ASHBY, MINN. – Dr. June LaValleur took a Danish pastry out of her oven and set it on the counter, part of a six-hour process from start to finish. Flaky, sweet and golden, it would be frosted and dotted with sliced cherries and then delivered to someone special — a long-ago benefactor.
In the early 1980s, when LaValleur was 41, married and the mother of three teenage boys living in Osakis, Minn., she wanted to go to medical school. She’d been accepted at the University of Minnesota Medical School and had already started taking classes. She had no trepidation about starting med school in her 40s, something most people start in their 20s. When she graduated from Ashby High School in 1959, nobody encouraged girls to become doctors. Now that she’d thought of it, she had no money and had been turned down for most loans. And medical school was expensive.
Enter a pair of Alexandria, Minn., radiologists, Dale Undem and Richard Eiser. They heard about LaValleur’s need from Undem’s wife, Jo, who was friends with June, and they agreed without hesitation to finance her education, interest-free.
“We had the assets,” Eiser recalled. “It was no big deal.”
Little did he know that the outspoken, determined friend of his partner’s wife would help change women’s health care throughout the state.
Eiser’s wife, Eileen, said they rarely thought about the loan. There was no paperwork, no promissory note, no breakdown of expenses. They never worried about being repaid. It was just something good they could do, so they did it.
LaValleur finished medical school and then her residency. It was tough being away from her family. She had asked them to come with her to the Twin Cities, but they wanted to stay at home in Osakis, two hours away. On weekends, she stayed with them, driving to the Twin Cities early Monday mornings and driving home on Fridays. She hired an Osakis woman to be at their home in the afternoon so that the boys would never come home from school to an empty house before her husband got home from work. That expense, too, was covered by the radiologists.
It was in her last year of residency that she had a blunt conversation with the head of the university’s OB/GYN department. She told him his department did a terrible job of educating students about menopause. Only she didn’t use the word “terrible.” She used a much stronger adjective, one we can’t reprint in a family newspaper.