Melissa Gaulke and Jessica Gaulke Chayer are sisters who are accustomed to wearing tiaras and sashes. Both have embraced their inner princesses since they were little girls competing with each other for a kiddie crown in Robbinsdale’s Whiz Bang Days.
Now they’re all grown up, but they still know how to reign over a parade. Gaulke, the older sister, is a candidate for St. Paul Winter Carnival Queen of the Snows, and Chayer was crowned 2007 Minneapolis Aquatennial Queen of the Lakes. If you now have an image in your mind of two girls who sit around and paint their nails, erase it, please. Because neither woman is a pampered blue blood.
“I don’t know if you know this, but both these girls can operate Bobcats,” says their uncle, Corey Ecklund.
The sisters learned how to operate heavy machinery while helping their dad with his landscaping business. And, as a former gas station technician, Gaulke wouldn’t need anyone to rescue her if a float she was riding on broke down; she could fix it herself. Same goes for Chayer, who is a diesel generator mechanic with the Minnesota National Guard; she made international headlines earlier this month when she abdicated her Aquatennial crown to prepare for her unit’s deployment to Iraq.
Winter Carnival coronation is Friday, and it represents a chance for Gaulke – the more introverted sister – to shine. But if she wins the crown, it will be bittersweet. The sisters dreamed of serving simultaneously as queens of the Twin Cities since, at just 10 months apart, they feel like twins themselves. Instead, they’re getting ready to say goodbye.
“When she leaves, half of me is leaving, too,” says Gaulke.
Baking and Bobcats
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istening to Gaulke and Chayer dish about royal protocol is like watching a clip out of “The Princess Diaries.”
“There were rules about how to eat corn on the cob,” Chayer says.
“We can’t dance when we’re wearing our crowns,” Gaulke says. “And we’re never supposed to put on our own coats.”
“But the really important thing is to just be yourself,” Chayer says. “That’s what I’ve told Missy.”
Their parents taught Chayer, 22, of Champlin, and Gaulke, 23, of Elk River, that “being yourself” can include many things.
“I used to tell their dad, ‘These girls can do anything a boy can do – don’t treat them any differently than you would if they were sons,’ ” Annette Sorenson says. “And that’s the way they were raised.”
“We helped our dad with his landscaping business,” Chayer says.
“And we’d bake cookies with our mom,” Gaulke says.
Early on, the girls impressed their father.
“They both have the hand-eye coordination necessary to run heavy equipment,” Mark Gaulke says.
But the girls also tapped into a more nurturing side, says their uncle.
“Their mom once had them raise a flock of baby ducks at a young age, which I thought was wild,” Ecklund says. “I asked my sister why, and she said, ‘Because I want to teach them that you care for your babies and you raise them, and then you let them go.’ ”
Gaulke, who works as a Hennepin County juvenile correctional officer, continues to be influenced by the way she grew up.
“I really like crossing social boundaries and going against the stereotype,” she says. “The summer I ran for Miss Robbinsdale, I was also working full time in landscaping and at a gas station. So I’d go from laying sod or hauling rock to working in a garage, and then I’d have to hurry home and clean and paint my nails, because as Miss Robbinsdale, you could never leave your fingernails unpainted at an event. It’s unprofessional.”
Embracing their inner princesses
Sorenson never dreamed of seeing her girls participate in pageants.
“I’m not a stage mom,” she says.
But, independently, the girls both showed an early interest in wearing tiaras. As kids, they ran for the title of Junior Ambassador, part of the entourage of royalty associated with Miss Robbinsdale.
“We tried out when we were 5 and 6, but I was so shy that I didn’t make it. I got weeded out while Jessie went on to compete,” Gaulke says.
Years later, in 2004, Gaulke emerged from her shyness and was crowned a Miss Robbinsdale princess (she was also named Miss Congeniality). The next year, her sister won the Miss Robbinsdale crown.
It’s not surprising that the sisters both coveted the title of Miss Robbinsdale; competing with each other is as natural to them as sharing clothes and talking on the phone every day.
“When I ran for Miss Robbinsdale,” Gaulke says, “we had to sell raffle tickets during our candidacy, and I had the attitude of, ‘I can’t control how the judges see me, but I can control how many raffle tickets I sell,’ so I was determined to be the top seller, and I was – I sold over 1,000 tickets.
“The next year, when my sister ran, she said, ‘I’m going to sell more raffle tickets than you.’ She wanted to break my record. And she did. She sold 100 more than I did. It’s all in fun.”
