BOOKS

 

Leaf after leaf, the pages pile up and are bound into a collection of ideas that comprise a book.  It never seemed to me that many ever made the best seller list.  The thousand upon thousands that fill the libraries of the world are the better and more popular ones.  There have probably been a hundred times that many books written in the last hundred years that are printed and never sell enough copies to pay for publishing.

 

I like to read historical and non fiction books.  Even these I find not to satisfy some of my ideas.  A lot of the history is not as it must have occurred, and the authors are politically or philosophically biased.  A person has to think of that and read between the lines.  That’s sort of like, where did my donation to the Red Cross or United Way go?  Did it go to the people it was intended for, or was most of it used up on the bookkeepers, secretaries, the bureaucrats of the organization, and to the buyers of the supplies, and shipping costs before 10% got to that foreign land or local mishap?

 

Some books are so brief they don’t cover the subject much.  The field guides pack so many different species into a book, you may get to read about what they look like, but nothing much else.  A guide to the birds tells about the male and female characteristics of feathers, and migration, or nesting areas, but little else.  Did you know that gold finches look like sparrows in the winter?  I fed about 70 birds one winter and then they started getting tiny patches of bright yellow feathers toward springtime.  Oh, those are seed eaters.  Yes, there are a lot of small seed on top of the ground when the snow melts, but by the time the birds have babies in the nests, they have to feed them a lot.  Most small birds feed a lot of tiny bugs to the chicks at that time.  I remember some years when it was so dry the baby robins were dead under the nest on the ground.  The parents couldn’t find enough worms to feed them.  I remember another year when it was so wet and buggy that the gnats killed the naked babies in the nest.  I suppose the seasonal fluctuation has the same effect on baby hummingbirds when there is little nectar for the parents to collect.  Last summer it was so dry there weren’t many bugs.  I didn’t hear many birds singing, either.  There were few bumble bees.  Don’t tell me the farmers around here are spraying bugs too much.  There aren’t many farmers here anymore.

 

Read a tree book.  Tell me where do maple trees grow?  We see them on gravel hills, but not on clay hills.  Some places they grow on river banks and on other rivers there are none.  Is it sand?  Is it the drainage of the soil?  Some areas the trees are old and solid.  The ones I tapped this spring are small.  Nearly all of them have split from frost in the winter.  A lot were rotten in the center.  Not one of them would make a log for lumber.  As we drove through Ely there have been plastic sap collecting bags on the street trees for the last few years.  I never see any being tapped in Hibbing.  When we went to a band concert in Aurora, Gwen noticed the huge maple trees were wet.  The sap was seeping down the bark on nearly every tree from some small broken twig or crack.

 

‘Be careful chopping around a birch tree,” was a warning from my dad.  “They usually have a rock under them, they contain phosphate.”   “Balm of Gilliad grows in ground that grows good clover when the land is cleared.”  “Moccasin flowers grow where birch, balsam, and cedar grow together.”  It was little things like this that were said once or twice, that are never seen in books, much.  There would never be enough space to put a lot of information on everything in one book.

 

Teachers should tell students the first day of school that history stories are eliminated all the time so new information can be printed into the new editions.  And even then, everything is only a brief review of the event written about.  Those events in the history books should be taught with the idea that they are to whet the imagination and that students should go back to other sources when they have time to read about all sides of the issues.  No one person will ever know everything that went on in that time frame.

 

I’m a romantic in my thoughts so I don’t need to read other people’s ideas in fictional love stories.  Adventure stories don’t thrill me too much.  I’ve had a lot of small adventures in my life.  I don’t need to read about climbing Mt. Everest.  Mountain climbing and unnecessary risk taking doesn’t thrill me.  I’ve had enough pain in my life so I don’t have to try to show how tough I am by getting tattooed or get pierced.  I take out my own slivers and rose thorns with a sewing needle.

 

I’d rather fish than watch a fishing movie.  I’d rather play a game than watch others play.  I’d rather do things than read about them.  I’d rather love than watch others in a movie or read about them. 

ON THE BALL

 

One of the most dangerous jobs I ever worked at was not shingling a steep roof or cutting iron with a welding torch.  Working at my table saw or jointer is not exactly safe, either.  Anyone working around a 1500 pound animal could get kicked, stepped on, crushed or mauled.  I’ve had to go to the hospital to get a stitch or two, and have gone there on several occasions to get bits of iron removed from my cornea.   That’s one thing your wife or mom can’t do.  Most of you country boys have worked under your car or truck changing mufflers and get stuff in your eyes.

 

When I was eleven or twelve, I graduated from standing in the window staring out watching the men work and moved out to throw wood as we sawed on the saw rig.  There, the most dangerous job was to be the sawyer and stand next to the 32 inch diameter saw and push the logs into it to the desired length.  That reason that was so bad was that the one or two men on the safe end of the log could slip and bump you into the blade.  The second most dangerous job was tossing the wood blocks away from the saw.  As you step toward the saw and toss the blocks, your feet start packing the snow and even at -20 degrees below it gets slippery.  Once in awhile you use your foot to sweep a little sawdust where you stand for traction.  Some saw dust always blows under the blade as you are sawing, and when the crew stops to move the saw rig back, there is a big pile of sawdust a couple of feet high.

 

It would be foolish to kick sawdust from under the moving blade while it was turning.  That would be like kicking a live beaver.  If they can chew a huge tree down, what would they do to your leg with those teeth?  The same with that saw blade.  At least with the job, a thrower, you were in control of your own destiny.  If you slipped into the saw or flipped a chip away from the moving blade with your mittened hand, it would be your own fault.

 

After I grew up no one used a saw rig anymore.  Chainsaws were perfected.  Even a chainsaw is a lot slower, but you don’t need a bunch of people to saw wood.  The large logs can be sawn on the ground and need not be lifted up to the saw.

 

We sawed wood from any size trees that grew around here.  These trees are small compared to the hardwood that grows out east.  An eight foot popal, birch, or ash were never too big for three men to lift as it was being sawed.  Those were shoved into the saw and sawed up to the arbor, backed out, and turned and sawed through.

 

Most young people don’t remember seeing the rig in action on the front or rear end of the tractor or joker the saw was mounted on.  A flat leather belt ran back about 6 feet to the flat pulley on the side of the maching.  This turned the flat pulley on one end of the saw arbor.  Two flat babbitt pillow block bearings held it on the rig.  There was another flat pulley that road on the belt as a tightener.  Some sort of belt dressing was poured on the inside of the belt to keep it from slipping on the iron pullies.  Dad had some kind of sticky stuff that didn’t freeze that came in a flat pint and a half can.  The other dressing looked like a cardboard caulking compound tube.  The paper was torn away for an inch and the tar like substance was pushed down against the inside of the moving belt.  They only doped the belt a couple of times cutting the entire 10 cords of wood.  It probably took 3 or 4 hours to cut a winter’s worth of wood with a four man crew.  Those babbitt bearings had to be oiled often as the oil seeped out.

 

I started thinking about John Deere inventing a steel plow by using a saw blade.  While Mrs. Novak told us small kids the story in school so many years ago, I was thinking about a circular sawmill blade.  The blade was probably a flat hand saw for cutting trees down with.  What blacksmith would use a sawmill circular saw for a farm tool?  How many kids picture things in different ways while learning a lesson if its not presented in its entirety?  As I lay awake, I realized that the saws used here in the old days were all factory made.  The use of factory made iron and steel was the North’s strength in the Civil War.  Most commercial steel tools were being made by the 1850’s.

 

I’ve got several old crosscut saws.  Some have short teeth and some have long teeth.  The reason is that some were sharpened so many times that the teeth wore down.  Those saws look identical because the guy that sharpened them knew what he was doing.  Even after filing an inch off those teeth, the saw was being used and cut perfectly.

 

To revitalize those old flat and circular saws, the man would gum the gullets out with a rounded circular grindstone going across the saw.  There was a swinging arbor for the stone, and a stop on it so it would only grind down so far.  The saw blade would lose some metal, but the teeth would be high again.  Those gullets in the blade is where the sawdust falls before being thrown out of the saw cut when sawing.

 

I have a couple of those circular grindstones hanging on a nail in the garage.

 

Like I’ve said before, no one took pictures of log loads being pulled by oxen or horses like mom told about.  It was so common a sight, no one paid much attention to it.  So was cutting wood on saw rigs on the farms.  There aren’t many pictures of people washing clothes on a scrub board or cutting cabbage for sauerkraut, either.

 

People had to be on the ball while cutting wood or cabbage.  You couldn’t daydream near a sawmill, either.  Those bulls can kill you if you’re not careful.

 

Daydreaming can mean a full pail of milk can be kicked out from between your knees as you sit there milking a cow.

 

Little Boy Blue come blow your horn.  The cows got into the grain field and ate a lot of winter’s food while the little boy nodded off on his job.  I bet he heard about it for the rest of his life.

 

Most of those nursery rhymes taught lessons in the days before many people knew how to read and write.

IT DOESN’T COST A THING

 

I remember when I was in the 9^th grade, two seniors were talking about dress pants they bought for $19. a pair.  That was when most men were earning $1.50 an hour.  Most of the kids in school wore blue jeans or khaki work pants that were known as everyday clothes.  Even those could be bought for $5. or $6.  Most dress pants were probably $9. a pair.  In the 1950’s the western style blue jeans were becoming popular.  Some girls started wearing them and nearly all wore them once in awhile.  Those were the days just before the flared can-can skirts became a fad with the girls.  Silk scarves were a fad and tight fitting jeans were a little risqué.

 

I never liked them because the legs were too tight.  I had big thick legs and had to wear the wider cuffed work pants so I could get into them.  I preferred the khaki work pants.  The dress pants didn’t do for me because the seams would rip if a kid wasn’t careful.

 

A few months later, one of those seniors got a brand new car for graduation.  I knew  neither one had to earn their own money to buy clothes like me or my buddies did, so I felt they were bragging.  If they had been talking quietly, I’d never have heard the conversation.

 

I do understand the way people think about impressing others.  If it weren’t for that reason, not many people would buy a new car or build a larger house than was necessary.  Not many people would buy a huge boat, a large 4 wheeler, or a motorcycle, either.  My mindset may have come about when our house burned down.  With no insurance, our life style changed and we started wearing hand me down clothes.  Mom sewed all our shirts and blouses and the girls’ skirts.  It was fun for me to go down in Herberger’s basement in Virginia, to pick out some very nice cloth remnants for mom to make me a shirt.  At that time in my life, women were saving all those printed flour and feed sacks.  Mom made our work shirts out of them.  I remember dad had a one of a kind pink zebra work shirt he wore on his carpenter jobs.  Of course, there were women who never sewed their own clothes.  They may not have known how to sew well.

 

Being practical was an idea that came to me from my parents living in the depression.  My dad was eight years older than mom.  As dad was an adult when the depression hit, he deferred marriage like a lot of men for awhile.  The folks talked about the hopeless feeling people had.  There was no cash to spend.  Most people around the rural area ate very well and had a lot of firewood, but had little cash to spend on their dreams.

 

I still feel a little guilty throwing away left overs.  We don’t have animals like chickens and pigs that recycled all that stuff.  The compost pile gets it all now.  The wood ashes go into the garden or are scattered on the wind over the hay field.

 

Dad was practical in his carpenter work, too.  He drew up the plans for every house he built.  They were not just a floor plan like you get on one page of a magazine, but were elaborate, compared to blueprints.  He had a list of materials with each set of plans.  It took a few days and late into the nights for him to do that work, but that list could be taken to the lumber yard and everything could be loaded on trucks and delivered to the site if he got the job.  He never was a believer in flat roofs.  Why build a building shaped like a T?  Those outer walls had enough material to make a rectangular building with more floor space and would be more practical to heat.  That idea came back to me when I went to UMD and saw the long curved one story dorms.  The building was constructed in a curve with one room in and one room out continuing for a block or two.  That was a lot of wall space and must have been hard to heat.

 

I had never heard of the term “Keeping up with the Jones” until I was grown up.  A couple of high school teachers may have mentioned it, but until I lived in town I never seemed to notice.  In rural America most people don’t want to be lumped in the same category as their neighbor.  When you drive down a road think of each person as a character who wants to be a little different.

 

I feel we are the spirit of America as we want to do things no one else does or can or knows how to do.  Maybe that’s our way of showing off without bragging about it.  We can let examples speak for themselves without saying a word.

 

Those blueberries fall on the ground.  Those trees die and blow down.  That maple sap goes up and down with the seasons.  That plot of ground lays there idle.

 

When someone is down and out, it’s OK to hold out a hand.  There is nothing wrong with smiling at a small kid or a stranger.  There is a good feeling when a person you know tries and makes good on a venture.

 

Envy and jealousy just consumes a person.  I have no time for that.

 

I love the kid who keeps trying.  That shack he built might look terrible, but he didn’t give up or ask his dad to build it.  Very few people I know asked help from their neighbors.  When help was needed someone came to their aid without a plea for help.

 

My retired time is worth nothing.  My TV time is worth nothing.  That firewood that rots away in the woods is worth nothing.

