Wilton Rasmusson never made it past eighth grade, but when he was 100, the Norwegian Ambassador visited Fridley to personally thank him for fighting the Nazis.
The WWII veteran was a spy who served as a paratrooper and demolition expert for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime predecessor of the CIA. Upon returning to Minnesota after the war, he turned down CIA job offers in favor of a quiet life, tending pristine rose gardens and raising a family with Doris Dinnetz, who lived with her sister in Minneapolis and whom he met on the first day of his return home. . They married in 1946.
Rasmusson, 102, formerly of New Brighton, died of natural causes on August 6 in the Landmark of Fridley retirement community. A joint service for him and his wife, Doris, who died of COVID-19 last year at the age of 94, will take place on October 7. Their only grandchild, Amber Rasmusson, said she was grateful her grandfather had lived such a long life. She said she remembered how her grandmother coaxed her to tell her what he had done during the war.
“He’s like, ‘It’s not really a big deal,” said Amber, of New Brighton. “And then as I got older and he started talking more about it, and we started doing more research, I was like, ‘This is really amazing. ” [But] part of it was traumatic and he didn’t want to talk about it. “
Rasmusson grew up with 11 siblings in Sunburg, Minnesota, a predominantly Norwegian community north of Willmar. Fluent in Norwegian, he served in the Norwegian OSS task force, NORSO II, during his 3.5 years abroad. He jumped from planes 13 times, blowing up bridges and roads to stop the German army.
When Ambassador KÃ¥re R. Aas visited Rasmusson at his Fridley nursing home in December 2019 to present him with two medals, he said that Rasmusson and his fellow Allied soldiers “made freedom possible”.
While on the front lines during the war, Rasmusson kept a cyanide pill in his pocket to swallow in case he was captured. But it was a bicycle collision with another cyclist in England that put him in a coma for 10 days and made him miss the D-Day invasion.
“I have never been to this ball,” he told the Star Tribune in 2019. “Instead of going to France, I went to the hospital.”
For nearly 40 years, Rasmusson worked for the Chicago & North Western Railroad. He savored a good glass of brandy – the alcohol he remembered had been parachuted into the troops celebrating the end of the war – and listened to Lawrence Welk.
Amber Rasmusson described her grandfather as humble, hardworking and “always a charmer”. She said her childhood was spent visiting Como Zoo and Hansen Park in New Brighton with her beloved grandparents. Later in life, they often took Caribbean cruises. Everywhere they went, she said, her grandfather befriended someone.
Amber said she was going to regret her thick Norwegian accent, especially when she heard him call on the phone to say “Grandpa calling!” – as if she could one day misunderstand his voice.
“I’m going to miss being able to present him to people and hear him tell stories again that I have heard countless times before,†she said. “Every time he told a story, I always felt like I was hearing it again for the first time.”
Besides his granddaughter, Rasmusson is survived by his son, Greg, of Minneapolis, and his brother, Walter, of Fort Collins, Colorado. The joint service for Wilton and Doris Rasmusson will take place at 9:30 am on October 7 at Northeast Washburn-McReavy Chapel, 2901 NE. Johnson Street, Minneapolis.
Kim Hyatt • 612-673-4751