cubs to finally win the World Series, but it took a while.

“People gave me hundreds of cards,” he said. “It took me almost two hours to go through all the cards and read them as they came in and I stacked them on the kitchen table.”

Born right before the Great Depression to Swedish immigrants, Werdin lost his father around the same time.

“My father died about the time I got home from the hospital so my mother had to raise two kids and do whatever she could, which was housework,” he said. “My mother had some family that said, ‘Why don’t you go out to the country where there is a lot of Swedish farming needing people to cook and clean and take care of things.’ So that’s what she did.”

His mother moved to a 75-acre farm just west of St. Charles. It was there that she fell in love with one of the bachelors, John Werdin. The couple married when Dave was five.

“That’s when I knew I wanted to farm,” he said. “I stayed home and worked on the farm with my dad and I loved it. I was adopted by him and took his name Werdin and had always said that this is what I wanted to do.”

Being on the farm truly is being at home and he remains on a farm today.

“I’ve always liked animals and driving tractors, seeing the crops get planted,” he said. “In the old days, we cultivated corn. We did all these things and I thought they were not terrible. They were fun. I would do it again the same way in a minute if I could. I wouldn’t want to change.”

Werdin attended St. Charles High School and then enlisted in the Army. He was in the 11th Airborne Division during World War II.

“Going to the Army for one and a half years was one of the best things that happened to me,” he said.

Meeting his future wife at a Young organization function before he was shipped out to Japan was even better.

The two were married on Feb. 7, 1948, and are looking forward to celebrating their 77th wedding anniversary early next year.

Werdin’s name has become so synonymous with Kaneville that the Kaneville Township Community Center is also known as the Dave Werdin Community Center. He was a longtime township supervisor. He even did some acting, playing Herbert Smith when the Kaneville United Methodist Church celebrated 150 years in 1998.

When Werdin was born in 1924, a new car cost under $300. A gallon of gas cost 11 cents, which you’d need in order to drive to buy a gallon of milk for 54 cents before heading home to a new house that cost less than $8,000.

“I went to high school in St. Charles and in those days people living in the country went to country schools which were one-room schools,” he said. “I was fortunate that I was in the St. Charles school district because some of the other further out towns only had a two-year high school so they had to finish their last two years by going into a bigger town, but I didn’t have to do that.”

Werdin finally stopped driving last September. He said he never got into computers and related technology such as smartphones. Rather, he’s stuck to his loves. Farming. Being a husband. Being a father. Being a grandfather. Being a buddy to his “buddies.”

“As time went on, I kept farming into my 80s but once I got into my 90s I started slowing down,” he said. “I never had anything terrible happen, but I was getting old and got slower. I did have heart attacks and had to take time off, but I healed at the hospital.”

Nowadays, Werdin enjoys spending time with his wife, family and friends. He drives his golf court around the farm to check the crops. He still reads as well as trains his brain with word searches, jigsaw puzzles and watching Wheel of Fortune. Soft-serve ice cream is still a favorite treat while his “buddies” are the fellas who keep him smiling and laughing each day.

While he may be too old to drive these days, you can’t take the boy out of the man Werdin has become in his amazing life. He still loves the Minneapolis Moline, a tractor, farm and industrial machinery producer.

“I liked their size. They were big,” he said. “I liked the yellow.”

As for his birthday cake, he enjoyed that as well.

It was vanilla.

As the past 100 years have proved, his life has been anything but vanilla.