Local History by David Hanson of Gheen

David & Gwen live near the Gheen Corners. They are the parents of five children.

David taught school in Cook for many years, he has constructed many rock fireplaces. 

More stories from David Hanson

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Wednesday, March 11   HAVE A GOOD SUMMER Dave Hanson   I’m starting to ask Gwen, “Did I write about that before?”   I don’t want to keep repeating myself.  Some things I’ve thought about a lot all my life, but I don’t remember if I ever talked about them to anyone.   Well, the snow is going to go soon.  The crows are back.  The winterkills were showing up as the snow melted.  They are covered up again.  With this snow, the deer will have to struggle a little longer eating brush, before the dandelion leaves sprout.   Winter gets a little long, but the days are getting a little longer every day, too.   Have a good summer.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Monday, March 09, 2009   MUNDANE Dave Hanson   I suppose most people dreamed of a thrilling and adventurous life.  It was always said that time never stands still.  No matter what our parents warned us about, we yearned to find out the unknown.   Most people did try out their wings.  Most escapades were never found out unless people bragged about them.  It seemed as we grew up that those may have been just a lot of wishful stories people told.   Those that broke away from traditions too far, didn’t get away unscathed.  Some wished for the rest of their lives that they hadn’t done or said those things.   The bright lights of some city attracted a lot of kids who weren’t prepared for that kind of life.  Some regretted getting drunk.  Those that came from homes where people drank knew what to expect, but some of those who were innocent, suffered all their lives from mistakes they made.   Some people lived a nonstop exciting life.  A few military people, like an airplane test pilot or an astronaut were like that.  The fast pace of a show girl or movie star may have been exciting to some.  TV personalities did a lot of different things in their lifetimes.   I never learned to read music.  I had 2 ½ years of voice training in college.  I had to memorize everything I sang.  Those times I sang, I lacked confidence.  I asked a doctor one time what professional singers took for stuffy noses.  He told me they don’t have allergies.  That has plagued me all my life.   Just like having breathing problems, other things make people hesitate.  Taking a plunge when you don’t know how to swim has its consequences.   When we see old photographs or pictures, usually they are the most significant.  Most of the clutter in the bottom of the shoe box is a mix of the blurred and unlabeled photos that didn’t turn out very well.  Some have black edges.  Some are of people who blinked.  The real old ones have people staring so they wouldn’t move.  Very few Scandinavians smiled.  I suppose times were so bad, a lot of them didn’t want to show emotions very much.   I grew up in a community where people never hugged each other.  We did as small kids when we stubbed a toe and ran to mom for some tender security, but very seldom when we got bigger.   The old timers didn’t like the Italians, who talked loud, laughed a lot, and smiled.  That bravado would never make it in the stern area around here.  People did get noisy in the taverns, but sometimes that led to a punch in the mouth when someone got insulted.  No one took pictures of a grown up with a black eye.   Gwen’s relatives from Roseau did hug a lot without feeling guilty about it.   There are pictures of prize bulls and cows in some of those albums.  Way back in time, in the hay day of dairy farming around here, people didn’t like to spend money on film.  I think it may have been the expense of developing the pictures that held photography back.   No pictures were taken when men gathered in the barns trying to save a cow that was down with milk fever.  When dad was a teenager, the neighbors called him to come over with his bicycle tire pump and blow the cow’s bag up with air.  Wild animals and beef cows probably never get milk fever.  That’s when a dairy cow dumps huge amounts of milk down when she calves.  It disrupts the normal balance of calcium and electrolytes in her blood.  The only remedy years ago, was to inflate the udder with air to stop the milk flow.  No pictures were taken of cows with prolapsed uteruses after calving.  Hardly anyone took a picture of a calf with scours, or dead cows being dragged out of a barn.   How many pictures do you see of women scrubbing clothes in a tub of soapy water, or hanging shirts on the clothes line?  I’ve never seen a picture of a girl with an arm load of frozen clothes from the line, with frost on her lashes and tears on her cheeks, from the cold, winter wind.  None were taken of changing kid’s diapers.  None of sick babies, or messy houses.   A lot of people didn’t have many clothes or even a closet in those small houses.  With a bunch of kids, where would you put stuff in a small cabin?   Weeding the garden never shows up in pictures.  How many kinds of weeds are there?  I suppose quack grass or thistle were the most dreaded.  Picking potato bugs was talked about.  There aren’t any pictures of sweating people hilling potatoes.  In the big fields where potato diggers pulled by horses were used, there are pictures of endless rows of spuds on top of the ground.  I’ve never seen them of people trying to dig them in muddy fields.  They did it some years just to survive.  Those times may have been heartbreaking, and no one wanted to remember that in this clay country.   A lot of wood stoops and porches near here had a metal mud scrapper, for boots, nailed on the edge of a step.  We were warned not to fall on them.  It seemed we never walked.  We ran everywhere.  We did step on sharp things and got slivers.  I stepped on nails a few times.  It would have helped if we watched where we stepped, but being in a hurry, we got banged up.  The worst thing that could have happened was falling out of a tree.   There never were pictures of those things.  No pictures were taken by the family if someone drowned, or dragging a lake for a lost body.   No one took pictures of dad covered with grease on his many repair jobs.  Washing dishes and rendering lard on the kitchen range were not subjects of interest.   I’ve seen a few pictures of men working on saw rigs cutting firewood for winter.  Carrying it in was a chore.  Feeding the stove and carrying out those ashes were endless, too.  Some of those ashes were tossed on the snow over the garden.  It replaced the lime and potash when the garden was in the same spot for years.  That dust blows across the snow on the breeze and finally settles.  No one took pictures of that.   A small kid struggled to get into those old wool snowsuits, and sat grunting, trying to get his boots on, but were never thought of as an important photo subject.   The screen door slammed as the old spring pulled them.  That sound was always a signal that someone was coming if from the barn, the out house, or from doing chores.  The dogs barked when strangers came.   Dad coming home from work was an exciting time for us kids.  We had a chance to look in his lunch box for some cookies left over from lunch.  Mom knew us kids were home from our bike ride.  I know in the middle of the night those doors never slammed.  We never fell asleep late at night until we heard them close quietly, like our folks, either.   The little kids had a lot more pictures taken.  All the first birthdays and frosting covered faces were recorded.  All the weddings and anniversary parties are in the albums.  The floods and some huge snowdrifts are in there.   The hundreds of times the trees are snow covered or encased in frost, are seldom shot.  Every evening the sun goes down framed by the yard trees.  The old battered pine by our garden is silhouetted against the cloud studded sky or different colored sunset every evening.  I’ve meant to take a few pictures, but never have.   Babysitting got boring.  Grandmas were recruited to do that while doing other domestic chores.   There were miners who never got pictures taken of eating their monotonous lunches.  None as they swung their picks or swinging their shovels.  That was just boring work.   Men swung five pound double bit axes, limbing trees.  Day after day, they did the same monotonous job.  Bending over sawing trees down by hand and fighting bugs wasn’t much fun.  Once in awhile, a huge load of logs was stacked for a publicity photo.   Catching fish is fun.  But to commercial fishermen on the North Shore of Lake Superior, gutting the catch was a chore that had to be done.  That was never fun.   All our lives we were told in school not to waste time.  But how many times did we catch ourselves staring out the window or dozing off as the lessons droned on?  How many minutes did we really learn?  How much time was used lining up and marching down the hall?  How much time as adults, do we waste watching TV, reading books, fishing with no success, or riding in our cars, to and fro?   We take pictures of our trips the first time, but when we go back again, we take fewer and fewer.   Snowbirds go south and sit in a trailer park somewhere.  They get bored and try to do something that will revitalize some interest that’s lost with age.   Every different way everyone lives in all places in America has mundane unimportant things that are repeated over and over.  All that small stuff is never written about.  But it is truly our lives.   Things that were making us curious as toddlers get to be uninteresting in our old age.  Maybe that’s why we may spend our last years staring at the floor or out the window in a nursing home.   Our ancestors just stopped eating and faded away.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Friday, March 06, 2009   PEA SOUP AND 3 CENT STAMPS Dave Hanson   These ten minute stories are an easy way to kill time.  At my age, I shouldn’t kill any time at all, but I’ve gotten really lazy in my old age.  I’ve sat around more this winter than anytime in my life, and get a feel of how a lot of retired men use their time.   It’s not half bad.  I see people drive by with their snowmobiles on the pickup and I know they’re headed for the lake to fish crappies.  I should go, but just like summertime, when they go by with the boats in the evening, I don’t get around to it.   Gwen just remarked how nice the internet is.  She said she only uses about 10 stamps a month now that everyone is emailing.  I said I remember the purple 3 cent stamps and the penny postcards when I was young.  We had all those little rural post offices in years past.  There was a joke that all the postcards were read by the postmistresses.  It probably only took an hour or so to sort the mail, and load up the mail car in the morning, and another hour when the mail run was done, and the out going mail came back to the post office.   We never ate out much, years ago.  But when we went to Virginia with the folks for shopping, and dentist appointments, we got to go to Henley’s Café.  No malls were built yet, and all the businesses were on the main streets of every town and city.  Henley’s had chrome pipes to slide your tray on.  Women stood behind glass dividers, and you told them what you wanted.  They dished it up and handed each thing to you.  Your meal was totaled up at the till on the end, where you paid up and went to your table or booth to eat.  That was fast food in those days.  No menu to study, or waiting a half an hour to eat.   I don’t mind McDonalds once in awhile.  I  usually order the same thing every time.  A side salad and a gut buster, and a small strawberry shake.   We have hit just about every restaurant from International Falls to Ely, and Aurora.  All the rest are along the highway to the cities, or on trips.   I love grocery stores.  When our kids were small, I’d stop at one of the grocery stores in Cook on my way home from school.  Gwen said the kids liked it when I shopped, because a lot of stuff that wasn’t on the list, was in those bags.  I was hungry, just like most kids who get out of school, so everything looked good.  I did get a lot of candy and sweets.  That’s why I’m fat today.  I still eat the stuff other people call poison.  I hobble along beside Gwen and use the cart to hold me up going down the aisles.  When I walked by the pickled pigs’ feet I got a jar for about $4.  I tossed in a chunk of ham for $8.  That impulse pigs’ feet only lasted a couple of nights.  I sliced ham steaks and got a cereal bowl full of lard.  The other part, I chunked up and got a heaping cereal bowl full for sweet and sour ham.  I mix half Catalina dressing and half Karo syrup for that.  Gwen fried Denver sandwiches up using some of that diced ham.   I got a hankering for pea soup.  I do like the crock pot for some stuff, and I like to use the frying pan.  Gwen loves it when I cook once in awhile.  With a little water I boiled the ham bone.  After the meat fell off, I retrieved the bones and tossed them out.  After dumping in a bag of split peas, I just let it cook all night on low.  After a couple of meals the rest is frozen.   It’s usually a $20 bill after leaving a tip at a restaurant.  That $8 ham made a few meals already for two people.  And a lot is left over.  I can whip up a couple of fried steak, boil a couple of potatoes and warm up some veggies in about 20 or 30 minutes.  Just dump in a small can of mushrooms, dice up an onion, and then toss in the steak and fry that while the potatoes do their thing.  I never burn the steak or potatoes.  Sometimes I use some brown sugar on ham.  I like the sweet gravy.   That glue on the old stamps tasted terrible.  The ham, venison, and beef tastes good.  I don’t even mind picking the bones out of the smaller northern pike, which I prefer, over most fish.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Wednesday, March 04, 2009   A WALK IN THE SWAMP Dave Hanson   The Everglades are a different breed of swamps than we have in northern Minnesota.  We have more conifer covered bogs than any other state in the lower 48.  Looking at Google Earth, you can make out the Big Bog north of the Red Lakes in Minnesota.  It shows up as a grey spot even as you look at the map of all of North America.   A lot of ditches were dug on the peripheries of many swamps back in the work programs during the depression.  Some of the muskeg was drained, but most never made good farm land.  A lot of those ditches can be seen along the roads near Zim, Minnesota.  The peat was only a couple of feet thick for many square miles, but the sand underneath didn’t yield much more than grass for hay.  Very little is used today.   The geologists figured out years ago how they formed.  After the glaciers melted, there were shallow lakes that filled in with water weeds and reeds.  As the vegetation died and rotted, it settled in the water.  The brush and fallen trees from the edges rotted and slowly the shallow lakes filled with more and more decayed material.  Moss covered the whole area and as brush and grass formed a mat, trees like black spruce, that can stand acid conditions, finally covered the area with intertwining root masses.   I don’t know of anyone who has any desire to roam into these spruce swamps.  Even deer hunters usually don’t follow deer into those dark areas.   I have about 10 acres of cut over swamp on our land.  Before it was logged, there were many holes in between the trees which were void of roots.  The whole area under the trees was soupy black muck and water.  If a person stepped into those holes, they would have sunk.  That’s why we have two legs, so we can get snagged and won’t go down too far.  Joking aside, no one logs those moss covered areas until winter.   Just like the lakes around here, the swamps freeze 2 or 3 feet, and the ice, or frozen ground, will hold up most logging equipment most years.  If the snow comes before the ground freezes, it makes for difficult logging.  Dad told of cutting skid roads years ago.  They tramped the roads.  The snow insulates the ground, but as the men packed the roads, the frost went down and froze.  It took a few -30 or -40 degree nights to freeze up, but as they cut the spruce and walked around, there was time before the horses came in to skid the wood out.   As all the logging was done by hand, there were no heavy machines used as today.  During my time, after the trees were cut, we limbed them and laid two sticks of wood on the ground perpendicular to the road, and piled the 8 foot pulpwood off to each side.  Most of our roads were 8 to 12 feet wide, so the tractor and dray could get through, the same as when teams were used.   All the skid roads came out to a landing, or a clear area, where the main pile of pulp was piled.  Here it could be loaded on trucks and hauled to the railroad spur to be piled there.  Some was loaded directly off the trucks into a gondola car on the siding.  Just like today, all that wood had to be skidded before breakup, when the swamp thawed out.   After the swamps are logged, the land is as flat as a pancake.  Before the tree seedlings get too tall, the blueberry brush grows.  Most years the blossoms bloom and the frost kills them, so no berries form.  Some few years, the ground was blue with berries if the snow stayed late.  When the swamp thaws later in the spring, the berries bloom later and set fruit.   When my parents were kids, a lot of people depended on the wild fruit during the depression of the 1930’s.  It was not uncommon for families to can two, three, and sometimes 400 quarts of blueberries.  The larger the family, the more kids to help pick, and so more that was put up for winter.  Dad said Grandpa Hanson and he, camped in the blueberry swamp and picked for the traveling blueberry buyers, who bought them and hauled truck loads to the cities.   A lot of the berries were picked by the Indians.  Those berries were preferred because they pick them clean.  Most people like me, pick fast and dirty.  We get a few sticks and a lot of leaves, which have to be cleaned before we freeze them.  I made a foot wide, ¼ inch hardware cloth screen a few years ago, and rolled a half an ice cream pail of berries at a time down into a dishpan.  The green and small berries fall through, but I hate the leaves.  So this last summer I made a leaf blower out of a box fan blowing up through a sloped 1/8 in. hardware cloth screen.  That blows the leaves all over, but the berries roll out the end pretty clean.   The Big Bog is probably the largest swamp in the lower US, but we have some big swamps near here.  There are a lot near Nett Lake.  The biggest swamp near here is the Byzick Swamp in Willow Valley and Greaney.  It’s about 15 or 16 square miles in area.  Another one is about 4 square miles south of Clifford Shermers.  The swamp between Linden Grove and Sturgeon covers about 20 square miles.  The swamp south of Husby’s is about 5 square miles.  Most of those big swamps were never private property and are state land.   There are hundreds of small swamps on private property.  I’ll bet a lot of money, people who read this have logged some of those places in the winter, and people who are my age or older, picked blueberries and cranberries in some of that spongy, muskeg in the summer.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: don Simonson Sent: Monday, March 02, 2009   ISN’T IT NICE Dave Hanson   When mom and dad were first married in the late 1930’s, there were a lot of grouse.  We never called them that, it was always partridge.  Grandma Miller called them patridge.  They were plentiful.   Grandpa Hanson said the guys from St. Paul came up and sat on the front fenders of cars, and shot out of open windows.  They killed the birds and left them.  He figured that’s why they died out.   After the land was logged, it looked like a battlefield in those old photos when the settlers moved in this area.  After 20 or 30 years, the poplar grew back and supplied endless buds for the grouse to feed on in the wintertime.  They like birch buds, too.   Uncle Dick came down home, before I was born and took a small stick of firewood and whipped it up into a tree in the yard and killed one of six or seven partridges.  They were everywhere.   I don’t think those road hunters killed them out.  There weren’t enough roads to drive on.  The dynamics of the woods changed as the trees grew older.   It seemed the winters were colder, and the snow deeper, years ago. It seemed to be wetter in the summers, too.  That may have something to do with the balsam diseases we have now.  After logging, it seemed the poplar sprouted first, and then the balsam sprouted under them.  As the poplar took up most of the potash in the soil, they got punky in the center and the balsam grew tall, as the popal blew down.  When the balsam was mature, it got red rot, and the carpenter ants moved in for a year or two, and then they died and blew down.  I’ve seen that cycle repeat itself many times where the pulpwood isn’t harvested.   Grouse like the thick popal woods with little underbrush to nest.  They snuggle right down on the ground, and a person can walk a couple of feet away and never notice them.  A hawk would tear his wings off flying in that brush.  The grouse has a large tail and can navigate anywhere.  They like balsam trees to hide in.   We kids didn’t stray too far off the road on our bike trips.  After we got our .22’s, we ventured farther and farther back.  When in our teens, the lure of the deer beckoned us everywhere in the woods, as long as we could get back out before dark.   Sometimes a covey of baby partridge would run out on the road in front of us.  The mother would drag on her wing and try to lead us away.  When that didn’t work, she puffed up and the neck feathers would ruff out and she would charge.  Anything to protect her babies.  She may only weigh a pound or two, but we would back up.   The first time I went in the woods, dad told me when a bird is flushed, it flies a hundred feet or so, and when it hits the ground, it runs sideways.  That’s the fun when hunting, you don’t know which side it ran.   Dad had a cocker spaniel when he was a kid, and that dog would dive at the partridge and it would fly straight up in a tree and sit there.  As long as the dogs bark, they won’t fly.    Uncle Roy had sheep and cows just after the war.  On one part of the pasture between the house and the cedar grove was a patch of rock.  The Killdeers always nested there.  The eggs are just on the ground and look like round rocks.  When a cow or us kids walked near their nest, they would squawk and drag their wing to lead us away.  On our walk back to the house, they did the same thing again.   I bought some lumber from Arnie Hill, near Cook, one time and he said, “Come here, I want to show you something.”  There on the grey mildewed shavings were four round camouflaged eggs.  He had watched the killdeers for a couple of days and found the eggs.  We that grew up in the woods learned a lot about nature.   Those kids that grew up on the lakes learned a lot, too.  I remember a friend telling me he caught muskrats as soon as the ice was thick enough to walk on.  He chopped a hole in the ice and placed a trap near the hole.  He then built a snow and ice cavity above it.  Muskrats crawl out of the water to rest.  Knowing that, he caught them.  He would put wax paper on the ice next to shore where fox jumped down.  The trap was covered with white tissue paper and a little snow.  When the fox jumped down at night, headed for the frozen perch and minnows left by fishermen on the ice, it got caught in his traps.  Those kids knew more than most tourist fishermen.  They grew up on the water.   The Navaho kids that grew up in the southwest, played and learned in their environment, and learned how to survive there the same way.  With a few tips from dad and grandpa, and the other kids, they learned.   It was the same with the Lapps and the reindeer.  And the Norwegians with the fish nets and the open sea.   We were at the Luskeinen Festival on the weekend again this year.  We saw the birch bark shoes the people knew how to make in Finland.   The girls learned how to do all the food stuff in the homes the same way.  Those skills were never taught at school, but moms, older sisters, and grandmas were always giving tips and showing them other ways of doing things.   Each place on the planet had different rules of survival, and no one even thought of them as lessons.  It was just what people had always done.   Kids in town learn the same way.  Wherever you live, it’s just second nature, and never thought about.   Isn’t it nice to be alive?

