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On Frazer Bay

Early Years on Carlson's Farm

I was born Solveg Katrina Nelson on April 9, 1918, six months before World War I ended, at home on Carlson's Farm, 12 miles east of Cook, Minnesota. I was the fifth child of August and Anna Nelson. However, when I went to school, the teachers couldn't pronounce my name and took the liberty of changing my name to Sylvia Catherine, the name I have been known by since. I had seven brothers and sisters, all of whom were born at home with only a midwife or neighbor attending, with the exception of my brother Bill, who was a breach baby and a doctor was called. First born was Kamila Signora (b. Aug. 11, 1911) who always went by the name Signora; then Alf Christian Nicholas (b. Feb. 28, 1913); Lily Helen (b. Sept. 5, 1914); William (Bill) Oscar (b. July 28, 1916); myself, Solveg (Sylvia) Katrina (b. April 9, 1918); Astrid Louise (b. March 20, 1920); Roy Arthur (b. April 24, 1922); Erling Lief (b. April 29, 1924).

In 1918, the year I was born, there was a flu epidemic which killed 600,000 people in the United States. My father's brother, Axel, died in the hospital in Sudan at the age of 28, but we don't know if flu was the cause of death. His brother, my Uncle Nels, was very upset and wished he had died, too. He started drinking to try to drown out the sadness he felt at losing his younger brother.

I recall my mother taking me with her to visit a neighbor named Mr. Smollen when I was a baby. She laid me down on the bed with a white bedspread for a nap. When I woke up, Mr. Smollen was talking baby talk to me. He always called me Mrs. Smollen after that.

We also visited a friend, Mrs. Carlson, who had a restaurant in Aurora, Minnesota. My mother said that when I was a baby I never cried, and Mrs. Carlson asked what kind of baby that was that never cried. My mother would leave me sitting in a high chair every night while she did barn work. I didn't try to stand up so I know I was very young - maybe about 10 months old. I was very lonesome when I couldn't see my mother in the kitchen. There were four older kids, Signora, age 7; Alf, age 5; Lily, age 4; Bill age 3, and no one paid any attention to me. It seemed dizzy with kids. The next thing I remember was seeing a muskrat in the river. The river was not far from the house.

One day, my Dad butchered a pig and everyone was outside, but I was locked in the house and very upset about that. About the time I was born, my mother, who had been a professional cook in Norway, got a patent on a type of cooker she had invented. She never had enough money to have it manufactured. She also tried making cheese to sell (a skill she learned working at a cheese factory in Norway) but there was no one to sell it to. At that time, the area was very sparsely populated. She always said she wished she had some way to make money.

When I was very small, my father was driving a team of horses and couldn't get them to move from the spot no matter what he did. He decided to get down and come around to see what the trouble was and found me standing right in front of the horses, so they wouldn't go. I must have been around a year old.

Frazer Bay on Lake Vermilion

My father got into the logging business when I was quite young. He bought 80 acres about a 1/2 mile into the woods near Frazer Bay on Lake Vermilion in Northern Minnesota, in an area known as the "Iron Range". While he was building a big house for us to live in, we lived in the logging camp he had been running in the area. There were 12 men living and working in the camp and they had already been there for several years, coming around 1916. My mother cooked for all the men, as well as her own family. They thought she was a wonderful cook as she knew how to make all kinds of good food and fancy salads, having worked as a professional cook in Norway.

My mother and father didn't speak English when I was little. They spoke only Norwegian, which was my first language. My mother taught me a Norwegian song and I would go up in the hill and sing it by myself. She said I was only about two at the time. It goes like this....Yi ar so glad de are yull Kvel, for da var Jesus fet. Oh starne shane some I soor. Eh englen song so set. Translated to English means...How glad I am this Christmas Eve, the night of Jesus birth...and like the sun, the stars shone forth and the angels sang on earth. The older kids learned English when they went to school and I learned English from them.

In the spring, during the month of May, our place at Frazer Bay would look like a fairy land. After the snow was gone, the maple trees, choke cherry bushes, rose bushes and other trees on the hill would all be blooming at once. The air would smell like perfume. I would build roads of sand, cutting the brush to make trails.

