Friends and family remembered longtime Annandale resident Cliff Lund last week as a man who loved people, especially kids. Lund, who died at age 89, was particularly devoted to the Annandale High School girls basketball team, they said, and he drove them to out-of-town games for nearly a decade. He died Tuesday, Aug. 19, at the Talahi Care Center in St. Cloud. An obituary appears on page 2. "He was just a guy who loved to be around kids and around people," former AHS girls basketball coach Brian Atkinson said. "He was just a good-hearted person." Lund drove the team bus to away games for M&M Bus Service for about eight seasons from 1993 to 2000, he said. He’d bring candy bars for the girls to enjoy after the game. If the Cardinals lost, he’d say it was because of bad calls "even though we just plain lost," Atkinson said. If one of the girls had a bad game, he’d tell her to go get ’em next time. "He was just a great guy to have as our bus driver." The coach once invited Lund to be the guest of honor at the team banquet, and he attended. And the girls paid tribute to him along with their families on Parents Night. "He was our family for a long time, and supporter," Atkinson said. It was as if he had adopted the team, and the team had adopted him. Rosalie Gloege of Annandale, Lund’s oldest daughter, said the girls team meant a lot to him. "He thoroughly enjoyed driving those girls. That was his joy in his later years." Curt Lund of South Haven, his oldest son, said his father continued to attend the girls’ home games even after he stopped driving the bus. "His heart was for the girls athletics." M&M owner Roger Millner added that Lund’s wife, Bev, rode along on the basketball trips. Lund did a lot of driving for M&M for more than 20 years, he said. "He drove everything," but drove mostly in the afternoon because he also worked for the post office. Lund had driven for Neil Bahr Bus Service and stayed on when Millner and his wife, Karen, bought the company in 1973. "Whenever we needed him … he was always ready to go," Millner said. "He loved the kids." "He was always ready to do stuff for kids." Millner called Lund "kind of a special person." He was community minded. "He was concerned about what was going on in the community all the time." "He was very interested in people." And he was patriotic. He kept his postal uniform neat, Millner recalled. "It was an honor for him to work for the government as a postal worker." Curt Lund agreed. "Dad was a very patriotic man. He was very, very supportive of the troops." His father served in Europe as an aircraft gunnery mechanic in the Army Air Corps during World War II, he said. Curt Lund later served in Vietnam and his brother, Dan, in Germany. "That was pretty important to him." Retired rural mail carrier Sandy Porter remembered Lund as a "very industrious" postal worker. He would sometimes stop at the Dairy Queen, she recalled, and bring back ice cream treats for the rest of the staff. Gloege said her father lived in nine different places here. "He built I think six houses in Annandale," designing them, managing the construction and doing a lot of the finishing work himself. He was also a late-blooming water skier. "He started water skiing when he was 60," she said, and retired the skis when he was 75.
