Tolkkinen: Heartbroken mom opens bookstore for Redwood Falls — and for herself

REDWOOD FALLS, MINN. - Not every small Minnesota town has a bookstore.

But then, not every small town has a Joni Ogdie.

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.

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’d never refinished a floor before but Ogdie, 65, is not averse to taking on challenges that would deter plenty of others.

“When I said I was going to start a bookstore, people said, ‘Are you dumb? Who’s going to come in?’” she recalled.

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.

But Ogdie was taken with the idea of what downtown Redwood Falls could do for her. And what she could do for it.

The immensity of those losses propelled her. She did not want to stay home alone with her grief.

Bookstores had provided her solace in the past, and she figured she could provide that environment for Redwood Falls. She didn’t care if many customers came in. She would live above the bookstore and be happily surrounded by books, and if someone stumbled in, she would welcome them.

She went ahead and bought a building, which had been a jewelry shop during the prosperous years of downtown Redwood Falls, and she painted, installed shelves and began stocking inventory.

After she opened, enough customers wandered in that she hired two employees. She ended up renting out the upstairs apartments and living elsewhere. She also remarried.

Like many independent bookstores, Chapter Two is no cookie-cutter store. It’s a haven, with comfy, mismatched furniture, jigsaw puzzles and card games, and an array of new and used books. It also contains memorials to loved ones she has lost.

On the opposite wall hangs the quilt Ogdie made for Mandy when she graduated from high school. The quilt is a reminder of a bad period for Redwood Falls families; the classmate who helped Ogdie choose the backing fabric died not long after Mandy. Theirs were two of several untimely deaths in Mandy’s class of some 100 students.

After Mandy died, Ogdie, always a voracious reader, read everything she could. She read books on the stages of grief and books by sociologists about death and then memoirs by parents who had lost children. She and Jim belonged to a Compassionate Friends group for bereaved parents, and its members shared still more books.

She collected so many books over the years — many besides those dealing with death or loss — that she easily had a thousand books at home. She needed to do something about them and decided that in retirement, she would open a bookstore. Redwood Falls has a library, but it had been a long time since it had a bookstore.

On opening day, her bookstore had 10,000 books for sale.

“A lot of them were mine,” she said.

Redwood Falls City Administrator Keith Muetzel called Ogdie a “breath of fresh air.”

“Downtowns have struggled for years with big-box competitors, with the internet, with Amazon,” he said. “It’s really refreshing to see some folks interested in pursuing activity downtown.”

The downtown buildings are in good shape, he said. In 1996, the city replaced the infrastructure in most of downtown and a group called Discover Downtown Redwood Falls has worked to revitalize the district.

“Our downtown has struggled for a number of years,” he said. “Now there’s a different level of energy.”

And while Ogdie’s losses are always with her, and tears never far away, the laughter is there, too, and a life still unfolding into new chapters.