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- [S927] Obituary.
Rose Mary (Rosa Maria) Steckler, 95, was born September 28th, 1919 in Morton County near St. Anthony, North Dakota. She passed away at the Sheyenne Care Center in Valley City, North Dakota on April 2nd, 2015.
Rose was the ninth of the twelve children of Angelika Fleck and Joseph Steckler. She grew up on farms near St. Anthony and Selfridge, North Dakota. Her early memories were of riding horses, helping her mother bake pies and do housework, driving horse-drawn rakes and headers during harvest season, going to German wedding dances, singing German songs and enjoying the companionship of all those sisters and brothers. Rose attended country schools through the eighth grade.
During the drought of 1936, the Steckler family moved to Kensal, North Dakota, and a few years later to Dazey. Rose worked as a housekeeper for local farm families. In 1941, her family moved to Yakima, Washington, and she worked in canneries. She worked as a cook for housing construction crews in Bremerton, Washington in 1942, and at a daycare center and infirmary for migrant workers in Yakima from 1942 to 1945.
Back on the farms in North Dakota, Rose and her family lived a few miles from the Valentine and Rose Bender family. Rose met their son, Joseph, when she was about seven years old and he was ten. The Benders had moved to Yakima in 1936. Joe worked for farmers in North Dakota, and as a migrant laborer in California until he was drafted into the army and trained as a medic after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Joe proposed to Rose in 1943, and they were married at St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Yakima on December 28th, 1943, in a double wedding with Rose's brother John Steckler and Joe's sister, Angie Bender. Joe was eventually sent overseas with Patton's 3rd Army, and took part in the Normandy invasion and the Battle of the Bulge.
Rose lived with Joe's parents in Yakima until he returned from the war in October of 1945. They moved back to North Dakota and began farming in 1946, living near Wimbledon, Hannaford and Dazey for the next 24 years.
Rose and Joe had three children, Robert, Betty and Kenneth. They were active members in the communities and the Catholic churches where they lived and the schools their children attended.
Joe died in 1970, and Rose went to Yakima, Washington in 1972-73 where she was an assembly worker at a Kwik-Lock factory. From 1973 to 1975, she worked as a housekeeper at the Sheyenne Manor in Valley City.
Rose married Harold Berg on December 12th, 1975, and moved to Tower City, North Dakota. Rose inherited a stepfamily that eventually grew from four children to eleven grandchildren, and is still expanding with great-grandchildren today! She and Harold farmed until their retirement in 1984. They moved to Valley City in 1999. Because of health issues, Rose went to live at the Sheyenne Care Center in June, 2005.
Rose was the consummate homemaker and farm wife. It seemed she could do just about anything well. She cooked, baked, (her apple pies were legendary!) sewed, decorated, gardened, (both vegetable and flower gardens) canned, made hay, raised chickens, butchered and drove grain trucks. She was as at home in her farm clothes milking cows as she was in a beautiful dress going dancing with Joe or Harold. Rose always celebrated and created beauty wherever she was.
They say when you come to die, no one is going to ask whether or not you kept a tidy house! Well, in Rose's case, no one had to ask: it was very obvious that she took great pride in keeping a beautiful, clean home. The family joke is that Rose would insist that you leave ""no round corners"" when you were cleaning floors!
She loved flowers, babies, Lladro porcelain, See's milk chocolate candies, music, dancing and singing. She especially liked the German songs she grew up with, and the old Catholic hymns and Latin songs. Rose was a devout Catholic. She had a great love for the rosary. She sang in her church choir, was a member of the Catholic Church's Altar Society and made significant contributions to the various churches she attended.
She loved her children, her grandsons and her ""steps:"" all the Berg children, grandchildren and great-grands, who knew her as ""Grandma Rose.""
She was outgoing and friendly, still making friends in the last years of her life at the care center. It seemed wherever Rose went in Barnes County and other parts of North Dakota, she would run into someone she knew. Harold used to joke, ""Do you know everyone?""
Rose is survived by her daughter, Betty (Cathedral City, CA), her son Ken and his wife Lisa (Yakima, WA), her grandsons Tyson and Brian Bender (Washington State), numerous nieces and nephews, and the Berg family: Diana and Terry Hanson (Fargo), Tom and Paula Berg (Rapid City, SD), Sharon and Brian Opdahl (Grand Forks), and Marcia and Fran Fagerstrom (Eden Prairie, MN), and their children and grandchildren. She was preceded in death by her parents; all eleven of her sisters and brothers; many, many aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, cousins, in-laws; her son Bob and her husbands Joe and Harold.
Her family would especially like to thank the many wonderful caregivers, nurses, food service workers, activities people and chaplains at Sheyenne Care Center who loved Rose and took good care of her for the nearly ten years she called the care center home. Thank you, too, to Monsignor Skonseng at St. Kate's, and Allen Schuldt and Mike Lerud for their kindness and help in the aftermath of Rose's death.
A rosary and prayer service will be held at the Lerud-Schuldt Funeral Home in Valley City at 7:00 PM on Tuesday, April 7th, with viewing beginning at 5:00 PM. A Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated on Wednesday, April 8th at 11:00 AM at St. Catherine's Catholic Church in Valley City, with interment at 2:00 PM at St. Boniface Catholic Cemetery in Wimbledon, North Dakota.
Published in Valley City Times-Record on Apr. 6, 2015 - See more at: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/times-online/obituary.aspx?n=rose-bender-berg&pid=174550698#sthash.kdbETqvR.dpuf
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1919 - 2015 (95 years)