Sylvia Hilgeman featured in Minneapolis Star Tribune

Sylvia Hilgeman’s dad, Greg, grew up in Minneapolis. But he liked visiting his uncle, Milan Rustan, and preferred working on the farm over life in the city. After high school he went to work for his uncle. His future wife, Gayle, grew up on a nearby farm, the oldest of seven and a veteran of 5 a.m. milking on her family’s dairy farm by the time she was in grade school.

The couple had three children — Frances, Sylvia and Scott. Even though there was little money around in the early 1990s, Sylvia was raised in a community where the old cliché was true: Everyone knew everyone and helped raise everyone else’s kids. She had some of the same elementary school teachers as her mother.

“Quite often, your fourth grade teacher is your baseball coach and your Sunday school teacher and your parents’ friend,” said Brad Kennett, the principal of Red Lake Falls High School and a native of Fort Frances, Ontario.

Sylvia Hilgeman was a standout point guard at tiny Oklee High School, which has since merged with the school in Plummer, and a straight-A student. She won a scholarship to study accounting at Jamestown University in North Dakota, the school where her older sister got a degree in nursing. The Red Lake Electrical Cooperative kicked in $300.

“It was just sort of a given that you would go to college, like, a given for everyone, not just me,” Hilgeman said. “That was just what people did. And I’m not sure that’s the case everywhere.”

After college, she spent five years working for the consulting giant Deloitte in Minneapolis before she joined the FBI to investigate bank fraud from New York City. She can’t talk much about her work, but she made the jump because she wanted to do something more meaningful, she said.

She comes home to visit at least once a year, and the family has prospered. Her parents built a new house a couple of years ago. Hilgeman sits in the tractor cab with her brother while he discs a soybean field, drinks coffee in the kitchen with her mom, plays with her nieces and nephews from Thief River Falls and rides along as her dad races the red border collie in the Gator.

“I don’t remember a time,” she said, “that I didn’t believe I could do anything that I wanted to.”