Remembering my Dad Martin Torgerson

My dad Martin Torgerson passed away on a Friday morning September 20, 2024. Dad had navigated Parkinson’s disease for decades, and our last few weeks together were about as good as possible considering the situation: we were all able to help pitch in and care for dad, we had lots of time to visit with him, remember all the blessings of our lives, and say our goodbyes. Dad’s faith was strong, and he was ready to move on from this life.

my dad Martin on the left, his daughter Anne, daughter in law Megan, me, granddaughters Izzy and Charlotte and his wife Carol Sue

Dad was born in the family home in Winamac, Indiana on March 11, 1938. He was a Christian who for as long as I knew him was often studying the Bible, leading us in prayer at family dinners, and often praying on his own. Especially later in his life, Dad was interested in Biblical prophecy and was often looking for connections between what was in the Bible and what was happening with current events around the world.

Dad on the far left in his sweat suit, me #10 as a junior on the Winamac basketball team

Dad on the far left as the Winamac girls golf coach and his daughter Anne back row far right

Dad was probably most well known to me as a coach. Some of my earliest memories of dad were when I was sitting in the bleachers watching one of his teams play or the times when one of his teams would come over to the house for a team dinner. When I was in elementary school, he was often on a variety of high school coaching staffs including at Logansport, Caston, and Winamac. He was my eighth grade basketball coach, freshman coach, and on the staff the entire time I played in high school. He also coached my sister Anne on the high girls golf team at Winamac.

Dad marked up his books and studied them for the entirety of his life

Dad was a voracious student of whatever caught his attention. This included the Bible, the literature anthologies and grammar handbooks he used in the classes he taught, and especially of the game of basketball. Coach Mike Miller, who was my high school coach for my junior and senior years and for whom dad was on his staff, used to remark with amazement at the sheer amount of notes dad could produce. His notes were often scheme related (what’s the plan for this team?), different breakdowns of statistics he’d compiled, or long scouting reports on upcoming opponents. Dad wrote in all of his books and his notes can be seen everywhere. When my first novel was published, I went over it many times, so did the publisher, and so did the editor I was working with. Given dad’s knowledge of the grammar handbook he taught out of for over thirty years, dad found twice as many corrections as anyone else who’d looked at the book. I trusted his opinion on how a sentence should be constructed. I’m sure if he read this text I’ve written, he’d have some suggestions.

dad early in his teaching career

As a teacher, I think something many students appreciated about him was that he gave everyone a chance. When you were a student in dad’s classroom, it didn’t matter what your reputation had been before arriving to his class. Dad started with a clean slate for every player and coach he worked with. In the times he knew about my teams or even helped me coach, he was always arguing for kids to receive second and third chances. In one of the last week’s of dad’s life, I was telling him that this was one of the things I appreciated about him and that I tried to emulate. Dad was at the point where I knew he could hear me. He often responded to what I was saying with words I couldn’t make out, but he very distinctively yelled, “hippies,” in response to what I was telling him. I laughed and then dad laughed with me. I took this to mean that dad was saying he even gave hippies a chance in his classes.

My father was competitive but not in the cliched way that I often hear about in others. The cliche is that a person just hates to lose at anything, whether it’s ping pong, the family Monopoly game, or a high school sporting event. There were no overturned Monopoly boards or broken ping pong paddles at our house. Dad’s competitveness–whether it was golf, coaching, teaching or even looking for morel mushrooms–came out with his relentless preparation.

Dad on the golf course

Here’s an elementary-school memory of mine that relates to dad’s competitiveness: one of dad’s very favorite hobbies was playing golf. He had a great group of friends with whom he regularly played in two foursomes, most often at Dykeman Golf Course in Logansport, Indiana. For many seasons, he had a golf pass. He and his friends made small bets and took great pride in beating each other and talked a lot of good-natured trash to each other. At the time I was in elementary school, probably 5th or 6th grade, we lived just outside a little town called Twelve Mile. There was a barn behind our house and a fenced in barnyard behind that. We didn’t own the woods that bordered our property, but the owner allowed us full access to do whatever we wanted. Dad mowed a path all the way to the back corner of the woods and every fifty yards or so he created a patch of grass where he could hit golf balls into the barnyard. My memory is that one of my favorite things to do was to get in the barnyard with my baseball mitt and as dad launched 7-irons from the back of the woods, I would (sometimes) catch them in my mitt. Somehow, I never took a golf ball to the face. Dad was always practicing not only so he could beat his friends but also because he enjoyed the work of trying to improve himself. Dad loved to practice.

