Carl A. Boberg

Carl August Boberg

Age 95 of Jenkins, MN, passed away peacefully in his Jenkins, MN home on January 6th, 2026 due to complications of leukemia. Services to be held at The Journey church, 5459 Co Hwy 18, Nisswa, MN on Wednesday, January 28th. Visitation 11AM-noon, service from 12-1PM, then lunch is served before military burial. In lieu of flowers, please make a donation to a charity of your choice.

He was preceded in death by his siblings Ernest, James and Anne. He is survived by his long-term partner, Ann Hutchings, his special friend, Craig Ross, his sons Arne and Carl-Eric, and his grandsons, Nils, Bjorn and Tejiri. Born in Titusville, FL, Carl grew up “between” Vero Beach, FL and Nisswa, MN where his parents, August and Ruth, operated Boberg’s Resort in the summer season. He graduated from Washington High School (Brainerd) in 1948 and was drafted into the US Army Signal Corps, where he oversaw the phone crew for critical US miliary communications in the Korean War for two years. He maintained a “clean” record of never doing one pushup nor picking up a cigarette butt despite sergeant’s commands. After being honorably discharged in August 1952, Carl assisted his father in building the Boberg’s Resort Motel and became part owner. In 1957, he launched Boberg Lumber Company with his father and his brother Jim, which is still in operation today.

Carl never officially retired and continued to build custom docks for lake home customers up until the last month of his life. In any spare time, he was actively involved in the American Swedish Institute (Swedish-speaking tour guide for many years), Crow Wing County Historical Society Board Member, Aurora Masonic Lodge (65-year tenure), Lake Hubert Grange, Mount Ski Gull (president for a couple years), Swedish Clubs in Duluth, Mora, and Bemidji, the Nisswa Historical Society, Emigrantinstitutets Vänner (in Sweden), and the Indian River County Historical Society in Vero Beach, FL.

He loved to travel and hiked the Great Wall of China, visited Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Germany, Ireland and Cuba. He downhill skied in Colorado, Utah, MN, France, Italy and Switzerland.

His hobbies included fishing, building houses and woodworking, which entailed building many authentic-style Swedish Mora clocks, using little more than some hand saws, clamps, a pocket knife and a belt sander, all done in his Boberg Lumber office on an Adirondack chair – which he also built - as his workbench. He was always a man of simple needs and had just enough tools to get the job done.

Arrangements are entrusted to Brenny Family Funeral Chapel, Baxter.

Here is Arne's Eulogy read at the funeral on Wednesday:

I’m Arne Boberg, Carl’s oldest son, and this is my eulogy.

As many of you may know, I worked for 3M for many years. I couldn’t even get an interview there at the beginning, but my dad had a contact – a lumberyard customer – who put the word in to get me an interview. Then I took it from there. It changed my life, really.

I had been at 3M for about 6 years when management told us to gather around any TV monitors that we had access to. Many of them were on rolling carts. Apparently, there was Pan important seminar that we needed to watch. This was around 1989. In the seminar there was this guy standing in the middle of a round stage with the surrounding area completely dark – no audience was observed. A light above his head illuminated his “chrome dome” as he began to debut “The 7 habits of highly successful people” – this was Steven Covey in front of an audience of 500M people worldwide. The first habit was to be proactive – we can choose our response – not react like animals, but the second habit stuck with me. It was “Begin with the end in mind”. Imagine being at this funeral, with many sad faces all around. It’s YOUR funeral and people are talking about your accomplishments and what you meant to them. Powerful words that should guide everyone’s life. However, with my dad’s funeral, we’re here to celebrate his life, and he had a very long good one. So, we should keep this light-hearted. Therefore, I’m going to tell you what I want people to say about me at my funeral, “Look, he’s moving!!!”. And that’s going to be some trick, since I’ll be cremated!

On a more serious note, I’m going to read you an excerpt from his memoir, titled “Bobergs in Nisswa”. Kinda shed some light on his family’s struggles in getting a foothold in this rugged north country that we now all enjoy as one of the premier vacation destinations in the USA.

“Boberg History in Nisswa as How I Remember it. By Carl A. Boberg

My family consisting of my dad, August T. Boberg, my mother Ruth, brothers James and Ernest, and sister Anne, arrived on gravel roads at Nisswa, Minnesota in April 1924. They had lived in Minneapolis for a year where my parents operated a grocery store on 29th and Lake Street. My oldest brother Ernest was born in Connecticut; my brother James was born in South Dakota as was my sister Anne. In the early years things were very poor in Nisswa, so my dad packed up the family and drove to Florida to look for work. He drove the Model T on all gravel roads for the first time in 1925, all the way to Florida. A little AI thrown in here: (In the 1920s, a Ford Model T typically traveled cross-country at an average speed of 20 to 30 mph. While the vehicle was capable of reaching top speeds of 40–45 mph, road conditions—mostly unpaved, muddy, or rough—and mechanical limitations made higher speeds impractical for long-distance travel. Assuming it’s 2000 miles from Nisswa to Vero Beach Florida on the back roads, that’s 80 hours of driving – or 10 days if you can stand being in a Model T for 8 hours each day. I’m thinking that the practical drive time would be 2 weeks. Today it would take 26 hours, or a little over 3 days.) Also, the fuel cost alone would be around $22.00 – a lot of money back then.

