The following are words & history from Mae who is the sister of Walter Norgren

Parents of Mae & Walter Norgren

Siblings of Mae/Walt

  • Charlie (John Norgren and ?-mystery wife)
  • Walter (John Urness & Nanny Lindstrom)
  • Oscar (John Norgren & Nanny Lindstrom Norgren)
  • Marie (John Norgren & Nanny Lindstrom Norgren)
  • Edith (John Norgren & Nanny Lindstrom Norgren)
  • Russell (John Norgren & Nanny Lindstrom Norgren)
  • Mae (John Norgren & Nanny Lindstrom Norgren)

Properties:

Cary Borg

  • (Nanny’s mom, Walter & Mae's grandma)
  • Worked at geneva lodge near Alexandria on lake Geniva.
  • Got pregnant with violinist who was also at the lodge
  • Had Nanny in St Paul. Lived in St Paul for 6 years before marrying Fritz Lindstrom and moving back to Evanston
  • Had 4 more children with Fritz.

Unknown Violinist

  • Father of Nanny, Grandfather of Walt and Mae
  • It is said he would not support Cary when she became pregnant.
  • It is said that he tracked Cary down later and begged for another chance. Cary refused since he was not there for her when she was pregnant.

Fritz Lindstrom

  • Adoptive parent of Nanny.
  • Reputation of being a nice person.
  • Seems to have helped Nanny and John jr out when they went bankrupt during depression by giving him use of 160 acre farm Lindstroms owned.

Nanny Norgren

  • Mother of Walt
  • Went to college to become a teacher

John Urness

  • Father of Walt.
  • Born in 1886, died in 1965
  • Served in WW1, came back to Alex and lived a solo life until he married Nettie who must have been in her 40s when they married.
  • John Urness and Nanny had Walter when Nanny was in her early 20s and teaching school (the school where John Norgrens son Charlie was).
  • It seems that John was a drunk of ill repute and Cary (Nanny’s mom) would not allow Nanny to marry John. That is saying a lot since Cary had a wild reputation.
  • (Johns Brother, Benny Urness was sheriff in Alex).

John Norgren Jr

  • Father of Mae. Adoptive father of Walter.
  • He was tall and never did get fat, but he was, you know, he was quite a big man, and he had, he had beautiful white hair, and that's kind of interesting too, because when my mother met him, he had beautiful, dark brown, wavy hair. Well, at the end of World War Two, one, when that flu epidemic was going around. My father was very sick with the flu, and as a result of that, his beautiful hair turned Snow White, and it never did get dark again.

  • There was one other thing about my father that really described the kind of man he was. It was an old Swedish custom that if you had company or someone special staying overnight in your home, you brought them coffee in bed the next morning.

    Every single day that my parents were married, my father brought my mother coffee in bed each morning. He used to say that as times became harder, there were many things he could no longer provide for her, but he could at least help her begin the day pleasantly.

    So they would sit together and drink coffee and talk a little and plan the day before Mother got up to begin her work.

    And at Christmas time he would bring coffee to all of us children early in the morning too. It was just one of those quiet, loving things that he always did.

Story

John Jr Coming to America and Starting a Farm

My father. You know, he had been born in Sweden, and his parents came to America. His mother was pregnant with their second child when they crossed the ocean.

They came into New York, of course, and then they went by train to Minnesota, to a town called St. Cloud. They stopped there for two weeks, and the next baby was born there. So now they had my father, who was about two years old, and another little child, I think a girl.

Well, they bought a team of oxen and a wagon, and they continued on their trip to the land they had chosen near Alexandria. And I suppose they camped in the wagon while my grandpa built a log cabin for them to live in. And I can’t imagine, you know, two little children living in a wagon like that, because of course there weren’t any grocery stores except in Alexandria, and they didn’t go there very often. I can’t imagine how they managed, but they did.

After the log house, they built a big farmhouse, and that’s where the children grew up.

