Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
MENTONE - A stint in the Army in the 1950s led the 2026 Mentone Egg Festival Parade grand marshal into teaching, which led him to Mentone in 1974, where he’s lived ever since.
Forrest Kantner was born on a farmhouse up by Howe on Aug. 31, 1933.
“My first memories was (when) we lived in Bronson, Mich., and then we moved from there to my grandparents’ house in Burr Oak, Mich. And then my grandfather in Bristol passed away, and I was in the first grade. We knew that we were going to be moving to Bristol, but my mother told the school in Burr Oak that she didn’t want me to enter kindergarten because Bristol didn’t offer kindergarten, so she enrolled me in first grade,” he recalled during a recent interview at his home on Jackson Street.
He grew up in Bristol, graduating from Bristol High School in 1951. While there, he played basketball and baseball. At 6 feet, Kantner was the starting center on the basketball team.
He then went to Purdue University for two years, studying general agriculture to start off with.
“I was absolutely broke at the end of two years, and so I was drafted into the Army in ’53,” Kantner said. “Two years in the Army, 15-1/2 months in Korea.”
Asked about his rank, he replied, “In a way, it’s kind of funny. I was in the Combat Engineers, and they changed the traditional Army rank - you went from private to corporal to sergeant. Well, the Combat Engineers, somewhere along the line, they changed theirs and said that - I was always a squad leader, I was never anything less than a squad leader, and received two leadership citations during that time - but the Combat Engineers changed, (you) weren’t a sergeant, you were a specialist. So they classified me then at the end as a specialist second class, which is the same as an E5.”
After eight weeks of basic training in Missouri and eight weeks of Combat Engineer training, they tried to convince Kantner to go to Officer Candidate School.
“I wanted to get back to Purdue on the G.I. Bill, and I got figuring, there was a six-month wait to get into Officer Candidate School, and Officer Candidate School was six months. And then you had to have two years in after that, and I didn’t want to be out that long, and so they sent me to Leadership School and they gave us the rank of private - PFC E3 - as soon as we graduated from that, and from that point on I was always a squad leader when I reached Korea,” he explained.
At one time, he had 34 men under him. He was a corporal, but of those 34 men two were sergeants. “Figure that out,” he said with a laugh.
He hit Korea right after the armistice.
“So, I usually tell people I was there in time (for when) they stood up the fence and blew the smoke away,” he stated. “So I didn’t see combat, but I was always a squad leader. And, of course, I pulled all kinds of duties, the same as anyone, and I found out that there were a lot of fellows in our company that never graduated from high school, and some of them were working on” earning their high school diplomas through correspondence.
When they found out Kantner had two years of college, the guys started coming to him to ask him how to do something.
“That’s when I decided that when I came back, I was going to go into teaching agriculture,” he said.
After getting back to the U.S., Kantner finished his classes at Purdue, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1959 and a master’s degree in 1960.
His first teaching job was at Rolling Prairie, which he said is now part of New Prairie. He salvaged the vocational agriculture program there.
“Vocational ag teaching was a four-year job at that time. I was there three years, and then I went to Nappanee and established another vocational ag at Nappanee and was there 11 years, and, of course, Nappanee became a part of NorthWood. We were anticipating going into a two-man department because Wakarusa already had a vocational department, and at that time, right when they were going to open up NorthWood, the state financial crisis hit them - hit all the schools at that time. And so they decided just to go with one ag teacher instead of two. I was the odd man out, so I ended up teaching science for three years out of that 11,” Kantner recalled.
Finding teaching junior high science boring, he started looking around and the job at Tippecanoe Valley opened up. They moved down to Mentone in August 1974, while Tippecanoe Valley High School was still in the process of being built.
“Our superintendent was the best superintendent I ever worked for because he hired those who could do the job, and if he had to tell them how to do things, he hired the wrong one. So he just let you do things. But anyway, the first semester in the fall of ’74, they still used the Mentone High School and the Akron High School, and then they joined at the end of the first semester and went into the new high school, which still was not finished because we went in there, walked down there and there were wires hanging out of the ceiling, and as they finished a room, they moved into that room,” Kantner recollected.
There also had been a tornado in 1974 that came through Rochester, Talma and parts of Mentone. Because the Talma junior high was destroyed, Kantner said they had to reshuffle the schools and classrooms. The TVHS had its first graduating class in 1975.
“It was interesting how the kids from both schools and community went into that building as a group, and they got along fantastic,” Kantner stated.
He taught at Valley for 11 years, starting the ag program, of which the Future Farmers of America (FFA) was a part of. Kantner said they didn’t have an FFA program at either school when he joined the Valley staff.
“So I got that started and it’s still a good program. It’s still surviving,” he stated.
In 1977, Valley’s Dairy Judging Team won the state contest, and Kantner said that was the first state championship that came out of the school. The national contest and FFA convention was in Kansas City. Valley came in 15th out of 56, and with “oral reasoning” Valley was in the top 10 of the nation.
He met his wife, Jane, at the LaPorte County Fair and they were married Aug. 24, 1963, in Rolling Prairie. She died Oct. 26, 2024. They had a daughter, Carol; a son, Craig; six grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren.
Around 1985, Kantner started a small insurance business in Mentone and bought the laundromat.
He spent 51 years in the Lions Club. He served on the town board for about three years and the school board for about four.
He was involved for a number of years with the Potawatomi Wildlife Park Board from its beginning.
When Kantner was told he was going to be this year’s parade grand marshal for the Mentone Egg Festival - which begins at 11 a.m. Saturday, May 30 downtown Mentone - he said he thought, “Well, there’s gotta be someone better than me. You just do a lot of things for the neighbors and friends in town, you just do it without thinking about doing it. Sometimes, things need to be done and they needed things done they couldn’t do themselves, so you just did it.”
Carol said for a while, her dad was the handyman for a lot of the widows in town.
“He’s been a member of the United Methodist Church up here since we moved here. Even in Nappanee, we were Methodists,” she said.
He will be 93 in August. He said his secret to living a long and happy life is, “I have to go to the VA every year for an annual physical. And, last year, where I was over at Mishawaka for that physical, the doctor gave me the physical, which didn’t amount to much, as far as I was concerned, but he said, ‘I’ll see you next year,’ and I thought, ‘Hey, as long as they want to give me a year between physicals, well, I’ll take it.’”
The doctor asked Kantner what he could do to live as long as Kantner has. Kantner said he hasn’t done anything in particular, but he looked at the doctor and said, “The best advice I can give you is to stay away from doctors.”
