Barn Boards and Baling Wire

Ernie Vohland was the baker in Montello, Wisconsin, when – fresh out of seminary – I was appointed in 1978 to serve as pastor at Trinity United Methodist Church. He was one of the first people I met Sunday morning. When I stopped in at Leone’s Bakery for sweet rolls the next day, Ernie wouldn’t let the new preacher pay. The smells and tastes of Ernie’s pastries, made from recipes inherited from his German grandfather and perfected under the tutelage of his baker father, were an exquisite pleasure.

Ernie Vohland was born in 1915 in Milwaukee. He delivered milk with a horse and wagon for Borden’s. He then operated bakeries with his wife, Leone, in the Milwaukee suburbs for several years before in 1960 moving to Montello. They lived in one of the apartments over Leone’s Bakery, near the intersections of Wisconsin Highways 22 and 23 in the heart of Montello.

People in Montello still rave about Ernie’s baked goods 38 years after the bakery closed in 1985. Every communion Sunday a big round loaf of potato bread adorned the altar at Trinity United Methodist Church; it was the best communion bread I ever tasted. Jesus would have loved Ernie’s bread.

But it’s not that delicious bread or the special walnut Danishes that I remember most about Ernie Vohland. It’s the part he played in a tragic event that occurred at Christmas time, just after we built a new church.

We had an open house Dec. 16, 1984, at that new church. About halfway through the afternoon I received an emergency phone call. Ernie’s granddaughters – Jessica Vohland, 4, and her sister, Candi Rinehart, 7 – had fallen through the ice on a pond near Packwaukee, Wisconsin. By the time I arrived at the hospital in Portage, Wisconsin, I knew they had been under the water for 30 minutes. When rescuers brought them up the girls weren’t breathing and their hearts weren’t beating.

I found their parents, Bob and Lillian, in the emergency-room lobby. Grandpa Ernie was in the hospital chapel praying. I remembered seeing him the previous Sunday with his granddaughters in church.