Jill Schramm/MDN Alma Hildahl is joined Tuesday by her sons, Mark, left, and Dean, right.

Alma Hildahl is marking her 100th birthday with a celebration that could last all week.

Hildahl plans to have lunch with friends at a favorite restaurant today and will be center of attention at a party Saturday that might very well have a television in the corner broadcasting the North Dakota State University Bison game. She would hate to miss one of her favorite teams in action. In between, the former Norsk Hostfest board member might take some time to roam the festival, having served as a volunteer for 43 years before the event took a two-year break in 2020-21.

An extended celebration is natural for someone who claims two birthdays.

Hildahl was born on Sept. 27, 1922, on a farm in Saskatchewan, near Regina, the youngest of three children. However, the doctor didn’t arrive until the next day, and the date he signed on her birth certificate was Sept. 28.

“I’ve had a good 100 years. I stay in good health,” Hildahl said. She and her husband, Allan, moved to The View in Minot 16 years ago after they gave up spending winters in Arizona. Allan died about 15 years ago.

As a young woman, Hildahl had earned a teaching certificate in Regina and taught grades 1-8 in a rural school in Canada, near Portal, in the 1940s for $700 a year. She also oversaw correspondence education by the 9th and 10th grade students and was paid an extra $25 a year to handle janitorial duties.

“That included firing the furnace. I had to go over at 11 o’clock at night and shut it down and go over at six in the morning and open it up so it would be warm,” she said. Her mode of travel was horseback.

She later taught school in Estevan, where Allan had been from. They married in Plentywood, Montana, which wasn’t far from Estevan and offered a less expensive marriage license.

“We didn’t have any money for weddings so that was the cheapest thing to do,” she chuckled. “We took both of our mothers, Allan’s mother and my mother.”

The Hildahls moved to Los Angeles in the late 1940s, drawn by strong free enterprise system in the United States. Alma Hildahl taught school there a few years. Deciding that California wasn’t where they wanted to be, they moved to Minot, which was closer to their Canadian families. 

“When I came here, I checked out the school system. Minot had excellent schools, so I thought this is a good place to raise a family,” she said.

During her years in Minot, she taught school only about a month. She taught during the 1969 teachers strike to ensure students would finish out the school year. Her sons were students at the time.

Mark went on to practice dentistry in Minot and recently retired. Her younger son, Dean, is a physician in Naples, Florida. Hildahl has a granddaughter, four grandsons and five great-grandsons with another on the way. 

Allan and Alma Hildahl gained their U.S. citizenship in the early 1950s. Afterwards, Alma Hildahl committed decades to behind-the-scenes political work for the Republican Party. For 15 years, she ran the Minot office of Mark Andrews, who represented North Dakota in the U.S. House from 1963 to 1981 before serving a six-year term in the U.S. Senate. 

Andrews’ Minot office had a rare facsimile (fax) machine, which was quite a large device in the 1960s and early 1970s. Hildahl would clip items about area residents from the region’s newspapers and send it to Andrews’ office so he could write notes of acknowledgement on the clippings to mail to the residents.

Hildahl met President Dwight D. Eisenhower during his visit to Minot in 1953 to dedicate the Garrison Dam and met Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan in Washington, D.C.

Mark Hildahl said his mother, an active supporter of Republican candidates, kept recipe cards with handwritten names of party faithful so they could all be called and reminded to vote at election time.

“When I was president of Republican Women, we put five phones in the basement of a house and I got people to call. We called everybody to see if they planned to vote, find out if they were Republican or Democrat,” Alma Hildahl said. They elected all their Republican candidates that year.

“So the work paid off,” she said.

In addition, she has been committed to Norsk Hostfest, coordinating Hall of Fame activities for many years and celebrating her husband’s Norwegian and Swedish heritage. Her ancestors came from England and Ireland.

She also served as president of the Ramstad School PTA, helped with Cub Scouts, taught Sunday School at the Presbyterian Church and coached her sons’ baseball team in northeast Minot.

“We’re calling all the players to make sure they showed up so we had enough to play. Then we would go around and pick them up and drive them down to Roosevelt Park, where we played. Then after the game, win or lose I bought them a snow cone,” she recalled.

“That was a team rule,” Mark Hildahl said. “Every kid played every game and everybody got a snow cone afterwards.”

The Hildahls were a hockey and curling family, too, and Alma still enjoys her sports teams, especially the University of North Dakota hockey team and NDSU Bison football team. At one time, she and Allan would join bus trips to Grand Forks or Estevan to watch hockey.

She also watches National Basketball Association games and occasionally major league baseball. Mark persuaded her to defect from the Minnesota Vikings to become a Green Bay Packers football fan, although loyalties die hard.

“I still like the Vikings to win,” she noted.

Her only regret is she can’t golf anymore, although she has helped put on local golf tournaments.

“Made the brownies,” Mark Hildahl said of one of her key contributions to the tournaments. “She still bakes every day.” 

An open house with cake and ice cream will be held Saturday from 2-5 p.m. at The View on Elk Drive.