Local History by David Hanson of Gheen

David & Gwen live near the Gheen Corners. They operate a Green House each Spring.

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

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Tuesday, December 30, 2008 BE NICE Dave Hanson   A big difference in the mass majority of people in our civilized world from the more rural life that I grew up in, is that I had the opportunity to be with my father most of my life before I moved away.  When I was small, it was in the evenings and in the house after dark and with him on the weekends.   Dad’s feet were sticking out from under the car and me on my hands and knees.  “Hand me a nine sixteenths box end.”  “Hand me a five eights open end.”  It was fun, just like a nursing student handing the doctor his tools during an operation.   “Don’t cut too deep.  Try not to cut too deep.”  Learning how to skin a cow isn’t easy the first few times.  “Don’t butcher it up too much.”  “You don’t want it to look like a kid had been monkeying around.”  I heard that a few times.  Dad bought me a two and a half pound single bit axe, to practice chopping popal trees in the pasture for firewood.  One time a neighbor came over and dad said “It looks like a beaver cut those trees down.”  The man laughed.  It did look like a kid monkeying around with a hundred hacks all the way around.  I liked that axe and hacked away a lot that summer and managed to get a few cords of wood piled up.  It made me feel good.  When we piled pulpwood, he’d say, “Get all the ends even in that pile so it won’t look like a kid was monkeying around, a stranger may drive by.”  What would it matter if a few poked out, but he wanted it that way.   Most kids in our culture never work with their fathers.  Few know what their father does in his job.  Most kids did what their fathers did in most of history.   The Eskimo boys go with on hunting trips.  The Indian boys in the Amazon went into the jungle with adults.  The Australian Aborigines learned survival skills with their families.  Chinese kids learned to plant rice along with the family.   The ties that bind are hard to break.  I did the same things with my kids that I did with my folks.  They can survive here in northern Minnesota or in any rural area.   But I tried to have them learn the civil skills of living anywhere.  What is civilization?  I suppose it is the ability of people to live together without civil strife.  Just because someone was born and raised in a city, doesn’t guarantee that they have learned survival skills.  When towns grow too large, or townspeople get too lax, things can go array.  Think of the slums where there is no civility at all.  Dog eat dog.  Take what you can get away with, and have no guilty conscience.  Is this a better way of life, where no man takes care of, or teaches his kids right from wrong, than the primitive family where each child is cherished?   Is it civilized to let someone else make all your decisions, and do everything for you?   Vultures sit and wait to swoop down on free food.  Is civilization when people feel good giving food to people who are just as capable as you or I?  I’ve never had to line up at a food bank to get a hand out.  Are all those people famished with their ribs sticking out?  Did they try hard to grow a garden, or pick wild berries every chance they got?  Did their parents teach them how, or teach them pride in a job well done?  Is our civilized culture teaching people to be self sufficient?    There are groups of people that no one wants.  When the Jews tried to leave Germany just before hell broke loose in WW II, no one would take them into their country.  They had to stay.  A lot were bankers and businessmen who got blamed for Germany’s depression.  They lost their fortunes that had taken generations to save.  Some refused to leave their property and bank accounts.  Everyone knows what Germany did to their own law abiding citizens, just because of their religion.  And after the war was over, no one would take the survivors into their country.  Were the Jews civil?  Were the Germans civil?   On the other side of the coin are the people who fill the American prisons.  Most of those gang people got arrested because of the drug trade, the drug wars, the drug money, and the manufacture of drugs.  If they were all let out of prison, would you want them moving into your neighborhood?  No, but some of those same kind of people are here already.  We tolerate them, because we knew them all our lives and they are our relatives.  Are those that make money from it and don’t care about a lot of people becoming addicted, are they civil?   Is the Russian Mafia civil?  Is the Irish mafia civil?  Just because these people live in our modern times, doesn’t make them civilized.   Are our politicians using our resources wisely?  Do communities ask, and get, handouts in exchange for votes?  Who are the masqueraders that are supposed to regulate and control and protect our country?  If a civilization gets too large, is it possible to regulate?   There is a fine line between being satisfied and not.  When too many dissatisfied people meet it doesn’t take much to trigger a riot.  How much waste has been generated by people burning a town down, or a war breaking out by people not being civil?   Teach your kids to get along with other people.  If things get too bad, they can just walk away.  At least if you don’t follow the mob, you can survive.   I’m glad that most people in America teach their own kids self control.  When the government tries to control, it doesn’t work well.   Be civil.  Be nice.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Sunday, December 28, 2008   GOING TO ANY LENGTH Dave Hanson   I grew up in a time before people had handheld calculators.  People talked about things that were important at the moment.  I don’t remember anyone getting too serious about politics until just before election time.  The Willow Valley Farmers Club usually invited county candidates to speak at the hall.  We had quite a crowd from the surrounding area to listen to their speeches.  Each person got a ten minute time slot.  Those commissioners took it serious.  Some of the gatherings they had on the range were not as well attended.   During the rest of the time, everyone was taking care of their own business and it didn’t seem as if state and federal politics was much of a topic of discussion.  I suppose they had heard so many promises during the depression where nothing ever happened anyway, that it didn’t seem to make a difference in their lives.   Today everything is exact.  Money is figured to the penny.  We even need pennies now-a-days to pay sales tax.  Everything is always two cents less than it actually costs.  A $1.98 or $19.95 may be the price tag.  Hardly anything costs $9.95 anymore.  Everyone has a twenty dollar bill.  Watch the ads on TV.  Everything is a nickel less than a twenty dollar bill.   Even a new car is $19,998 dollars.  I don’t think there is a ten year old kid that is taken in by it, but it’s an American tradition to have people save a couple of cents on an item.   I’d walk behind dad as he would pace off the ten feet between fence posts.  Eight feet is too close, and twelve feet might be a little too far for barbed wire.  It may sag over time.  Some long legged guys would take long paces of 3 feet.  Dad would take a little longer steps than usual and count,   … step, step, 5 ft. step, step 10., drop a post, step, step 5, step, step 10, drop another post.  Nothing like a fence had to be precise so no one carried a tape measure.  What would two or three extra cedar posts matter on a fence line?   The same pacing was done by most loggers to estimate how much pulpwood was in a pile beside the road.  Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, …..   Pulpwood was measured by the logging cord.  That was 4 feet by four feet, by 8 feet long.  Most people didn’t buy wood unless they had a (railroad) car load.  That was twenty cords.  A car load or two was about all most people cut, in their spare time, to make a little extra cash each winter.  Some cut a car load or two in the late spring or early summer, so they could peel it.  People got a few dollars more a cord with the bark off.  In those days, no wood was dragged through the sand and mud.  If it was dirty, the mills would refuse to take it.  After 1970, or so,  Timberjack and Treefarmer cable skidders came into use.  That pulp was always sold rough, (bark on), and the mills used mechanical peelers that rasped the bark off when it came into the mill and before it went into the chipper for making paper.  After the loggers started skidding tree length, no one peeled pulpwood anymore.   Today pulpwood, like popal, is sold by the weight.  The loggers try to get all the wood into the mills before it dries out and losses some weight.  When I was a kid, pulp was sold by the cord, and couldn’t have red rot or carpenter ants in it.  If there were more than a couple of sticks of pulpwood with rot in a truck load, it was docked, (refused to pay full price) so people made sure not to include any in their load.  Today you can see truckloads of pulp where nearly all the wood has some rot in it.  When it is bought by weight, that rot is light, so it doesn’t weigh anything.  The rest of the wood is ground up at the mill and the rot is just powder so it never gets in the paper, anyway.   “How much pulp do you think we have, dad?”   “Well, it’s about 4 ½ feet high, that averages out to be four feet high with the voids filled in.  Four feet is about up to a guy’s nipples.  Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, …..  Maybe we have sixteen cords.”   Popal used to sell for $10 or $12 a cord.  Balsam was maybe $15 a cord and about $3 more if peeled.  Spruce pulpwood has the longest fibers, so it always was worth the most.   I was blessed with getting in on the tail end of cutting pulpwood by hand.  We used bow saws and double bit axes for limbing.  That was still going on after the Rural Electric lines came into the rural area.  I got into the tail end of the kerosene lamp and the outhouse era, too.   We didn’t have steel posts, or four wheelers to help with carrying the fence posts, either.  Up here in the clay ground, we used an iron bar to make a guide hold and then pounded down pre sharpened fence posts with a 13 pound cast iron maul.  Everyone did it.  We did it in the rain some times, because it cooled us off while we sweated.  If it was a hot spell, we had to take a break more often, and just go home if it got too hot.  There was always something else we could do at home.   I remember Grandpa Hanson telling me that William Carlson, grandfather of Dr. Dennis Carlson from Virginia, carrying armloads of fence posts instead of one at a time.   First a trail was cleared of brush by hand around a forty acre parcel and then posts were carried from a road somewhere, and dropped 10 feet apart.  A thirty gallon oil drum was just the right height to stand on to swat those posts into the ground.  After the posts were in, usually a three strand barbwire fence was built to keep cows in.  Each roll of wire was a quarter of a mile long.  A pipe was stuck through the hole in the roll and two guys with leather gloves walked and unrolled it.  Next it was stapled on the posts so it wouldn’t tangle with the next strand that had to be rolled out.  It sure took a lot of walking through the woods to build a fence.   The corners of the fences had to be braced up with cedar poles so they wouldn’t pull in.  There was tension on the wires to keep them tight.  Gates had to be made and braced up, too, where roads went through the fence.   We never said estimate, just said it was about that far.  Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, …..   When an old Swede said, “I tink it’s like that,” he was guessing.   When an old Swede said, “But I tell you!”  You knew he had his facts down.   A house floor was measured to the quarter of an inch.  A barn didn’t have to be perfect, but it usually was within an inch.    A shed was whatever lumber you had, and could be sawed to any length.   It was uncanny at how accurate those old guys were estimating how much wood was in a firewood pile, or a pulpwood pile.  The old loggers knew, just by looking at it, how many thousand feet of lumber a pile of saw logs would yield.  They did it all their life.  They had been with their dads for years, before they started selling or buying wood.   They knew how to judge how many tons of hay was in a stack, too.  Most hay was put up loose.  Today they count bales.  They used to sell horse hay to the logging camps for a little extra cash.  They estimated how much they had, and the buyer did the same.   When the logging boss, or timber buyer came time to pay up, they did measure each stick of pulpwood and mark the end with chalk or crayon.  The saw logs were measured individually on the small end and each log was recorded.   Most people just did business with a shake of hands, or just by word of mouth.  If someone cheated or lied, word soon got around and no one would forget that.   The Scandinavians were like the Indians, in that they may forgive you for a misdeed, but until their dying day, they wouldn’t forget.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Friday, December 19, 2008   DRYING WET SOCKS Dave Hanson   Ben Franklin was the inventor of the cast iron stove.  Before that time, homes and buildings were built with many chimneys for each fireplace.  Like in the story of Mary Poppins, there were chimney sweeps in every city.  Many of the old cities in the Old World burned down.  Stockholm, Sweden and St. Petersburg in Russia burned down and new laws were passed to have all new buildings built of stone instead of lumber.  Everyone coming into St. Petersburg had to take a stone in from the country as a tax.  Even towns like Virginia and Chisholm burned down around the turn of the century.   When we were in Tyrol, Austria a few years ago, Gwen got her picture taken with the chimney sweep.  The government has men travel the country and inspect and sweep the chimneys once a year.   When I was a kid, coal furnaces were used in most city homes.  Some had mechanical stokers feeding the stove, but some did it the old way with a shovel.  Coal burns hotter than wood, but it only took a few tons to heat a home all year.  Where wood ashes just fall through the grates, coal makes clinkers which have to be taken out often.  That is like slag, and would plug things up in a few days if not taken care of.   Train cars of coal were unloaded in Cook by the tracks near where Lakes Gas. Co. is today.  I unloaded boxcars with a shovel into a truck on the siding in Orr in 1957.  This was delivered to the schools in the area.  I unloaded some of it with a shovel, into a few private people’s coal bins.   Coal trains rumble into Duluth even today.  That coal is hauled by ships down lakes to the markets out east.   Out in the country, we had parlor stoves.  Most of the people used wood and it really only warmed up the living room.  The kitchen range was used for cooking.  I suppose that is why most socializing was done around the kitchen table.  I think most people visited more in the winter time because they couldn’t do field work or haying.  The kitchen was warm.   Before 1920, there weren’t many steel barrels.  They became popular for motor oil when cars became popular.   When we were in Colonial Williamsburg a few years ago, we talked to a cooper from England.  He and his apprentice were making barrels out of white oak with hand tools just like they had done for centuries.  It takes an apprentice about four years to learn the trade.  Those joints swell up and hold water.   We have a lot of minerals in our area and before we had electricity and water conditioners, people had those old wood barrels catching rain water.  Hard water used to make soap curdle, so the girls liked rain water to wash their hair.  Grandma Miller melted snow to get soft water to wash clothes.  The iron water stained everything orange.   I’m sitting here looking out the window and I’m cozy.  I know a lot of people didn’t have nice houses years ago.  During the depression people moved up here to get away from the cities.  They could survive here by burning wood.  Some built small shacks and made stoves out of steel barrels.  The cast iron parts can still be bought in hardware stores.   The only tools they needed were a cold chisel, a brace and bit to drill holes and a wrench and screwdriver.  Those cheap stoves kept a lot of people warm.  With no thermostat they were dangerous.  But they did throw a lot of heat if you kept putting wood in.  I know there are a lot of them out in the hunting shacks.  Some have even pounded a flat spot on top for a coffee pot.   No one wants a barrel stove in their house, but when you come in from the woods wet and cold, you don’t mind the wood ashes around the stove, when you can warm up fast.   You can dry out your gloves and mittens fast if you lay them on the stove for a few seconds at a time.  That steam stinks, but grown men monkey around like that, too.  They dried out stinky socks in the logging camps where they hung on wires over the stoves.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2008   A ROAD LESS TRAVELED Dave Hanson   Have you ever noticed that people change over the years?  Some people were really aggressive and mean in their younger years and turn out to be nice and benevolent when they are old.   Dad always said young people are radical and get more and more conservative as they live their life and have “seen it all” like the saying goes.  When there is a revolution, it’s usually the young that are in the mix of things.  When there is a war, they don’t want old married men.  They would ask the lieutenant, “Why don’t you run across that field first?”  They want young, brave, non thinking, invincible kids to be troops.  They feel they can never be killed, and if they do get hurt, they will be heroes anyway.   Young people have a built in desire for adventure.  Some dream of fame and fortune, even if they are too shy to try or even talk to strangers.  I suppose there is a fine balance to the strict scare tactics we use to try to control our kids when we want them to develop a sense of security and caution.   Watch out for those party girls, they may not make good wives.  Watch out for those popular boys who go out with all the girls.  They may not make stable husbands.  Some people don’t say anything to their kids and have no rules about drinking, smoking, or a curfew.  The kids just copy the parents.  I suppose they say to themselves “How can I tell them not to go to parties and drink?  I got pregnant myself.”  A dad may say, “How can I tell them not to fight or drive like a manic?  I’ve bragged about that all my life.”   Some were so quick to criticize and tell others how to live all those years, it comes back to haunt them.  When those kids grew up and became better citizens than they ever were.  It’s hard to say you’re sorry and some never do.  Some people were so rough on their own kids they never see them in their old age.   If anyone has read a few of these stories, you’ll have noticed I never mentioned a lot of things that would make good stories.  I could write everyday and never tell all my life’s memories.   Just like you, some things are sacred to me.  The memories of folks and family are like that.  I write in generalities about unimportant things.  The details are for me to cherish.  I don’t write much about my mom, my brothers and sisters, my aunts and uncles, my forty or so cousins on both sides.  I never want to be negative and reveal things I think should be forgotten.   Private things are only talked about at home.   There are privacy laws in this country.  It’s a dilemma for the government to regulate how much information should be controlled.  We have the freedom of speech and freedom of the press, so things get kind of out in the open when people run for public offices.   One of our kids got a graduation card about “Marching to the Tune of a Different Drummer.”   Harry Truman said, “The masses are asses.” Some do follow the status quo and march blindly off in any direction without thinking about consequences.  There are always alternatives to every situation.  When we come to making choices do we take the road less traveled where there is a fork in the road?   What is your reward in life?  If we reach for the sky and don’t make our goal, is it going to make us miserable forever?  If we don’t set our sights high enough, is it going to make us miserable forever?   Is it bad or good to have a philosophy all our lives and stick to it?   No one knows my philosophy about life.  That’s OK.  We don’t have to reveal or gossip about everything we know.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2008   A NEW PAIR OF GLASSES Dave Hanson   The most important thing for a child is the first four or five years of life.  After a kid is old enough to talk, there starts a few years of non-stop questions.  That’s why a mother is so important.  A hundred questions a day, and a hundred straight answers a day.  No teasing and false impressions needed, thank you.   They say behind each doctor is their mother.  I never knew what that meant, but over the years it’s obvious the importance and deep impression it set in a child’s mind.  They say you can tell if a kid will get in trouble in life before they are in school.  That moral training is important very early on.  When the dads were away working years ago, that job fell on moms.   I remember my daughter coming home from a date, and telling of a mom who wasn’t having such a nice time in her life.  The lady told her boys to always look at the bright side of things.  Isn’t that a wonderful motto?   A lot of people just turn off a conversation when it isn’t of interest to them.  They may not realize it, but you can tell.  That’s the same with kids in school.  How many of us waited until we were eighteen to get out of there.  We had the same American History in grade school, junior high school, and finally in eleventh grade, and never got up to, or past, the Civil War.  It was getting more and more boring as we went along.   To a lot of teachers, just doing your job and going home was important.  Just like a grown up, a kid won’t listen or get excited if they aren’t interested in the subject.  Knowing how to read will save most of them, because they will read that stuff when they are ready, years later.  It’s harder for the kids who can’t read well.  Then it becomes torture for them when the teacher hammers away on the kids techniques of proper sentences, spelling, grammar, and not reciting in front of the room.  They just clam up.   Mom, why is the world round?  Why does the sun come up?  Mommy, why do I have to poop, when I pee?  Because you have to go.   Mommy why……….?  Shut up and go outside to play, can’t you kids see I’m trying to read?   Daddy, can I go out and play?  No, shut up and deal.  That last one is a joke I read once in a Mad Comic.  Those came out in the mid 1950s?  Super Man came running out of a phone booth and shouted, “I was raised on chicken fat.”  I got a nice bumper sticker in the center fold one time.  “We stayed overnight in the Waldorf Astoria Boiler Room.”  I showed dad and asked if I should put it on the back bumper of Scott W. Erickson’s Cadillac.  Dad smiled and we decided not to do that.   When we were little, dad explained that some people had a hard time hearing and were deaf.  Likewise, some people were color blind.  We knew a few men who couldn’t see red.  It looked black to them.  Most mammals like deer and cows are color blind.  Its stuff like that you learn at home and not in school.   The folks bought us a set of colored pencils just after the war.  I had been fascinated by the rainbow colors in the Mexican blankets when smaller still.  Those pencils were the best present we could get at that time in our lives.  Dad had a prism and showed us how sunlight spread out into a spectrum.  The same happened every sunny day as the sun went down in the west and shined through the aquarium.  That little spectrum slowly ran across the living room wall until it faded away.   We learned from the folks about a vanishing point when drawing so things disappeared in the distance.  Dad tore a picture out of a magazine and drew a one inch grid.  He showed us how to make a larger grid on a piece of paper and just draw in one square at a time.  By the time we were in school and Mrs. Novak told us about vanishing points, we were interested in it already.   We got to stay up late, or were woken up by the folks a few times to see the eclipse of the moon.   Mom let me keep a pint jar of stagnant water in my bedroom all winter.  It smelled some, but the snails I had taken home from the river laid eggs on the inside of the jar and kept reproducing.  Most moms would have thrown them out.  Dad had told us of a balanced aquarium where the algae made oxygen as long as it was in the light, and the snails were never fed because they ate that algae.  I picked about a dozen Sacropia cocoons one fall and pinned them on my curtain.  After it warmed up, they started emerging about Christmas time.  They had thought it was spring in the warm house and developed into moths.   Those trips from the car into the house at night after we got home from the shows in Cook, were a time for lessons about the constellations of Orion and Taurus the Bull.  We learned about the Big Dipper and the North Star.  Dad explained about the Northern Lights and the  magnetism of the North Pole causing the gases to glow.   Dad had only gone through the eighth grade.  So he kept telling us kids about interesting things he had read about while he grew up.   Even after we were married, mom told about the popal branches that came down in the yard after a storm.  She saw all the rabbit tracks in the yard.  One day she was excited as we came over for a visit.  She had looked out the window the moonlit night before and saw the shadows of the rabbits hopping around the yard.   Oh, we’ve heard that story so many times.  We’ve heard that story before.  Old people do keep telling those stories, because that’s the way information was passed on for ages.  To the teller of the story, it’s the most important things in their life at the moment.   I know there are old people who end up with tears in their eyes when they remember things about the past.  And what’s worse, is when the kids or grandkids aren’t interested.   It’s just the perspective.  It’s just the other way of looking at things.  Sometimes they are just in front of our noses and we don’t see them.    Little things can be important, too.  Pick up a lens.   A new idea from some old person.   Get a new pair of glasses and everything seems so clear.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Sunday, December 07, 2008   IT’S NICE TO TAKE A REST Dave Hanson   It finally got below zero.  I’m looking forward to that first -40 degree night.  If it gets colder, we can brag how cold it was.   My dog’s better than your dog.  When we were kids, we did talk like that.  We knew what we were saying and knew we weren’t always right, but we didn’t want to be less of a person or poorer than our friends or neighbors.  What ever kind of car our folks had was just as good as someone else’s car.  Most people seemed to have a Ford or Chevrolet.   But there were some Plymouths from Wally’s in Orr, too.  Dad had Buicks.   Most kids had one or two best friends, so we never argued with our buddies.  There were always other things to talk about, like a western movie or a WW II movie that was filmed a year or two before.   We knew we couldn’t lie or exaggerate too much, because all the other kids knew about all the same things we did.  We liked to talk about big things.  Small stuff didn’t make an impression on most people, but big stuff was something else.   Dad worked for Scott Erickson in Orr, so when I told the kids at Gheen School about Speed Erickson, who was Scott Erickson Jr., in Orr, who was 6 foot 8 inches tall, that was really something.  Some kids talked about a big white pine on the south side of Norway Hill that three grown men couldn’t reach around.  That was impressive.   Mom had hauled leaf mold soil she gathered from around rocks and used it to fertilize the first garden she had after the folks were married.  She had some carrots that were the size of 2 quart jars.  If someone grew a 2 pound potato, that got a picture in a newspaper.   I know some people envied others, its human nature, and some grown ups can’t hide jealousy any better than kids can.  The people who were kids during the depression told of boastful people who bragged about their clothes or new cars, or people who put down others to try to make themselves look better.   Our folks let us kids run around barefoot all summer.  By the time school was out, our feet were so tender we tip toed around for a week or so.  By the time summer was over, we were so tough we could run down the gravel road and think nothing of it.  Two things I didn’t like were running in the dew in the morning because sand would stick to my feet.  The other was running across the newly mowed hay field where the stubble would poke between the toes.  Mom had bunions on her feet because she had to wear shoes that were too tight during the depression.  Everyone wore shoes during poor times.  Even hand me down shoes that didn’t fit, were worn.  People felt bare feet were hillbilly style and didn’t want to look poor.  Mom and dad said we could go barefooted if we wanted.  We did pick up stickers and slivers, but mom was always there with a needle to pick them out.   It’s funny now to even think of bare feet.  We wade through wet and muddy places and never take our shoes off.  We kids would take our shoes off and carry them and wade through mud or ditches, and then put them back on again just to keep them dry.   Even now, when I’m getting old, and talk to some people my age, we seem to feel we have to always be doing something useful.  Maybe it’s to prove to others we know how and can do it, just to impress them.  I’ve told people I’ve never lifted weights.  I’ve never jogged to get exercise.   One time a couple of teachers from Cook had gone out on the weekend and had cut a pickup load of firewood.  They talked about that deed for a couple of weeks.  You can imagine how hard it was for me, with my big mouth, to keep quiet.  After school when the kids got home, we quickly changed clothes and piled into the pickup and headed for the woods.  I’d saw up wood and the kids pitched it in the pickup as high as the cab.  Me driving, and the big kids piled in and the smaller kids sat on their laps, as we laughed and drove a few miles home before dark.  That happened for a couple of weeks and we had enough wood for all winter.  After the oil price hike in 1970’s, for twenty years, we burned just wood, so I’ve saved thousands of dollars in fuel.  The kids still tell how much fun that was.   I know there is a whole generation of people who grew up with the idea of golf is a hobby for rich people, as is playing ball and going to the gyms to work out for exercise, but it doesn’t bother me.   I think of when I was smoking a cigarette in the halls of UMD, where I felt like a 13 year old, trying to look grown up.  I put it aside and never needed it.  Maybe when people see me hilling and digging potatoes by hand instead of with a tractor, they think of me as being old fashioned.  But I do it, and cut wood for exercise.  I’d feel silly playing with a round ball, too.   I’d rather fish, than watch a movie about fishing.  I’d rather hunt than watch a hunting movie.  I’d rather be loved than watch a romance movie or read a romance book.   I suppose I’d rather be in the mix of things than be a spectator.   There are things that I should do, but never hire that work done, because I know how to do it myself.  After the kids grew up and moved away, some of those things aren’t a priority to get done.  I tell people I only do things I like to do.   Maybe I never got to be a millionaire, but I don’t envy other people.  Your job may be better than mine was.  Your house may be better than mine.  Your dog may be purebred and mine a mongrel, but I never want to keep up with the Jones’s or my neighbors.  That’s why I live here where everyone is a character.  We don’t want to be exactly like every other person.   I don’t even want to live out my life in a nursing home.   When we were small, we were afraid to die.  Now that my kids are all grown and the grandkids are on a good start, and a long fun life has gone by, it’s not scary at all.  To some of us, if it gets bad enough, we may look forward to just going to sleep.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Friday, December 05, 2008   SACKS Dave Hanson   If I remember right, the Spalding Hotel in Duluth was just east across the street from where the library is today.  William Spalding was a rich man, and in 1889 built the 200 room hotel.  At the time, it was the most magnificent hotel between the large cities on the east coast and San Francisco.  People came from all over the United States to attend the grand opening.  It was still standing when I went to UMD in 1961.  I remember the professors talking about the splendor when it was built.  That was a brick building but buildings didn’t have a riveted steel frame in those days, so the walls were built like a fortress with thick walls at its base to hold up the weight, and decreasing thickness of brick as it neared the top.    