 

It doesn’t cost a thing to pick berries, cut some wood, grow some spuds, or smile.  It doesn’t have to cost anything to help someone who is really in need.

 

Please, don’t ask me for help if you are able bodied and younger than I am.  If you need help, I’ll know it.  If you don’t need help, I’ll know that, too.

 

MAKING TIME

 

I remember three hippies who were planning to cut pulpwood on one’s property near here.  None of them had ever done it, but trees were starting to die and blow down.  Trees do mature and can make a tangled mess if not cut at the right time.  In nature, a fire would clear up a blow down, but now no fire is let burn even on private land because it may spread for miles.  They would meet everyday and plan what they had to do.  I found out they never did get enough wood cut to sell.  That land is half way up to Orr and has been blowing down now for 25 or 30 years.

 

One thing every woods worker had to do was use time wisely.  Nearly every one of them walked on their way home next to the wood that was to be cut the next day.  A few lay awake planning what to do the next day.

 

When I worked with dad in the woods, I could day dream and just plod along.  When I had to do it solo later on, I found out you didn’t get anything done sitting on a stump drinking coffee.  It’s OK to drink coffee, but don’t sit there long, or better yet, drink it standing up and get back to work as soon as possible.

 

Lumberjacks did most of the work in the winter when the ground was frozen so timber could be skidded over frozen swamps and sleighs wouldn’t get hung up on rocks as snow covered gravel ground.  Peeling pulpwood was another deal altogether.  That had to be cut when the trees were growing before the bark stuck about the middle of July.  That wood would be skidded out the next winter in the swamps, but could be skidded out with woods trailers on higher ground in the dry summer or fall, if you could drive over wet spots without getting stuck.

 

I remember a few times when dad got state sales and we cut spruce or balsam and peeled it.  That wood was sold for a better price than peeled poplar.  I also remember walking through that four foot high grass covered with dew each morning.  We tried to get out in the woods by 6 o’clock in the morning to beat the summer heat.  It’s not pleasant to get soaked that way on cold mornings, and those spider webs that were spun across our path each evening brushed across our faces.  I always wore the oldest blue jeans and a tee shirt and a long sleeved shirt over that.  We smeared up with 6-12 bug dope and started work.  Dad notched the trees and sawed them down with a bow saw, while I pushed them with my 100” marking pole so the trees wouldn’t pinch the saw blade.

 

My job was to limb all those downed trees and mark each stick of pulpwood with a small notch.  Mom would come along behind me and peel the trees with her peeling iron.  Dad kept knocking trees down until about 10 o’clock while I kept on limbing.  If I got ahead of mom, I would cut a strip of bark off the top of the tree to help mom so she wouldn’t have to do that.  After 10 o’clock dad stopped falling, and helped limb.  Then all three of us peeled the trees.

 

After a person starts to perspire fiercely, you could strip off the long sleeved shirt because the bugs leave you alone.  That happens after only about 10 for 15 minutes of work.  We always went through a gallon of Kool-Aid by noon.  We always took a coffee break.  We had our tin lunch pail and a thermos of coffee.

 

It used to get so hot we stopped at noon and headed home.  Six hours of non stop work always paid off and we made good time, so we did a day’s work.  If you get too tired, you don’t get much done anyway, when you’re groggy.

 

Those trees were left full length.  In a few weeks, we were done cutting, and then they were sawed to length and piled up along the roads to be skidded.

 

When dad and I worked together, we never talked or visited.  “Head’s up.” Never “Timber!” like in the movies when a tree was about to fall.  We never got that close to dad anyway.  A tree top whipping down on a person could break your neck.

 

A successful contractor always plans ahead so he can keep his crew from getting into “stalls.”  That does happen on sawmills, because if something breaks, the whole crew is idle until it’s repaired.  I suppose they can go and pile green lumber.  Few wanted to go home without a full day’s pay.

 

A carpenter contractor wanted to make good time, too.  Good planning was spreading out the men so they wouldn’t be getting in each other’s way.  Lumber was piled near the job to save walking time, but not where it would have to be walked around for days.

 

I was working with dad in West Virginia across from where the YMCA in Virginia is today.  We were remodeling a house and dad said on the way to work the first day, “This guy is fussy, so we have to be a little inefficient and not do everything in sequence like usual.”  We didn’t make as good time on that job.  We were working by the hour and had to “make a showing” each day to satisfy the man.

 

It looked good to him to see our progress each day, but it cost him more, because the job took a week longer than if we contracted the job.  We always worked hard and had a reputation for good work.  So, I guess we made better time than some men who puttered around.

I LOVE MY REDS

 

I just got my March Potato Grower magazine.  Roy Pearson, of Cook, got me going on this about 15 years ago.  It’s interesting to read about spuds as I love to grow them.

 

This clay based soil is not ideal for growing potatoes, but I do everything my ancestors did and they come out fine most years.  Potato rot in the ground so a person has to hill them with dirt so when it does rain a lot, the spuds are elevated above the saturated clay.  Most people try to find a sloping spot for the potato patch.  Those that have sandy loam soil don’t worry as much as it drains well.  Even growers in sandy soil hill the spuds so they won’t turn green when the sun hits them.  A few green potatoes won’t hurt you, but in famine time, they were used day after day, and people did get poisoned by the acid in them.

 

I’m not an advocate of doing exercises, but I like to do stuff by hand for a little exertion, like planting my potatoes with a shovel, hilling them by hand, and digging them with a shovel, too.  I like to do firewood by hand for the same reason.

 

Those potatoes came from Peru, and were well suited for the gravel and sandy ground where other crops didn’t grow well.  Maybe that’s why the Scandinavians, Poles, Germans, and Russians had grown so many potatoes in the past.  Those people were known to be healthy and had a good work ethic.

 

Potatoes with the skins on rank the highest for potassium content among the top 20 most consumed raw vegetables, and the 20 most consumed raw fruit.  No one eats many raw potatoes but microwaving them preserves most nutritional value.

 

Why grow them when they’re so cheap?

 

It’s an eye opener to read my magazine and see when a crop is good, it’s bad for the farmers.  In 2005, Idaho russets were selling for $3.00 in January and dropped to $2.25 by April.  It was known as a bloodbath for the growers.  That drove many growers out of business.  In January 2005, the same Red River Reds were selling for $5.12, $2.12 more than the Idaho russets.

 

This year Idaho russets again dropped to $3.00 and are still dropping.  Red River Valley Reds are $6.88, or $1.75 more than in 2005.  Those prices fluctuate all the time every year.

 

In the Red River Valley nearly all the reds go to the fresh market, all the russets go to the frozen processors, and all the round whites go to the chippers.

 

In Idaho, over production has pushed prices down.  This year, processors are buying potatoes on the open market for 50 cents a hundred weight.

 

Don’t go to the store and expect to get them for nothing.  Those growers have only a few weeks to get the potatoes in the ground in the spring, and hopefully, get nice weather in the few weeks in the fall to harvest them.  That farm equipment is tremendously expensive.  They have to pay for storage each winter so the spuds won’t freeze.  As the processors continue to buy them, they have to be taken care of.  After the French fries or tater tots are frozen, that product can be kept indefinitely.  In an over abundance, the extra stored potatoes still have to be stored later and later.  Potatoes don’t keep forever.

 

I wonder if the Red River floods this spring how late the new crop will be planted.  If the crop is poor this fall, will the price go up in the store a few cents?  How many farmers, who make payments to the implement dealers and pay labor, will go broke?

 

Last year I got about 8 hundred pounds.  I grow Yukon Gold, Yellow Finns, Irish Cobbler, Kennebec, and my Reds.  The kids got potatoes, and we got enough for me to mash.  My basement is too warm, so they are sprouting and getting wrinkled.  I’ve busted off the sprouts, so they keep better.  I have my egg sized seed potatoes in about 30 egg cartons just waiting for the ground to warm up.

 

I got seed potatoes from one of the Kutsi brothers in Alango years ago and he told me the old Finns said “when the ground is warm enough to sit on and your seat doesn’t get cold, it’s time to plant spuds.”

 

Support your potato farmers in the Red River Valley.  Go buy some spuds.  They’re good for you.

SUMMER IS NEAR

 

I told people after I retired I would get pigeons and honey bees again.  After 40 years, I resurrected my old bee hives from the boards up in the wood shed.  I’ve ordered my bees and they will be here about the first of May.  I’ve cleaned the mice nests out of the hives and painted them and replaced the wax foundations in the frames.  So, I’m all ready to go.

 

I had some when the kids were small.  I got my hives from Alice Mattson.  I think they were second hand when Matt got them.  When I was painting them, I saw the date, July -27 and -31 so those hives were in use before the depression.  I left those penciled dates when the hives were checked, unpainted.  I’m going to varnish that spot.  Bees don’t care if they live in antique hives.  Some of those hollow hardwood trees are hundreds of years older than my hives.  They have had mice and squirrels in them, too.  Why buy new stuff?  I’m making a few new frames on the table saw.  Old lumber and scraps can be used.  It’s just kindling wood, anyway. 

 

I may trap a few beaver again as soon as the ice goes.  Some people are complaining and want me to thin them out.  I may tap a few maple trees, also.  Some seeds have come in the mail.  It’s nice not to have the greenhouses going.  We would have gone through 500 gallons of propane by this time of the year.

 

If I ever write a few more stories, I’ll try not to write like I have been doing.  Those run on sentences and mixed up prepositional phrases were supposed to be like a conversation around a kitchen table where people blurt out things as they come to mind.

 

When we get to be senior citizens, time is of the essence and may be running out.  I have to get busy and do some of those things I’d like to do.  I know I’ll never get time to do them all, but I’m thankful when I wake up every morning.  That’s a gift in itself.

 

Have a cup of coffee and God Bless You.

SIGNS

 

As a small kid, I never paid attention to the landscape, much less the side of the road.  “Crystal Cave.”

 

On the way to Orr, between Norway Hill and Utalla’s hill there was a sign, “Tillie’s Tonight.”  That was an indistinctive sign advertising some small cabins just south of International Falls, Mn.  There were smaller signs nailed to trees advertising just about everything.  There was a big billboard next to Willow River a couple miles south of the Gheen Corner advertising, I think, the Androy Hotel in Hibbing.  No signs were nailed on the power poles or the telephone poles, as they would interfere with the linemen who may have had to climb them in an emergency.  That doesn’t mean they weren’t used for posters.  Campaign posters were tacked up and seldom taken down.  The same with posters advertising the county fair or some circus.  I remember the pine tree a half mile north of Archie’s Corner, where highway #73 meets #53.  That tree on the east side of the road was just cut down for the new power line.  Those cheap paper posters only lasted a few months and then rotted away.  That tree must have a thousand small nails and tacks that grew into the wood.

 

When Reinhold Holmer was a kid, he boarded out at the Pearson’s place in Cook so he could go to high school.  Cook was the only high school between International Falls and Virginia.  He was painting pictures in those days.  After coming home from World War II he started painting signs.  I think his first one was on the door of Cameron Johnson’s farm truck.  Later, as his reputation grew, he went into some of the first reflective paint.  I think it was developed by 3M, but I’m not sure.  He called his business “Silver Sign Service.”  He was a house painter and worked in a hospital for years near Seattle, Washington.  He moved back here and painted mostly signs.

 

There weren’t any of those tall signs on pipes in those days.  The large signs were a conglomeration of 2x8, 2x6, and 2x4.  Some were drilled in wood poles the size of telephone poles.

 

Burma Shave had small signs spaced at intervals, along the highways, far enough apart so people could read the witty poems about Burma Shave as they drove by. 

 

Mike Terska had signs like that on the Nett Lake Road that read, “Follow the Signs to Cabin-O-Pines.

 

There was a sign on the Greaney Road by Roy Hanson’s gravel pit that read “The End is Near.”  It was there when I was a kid, but a windstorm broke a big branch and it hung down and hid the sign.

 

Willard Pearson told about his dad taking a cow tail and cut the hair short and painted a “Spring” sign that he put up on the hill across from where Darrell Chase’s sawmill was on Hwy. #53.  When they improved the road years ago, the ditch was dug deeper and the spring dried up.

 

Free kittens, puppies, rabbits for sale, and minnows for sale signs were hammered in on the end of driveways all over the country.

 

It got so bad that when Lyndon Johnson became president, his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, got the highway beautification trend going.  The billboards that had cluttered America were cut down and removed.

 

I can’t put a sign up on my own land along Hwy. #53.  The State Highway has to be notified and they will put up a blue or green sign advertising your business.  The only place where commercial signs can be erected are on commercial property.  Between Orr and Cook, there are areas near Hiltinen Lumber north of Cook, and at Hively’s property at the Gheen Corner.  There are a few signs tacked up here and there, but probably could be knocked down technically because of legality.

 

Today I marvel at all the highway signs between International Falls and Virginia.  Start counting the little green mile marker signs.  Then the no passing signs, mile per hour signs. Curves, highway junction signs, stop signs, town identification signs, miles to the next town signs, the signs that designate summer camps and national parks, there are even some boat ramp signs.

 

Those signs whip by as we travel and it’s instinctive to read most of them.  There may be a couple of thousand in a hundred miles.  But I’ve never thought about them much.

