“Everyone has a friend during each stage of life. But only lucky ones have the same friend in all stages of life.”
Butch, also known as Duane Struck, passed away in June, leaving behind no surviving family members to care for his 500-acre farm. Therefore, the condition of his farm was uncertain until it came time to harvest the crops.
It is to our great relief that a group of farmers came up and volunteered to harvest more than 500 acres of corn.
“He had a little over 500 acres of corn we’re taking out for him today. There’s 14 combines, probably that many trucks and grain carts out combining for him today,” friend Jeff Kapperman told KELO.
According to his obituary, Butch passed away on June 25, 2022. He was a native of South Dakota, having spent his entire life there.
He worked on a farm for the bulk of his life, with the exception of the thirty years that he and his wife, Bonnie, ran an oil business that they owned together.
After that, they relocated their family to the farm, which allowed Butch’s passion for farming to continue to develop.
Butch was widely known across the community due to his time spent serving as the mayor of Humboldt in the past, as a member of the township board, and as a volunteer for the fire department.
Many people in the village were taken aback by his untimely passing.
Nobody, in their right mind, would have imagined that Butch would not be around to see the harvest of the crops that he had sown back in the spring.
As a result, once it was publicized that Butch’s farm need assistance, a large number of farmers showed out with their tools and vehicles, prepared to begin working.
In point of fact, there were so many individuals who showed up that some of them had to be denied entry.
Butch was known to be friendly and outgoing. Butch was always there to lend a helping hand to whoever required it; I mean, nobody ever had to ask him for anything. “He showed up,” Kapperman stated. “I was surprised.”
“He was my best friend and more than once when I was having difficulty or had some problems of my own Duane showed up to help me so he just. We talked just about every day and it was really a shock when he passed away but we all hope he’s in a better place.”
That right there is what I call a true friendship.