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Saturday, February 28, 2009   NEVER GOT DONE Dave Hanson   The first fence I remember was a picket fence dad built to keep us little kids in the yard.  I don’t know if he did it before I was born in 1939, or right after we moved back to Gheen from California in 1946.  I do remember it rotting.  I was probably about 10 or 12 when we tore it down.  Dad had a bunch of 1x4 rough lumber, so one afternoon we started augering cedar posts down on two sides of our yard.  Dad had cut a bunch of cedar poles and the posts were notched about a foot off the ground and about 3 feet up.  Those poles were nailed in the notches for rails.  Dad nailed up the pickets and left each picket on the posts 6 inches high.  He hung a clothesline rope from post to post letting it sag in the middle.  He marked each picket and took the rope down.  With his chain saw the pickets were sawed off in a minute or two.  It was up to us kids to finish nailing up the pickets.  He laid a board on the ground to keep it off the soil.  We got a lot of practice nailing.  On the weekend he trimmed the pickets on the fence.  I can’t remember when that old fence fell apart.   When Grandpa Hanson moved to Gheen, he cut jack pine on the hill behind the barn.  Dad said when the big trees were cut, the young trees the size of a man’s arm, bent almost to the ground.  Grandpa cut the trees and built a pole fence.  A lot of the poles were 30 feet long.   There was a lot of cedar on the home place.  The cedar swamp was on the west forty north of the Greaney Road.  Dad and Uncle George went with grandpa and recalled splitting dead and down old growth cedar for posts.  Some of those split posts are still sticking up through the snow or slough grass all over this country after almost a century.  The barb wire has long rusted away, but some places wire that was put up in 1930 or the 1940’s still droops in some places.  That old cedar lying on the ground was the hard heartwood.  The soft new wood rotted, so the post lasted a lot longer than the second growth.  Round posts have only a two inch center of heartwood and the sapwood rots away in 10 or 15 years, so the fences fall over.  You hardly ever see cedar posts used today.   Gwen and I bummed around and saw fences out west that were made with whatever wood grew there.  Some of those posts are pretty gnarled.  It may be mesquite.  It’s so dry they seem to last forever.   We were in Mammoth Cave twice over the years.  On one trip we drove east and north through the Blue Grass Country of Kentucky.  If you want to see nice fences, that’s where you want to go.  White board fences for miles around those thoroughbred farms.   We have never gone to New England.  Some of that land is so full of rocks it must have been hard to make a living farming.  They cleared the rocks from the small fields and used them to make stone fences.  They do that dry wall work in England and Ireland and don’t use cement.  They didn’t have to go far for material, but had to keep tweaking the stones as frost pushed them around.   I remember seeing a picture of young Abe Lincoln splitting fence rails as a teenager.  Those were probably oak or hickory.   When I was about 25, dad got some cedar from Roy Tupy on land behind Earl Bixby’s farm.  It was hollow, but a couple of those trees were more than 3 feet on the stump.  One had a one foot hollow, but I counted 180 rings on the outside of the hole.  Dad used most of it for shingles.  The trees that were no good for shingles, I split for fence posts.  I was going to fence dad’s forty, but got married and never got it done.  There still is a pile on the north side of the road in the woods near Mary Lohn’s place.  They are moss and leaf covered and nearly rotted away.   I’m not the only man who had a dream and never even got started on some project like that.  We did waste a lot of effort getting ready, sometimes.   One for the money, two for the show, never got done.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: don Simonson Sent: Sunday, February 22, 2009   DON’T GET A BACKACHE Dave Hanson   I’ve heard all kinds of stories of where the Indians camped on their travels.  When I’ve been on the lakes, there are campsites all over.  One man told me the Indians set up camp in the low land and not the high ground, because lightning hit the tall trees on the ledges.  I’ve seen Black Ash in the swamps that were split by lightning, so lightning hits wherever it wants.  I think maybe the smoke from the fires settled out and filled the small lowlands and maybe kept the mosquitoes away.   It seems the south shores of the lakes around here are preferred.  I suppose it’s because of the prevailing winds from the northwest keep it cooler in the summer.  Maybe it’s the glaciers that came from the north and left rougher ground on the north shores, and the sandy beaches more on the south.   When a person buys a lake lot, they build facing the lake no matter what direction it faces.  Nearly always, there is a picture window and a living room facing the lake.   When building a house on a large piece of property, a person has a choice.  If there is a nice view, you can build with your big windows facing the scenery.  If you want the sun waking you each morning, you can have your bedroom facing east.  Sometimes a west facing living room gets pretty hot in the summer afternoons, and the blinds are pulled every sundown.   I’ve been told never to build a deck on the north side of the house, because it’s shady and damp.  We didn’t want ours to face the road.  How many people do you see on a deck facing a road?  Not many, but on a lake, everyone uses their decks a lot more.  Some decks do get cluttered with swings, lawn chairs, and grills.  And when it cools down, the bugs can chase a person in.  On the lakes there seems to always be a breeze to chase the bugs away.  Privacy is an issue with some people.  Screen walls can be built, too.   We built on the north.  It’s kind of nice back there.  Its cool, which I like, and there seems to be enough breeze to keep bugs at bay most of the time.  I never sit out there when there is snow on the pumpkins.   The houses years ago weren’t insulated.  The log walls were thicker, so they were warmer than the frame houses.  They did have to chink between the logs back then, just like today.  The frame houses cooled off faster when the fires died down or went out.  I’ve seen pictures where people nailed up newspapers and cardboard on the walls during the depression to try to seal the houses up a little.  People planted needle trees on the north sides of the yard for wind breaks, and leaf trees on the south, for shade in the summer, and after the leaves fell, for sunlight in the winter time.  The overhanging eves shaded the house in the summer when the sun was high, and let sunlight in when the sun was low in the winter.   Everyone has so many choices now, when building, that none of those old ideas have to be taken into consideration.  We have automatic furnaces and air conditioners.  We have automatic water pumps and drilled wells.  Most of us who own our own homes have enough money to pay our power and fuel bills without thinking much about it.  We wouldn’t want to go back, like in the good old days.   The first time we went to Mesa, Arizona, we saw a Navaho boy riding a horse through the sage brush.  It must have been a hundred above.  We noticed a lot of trailer houses, but most had a Hogan nearby.  The traditional home was logs standing in a circle with logs across the roof.  The whole thing was covered with a thick layer of soil.  They were cool in the summer.   Didn’t the Ingles have a dugout in a clay bank, before they built the Little House on the Prairie?   The pioneers had no lumber, so they built the sod houses on the prairie.  There still are some of those old houses that were plastered with stucco and remodeled that are lived in today.   The Mexicans used adobe brick and tile roofs on the haciendas in the south west.   There weren’t many caves in the caveman days so they invented huts of all kinds and the teepees that could be taken down and moved.  The Lapps had teepees just like all the Siberians who herded reindeer.  The Indians took that idea with them to the Americas.  As long as people move, they have to make camp in a hurry.   The woodland Indians built bark wigwams, which were sewn up with split tamarack or spruce roots.  They made the canoes the same way and melted pitch to seal the seams.   In the tropics the homes were built with roofs, but had air circulating through them.   I don’t know of any people anywhere that sleep directly on the ground.  Even the Eskimos had fur hides to sleep on.   A bit of wisdom from my good ole dad.  If you go camping, dig a small depression for your butt or hip so you don’t get a backache when you wake up.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Saturday, February 21, 2009   AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE Dave Hanson   I never ran into life scared.   A couple of generations ago, kids my age worked at a lot of different things to get money to go to college.   I know some guys were lucky enough to get work on the extra gang on the railroad up here.  That was grueling work.  There is no shade in the summer heat tamping ties.  Those ties are heavy and the creosote burned the skin.  It must have been hard on the blond, light skinned kids that couldn’t tan.  The boys always had higher paying jobs than the girls, even if it was harder as labor goes.   A lot of kids worked at cutting pulpwood, and a few may have worked at someone’s sawmill.  All these were temporary summer jobs, and some didn’t last all summer.  So, we worked at anything we could get.  Some were farm hands, some worked for themselves and cut hay and sold it.   I knew kids that worked as dock boys and guided.  They sometimes made more on tips than on their wages.   Some kids had come up with their own money making ideas.   When I went to UMD, one kid from Grand Marais made necklaces and earring jewelry by soaking moose turds in epoxy cement.  He took a pail in the woods and gathered his material.  When they were lacquered he mounted them on white cardboard and sold them for $1.50 a set in Duluth.   Another kid from Ely cut birch fireplace wood and boxed it up.  It seemed every gas station in Duluth was selling that for $1.00 a box.   One guy from Gheen cut pulpwood and trapped and sold minnows to finance his college.  He became a chemical engineer and worked for the oil companies.  He later became a high school chemistry teacher.   I knew kids that got summer work in the mines on the Range.   Some kids worked for professors correcting papers.  I suppose that was on the job training, but it saved the teachers a lot of work for a few dollars.   John Harris, from International Falls made deliveries every evening for a liquor store in Virginia.   A couple of guys got summer work mowing grass and odd jobs working for the St. Louis County Schools.   James Welsh, and I’m not sure if it was George Milkovich, from Virginia were good readers and had nice voices.  They worked at the radio station.   My cousin sold hay, and painted water towers.  No one else wanted that job, but he wasn’t afraid, so that worked out well.   I know some girls cleaned cabins at some resorts.  Some cooked, some were waitresses.  The girls’ wages never seemed to be as good as the men in those days, but some made good on tips.   I cut pulp, worked in the grain door factory, did carpenter work, plumbed cabins, dug graves by hand, and did any small labor job that came along in the summer.   I washed dishes every noon in the hot lunch room in Virginia High School for a free lunch each day.  After school I washed dishes and prepared food and ice cream toppings at Bridgeman’s Ice Cream Store.   Most of the kids I knew worked in the summer and some worked evening jobs during the school year.   Rudy DeLuca and his buddy cut wrecked cars in half and welded them back together and sold them.  I think they worked at the station where Flip’s Auto is now near Falkowski’s in Virginia.  I’m not sure if he was in on it, but his friend was scuba diving in Lake Vermilion and bringing up out board motors.  They overhauled them and sold them to make a few bucks.   In 1962 or 1963, there were 100,000 people in Duluth.  The steel mill was still in operation and the air base was still there.  Those years weren’t any better than it is now.  There were 8,000 men unemployed.   I was running out of money and answered an ad for a gas station attendant down under the high bridge in Duluth across from the old Goldfine’s store.  It was from midnight until morning.  I went down and got the job.  I figured I could get robbed there, but we were married, and had Danny, so I needed that job.  On the way home, I pulled into the Kitchi Gammi Club by the lake and asked for a waiter job there.  Wally Laakkonen told me about the job.  He was working at Perkins Pancake House.  He told me someone had quit and moved to the cities.   Old man Pettyjohn was the head honcho at the millionaire’s club.  I got hired.  I drove up the hill and announced to Gwen that I had two jobs.  I called the gas station and bailed out of that, without ever working there at all.   The waiter job only paid $1.00 an hour, so I sure never made much.  In the four months I worked there, I only got a $1.00 tip.  I know why some people are rich.  They don’t give their money away.   At UMD I was talking to a kid from Hibbing that I knew from Virginia Junior College.  We were talking about what we did during the summer.  I think his dad worked in the mines or was a cement man.  I told him dad and I were building houses and cabins and laying block, did the carpentry work, and plumbed the places on the lakes.  He called me a scab.  They may be union people on the range, but up here most people did anything they could to make a living.  We never had a union boss getting jobs for us, so we did whatever came along.   He was married, like me, and going to college, too.  One day I drove by and there he was working on his stalled car in front of his apartment.  I said to myself, he didn’t hire a union mechanic to fix his car.   Gwen and I were walking around in Walmart a few months ago, and who do you think I bumped into?  The Scab Man.  He worked in the cities teaching and now he was retired, too.  I asked him what he was up to, and he said he was doing a few cement block jobs.  There must be some union masons on the Range that could have used that money.    I joined the carpenters union in Virginia in 1976, and worked at Mintac.   When I started teaching there were a lot of teachers with two year degrees.  A lot of them were married, and would have worked for near to nothing, like volunteers  do today.  The only option for the teachers was to join the MEA.  That organization was run mainly by college professors, and,  maybe school boards.  We were the lowest paid college graduates.  Maybe teachers still are.   Xavier Matti, Vince Matti, Vern Nelson, Conrad Lahtigar, and myself met in a basement room, I don’t recall what  building, and started the St. Louis County Federation of Teachers.  After our union picked negotiators and started planning our strategy, our wages came up to nearly par with the schools in the twin cities.  There were a couple of more people there at that meeting, but I never knew their names.  Being in that union gave us options for retirement and liability insurance.   I did build fireplaces in the summer.  Mostly in places where no one else wanted to go.  I never took a job away from anyone.  I even was a chainsaw man in the woods a few times.  They asked me to do it, because they couldn’t get anyone else to work when they needed them.  All the other good men were working already.   I wonder if the man remembered our encounter nearly 50 years ago.  I did.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2009   TOP DOG Dave Hanson   As a kid in the late 1940’s and 1950’s, I was scared stiff by stories we were bombarded with, about the Soviets dominating the Atomic Age.  That’s all we heard on the news.  I remember the old timers here, blaming all the cancer on the atomic fallout from the tests in Nevada.  There were a lot of tests, but after they tested the hydrogen bombs, most government officials saw the danger and those tests became more infrequent.   I’m not sure that the Lapps in Scandinavia or the Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert of Africa were anymore concerned about that, than the penguins on the Antarctic.  To them, surviving in the age old way was more important.   Who holds the high ground?  Who holds the mountain pass?  Who owns the well in the Sahara?   The harsher the way of life was what seemed to dominate competition.  Those people who lived in relatively sparse settled areas, never seemed to depend on others to protect them.   There always was uneasiness when the river people had to keep an eye on the raiders from the desert.  There was an eye on the horsemen from the north in China.  The cities built a wall to try to keep the Mongols away from civilization.   Who do we as little people look up to, to keep us safe?  The top dog can raise an army.  There lies the power.  It never was the most stupid person who rose to the top.  But, because of power and wealth, they were probably the most hated by the masses.    The chieftain battled the chieftain.  Village fought village.  That was the history of my ancestors.  I think my folks were always the underdogs.  They were the peasants who tried to survive, and did so.   There was always a rivalry between evil and good.  The ancient empires were always good according to their historians, and the other empire was always evil.  After the Roman Empire collapsed, the Roman Catholic Church emerged as the protector of man over evil.   The great protestor, Martin Luther, questioned the rulers of the church.  A long good versus evil war, was waged in Europe.  Wars were fought, heads rolled, witches were burned at the stake.  Who was good and who was evil?  It seemed that was the cruelest time in church history.  People thought nothing of torturing people to get them to admit to things they never did, or even thought.  The Iron Maiden was feared as much as the Rack where people were torn apart.  Did you hear about Europeans quartering a man by chaining each arm and leg to work horses and being pulled apart?   A lot of things have been written and said trying to defend good and evil.   Warriors picked the chief.  Later, kings were picked by all the chiefs.  King fought the other evil king.  The guy on the other side of the mountain or hill was always the evil one.   Later, the kings were evil and overthrown by the good people.  So it was democracy over royalty.  Then came socialism and communism.  To the communists, we were the evil people.  To the democracy the soviets were evil.  Then came the depressions, and the people with businesses and who had saved their profits, became evil.  The Nazi’s decided the Jews were evil and stole everything, and tried to exterminate them.  They nearly succeeded, but they became the evil ones themselves.   The democracies were the good people who waged a terrible war to conquer the bad guys.   When I was going to college and then started teaching, I was introduced to some books by another teacher, who is my friend.  He told me about the “Status Seeker,” and “The Ugly American.”  The status seeker is a person who works his way up in the social system.  You know the guy with the rags to riches story, the guy with the big house, the swimming pool and a Cadillac in the front yard.  The ugly American was the tourist that flaunted his wealth in some poor country, lighting a big cigar with a $20 bill.  Those ideas made me, as an ignorant country boy, think a lot.   Gwen and I walked the streets of Virginia, Minnesota, and looked at all the nice beautiful houses on the south side.  We wondered if we ever would have enough money to live like that.   I never did let myself become envious of the well to do people.  I always thought of the circumstances that led those people to their success.   There are a lot of people that think like me.  It’s OK to inherit money.  That’s an American dream, and no different than a person being able to pay for your kid’s college.  If you die with a little left over, there is nothing wrong with leaving it to the kids.   To some people the huge corporations were evil.  Those companies made money from the workers’ labor.  Some felt they had no right to make more money than the miners did.  They can wait us out if we strike.  “I’ll fix them.”  “Every night when I go home, I’ll take a wrench, or a lunch box full of bolts or nuts.”  Many welding outfits disappeared from the mines and show up at auctions, after they die.    To some, it was the labor unions that were evil. The free enterprise group were the ones who were evil to the working men.   Getting rich quick was the dream of a lot of people.  Everyone wanted to get rich.  Win the lottery was fast.  People still try.   Gambling is evil to some people, but most farmers are religious.  To me, they are the biggest gamblers, because of weather and fluctuating prices.  Are they evil or good?   Gold is high priced now.  Is it a gamble to finance a gold mine in this day and age?   To the unemployed, people who hire people are greedy and evil.  To unemployed people, other people should be punished and be forced to give money to the poor.   Who will take the brunt of the wind?  The tree that fought its way to the top is lashed and bashed by the storm.  The little ones on the bottom stand there protected by the mighty arms of the oak and hardly feel the breeze.  When the ancient oak and protector falls, they will all have to fight each other to rise to the top.   Some people figure the system out and try to beat it.  Some try to get someone to trust them with their money, so they can build a big house.  Some rent a motor home for a week.  Some play the part of the wealthy.   Some break promises and never pay their debts.  It comes home to haunt them.  Who is evil, the pretender or the realist?   If you are as old as I am, you’ve seen a lot of these things in your lifetime.   History should be studied, so people in power, and people not in power, won’t repeat mistakes.   Is failure evil?  Is success good?  Can failure be a good lesson?  Can success be evil to some people?   The school board, related to the teachers’ union negotiators Democrats or Republicans High school rivals, Virginia vs. Eveleth My dog, your dog Deer, on what side of the fence Lutefisk-is it good or bad   Before you mess something up, thmink!   I’m propped up here in my recliner listening to the theme song of Dr. Zivago on Escape Channel 820, Direct TV.  This must be what an “armchair philosopher” is.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2009 A RISK Dave Hanson   When Columbus sailed, he had to do a lot of thinking before he took his venture.  