 

One time while a bunch of us were raking and cleaning up the Willow Valley Hall yard, Roy Holmer and I found a pile of signs someone dumped there some night.  They were the Littlefork River sign, stop signs, Highway #1 sign and others.  There were at least a dozen signs.  Ray said those large reflector painted signs cost a couple of hundred dollars each.

 

I threw them in my pickup and dropped them off at the Linden Grove County Garage the next morning. 

 

DULUTH SHIP CANAL

 

When I was at UMD in 1961, a history professor by the name of Mr. Larson, told a story about a controversy between Duluth and Superior.

 

Duluth was a terrible place to build a town because of the steep rock escarpment.  Basements and roads had to be blasted into the hillside.  Superior, on the other hand, was flat and could be expanded for a hundred miles easily if ever necessary.

 

The sister cities got along well at first and Duluth really didn’t grow much, but a lot of lumber barons were milling logs there.  Superior had the natural drainage of the St. Louis River and the entrance to the Bay.

 

Larson stated St. Louis River Bay was one of the best harbors in the world because of 7 mile long Park Point keeping the storm surges from interfering with the ships that moored there.

 

Duluth started digging a ship canal in 1870, and on the second year of the dig, Superior worried that the canal would change the water current from the St. Louis River and then their channel would silt up.

 

The mayor of Duluth, Joshua Culver, was tipped off and arranged for 50 volunteers to dig day and night to finish it before Monday morning.

 

Everyone in Duluth heard about it and swarms of people came down to help dig.  Men, women, and children worked through the weekend.  The women cooked and tended fires.  Some used pots and pans or whatever they had to help.

 

By dawn of Monday morning when the injunction was to take place, the canal was 30 feet wide.  When the officers came to deliver the papers, there was nothing they could do.

 

The first vessel through the canal was a small tug boat.

Check these pictures of the Duluth Aerial Bridge over the canal.

TURNIP

 

I don’t know if a man not wearing jewelry was a Scandinavian idea or not.  I don’t remember any of my relatives wearing any ornamental or ornate clothing, either.  When I was a kid men did wear felt hats when they dressed up.  In those days, the Rhinestone Cowboy was considered a fake.  Real cowboys sweat and rode horses, and herded cattle, and no amount of sequins, cowboy boots, or ten gallon hats could make him a working man.

 

In the movies the hero cowboy always had a clean shirt on and a neat bandana around his neck, just like Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and all the imitators who exactly mimicked their singing, even to the same breathing in their songs.  Those sequins showed up and glittered in the spotlights of the stage and on the movie screen.  I don’t think many real live cowboy would want to dress like them.  They probably would be labeled a sissy.  A few of those cowboys did know how to play a guitar, but on a real cattle drive it probably would get all banged up.  I think they were so hard to transport, that they were left on the ranch and only played when the boys got back home.

 

Hardly any working man wore jewelry.  I never remember anyone having a wedding ring.  Some of the men from the cities had wedding rings, but they were office workers or had some other kind of occupation where safety wasn’t a concern.

 

When dad was bossing in the Long Beach ship yard in LA during World War II, the shop employed literally hundreds of women.  As soon as he was hired, everyone was trained in safety courses.  No jewelry was a rule.  He told of one girl who got her hair caught in one of those heavy duty drill presses that were used on iron plates of ships.  As she screamed, luckily dad was nearby and hit the switch and her head was right up against the machine.  If it had been on another second it would have torn her scalp off or worse yet, broken her neck.  There were no law suits in those days.  She was fired right away and all the other people in the plant were warned.  They were not supposed to wear jewelry and were supposed to have their hair up out of the way.

 

When I was working as carpenter on the fine crusher at Mintac in the summer of 1976, we were building the forms for the walls of that building.  We built boxes out of 2x12 lumber for the openings where conveyors came through the walls.  We built the plywood forms and the cranes stood them up.  If a conveyor hole was, say 6 feet by 8 feet, that size box was slid down inside the two plywood walls and secured before the iron workers put the rebar around it in the forms.  One day one of my partners rigged up the nylon straps on a box and as the crane lifted it up, he guided it so it wouldn’t swing.  His wedding ring got caught on the strap and it lifted him a few inches off the ground.  When they set everything down, his ring cut to the bone and he went into shock, so he was rushed off in the ambulance.

 

Few lumberjacks, farmers, or tradesmen wore jewelry.  I don’t think it was because they were poor, but just for safety reasons.  Most of us kids that got class rings took them off when we worked.  Some wore them again when they went to college, but a lot just gave them to their girlfriend to wear.  “Going steady,” was popular in my youth.  Not many would approach someone who had someone else’s ring.  There seemed to be some loyalty.  Some may have taken them off and cheated.

 

Wrist watches were not really made for working men either.  Leather straps got sweaty, and expansion bands pulled hair.  I remember watches getting torn off and some carried band less watches in their pocket.

 

In my dad’s younger days, people had pocket watches.  Nearly all dress and work pants had a pocket for those round flat watches.  The lumberjacks wore heavy wool pants as most logging was done in the wintertime.  They may have had a piece of rawhide lacing tied on their watch and tied to a belt loop or a suspender button hole.  The men who dressed up in “Sunday best,” had a fancy gold chain which was displayed for show.

 

I remember a short story by O’Henry, where a girl cut her long hair to make a watch fob for her husband because they were poor.  When they next met he presented her with ribbons for her long hair.  I don’t remember the details, but I think he pawned his watch to get money for her gift.

 

Those flat pocket watches were called Turnips, because of their shape.  You may call them railroad watches because all the railroad men had to be on time, and kept on schedules.  Even the section men had to know when the next trains were coming.  When men retired, a lot of the time they were given a gold pocket watch.

 

Dad had a few of those chrome or nickel plated watches years ago.  He would put his watch between his two palms and twist the back of the watch off.  There inside were engraved all the names and dates of the jeweler and the dates he cleaned or fixed the watch.

 

About thirty five years ago dad gave me a gold plated pocket watch that his grandfather, Fred Johnson, had in Soudan when he worked in the mine.  I didn’t even know dad had it, as Great grandpa Johnson died in 1920.  A few years ago I gave it to my son, Dan, who will probably give it to my grandson, Mitch Hanson.

 

When you carry pulpwood against your thigh as you walk out to the logging road, you always have the crystal of your watch facing in toward your body.  That glass did break once in awhile, but they could be replaced.

 

I was starving when I got married and had lost 35 pounds in the fall quarter of college in 1961.  We got married during Christmas vacation and Gwen had a job, so she fattened me up again.  My wedding ring never fit again.

 

Most of the men around here would think a man who wore earrings or a gold necklace was kind of a slum dandy.

 

Pirates did pierce their ears.  But the royalty in those days wore lace and doilies around their wrists.  They were pretty boys.  That must have been a symbol that they didn’t work.  Those rich Chinese men had fingernails a foot long for the same reason.

 

Carpenters didn’t bite their finger nails much.  The fingers wear smooth from lumber and those finger nails help get a hold of lumber.  Years ago they didn’t use much plywood and no chipboard.  It was nearly always planed lumber. 

SAME TO YOU!

 

What’s wrong with you?  Why are you moping around all the time?  Why are you so lazy?  Why don’t you get anything done?  Those are the questions that were asked by people years ago.  “Mind your own business.”  Boy, isn’t she a busybody? Always sticking her nose in someone else’s business.

 

Today we live next to a bottle of ibuprophin.  When I was a kid it was aspirin.

 

Years ago people didn’t live as long as we do today.  People try to live in a pain free state as much as possible.  We do have a lot better medical advantage than years ago.

 

What was wrong with those people?  Few went to the dentist unless it was to have a tooth pulled.  When dad was 14 or 15, he had lain awake for a couple of weeks with a tooth ache.  One day he took a screwdriver and pried his molar apart and then pulled each piece of tooth out with a plier.  Sure, it must have hurt, but a person gets tired of constant pain.  Think of a lumberjack with a headache, chopping with an axe day after day.  They had sinus headaches that were never treated.  They had a mouth full of rotten stubs that were never taken care of.  People had teeth that literally rotted right out of their head.  They were bitten by ticks all the time, and may have had untreated lyme’s disease.  I remember people with rheumatoid arthritis bent over with pain.  It could have been caused by a tick bite.

 

During hard times years ago, Father ate first.  He was the breadwinner and had to keep his strength up.  We never thought about a lack of food here in the rural area, but not everyone lived in a place where food was grown at home, or fish, game, and berries could be gotten from the woods.

 

The mother would eat next, because when she was younger she was probably nursing a baby and had to keep her strength up to be able to take care of her kids.  The kids ate last.  In famine times, they were the first to die.  That same lack of food caused a lot of miscarriages.  Those that made it full term were sometimes dead at birth.  That strain of child rearing took a toll on the health of women.  A lot of times, the older children raised their brothers and sisters because mom was too weak anymore to do it.  “It takes a lot out of you,” when you nurse babies.

 

I remember our cows having horns.  The horns are like fingernails in that they keep growing.  Every year there was a notch in the cow’s horns from gestation and 9 months of milking.  We counted the rings in the horn to tell how many calves the cow had.

 

Why were jolly farm wives fat?  They had food and lots of it.  They had large families and most were healthy.  A couple of bad years and famine would kill off those who didn’t have “a little extra” on their bones.

 

A broken bone coming through the skin was nearly a death sentence years ago, because of infection.  A lot of people walked around with deformed legs and arms, because the bones were never set properly.

 

The tropics were never heavily populated because of the diseases in hot humid regions.  There were more people living in the deserts than in the wet jungles.  Why wear shoes, they just rot off your feet.  Jungle rot, open sores, fungus on your skin, and no way of treating it in those days.  Yellow fever, malaria, and a multitude of internal parasites ate away at people.

 

They used to talk about Yankee ingenuity.  People can work harder in a cool climate without sweating so much.  Most germs die off in the winter time.  Exception to that rule, the epidemic in Nome, Alaska where germs don’t die and contaminated drinking water can make you sick.

 

When people were overworked and tired, malnourished and weak, stunted from childhood, full of parasites, and living with infections, life wasn’t as pleasant as we have it today.

 

I’ll have to say, the Scandinavians did hold some other people in contempt because they didn’t work hard.  My ancestors didn’t wait around for a deer to walk by for food.  It may have been a cold climate, but cows keep everyone alive.  They could eat grass and eat hay in the winter.  A cow doesn’t have to be killed to sustain life.  Every other calf is a bull which is raised to be eaten.  Those other foods like venison, moose, fish, berries, and garden produce were just extras to make life more interesting.

 

Why are you lazy?  Get the lead out!  Yes, people did have lead poisoning and didn’t even know it.  That just came with some jobs.  Mercury made some people crazy.  The people making hats in the old days used mercury in the process.  “Mad Hatter.”

 

Bunions, ingrown toenails, athletes’ foot, dandruff, lice, crabs, and bedbugs biting all night long added to the misery.  Untreated venereal disease took its toll on those unfortunate souls who lived the fast life.

 

Today we don’t see the urgent rush to get stuff done like years ago.  We live a lot longer now.  Some really big guys never do anything.  Some small guys amaze people by what they do.  Do some people resent a “Go Getter?”  Some people are small, but nothing stands in their way when they make up their mind to do it.

 

 

MY QUEST

 

They say an animal is intelligent because they are curious.  A mink is sticking his nose in every hole on a river bank or lake shore.  He may be curious about those nooks and crannies, but it does yield a lot of mice, frogs, crayfish, and minnows.  He doesn’t go hungry when everything ices over.  As the rain stops and the snow doesn’t melt, the water in the creeks and beaver dams seep and leave air pockets under the ice.  It may be damp under there, but it makes a good runway for the little fisherman.

 

A fox can’t leave an intriguing smell.  Jack Finstad, of Buyck, taught me how to trap.  He took a trapping class from Buck Snyder years ago and told me how to make bait for canines.  Get an old cream can and chop all the pads off of fox or coyote feet you can get.  Even road kills.  Chop up the sex organs, too.   Chop the rear end off of dead skunks.  Beaver castor glands and muskrat glands are dumped in there, too.  Chain the cream can to a tree so the bears don’t carry it away.  Put cloth over the top and place the cover over it lightly.  Don’t get too much meat in the mix.  It smells bad to people, but to dogs it’s the best thing next to heaven.  After a couple of months, it’s ready to put into baby food jars.  Wear gloves or every dog in the country will think you’re a mail man.

 

When setting a fox trap, find an ant hill or a small rock and make a mouse hole at the bottom.  Carefully take the cover off your baby food jar and place the jar back in the mouse hole.  Set your trap, cover it with wild rice hulls or dry balsam needles and put a raspberry or wild rose stem on each side of the trap.  A fox is so smart he will never step on a sticker.  He may monkey around for an hour.  He knows you have been there, but he can’t leave that smell.  Sooner or later he will have to investigate.  When he sticks his nose in there, he will step on that trap.

 

I may not be intelligent, but something has been bothering me to a great extent.  Who was Saunders?  The man they named Saunders’s Bay after on Pelican Lake.