There were a lot of live plays and theaters in the days before movies and TV so people came up from the cities and Chicago on the railroad and stayed at hotels for short vacations.  The Lyceum Theater was across the street where productions were put on.  That was still there, too.  The back of the stage was seven stories high so scenery could be hoisted up and lowered for different plays.   There was a lot of hullabaloo when these old buildings were torn down for urban renewal in the 1960’s.  The old people in town reminisced and there were some protesters.  When the wrecking crews started tearing down the Spaulding they thought it would only take a day or two.  But work went on for a long time to knock it down.  They had reinforced it very well when it was built, so it went down with quite a fight.   Old man Spalding had grub staked many men when they headed north looking for gold on the Vermilion Gold Rush.  No one ever found gold, so he never got paid back for his supplies, but he was well thought of by many people long after he died.   Dr. Maude Lindquist was a history teacher at UMD.  She made Minnesota History come alive.  She told of a cruiser who used to crisscross the north woods with a packsack on his back.  I’m not sure if he was cruising for pine timber, or prospecting, or a missionary, or all at the same time, but after many years, he developed cancer from the straps of the packsack irritating his shoulders.   Most of the old men in the 1950’s that didn’t drive, had a canvas packsack which they carried their groceries and supplies home with.  With 4 wheelers and snowmobiles nowadays, you hardly ever see packsacks.   Those packs could hold about ninety pounds of groceries.  They could carry the meat of most deer if the meat was cut off the bones.  Even live calves, with their heads sticking out, were carried miles through the woods to new farmsteads.   Packsacks were made from canvas and had cowhide straps that could be adjusted.  Canvas is sailcloth, or a heavy duty denim cloth that was waterproofed with paraffin wax.  Some of those old packsacks lasted for years.   My Grandpa Miller and Leopold Berg would walk six miles through the woods to Pelican Lake and fill their packs with Northern Pike and carry them home once in awhile in the early 1900’s.   The old gunny sack was just as useful on the old home places.  They were a very course cloth made from jute fiber.  When I was a kid, no one bought gunny sacks.  We got cow feed in them.  They piled up in the barn and came in handy for numerous uses.  Best of all, they were disposable.  They worked well for carrying chickens in.  A hen or two could be tied up in a sack and easily breathe through the cloth.  People used them by the hundreds to carry suckers home from Elbow Rapids each spring.  A newborn calf could be stuffed in one if you folded its legs up, and the sack was tied around its neck so its head would stick out.  Many calves were hauled home in the back seat of cars years ago.  No one let a dairy calf suck from its mother.  They were taken away and fed from a pail.  Milk was separated and the cream was saved to make butter or sold to the creamery in Cook.  The warm skim milk was mixed with calf feed and fed back to the calves.   We used to dump in a lot of dairy feed when the calves got big and it only took a minute or two for those calves to drain a 12 quart bucket of skim milk.  About 1950 we started buying milk replacer for the calves which is much like formula babies get when moms don’t nurse them.   Those gunny sacks were used to wipe cow manure off cows and calves that got dirty.  Some people burned them, and some just tossed them away and they rotted.  I remember driving by farms and gunny sacks were flapping in the windows where they had been nailed up as screens.   No one ate bran in those days.  Only poor people ate brown bread.  The bran and middlings were ground off wheat and sold as cheap feed for pigs and chickens.  Everyone ate white bread.  Those middlings were fluffy so a hundred pound sack was big.  Heavy grain like corn came in a smaller 100 pound gunny sack.   A hundred pounds was a standard weight years ago.  That was about the most weight men wanted to carry.  Most people did work by hand so they were used to carrying heavy things.  Potatoes were hauled in 100 pound gunny sacks.  I remember trucks hauling a couple of tons of potatoes (40 sacks) down the road.  They were probably grown in Embarrass or Lakeland and headed for a county school somewhere.   Chain came in gunny sacks and was tied with wire.   I remember mom pulling on the chain stitch and opening a middling sack.  It was about 40 inches by 6 feet.  She could rake about 2 wheelbarrow loads of leaves on it in the fall and skid them out of the yard.  I used it when I cut grass for our tame rabbits.   Willard Pearson has a moose hide packsack made in 1888 that his father, Abel Pearson, had.  Abel lived west of Frazer Bay from 1893-1900.  He homesteaded in Cook.  About 1900 or so, he carried John Klintman’s daughter, Judith, from Tower to Cook in that packsack.  Years later, Judith married Art Erickson.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2008   JUST FOR THE TAKING Dave Hanson   To most of the Native Americans, the idea of personal property was not important to individuals as it was to the Judo-Christian desert culture where material property was defended by death, if necessary.  I suppose if someone’s herd of sheep drank all your water, your family would die.  In such a harsh region of the world, every little thing was of life or death importance.   In most of the new world, resources were so plentiful there were only a sense of sharing and no sense of stealing.  That doesn’t mean they were not grateful for things.  I’ve seen old paintings of Indian men bent over, blowing tobacco smoke on a deer they had just shot, and saying thanks to the deer for letting itself be shot, so the brave could feed his family.   As little kids, we dressed up at school at Thanksgiving time and were told stories by our teachers that reinforced the ideas we got from our parents about being thankful for our food, too.  I know the kids in town were thankful for the food they got from the stores and what they could grow in their yard or berries they could pick.  Even on the mining locations, people had gardens and potato patches way before the Great Depression hit in the 1930’s.   At Ironworld there are a lot of photos of the huge cabbages and potatoes people grew in home gardens.  The folks told about the huge gardens surrounding Virginia during the 1930’s and victory gardens during WW II.  The area where the Mall and Target is was all vegetable gardens years ago.   When Gwen and I rented in Duluth years ago, our landlord, Tony Nesgoda, told us he had a job as a boy herding people’s cows up the hill in Duluth to the pastures and after school chasing them down to the barns to be milked.   We kids in rural America took chores for granted.  We didn’t get paid an allowance for doing chores.  We were just doing our part for the family.  When we were small, our parents did the work, but as we got older, we did what we could.   Most of us were not farmers, but had a garden and a few cows for our own food.  Our family never skimped on food, but we didn’t waste things, either.  No one dished up our plates.  We were told to take what we could eat, and if we were hungry, to take a second helping.  In our family, we always ate together.  Each bowl was passed around the table and we helped ourselves.  There was no clean plate club in our house.  But, no dessert if you didn’t eat what you took.  We didn’t have dessert often, but we did have bread, cake and cookies for snacks nearly always.  Milk and bread was at every meal every day.  Beef was no treat because we usually butchered two cows a year.  When we got down to the soup bones and ribs, it was time to butcher.  That stuff in the bottom of the deep freeze went to feed the dogs most of the time.   A treat was something we didn’t have at home very often.  I personally liked pickled herring, pickled pigs’ feet, or sausage.  Chocolate covered cherries were a real treat, as were bismarcks or peanut butter twists a couple times a year from some bakery.   The stuff we raised and grew was just for the taking.  Anyone else could have done what we did if they wanted to.  We knew that city kids had walked along the railroad tracks picking up coal during the depression.  We just went out in the pasture and cut enough wood each year for our heat.  When there was a good berry year, we picked during our spare time and made it a fun thing.  I suppose because we did things together made it fun.  It didn’t matter if we were digging potatoes, picking berries, butchering chickens, cutting firewood, making hay, or having a picnic, it was fun because we were together.   This was a land of plenty, just like now, to the Native Americans, too.  They worked together to prepare for winter.  They hunted and fished together.  They ate and danced together, and had fun doing it.  They didn’t take the maple sugar, dried fish, and wild rice for granted, but felt grateful for the fun they had gathering it.   So now when the holiday season comes along, I think back at sometimes when I was young, how selfish I was, sometimes, and think back how lucky and grateful we were to be able to share the simple things in life that were always there, just for the taking.   We have a little photo of the man from Bovey, Minnesota hanging on the wall in the kitchen.  It’s a bearded man with his eyes closed and hands in prayer, “Grace.”   I’m thankful for our neighbors and the families of kids I taught, and for the people who live up here and share our ideas of all the fun things we can do.  Most people I know are thankful for what we have and not for what we don’t have.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Monday, December 01, 2008   WHO WOULD YOU DRINK COFFEE WITH? David Hanson   A walk in the park isn’t always perfect.  After a week like the Land of the Loon Festival in Virginia, or the Blueberry Festival in Ely , the sod kind of looks like a well used football field after a rainy weekend.   Walking up to an auction site is kind of like that on a rainy day with so many people tramping around.  It’s a good idea to wear some work shoe type of protection, because you never know what type of weather we will have in Minnesota.   I’ve always had the most fun watching people.  That’s one thing no one has to pay for.  An example is sitting on a bench in a large city or at a county fair and watch people.    I’ve said many times that I should take a camera to a few public auctions and take pictures of characters bidding on things.  After they buy them, they try to talk up their good buy.   The people come in every shape, size, and age.  They dress in every imaginable type of clothes.  It’s humorous to watch how the different types of people show their individuality.  Every different kind of beard or mustache can be seen on the men.  The men, who are in the late or middle late age, use oil to different degrees in their hair and comb it in all the ways they did as a teenager.  Some bald men shave what little remains, and some are shiny on top, but sport a pony tail, or a small braid in back.   Some men are big.  They take pride in their weight.  Not all are muscle men, but seem to think they look like a weight lifter.  Some of these fat men wear their shirt open all day and get sunburn on their fat belly.  Some come in water walkers and Bermuda shorts.    Caps are worn even on 95 degree days.  Some men never feel right with their cap off.  A brimmed cap was used by the loggers years ago to offer a little protection to the eyes when chopping branches off trees.  A person has to get close enough to a tree to chop and a twig could get in your face.  The cap would be knocked off a couple of times a day by brush that wasn’t noticed and save an eye injury.  The other brimmed caps were used by baseball players for sun glare.   A gentleman always takes his cap off when entering a church, or public place.  Some are reluctant to remove them for the National Anthem or when our flag goes by.  To some people, grease or sweat is a badge of something.  Those caps seem to fall apart before they are washed or thrown away.  If someone wore his cap sideways or backwards years ago, people would have been thought of as drunk or retarded.  Today that style goes with the crotch between the knees, and the cleavage showing of some males.   The attire at an auction is anything goes.  Some really pretty women and girls attend auctions.  Some to look, and some to be seen.  They come in all shapes and sizes, too.  Make up is used in every conceivable way, also.  When I was a teen, lipstick was pink or red shades.  Now it is used not at all by some gals, and in every shade including brown, black, grape and eye liner around the edges.  Some walk around with their mouth drooping open all day so people can see the stud pierced in their tongue.  Some skinny girls wear few clothes.  Some heftier girls have skimpy clothes, too.  They usually take a folding chair with.  That chair can be set up near the food stand just for a handy resting spot.  Hardly ever have I seen men paying any attention to any of those girls.  Their eye is on the prize.  Whatever is up for bids.   There is something about the whole auction scene.  People can be sucked right into the action and bid on junk.  It’s best to get to the auction about an hour early so you can get a chance to look over the goods.  I may be making fun of people, but I’ve bid from afar and bought some junk myself.  I bought about six fishing rods one time at an auction in Angora.  When I bid a dollar and no one else bid, I got my handful of rods.  I figured there must be one in there that was good.  Not a one.  I think they may be in the corner of the woodshed.   The smell of an auction comes in all shapes and sizes, too.  At some farm auctions the barnyard smell comes in loud and clear.  It seems horse people wear the same blue jeans for as long as they own them.  Men don’t ride horses as much as girls and women.  Horses sweat, and smell different than cows.  When it’s a hot summer day, those auction gals sweat, too, and seem by the looks of things, don’t wash those pants.  Those are not cowgirls.  They smell like horse girls.   Even at old estate auctions where there are no cows, some men must be cowboys.  These aren’t the movie cowboys who ride horses.  They don’t smell like horses.  They smell more like cowboys because they smell like cows.  They don’t wash off their boots or blue jeans ever, either.  Some of these guys chew snoose, too.  Most just spit now and then, but before they eat a hamburger or a polish sausage, they flick out their cud before eating.  Usually they turn their back when they do this, as a gesture of being polite.  That doesn’t bother me at all.  I remember lumberjacks doing that, downtown, when I was a kid, too.  Our social studies teacher told a story years ago.  What does a poor man throw away and a rich man save?  Answer,  a rich man blows his nose in a silk hanky and folds it up and puts it in his pocket and saves it.   Eighty percent of people who go to auctions are just regular, average people.  The rest are on both extreme ends of the spectrum.  I’ve seen men in business suits and neat gold and diamond jewelry, and at the other, looking like the most dirty, poverty stricken people.   I’ve had to move back away from the bidding because of a woman who thought she smelled wonderfully by soaking herself in perfume.  When the bidding gets furious over an old logging chain or a welding set,  I’ve been trapped by the surging crowd.  Some of those men are huge.   It would be best to have a camera without a flash for taking pictures at an auction.  Some of these fierce looking men could be right out of the movie “The Man from Snowy River” with those old sweaty felt hats sagging down.  And those cold steely eyes that seem to cut right through you.  If you took a picture of their toothless bearded face, they may get mad at you.  Maybe a telephoto lens would work better, then you would have a little distance to get away, and maybe those huge people with skinny legs would never know you took a candid shot.   It would be easy to attend only three or four auctions to make a nice character album from the best of the worst photos.   Some of those ugliest people might be the nicest in the crowd.  And maybe some of the most distinguished would not be very nice.   Who would you want to drink coffee with?

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2008   THEY JUST WORE OUT Dave Hanson   Nothing is as simple as they appear.  Just when a person thinks everything is set up just right, something seems to happen and put a monkey wrench in the works.   What’s a monkey wrench?  They were a popular tool many years before my time.  When I was a kid, we had one at home but never used it.  It’s a museum piece.  It looks like those old steel pipe wrenches, but has no teeth, because it was used on old fashioned square nuts on the early cars and trucks and farm equipment.   The Virginia Rainy Lake Co. was the last real big logging company up here.  It closed in 1929.  After that, small loggers set up camps and cleaned up the scattered large pine around this country.   Don’t think for an instant that those loggers made a lot of money.  Some ran a sawmill along with the pulpwood business.  There were a lot of people working during the depression.  Competition was probably fiercer than ever.  It sure paid to be friends with a head forest ranger, and if you knew a state senator, that was even more important.  The state people had power over the fledging forestry dept. in those days.   Getting a state sale was locating a tract of trees where you thought you could make a little money.  If it was located a long way from a road, or the ground was rocky, made a difference in profit.  If it was in back of a large swamp, that made summertime work impossible.   No one goes into a business with the idea of losing money.  No farmer loses money on his ventures.  If they do, it’s a hobby, not a business.   The same was true with being a logger, a sawmill owner, or just a farmer cutting a little pulpwood to pay taxes.   There were some pulpwood camps scattered around the country.  In those places that were cut in the 1880’s and later, the trees grew back.  Those smaller trees had forty years or more to grow back by the 1930’s.  That is the second growth people used to talk about.   One thing all these people had to worry about was the weather.  People always waited for freeze up in the fall.  The swamps froze and snow covered everything.  Most pulp and logs were skidded on drays, so snow was essential.   Some years were called open winters.  Mom told of a few dates she remembered when the logging came to a standstill.  Nothing moved as the snow didn’t come.  People start to get hungry when it’s the end of December and no snow.  An open winter is when it’s so warm the ground doesn’t freeze.  Even on high ground there are tag alder swales where the muck is deep.  They have to freeze so the logging road will hold up a load.  No one cut black spruce until the ground froze.   Some farmers rented out their teams, or worked as teamsters in the winter.  Horses had to be fed all year, so just like now, keep them working.   Do you ever see road construction machinery sitting idle all winter?  It isn’t paying for itself unless it’s moving.  That was the same with horses years ago.   When logging slowed down, even the farmers suffered.  Without wood coming into the railroad spurs, people there waited.   General Logging Company was built by the railroad in Gheen, and pulpwood was piled there next to the tracks.  That way, even in slack times, the mills in Cloquet could make paper.  They had piles of surplus wood at the mills, also.   Those independent loggers struggled to get wood sales from the State Forestry.  When times were booming, the rangers had a hard time keeping up with the demand for wood.  They had to go out and cruise and mark the tract of land that was going to be logged.  In the summer, the rangers had to walk back into swamps, through blow down timber, and try to get across creeks and rivers that would freeze in the winter.  Sand flies, no-see-ums, mosquitoes, and deer flies nearly ate them alive some years.   I knew of a few independent loggers who would never speak to each other for the rest of their lives, because of someone getting a timber sale they had asked for.  Only one can be the winner.   Hurry up and wait.   I hope it freezes up early and we don’t get too much snow.  Walking in snow up to your rear is hard work.  I remember Marty and Bernie Novak cutting spruce east of Gheen.  They had to shovel the snow away from the trees to cut them.  The forest rangers will not stand for 4 foot stumps when the snow melts in the spring.   Some loggers have had equipment sink in soft spots in the winter time.  I’ve known some that have gone down on the edge of beaver ponds.  Every logger in the country comes to the rescue.  Those modern machines are huge, and also the price tag is huge.  If that machine is left, that mud, muck, and clay freezes like cement, so time is important to get them out and cleaned up.  It’s hard if it’s 30 degrees below.   Don’t think accidents have never happened.  Willard Pearson told about his dad’s team going through the ice on Ash Lake, north of Orr, years ago.  They did save the horse after a lot of work.  Horses got hurt and had to be put down once in awhile.  Even today, something can go wrong in a hurry and a breakdown can sour a profitable logging job.   I’m not sure some young people in the cities realize how much misery some rural people went through.  It isn’t easy to keep trying, day after day, year after year.   Prices fluctuate, costs fluctuate, and weather is not predictable.  It’s not easy to find the right kind of people to hire.  Some want the money, but don’t want to take the responsibility to do the job.  Some don’t want to work hard.  That’s why a lot of the people who worked in the woods were alcoholics or simple minded people.  They couldn’t find work anywhere else.  Some say those people were exploited.  But they had pride in that they had a job.  They may have drunk too much on the weekends, but even drunk, they held their heads high.  They were not unemployed like so many other people during the depression.   A lot of people buy new 4 wheel drive pick ups and never take them in the woods.  They may get a scratch.  That’s another story for the loggers.  Those people don’t baby the trucks.  They use them for what they were designed for.  With a fuel tank in the back, and oil and parts for equipment, those pickup beds sometimes fill with leaves, and bark, and oil stained rags, but if a truck were alive, they would be proud of the work they did and how long they stood up before they wore out.   Horses and lumberjacks wear out too, some sooner, some later.  Look at old Vic Zgaynor….

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: dDn Simonson Sent: Sunday, November 09, 2008   YOU DON’T NEED MAKEUP Dave Hanson   I’ve seen little kids spitting, or strutting around.  When you see his father, you know why the kid acts that way.  When the boys came back from WW II, a lot of them had crew cuts.  That lasted for 15 years after the war.  In the late 1950’s, Elvis came along and people imitated him with lengthening sideburns.  Some of the older men got a slow burn, because the teenagers were going to an extreme.   There have always been copycats.  I’ll never know who started the Civil War cap fad in 1951.  Lammi’s had a store in Orr and sold maybe a hundred of those caps.  Silk scarves were popular with the girls for a few years.  I remember a couple of years later, when yo-yos were the rage at school.  It was a challenge to walk in the halls at school during noon break.  Squirt guns were taken away and literally shoveled into the furnace by the janitors.   During the pioneer days, steep roofs were built on houses.  Roof dormers were the style on a lot of homes during the 1920’s.  A lot of hip roofs were built on homes in the 1930’s.  Those roofs sloped up on all four sides, coming to a peak in the center.  Right after WW II, the roofs had only about a 4 inch eave.   I remember when the ranch style homes started to be built about 1950.  The roofs were popular in California, but they didn’t have much of a slope, so up here in the mid west and in New England snow had to be shoveled a lot.   Just about every house was built that way.  Instead of carpenters stick building roofs, pre built trusses could be swung up in a hurry.   Most houses today are built with steeper roofs.  They have a lot of dormers on those upstairs rooms, too.  That makes a lot of valleys that could leak.  It’s a lot easier to walk around on the ranch style house when shingling.  That style lasted until 1995.   I remember dad sitting down with his steel square and laying out the angles and length of rafters while I piled up 2x6s on a couple of sawhorses.  All the carpenters knew how to read the square.  One side of the square was etched with the length and rise of each foot of run on the rafter.  A steep roof had to have a slightly longer rafter than a flatter roof.  If a roof is too flat, rain would run under the flat shingles.  The more the slant, the less chance of leaking.  I remember old barns with pin holes in the wood shingles keeping the hay dry inside.  The rain ran right off.   Coral and turquoise colored paint became popular in the 1950’s.  Remember the olive colored bathroom fixtures and the almond kitchen appliances?  Each time a new fad came out, it was advertised on TV, and in every magazine and newspaper ad.  When new houses were built they didn’t just want plain white appliances or bathroom fixtures.  Those would be old fashioned.   Dad put in a bathroom for a farmer in Greaney years ago, and teasingly asked the wife if she wanted pink bathroom fixtures.  She told him, “I can plant my fat rear on white and I don’t need anything like that!”   Today stainless steel is popular for kitchens.  We bought all copper tone appliances when we built in our kitchen cabinets about 1974.  We went back to plain white.  I bought a white hood for over the range about three years ago, but it’s down in the basement out of sight and out of mind.  The copper tone hood is all that’s left of the original stuff.  That’s a honey-do project I have to do before I die.   Mini skirts started when I was in college and made quite a stir at first.  After a few years no one noticed, and some girls with big legs, stood out in the crowd.  Back then, girls froze their legs when it was 20 degrees below.  They wouldn’t be caught dead wearing slacks.  I don’t remember when bell bottomed pants came out.  Men wore then, too.  Double knit cloth was popular for a few years for both men and women.  Neck ties have gone from the broad ties, to the narrow ties, and to no ties at all here in the woods.   Men in the cities feel they won’t be respected without them.  Remember the Hawaiian shirts for men, and the moo moo dresses women wore?   When I was a kid, men wore hats when they dressed up.  Women wore little hats with nets on, too.  When John F Kennedy was elected, he didn’t wear a top hat at his inauguration ceremony,  and let his hair blow in the wind.  Dad didn’t have to slick down his hair anymore.  When I was in high school, boys used Wildroot Cream Oil or Brylcream in their hair.  When hairspray came out, girls’ hair styles went ballistic.   One time, mom told of a township officers meeting in Hibbing.  She was town clerk and John Silverdahl was a supervisor.    A red haired girl with a bee hive hairdo walked by, and John said in his Swede brogue, “Look at that bunkin head.”   Some people kept their styles that were popular when they were teenagers.  I remember men who parted their hair in the middle for years after the 1920’s.  I remember some women wearing those little hats with a small veil way into the 1970’s.  Remember women who had the 1945 hairdos until they passed away?   One old man in his seventies, I knew, tried to stay young, and told me he didn’t like those old time slow dances like the polkas and waltzes.  He was old and stiff, but tried to do the twist and the rock and roll and looked kind of stupid.   Now tattoos and body piercing is popular with the kids that think they need help with their natural beauty.  Some don’t know when to quit.  I know some girls who are so pretty they don’t need make up.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2008   HIGH TONED Dave Hanson   We never heard of gandydancers when I was a kid.  The railroad had no impact on little kids.  When we had to cross the tracks everyday when I went to Orr School, it was nice to see that huge steam engine breathing away, as it sat, stopped at the crossing in Orr.  We never called the men gandydancers.  They were fathers of our friends.  They were section men.   We didn’t have fancy names for things.  Everything was borrow, we never heard of loan.  We never said angry, it was always mad.  A mud minnow was just that.  A chub was just that.  A sucker was called a sucker.  Those fish have some fancy Latin names.  A pike was a walleye.  A northern was a northern.  A drunk was called a drunk.  We never said children, it was always a kid.   Dad told us kids if we used the English word for a terd, it would be swearing.  If we used the English word for pee, it would be swearing.  People say feces and urine and its o.k. if it’s used properly.  Living with farm people we always talked about manure, and no one blinked an eye.  Tits were something people talked about all the time on a farm.  It was important when cows bruised themselves and got mastitis infections.  It was a little nasty when a kid said he had to go home and shovel crap.  He should have said, “I have to clean the manure out of the barn every evening when I get home from school.”  I never heard of a delinquent, they were only brats.   We always said Norway Pine, instead of Red Pine.  White Pine was always White Pine.  Black Spruce was called Swamp Spruce, and White Spruce was called Highland Spruce.  We were ignorant and never knew it and didn’t care when we did find out.   We never said critter, and never a mammal, it was always an animal.  A raptor was either an owl or a hawk.  A Gray Jay was always a Lumberjack, until the Timberjay newspaper came here.  A creek was always a crick.  A bog was always a swamp.  Any grass that grew in a wet spot was swamp grass.  No one called a cat tail anything else.  Everyone knew what everything was.  If they didn’t, they coined a generic word, like brush.  How many different kinds of brush are there up here?  Oh, we knew a few like chokecherry, or high bush cranberries.  We knew what hazel brush looked like, and willow.   Soil was dirt, sand was sand.  Everything was rock or rocks.  Never stone.  When we were about 10 years old, we learned about bedrock or ledge rock.   Guts were just guts, until we started helping dad butcher cows.  Then we learned what lungs and intestines were.   Bugs were generic for anything that bit you or crawled around.  Those that bit, we knew each kind.   One time Alex Gerber, the forest ranger in Orr, was down at Scott Erickson’s lumber yard.  Dad and Carl Ardin were making doors, windows and screens in the shop behind the lumber yard.  After the war, it was nearly impossible to get millwork from factories, so Scott hired dad to set up a woodworking shop.  Dad had experience from the shipyard in California during the war.  Scott had about 50 lumber piles drying next to the lake.  Alex said, “I see you have Pinous Strobus (White Pine) drying out there.”  Dad said yes, we have Pinous resonosus, pinous banksiana, and some arborvitae occidental, too.  Dad knew Alex was teasing, so he teased back.  The only other person I know that knows all those Latin names for plants, is Shirley Lund, here in Gheen.   I know Aspen is the proper name, but we used to call it popal.  A few years later some called it poplar.  Balm of Gilead was a weed tree, we called it balm and some at the grain door factory called it bam.  Some called it Black Walnut, too.  It looks real dark when it’s green, but it’s a real poor lumber.  If it’s cut from a tree larger than 15 inches on the stump, it makes shaky lumber.  It’s so full of water it won’t burn on a brush pile, when it’s green.  Green meant lumber that wasn’t dried yet.  A dry pile was lumber that had just come off the mill, and had air spaces between the boards.  If it wasn’t dried, it would rot fast.   The logging industry had terms we kids never heard of.  The mines on the range must have had them, too.   The older Finns mixed Finnish words and slang in with English and others didn’t know what it meant.  They kept the homeland language longer than most other people.  The Nett Lake kids had a few words like that, too.  I’ve been told there were no swear words in the Indian language.  Some may have been French, but some may have meant just plain, “Hello,” in French.   I had fun at UMD in Duluth.  Some person with a foreign accent would talk, and most of those kids at college would poke me and whisper, “What did he say?”  I grew up with a bunch of people that had heavy Scandinavian accents.  My friend’s grandparents had Finnish accents.  People hand me scribbled writing and ask me what it means.  It’s not hard.  I read writing like that for 33 years, with a bunch of kids, who were in a hurry.  I tried hard not to turn them off.  I’ve liked just about every minute of it.   My Grandma Miller came up here about 1910, or so.  They had electricity in St. Paul, when she moved here.  