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For years Kral delighted, annoyed and damned Winonans. She rode on an old-fashioned bicycle more suited for children, with many of her belongings lashed to the sides. Fastened to the bike was a constantly changing placard of injustices she’d recently discovered or those she felt she had suffered.
Every day seemed to be a new struggle for vindication.
She wore a ratty straw hat with a green sun visor and 1950s-vintage sunglasses. Small in stature and in voice, she was ferocious in her beliefs.
She was, by most accounts, an odd mix of charm and blasphemy.
And Kral was by all accounts a colorful Winona character.
For decades now, Winona has cleverly proclaimed it was the home of the boat that don’t float, the plane that doesn’t fly and the nun who is out of order. But the Wilkie, the jet owned by the U.S. Navy and now Kral have disappeared or are about to vanish from the Island City’s landscape.
Kral could lay claim to two feats that no one has achieved and maybe no one would want to. And it was Winona Bishop Loras Watters who banned Kral from the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart because she had become such a nuisance.
Out of order
Steve Schild, now an associate professor at Saint Mary’s University, remembers sitting in the Daily News newsroom as a reporter one day during lunch. The rest of the news staff had left — he’d packed a lunch. Kral came charging in, obviously excited. She dragged him along to the Tau Center of what was then the College of St. Teresa. There on the loading dock sat Kral’s possessions.
Schild stood speechless.
“It looked pathetic,” Schild said. “Here was this little woman with all of her earthly belongings, just sitting there.”
Kral had been dismissed against her will.
Her only refuge was a green Plymouth Duster, where she lived for a time after she was dismissed. The car became a makeshift bedroom and a legal library, with part of the auto filled with notes about church canon law and other cases.
Almost as soon as she was dismissed, she started filing lawsuits, mostly against her former order and the diocese. Every suit met with the same result — a dismissal.
As one person quipped, “you’re nobody until Sister sues you.”
“She could launch into an assault of names and facts of events and wrongdoings,” Schild said, “real or imagined.”
The heart of the matter
Krall was driven — possessed — by the idea that she had been kicked out of the order unnecessarily. The order confirms only that she was dismissed because of insubordination — nothing further.
“Boy do I have a story for you,” one sister told the Daily News on Wednesday. “But you can’t have it. The documentation and the reasons are locked in a file somewhere.”
Kral frequently wrote letters to the editor but only occasionally got them printed. She had a long, seemingly endless list of injustices, and she scoured newspapers daily, making notes, memorizing facts and most of all, crusading.
Hand-written notes were pasted to her car when the Duster still ran. Later they were affixed to a board on the back of her bike.
“Much of what she said and did people felt was hurtful,” Schild said.
She claimed to love Jesus, but spat venom at church leaders. She loathed Vatican II. And in her later years, she loved reading paperback Western novels.
“I wonder if she was kicked out because they didn’t know what to do with her,” Schild said. “She became sort of a caricature, but that’s not what she set out to be. She was a real human with a real heart and that’s important to remember.”
Becoming infamous
Shortly after being dismissed, Kral took up residence in her green Duster. At first, she camped out in the parking lot of the Cathedral, using the bishop’s bushes as a toilet.
But as often happened with Kral, she wore out her welcome.
“She was a figure that couldn’t be ignored, even though some people would like to,” Schild said.
The first unbelievable act came when Kral marched up the center aisle of the cathedral during Mass with an ice-cream bucket carrying two empty liquor bottles she claimed to have fished out of the bishop’s garbage.
Shortly after that, she was asked to leave the parking lot. She filed a spate of lawsuits against the Diocese of Winona.
District and federal courts dismissed her cases, including a complaint against Watters, the bishop, for “forcing her to live in an inhuman manner.”
Eventually, Kral ended up on the wrong side of the law when she was convicted in 1982 of disorderly conduct.
Armed a determination and indignation that only she seemed to understand, Kral had entered the pastoral center to take an address book belonging to Watters, which she believed contained correspondence between the diocese and the Franciscan sisters. When the chancellor, the Rev. Donald Schmitz, tried to stop her, she grabbed his leg, knocking him to the floor.
The diminutive Kral then lifted Schmitz’ leg and hoisted him over her shoulder.
She represented herself during trial and invited Schmitz onto the courtroom floor for a re-enactment of the scene. He declined. The court found her guilty.
“Sister Elzear is a likable, intelligent, good-hearted person who has been hurt deeply by her dismissal from her religious order,” Judge Dennis Challeen wrote in his decision. “She is zealously committed to reversing what she considers a grave injustice. Unfortunately, the courts are not the forum for her grievances. It would be gratifying to see the energies of this little nun spent on the poor, the sick, the handicapped, the mentally ill, the imprisoned, the uneducated, the helpless and the hopeless.”
Left with disturbed parishioners and few options, the diocese banned her from the Cathedral, but not other parishes.
“It’s a question of the rights of other people to be able to assemble without being disturbed,” Watters said. “No one has ever done the kind of things she has done.”
Junkyard nun
After being booted from the church parking lot, Kral sought refuge in a Second Street junkyard.