Well, when my dad got old enough, he got a job on what they called a bonanza farm up in the Red River Valley (likely around 18 years of age). As soon as the railroad came through that country, rich people would buy up huge pieces of land, and they hired big crews of men to work them. The farm my father worked on belonged to people from Minneapolis, and they recognized that he was quite an intelligent man. They encouraged him to come to Minneapolis during the winters and go to school, which he did.

He attended an academy and later a business school, so he got quite an education that way.

Then his father was getting old, and most of the children had left home and gone west, some to Montana and some to Washington. Old John E. was left there pretty much alone, and he wanted my father to come back and farm the land.

I guess Dad agreed to do that. And it was after that that he married his first wife (Believed to be around age 30 at this time). Charlie was born. Then she passed away, and later on, that’s when he met my mother.

John Jr meeting Nanny & Having Large Family

My mother was a teacher, and she came to teach in the school where my father lived. My father, at that time, was married, and they had a son named Charles. My dad was on the school board. It was part of his duty to check on things at the school. During that time, his first wife became ill and passed away. He was left with A son named Walter, Mary's father. My My dad, of course, knew her and cared for her very much. And I guess he must have decided that he really wanted to marry this young lady, even if she already had a child. And so they were married, and, you know, accepted this boy into his family. And Mary's dad was was raised as part of the family that I was part of, and we always thought of him as our brother, which he was our half brother.

Dad loved my mother and took very good care of her. He was quite a bit older than she was, but they seemed to care very much about each other, and they certainly were good to all of us, children that followed.

John Jr. had beautiful handwriting. That was something that was encouraged in those days. Children were taught to write carefully, and both my mother and father had beautiful handwriting.

And they both liked to read. I grew up in a home where everybody liked to read. We had a lot of books of our own, and we borrowed books from the library, too. Books were always an important part of our family.”

Focus on the home

“There was one bedroom where the boys slept — Walter and Oscar and Russell — and there was room for two beds in that room. And then us girls, Marie and Edith and I, well, Marie and Edith shared a bedroom. When I was very little, of course, I slept in the same room as my mother and father, but when I got a little older, then I shared the big bedroom with my sisters.

Mother always kept one bedroom ready for company, because people would come to visit and stay overnight, and she liked to have a guest room all in order so there would always be a place for them to sleep.

Now, we did not have electricity, because the government hadn’t provided for that out in the country until after World War Two. So as long as we lived on the farm, we had no electricity and no running water. We had to carry in all the water we used. We heated it on the stove, or tried to keep it as cold as we could for drinking, and so there was always a lot of work to be done.

There were two floors in the house, with a stairway leading upstairs. On the upper floor there were three bedrooms and a very large closet. Downstairs there was a large living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and one big bedroom where my parents slept.

And in the living room, my dad had a beautiful roll-top desk that had been made for him. It had a bookcase with three shelves on it, and those shelves were full of his books. Then there was another smaller bookcase where us children kept our books. And when I couldn’t be found, they would always come look in the living room, because I would be sitting there on the little bench reading a book.

In the evenings we would gather in that room around what was called a parlor organ. My sister Marie knew how to play, and the whole family would sing together once in a while. We all liked music, and Marie would play while we sang our favorite songs.

Us children would play board games too, sometimes on the carpet in the living room and sometimes around the dining room table. And we had quite nice furniture in there — a big oak couch with leather upholstery, and a matching chair and rocking chair. Dad had his favorite rocking chair, and Mother had her favorite chair.

There was also a large cement porch, with one door from the dining room and another from the kitchen. In the summertime especially, we would sit out there and play games, or visitors would come and sit and visit. Mother always had the coffee pot on the stove, and whenever company came she would serve coffee and some kind of lunch, probably cake or cookies or something. Eating was important in those days.

We always had a big garden. Dad knew how and when to plant things, and in the spring we would have fresh lettuce and radishes and onions. As the summer went on, we had peas and green beans and carrots and tomatoes and watermelon. So we ate very healthy food.

That last farm we lived on had one hundred and sixty acres. Dad planted wheat and corn and flax and rye, and part of the land was pasture for the cows and horses. So there was pasture land and field land both on the farm.