She called some people “High Toned.”  Dad called them, “Stuffed Shirts.”  We kids called them, “Stuck up.”   We’ve sure learned a lot in our lifetime.  Some of us know how, and when, to needle some people a little.  That’s teasing a little too much.   We’ve talked about how hard it must be for foreigners to learn English.  A lot of words have many meanings.  But we grew up talking and knew how to communicate before we ever went to school.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Tuesday, November 04, 2008   MINNESOTA MOSQUITOES Dave Hanson   Mom told about her sister, Hulda, and three other girls from Hibbing or Chisholm, packing up and driving a Model T Ford out to Hollywood in the late 1920’s.  Hulda married a high school teacher in Anaheim.   Jack Wallin was the football coach and was one of the best, in those years he taught.   Hulda had a boy, Carl, here in Gheen, but she wasn’t married.  Grandpa Miller didn’t approve of the young Swedish man.  He drank more than grandpa liked.  I imagine Aunt Hulda heard about her situation constantly.  When she left home, grandma and grandpa raised Carl, here on this place.  I never knew anything about this when I was young.  We always thought Carl was our uncle.  All the family pictures were like a happy family.   In those days, any kid that graduated from the eighth grade had to go to Virginia to finish high school.  Mom’s sisters, Hulda and Signe, boarded out and graduated from Virginia High School.   A high school was built in Cook, so mom went there.  When the school was built in Orr, she graduated in 1937.   Signe married a young chemistry teacher,  Ray Simonson, who grew up in Macintosh.  Signe was teaching in Fredenberg, north of Duluth, but had to keep it secret.  In those days, women teachers had to be single.  If the school system people would have found out, she would have been fired.  I think she taught a couple of years this way, only seeing her husband, as if dating.   Hulda had a happy marriage with Jack.  They attended a lot of school doings in the Los Angeles area, as Jack’s teams were winning a lot.   I don’t remember the many visits we had at Hulda’s during the last part of WW II, when dad was working in the ship yards at Long Beach.  When I looked at the photographs later, and heard these stories, it sees like memories.   The folks used to talk of the pea soup fog in L.A.  There were black outs each night in the coastal cities in the US.  People had all shades pulled and there were no street lights on at night.  I’ve seen pictures of army vehicles with black tape over the head lights and only a little light shining down the road.  I do remember dad stopping and getting out to read a street sign with his flash light one foggy night.  There wasn’t much traffic, but they drove with the parking lights on.   Dad told of a time when Uncle Jack and him got motorcycle rides in the mountains north of L.A.  Jack was riding with a friend and dad was on Roy Rogers’s motorcycle.  He may have always been on his horse, Trigger, in the movies, but he was just a regular guy in everyday life.  Dad said that was about the most scared he had ever been.  Roy was a speed demon on the bike.  He was used to those curves and hills, but dad wasn’t.   Dad was offered a piece of property farther east of all the orange groves in Orange County.  Jack took dad out to see the land.  There was brush and a few cactus and a large rock hill in the middle.  Dad could have bought it for $1200, but it was far from city water, so he passed it up.   I was a preschooler, but do remember the ground under the orange trees in those groves being orange with all the fruit that fell off those trees before harvest time.  There were thousands of acres of groves near L.A.  The folks told people that it was hard to find nice oranges in the stores in L.A. because all the perfect ones were shipped to markets all over the rest of the country.  No one was allowed to stop the car and pick up those culls on the ground.  If that was allowed, no one would buy any from the stores.  I don’t remember any fences, but I suppose a lot of people that liked oranges had a tree in their yard.   Gwen and I scoped out property near Albuquerque N.M. last summer that was a lot like that.  The property was a couple of miles away from city water, so we turned the deed over to Gwen’s sister, Rita.  I paid the taxes for seven years already, and I won’t do it anymore.   The L.A. property turned out to be Disneyland, and that rock turned out to be the castle.  I told dad one time, if he owned it, probably Disney wouldn’t have bought it from him.  That’s one of those, “What if,” stories.   Mom and dad started grinding stone and making jewelry, in their late middle age.  They traveled, and became rock hounds.  Dad built a camper on a 1955 Chrysler car chassis.  That had a Hemi V8 motor, with a double set of breaker points.  Dad had 12 volt lights and an air tank which he filled up at gas stations, to supply pressure in his water tank for the shower and kitchen sink.  With propane, they had heat and gas for the cooking.  The folks painted it green, so it would be hidden more in the woods.  When they got out west in the mountains and desert, they saw a lot of college age kids with long hair waving when they drove by.  That was the start of the Hippy Era, and they didn’t know green was a Hippy color.   That camper was up on top of a lot of mountain roads, and out in the middle of the desert.  They used it until it became difficult to get parts for that old car.  Dad was a good mechanic, too.   They went to Murdo, South Dakota, for a rock hound rendezvous.  Bubblegum agates are found there.  They are ugly and don’t make it as a jewelry stone.  Did you hear of the guy who dropped his gum in the chicken coop, and found it on the forth try?  I don’t think that’s a true story.   The folks were in the Black Hills one time and came upon a movie set.  They waited for hours to see Henry Fonda, but it was so hot he never showed.  They left.  That was the movie,  How the West was Won, being filmed.  There were piles of electric cable laying around.  The stage crew pulled canvases over it and it looked like rocks.  There were a few covered wagons there and extras sitting around in the shade with arrows sticking out of them, waiting too.   The folks had an excuse to travel around looking for Montana agates, and buying crazy lace agates that had been hauled across the border from Mexico, for their jewelry hobby and business.   They went to craft shows and sold their jewelry.  Dad ground and polished the stones in his basement and bought the findings for pins, earrings, and necklaces.  Once in awhile I see one of mom’s “Minnesota Mosquitoes,” she used to make out of teasels for bodies, and pipe cleaners for the legs.  The wings were feathers all the neighbors brought her.  She mass produced them on the coffee table while she watched TV.  The bugs were about 6 or 8 inches long and sold for 50 cents each.  During the winter, she made cardboard boxes of them.  I remember dad making a run back to Gheen from the Blueberry Festival in Ely, to get a couple more boxes of mosquitoes when they sold out.  Those mosquitoes paid for the rent for space in the park many times.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Sunday, November 02, 2008   UNCLE BEN Dave Hanson   My Grandma Miller’s younger brother lived in St. Paul.  Most of her brothers and sisters lived there all their lives.  I think one of grandma’s sisters lived in Little Falls.  Just like grandma, she went with her husband.   Their folks came from Sweden.  I never knew anything about the Old Country until I was middle aged.  Carl Quarfoot, from Vastergotland, Sweden, was born in 1855.  He married Anna Malm, who was 10 years younger.  It’s just listed as Varmland.  I don’t know what town.  Varmland is like the Arrowhead country of Minnesota.  I suppose Vastergotland, means Western Gotland.  That’s south western Sweden, east of Denmark.   Quarfoot isn’t a very Swedish name.  Malm is.  Way back about 300 or more years ago, a lot of Belgium, French, moved into Sweden and were known as iron workers, the Waloons.  The Swedes couldn’t pronounce w’s, so it was always Valoons.   Grandma Miller grew up in Lilydale, on the Mississippi River.  Her father, Carl, worked in the brickyards there.  I don’t know when he got his arm blown off in the clay pit, but he lived until 1933.  Great grandma Anna, died two years before I was born in 1937.   I’m not sure of my Great Uncle Ben’s age.  In his younger years, Ben drank a lot.  Just about every weekend he got thrown in jail.  He beat up a cop or cops.  Mom said Ben’s younger brother, Ted, had to go down to the police station and bail Ben out.  He had quit drinking years before I was born.   Ben came to visit his sister, Grandma Miller, each summer.  He worked in a slaughter house in St. Paul.  I remember one time when Grandpa Miller was getting ready to butcher a bull.  Grandpa made a big production out of every situation.  He had the tripod set up and the block and tackle ready to hoist, but he was in the house monkeying around, sharpening knives, and getting a pail of hot water, and, I suppose, having some coffee before he tackled a two hour project.    Ben got tired of waiting, and went down by the barn.  When grandpa got out there, Ben had the cow skinned and gutted in just a few minutes, so all grandpa did was saw the beef in half.  I don’t think grandpa liked that, but he never said anything.  Ben may have conked it in the head and used his pocket knife.  Grandpa had a rifle, but didn’t have to use it.   Every year, that was a common scene in the late fall.  People don’t realize how big a cow or bull is.  They skin deer, but they’re a lot smaller than a 1500 pound steer or bull.  I remember one of the men up on a step ladder with a saw, splitting the carcass down the spine.  I had to hold the front legs so it didn’t start swinging.  That saw cut was from the tail all the way down to the neck.  Usually we didn’t cut the head off completely until the saw cut was near the ground.   Uncle Ben liked westerns.  He read every book Zane Grey wrote.  In those days, they read a lot more than people do now.  They didn’t have TV, and didn’t listen to the radio much.  Well, maybe in the evenings.   “Oh you,” mom would say.  When Ben came down to our house, he would always find the first ripe tomato in mom’s garden.  He didn’t take it into the house, either.  He ate it.  He must have taken a lot of time doing it, too, because mom always saw him take the last bite.   “Take me out to the ball game.  Take me out to the fair.”  I suppose they went to the State Fair most of the time.  They didn’t talk about that, but baseball was another matter.  Ben loved Babe Ruth.  To him, Babe was like John F. Kennedy, Willy Nelson, Neil Armstrong, and Superman all put together in one man.  Babe was his hero.   Every time he was up visiting, he had to go fishing across from the State Forestry Building in Orr.  There’s a little ditch that runs under the highway, and he would walk on the shore from the rock wall and cast his red and white daredevil into Orr Bay.  It seems he was never gone long, and always came back to Gheen with a Pickerel.  He never said Northern Pike, always a Pickerel.   Ben was barrel chested.  To me, he was the nicest man I knew.   Gentle Ben

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Saturday, November 01, 2008 ABOVE THE CLOUDS Dave Hanson   Is there anyone who is unscathed by a heartbreak?  Is there anyone who has or had the fortunate blessing to be in a perfect family, where nothing bad was ever done or said?   Dad said, one time, long ago, “You may not like what you find.”   One time I told the kids in my sixth grade class in Cook, “I’ve got a skeleton in my closet.”  There may have been a couple of kids that knew what that meant.  I explained it, anyway.   John Plershe was digging sewer lines in on his property across the bay from Orr.  He was building his campground, and dug up a human skeleton.  I had been teaching my kids the bones of the skeleton, so they knew most of them.  I heard about it and asked John if I could take them to school for a day or two.   The kids were giggling a little as I walked over to my closet and carried the box to my desk.  When I held up a femur, they became quiet.  I told them that people said the person was about seven feet tall.  No skull was found, so no one knew if it was a native or some lumberjack that was buried in a shallow grave.  Those bones were not white like bones people usually see.  These were stained brown from the tannic acid from the leaves and grass that decay into the soil.  I handed each bone and the students passed them around the room.  After two years, John said he couldn’t let me have them again.  The government was starting to give bones that were collected and in museums, back to the Native Americans.   I think those kids felt something they had never felt before.  I liked to give them ideas to think about, that weren’t in any textbook.   Is there someone out there that hasn’t made a mistake?  Are there some secrets that no one knows about?  Does it bother the soul?   I told the kids, one time, if you were the only person on the planet, would there be anything you could do that would hurt anyone or anything?  Could you kill things until you got tired, and would it matter?  You could start forest fires, and would it matter?  They would burn out, and trees would grow back.  As soon as there were more people, you couldn’t do it anymore.   Did Christ know how to read and write in his 33 years of life?  Were some of those stories finally written down a hundred years later?  Was there anyone who knew how to write when Cain killed Abel?  Did Adam or Eve write down their life history?  A lot of water has gone under the bridge.   When an unexpected envelope came in the mail from Norway, I did finally get the family tree that no one here in America knew about.  Had Grandpa Hanson known?  Had my dad, who was the oldest in the family, know?  Had grandpa told him something when he was young that he kept under wraps?  I’ll never know.  I saw in the records, that way back in time, some of my ancestors were not married, but raised a family.  Were they so poor, no one cared?  Were they shunned by the other people up in those hills?  Did they seek comfort in each other their whole lives?   Back in those branches of family trees, cousins married with no ill effects.  There doesn’t seem to be a law against marriages like that in a lot of cultures.  Think of royalty.  They have no one else to choose from.  The royal family of England is really German.  This made a problem for them when they were fighting Germany in WWI and WWII.  They were related to the Czars of Russia by marriage, too.  Sometime when marriages were arranged, people weren’t happy, but divorce was not allowed.   There is no way people can control other people.  Even people in your own family.  People try, but it isn’t guaranteed.   Some people have hurt their own children in an insane rage while drunk.  Some in a rage of anger.  Probably they didn’t mean to have it happen, but it can be too late, when a person acts before they think.   I can’t think of a better feeling than to walk down the street with my son or daughter sitting in the crook of my arm, with their little arm around my neck.  We, as grown ups, want to protect them from every physical injury or any mental agony.  As time goes by, we lose more and more control.  I suppose that’s the way it’s meant to be.   Do we make mistakes?  Do we cradle the kids too long?  Do we protect them from danger and heartbreak too long?   Remember when we were young, we were loved by the whole family.  I think everyone wants a private love of their own, away from the family, away from our town.  It seems that the people we know nothing about seem more attractive than people and neighbors we’ve known all our lives.  The kids we know are like our own family.   Even our church and our teachers tried to control how we acted.  We contrived every way possible to rebel against what they knew was the proper and safe way to behave.  If you were like me, and most of the kids I knew, we got away with things the grownups didn’t know about.  What you don’t know isn’t going to hurt you.  That’s just as true today as it was in my time, and probably was said in ancient times.   Daddy, don’t you walk so fast.  Some dads did walk away and leave the kids.  Some moms did, too.  All kinds of excuses have been made up in a divorce.  It does hurt the kids.  Sometimes for life.  I’ve seen kids play one parent against the other.  If you don’t let me, I’ll go stay with dad.  If you don’t let me, I’ll go stay with mom.  I’ll give you money and let you do it so you will love me more than your mom.  I’ll let you do it so you will love me more than dad.  I’ll home school you so you don’t have to hear all the swearing on the bus, or the teasing at school.  I’ll protect you forever.  As soon as I’m old enough, I’m out of here!   I can’t do anything.  I don’t want to go out with a prude.   If you call everybody sweetheart, as the years go by, you’ll sit and wonder why no one calls you sweetheart anymore.  That was a song when I was a teenager.   Who wants to marry a party girl?  Who wants to marry a bar fly?  That guy’s a wolf.  Will he be loyal to me after we’re married?   She’s pretty now, but I remember when we were seven and she had a runny nose, and her stockings were down in her shoes, and dust was stuck on her sweaty ankles.  Remember when he wet his pants in the first grade?  He threw up on teacher’s feet.  I guess no one is perfect.  I know no one is perfect.   Now I know this may be one of my last stories.  Life may get foggy.  It may go on and on, and you don’t have to read this.  I want my grandkids to find this someday and know what most of us think about.  We remember the good things we did, but we also remember the things we neglected, and things we ignored.  Sometimes we feel guilty about things we should have done, but just never did them.  Please don’t be too harsh when you judge us.   I’ve always said, “People have been raising kids since time began, but when we had our kids, it was our first time for us.”   We did the best we could, with what we had.  We could have coddled you more, but we wanted you to know how to take care of yourselves.  We wanted you to survive and be happy.   Some say how terrible kids are now a days.  I say, they are the same as kids have always been.  We grown ups are probably the same, in general, as people have always been, too.   If you have raised your kids well, hats off to you.  If you have made some mistakes, you’re not alone by a long shot.  I know it hurts way down inside, but don’t feel guilty forever.   Look for the Silver Lining when a Cloud Appears in the Sky.  It’s always sunny above the clouds.  HEAVEN

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Friday, October 31, 2008   LOGGING CHAIN Dave Hanson   I don’t know when chain was first used for work.  Copper and bronze were probably too soft for that.  It had to have been in the Iron Age.  Some chain was used on ships.  In the movies, we see it on the draw bridges of old castles.   When logging started in the US, chain was used in all phases of the industry.  A blacksmith had a job welding links together.  This wasn’t wire like the armor smiths used to make chain mail.  Wrought iron was used by the smiths years ago.  Steel chain was factory made, but smiths had to repair the chains that broke apart.   Anoka, on the Rum River, was a sawmill town.  Logs were floated for many miles south to the twin cities.  There were logs coming down the Mississippi River to the sawmills in Minneapolis and St. Paul.  Stillwater was a sawmill town and a boom was stretched across the St. Croix River to catch the logs there.   Duluth was a tremendous lumber town and shipped lumber across the lakes to the eastern states.  A lot of log booms floated pine down to Duluth from the North Shore.   Schroeder had a camp on Cross River on the North Shore.  That river was blasted so the logs could be floated down to Lake Superior without causing a log jam.  Later, he cut timber on the Apostle Islands.  All these logs were chained into booms, and were towed across Lake Superior to his sawmill in Ashland, Wisconsin.  One of his booms tore apart and the logs were lost.  I may be wrong on some of the details.   Leonadas Merritt was cruising for good pine for his father’s mill in Duluth when his compass went goofy.  He discovered the Mesabi Iron Range.  He was the eldest, of the Seven Iron Men, of the Merritt family.   Railroads were built up to the range for the iron and the timber.  A lot of logging railroads were built up the North Shore to supply logs for Duluth mills.  Once iron was discovered, many mills set up on the range.   Even here, south of Pelican Lake, logs were sent north on the Littlefork River to Kenora in the 1880’s to the mills in Kenora, Ontario, on the north shore of Lake of the Woods.  That’s 400 miles away.   The last big logging era, was the cutting of timber that was too far from the rivers and border lakes to be floated on drives.  Railroads ran from Grand Rapids north.  There were railroads going through Northome, and Mizpah, and Margie up to Big Falls.  Logs went from Craigsville up to the Falls.   The rails went north from Virginia to Cusson.  This railroad supplied the Virginia Rainy Lake Company in Virginia with enough logs to saw a million board feet of lumber a day from 1911 until 1929, when the mill closed down.   Oxen were used first to skid logs, but they were slow.  By 1900, logs were pulled mainly with horses.  Sometimes a single horse pulled one tree at a time, so a road didn’t have to be made.  Mostly teams were used on the ice roads to pull sleighs to the railroad spurs.  These linked up to the main line in Cusson.  When a tract of trees was cut, the spur was moved to another area.  There were track gangs who never cut timber, but just maintained and moved rails.  In the summer, logs were hauled to Virginia, so the mill sawed all year.   Can you imagine the amount of logging chain used?  It seemed everyone around here had logging chains on the place.  The chains we had when I was a kid, probably were chains that had been used years earlier, in those camps.  Most of the chains we had were about 12 feet long.  That may have been the standard length for skidding chains behind the teams.  I’ve seen photos of the long chains used on the sleighs.   All our chains had a grab hook on one end and a ring hook on the other.  The grab hook can be hooked on any link of the chain and won’t slip.  The ring hook is pulled under the log and hooked on the log.    It was my job to poke a hole under the log and push the ring hook under and pull it up over the log.  The curve of the ring hook has to be positioned under the chain that went to the tractor.  If the hook was on top, it would slip off.  I held the chain tight until dad pulled the slack out, and it tightened up like a noose on the log.  If I couldn’t lift the log up enough to get the chain under, I’d ram a pole about the size of my arm under and pry it high enough with one arm to get the chain under.  Another way is to lay the chain along side the tree or heavy log and roll the log over the chain a foot and a half so it can be hooked up.  That way, I wouldn’t rupture myself with those big logs.   I don’t think those teamsters hooked up the logs years ago.  The guys in the woods did that while the teamster held the reins and drove.  They had to get up a lot earlier in the morning to feed and harness the teams, and feed and water them each night, long after the lumberjacks went to bed.  Someone would probably be on the landing to unhook the logs, also.   Log chains are shown in the old pictures, being used to roll logs up on those sleighs.  Those logs were chained down so they wouldn’t move.  Chains were thrown over the load and another layer of logs were rolled up and chained down.  Those loaders were the elite woodsmen.  They were paid more, and they took great pride in their work.  Some of those loads were 10 or 12 feet high.  All chained and bound tight, these loads were pulled miles, sometimes, to a lake or river, for floating to a mill.   Some of those camps had over 120 men.  Those camps were all the way from Red Lake to Lake Superior.  They were still logging to a lesser degree in Wisconsin, Michigan, and I suppose, in Ohio, New York, and Maine, all at the same time.  Hardwood was being cut all over the south.  The Virginia Rainy Lake Co. had lots of timber north of the border lakes.  This was floated down to the landing on Namakan Lake and taken by rail 20 miles south to Cusson and on to Virginia.   I can’t imagine how many thousands of tons of steel were in all those chains.  Chain in use today is high tensil welded steel links.  They still use chain to tie down pulpwood on the trucks.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Wednesday, October 29, 2008   EASY WAY OUT Dave Hanson   Jerry Jacobson on Lake Vermilion remarks about one of my neighbors.  He says that man has a “Can Do” attitude.  He does have a bunch of cows, and he has a lot of different kinds of animals.  He sold his llama, and he sold his 4 horned sheep.  A wolf stole one of his pot bellied pigs.   He had a bunch of guys on the highway with their rifles shooting his buffalo that broke out of the fence.  There was a Highway Patrol regulating traffic on Highway 53.  Those buffalo should have known better than refuse to go back home.  They ended up as buffalo burgers.   One time someone told me if you want to get something done, find the busiest person in town.  You’ve probably noticed, there are a lot of people full of ideas, but when it comes time to do something, they have other things to do.   Why is it that something that took 2 years to do back in the 1920’s, now takes 40 years?   If they wanted a church built, everyone went to the woods, cut the logs, helped at the sawmill, and all helped to build it.  They had to wait for the lumber to dry, or else it would have been built a lot sooner.  They did it in their spare time.  They did have to buy the cement for the foundation, and the paint, and windows.  I forgot, some hinges.  Now they have someone else build the building and pay off the loan for years.   A lot of people got into a lot of trouble using a credit card.  A lot of people got into a lot of trouble buying a house they couldn’t possibly pay for.  A lot of banks got into a lot of trouble borrowing a lot of someone else’s money to a lot of people who couldn’t pay them back.  Talk about bad business decisions.   A lot of politicians promise a lot of things they are going to do for a lot of people.  They will use a lot of other people’s money to pay for all the wonderful things they are going to do.   When a “can do” person borrows money, he or she, sharpens the pencil and figures really hard, just how much and how long it will take until its pay back day.   It seems the government doesn’t do it that way.  They do a project and then make a new tax to pay for it.  The only people I know that sets up their own taxes beforehand are the townships.  This is real grass roots government.   We had some large highway projects in Minnesota this year.  One politician got credit for getting the money for them.  Was that federal and state gas tax money they had in the bank in Washington already?  How many years did they wait to let it go?    We went to New Mexico and up to Washington state this summer, and back home across Montana and North Dakota.  I bet the congress man or woman from every one of those states took credit for getting money for all the highway projects in every state we went through.  I know they get votes for giving gas tax money to their states.   If someone in the country pours concrete for sidewalks, he does it himself.  If a person lives in town, you’d probably get thrown in jail if you tore up a sidewalk and tried to repair it yourself.  What would happen if all the men and physically fit football players got together and paved one block long alley, each year?  What if they all pitched in a few dollars for ready mix?  How many years would it take to get the whole village done?  That would be a primitive way of doing things.  That would be just like the Amish people do it.   Some people like the story of a feisty near-sighted “can do” guy called Teddy Roosevelt.  I don’t know if they had microphones and amplifiers in those days.  I imagine he talked loud on the train caboose when he went through towns campaigning.  He didn’t look like a movie star like most politicians today, who appear on TV.  He did get the Panama Canal built.  Abe Lincoln would never get elected now.  He might, but he wouldn’t win any beauty contest.  He got himself shot.   Little Harry Truman didn’t get elected president the first time around.  When unexpectedly, he got to be president, hardly anyone knew who he was.  He was a “can do” man.  He told it like it was.  He told men to their face what they were.  He made some hard decisions.  He was a Democrat, but was hated and had the worst rating of just about any president by the time he left office.  He stopped a strike which would have crippled the country.  So the unions hated him.  He fired General Douglas McArthur when he wanted to invade China.  This made a lot of people angry.  Years later, looking back, he seems to be one of our best presidents.   Busy as a bee.  Busy as a beaver.  Work like a slave.  As strong as an ox.   What kind of attitude do most people have today?  If someone works hard, are they somehow lower class people?   Think about people you know who complain about our country.  Are they the “can do” people, or are they the people who never have taken a chance and lost, and started something else, and succeeded?   If I can’t get a high paying job, should I stop working completely and let someone else feed me?   What if all the “can do” people say, “I quit.” What would happen to our country?   What will happen when ¾ of the US population is retired, and one half of the rest, is disabled or too young to work?  Will the 1/8 of the population, be able to keep everyone else happy?   We always depended on immigrants to keep our population growing in the US.  How many people die around here?  How many babies are born here in a year?   “Can do” people are getting more and more scarce in this area.  Most people don’t have the old fashioned ideas the pioneers had.  Take the easy way out.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2008   OLD MAN Dave Hanson   They came from the rocky hills of Norway and the rocky pastures of Sweden and Finland.  Those Irish country pictures may be pretty with all the stone walls that make up the fences of small garden plots.  People came down off the rocky hillsides in Slovania and the hills of Italy and Greece.   A lot of the first people that came to America didn’t want to leave England.  There wasn’t that much interest in their welfare from that country when they got here.  A lot of those people were political prisoners.  New England was a penal colony.  There was no welfare system like we have today.  Some of those people came from orphanages, too.   Those quaint stone walls in New England were a way to clear the fields when the rocks were plowed up each year.  Not all land is pure black soil.  Not all the people who settled here had good land to farm.  But those people came from land that was a lot worse than here.  The first people that took the plunge and immigrated from out east, picked up the better land in the grain belt and the Great Plains.  The later arrivals from Europe had to settle in the marginal areas where no one lived.  But they knew how to farm and make a living on poor land, so it was still better than the Old Country where they didn’t own land.  Here it was like the Land of Milk and Honey.   Nothing is guaranteed.  Nothing is handed to you.  People had to work if they wanted to succeed.  Just like today, they had to know how to work.   I’ve seen pictures of the rock hill when Chisholm was being built.  A lot of those stones were split and used for foundations and walls.  Most of those masons were from Italy.  They couldn’t take forever to build those walls, they had to work fast.  They learned from their fathers how to work rock.  Some started out as laborers, mixing mortar, and doing the grunt work, but picked up the trade by watching and helping.   Some rocks were dressed with chisels and the joints are nearly smooth.  On the faster jobs, split rocks were laid up on the walls and the wide joints were smoothed with a trowel.  When the mortor was still damp, lamp black or red ocher was mixed with regular mortar and squeezed, with a tool that was like a pipe cut length wise, on the mortar between the rocks, making a contrasting, colored joint.  It looks nice and is neat.  It was a lot less expensive and ten times faster to doctor the joints, than to dress each stone perfectly.   Dad had split flag stones for paths.  One day, dad discovered rock that would split, where the grader knocked the gravel off the top of the road on the east side of the Guzman hill, four miles west of the Gheen corner.  I was probably 15 at that time.  Dad cut 8 inch pieces off a leaf spring, and heated them with his acetylene torch and made 3 inch wide, thin wedges.  We had about eight of these.   Dad and I drove up and parked on the hill.  Using a couple sharp cold chisels, we scored the rock.  When a crack started, we started the wedges and spaced them apart along the crack.  By tapping them a little at a time, we were able to split some of those stones 3 or 4 feet long.  