 

I started reading about the Virginia Rainy Lake Company a few years ago and came across the name of O.W. Saunders who logged this area around Pelican Lake in the late 1880’s.  His logging camp was located about a mile south of Pelican and about 4 miles north of where I grew up in Willow Valley Township.

 

I joined the Iron Range Historical Society years ago.  Nothing about Saunders there.  I joined the Virginia Historical Society.  Bingo.  There was a paper Ken Perala of Orr had written when he was in college.  I’ve written about this in my Willow River Story a couple of years ago.  Fifteen million board feet of logs each winter is a lot of timber to be sawn down by men with handsaws and skidded to Willow River by oxen each year.

 

Who was he?  Gwen and I went down to UMD at Duluth and I looked through everything I could find.  Nothing.  Back to Virginia, found a who’s who book and read a blurb about him being born in Washburn, Wisconsin.  He was a contractor from Duluth and was building the town of Tower when he ran out of lumber.  So he started logging.

 

I drove to Washburn, Wisconsin and went to the barber shop and inquired about Saunders.  “Who’s that?”  The barber and two men told me about a guy who ran the historical society.  Found him and had a cup of coffee and off we went to the old two story school which was the museum.  Went through the info there, nothing.

 

Off to Bayfield, he told me of the historical society there.  Waited a few minutes and as the meeting was over, the lady got real excited.  Her husband was a kid just before World War II and he knew a Saunders.  He came over to the office and told me his buddy let him watch as he ran the projector in the local movie theater in Bayfield years ago.  His dad and he and his brother were fishermen on Lake Superior.  Dead end.  The projectionist got killed in Europe in the war.

 

I next drove down to the interpretative center at Ashland and checked the census records looking for an O.W. Saunders.  Nothing.  They said maybe in the Washburn County, Wisconsin records, and not the town of Washburn, I could find something.  I went back home.

 

Today I drove back to UMD for another try.  Fifty years ago I looked at some newspapers that were falling apart in the basement of UMD library.  Now I figured maybe I could put a face on O.W. if I could find his obituary in one of those newspapers.  I looked up his name on the death list of St. Louis County and found out he died on June 5, 1909.  Now all the info is on microfiche and is outdated as everything is going digital on disks, but I did find his picture and death announcement in the June 7^th edition.  That must have been on Monday because the 6^th wasn’t there and must have been on a Sunday.  No Sunday paper in those days.

 

Saunders was one of the richest men in Duluth at one time.  He was over 70 years old when he died.  He had lived in Duluth over thirty years.  So he must have been over 50 when he was logging near Pelican Lake.  He was a well known contractor and employed thousands of men during his logging operations in the northern woods.  At one time he owned the Windsor Hotel at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Superior Street.  He bought it for $25,000., operated it for 6 months, and sold it for $75,000.  That was in 1907.  That was a lot of money in those days.

 

He had one daughter by his first wife.  And his second wife lived in Portland, Oregon.

 

His remains were at Flood and Horgan’s undertaking rooms and were placed in the Forest Hill vault at the request of his son-in-law who came to Duluth later to arrange his funeral.

 

I’ll try and get a copy of his picture and head out to Forest Hill cemetery and maybe find his birthday carved on his head stone.  Maybe I can then find out where he was born.

 

It’s a lot of monkey business trying to find out something about a guy who has been dead over a century.  I hope he doesn’t get mad at me digging up his past.

 

I can’t stop thinking about how those men could cut 15 million board feet of pine logs by hand each winter, and drag them down to Willow River with oxen a half a mile from where I grew up.

 

It cost me twelve bucks.  I got a ticket for parking in the lot in front of the library.  I parked there before a couple of times and no one put a ticket under my windshield wiper those times.  I suppose I should have bought a parking permit like I had fifty years ago.  I suppose the fine was a dollar, then.  That would have hurt a lot more because I was about the poorest married student, (marks and money), at UMD in 1962.

I MIGHT BE A DANE

 

It’s taken a lifetime to make my conclusion of human culture.  You may not agree with my ideas.  You may not agree with my timeline of history.  My dates of when things have happened may not be accurate.  It’s up to you to read between the lines.  If you are curious, it’s up to you to look up the dates of events.  I’ve said before, I’m not an historian, just a story teller.

 

Maybe you will become interested and start to read about things that did happen back in the time of your ancestors.  People spend thousands of hours watching someone else play games.  Some spend thousands of hours hunting and fishing.  Most spend thousands of hours watching television.  I have.

 

When I’m in a crowd of people, I do think of culture.  What is it?  People talk a lot about it but I don’t know what it is supposed to be.

 

When I go to some festival and smile at someone they usually smile back.  I suppose if you are accepted into a group you become one of them.  I think that really is at the root of a culture.

 

Case in point.  Who are Irish?  That country is about the size of St. Louis County.  They have been fighting amongst themselves for hundreds of years.  They are the same kind of people with the same way of doing things, but fight over political power.  What unites them and divides them?  Religion.  Both Christian, but the north is Protestant and the south is Catholic.  They do not accept each other.

 

The same in the Holy Land.  The people are of the same basic Mediterranean stock, but the Jews and the Arabs started fighting over control of the land thousands of years ago.  At that time they all looked alike, raised sheep the same way, talked basically the same language, but developed different religions.  They don’t accept each other.

 

Don’t start priding ourselves as being perfect.  The people in our country came from all over the world.  They squabbled and fought some, but broke away from England.  People poured into our country from all over the place.  English was our basic language that everyone learned.  We were sort of accepted, but the industrial north started to dictate a little too much, so the southern states broke away.  Both sides spoke the same language.  Both sides had banks, schools, democratic governments, judges and juries and did everything the same way.  They no longer accepted each other and killed more people in one day in some of those battles than were killed in some modern day wars.  So being completely the same is no guarantee of being a single culture.

 

I think the thing that becomes a culture is the language people speak.  When the Spaniards brought back domestic servants from the Aztec, the Maya, the Inca, and the Caribbean Islands to Spain, they learned Spanish and never went back to their homeland.  They became Spanish.  They can never be removed from the blood of the Spanish.

 

When the glaciers melted and the cave men (tent men, hut men) moved into England, they were met years later by the Romans who moved in with them.  Then the Germanic Anglos and Saxons, and Vikings and Normans moved in, too.  They squabbled and fought and became English.  Today they speak English.

 

When the glaciers melted in Scandinavia, the cave men moved north.  They hunted and gathered and ate reindeer.  Some people with lighter skin in the Caucus Mountain area and surrounding territory north of the Black Sea decided to start riding their horses, they went in every direction.  Some came into Europe from the east, some went down south, and some went into Afghanistan.  They didn’t bounce back to their homeland, they kept moving.  Did they kill off the darker people in Scandinavia?  I doubt it.  Do young men find women in another country ugly and kill them?  I think they mingled.  There weren’t that many people in the wide open world in those days.  Do tall men ever marry short girls?  Do fat people ever marry skinny men?  Do blond people ever get attracted to dark people?  Yes, bald men look good to a lot of women.

 

A couple of centuries before the Viking era started, Swedish tribes took over Denmark.  A lot of Scandinavians got blamed for the marauding of the Vikings.  Large populations of their descendants are in France, Germany, and even Spain.

 

Denmark is the oldest monarch in the world and was formed in the 1300s.  It included Sweden, Norway, Greenland, Iceland, and the Faeroes Islands.  The Swedes broke away with a Civil War in the 1500’s, beginning a brutal war that lasted for hundreds of years.

 

Norway broke away in 1814.

 

 The country was Christianized by Harold (Bluetooth) Blaatand in the  10^th century.  His son, Sweyn, conquered England in 1013.  Sweyn’s son, Canute the Great, united Denmark, Norway, and England, and the southern part of Sweden.  After he died, all heck broke out in a civil war.

 

Denmark supported Napoleon and was punished at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which made them give up Norway to Sweden.  In 1864 the Prussians under Bismarck and the Austrians invaded Denmark to unify Germany.

 

This was probably a calm time in Scandinavian history.  Those hundreds of tribes and clans and families in Norway, Sweden, and Finland were probably fighting, stealing, and killing each other over girlfriends and reindeer.  The winners always were bragging and smiling over their conquests.  They didn’t have TV for entertainment like we have today.  They didn’t have coffee to keep them peppy and awake in those days, so I suppose they had to keep busy just to keep warm in those old cold houses.  They must have gotten a lot of rest on those ever so short days of winter.  They couldn’t fight much with torches to light the night.  They must have done most fighting during those ever so long summer days in the land of the midnight sun.  No wonder the little guys could win when those big guys fell asleep after 24 hours of daylight.  They just nodded off and got conked on the head by the smarter short men.

 

At one time Egypt was a crossroads of trade.  People came from all over.  Most of the Egyptians of long past were black.  Today they are a mix of all the countries that moved in there.  They are accepted and all speak the same language.

 

Every country of the world is a country of mongrel, mixed up people.  Even China, with one fourth of the world’s population, has people that look different.  We say they all look alike, but they don’t.  Some have small noses and some have different shaped faces.  Some are lighter than others.  Most have straight black hair, but they have come from all over Asia, too.  They had their internal battles to unite all the different tribes, but today, most speak the same language.

 

We are all members of the human race.  We can’t really condemn all the illegitimate births in our ancestry, because then a lot of us would not be here if those people were put to death.

 

Where did all your ancestors come from?  Not just the ones you want to think about in the last few hundred years.  Are your eyes blue; were all your relatives’ eyes blue?  Do you tan easily?  Do all your relatives sunburn?  Do some have freckles and red hair?

 

Argue my point about culture.  Is it language?

MISFIT

 

We have heard about the lone trapper tucked away in his small cabin way up in Canada when we were little kids.  We heard stories about the prospector with his burro and gold pan combing the west searching for a lost treasure or the mother lode.  But, we had our own people here in the northern realm of Minnesota, too.

 

The stories we heard, as small kids, were fascinating.  The trapper would go out in the wintertime when the hair on the animal pelts was at its prime.  Long hair in early winter, that wasn’t worn out or bleached from the sun and shedding in the warm springtime.  There was a radio program about Sergeant Preston of the Royal Mounted Police who had to take his dog team in the howling winter to pursue a rogue that had murdered some lone soul in the wilderness.

 

Even as small kids we heard of the sourdough who was panning gravel at each stream looking for “color.” With his bed roll and his frying pan and water canteen, he traveled the west.  Those sourdoughs had to keep a starter of yeast alive so they could make pancakes from the sack of flour they carried.  Those stories tried to make romantic feelings about those men.

 

We had our lone men living here, too.  This wasn’t the Paul Bunyan lumberjack of the logging camps of yesteryear; they were the gypos of the pulpwood era of my younger days.  These people have never been glorified.  They are not even mentioned in the history books.  To nearly every person in the US and the world, they never existed.  Even we who grew up here in the 1940’s and 1950’s didn’t really mix or visit with them.

 

Ronny McClellan wrote to me via email and asked where the name gypo came from.  We went to school together in Orr, and graduated in 1957.  The gypo era would still be around for probably another 10 or 15 years later until cable skidders put a stop to piece cutting of pulpwood.  I didn’t exactly know either.  I wrote back and said that I thought the name came from gypsies whom were thought, by early Europeans, to have come from Egypt.  In reality they came from India.  To be gypped was to have been taken advantage of.  We came to the consensus the word gypo came from those men being gypped when payday came around.

 

Gypos only owned the clothes on their backs.  They were called shackers, too, because they lived in small shacks the loggers moved out to the woods for them to live in.  The logger had enough money to pay for stumpage, which was standing timber.  He could buy it from the state, county or federal forestry.  Private land could be cut for a fee, too.  Usually the logger supplied the tools, shack, and brought food and supplies like kerosene, new clothes, food, and what else the gypo wanted.  When the logger counted out the pieces of 100 inch long pulpwood the gypo cut, he would measure each small end of each stick of pulpwood and record it in his notebook.  Each stick was marked with a colored crayon.  Most gypos were paid a few pennies for each stick and the larger the log the more he got, really a cent or two.  Payday was on Fridays.  Some every week, and a few every other week.  All the supplies the logger delivered were subtracted from the wages of the gypo.

 

Most loggers were honest and didn’t cheat.  Some were noted for cheating their workers.  Some gypos were desperate and asked for an advance on his pay.  It was usually so he could go to town and get drunk.  Sometimes the unscrupulous logger would pay him while he was drunk and charge twice for the supplies.  Sometimes he would charge a lot for taxi service to take him to town.  Sometimes he would cheat on his pulpwood scale (count,) so there were some who did get gypped badly.  Some did drink and not cut enough wood to pay for their expenses.

 

Most loggers were honest and had the same “Jacks,” work for them for years.  Some nursed the hung-over jacks back to health, after a long spree of drinking.  Most took care of their hospital bills.  Some became friends for life.

 

The piece cutters who worked from home and drove out to the jobs were people who were laid off for the winter and wanted to earn a little cash, were not gypos.

