Maxine Penas, a popular three-term legislator from Badger, Minn., died Monday after a yearlong battle recovering from a stroke. She was 62 and had been living in LifeCare Roseau Manor in Roseau, Minn.
Penas suffered a stroke in early December 2007.
Her funeral service will be at 10 a.m. Saturday in St. Mary's Catholic Church, Badger; visitation will be 5 to 8 p.m. Friday in Helgeson Funeral Chapel in Roseau, with a prayer service at 7 p.m.
Penas returned home from a Twin Cities rehabilitation center in January, where she spent eight weeks and had been recovering since.
In January, her daughter, Mary Anderson, posted a note on Penas' CaringBridge Web site about the trip back home: "Mom rode very well, only asking for Tylenol two times for a headache."
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Thousands of well-wishers left messages for her on the Web site during the past year and, since Monday, condolences to her family.
The retired teacher first was elected in November 2000 in District 1A in the northwest corner of the state that includes Roseau, Marshall, Kittson and Pennington counties, bordering North Dakota and Canada.
To do so, the Republican Penas defeated veteran legislator Jim Tunheim, a DFLer from Kennedy, Minn., who had held the seat since 1982.
Re-elected in 2002 and 2004, she garnered 65 percent and 62 percent of the votes in her last two runs for the seat in the traditionally Democratic district.
She decided not to run for a fourth term, ending her third two-year term in early January 2007.
She and her husband, Albert, lived in rural Badger and farmed for 26 years before she ran for the legislature. Penas taught science in the Middle River and Greenbush school districts for 31 years.
Earlier this year, Sen. LeRoy Stumpf, who served in the legislature with Penas, told the Herald she was successful in politics because she was honest and straightforward.
In the first week of December 2007, Penas went to the emergency room of Roseau's LifeCare Medical Center, thinking she had the flu or an inner ear infection. An exam found bleeding in her brain, and she was airlifted to a Minneapolis hospital, where doctors found Penas had an aneurysm in her neck that was causing blood to leak into areas around her brain.
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She had several surgeries and returned home in mid-January.
Former student Jeff Scramstad, Bemidji, said he was in the class of 1981 at Middle River and that his former teacher "was one of a kind."
"She will be sadly missed by all those whose lives she touched and who had the pleasure of knowing her," Scramstad wrote. "She gave us a lifetime of wonderful memories, which we will always cherish; we are forever grateful to have been graced by her presence. While we are saddened by the loss of such a wonderful and selfless woman, we celebrate her life and rejoice that there are many waiting for her arrival on the other side of the veil, ready to be reunited with (her) and lead her by the hand into life eternal."
Penas' survivors include her husband and their three children.
A full obituary is expected later this week.
