Alyce Lindberg Densow finds it amusing that she lived the first 46 years of her life in Wisconsin.
“As of August, I will have lived 46 years in Red River!”
She also enjoys the fact that, in Sweden, the Lindberg name is pronounced Lindberry which means “A Tree On A Mountain.”
“I’m Red River’s professional Swede!”
Born in Lincoln County in the Badger State on her grandfather’s farm, Alyce was raised by her Grandfather who holds a special place in her heart.
“He was a wonderful man, taught me everything.
I remember his hands. My Grandfather worked hard all his life. He raised horses, he was a farmer, he did lumbering and all kinds of stuff. It was always outdoor, physical work. He had the most beautiful hands in the world. His fingers were so tapered and the nails were so perfect.
“You would think he never did a day’s work in his life! God protected his hands I guess.
“He was 6’4” and a tall oak of a man! He was very spiritual. The way I was raised by that man… no wonder I’m such a weirdo.”
One of her many “weirdo” talents is writing.
“I been a writer all my life. I took journalism courses and fiction writing and article writing – you name it, you know. That’s all I ever wanted to do was write since I was a kid.”
It was a writing professor who told her “you’re not going to make any money writing fiction: get into newspapering.”
He was a friend of the man who owned The Lake Country Reporter so “I went to see the man and he gave me a job as a reporter!”
With husband, Ken, a school principal, and four kids to care for, the job was very handy, with the paper office only seven miles from her house.
“I could get to my kids if they got sick. It just really worked out for me.”
Alyce did everything at the small newspaper. She wrote obituaries and sports news. She specialized on doing features on people and she started a page “for women that had nothing to do with growing flowers or doing recipes.
“It was about women entrepreneurs who were doing really interesting things in the area. Oh, my goodness, that was one of the best things I did for that paper!
It brought so much interest in, and it did so much for the women of the town.
“We covered a huge territory called the Lake Country. I don’t know how many lakes there were and I can’t even remember all their names anymore!” She also wrote political articles which gained her a reputation.
She remembers, “I’d walk into a restaurant and all the guys would say ‘Hey, Densow, where’s your white hat?’ The old coffee crowd would tease me.
“In the 60s I was very, very active in ERA and Civil Rights and all that sort of thing. I was going to consciousness-raising sessions and the whole 1960s bit for women.
“The city of Waukesha where I lived was a very old college town with lots of ancient people with lots of money! It was a city of about 30,000.” The 60s was a time of change even in Waukesha.
The passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (also known as the Hart-Celler Act), saw the United States adopt a new immigration policy that dropped the quota system of immigration that had always been biased in favor of immigrants from northern and western Europe. The Fair Housing Act (1968) also passed, part of the Civil Rights Act.
“We had a big influx of Filipino people. They came to buy homes. The government had passed the law that you couldn’t discriminate with home buyers.
People were very upset by it all.
“I worked very hard to help get homes because the people who were selling were using all kinds of excuses and reasons not to sell to them. I had articles in the paper about it and I put letters in the daily paper in Waukesha and I became the sweetheart of all the priests in the area because they were trying to help those (Filipino) people.
She was also fighting pollution on the lakes “long before anybody was having fits about it!
“It was a great time. I had a blast!”
It was about this time that Alyce was also writing fiction. She had an agent named Irma Ritchie.
“Actually it was Reitci. Her son was named Jack and he changed the name to Ritchie. He wrote murder mysteries. Irma helped me get some of my work published. I was writing juvenile fiction at the time.
One of my stories was published in a magazine for boys in Canada. I was published in Junior Scholastic, in books, and in regular little magazines mostly for girls called IN Magazine. I published a couple of adult pieces in the New York Daily News. I did all that in the 60s. I was busy!
“I look at my granddaughters now. They’re doing 45 things at once and holding down two jobs or whatever.
I think ‘where do they get all the energy?’ Then I remember what all I did when I was their age!”
Alyce wrote for the Lake Country paper for over 20 years and was still writing articles when the Densow family moved from Pewaukee Lake, “Ice Boating Capital of the World,” to Red River.
A vacation to New Mexico to visit a friend was a life-changer. The friend was a skier and brought them to the Red River Valley. While in town, they meet the owners of the Red River Inn. Was it for sale?
“Ken said ‘It has a lot of parking. It looks like a good deal to me. We can really build it up.’ So we did.” They took possession in August 1975.
Alyce knew she had found her spiritual home.
She soon made friends with some of the “oldtimers” like Winnie and Florence Oldham at Tall Pines Lodge and John and Rosie Brandenburg.
“They were lovely people and we had so much fun getting together. They helped us a lot.”
The Densow family ran the lodge, a restaurant “for four years,” and a gift shop. They also built a 150-seat theater which became home for the summer melodramas that were written and performed by the Densows and other eager town thespians. It was also an intimate venue for Michael Martin Murphey concerts for many years.
With no retail experience, Alyce embraced the challenge of the shop. She began by selling pottery.
Eventually beautiful quilts and teapots would became a trademark. Repeat customers became the norm.
The Inn stopped nightly rentals shortly after the death of Ken in October of 2000. “We decided to rent monthly and concentrate on retail. I still owned the place and was running it. The kids were all helping me.” Dirk Arnold, Alyce’s son-in-law, took over the bookkeeping and “it worked out quite well.”
When Dirk and daughter Kathi bought the business in the fall of 2007, Alyce retired, just in time to suffer injuries in a “darn ol’ car crash” in the Moreno Valley with her friend Bob Prunty. The worst physical injury was a broken left arm and wrist, but the bigger loss came a year later when Bob died.
Alyce is still writing a weekly column for the Miner after almost 28 years. She admits, after all these years, to still being curious. “If I didn’t have curiosity, I wouldn’t be a writer!”
