If you spend a few minutes talking with Richard Wenzel, you quickly realize something about the life he’s lived. It was built the old way. Long days. Hard work. Learning by doing. And solving problems with whatever tools were within reach.

Richard grew up on a rented farm southeast of Kirkland before his father—a German immigrant who came to America around 1928—purchased land near Leaf River. The family moved in the fall of 1962, once Richard’s older brothers Max and John had graduated. Richard, the youngest of five children, finished school at Leaf River, graduating in 1969.

Everyone worked including their only sister Josephine. There were crops to plant, cattle to feed, hog houses to clean, and equipment that never stopped needing repair. “I helped on the weekends, stuff like that, when I was off at school,” Richard recalls. “But I didn’t work too much because when I got out of school, I got drafted.”

All four Wenzel brothers served in the military. Bob went to Germany and Hawaii. Max trained in El Paso before being stationed in Germany, where he and Bob each visited the family’s home farm. John served in Louisiana as a cook. Richard went to basic training at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, then to chemical school at Fort McClellan, Alabama.

The Alabama heat was brutal. While filming a training demonstration in full hazmat suits, temperatures soared past 102 degrees. “We had a tanker truck spraying water down,” Richard says. “The one that’s not shooting would sit underneath the water, get cooled off. Then we would switch and take shots.”

Shortly after completing that film, Richard received orders for Vietnam. He was stationed near Quảng Trị and later served near Chu Lai, spending about twelve months in-country. A lieutenant asked what his training was. Chemical, Richard told him. “He says, I don’t need no chemical person here.” The lieutenant asked what he wanted to do. Richard had always wanted to be a mechanic. So he was sent to the generator shop, where he learned to rebuild everything from small 1.5-kilowatt units to massive 60-kilowatt generators. He helped rebuild a boat transmission on a bulldozer outside in the rain. He pulled guard duty every night. “It was a lot of hard work,” he says. “We didn’t have much time off.”

When Richard came home, finding work wasn’t easy. “Nobody would hire me,” he says. Eventually, he landed a job in Rockford, maintaining and rebuilding bus engines—about twenty-five buses in the fleet. “I replaced engines and transmissions. Everything. Everything on a bus.” All learned on the job. Richard never went to college.

But while farming, the military, and mechanics shaped Richard’s life, it was his brother Max who shaped this story.

Max had a particular gift. “He could fix things and make things,” Richard says. “Little toys. He makes different little cannons.” When Richard was small, Max built him a miniature tractor and fashioned a tiny manure spreader to pull behind it. Later, Max turned brass cannons on a lathe—Richard still has one, heavy and finely machined. On the farm, Max combined two four-row planters into an eight-row planter, engineering the frame and attachments himself.

“He always had that ability to make things,” Richard says.

Max never went to college. But he believed deeply that young people should have the chance. Though Richard didn’t know about it at the time, Max quietly arranged to help students from Forreston High School to pursue higher education through the establishment of the Max Wenzel Educational Trust. Passionate about equity, Max outlined his trust to provide scholarships to every single Forreston graduate to apply to their first year of college, a gift so generous it will live for decades.

Max was a simple man. He refused to tie the funds to GPA, class rank, or even community service. His scholarship has only two requirements: graduate from FHS and enroll in college. His goal allowed every student an opportunity, a generosity never experienced in the history of the district.

Combine Max’s generosity with seven college partnerships, and students from Forreston can have their first year of college tuition paid in full.

Max passed away on March 7, 2025. The conversation about his gift is still fresh, still close.

“I really didn’t know about it,” Richard says. “It was good because I think it’s best for the kids to learn, get more experience. That’s something that you wouldn’t even believe anybody would do.”

“He always is interested in learning things,” Richard says—still speaking of his brother in the present tense. And he understood that college isn’t always financially possible. “There are a lot of kids that just don’t have the money to go.”

“I think it makes me feel good to know that the money that he had is going in a good way,” Richard says, “to the kids that can learn.”

Asked what Max would tell those students today, Richard doesn’t hesitate. “Try to go in and get all the experience you can. Go to a place where you can do what you like to do.” And then he adds something of his own: “Learn how to talk to people. Communication with everybody—that’s such a big key.”