Vae Nadine Cannon

Vae Nadine Cannon, youngest of two children of Ethel Irene Brown and James Littlefield Cannon, was born 21 December 1908 in DeQueen, Sevier County, AR. Her father had been raised within Sevier County. Her mother had come there in 1898 at age eighteen. DeQueen would remain her home throughout childhood. Her birth household consisted of her parents, herself, and older sister Hazel. She was known in childhood as Vae, but in adulthood seems to have taken to using her middle name, and appears in more than one public record as Nadine with no mention that Vae went in front.

The Cannon family lived outside the incorporated area, but were in fact somewhat of a “town” household in terms of lifestyle. In Nadine’s early childhood, her father was the editor and publisher of the local daily newspaper, the Bee. When she was ten years old, he sold the periodical and took up a dual career as the postmaster of DeQueen and as a broker of fresh fruits and vegetables for a coalition of Sevier County small farmers.

Nadine’s father died in the summer of 1926. All four grandparents were already dead by then. It is easy to imagine that Nadine felt the connection to DeQueen growing tenuous, and a year later, having just graduated from DeQueen High School, she began what would prove to be a thorough and permanent removal of herself from her hometown. The first step in this process was her departure for Battle Creek, MI, where she attended Battle Creek College. She enjoyed the experience and the people so much she brought a couple of her classmates, Alberta Limbach and Joan Reyburn, home with her to DeQueen in the summer of 1928 to meet her mother and sister and to show off the touristy parts of Arkansas such as Hot Springs. (Alberta was from Ohio, and Joan from California -- it is quite likely they had never been to Arkansas before.) During the road trip, it was undoubtedly either Alberta or Joan who handled the camera to take the photograph you see slightly lower on the right, which shows Nadine on the left and Hazel on the right on either side of their mother. Other images from the same roll of film show Nadine with her friends in DeQueen on the stoop of the Cannon home.

The version of Battle Creek College that Nadine attended was not the original one founded by the Seventh Day Adventist church. That one had already been reestablished elsewhere in Michigan, to be known as Andrews University. Nadine attended the new institution of the same name founded in 1923 by nutritionist and cereal magnate John Harvey Kellogg. It was surely through the college and its profound association with the world of brand name cereal production that Nadine came to know John Donald Fruen of Minneapolis, part of the family behind Fruen Cereal Company. Though the two are likely to have met in Battle Creek, it was Minneapolis where they settled after the wedding, which took place 8 November 1929. Nadine would go on to spend the rest of her life as a resident of the greater Minneapolis area.

Nadine’s new husband was best known by his middle name, something which increasingly became true of Nadine herself. Born 10 July 1902 in Minneapolis, he was the youngest of the three children of William Franklin Fruen and Jessie B. Confer. He understood the absence of a parent, his mother having died when he was eighteen months old. (His own father had lost his mother at an even younger age.) Donald’s grandfather, the late William Henry Fruen, had been an early prominent businessman of Minneapolis, having come to that city from Boston in the early 1870s. Fruen Cereal Company was one of the two ways in which he had shown his entrepreneurial genius. He had also founded Glenwood Inglewood Water Company not long after the family moved to property on the west side of Minneapolis in 1884. There William, upon digging out a pond in order to be able to stock fish, discovered a spring of unusually fine water. The property lay on a subterranean layer of blue clay that purified and lightly mineralized the water, creating a natural product of superior quality. Unable to convince the city of Minneapolis to make use of the resource, William instead created a bottled-water firm, a nearly unheard-of thing at the time. The company still exists today, having been acquired in 2004 by Deep Rock Water Company of Colorado. Its sales are quite large, all stemming from water drawn from the same spring that William Fruen discovered in 1884.

Donald’s father William Franklin Fruen had chosen to go into the heritage bottled-water business, even while most of the other men of the Fruen clan cleaved to the cereal enterprises. That was a choice echoed even by Donald’s eldest and only brother, Kenneth. Donald followed his father’s example and after a brief apprenticeship stepped up to a major level of responsibility as vice president and manager of sales at Glenwood Inglewood. He would eventually go on to succeed his father as president, though this did not happen until 1950 when his father, entering his eighties, finally slipped into the less-active role of chairman of the board. Among Donald’s accomplishments was the invention of a type of water cooler for which he was granted a patent in 1950. This was very much in keeping with his grandfather, who had taken the same path with a number of inventions, including an 1892 patent of, yes, a type of water cooler. Through such means, Donald cemented his personal status in the industry, leading to his posthumous induction into the Bottled Water Hall of Fame in 1984. (Yes, there really is such a thing as a Bottled Water Hall of Fame!) He was also prominent for his many civic-minded efforts, which included serving as an officer (secretary-treasurer at first, and then president) of the Minnesota Wildlife Federation. He was also a member of the Upper Mississippi and St. Croix Commission.

In becoming a Fruen, Nadine could be said to have ceased being a Cannon, or a Brown, or a Martin. Though her father, grandfather Cullen Brown, and great-grandfather Nathaniel Martin had all been highly successful businessmen and pillars of their communities, they had been big fish in small ponds, all based in villages of very limited population, and much of the attention and respect they enjoyed stemmed from direct, face-to-face contact. Minneapolis was a different sort of stage, and the Fruen commercial footprint was one of national significance. Nadine may have felt obliged to downplay an origin that some members of Donald’s stratum of society would call humble. She became a “one percenter,” living a life with a fine house, a maid, taking frequent vacations to the Caribbean and other warm climes, and endorsing an ultra-conservative political philosophy even as her widowed mother observed modest Christian values to such an extent that she scraped by in obscure rural areas of Texas, and kept working all the way up into her eighties.

Nadine and Donald resided at first in Minneapolis itself, but in the late 1930s, they migrated westward from the main city to the suburb of Golden Valley, and specifically to the Tyrol Hills neighborhood, a relocation that may have been spurred in part by the need for a larger home now that the couple had two young children in the household. Said kids were Todd and Donna, both born in the late 1930s. A note made by a distant cousin implies one or both of the children were adopted, but the pair appear in the Minnesota Birth Index as if they were biological children, and there is a family resemblance discernable in photographs. Perhaps it was just the fact that Nadine and Donald produced no children for the first seven years of their union that gave relatives the impression they were not able to have any.

When the youngsters were in the earliest years of elementary school age, the couple moved another ten miles west to Long Lake/Orono, Hennepin County. This locale was their long-term home. There they finished raising Todd and Donna. Todd went on to attend the University of Minnesota and then joined Glenwood Inglewood, to eventually succeed Donald as president. Donna also attended the University of Minnesota, earning a B.S. in Nursing (in Medical Tech), leading into a career which in turn led to her becoming a doctor’s wife. Even though Nadine and Donald died somewhat young -- only in their sixties -- they had the comfort of knowing that both of their offspring had established themselves in secure life situations on a par with their own privileged-class upbringing.

Nadine narrowly survived a head-on collision in March, 1956 when another driver lost control and slid into her lane of traffic. The people in the other vehicle were not so fortunate. Nadine would go on to live nearly sixteen more years. She passed away on the 29th of February -- that rarest of calendar dates -- in 1972 in Hennepin County, MN. By that point she had been a widow for a little more than six months, Donald having expired 11 August 1971. Both are buried at Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis.

Descendants of Vae Nadine Cannon with John Donald Fruen

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