Frank Howard Schroeder—Dec. 21, 1938-March 9, 2014
Frank Howard Schroeder was born Dec. 21, 1938 to Frank H. W. and Emilie W. M. (Rehm) Schroeder of De Witt, Nebraska. He was baptized as an infant at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church. He was raised on the farm and attended country school through 8th grade. He graduated from DeWitt High School in 1956 and then attended Wartburg College, Waverly, Iowa.
While at Wartburg, he met Marilyn Nissen. They were married on August 21, 1960, following their graduation from college. From there they moved to Dubuque, IA, where Howard studied at Wartburg Seminary. From June, 1962-June, 1963, he served his internship at Messiah Lutheran Church in Los Angeles, CA. (This was in the Watts area, about one year before the riots.) He graduated from the seminary in 1965 and, after a 3 months study session at the Iowa State Correctional Institution for Boys, accepted a call to St. James Lutheran Church in Garden City. (This was a ranching and oil drilling community.)
As part of his continuing education, he attended the Urban Training Center in Chicago in 1968. It was a helpful support for his next call to Hope Lutheran Church in Tulsa, OK, located in a struggling changing community. He served there from 1969-1973, working with the Greater Tulsa Council, trying to improve bussing, housing, and job opportunities in the church’s area, as well as ministering to the mission congregation.
In 1973, he accepted a call to be associate pastor at Zion Lutheran Church in Loveland, CO, where he worked closely with the youth. He was on the District’s Youth Council and chaired the Annual Youth Convention one year in Denver. (This was a mixed community of business people, manufacturing, and farming.) He was very involved with the events following the Big Thompson Flood Disaster, helping families with identifying their loved ones and the memorial services and grieving, where over 140 people died.
In 1980 he accepted a call to American Lutheran Church in Kellogg, ID. While there, the bottom dropped out of the silver prices and this community went from a prosperous mining community to a struggling, depressed area where mines closed and people left the area. He served on the Governor’s Task Force to help stabilize the Silver Valley.
His last two parishes were in Nebraska. St. John’s in Atkinson (1987-1995) was a farming and ranching part of the sand-hills and St. Paul (Byron) and St. Paul (Hardy) (joint parishes served from 1995-2005) was a farming community on the Nebraska/Kansas border. He enjoyed the opportunity to drive a tractor occasionally and recall his roots.
Howard retired from the ministry in 2002, because of failing health. He and Marilyn moved to Colorado Springs where both of their sons and their families lived. They joined Bethel Lutheran Church where he was a Stephen Minister and sang in the choir for awhile.
Howard loved working in a garden and grew many, many beautiful roses and always planted a trumpet vine in each place he lived, reminiscing the vines on Marilyn’s Iowa farm. Photography, especially pictures of his flowers, trains, and farming, filled his spare time, when he wasn’t sneaking off to a parishioner’s farm to see if he could drive a tractor, truck or other piece of equipment or do a little welding. He loved to tell stories.
He leaves many loved ones behind, including his wife, Marilyn, son Mark and his wife, Lynn, son Timothy and his wife, Lanna, 4 grandchildren, Dakota, Riley, Sydney, and Jacob, 1 great-granddaughter, Eva, his brother, Dennis Schroeder and his wife, Susan, of Beatrice, NE, 2 sisters, Janice Schroeder, of Aurora, CO, and Carol Tesar and her husband, Bill, of Lincoln, NE, a brother-in-law, Dr. Erwin Janssen, of Tulsa, OK, brother-in-law Jon Nissen and his wife, Mary, 3 nieces, Julie Janssen and her husband Alan, Kathy Klaassen and her husband Dan, and their sons Christopher and Stephen, Michelle Thiltgen and her husband Neil and their daughters Madelyn and Hailey, and 2 nephews, Jason Schroeder and his wife Erica, and children Hailey and Grayson, and Jay Nissen and his wife Misty and many aunts, uncles, cousins, relatives and friends. He was preceded in death by his parents, his sister-in-law, Maurine Janssen, and brother-in-law, Walter Oleksinski. In God he now rests and lives on to celebrate in eternity!