 

The gypo was seen by most family oriented people as undesirables.  Living with no running water or electricity, they were often unbathed and wore the sweaty clothes to town.  A few were introverts and shy.  They took their bottles and beer back to the shack and drank alone.  Most went to the taverns each weekend.  A lot of the loggers went from bar to bar each weekend, looking for men to hire.  A lot of gypos were vagabonds and left, so replacing them was a full time job.  Some of the independent gypos would pawn something like a chainsaw to get cash so he could keep drinking.  Sometimes other people took advantage of his condition and would buy a saw, gun, or other property for a “song and a dance.”

 

Some were retarded and couldn’t work anywhere else.  Some were alcoholics and had lost everything in the world.  Some were so mean they had their shack on a strip of pulpwood way far away from anyone else.

 

I would have to say, “Hats off,” to those who did the brunt of the woods work for a generation that ended in about 1965.  They may have been misfits most want to forget all about, but they were working men.

 

THE STEERING WHEEL

David Hanson

 

Some people are lucky enough to live just a short distance from where they work.  But for a lot of people it takes time to get to work, or to get to town to get supplies for their jobs.

 

In the large cities there are subways and busses that are reliable and on time so a lot of those people use them instead of fighting traffic and looking for a parking space.  Mass transit is cheap.  Taking a taxi would defeat the purpose because it is expensive.

 

I know a few people who made such a good salary that they could fly back and forth on an airliner.  Usually, that air fare and rental car was paid for by their employer.

 

I remember some of the cars covered with red iron ore back in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s.  In those years, all the mines on the Mesabi were mining high grade ore that was directly shipped to the blast furnaces without having to be high graded for smelting.  After WWII, most high grade ore was being depleted and taconite plants were being built.  That low grade taconite is miles around and will last centuries.  More and more people started driving that forty, fifty, and sixty miles every day to get to work in the taconite plants on the Iron Range.  When they parked in the parking lots, they didn’t have to drive through that wet or dusty iron ore anymore.

 

There have been a few people who had jobs so far from home they couldn’t possibly drive to work.  In my youth we worried about the Russians invading the United States.  Radar stations were built across Alaska, Canada, and Greenland as an early warning system to alert the air base in Duluth to intercept Russian bombers coming across the North Pole.  There was a missile base on the North Shore of Lake Superior at Finland, too.  Claude Lakosky, from Gheen, worked on the base in Thule, Greenland.  Those people had to stay for months at a time and had to be flown to and from those jobs.

 

Dad had some fairly long drives years ago to get to his carpenter jobs.  It’s only about an hour to get to the Range towns and that long to get to International Falls.  Most of the jobs were closer to home.  When gas was about 30 cents a gallon nobody worried about that, but they wanted a dependable car to get to work.

 

A lot of those carpenter jobs dad had, and I with him when I grew up, were a long drive and then a boat ride over water.  A few times we built a dock first and piled lumber, cement, propane tanks, and supplies on it and towed it out to the job to get started.  We never left our tool boxes on the job.  Those were loaded in the boat and then the car every day.  If it rained, or for some other reason we weren’t going out to the job, we had the tools at home.  I suppose they could have been swiped some night and never be seen again.

 

Some of the people who were on the road were getting parts for their boss.  Some were moving equipment.  They could be on the North Shore of Lake Superior one day, and half way to the Twin Cities the next.  Some are pulpwood truckers and drive to Duluth, International Falls, or Cloquet making several trips a day.

 

Some of those people like the Ulland Brothers, had many road construction jobs going at the same time, scattered around the country.  Sometimes those guys got moved around and had to motel it for awhile if it was too far to drive.  It takes a couple of hours to drive both ways to Scanlon and back to Orr every morning and night.  I know some who worked overtime and did travel home each night, anyway.

 

I asked one truck driver how he stayed awake driving truck.  He said, “When my head hits the steering wheel, I wake up.”

 

WALKING BACKWARDS

 

The tide rushes in, the tide rushes out.  The breeze in the trees or the breeze in your hair.  Red sails in the sunset, blue skies up above, or the silvery moon have been themes for romantic songwriters.

 

Boy, a small kid has a lot to learn and think about.  I remember mom and dad singing in the front seat of the car when we were packed in the back seat.  Sometimes it was singing along with the radio, or just dad whistling and that turned into a song.  When the silvery Colorado wends its way, or the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.  Even the cow jumped over the moon.

 

I’ve just come in from outside and its -20 and it doesn’t even bother me.  In the daytime I sometimes walk out to the table saw and never put on a jacket for those few minutes. 

 

I remember those cold nights 60 years ago, looking up at the seven dancing sisters, or Orion and the Big Dipper.  Somehow, they seemed clearer then.  I didn’t have cataracts starting yet.  I now put on my glasses and on these cold clear nights everything jump out at me and is clear again.

 

Back in the 1950 and 1960’s, people were starting to vacation in Arizona for the winter.  It was for the allergy free air of the desert.  Today so many plants have been planted down around Phoenix that the air has pollen just like around here.

 

Back in the early part of the 1900’s, Duluth was famous for its therapeutic air. Porches were rented out in Duluth so people could sleep in the cold night air.  It was so pure people thought it would cure tuberculosis.  They called it consumption in those days because people got so skinny from the disease.

 

Nopeming Sanitarium was built near Duluth for tuberculosis patients because of that belief.  Dad got TB in about 1955 or so, and had to go to Nopeming for seven or eight months.  They didn’t sleep in the cold by then.  Some new drugs were developed and streptomycin was developed so it could be cured that way, but it took time.  Mom and I were the only family members that had a positive reaction to the Manitou tests.  That was a small shot given under the skin or a person’s forearm.  If it swelled up, you had been exposed to the germs.

 

Joe Glowaski was working on the railroad down there and made sure mom got a ride down to see dad.  We will never forget Joe for his generosity.  A lot of people feared someone with TB in those days.

 

Later, mom’s tests became active, and she had to go to Nopeming for three months.  The folks were released about the same time.  You will always react to a Manitou test for the rest of your life, so we had to have chest x-rays after that.

 

Dad had spots on his lungs so he wasn’t able to enlist for WWII.  He figured he had TB, when he worked underground in the iron mine in Ely when he was 19.  TB isn’t really killed, but it encases itself in calcium and becomes inactive.  Dad had to keep away from Vitamin D.  That may utilize and dissolve the calcium in his lungs.  Dad said it was a good thing he didn’t stay down in the mine or he may have died.

 

There wasn’t much work up here in Gheen in 1929, so dad went up to Soudan and that mine didn’t need help so he went up to Ely and worked there.  He didn’t really mind the sticky red ore.  It was no worse than digging ditches near home, or working as a lumberjack.

 

In those days, there was a dance somewhere nearby in every community every Saturday night.  No one sued you, and as this was lumberjack country, and nearly every man and kid worked in the woods, fights often broke out at those dances.

 

Dad was a welterweight, and didn’t take guff from anyone.  The ore in Ely was like clay and stuck to the shovels.  Grandpa, dad and George dug ditches for the county and were used to clay.

 

The foreman in the mine was a “cousin jack.”  They were from Cornwell, England, and were miners there.  They could read and write English and were chosen for bosses.  The immigrants hated them because they were treated as being ignorant because of their accents.

 

Dad did his job and wasn’t mouthy, but when Billy Rowe started in on dad, he didn’t back down.  Billy started swinging and dad got the best of him.  There were other witnesses.  To make things worse, after he knocked Billy down, as he got up on his hands and knees, dad swatted him in the rear with his heavy shovel, knocking him flat.  Dad didn’t stay down there but went up to the office and explained what happened.  The time keeper tried to get dad to stay, but dad told him he would have to work with a bitter boss every day.  So dad went to work for the federal forestry paddling freight in a canoe.  Poison ivy put a stop to that job when he used a handful for toilet paper.

 

People say they hate being cold.  Just turn up the thermostat.  When you sit around a 60 degree house, you may save money on heat, but it’s not pleasant.  Turn up the heat and be comfortable.

 

I’d just spend money to rent a spot down south.  I’d just be looking at some old people down there.  We have a lot of senior citizens up here, too.  Anyway, I’ve been down there and I like it up here.

 

I had a dear old friend who isn’t here anymore.  One joke he told was,

“When I got my first pair of shoes, I walked backwards just to admire my tracks!”

 

When I walk in fresh snow I have to turn around to admire my tracks.  We never know what’s ahead, but we can always look back and remember.

GETTING BY

 

I think people who come to America for the first time are surprised to see most Americans are working and not living in the fairy tale world they see on TV.

 

Gwen and I were visiting with a girl we know last summer.  She is going to college and working every chance she gets.  She went on a college trip to Ireland.  She said they earn a lot more money in those towns, but everything costs a lot more than in the USA.

 

She was surprised that nearly no kids work.  If they are students they go to school, but have no part time jobs.  Some girls told her they would love to come to America to visit.  She told them they could come, but she wouldn’t have time to visit because she would be working.

 

I suppose you can read anything you want to into the way Americans live.  When people watch TV shows, it’s either crime ridden cities and gangsters, and crooked politicians and murder, or the rosy stories of rich people buying their first home for $350,000.  Other stories portray the Real Housewives of Orange County.  Those people who want to hate our country see the evil.  Those who want to love America watch the fakey shows where everyone looks like movie stars, and think that’s our real country.

 

Not all Americans are trying to keep up with the Joneses.  I’ve seen when times get tough, people start driving more cars with a little rust around the fenders.  Junk yards do a better business as people buy used parts to keep the car running longer.

 

Back in the Depression, a lot of boys learned to be pretty good mechanics by cobbling a bunch of car parts together and succeeded in building a joker to use as a tractor.  Not only did they build a tractor, they had to keep it running.  Some of those old gas tanks had rust in them.  It wasn’t uncommon to take the gas line off a number of times a day to blow the line clear.  Water had to be dumped out of the sediment bowl, too.  Carburetors were taken apart and a leaky float had to be drained and soldered to make it work, and home made gaskets were cut out of cereal box cardboard and covered with permatex when the original gaskets were broken.  Old breaker points had to be filed, and the starters and generators had to have the armature cleaned and new brushes put in.  Scavenging these parts off of old cars out in the woods may be an adventure they had to take to some friend’s bone yard, to get parts to match.

 

Old tires were taken off rims and patched many times.  An old tire may have been cut up to make boots to cover a hole in a blown out or bruised tire.  Those slipping tire irons hit more than one guy in the arm or head.  Those tires were pumped up with a hand tire pump, too.

 

When hard times hit, shoemakers started repairing shoes again.  Sorrel type Pac boots were never thrown away.  The tops were saved and new rubber bottoms were sewn on.  Worn shoes were resoled and re-heeled and used until they fell apart.

 

I have and old Singer leather sewing machine dad bought when he was still living at home.  Grandpa had a last with different sized irons to nail soles on shoes and then when dad got the machine, they could repair the shoes for the whole family.  My son, Brad, had divvies on it when he wants to take it home.  I know it was old in the 1930’s when dad bought it, but he got some new parts and got it working again in the 1970’s.  You can still get parts for it.

 

In 1960 I bought a pair of shoes for about $7.00.  I wore them out when I was going to college in St. Cloud in 1961.  I had new soles put on them at Virginia, and when I was kneeling at the alter getting married, I wondered how many people noticed the half soles on my shoes.  I wore those soles out again when I went to UMD in Duluth the next spring.  Gwen will tell you it’s no lie that I cut insoles out of cereal boxes and wore them.  I had to be careful not to lift my feet too high when climbing the stairs at UMD, so those people following me below wouldn’t see those two circles on the bottom of my feet winking at them at each step.

 

Are times hard in the USA?

 

Maybe for some. Those that have government help won’t feel it too much.  Those who have a lot of pride will do what it takes to get by.

MUD VACATION

 

Some construction areas really are a road builder’s paradise.  The land has a good base and gravel is close by so it doesn’t have to be moved very far.

 

On our trips up the Alcan Highway, I told Gwen the guys back home would love to see those mountains of gravel.  There is literally mile after mile of gravel hundreds of feet high.  It was left by retreating glaciers.

 

There are challenges to road building there, though.  Between every mountain there is a valley and every spring, melt water turns into rivers.  When we were there, it was during late summer so it was dry, but every mile or two there was a bridge so the road wouldn’t wash away by all that water.  In the areas where there was no wide valley, the road had to follow a river between the mountains.  There, the road is built up above the flood plain and has to be cut into the side of the rock or gravel mountain.  Just like out west in the Rocky Mountains, there are landslides and those roads have to be cleared when rocks tumble down.

 

We never think about it here, but in most mountain areas there are earthquakes and can cause unstable ground to give way.  We did go over some gravel stretches where construction was going on, so we had to drive on the outside edge of some precariously high places.  The Alcan is paved all the way to Fairbanks, except in those construction areas.  In the really bad places, there are guard rails.  Even then, it’s eerie where there are a thousand foot or more drop offs a few feet on the other side of the rail.  I don’t mind climbing mountains while driving, but I don’t particularly care for going down them.

 

Those mountain people and semi truck drivers are used to it so you have to keep up speed or you will have a caravan of mad people behind you.

