Edwin Wall
Among all the fathers and grandfathers who ever used the old line about having to walk a mile to school in the snow, few could probably tell it as well, or as honestly, as Edwin Wall. He grew up in the 1920s on a farm in Kremlin, Mont., where not even blizzard conditions could convince his strict parents that he deserved to stay home.
“If it was snowing hard, it was a mile and a half ” to the one-room schoolhouse, Wall said in a family video. “They didn’t want you to lose your sense of direction cutting across a field, so they made us follow the fence line” along the road. “We had to spend half an hour thawing out our cheeks.”
Wall was the youngest of six children. He went on to serve in World War II, driving a halftrack for the Army and fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, the last big German offensive of the conflict.
Loyalty was a standard of his life. When he moved to California and joined the Lodi Fire Department after the war, he stayed on for 32 years. When he met and then married the love of his life, Helen, they were together for 69 years, until she died in 2016. When anyone in the neighborhood needed their television or stereo repaired, Wall, the self-taught electronics expert, was there to help.
The couple also ran King’s Cafe in Lodi for 10 years. In 1991, they moved to Elk Grove, outside Sacramento, to be closer to their growing extended family.
Wall enjoyed bridge, chess, dancing, music and computers. He was a Giants fan and was at the World Series game in 1989 that was postponed because of the Loma Prieta earthquake.
His family said there couldn’t have been a better father or grandfather. “He always let us know how much he loved us, and how he could not have lived so long without the love of his two daughters,” said one of them, Diane Wall Frieders.
At a Christmas party in 2019, when he was 96, Wall insisted on dancing with Frieders. She wasn’t going to, she said, but changed her mind after her father said, “‘It might be the last time’ — and it was.”
Wall died on Jan. 6 from complications of COVID-19. He was 97. Frieders said the family was told that he and four other residents of their board-and-care facility probably contracted the disease from a staff member. Two of the other residents also died.
In addition to Frieders, Wall is survived by daughter Chandra Wall Blake, six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his wife, Helen.