Obituary: Mary Kiefer, mother of Minnesota Twins owner Carl Pohlad

Article by: TERRY COLLINS , Star Tribune
Updated: February 27, 2000 - 10:00 PM

The Minnesota Twins spring training just won't be the same.

Mary Kiefer, mother of Minnesota Twins owner Carl Pohlad and one of the club's most ardent and beloved supporters, died Sunday of natural causes at Methodist Hospital in St. Louis Park after being admitted on Saturday.

Kiefer, who lived in Edina, was 104.

"Doctors used to ask her what did she do to stay healthy," Pohlad said Sunday night. "She said, 'I ate chocolate every day.' "

Craig Erickson, her eldest grandchild, said Kiefer "was a wonderful, remarkable woman. We will all deeply miss her."

Kiefer was born in 1895. She married Michael Pohlad, a railroad brakeman, and lived in Valley Junction, Iowa, now known as West Des Moines. They raised eight children and she worked for several decades as a cleaning woman for wealthy families.

After Michael Pohlad died in the mid-1960s, she met and married Henry Kiefer.

They moved to Clinton, Ill., where they lived until his death in 1977. She then went to the Twin Cities.

Erickson said his fondest memories of Kiefer were from his childhood visits to her home in the quaint town of Clinton. He said they always attended daily mass.

"And she would always load our family car up with canteloupes when we left," Erickson said. "By the time we got home, it'd have quite a scent."

He said he was amazed by her mind. "She was sharp as a tack. She could name all of her children, their children and even knew how many kids each grandchild had."

He also remembered how fond she was of his grandfather, Henry Kiefer.

Hard work was her constant theme and a key to her family's later success, said grandson Bob Pohlad, a son of Carl. His grandmother lived through many hard times, he said, including the Great Depression.

"She was the true matriarch of this family," Bob Pohlad said. "She was a person -- with her strong character, her loving personality -- who always pulled the entire family together."

Kiefer would make an annual sojourn to Twins spring training. To say she was a huge baseball fan would be an understatement, Erickson said.

A March 1993 Star Tribune article said her fondness for the sport went back to age 12, when she played for a girls' baseball team in Oskaloosa, Iowa. When the Washington Senators moved to Minnesota in 1961, she was a frequent visitor to the old Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington.

Her interest in the club increased considerably when her son Carl bought the team in 1984, the article said.

Since then, Kiefer had attended most of the Twins' games at the Metrodome. Carl Pohlad told friends that when the phone rang late at night after a game, he could be sure it was his mother, offering advice on the Twins' manpower.

"I want them to win," Kiefer was quoted as saying in the 1993 article. "When they lose, I feel hurt."

Carl Pohlad reiterated those comments Sunday night. He recalled when Twins great Kirby Puckett was on the verge of becoming the sport's highest-paid player -- baseball's first $3-million-a-year man -- in 1989, a title that only lasted a week.

"My mother and Kirby were really close," said Pohlad, also citing the efforts of his wife, Eloise, and Puckett's wife, Tanya, to keep Puckett with the team. "She was probably the most instrumental" in Puckett staying with the Twins.

Erickson said Kiefer was supposed to be in Fort Myers, Fla., for Twins training camp in two weeks.

"She was an eternal optimist," Erickson said of her love for the Twins. "She was always hopeful for the team, no matter how bad the seasons got. She always thought they could pull it out.

"Somehow, I know she'll be watching."

Besides her son Carl Pohlad and grandsons Bob Pohlad and Craig Erickson, Kiefer is survived by three daughters, Helen Quinn of Edina, Jean White of White Bear Lake and Dorothy Dolphin of Minneapolis; another son, Harold (Chug) Pohlad of Edina, and several other grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Visitation will begin at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at Washburn-McReavy's Edina Chapel, 5000 W. 50th St., near Hwy. 100. Services will be held at 10 a.m. Wednesday at the Catholic Church of St. John the Evangelist, 6 Interlachen Rd., Hopkins.