Allan Eugene Meinerts was born the youngest of nine children, on August 12, 1948, to John and Freida (Bruns) Meinerts at the Luverne Community Hospital in Luverne, Minnesota. He was raised on the family farm and attended school in town, graduating from Luverne High School in 1967. That fall, Allan was involved in a serious automobile accident, where he was crushed from the waist down and told he…