I was about two years old when we moved to that farm. Before that my parents had lived on a bigger farm not too many miles away, but during the Depression years the farm did not produce enough money, and the bank took it back. Then we moved to this other farm, which already belonged to my mother’s parents. So the farm I grew up on was really my grandparents’ farm.

My father was tall and never did get fat. He was quite a big man, and he had beautiful white hair. That was interesting, because when my mother first met him he had beautiful dark brown wavy hair. But after the flu epidemic around the end of the First World War, he became very sick, and afterward his hair turned snow white and never became dark again.

I remember thinking, as a child, that my father had very large ears. You remember silly little things like that. And of course he had whiskers and shaved every day with a brush and razor and soap, and he had to be careful not to cut himself.

It was very important to him that we all be clean. Even when water was short, we took baths regularly and always wore clean clothes. And like I said, Dad liked to read. I remember him reading stories to me when I was a little girl.

He suffered from asthma, and sometimes he had great difficulty breathing, so he wasn’t always able to work as hard as he wanted to. But then he would feel better again, and the work would get done. And of course Walter and Oscar were still at home then.”

Focusing on Nanny

My mother (Nanny) was very pretty. She had dark hair and a very nice complexion. She was not very tall. I suppose she was probably about five foot four, something like that. And she liked to sing.

Another thing about both of my parents — they were very religious. We went to church every Sunday. Us children went to what was called Sunday school, and my dad read his Bible every morning before any of us got up. He would sit at the dining room table and read by lamplight, and that was very important to him.

My mother taught Sunday school for many, many years, and going to church was extremely important in our family.

And like I said, my mother liked to sing, and she encouraged all of us children to sing too. Some of us became quite good singers. I remember singing solos at people’s weddings, and I sang in church, and in the choir in high school and college. Music was very important in our family.

Mom was a pretty good cook. We ate very well.

Well, we had lutefisk at Christmastime, of course, and my mother and father also made something we called potato sausage. They would mix together ground potatoes, ground beef, and ground pork, with spices, and stuff it all into sausage casings.

To prepare it, you boiled it in a kettle of water for about half an hour, and then we had hot potato sausage. That was something we always had at Christmas time.

There are still a few meat markets around that make potato sausage, and there is one in Evansville that still makes it. So every Christmas, I still get potato sausage from the Evansville Meat Market.

There was a lot of fruit too — apples and chokecherries. Of course, peaches did not grow in Minnesota, so those had to be bought. But peaches and pears and other fruits would be canned and preserved by my mother, so we would have fruit to eat during the wintertime when there was no fresh fruit available.

My mother had wanted to be a nurse when she was growing up, but her mother thought she should become a teacher, and that is what she did. But she had taken some nursing training, and when a baby was born in the neighborhood, people would call my mother and ask her to come help take care of the baby and the mother until the mother was strong enough again.

So she was often away helping neighbors who had just had babies. And of course, back then, all babies were born at home.

And yes, you got to know your neighbors very well, because everybody lived on small farms like we did, and neighbors would visit back and forth quite often.

Evanston Community

I remember we used to go over to visit Mary’s grandparents, who lived on a farm very close to us, and they were musical too. Mary’s mother played the piano, and we all enjoyed the music. Music was an important part of a lot of families in those days.

There was another family in the neighborhood too, a family with all girls, and I had a couple of good friends there. When we were little, we would play with dolls together, and we would go over to visit them quite often.

And all the mothers usually had something special they would make for company, some kind of treat to have with coffee. So we always had a good lunch whenever we went visiting.

Very often we would walk to visit people because it wasn’t really that far from one farmhouse to another. We did not always have a car that ran very well, so we were used to walking wherever we wanted to go.

And yes, those were also the children we went to school with, so we all knew each other very well.

Mae, Childhood memory

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

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 and helped each other and walked to school together at the little country school about a quarter mile from our house.

It was one of those country schools where one teacher taught all eight grades. I had learned to read before I ever started school because my parents read to me so much, and I just caught on. So after I started first grade, the teacher asked my parents if she could move me into second grade because I already knew how to read and knew all my number facts.