He didn’t have any ships of his own.  To my knowledge, he didn’t have much money, either.  He went to the merchants in Genoa, where he was from, but the Italians there would not take a risk on what he was talking about.  He finally convinced the Spanish to give him three old ships, and enough money to pay for his supplies and his men.   At that time, I don’t know how rich Spain was.  They got repaid after the army took over Mexico and Peru.  That was a gamble that paid off.   When Magellan sailed around the world with his expedition, he stayed on an island in the Pacific Ocean a couple of minutes too long and may have been eaten.  His men got back to the ship and returned home.  His gamble didn’t pay off.   Napoleon gambled many times and won most of the time.  He did gamble, and the snows of Russia beat him back.  A lot of his men didn’t make it home and were left frozen stiff in the snow.  He did meet his Waterloo.   Thomas Jefferson gambled a few million dollars on the Louisiana Purchase a few years before and doubled the size of the United States.  It seemed a lot of things like that are not necessary.   Sometimes, when your back is against the wall, you are almost forced to gamble, and hope it turns out OK.  When the weather got cold and wet, the Irish took a chance and planted potatoes.  Not only once, but year after year.  The spuds rotted in the ground.  I wonder how many times in the past our ancestors had a hard time falling asleep because the starving kids cried all night.  They had a couple of hundred pounds of barley for seed, but had to save it for the next spring.  Do I keep all my kids alive, or gamble on a good crop next year?   I read a true story of an Eskimo mother, whose husband never came back from a hunt in northeast Canada.  She nursed her baby until she had no milk left.  To save the baby, she cut off her finger and let the baby suck the blood.  When the people found her, she was frozen.  They knew what she did trying to save her baby.  I suppose she felt her husband may come home in time.   Today we can take a lot of risks without having much of a bad consequence.  Going to college is costly.  If a kid runs out of money, or flunks out, they just forget it and chalk it up as a bad experience.  Maybe they got a loan, or the folks put up the money.  When a kid is working and saving their own money, they probably will work harder at school, and maybe take up some kind of classes that will land them a job.  How many kids went to college and took up something they liked, just to find out they would never get a job in that field?  That wasn’t even a gamble.  There was no future in it from the start.   About 20 years ago, I started telling people that to graduate from college, everyone should be required to take at least two business classes.  Even if they never went into business, they would have a good understanding of risks.  Do colleges ever teach anyone to work for themselves?  It seems even in business schools, they teach people how to be hired by someone else.  It seems to me, that a lot of business owners never went to college, and some never graduated from high school.  They started out shoveling snow off sidewalks and worked and learned and took over a business once they grew up.  I suppose that’s where the saying, “starting from the ground up,” started.   Those that do graduate with a business degree can move into larger and larger businesses and can earn millions of dollars a year.  They do take risks.  But is it with their own money?  If they don’t get it right, they fade away, if they do gamble and get it right, the company makes money and they get rewarded.   A lot of the kids my age didn’t get help to go to college.  It seemed to be a lot more inexpensive in those times.  The universities didn’t spend millions of dollars on office buildings.  Most of the buildings were for the students.  It seemed the only kids that got scholarships were the ones who had parents who had gone to college.  We didn’t know how to apply for them.  We didn’t have councilors in the schools.   I didn’t know what to take.  Dean Gilbert Staupe asked me, “What do you want to take as a major?”  I said, “I don’t know.”  So he gave me an aptitude test.  He said, “You’d make a good shop teacher.”  I said, “I’ve been doing carpenter work, and I’d like to do something else.”  So the next best thing would have been to be a salesman for farm machinery.  I didn’t want that.  Maybe I should have and sold potato machinery in the Red River Valley.  Staupe said, “O.K., we’ll sign you up for SLA.  Science, Literature, and art.  That ended up being general ed.  That’s what everyone does in the first two years of college anyway.  When you specialize in something, you do that the next two years.  I liked biology, so I majored in that, and minored in geography, which I like also.  I got to thinking about getting a job, so I switched to majoring in teaching.  It was a gamble, but my odds were better with elementary ed. then biology.  I got hired on my first interview.   Some things are risky.  Skydiving has its drawbacks, bungee jumping has some risks, too.  Mountain climbing can be chancy.  Racecar driving, boxing, gambling at the casino, lottery tickets, blind dates, or eating in Mexico.  Some are gut wrenching, and some have no physical pain, but something can kill you if they go wrong.   We hesitated for a couple of years before we set up the greenhouse.  Gary Rantala, from Embarrass, got us thinking about it.  We owe him a lot for his help and information.  We decided last year that we should spend more time for ourselves.  It took up 10 years of our retirement.  So as long as we can still get around, we should poke around the country, and do other ventures.   Now with the climate the way it is, I’m glad we made that choice.  Fuel, plastic containers, soil mix, electricity, liability insurance, seed, nursery seedlings and rooted cuttings, mileage to get that stuff, and UPS, Speedy, Fed Ex, maintenance on fans, water pumps, electric lights, and time.  A lot of time.  We started seeds in January in the basement.  I had 36 shop lights down there.  As that stuff grows, it has to be transplanted.  Gwen could transplant 2000 seedlings a day into four packs.  I transplanted most of the big stuff.  But you have to water everything.  Each thing is different, so some can take a lot and some things rot off, so you can’t depend on someone else watering.  Why take a risk of getting caught with our three greenhouses full of stuff at the end of the year?  Our expenses were about $11,000 a year, so we had to sell that much to break even.  If we only sold $11,200 we would make $200 profit at the end, and throw all the rest away.   If you think those business people have a worry free income, think again.  If you think a farmer makes a lot, or a logger, think about how much he has to get to break even.   There are a lot of gamblers out there.  There are a lot of risks, too.  There may be some profit, too.  You don’t have much money in a couple of dozen bird houses, but you may take a long time getting your money back.   Those that built big houses to sell for a profit and retirement took a risk.  Those that built a hundred big houses took a risk in selling all of them.   Politicians took a risk by bailing out the banks that made loans to all the people.  That was someone else’s money, so it won’t hurt them if it doesn’t work.  Even if they get voted out, most have a risk free retirement.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Sunday, February 15, 2009   I DON’T KNOW Dave Hanson   To most people, there isn’t an urge to be perfect in any one area.  To most people, there isn’t any need to be perfect in doing a lot of things.  There isn’t anyone who would truly be a “Jack of All Trades.”  Maybe they are good in the things they do, but nobody can be perfect in everything.  Even a perfectionist would have to give in at some time, if they didn’t, they would be so incensed in perfection they wouldn’t get anything done.   Every carpenter makes some mistakes.  Those that leave the mistake aren’t very conscientious.  Those that correct their mistakes are very good.  But if they spent all their time perfecting everything, they wouldn’t work by the hour, and if contracting, they would take so long they would never make any money.   The same with a true historian.  If there was no bias in history, everything written would be true.  A true historian goes back and researches everything he reads.  You can memorize events and dates, but they are not always accurate.  Especially far back in time.  A lot of prehistory is taken as history, even if it was never recorded.  Some of that isn’t accurate.   Some say science is an art.  I think that’s true.  Assumption and theories are assumed to be science.  Pure science is always proved and cannot be argued.   I’ve never gotten into reading romance and non-fiction stories.  I can daydream and make up enough maybe ideas, without reading about other’s dreams.   Non-fiction has given me a lot of pleasure thinking, if it is true.  I’m not a critic and a know-it-all.  Sometimes in a friendly debate, I do try to trick up someone by taking the opposite side, even if I don’t believe in it.   As a kid of about 10 years old, I started thinking about things we were discussing in school.  Erosion was talked about, and contour plowing and crop rotation were subjects I remember.  We had a few movies in school, once a month or so.  They showed the people in Appalachia plowing sloping hills and the soil washed away.  They showed the dust blowing in the Great Plaines during the depression.  It was to teach how man has destroyed the land, and how they could plant trees and wind breaks, and not plow right up to the edge of hills to save the soil.   What hit my mind was that the tops of all those buttes and mesas were level.  Where did all the soil go from Canada to Texas that was between the high hills?  It had washed down the rivers to form hundreds of miles of land in the Mississippi Valley.  As I lived a little longer, I learned about the greatest erosion that had ever taken place.  That was the glaciers of our many Ice Ages that have come and gone.   That ice didn’t only dig out the Great Lakes and all the fiords we know today, but covered up lakes and depressions that were left from the times of volcanoes, earthquakes, ancient seas, and the ice ages that were here before.   My Uncle George was deep underground in Redding, California, in his gold mine, years ago digging gravel out of the bottom of an ancient river that had been buried by some ancient glacier as the ice melted.  California had glaciers in the mountains, also.  That dirt was eroded by ice.   When I went to UMD, I had my most interesting class in all my college days.  Dr. Heller was the teacher of my historical geology class.  There is a history, so to speak, of the changes that have happened to planet earth.  With all this information, we can never learn much in three months.   Mountain building is an awesome thing, but when they wear away, that’s even more mind boggling.   When we were little kids, the missionaries, at the old mission in Gheen, told us kids, “If a bird took one grain of sand off a mountain once every thousand years, and when the mountain was all gone, that was one day in God’s heaven.”   We learned in that geology class that all the highest mountains are the youngest.  The Appalachians are old.  They are made up of limestone, and sandstone from an ancient mountain range that was east, in the Atlantic, and eroded into that sand that built the sea bottom that was pushed up to become the Appalachians.   Leonardo DeVinci was a genius that not many today would argue.  But in his time, little was known about strange scientific things.  While he was up in the Italian Alps, he noticed all the fossils in the rock.  He didn’t look very carefully.  He stated they were bones left from the great flood of the Bible.  Today they are the fossils of ancient sea bottom that were pushed up when the Alps were formed.   I have a four inch fish fossil from the Colorado Mountains, when that layer of rock was sea bottom.  Shark teeth have been found in the sea bottom rock of the Buhl iron mines.  More and more fossils are found as you travel west on the Iron Range.   Erosion took place all over the world since it was first formed.  It’s built up, eroded away, and built up again.   Man has had little effect on this planet.  We haven’t had time to do much.  If people build pyramids in the desert they last a long time.  If they build huge highways in Minnesota, they don’t last long.  If people build cities in swamps, they sink, if in flood plains, they flood.  Man stands there scratching his head, like Darwin’s chimp, wondering what went wrong.   Man can’t control the wind, the water, or the ice.  They tried to seed the clouds with iodine crystals to create rain during drought.  That never worked.  They tried to build levies to contain the rivers.  That never seems to work either, when the theme of things does its own thing.   What we think of science always comes up with unexpected things, we, with our tiny minds, never thought about.  We as mere people will never know much of anything, compared to what is out there in God’s Universe.   It’s fun to think of what has been discovered, and it’s fun to think what’s in the future.  We have been blessed with a thinking mind, but we have been blessed with endless things to think about and study, too.   When people used to say, “It’s universal,” a term we don’t hear much today, they were right and they were wrong, both at the same time.   Only some greater power than man regulates the large and infinitesimally small things we know, may know someday, and never will know.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2009   VOICE OF AMERICA Dave Hanson   When I was a kid and old enough to listen to grown ups, I remember Wheeling, Pennsylvania, as being a town where galvanized steel was produced.  They were famous for roofing steel and galvanized garbage cans.  There was only a small amount of plastic being made in those days.  I don’t think any of my grandparents would have imagined that so much plastic would be produced, like today.   It wasn’t until I saw the movie, “The Deer Hunter”, that I realized that the steel belt towns out east had the same ethnic groups as our Iron Range towns in Minnesota.   When you turned on the radio in the 1960’s, you knew they were broadcasting from Virginia, Eveleth, or Hibbing.  I suppose that accent came from the Italians, Croatian, Serbs, and Slovenians who almost dominated the mining districts here.   I grew up with the heavy Swede accent in Willow Valley.  We heard the Finn accent in surrounding areas around here.  After I married Gwen, we used to visit Roseau, where her family came from.  No one up there realized they had the same accent of the eastern North Dakota and Red River Valley, that the other Swede and Norwegian people had.   Dad told about teasing a man from Arkansas about his accent, in the early 1950’s.  No one got angry, but he told dad that he sounded funny, too.   Dad said that the standard for radio announcers was the clear speech of the mid west.   When he was working out east during the war years, he had contact with some of the New Englanders.  Remember President Kennedy, from the Boston area, pronounced Cuba as Cuber.  They do have their way of saying words that end in A.   In the movies, James Cagney was the tough talking gangster, and always sounded like a cab driver from the Bronx.  It seems each area in New York City had a different accent.  Those that lived there years ago could tell the difference.   The tourists that came up here from Iowa had their unique sound, too.  Some of those Iowa farmers were joked about.  They didn’t like to let go of their money and would stop at every gas station and put in a couple of bucks worth of gas.  One man told me a car load of people stopped at the Standard Station in Cook and got a dollar’s worth of gas and asked if the attendant would put a quart of oil in the car.  He had taken a case of oil from the farm, so he had his own to save a few cents.   The people from the Ozarks had a distinct sound, too.  I suppose the Irish, English, Scotts, and German people from Kentucky and Tennessee moved into Oklahoma and Arkansas and took that accent with them.   During WWII, the boys from all over the country were thrown together with all these different people from the United States.   I don’t know where the people from the Carolinas, Alabama, and Georgia got their accent.  Maybe it was from the English plantation owners, and nearly 90 percent slave population at one time, from Africa.  When the slaves were freed, many migrated to the northern cities to work in the factories, took their jive with them.  When you hear a black person talk, from Canada or Great Britain, they sound what we think of as perfect English.  When Mohamed Ali’s daughter talks about Parkinson’s disease, she sounds perfect, also.  You would never know she was a minority, if you didn’t know she was from such a famous family.   With the advent of Country Western music, came the imitators of the Nashville natives.   I remember the disc jockey from Grand Rapids who tried so hard to sound and imitate country that she was funny.  People did start wearing cowboy boots and rhinestone cowboy shirts when they sang those songs.  They sound just like you and I in real life, but twang out those Grand ole Opery songs.   There is a tenor sing song sound of the Native Americans.  I always have had a feeling, which I have no proof of, that the Indians came here long before the last ice age.  For sure, they came from Asia.  It may have been in a global warming time, but just like now, it still got cold each winter.  It may have been in an ice age.  Those people in the northern regions of Asia always followed the deer and game.  They always knew how to dress for the cold.  When I sit and eat at one of the Chinese restaurants, I hear that same sing song way of talking as the kids fold napkins or talk to the cooks on their way to the kitchen.  Now we hear the Mexican accent creeping into our language.   When the book “Roots” came out, it seems the rest of America became interested in genealogy.  The people from the cities could have cared less.  When introduced to strangers, just a first name was given.  After “Roots”, people became interested in their heritage.   The people around here were always interested, and wanted to know the person’s last name.  The son, or sen, was Swede or Norwegian.  Kangas, Neimi, Paavala, Nissinen, Maki, Ongalo were common Finn type names.   Those ending in sky were Polish, and the Slaves were ending in litch or vich.  We had fun trying to guess where the ancestors came from.   Why is it that they have someone with an English accent to advertise stuff on TV?  They must be more intelligent than the average American.  Public radio has some of those announcers that try hard to speak with an English accent, too.   Even the History Channel has stories of haunted houses, crop circles, and UFO’s coming from England.  They must all be true, because they are filmed in England.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Tuesday, February 10, 2009   A QUEST Dave Hanson   Curiosity is a funny thing.  I suppose we would all be gatherer-hunters like our ancestors, if we didn’t have such a trait.  As little kids, we wouldn’t have pestered our parents for information they knew, if we didn’t want to know things we were ignorant about.  We became the great imitators of our parents because of all those ideas we gleaned from their minds.   A few times at school, I told the kids that some of my ideas I passed on to them were from my grandmothers who passed those ideas on to my folks.  Those ideas are not mine.  They have been passed down from generation after generation.  When we think about it that way, I have ancestors from all the Northern European areas.  So some of those ideas came from Sweden, Norway, Finland, Belgium, and only God knows where.  I have common ancestors with most of you who read this.  Your ideas came from our combined ancestors.   Curiosity is, then, one awesome idea.   One, of many, things I can’t get out of my mind is, who was Hank Saunders.  Saunder’s Bay, in Pelican Lake, is named after the logger who had a logging camp south of Pelican Lake in the late 1880’s.   The first time I read about him was at the Virginia Historical House in the park in Virginia.  While researching the Virginia Rainy Lake Company, I came across a paper written by Kenny Perala, of Orr, that mentioned that Leslie Beatty had talked to Saunders in the very early 1900’s.   Saunders tried to float his pine logs down Pelican River to Kenora, but they spread out in the wild rice beds north of Buyck.  So he used teams of oxen and horses to sleigh them down to Willow River, and float them to Canada on the Littlefork River.  He cut up to fifteen million board feet of logs a year.   I went to UMD and looked at some info there, but found nothing.  At Virginia, I noted that he was from Washburn, Wisconsin.  So one day before we opened the greenhouse, and Gwen was transplanting, I took off to look for my man.  With snow in the street, at Washburn, I stopped at the barber shop and asked the men in there about the Saunder’s name.  They directed me to the history man in town, who invited me in for a cup of coffee.  After he got off the phone, he took me over to the museum which was locked up.  I think it was an old school that had been shut down.  After pouring over some old journals, the name Saunders came up at Bayfield.  So after an hour or two researching, I drove up to Bayfield.  There was a meeting going on at that museum so I waited.  A lady came out and I related my story.  She got excited and called her husband.  As a boy, a few years older than me, he had an older friend named Saunders who ran the projector at the local theater.  He had been killed in World War II.  His father and brother were fishermen at that time on Lake Superior.  That was the end of that, they were not related in any way to the man I sought.   I next drove down to the interpretative center near Ashland, where a lady helped me look through the census documents.  I found nothing, but she told me of Washburn Co., Wisconsin.   I’ll have to check out the genealogical societies, and go back to UMD where the St. Louis County historical records are kept.  All that old information is not computerized, as it would take hundreds of thousands of hours to type all the information.  Even thousands of hours to scan it.   What I think I know is that Saunders was a contractor from Duluth and was building in Tower when he ran out of lumber.  He then went into logging pine.    He sold his wood to Rat Portage Lumber Company, which was in what today is Kenora.  In those days of 1880’s, there were no roads, so all the supplies came from Two Harbors on the railroad that carried iron from Tower to Lake Superior.   