A daughter of Rainy Lake, Connie was born July 10, 1946 in Littlefork, MN to Clara and George Finstad of Ranier, Minnesota. She died unexpectedly August 12, 2022 on Finstad Lane in Ranier just 200 hundred feet from where she grew up. Connie grew up in Ranier, Minnesota and lived above the Auto-Marine Shop with a father who was a genius machinist and mechanic with an unmatched work ethic and with a mother who spoke
five languages. In the short northern Minnesota summers,
red, white and blue petunias surrounded the
Shop and the Stars & Stripes graced the shop on July 4th each year. That patriotic display somehow foretold that Finstad’s Auto-Marine Shop would be listed on
the National Record of Historic Places. Connie was a quiet, private person whose passions
were classical music, theater and the arts. She was a
small-town girl who was never ostentatious. As she
sometimes said, all she really ever wanted to do was to do her work. But the real story of her life was how she made the journey. Connie was an accomplished musician
who played the piano, cello and drums during her schooldays. She graduated from International Falls
high school years, she washed glassware and pipetted samples at her sister’s University of Minnesota lab where the seeds of the nascent technology of the field
of immunology were being sown. When she was a
sophomore, Connie was too shy to tell her high school biology class that the teacher was wrong the thymus gland did have a function in the human body! She was
a 14 year-old worker bee in the lab where they had
discovered that function in the past year. In college,
Connie majored in mathematics at the U of MN
her graduating class! Connie never stopped taking
courses at the U of MN she had about a hundred extra
credits when she graduated.
Connie began working as a scientist in her sister’s lab upon her graduation in 1969 from the University of Minnesota with a Bachelor of Mathematics degree. In
1973 she moved to Manhattan when her sister Joanne and her husband moved their lab to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Connie worked at Sloan-Kettering until 1999 and concluded her career at United Biomedical, Inc. in
2019. Her 68 scientific publications in the scientific and medical journals of the world spanned the period from 1972 to 2019. Her first publication in 1972 at age
26 was “The Evolution of the Immune Response
XIII…” in The Journal of Immunology. Together with her sister Joanne, the two girls who grew up over a little machine shop in Ranier enriched the field of
immunology with more than 100 published scientific papers! Connie earned a PhD from New York University in
1986. Along the way Connie’s research covered
invertebrate immunological system development, monoclonal antibody development for immunotherapy
and vaccines for cervical cancer, renal cancer, prostate cancer, epithelial ovarian cancer, cervical cancer, colon cancer, liver cancers, Alzheimer’s Disease, AIDS and
more. Connie and her father George shared a distinction
that few fathers and daughters can claim. Both have multiple U.S. patents. George, like Connie, did not seek the spotlight for his work. Most of his patents
were in the name of the companies with whom he
shared them. Likewise, Connie’s patents were assigned
to the institutions where she worked. Belying her north-woods small-town roots, Connie
sojourn to New York City evolved to 47 years – most of her working career. Her mother Clara instilled in Connie the importance of being a good citizen in her
community. Connie was Open House New York (OHNY) Volunteer Council Secretary and helped organize tours of NYC landmarks for many years. Following the death of her sister Joanne in 2020, Connie moved back to her beloved hometown of
the remaining few years of her life, Connie became one with the glory of the wind and the waves, the
transparent cold air, the pealing voices of children on
the beach and the solitude of the even-diminishing sunsets slipping beneath the Canadian horizon.
and Clara Finstad and her sister Joanne Finstad-Good. Survivors include her first cousin, Louise (Dwayne)
Helleloid, extended family Randy and Barb Gawtry,
her Ranier family Tami Walls, Libby Miggins, Sheila
Johnson and Kenni Roberts, and especially all the
people of the world whose lives have been or will be touched by Connie’s contributions to medical science. Memorials to honor Connie’s life should be directed to the Koochiching County Historical Society or the
Backus Community Center in International Falls. Condolences may be left on www.greenlarsen.com Arrangements are with Green-Larsen Mortuary, Inc.