 

The motor home craze was worse a few years ago.    When I travel long distances, I start out driving normal speed, but after a few hundred miles, I start to drive like a tourist and push the limit as much as I dare.  With the price of gas going up a few years ago, the motor homes diminished tenfold.  Sometimes five or six would be traveling together and poked along at 50 miles per hour.  When they hit the Rockies, and started to climb, they slow down even more.  So you pass when you get a chance.  On the prairie of Canada it’s flat.  The Alcan skirts the east side of the mountains and is like driving around here.  I should say before the Alcan starts.  That’s north of Edmonton.  It starts to twist and turn in northern British Columbia and the Yukon.  If you ever get a chance, take that trip.  I’d recommend July and August because some lakes thaw out at the end of June, and everything closes down in late August.

 

We saw that same metal netting filled with rock in Tyrol on those twisting mountain roads.  It keeps falling rocks off the road.

 

On some trips to Washington State, we encountered mudslides that had covered some highways and front end loaders were clearing it so traffic could get through.

 

On some of our roads around here, there are grown over gravel pits most people don’t even notice.  They are only the size of a house.  That was when roads were built by men using hand shovels and horses.  Willard Pearson grew up in Cook and told of his dad hauling gravel with horses years ago.  Dad said the old Model A Ford trucks weren’t much bigger than the Duely pickups we have today.  They may have carried three yards of dirt, so gravel was dug up next to the side of the road wherever it could be found.

 

Up in Roseau country there is a road on every section line in the farm country.  With a cross road every mile in every direction, a lot don’t have much gravel on them.  Some turn to slime after a hard rain or in the spring.

 

Some of you may have heard of mud vacation when you were a kid.  They did close school for a couple of weeks each spring, until the roads were passable again.

NATURE TAKES CARE OF ITS OWN

 

Where is that old logging camp?  Where is that old home site?  Grandma had rose bushes and plums.  I can’t find them.  Where are the old garbage piles?  We can’t find those antique bottles.

 

To the modern historian, people ruined the land.  They cut the trees and denuded everything.  They plowed up the land and changed it forever.  They paved the cities and drained the swamps.

 

This land of America was the Garden of Eden before the Europeans came.

 

I’ve seen the photos of this country around 1900 when it did look like a World War I battlefield.  It was fenced off and cattle roamed by the tens of thousands in St. Louis County.  Where are they now?  Most townships around here may be lucky to have one family in all the 36 square miles, raising a few beef cows.  Where are the barbed wire fences?  Not many stand now.  The wire is rusted away and only an old cedar post surprises some hunter as he stumbles upon it in the woods.

 

The fields up in this country were small compared to the open prairie land where most of American farming is done.

 

Like a vast forest fire that denudes the land, so did the loggers and the few thousand settlers that followed.

 

Why doesn’t it look like it did in 1900?

 

Nature.  Nature is a powerful thing that is hard to understand.  Without constant work, and eradication of weeds, nature heals scars just like after fire.  In a few years a garden spot cannot be seen.  Not even garden weeds survive.  In a few more years the brush and trees cover the whole logging camp or homestead.

 

There is European clover and grass in the logging roads, but when the woods grow back even that succumbs to the native plants.  The trees shade all out.  There aren’t many dandelions in the swampy muskeg or in the swamp grass meadows along the old dead beaver dams.  They are covered with the wild grass and plants that are native here.

 

If the ranchers pulled up stakes and removed the beef cows, that land reverts back to native plants.  The same would happen in a few years if the farmers stopped planting wheat, corn, potatoes and sugar beets.

 

The wild animals would soon replace the domestic animals that need man to feed them.  Without hay, the cattle would all die in the winter.  The bison would take the Great Plains back.  The elk would take over those ranches, too.

 

The environmentalists from the cities are worried about the activity of people making a living in rural areas.  Most farmers are not ruining their land.  If that was so, they couldn’t make a living on their land anymore.  The loggers aren’t ruining the forests.  It was stated in the Minnesota Conservation Volunteer Magazine back in the 1960’s that the annual growth of trees in Minnesota would make a pile of wood four feet high and eight feet long, from here to the east coast and back to St. Louis, Missouri.  That sounds unrealistic, but most of it does die and blow down.  It rots away.

 

 Did you ever notice how young trees grow a few inches apart?  When they are fifteen feet high and a foot apart, they crowd each other and most die.  By the time they are eight inches on the stump, they are eight feet apart, and by the time they are twenty inches on the stump and fifty feet high, they have shaded the land beneath and are fifty feet apart.  What happened to all those other trees?  They are lying there, rotting away.  In a lot of places, the trees are never cut and blow down and the cycle starts over.

 

Is it a waste to let the trees rot?  Is it a sin to harvest some of them?  Is it a waste to let fish live and die in the lake?  Is it OK to eat a few?  The same with deer in the woods.  If the hunter killed them to near extinction, why are there so many left?

 

I never hear many rural people criticizing the paving over of good farm land with concrete.  I never hear many complain about the huge number of city people burning fuel for electricity or the majority of the cars in the world.  I never hear much about the majority of the population eating food that they never grew or even know how it is grown.

 

How many really skinny people do you know with their ribs sticking out?  Those are the sick people who have some disease they can’t control.  I feel for them

 

The food bank isn’t feeding those people.  They are in the hospital.

 

Where are the hungry people that are starving in the USA?  They must be the druggies and the alcoholics that spend their money on something besides food.

 

Most of them are invisible to us because they live in the cities.  If we didn’t take care of their dear, poor souls, nature would take its course.

CANDY

 

I grew up in a home where we ate a lot of sugar.  The folks told stories of people skimping on sugar during the depression, and then during World War II, when they had to use ration stamps to buy sugar.

 

Some people started raising honey bees so they had an excuse to buy a couple of hundred pounds of sugar to feed the hives before the flowers started to bloom.

 

Eyebrows were raised at the store when someone bought a lot of sugar.  They suspected they were setting a barrel of mash to make moonshine.

 

Dad always used the excuse that sugar was a good food because it was concentrated energy.

 

Hardly ever did we come back from town without some candy.  Dad and mom would never let us throw stuff out the car windows.  The only exception was paper candy wrappers.  That paper rotted just like grass and leaves.

 

In Virginia, we always went into the dime stores and dad got two or three kinds of bulk candy in those white paper bags.  I remember the chocolate stars and those chocolate covered vanilla candies.  We never drank much pop.  But we sure drank milk when we got home.

 

I remember mom making fudge a lot.  First on the wood burning kitchen range, and later on the electric range.  She didn’t need a candy thermometer because she used the soft and hard ball stage by dropping the bubbling fudge in a cup of water.  We weren’t allowed to taste that cooling pan because it might sugar.  When it was cool enough it was a frenzy to stir in the melted butter and get it spread on a platter before it set.  A lot of those double batches of fudge got eaten right away, and we probably downed a gallon of milk with it.  It never made us kids hyper because we were eating sweets all the time.

 

I never could figure out why some kids threw up at school when they ate a lot of sweets during our parties.  I could eat candy and cake til it came out my ears and it never made me sick.

 

In our little Gheen School, we had our moments.  When we were in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades we could go down town at noon if we asked Mrs. Novak for permission.  She trusted us as long as we didn’t go alone.  We sure didn’t want her to lose her trust in us, so we never got in trouble on our trips to buy candy at Neagabeur’s store, or  penny candy that Mrs. Brooker, and later Mrs. Johnson, sold at the post office.

 

We were introduced to the penny candy by the older kids who went with us on our trips.  Orange slices were never wrapped.  Peppermints and caramels always were.  Those were always two for a penny.  I think those red wax lips were 2 cents each.  All the bars were a nickel, or a dime, for the big ones.  Those Sugar Daddy suckers were a nickel.  I remember when those chocolate Easter eggs with different flavored centers, wrapped in different colored aluminum foil came out in the late 1940’s.  We bought rolls of lifesavers and packages of Charms.  That’s about the time 7 Up Candy Bars were introduced.  I ate so many Heath Bars (chocolate covered toffee) that I got tired of them.

 

By the time I was a senior in high school, I had enough money to buy a 25 cent Hershey bar once in awhile.

 

About the time I got married, mom was making many different kinds of candy each Christmas.  Even chocolate covered cherries.  She always had made peppermint fondant.  Dad ordered invertase from Herter’s Sporting Goods Company near the Twin Cities.  Mom would mix that with the white fondant and bury a cherry in it and dip it in melted chocolate.  In a couple of weeks the fondant dissolved inside and they were ready for Christmas Eve.

 

I hope I never become diabetic.  I’d have to go easy on my favorite food.

 

I’m sitting here eating Whoppers and orange slices at the same time.  I like those jelly filled candy in Bridge Mix.

  

MEETING A DOCTOR

 

When I reminisce about things, one memory leads to another.  A few years ago I was approached by the people who were starting the Timberjay Newspaper to write about the history of Gheen.  I told them that there really wasn’t many historic things that went on in this area.  In a week or two of listing events, there wouldn’t be much to write about.  I figured that it may be better to write about things I heard about from my folks.  Just common things may be just as important to people as something historic.

 

I’m a common man.  I’m not famous, I’m not big, and I’m not small.  I never wanted to be famous or rich.  I’ve never influenced anyone to any degree.  Even as a teacher of young kids, I never taught anything spectacular.  I know I didn’t change anyone’s life.  The teachers, who taught the small kids, taught them to do reading, writing and do arithmetic.  They knew how to do all that by the time I had them in my class.

 

There were about a thousand people in all those classes over 33 years that had to put up with me.  I made mistakes as I stumbled along the way.  I know a few times some of those kids wished they could be somewhere else.  But we somehow made it even if we had to live together in those school rooms.

 

I was the one who learned from them.  One of the most important lessons I learned was not to underestimate people.  Teachers ask a lot of questions to kids.  Those questions are supposed to be for only two reasons.  One is to get them to think about a subject, and to study and find the answer themselves.  The second is to see if they have found the answer.

 

Sometimes the kids stop answering the teacher after other kids laugh at their guess.  After being embarrassed a few times they won’t attempt to repeat what they think is a mistake.  Another thing that turns students off is if they think someone is picking their mind.  People do keep their mouth shut to keep out of trouble.

 

I was trying to find out information about the Virginia Rainy Lake Logging Company, and stumbled on information about the muddy river of my childhood, the Willow River, only a few hundred feet south of where I grew up.  One thing led to another and Don Simonson said to keep it up.  So that’s how I got going on these unimportant stories.

 

If you start thinking back in your life, you have just as many memories as I have.  Then think about every person you walk by on every sidewalk.  Every car that drives by has a person with a lifetime of memories of just common things.  Very few people become famous or exceptionally important.

 

Most people are private.  It’s not polite to dig into their past.  Their memories are not to be shared but its fun to hear some of those stories.  I’ve noticed that poaching stories are shared.  It must be that Robin Hood mentality men have.  Some share a few exploits, too.  But really, most people keep their lives to themselves.

 

What if we could have all the people we’ve talked to and visited with in our entire lifetime get together all in one place at the same time?

 

Maybe if I ever get to heaven, I’ll be floating past all those people I’ve been with in my whole lifetime.  I may meet the doctor who delivered me.  I have no memory of him.

DIRTY HANDS

 

To some men, dirty hands are something to avoid like the plague.  To others, it’s a badge of their occupation.  I’ve shaken hands with a lot of people over the years, and one thing most men dislike is a limp washrag handshake.  That’s like a man who walks around with his arms up and his hands dangling like a woman.

 

Some of those men had fingers like a bunch of bananas.  Some were swollen from years of working in the cold.  Some men have callused hands from hand tools rubbing.  Maybe not so much now as when I was young.  We did use axes and the constant sliding of the hand on those handles developed thick calluses.  The same was with jobs like pitching hay with a pitch fork or using a number 2 shovel digging by hand.  I remember dad smiling at me when my pink hands blistered as a kid, but I kept on working and in a week or two those blisters peeled and calluses got thicker and thicker by the end of summer.

 

Some things are hard to do with gloves on.  As most rural people did, we did roll up our sleeves once in awhile, but in the summer we used to wear short sleeved shirts or just took them off.

 

Gardening is one thing most people do without gloves.  Sally Rahikinen, in Idington, used to say digging in the garden dirt was therapy.  That black dirt washes off easily.

 

Some jobs are dirty and can’t be done with gloves on.  How many country women, over the centuries, plucked and gutted chickens without gloves on.  Getting those lungs out of the rib cages isn’t easy, but most women didn’t want them in there when they cooked them, so they had to be gotten out even if they had to use a teaspoon to scrape with.  I suppose its only been the last century they even had rubber gloves.

 

Men doing mechanic work never use gloves, and so end up with grease under their fingernails and in their cracked hands.

 

When dad was in his late teens he did some veterinary work around the community.  They didn’t have those shoulder length plastic artificial insemination gloves for cows in those days.  One unpleasant job that had to be done was to remove a placenta that wouldn’t shed, after a cow calved.  If it got infected, the cow would become sterile and never breed back.  Dad used lard to grease his hand and arm to reach inside the cow and detach the placenta from the buttons on the inside of the uterus.  The cow would walk around for sometimes a week with the afterbirth hanging out.  If you pull on it, it may cause the cow to hemorrhage.

