One might think Bill Kramer would sit up front at church. After all, he was a charter member at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Everett.
But that wasn’t Kramer’s style.
He always sat in the back, on the last pew, so he could shake hands with every parishioner as they filed out of the sanctuary, saying “How are you today, my friend?”
Kramer, 86, could be described as a Godly man, and a newspaperman.
He died Jan. 27 of natural causes.
Kramer, who lived in Everett, began work at the Granville (N.D.) Herald when he was a freshman in high school. He learned to operate the linotype for $2 a week. Those were the days when advertisements were all set letter by letter, on backward lead type.
“He could type 90 to 100 words per minute,” said his wife, Ardath Kramer. “And talk about a good speller!”
He was taught the business by writer Fred Roble, known as the Mark Twain of North Dakota.
Kramer graduated from Granville High School in 1941, then served in the U.S. Army. After he married Ardath Erlandson of Granville, he worked the presses and linotype machine for Minot Daily News before they moved west. He worked at other papers and at a telephone directory publishing business before coming to work for The Herald, where he spent 17 years.
Kramer was born Dec. 4, 1922, in Granville, N.D., to Thomas and Hazel Kramer, and was the oldest of eight children. He was a member of the Nile Temple Shrine. He is survived by his wife of 62 years, Ardath, and sons Jerald and his wife Loye; Jeff; Joel and his wife Angie; and Jon and his wife Janice; grandchildren Heather Dodd, Melissa Singh, Sarah Richardson, Amy Curtiss, Meagan Soltwisch, Jenny Crane, Joey Kramer, Ryan Kramer and Kelly Chambers; nine great-grandchildren; and four siblings, Earl Kramer, Donna Johnson, Forest Kramer and Cheryl Andrews.
He was preceded in death by his parents and siblings Gail Kramer, Louise Rood and Thelma Olson.
Friend JoAnn Gillespie of Everett called Bill and Ardath Kramer the lefse king and queen. The Kramers taught folks at church how to make the famous Norwegian flatbread.
“They were such role models,” Gillespie said. “Always doing things for other people.”
The Kramers drove a neighbor to the airport and were back home by 5:30 a.m. Bill Kramer died later that morning.
His son, Jerry, said his father was a man of many letters.
“Not like an M.A., or a Ph.D. that follow someone’s name,” Jerald Kramer said. “He could edit faster than anyone I knew. My dad knew letters in that he had a sense of content within the framework of context.”
Bill Kramer once told his son he would never make it as a newspaperman.
“Always be thrifty with words,” his father said. “Lose about half of the articles and all of the ‘thats’ and you’ll have it pretty close.”
Jerald Kramer treasures a manuscript his father read.
“When I went back to school to work on my master’s degree, I had Dad edit the manuscript of a play that I wrote,” his son said. “I still have the original, full of his hen scratchin’s.”
He was a steak and potatoes man. He would clean the bathroom, his wife said, but would not make breakfast. He retired from The Herald in 1988 on her birthday so he would never forget the date, she said.
Always a reader, Kramer subscribed to several newspapers. The family did a lot of sightseeing by car and the first thing Bill Kramer always did, wherever they stopped, was to read the local newspaper.
Kristi O’Harran: 425-339-3451, oharran@heraldnet.com.
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