The Duster wouldn’t turn over anymore. She paid $10 to haul it to the junkyard, then covered the car with boards borrowed from a piano crate and abandoned retail store shelving. It didn’t matter, the state had yanked her license.
Signs hung on the warped wood: “No Trespassing.” “Private Property.”
She spent nights there huddled in a wool blanket, taking her breakfast at a local dime store and finding her dinner in trashcans, along with whatever else she could fish out for scrap and recycling.
That’s when she turned to a bicycle. She cruised around on it, loaded with possessions others might call junk, spearing soda cans with an old TV antenna.
When a reporter called her Ms. Lillian Kral, she replied: “It is Sister Elzear. It is and always will be.”
Becoming famous
A Winona Daily News story about her living in a junkyard went across the world on The Associated Press wire in October 1981. The sensational story of a junkyard nun started a tidal wave of publicity centering around her life and her struggle against the Sisters of St. Francis. Her story touched many, and the newspaper was deluged with calls from concerned citizens and Hollywood.
Some callers as far away as Florida and San Diego offered help.
The reaction in Winona was much cooler, with letters and calls criticizing the Daily News for running the story. The Daily News recorded two stopped subscriptions.
A screenwriter, filmmaker and producer contacted Kral about her story, having to track her down through the newspaper since she was without a home and phone. One producer, Nance McCormick, followed Kral around Winona in November 1981 for several weeks, planning to produce a screenplay.
But just as quickly as the “CBS Evening News” van rolled into Winona, Kral’s flirt with fame as the “junkyard nun” came to an end. Interest in Kral waned.
None of this seemed to deter Kral. She simply muttered, “God loves persistence.”
“She always believed Shirley MacLaine was going to play her,” said former Daily News reporter Mark Metzler, who sometimes covered Kral’s antics in Winona. Metzler works for Merchants Bank now.
The city ordered her out of the junkyard shortly after her brush with fame, saying “dwellings and residences of any kind” were prohibited in the manufacturing district.
Only city councilmember Paul Rekstad voted against kicking the ex-nun out.
“Winona will just end up with more egg on it’s face,” Rekstad said. “As I see it, they’re harassing someone they don’t need to harass.”
On the same day the city council told Kral to move, Watters re-issued his statement about the dismissed nun, insisting he was powerless to reinstate her to the order.
Homeless again
Kral then found a home in the basement of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
She lived there at the Main Street location for nearly a year and a half before the church asked her to leave because it lacked cooking and bathing facilities, the zoning laws prohibited the use of the church as a residence and the church’s insurance carrier wouldn’t cover the liability.
At the time, Kral said her eviction fulfilled a prophecy that other churches will join with the Roman Catholic Church in persecuting her.
Yet when the loading van showed up at the church, the pastor offered her a place to live at his own home in Fountain City.
When that didn’t work out, she kept moving to different private residences, one after another, until they didn’t work out.
Meanwhile, she remained a constant Winona figure.
“She was a little John the Baptist,” said Jim Galewski, former Daily News editor and columnist. “She loved playing the role of persecuted victim.”
Vanishing character
Kral appeared occasionally in court to bring a lawsuit against public officials, ranging from the mayor and the entire city council to several attempts to sue media outlets and her former order.
Kral appeared constantly on the streets of Winona, waiting to talk to anyone who would stop to listen or read the messages on her bike. She often parked her bike at the public library racks. There she’d go to read, photocopy and photocopy some more.
“She was totally herself. She couldn’t care what other people thought about her,” said Robin DeVries, a reference librarian who often interacted with Kral. “I loved having her here and talking to me.”
Schild said he could gauge her temperament and her health by that bike. The more items tied on to the bike, the better she was feeling; the more items written on the placard, the more issues she had her sights set on.
Back when the Winona Public Library still had public typewriters, she could be found for hours pounding out missives to editors, lawyers and clerics. She showed up regularly at the newspaper, often to drop off a letter or prey on a new reporter.
“She irritated editors. Reporters don’t need help wasting an afternoon,” Galewski said.
And some of those reporters didn’t mind the quirky sister.
“She was kind to me because I was kind to her. I listened,” Metzler said.
Editors listened, sometimes for just a moment. They frequently rejected the rambling, sometimes libelous letters out of hand.
Calmly and without raising a hand — in a tiny voice that seemed to have been borrowed from a schoolgirl — the firebrand nun would predict that the editor, like all the ones before him, would burn in hell.
“She did tell me to burn in hell, but she did it pleasantly,” said former Daily News editor Gary Evans. Evans is now the chief executive officer of HBC in Winona.
In her final years, the woman whose voice couldn’t seem to be muffled faded into the background as her health declined and she moved into an assisted-living facility.
A private family remembrance will be held in spring in Sleepy Eye, Minn., where she grew up.
As Kral moved into the junkyard in October 1981, she compared herself to the Biblical figure Job. “He lost everything. But when he lost it, he started getting it back,” she said, not knowing her struggle would last for a quarter century.
But Sister Elzear Lillian Kral’s story followed a different arc, and she didn’t get back what she once had. And on Tuesday, her struggle finally ended.
Darrell Ehrlick is the editor of the Winona Daily News.
JimmyK wrote on Mar 27, 2009 5:19 PM:
Mary Jean Kennedy "