As he was prominent in Duluth, I’ll have to look up funerals.  He was married, and I think he had two daughters, so it’s hard when I don’t know his first name.  Hank is a nickname that was common for different names back then.   It’s not important, but it bugs me when I look at the woods north of me where his camp was.  If I can find his obituary, it would tell a little of his life, and bring a part of history back.  He was a real live man 125 years ago.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Sunday, February 08, 2009   MOSQUITO SEASON Dave Hanson   I just found some notes I had mom write in the late 1980’s.  They were in a box of stuff I hadn’t looked at for a long time.   August Grund had a steam driven saw mill a quarter of a mile south of the Gheen Corner on the Palmer place.  The mill had a complete lumber making outfit.  August operated from 1915 to 1930, and sawed lumber for all the houses in Willow Valley.  Our house here, where mom lived, was built by my grandfather in 1918.   Lind had a logging camp on the south side of Willow River in either section 7 or 8.  He maintained an ice road following the river that went into old Gheen.  Lind logged with horses.  He had a way station on Rohn’s place, where Shirley Lund lives today.  They had barns and a place to feed and rest the horses.  In the summer, they used a tote road, or summer road, that followed the hill from Pete Olson’s, where Mary Lohn lives today.  The road crossed the old log dam and bridge to the north side of the river at Rohn’s, and continued east through Holmer’s land, where Kathy Stevenson lives today.   Frank Carlson had a sawmill in Silverdale in the early 1920’s.  His lumber was hauled out with chain drive trucks with solid rubber tires.  He also had a gigantic steel wheeled steam tractor which he attempted to use to haul a train of sleds, but it was a failure because the steel wheels wouldn’t stay on the road.   Carlson had a mill about 1/8 mile south of the old depot in Gheen in 1925.  He had a railroad spur going through his lumber sheds.  He cut box lumber in Gheen.   Vernon Colton had a mill set up where Ken Blake’s hunting shack is 3 ½ miles west of the Gheen corner.  He logged north of there.  I remember dad cutting 20 cords of wood on our property.  That would yield 10,000 feet of lumber.  Colton did some custom sawing and dad paid him to do that.  Vern had his own truck and hauled most of his lumber down to Duluth or Superior.   Other portable sawmills were pulled into people’s property and sawed lumber in every township.  Usually they stayed only a few weeks and were moved after they sawed lumber for all the locals that had bolts, saw logs, cut and on the skid way.  The minimum amount was 20 cords, or 10,000 feet.  No one would monkey with a jag smaller than that.   During the 1950’s, Scott Erickson, in Orr, bought a lot of rough popal lumber from all the small mills around the country, for his grain door factory.  When I was working there, just after I got out of high school, Scott was paying about $30 a thousand board feet for that lumber.  It was all 2 inches thick.  When that lumber came off those small mills, it was rough and usually was hauled right up to Orr, where the men dry piled it in the factory yard.  Once it was dried, it went through the planer, then through the resaw that split it into two ¾ inch boards.   There is so much information that has been lost here in Willow Valley Township.  Most people live their lives and never record information of the things and people who lived here before.  The same thing happened in every township here in America, and really, in the entire world.  It really isn’t important, but it’s fun to read about.   I’m off on the side roads with my metal detector as soon as the snow melts.  The grass is plastered down, and the leaves aren’t in the way to bump the coil.  Now that I can walk again, without a handful of ibuprofen, I can’t wait until mosquito season.   I’m looking for iron.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2009   I’D LIKE TO GO BACK Dave Hanson   A township seems to be kind of petty compared to the state or federal government.  But in reality, the township government is the real grass root organization of the United States. The residents of the township meet once a year to go over the records of the township business for the last year.  At the meeting, the citizens listen to the recommendations of the board to set tax levies to pay for the expenses of the township.   Our township population is small.  All townships are 36 square miles.  There are townships with less than 100 people, including children.   The town clerk, who is the secretary, has the most work.  The clerk records all the business of all the meetings, takes care of all the mail, and takes care of all the expenses of town business.  The treasurer takes care of the money and bank accounts.  The directors attend the meetings.  The directors make motions which are voted on and either pass or fail.  The clerk and treasurer have no vote on these matters.   At the annual meeting, the directors and township officials, have no more power than any other citizen of the township.  At this annual meeting, all township business for the year is voted on.   My grandfather, Oscar Hanson, was the town clerk here in Willow Valley for many years.  My mom, Thelma Hanson, was town clerk for years.  I was honored to be the town constable and weed inspector for a few years.  I had an old .32 caliber six shooter, a tin badge, a pair of handcuffs, and a blackjack.  The leather on that sap rotted and the lead BB’s fell out, but I never had to use it anyway.  I shot the pistol a couple of times, but couldn’t hit anything with it, so I never even took that with me.  When the law changed, and we would have to have police training, most townships eliminated the constables.   St. Louis County has an association of townships organization that meets once a month at the town hall in Cotton.  I was a town director for many years, and tried to attend two or three of those meetings a year.  They were always interesting and usually a county commissioner or county official gave a talk about township problems or discussed new ideas coming from the state offices.   During each spring, a bus loaded up with St. Louis County township officials and drove down to the state capitol when the legislature was in session.  The Iron Range delegation was always busy with their jobs, but always made time to meet with us.  I don’t think they liked to do it, but they didn’t want the county township officials to take back negative news to the town meetings.   One time at Cotton, my name was drawn to attend the National Township Convention in Washington D.C., all travel and lodging expenses are paid by the STLCAT (association of townships).  I didn’t want to go alone, so I paid Gwen’s expenses and plane fair.  It was October, but it was over 80 above in D.C.  The weather was nice, so we had a chance to do a some walking.  There were a lot of people from townships all across the U.S. there.  Of course, our plane was filled with Minnesota people.   If you ever get a chance, try to see our Federal Buildings in Washington D.C.  You will see so much stuff, you won’t remember it all.  We took a bus tour around the Mall.  The only thing that wasn’t open was the Washington Monument.  That was shrouded in scaffolding for repair.   The convention itself started the next day at the large paved area, it seemed like a few acres, behind the capital building.  We lined up and had to be checked by security when we entered the building.  It was nothing like they do now after 9/11.   We went to the meetings of our choice and met with Minnesota representatives and senators.  A lot went on.   The next day Gwen and I had a lot of spare time, and walked miles around the mall.  It sure was hot, but we took our time and ducked into a lot of the buildings, as all tourists do.   To stand next to a Saturn II rocket engine with soot on it was interesting.  Also a space capsule which had survived the reentry is awesome.  The Kitty Hawk, the Spirit of St. Louis, and some world war planes were hanging from the ceiling by cables, are not replicas, but the real thing.   I think the highlight for me, was a trip to Old Town Alexandria just south of D.C.  We went into the old tavern where Washington and the boys planned the revolution.  Right across the street is the same ground where slaves were sold.  There may even be a tree or two alive today that were growing there in those days.  The buildings are still there.  The same paving bricks are still there.  Those streets all sloped down to the river.  The reason for that is that hog heads of tobacco could be rolled across town and down to the docks to be loaded on ships for export.  Also, a lot of other things were shipped in those large barrels.  Even the carts, that were ever so slow, were helped by that sloping pavement.   We ate in Old Town Alexandria.  We came home, but sometime when it’s not so hot, I’d like to go back and go through some more of those museums.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2009   THE SECOND VIRGINIA FIRE June 7, 1900 Dave Hanson   The Virginia Enterprise   June 8, 1900 “For the Second Time” “Virginia is wiped out by fire, entire business portion being destroyed.”   Loss $600,000, Insurance $100,000   “The fire caught first from the shavings burner at the Moon and Kerr Mill at about 11:00 yesterday morning.  A high west wind at the time quickly carrying the flames into the planning, and thence, to the sawmill.  The fire company quickly responded to the alarm and was in good prospect of confining the fire to the Moon and Kerr Plant when a second alarm from the city was turned in, and it was soon to be seen that the town was doomed.”   The second alarm came from Jos. Karl’s meat market, which went up in flames instantly.  Joe Backus’ saloon and Sutherland’s Parlor Restaurant caught fire.  The fire spread from block to block.  It burned the most prosperous part of town.   The Moon and Kerr Co. loss was the heaviest.  They lost $75,000, with only $18,000 insurance.  The lumber in the yard was saved by much work.   By this time, Virginia had a fire department.  Eveleth Fire Department, under Chief Ellworth, responded, and, by valiant work, the two departments saved the rest of the town.   “Virginia faired the second fire much easier than the first fire,” the newspaper stated.  “The city was rebuilt right away, with brick and stone.”   The establishment of the Virginia and Rainy Lake Company and the Bailey Lumber Company employed a lot of people, so Virginia grew to over 10,000 people by 1910.   In 1949, four railroads supplied the city with a population of nearly 13,000.  At that time, the population was bolstered because of the mining activity.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2009 PLAY BALL Dave Hanson   Success is viewed in different ways by different people.   People walk into situations with their eyes wide open, or eyes closed shut.  There are examples, all through history, of success and failure by people.   When the wandering type of people inhabited Scandinavia, they adapted to the migration of the reindeer, the European caribou.  Even to this day, some people still live that way.  To the other people in the world, they are stubborn and primitive.  Why are they still here?   Did the rat infested towns of Europe and Asia affect them?  No, it didn’t have much effect on the nomads of the cold north, not only in Lapland, but in Siberia and the Inuit in North America, either.   When the French and English established colonies on the east coast of America, there are some historical facts to look at, too.  The French only had a few thousand men in Canada and very few women.  They married Indian women.  The British sent more people and they had British women with.  They would not marry Indians, because of the class system they took with.  They starved because they were looking for gold, and depended on supply ships.  They didn’t plant native crops.  So what they planted failed.   Historians say the Greenlanders could have survived if the Scandinavians would have lived like the Eskimos.  The supply ships never came, so they died out.   Adapting to different environments isn’t easy in the short time.  It takes a few generations to feel secure in a new way to live.  If people are too stubborn, they don’t change.   The Native Americans died mostly from diseases the Europeans introduced.  It took four hundred years, until now, to grow their population back to original numbers.  That was a physical adaptation taking place.  Culturally they have adapted in the last few generations, to live in modern cultures.  Once they found their confidence, they are just as productive as anyone else in this country.   The same situation is taking place in Palestine, where the loser can’t accept losing.  They stick to the ancestral idea of taking no advice or orders from anyone.  They had a choice to blend into the Israeli government.  But they had a different religion.  They moved into camps in the surrounding countries.  They struggle to regain their lost land.  It seems it will never end.  The other Moslem countries don’t want them, but all the world gives them aid, so they keep increasing in population.  In Africa there are people killing each other in nearly every section of the continent.   There is a dilemma about population on our planet.  Do people feed hungry people?  Do we feed our own family?  Do we know how to feed our own family?  Do the people who know how to grow our food have the obligation to work, spend their own money on fuel and fertilizer, and to buy the land, have to feed everyone else, with not much compensation?   What is the priority of modern medicine?  Is it to cure cancer, and all infectious diseases?   Is it to clone genes to cure all inherited diseases?  When we keep all people alive, and conquer old age, will just some people live forever?   The old definition of sophistication was a false front.  People try to be something they aren’t.  Are the people from the Iron Range better than the people who live north of them?  Are the people from Crane Lake better than those who live south of them, better, somehow, because of where they live?  Are the Lake Vermilion people better than the small village people or rural people?  Do the people with big houses have more money than the people with small homes?  Is a store bought item more valuable than some hand made item?  Money counts.   Without electricity, there would be no gasoline refineries.  Without gas, most of the irrigation in the country would stop.  The transportation would stop.  We have become so dependent on electricity that we are vulnerable.   Don’t worry about a huge volcanic eruption, and don’t worry about an asteroid hitting us.  Think about getting water pumped out of our wells.  Think about our furnace fans going off and shutting down.  The gas pump wouldn’t work.  All factories would shut down.  Even the trains today run on electricity fueled by oil.  We don’t log by hand anymore.   It would be hard to survive today even if we knew how people did all those things before electricity and gasoline.  Most of the old ways of doing things are now hobbies and crafts.  To most people they are primitive ideas.  To some, they are a foolish waste of time.   To us, fishing is a fun pastime and hunting is a challenge.  We try to hone our skills, and become better fishermen.  We try all our lives to become better hunters.  We that garden, try to get the most flowers or vegetables from the smallest amount of ground.  To the wood worker, using wood to make a nice item is a hobby.  To make it challenging some only use hand tools.   There is some urge to keep those old ways alive.  It seems more in the rural areas and small towns.   Playing with some sort of ball is more popular with the large city population.   What’s more important?  Ping pong, football, croquet, golf, baseball, rubber ball on a paddle, basketball, polo, volleyball, soccer, bowling, tennis, super balls, spitballs, snowballs, beach balls, marbles, shot put,……………..BBs, pinball…

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Sunday, February 01, 2009   THE FIRST TIME VIRGINIA, MINNESOTA BURNED DOWN Dave Hanson   June 20, 1893   Duluth Evening Herald   “Late in the forenoon the citizens noticed that a hot forest fire was raging in the woods to the west and southwest of town.  No danger was particularly apprehended.  Just at dinner time, between 1 and 2 p.m., as nearly as can be judged from conflicting opinions, a small blaze was discovered on the southwest corner of the town site, only a few feet from Keaough’s Sporting House.”   People tried to put it out, but it soon burned the town.   People ran to the lake, took boats, rafts, or swam or crouched in the water to save themselves.   All the leading businesses were burned.  Even the vault of heavy masonry, erected the week before, in the Kinney’s bank, was cracked and crumbled by the intense heat.  Thirty small buildings along the western edge of town were still standing, but were of little value.   In the newspaper article about 60 businesses were lost, with losses of $20,000 to around $2,000, are listed by name and amount.  They felt that $1,200,000 in insurances would probably not cover the losses.   Mike Keaoughs large sporting house, was still standing after the fire.  “Mike Keaough conducts a dance house of unusual proportions and splendid facilities for indulging in vice.  As soon as the fire was over, he commenced to call in the hungry and needy and ever since has kept open house.  Sunday evening alone, he fed 300 people and gave away $50 in small change to those who were without money, ninety women and children were given sleeping accommodations Sunday night.  When he commenced to send in the crowd to supper, the cook objected.  Keaough punched him in the head, kicked him into the back yard and impressed three of the female inmates into the kitchen service to assist Mrs. Keaough.  Keaough was among the most popular heroes of the fire.”   The Mesabi railroad depot was saved.  They had a water tower and the buildings were hosed down and kept wet.   A relief train was sent up to Virginia from Duluth.  Some tracks had been moved.  I assume the ties were burned, so they got the rails out of there, so incoming trains wouldn’t derail.  The plan was to have the relief train pull into the station at the end of Main Street.   The train had to stop and unload supplies, which were hauled into town by teams.   I copied this information from some of Harry Lamppa’s newspaper clippings in the Virginia Historical Society building in Virginia.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Saturday, January 31, 2009   IN MY EAR Dave Hanson   “Why didn’t you do your homework?”  “I forgot.”  Maybe a teacher heard that at least once in their career.  Don’t laugh, just about everyone who has ever gone to school, did forget something like that.  A kid sits frantically trying to get his math done on the bumpy bus ride to school.  Those papers done in a hurry, usually aren’t an example of his best work.   “Mom, I can’t find my other shoe.”  The bus is coming down the hill a half mile away.  “Where did you take them off?”  One kid watches for the bus and hollers, “The bus is coming.”  With panic and tears, they seem to always make the bus.   “Who stole my wrench?”  Mumble, mumble.  “Where did I use that last?”  Which one of you kids lost my hammer?”  Mumble, mumble.  Sometimes you do find it in the most unexpected place a few days later.    The human mind is a wonderful thing.  We can forget.  It would be terrible if we remembered everything we ever saw, heard, or learned.  I suppose crazy people are the ones who never forget anything.   We do have short term and long term memory.  Do you remember every phone number you had remembered in your lifetime, and all your friends and businesses you knew years ago?  I always joked, when I had to give my phone number to someone.  “I never call my wife.”  I did come home every night after work, so I never had to phone much.  I do know it.   I never bothered to memorize other phone numbers.  I can always look them up.   I remember Vince Lundberg, who was valedictorian.  He’s five years older than me.  He said he wasn’t good at spelling.  That was all I needed.  I wasn’t either and always told the kids at school that that’s what dictionaries were written for.   Some of those kids are smarter than I ever was, so it’s no use to try to lie to them.  I’d be at the blackboard and ask, “How do you spell that?”  There would be a mad rush to the dictionary to see who could find the word first.   “What does O.K. mean?”  The rush was on.  Finally after about 2 months, Morgan Shultz popped up one day and said, “I found it!”  “Where?”  “In an old dictionary.”  It had to do with something in the upper New York elite, old fogies gang of men.  I’ve forgotten all the facts about the good old boys, but it’s not that important.  I should ask some kid in Japan, or a professor in England, where they use that term, what it means.  That would be mean, because professors don’t like to admit they don’t know stuff.   I’ll admit I’ve forgotten more stuff than I remember.  It’s not old age like most people use as an excuse.  Who wants to remember the tooth aches, or head ache, or enema, or going in the ditch, years ago?  Who wants to remember the old short and long rings we had on the old crank up wall telephones?  Who wants to remember the post dated checks?  And there were a lot of them, mostly to the feed house in Cook, when I was farming.  Thanks to Harold Wein and Selma Falk, I made it to pay day many times.   I do remember the people who trusted me.  I do remember the people who had faith in me over the years.  I remember the people who helped me so many times.   I only hope I have never forgotten people who have done the other favors for me.   Something like a birthday is not important to me.  So I have forgotten dates and anniversaries.  To me, every day is important.  To me some small thing is important, but forgetting a birthday may be really important to someone else.   Some people have a little black book that is filled with phone numbers, a running account of money, names of people, and important meetings.  I never do that.  It’s easier just to say, “I’ll have to check on the calendar at home.”  That’s not lying.   We did have an excuse to go home, years ago, when we had to get home to milk the cows.  When we were having fun, we did stay longer than necessary.   The last thing to go in the memory of real old people is the fun things we did as a kid.  That’s long term memory.  The mundane things we do in later life just aren’t that important, so why pay much attention to them.  “What did we have for lunch yesterday?”  “What did we eat last Tuesday for supper?”  “Where did I leave my hearing aid?”  “Oh, it’s here in my ear.  I turned it down.”

