Kenneth Sanderman

Kenneth G. Sanderman, 80, a longtime resident of rural Schaller, died June 8, 2023 at Methodist Manor Retirement Community after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease.

In recent years he was a resident of Methodist Manor Retirement Community in Storm Lake.

Ken, as he was known, was born July 15, 1942.  He was the second child of Clarence and Mabel (Chamberlin) Sanderman, who farmed three miles north of Schaller, just west of State Route 110.  His older sister, Karen (Sanderman) McCrea, died in July 2021. Ken, who never married and had no children, is survived by Karen’s two sons, Rodney and Kevin McCrea, both of whom live in the Des Moines area.  

He attended kindergarten at the Eureka No.1 one-room country school near his parents’ farm. He completed his elementary, junior high and high school education in the Schaller School District, graduating from Schaller High School in 1960.  

During his youth on the farm starting at age 10, Ken was a very active member of the “Eureka Hawkeyes” 4-H Club. In fact, he became a successful entrepreneur, raising purebred Chester White hogs for sale. His venture began in his first year in 4-H when his dad bought him a bred gilt for a club project. Throughout his high school years, he sold dozens of purebred boars for top prices, but he got a painful education in the fickleness of livestock markets when hog prices collapsed just as he was finishing high school.

Ken spoke with great affection about spending a lot of time during his youth at his grandma Chamberlin’s farm home several miles southeast of the Sanderman place. He credits her with baking the best bread in the world in her cob-fired iron cook stove.  She would sometimes give him a whole loaf right out of the oven to consume with butter, he said.

Ken enrolled at Iowa State University in September 1960, initially trying majors in animal science, pre-veterinary medicine and agricultural business. Later, he tried majors in architecture and landscape architecture, but none of them suited him and he became disenchanted with college life, especially after spending several hours on a bitterly cold day in a civil engineering class surveying a hypothetical drainage pipe from the base of the Campanile to the Memorial Union’s coffee shop.

With an adventurous spirit, he withdrew from ISU and drove to California in January 1962, joined by a high school classmate who was returning to U.S. Navy service in San Diego. Much of their westward journey covered historic U.S. Route 66. Being a good amateur artist, and having an interest in architecture, Ken got a job with a large San Francisco architectural firm drafting plans for major building projects. Later, he took a job with an architectural firm in Sacramento. Then, after sightseeing in Canada and the western U.S., he returned to Iowa where he worked for almost a year as a draftsman at Crites & McConnell Architects in Cedar Rapids. He returned to the family farm in late 1963 to help with its operation.

In the spring quarter of 1964, Ken, a good writer and photographer, re-enrolled at Iowa State, majoring in journalism and mass communication. He also immersed himself in TKE fraternity life, producing membership recruitment publications, as well as promotional publications for the ISU Greek system.  The TKE national organization named him the top chapter historian in 1965, a major honor because there were more than 200 chapters across the country.  

“Ken was known to our chapter’s members as a very talented, but eccentric, individual. He would stay up without sleep for three or more days to finish editing an important member recruitment publication, then demand that pledges drag him out of bed so he wouldn’t miss an exam,” said fellow TKE member. “He could be ornery, stubborn, and contentious at times, but there was a kind and curious side to him that made him a good, interesting friend and a great conversationalist. He stopped by our Ames home many times to stay overnight, usually on football game weekends, and buy us a pizza, and he took a real interest in how our daughters were doing.”  

Ken’s re-enrollment at Iowa State endured for two more years, but his approach to tackling college in phases was not over. In mid-1966 he again dropped out of the university to enlist in the U.S. Army, just as the Vietnam War was intensifying. His motivation was not patriotic; it was more a matter of self-preservation, thinking an enlistment, vs. being drafted, would give him a military job that would keep him out of the jungle.  And he was right. He chose to become a military intelligence specialist. After basic training at Ft. Bliss, El Paso, Texas, and the Army’s intelligence school at Ft. Holabird, Baltimore, Md., he became an Army counterintelligence special agent stationed in Oberursel and Munich, Germany. His cloak-and-dagger work supported military counterintelligence activity throughout Europe.

Ken was discharged from the Army in Germany on the Fourth of July in 1969. But, ever the adventurer, and unlike nearly all European G.I.’s who returned immediately to the United States after completing military service, he chose to leave Germany in his Volkswagen to visit parts of the world he would probably never again have a chance to see.  First, he went north to the Scandinavian countries; then, after regrouping with friends in Germany for a while, he went south to visit Italy and Greece; then east to Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he sold his Volkswagen to raise badly needed cash for more travel.  

He then continued east to visit India and most of the Southeast Asian nations (Ceylon, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Cambodia, South Vietnam, Laos, Hong Kong, Macao, the Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan).  With a long beard, sandals, and jeans, and carrying a small suitcase, he used trains, buses, even donkey carts, to get around, plus an “open” airline ticket to Los Angeles that allowed him to linger in a country as long as he wanted. He often slept in u.cparks or train stations, or wherever he could find a cheap room. Finally, after seven months of fascinating travel, Ken returned to the States (via Hawaii and Los Angeles) and the family farm to be with his parents for the first time in three years, gaunt and looking every bit a “hippie.”

Now, the stark reality of needing to finish his education at Iowa State was upon him. In the spring quarter of 1970, he re-enrolled a second time to take the few additional courses necessary to graduate. He received his B.S. degree in journalism and mass communication in July 1970.

Throughout the 1970s, Ken held a number of communication and advertising jobs in the Twin Cities, eventually living near the cities in a nice home on the bank of the “National Wild and Scenic” St. Croix River at Prescott, Wis.  For several years he worked for firms involved with the so-called “exotic” cattle breeds popular with livestock producers for breeding stock. He and a friend briefly had an advertising agency, before he started his own agency in Prescott, where he also had some real estate investments.

Throughout the 1980s, Ken lived in Prescott and managed his real estate investments, returning to the family farm on weekends to help his dad work that land and the nearby Chamberlin farm, which he and his sister had inherited from their aunt Gladys. In 1990, he left Prescott for full-time farming, living in the Chamberlin farm house.  After his parents died, he moved into their farm home.  In 2015, he retired from farming and he and his sister began renting the jointly owned land on both farms.

Ken will be remembered by a wide circle of friends as a good person who cared about them and their families, always asking what they were “up to” and finding satisfaction in their successes.  He will be missed, but not forgotten. 

He asked that no funeral be held, and that he be cremated, with his ashes scattered on a hill in the cropland of the “home place,” hoping, thereby, to improve soil fertility. He will be memorialized on a gravestone next to his parents’ graves at Immanuel Reformed Cemetery in rural Schaller.