Longtime Lion, volunteer lauded as Monticello's Citizen of Year

MONTICELLO — At 68, Jim Dickrell is living his best life.

The longtime Monticellan has been enjoying retirement with his wife of 44 years; cycling through the countryside on his bike every day; admiring the majesty of the Mighty Mississippi from his riverfront home; devouring more books in a year than some read in a lifetime; and spending time with friends and his only daughter.

Now, he’s got even more to appreciate, with two new triumphs to rejoice in, as he just got the literal keys to his dream ride and will soon hold the figurative keys to the city.

Dickrell recently manifested a simple aspiration he’s harbored for over 40 years, finally becoming the owner of a pickup truck, a shiny cherry-red Ford Explorer Sport Trac.

“I’ve wanted a truck for 44 years,” he said.

But, more importantly, he’s been named Monticello’s Citizen of the Year for 2024.

“I’m really honored to be recognized,” he said. “I was frankly shocked that Mike Jones nominated me and the committee selected me.”

Dickrell was referencing the former president of the Lion’s Club, who had, while in office, put his name forth, and the Riverfest Committee, which each year awards one individual who helps make Monticello great, recognizing them with the top honor in mid-July.

As a longtime volunteer who has served the city over four decades, and an active member of the Monticello Lions Club since 1991, Jones said picking Dickrell was a no-brainer.

“He’s been in the club for many years,” Jones said. “The guy is just outstanding with his volunteerism. I’m like, ‘Who would be a better Citizen of the Year than him?’”

Dickrell will officially receive the award during Riverfest at 3 p.m. on Sunday, July 14, in a ceremony behind the Monticello Community Center.

Riverfest makes for an appropriate venue to honor Dickrell, who has long been involved in the annual event, sitting on the Riverfest Committee and even serving as chairman of the 25th Anniversary Riverfest community celebration in 2001.

But helping to organize Riverfest is just one of many roles Dickrell has held in his career of volunteerism, which also includes involvement with the Lion’s Club, Monticello Help Center, Senior Center, Monticello Scholarship Foundation committee and local elections.

“He’s all about the community,” Jones said. “He’s a passionate person. He cares about his volunteerism, people in the community, the things that are going on in the town.”

Dickrell says it all started with the Lions and spread from there.

He joined the group 33 years ago as a way to meet new people and get more involved in Monticello after relocating with wife Mary Micke from their native state of Wisconsin, where he grew up on a dairy farm south of Green Bay.

“We’re both from Wisconsin and we had no family here,” Dickrell said. “So when we moved up here, volunteering was really a way to get involved in the community and to meet people.”

During his Lions tenure, Dickrell has served in myriad leadership roles, including as a director, vice-president and as president from 2002-03.

In 1998, he was recognized as Lion of the Year and was also named the Lions’ prestigious Melvin Jones Fellow in 2003.

Dickrell’s work with the Lions is what led him to the Monticello Senior Center, where he sat on the Board of Directors for two consecutive three-year terms, from 2009 to 2014.

“A lot of Lions members are involved in other things,” he explained. “So it kind of spiders out, where the Lions members are typically involved in the Senior Center, so I got involved with that board.”

You can still find Dickrell volunteering at the Senior Center, where he has worked at every breakfast fundraiser Director Pam Loidolt can remember.

“Pam is really good at getting everybody involved,” Dickrell said. “So all of a sudden I was serving up pancakes twice a year at the Senior Center breakfasts.”

But that’s just one way he feeds the community.

As an active volunteer at the Monticello Help Center since 2020, Dickrell has also clocked in approximately 500 hours securing, storing and stocking food on the shelves for the area’s neediest citizens.

Making food rescue runs for the Help Center is something Dickrell said he enjoys, mainly because it’s a social activity.

“There’s a group of about three to four Lions that do food rescue for the Help Center,” he said. “We go to Cub and pick up food that’s nearing its expiration date and we pick that up and bring it back. It’s just the camaraderie of doing that and seeing everybody each week. For the most part, it’s a lot of fun.”

And that — “just the fun of working with other people” — is really what keeps him volunteering, Dickrell said.

“People say they do this to give back to the community, but in reality you just get to work with other community-minded people who commit these hours, and we have a lot of fun doing it.”

Volunteering has helped him form a solid social foundation.

“I’m an introvert that’s an extrovert if I know you,” he explained. “We’ve gotten lifelong friends through our involvement in the community.”

Another way Dickrell and his wife have gotten involved in the community is by helping to run local elections.

“Mary and I have been election judges for a couple of election cycles now,” he said. “That’s for the state and federal elections. We’ll be at the polling place. We actually run the election, check people in, check ballots and all the stuff that’s involved with the election.”

It’s not quite volunteerism, though, he explained.

“For that, we’re actually city employees,” he said. “We get paid by the city to be there, and it involves training.”

Working the polls is quite a bit different from what Dickrell did in his longtime career as an agriculture journalist, which included more than 30 years as the editor and associate publisher of the Farm Journal magazine “Dairy Today.”

It’s a job that naturally suited Dickrell, who spent childhood on a 160-acre dairy farm with 65 cows in America’s Dairyland.

“I grew up on a farm and I like to write so it seemed like a natural way to go,” he explained, leading him to pursue a bachelor’s degree, double majoring in print journalism and broad-area agriculture, from the University of Wisconsin, River Falls.

Although Dickrell and Micke tried their hand at farming in Wisconsin, it was the call of journalism that brought the pair to Minnesota, where Dickrell in 1991 earned a Masters of Arts Liberal Studies Degree from Hamline University in St. Paul.

Wife Micke also worked as a journalist, and her job as a reporter for the Monticello Times beginning in the ’70s is what brought them to the city in the first place. Daughter Stephanie Dickrell, now 37, also followed her parents into the business, and currently works as a reporter for St. Cloud Live.

After a career filled with accolades — from being named World Dairy Expo Industry Person of the Year in 2015, to winning the Distinguished Service Award from the National Mastitis Council in 2000, to more than 50 writing awards from the Livestock Publications Council — Dickrell retired in 2020.

Since then, he has more time for volunteerism, and also to pursue his hobbies, which include bicycling, reading and supporting his home state’s football team.

“I highly recommend it,” Dickrell said of retirement. “I was a little bit nervous at first because I didn’t know how I would fill my time up. But now it’s like, ‘Oh man, I need to sit down.’ We’re really enjoying it.”

The spry sexagenarian is a member of the River City Riders bike club through the Senior Center, and typically hits the road every day.

“I do ride quite a bit,” he said. “I put in 2,400 miles per season.”

He’s also an avid reader, mainly checking out fiction and historical fiction books from the library.

“I read quite a bit,” he said. “I’ll probably read 60 to 70 books a year.”

Despite having lived permanently in Monticello since 1983, Dickrell and his wife are still loyal to their Wisconsin roots when it comes to sports.

“Mary and I are both Green Bay Packers fans and owners,” he said, which makes for some light-hearted ribbing among the Lions.

“We have about 80 members in our Lions Club and there are two bonafide Green Bay Packers fans that have come out of the closet,” he said. “Everybody else is a Vikings fan. It’s just a fun rivalry, we have a lot of fun going back and forth with that.”

“When I joined, I didn’t tell them I was a Packers fan, because they might not have let me in,” he joked.