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2009   DIG IN Dave Hanson   There has to be a reason why people live where they do.  If it hadn’t been for the timber up here in northern Minnesota, no one would have moved to Duluth.  If it hadn’t been for the depletion of the iron deposits near Valley Forge, no one would have moved into the Iron Region of the upper peninsula of Michigan.  When that high grade ore was being depleted, those towns started to dwindle as the people moved to the newly discovered Mesabi in northern Minnesota.  Who would move up here if not for a job.   With the need for paper, came the pulpwood industry in our area.   Getting here wasn’t easy.  I think of the reason the English came to the Americas.  It was a good place to dump prisoners.  That way the navy could get timber for building ships.  Most of the trees had been cleared from England.  The pine here made fine masts and the oak made good timber and planking for the ships.  As time went on, and the colonies grew, the Appalachian Mountains made a good defensive barrier to the west, and the ocean to the east was another, easy to defend border.  When the French started bothering them from Canada, they only had to fight on one front.   The Appalachians are rough and wide.  It was nearly impossible to get over the ridgebacks for mile after mile.  Few roads went back into Pennsylvania, so it may have been easy to defend, but it was nearly impossible to expand west.   When Daniel Boone discovered and built a road through the Cumberland Gap, people poured into Kentucky and had the Ohio River for a highway to the west.  The French claimed that territory from the Hudson Bay all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, so that led to all the fighting with them.  There were so few people in the region it was hard for the French to defend the territory.   We have terrible land here for building roads.  If it weren’t for the rock ledge at Greaney Falls, all this land would be eroded down into the clay gullies like it is west of those falls.  The clay just keeps sliding down into the river and washing away.  By the time the river gets to Samuelson Falls, it doesn’t drop much because of the rock and boulders all the way from Jackopich’s to the town of Littlefork.  The clay sure does slide into the river all the time, though.  They have those same clay slides on the California coasts and I’ve read, a lot of trouble with it in Sweden, too.   Last summer we followed a pickup truck that had gone around some barriers on the main road in Greaney.  When we neared the Catholic Church, half the road was gone.  If it hadn’t been paved, the whole thing would have caved down the hill.  We crept across on the tar that was left, but the rest of the road was in the ravine about thirty feet below.  It takes a lot of work and material to try to stabilize and rebuild those slides.   Another place that’s interesting is the road going east from Duluth to the Upper Peninsula.  It must be gravel because of the thick maple and pine growing on that ground.  It’s mile after mile of hills like the Gheen hill.  Up and down, mile after mile.  Off on the side, you can see where old roads were built, here and there, when they logged the white pine years ago.  Some places had to be cut, and some places filled for the logging railroads.  A train can’t go up and down like a car.  The wheels spin.   We do have swamps to go around here.  That makes for curvy roads.  The rock hills north of us, are hard to blast through and makes it hard, even this day, to build roads.  We came back from a community concert in Ely, in the dark, the other night and I told Gwen, it seemed we drove in a complete circle around some unseen lake.  That road from Tower to Lake Superior is beautiful, but curvy because of the rock and lakes.  On the maps, most roads are marked in fairly straight lines, but aren’t that way in reality.   The Indians followed deer trails.  The animals take the easiest routes.  The loggers followed the old Indian trails to get the timber out.  The logging railroads followed the flat land, too.  They curved around like the roads.  At the bottom of the ravines, there is always a swamp or creek, so the roads are always on higher ground.   As a kid, dad worked on old Highway 11, south of Archie’s Corner on #73.  Those ditches were all dug by hand.  They used scrapers behind horses, but with so many rocks and roots, the ditches were grubbed and shoveled mostly by hand.  Those ditches were only a foot deep most places.  Where there was a knoll, they had to be dug deep so water would drain.   About a mile south of the Tin Man’s place, that was Sulo Harkkanen’s land when dad was a kid, there is a small knoll.  Dad was working on that road.  One noon break, he took an iron bar, and was monkeying around and poked a hole.  The water gushed up and started flowing down the ditch toward Willow River.  That water is full of iron so the ditch is red, from that water, to this day.    A lot of those old roads were built over swamps.  The trees that were cut down were laid crossways, and the corduroy was covered with dirt and gravel.  Some of the old railroad grades were built that way, too, and are paved now, as roads.   As we rumble along on our merry way, most of the time we don’t even think of the misery those old timers had building our roads.   Don’t forget the culverts they had to dig in.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: don Simonson Sent: Monday, January 26, 2009   FINNS ARE TOUGH Dave Hanson   Ron Maki and his friends took a sauna bath one cold winter night and cut a hole in the ice on Lake Vermilion and jumped in to cool off.  Venture North TV show, from Duluth, took videos of the fun event.  I remember his wife, Mickey, saying, “You guys are crazy.”   Ron Maki taught art in Orr and Cook Schools for many years.  He cross country skied and took on the Berkebeiner race in Wisconsin.  He learned by watching how to hand scribe and build log buildings.  In his spare time, he painted many signs, which he still does.   When I was a kid, the old Finns didn’t like being called a Finlander  That meant they were born in Finland.  They wanted to be called Finnish, which meant they were born in America.  The kids my age didn’t mind being called a Finlander.  They were the kids that took the Polock jokes from Chicago, and changed the name to protect the innocent, and changed them to the Finlander jokes.  Darrell Kallio, from Linden Grove knew every one of those jokes, and could really tell them.  It was his accent and smile that was what made him so much fun to listen to.   When I was in my late teens, I had my first sauna, with a buddy of mine, at a neighbor’s house.  We weren’t co-ed that night, so after cooking for quite awhile, we ran out into the night and rolled in the snow.   When we started cooling down, we went back in.  When people get heated up like that, you don’t feel the -30 below for a few minutes.  If a person fired up the sauna twice a week, which most Finns do, they would get used to the heat, and if they dove into the cold lake or rolled in the snow twice a week, they got used to that, too.  That old tradition of the steam bath came into Finland from Asia as soon as the glaciers melted in Scandinavia and the Finn ancestors moved north.   I read in the Scandinavian history that the coast of Norway and Finland had some ice free land before any of Sweden was bare.  The original people moved up to Scandinavia from Europe.  People from what is now Russia moved in next and either married the first inhabitants or killed them off.  So the people who settled in southern Norway, Sweden, and Finland were all the same kind of people.  Other people from the Germanic tribes moved north, too.  Other people moved west into Finland, and the northern half of Sweden and Norway.  Those people in Finland and northern Sweden and Norway all spoke the same language.  The people in southern Norway, Sweden, and Denmark speak a Nordic or Germanic language.   In a sauna, there isn’t a need for many gallons of water to take a bath, maybe a couple of quarts to get steamed up, and a small amount to rinse off.   In the middle ages, most of the people in Europe didn’t bathe.  History says they smelled so bad, the rich people started using perfume that the Crusaders brought back from the Middle East.   After the Black Death, people started bathing a lot more in the northern part of Europe, but it takes a lot of water if there were a lot of kids in the family.  It was heated on wood stoves.   There were a lot of stories about the old out houses.  But years ago, there were stories about saunas, too.   A friend of mine, who was a generation older than me, told about two boys who drilled a hole in the ceiling of a sauna and waited to peek at women and girls.  You can imagine how hot it got in the small attic as the heat rises.  You start the fire way before you take a bath.  They had crawled up there and were cooked before anyone came in.  As the women threw water on the rocks, they nearly died from the heat, but if they tried to come down, the women would have nearly killed them, too.  So they had to keep quiet.  They say it’s hot in Hades and you suffer.  I suppose those kids got a taste of it.  When you’re hot, you do get red as a beet.   Wayne Moroste told me he had hunters that came up every deer season.  He had to stoke up the sauna every year for those guys.  One day I met him and he told me had had gone down to the Vets Hospital, in the cities, for a couple of weeks, because he had a bad asthma attack.  Knowing “Nibs”, he cranked up the heat and drove those tender feet right out of the sauna.  He said he had it up to almost 170 degrees in there, and he stayed in there just to prove he could take the heat.  There is a lot of pride in being tough.  The asthma doesn’t help matters, sometimes.  He just smiled as he told me his story.   I’ve never heard of a Finn dying in a sauna, if they did, they wouldn’t let anyone know.  That would be a sign of weakness.  The same, if they died of shock jumping in the lake.  They wouldn’t tell anyone about that, either.  Finns are known to be strong and never give up.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Sunday, January 25, 2009   FOND MEMORIES Dave Hanson   We grew up with bugs.  I suppose the bugs we feared the most were hornets, wasps, and spiders.  I don’t know why, but spiders and snakes scare a lot of people.  I suppose most people avoid them, so they hardly ever bite anyone.   As a toddler, the only things I remember were mosquitoes.  When I was old enough to leave the security of the picket fence around the house, there were a lot of interesting things to see.  Little kids are only 3 feet above the ground and their eyes are usually the best they will ever be.  Like most small young animals, any movement caught the eye.  In the grass in our yard, there were thousands of little black crickets about a quarter of an inch long.  When it was hot, those things buzzed a lot.  On the driveway there were always a couple of those yellow winged grasshoppers that were almost impossible to catch.   I liked to monkey with the ant hills.  We knew the difference between the black ants and the vicious red ants.  We had half a dozen balsams in the yard, and early on, they matured and carpenter ants started making nests in those trees.  I’d poke a timothy grass straw in the hole in the tree and those large soldier ants would chomp on it.   I got the shivers looking at those ants, but I probably spent the most time playing with them.  At first, it was throwing rocks into those hills, and later I’d put grasshoppers or some honey on the hill and watch them struggle to get that stuff underground.  With the red ants, I’d poke a hole in the hill and after getting bit a few times, stayed at a distance.   I’ve never found a bumble bee nest.  It seems the yellow jackets were the most numerous.  Once in awhile, the big black hornets would build a nest somewhere.  Those things will follow you for a long way.  We got stung by yellow jackets, but most of the time they buzzed around you for a few seconds, so most of the time, after stepping on a nest in the ground, I got out of there fast.  They only fly about 10 feet from their nest.  I did sit on the porch and put dead grasshoppers or house flies on the sidewalk and they would haul them back to their nests.   When everyone had cattle, there were a lot more flies around.  They would breed in the manure piles and find food in the spilled feed and rotting hay and straw.   Most kids who spend their time in front of the TV or computers probably never experience the bugs like we did.  It seemed there was always some small dead animal somewhere in the yard, driveway, or barnyard.  Those blue bottle flies would lay eggs within a few hours, and the maggots would start eating it up.  Carrion beetles seemed to eat on it from underneath.  Kids took sticks and always poked and turned those dead things over.  We turned old boards over to monkey with worms.  It always seemed there were centipedes and pill bugs and a few slugs under there, too.   Dad showed us the cadis fly larvae that built a little tube nest in the water.   It seemed every time we went to the second show at Cook, it was dark when we left the Comet Theater.  Those three inch water beetles had been attracted to the lights and were crawling on the sidewalk.  We had smaller water beetles in the ditches at home, and those little whirly gigs buzzing around on top of the water.  I liked skaters, that’s what we called them, that skipped along on the surface of water.   A farm has a lot of blood suckers that fill up on cows.  Horseflies, cow flies, gnats, no-see-ums, mosquitoes, sand flies, and once in a while a bott fly larvae would make a lump on a cow’s back the size of an egg.    The best time to catch grasshoppers was after the hay was cut.  By that time, they are big enough to monkey with and with most of the grass gone, they were concentrated.   There were little golden colored flies that only seemed to be on fresh cow manure.  When we flipped those dry cow pies over with a stick, the damp underside was full of grubs of some kind of small beetle.  We knew what they were, because we dug up the large white June beetle grubs in the sod, sometimes.  You know those large beetles that rattle on the windows at night when they are attracted to the lights.   Beetles gave me the shivers.  I never got pinched.  Those pine beetles can bite.  The best bugs were the ones that never bit us.  We caught butterflies of many varieties, moths on the walls near the yard lights, and the dragonflies that we were told ate mosquitoes.  A family from International Falls, moved down on Pete Olson’s place for a few years, and they called them mosquito hawks.   We fell asleep a few times staring at a pint jar with lightning bugs in, that we caught when the folks let up stay up a lot later than usual.  Those are some of my fondest memories.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2009   I MADE IT Dave Hanson   In most of history, people had to do with what they had.  Even if they made an infrequent trip to town, sometimes they couldn’t buy what they needed even if they had the money.  Some things had to be made, so an order was given the blacksmith, and if he didn’t have material to work with, he couldn’t get going on a project until he got supplies.  People did go without a lot of times.   There wasn’t much instant gratification on material things like we have today.  There wasn’t much impulse buying, either.  The people in most of our history weren’t mobile like we are.  We seem to think a car is a necessity.  People walked.  Most never went far from where they were born, until they went into the military service on a ship in the Navy, or marching in the Army.  Even in the days of horseback, most people didn’t own a horse to ride.  They had to march.  Most of the horses in war pulled carts of supplies.  That’s why the Mongols and the Huns were so successful, they were horse people and could move faster than any army on foot.   Most of our ancestors in Europe and ancient America were in the same traveling mode.  They walked.  Mom told of her mom, Grandma Miller and Mrs. Berg, walking down the road whenever they went visiting, chatting and knitting as they walked.  Everyone knitted, mostly wood socks and mittens for the kids, but especially for the men who wore them out working in the woods and doing barn chores.    The toes and heels wore out of those socks as they rubbed.  They were not thrown away like today.  The women sat around visiting and used a large needle and used a potato or a round wood egg inside for a form, and darned, or wove a patch on the holes.  It was a lot faster to get some spare socks that way than to knit new ones.  I remember grandma, and, as a real small boy, watching mom unravel a knit sweater and winding rolls so they could knit something else out of the yarn.  When we got new yarn, it came in a skein and had to be rolled into balls so it wouldn’t tangle when they knit with it.  We kids would hold our arms out straight in front of us, with the skein, and mom would quickly roll up the yarn into a ball.  When no one was around, they put the skein on the back of a kitchen chair and stood up and rolled the yarn into balls by themselves.  No one spun their own wool when I was a kid.  That became a novelty craft later.  The same with knitting today.  People do it for a hobby, not a necessity.   In the days before cars, when my dad was small, people in town had a little grocery store every few blocks.  That way people could walk and get groceries as they needed them.  There were stores scattered around the country, too.  Billy Gheen had a store in Gheen.  Lemoine built a store at the same time in Gheen.  Johnson had a store north of the Gheen corner.  The Pine Grove store was located on the north end of the Guzman Road.  Starich had a store across the road from the Catholic Church in Greaney.  A mile north, Novak had a store.  There was a store in Silverdale.  Provosnik had a store in Buyck.  Kallio had a store in Linden Grove.  The Coop Store was on the corner at Sturgeon.  A lot of these were combined as a tavern.  A lot of the taverns that were in the front part of people’s residences were located even closer between the other stores, and some sold small amounts of groceries, too.   I think there were people up here that may have only rode on the train to Virginia or Duluth a few times in their lives.  Some had relatives in the Twin Cities, like Grandma Miller.  She went down there and had her babies with her sisters or with her mom.  I don’t know if many went to a hospital, but there were midwives that helped.   Up here in the scattered neighborhoods in the woods, people made a list and when they came into town infrequently, they bought enough supplies to last many months, or all winter.   What we think of as essential, were luxuries to those people.  Things that couldn’t be made or raised on the farm were purchased.  Dad told of his mother making soda crackers on cookie sheets.  They sometimes grated raw potatoes into water and the starch would settle out in the bottom and was dried out.  Those grated potatoes that were left were cooked and either eaten or fed to the animals.  Nearly all the old farms had a huge cast iron kettle that they cooked potatoes and root crops for the pigs and livestock.  Pigs are like people and can’t digest most uncooked food, like potatoes.  The heat releases the starch and sugar.   Salt, baking powder, soda, kerosene, most hardware, first aid stuff, needles, tools, and hickory tool handles all had to be bought at the stores.  Bolts of cloth were on the shelves, and as no one weaved cloth here, what was needed was measured and cut off the bolt in the store.  A few people wove rag rugs, but no one had time to weave fine cloth.   Before my folks were born, there were little trading posts along the Littlefork River.  I read of an old French couple that lived on Makooda Lake, where they baked bread in a bee hive oven and sold it to travelers that went from Tower to Fort Francis.  Along some old horse roads people used their house for a stop over, or inn, and fed whatever stew they had going, to travelers for a small fee.  They stabled the horses or teams in their barn, too.   Herman Lammi had a General Mercantile Store in Orr.  When I was a kid, he said, “If I don’t have it, you don’t need it.”   In those days, the stores and lumber yard had a large inventory, so if you came to town, you knew you could get it.   As the roads became better, there was a 50 year expansion of the mail order companies.  The two I remember most were Sears and Roebuck, and Montgomery Wards.  You got a large catalog and could order most anything that the stores didn’t have, and they would come in the mail in about two weeks.  The large items came on the train, and later by semi trucks.  Sears even sold kits for homes and barns.  I think there is a hay barn on the way to Haley that was a Sears’s kit.   Today, the stores don’t tie up their money in large inventories.  You may have to wait a day or two for the UPS or Speedy truck to get it to you.  Sometimes if they have it in a warehouse in Minneapolis, it comes the next day.  Those trucks run all night, so it’s faster than if you drove down the next day to get some farm machine part, or part for your logging equipment.   We don’t see much photo film in the stores in the last year or two with digital cameras.  Sears has almost gone out of business.  The bookstores are going down, because of Amazon.com. where you can order any book at a reduced price, on the internet.   We feel cheated when gas prices go up, but we do a lot of traveling that isn’t necessary.   I liked the blizzards where the roads are nearly impassible.  The kids like it when schools are closed because of the snow.   What a macho feeling a man has, when he made it to town from Silverdale, Rauch, or Bramble.  “I had to get cigarettes, I ran out.  I had a terrible time, but my trusty 4 wheel drive made it.  I was bucking snow nearly to the hood a few times, but I made it.”