So I finished first and second grade in one year. Later on I graduated from eighth grade and then went to high school in Evansville. We started out with a class of around twenty-seven or twenty-eight students, but because of the war and boys needing to stay home to help on farms, we graduated with only twelve students in the class.

I was the top student in my class, so I gave the graduation speech.

We lived on a farm that had the biggest hill in the whole community, and in the wintertime when the snow came, all the neighborhood children gathered there for coasting and tobogganing and skiing. On Sunday afternoons there would always be crowds of people on the hill.

Afterward everybody would come into the house cold and wet, and Dad would make a big pan of popcorn for us, and we might sit around the dining room table and play games. That was some of what we did for fun.

And of course, being a little girl, I played with dolls. I had what I called a playhouse out under the trees, and I would play there for hours, and sometimes neighbor girls would come over and play with me too.

One year, in 1936, I wanted a doll so badly for Christmas. I had always played with my sisters’ dolls, but that year I wanted one of my very own. Money was very scarce then, and Mother tried to explain to me that there might not be enough money for a doll.

But I had picked one out in the catalog already. Her name was going to be Patsy, and I knew exactly what stories I would read to her and songs I would sing to her.

Well, Christmas Eve came, and there were two boxes under the tree with my name on them. One contained a homemade doll that my mother and sister had made for me, along with a little quilt. And the other one — to my complete surprise — was Patsy from the catalog.

My brother Charlie, who lived in St. Paul, had gone to Montgomery Ward and bought the exact doll I had wanted and sent it to me for Christmas.

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

My father was born in Sweden, in the province of Westmanland northwest of Stockholm. When I was fifty years old, my sister Edith and I traveled to Sweden, and we actually found the farm where my father had been born.

We stopped in a little town and asked whether anyone had ever heard the Norgren name, and one woman said, “Why, there’s even a Norgren Road.” She offered to drive ahead of us and show us the farm.

When we arrived, there was a woman living nearby who was something of a local historian, and she said she thought she had a letter there from John Norgren describing America. She found the letter, and although it was written in Swedish, my sister Edith could still read Swedish, so we sat there and read all about their journey from Sweden to America.

We made a copy of the letter, and later I even used part of it in invitations for a family reunion. It described their trip from Sweden to England, then across England to the ship that brought them to New York, and then by train to Minnesota.

When they reached St. Cloud, my grandmother gave birth to another baby, and the family stayed there for two weeks. After that they bought a team of oxen and a wagon and traveled the hundred miles north to Alexandria, where my grandfather had chosen land.

Eventually they built a log cabin there, and that was where the family first lived for several years.

My grandfather’s name was John Eric Norgren, and my father was John Abraham Norgren. He met my mother when she came to teach school in the district where he lived. Dad served on the school board, and he seemed to find many reasons to stop by the school. Eventually they were married and raised a family of seven children together.

My father had been married once before, and his first wife had died. They had one son, Charlie — the same brother who later bought me the doll.

Then my mother and father had six more children together, and after some years they moved to the farm near Evansville where I was born.

We lived there until my father died in 1942. The next year Mother and I moved into town while I was attending high school.

Charlie Norgren:

“Charlie was the oldest, of course, and he was from my dad’s first marriage. He was a tall, good-looking young man, and quite a bit older than the rest of us.

He got married fairly young, and he and his wife, whose name was Gail, lived in St. Paul. Charlie worked as the night manager of a very important restaurant there, so he worked nights and slept during the daytime.

They lived in St. Paul the rest of their lives, and they would come up to the farm especially in the fall to go pheasant hunting.

It was always exciting when they came up from St. Paul, because they would bring good food and fresh fruit. Gail was a wonderful cook, and she would help Mother prepare meals while the men went out hunting.

All my brothers liked to hunt, and one of them had a little cocker spaniel named Spotty who would chase up the pheasants and get them ready for the boys to shoot. Then of course we would have roast pheasant to eat during the weekend.

At Christmas time there was always an exchange of boxes and gifts. They did not usually come home for Christmas, but we would send a box down to them, and they would send one up to us.

