Leona Margaret Mattson, 94, of Misquah, died peacefully on Friday, May 1, 2026, at the Lakeview care home in Pinedale, with her family at her side. For thirty-eight years she fed the children of this town, and she is mourned, now, by most of them grown.

She was born March 3, 1932, on a farm in Birch Lake Township, the daughter of Wilhelm and Augusta (Saari) Niemi, and attended the country school through the eighth grade. She married Carl Mattson in 1953 at First Lutheran Church; together they farmed the Mattson place east of town and raised four children. Carl preceded her in death in 2001.

From 1958 until her retirement in 1996, Leona ran the hot-lunch kitchen at Oakview Elementary, where she cooked for a generation of Misquah children without once consulting a written recipe and without once, by the unanimous testimony of those children, producing a cinnamon roll that could be improved upon. She regarded the school lunch as a serious undertaking and a hungry child as an emergency, and she fed both the children who could pay and, without comment or record, the ones who could not.

She is survived by her four children, Carol (Dennis) Lund of Misquah, Gary (Sheila) Mattson of Fargo, Nancy (Tom) Brekke of Bemidji, and David Mattson of Misquah; by eleven grandchildren and nineteen great-grandchildren; and by a great many former students who can still, on a winter morning, summon the smell of her kitchen. Services will be held Saturday, May 9, at 11 a.m. at First Lutheran Church, with burial in the church cemetery and a lunch to follow — prepared, at her instruction, from her own recipes by women she trained. Memorials are preferred to the Oakview hot-lunch fund, that no child go without.