Some we split were 2 or 3 feet square.  Dad drove up to the hill and we loaded those rocks on the hay wagon and took them home where mom and dad built a patio.   The grass grew between the rocks after a couple of years, so mom took her garden trowel and dug up the grass and mixed mortar and filled the joints with cement.   Some people stated that they couldn’t find any flat rock around the country anymore.  Once in awhile, you get lucky and find a flagstone here and there, where the glaciers dropped them, but most are covered with dirt.   Our first fireplace dad and I built was on Namakan.  The summer before, we built a cabin on Black Bay, north of Cook.  We had to stop work for a week or two and Ole Swanson came in and built a split rock fireplace, before we could come back and sheetrock the place.  Dad had looked over Ole’s job, so he figured we could do it on our Namakan job.   The next fireplace was on the Y.O.U. Camp on Pelican Lake.  My brother, Vernon, and I split up a huge boulder on the road a block from our job for the flat black rock.  We picked up other rock along the highway near Cusson.  The carpenters put in a 5 by 10 foot base along with the foundation of the dining hall, so we didn’t have to do that.   It was hard cutting that stone those first few years.  I built a fireplace for Phil Anshus on Pelican Lake a few years later.  Phil said one day, “Let’s take a boat ride over to Carl Bloomquist’s.”  Carl said he and another man had built about 45 fireplaces in Chicago during the war.  He said he liked my layout of flat rocks.  I don’t remember if Phil paid him or if he just gave me his old mason tools.  I have most of them today.  Thanks, Phil.   One time I told Armas Johnson, up in Orr, that I had never seen a mason hammer.  I had been struggling with just chisels and a 3 pound hammer to cut my stone.  I used a regular 8 pound sledge to pop round stones.   As you know, masons don’t give up secrets.  Stone masons never were very free with their knowledge either.  I had never seen anyone besides dad split rock.  I kind of stopped chisling when people came close, too.  Those spalls fly off like arrow heads sometimes, and could put an eye out.  When one hit me in the eyebrow, I put on safety glasses, and used a clear mask after that.   Armas told me of a master stone mason on the highway in Cherry.  He said if you bring him a bottle, he will show you his hammer.  So, I went down to the power house in Orr, and bought a quart for my quest.  I drove down to Cherry and met his wife at the door.  She didn’t exactly seem friendly when a strange, young man came knocking.  She had probably seen that many times before.  When he came to the door, I explained to him what Armas had told me.  We sat on chairs in his open garage door and he shared his knowledge with me.  He showed me what rock hammers look like.  He told me I could buy a hammer head in a hardware store in Grand Rapids.   He built the fireplace in the Elroy, north of Virginia.  The old man said he could split rocks for me as fast as I could load them into my pickup.  He told me damp rocks that roll out of the gravel are easier to split than those that have lain in the open for a few years.  “Just roll them around and look for the grain.”  I thought of the gravel pit at Angora and boulders in the pit at Gabrielson Lake on the Nett Lake Road.   I went to Grand Rapids and found a hammer head under a bench.  I don’t think they sell many of them.  It was priced at $65. for an 8 pound hammer.  I left it right there and drove back home.  I picked up a twelve pounder at a rummage sale and an 8 pounder at an auction.   Just like the old man said, a twelve pounder wears you out, but you can swing the 8 pounder all day long.   I’ve practiced in every gravel pit from International Falls to Grand Rapids.  I’m not very good at popping those rocks.  Even with a good hammer it doesn’t always go right.  “Just tap them, don’t try to mash them.”  The old man said.  I’ve gotten impatient when the bugs were eating the bee gosh out of me and ruined the chisel edge on those old hammers.  Just like my pail of old chisels, I’ve ground them so many times, I’ve taken all the tempered steel off the edges.   If you ever leave the road and go into those old gravel pits, to make a pit stop, some of those busted rocks may be some of my unsuccessful attempts at learning how to split stone.    The old man told me about cabbage rock.  Every time you hit it, it peels off like cabbage leaves.  Some stone is so hard you bounce it all the way across the pit.  You have to be better at reading the rocks than I am.  I’m not good at it.  But I do know nearly every place to get good fireplace rock.  I don’t advertise that.   Some rock is leaverite.  That’s rock you leave right there.   The old man told me, “What do you want to be a mason for?  That’s just hard work.”  His son took up cement contracting.  One Friday evening, some guys were mad at his son.  When he came back on Monday morning, he saw they had not washed out the cement mixer.  It was completely filled with hard concrete.   I’ve built a couple more fireplaces.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Monday, October 27, 2008   PLEASE PASS THE GRAVY Dave Hanson   During the Logging Era, food was an important part of life.  Maybe the most important to the lumberjacks.  Don’t get lumberjacks mixed up with gypos.  Gypos lived alone in shacks and cut pulpwood.  They cooked for themselves.  Lumberjacks were another breed of men.  They worked as crews.   The Logging Era was from 1880’s until 1929, when the Virginia Rainy Lake Company closed down.   The pulpwood era came after that.  There may have been a few shacks in a pulp camp, but each man cooked for himself.  Vic Zgaynor and Vince Shute and quite a few other loggers here had these pulpwood businesses.  They drove out to the shacks and delivered kerosene and supplies to the men.  Most of the cutters didn’t drive, so, they had to give them rides to town.   After the logger got his sale of wood from the state, county, or private landowner, he had to get roads into those parcels of land.  When I was a kid, they used bulldozers to punch a road in.  Don’t think that was an easy thing to do.  Some of those remote places were boggy ground.  Some were steep hills like north and east of Orr.  There is some pretty rugged land.  Some places were gravel, but strewn with boulders and ledge rock.  Those steel tracks on a cat can spin and slide on a smooth ledge.  Some men used rubber tired John Deere tractors to skid on bare rock years ago.   It was the cats that skidded in the winter.  Even the muskeg swamps froze up.  Even now, trucks haul spruce out of the swamps in the winter.   About 1970, I saw a Tree Farmer cable skidder for the first time.  They were 4 wheel drive, rubber tired tractors with tire chains on.  About the same time, snowmobiles became popular.  The loggers hated them because the trails froze up and when the underpowered skidders hit the frozen snow, it would slow them down.   Dad always considered himself a Minnesota lumberjack. He always worked for the family or himself, never in a camp. When he was young, people didn’t have chainsaws, so everything was done the hard way, by hand.  Most of the people his age worked in the woods at some point in their lives.  So they all knew how to do it.  After WW II, very few people wanted to work like they did before, in the depression.  Most of the people that kept on working in the woods considered themselves tough.  Why else would those other guys quit?  They may not have had the stamina.  Some went into other work because the pay was better.   I think I know why some people hate manual labor.  When I was a kid, dad said that when you ache, you’re putting on muscle.  I did ache, but after a few days, it went away.  I got tired working hard, but it gave me a good appetite, and I didn’t hurt, no matter what the job.  So I never gave work another thought, it was just a good way to make money.   A crew went in and built all the buildings in the summer before the jacks came to work in the fall.   Those logging camps had the best cooks they could find.  Some camps had a root cellar built for potatoes.  The lumberjacks would leave if they didn’t get fed well.  The camp cooks worked hard to have fresh bread and pies for the guys.  They used huge amounts of dried fruit.  When they were near farms in the later years, they bought a lot of eggs and beef to haul into camp.  Coffee was supplied in huge amounts.  The lumberjacks got hot meals at noon.  Teams would haul a dray full of hot food, sometimes a few miles from camp to where the men were working.  When the crew came in, in the evening, they had a warm meal waiting.   One rule, keep quiet when eating.  Only talk when you wanted someone to pass the food.  More than once a novice reached in front of a jack while he was eating, and got a fork punched into his hand.  Eat and get out of there.  The cook was the boss of the kitchen and the tables.   I never cooked much, I had a mom to do that, and Gwen, after we got married.  During college we took a couple of chickens down to Virginia and Wally Laakkonen and I stuck our heads out our upstairs apartment window and asked a couple of girls how to roast a chicken.  They didn’t know how, either.  Someone finally told us to put a little butter or Crisco and a cup of water in the roaster and put the oven on 350 degrees, and keep checking it until it was tender.   When Teddy Provosnic was my roommate, he showed me how to make a cheap meal.  Boil spaghetti and put a half cup of melted butter on it.  Mom always had tomato spaghetti sauce on ours.   Wally Refsdal, in Cook, showed me how to make a green bean sandwich.  Open a butter sandwich and put long green beans in there, and boy, was that good!   Jack Finstad, from Buyck, taught me how to trap when I was over 50 years old.  One time, we went fishing south of the rice beds on Vermilion River.  He had his canvas packsack with.  We stopped for coffee and he said, “I’ll show you a quick meal the cruisers used to make.”  We had the campfire going and the old hobo coffee can boiling our coffee already.  He opened a can of cream style corn and took out his 6 eggs from the carton and fried them up in a couple of minutes.  That is quick and good.  You can dump in some canned milk, too.   When mom was away for 10 days in the Virginia Hospital when my brother, Vernon, was born, dad showed us how to make cocoa.  Heat the sugar and cocoa powder in a half cup of milk first.  Otherwise, the cocoa just floats.  When the milk is warm, add the syrup.  To cap it off, give it a small dash of cinnamon.   Mom always used cornstarch instead of flour to make gravy.  It never got lumpy.  I remember people straining lumpy gravy when they used flour, through a strainer.  Add a couple of tablespoons of cornstarch to a half cup of water.  Pour water in the meat juice in a hot frying pan and stir while adding the starch mix.  If you dump it in too fast, that gets lumpy, too.   I’ve started crock potting stuff over the years.  The other day Gwen put an old hen in the crockpot.  I took all the meat off the bones and diced up a little over a cup.  I added a can of Cream of Mushroom Soup and a couple tablespoons of butter to it in a frying pan.  Chicken-ala-King.  I like it on shingles (toast.)   I’ve got a lot of sausage recipes I’ve collected over the years.  I never could find a recipe for bratwurst.  I finally got one from Gwen Huismann a couple of years ago.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Monday, October 27, 2008   MINNOWS Dave Hanson   Using leeches for bait became popular only in recent years.  Night crawlers, angleworms, and things like crayfish, live mice, and even frogs were used years ago.   Frog harnesses were made of light wire and a frog kicks as it floats along.  I think they were used for bass.  Mice were hooked in a hind leg and swam around attracting fish.  I never used any of those.   I did use horse flies, grasshoppers, and of course, worms, to fish chubs in Willow River.  I’d catch horse flies that were inside the barn on the windows.  I liked an empty tin cinnamon can.  When I needed a fly, I’d open that slide where a teaspoon fit in, and let one out at a time.  I’d use one of dad’s empty pocket Prince Albert, or a Velvet tobacco can for grasshoppers.  Any tin can worked for worms.   I  remember when I was about six, dad, mom and us kids walked down to Willow River about a half mile south of home.  Dad cut some seven foot willow sticks for poles and rigged up lines for us kids.  We caught a few 10 inch chubs and a couple shiners.  I know I didn’t go down there for a couple of years by myself.  By the time I was 10, I was down there every chance I got in the summer.   Years before, Grandma Miller would fry up chubs that Carl Miller and Eddie McDonald caught in the creek near Gheen corner.  So mom told me if I scaled them and cleaned them, she would fry them up for me.  When our kids fished in the creek, Gwen fried them up for them, too.   When I was small, it was a lot of fun.  By the time our house had burned down in 1948, dad had no extra time.  He spent every available hour building the new house.  I only remember fishing off the dock at Cabin-O-Pines on the Forth of July picnic on Pelican Lake.  We only went a few times on Pelican Lake.  In those days, most of the boats at the resorts were wood.  When aluminum boats came out, everyone said they were so noisy they would scare the fish.   My Uncle Roy started trapping minnows in Willow River and sold them at Cook.  He had a tank in the basement of the locker plant.   Willow River produced tons of minnows over the years.  Novaks sold minnows at the Gheen corner.  Earl Bixby trapped and sold them, also.  Archie Johnson sold them at his place at the Highway #73 junction.  Zig Delesky sold them a mile south of the Gheen corner.   The first time I ever heard of a minnow seine was when a bait dealer from International Falls, came down to the river to net minnows in the summer.  He and his helper had a 25 ft., ¼ inch mesh net tied on two 6 foot poles and walked in the shallow water a hundred feet up river, and tipped it up with the minnows.   I went with Earl Bixby one time when he was emptying his minnow traps.  The mud minnows, sticklebacks, and a 2 inch minnow that looks like a baby walleye were sorted out and tossed up in the grass.   He explained that you can’t sell baby game fish.  If a game warden checked, he could lose his minnow license.  He kept all the 6 in. male and 10 inch female sand suckers.  These sell for Northern Pike bait.  There are six inch shiners and a half dozen kinds of dace in the creeks.  We always called them chubs, too.  Those 10 inch chubs have a bump on their head.  Don Fultz told me they’re called stone rollers.  They find bugs under small rocks.  In early summer, the rainbow chubs have bright red and yellow coloring on their sides.  People like them for crappies.   Mom and dad showed me how to make a cone for the ends of a trap.  Dad gave me an old ¼ inch hardware cloth mason sand screen.  That made the 10 inch tube.  Dad opened up a paper grocery bag and made a pattern for the cone that fit into the ends of the trap.  When it was opened up, it was traced on window screen.  By using a pattern, no screen was wasted.  I used copper wire I took out of an old car generator to sew up the trap.   I monkeyed around with a few traps for a few years.  I’d dump them out, and come back and check them every day.  Once, someone was taking my minnows.  I figured maybe they were empty because the fish weren’t moving.  So I tied a piece of black sewing thread across my path down to the river about six inches off the ground.  Sure enough, every time my thread was broken, the traps were empty.  One day I found a foot print, so I knew it wasn’t a deer that broke the thread.  In a couple of years I was working, so I didn’t have time to play in the summer time.   Maybe someday I’ll start a minnow business and take up one of my favorite pastimes.  I’ve got enough money now to buy a lot of traps, air compressors and tanks.  I know I could make money.  There are other streams around here with a lot of minnows.  Oh, I could trap leeches, too.   Kids like to splash and play in water, too.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Sunday, October 26, 2008   THREE DOGS Dave Hanson   One thing no one can say is the Finns didn’t know how to use wood.  Maybe some of those Russians that lived up there near Siberia were an equal, and the Swedes, but they may have been the same people living in different countries. We visited the Wirtanen farm on Highway 4 and the first thing I noticed was a roof on one building made of split balsam.  The most important thing a woodsman had was his axe.  You can split some wood any time of the year.  It probably splits easier when it’s frozen.  A man can chop maple or birch wedges and chop a maul from hardwood to split with.   I read about those roofs years ago in a little soft covered book, Woodcraft, by E. H. Kreps.  He was born in 1880 in Pennsylvania.  He started trapping as a kid, and traveled all over the north woods and into Canada.  He did a lot of writing and a lot of that old survival information could keep a person alive, if needed.  With just an axe, a cabin could be built.  Those old trapper cabins weren’t any larger than necessary.  Some had walls only 3 feet high, but the roof slanted up high enough so a man could stand up inside.   No way a man could survive without heat.  By the time the Hudson Bay Company and the Northwest Company came here, they had steel traps and also sheet iron for stoves and stovepipes.  If a man married an Indian woman, he had a helper.  This was the best thing, as she could help build a wigwam and skin and take care of the fur he trapped and snare rabbits when he was gone.   Getting back to those pioneer roofs, balsam worked best to split.  Eight or ten inch balsam, about seven feet long were split.  They were hollowed out with an axe and laid up on the ridge pole.  A three inch pole was laid up and another balsam with the hollow up.  After the bottom layer was done, sphagnum moss was used to cover the poles and the top was covered with balsam with the hollow down.  It may have only taken a day to build the roof.  Those cabins may have been only 10 x 12 feet, but it was easier to heat.  There were thousands of these cabins in Canada.   Kreps wrote about wool blankets being next to the axe for survival.  Wool can get wet and still keep a person warm.  Cotton doesn’t hold heat.  One thing that was interesting is the rabbit blankets the Indian women used to make.  I’m assuming they were the Cree.  They would start snaring rabbits when it snowed in the fall and case skin them like taking a stocking off.  They started cutting the fur in a spiral strip.  A rabbit skin got a strip about 10 or 12 feet long.  They rolled this up and kept it frozen outside.  It took about 50 skins to make a blanket.  They made a frame the size of the blanket and tied a cord just inside the frame.  Using their fingers as a guide, they wove the fuzzy strip back and forth like a fish net.  He said those blankets were so warm, they beat the wool,  Hudson Bay Blanket.  They were so light they even kept babies warm without smothering them.  Rabbit skin blankets had to be kept dry because they weren’t tanned.   The other day we had a new dish put up for Direct TV so we could get local channels, too.  A man from Chicago put up the dish and hooked everything up again.  It was hard for him to imagine how we could stand the cold.  I showed him the hollow in the bottom of a spruce tree in our yard, where a Pilated Woodpecker holed up for two days when it was 58 degrees below zero.  I explained how trees sound like gun shots when it’s 30 or 40 below, when they split.   About 15 years ago, my sister’s granddaughter was here from San Diego.  We were looking out over Lake Vermilion and I talked to her as if I was teasing, that pickup trucks drove all over that lake in the wintertime.  “Oh, no.”  “Yah,” I said, “And they drill holes through the ice and fish.”  “Oh, no.”  She said.  I think she thought I was crazy.   On those clear, cold nights, and a lone wolf howls, with the Northern Lights rippling across the sky, if it’s cold enough, that’s a three dog night.  That’s when you have three of your dogs sleeping on top of you so you won’t freeze to death.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Saturday, October 25, 2008   NAILS Dave Hanson   When I went to Virginia Junior College in 1959, the tuition was $28. a semester.  The kids in town lived at home and could save a lot of money by walking to school or drive only a few blocks.  People like me had to rent a room or an apartment somewhere in town, because there were no dorms.   Ralph Cooper was our biology teacher.  One day he told us he didn’t know anything about his ancestors.  A wagon train was attacked somewhere west of the Appalachian Mountains and everything was destroyed.  The next wagon train that came along saw only smoking remains.  They heard a baby crying in the bushes.  The men rushed over and picked up the unharmed child.  They knew nothing of the wagon train or who was on it.  They saw a Purple Martin fly over head, and the baby was under a willow tree, so they decided to name the babe Martin Willow.  That story always stuck in my mind.   As the pioneers had a terrible time traveling over the rugged hills of Pennsylvania, few people moved from the coastal New England towns.  Daniel Boone was hunting buffalo and selling hides for leather.  He discovered the Cumberland Gap and blazed a road from there into Kentucky.  People started pouring into that raw land.  Most just cleared some land and built a cabin.  The English had built timbered houses and filled the walls with mud and wattle made from willow switches.  They plastered the walls and that took time.   Delaware had been a Swede colony and the Scandinavians introduced the log cabin.  These could be built with just an axe, but a saw helped a lot.   When the pioneers decided to move, they burned the old cabin down, and waited for the ashes to cool so they could retrieve the nails.   In those days, all the nails were supposed to be imported from England, but most villages had blacksmiths who spent their spare time making square nails by hand.  These were sold by the penny.  Even to this day, we have 6 penny nails, common 8 penny nails for 1 inch lumber, and 16 penny nails for framing.  When they used rough sawn lumber, 10 penny nails were used for the thin boards, and for 2 inch lumber they used 20 penny nails.  Those 60 penny nails were used as bridge spikes.   When I was a kid, nails came in wooden nail kegs.  Scott Erickson had the lumber yard in Orr.  I remember those small kegs.  But when they’re filled with nails, they are heavy.  Scott had someone go down to the steel mill in West Duluth with the yard truck to pick up nails.  The common nails all went to the lumber yard.  On those loads he had tons of nails for the grain door factory by the tracks north of town.  Some of those nails were select.  Those went into the nailing machine.  The grain door nails were probably a 7 penny common size, but they had a crosshatch pattern on each head.  By the time I started working there, the nails were coming in cardboard boxes.  We used those lath hatchets with the hatched heads to nail with in the plant.   Dad, being a carpenter, never would pick up nails if he dropped them.  When you work by the hour, your time is too valuable to pick up nails.  I never saw dad straighten a bent nail either.  Even on projects at home.   Mom helped dad remodel a house in Leonadas one time.  It was really an addition.  He contracted that job, but the owner had his wife cook meals for the folks.  Gas was only about 20 or 25 cents a gallon, so just like now, they drove each day.  One day the owner chased a 10 or 12 year old boy away.  He had been picking up nails that had fallen when they were dropped from up on a scaffold.  When dad came down for coffee, he gave the kid a 2 pound coffee can full of nails for his tree house.  Dad had paid for the material anyway.   I went to an auction one time, and the man had died, and his wife was moving.  He must have had 300 pounds of straightened out nails in a lot of cans.  People did bid and buy them.   In colonial times, people would strip ships that had wrecked or burned.  The iron was taken to the blacksmith in town, where it was remade into useful items.  Worn out horse shoes were made into rods that were made into nails.  Old spikes were welded into rods that were heated red hot and pounded around a rod to make a gun barrel.   The German gunsmiths in Pennsylvania made a real improvement over the smooth bore musket.  They drilled a hole in an octagon piece of steel and used a hickory wood rod with flint set in the end to make rifling inside the barrel.  These were the Kentucky long rifle we read so much about in history books.  The bullet would spiral in flight, and by using a smaller caliber, could shoot accurately a lot farther than those musket slugs.   Dad got old before nailing guns became popular.  He used the old tricks to nail oak flooring.  Use bar soap to lubricate those finishing nails.  He never predrilled holes in that 1 inch tongue and grooved oak.  He held a nail set and nails in his left hand and toe nailed it down to the sub floor.  After each nail was driven in, he set it so it wouldn’t mess up the tongue.  Otherwise the next piece of oak wouldn’t fit up tight.  He sure could nail.   I learned to nail fast working with him and later working in the grain door factory in Orr.   He held  a handful of 8 penny nails and turned them, head up, without stopping, as he nailed.  I used to do it too, but now sometimes I have to stop hammering to turn one or two.   We remodeled a house in Orr years ago, and dad said it probably was built by some Finn lumberjacks.  They were making sure it wouldn’t fall down.  Those studs had about 10 nails in each end.   During the depression people used as few nails as they could get by with.  A neighbor tore down an old house.  He said he wondered how it stood up.  There were only 3 or 4 nails in each wall board.    Most people don’t even have nails around.  Not many people build their own homes now.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Friday, October 24, 2008   MEMORY LANE Dave Hanson   Gwen’s cousin was here a couple of weeks ago from Minneapolis.  She grew up in Roseau.  Her husband is a retired high school principal.  While the girls were talking, we talked small talk.  When you don’t have that much in common, you keep a conversation going.  I’ve never been interested in sports much.  I suppose I’ve got other things to do and think about.  Who are the Vikings?  Those guys with horns painted on their helmets? I don’t see many Scandinavian blonds who grew up in Minnesota on that team, have you? I’d make a fool of myself if I tried to discuss football statistics.  Somehow, we got around to talking about these stories.  I told him I try hard not to write negatively.  He said, “And I agree, to write for the reader, and not yourself.”   The conversation turned to a trip, Gwen and I made to Roseau.  It was a trip to see her aunt and uncle.  It was fall and the leaves had turned, so it was nice.  Maynard and Anna Erickson had lived there all their lives.  They said, “Let’s go for a ride.”  We toured the old church at Malung, where they had always gone.  Think of the memories they both had there over the last 70 years.  They knew each other always.  We traveled over the countryside on all those side roads.  Some ditches had a little water in them, but they all drain down to Roseau River.  We traveled way out to Bemus Hill.  Here, everyone in Roseau County seemed to go to pick blueberries in the summer time. The “Good Old Summertime.”   It seemed Maynard had changed.  He was a small, reserved quiet man.  He sure talked a lot that day.  We had coffee that evening back at the farm.  We had to make our 3 hour trip back to Gheen.  On the way out to the car, and a long Minnesota good bye,  Anna whispered to Gwen that Maynard was going in the morning for a check up.  We never saw him again.  When I helped carry him on his last trip behind that old church, I knew he had made the trip through memory lane with us that day.   It was late one afternoon and I was a half mile away from home on the state land.  Circling below a huge white spruce, I was hunting.  Looking up in those black branches, I had flushed up a partridge and couldn’t make it out.  My single shot .22 in hand, I squinted looking up.  Those birds had been in the pasture.  I’d walked for three days trying to find them.  Finally, I had a chance.  Only one shot from that J.C. Higgins rifle I had bought a couple of years before from Sears.  After a few minutes, I saw a silhouette against the evening sky.  Don’t jerk, just take a breath, let half of it out, and squeeze.  Pow!  Down it came and fluttered on the ground.  I grabbed it by the feet and took off on a run.  I didn’t want to get caught out there in the dark.  Mom never worried about me out in the woods by myself, by that time.  At least she never let on.   When the kids were very small, Gwen had sewed little velveteen jackets for them.  Danny’s was green, Bonnie and Carmen’s were teal blue, and Brad and Neil’s were yellow.  We were so proud of our kids.  They were good and went with us everywhere.  We took them to the community concerts in Virginia and Hibbing.  They sat there quieter than most grownups.   Gwen had bought that new Singer Sewing Machine when she worked in Bridgemans, and over the years, she wore that machine out.  That’s one thing we put in the trunk of our car with all our worldly possessions after we were married.  Everything we owned fit in the trunk of our car.   I was laying in bed looking up at the ceiling in St. Luke’s Hospital.  The man next to me was about 45 years old and worked on the ore boats on Lake Superior.  He was reading the Wall Street Journal.  He had invested in the stock market.  He and another guy bought tumbled stones and bell caps at the Tandy Leather Shop downtown, and made jewelry in their spare time on the ship.  They peddled them when they reached port, down the lakes. “I’m a three time loser.”  “What’s that?” I asked him.  “My name is Siegal and I’m a Jew from Eveleth.  When I was a kid they helped me get started.  I had a bar but went belly up. The men helped me get going again, but I failed at that.  If you don’t succeed after three times, they don’t help you again.”  He was such a nice fellow.  I know he was honest.   I asked him why his finger was missing.  He told me when he was about eleven, he was sliding down a tin roof on a shed in Eveleth and his ring got caught on a nail as he went over the edge.  He said his finger was hanging up there with some cord hanging down.  What memories some people have.  When you memorize every crack in the hospital ceiling, it’s time to get out of there.   Gwen and I bought a watermelon years ago while on a trip with the kids.  We stopped at a road side stand in southern Minnesota and got that watermelon.  We were headed west toward Pipestone.  At one pit stop, we decided to take out our picnic lunch and have a snack on one of those public tables.  Gwen had a sheet or something for a table cloth.  I’ve always felt dirty eating off those tables where other people had been.  The birds fly around there, too.  Boy was that watermelon going to taste good.  I sliced half of it and took a bite.  Wet sawdust.  No taste at all.  I told Gwen to put a piece of wax paper over the other half and leave it there on the table.  Whoever found it would soon realize why we left it.   Gwen and I had made a trip to Phoenix one time to see her folks in Mesa.  Gwen’s mom said she liked the heat.  It was summertime.  They took us to the zoo.  It must have been 105 degrees in the shade.  I looked up at a palm tree and there must have been 400 pounds of dates up there in four or five clumps.  It was hot.  I know Gwen’s mom was hot, but she was a stubborn Swede and would never admit it.  There sat an old obese orangutan.  He was holding a bunch of banana leaves on his head for shade with those long red, hairy arms.  I don’t especially like heat, either.   On that same trip we went to El Centro, California to see her cousin, and on to San Diego to look up my nephew, Stevie.  He wasn’t home, so we drove up to San Bernardino and cut off across the desert for Las Vegas.  We filled up in one town because it would be 80 miles to the next gas station.  It was time for a break half way across the desert.  So at noon I took out the propane gas stove and we cooked coffee and cut that Canary melon and ate lunch.  That was the sweetest melon I’ve ever eaten.  I think the hot cup of coffee is the best tasting coffee I ever had, sitting in 120 degrees above zero.  One thing that sticks in my memory of that trip is the purple green haze we saw around San Diego, L.A., Las Vegas and Denver.  You could see it 40 miles away.  We had seen it in Cincinnati before.  You don’t notice in town, but they are breathing it in all the cities.   We were in a grocery store in Roseau a few months later and found another yellow, football shaped, Canary melon.  When we were checking out, the gal said, “Aren’t those things good?” They sure are.   So was all that fudge mom used to make when we were kids.  So was that wild raspberry jelly she put in those jelly rolls.  So were those peanut butter twists from Nyland’s Bakery in Cook.   Does anyone remember eating jelly filled bismarcks while driving at night down memory lane?