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Monday, January 19, 2009   MACARONI AND CHEESE Dave Hanson   Back in the 1950’s, dad started subscribing to the Scientific American Magazine.  I bought one a few years ago, but it was too technical, and the stories were not interesting to me.   It seemed that at least one story each month, years ago, was interesting.  One article that stuck in my mind was an experiment about mice.  A room was lined halfway up the walls with sheet metal.  The walls were built up with hundreds of small nest boxes, and an endless supply of good food and water were supplied.  Ramps went up to all the boxes.  Two pairs of mice were placed in the large room.  The population exploded, and, at first, it seemed every mouse was healthy and vigorous.  As time went by, the mental health of the colony seemed to start to disintegrate.   Some mice became paranoid and reclusive.  They hid in their own box, only to come down to eat and then go back and hide.  Some went insane and started killing the other mice.  Some hogged the food, and fought off the others.   As time went on, the mice reproduced less and less.  It was phenomenal how selfish they were.  They became self centered and cared about no one or no thing.  Some became obese.   Isn’t it interesting how social people become when they are separated by long distances?  I’ve used the make believe scenario, where two trappers are crowded in a cabin somewhere in Canada, where the days are cold and dark.  After months, they become angry.  By the end of winter, they just sit there glaring at each other with their rifles across their laps.  While this is happening, there are two other trappers living in cabins thirty miles apart.  The weather is cold, and the nights are long, but they haven’t seen their friend for so many long months.  One night when the moon is up, and the north wind blows and its 50 degrees below, one man sets out on his dog sled to see his friend.  He may die, but he tries.  If he succeeds, it will be worth it!   I started noticing years ago, that a lot of teachers’ kids, don’t have kids, even if they are married.  Now, more and more people are thinking the same way.   What makes people give up, when there is an endless supply of money, security, and food, like we have in our country?  Is it that when we are in a crowded room with so many people, we become like mice!  When people are crowded like in the slums, they become selfish and a lot kill their own kind?  With endless food, why do some people eat like there will never be another meal and become obese like those mice?   Why is it that some years, when grasshoppers’ populations become huge, they grow and metamorphose into locusts and change appearance?   People seem to be changed by environment.  The people who were deprived as a child seem to have an urge to be ego maniacs like some movie stars.  They have millions and hundreds of millions of dollars, but they cannot stop working.  Some people can not take the time to raise children even if they have enough money and a nice job and home.   Some, who had all the love and leisure time they could ever want, become incapable of being nice.  They always have to have everything their own way.   To me, Christmas time isn’t about the endless frenzy to get everything done.  The gifts are not important.  They may have been when we were kids and younger in life.  But now, it’s the time when we get together, that is the most important.   Father Antus always says, “Don’t forget, don’t forget to be nice, don’t forget to go to church, and don’t forget your fellow man.”    He is by far, my favorite preacher.  I only know him by his words, but what a way to be remembered.  I know other preachers who have had their share of heartache and have had their faith tested.  It only seems to make them stronger.   I do feel for the people who have given up.  It’s a helpless feeling to see unhappy people and you can’t do anything about it.   We’ve seen people dote on others, in vain,  just to see them not appreciate all the small things in life that are so important.  Once an impression is set, it seems it’s too late to change people’s minds.   Is it our job to change other people’s minds?    We often wonder as we sit at the Christmas table.  We often wonder as we sit at the Thanksgiving table.  We often wonder as we sit at the Forth of July picnic, what do old couples, with no kids, do when there are no grandkids around.   We, with the laughter, we, with the sick babe in arms, we, with the memories of seeing the little ones growing up, have gone through trials and some sacrifice of our time.   Do we think of the poor rich people who sit and say, “What should we do tonight?”  “Where should we eat out tonight?”  Do they get up in the middle of the night and say “Hey, let’s cook a box of macaroni and cheese?”    Life can get lonesome with all the wealth in the world, if you don’t have kids.  Like Father Antus says, “If you have a problem, do something about it.”  Some couldn’t have kids, but have adopted.  What a wonderful thing to do.  To them, it’s not a sacrifice, it’s a blessing.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Sunday, January 18, 2009   I WON’T DO THAT AGAIN Dave Hanson   I’ve always liked fish.  Pickled herring is a treat.  Lutefisk is not.  I’ll eat it to be polite.  The melted butter and white sauce is good.  The smell isn’t.  I don’t really care for the gelatinous texture, but I have to respect the heritage of the poor Scandinavians, who ate it once in awhile, when they didn’t have any fresh food left.  Cod fish are so greasy that the dry fish gets rancid, even being dried, after a few months.  Those old timers soaked the cod in lye.  This turned the fat to soap, which could then be washed out of the foul smelling protein that was left behind.  If anyone has tasted rancid food, they will understand why people had a hard time eating poor food.   If pork isn’t wrapped well, the fat turns rancid, too.  Oxygen combines with it and it gets freezer burned in a few months.  Most people freeze fish in a bag with water.  The ice keeps the air off and it keeps longer.   With all the Finns and Swedes around here, the stores still carried salt herring that came in small wood pails, up until the 1960’s.  Some specialty stores may still sell it that way.   I remember the little wood boxes that had a sliding wood lid.  That was one pound of dry, salted cod flakes.  Mom would cream it or we ate it on toast or mashed potatoes.  It never was rancid.   Grandpa Miller used to get those pint jars of spicy, very salty, anchovies.  Those little fish had their heads on.  I ate a few of them and liked them.  You snap the head off and suck the meat off the bones.  When grandpa had them, we never got more than one, if any.  They were his property and we respected that.  Grandma seemed to always have a box of chocolate covered cherries in the cupboard that we never touched either.    When I was a kid, the joke was that any self respecting Swede could slide a fried fish in one side of his mouth and pull the clean bones out the other side.   I was fascinated with the small chubs and fish we caught in the Willow River when I was real young.  The swim bladder was not attached to the body wall like some fish.  They were a kind of bubble in the front and a longer section toward the back.  When I tried to squeeze and pop them, they were so tough they just slipped out of my fingers.  Those scales are remarkable structures too, kind of like armor.  We knew what the gills were for, but kept away from them, most of the time, because you can get cut on the gill plates.   Once I started fishing for them, a small one could be tossed back in,  or used for bait to try to catch a bigger one.  I always had a fish line, that old time black nylon, with a sinker and a hook rolled up on a small stick, inside the handle bar of my bike.  The handle bar grip could be pulled off and I always cut a new willow or small popal pole when I peddled down to the river.  I only fished in the river when it was hot weather.  They never bit good during cool times of the year.   I always joked that if a person wanted to get fish, they should tie a net between two boats and make a swoop across a lake.  Now they troll with one string with a bent wire on the end, and maybe catch a fish.   Our ancestors set up twig traps in the rivers in Europe in ancient times.  Little by little, they used boats near shore or inland waters.  As time went on, they built ships and went to sea.   I saw pictures of the Finns cutting holes in the ice on lakes about fifty feet apart.  Using long spruce poles they pushed a net down one hole and snag it with another long pole and treaded it several hundred feet under the ice.  The holes froze over, in the morning they chopped the ice off each end and freed the net and the group of men pulled the net out of the lake.  It was a lot of work, but the Finns were never known to starve if there were fish to be had.   We used to go up to Elbow River, east of Gheen, to get suckers, when I was a kid.  Everyone who lives here know they are full of bones, but it was so thrilling and so much fun we went some years.  Sometimes they would spawn and we missed the run.  When that water warmed up, people drove up there several times a day to see if the fish were flopping and jumping in the pool below the rapids.   When someone came back to Bixby’s with a couple of gunny sacks of fish, everyone phoned their friends and the fun began.  We had to wait for dad to get home from work to take a ride up to Elbow.  It seemed like Grand Central Station, with all the traffic on that old road.  Sometimes we’d pass a half dozen cars coming back from the river.  They often were people from the Iron Range 40 or 50 miles to the south of us.  Wide eyed, those people really checked us over as they drove by, trying to recognize someone else they knew.  At that time, as a small kid, I wondered what were they slowing down and almost stopping, and staring at.   Dad went up there with a pitch fork.  We didn’t have a spear.  It poked holes in the fish and made a mess to clean them.  So dad waded in the water and got behind that big rock half way up the rapids.  The fish rest there before trying to get further up the hill.  After dad started throwing them out with his bare hands, I did it, too.  That water is so cold in the spring, your hands get numb.  You do have to bend over and get soaked up to your neck.  But just like today, there is some pride in being able to stand the cold.  Those sissies in their hip boots and waders standing on shore, were dulling and bending the tines of their spears on the rocks in the river, didn’t get the fish we did.  We had to walk about 200 yards back to the car.  Those wet gunny sacks full of fish were heavy.  But with a hundred other people up there at the rapids, I couldn’t put the sack down.  It would get all full of dead grass, and I’d have to admit I was too tired to keep going.   Most of the people smoked the fish.  Some canned them with a little catsup, so they looked like salmon.  Those bones soften up when canned.   We got our recipe (whatever little information it was) for the brine to soak the fish before smoking, from Gust Parson.  I think it was enough salt in the brine to float an egg.  Most people had 5, 10, or 20 gallon crocks in those days, so that’s what people used.   One day we were driving toward Gheen and Gust’s toilet was burning up.  Dad slammed on the brakes and backed up, only to see it was Gust’s small smoke house smoking away.   The story is that the Indians on the east coast buried a small fish under each corn seed to fertilize it.  Mom buried a sack full under the rhubarb, and I dug some down around the lilac bush.  We had so many that time, we didn’t want to clean anymore.   One year, about 1950, there were trucks loading up on the bridge.  The men had wash tubs between floats and were hoisting them up to the trucks.  I think they hauled them to Duluth for dog food.   Now the beavers have plugged up the river so few make it to the rapids.   About 1970, Gwen and I went up and got a bunch of suckers.  We canned a few.  I figured why not dig them down in the garden.  I dug four trenches about 8 inches deep and 60 feet long.  I laid the fish head to tail, and covered them and planted corn.  Well, like some best laid plans, the neighbor’s dogs came over one night and dug most of them up after a few days.   It smelled bad and I decided I’ll never do that again.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Friday, January 16, 2009   SOME ARE LUCKY Dave Hanson   There is something about a helpless little bird in a nest that attracts people.  Maybe it’s that they are so ugly.  When they first hatch, most are bare and the blood veins are sticking out, but that mouth that is gaping is hard to forget.  Most birds build the nest so high, no one sees the babies, but robins sometime build a nest in a tree close to the ground.  Even with house cats hunting in the yard, a lot of those babies grow up and learn to fly before they get eaten.   We’d find a blue egg shell the mother flew away from the nest and dropped, once in awhile.  We knew it was a robin.  A few other birds had white shells and they dropped them away from the nest, too.   As far as I was concerned, there were two kinds of birds.  The ones we ate and the rest that we didn’t.  I never wanted anything to happen to the partridge chicks.  I wanted them to grow up so I could shoot them in the fall.   There were a lot of interesting birds around home.  We could hear the Great Horned Owls hooting at night.  And when we hooted, they would answer.   Once when I was with dad on the edge of the hay field, we scared up a Shy Poke.  He said that when they got scared they sometimes fly right over a person, and let loose with a pitchfork sized white squirt.  It’s true about startling some birds.  A grouse or woodcock make such a racket when they take off, it startles a person.   We had Great Blue Herons down on the river spearing frogs and minnows.  In the 1940’s, there were very few ducks or geese where we lived.  It was exciting to see the flocks fly south in the fall.  The geese were so shy in those days that it was hard to get within a quarter mile of them.  I remember I was with Uncle Roy one fall day and a flock of geese flew over.  He took a 30-30 and took a couple of shots.  They were up about what seemed a quarter mile high.  He said, “Maybe I can wing one.”  I thought they would probably explode hitting the ground from that high up.   A few people had tamed baby crows years ago, but they are so smart they become a nuisance.  There was a pesky crow down at the Gheen Corner years ago, and it would monkey with people’s windshield wipers when they stopped the car.  When I taught in Arnold School, near Duluth, one of my students had a tame crow that knew what room he was in.  Just as school was out, the crow would peck at the glass, and then fly to the door and follow him home each day.  When I first met Willard Pearson, he had a blue jay in a cage that barked.   Dad told of Uncle Dick Hanson coming home with an owl he had picked out of a tree.  Some people are good with animals and birds like that.   One year, about 1950, the snow had all melted in the spring and the birds were returning.  After a week or two, we got about 2 feet of snow.  Those birds were starving.  We had tame rabbits and I would take a couple of quarts of whole oats from their feed sack and toss on top of the snow.  The snow was covered with hundreds of sparrows and seed eaters.  After a week with no worms, thousands of robins starved.  Nature has its ways of controlling populations of different life.   Here, where it gets over 100 degrees above in the summer some years, and near -60 below in the winter sometimes, the balsam, birch, popal, spruce, and pine have adapted to those extremes.  A tree can’t move once it sprouts.   Animals are like that, too.  The deer may have multiplied and survived the last few nice winters, but if this snow gets deeper, they may be tested, and only a few that can take it, will survive.   The grouse, who dive into deep snow to stay warm, may all survive this winter.  If it rains and an ice crust forms toward spring, they may break their necks and not survive.  Those that try to be the early bird and get the worm, may be caught by weather and die.  Those lazy late comers may escape the late snow and be the ones to survive.   People are like birds, it’s lucky we aren’t all alike.  We’d be like sheep that all follow the leader.  Some people are bold, and some are shy.  Some stick out their neck and take chances, and some are conservative and don’t take chances often.  So some miss opportunities and some make out big.   Some are lucky and some never are.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2009   YOU CAN DO IT YOURSELF Dave Hanson   We used to say, “Mom, what was it like in the olden days?”  Mom would smile.  She was 20 years old when I was born, so she was only 27 when I was asking those questions.  I can’t remember what she said, but I remember my sister and me asking questions like that.   “Grandma, stick out your teeth.”  Grandma Miller would push her false teeth out a half an inch and we kids would laugh and laugh.  She never did it when any adult was around, only when we small kids were at her house.  A few times we snuck upstairs and there were some false teeth in a glass of water besides grandma’s bed.  That was kind of fascinating to us imps and we would giggle and sneak back downstairs and take off across the yard to play.   Life wasn’t always dreary and dull, and all work.  As little kids, we didn’t have a worry in the world.  We had fun and there was humor, too.  We didn’t watch TV and listen to tape recorded laughter on some comedy show where there was no audience at all.  Those cheap shows were filmed on a stage with just a few people in the studio.  We made up a lot of our own fun.   I remember my sister and Joylene Barreros, the neighbor girl in Channel Heights in L.A., during the war.  They cut out the colored cartoons out of the funny papers and glued them into a long strip and rolled it up on two sticks.  As they unrolled the strip and rolled it up on the other end, they pretended it was a movie.  That entertained about a half a dozen of us other kids in the audience.   When we moved back to Minnesota, we never had chores to do as small kids.  My sister, Marion, learned to braid.  So we would pick long stemmed dandelions and braided the flowers into necklaces for the Guernsey calves that were laying in the pasture chewing their cuds, in the warm summer days.  We had monkeyed with the calves so much, they were as tame as our dogs.  I remember lying against one or two of them and they just swallowed their cud, waited a few seconds, and burped it back up, and started chewing again, like all cows do.  They seemed to like us kids out there with them.   When we were a little older, it was our job to feed the skim milk to the calves.  They were small at first, and would suck on our fingers.  That’s how we got them to drink milk out of a pail.  As soon as we got close to them, they would start slobbering and suck on our hands, which we dunked down into the milk.  After a day or two, they didn’t need our fingers anymore, and would drink by themselves.  As they got bigger and bigger, we had to be careful they wouldn’t knock us over.   I remember dad showing us how to make a lean to, a few feet from the yard in the woods by the house.  It only took a bunch of small dry dead popal poles and some branches to make a hut.  I peeled that soft green moss off the bottom of the popal trees and made a carpet for the floor.  After we did that a few times, it got old, so we got bored with that and didn’t do it again.   For me, playing with frog eggs and catching frogs and grasshoppers, slowly changed into monkeying with bugs, and finally into shooting my .22, and planting seeds I collected from mom’s flowers.   What did the other kids do in other places and with other families didn’t even enter my mind.  Our family went together to see the shows in Cook.  We couldn’t walk the way kids did in town.  We had to go in the car with the folks.  We never thought about it, we just went with them.  At home we only went as far as we could go on our bikes, and we always told mom where we were going and when we would be home.   There weren’t any kids my age in Willow Valley after Allen Holmer moved to Seattle after the 7th grade.  We did bike up to Ray Ollila’s, south of Orr one time, but that was 8 miles away.  Four of those miles were on gravel, so it was exhausting peddling 16 miles.   I never learned to play cards, and I didn’t care for board games.  You have to have someone to do stuff like that with.  Solitaire gets boring.  I’d rather poke around in the woods, and hunt and trap weasels, and snare rabbits in the early winter before it got too cold in January.   The kids in town didn’t have the same kind of chores the teenagers had on farms.  They had enough people to play baseball and football.   I suppose because I grew up ten miles from town, as a teenager, I did things by myself.  I was never bored.  Thinking now, I don’t like to hunt with other people.  I feel safer with no one else around.   Dad always warned me of the men’s men.  There are some people always trying to get you to join a gang.  There are always some guys trying to get you to go on fishing trips with them, and trying to get you to join in the hunting shack gang.  I suppose he had ended up doing most of the work on a couple of those ventures as a teen.   Some people don’t feel safe in the woods alone. They always need other people.  They never fish alone either, or trap alone.  Some hate to get drunk alone, too.   There are some men who never became good lumberjacks after the camps closed down.  They had to have a boss making the decisions, and a crew with them.  Those men that sat alone on a stump dreaming of how much pulpwood they would cut never were successful.  You have to get off your fat lawn chair and get started.  It’s best to get going on any job right away, and don’t stop until it’s quitting time.   Being alone, while dad was away working, I learned to work by myself.  I’ve never needed a boss to keep me working.  Thinking of things to do by myself as a kid has helped me see where money could be made.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2009   PANIC Dave Hanson   About a year ago, I was sitting eating, at a fund raiser for someone at the American Legion Hall in Orr.  Next to me sat Speed.  We were visiting and the conversation turned to Billy Orr, who promoted the town.  Speed said he had the opportunity as a small boy to meet Billy one time when he walked down town with his father, Scott W. Erickson Sr.  Scott Jr. (Speed) said he felt that Billy got a bad rap by gossiping,  jealous people, and that he was really a nice man who got the town started.  