JON & MARTHA LINDENBERG  
 		  

Martha Lindenberg will readily explain the reason why even on day hikes her husband Jon carries a large pack laden with emergency food and other supplies. Several years ago, while bicycling in the wilderness of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the pair became lost and ran out of food. Insulin-dependent Jon collapsed in shock, and Martha had to leave him unconscious under a tree and set out to find help. “I really thought I would never see him alive again,” she recalls.

Martha still regards it as a miracle that after many terrifying hours of stumbling through the woods she did find a cabin and was able to set off a search and rescue operation that eventually found Jon at 1:30 a. m. Their abandoned bicycles were stolen, but they considered that a small price to pay for Jon’s survival.

In childhood both Jon and Martha enjoyed active sports, Martha on the dunes of Lake Michigan and Jon on the flatlands near Chicago. In retirement they opted for the mountain lifestyle, moved to Glenwood Springs, and have become enthusiastic participants in many 100 Club activities. A resident son and granddaughter have added to the attractions of our mountains.

Jon was born in St. Louis in 1941 and remembers playing with cardboard toys because most of the steel was earmarked for building planes at the Curtis Wright plant there. In 1945 his family moved to Chicago, where he grew up with three siblings and many cousins. To escape crowds and the threat of polio they moved to a vacation area in southwestern Michigan. Although Jon’s diabetes was diagnosed in childhood, he was active “in all sports that could be played on level ground—no mountains in Michigan!” He played college football after enrolling at Kalamazoo College in 1958. He was soon to meet his life partner there.

Martha was born and spent her childhood in Gary, Indiana, where her father was an attorney. Their home was a converted summer cottage on the dunes of Lake Michigan. She recalls long summers spent water skiing and “running faster, throwing better, swimming farther, and playing harder than any boy in the dunes, including my younger brother.” In 1958, while a freshman at Kalamazoo College, she met Jon, “and the rest is history.” Coincidentally, both of them had experienced college language and cultural study programs in Europe--Martha in Italy and Jon in Germany.

They were married in 1963 and moved to West Carrollton, Ohio, where Jon began his long career with the Kimberly-Clark Corporation and Martha began teaching junior high school English and social studies. In 1965 Jon’s employer transferred him to Neenah, Wisconsin. Martha continued teaching until 1970 when she began a fifteen-year leave of absence as a stay-at-home mom for sons David and Mike. In 1985 she returned to teaching as an instructor at Fox Valley Technical College, eventually switching to schooling at-risk students in an alternative high school program. The Lindenbergs were involved in activities at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Menasha. Jon was church treasurer for twenty years, and both of them taught in the Sunday school “at whatever level our boys happened to be.”

Martha and Jon both retired in 2002 and moved to Colorado. Their son David had come to Glenwood Springs in 1992 and met his wife Tiffany. He is now the principal of the Kathryn Senor Elementary School in New Castle. Son Mike and his wife Angie recently moved to jobs in New York City, having left Miami Beach two weeks before Hurricane Katrina arrived.

In addition to hiking, Jon is interested in alpine skiing and mountain biking. Martha enjoys snowshoeing, hiking, flat-water kayaking, and cooking.
 
   

by Doris Lee Shettel