The son who remembered everything Palmer built.
Rodney Stadum was born in 1948 in Cando, North Dakota. Growing up shaped by his father Palmer's work – the electric lines, the cooperative ethic, the love of tinkering with machines and radios, Rod absorbed the rhythm of that life: work, community, land, and memory.
As Palmer and Signe aged, it was Rod who became the keeper of the oral record – the son who sat with his father on the porch and heard the stories that never made it into any document or photograph. When Scott began building this archive decades later, Rod's recollections became some of its most valuable sources.
Rod's children – Scott, Kristin, and Amy – carry both the Stadum name and those memories forward into the digital age.
The external source layer adds a professional thread as well: Rodney Stadum appears as a co-author of the 1973 American Journal of Physics article "Bragg Diffraction of Microwaves" with Thomas D. Rossing and Douglas Lang. That places Rod's story not only in family memory, but also in science education and physics publishing. Read more in his Physics Education Story and explore his parents' history in the Palmer and Signe Life Story.
