I was born in 1928. I was unexpected, the youngest of our family. It was the end of the financial bust of the 1920s and the beginning of the depression of the 1930s and another child was not really what my parents needed, but here I was, and they took very good care of me.

I had, I had all these older brothers and sisters, and the one I was closest to was my brother, Russell. He was about three years older than I was. We played together, sometimes helped each other, and went to school together in a country school that was about a quarter of a mile from our house. It was a school where the teacher had all eight grades, from first grade to eighth grade. I had learned to read before I went to school, because my parents read to me a lot, and I caught on on how to read. So in first grade, the teacher asked my parents if she could put me in second grade because I knew how to read and I knew all my numbers facts.

So I took first and second grade in one year, and eventually graduated from eighth grade, and then I went to school in Evansville for my four years of high school. We started out with a class of about 27 or 28, and due to the war and boys needing to help at home, we ended up with a class of 12 when we graduated. I was top student of My class, so I gave a speech at graduation.

We lived on this farm that had the biggest hill in the community, and in the wintertime when there was a lot of snow, that's where all the kids got together. We went coasting and tobogganing and skiing. On Sunday afternoons there would always be a crowd of people up on the hill. Well, then we were cold and wet and whatever we would go to the house, and Dad would make a big pan of popcorn for us, and we might play some games around the dining room table. So that was some of what we did for fun.

And of course, being a little girl, I always played with my dolls, and I had what I called a playhouse out under the trees, and I would play there, and sometimes some neighbor girls would come over and play with me. So we had a lot of fun.

One year (1936) I wanted to know so badly for Christmas. I had been playing with my sisters dolls. And that year I wanted a doll of my very own. Money was very, very scarce, and my mother tried to explain to me that maybe there wouldn't be enough money for a doll.

Well, I had picked out a doll in the catalog that I wanted, and I had a name for her. She was going to be Patsy, and I knew what I would sing to her and the stories I would read to her. And Christmas came, you know, was in December, and I was really looking forward to this doll, and I knew that there wasn't any extra money for one the doll that I wanted cost 98 cents (That was a lot of money back then), and when Christmas Eve came and we were opening our presents, here there were two boxes with my name on them, and one was a doll that My mother and my big sister had made for me, and they had made a quilt. And the other one, lo and behold, was Patsy from the catalog. My big brother, Charlie, lived in St Paul, and he had gone to the Montgomery Ward store and found the doll that I had picked out, and he sent it to me for Christmas.

So then, instead of one doll, I had two of them, and I took very good care of them.

My father was born in Sweden, in the province of WestmanLAND. It was a northwest of Stokholm. When I was 50 years old, my sister Edith and I went to Sweden, and we actually found a farm where my father had been born. We stopped in a little town and asked if anybody had ever heard of the Norgren name. Oh, my goodness, a lady in the store said, there's even a road called Norgren road, and she offered to drive out there ahead of us and show us the way out to the farm where my Father was born.

Well, then we got there, and there was a lady living on a house close by who was sort of the community historian, and she said, Norgren I think there's a letter here from John Norgren telling about America, and she went and found this letter, which, of course, was written in Swedish, but my sister could read and write Swedish. So we we read it and found out, you know, all about their trip from from Sweden to America.

We made a copy of the letter, and I was telling Mary that I had used it for a part of an invitation to a family reunion with our northern relatives. And when I find it here, I will send Mary a copy of that letter, because it tells all of us their trip from Sweden to England, then they went across England and got on a boat and came to New York. And then when they went by train to Minnesota, and then in St Cloud, Minnesota, they stopped for two weeks while my grandmother had another baby.

Well here then, after two weeks, they bought a team of oxen and a wagon, and they drove the 100 miles from from St Cloud up to Alexandria, and there they found land that my grandfather had picked out, and eventually they built a log cabin, and that was where they lived for a number of years.

My grandfather's name was John, Eric Norgren, and my father's name was John, J O, H N, John Abraham Norgren, and he met my mother when she came To teach school in the district where they lived, and he found while he was on the school board, so he found many reasons to come over and check on the School and eventually he and my mother were married and had this big family of seven.

My dad had been married once before, and his first wife passed away. Well, had one one son called son called Charlie, the one who later on gave me the Zell. And then Mom and Dad had six more children, so they had a big family to provide for and after a number of years, they moved up to the farm where I was born, near Evansville, Minnesota, And we lived there until my father died in 1942 died in 1942 and next year, mother and I moved into town, and that's when I was going to high school.

You were kind of wondering what kinds of things my brother and I did I have a little one winter, quite a few years ago, on a stormy winter day, my husband and I were both retired, and we sat there, and I sat down and started writing a few little stories about what it was like to be a kid in the 1930s Would you like a copy of that bunch of stories?

yes, 100%

Well, I'll see if I can get some help to get one made, and I'll send it along with that letter from John Harry, wrote back to Sweden.

We lived on a farm, and of course, we had grain growing in the crops on the fields, and you had to thresh that grain, to separate this grain from the straw. When you did that threshing, as they called it, there was a big straw stack. Well, I had read somewhere that you could ski on straw, and so I told my brother about it, and he took a pair of skis and went to the top of the straw pile.

Well, it worked good to ski on the straw.

But then when you came to the green grass, the skis didn't slide on that. So then, in doing that, he broke off the tip of one of the skis, and we were kind of afraid to tell Dad what we had been doing, so we put the skis away and didn't mention it later on, of course, dad found the skis and He repaired them so that we could use them again. So that was that,

in that same collection of stories I write about, you know, the kind of clothes that we wore, much of it was homemade. I did not have a coat that was purchased in a store until I was 14 years old. Of course, the coats I had had been in a store, but they had all been given to me after someone else had worn them. So I was 14 when I got my very first coat of my own.

We did not have snow boots like kids have now. We wore our regular shoes, and we had what was called over shoes that we put on right over our shoes. And of course, sometimes they got holes in them and our feet would get wet, and that wasn't very comfortable.

I suppose Mary has told you I am 98 years Well, I will be 98 years old next month. We're going to celebrate my birthday with all the nieces and nephews and have have a little pizza party and some birthday cake. Of course, we've been doing that now for a few years, and the cousins seem to enjoy getting together and visiting with each other and hearing some more stories from their old auntie, that's how we celebrate my Birthday.

My mother was born in Sweden, and her name was her name was Carrie Borg, B, O, R, G and her father and An older sister had gone from Sweden in farmland to America one year, and they found a place for the family to live, and they found a farm that they could have. And then the next summer, they had enough money, so they sent back to Sweden for the mother and the rest of the children to come.

Well, my grandmother was 16 years old at the time, and her mom got she sick on the way over to America, so my grandma had to take care of the rest of the family during the trip, and I really Don't know much about how they got from from New York to Minnesota, but I imagine there were, there were travel people that helped make those arrangements. And so then that summer, they got to up to Melby, Minnesota, which was just west of Alexandria.

There are many pretty places in Minnesota. I have lived here all my life, and I have traveled quite a bit, but it was always good to come back to Minnesota.

My husband was a road builder, we had one daughter, and she used to love to go with her dad to work and ride on the big caterpillars and spend the day out in the dusty road building with her dad. That's another story. So okay, I'll wait for your call next Friday.