The box from our farm would always have things like a dressed turkey, several pounds of butter, some potato sausage, and presents too. I always thought it was kind of a silly box because it was full of ordinary farm things that I saw all the time, but of course they thought it was wonderful to receive food from the farm.

And then the box they sent to us always seemed very exciting to me. There would be presents for Mother and Dad and one for me, and then there would be fresh fruit and celery and head lettuce, because those were things our little stores did not usually have. There would also be Christmas candy in the box, and I always thought that was so exciting.

Charlie was very good to us younger children. Whenever any of us wanted to go visit the city, we always stayed at their house after they bought a home there, and Charlie would take us around and show us all the important places.

I remember one year when I was not even ten years old yet, I went down there and we visited the State Fair. I thought that was about the most exciting thing I had ever done.

They had one daughter who was about a year younger than I was, so I would play with her while Charlie took us sightseeing whenever he had time off from work. We visited the State Capitol and Fort Snelling, which had once been a wilderness fort and was preserved as a historic place. Fort Snelling was very interesting to me.

And as I say, Charlie was almost like another father to us younger ones, because he was always so good to us. We stayed close all through the years, visiting back and forth often, and always keeping in touch.”

Walter Norgren:

Walter was my big brother, and we spent a lot of time together. He would tell me stories and talk to me. He was a very good big brother.

After he and Pearl were married, I used to babysit for them, so I babysat your mom when she was a little girl. Walter would always pay me a little extra for taking care of the children, so that was one way I earned a little spending money that I would not have had otherwise.

At that time they lived at the old Mint Hotel, the place where the stagecoaches used to stop, and I would babysit the children there.

Later on Walter and Pearl were divorced, and Pearl and the children moved to Alexandria, but we always stayed in touch. The girls would come out to visit at my sister Edith’s house or my sister Marie’s house, and later they visited me too after I was married.

I remember Mary and Nancy each spending a week with me and my husband at our house in Morris, and we had such a wonderful time together. We went to their confirmations and graduations and kept in touch with the girls all through the years.

It has been such fun knowing Nancy and Mary and Betty all these years.

Oscar Norgren:

my brother Oscar went to the University of Minnesota, but he never finished, he took classes that he needed for his work, and then he got married and had a family and had a job, and so he never finished college

Oscar also worked for another farmer during that time, so he was not home as much as Walter was. I never got to know him quite as well as I knew Walter, but anyway, the day after he graduated from high school, he went to Minneapolis, and he went to work for a cousin of my dad who had a neon sign company. Oscar worked for him and then he got into more work for other electrical contractors and and he finally became the business manager for the Minneapolis Electrical Contractors, and he had a very good job there, earned a very good living, and he met a lovely lady in Minneapolis, and they were married and had two daughters, and it's one of his daughters that likes to draw. She is an artist who lives in Florida.

Oscar’s family would always come up to visit during fishing season in Minnesota, and they would come up during hunting season. My brothers all like to go out hunting the bird that we call a pheasant, and that season was open in October, and so it would be fall when they would come up to go hunting pheasants, and that was also when my father's birthday was, so we would celebrate his birthday when they were up here, and we would have a very good time.

Marie Norgren:

Marie, she did not go to college. She went to high school, but she went, she went to work, she worked as a maid for some people, and then during World War Two, she lived in Minneapolis and worked in a defense plant. One of those people that they called Rosie the Riveter, you know, she worked on equipment that the military needed.

She had met a young man who was in the army and was hurt very badly. He came home again, and they bought a farm, and so they were farmers the rest of their life, and they had one daughter called Carol and she became a teacher. She taught first grade for 31 years in the same school.

Edith Norgren:

My sister Edith and I both went to the same college that your mother (Mary) went to in Moorhead, Minnesota,

Edith went to Moorhead Emesky College, the same as your mother (Mary) did, and she became a teacher, when she got married and they had three children, but she taught school for for many many years in Evansville. She married a young man that she had gone to high school with, and he was an engineer on an iron ore boat on Lake Superior. He would have both boat that he worked on would bring iron ore from Duluth down to Cleveland, Ohio, and where it would be used in factories, and then he got sick and couldn't do that work any longer, so he came back home to Evansville, and he worked as an engineer at what we call a creamery where they bake butter and cheese.

