Star Tribune
On the last day of high school, a slow tractor roll into a bright future for these Minnesota seniors
FOLEY, Minn. — It was the last day of senior year. The first day of everything that comes next.
At Foley High School, that could mean only one thing.
Tractor Day.
The first tractors rumbled into the high school parking lot early Friday morning. Dozens followed. Sparkling clean, decked with balloons and streamers, pulling trailers loaded with laughing teenagers on hay bales.
For decades, high schoolers in this central Minnesota town have rolled to the last day of school at the lowest possible speed, in the grandest possible style.
“It’s a good way to kind of close it out,” said senior Megan Trigg, standing next to a trailer covered in pink balloons and streamers. The tractor ride to school took a leisurely 25 minutes that morning, giving motorists behind them plenty of time to enjoy the jokey sign tied to the back — a riff on the classic line from “Mean Girls”: Get in Losers, We’re Graduating.
Trigg and her friends — Megan Latterell, Gabby Johnson and Gracie Blank — grew up watching the tractors roll through each May. Now it was their turn.
“People come out and wave, people drive by and honk. It’s pretty cool,” Johnson said.
No one seems sure when or why the tradition began. There are other rural high schools that celebrate tractor days. Few do it bigger or better than Foley.
“Wow! A John Deere!” Emily Miller’s youngest son, Beckham, called out, pointing as a vintage green tractor pulled up to the school. As adult volunteers directed traffic, the green tractor joined the orderly rows of parked farm equipment — with the kindergartner excitedly narrating every turn. “Look, Mom!”
Tractor Day is an event for the whole community. Neighbors wave from the curbs. Families head to the high school to watch the fun.
But this day was for the Class of ’23. Seniors like Miller’s older son, Evan, who worked late with his friends on Thursday; getting the tractor ready, putting the final touches on the cutoff jean short-shorts for their group costume.
Seniors hugged, snapped selfies and danced across the parking lot. The airspace over Foley High School filled with arcing water balloons.
The seniors were freshmen in March 2020. Their high school years were marked by pandemic disruptions, distance learning and missed milestones. Give these kids all the water balloons their hearts desire.
“That’s why a lot of us want to do the traditions now so much,” said senior Kristen Drexler, standing with classmates Madelyn Craft, AJ Rahm and Haley Hamilton, sporting matching cowboy hats. “We want to try to get everything in that we had to miss for so many years.”
Foley High Principal Joel Foss estimated that some students had to be on the road as early as 5 a.m. with their slow-moving rigs. A tractor can’t exactly cruise down country roads at 60 miles an hour. Some parents trailed the tractor convoys in their cars, hazard lights flashing.
For the students, Tractor Day is worth the early start and extra effort.
“It’s a farming community and kids like to show off their tractors,” said Noah Lentner, who rode in with friends Ben Lewandowski, Emmit Olson, Alex Wirtzfeld and Mason Arnold.
Students compete for titles like cleanest tractor, smallest tractor, biggest tractor and, of course, best-decorated tractor. The machines were festooned with taxidermy and decoys, sporting llama balloons, draped in American flags.
One student brought a push lawn mower and left it parked next to one of the John Deeres with a sign arguing the case that lawn mowers are just very, very, very small tractors.
There was a trailer decked in rainbows and trans pride flags. There was a tractor waving a Trump 2024 flag. It was Tractor Day in America.
A group of students gathered by the rainbow-draped tractor, keeping an eye on it for the classmates who had decorated it. A few water balloons had been lobbed its way. The Class of ’23 looks out for each other.
“I think it taught me how important friends are,” Craft said.
“Tractor Day is a good get-together with everybody,” she added. “Foley’s a very rural and country place, and we can celebrate in a way that feels like us.”
“It’s been a huge shift,” he said.
Deqa Muhidin, a former schoolteacher, children’s book author and Somali language heritage program coordinator at the Minneapolis Public Schools Multilingual Department, said the Sing-Again project would be a great addition to what was already in place.
