FRAZEE, Minn. _ Methodism, and our family's abidance to it, explains as well as anything how as a kid I ended up fishing near this small town.
My maternal grandfather was a Methodist minister in Frazee, thus my periodic landing here in summers. Sometimes Dad and Mom also would stay a week or more while my brother and I vacationed with Grandma and Grandpa. Other times they visited only a day or two while dropping us off or picking us up.
A bit of an outlier to his in-laws, Dad was a fisherman, and a Camel-smoking fisherman at that. Come Sundays, he was in the proper pew listening to Grandpa preach. But his more universalist beliefs pivoted on the special kind of salvation a live minnow impaled on a small hook can deliver, and he tested that faith whenever possible.
Grandpa was 80 when he died in 1961, and I was 10. I suspect he was born to be a Methodist preacher, because his name was John Wesley Frisbie _ John Wesley being the founder in England in the 18th century of the Methodist Church.
An Ohio native and a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan, Grandpa and his brother, Clifford, also a Methodist minister, were sent to North Dakota to spread the faith. In that state, Grandpa served various small-town churches before retiring to Frazee, where until his death he pastored the Richville Methodist Church.
Grandma _ Elnetta was her name _ was, like her sisters, Myra, Grace and Elsie, a college graduate, a relative rarity for women in the early 1900s. Myra I don't recall. Grace was gracious. But Elsie ... Elsie was a problem, particularly for Dad, and especially when there were fish to clean.