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Friday, October 24, 2008   TAMARACK Dave Hanson   People have different likes and dislikes.  I knew a man who didn’t like corn in the garden.  He didn’t like hollyhocks, either.  He may have had a bad experience when he was small.   A lot of people don’t like milk.  It’s only been a few decades that we found out about lactose intolerance.  Those people get sick to different degrees.  Some get violent diarrhea when they drink milk.   One old fellow I knew years ago, hated vegetables.  He was Swedish and had been a meat and potato man.  Once he said he ate some corn and heaved, so he never tried eating vegetables again.  A person can exist on meat and potatoes, but they drank a lot of milk and always had bread and butter, too.  Desserts are never made of vegetables.   Most people don’t ask, “Why don’t you like that?”  To some people, it’s just a phobia, and there is no explanation.   Gwen hated cooked carrots as a small kid.  I did, too, so did most of us kids, so mom didn’t cook them.  Gwen would try to get her dog to eat them under the table.  The pup didn’t like them, either.  So she tried to hide them in her glass of milk.  She had to drink her milk, so they always showed up on the bottom.   People that live in the open spaces on the prairie, feel claustrophobic up here where the tall trees hug the roads.   We try to plant evergreens around here.  I know a guy from the hardwood country, a few hundred miles south of here, who doesn’t like coniferous trees.  To him, oak and maple are preferred.  He’d never plant needle trees in his yard.   I got a few Norway Pine seedlings from Roy Tupy years ago when he worked at General Logging Co. in old Gheen.  He told me cedars are the easiest tree to transplant.  They sprout in damp places, but will grow almost anywhere, and they can be transplanted any time of the year.  Dad transplanted cedar in the yard at home when he was a kid.  I hauled some home in a little wagon when I was a kid, too.  I got some spruce seedlings at Orr School in the 7th grade.  They are growing at our old home place.   I planted a thousand cedar, and two thousand white spruce one year, but it was so dry only a few grew.   My friend, Jack Finstad, always said “I never planted a tree in my life, and look at all these trees growing around here.”  He was right.  Nature sure takes care of itself.   Some of those Norway Spruce that were planted east of Gheen near Elbow River and near Ed Hegland’s place, sure haven’t grown much in the last 60 years.   After the Cloquet fire burned everything off right up to the hills in Duluth, the aspen that grew back is small and rotten in the center.  That should be 70 ft. tall, mature pine by this time.  None was planted back.   Mom told of the Larch Fly that killed off the Tamarack trees about WWI time.  It took a half century for that to come back.  No one planted it, but it did make it.   In 1918, most of the people here in Willow Valley used Tamarack for the framing of their homes.  It was standing dead.  They had it sawed and didn’t have to dry it, so they could use it right away.   I remember Tamarack being a lot heavier than most trees.  When it was dry, it burned very hot as firewood.  If people weren’t careful, the stoves would get red hot.  I suppose it was the large amount of pitch in it.   About the only underground mines that were digging iron ore was in Ely, when I was aware of timber.  The Soudan Mine was hard rock and never caved in.  The Ely iron was red and crumbly and had to be timbered so the mines wouldn’t cave in.  Tamarack is fairly rot resistant, and maybe three times stronger than cedar, so trainloads of it went by rail to Ely.   Tamarack makes a wonderful shade tree for the south side of homes.  It keeps the house cool and shaded in the summer, but it is the only conifer that completely sheds its needles each fall.  So it lets the sun in on those cold, winter days.   It’s nice to take a ride this time of the year, and see all those golden needles dazzling you eyes in the sunshine.  They’ll be gone in a few days.   Bright green spruce, golden tamarack, and that bright blue sky, make a perfect picture.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Thursday, October 23, 2008   STICKY ELBOW Dave Hanson   Bouncing along in the school bus was a trip that the country kids had to put up with.  Today, the busses go by half empty.  There just aren’t as many kids being born in rural America.   Times are good.  Gas is cheap.  Cars are cheap.  In the parking lots at school, it isn’t only the teacher’s cars, but it seems to be cars of any kid over 16 and knows how to drive, fill the parking lots.  Cook had to build a huge parking lot years ago.  The large lot in front of the school was full and so was the edge of the street.  When we drive by now, they all seem to be full.  If times were bad, all those kids would ride the busses again.   One time a long time ago, some St. Louis County School people visited with my grandpa Oscar Hanson.  They were scoping out the land a quarter mile east for a school site.  This is county land.  They decided to build the high school in Orr.  This school was finished in 1936.  Mom had been riding to Cook with the Orr kids.  An old cracker box school bus would load up at Orr and make a stop at the Gheen corner to pick up the kids from here.  People have to remember that even though most families were large in those days, a lot of kids left school to work, so not all graduated.  I have no idea how many busses emptied out at the Cook School.  Mom knew most of the kids in Cook School.   Mom always laughed when we went to Virginia.  It brought back a memory of a man walking slowly across 5th Avenue near the high school there.  As their car went by, Elsie Kantola, yelled out the window, “Hey, mister, pull in your tail feathers.”   Mom went to the Orr School during her senior year and graduated in the first class in 1937.  When I graduated in 1957, it seemed that old school was ancient.  It was only 20 years old.   In the Gheen School we always had to run into the school and sit at our desks when a kid saw the bus coming down the road heading for school.  The bus hauled the high school kids home from Orr, but had to pull into Gheen to pick up us little kids.  Mrs. Novak had to count noses before we could get on the bus.   One day while lined up, I noticed something bolted on the front fender of the bus.  It was a blinker.  I suppose the busses had been at Wally’s that day and the mechanics had installed signal lights.  The signal lever was bolted on the steering column.  Wow, we were getting really modern.  There still was a six inch fan blowing on the inside of the windshield so Gust Parson could see where to drive on those 30 below zero days.   The big kids always sat in the back of the bus and the little kids rode up front.  The busses always came to a stop at the railroad crossing.  There were no arms or blinking lights on the crossings in those days.  When we were in the 7th grade, we were taught by the older kids how to be safety patrol boys.  When the bus stopped, I ran out across the tracks, looked both ways, and waved the bus across.  Even on football trips or track meet trips, the bus stopped, and someone flagged.   Just like now, when the bus hit a bad bump, everyone hollered and sometimes the kids in the back seat hit their heads on the ceiling.   Those busses were cold in the winter, with all those kids breathing, the windows frosted up.  I learned how to make baby tracks on those frosty windows.   Once in awhile a small kid would get his lip stuck on the cold metal window frame where it froze.  With a jerk and tears in his eyes, all the older kids laughed.    Those seats were shorter.  A pipe framed the top of the back rest.  Some teeth must have been broken when those busses came to an unexpected, fast stop.  Every once in awhile, a kid would throw up.  We had to put up with that smell until we got off the bus.  I suppose there was some holding hands in those back seats where the high school kids sat.  There were a few spitballs and some paper thrown once in awhile, too.   We liked Gust Parson.  When he said in a firm, quiet voice to quiet down, we did it.  We didn’t want him to get mad at us.  We chipped in 5 or 10 cents so a senior girl could buy him a Christmas present each year.   Those seats were plastered with old chewing gum underneath.  The same with the hot lunch tables at school, and our desks.  Some times in the 7th grade, kids would be sent down to see the principal, Dave Hill.  One punishment he had was to have that kid take a putty knife and clean gum off the bottom of the hot lunch tables.  Of course, the other kids walking by, got a laugh out of it, and usually teased the sheepish looking kid down on his knees.   Kids seem to be so much cleaner today than when I was a kid.  I suppose they stay inside watching TV and playing computer games.  We had balsam trees in our yard and would poke those pitch blisters with sticks.  It wasn’t only my family.  Every other kid I knew did it, too.  It’s hard to get that pitch out of your hair.  It stings when you get it in your eye.   When we peeled balsam pulpwood when I was older, our gloves and pants were soaked with pitch.  Even with gloves on, we got it on our face and wrists.  No one peeled pulp with short sleeved shirts.  We used cold cream to remove it.  Some tried gasoline, but that dries out skin and it stings.   Honey is sticky, too.  Dad had honey bees right after the war.  Not knowing how to get it out of the comb, the kitchen was a mess.  He cut the caps off the combs and mashed the comb with a table fork in a dish pan.  We got a lot of honey and a lot of bees wax.  I remember just chewing the comb to get the honey.    The next morning dad sat at the kitchen table and had his toast and coffee.  When he got up to go to work, the chair came up off the floor, stuck to his pants for a second.  He forgot the mess the night before and mom cleaned up, but didn’t think of the chair.   Mom said, as kids, they picked dried spruce pitch off the side of a tree and chewed it like chewing gum.   One of the hardest things I’ve ever done was to learn how to blow bubble gum.  That came out in 1946, I think.  That got stuck all over, too.  Some of the big girls had about 3 pieces in their mouths and blew them the size of their heads.  When they burst, it got in their hair.   If I ever owned a restaurant, there is one thing I’d always insist on.  After washing the tables, have another towel and dry the table.  I hate it when I put my arm on the table to order and the hair on my arm seems to stick.  They must use the same sticky washcloth all day and just smear it around on the table or counter.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2008   SENSE OF SMELL Dave Hanson   One time I went to Virginia and had my first scan.  I hadn’t been able to smell as well as when I was young.  On one of those TV medical programs it showed that a tumor between the two lobes of the brain could cause loss of smell.  They found out there was nothing there.   We always joked that Swedes had hollow heads.  I never figured out what caused my problem.  Probably no common sense…………..of smell.   It may be all the dust I’ve breathed all my life.  Cement, fine sand, vermiculite insulation in attics.  No one ever thought of using a dust mask.   For the last 30 years I’ve told people I’d make a good dump attendant.    There was one place on the edge of our hay field that had a sweet smell.  Even when I was fifteen cutting hay, it reminded me of California when I was about five years old.  It must have been sweet clover.  Smell seems to imprint in your brain.   Maybe we live in an environment bombarded with so many chemicals that it does dull our sense of smell.   Does anyone remember people burning trash years ago?    The Orr School had a steel incinerator about 40 feet from the school.  It was about 4 or 5 feet in diameter and about six feet tall.  A hole about 20 inches square was cut in the bottom.  When it wouldn’t burn hot, because ashes built up in the bottom, it was tipped and moved a few feet away.  The janitors hauled the ashes away in a wheelbarrow.   I emptied a few full wastebaskets of paper in there when I was in high school.  They never burned paper in the coal furnaces because the fly ash would plug up the flues.   While driving at night, smell seems more intense because you don’t see the smoke until you drive through it.  The smell of burning cotton rags filtered into the car often.  Almost everyone in the country burned garbage in a barrel or just in a bon fire.  A lot of that wet garbage or old mattresses just smoldered, sometimes for a few days.   When Gwen was a small girl in Grand Island, Nebraska, her dog got hit by a car.  She said people were burning leaves all over town that fall and her little cocker spaniel ran through the fire all the way home.  He died a few hours later.   People all over the country burned leaves in the gutters in towns.  Farmers burned crop residue on farms, too.  At least that put potash back into the soil.   When we lived in Duluth, some mornings the wind blew over town from Cloquet.  The sulfur smell was strong.  People joked Cloquet is coming in loud and clear today.   I was told a lot of the sign companies on the Iron Range wanted to get the sign jobs at International Falls, because the sulfur from the mills in Fort Francis and the Falls was really hard on the paint, so they had job security repainting up there.   In some cities like Los Angeles, high land and mountains surround the town.  If it wasn’t windy, fog would mix with the smoke from factories and cars and would hang as smog.  Years ago the smokier the city, the more it indicated success.   One reason the US became such a world power was our tremendous reserves of coal.  It was first used to heat homes and factories and later when the woods of eastern US was cut off, charcoal was hard to come by to smelt iron.  They started making coke out of coal for the blast furnaces about the same time iron was discovered on the Mesabi of Minnesota.  So as railroads spread to the coal fields of the west, the Industrial Revolution came into full swing.  The pollution did cause a lot of respiratory trouble for people.   People now think someone will drop dead if they smell tobacco smoke.  The air is cleaner now than it’s been for thousands of years.   I suppose the next thing St. Louis County will do is outlaw burning wood in our homes in the rural area.  Maybe those people in towns who have outlawed it now, want revenge, so they won’t let us do it.   Did you ever smell the wonderful smell when you walked by Peplinjacks Bakery in Virginia?  That chocolate smelled good in front of Cainlakes Candy Co. too.   One thing that gets bad is sitting in your concession stand at the county or state fair next to a stand boiling greasy French fried food for a week or more.   There are one or two varieties of roses in the Rose Garden in Duluth that I can smell.  Maybe it’s the Sweet Alyssum.   Some people can hear some frequencies that others can’t.  Some are color blind, or are partially color blind.  Maybe smell has a spectrum, too.   I can smell some kinds of food.  I’m thankful for that.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Tuesday, October 21, 2008 GLASS Dave Hanson   Some of these stories may seem frivolous, but some younger kids may find some information interesting.   I’m watching the rain run down the windows here in the living room.  I’m propped up in my worn recliner watching TV, but I’ve seen this show on the History Channel a couple of times before.  It’s only a Modern Marvel show.   Over 60 years ago, I started daydreaming like usual and watched the rain run down the windows on the east side of our room in the Gheen School.  That school had all three rooms full during the depression, but now only about 20 kids filled six rows in our one room.  The big picture of George Washington was up high in the front of us, and the old octagon clock that Mr. Lundberg, the janitor, climbed up on a stepladder and wound up each day, tic-tocked away.   They weren’t large thermal panes like homes have today.  Those large windows were wood sash with 12x16 inch panes puttied in.  The glass had small bubbles in it and was kind of wiggly because it wasn’t exactly flat like new glass.  The old club hall in Willow Valley had glass like that.  Grandma’s house had glass like that, too.   Dad made a lot of picture windows for people, about 1950, until Anderson Windows started distributing their crank out models to the lumber yards.  A few people he remodeled for had some lumber stored on the place.  He selected the clear pine out, and made the door frames, molding and window frames and sash out of the best wood.  If not, he got clear, select pine from Scott Erickson in Orr or Lampert’s in Cook.  A few times I went with dad down to Grandes in Virginia to get glass.  Those picture windows were all custom made so they were different sizes.  Grandes liked to see dad come, because he went downstairs and cut the glass himself.  With his list on the table, dad measured the glass, scored it along the straight edge, and snapped it off.  Once in awhile, a small sliver broke off on an edge and he would pinch it in those pliers and crack it off on the score.   One time on a large order, he pulled the hay wagon with the ends off down to Virginia.  Glass isn’t hauled flat.  If you hit a bump, a 4 or 5 foot pane will break.  He had a lot of large panes, so he built a rack to hold the panes upright.    We kids had a lot of scratch paper to monkey with.  When glass is new, it is shipped from the factory with paper between each pane, so it won’t rub and scratch in transport.   I was grown up before the county started to worry about garbage.  Cook had a dump.  Orr had a dump and when I went to college, there was a large dump east of the highway going through Eveleth.  The teens shot rats at night in all those places.   I did it.  A bunch of us would turn the car lights off and after 10 minutes, there would be all kinds of tinkling and squeaks as the rats fought and squirmed through the garbage and trash.  On went the head lights, and we jumped out and blazed away with our .22 rifles.  No one ever said a thing about uncased guns.   The dump in Gheen was on the north side of the Elbow River Road a mile east of town.  It was just thrown in the ditch for a few hundred feet.   Before plastics were used, vinegar, hylex, and apple juice came in glass gallon jugs.  Oil came in rectangular 2 gallon cans and 1 quart tin cans.  The garbage was made up of a lot of glass.   Every farm had a slop pile out of the yard.  All the stuff like glass and cans went into a dump a little ways into the woods.   I don’t know of anyone having a pile in the pasture because the cows could step on broken glass and get cut.  Cows can’t spit, so anything they got in their mouth, they swallowed.  Those small pieces of metal cause hardware disease and cut the inside of their stomachs.  Today, cows have magnets in their stomach to pick up fence staples and small nails they swallow.   The town people had no place to dump garbage.  Most dumps were on the edge of a swamp.  It just sunk in and rotted away.  Most had gravel nearby for a road.  They were on county land.  If the junk and broken glass got too thick on the road they bulldozed it back, out of the way.   About 1970 the environmental movement got underway.  That’s one good thing that came out of the hippy era.   Laws were passed.  The highway litter law cleaned up our roads.  The county started land fills.  They designated where to dump, and covered it periodically with gravel.  The county closed the Orr dump.  A new dump was developed south of Gabrielson Lake (Little Lake) a mile west of the Guzman Road.  There was a high gravel hill there, with enough gravel for a hundred years, for cover.   I was a township supervisor and on the garbage dump committee, as all our people used the Orr dump.  The county found out the land fills polluted and leaked so all the small dumps in the county closed.   We could have kept the Orr dump on the Nett Lake Road open, but we would have to have four test wells put in and monitored.  This was a prohibitive cost of $200,000.  So it closed.  All the dumps were closed and transfer stations were built in the county.  These quarter million dollar facilities led to taxing the land some, and we now pay to dump.  It was free until the stations were put in.  All the old dumps were dug up and hauled to Virginia or Duluth.   No one ever told us kids not to use old glass bottles for target practice.  We put them on fence posts or stumps and blew them apart.  A tin can only gets punctured, but those old jars that didn’t have regular size lids, really flew apart when you hit them.   I’d walk down to Willow River, south of home, and sink all the old whiskey bottles that floated out of the grass during each spring flood.  There was a log jam there against the old piling from the bridge that used to go down to Gorences and Grubbers years before.  To this day, I’d never swim or wade there.  I know how much broken glass is in that mud.  When those people moved away, the road was abandoned.  So was the telephone line that ran 2 ½ miles south from the Greaney Road.  One day I took dad’s lineman’s pliers and cut off a quarter mile of that old galvanized wire and twisted a loop on the end for my hand, and skidded it home for an electric fence.   We shot a lot of those old green insulators off those old cedar telephone poles.   Today, all those old medicine bottles, and blue glass vap-o-rub jars are stacked in the antique shops.  So are the old green telephone wire insulators.  I’ve bought a few antiques, but I’ve never seen anyone buy that other glass junk.   I’ve found a pop bottle made in Virginia, Minnesota years ago in a glass works there, but I’m not really a glass collector.   Dad would only let us throw paper candy wrappers out the car window because they would rot away.  Never glass, it wouldn’t rot.   People hardly ever throw anything out of car windows now.  But they don’t want to get caught drinking, so you do see beer cans and bottles that get chucked out after dark.   When we were small, glass dishes were placed in oatmeal boxes, so people got a prize when they opened them.  During hard times, people ate a lot of oatmeal, but during the 1940’s with rationing, the little extra, meant a lot to poor people, so they kept on buying oatmeal.  Maybe those cups and saucers were in boxes of cake flour, too.  There are some people older than I.  Maybe they can tell you about that.   When Gwen and I were first married in the early 1960’s, the gas stations had cases of glass dishes and glasses outside.  If you bought a certain amount of gas, you got a dish or glass.  We went to the Erickson Gas Station in Duluth and after 8 fillings, we got our first set of glasses.   Before plastic and Styrofoam came out, glasses were either worn on your nose or were drunk out of.   A lot of glass is recycled today.  They washed out pop and beer bottles and used them again.  Most glass is just dumped.   Mason canning jars were used over, and over, and over.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Monday, October 20, 2008   THE STEEPLE Dave Hanson   Oh, how hard it is to think of closing a school.  I remember when the small school in Greaney closed.  A community hates to lose its identity.  People have meetings and know it will happen, but try to put it off as long as possible.  It happened when the Gheen School closed.  The Bear River School closed.  Like all these little communities and townships, these schools were centers of heritage and pride.  In some places, the schools were not in any village or business center, but out in the country amongst the homes.   When the school closed, an era came to an end.  The county tweaked the figures for years, and those numbers wouldn’t add up, both student numbers and available money.   Some of us remember the beautiful school at Embarrass that is completely gone.  The school at Loon Lake is still used as a community center.  They have enough people there and from the range to keep it open.  I think it’s shaky, though.   The Buyck School stayed open for a few years longer.  The old school at Parkville has a few windows broken.  The Idington School is gone.  The Silverdale School is falling in.   The Alango School lived on as a high school and later was downgraded to just 6 grades.  Now that has closed, and busses don’t line up at 3 o’clock anymore.   The old post office in Old Gheen with wild cucumbers vining up the wall is gone.  So is the old railroad depot by the tracks.  That old school building burned down and only some old bricks show in the old basement from the walls that caved in.   It’s sad.  Maybe only to me.   The aqueducts, going into Rome, had been abandoned, too.  The Erie Canal has fallen apart and has filled in.  Some old towns are gone and the cemetery stones are falling over.  Most of the old hay barns have caved in. As the shingles and roofing paper blows off, a little daylight can be seen from inside.  Even the tin roofs rust away.   The old church still stands in Idington.  The old church still stands on the Leander Road.  The old church is still in use in Alango.  The church stands proud in Bear River.   Don’t forget the old churches in Bramble, Greaney, and Silverdale.  The old mission in Gheen is rotting away.   Provoznic built a church in Buyck, as did Hoffman at Kinmount. In these small communities, the churches were a social center, also.   As the kids grew up and moved away, like the schools, they couldn’t afford to keep them open.  A lot of tears were shed, and some people just didn’t like the idea of going to a church in another town.  Every time they look at old wedding or conformation pictures, they are reminded of what once was.   The old country church had to close in Malung, near Roseau years ago.  Those descendants of the early settlers had to make a heart wrenching decision.  Lay people had been conducting the services for some time, but so few people couldn’t keep going.   About 4 years ago, Gwen and I went to a museum park near Roseau where old buildings have been moved in, to take part in a Malung Church reunion.  The old church had to be destroyed because teenagers were having parties inside at night and the building was a hazard.   “This is the church, and this is the steeple, open the door and see all the people.”  Remember your fingers wiggling?   There were a lot of people at the reunion.  Grandkids of the builders years ago, even younger, 50 year old people who had attended church there all their lives, their kids, some of who never lived there, and people like Gwen and I who knew a lot of them.   The six white haired Espe boys, and sister, Evadell, harmonized some of the old songs they had sung in that church years ago.  They are Gwen’s relatives.  There were a lot more relatives there, too.  It may have been a church reunion, but it was a family reunion for a lot of families, too.   The alter and the steeple are all that remain from that old church that once stood on the small knoll in Malung.   We did walk the cemetery where I was pall bearer so many times.  That is still there.  Gwen’s ancestors are there.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Sunday, October 19, 2008   WHERE SHOULD WE GO  Dave Hanson   One of my fondest memories is taking a ride, with mom and dad in the front seat of the car and us kids piled in the back.   Most of the time it was just to Cook, but less often to Virginia.  Sometimes in the hot summertime, it was up to Indian Point on Pelican Lake, or the park in Orr to swim.   Years ago dad said, “Let’s take the Echo Trail.”  That starts between Buyck and Crane Lake and ends at Ely.  That area had been cut over for the large pine in the early part of the century.  The small pines that were passed over by the logging companies had 40 years to grow and the second growth pulp was just starting to be cut.    The trail was only a one car wide trail with grass growing about a foot high in the middle.  We met one or two cars coming west from Ely and we had to pull over and stop for them to get by.  It was like a green tunnel most of the way.  The road was pretty rough, but everyone was used to that because most county roads were gravel.   Another road that was like a tunnel was the Range Line Road, six miles west of the Gheen Corner.  With no telephone or power lines on the side of the road, the trees were right up to the shoulder and the branches touched overhead.   Carl and Barbara Sied lived one mile north of the Greaney Road and Barb always called the Range Line Road, “Lovers’ Lane.”  Another tunnel was the driveway into Terska’s Cabin-O-Pine Resort on Pelican Lake.  We swam there in the summer, too.   The township roads were not maintained by the county road crews like now.  We had a township drag which dad got from whoever was a township board member, and I would stand on it for weight, and we dragged the road with dad’s joker and later, his tractor.  If we didn’t do it, the grass would grow in the center.  As time went by, the county came down the road more often and the gravel was pushed out so the roads are twice as wide now as years ago.   We rode up to Ft. Francis once, and up the North Shore.  We always had a cow or two, so they were one day trips.   I suppose taking a ride is a tradition for me.  I’ve always loved to drive.  I don’t think I’d like to be a truck driver, because I’d have to stick to the same route.  Taking off on the spur of the moment and driving on side roads is a lot more fun.   We did the same with our kids. To break the monotony of staying at home, jumping in the car was always our form of recreation.  On short trips “Around the Horn,” we stopped  at Vi’s in Greaney and got pop and candy bars and headed out through Silverdale, and around to Rauch and back home.  If hay was knocked down and drying, we had time to stop at Samuelson’s Rapids on the Little Fork River.  Sometimes we’d go the other way and pass the Greaney Church, heading south to Saarikoski’s and come home on the Old Chisholm Road.  The short jaunt out to Elbow River was always fun.  Once or twice we stopped at Stall’s place and picked plums in the fall on the old home site.   After the kids grew up, we go on longer trips.  The Ely-Finland Road to Lake Superior trip is always nice.  We usually go to Effie and to Northome and up to Littlefork and home at least once a year.  A week ago we went down to Deer River and up to Effie and ate at the cafe and came back the Togo route.   The Vermilion Dam-Buyck Loop is fun.  Also up to Littlefork and back south through the reservation is just beautiful.  There are some million dollar town sites on that reservation.  They didn’t log it all off and some of those pine are magnificent.   Most of our twin cities trips were either going through, or quick, get business done and get home, trips.   We’ve been to Pipestone and the quarry there, but I’ve never been to the western part of Minnesota, south of Detroit Lakes.  We’ve never been to eastern Wisconsin.   I don’t feel guilty for putting miles on our car or for burning gas.  The environmentalists may think I’m wasteful, but they don’t think of the fossil fuel the cities use to burn rock into cement, or the fuel it takes to heat the towns and keep the street lights on.  Do they think of the fuel that is used to grow their food?  Or the fuel that is used to grow non-essential things like tobacco, barley for beer, or the water the golf courses and a billion acres of sod and trees in town?   Pulling boats around and trailers with snowmobiles and 4 wheelers, is part of our culture.  Hunting trips are just as sensible as shopping trips to fill the closet, or going to the casinos.  Or a flight to Las Vegas or a ski trip to the Rockies or the Alps.   The swamps are full of cranberries, but it’s easier to drive to the super market than to pick them.  It takes fuel to heat a 20 room house and keep a mansion on the lake from freezing up.   All these things keep our economy going.  It’s wonderful to have a country where we are free to make our own decisions on what we do. Not all places are as lucky as we, to have spare time.  We can just sit around, too.   The singer, Dinah Shore had a TV show years ago.  Her theme song was “See the USA in your Chevrolet” and she threw a kiss at the close.   Take a trip.  It doesn’t have to be long.  It may be to nowhere.  Enjoy the scenery even on a wet day.  I feel if you can afford the gas, you’ve worked for it.  Go for it.   The End   That’s what a few 6th grade boys always wrote on the end of their English themes.  Just so I’d know they were done writing.   I like that.  “The End”