I’ve heard the same thing from other people from Orr.   As conversations go, he started talking about his folks.  I knew beforehand that Scott had moved up here from Wisconsin and was trying to start his own business, but never knew anything about Gerta.  Speed told me, “One day everyone got wind that a school marm was arriving on the train, so that day about thirty men lined up near the depot to see what this young woman looked like.”  Scott Erickson was a handsome young Norwegian, and as people my age remember, he was not shy, but a confident man.  “Those men were mostly lumberjacks and were dressed in their work clothes and a couple could have been drunk at the time, when mom stepped off the train.  Dad was right there, dressed in nice clean clothes and carried mom’s suitcases for her.”   Gerta even taught in the Willow Valley Club Hall here in this township.  The Gorence school burned down, so the school set up in the hall which was built in 1923.  One thing led to another and Scott and Gerta married.  Speed Erickson is about 10 years older than I am.  I was born in 1939.  So all of that old history was about 1925 when the Virginia Rainy Lake Company had its headquarters in Cusson.  That company dissolved in 1929.   Orr was a little rough around the edges, as most boom towns were.  So were the border towns, seaports, the Great Lakes ports, and cattle towns and the mining towns, both out west and here in Minnesota.   When you start thinking about people and things that have happened in your lifetime, people have reacted differently to different situations.  Change is hard for some people to get used to.  Those old close knit communities have been threatened by change.   Dad told of a small town north of Grand Rapids where, the rumor has it, one day the Hells Angels were going to have a rally in northern Minnesota.  I think someone told dad the story when he was working at Hibbing Tac, when that was first being built.  Anyway, when about twenty motorcycles roared into town, they were met with a lot of rifle barrels sticking out the upstairs windows, so they turned around and roared back out of town and never came back.  Some of those old movies of Marlon Brando portrayed motorcycle people in a dim light. I don’t remember when Sturgis became the motorcycle capital, but quite a crowd gathers there for their rendezvous.   When our kids were little, the surrounding area here in Willow Valley became unnerved when the hippies were scouting out the area for a huge rock concert.  Woodstock Rock Festival had recently taken place out east, and some people were promoting the concert up here.  Rumors got around that the location would be a couple of miles north of Vic Zgaynor’s store in Celina.  They claimed so many people would come, that the cars would be parked and fill all the roads in Gheen, Greaney, Bear River, and surrounding areas, and shuttle busses would have to be used to get the people to the site.   As all promoters think, a lot of money would be taken in to pay for the bands and enough profit would pay for all the trouble and advertisement.  Rumor has it that the St. Louis County Health Dept. wouldn’t permit the hundreds of satellite toilets.  Personally, I didn’t think it would last, not because of rain, but because those people moving in for a week ahead of time would not be prepared for our friendly friends, mosquitoes,  no-see-ums, and sand flies.   Some years we had to keep the windows closed after the sun went down because the no-see-ums came right in through the screen windows.  Most people who camp, know about bugs coming into your tent at night.  Most people hate to get out of the tent to take a leak, because you get chewed up and have to spend the rest of the night killing mosquitoes.   Worry is one thing that is hard not to do.  Most of the time the dreaded thing doesn’t happen.  When I was little, the three bears, and Goldilocks had us kids scared that we would get caught and eaten by these creatures.  I suppose that came from the Old Country where there were a lot of dead people from the Black Death laying frozen in the snow, and the wolves and bears did get used to eating people.   Did you ever know anyone who solved their problems by worry?  To me, it’s a waste of time.  I try hard not to get myself in a jam, that way I don’t have to lose sleep over something I have no control of.   We never heard of hippies before that rock concert thing.  They were called Flower Children, or Beatniks, and portrayed in the Life and Look magazines.  We thought they were like Buddhist monks sitting on the sidewalks and getting handouts for food.  After seeing all the mud and litter left in the farm country of Woodstock, people changed their minds.   A few dozen hippies did move into the country around here.  Most of them were college graduates and were kids of prominent people in the large cities.  Up here where no one knew them, they could live off the land and let off steam.  Some tried free love and communal living.  Just about all of them were smoking some drugs.   I heard of one kid who came home with the crabs, and asked his folks what to do, he had been raiding the cupboards at home and feeding his friends.  His dad told him, “You got them, now you can get rid of them.”  I don’t know the details, but his dad told me that, so it’s not second hand information.   Aids wouldn’t come on the scene yet for another few years, so there was no fear of promiscuity.  A few did have babies.   Only a few of the old hippies are left.  They are all grey haired.  I think their parents sent money to them, hoping they would stay up here and not embarrass them in the cities.   Panic has always scared communities from time to time.  Now we see the doomsday TV programs of the world coming to an end and global warming.   When I was a kid, about 1950, there was a large sign 2 ½ miles west of the Gheen Corner.  “The End is Near.”  Someone nailed it up on a Balm of Gilead tree.  After about 10 years, the top of the tree broke off and covered the sign.  No one ever took it down and nailed it in another tree.  Maybe whoever nailed it up was old and the end was near for him.  But to the rest of us kids, it was a lesson about things people worry about, never seem to happen.   Sometimes it’s the opposite that happens.  As a kid, we thought everyplace would get so populated that everyone in the world would starve.   Starving people don’t have any kids, because they are sick.  Now there is a population boom.  There is so much food it’s practically being given away.  Corn is burned and made into fuel.  But to white people, there are no kids being born.  With birth control and abortions, we have a zero population growth in our higher class people.  Europe has even a lower birth rate than we do.  No one seems to worry about it, but minorities and immigrants will take up the slack and keep some young people coming.   We do have a lost generation.  I suppose some people think kids put a kink in their lifestyle, so don’t want any rug rats running around in their house.   With all the fat people in this country, I don’t think we have to panic about running out of food.  If that was the case, everyone would start a garden next spring.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Monday, January 12, 2009   BIG RATS Dave Hanson   When Gwen and I moved onto this place where mom grew up, I cut a few cords of popal pulpwood.  Some of the tops fell in the creek that drains the pond that was known as Berg’s Lake when grandpa moved here in 1910, or so.  Those green popal tops attracted a pair of young beaver that built a dam.  I was tickled that we had our own private beaver dam on our land.   After a couple of years, the pests multiplied and the dam grew to be about 120 yards long and flooded out about 20 acres of trees on my land, that would have made a lot of pulpwood.   I tried shooting them with my .22, but it just bounced off the water, or just punched a hole in those fat 50 pound pigs.  I graduated to using my deer rifle and I shot two.  I had to wait until the sun was going down, as they are most active at night.  A lady teacher in Cook School told me those things are valuable.   I met Jack Finstad at a basketball game in Orr and he told me he’d show me how to catch them.  When spring came, he took me with checking his traps as the ice was going out of the creeks and rivers.  He showed me how to skin some of his beaver, and how to scrape the fat off.  Next he nailed them on the boards to dry.   I got a dozen traps and a license, and didn’t catch one beaver that first year.  I hate to have something like a beaver outsmart me, so I never gave up.  Never.  I knew Russell Hyppa was catching every fur bearer there was, and paying for his college education.  Russell was one of the smartest kids I ever taught.   After learning a few tricks of the trade, I started having some success.  I kept my mouth shut and didn’t brag about my measly take.  It’s a lot of work.  I liked the woods and fresh air a lot so I didn’t mind walking a lot.   As word got around that I had traps, people started asking me to trap around Cook and the surrounding area.  I got more and more traps, and started getting more fur.   Animal rights people were making the news a lot in those days, so most of us kept a low profile.  The people in China and Russia wanted those furs and were a big part of the export trade.   I never got into the high price era, prices were dropping by the time I started trapping.   Jack and I went together the first few years and sold to the traveling fur buyers.  In the later years, we sent our furs on the Minnesota Trappers Association truck that collected fur all over Minnesota and took them up to North Bay, Ontario, for the international fur auction.  I still have some of my receipts of the fur I was paid for each year.   One year just before the shipping date, I had the kids help me string up 110 hides for a picture.  It was so cold out, and it took about 2 ½ hours, I never did it again.   The last two years I taught, 1996 and 1997, I caught 180 beaver each spring.  I even gave a few small ones away to kids so they could practice skinning them.   I may be wrong, but one spring, Mike Keister caught 2 large albino beaver. I caught a baby in Beaver Creek down by Don Potter’s old place.  When I went to the fur buyer in Cook, I told him it would look nice if some taxidermist had that baby beaver along side the two large albinos.  If I had skinned it, it would have been about $5. But he asked what I thought it was worth.  I said $75.  I was surprised when he wrote out the check.   Gwen said she never thought she’d be giving a baby albino beaver a bath.  We kept it frozen in the deep freeze until we sold it along with my spring take.    Some of those big 55 pounders have a tail the size of your Sorel boot.  I got a whole pickup load at Harry Enzmann’s place one day.  I never trapped a beaver north of Gheen Hill.  I didn’t have time.    The year after we started the greenhouse I stopped trapping.  I sold most of my traps to Dave Arola a couple of years ago.   I told my brother in law in Olympia, Washington, about this a week ago.  I also sent the pictures to him.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Monday, January 12, 2009   WIND IN THE WILLOWS Dave Hanson   The love of nature and the land is ingrained in a lot of us people who live up here year round.  Some of the snow birds that evacuate every fall may have given in to the short days of winter, and the snow, but I don’t think they forget the fun times they had as kids sliding down hills on cardboard or small sleds.  As teenagers it was a chance to get your arms around a girl as a half dozen kids sat on a toboggan and flew down a hill.  They did come in for hot apple cider or hot cocoa to warm up.  I was only on a couple of hay rides as a kid.  They didn’t use horses by then, just a tractor or a jeep.   I was in early grade school when they invented Smoky the Bear.  Allan Holmer and I lay on the floor of our school room and used color crayons to draw a three foot Smoky.  Charlie Hedberg, the forest ranger, saw our bear and asked if he could take it to the St. Louis County Fair in Hibbing.  We gave it up.   No one seemed to plant trees up here until the CCC camps were started during the depression years.  I’m not sure when Arbor Day was started.  I think that was earlier in the century, and more in the prairie states.  The pioneers did plant trees in their yards as wind breaks.  Grandpa Miller hauled in the spruce and balsam trees into the yard in a wheelbarrow about 1920 and planted them all the way around the yard.  There were four white pine, one Norway pine, and some clumps of birch already growing on this clay knob when he built the house in 1918.  When Gwen and I bought the place from grandma and moved in here in 1968, the balsams were mature and I cut the dying trees down.  The white spruce are longer lived, but they are moth eaten and getting beat up.  I’ll keep them standing for sentimental reasons for a few more years.  The white pine were small and passed over by the loggers who went through this country before the settlers came in, but they too, are now mature and dying.         . I asked mom about twenty years ago if she minded if I cut down the birch trees.  They were dying and chunks of dead wood were coming down and were dangerous.  She just said nonchalantly, “They lived their life.”  I knew Gwen would be a nervous wreck so I cut them down when she went to Cook one day.  Those clumps were leaning in all directions.  I didn’t want to have them hit the power line, so I had to leave the straight tree stand until last, so in case one went the wrong way, it had a tree to bounce off of.  Everything went down OK and the yard was a mess, but those nine trees made enough firewood for a week or two.   My Uncle Roy Hanson lived on the old home place where the family grew up.  In the pasture there was a cedar grove where, as small kids, we grandchildren played.  The balsam trees have long since died out, but the cedar grove is still there.   Most of the cedar has died out of this country.  At the turn of the century, this was moose and woodland caribou country.  But the white tailed deer moved in and replaced them.  They browse during the winter and have kept the cedar from regenerating.   I’ve got enough steel fence posts to build a couple of fences.  I’m going to plant cedar groves in a couple of places here on this property.  Once the trees are seven feet tall, the deer can’t reach the top branches and I’ll take the fences down.  Cedars grow a couple of feet a year if protected from those dog gone deer.   A lot of people used to plant gardens and really looked forward to getting seed catalogs (wish books) just after Christmas each year.  You watch for zone 3 plants or trees that can stand our winters.  How many hundreds of trees were planted in the hopes of them surviving?  Just about everyone planted an apple tree.  It’s an urge to plant shrubs and trees that are not native here.  Grandpa planted Siberian elm trees, that are still here, but they are scrubby and never get more than 10 feet tall.  I cut them down with the chainsaw a few years ago, but they are tough Siberian, alright, and came back as brush.   I cut down all the hawthorns here in the yard grandpa planted.  I still have the big one in the pasture.  That’s in the open and about 30 feet in diameter.  It was there when mom was a girl, and is another sentimental, terrible, thorny nightmare, I think I’ll cut down and get rid of it.   Three miles from here on mom and dad’s place, there is a yellow willow tree with a diameter of about 4 feet.  That was a 2 foot sprig mom got from Mrs. Paradise.  The tree was probably planted in that yard thirty years before.  Captain Coty, Mrs. Paradise’s father, was the first person to settle along the Willow River here in Willow Valley Township.  Mom shoved the twig down in the ground 69 years ago when I was born.  The thing sprouted roots and grew.  It’s all beat up just like me, and I told my nephew he could cut it down if he wanted to.  That willow is the messiest tree there ever was.  Every time there is a wind storm, the yard is full of branches.  Maybe that’s why I’m such a messy guy.   Mom only had rustling quaking aspen over there, at home, but she always remarked about the sound of the wind blowing through the white pine here where she grew up. It’s easy to fall asleep hearing that.  Every time I came home from college, I could fall asleep at the home place.  I really relaxed and that sound of the wind in the leaves lulled me into dreamland.  I suppose mom fell asleep the same way in this yard.   Maybe that’s the way I want to die, listening to the wind in the trees.   Hospitals are bad.  They keep waking you up every hour to take your temperature, or they are giggling out in the hall.  Or sirens blare or breakfast comes when you want to sleep.  The biggest concern or conversation in the nursing home is everyone asking each other if they had a bowel movement today!  Who stole her false teeth?  We’ll have to check.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Sunday, January 11, 2009   TOO LAZY TO FARM Dave Hanson   It would be interesting to know statistics of the past years, for some subjects.   In the Minnesota Conservation Volunteer magazine, the scientists are baffled as to why the pine martins are prevalent now compared to about the first 50 years of the 20th century.  When I was trapping, it was one of the easiest animals to catch.  They have no fear, and just sit and look at you a lot of times.  Knowing the little animals, no one would walk over and try to grab them.  They are quick and if they ever bit you, you probably would have to make a trip to the hospital to get sewed up.   Scientists are by and large, city people.  I know it’s hard for college educated people to ask old people what they know about a lot of things.  It would remind them that college and books don’t answer everything.   They state that there were nearly a zero population of martin in 1970, and more than 200 in 1979, and now increased to cover their former range.   It flashes into my mind, the way people live in rural Minnesota when I read stuff like this.   The pine martin is primarily a red squirrel feeder.  They can run through the branches and catch all the food they need.   When it was illegal to trap them in the sparse years, the accidental catch got tossed into the woods, so the game wardens wouldn’t catch the trapper.  It was easier to do that than try to explain how it got caught.   When I was over 50 years old, Jack Finstad, from Buyck, taught me how to trap.  I got some tips from Stub Schultz from Gheen, and Floyd Kielchewski in Orr.  The first year while trying to trap beaver, I caught an otter in one of my traps.  I hated to waste the animal, so I took it up to Tom Fink, the game warden, in Orr.  He thanked me for being honest.  That surprised me.   I talked to other trappers over the years and just about every one of the professional trappers has an ethic of being legal.  That said a game warden is you best friend sometimes.  I suppose if they didn’t do their job, there would be no wildlife left.   The conservation people blame the clear cutting of the large white pine and logging of other species of pulpwood for the decline of the martin.  There seems to be no decrease in the logging until perhaps the last year.  So it can’t be that.   Think of the other things besides logging.  Just around the turn of the century, people moved in and started settling this area.  Just about everyone had a few cows for personal food.  They also had dogs and cats.  Not only did they eat mice, they ate red squirrels.  The food of the martin.   How many cows are there between Orr and International Falls?  How many cows are there between Crane Lake and Cook?  I don’t think there ever were many in Crane Lake, but Buyck was full of cattle.  There were scattered herds all the way from Pelican Lake to Duluth.  Now we can count on our two hands the few people with cows between Cook and the Falls.   With the cows, went the dogs and cats.  When is the last time you saw a cat dead on a road, or the eyes shining in the headlights at night while they hunt?   Those squirrels came back.  Anyone who feeds sunflower seeds at the birdfeeders knows that.  When ever there is a surplus of food, something will eat it.   Nature has cycles, too.  Think of the army worms we get on the popal trees every few years.  Someone told me they swam out across Lake Vermilion and ate all the leaves off the trees.  I smiled and knew the moths had laid eggs in those trees the year before.  We always have a few of those caterpillars every year, but what triggers them, I don’t know.  Someone said it has to be colder than -42 below zero to kill the eggs.  We’ve had a lot of winters when it didn’t get that cold, so it has to be something else that controls them.   Those friendly flies, the large hairy grey buggers, that just cling on you, do lay eggs in the (tent caterpillar) army worm cocoons.   About 10 years ago, our yard trees were covered with aphids.  We had them to deal with in the greenhouses, too.  How many thousands of tons were there in St. Louis county, I’ll never know.   The next year we got our famous lady bug invasion.  It took them about 3 or 4 years to eat themselves out of house and home.  A lot of people blamed the DNR for introducing those Friendly Flies, and the Asian Lady Bugs.  I know people who bought a pint or two of lady bugs from California, as organic farming bug control.   There always were popal trees here in the woods of Minnesota.  The natives have beaver trapped them since time began.  Those beaver made a rebound.  Don’t tell me they are extinct now because of trapping.  I caught my share while still teaching.  I used to take my work clothes with and change after I got out of school each evening.  That way I could take three different routes home.  You have to check your traps often to be legal.  I liked to trap on private property.  Usually those people hated beaver because of the flooding and damage they caused.   You don’t have to worry much about people monkeying with your trap on private property.   Those beaver have invaded the eastern United States all the way to the Mississippi River.  They have eaten all the trees way back from the river banks and even the trees on the resorts of Lake Vermilion.  Will they eat up their food source?  I know the disease, Touleremia (I don’t know if I spelled that right) killed them off years ago.  I don’t think it was the trapping.   Why did the herds of cows disappear from our area?  I don’t think it was because people ate them all up.  I don’t think some disease killed them, and I don’t think it was global warming, or deer hunters killing them.   What will historians say a couple hundred years from now?   Will they say we were too lazy to keep farming?

