Don’t let the rainbow pastel sneakers fool you. “I’m just an old farm girl,” says LaVon “Dolly” Roll. “I used to drive tractors, ride horses, and even helped raise a couple of baby foxes when I was a kid. I have always loved being outdoors and around animals.”
LaVon “Dolly” Roll has been operating Walker Mowers
around her 80-acre property for nearly 30 years.
Dolly has also had a love for target shooting. She got to be pretty good at it too. At the age of 75, she took a class to obtain a concealed carry gun permit. “The instructor was pretty impressed,” says Kim Ruffalo, the older of Dolly’s two daughters. “The instructor told Mom, ‘You don’t have to shoot the same hole every single time, you know.’”
Dolly has also become quite the lawn mower operator over the years, something she still does on a regular basis today.
“It’s really amazing,” says Jon Roll, Dolly’s son. Now at age 86, Dolly no longer does many of the things she so passionately and brilliantly did when she was younger. But once she is comfortably seated on her Walker Mower, you can see her eyes light up.
“This mower is what gives Mom a lot of purpose now,” Jon says. “Sometimes I wonder if the whole mowing experience takes her back to her tractor days on the farm,” adds Keri Hinshaw, Dolly’s younger daughter.
An aerial photographer snapped this shot of Dolly’s property many years ago. As luck would have it,
Dolly was out on her Walker Mower at the time (red circle). But it wasn’t really luck. Dolly spent a lot of
time on her Walker, earning her the nickname “lady on the lawn mower” around town.
Even when she was in her younger years working on the farm, Dolly spent nearly as much time on a mower as she did a tractor. In fact, if you look closely, you can see Dolly on her Walker Mower in an aerial photo taken of the property many years ago. “Mom became known as the ‘lady on the lawn mower’ around here,” Keri points out.
EARLY ADOPTER OF ZERO-TURN MOWING
Dolly and her late husband, Donald, were elementary school teachers in their hometown of Mayville, Wisconsin. They also cash-crop farmed on the side. As Dolly affectionately recalls, Donald loved planting things—from corn and soybeans to a variety of trees including maple, spruce and arborvitae. That meant Dolly had to take care of the lion’s share of the mowing around the property and its many trees.
Dolly mowed with classic-style tractors for many years. Then, in the early 1990s, Donald heard about this new craze that was catching on: zero-turn mowing. He did some checking around and happened upon a dealer roughly 100 miles away in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. Jerry’s Small Engine Supply Co. carried a brand called Walker, something most people around Mayville had never heard of. “Dad got a demo mower and tried it out for a while,” Kim recalls. “He’d also tested another brand from a dealer closer by. He decided he wanted a Walker.”
Today there are three Walker Mowers in Dolly’s machine shed: two grass-catching units with 42- and 48-inch decks, and a side-discharging unit with a 60-inch deck. Dolly’s preferred machine is the 48-inch Commemorative Edition grass-catching mower with the Walker Power Dump.
“I remember how leery I was at first when Donald bought the Walker,” Dolly recalls. “Back then, a zero-turn was so different with so many new things to know. But I soon found out that it was actually much easier, especially with all the trees on our property. You don’t have to worry about a steering wheel, which is so nice. It was just so easy to drive, even when turning around or backing up. Driving the Walker is still very easy for me today.”
After undergoing both back and hip surgery over the past decade, the hardest part about running the mower for Dolly these days is getting on and off. Jon has rigged up a couple of solutions. Out in the shed, Dolly pulls up to the back of an ATV so she can use the ATV rack as a handrail. Up by the house, Jon has installed a more conventional handrail right on the brick siding.
Dolly loves the automatic Walker Power Dump on her 48-inch grass-catching Walker. “I could
never get on and off the mower over and over to keep emptying the catcher box these days,” she says.
“I do have to be careful, which is why I just love the automatic dumping (Walker Power Dump),” Dolly relates. “I just pull up around the side of the barn and dump my grass or leaves in a big pile. I never have to get off the mower. I’ve gotten pretty good about how I pull the lever and start lifting the box while I’m still backing up to the pile; that way I don’t have to sit there and wait as long. Every fall after the crops are off, Jon takes the tractor over to the pile to scoop up the leaves and grass clippings and spread them out over the field. This stuff makes really good fertilizer.”
NOBODY MOWS QUITE LIKE DOLLY
Years ago, when Dolly returned from the hospital after recovering from back surgery, she climbed onto her 2008 Commemorative Edition Walker Mower. Her kids took a photo of her captioned, “She’s Back!” Not only was Dolly back, she was back where she belonged. Even though her husband was one of the first in the area to purchase a Walker Mower, Dolly was the one who racked up most of the operating hours.
“I did most of the mowing around here,” Dolly says. “Donald used to give me pointers about my overlapping and such. Yeah, he’s standing in the shed giving me advice while I’m the one on the mower. I remember one time we took the mower in for service. When we went back to pick it up, Donald drove it around in the parking lot a bit, telling the dealer it handled just great. I'm thinking, 'Hey, I'm standing right here, and I'm the one who does all of the mowing at home.'"
Dolly smiles brightly after telling that story. It’s not that she was ever upset. She just takes tremendous pride in her passion, which for many years has been mowing the lawn and cleaning up leaves.
From left: Daughter Keri Hinshaw, Dolly Roll, son Jon Roll and daughter Kim Ruffalo.
“I’ve told Mom so many times that I should mow certain parts of the property with the 60-inch discharge mower because I could get it done so much faster,” Jon says. “Mom looks at me like I’m crazy. ‘But Jon,’ Mom says, ‘it looks so much nicer when I catch the clippings and haul them away.’” And that’s the end of that discussion.
Jon does handle some of the mowing on the property. There’s a waterway in the field he mows a few times a year with the 60-inch mower. But other than that, it’s pretty much all Dolly, just as it has been for nearly 30 years.
There’s just no stopping the lady on the lawn mower.