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Saturday, October 18, 2008   LEAVE ME ALONE Dave Hanson   When in Fairbanks on our first trip there, we watched a bearded man, probably 35 years old, heading out of town with a huge packsack on his back.  He didn’t look in any direction, only straight ahead.    I asked the man at the tourist information center how far out the roads went from town.  He said he didn’t think many of those people wanted roads or power out in the wilderness.  “After all, that’s why they moved up here from the states.”  The man was on a mission.   My folks always talked about men who stayed around here.  A lot of those old people moved up here to work as lumberjacks, and most lived alone in shacks scattered around the woods.  Not many had cars, and probably very few could drive.   Everyone has a story to tell.  Most of those guys never revealed much information about how they came to that station in life.  To me, they were nearly like phantoms, only glimpsed once in awhile on their infrequent treks to town.  Some may have worked in the camps cutting pine when they were young.  Some cut a little pulpwood when they got old, working as gypos.  Most were too old by the 1950’s.  They would live out their lives alone in the woods.   I remember Hunchback Dave, walking to the Co-op Store on the Gheen corner.  He spent most of his time in Old Gheen, and lived somewhere out in the woods.  Stanley lived in an old house in Gheen.  He worked up in Orr.  I gave him rides to the grain door factory.  I don’t know if he drove, but he didn’t have a car.  Never once did we talk about anything personal.   Years earlier, when I went to the Gheen School, we would walk down town to buy candy at Neagabour’s Store or penny candy at the post office.  Also, we went to the old Mission once a week for religious instructions.  We passed the nice small white house of Jim Keho.  He was a pleasant man, but I never knew a thing about him.  Across the street lived Chicken Mike.  When mom went to that same school, Chicken Mike, or Rabbit Mike was already living there.  The kids teased him.  We were all scared of Mike Felix.  I’m not sure, but it seems he may have been hurt years earlier in WWI, or in the woods.  It must have been a torment for him to have to live next to the road.  He had little privacy.   One time I was looking for Harold Lakosky.  I was going to Virginia Junior College and wanted to piece cut pulp for Harold.  Someone said he was out on a road south of General Logging Co., so I headed out but never found him.   I stopped at a gypo shack and was invited in for a cup of coffee.  I sat visiting and drinking coffee with a guy from Nett Lake who was about 10 years older than me.  He only lived out next to his strip of pulpwood during the week, but went home each weekend.   A real neat story I can never forget was during hunting season, when two college students, dressed in their red, were arguing about a calculus problem at the bar in Earl Bixby’s tavern on the Gheen corner.  After about 10 minutes a drunk old gypo set his beer down and in a quiet voice told them they were both wrong.  In almost a state of shock, the kids stopped arguing and the whole place quieted down.  Kayo Winamaki said, “Give me that napkin and a pencil.”  He jotted out the formula and solved the problem to everyone’s surprise.  No one knew he was a college graduate and was the brother of Walter Whiskey, the Chief of Police in Duluth at that time.  Winamaki meant wine hill in Finland.  Walter went only by Whiskey.   Vince Shute told me the story of a man known as the Jeweler.  Vince had a camp about 5 miles farther out from where he lived.  A few months before, the Jeweler disappeared.  A sheriff came out and put a lock on the gypo shack Vince owned.  It was full of wrist watches that he was supposed to fix for people in Orr.  Vince went on to tell me he had started drinking and his wife left him.  Then he lost his jewelery store in Ely.  With nothing left in his world, he came and started working for Vince.   When we sat in our rooms on the north side of Orr School, we saw men walking down from Buyck, or Myrtle Lake, to get a packsack full of supplies and walk back east.  We never paid much attention to them.   Jimmy Johnson can tell you about a lot of the old jacks who stopped in at Armas and Angie’s place in Orr.  Angie always had a stew on the stove.  Also, they looked after most of those old men.  If they didn’t have anywhere to go, they could stay in some of Johnson’s shacks.  Angie nursed more than one back to health.  Off they’d go, back to the woods.   John Gibson was a Canadian.  He lived about three miles south of us in Willow Valley.  When Mr. Gorence died, John married his widow.  I never knew Mrs. Gorence.  She died, and John stayed alone on the farm until he died.  John got hurt one time as he sat in his easy chair.  Lightning hit the top of his house and traveled down the aerial to his radio beside him and he got burned.  John had to go down to register each year at the post office because he was an alien.   This country was full of these old men when I was young.  There weren’t very many nursing homes, and there probably wasn’t a single one of those guys that wanted to go there, anyway.   Each had his reason.  Each had his memories.  Each solved their personal problems in their own way.  They didn’t want pity.  They were men.  Were they really misfits?   Are there some people living with only themselves tucked away in the large cities?   Please don’t cry for me.  Just leave me alone.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Friday, October 17, 2008   THE COOKIE JAR Dave Hanson   Maybe someday they’ll have a TV show about the cookie jar.  I’ve never seen that theme.   The only thing mom never did quite right in dad’s eyes, was to bake sugar cookies that tasted the same as his mother baked.  Mom tried every recipe she could find and never did find the perfect formula.  Gwen told me it’s the memory.  When a kid is small, everything is working perfectly.  Smell, taste, sight, and probably most of all, is emotion.   We have a flood of memories.  Remember grandma’s cookie jar?  Just like a few leftover cookies in dad’s lunch box when he came home each night, so were those stale cookies in grandma’s cookie jar.  They may have been broken and there may have been some crumbs in the jar, but grandmas seem to let kids have a little more freedom than moms.   I always liked homemade cookies better than boughten ones.  It seemed all the boughten ones were dry.  They had a cookie case at the coop store, with glass doors.  There may have been eight kinds of cookies to choose from.  I can’t remember if those were self service or not.  All the groceries were on shelves behind the counter.  The clerk reached up and took down each can when you told them.  I suppose that’s where the term, a counter, came to be.   The clerk counted up everything and added up the total price.  I remember the bins on both sides of the door with potatoes and produce back there.  The meat was all inside a glass showcase with a celluloid price tag with two sharpened wires stuck in each cut of meat.  The clerk would reach in there and take out what you wanted.  A small waxed cardboard tray-like container was placed on a scale and hamburger was scooped out of the case and weighed, then wrapped with white paper and tied with store string.  Adhesive tape didn’t become common until about 1950.  If you wanted a special cut, or a roast, the large chunk of beef was taken out and cut up there right in front of you, behind the meat case.   The bulk cookies were in the cookie case, and the more expensive varieties were wrapped like today, but in cellophane.  Cellophane would split easily so those packs had to be handled carefully.  Some just had a small clear window in the cardboard, to show the contents.   I’m not a historian, otherwise I’d look up the dates of when things were invented.  If it bugs you, you can look it up.  I suppose plastic film like Saran wrap came on the market about 1960.  That made wrapping a lot easier for the grocery markets.  That plastic can be made in many different thicknesses.  Now it’s almost impossible to get candy wrappers open in a hurry when I really need them fast.  John Musech told me once that he had to move the candy next to the check out counters, because the kids would punch holes in the candy when he had it back by the meat cases.   How did I get this far away from cookies?   The table is covered with chocolate chip cookies for the Sons of Norway feed tomorrow in Virginia.  I was eating lunch and I asked her, “If you had a chocolate chip cookie and a rice crispy bar, what would a kid choose?”  She said, “Chocolate chip.”  I asked, “Chocolate chip or an Oreo?”  She said, “I’d have to think about that.”   Gustie Parson made those one inch powered sugar covered cookies she called Russian Nuts.  My favorite is raisin spice and chocolate drop cookies.  They are soft cookies.  I eat them by the handful.   There was an old joke that states, Everything I like is illegal, immoral, or fattening.  When I eat cookies, I drink a lot of milk and don’t just stop at a couple.  It’s kind of sinful.  I try to justify it by thinking that some guys drink a six pack of beer each night, watching TV.  But, it doesn’t make it right for me.  I keep eating and feel guilty.   Fran Shimmin taught the other 6th grade in Cook.  She made small, one inch gingersnaps.  She said, “Add a small pinch of pepper in the dough, and roll little rabbit dropping size pellets.”   I remember mom and grandma rolling out dough.  They had cookie cutters, and sometimes us kids would stand on chairs by the kitchen table, cutting out different designs.  A canning jar ring would be used in a pinch.   Mom used to cut out a little larger size, and fill them with date filling.  She folded them over and used a fork to press down the edges.  They looked like little pasties they make on the Iron Range.  Some she just left round and used another to cover the top and used the fork all the way around.   I do remember her baking cookies in the hot summertime in the old wood kitchen range.  There was no timer, but she kept opening the over door and check to see if they were done.  We kids could run out to play and swing but mom had to stay in the hot kitchen.  Nothing was instant in those days, long, long before microwaves and air conditioning.  But, it sure was worth the wait.   Once or twice, I tried to sneak some bakers’ chocolate from the cabinet.  That block of unsweetened chocolate was sure bitter.   We sat there with our milk mustaches and munched on fresh baked cookies.  I suppose we chattered like all little kids do.   Ernie Lund and Doug Johnson got together just about every year to make Christmas cookies.  I’ve never seen it, but they had all the frosting and decorations.  I bet they ate quite a few, too, and sat around drinking coffee and chattering.   Next time you see a cookie jar, remember mom and grandma.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Wednesday, October 15, 2008   THE OLD ROAD  Dave Hanson   Just about everywhere people have settled, there are old roads that have been abandoned.   From my reading, the first road by horse and wagon went from Tower west to Rice River and west to the logging camps west into the Little Fork territory.  This was not improved or probably not much more than a dirt trail through the woods.   The Mesabi wasn’t discovered yet, but a railroad from Lake Superior had been built to Tower and the Soudan mine.   Roads started to radiate from Tower.  At first, wood bridges were built along with wood culverts.  The boggy muskeg was corduroyed.   A tote road ran north of the Willow River here in Willow Valley and supplied the camp 3 ½ miles west of where Highway 53 is now.  A winter road followed the river when it froze up in the winter.  These winter roads were flat and a lot larger loads could be pulled by a team on ice, than the small wagons on the tote roads in the summer.  My dad showed me the old tote road just south of our field in 1950.  It was nearly grown over, but with my .22 in hand, I followed it nearly a half mile east, across the state land.  I found a one gallon crock jug.  It had landed with the mouth down so it didn’t fill up with water.  Otherwise, it would have froze and cracked.   Twenty years after the tote road was used, the railroad came north and the town of Gheen grew up.  The first real road was built out to Greaney.  This was used by horse and oxen to haul logs to the railroad in Gheen.  About 1920, people started getting cars up here.  By the time of the depression, few horses used the road, as small trucks hauled pulpwood into Gheen.  The county road had wound around Berg’s hill, and Holmer’s hill, and stayed on flat ground.  It went down a steeper grad for a half mile east of the Guzman Road.  During the 1930’s, the road was built a half mile south of the old road, and went straight west to Greaney.  They cut the hills down.  About 1950 they built a more graceful curve by the Guzman Road, and paved it for the first time.  On the way to Tower, the road has been rerouted in many places. It’s neat to be driving along and see an old  road next to the highway north of Orr. The old road ran east of highway 53.  The old concrete bridge is still recognized on Sucker Creek across the road from Billy Purdy’s.   After gold was discovered in California, wagon roads, or trails developed along rivers and places where teams could get water.  The Santa Fe Trail was rutted by the wagons.  When it got too bad to travel on, people just moved over and rutted that up.  They had to go the same way for the water for the animals.  When people took off from St. Louis, Mo. They left the last city until they got to their destination.  I don’t know the route the Mormons took to get to Salt Lake.   People say there are still ruts across the west in a few places on the Oregon Trail.   A lot of the old township roads have been abandoned after people left.  They didn’t think the land was worth paying taxes so the land went back to the county as tax forfeit.   When the interstate roads were built, the old roads were abandoned as the freeways went around the cities and towns.  A lot of gas stations and business went out of business as the cars whizzed by on the new road a mile away.   We’ve pulled off onto old Route 66 and saw some of the first motels built in the 1940’s and 1950’s.  One place had teepees, made of some thin concrete to rent out.  They are still standing.  This was a paved road with 2 way traffic.   Tucumcari, New Mexico boasts of 10,000 motel rooms in town.  Gwen and I rented a room on one of our trips.  Let me tell you, that was as old as they get.  The last time we did that was on our first trip to Fairbanks.  It was October and most of the motels on the Alcan were closed for the season.  We took a room in an old hotel in the old part of town.  Now we always motel it on our trips and stop early enough to get a good room.   The small towns fight to keep the highway in town.  It took forever to get to the cities in the 1950’s.  We went through downtown Virginia, through downtown Eveleth, and we still go through Cloquet.  The road went through Barnum, Moose Lake, and all the towns along the way.  After the freeway went through, it only takes 4 hours.  The town’s businesses dwindled.  Those that could afford it, built gas stations on the exits and crossroads of the freeway.   The new road near Britt will probably do the same to the convenience store there.  The old road will just be an access road to Sand Lake.   The road will probably go through Cook.  I don’t know about Orr.  There isn’t much room like Cook.  It it goes north at Pelican River at Glendale, it would be east of town.   If they can go through Cloquet, they can sure do it in Orr.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Tuesday, October 14, 2008   BURNING SANDS Dave Hanson   One day, with my kids all around me, I was building a small granary.  I had a good crop of oats over at dad’s place and needed storage.  Up the driveway came a large, tall man.  John Anderson was selling insurance and tax shelter annuities for the Ben Franklin Insurance Co.  I had never invested in my life, but he talked me into a $15. a month annuity.  John was a St. Louis Co. sheriff from Hibbing.   He talked to some people, and a few days later, two men from Sturgeon township came here for a visit.  They interviewed me, and reported back to the Masonic people in Hibbing.  John Anderson had me come down to Hibbing to get my small book for training for my first degree.  You may have heard the term, “Getting the Third Degree.”  You’d better listen, you’re going to get a talking to.   I had help interpretating the code by another mason.  A third degree mason is a full member, but a person has to memorize information and pass a test, and finally get initiated, in front of all the masons.  I’ve never divulged any information that I pledged to keep secret.  One thing I did do was make a lot of people laugh, when I put up quite a struggle, when blindfolded, in one part of the initiation process.  I had never known what to expect, and I wasn’t going to lay down without a fight.  Everything went alright and I was accepted by the guys from Hibbing.   Everyone kept saying the Shriners, was the fun part of the Free Masons, so I went on to Duluth and got my advanced degrees.   To be a Shriner, we went from Duluth over to Superior, Wisconsin to be initiated.  I’ve been nervous before as a kid on the track team, standing on the starting line, waiting for the gun to go off.  I was nervous again, when I had to undress and put on a robe and a blindfold and be marched into an arena in front of hundreds of men, knowing something would happen.  I think that’s the idea of it.  I won’t ever reveal the secrets that I promised years ago, but to be initiated into something, is like a child years ago, in front of men, becoming a man.  Those boys know it may be unpleasant, but it’s something you do, or you won’t be accepted.   I’ve waded in snow up to my knees while cutting pulpwood all day long.  My cheeks have turned white and were nearly frostbitten a few times.  My feet started loosing their feeling, but never did freeze.  I’ve had sweat pouring off my face and trickling down my back and chest, while making hay, piling lumber, and working in box cars.  I’ve walked across burning sand, but I’ve always taken it in stride.  Now I’m old and fat and worn out, but I look back and say, I really didn’t mind it and am glad I did it.   I never went on the houseboat parties on Namikan Lake.  I did go to the Shrine Circus in Hibbing with the gang.   Scott Erickson and Roy Johnson had become the solicitors in Orr.  All the businesses donated money for the Shrine.  The money all goes to crippled children in Minnesota.  Each state used it differently for a good cause.   Scott wanted some younger person to solicit.  I hated to beg.  I still hate to beg.  I’ll starve before I beg, but in that organization I had to do it, no questions asked.  I donned my Fez and went to the businesses in Orr asking for a donation to buy tickets for the kids, and for their ads in the Shrine Book.  I didn’t feel superior, but really out of place.  Only one business refused.  They had always had an ad before.  I never went in there or did any business there again.  I think the refusal was because it was me who asked and not Scott Erickson.   When a man from the range told me I had to go to Tower, and not Hibbing, I didn’t like the idea of someone telling me where to go.  I had my friends in Hibbing already.   I put my Fez, and scroll, and apron in a box in my closet where they are to this day.  I’m looking at my gold ring now.  VIRTUS JUNXIT MORS NON SEPARABIT  and my name, 4-26-75 is stamped inside.   I’ve never marched in any parade, but I still try to be an upstanding person, I promised to be those many long years ago.   All I’ll say is that everyone believes and God and no one can ever cheat another.  A man promises to follow the laws of your country.  A bankruptcy is almost unheard of.  If a person does not pay his debt, he would put that other person in a precarious position.   I know there may have been some people who were not sincere and joined just to learn and divulge information.   Think about the character of those people you know.  Very few are bad citizens.  The organization is a band of brothers.  I’ve heard of wounded Americans lying in the mud of Germany.  When the soldiers saw the ring on the wounded man’s finger, they knew he was a Mason, also.  They may have been German soldiers, but they were not Nazi, they were brothers.  A band of decent people, no matter what your religion.    Maybe I’ll pay up my overdue dues, and maybe I won’t.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Saturday, October 11, 2008   IT GOES ON AND ON Dave Hanson   There are many ways to look at things.  When we were small, we were innocent and believed everything anyone said.  After a lot of teasing, we began to doubt some things.  Sometimes people were joking, and what they said was meant to be laughed at and then ignored.   Some kids heard things from their parents and repeated them to other kids.  A Chevie is better than a Ford.  Shove it or leave it.  Or, fix it daily, for a Ford.  When cars are new, they are all good.  Our dads seemed to all have used cars.   As we grew up, we started to think a lot like our parents, and as teenagers, most of us wanted to be independent.  The old saying is how dumb your parents are, but when you are holding your newborn babe, how smart grandma is.  A kid wants to get out of school, but it’s lonesome out there, when you have to make decisions on your own.  Kids want to get away from home, but you have to leave the security you have always known.   After a whole lifetime, we’ve seen and heard a lot of things.  We’ve made decisions, good and bad.  We’ve learned to appreciate things we took for granted or knew nothing about years ago.   Some people always wanted to give their kids all the things they didn’t have when they were young.  Some people wanted their kids to work to get things so they would appreciate them, and take care of them.   It’s funny that all the ancient people had their own way of looking at things.  Each culture, and there have been thousands of them, tried to explain the unknown.  Man has always been different from other mammals in that we can think, and have a conscience of what is right, and what is wrong.   No matter what religion one has, man always interprets it and thinks a little different than the next person.  Even identical twins are not together all the time.  As time goes on, each forms a slightly different way of thinking.  Who is to say what is right in one situation and what is wrong in another?   Most universal is the Golden Rule, Do unto Others   To some societies, revenge is a normal thing.  To others, the want to amass huge amounts of material things is normal.  Fame is the goal of some, as the ability to rule and have power over others.  Some really like the position of officiating, even if it’s to regulate the planning and zoning of people in your own county.   The reason it was so easy to Christianize the Native Americans, was the similarity of God and the Great Spirit, and the happy hunting grounds and heaven.   It seems almost all humanity believe in something.  Some universal power that holds everything in place.  Some are simple and some are complicated to no end.  Some are ancient and some are scientific.   Some say their Bible can prove everything.  Some say science can agree with everything in the Bible.   To me, God is everywhere and in everything in this galaxy and all others.  God is the universe and all the power that is and ever was.   We, as simple people, sometimes seem to limit that power by only what is in our Bible, Koran, or any other new or ancient writing.  We know so little, and keep finding out things that were never thought of, or known.   I knew a man who had a hard time believing in a religion, and always said death is so final.  He joked about covering all facets, just in case, and hauled gravel for the Lutherans, the Baptists, the Catholics and the Jehovah Witnesses.  He made a friend with a Catholic priest who he met when they were in a hospital together.  He is gone now, and has gone where everyone else has gone before, and where everyone else will go someday.   Once, years ago, Gwen and I were standing up in the old ancient settlement on top of Acoma Pueblo.  The Apaches had migrated south from Canada, hundreds of years ago, and started raiding the corn patches of the desert people.  They camped in the valleys and always left enough food for the people in their protected fortresses.  When the Spanish came to Acoma, the natives moved up to the top and survived a long siege.   Our guide was a middle aged woman whose ancestors had been there for centuries.  There was a pool about 20 by 40 feet and several feet deep that filled with rain water.  This sustained the village. After the Spanish conquered the whole of the Mexican territory in America, the Jesuits had the Indians build adobe churches in all the settlements.  If you are ever headed for Phoenix, it’s only a short distance to see this cathedral at Acoma.   As she was giving us our tour, we stood next to the pool. There were a few plants growing along one edge.  I noticed some tadpoles in the shallow water.  I asked her, “Where did the frogs come from?”  It’s surrounded by dry sandstone and sand desert for miles around.  She said, “They came from heaven in the rain.”  No one said anything.  No laughing.  A thought flashed into my mind.  God created Adam from a lump of clay.   I’m always thankful when I dig a potato from the ground.  I’m always thankful when I cut a tree for wood.  I’m always amazed when I shoot a deer or pull a fish from the water, that they have always reproduced themselves and prosper.  We, as people, always benefit from them.  The lion and the beast always find enough to eat.  The grass always comes back.  The forest always returns after a fire.  Cities crumble and turn to dust and the land returns to the way it was.  The water always flows to the sea and evaporates and returns as rain.   We, as people, are the only ones that ponder all things big and small.  We know nothing more is ever created or destroyed.   When the wind blows through the branches of a tree, is it our Megan and our Tammy smiling down on us?  When those snow flakes fall from heaven, is there something else there?   We came here naked, and we can go in peace.  We take comfort in those that are here and those that have gone before.  Our kids take our places and it goes on and on.   That’s the way it is meant to be. Thanks Dave for reminding us of God creating Adam

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Saturday, October 11, 2008   IT TASTES GOOD Dave Hanson   The northwoods can be Maine, New York, the UP, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and anywhere in Canada and Alaska.   This is the land of the hunting camp, hunting shack, or just back in the brush where a few guys go to get away from the hustle and bustle of life.   I know some of those shacks have a few highballs and some beer, but a lot of those guys drink a lot of coffee during the day.   Some take turns cooking, and some have a guy that doesn’t like hunting, but likes to be along with the gang and likes to cook.  Some are a family group who have a tradition of going to the shack.   There are stories of people shooting a small deer for camp meat.  That may be true, but most hunters follow the laws.  It would be a spoiler if a game warden caught some guys during the middle of season.  It’s too easy to be cornered at a deer shack with an untagged deer.  I did hear of a deer that was tagged and hanging next to a deer shack being stolen during the day while everyone was out hunting.   Most of the deer up here have liver flukes, so most people just leave them with the guts in the woods and never even try to fry them.  Most shacks use propane to cook with.  Everything else is too slow.  I suspect most food is fried, too.   Steve Dasious (I don’t know how to spell his name)  had a hamburger joint in Virginia, Minnesota, years ago, and cooked everything in a huge cast iron frying pan.  I think he had a pound of melted lard in there.  He would open the buns and warm them in there, too.  Those were the best tasting hamburgers around.  French fried potatoes don’t taste as good as they used to, either.  They fried them in beef tallow.  Now, everyone is trying to be politically correct, and they fry them in vegetable oil.  That isn’t diet food, so why not cook them like they used to?  At least they would taste wonderful.  You don’t have to eat them everyday.  What would bacon taste like if it didn’t have strips of lard in it?   Why does everything taste so good during hunting season?  A man can eat a whole can of beans by himself.  We called them pork and beans when I was a kid.  They had a 1 inch cube of pork on the top of the beans in the can.   I think being out in the cold all day makes anything taste good.  The lumberjacks ate a lot of bacon fat on their bread.  A lot of calories are burned up working in the cold weather.  Staying out hunting from day break until sundown, with only a sandwich and a thermos jug of coffee, makes a man hungry.  That fried food, and anything warmed up, always is a welcome sight to the gang each evening.  I’m sure there has been contests, quite a few times over the years, after eating all those beans.   I do know one or two gourmet cooks, who packed in a lot of food, and made really nice meals for the men.  Those guys had been good hunters years ago, but their legs gave out as they got old.  They would have felt left out if they stayed home watching TV while the gang was out in the brush hunting.   A lot of the communities around here, and maybe in the other states, have hunters’ suppers.  I think I like the baked beans and the meatballs the best.   They made fun about Spam after WWII, and also hamburger gravy on potatoes or toast.  That was called shingles in those days.  I like it.  I like Spam fried until it caramelizes.  I like greasy hamburgers with raw onions, with a little grease running down my little finger, and beans.  My breath may not smell good, and __________I’ll let it go with that.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Saturday, October 11, 2008   HUH? Dave Hanson   I had a 1951 Packard I bought from Gustafson’s in Cook.  It was a pea green, boxy, ugly car.  I only paid $250  for it when my 1950 Buick started burning oil.  I parked the Buick in dad’s pasture.  That old straight 8 engine was about 4 feet long.  It sounded like a locomotive.  The Buick was a straight 8, with overhead valves, and that whispered when it idled.   I had just started junior college and was riding with a bunch of kids.  They stopped at a car dealer and the salesman started talking about a newer car.  I explained to him I didn’t have any money for a car, and explained that my dad had had some bad luck eleven years earlier when our house burned down, and he contracted TB in 1955.  He had younger kids and couldn’t help me with any money.  I wasn’t shopping for a car, and those kids just dropped me off.  He said, “Most kids call their dad “old man.”  He was impressed by me saying “Dad.”  I respected my dad, and I didn’t really want to waste the dealer’s time.   Those kids all had newer cars, and had a sign, “Aristocrats” in the back window.  They wanted me to join a car club.  No way was I an  aristocrat.  I suppose that old Packard had some social status.   I was like a lot of other kids that were working their way through college.  I wasn’t careful and started running out of money the next year.  You can only earn so much during a 3 month summer “vacation.”   I knew some kids that worked at the “Dirty Bird,” the Red Owl on north side of Virginia.  They came back at night and raided the dumpster behind the store where they had stashed meat, and packages of food they had swiped from the store.  I never did steal.   I had bought a ring for Gwen that summer before we were married.  I only had $250 when I started school in St. Cloud the fall of 1961.  My Packard was worn out and would hardly climb the hill in Cloquet, so I drove that out into dad’s pasture and resurrected my 1950 Buick.  That thing started to knock and broke down, so I hitch hiked back home every weekend.  I had to get back to see Gwen.   On one trip, Johnny Swanson’s wife and daughter picked me up at the junction of #53 and #33 at Independence and gave me a ride as far as Hinckley.  Some of those trips I was hitch hiking in the snow.   We got married that December vacation.  Gwen had a $1.20 an hour job, and saved my life, and college career.   After I started teaching, another teacher explained to me the social class system in the American and European culture.   High society is people who have had money for many generations, like royalty.    Middle high, were people who were someone like a president and had money.   Low high society people, were not as rich but had a long line of wealth and power. .  High middle were people like doctors, lawyers, maybe a “new rich,” and a millionaire but no family history of wealth and power.   Middle middle were people with a college education.  Money helps, and self made business people.    Low middle class were people who owned their own home.    Low class were people who didn’t have steady work, and   Low low, were the street people and people who didn’t know how to stay out of jail.   I was pretty low class when it was raining on me and snowing, when I was hitch hiking.  One time I was waiting for a ride south of Mora, and started thinking about all that corn on those thousands of acres of farm land.  I never did take any.  I did think maybe I could get a job on one of those farms on weekends.  I was spending 25 cents a day on one hamburger at St. Cloud.  I went from 195 pounds down to 165 pounds that fall.  I was desperate and went to the college office and they found 2 jobs for me.  One was washing out cattle trucks at the slaughter house in town.  But I didn’t have rubber boots or work clothes.  The other job was west of town, working at the steel mill.  I didn’t have a car, so that was out of the question, too.   I walked 14 blocks to school and one day I saw a driveway with concrete forms ready to pour.  I thought, if I had work  clothes, maybe I could get a job.  My work clothes were up in Gheen.   Don’t tell me you can’t lose weight.  Stop eating.  When I used to eat hot lunch in Cook School, the cooks loaded me down with food.  So I quit eating lunch.  