Remembrance in Four Songs

A rock and roll tribute to Lynn Kleven-Ford (1951-2025)

Sitting on a vinyl kitchen chair, I watched my teen-aged cousin iron clothes while her hair dried. Lynn had wrapped her long wet hair around frozen orange juice cans and bobby-pinned them on top of her head. She’d taped her bangs flat to her forehead.

We listened to WDGY while our moms ran to Target in Crystal.

“Leader of the Pack” came on the radio. Lynn sang along with the Shangri-La’s, an American girl group, who took this song to number one on the Billboard charts.

Lynn pranced around on tippy-toes in her flip-flops and denim shorts, dancing with the electrical cord and holding the iron like it was a microphone.

“Sing it again!” I begged her.

She turned the radio off and line by line taught me the song. When we got to the place where we made the motorcycle sound effects – vroom, vroom – my lips tingled with the sound of a revving engine and I growled with the thrill of it.

When I was six years old, I thought my cousin Lynn looked like a rock star.

When Lynn was six years old, she walked to school every day with Henry Boucha. She never imagined he’d play hockey in the Olympics then, but when he died in the fall of 2023 she told me how he had been so kind to her on the first day of school when he took her hand.

Lynn spent her early childhood in Warroad; and when raising her own children she lived for some time at the Northwest Angle. We didn’t stay close as we became adults, but we did stay in touch.

My memories of Lynn are associated with the music she introduced me to after the Shangri-La’s: The Rolling Stones, The Who, ZZ Top, Led Zeppelin. Hard rock.

When I learned Guns N Roses would be played at her funeral service, I assumed the song would be their cover of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” Lynn liked that version better than the original recording by Dylan. But it had been Lynn who first mentioned that guy from Hibbing to me.

It wasn’t “Knockin on Heaven’s Door” that played in the sanctuary of the Stillwater Evangelical Free Church for her funeral service.

Instead it was “November Rain” playing while snapshots splashed up on a large screen. Photographs of Lynn’s childhood in Warroad, her teens in the Twin Cities, as a bride, as a mother, on family vacations, at graduations, in her gardens, road trips with friends, her dogs and cats, her children, and grandchildren.

I last saw Lynn at our Aunt Audrey’s funeral last June. I did not imagine I would be attending her funeral so soon.

The daughter of my mother’s sister Shirley, Lynn was the eldest of Harold and Emma Kling’s grandchildren. The leader of the pack. Days before she died we talked on the phone. Knockin’ on heaven’s door. She talked about how grateful she was for all the love she had known. Lynn left this Shangri-La for a place among the stars.

This tribute to my classic rock cousin would be incompete without Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.”