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009   TRYING TO GET THINGS DONE Dave Hanson   You hardly ever hear the term “scraping the bottom of the barrel,” these days.  That was a term I heard often as a kid.  I suppose it was the culture of our rural people who regulated the way people behaved by being critical.  No kid I knew deliberately dishonored their parents.  Few wanted their community to be criticized, either.  So people conducted themselves in such a way that no one would gossip about them and how their parents had raised them.  Those that wanted to act bad tried to get away from the community, so no one would know them.   I figured out years ago, that it’s hard to hide, even in a place like Minneapolis.  It seems wherever I go, I run into someone I know.  It’s not that, “Have I seen you somewhere?” kind of person.  It’s someone I know, and they know my name too, kind of person.   I’m starting to run into some older looking people who were my former students.  Some of those kids I don’t even recognize.  When they grow up, the boys change into men.  I’ve always used an idea I learned from my dad, that all kittens look alike, but you can tell a tom cat across the yard, because his head gets like a brick.  Those sixth grade boys grew into men, and their heads and appearance changed a lot, too.  Girls don’t change that much in appearance.  They don’t get that heavy bone growth change on their faces.   What are people talking about old barrels for?  All the unpleasant dregs settled to the bottom of wine in a barrel.  That may have been drunk by desperate people.  The yeast settles to the bottom of the beer barrels, too.  In the olden days of Europe, when a good grain crop was harvested, it was time to drink up the rest of the old beer, so the barrels could be filled with new beer.  That’s when Oktoberfest, binge drinking, came to be.  The celebration of a good crop became a tradition.  We don’t have many crop failures or famine now, but I suppose there wasn’t much to celebrate about during hard times.   Some things have to be taken care of.  Some things need to have constant care.  A bad apple can spoil the whole works.  Apples had to be watched constantly.  If one started to rot, it would rot the apple next to it in a barrel.  People didn’t buy 5 pounds at a time in a store, they had them in a cellar, and if you had a tree, you had a few hundred pounds of them.  Potatoes can rot that way, too, if they get frozen a little.   I never saw my dad give up on anything when I was young.  He said a couple of times, “There is no shame in failing, but there is if you never do try.”  He also said, “I’d rather be a has been, than never had been anything.”  There always was some substance to his wisdom.  Isn’t it interesting how only a few bits of wisdom can give a person some kind of destiny for their entire life?   Who inspired Babe Ruth, he was an orphan and kind of a bad egg as a kid, but somehow he found something he could excel in.  Who inspires a kid to become a doctor, or a scientist?  What makes an inventor keep trying his whole life to figure out how life works, or invent a new medicine?   What was said to a kid that turned off their curiosity?  Some kids grow up in a bad environment and still go on to great things.  Some people in the same environment give up, or get in trouble.   I kind of admire people who become politicians, because they know they will be criticized when they get elected.  Those who stay in must have the ability to not let criticisms upset them.  Most people I know would do anything to not be judged.  Only a very few people can be politicians.  We do need them dearly.  Someone has to run our country.   From the stories I’ve heard, my Grandpa Hanson did give up.  He was the timekeeper in the Soudan Mine, and when the men in the mine turned on him for being honest, he walked away from his job and moved up here to Gheen.  I understand why.  He had a lot of friends, but there were too many union men who labeled him as a company man.  Grandpa did control the books and the payroll.  He was contented to live here with his true love, Hannah, and his family.  Dad said when grandma died, he started drinking and never got over his loss.  He stopped drinking in a few years.   Dad was the most resilient man I ever knew.  He lost his young mother when he was old enough to think about things.  Uncle George and dad worked for a few years longer than most kids, giving their hard earned money to grandpa to make sure there was flour, a barrel of toast, and supplies in the upstairs of the house for winter.  They had ended their formal education after the eighth grade.   During the depression, he built his first house while dating mom.  He hewed the logs for the house and cut saw logs for the lumber.  They worked together and built the home before they got married.   When their third child, Laurence, drowned, they got over that heartache.  After a few good years, during WW II, luck changed and the house burned down in 1948, so dad had to start from scratch again.  He never quit, but he did run his health into the ground by working too hard and never sleeping.  About 1954 or 1955, he got T.B.  He got skinny.  He drank a lot of coffee and had insomnia, so he worked on the new house a lot, and cut pulpwood and firewood in his spare time, and made hay on weekends, or picked up extra work.  He wasn’t lazy.   We kids always had our teeth fixed in the days before fluoride.  The folks made sure of that.  Dad neglected his because of the cost.  He had a mouth full of abscessed teeth, and Dr. Krause said that infection was just too much for his body and led to his tuberculosis.  After 9 months in Nopeming, he couldn’t work, doctor’s orders, so he built his sawmill, and his inboard boat, to kill time.  Once he got working again, he never had time to get his boat trailer completely welded up, so he never got his boat in the water.  Old Herman Lammi in Orr, had a Crisscraft inboard he would take out on Pelican Lake once in awhile.  Dad liked Herman, and I suppose that inspired him to build that boat.  He got a large brass propeller from Herman.   After 1960, he did some of his best work up here, working as foreman on nearly all the taconite plants.   Dad grew up in the depression and he built what he needed instead of buying it.   One man tells of meeting dad for the first time.  He came over to the house and mom was knitting a wool sweater from homespun wool.  “Where did you get that wool?” was the question.  Mom said, “I spun it.”  “Where did you get the spinning wheel?”  “Herb made it.  He remembered how his mother’s wheel worked.”  Dad took him out in the addition of the barn and showed him his homemade lathe he had made the spinning wheel parts on.  He had his home made table saw out there, too.  He could take it apart.  That way he could get his table saw, jointer, and home made spindle shaper in the station wagon and take off to his remodeling jobs.  “Where did you get the black ash for the spinning wheel?”  “I sawed it on my mill.”  He showed him his homemade sawmill.  They had to walk by his home made shingle mill he had built as a kid on the home place.  “How does that cut shingles?”  The roof of the folk’s house was shingled with home made cedar shingles.  I’ve heard the man relate that story to some friends of mine.   Dad had a stroke when he was 80 years old.  He was making a good comeback, but mom died less than a year later.  That’s when dad finally gave up trying.  He was deaf, had macular degeneration and was paralyzed on his right side.  He couldn’t watch television, but he turned up his stories on tapes, and could hear that with his hearing aid on.  He said those stories on tapes kept him from going insane.  He couldn’t read anymore, which he dearly loved.   I think he accomplished a lot in his lifetime.  He did go from horse and buggy times as a kid, and saw a lot of change in our country.  They had already gone to the moon and invented transistors and had all the modern stuff by the 1990’s.   I don’t know when I’m going to throw in the towel and give up.  We aren’t going to do the greenhouse anymore.  That took up 10 years of my retirement.  It’s time to start a new venture in my life.  I had a hip replacement, and after 6 weeks in the house, I’m chomping at the bit to get outside again.  By the time the snow is gone, I’ll be spinning my wheels, too.  These short days of winter always seem to charge people’s batteries, so we can give it the snooze next summer when the days get long again, at least then we get enough day light so we can get something done.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Sunday, January 06, 2009

160 Dave Hanson   I have no idea of how many people are reading these stories.  One of my kids said it was like sitting around the table drinking coffee and visiting.  That’s how I try to jot my stories down.  I suppose I should start to write more carefully and not have incomplete sentences, or run on sentences.  It must make English teachers shudder to think an old teacher would write like I do.  Sometimes I think it may look too stuffy if I did everything perfect and got out a thesaurus to change some common words into high faluttin  English.  Some old timers don’t like to take the first 60 pages of a novel to finally get into the story.  I write American and the English  can say what they want.  I’ll stop B.S.ing and get going on the 160 story.   When people look at a map, it’s all neat and nice and a lot of roads in the flat prairie run east and west and north and south in straight lines.  They follow the surveyed lines and follow the sections of land.  Most people know a section is 1 square mile and ¼ of that is 160 acres.  Those were the parcels people got when they homesteaded on free land from the government years ago.   It wasn’t always like that.  In the old country, people settled along the sea coast or on river banks.  Over the last 2 thousand years, the population grew so people spread back away from the rivers.  As time went on, villages and towns built up far from water.  Just about every town was built on a river crossing or lake shore.   Just like lake shore property, those river banks got crowded, so long narrow strips went straight back.  Even when the river curved back and forth, the property lines fanned out on one side of the river and became a wedge on the other side.  The property lines always went straight back from the river or shore.  That same custom came over here with the French and the English.  A good example is on the St. Laurence River near Quebec.  If you have Google Earth on your computer, you can zoom in just east of Quebec City and see the farm land.   George Washington was a surveyor as a young man.  Thomas Jefferson was always interested in the land, too.  When he sent Lewis and Clark out west, he wanted them to record everything they could, about the Louisiana Purchase and try to find a waterway to the Pacific.   I’m not sure when the first federal land was surveyed.  They used compasses, but as you get closer to the North Pole, that gets distorted, too.  I know mariners used the sun and stars as well as compasses to find their location on the sea.   I met Harry Lammpa in Virginia a couple of years ago.  He is so interesting to listen to.  He knows when each part of northern Minnesota was surveyed.  A lot of this land wasn’t logged until the land was surveyed.  Some timber was taken to Canada before that.  But no one cared in those days.   I just got wind of a man in Cook who has maps of a lot of logging camps in the surrounding area here, before people started to settle the area.   In the late 1800’s, the first pioneers here were mostly Scandinavian immigrants or first generation people looking for farm land.   The Beattys, from near Cook, were prospectors and thought there was iron near their property.  Some people paid a few dollars to have people come up here and homestead so they could get the timber from the land.  The homesteaders wanted to stay in the twin cities.  So it was a scam by the logging companies.  The lumberjacks didn’t care about the legality of their bosses, they got paid, anyway.  Those first surveyors were pretty accurate in their work.   When the farmers decided to put up fences, they walked together and blazed (chopped bark off) trees on the fence lines.  There were hardly any disputes on fence lines because both parties worked together.  There may have been some discrepancies, but by and large those same fence lines are honored to this day.  When I fenced my land in, none of the neighbors came to watch me.  They said, “Just stand up what old fence post you can still find and put up your fence.”   When people have bought up the old places around here for hunting property, they do hire someone to run the property lines.  Also, when people log private property, someone has to run the lines, so they don’t cut trees down on someone else’s property.   When I was a kid, there were concrete posts in the ditches along the county road here every mile.  The posts were about six inches square and buried so they wouldn’t move.  Each had a three inch brass disk inlaid in the top with information about the survey location.  They stuck up about six inches or a foot above ground.  One of those brass markers was just in the door of Scott Erickson lumber shed, in Orr, level with the cement floor.   I see a lot of small yellow sheet metal markers nailed on trees now identifying the corners of sections of land.  When the roads were paved, a lot of the old concrete marker posts were torn up.   With modern global positioners and satellites, the old way of surveying with transits is no longer needed.  But people still have to run the lines.   It would be easy to survey the prairie, but here in the brush, woods, and rock hills, and swamps, it’s still a chore most people hire done.   Just think of a whole 160 acres of cleared land.  That’s four forties.  It took a lot of work to clear forty acres of stumps once the trees were cut, and even more work to plow and disk the land.  Then they had to plant it.   One thing about farming, you have to cut the hay and rake it and take it in.  Not once, but every year.  That’s not all.  After the cows eat it, it has to be cleaned out of the barn.  That’s an endless chore, too.   To most people up here, those fields have grown back to trees.  Most don’t have 160 any more, but some do have the back 40 where they have a hunting shack or a deer stand.   To a lot of renters in the cities, we seem selfish to have so much property.  Some feel it should belong to everyone and be a national park.  But to most of us up here, we like to have, if only a little parcel, a piece of land to call our own.                 It doesn’t have to be 160. Dave, I like the way you write, it is the way I think. As for me, sorry to say I never studied English!  I would say for what we are paid, our readers are getting a bargain. Just for the record, I have never been criticized for the way I write, as our readers are so nice and understanding. Also people make allowances for people like me. Don

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Sunday, January 04, 2009   IT’LL SHOW UP Dave Hanson   People don’t use files as much as they did years ago.  They almost never us a rasp.  I don’t think a lot of people have seen a rasp.  I had always wondered as a kid how they made tools like files and rasps.  It’s impossible to sharpen them.  Some lasted a long time if used right and were taken care of.  A file is used to cut down iron.  Brass, copper or aluminum is so soft it plugs up the ridges on a file.  A kid soon finds out from his dad that it’s not a good idea to ruin one of dad’s tools.  More than once, when something broke down, a tool could not be found or was unusable, so a trip to town was necessary to buy another one.  People in rural America had to fix things for themselves.  When it came to haying time, it was every man for him self.  Everyone was “making hay while the sun shines.”  Sometimes neighbors would help some friend hay and then the friend would help him.  Usually one got his haying done, and the weather changed and it rained a lot, so the other had a terrible time getting his hay put up.  The first guy sat around waiting for dry weather to help, but everyone knows how terrible the weather can get some years.   Dad told about those old days when he was a kid.  They had an old horse named Dick, and dad learned a teenager how to float teeth.  Maybe that old horse standing there with his ribs sticking out, isn’t old at all.  Dad said to look at the horse turds and see if the grass was real long.  That was a sign that the horse could graze because his front teeth were fine, but his molars weren’t coming together.  If the molars grew faster than the front teeth, he couldn’t graze and would starve, too.   Dad floated Old Dick’s teeth with a large flat file.  That old horse stood there with his mouth open and let dad level out all his teeth.  Horses are a desert animal and ate gritty grass.  Here in this clay country, the teeth didn’t wear down by themselves, so some 15 year old horses could have lived another 10 or 15 years if they were taken care of.   Mom told about a time they were traveling across the prairie and had to stop so one of us kids could pee.  We had taken our dog, Tootsie, with when dad was working on those factory jobs during the war.  Tootsie took off after a jack rabbit.  The folks waited for about an hour and were really sad, but just as they were leaving, Tootsie showed up.  She never caught the jack rabbit.  She caught rabbits up here in Gheen, but they aren’t as fast as those large jack rabbits.   When we came back to Gheen from California just after WW II, we took a black Persian tom cat with.  Dad made a little cage for the trip.  When our house burned down just before Christmas in 1948, that cat was in the burning house and when the door was opened, he tore out into the snowy night and never came back.  Dad figured he survived, because there were a lot of flat faced black kittens being born around the neighborhood.   Years ago while metal detecting, I found a length of very eroded and rusty logging chain on the old road.  I suppose it had fallen off one of the old logging sleighs returning to Greaney after logs had been hauled into Gheen.  It could have fallen off an early logging truck later on, too.   I found a couple of old horse shoes in the old ditch too.  They probably tore off a foot of one of those teams pulling loads into Gheen.  Teamsters were always checking the horses feet.  Mud or ice would pile up under the feet of a shod horse.  The teamsters had a small pick that they used to clear the shoes with.  I found one at an old Virginia Rainy Lake logging camp site the year before last.   A lot of tools were lost on farms, too.  I wonder how many wrenches and screwdrivers have fallen off tractors when they drive out to the fields.  One time I drove into the yard here in Gheen and saw a vise grip pliers on the hood of my pickup.  I had been haying and used it on some machinery, drove home, and needed something in Cook.  How it managed to stay there on a 22 mile round trip is hard to imagine.  At least I wasn’t making sudden stops on my trip.   I knew one old man that had a lock on everything.  That was in a time when no one locked their cars, houses, or sheds.   A few times dad went to get a pitchfork, or sledge hammer and the handle was broken.  He had a good idea of who had borrowed them, but he always said it was always a courtesy to repair anything you borrowed and broke.   There have only been a few things stolen around here.  Just like years ago, there are enough people up here to watch out for their neighbors.  If a strange car is in someone’s yard, they stop and ask questions.  Are you your neighbor’s keeper?   I wonder how many nine sixteenth and half inch wrenches were lost by kids like me fixing our bikes.  They fall out of pockets easily.  I know some of those never showed up again.   Where did I put that?  Oh, they’ll show up.  I know some don’t.   Gwen spotted a six foot steel bar on the side of the highway one time.  I backed up and picked up the bar.  We’ve found a nice life preserver, a logging chain, a canoe paddle, and a bag of Christmas presents north of Virginia when they probably fell out of a pickup on a trip home.  Styrofoam coolers and lids blow out of boats on the trip south, while people return from vacations.  They know those things will never show up.   Finding a needle in a haystack is nearly impossible.  But there is always a chance.  I’ve heard of people finding a diamond ring in the folds of a couch years after it disappeared.  It’s everyone’s dream to find the old “Lost Dutchman” gold mine in the Superstition Mts. near Phoenix.  There are a lot of people looking for gold coins, or Civil War relics with metal detectors.   One old lady from Cook told me her mother lost her wedding ring when she threw the dishwater out in the yard years ago in Linden Grove.  I have to get permission from the owners of the property to look for it.  I know some people who would help me.  She figured it fell in a crack in the dry dirt.   What a thrill for a 90 year old woman, if we could find her mother’s wedding band.   It could show up.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Thursday, January 01, 2009   THREE SCORE AND TEN Dave Hanson   There are only a few people now who remember the old time push lawnmowers.  There aren’t many people now who remember kids taking those old Maytag gas engines and bolting them on their bikes.   There are some who remember the Swede Saws (Bow saws) for cutting pulpwood, but few remember the crosscut saws they used to cut the large white pine saw logs.  I asked an 80 year old man a year ago, how they set the teeth on those old cross cut saws.  He never saw it done.  He was too young or didn’t work in the woods.   By the time I was a teenager, a few kids had motorcycles and no one monkeyed with homemade stuff.  Chainsaws were replacing hand saws in the woods, and electric power tools were replacing all the hand tools in the building trades.   Just after the war, there were some articles in the Popular Mechanics magazine showing how to put a gas engine on a reel type lawn mower.  When the gas powered lawn mowers like we have now came on the market, they were so expensive that most people didn’t buy them.   Dad welded one up that was nearly like ours today.  The only trouble was the gas engine was worn out and it was a job to get it started.   About five years later, the price came down and nearly everyone bought a rotary lawn mower.   In town, people had small yards, so most lawns were mowed.  In the country, some had animals grazing next to the house, or the yard was fenced in and people like my grandpa cut the grass with a scythe a couple of times a summer.  Grandpa Miller piled it up as hay and carried it out of the yard.   About 1950, when the power lawn mowers became popular, people started to take pride in their yards.  People hit a lot of stuff in the tall grass.  Bricks, rocks, chunks of iron, and stuff like that had been tossed around for years.  They ruined a few of those first mowers.   I know of one day at Dr. Heiam’s hospital in Cook, where he had to sew up three people I know, because of those power mowers.  One girl from Greaney, one boy from west of here, lost a toe, and a man here in Willow Valley, who was unclogging wet grass while it was running, got his finger wacked.  I think the easiest and most accidents happened when kids got the mowers stuck on an ant hill and cut a toe,  while pulling it back and it unexpectedly lurched back with a vengeance.  Now I see small kids mowing with relative safety on a riding mower.   When power lines were built, the electric kitchen range replaced the wood range.  Nearly everyone bought a refrigerator, and some with cows, bought deep freezers for their beef and other meat they raised.  The old battery radios were all replaced by 110 volt radios.  Those close to Duluth in the early 1950’s could get some good TV reception.  Those first TVs had poor reception because the signal traveled a hundred miles up here.  No TV towers had been built yet.  After they were built every few miles, TV reception improved.   Probably one of the most important conveniences was the electric water pump.  It was nice to have running water, and a hot water heater, for fast baths.  Women were able to get electric washers and dryers.  It had always been a chore to heat water on stoves and then wash clothes by hand and hang them to dry.  You don’t see many clothes lines today.  Remember the cloths pins?   I like the smell of fresh sheets and pillowcases coming in off the clotheslines.  Mom hung clothes out in the wintertime, too.  I remember if it was windy, the freeze dried clothes would become soft.  If it was calm, they dripped and then froze solid.  Mom carried the stiff clothes in an armload at a time and dried them next to the living room stove.  In the summer, sometimes they got rinsed again by a sudden rain shower.   Mom had a gas clothes iron that she had to light with a match and let warm up before she could iron.  There were no electric steam irons, so they had a glass pop bottle that they would sprinkle the cloth with before they ironed, otherwise it could scorch the cloth easily.  Those old irons burned white gas.  The old pump up gas mantle lamps burned white gas, too.  That gas didn’t have lead in it like red gas we burned in the cars and tractors.   When I worked at Bridgemans in Virginia, I had to have a clean white shirt every four hour shift.  I was a bus boy and had to wash dirty dishes, but also prepare a lot of the food for the short orders, like slicing raw onions, baking a ham and slicing it for sandwiches, slicing tomatoes for BLTs, and even sliced cylinders of half frozen hamburger for the quarter pounders.   It was fun working in the back of Bridgies preparing all the different kinds of sundae toppings, but mostly chipping those 5 pound Hershey bars for hot fudge topping.  We had to have a clean white shirt when working with all that food.  I washed my shirts at the laundromat and laid a wet wash cloth on them, and ironed them that way, so I wouldn’t burn them.  It was a lot cheaper than taking them to the Troy Laundry and having them wash and press them.   Little by little, life improved with the new conveniences becoming affordable to everyone.   Before electric power, some rural people cut ice and had ice boxes.  Some didn’t, and had a pantry room where a window could be opened at night and closed during the day to keep food cool.  Some lowered a pail down the well.  During the hot summer months it was hard to keep food from s