101 years old and counting

“I love to drive and I make it to the Falls in about three and a half days,” the sharp-minded former dentist said. “And, I love to play golf and try to at least twice a week. It keeps me young.”

Back in the day

Banen was born Sept. 30, 1909, in Eveleth. He grew up in Gilbert and moved to Chisholm when he was in ninth grade.

After high school, Banen attended the University of Wisconsin where he majored in German. Deciding he wanted to study dentistry, he transferred to the University of Minnesota to obtain his dental license.

“I liked coming back to Minnesota. Much nicer here,” he said.

Banen reflected on how cheap things were “back in the day.” In 1927, he and two of his high school classmates rented an apartment during their first year of college. It was during the depression, but he and his friends had a little more money than most of his peers and he remembers they “ate like kings.”

“Our average grocery bill was $8 per month,” he said laughing. “We felt sorry for some of our classmates, so we’d have them over for dinner.”

He added that many of his classmates didn’t even have 10 cents during that time period.

The most expensive year of college for Banen was when he had to buy his dental instruments. He paid $550.

“That was a lot of money in those days,” he said.

His first car was a 1936 brand new “real sporty” Oldsmobile. It cost him $630.

Life as a soldier

After college, the United States was at war and Banen enlisted in the army.

“I was single and knew I would be drafted anyway. But, I willingly applied for a commission because they give you the preference of where you want to be stationed.”

Unfortunately, Banen was assigned to infantry.

“I didn’t pick infantry, who the hell wants to go in the infantry?”

Banen and his battalion landed in Normandy in July of 1944. The battalion consisted of about 3,500 men at the beginning of the war. A week later, it was down to about 2,000.

“We lost soldiers like crazy. They were getting killed left and right,” he sighed.

Banen said with numbers in the battalion dwindling, it was hard to get replacement soldiers. When replacements finally came it, they were “young kids.”

“They were maybe 18, 19, 20 years old. They were just kids. They didn’t know anything.”

Banen recounted several stories of his days in the war including encountering concentration camps and meeting civilians of all walks of life.

Banen knew not only German, but also French and was relied on heavily for translation.

He said, “When we came into Paris, the colonel was with me all the time because I knew French.”

While Banen served in the army, there was a rule that if a soldier was in combat for a month, he got 10 days off. During his battalion’s break, they were in Bastogne, Belgium. The day after the group left, the Germans invaded and started the Battle of the Bulge.

“We just barely missed that one.”

With a small, black and white film video camera, Banen took a lot of movies while overseas — over 3,000 feet of film — and donated some of them to a Jewish museum in New York City.

Banen was shot in the back of his knee and was awarded a Purple Heart. He said the fear of never coming home from the war was always in the back of his mind.

“I always thought: ‘It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.’”

After serving, Banen was in the United States on a 30-day break when he received notice that the war had come to an end.

“I got out early. I was very happy.”

Opening a practice

After the war, Banen came to International Falls in January of 1946 to start his dental practice. He was 37 years old.

He chose to move to the area because there were only two dentists in Koochiching County. In Chisholm, he said there were maybe six dentists in the city alone.

The International Falls community was “very active” when Banen first opened the doors to his Third Street office.

“People were lined up at the door,” he said with a laugh. “It was very busy and it stayed that way for a long time. I had a good practice.”

During the time he was practicing, people had the notion that they would eventually lose their teeth, so they got dentures.

Laughing, he remembered, “Losing their teeth was the common idea everybody had. So I used to put them in the hospital and took their teeth out all at one time and they’d get their dentures quicker.”

Banen said he met a lot of good people during the days of his practice, including one in particular.

“When I started my practice, I needed a girl to assist me in my office, so I hired Blanche. I ended up marrying her.”

The couple were married in Guatemala in 1949. Banen knew a wealthy coffee plantation owner who lived in Guatemala City and during a visit, Banen’s friend said he would have his personal lawyer take care of all the arrangements for the marriage.

“We went to get married by the mayor of the Guatemala City and when we went there, it happened to be a holiday,” he chuckled. “So, we went back three days later and they had a big soccer game that day, and that’s a big holiday, too.”

The third time was a charm and Doc and Blanche were married in a small ceremony. They will celebrate their 62nd anniversary this year.

The couple had three children — Wendy, Tom and Terry. Terry has the couple’s two grandchildren.

Mayor

Aside from serving the community has a dentist, Banen served as the mayor of International Falls from 1972-1974.

“I didn’t decide to run for mayor,” he recalled.

As a strong union man, Banen was approached by Irv Anderson and Bob Walls about the idea.

“They said to me, ‘We want you to run for mayor,’ I said, ‘Hell no.’”

Banen was turned off by the idea of spending money and going door-to-door to campaign. Walls said he and Anderson would take care of everything and Banen wouldn’t have to spend $1 or one hour on a campaign.

“A week before the election, I did put an ad in the paper,” he admitted. “It cost me $54.”

During his term, he witnessed the effort to create Voyageurs National Park and Banen strongly supported the idea.

“We had seven men on the council at that time and they all worked for the mill. The mill was strongly opposed to the park because they had a lot of land in there.”

Banen asked for a resolution for the city to approve the park and all seven voted no.

“I thought it’d be a hell of a good thing for this area. It would bring a lot of tourists here and a lot of businesses here.”

He said he was satisfied to see it go through.

Banen said he didn’t especially like serving as mayor and decided not to run for another term. He finally retired from his dental practice in 1989 at the age of 80.

Living the good life

Banen says he has enjoyed life to the fullest and has developed many friends throughout the years including the late Congressman John Blatnik and former Vice President Walter Mondale.

“There aren’t a lot of folks as lucky as me,” he said grinning. “If you live for so many years you go through an awful lot of periods of different times — depressions, prosperity, you know, you go through an awful lot of things and get to know a lot of people.”

The golfer said the secret to staying active in the triple digits is to watch what he eats and keep his mind sharp.

“I eat everything, but I only eat half,” he said. “I don’t live to eat, I eat to live. Plus, I don’t worry about things that I can’t control.”

Good genes might play a role, too. Banen had two sisters who lived to be 101 and 103, and a brother who died at 89. His grandmother, who lived in Russia, lived to be 106.

“I’m just not ready to enter Green Larsen’s paradise yet,” he joked of the local funeral home.

Apparently others don’t think so either.

“In Florida, you have to renew your driver’s license every six years. Well, when I did that before I drove up here, the woman in the license bureau remembered me from 2005,” he said. “As I left, she yelled, ‘See you in six years.’”