Delmar Harco Mulder, born on July 4, 1943, passed away on the 27th of January 2025.  He passed away at the self-reported age of 38, turning 39 next summer.  He is known to be the only man on earth that committed to that bit for well over 40 years.
Del is survived by his wife of 52 years, Kathleen, his daughters, Meiken Greenamyre (Jeremy) and Annelise Schriber (Jasper), his sister Marianne Skatvold (Allen) and his brother Doug (Beth Maracotta). He is also survived by his 3 grandchildren: Baird, Myrsa and Lorna Greenamyre. He is preceded in death by his parents, Jake and Alice Mulder, his sister LaVonne Mulder, and the
two loves of his life: his loyal hounds Logan and Beauregard.
Throughout his life, Del always stood out.  Growing up on a dairy farm in an isolated corner of South Dakota, he realized at a young age that he liked to wheel and deal and converse with just about anyone.   When he was 18, he realized he wanted to go to college but couldn't afford it.
His mother recommended he start up a firecracker stand like the kind that littered the roadsides close to the Minnesota border.  This led him to his first, and probably only, illegal venture of selling fireworks out of season.  During this time of disorder, he roped his much younger brother and his friends into his seemingly innocent crimes by 'painting the exterior really slowly' to lure customers in for off-season fireworks.

Del was able to attend college and was a proud alum of the University of South Dakota and a proud member of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity where he reported he slept on a filthy mattress in the basement.   Perhaps to avoid the dirty mattress, Del took up a teaching job on the Crow Creek reservation in South Dakota.  They provided him a better mattress to sleep on and a salary and an honest love for educating children as well as for Native populations.  Throughout his life, he held a deep respect for Native traditions, art and customs.   He also taught at a rural school west of Onida, SD, where he was paid $400 a month and lived in the basement of the school, and thought that he was incredibly lucky to have enough money for cigarettes and gas, and at schools in Goodwin, SD and Wessington, SD. Del always loved the theater, whether it be performing in local theater in SD or Minneapolis, directing theater as a teacher, or attending theater locally or in New York or London. One of the
last performances he attended was a performance of 'Bus Stop' in Santa Fe, where he fussed when the sheriff put his cowboy hat brim down on the table, as anyone who wears a cowboy hat will tell you, is strictly verboten: cowboy hats always go brim up, or you ruin the curve.
He legally (we assume) continued his fireworks business, Big Country Fireworks, for 57 years.  He proudly served his community and the children and grandchildren of his original customers. While he would chit-chat with drunken rodeo attendees in the air conditioned trailer off Highway 212, his sister and wife were making sales by punching his indecipherable item codes into the computer, and his daughters, niece and nephew were usually packing assortment packages in an unventilated semi trailer, being paid with the promise they could light off one of the cheaper fireworks later that night.  He also offered one penny for every dead moth collected on the front porch.
Del was not a man who was satisfied with just one iron in the fire.  While he ran his fireworks store, he also worked in several other trades.  Some of them were short-lived, such as his restaurant venture Walden II with his childhood friend Curt Toft, which left us with what he called his $100,000 pancake recipe.  Another one was a  warranty business with an office in downtown Edina, MN, another a stop-smoking seminar business run from his home on Casco Ave in Edina. He expressed his love of cars through the creation of a car shop called 20th Century Motors with his longtime friend, Dick Belfry.  Additionally , he spent many years at Kline Volvo in Minneapolis and many more years within the car sales industry. Some of his best advice is 'it's not over until you see the taillights leaving the lot'.   He also continued his quest to inconvenience police by making his daughter lay down in the back seat of his car and driving in the brand new carpool lane in Minneapolis in the hopes of being pulled over, so he could really "shove it in that damn cop's face".
In 1995, his family moved from Minneapolis, MN to Santa Fe, NM where he and Kathleen purchased a Pak Mail franchise and grew it to be the #1 store in the country.  It may have been his wife's attention to detail, or it may have been his homemade radio ads that he spent hours writing that led to the store's success.  Many of their employees worked alongside them for years, a testament to their management style. Under that umbrella of Pak Mail, Del started up his own shipping company called Let's Move it USA where he got to use his newfound understanding of packing and shipping to deliver goods big and small, ugly and beautiful to humans of varying nature across the country. He believed all customers were deserving of excellent service , so you always got your items delivered and he took full responsibility if it weren't up to his standards.
On that same note, the comfort of his last dog, Beauregard, was of the utmost importance. Beauregard rode shotgun.  Humans in the back.  The very dog-snotty and dog-haired back. As a grandfather, Del was loved by his grandchildren. His silliness translated well and they loved playing pranks and laughing with their grandpa.
In his old age, unable to maintain the manual labor that a warehouse and crate-building life demands, Del reluctantly retired from his work and chose to move back to his roots of small town South Dakota.  The last years of his life were spent sitting on the porch, hosting family and
old friends and mowing the lawn a perfectly normal 7-10 times a day on a riding lawn mower. He lives on through a legacy of curiosity, stubbornness, a love of reading, a need to constantly question authority, musical theater, The Chad Mitchell Trio, a will to fight the overreach of any authority and a work ethic that won't allow either of his daughters to ever stop working.

Oh, and also probably a box truck somewhere with a giant photograph of him standing next to a globe bearing the quote: "Some may call us obsessive, compulsive…even anal retentive ……will the compliments never end?".