The Legend of Bob Rundell, Part I

Some families have stories about a relative who once caught a really big fish, or another one who almost played professional baseball. The Rundell family has Bob. And just like the tales of Chuck Norris that are as numerous as they are legendary, the stories of Bob Rundell are an ongoing and ever-evolving anthology that has been added to and embellished over the course of his 81 years.

Robert Eugene Rundell was born in 1933 during the Great Depression in Starbuck, Minnesota, a tiny farming community on the western side of the state. He was the second of five children born to Elmer and Alma Rundell. Like most rural families during that time, the Rundells survived primarily from the work they could do on their own land, and Bob’s muscles got their start on the family farm.

By the time he was a teenager, he was doing a man’s share of the work (this is not hyperbole). He left school in the tenth grade to work full time on the farm to help support the family. Despite the fact that he never completed his education, he was an intelligent and resourceful man who could build, fix, or figure out just about anything.

In 1955 he married a redhead named Carole Johnson, and the two of them produced a daughter named Jackie, and then hooked a travel trailer up to their car and drove it out to Oregon. In his later years, he’d tell his family that they should never try anything half that foolish.

A few years later, Bob and Carole added a son named Jerry to the family, and not long after that they moved to The Dalles. Once again, all those muscles he built up working on the family farm were put to good use when he got a job with a moving company called Ralph’s Transfer. His company sometimes moved families, but often they were called out to businesses to move heavy equipment. It was on one such occasion that he found himself and his crew of two staring down a half ton safe located on the second floor of a bank building. I don’t know how big the other two guys were, or how they formulated their plan, but what I do know is that they strapped that safe to a dolly and while the two other guys stood at the top of the stairs, Bob Rundell took the position below the safe. Recalling it as an old man he would just shake his head and say, “I could have easily been crushed to death. Pretty stupid.”

One day he and his boss were moving a power bay out of a telephone company. They had it tied up with rope and were slowly lowering it into place when his boss unhooked it from the winch too soon and the bulky equipment came crashing down. In a split second, Bob pushed his boss out of the way and the hunk of metal landed on his leg instead, crushing it. He begrudgingly took several weeks off from work, but he made good use of his time, driving his entire family out to Minnesota for a visit with his parents.