 

When I had to do it to one of my cows, I got a plastic glove from a farmer.  It’s not easy to reach in and find those attachments.  With a finger on each side, the thumb pushes between the two fingers and it comes loose.  You have to find all those attachments.  Sometimes it’s not the best smelling job, either.

 

We never used gloves when we butchered cows, pigs, and chickens.  Like most of us country people, we were particular about our meat as we were the people who were going to eat it.  We always had a couple of pails of hot water nearby to wash our hands.  Those animals are warm at first, even if it’s November, and snow on the ground.  Sometimes just to wash the blood off, and sometimes to warm cold hands toward the end of the job.  Just about always a pail of water was splashed up inside the beef as it hung there to wash the blood out.

 

I can’t say that every dirty job was unpleasant.

 

“Up to your ears in grease.”  It wasn’t fun to work on a broken down car when you needed it to get to work the next morning, but how many kids in the country, or in some garage in the cities, worked on a car just for fun?

 

Many wives stood in the doorway watching their man walk up to the house, dirty as can be, but with a smile on his face, after accomplishing what he had set off to do.

 

Be it pitch from the woods, a pail with the liver, heart, and tongue, grease from the tractor or truck, or dirt and clay from the field, there is pride in having dirty hands. 

WHEN THE ROBIN GOES BOBBING ALONG

 

Written in June

 

What happened when the hay got rained on in the old country?  It didn’t matter if it was in Norway, Sweden, Finland or Slovenia.  I’m sure it happened in Mother Russia, too.  With scythes and wooden rakes, it took nearly every waking hour to make enough hay for the few cows for winter.  Most years, there were enough sunny days to make up for the rain.  Those years when it rained most of the time, the folks had some pretty black hay to feed the stock.  Grandpa and grandma worked together to survive.

 

When I remember back to when I was a kid, we had a few summers when it rained most of the haying season.  But dad was a carpenter, and we cut pulpwood in slack time, so it wasn’t really survival if the hay wasn’t perfect.

 

Wally Laakkonen was three years younger than me.  His brother Jesse and Raymond Ollila were my best friends and classmates in Orr.  Ray went into the Marines after we graduated, and Jesse went to work on the railroad, and I worked at the grain door factory in Orr.  After a couple of years, I had enough money to go to Virginia Junior College.  Wally and I were room mates, and we had a lot of those late night, early morning discussions about everything.  Most college kids did that, and most of you know what that is all about.  Those discussions happen in taverns, beside campfires late at night on fishing trips, and in most deer camps.

 

The story I remember the most was when Wally related the stubbornness to survive by his grandfather.  When he came to this country, he settled on the South Shore of Pelican Lake.  Like most people in those days, he had a couple of cows and raised good potatoes, but the lake was there and there were fish to be had.

 

When a person dilly-dallies in the dishwater too long, your hands turn white and start to pucker.  Wally said, “My grandpa was netting Northern Pike.  It was freezing in the late fall and one time he froze his hands and all his fingernails fell out.”

 

It’s the longest days of the year right now, and it’s almost dark, but there are two robins bobbing around in the lawn trying to find the last worm.  They must have a nest in the Spruce tree, and will do anything to feed their babies.

 

They may only be birds, but they inspire me to write stuff like this.

PRETTY WOMEN

 

When a kid is young and ignorant, they talk about things they know little about.  Sometimes that chatter is just nervous talk and not really an attempt to impress the others around them, but sometimes it’s a stab at trying to be humorous.  To the kids a little more mature, it seems ridiculous.

 

One thing most of those teenage boys are interested in is girls.  That’s usually what topic they get around to talking about.  It may start out as some ballgame discussion, but nearly always it turns to the unfamiliar topic of the opposite sex.

 

We were eating out with some friends the other night and us guys talked about guy things.  I never even listened to the women, but every once in awhile, something catches my ear and I listen and chime in on their conversation.

 

Just as we were leaving, another couple came in and sat down to order.  As always, the greetings from across the room.

 

I noticed one thing.  Isn’t it nice to have a pretty woman smiling across the table.  Me with mine.  Our neighbors with theirs, and I started to think about the other couples I know.

 

I don’t know if other people see things the way I do, but personality is the most important thing.  When we were young we probably looked a lot better than we do now, but to me she’s still my pretty woman.  To those girls that were never pretty in their youth, something happens with time, they take on a certain glow and shine with their smile.

 

To all of us guys that have stayed attached to our spouses over the years, there is an attraction that keeps pulling us together.  Even old and grey and wrinkled, we sit there across the table with our pretty women.

RESPECT

 

When growing up in the country, kids are fascinated with eggs in a robin’s nest.  Those hummingbirds do hum, and will sip sugar water endlessly as long as you keep the feeder filled.

 

We never had chickens at home until my little brother brought a bunch of chicks home from school that Mrs. Novak hatched in her incubator.  They were cute and we watched them grow up and helped butcher them in the fall.  Grandma always had chickens that wintered over in the barn with the cows.

 

Grandma was handy with an axe.  She always split up kindling for the kitchen range.  She didn’t wait for grandpa to kill the old red rooster.  She popped the heads off those chickens and never felt sorry for them.

 

 When we were small we went over to grandma and grandpa’s for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, for roast chicken.  Oh, we ate other stuff at those feasts, too.  Hardly any kids now watch a chicken being plucked, gutted, and the pin feathers being pulled out.  Grandma took a candle and burned off the few hairs those old hens had.

 

I don’t see as many canary or parakeets in home cages now, as years ago.

 

A neighbor lady had a parrot in her living room when I was a kid.  It talked dirty and it was dirty.  Can you imagine a small chicken littering old newspapers on the floor in your house?  Those little birds, parakeets, get seed hulls all over, too.

 

Those Audubon people run around with binoculars and bird books, but I’ve never seen any of them in my travels.  There are a bunch of those people on Hawk Ridge at Duluth waiting for the migration each fall.

 

I suppose the most famous group of birds is not the pheasant, duck, or wild turkey.  Not even the bald eagle.  It has to be the pigeon that inhabits every sizable town in the temperate part of the world.  To some, they are the free flying pets who eat popcorn out of people’s hands if they stay still.  The white ones are called doves and are a symbol of “peace.”

 

How many statues of George Washington, Lincoln, and mounted war heroes are standing in parks all over the world?

 

And what kind of reward do these heroes get?  White streaks, given to them by those unrespectful birds.

DANGER

 

Those young boys that were hired on those sailing ships must have been horrified by the sea in all its fury.  Those Norwegian fishing ships on the North Sea were in some of the stormiest parts of the ocean.

 

Then why did those Norwegians go out from the North Shore of Lake Superior to set nets and fish in small boats, just like they did in the old country?

 

I suppose the fear of a dangerous job gets dulled in time, after years of surviving storms.  I bet those second and third generation kids on the North Shore were scared when they experienced a bad storm for the first time.

 

Dad told me to stand behind a tree and watch as he trimmed all the bottom branches off a big balsam tree.  “Trim them up as high as possible so when you notch the tree, your axe won’t snag a high branch and deflect.  You could cut yourself.”  “Stay behind that big tree.  When the tree comes down, it could go the wrong way.”  “Notch it the way you want it to fall.”  He put the head of his double bit axe in the notch and the handle pointed in the direction where it would fall.  “Always have a path to back away from the tree when it starts to fall.”  “Never turn your back on a tree.  It may twist around, or the wind may blow it back on you.”  “Don’t run, you could trip.”

 

Those were not frivolous warnings.  They were life or death decisions I heard from him as he bent over and sawed the tree down by hand.  Looking up, always looking up, as it started to sway, he backed away in case it bounced back at him as it hit the ground.

 

I know a lot of people have never seen a tree cut down in real life.  It’s not safe like watching a movie.  To me, as a six year old, it made an impression on me to feel the ground shake and hear the thunder as it hit the ground.  Those snapped off branches flew in every direction and fell back to the ground in a second or two.  Silence again.  That was a smaller tree than those that I would eventually cut down after I grew up.  Even men who worked all their life in the woods got hurt sometimes.  I’ve nicked myself three different times with a double bit axe.  I nicked myself on the arm when I cleared branches before the chain stopped moving on my chainsaw.

 

I know of men being pinned under big trees.  I’ve know men killed when flying wood hit them.  These were not carelessness, but true accidents.  That fear is always in the back of a man’s mind.

 

I’ve heard of a man who was working under his car in Minneapolis who was crushed when a brand new floor jack broke and he had no way of surviving.

 

Every time the cage went down into the Soudan Mine, those men hoped the cable wouldn’t break.

 

Great Grandpa, Herman Hanson, died in that mine when a blasted chunk of ore tore a hole in his side.

 

What did Grandpa Oscar Hanson do when he was 15 yrs. old?  He went down in the mine.

THE FIELD

 

The field was etched in a lot of people’s memories when they were kids.  There are stories of tying a rope around small kids’ waists in Norway to prevent them from falling down the side of mountains while the family cut hay with scythes, and later raked it with wood rakes.  Even grandma and grandpa were working, so no one left the kids at home.  They came with all the time.

 

I remember skipping and running along in the field when the folks were cocking hay by hand.  We only had a few cows so we never had modern equipment.  Dad cut the hay with his homemade joker pulling an old horse mower.  He tied a rope on the trip peddle of the old dump rake so no one had to ride.  When the rake was near the windrow, he pulled the rope and it dumped the hay.  We kids were never allowed in the field when he mowed.  But we had fun when they raked the hay.   In a few hours the field was filled with hay piles the folks called cocks.  They were five foot high haystacks that settled down a foot or two and would shed rain.

 

 It’s surprising how fast two or three people could shock that three or four acre field.  For weekend farmers, those cocks could stay out there for two or three weeks if necessary, until a nice weekend came along.

 

 I remember only about half the small farms having hay barns.  Those that didn’t got together and stacked the hay near the barn.  One person drove the bug or tractor and stopped at every hay cock so the two people on the ground could pitch the hay up on the hay wagon.  Mom used to be on the wagon and stacked it higher and higher. 

 

The platform of the wagon was three feet above the ground to clear the tires and that hay was piled as high as men with six foot handled pitch forks could reach.  A couple of us kids would be up on that load with mom tramping the hay down.  Loose hay is fluffy so it would slide off the load if it wasn’t tramped down.

 

It had to be a hot clear day.  The stack had to be built up and finished by evening so it would shed water until snow fell, or it would take water and rot.  Even those huge loads only held about a ton and a half of hay, but everyone kept going until the job was done, only taking a break for coffee about 3:00 in the afternoon.

 

Sometimes if the hay was in the fields for two or three weeks, mice would build nests and the nearly grown babies would be running around when the men removed the hay.  We had two rat terriers, Tootsie and Spotty, who vacuumed up the mice.  We ran and followed when we were too small to help, but dad let us climb up the front of the hay rack to have a hay ride back to the barn.  We got an old hay loader and that hitched to the back of the wagon.  We didn’t have to cock it and pitch it up.  That was faster as it was raked and stacked right away.

 

The field was a play field to me.  After the hay is all gone, it takes a week or more for the grass to grow again.  In that sharp stubble, the grasshoppers were concentrated, and the leopard frogs could be caught in the slough grass that hadn’t been cut.

 

Some of those fields didn’t get plowed and grew back into weeds and a lot of wildflowers after a few years.  When people got rid of the cows, the willow brush sprouted up and the popal trees started crowding in from the woods on each side of the clearing.

 

In those long gone playgrounds of our youth, row upon row of spruce trees grow that were planted by some long gone tree farmer who never did live long enough to cut those trees.  More often, the fields were never planted into trees and reverted back to nature.

 

We picked the red clover flowers and the white daisies.  We picked the wild strawberries as the fields ran down.  We smelled the clover bloom and remember the smell of new mown hay.

 

Hey, that’s the way it was.

106

 

As a young kid in the late 1940’s, I really didn’t know any really old people.  Most of the people who moved into this area north of the Iron Range were young couples when they came in about 1910.  Most were about 60 years old.

 

When they came here, everything was new.  The buildings were new, the fences were new, and everyone was dreaming of building a community and a future.

 

What I remember was the boys coming back from World War II.  In the next few years those people the age of my grandparents started to die.  A lot of the boys left for the Twin Cities for jobs.  It would be in the next ten years that the small dairy farms went out of business.

 

One thing that stuck in my mind was the oldest surviving man from the Civil War who was living in Duluth.  I remember some newspaper pictures of him riding in a parade or two in Duluth.

 

A man named Willard Woolson was wounded in the Battle of Shiloh.  He was transported to an army hospital in Windom, Minnesota.  His wife and son, Albert, moved to Windom from New York, to be near Willard.

 

After Willard died, Alfred enlisted as a drummer boy.  He never saw action as the war was nearly over.  After a year, Albert was discharged on Sept. 7, 1865.  He became a carpenter.  He lived at 215 East Fifth Street in Duluth.

 

Albert died at St. Luke’s Hospital on August 2, 1965.  Census records show he was 106 years old.

