December Newsletter 2023

December 1, 2023    News, People of the Park, Uncategorized   

“If you can’t live with Bob…”

A Visit with The Andersons

By Dale Dauten

When I visited with Bob and Linda Anderson, as we sat at their kitchen table, I admired the stained-glass piece hanging in the window and Bob told me, “Linda made that,” adding, “she’s a perfectionist… in everything she does.”

 

And that might just apply to her long marriage to Bob, too. Linda recounted how her grandparents (who raised her) loved him so much so that grandmother told her when she got married, “If you can’t live with Bob, you can’t live with anyone, so don’t come back.” That was over 60 years ago and they still seem perfectly suited to one another.
The two grew up in South Dakota, and they met when Linda was a senior in high school and Bob a couple of years older, about to head into the Army. A friend of Linda’s asked for her help putting together a party, a reunion event. The friend eventually said to Linda, “Now that you’ve helped with the planning, you’ve got to come.” Linda had no intention of joining in, saying, “I won’t know anyone there.” But her friend prevailed, and she went. Then Bob arrived. “I noticed how all the guys were excited to see him,” she recalled, “and he had this blonde, curly hair, and I asked my girlfriend who he was. She replied, ‘Oh, he has a girlfriend.’ But I found out later that they’d broken up. A year and a half later, we were married.”

 

Bob did his time in the Army and the two eventually settled on the farm that had been in the Anderson family since 1895. “I was born on the farm,” Bob said, “and so was my dad.” I asked if being “born on the farm” meant actually being delivered at the family home, and he joked about it, saying, “Yes, Mom popped me out and then she went back to work.”

 

And it’s still the family farm. No, Linda did not deliver the Anderson children at home; and, yes, the Andersons can now leave the farm for months at a time as they split their time between South Dakota and Mesa. “I came off the combine just last week,” Bob noted with a smile, “although our youngest son now runs the farm.”

 

Linda passed along photos of their youngest son and grandkids at harvest time.
Coming to The Resort

With the farm, three kids, and Linda having a career beyond the farm (at a high school and then at a nursing home), they still found time for Linda to serve on the School Board for 12 years and Bob for 10 years on the Farm Credit Board. Even so, they eventually were able to travel during the winter. Bob recalled how a friend with a place at The Resort had urged them to come and buy the home next to his. They came to visit, but instead of buying the place next door, they bought an RV to bring to the park and also to spend most of a decade traveling the country. Indeed, the Andersons became part of a group of four RVers who’d travel together, once crossing Canada and one time, as Bob put it, “We went to Florida on the way from South Dakota to Arizona.”

 

They eventually gave up the RV but didn’t give up visiting The Resort, buying a park model on J Street in 2006. There are two places you’ll likely to see Bob and Linda: the dance floor and the tennis courts. “We love to dance,” Linda explained, “and we dance at least two to three times a week – the dances every Friday here at The Resort, every Tuesday at Silveridge, and then the ones at the American Legion.” As for tennis, Bob is a regular in league play, but after some injuries, Linda has stepped down to more casual play and is part of a Resort tennis group called The Golden Girls.

 

(Photos: The Andersons at one of the dances, and Linda on the tennis court with The Golden Girls)
The couple have settled into a pleasant routine of looking forward to both annual treks: “We head to South Dakota around April, depending,” as Linda puts it, “how itchy Bob is to come back to the farm,”; then returning to The Resort in November, where, Linda says, “The people at the park are just special – we can’t wait and get back to see everybody.”

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NEWS ABOUT PAST NEWSLETTERS
We have now a decade of past issues of “The Resorter” available online. You’ll find them at theresortrvpark.com (under News & Updates). Plus, we now have a SEARCH feature that lets you find people or topics that we’ve written about.
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NOTE FROM THE EDITOR:

If you’d like to volunteer to be the subject of an article, or have someone you’d like to learn more about, please let me know.

 

Or, if you have photos you’ll like to share in upcoming newsletters, please send them.

 

Dale Dauten, Editor

Email: ddauten@gmail.com

Text: 480-297-6244

 

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