I ate my 2 slices of toast and a cup of coffee for breakfast, and didn’t eat until I got home.  Some of those teachers asked me how I could do it.  Easy, I did that before.   The Upper Crust, huh, what did you say? Was a term I heard as a kid.  That’s just a very few people, as the upper crust on a loaf of bread is pretty thin.  Crusty is probably an old man with thick dandruff in his hair.   There are a lot of terms in America, that are not really English.  In those other English speaking countries, they have terms we don’t know about.   They're sitting pretty, up there in their surrey with the fringe on top, and fancy clothes, and I down here walking.    On top of the world.    Big frog in a small puddle, doing well in a small town.   Hobo, dire straights, but willing to work.    Down and out, lost my job and got knocked out.  I’ve been there.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Friday, October 10, 2008   BE CAREFUL Dave Hanson   Well, I’m late again.  This story has been sitting on the desk for a week.  I was going to bring it down to the Mesabi Daily News, but it may not have been printed anyway.  A lot of the same things were brought up on TV by Dr. Phil a couple of days ago, and on talk radio, this morning.   Kill the umpire, throw out the bums, get rid of them all.  Term limits, we’ve heard that for a long time.   Be careful, you may get your wish.  I’ve been an independent voter all my life.  I try not to vote for just one issue.  We’ve heard politicians make promises, and when they get in, they can’t deliver because they have done no one any favors yet, so they can’t get the votes.   It’s hard to make up my mind this election year.  It seems the candidate’s cabinet will be making the decisions and not the president.  We don’t know who these people will be, or what their ideas are.   Tax the rich right into the ground.  Who?  The majority of the population does not invest in the stock market.  Who does invest?  Are they taking their money and running off to the Swiss banks?  Will the huge corporations be taxed to death and sit idle like Ainsworth Plant in Cook, Mn.?  The huge mining companies could be idle and shut down, too.  The paper mills could go.  We could get paper from Canada and Finland.   I know the range is a strong union area.  Do the union representatives police themselves and the workers?  Does anyone in the steel industry try to prevent our scrap iron from leaving this country and returning as finished products from China?  Why isn’t our scrap metal made into finished products in the USA?   I’m not criticizing, but people want to know.  The people on the range are probably better educated than some of the other people in the country, but don’t want to ask questions because of their businesses and jobs.   If those share holders in the stock market lose a lot of money, will they take a loss on their income tax and pay less than they did last year?  Will the companies close down because stock people pull their money out and pull the rug out from under them?   I don’t think our retirement funds were put into banks, they don’t pay much interest.  Is it invested in corporations that were giving a better return?   Could some CPA tax expert write some articles for the paper explaining issues?   Has the general population of the US think the government should do their thinking and make all the decisions for them?  Do people expect to be rewarded for doing nothing?   This country is not a democracy where everyone votes on every issue.  We have elected representatives to make laws for us.   Why is there a layer of bureaucrats that were never elected, become officious, and seem to hamper every initiative we have?  Why are they our adversaries instead of helping us when we need it the most?  Aren’t we, the taxpayers, their bosses?  We pay them.   It seems those people in congress today and yesterday didn’t see this coming.  I hope our elected people can solve the problem.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008   I SMELL BREAD BAKING Dave Hanson   Eating is one of my favorite pastimes.  Lucky for me, mom was a good cook and we always had a variety of good food and lots of it.  We weren’t forced to clean our plates at each meal.  Us kids could graze all day long if we wanted to.  We would ask mom if we could have a piece of cake or a cookie.  The only time she said no, was before a meal and she said, “No, it will spoil your appetite.”   Some people who skipped meals, or didn’t have much to eat when they were kids, eat like there will be no tomorrow, and become obese.   In 1946, we had moved back to Gheen from California.  Before that, I really don’t remember much.  It must have been like moving to a new world, because to a preschooler, everything was new and interesting.    When we went over to Grandma Miller’s, it was different than at home.  Dad had a 32 volt light plant and we had a few electric lights and a water pump.  Grandma and grandpa didn’t have power, so we would monkey with the water pump.  We were always warned about falling in the well.  A plank would swing over so a pail on a rope could be lowered down.  A quart of cream and some butter and milk were kept cool down there, and the plank was swung back to close it.  We had a tank in the attic that was filled with an electric motor powering a pump.  With no running water at grandma’s, we were fascinated with the dipper and water pail.  Grandma had something we didn’t have at home.  Chickens and a potato ricer.   On Easter or Thanksgiving or Christmas, we went over to grandma’s for roast chicken and all the trimmings.  We were there most of the time while everything was being prepared, sometimes hours before we ate.   I remember grandma burning the hair off a chicken with a candle.  Those old hens or a rooster were treated to a trip to the woodshed where grandma took the double bit axe she used to chop up kindling wood, and chopped it’s head off.  The bird was tossed out the door, where it flopped around for a minute before it was plucked.  It had been caught in the dark the night before while roosting and kept in a gunny sack until morning.  Water has to be heated to boiling before the bird was killed.  If it’s boiling, it was cooled down with some cold water a little.  If it’s too cold, the feathers won’t loosen, and if too hot, the skin will cook in a few seconds and peel off.  All the old timers knew how to pluck chickens. Grandma plucked and gutted it before we got there, so we didn’t see that when we were small.   It was fascinating to see those hot, boiled potatoes oozing out of the ricer.   A two quart bowl of riced potatoes had about a quarter pound of home made butter melting on top.  Grandpa or dad got the honor of carving the golden, roasted bird.   Grandpa Hanson had moved to Cook after the war.  At that time, the boys were building the locker plant.  Grandpa built a small house on the end of the street from the gas station in Gustafson’s Addition.  Grandpa was a bartender at the pool hall and was Doc Heiam’s gardener.  He liked to pick blueberries in the bogs within walking distance just south of Cook.  He would pick hazelnuts at the end of August.  You only have about a week as they ripen.  If you wait, the squirrels clean them out.   One time, grandpa was painting the inside of his house.  If I remember right, he said a little girl from across the street came over and got a cup of coffee for grandpa. Judy Harkonen asked him, “Oscar, do you want cream and sugar?”  “Just cream.”  She brought it out to grandpa and one sip, and a spray.  He had washed his paint brush in a pint jar, and she thought that white colored gasoline was cream.   He moved back to Gheen in the early 1950’s.  Grandpa made the best stew.  His secret was to put a little sweet corn in.  To me, that slightly sweet, garlicky stew was delicious.   When we were small, we didn’t like steak.  We had beef all the time.  Our favorite was hamburger.  After I grew up, I figured that kids are always losing teeth and it was easier to eat hamburger.  Anyway, hamburger could be creamed, baked with potatoes or macaroni, scrambled, or made into plain hamburgers.   I remember the Swansdown Cake Flour, and the flour sifter in the flour bin dad had made.  On all the built in kitchen cabinets he built, he made an aluminum lined drawer that held a 25 pound sack of flour.  Mom baked bread at least once and nearly always twice a week.  Maybe once or twice a month she would bake a loaf of rye bread for dad.  We didn’t eat too many potatoes like some people, but were bread eaters.   Mom would make homemade wild strawberry and raspberry jam and jelly every year.  We got our share of peanut butter.  Most of us kids put butter on our toast so it would melt in, and then peanut butter, and finally jelly.  We had our own milk and butter, so that was never skimped on.  Mom skimmed the foam from the jelly and we kids got to, “lick the jelly kettle,” and eat that foam.   I never liked the smell of cooked cabbage or cauliflower.  We never grew broccoli.  I never ate it until dip became popular in the 1960’s or early 1970’s, we started eating it raw.  I never liked cheese as a kid.  We had creamed salmon with green peas in it, served on top of mashed potatoes at school.  I hated that and threw up a lot after eating it.   In the late 1940’s, the Watkins Man would sell nectar, which was mixed with water. It was expensive.  We would cut oranges in half and juice them with that glass juicer, and mom would mix that with a cup of sugar and two quarts of water.  I’m not sure when Kool-aid came out, but we drank hundreds of gallons of that.  Of course, when people had cows, we always had milk.  We started drinking coffee as soon as we could sit up at the table.  It was mixed half and half with milk.  When I was six, I remember drinking cocoa (hot chocolate) and looking at the reflection of our kitchen window in each of the bubbles on top of my cocoa.   Its funny how memories that you have never thought about since it happened, come back to you when you start to reminisce.   A Canadian got the idea to put a layer of snow in a barrel and a layer of vegetables and another layer of snow.  This started the fresh frozen food market.  When the locker plant was built in Cook, we had a place to store our meat and other frozen food.  This prompted a trip to Cook quite often, because food would spoil if you took too much home at a time.  Once the REA (Rural Electric Association) power came into our country, the locker plant wasn’t needed, so the boys started selling deep freezers and refrigerators and appliances.  Now everyone had a place to keep frozen food at home.   Some city people shop for groceries every day or two.  We rural people didn’t go to town often, so we had to store up groceries.  Everyone had a shopping list.  On our few trips to Virginia each year, the folks combined dentist visits, or clinic check-ups with Christmas shopping or a picnic in the Virginia Park.   A lot of people my age still have a few extras on hand, just in case we get, “snowed in.”  I think some of the younger city people think its kind of a strange idea.  When I was young, probably half the people in the twin cities were raised in the rural area and moved to town.  They grew up with a self sufficient life.  They knew it.  Now most of the people in America were born and raised in town.  To them it is fascinating to think of survival.  What we lived is now history.  Our way of life is still carried on in places around the globe, but these are now labeled primitive.   I had cows, chickens, and a garden, when our kids were young.  We ate our own eggs, chicken meat, beef, pork, and vegetables.  We ate berries, and drank raw milk and homemade butter.  We used to have two deep freezers, and Gwen canned and baked 20 loaves of bread each week.  We heated mainly with wood.  I never had time to fish or hunt very much.  But we were never smug or felt inferior or superior of our way of life.  Live and let live.   We worked, loved, took pride in our accomplishments, and cherished our family, friends and community.  We’re happy, and don’t take anything for granted.  Don’t forget to be thankful.  Don’t be too judgmental.  I shouldn’t tell people how to live.  Some of those old ways have proved to be tried and true.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Wednesday, October 08, 2008   CONTEMPT Dave Hanson   I was pretty small when I first learned the term, superiority complex.  My sister, Marion, was a year older than I am, but she skipped the second grade, so was with kids a year older than her in school, she had picked up that term from the 5th or 6th graders in our one room school in Gheen.  She didn’t feel superior even if she was smart.  Maybe she worked hard at school work because she was younger and felt she had to, to keep up with the older kids.  She was feisty though, and didn’t take any guff from anyone.   In the olden days, thousands of years ago, the best warrior was the best soldier, and because of his good decisions in battle, determined if he became the king of the related clans that spoke the same language.  There were a lot of related clans, with different languages, so there were a lot of different kingdoms.  They were at war all the time, fighting for territory.  As time went on, choosing a king was determined, not by battle, but became so by heredity.  Even an inferior mental or physical specimen could be king, because people around him would govern.   Also, as time went on, people settled in towns for protection.  At first villages were made up of a clan.  Everyone was related to each other.   The rural people were tremendously independent.  As cities grew, they depended more and more on the rural people to produce the food on farms, and the rural people for wood for fuel.   After the Romans took over most of Europe, the system changed because of the Roman domination.  The people had to be subservient to the conquering Romans.  About 500 AD the Roman Empire became bankrupt, known as the downfall of Rome, the Roman rule collapsed and the Christian church took up the vacuum.  The Feudal system took over.  The royalty ruled, and the landlords held the power.  A class system resulted.  At the top was the royalty and clergy.  Under them was the business class of merchants, and then craftsmen, and, at the bottom, the bulk of the population were the serfs.  They were tenant farmers who lived on the landowner’s properties and paid part of the crop for rent.  These people were practically slaves.   As towns grew up into cities, there were poor people who lived in the fringe of society.  These were the cripples and beggars, prostitutes, thieves, and thugs that would murder for a small fee.  To the people in power, all the lower class was held in contempt.   The northern parts of Europe never were under Roman rule.  The Scandinavians were war like and lived in clans.  The women had the same rights as the men, and were indispensable in keeping the family well fed and the farm going, while the husbands were away for long periods, fishing, hunting, or at war.   The cities and large towns in Scandinavia is a relatively resent thing.  This came about by the Hanseatic League system from Germany, where certain towns became proficient in only one craft.  One town made only glass, one was steel, one maybe known for leather.  That system was kind of like and early form of a union.  It was a merchant society.  These Germans moved into the Norwegian, Swedish, and towns in Finland, and set up factories.  The goods produced always had a market and were exported by the merchants.  The cities grew, and rural people started giving up the farm life and moved to town.   These fiercely independent people became dependent on the jobs in town.  Within a generation or two, the people lost the farming and woodsman skills.  They had to accept any wages the factories gave them.  Even people who aren’t that smart could survive by working in a factory.  I liked working in a factory.   As Scandinavia got more and more populated, the land of a farmer could not be divided up for his sons when he died.  The farms wouldn’t be large enough to support a family, so the oldest son inherited the land, and the other boys had to find other work.  A lot of them on the sea coast went into the fishing industry, and the people of the interior, worked as tenant farmers on someone else’s land.   For hundreds of years, the system worked in Scandinavia.  The bulk of the people were landless, and the high society people ruled the country.  The royalty was the high class, as were the merchants, politicians, and the Lutheran Church clergy. These people held the peasants in contempt.   I think that’s why the bulk of the immigrants that came to America were poor people.  One thing they knew how to do was hard work.  They knew how to log, they knew how to farm, and they knew how to work in the mines, and factories before they got here.  They didn’t have to be trained in the United States.   One of my wife’s relatives told us he was a Methodist because when he was young, everyone had to be a Lutheran just like Norway and Sweden.   Some immigrants here did the same thing they did at home.  But here they owned their own land.  Here they all went to school and learned English at the same time, so everyone was starting off on an even keel.  In America, no one was lorded over.   Some people were successful in their businesses in town.  Some became prominent in their towns.  It wasn’t long before some began to hold rural people in contempt, because they were struggling on the farm, or cutting timber for someone else.  The country bumpkin, or hayseed, or hillbilly were nicknames for people who decided to continue living in the country.  The country people held city people in contempt and they nicknamed them city slickers.   Every farm kid knows he or she has the knowledge to survive, using the skills that has been handed down for thousands of years.  Even people who have moved back into the rural areas, know they have to learn a lot of skills they didn’t know about in town.   I’m fiercely independent.  When I was young, I felt the judgment people made.  But, I never let it bother me.   Socially, I may not have had the street survival skills as the kids that grew up in the slums, but like a lot of city kids, I stayed out of that part of town.   I still don’t think its right for a farm kid to come to town with manure on his shoes or clothes.  We were always conscious of having clean clothes on, and washing our hair so we didn’t smell.  When you’re working, it’s ok to sweat and get dirty.  That’s a badge of honor.  But, a person can clean up when you get done.   You can tell a tourist by the Bermuda shorts and sandals.  The shave lotion and fancy gold necklaces aren’t worn by a working man.  That perfume attracts wasps and jewelry gets caught in machines.   When I started teaching years ago, I was walking between a row of desks, and a sevenths grade student said to another boy, “Those are working man’s hands.”  I had a few scars, a few scratches, and swelled, callused fingers.  I felt a little proud.  I remember those kids’ names.  Ricky’s dad was a working man also.  Charlene said one time, “If you’re mechanicing all the time, why aren’t your fingernails black?”  I smiled and told her, “I wash my hands.”   Dr. Kahn was our dentist.  But he built his own huge house.  He cut huge amounts of firewood, and he had cut pulpwood to get money to go through college.  He never did forget his roots.  He was a working man.   Dr. Lager was our dentist in Virginia.  I told him one time, “With all those used drills, you could grind cameos for jewelry.”  He said, “I’m working with small stuff all day long, when I get spare time, I cut firewood and split it all by hand.”  He went over to Finland a few times to give seminars on dentistry, but he was a working man, too.   Some hold people who do manual labor in contempt.   I’ve always told people the ancient Greeks had slaves to do their work for them, but they had a philosophy to use their bodies as well as their minds.  Those upper society men studied up into their 80’s, and did exercises to keep fit.   I don’t hold anyone in contempt, but I can tell what kind of upbringing they had, when they start to talk.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Saturday, October 04, 2008   SQUIRRELLY Dave Hanson   I’m not an author, I’m not an historian, I rate myself as a story teller.  I try not to start all the sentences with the word, I.  I’m not an eccentric, or a romantic, or a perfectionist.  I don’t even care if anyone reads these nonessential essays.  I’m not interested in making money from my unedited scribbling.  I’m having fun spending five to twenty minutes of my spare time jotting down an idea once in awhile.   Someone who runs around in circles, wastes a lot of movement and energy, and getting nothing done is nicknamed squirrelly.    To me, on careful observation, squirrels are fascinating.  I’ve lived up here in the sticks all my life, and observed different kinds of animals behaving in a variety of ways.  A squirrel is not exactly what they appear.  They run up and down a tree to observe their surroundings.  These little red squirrels are feisty.  They take chances, and survive most of the time.  When they eat, they keep their long tail up over their head and body.  If a small hawk makes a swipe, they get a fist full of tail, but not the nutcracker.   When they sit up there on a branch chattering, they wake the whole universe.  Their kinfolks are alerted, and they chatter, too.  These little buggers are industrious all year.   Beavers lay around in an unrepaired dam all summer.  They cut down just enough trees in about a week to last all winter.  When it starts to freeze, beavers patch up the dam and store branches in a feed bed near home, so they have a handy food shelf of bark to munch on during the winter.   Those squirrels aren’t taking any chances on running out of food during the winter. They remind me of successful people who never seem to get into financial trouble, because they are always thinking of the future.  In all that activity which seems a waste of energy, squirrels are storing food.  It may be sunflower seeds from the birdfeeder, but they can get along just fine in the wild, on their own.  They eat small seeds from balsam and spruce cones, but will take advantage of anything that tastes good that they can carry away.  Break up a slice of bread and they take that.  A whole slice will be nibbled up, but not wasted.  They can carry hazelnuts and acorns, which they bury somewhere.  They burrow under the snow and never find all the seeds they hid, but that’s good for the woods, as a lot of plants and trees sprout from these forgotten, hidden seeds.   We were accused of hoarding food one time by a person from Minneapolis.  To us, that was an alien idea.   When I went to school years ago, there was a class that all girls had called Home Ec., or Home Economics.  During the depression, a lot of people had things at home, but no cash.  So girls were taught how to cook food they had at home into good meals, and how to remodel clothes, or how to use material from old clothes into usable items.   Squirreling away for winter was a survival skill as old as time itself.  In places like the woodlands of America, food was plentiful and game and fish could be had nearly all the time, as it was needed.  Even so, woodland Indians put food like wild rice and smoked fish away for winter in large quantities.  In the desert, most natives grew corn and beans, and squash, which was dried and stored.   Where my people came from in Europe, food wasn’t easily raised on the rocky and cold land.  They had a boring diet compared to today’s standards.  They could grow small fields peas, rye, barley, oats, cabbage, and turnips in Scandinavia.   Rutabagas only came on the scene a few hundred years ago.  Those people tried to live close to the ocean, a river, or a lake for fish.  Crop failure was common, but most survived by storing hay during the summer, and living on milk from a cow that can eat grass. All over the world people squirreled away food for hard times, whether it was the winters in cold climates, or famine in the warmer parts of the world.   Fruit doesn’t keep very long.  So wine was made from surplus fruit.  Any surplus grain was made into beer.  Most grain was ground into flour, but it had to be stored in a dry place so it wouldn’t rot or sprout.   An acre of ground isn’t a very large piece of ground for growing food.  But yields of 20 tons per acre of potatoes is not uncommon.  Carrots, beets, and rutabagas yield a lot of food in a small space also.  A root cellar was built to store food in cold climates.   Just about all the immigrants knew how to survive tough times.  The only reason they left their homeland was that it was a lot better over here.  Those people all knew how to preserve food.  With no refrigeration, meat was salted, smoked, dried, and in the last century, canned.   Canning was done in tin cans during the depression, when some towns had canneries that people could take their produce and berries to.  At home, it was done by the women in a hot water bath in a canner or boiler, on the top of a wood range.  Some were canned in the pressure cookers.  Kerr, Ball and Mason jars were the most common glass jars used.  They came in jelly jars, pints, quarts, and 2 quart volumes. The lids were the common or wide mouth sizes.   It was not uncommon for families to can hundreds of quarts of food each year.  The rural and farm families had a lot easier time getting a surplus, because they could raise most of it at home.  They did it in town too, but a small yard doesn’t support a large garden.   It’s hard for me to throw food away.  It’s just the way I was raised.  What we didn’t eat was fed to our pets, or farm animals.  What they didn’t eat went into the garbage years ago.  We had cows, so we had manure for fertilizer.  Now we have a compost pile.  It’s mostly grass clippings, and dead plants from the garden in the fall, but even a bouquet of drying flowers go on top as well as potato peelings.   I have a neighbor who loves to pick berries and grow vegetables and flowers, just as much or more than I do.  She picked about 200 quarts of blueberries last year.  It wasn’t as good this year.  She only got about 150 quarts.  Don’t worry, I got my share, but not as many as her.  I asked her, “How many did you give away?”  Shirley said, “I don’t keep track of how many I give away, just how many I pick.”   I read years ago, the definition of a lady is “a giver of food, or a woman who serves food.”  Gwen and I, along with a hundred other people have had thousands of cups of coffee over there.   We rural people have a deep freeze.  Some two, some have three.  A few just that little compartment over the fridge.  Most don’t have gardens anymore.   It’s fun to go to the fair and see that we have nicer stuff growing in our gardens back home.   We don’t have to, but I suppose I’m squirrelly putting some stuff away for winter.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2008   THE MEADOW  Dave Hanson   One of my first memories is walking behind dad through the meadow at home with grass way over my head.   The meadows in northern Minnesota are wet areas along rivers and creeks.  Any opening on high ground grows back into trees in just a few years.   The beavers plug up the rivers and creeks and flood the low land.  They can reach trees sometimes a quarter mile away from the main stream of a river.  When they eat themselves out of house and home, they move and the dam rots away.  This ebb and flow has gone on here since the glaciers melted thousands of years ago.   The wild bluejoint grass grows in the mud flats in just a year or two and slowly the popal and willow grow back again.   The first settlers around here didn’t have any fields cleared and they burned the meadows.  With all the dead grass gone, they cut the grass with scythes and used wooden rakes to make meadow hay.  Dad said the logging camps would buy wild hay for $8.00 a ton, and tame hay (timothy and clover) for $12.00 a ton, to feed their teams.   Meadowlands, Cotton, Alango, Cherry, and even Field Township have a lot of low lying ground that was used for hay.  They are so wet it is only cut once a year when it dries up enough.   Years and years ago it was burned each spring.  That killed the brush along the edges and increased the size of the meadow.  Fire doesn’t kill grass.  In those wet areas, it never burns the roots or the black muck soil.   I’ve heard stories of a community meadow a few miles west of the Gheen corner, where some of the Willow Valley Township people, and some of the Greaney people would cut hay in years when they didn’t get enough off their own fields.   That hay is excellent feed if it’s cut young, but being in such a wet area, it was usually mature when it dried up enough to get in there.   I had a friend years ago who had a stroke and needed extra hay for winter.  I was teaching in the fall already, and he came over and asked if he and his wife cut the hay and raked it, if I would bail it for him.  It was October, and the yellow popal leaves were falling.  The timothy was all dry, but the second growth clover was about a foot high underneath it.  That was about a six or seven acre field on the Guzman Road.  I bailed it, and he got a few hundred bails.  I told my neighbor, Nick Shermer, “That’s the first time I’ve baled popal leaves.”  He said, “It’s better than eating snow.”  Just like the old timers, a person does what they have to do out of desperation.  The same with the meadow hay.   I remember a few dry years when our pasture got eaten down, the cows tramped down into the meadow to graze.  When they used the same trail, it looked like a bunch of 4 wheelers had gone through.  It was my job to milk them and had to practically give them a bath to get the wet, inky peat off them.   We hayed our meadow one year to get a few more tons of hay.  We put up loose hay on weekends for only a few cows.  It went so fast, it didn’t pay to bail it.  Most people put loose hay on wagons and had slings on the hay rack to hoist into the barn.  Before that, they had grapple hay hoists to unload it into the barn.  Some just stacked it near the barn.  A good stack would stand for years if it was thatched right.   We cut our meadow with an old horse mower behind dad’s homemade joker, and dragged it onto high ground with an old dump rake.  It probably would never have dried on that wet ground.   Today I see a lot of the old meadows are covered with reed canary grass that has replaced the wild bluejoint.   This summer we went down to Albuquerque to check on some land Gwen’s folks bought in Los Lunas.  I saw farmers cutting all the reed canary for silage in Wyoming.  Around here, the farmers treat it like poison ivy and cut way around it.  Then, a willow island grows in the middle of the field.   Those mountain meadows stay open because it’s so high and cold.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Tuesday, September 30, 2008   GOD BLESSED AMERICA Dave Hanson   Back in the late 1940’s, we didn’t have much of a reason to go up to Orr.  We always seemed to go south.  Cook was only eleven miles south of the Co-op Store on the Gheen corner.  We got our gas there at the coop.    With only one or two Guernsey cows milking, a sack of 16% protein cow feed was tossed on the front fender of the car and off we went.  Dad, driving down the gravel road, headed for home three miles away.  Toward spring, dad would get 20% feed for a month or two before the pasture came in.  Dad tried to have the cow calf in the fall, because they milk heavy at first, and then when the pasture grew lush at the end of May and June, they would give a boost in milk again.  That old coop store had groceries, gas, farm tools, and just a lot of everything.   We had to go to Cook for a malt or to fill a prescription at Swanson’s Drug Store.  We had to go to Cook once or twice a week to see the shows at L.D.’s Comet Theater, and get our comic books at Ardin’s.   Dad knew Dr. Peterson at the Lenont-Peterson Clinic in Virginia, so we went down there.  Also, we went to Dr. Krause for our teeth, before Dr. Kahn came to Cook.   The first time I went to Alango, was on the school bus to play football.  The same with Cherry and Embarrass.  I know most of those kids had never been to Orr, except for high school games.   I remember some of those aluminum Airstream travel trailers going by on Highway 53 the summer of 1954 or ’55.  They were pulled by big cars like Buicks and Oldsmobiles that had power enough to pull them.  There were few pickups in those days, and even fewer 4 wheel drives.   Dad and I were building a cabin on Black Bay on Lake Vermilion in the summer of 1960 for a dentist, Dr. Swenson, from Minneapolis.  He was telling of his trip on the Alcan Highway.  His windshield was cracked and they used adhesive tape to reinforce the headlights, because of rocks.  The Alcan was gravel in those days.   Our road trips were one day trips when the kids were young.  We had cows and animals, so we could never get away.  One of our favorite trips was up to Tower, especially in the fall, to see the leaves.  The Ely-Finland Hwy. #1 was also fun.  We could cut out to Lake Superior and down to Duluth and still be home in six hours.   It seems that people have to get into unfamiliar areas to take notice of the scenery.  Home is so familiar we think of other things when driving.   Our first trip out west was to get down to Gwen’s folks in Mesa, Arizona.  That was in 1986 in our Chev Citation.  That car didn’t have air conditioning.  We had to go right after school was out in the spring.  We were awed by the Great Stone Faces at Mt. Rushmore.  