Helen Knobloch knows something about service and giving of one’s time. She is one of only a few people who can say they belonged to the Lester Auxiliary for sixty years. Before she joined the Lester Auxiliary, Helen married Ernst F. Knobloch on March 24, 1945. In January, 1942, he had enlisted in the Air Force, and then was sent overseas in June of 1942 to fight in World War II. In March, 1945, he returned to the United States. He and Helen were married that same month. Ernst was discharged on July 22, 1945, and the couple moved to a farm northwest of Lester on March 1, 1946. Their neighbor, Mrs. John Groth invited Helen to an Auxiliary meeting and Helen eventually signed up to join that fall. She attended the meetings that were held in the homes of members and eventually in the Lester Town Hall, and remembers getting to know Tillie Groth, Marion Rank, Hazel Moser, Mary Marnette, Myrtle Siebensen, and Katie Schubert. Recalling her time with these ladies, Helen says that she formed many good friendships as a result of her Legion membership. Not to compete for meeting dates, the men of the Legion held their meetings of a different night of the week.

Recently, Helen was honored for her sixty years of membership in the Auxiliary. The meeting included the singing of ‘God Bless America", and a presentation of an angel figurine given to Helen by her fellow Auxiliary members. She remembers the Auxiliary holding feather parties in the fall, sponsoring a needy child in Cherokee, and decorating graves on Memorial Day. Looking back on sixty years with the Auxiliary, as well as the time Ernst was in the military, Helen saw the surrender of Germany, the United States’ bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the surrender of Japan. In her lifetime, the United Nations was established, the hydrogen bomb was developed, the first satellite orbited the earth and the first man walked on the moon. As a member of the Auxiliary, Helen remembers the Korean War, the signing of the Warsaw Pact, the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam War, and more recently war in the Middle East. She also saw inventions including television and the space shuttle, as well as medical breakthroughs including the first artificial heart, the first human heart transplant, and the first test tube baby.