The district’s Somali Heritage Language Program was launched in 2021 and has grown to 270 students in kindergarten through fourth grade.
The program is more than a language-learning program, she said, also teaching Somali culture.
The Somali language has its own cultural insights, which are only spoken by elders, and once they are no longer here, those insights will be lost, Muhidin said. For example, elders might use the phrase, “Look at something in your foot,” meaning run. Or a merchant may tell a customer, “I’m going to close my eyes,” meaning this is my final offer, she said.
An area shuttle service hopes to help ease Freeborn County’s health care woes by offering free rides to local hospitals.
SMART Transit, which operates in Austin, Albert Lea and Owatonna, is expanding its medical ride service for Freeborn County residents next year thanks to a $10,000 grant. The shuttle company will offer free rides to Mayo Clinic hospitals in Albert Lea and Austin for residents age 55 and up, addressing a problem for residents who’ve seen medical services in the region shrink over the years.
“We’re quite ecstatic,” said Chris Thompson, operations manager at SMART Transit. “I can’t even explain how wonderful news it is.”
Mayo Clinic Health System in Albert Lea announced service cuts in 2017, urging people to travel to Austin, about 20 minutes east, for most inpatient hospital visits. Area residents organized to get Iowa-based MercyOne to open a primary care clinic in 2022, but pandemic-related complications and financial troubles led to the clinic closing at the beginning of 2024.
A group of Albert Lea residents approached SMART Transit officials earlier this year, asking for more medical shuttle service and expanded rides to hospitals. SMART has had a free ride program for seniors in Mower County for years thanks to Mayo Clinic grants, but there wasn’t funding to duplicate the program.
Mayo officials worked with SMART staff to secure grant money through the Naeve Health Care Foundation, a local group named after the former hospital that served Albert Lea residents since 1911. The foundation grants money for local health care issues including Mayo program funding; it has donated more than $4 million for community health care.
Freeborn County isn’t alone in struggling to access health care. For decades, hospitals in greater Minnesota have largely joined up with bigger systems or closed as the state’s population shifted to metropolitan areas. Some smaller hospitals have tried banding together to save money, while others find niches in the area to offer better services.
Yet a growing population of seniors means an ever-increasing need to get them to doctor’s appointments, and rural communities are struggling to meet transportation demands. Minnesota’s senior population (age 65 and older) grew from about 680,000 residents in 2010 to almost 950,000 in 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Not all of them have their own transportation.
As a photojournalism professor, R. Smith Schuneman mixed high expectations with a warm manner to launch the careers of a wide spectrum of photographers.
His students at the University of Minnesota, many of whom regarded Schuneman as a pivotal influence in their lives, went on to shoot for National Geographic, Look, Life and numerous other magazines and newspapers, as well as for corporate clients, photography studios and a wide array of film and video productions.
Then Schuneman, who went by his nickname “Smitty” and never by his given name of Raymond, embarked on a second career with the creation of Media Loft , an events and communications agency. He eventually sold the company to his employees before retiring with his wife, Pat, to a lakeside home in Okoboji, Iowa.
“Smitty could be utterly ruthless, uncompromising or unyielding in his goal of making photojournalists out of us,” wrote Richard Olsenius, a former student of Schuneman’s, in a memorial book prepared by friends. “But it was underlied with a deep-rooted concern for what is right and moral. He demanded honesty from our work.”
He died Nov. 24 at age 88 of heart problems.
Schuneman was born in 1936 in Spirit Lake, Iowa. His parents Raymond “Art” and Olive “Bunch” Schuneman ran the local newspaper in Milford, Iowa, and it was there that Schuneman began publishing photos while still in school.
He also ran a side business covering weddings, events and “whatever pictures were needed around the small town,” his wife said.
She remembers seeing Schuneman for the first time when her band director arranged for her to take drum lessons from him. She was 15 and he was 16. She later worked for him at his photo service, processing the film.
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