Devil’s Tower was amazing, with the little specks of climbing people on its face, and the prairie dog town at its base.  The Bighorn Mountains were fascinating.  I stopped and climbed up on the side of the road to make a snowball.  I felt light headed, but even though, it was beautiful, the steep road that dropped off down to rivers far below was nerve wracking.   We dropped down into Thermopolis, Wyoming, where we stayed.  The swimming pool was not filled yet.  When we looked at the map that night, I noticed we were over 10,000 ft. high in the Bighorns, so no wonder I was tired up there.  We got to Dinosaur National Park just at closing time, so I’ll have to go back sometime.  We cut south on an out of the way road down to the Grand Canyon.  Then on to Flagstaff and to Windsor to see the great meteor crater.   Flagstaff was nice, but it sure got hot when we got to the flat dessert.  It was only a few hours to get to Mesa.  I’ve never seen the desert bloom in person, only in pictures.  We drove down either just after school was out or just before it started in August, on our trips.   On that same trip we drove across the Mojave Desert at night to beat the heat.  It gets over 100 degrees in the daytime.   I drove nonstop from Mesa up to Sequoia National Park.  What an experience.  Our whole family went into a standing, burned out, living tree.  How long it stood there, only God knows.  Nearby was General Sherman.  That tree is so big it would completely fill a 30 x30 foot school room and still be outside the walls.  Those mountain meadows on the way up to the forest were just as beautiful as all those calendar pictures.   We drove on up Hwy. 5 to Olympia, Washington to see Gwen’s sister, Rita, who we hadn’t seen for a few years and also her sister, Terri, in Walla Walla.   Everywhere we went was amazing.  The Rocky Mts., the buttes, the mesas, the sage brush and prairie are all ingrained in my memory.   It’s fun to go, but it’s fun to get back home.  It doesn’t matter if it’s just for a day or on a long trip, home is home.   It seems everyone who lives in all these different places call home “God’s country.”   Some people didn’t have a pleasant childhood like most of us.  They had their different reasons to get away from home as soon as they could.  Some ran away from home, and wished they hadn’t been so rash, but stay away to save face and don’t want to admit it may have been a mistake.  But a lot have that feeling of a tug on their heart strings once in awhile, remembering home.   We’ve been out east, down south, out west, up the Alcan to Fairbanks twice.  Even eastern Canada.  We always drive so we can turn off the road when we like.  We’ve followed the Lewis and Clark trail.  We’ve taken off on Route 66 a few times.  Colonial Williamsburg was nice, so was Mammoth Cave, and the Amish Lehman Hardware Store in Ohio.  Lincoln’s old cabin was a fake.  No one comes to see big trees in Minnesota. They come here to fish.  If you want to see trees go to Kentucky, or the ponderosa pine in Flagstaff.  If you want to see white pine, you have to drive through the Adirondacks of New York.  Aunt Doris and Uncle Del took us to see alligators in the OkeFenokee Swamp.   It was nice to stand on the Acoma Pueblo Mesa and see the old mission and look for miles across the desert.  It was a small side trip on our way home from Gwen’s folks.   We’ve been to a lot of other places, but when we see the red lights blinking on the towers on Gheen Hill, we know we’re home.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Monday, September 29, 2008   AN UNEASY FEELING Dave Hanson   After Gwen and I were married, I still had a couple of years of college at UMD in Duluth to go.  We were driving around and saw a for rent sign in a window.  Tony Nesgoda lived on the main floor of his house and rented out the upstairs, and the basement apartment.  A young couple from the air base lived downstairs.  We were lucky to get the upstairs.   Tony was old, and I helped him put up storm windows and shoveled the snow off his sidewalks.  He appreciated it.  I was behind about 3 months rent one time, and he told me anyone else would have been out of there.   Wally Laakkonen told me there was a job opening at the Kitchi Gami Club.  I had gotten a job at a gas station under the high bridge next to Goldfines.  The hours would be 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m.  I stopped on my trip back home and went to check on the waiter job at the Kitchi Gami Club.  I took the waiter job on the spot.  Wages?  $1.00 an hour.  That was my library study time each evening, but I needed the money.   I had a terrible time getting a $500. loan from the Cook Bank, so when it finally came through, I paid Tony.  The year before, our son Danny was born.  My sister, Marion, and her son, Stevie, moved in and held the apartment over the summer when we moved back to Gheen so I could work.  So the last year of college, we rented from Tony again.   Both Marion and Gwen typed a lot of papers for Dr. Maude Lindquist’s Minnesota History Class.  We had to read 50 Minnesota books and 50 articles and report on all of them.  I’d take the notes, and they’d type them for me.   Dad came home from Orr after work and told mom it seemed a lot of people were acting different and staring.  We found out the FBI were asking a lot of questions about him and our family history.  Dad had worked on top secret jobs in WW II, so everything was fine.  My sister had applied for a secretarial job for a top Air Force commander in the Sage building at the air base in Duluth.  She got the job.   One day she called and said only that she wouldn’t be home and didn’t know when she could get away.  I was going to school and Gwen was babysitting Steve.    We had a small black and white TV, and heard President Kennedy speak to the public of the Cuban Missiles.  I remember the spy plane picture of the missiles in Cuba.  At the air base a red alert was issued.  That was close to a holocaust, and  our country going into an atomic war.   The Strategic Air Command had one third of the bombers in the air at all times.  They were all armed with hydrogen bombs.  We had bases in Alaska, Germany, England,  Turkey, I’m not sure, but probably in Japan and maybe India.   Kennedy warned the Soviet Union to get those Russian missiles out of Cuba, because if they fired on the USA we would send everything in our arsenal to Russia.  The Soviets retrieved the missiles and took them back to Russia.  American planes were patrolling the Caribbean at the time, and escorted them across the Atlantic.   We were cheering Castro when I was at Virginia Junior College when he and his men took over Cuba.  But, the American sugar refineries and American businesses were taken over when the country became communist.  That’s where the hatred came to be.   The situation settled down.  The US encouraged exiled Cubans to stage a counter-revolution in Cuba.  When they invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, the Castro people just about annihilated the invasion force.  Kennedy and the US did not back up the invasion.  The Cubans tried to support other Communist revolutions in Central and South America.   Gwen and I have been to Tyrol, Austria twice.  Our son’s wife had relatives and a sister who lived in the home place in Lendl, Austria, a few miles south of the German border.  The Austrians there take the milk cows up to the Alms, which is the mountain pastures, much like our open range out west.  Each farmer has a cabin and barn where they milk the cows.  In the fall, they parade the flower bedecked cows back down to the barns in the valley towns.   Every mountain valley has a river.  These are fed by the snow melts in the Alps.  One day Gwen and I took a walk across a bridge across from the house, up a road.  It must have been the “old road,” years ago.  I looked under the brush about 10 feet off the steep road and there, with the door open, was a concrete wall going back into the side of the hill.  I got an uneasy feeling, and told Gwen, “That must have been a German guard house guarding the main road in WW II.”  I think they guarded every road and mountain pass in every country they occupied.   One great advantage we had in WW II is the National Geographic Society maps of the world.  We knew where the rivers were.  We knew where the roads were, and we knew where all the natural resources were in the world.   At nineteen, George Washington was hired by Lord Fairfax to survey and map all his land that England had granted him.  So when the war broke out with England, he knew where every river was, where to ford each river and where to hide his army.   The enemy must have had an uneasy feeling so far from home.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Sunday, September 28, 2008   THE MUSIC BOX Dave Hanson   Children will be children was an old saying, but when the industrial revolution swung into high gear, the kids in the slums were put to work.  Even in the coal mines out east there are pictures of small boys working in dangerous conditions for up to 12 hours a day.  Some kids working in the sweat shops in our eastern cities would fall asleep, “With vittles in their mouths,” when eating supper.   Americans got more leisure time on their hands when conditions improved. Sports were invented for fun after work and on weekends.  The city kids didn’t have chores to do like the country kids.  I’ve heard of kids from Cook making fun and teasing some country kids who went to Cook School seventy years ago.  Some farm kids have a hard time forgetting people who had teased them.   I remember visiting in Cook when my uncles were building the locker plant.  The Chase boys and a couple of other kids came by with a bunch of crabs, (crayfish) they had fished out of Littlefork River on the bridge by Lambert Lumber Company.  They told me they tied a piece of meat on a string and slowly lifted them up on the bridge.   Kids didn’t stay inside watching TV like they do now.  Kids entertained themselves and the parents weren’t regulating every activity they did.   Building tree houses, most kids only got a platform up and never finished the rest, unless their dad got lumber and helped them.  Little huts and shacks in the woods were built, too.  A lot of the time, the sisters were working on them with the boys.   Willard Pearson’s dad made and set up a diving board for the kids on the river. Willard tells about Eugene Kantola, Wendy Soderberg, Roy Drevland, and Roy Pearson’s  swimming hole.  They spent a lot of time each summer there.  Eugene lost a hatchet in the river years ago.  About 15 years ago, Willard and I went up the Rice River in his boat with a magnet on a rope dragging it in the mud.  Willard said, “Boy, would Eugene be happy if we could find it.”  I said, “The ice each spring probably moved it and the mud downstream.”  We never found it.   It didn’t make any difference if a kid was from town or the country to entertain themselves years ago.   I could pick up a dozen toad mummies on the gravel road north of home.  Cars flattened them and they dried up.   Carpenter ants were fun things to watch, especially when the winged queens and drones poured out of a balsam tree.  The pilated  woodpeckers would chip a square hole and clean the tree out.  Kids played for hours with earthworms.  One kid told me the worst thing he ever smelled was his angleworms that were forgotten in the car trunk after a fishing trip.  Beetles of all kinds were monkeyed with by most boys.  Throwing rocks into ant hills was great fun.  It was fun to monkey with frog eggs each spring.   When we were kids, we would wait until dark, and catch lightning bugs in a quart jar for a lantern.  Our kids did the same thing.  They let them fly away the next morning.   Most kids had a dog that went with on every bike ride on the country roads.  A ball of yarn was swung and kittens would play and swat it.  Some kids dressed up their dog.   Dad told us how to hypnotize a chicken.  Put it’s head under one wing and hold your hands over the wings so it didn’t move.  At arm’s length, slowly swing it around in a circle.  After a half dozen times you could set it on a fence post, and it would sit there a long time.  I suppose it fell asleep.   Throwing cattails around made a snow storm in the fall.  I remember kids soaking them in kerosene and throwing flaming cattails around at night.  That was dangerous.   When my little brother and sister were about 6 or 7 they had an old tin lunch pail they had made into a music box.  We went over to visit and asked what was in there.  They had a dead mouse in there, and when it filled with flies, they closed the cover.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: don Simonson Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2008   THE SWAMP Dave Hanson   A lot of people believe it’s hard on the legs and feet to walk on concrete floors.  You can do it all day in a factory, or on the floors at school.  But try walking in muskeg all day long.   Up here in Minnesota everyone knows what a swamp is.  Is it scientifically called a bog?   Berg’s Lake, north of the Willow Valley Farmers’ Club Hall, was used for cutting ice years ago.  Grandpa Miller and Leopold Berg kept tying tamarack poles together and shoving them down in the water.  They never reached the bottom of the peat.  Today it’s just a small beaver pond.  Dad told me the edges were a floating bog, and not to walk on it.   After I was grown, I remember him saying if you ever fall through the root mass, you may not be able to get back up.  It’s a funny feeling to step hard a couple of times and see stunted spruce and willow 75 feet away bob and sway on the waves under their roots.  (Mud Lake) or Rice Lake between Gheen and Orr is surrounded by floating vegetation, too.   When a shallow lake fills with rotted peat and wood it becomes solid enough to support a black spruce woods. These spruce swamps are logged in the winter when it’s frozen enough to get the wood out to high ground.   Blueberries grow under the trees for years.  They never have berries until the trees are cut.  In a couple of years the Labrador tea and blueberries grow rank.  The spruce roots don’t rot very fast, so the young spruce grow back in a few years.  I’m not sure of nature’s cycles.  In nature, only beaver dams flood and kill spruce.  Forest fires seem to burn around them because it is so wet.   There are a few really boggy swamps that stay stagnant.  Those stunted spruce may be a couple of hundred years old.  The muskeg grows in hummocks and some are covered with lingonberries and cranberries.  A lot of times the berry blossoms freeze so no fruit forms.   A lot of the same plants that grow on the pine hills grow in the cut-over spruce swamps.  In late June, the Split Pink Moccasin flowers bloom.  Another is the bunch berries.  They bloom and form small red berries.  It’s the acid soil, not the swamp itself.  If it’s not too acid, the Larch trees grow.  Usually the peat is no more than three feet deep there.   I always wait for the small purple swamp laurel by Soderberg’s corner in Field township to bloom.  That’s when we plant our sweet corn.   One time, as a kid, Uncle Dick Hanson took us out in his swamp in East Littlefork and showed us the Pitcher Plants.  That area has such slow growing trees, it seems they are the same size now as 60 years ago.  I suppose it’s the high water level.   I had honey bees years ago.  The Bee Journal said there is always something blooming in the swamp.  It’s September and there is some kind of shrub blooming right now.   The town of Cook was built on a peat bog.  The railroad is the reason.  They stopped the train at Cook to refill the boiler tank on the old steam engines.  A small water tower stood next to the tracks by the Little Fork River bridge across from the school.   It was a natural place for a town to spring up.  Cook is about halfway between Virginia and the Falls.  They may have filled up at Ash Lake, and maybe somewhere in Britt, too.  Maybe someone knows more about the railroad.   When they rebuilt the main street of Cook, the equipment was well below street level and as the peat was removed, gravel was filled in.  I think a lot of the buildings on main street are built on pilings driven in the ground.   Mom told of a steam engine that jumped the tracks and sank in the peat.  A wrecker was sent up from Duluth, but by the time they got here, it was submerged.  I was small and I don’t remember if it was between Orr and Glendale, or between Gheen and Haley.  I know it was before my time.   Like I say, I don’t know the history of our railroad, but it would make a good research project for someone to locate the old engine.   There were old timers that told stories that there maybe old lumberjacks that were killed and thrown in the swamps.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: don Simonson Sent: Sunday, September 21, 2008   THE PELICANS CAME BACK Dave Hanson   When I finally got enough money together in 1959, I had a chance to buy an old Piper Cub airplane for $1200.  I had been saving money for 2 years and I could also have invested in My Uncle Harold Hanson’s Magnetic Control Company in Minneapolis.   I worked at the Scott Erickson’s grain door factory in Orr, and had been unemployed the last winter.  Some kids from Orr were talking about Virginia Junior College.  About two weeks before school started that fall I said to myself, “It may be fun, maybe I’ll give it a try.”  That was a decision I’ve never regretted.   I hadn’t been a very good student in high school and I called up Herman Kiland.  He was our principal and owned a resort on Kabetogama  Lake.  I hadn’t had any entrance paperwork done, like the other kids, the last spring as a senior, so he had to come all the way down to Orr School in the middle of August to type in information for me.  I know he wasn’t happy on such a short notice of time.  He probably thought it would be a waste of time, anyway.   I told dad, “I think I’ll go to college in Virginia.”  He didn’t say anything.  But work wasn’t easy to find up here after the weather got cold.   I had bought a 1950 Buick from Gentilini’s in Virginia and ran that a couple of years and had just bought a 1952 Packard from Gustafson’s in Cook.  Those straight eight engines got about 19-20 miles per gallon, but gas was cheap, so most people didn’t even consider that.   Off I went down to Virginia.  Ducks were everywhere in that town.  In those days, if you got within a quarter of a mile of a bunch of geese, you were lucky.  Someone got a bunch of ducklings and some goslings from “Ducks Unlimited.”  I think some kids raised them.    The pond in Virginia stays open all winter because of the public heating system in the town.  Trainloads of coal were burned to make steam for power and for heating the town.  Most homes didn’t have chimneys but had meters and paid the city for steam heat.  The extra heat and discharge goes out into the lake and keeps it  open.  Those ducks and geese didn’t migrate or if they did, they came back to town.  People had to stop their cars so they wouldn’t run over ducks and ducklings crossing the streets.  I remember ducks nesting right next to the entrance of the Methodist Church, under a shrub.  Now geese are such pests, no one lays on the lawn by the college in Virginia.  It’s goofy to see geese flying north from Virginia in a snowstorm.  Here in Gheen they do it as long as Pelican and Nett Lake are open.  They like the wild rice.  Silver Lake had a beach for swimming years ago, but it’s full of bacteria now, and hasn’t been used for years.   When I was a kid back in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, there were only a couple of beaver dams on Willow River here in Willow Valley Township.  A decade before, the clearings along Highway #53 were hayed during the depression.   Robert and Phillip Stevenson helped their father, Alfred, clear and farm the clearings along the Willow River two miles west of Highway 53.  Robert told me of the layer of marl, under the black meadow soil, they plowed.  Marl is a hard limestone-like mineral.   The river flooded each spring and some times a boat had to be used to get to the house of Pete Olson, as it flooded across the road and fields along the river.  We could wade across the river in the summer.  Now the water seems stagnant and deep in the summer because of the beaver dams.  I don’t know why the beaver population exploded during the 1970’s until now.   I’ve always believed in cycles that have always been here, but people never recorded them, because people that read and write have only been here a century.   Pre history is anytime before writing records.  The natives had oral stories, but many have been forgotten.  And like political history, just like now, is biased,  so the old stories may have been, also.   People forget in just a few decades.  Now they are talking about DDT insecticide again.  It wasn’t really toxic to people, but it was hard on microbiology in lakes, and the eggs of large birds broke in the nests because the shells were thin.  Now the eagles hatch most of their eggs.  They’re back.   I always wondered why Pelican Lake was named that, because I never knew when they were ever there.  Maybe in the 1800’s they were, but the lake was filled with logs during the late 1800’s and that commotion may have driven them away.  Anyway, they came back and turned a small island into a rookery for raising their young.   Gwen and I were fishing one day and observed about 15 of them in a few feet of water. They were in a circle all facing each other and dipping in the shallow water.  They must have had a school of bluegills in there.  When you see them, it’s hard to imagine they can even fly.  They must be light under all those feathers because they can glide a few feet above the water for a long way.   They aren’t the best looking bird, for sure, but just like a kid, they always are beautiful to their mother.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2008   THE POND Dave Hanson   If I recall right, Doug Johnson had been teaching at the Lab School on the old UMD campus in Duluth.  I was called to the County School Office in Duluth in 1964 for an interview for my first teaching job.   W.W. Salmi was the superintendent and wanted me to be the principal at Brimson.  I had no experience except student teaching and was as green as could be.  Ben Borken was a supervisor and told Salmi that I would have to keep records for the hot lunch program and keep track of the cooks, janitor, and bus run.  On my first and only interview, I was hired to teach 7th grade at Arnold School.   Wil Makala from Meadowlands, Doug Johnson, and I were the only teachers hired that year.  Most elementary teachers had been women, so the new trend was to hire some men in that field.   I never had a junior high school endorsement,  but I was desperate and would take any job I could get.  Our starting salary was $4700. a year.  The people who got hired on in Minneapolis got $5200. a year, but I felt the cost of living was cheaper up here.  Gwen and I were married and we had two children already and another on the way.   Arnold was an 8 grade school.  The ninth graders went down to Washington Junior High in Duluth, and on to Central High School.  Gwen had gone to those two schools a few years before and knew kids who lived in Arnold.   The school was a two story brick building and was probably built in the 1930’s.  It had been an independent district, but, because of financial difficulty, it became a county school.   I always had projects going on in the room.  I had requested an incubator and two $12. radios, for the seventh and eighth grades, for current events and news for our social studies classes.  I got an okay from the district and sent the order off to Sears, Roebuck and Company, but they had to go through the school supplies.  I never did get them.  I suppose they got taken home by someone who needed them more than our kids.  I finally bought my own 50-egg incubator.  I picked up a couple of boys from my class and went over to the University Experimental Farm nearby and got 4 dozen fertile, white leghorn eggs.  We had a pretty good hatch.  A few kids took some chicks home.  I had the kids plant tomato and cabbage seeds each spring to take home.   We had some protozoa and algae from ditch water in jars in the room.  The microscope was popular with the students.   The kids always said minnows came up in the fountain.  That wasn’t possible because the water was treated in the basement by the janitors.  It did smell bad and didn’t taste very good either.  It came from a pond on the other side of the road next to the school.   One day after school, I told one of my students, Terry Carl, it would sure be nice if I could get a sample of that pond water, but someone would get in trouble if they got caught jumping over that fence.  Monday morning Terry brought in a sample of swamp water in a pint jar.   I made a slide out of water from the jar we had all year.  It was crawling with paramecium and protozoa.  At noon I invited the 8th grade kids in to use the microscope.  Oh, I may as well invite the 5th and 6th grade kids in, too.   The next night there was a PTA meeting.  A near riot broke out.  I wasn’t there, but the boys were bragging about the pond water, and the parents from the community heard about it.  Ben Borken was the principal and stated that Typhoid Fever could break out if the janitors did something wrong with the chlorine system.  They drained the pond and used stainless steel milk trucks to haul water from Woodland a couple miles south of the school.  When the pond emptied, water was seeping in under the road from the school septic tank.   I was sweating.  I didn’t know if my rocking the boat and costing the school district a lot of money, would jeopardize my job.   I got out of Arnold and got back up to Gheen, when I got my job teaching in Cook.   I don’t know how much money they spent in Rice Lake Township.  A pipeline from Duluth was built to hundreds and maybe a thousand plus homes in all of Homecroft and Arnold.   I heard that red clay covered solid rock.  The bed rock rolls up and down in that township.  When they dug the pipeline in over the low spots in the rock, there was black, stinky slime from the run off of septic tanks draining for years.  I think they still have their own septic systems but everyone has pure Lake Superior water.   Gwen and I were visiting in Arnold and Duluth yesterday and were reminded by some people about the pond.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Tuesday, September 16, 2008   HORNETS Dave Hanson   When I added on to our house here in the late 1960’s, I had insulated and was nailing up sheetrock.  A black hornet flew in the open door and tried to grab every nail head on the white paper.  When I was a kid, I’d put grasshoppers on the sidewalk and the hornets would carry them back to their nest.  Honey bees collect yellow pollen for protein for their young, but wasps and hornets feed insects for protein and nectar for carbohydrates like bees.   They say the Chinese invented paper but hornets have been making it for millions of years.  It’s gray paper.  They don’t bleach it.  It’s fuzz off of old trees.   I think it was a really dry summer in 1952.  Louie Ayotte and his son, Lenny, were cutting pulpwood for Uncle Roy Hanson.  I remember Louie was allergic to wasps and got stung while working in the woods.  It seemed every chunk of rotten birch had a yellow jacket nest in those bark tubes.  A lot of nests were in the ground under old stumps, too.   In those days, balsam and spruce were cut in strips.  Roads were cut first and stumps had to be cut right at ground level so the drays could go right over the stumps in the road.  The trees were cut so they fell away from the road.  The limbs were cut off with a double bit axe and the 8 foot pulp was piled on both sides of the skid road.   After a couple of years, the windrows of slash grew up into wild raspberry brush.  The needles fall off and mulched the canes, so they grew 4 or 5 feet tall.  A person had to wear some kind of leather six inch shoes because dry balsam branches really scratch.   Mom would pack a lunch and take us kids out in the woods to pick berries.  When we were young, we kids ate most of what we picked.  Mom used a small tin lard pail on her belt to pick in.  She emptied this in a 10 quart milk pail.  She filled the milk pail nearly every time.  I wonder how many thousands of pint jars of raspberry sauce she canned and how many pints of raspberry jelly she made in her life.   “Mom, can I have some raspberries?”  It was always, “Yes.”  As a teenager, I almost always ate the whole pint jar myself.   Bears were always feared in the berry patch, but almost never were seen.  Wasps were a different story.  Probably more people were stung picking berries than at any other time.   Mom said Uncle Harold Hanson, who was younger than her, was burning the wings off of   wasps one time with matches.  Mom said he put his thumb over the hole in the wall, lit a match, took his thumb away and let one out.  Then he blocked the hole again.  She said his thumb looked like a plum.   We always called them hornets.  They built their nests inside walls, under porches, in haystacks, woodpiles under the eaves, and any dry place the queen decided.   Just about everyone got stung on the rear sometime in their lifetime.  Under the outhouse seat was where they had a nest.  Running in, in desperation, pants down, sitting down, and the door slamming  shut at the same time, riled the bees into a rage.  I suppose that’s where the phrase “Getting caught with your pants down,” came to be.   I wrote a story years ago about my folks, when first married, had a new “one holer,” out house.  One day when dad was away working, mom spotted a hornets’ nest under the eaves in back.  A lot of people burnt them out with a kerosene soaked rag on a long pole.  Mom burned the nest and, proud of her 19 year old self, went back into the house to bake bread for dad.  She looked out the window an hour later and the thing was on fire.  When dad got home a few hours later, the toilet was only ashes.  Dad teased mom many times about burning the ---- little house down.

From: Dave and Gwen Hanson To: Don Simonson Sent: Monday, September 15, 2008 THE GARDEN Dave Hanson   It was not the nicest place to be, pulling weeds in the garden.  We kids had to know the difference between the vegetables and the different kinds of weeds.  It seemed that dandelions and quack grass were the worst.  The tops break off and the roots sprout again.  It seems we weren’t very patient and mom ended up weeding most of the time.   It seemed that the rotten manure was the fertilizer of choice, but it fertilized the weeds just as much as the corn and beans.   Marvin Pearson told me years ago, that the Timothy grass and the clover didn’t come up by itself like it did years ago.  I told him he cut the hay early and it never went to seed like in the old days.  When hay is cut in late July and August, it is full of hayseeds.  When clover goes through a cow, the seed seems to sprout better.  The poor hay the cows didn’t eat was tossed under them for bedding.  It all got shoveled out into the manure pile.  A wheelbarrow of brown gold had a million seeds in it.   A lot of people in the country had gardens of various sizes.   Some of the people here in Willow Valley township bought potatoes and cabbage from the Polish people on the Guzman Road.  They always seemed to have wonderful crops.   By the time I was a kid most people had cash and could afford to buy groceries from the stores.  Cows and gardens started to disappear.  A lot of people felt peas and potatoes were so cheap to buy, why bother with a garden.  Those that had gardens did it as a hobby or else just to help out a little on the grocery bill for large families.   When the kids grow up and move away, garden vegetables make good gifts.  I don’t know who is rewarded the most, the recipient or the giver.   This year was so cool the broccoli and cabbage did the best.  We had only a few warm nights so the corn was a lot later than usual, as were the tomatoes.   The deer aggravate people to no end.  I always planted enough for us and the deer.  A few years ago, I built high fences around my garden and potato patch.  Now we get so much stuff we give a lot away.   I only watered a couple of times this summer and now there are cracks in the ground.  The spuds need an inch of water a week, so a lot of them are small.  In the other garden I only watered the cukes and tomatoes and beans a few times.  We got cuked out.  That’s what happens when you eat them everyday.  We gave a few five gallon pails of cukes away, and I don’t feel bad when the garden freezes.  You can only eat so much, and when a person gives stuff away , a lot of people don’t use it anyway.   One time my wife and mom  drove me down to Sally Rahikinen in Idington to get my back snapped back.  I crawled up her steps and after she snapped me, I walked down.  Sally had wonderful gardens and flowers.  Mom asked her, “Sally, how do you do it?”  She said, “Sheep ----!  It’s wonderful therapy to get your hands in the dirt.”   To a kid a garden is a chore.  To a middle aged parent, it’s economical, and to an old man like me, it’s a hobby.  It’s a place to think, remember, and dream.  Planning for next year is fun.   It must be wonderful for a seed company man to come up with one or two new varieties of a flower or vegetable in his lifetime.   The Garden of Eden was paradise.  My garden is only one small part of Eden.  It’s only one small part of paradise where I feel warm and happy.  I kind of feel that way in the woods, too.  I suppose to some city people, it’s unfamiliar and scary, but to me, that’s part of paradise, too.