The story continues…

There dad worked as a fisherman and did some carpenter work, anything to survive. Because of these Florida work trips, it happened that I was born at Titusville, Florida on 12, March, 1930.

When my family was in the grocery store in Minneapolis, dad read an ad in the paper for a place that was for sale on East Twin Lake just north of Nisswa. Dad had passed through Nisswa in 1914 on an excursion farther north and had not forgotten about it. He took the train to Nisswa and looked at the place, but it wasn’t what he wanted. The real estate agent that ran the ad was John Swanson at Swanson’s Store in Nisswa and he had a place listed on Gull Lake that was for lease. It was the Nash Estate on the SW shore of Bishop Creek. The estate consisted of 62 acres with a large hotel located on the shore of Bishop Creek. The building had been the Gull Lake Outing Club House, a group of business men in Brainerd had used it as a place to come out to the lake, there even was a bicycle trail from Brainerd, along with the gravel road to the place. The highway, now #371, was #19 and it was not paved until 1926. Dad saw a good opportunity so he leased the place, sold the store in Minneapolis and moved to Nisswa. There was a boat house, barn and huge chicken coop on the property. Dad built some flat-bottom boats with lumber that was there, fixed up the rooms in the club house and opened for business. He took fishermen in the rooms and mother cooked meals for anyone that would eat there. Dad built platforms for campers to pitch their tents on and rented them. This was one of the first camp areas on Gull Lake, if not the first. (This foothold on Gull Lake led to Boberg’s resort and other established vacation spots in the area).

“Life at the Round Lake Home”

I was not born when my parents built the Round Lake House. It was built in 1929. They moved in there in the winter but left for Florida. We had a small garage and a smokehouse where dad smoked fish and some meat. We did not have a freezer. One winter, 1933-34, ma went home to Sweden for the first time since she arrived at Boston in 1914. Dad bought a half a cow from L.E. Penny that lived on Sebago Point on Round Lake. I can still remember it hanging in the garage frozen and the cat chewing on it. There came a January thaw and the meat thawed out. Jim still talks about having to stay home from school and cook and can the meat to keep it from spoiling. It has always been a topic of discussion with Jim of how long it took to cook that meat as it was so tough. There was no high school bus those days and a person had to find a way to get to high school. My brother Ernie walked to Sportland corner (exactly 2.8 miles each way) for two years where there was a Pequot bus, and the last two years he stayed in an old hotel in Brainerd where he slept by the furnace and fired it. Jim cranked an old Model T to get to school and Anne roomed in Brainerd and worked at the theater. Later when I went to high school, it was the first year of the school bus to Brainerd.

The year after ma went to Sweden, it was dad’s turn. He was gone 3 weeks on his first trip home since arriving at Ellis Island in 1913. I remember very well the winter dad was gone as it was terribly cold and we did not have a warm house. It took a lot of wood to heat the place. (my comment – the walls weren’t insulated and that year hit -45F, with 36 consecutive days below zero). At the time, there were no neighbor kids to play with – that came later when we moved across the highway in 1936 and I met the Dullum boys.

Most of the rest of his memoirs deals with life in Florida, which was a completely different world, trying to scratch a living out of the ocean, harvesting fish, shrimp, oysters and crabs, in addition to servicing the fishing industry by selling equipment and bait and guiding fishing expeditions. But August was primarily a carpenter and built a number of homes down there.

I admired my dad because he was a provider, the hardest worker I’ve ever known. Sometimes, being a provider comes at a cost as I never spent as much time with him as I had liked. He was born right at the beginning of the Great Depression and became programmed to hustle for every penny. He worked long, hard hours in the lumber business, including weekends, when my brother Carl-Eric and I were growing up. The time we did spend together was quality time though – it had to be. He made sure that we went out to dinner every Friday night and that we went on vacation at least once a year – this was usually Sweden or Florida. At the time, I didn’t know how good we had it! Plus, mom had raised us to be bi-lingual, and taught dad, too! My brother and I hammered on our dad for years to get a speed boat – after all, all the neighbors had one. When we finally got one, the novelty had worn off. We grew tired of water skiing – after all, there were no hills, and at that point, I had downhill skied for 11 years, sometimes 3 times a week using high-speed tow ropes and not snail’s pace chair lifts – again – we didn’t know how good we had it – the neighbors had no edge on us! Despite scratching for every penny and working long hard hours in the lumber business, dad was always trying to keep us happy! And he wanted everybody to be happy – that’s just who he was.