Despite their spirit of competition, the sisters have always been friends, and in many ways their lives have paralleled each other’s. As little girls, they asked their mother to dress them alike so people would think they were twins. As teenagers, they were both star volleyball players. As college students, they both attended Augsburg College and majored in sociology. As young women, they both got engaged to their high school sweethearts and purchased homes at an early age.
But, as Miss Robbinsdale, Chayer went on to compete for the Aquatennial crown last summer. She stood out among the contestants, especially when she wore her Guard uniform. In the national publicity frenzy surrounding Chayer’s decision to end her reign halfway through, she was named “ABC News Person of the Week” and she told a U.S. Army publication: “I think maybe this is changing the whole outlook on the pageant system and scholarship programs because it’s not all about the glitz and glam. It’s really about the person you are.”
When she enters a room, Chayer is a princess in combat boots, and she commands attention with a professional-grade smile and the strength of a soldier. When Gaulke walks into that same room, she warms it slowly with a poise that is calm and still. Perhaps it’s best explained this way: Chayer is Princess Diana to Gaulke’s Queen Elizabeth II. Both regal women, but in different ways.
Princess Di always got more headlines, and Gaulke admits that it’s been “a little bit” challenging to live in her little sister’s shadow.
“I’m not the kind of person who needs to be in the spotlight, but I’d like to experience what my sister has experienced,” she says.
If things had been different, Gaulke might also have been heading to Iraq, instead of running for Queen of the Snows.
“Our father was in the Minnesota National Guard for 28 years, and we grew up hearing the stories,” Gaulke says. “Jessie signed up as a junior in high school, and I wanted to, too – I wanted to be just like Dad – but I was diagnosed with exercise-induced asthma, so they wouldn’t let me sign up. I understand, because it’s not good if you can’t make it through basic training without your inhaler, but it was frustrating.”
Instead, Gaulke focused on college and now her career in corrections. She also is starting to plan her wedding, and she has been keeping busy with the quest for her latest tiara. Gaulke is used to thriving on her own – she worked three jobs to put herself through school, becoming the first person in her family to graduate from college – but she’s going to miss her sister.
“When I read all the stories about Jessie stepping down, it made me cry, because that’s when it really hit me: My sister is going to be leaving. It’s going to be a reality,” says Gaulke.
Chayer, now on leave from Augsburg, has also worked to accept this new reality.
“At first, it was disappointing and upsetting to change my lifestyle,” she says. “But now that I’ve given up the crown, I’ve accepted it, and I’m ready to go and come home again.”
Chayer expects she’ll be away for 18 months. If her sister is crowned queen, Chayer has some advice for her.
“Treat every moment like it’s a golden moment,” she says. “Because you’ll never be in this situation again.”
‘Don’t show emotion’
About 15 minutes before she walked down the aisle to get married Jan. 13, Jessica Gaulke ate a sandwich in the basement of the Church of the Sacred Heart in Robbinsdale.
“Look how calm she is!” Diane Chayer, the mother of the groom, said.
Jessica’s maid of honor, her sister, was just as unruffled, even though she had rushed from a hair-styling appointment at 7:30 a.m. to a round of interviews for Queen of the Snows at 9 a.m. to the church at 11 a.m. As the bride ate, her maid of honor calmly rolled a lint brush over the white gown.
For the bride, her beauty-queen-and-soldier training helped her maintain her composure.
“Don’t show emotion,” the bride said brightly as she took another bite out of her sandwich.
The same attitude fits her sister.
“Actually, Jessie is the more emotional one,” Gaulke says.
Their mother sees how the sisters’ impending separation is subtly shifting their dynamic. Competition is becoming less important.
“I don’t feel this has brought us closer, because we’ve always been close,” Sorenson says. “But these things do tend to make you more aware. You don’t want to look back and say, ‘I wish I would have spent more time, I wish we had done this, I wish we had done that’ – it brings it all to the surface. It’s not really what you do together, though, but just spending time together that’s important. And I think I’ve seen that happening between them.”
In fact, Chayer is cutting her honeymoon short to be there on her sister’s coronation night. She’s supporting her sister in other ways, too.
“I’m going to be wearing the dress that she wore for Aquatennial,” Gaulke says. “Wearing it will make me feel like I’m carrying it on for her.”
Molly Millett can be reached at mollymillett@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5505.
Copyright 2007 Pioneer Press.