Dad #13 pictured in high school with his friend and teammate #11 Bob March

Dad was always working to better himself in other areas of his life. He absolutely scoured the texts he was going to teach from in his classes. He would read book after book about basketball. Coach Morgan Wooten’s book Coaching Basketball was one of his favorites. He actually bought me two copies of that book as well as running off some key pages where he had made some notes for me. Once a year he would go over the details of Wooten’s man to man press. He went to lots of clinics, and he seemed to like to do nothing more than go scout an upcoming opponent. Dad often went to high school basketball games just because he liked them so much. When I was an assistant coach at Vance High School in Charlotte, dad drove to North Carolina three weekends in a row from Indiana to watch the team as they made their way to a state championship.

Casey Jones on the left, Dad in the middle, and Kenny Hattery on the right with their morel mushroom finds

Dad’s other great hobby in addition to playing golf was that he liked to forage for morel mushrooms. I should note that Dad would never use that word forage. He would say he hunted for mushrooms, and dad had maps of the areas he looked for mushrooms–whether in the upper peninsula of Michigan, way up in Northern Wisconsin, or in France Park near Logansport. One of the places dad would find morels was near newly dead elm trees. It didn’t matter what time of year it was. If we were in the car, dad was looking out the window for dead elm trees. Incredibly, in the last years of his life hundreds of morel mushrooms grew right outside his bedroom window and in the woods that bordered our property. We would drive our car across the front lawn, park on the edge of the grass, and dad would use his cane to step out of the car and take a look for himself. One of my first documentaries was about dad and his friends and the film was called “The Mushroom Hunter.” You can click here to access it.

Dad in the woods looking for morels with his friend Vick Heater

Dad wrote his own obituary, and I’ll link to that here when it is available. I’ll also share a few details he included in that text here. He noted that one of his favorite things to do was to watch his granddaughters play basketball. While dad always had a lot of feedback for my sister Anne and I during our playing days, when it came to his granddaughters there was nothing but praise from Dad. His favorite thing was to watch them drain a long three pointer. He was able to see both of them play in front of a packed gym at Watauga High School in Boone during last year’s state playoffs.

Dad with his granddaughter Izzy

Dad reading to his granddaughter Charlotte

The more that Parkinson’s disease impacted the quality of dad’s life, the more open he was about his love for us and the more thankful he was for the care he that was provided to him. This included the staff at Watauga Hospital, Margate Rehabilitation Facility in Ashe County, the staff of Medi-Home Healthcare, and we his family. My mom Carol Sue was an absolutely incredible caretaker for dad, not only for the decades that impacted the quality of dad’s life but also for the last few months when dad was not mobile. My mom in an inspiration to me as a model of how one cares for a loved one. Dad and mom were married for 59 years.

My mom Sue, daughter Charlotte, Dad, and my daughter Izzy at a state playoff game in 2024

Dad kept up a positive and hopeful attitude throughout his entire life. He credited this to his faith in God, the loving care of his family, and the work of the actor Michael J. Fox who also has Parkinson’s. “I’ve got Parkinson’s you know,” Dad would tell just about every healthcare worker who would come into his room. “It makes it hard for me to hold a thought or to be understood.” Invariably, dad would use a couple of vocabulary words from his teaching days or scientific ones he’d picked up from studying Parkinson’s and the person he was talking to would tell him they thought he was doing pretty well.

my mom Sue and dad Martin at a wedding

If you are so inclined to want to remember dad in some way, he asked that you might donate to The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. Click here to link to the Michael J. Fox Foundation website if you’d like to donate. There’s a section on the website titled, “Give in Honor & Memorial.” eCards from the foundation can be sent to my mom’s email: TorgerC@yahoo.com. Physical cards can be sent to 165 Leighway LN, Banner Elk, NC 28604. 

As per Dad’s request, he was cremated and will be buried in a private ceremony at McKinley Memorial Gardens Cemetery in Winamac, Indiana.