90th Birthday

Loren Ekroth turned ninety on January 14, 2025. A family birthday cake, photographed and preserved, reads: “Happy Happy 90th Birthday Loren Bud Farfar!” The cake features a photo of Loren in a suit and glasses, hands raised mid-gesture — the pose of someone who spent a lifetime teaching communication.

The inscription confirms two family names not documented in any public source. “Bud” was a nickname — common among men of his generation in the Upper Midwest, and the kind of name a boy named Lauren might have preferred on the playgrounds of Superior. “Farfar” is Swedish for paternal grandfather (literally “father’s father”), confirming that the Swedish kinship vocabulary his immigrant grandparents brought from Sweden was still alive in the family three generations later. His grandson Anders — son of Aaron David Ekroth and Stacey Bearden — knew him as Farfar.