Marvin Lee of Hinton, Alberta, Canada, died Feb. 17, 2021, age 80.
Marvin died on Feb. 17, 2021 undergoing heart valve replacement surgery, one week short of his 81st birthday. He is survived by his wife Ruth (Haugen) Lee; son Erik (Kaitlin); daughters Krista Lee ’03 (Andras Hos) and Grete (Matt) Ruryk; grandchildren Amelia, Elliot, and Leela; sister Dixie (Lee) Hanson ‘68 (Paul Hanson ’67); brothers Arland Braaten-Lee ‘71 (Kristine Braaten-Lee ‘77) and David Lee ‘80 (Joy (Zuidema) Lee ‘80 (ex)); two nieces, seven nephews; and many extended family and friends, both in Canada and the United States. He was preceded in death by his sister Carol (1941), father Milo Lee ‘34 (2003), sister Lorna Lee ‘65 (2007), and mother Agnes (2010).
Marvin was born, slightly premature, in Estevan, Saskatchewan, on Feb. 24, 1940, the first child of Pastor Milo Lee ‘34 of Decorah, Iowa and Agnes (Roen) Lee of Lake Alma, Saskatchewan. They lived in Macoun where Milo was serving his first parish, comprised of five congregations and a preaching place, one of which was 86 miles from the parsonage. On March 12, 1941, a second child, Carol, was born with hydrocephalus and lived only 20 minutes. Though Marvin was only a year-and-a-half old when the family moved to the States, his roots in Canada would prove consequential.
They moved in Nov. 1941 to Hingham in north central Montana, another parish with five congregations and a preaching place, still widely spaced but none so far as 86 miles. In Hingham Marvin “began school, played with two girls and a couple of boys, learned [he] was a fatty, played in a harmonica band, and explored the prairie.” Three siblings were born during the Hingham years: Lorna (1943), Dixie (1946), and Arland (1949). Also, a young farmer and leader in the Hingham congregation named Lloyd Twedt on a visit to the parsonage was taken with a picture of Agnes’s younger sister Ranveig. When Ranveig visited, Lloyd was invited to dinner, they fell in love, and were married, establishing a family connection to Hingham that would last long after Milo’s pastorate there.
Having completed work for a Master of Theology degree while in the parish, Milo decided to go back to school to study for a doctoral degree. He was accepted at Concordia Lutheran Seminary in St. Louis. So in 1950 the family moved from a town of 250 to a city of more than 850,000, and a whole new world opened up for Marvin: TV, movies, Forest Park, the Zoo, the Jewel Box, St. Louis Browns baseball games, wandering the city by bus, earning money by lawn mowing, snow shoveling, and a paper route. He delivered an advertising paper to the 250 households of the apartment complex where they lived whether the residents wanted it or not, and then went around collecting, never taking no for a final answer. His persistence paid off. Over and above spending money, he made enough to buy a 3-speed English bike for himself and a conventional bike for Lorna.
Milo completed his doctoral thesis in 1952 and accepted a call to First Lutheran Church in Renville, Minn., a pastorate that lasted 15 years. So First Lutheran became Marvin’s home congregation and Renville his home town. After weathering fights with two class bullies in junior high school, life became much easier. He was active in football, basketball, and baseball, as well as drama, band, and chorus. Beginning in 1955 at age 15 he spent five summers with the Twedts in Montana, working on their wheat farm, earning some money, helping to sustain that close familial bond. He graduated in 1958 as salutatorian of his class. It was an eventful May for the Lees: Lorna was confirmed on the 4th; David was born on the 12th, baptized on the 25th; and Marvin graduated on the 26th. One of the men of the church said, “If Mrs. Lee can make it through this month, she can take anything.” She did. With full festivity.
Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, was Milo’s alma mater, and Marvin grew up knowing he would be going there too. He had long enjoyed visiting his Lee relatives in the Decorah area, often staying at the farm of Elmer and Hazel Wangsness, whose son, Wayne Wangsness ’68, of all the Lee cousins was closest to him in age. Marvin’s academic career at Luther was unremarkable, but the ambience of campus life helped him develop his social confidence. He also developed physically. Continuing his football career in college, he came into his own as a junior, becoming a force on the offensive line and catching the eye of a scout for the Montreal Alouettes who was looking for American football players with a Canadian background. Marvin graduated from Luther with an English major in 1962 and was drafted by the Alouettes along with Sandy Stephens, the quarterback who had led the Minnesota Gophers to a national championship in 1960 and a Rose Bowl victory in 1962.
Training camp and life in French Canadian Montreal were challenging, but Marvin adjusted and made the team. He enjoyed the wide-open, faster-paced style of Canadian football with its larger field and rule of three downs instead of four. In his sophomore season he was traded to Winnipeg. Under coach Bud Grant the Blue Bombers had become a dynasty, winning the Grey Cup four out of the last five years. Grant moved Marv to defensive end where his speed could be used more effectively. Marvin was happy with the move and felt now he could begin to reach his potential as a football player. It was not to be. A knee injury during an exhibition game sidelined him for two months. He played sporadically for the rest of that season and part of the next with the Edmonton Eskimos, but the injury effectively ended his football career. Perhaps a blessing in disguise.