GET OUT OF HERE

 

You think everyone living around here has the same life style.  Oh, no.

 

When the mines opened up on the Mesabi, one thing that set the Range above the rest of the U.S. was its school system.  Not only were the taxes from the iron mines going into the schools in every town on the Range, but junior colleges were springing up, too.

 

Those high schools had technical training in those shops that rivaled any in America.

 

While the rest of the county only had small schools that went to the 8^th grade, the Range had it all.  In dad’s days, he would have had to board out in Virginia to go to the 9^th through the 12^th grade.  My mom’s older sisters, Hulda and Signe, did that.  By the time mom went to high school, Cook was built and the kids from Orr and Gheen and surrounding areas went there.  When Orr School was built, mom was in the first graduating class there in 1937.

 

I was lucky enough to go to Virginia Junior College for two years, and finished up at UMD in Duluth.  I was also fortunate enough to get a job near home.  How many other people got a chance to get a job close to where they were born and raised?

 

The people who want to stay find some way to do it!  I’ll never know when the idea of being better than your parents or grandparents came to be.  The mediocre ball players want their kids to be better than they ever were.  Games are not played for fun anymore.  Winning is the only goal.  The coaches push for wins.  Parents put pressure on their kids to be the best.  Even if they sit on the bench all the years of high school, the parents expect them to go to all the practices and sit out all the games.

.

Why do the kids do it?  Because they don’t want to let the folks down.  I know most don’t exactly relish all that effort.  Maybe the best of the team do, but some of those do it to please the folks, too.  I know men who still shoot baskets and kick soccer balls against a wall just like they did years ago when they were kids.

 

My  kid is better than your kid.  You have to go to college.  You have to get a good job.  You have to make a lot of money when you grow up!

 

You can’t get married and have kids like women did years ago.  You have to get a good job and depend on yourselves.

 

Why?  Your parents expect that from you.  You will be a failure in their eyes if you don’t.  You will waste your life if you get married.  You have to work for someone and get paid money.

 

What is happiness?  Some of my happiest times have been when I had nearly no money.  I was young and could do what I wanted with the strength of my hands and back.  I started to realize at that time that financial success didn’t make people happy.

 

One millionaire I was working for during my college years, called me into his office.  He had been drinking heavily and was crying.  He wanted someone to talk to.  He probably felt I would never tell anyone what he was telling me.  His office was filled with pictures of him and politician friends and documents of recognition.

 

I felt sorry for the pain he was in.  Some of these things I’ve seen and heard have made me think the way I do.  I don’t know how other people think way deep down.  We are all different.

 

Are all the old ways of working primitive?  Are the new ways and ideas better?  Do the college councilors know what jobs are out there?  They have computers and know if you can get a job after you graduate.  They know how many positions are vacant and how many kids will be needed to fill them.  There should never be a college graduate that can’t find a job!

 

What do you want your kids to do?

 

I’ll pay your way through college.  You’ll get training in jobs you’ll never find around here.  You’ll have to move to a large city to get a job.  You may not be happy, but you’ll please me and mom.

 

This land was good enough for us parents.  Why are our schools empty?  I’ll pay you to move away!  In a few years they will be gone for good.

 

PRIZE POSSESSION

 

I suppose the crown is the most important thing to the Queen of England.  The Declaration of Independence may be the most important to us Americans.  A Rolls Royce may be to a millionaire, but it is a used car after it’s used awhile.

 

As a small kid, during the last year of WWII I only remember a few favorite things.  At the time it seemed only one thing at a time really mattered.  Accumulating a lot of stuff didn’t matter, but the thing of interest at the time was of utmost importance.

 

I remember playing with an aluminum ball point pen the folks got from Aunt Hulda and Uncle Jack Wallin in Anaheim.  When it ran out of ink it was a wonderful toy for me.  As most of our toys were shared with the other kids, like the swing, the sand box and the wood blocks, we really didn’t have many toys just for ourselves.  That came about when we were just a little older.

 

Our birthdays were not as important as Christmas.  There was so much fanfare and hype leading up to Christmas Eve and Christmas day that I remember having a hard time falling asleep, and could hardly think of anything else.

 

One Christmas I got a wind up toy train.  The kids in towns had electricity but a lot of people in America in the rural areas didn’t.  That train had individual cars and an oval track, so it could be set up on the living room floor and taken apart to be stored when we were done playing.

 

I remember the next year I got a wind up metal car about 10 inches  long.  On the bottom there was an H shaped slot and a pin that could be moved around.  One setting made the car go around the block in about a three foot square.  Another setting made the car drive ahead and then parallel park.  I remember picking up that burned up car from the ashes when our house burned down in 1948.

 

I don’t know for sure what dad’s prize possession was.  Like all grown-ups he had accumulated a lot of stuff by that time.  As dad and I surveyed the damage of the house, I remember the dishes and window glass melted into what appeared to be wrinkled Christmas candy.

 

Dad found his 32 special octagon barreled rifle and looked it over and dropped it back on the rubble.  It may have been his prize possession, but he never said anything.  The house probably was but that was gone.

 

Dad and mom built the house the year before they got married.  Dad hewed cedar timbers and stood those up on the sills.  He sawed cedar shingles and roofed the house and sided it with them.  They had a lot of sweat equity into that home.  Not much came easy to those people who grew up in the depression.

 

Probably the most prized possession mom had were the photo albums that burned up.  The dishes and clothes and other thing could be replaced, but not the pictures.  We got pictures from relatives and some of their negatives were reproduced, but some were lost forever.

 

It was kind of miserable for a year or two after that, but slowly we all recovered and started accumulating stuff again.

 

I don’t remember mom having a class ring.  During the depression most kids got a silver class ring.  Maybe a few got a gold ring, but most people had a hard time getting cash.  When mom graduated from Orr in 1937, she got an Elgin watch from her folks.  That was on her wrist when the house was burning down.  Twenty years later, I bought my gold class ring for $19.95.  Some kids got a ring with a manmade ruby for a few dollars more.  Most men were making around $10. a day in those days.

 

Now if you go to a rummage sale you will sift through a pick-up load of children’s toys and clothes.  Most have not been worn or played with much.

 

What is a prized possession people cherish today?  Two hundred Beanie Babies or an empty beer can collection, or fifty pounds of baseball cards?

 

Things that were important as when I was a child are of no value to me now.

 

A man I know in Orr, Minnesota told me a few years ago, “You never see a luggage rack on the top of a hearse.”   Oh, how right he was.

 

I don’t really have a prized possession now, but with Thanksgiving coming up, I do think of important things in my life.

 

I thank God for the people I know.

I thank God for my family. 

I thank God for my freedom and those that fought and those who died for it.

I thank God for the ground I walk on, and plant my garden in.

I thank God for my and your life.

 

A DIM MEMORY

 

Kids talk big at school.  The older kids had louder voices and had to be listened to.  The teachers didn’t have to be loud.  They were marking the report cards so the kids listen to them.

 

I remember saying, “Huh?” sometimes when the folks said something.  I heard them, but somehow some of us had a habit of saying, “Huh?” when people talked.

 

We knew everyone who lived in our community.  We knew who were mentally unstable.  We as kids knew which grown ups were retarded.  We knew who the hardest working people were.  We weren’t ignorant about that even if we were small kids.  We knew who was rubber-necking on the party line telephone system.  Some people were religious and we knew we had to be careful of what we said when they were around.  We knew who the busy body was and who the township gossip was.  There was a meeting every month at the club hall and parties once in a while so we knew everyone.

 

Each town or township had a person who was master of ceremonies at most social functions.  When I was a kid, our master of ceremonies was Mike Terska.  He owned Cabin-O-Pines on Pelican Lake.  He wasn’t living in our township of Willow Valley, but he was so much fun and respected that we all loved him and his wife.  Mike must have had a joke book, as he always had a joke or two that no one had heard before.

 

We never had a town hall, but in 1913 the Swedes started the Willow Valley Farmers Club and met in individual homes.  In 1923 they built the club hall that is still standing today.  Mike Terska always had the Farmers Club picnic each forth of July at Cabin-O-Pines.

 

I remember, as a five year old, a neighbor who was sawing grandpa’s winter firewood by hand, came in for supper.  He was a retarded man.  He could write his first name.  Doing small jobs for people, he supported himself.  My grandparents had an Aladdin mantel lamp in the days before electricity came to the country.  Oscar was old but he entertained us kids by making animal shadows on the wall.  With his hands he made a rabbit shadow and wiggled the ears.  He made a dog shadow and a duck with an eye.

 

I used that experience as an example when I taught the sixth grade in Cook.  You can always learn something from anyone if you are willing to listen.

 

When my uncles came back from the war, we would stay up as long as we could so we could listen to the stories the boys told of the war.  They were only in their twenties, but they were like old men to me.

 

A lot of kids like me listened to the stories our folks told.  We didn’t have any TV in those days.  Our radio had a long cardboard covered battery made up of dry cells.  We wouldn’t leave the radio on like people can today.  That would kill the battery.  So listening to the stories of older people was fun and interesting.

 

At grandma’s house we had to go to bed upstairs and mom and dad would visit with grandpa and grandma late into the night.  That bedroom had a small trap door in the floor which opened in the daytime so heat from the parlor stove in the living room would heat the bedroom upstairs.  That was closed at night.  My sister, Marion, and I would lie on the floor and listen to the visiting going on downstairs.

 

Probably the most important to me were the stories the oldest people told.  My grandparents grew up in the horse and buggy days.  They were born in the Wild West time.  They never were out west, but times were bustling in the 1800’s and early 1900’s.

 

Over the years I’ve listened to a lot of old men tell their tales.  Some were drunk, but I respected them, because their stories were true and real.  They never made up stuff, but wanted someone, anyone, to listen to them.  Some old men were lonesome and had no one close to them left.  Some of those old men are still making out the best they can.  Some don’t have much energy left.

 

When the sparkle is gone, when their eyes become dim, when they sit there with a distant stare, seeming to be looking in the far off distance, sometimes a memory comes back.

 

Was it their late wife in her white wedding gown?  Or was it the memory of the first kiss?  Or even as a four year old, just before dozing off, maybe he mumbles, “I love you, Mama.”

FROST

 

I don’t remember the spring back thermometers in the 1940’s.  We had the glass tube thermometers filled with mercury.  They were harder to read than the red alcohol filled tubes.  The mercury froze at -40 degrees below so we never knew how cold it really was.

 

The red thermometers went lower, but if the tube slid up or down they weren’t accurate either.

 

Some of the gas stations had a large 3 ft. high thermometer on the side of the building.

 

We always had a couple of thermometers and they were never the same temperature.  I bet if you had three or four thermometers today, they would all be different by a few degrees.

 

Our house is on a knoll and the barn was a few feet lower on the north side of the house.  If it was -40 degrees below at the house, it was always -45 degrees below at the barn.

 

With bragging rights of cold temperatures, the people living on higher ground could never get a lower temperature to brag about unless they lied most of the time.

 

We waited and listened to the radio many mornings to see if they would close school because of a cold snap.  Whoopee! If school was closed for the day.

 

No one worries about cool nights much anymore.  Some people remember when country people always looked at the thermometer.

 

Before the garden was planted each spring, just as the pasture grass was coming in, frost hits on some cool nights.  When the winter snow lasted late in the spring, it slowed the growth a little.  When the snow melts early and the ground thaws early, the berries bloom and get nipped by frost.

 

There isn’t anything people can do to change the weather.  Before my time people used to depend on wild fruit to can for winter.

 

This being northern Minnesota, we can get frost anytime.  Once the berries set and the petals fall off, the berries grow anyway.  So  when they bloomed is when every woman worried.

 

I remember one year, near the dump in Cook, when John Gieselmann’s garden  froze flat on  July 27^th, 1971.

 

We used to get a frost on the 25^th or so of August nearly every year.  If it was cloudy those full moon nights, the temperature stayed warm.  If it cleared up during the night, it would be white with frost in the morning.

 

Those gardens were important and if they could keep them alive, it meant more food.  I know some of you covered some things like cucumbers and tomatoes.  As a kid we didn’t have plastic but we used cardboard boxes, bushel baskets, old sheets and pillow cases to cover the garden and the flower beds.

 

We picked all the tomatoes larger than hen’s eggs and spread the green tomatoes upstairs to ripen.  We left the small ones on the plants and covered.  Those plants survived and sometimes we got warm weather for another month.  Those itty bitty tomatoes grew to full size, so it was like another crop.

 

We had arm loads of cukes in the summer and leaf lettuce.  Mom probably bought 1 cuke a month in the winter.  With 6 kids at home, I carried in corn cobs like an armload of firewood.  Boiled corn and homemade butter, homemade bread and homemade wild strawberry or raspberry jelly and milk from the fridge made a meal many times.

 

We never felt poor.  We never felt superior to other people.  We never expected to be hungry.  We lived like everyone else.  We and our neighbors were self sufficient.

 

We didn’t really depend on the garden or the berries but they sure tasted good.

 

Chokecherries puckered our tongues, but made good jelly and some dads made wine.

 

Rhubarb never freezes, but if you put enough sugar on, most things are edible.   Frost.