REDWOOD FALLS, MINN. – Not every small Minnesota town has a bookstore. <\/p>\n
But then, not every small town has a Joni Ogdie.<\/p>\n
When I first met Ogdie, or Mrs. N, as she is still known to a generation of her former high school chemistry and physics students, she was vacuuming a cavernous empty building next to Chapter Two, the bookstore she opened in downtown Redwood Falls in 2021. <\/p>\n
She had bought the adjacent building to expand her bookstore and had just finished sanding 2,500 square feet of hardwood floor to save herself the exorbitant cost of hiring a professional. She\u2019d never refinished a floor before but Ogdie, 65, is not averse to taking on challenges that would deter plenty of others. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I said I was going to start a bookstore, people said, \u2018Are you dumb? Who\u2019s going to come in?\u2019\u201d she recalled. <\/p>\n
The naysayers had a point. Not only were rural downtowns designed for the trade habits of 125 years ago, but until recently, bookstores seemed doomed to fall before an onslaught of online sellers and e-books. The way of the future seemed to be digital, not bookstores in late 19th- or early 20th-century buildings. <\/p>\n
But Ogdie was taken with the idea of what downtown Redwood Falls could do for her. And what she could do for it. <\/p>\n
You see, the downtown area was struggling with too many vacant storefronts. And Ogdie had her own struggles. In 2006, her beautiful 18-year-old daughter Mandy Nieland, a college freshman who wanted to become a pediatric transplant surgeon, was killed in a snowmobile crash. In 2019, her husband, Jim Nieland, an engineer who loved camping, fishing and holding babies, died of liver disease. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"REDWOOD FALLS, MINN. – Not every small Minnesota town has a bookstore. But then, not every small town…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":176846,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1022,171,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-176845","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176845\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/176846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}