After his first season of football, Marvin returned to Luther College to pick up education credits for his teaching certificate. After the second, he taught high school English in Northwood, Iowa. After his final season he followed in his father’s footsteps, trying out Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minn., for four quarters. Deciding he was better suited for teaching than pastoring, he left the seminary in Jan. 1966 to teach high school English again, this time in Tripoli, Iowa. Still restless, he returned to school in the fall, entering the graduate program at Utah State University in Logan. Mentored by an excellent advisor, he experienced a breakthrough in learning how to systematically write papers. For the first time he enjoyed being a student, and his advisor encouraged him to go on for his doctorate. So in the fall of 1967 he enrolled in the graduate program at the University of Missouri in Columbia.
Life at Mizzou was good: good sports, good visiting lecturers, good musical programs, interesting people. Not much money as an instructor teaching half-time, but then not many needs either. Marv was in danger of becoming a professional student. After six years, however, he finally completed his doctoral thesis on the poet Robert Lowell. Facing a tight job market for English professors, he thought he would do well to get a degree in educational administration. But then his Utah State advisor, now at the University of Calgary, called asking him to come and work with him in a consulting business he was developing. So Marvin moved to Calgary, and for the next four years traveled throughout Canada and the States giving seminars on writing to people in government and industry.
Attending Faith Lutheran Church in Calgary, he met some members of the A.K. Haugen family. This was for Marvin a kind of coming full circle: Pastor Haugen in Torquay had served next door to Milo in Macoun, and the two had worked closely together establishing the first Bible Camp of the Moose Jaw Circuit in 1940. One of the Haugen daughters, Ruth, who worked as a nurse in Edmonton, caught Marvin’s interest when she visited and attended church with her family. The courtship took a while to get off the ground, but when it did they were married in short order on Aug. 19, 1977, at Faith Lutheran. It was a truly joyful wedding, bringing together from far and wide the extended, historically linked families of bride and groom.
As befitted a married man, Marvin gave up his transcontinental seminars for a more stationary job as Director of Student Services at Camrose Lutheran College. After their honeymoon in southern California the newlyweds bought a house and moved to Camrose. The following May, with Ruth four months pregnant, they went on an epic two-month world tour with another couple. Flying out from Seattle, they touched down in Hawaii, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Leaving Pan Am in Singapore, they traveled by bus and train through Malaysia to Bangkok, Thailand. From there they flew to Burma and stayed a week. The remainder of the trip was spent in northern India and Nepal. From Delhi they flew back to Seattle via Tehran, Frankfort, and London. The trip left them with a desire to return to the Far East, but with Krista’s birth in Nov. they were content to stay settled for the time being in Camrose. Two and a half years later Erik was born in April of 1981. Marvin resigned from his position at CLC in 1982 and followed through on his earlier idea of getting a Master’s degree in educational administration, taking classes this time at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.
Marvin and Ruth named their youngest child Grete after Grete Waitz, the great Norwegian marathoner, a hero of the era’s running boom of which Marvin was certainly a part. Grete was born in Sept. 1983, just in time for the family’s move to the Azores, nine Portuguese islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The family spent three enjoyable years in Ponta Delgada on the largest island, São Miguel, while Marvin taught English at the University of the Azores.
No job was waiting for Marvin when they returned to Canada in 1986, so for the next three years he was the house parent and Ruth the breadwinner as a nurse at Bethany Auxiliary Hospital in Camrose. Their time in Camrose ended in 1989 when Marvin accepted a position with Grande Prairie Regional College at Hinton, Alberta. It was a good fit for Marvin, including both teaching and administration responsibilities. Located in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains on the Athabasca River just east of Jasper National Park, Hinton was a place and community that Marvin and Ruth enjoyed and served for the next 32 years. After retiring in 2006, Marvin continued to be active, worshiping and sometimes preaching at Grace Lutheran Church, singing in the Foothills Male Chorus, downhill skiing at Marmot Basin, refereeing soccer, always reading, gardening, and remodeling, going to Edmonton Eskimos football games, visiting his children, doting on his grandchildren, never missing a family, high school, or college reunion, going on a last joyful pilgrimage to Norway in the summer of 2019, and simply living day by day with his beloved Ruth.
In 1995 Marvin learned that he was one of the two percent with a bicuspid aortic valve rather than the normal tricuspid valve. A bicuspid valve is prone either to not fully open, restricting blood flow to the body; or to not fully close, letting blood leak back into the left ventricle. After this slightly worrisome discovery he began to check in with a cardiologist regularly. In 2006 the valve was replaced. Fifteen years later, in Jan. of this year, he was hospitalized with congestive heart failure. An angiogram on Feb. 10 indicated that the replacement valve was wearing out and needed to be replaced. On Feb. 17 the valve was replaced, but they could not restart the heart.
This is what I imagine: The surgery’s complete. Marvin, hovering between life and death, assesses the situation. He’s lived a long, full, rich life. Even with a new valve, his tired heart will struggle. It’s Ash Wednesday. Wouldn’t this be a good day to die? He and the Holy Spirit agree that it is.
Marvin was never one to hold back from a new adventure.