Active Life Winter 2020

ACTIVE LIFE SPECIAL SUPPLEMENT TO THE GLOBE

OCTOBER 2020

Ryan McGaughey/The Globe

Ed Zylstra (left) and Gary Brandt stand in front of the playhouse they have been constructing in the driveway of Zylstra’s Worthington residence.

A sight for poor eyes Worthington’s Ed Zylstra completing playhouse project, with help, despite blindness By Ryan McGaughey rmcgaughey@dglobe.com Worthington

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d Zylstra wanted to build a playhouse for his granddaughter, and hasn’t let being blind stand in his way. Zylstra, who lives along Worthington’s 11th Avenue, has been engaged in the project for roughly four months now. He’s getting considerable assistance from Gary Brandt, another Worthington resident who has been impressed with Zylstra’s abilities to overcome his disadvantages. This month marks the fourth birthday of Zylsta’s granddaughter, Hannah, one of two children of a daughter who lives in Baltic, South Dakota. After learning that Hannah wanted a playhouse of her own, Zylstra resolved to make it happen. One of the first things he did was get Brandt,

who he knew through his cousin and Brandt’s work at Pioneer VIllage, on board. “The conversation initially was him saying, ‘I hear that you do garden tilling,’” Brandt remembered last week. “Well, I’ve done it for a friend. Then that led to, ‘Well, would you like to sharecrop in my garden?’ Then he said, “I’ve got a shelf that I’m working on, but I can’t get it square.’ Then he concluded the conversation by saying, ‘By the way, I’m blind.’ “The shelf did need some squaring up,” Brandt added with a smile. “I will say that he does more seed in a row than most people do. His row ends up curving a little bit, so by the time he gets to the end there’s a lot there.” “That’s called contouring,” Zylstra interrupted, laughing. “The only thing was, it wasn’t on a hill.”

Earlier days

Zylstra attended college in Marshall and had difficulty finding jobs after his schooling. Eventually, he took a position as a darkroom technician at the University of Minnesota. “I could see some mobility-wise back then, so I thought ‘this is kind of crazy, sitting in a darkroom,” Zylstra recalled. “So my dad said, ‘Why don’t you come back to Worthington?” That return brought Zylstra into the realm of pig farming, in which he worked from 1980 to about 1997. “I called myself a swine nutritionist,” Zylstra said with a chuckle. “That’s what I told the Extension — because I fed pigs.” With his father getting older and the price of pigs proving much less conducive to making a living, Zylstra left farming.

After living on an acreage a mile and a half from his father’s place, he and his wife, Shirley, moved into town in 2001. By then, his vision was hindering him more than it did in his younger days. “It’s a progressive blindness,” Zylstra said. “I had pretty good mobility as I grew up into an adult. It was probably in ’92 that I went to cane travel. … Now, a lot is knowing my surroundings.”

A special build

Zylstra remembers doing some “rough construction” while working with his dad on the farm, but he said he believes in not rushing a job. ”My saying to Dad was, ‘If you don’t have time to do it right the first time, that means you don’t have Ryan McGaughey/The Globe time to do it right the secGary Brandt (left) and Ed Zylstra prepare to enter the ond time,” he said.

playhouse they’ve been building together for the past

POOR EYES: Page 3 four months.