Clarence and Alberta Born
My father departed from the Born tradition of farming by going into the Lutheran ministry. In the late forties, he left the North Dakota grain fields to enter the seminary of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod in Springfield, Illinois.
After graduating in 1953 and being called to pastor a church in Marion, Kansas, he met Alberta Schaaf who lived in nearby Wichita.
She was from German immigrant stock just as he was—her grandparents on both sides had come to America from Germany about the same time as my father's grandparents. Her father's father had emigrated from the Rhineland Pfalz and her mother's father had come from the Danzig area of West Prussia.
Clarence and Alberta were married in 1954. I am their oldest son, one of four boys they raised. Though I was born in Wisconsin during a brief pastorship my father served there, my earliest memories are of Holton, Kansas, where my father was pastor of the Lutheran church from 1957 to 1960. Below my younger brother Dan and I are standing with him in the front yard of the parsonage there in 1958; the picture below that is of the same house in 2002.