Russell Norgren:

Russell was married twice. He and his first wife were divorced. They had one daughter, and then he and his second wife had had two more daughters.

Mae Norgren:

Candice was born in 1951 and grew up in Morris. She went to high school here and was an honor student when she graduated, and then from here she went to college in Duluth, Minnesota, and she became what they call a health information manager. She took care of the records of patients who were in the hospital, that was the kind of work she did all of her life, even when she went to Alaska, she worked in a hospital doing that same kind of work.

Candice wanted some adventure, her life had been kind of quiet, and she wanted to do something totally different, and so she, she heard about this hospital way up north in Alaska, decided that was what she would would enjoy, and she, she did work up there for a year and a half, and then she came back to Minnesota

I started teaching school after graduating from Moorhead State. I taught for four years, and then I got married and stayed home and was a wife and a mother. When our daughter got to be in high school then I went back to work and school working with children who had difficulty learning to read and to do math, so I worked with little, with younger children who were in reading and mathematics, and that was quite satisfying, helping children learn how to read, because I myself like to read, and I wanted other people to read.

After World War Two all of these young men that had been in the military came home, they were ready to settle down and meet a young lady, and get married. I met my husband through some friends, through some people that both of us knew, and they thought that we should know each other. I remember our first, going to a movie together, and we got to know each other and decided that we should be together, and so we got married in Evansville at our church there, and then we had bought a house here in Morris, and so we went, we lived in Morris all of the years that we were married.

We went on a long trip right after our wedding. We drove to California and back again over three weeks. We drove on Route 66 when we were on our wedding trip. We saw a lot of beautiful scenery, and a lot of mud, you know. I thought that all soil was black, like it is in Minnesota. Well, I learned that much of the soil in the United States is red. It is not black. I learned a lot of things on my wedding trip.

NEEDS EDITING

My mother’s story was an interesting one too. My grandmother, her mother, was working at a resort hotel near one of the lakes around Alexandria. She worked there as a maid, and there were many other young girls working there too, along with some young men.

Some of the young men were musicians, and some worked outside taking care of the grounds, and naturally all the young people became acquainted with each other.

Well, my grandmother became quite close to one of the musicians, and eventually she became pregnant. When she told him there was going to be a baby, he became frightened and left the resort, and there she was alone and expecting a child.

Later on she went down to St. Paul to a home for young women who were expecting babies, and that was where my mother was born.

My grandmother was also an excellent seamstress. In those days women did not buy ready-made dresses in stores the way they do now. Dresses were sewn individually, and my grandmother became very well known for her sewing. She built up quite a business making dresses for women in St. Paul.

Then one day the young man who had been my mother’s real father came back wanting to see her again and try to make things right. But my grandmother was a stubborn Swede, and she told him, “No. You would not help me when I needed help, and I do not need you now.”

So my mother never really knew her real father.

But my grandmother had a good friend from the Evansville area who stayed in touch with her over the years. Eventually they married, and that was how my mother came to live up near Evansville on the farm my grandfather owned there.

Together my grandmother and grandfather had four more children, so they became a family of five children altogether. They eventually became quite prosperous and built one of those large white farmhouse homes that many successful farmers had in those days.

They raised cattle and farmed crops, and eventually they owned a half section of land, which was considered a very large farm back in the days when farming was still done with horses.”

My grandmother Carrie was born in Sweden. Her father and an older daughter came to America first and found land in Minnesota and started building a life there. They worked for other people and saved enough money to send back to Sweden so the rest of the family could come over too.

My grandmother was about sixteen years old when she made the trip across the ocean. Her mother became terribly seasick during the voyage, so Grandma had to take care of all the younger children on the ship until they reached America.

They landed in New York and eventually traveled by train to Minnesota, where the rest of the family was waiting for them.

Grandma had been born in the province of Varmland in Sweden, and years later when my sister Edith and I traveled there, we drove through that part of the country. Grandma had always talked about the beautiful birch trees there, and it was wonderful finally getting to see them for ourselves.

