BROOKINGS — Come June, Doug and Cheryl Austreim will have been married 55 years.
“We like to say we met in the moonlight, because that sounds more romantic,” she said as they smiled at the memory.
At the time, Cheryl was playing the accordion in a dance band that had a gig at the Moonlight Supper Club near Lake Herman in Madison. Was it love at first sight? Yea or nay, it would be life-changing for both.
Doug, 78, and Cheryl, 74, were married June 19, 1971, at Holy Three Kings Catholic Church in Epiphany. He was 23; she was 18.
Their shared Catholic faith is a strong bond that brings the Austreims together in many of their activities. Cheryl is a cradle Catholic; Doug was raised a Lutheran. He converted to Catholicism in 1969 at 21. He underwent no formal instruction, such as the lengthy OCIA (Order of Christian Initiation of Adults) program used today for bringing people into the Catholic Church. Instead, in addition to prayer and discernment, he met weekly for a while with a local priest, Monsignor Kolbach, and they used “Father Smith Instructs Jackon,” a text at that time used for converts coming into the Catholic Church.
“Basically, it’s the center of our lives anymore,” Cheryl said of how strong the Catholic Church is in their lives.
By way of background, Cheryl Eich grew up on farm near Epiphany, and attended Catholic parochial school there for eight years. She learned to play the organ in grade school; so, when the nuns from the school were gone over the summer, the church still had music. She attended Canova High School and “was still in high school when we were playing for dances.” And as a senior, she began dating Doug.
She went on to college at Dakota State University in Madison. Following that, she would go on to a long career in teaching.
Doug was born and grew north of Howard on a farm. He attended a one-room country school for eight years. He went on to high school in Howard. “First time that I’d ever been in a class with other kids in my classes,” he noted, smiling.
He graduated from high school in 1966 and went on to General Beadle State College (Madison), which morphed into Dakota State University. Following graduation, he taught a year in Iroquois and then 4½ years in Flandreau, both times teaching middles school science. He would later, while he and Cheryl were raising a family, earn a master’s degree in biology.
In 1973, he turned that talent and passion into founding his own business: Austreim Landscaping, in Flandreau. The business relocated to Brookings in 1996. It remains in the family, with his son Allan at the helm. Doug doesn’t do much of the heavy lifting, but he keeps his hand in the business, using his administrative acumen.
Church, charity and family
As a member of St. Thomas More Catholic Church, Cheryl has been a key organizer of two major food drives via Kids Against Hunger that raised a total of nearly 220,000 fortified ready-to-eat meals for shipment abroad to such war-torn areas of the world as Chad and Sudan. Those major efforts were in a fashion a fallout from activities she had undertaken as a member of Catholic Daughters of the Americas, having filled at one time or another most of the officer post and been one of its most active members.
Members of CDA had been involved with filling specially-made shoeboxes with toys and other small gifts for Operation Christmas Child, a part of Samaritan’s Purse International. On one occasion, when the needed specialty shoeboxes were not available for filling, the group filled “eight apple boxes of miscellaneous, lots of toys and lots of coloring books and markers, things like that.”
The couple also work together on gathering food donations within the parish and transporting collections to the food pantry. They also helped move the food pantry from its old location in the old red house to its present location.
In 2020, the Daughters got into quilt making. “We have donated over 400 to date,” Cheryl explained. “I have had some part of each one. Different people have different jobs. … Then they come back to me and I trim them up.” Every bed that goes into the Sleep in Heavenly Peace project gets a quilt. “That is our big project; I love to sew.”
“We do a lot of odd jobs together,” Cheryl said of their efforts at St. Thomas More. “We change the candles, we do the liturgical laundry, washing and ironing.”
Cheryl was an organist for about 25 years, playing for Mass at Epiphany and Flandreau; but she hasn’t played the organ at St. Thomas More, having more duties in other church activities. She serves as a sacristan and usher-greeter. Doug also serves as a sacristan, taking care of all the sacred vessels and other materials used for the Mass and keeping the sacristy in good order. Additionaly, he is a lector, lay eucharistic minister and he brings communion to the homebound.
One parish activity near and dear to both their hearts is the St. Thomas More Rosary Makers Group, which over the years has made more than 3,500 rosaries; most of them are sent to the missions that the parish supports.
Finally, there’s a project that, while it involves a maximum Doug-and-Cheryl team effort, also gets some of their children, their spouses, and their grandchildren. The Austreims have four grown children and 10 grandchildren.
“It’s big garden, about a third of an acre, over by Volga,” Doug said. For his wife, it involves “canning about 300 to 400 jars of tomato products: spaghetti sauce, tomato soup, chili mixes, salsa, and a lot of different things.”
“It goes to family,” Cheryl said. “It goes to my brothers and sisters and their families, nieces and nephews.”
“The garden’s a big, big part of our activities,” Doug added.
— Contact John Kubal at [email protected].
Leave a Reply