What really counts is that my brother and I had a lot of great memories of our childhood.

One such memory I had was playing elimination in elementary school – I think it was 5th or 6th grade phyed. Kim Rarden was in my class and had the same slingshot arm that his dad Ray Rarden did in my dad’s class. Nobody could beat him – no one had hope. No one could catch his ball – it had just too much kinetic energy. And he could catch everyone’s throw – he was like glue. He was an all-around talented athlete – arguably one of the best Nisswa Elementary had ever seen. One day, I had asked my dad if he knew of a way to beat him. He reflected on his day playing against Kim’s dad Ray Rarden and I’m sure he thought he could get his revenge by living vicariously through me! He suggested we use a football since it was a lot harder to catch – oblong and slippery! So, we went out and he bought a football for me. After about a week of playing catch with dad, as he threw spirals and end-over-ends as hard as he could, I was able to catch everything he could throw at me.

Then the day of reckoning came – our next elimination tournament at school. I stayed out of the way the first game, letting it pare down. Kim was picking them off like an arcade game – of course. Finally, it was just Kim and me, and he had the ball. I remember this moment like it was yesterday. Kim hurled that thing at me with almost no arc in its trajectory– it was that fast. When I caught it, there was a “thoom!!!” Man, that stung! No wonder nobody caught these missiles! Kim was shocked – I remember the look on his face. I’d won that game - now I was “it” for the next game. In this game, Kim stayed out of the way and I mopped up the rest until it was just him and me, and I had the ball, but he was 30 feet away and the rules are that we can’t move around. My only hope was to throw high, making it harder to catch, but the risk was that he could duck. Fortunately, he was up against the stage and couldn’t bend over. My shot ricocheted off his upper chest and hit the stage curtain and bounced on the stage. I got Kim twice thanks to my dad’s training! Right after that, my best friend, Richard Geike (Nisswa’s future fire chief) came up to me and asked, “Arne, how did you do that?” I told him that I trained with my dad using a football. The next week, Richard came back prepared. He eliminated Kim near the end of the round by catching his ball (and yes it was loud), then it was just Richard and me. I didn’t have time to be shocked because Richard quickly pivoted and ricocheted the ball off my foot to win the game. I think that was the fastest game I ever saw!

The moral here is that just that little time that my dad spent training me went a long, long way to building my self-esteem and showing me if I could even occasionally beat the top guy, just with some training and focus, I could do anything. Before that point in time – I didn’t know how to win. Now I knew that I could, and knew that careful preparation is essential in achieving my goals. That was the greatest gift my dad could have ever given me. It was a gift that I could now give to my own kids someday.

As a lumberman, dad contributed greatly to the region, having built 23 homes himself and supplying building materials to many homes and developments, such as Madden’s Lodge, which had Boberg Lumber as sole supplier for many decades. Over those decades, there were many stories to tell. I’ll just share a few of them here and I’m done.

Mark Twain once said: “The problem with working at the post office is that you’re at the mercy of anyone with a penny for a postage stamp”. Basically, running a retail establishment.

But my dad got his licks in, nevertheless.

Dad kept a sign posted on the overhead beam up in the office that customers would see on the way out. It listed 3 excuses as to why they didn’t buy after hearing the price:

1. I have to go home and measure
2. I have to go get my checkbook
3. I have to discuss it with the wife

One customer came in looking for polyethylene film in roll form. He asked my dad, “How wide a poly do you have?” My dad replies, “100 feet wide”. “100 feet!!???”, “Yeah, but it’s only 8 feet long”.

A contractor, Brian Levig, stopped by Boberg Lumber one day asking dad, “I have this 1x12 tongue and groove that’s just been sawn and planed, but not dried yet. If I skip the months of drying and install the boards on customer’s walls right now, how much will they shrink?” Dad replied, “1 inch per year for 12 years”.

A customer rolls in asking how much 2x4 studs were. My dad asks, “pine or fur”. The customer replies, “pine”. My dad says, “85 cents”. The customer replies, “It’s 75 cents at Menards!” My dad immediately rushes to one of the entrance door and peers out, “I don’t see it!” Then runs to the other door and repeats, “I don’t see it!”. The customer asks, “You don’t see what?” Dad replies, “Menards”. The customer says, “Oh, Menards is down in Des Moines”. Dad replies, “That’s right, and we’re right here!” (with finger pointing and shaking down toward floor).