Later on my grandmother worked at a resort hotel near Alexandria, and eventually my mother was born in St. Paul. My mother was still a little girl, probably around six years old, when Grandma married my grandfather Fritz Lindstrom and moved up to the farm near Evansville.

Grandpa Lindstrom had been born in America. His family were farmers, and he became a farmer too. They eventually built a large white farmhouse and a big red barn, and they named the farm Mandolawn, which meant a green and grassy place.

There was a river nearby where Grandpa liked to fish in the springtime after the ice went out and the fish started running.

My mother loved school. She liked music and reading and drawing and painting. She attended country school through the eighth grade and later went to high school in Evansville. She even studied Latin there.

Afterward she took teacher training and spent a short time attending college in Moorhead, the same college where I later went, and where your mother and Aunt Nancy went too.

Before she married my father, she taught school for several years. She had originally wanted to become a nurse, but my grandmother thought nursing was too difficult a life. Still, Mother did take some nursing training, and later on when women in the neighborhood had babies, they often called my mother to come help care for the new mother and child until they were strong again.

My mother was full of fun. She loved music and encouraged all of us children to sing. We had a phonograph and an organ in the house, and music was always a part of our family life.

She loved books too, and we were constantly borrowing books from the public library in town. Both my mother and father loved reading, so books were always important in our house.

Mother liked flowers very much and kept flower gardens outside so she could enjoy blooms all summer long. She liked having bouquets of flowers inside the house too.

She was an excellent housekeeper and cook, and she taught all us girls how to cook and take care of a home. But with so many children and all the work that came with farm life, she worked very hard every single day.

That was one reason my father always brought her coffee in bed each morning. He wanted her day to begin pleasantly before all the hard work started.

Church was extremely important in our family too. Mother taught Sunday school for many years because she believed children should learn about the Bible and about helping neighbors and caring for people who were sick or poor. Those were very important values in our home.

During the dry years of the 1930s there were terrible grasshopper infestations. The grasshoppers would come through and eat the grain growing in the fields, and that caused real hardship for many farmers.

But there were good memories too. In those years airplanes were still very new and exciting, and sometimes local farmers would organize what people called “airplane days.” Someone with an airplane would come out and give rides for money.

I remember one Sunday when your great-grandfather Oscar Swenson held an airplane day on his farm. My sisters and I walked over there because we wanted so badly to see the airplane. We could not afford rides ourselves, but we watched the plane take off and land over and over again in the field.

Someone was selling ice cream cones too, so we stood there eating ice cream and watching airplanes fly through the sky, which was a remarkable thing for farm children back then.

We had an ice house on the farm where blocks of ice were packed in sawdust during the winter so they would last through the summer months.

Sometimes during the summer my father would make homemade ice cream in a hand-cranked churn. We children would take turns turning the handle until finally the cream became ice cream. It was quite a treat.

Every summer there was also the county fair in Alexandria. Farmers brought their best cattle to be judged, and there were rides and food stands and all kinds of excitement for children. Alexandria was about twenty miles from Evansville, and by then there were already automobiles, although not everybody had one that worked especially well.

The main highway between Minneapolis and Fargo ran right past our farm.

One of the special things about our farm was the enormous hill on the west side of the property. In the summertime it was pastureland where the cows and calves grazed and drank from a pond at the bottom of the hill.

But in wintertime it became the gathering place for all the neighborhood children. People even came out from town to ski and sled there because it was the biggest hill in the whole community.

Families visited each other often in those days, especially during the winter months. We would spend evenings at neighbors’ homes while the adults visited and the children played together.

I especially remember visiting Pearl’s family. Pearl played the piano beautifully, and her father played the accordion, so there was always wonderful music whenever everyone gathered together.

Black and white photograph of a man with a mustache and sideburns, wearing a suit with a bow tie, framed in an oval with decorative border, with handwritten text below.
Black and white campaign flyer for Benny Urness, running for sheriff of Douglas County, featuring a portrait photograph of Benny Urness wearing a suit and tie.