When there was a big thunderstorm, I would take a chair and sit in the corner facing the wall until it was all over. Nobody ever noticed or asked why I was there. I would also like to watch the horses from the window as they pulled the big birch logs up the hill. My father would cut them up for firewood that we used for cooking and heating.

My brother, Bill, and I nearly got in trouble once when we were about five and three years old. We went into a nearby cabin and found a bowl of sugar lumps on the table. We crawled up on the table and filled our mouths. When we got back home, we got dirty looks from our mother.

When I was about four years old, a man named Tunel came by one day and took a picture of our house from the top of the hill. My sister Astrid, my mother, father and I stood out by the house posing so excited to have our picture taken. You could barely see us in the picture when it was developed.

We would all get home haircuts. I remember how I dreaded getting a haircut with my mouth all full of hair. Sisters Signora and Lily had long braids.

Since we lived five miles from the schoolhouse, the older kids, Signora, Alf, Lily and Bill had to board out at people's houses who lived near the school, since there were no busses and barely a road. The state paid for their room and board so they could be near the school. It was very lonesome for my sister Astrid and me, not seeing them. I would walk around outside all by myself and freeze. I watched the chickadees (they were quite tame) and I picked pussy willows and used them to paste on a rabbit drawing I made to make it look like fur. I was chopping with a hatchet once and chopped my thumb. I was afraid to admit I did it. We were never watched...we just took care of ourselves. My dad came home with a box of clothes in the wagon one day, and Astrid and I tried on the dresses. They were really nice and hers always looked better than mine, so I wanted to trade mine for hers.

About the same time, I remember my brothers and sisters coming home from where they were staying during the school year....all excited, telling a story about one of the men in the lumber camp who went berserk after drinking too much. He followed a fellow lumberjack as he was going out to work in the woods and took an ax after him and killed him. The kids saw the dead man laying on the ground on their way home from school. He then walked back to the camp where the cook, Mrs.Johnson, was standing in the doorway. He showed her the ax and was waving it at her. He kept walking down the Tower road and when he came to an area with about 6 mail boxes, he hacked away at the mail boxes with the ax. Our mail box was among those damaged and it always bore the marks of where he chopped it. He continued on down the road until he came to a bridge and started hacking away at the bridge. By then, the sheriff had been called and the sheriff took after the man and shot him in the stomach. He asked the sheriff why he was shooting him and then died from his wounds.

My mother never went to the store or handled any money. She said she didn't like to go to the store. My dad did all the grocery shopping in Tower. Everyone charged their groceries and paid their bill in the spring when they got paid. Some never paid. The store was 20 miles away and sometimes dad would walk the whole way and carry the groceries home. Uncle Nels would walk to do his shopping and always had a back-pack on his back. There was no refrigeration at that time. My mother would make out a grocery list, but it hardly ever had any meat or good things to eat on it. Mostly it was flour, yeast, lard, corn meal, kerosene, coffee, oatmeal, salt herring and salt pork. Nothing else would keep. In the oatmeal boxes, there would be a cup or some fancy dish for us to use.

In the baking soda box, would be one bird card and we used it for a game called "Guess the Bird". Flour was bought by the 100 lb. sack, syrup by the gallon and my mother baked bread almost every day. She also baked for the men working for my fad as piece cutters.

My father never, ever, talked to us kids, even when my sister Astrid and I were alone with him when we were two and four years old. When he was around, we didn't even dare talk to our mother. I remember being down at the lake when I was about seven, and happened to hear another kid talking to his father and I couldn't believe that he dared talk to his father!!. It seemed so funny to me. When we were grown up, after my mother died, he was complaining to my Uncle Nels that there was no one to talk to. There was a house full of people, but no one talked to him after we grew up.

I remember the whole family going to visit a family named Nelson across from Goodwill's Landing on Lake Vermilion. I think I was about three at the time. Dad tied two boats together since there were too many of us for one boat. The trees were full of blue army worms. Many years later, in 1982, I went to a reunion picnic at Frazer Bay and ran into Mrs. Nelson. She was 86 years old then and I hadn't seen her for 61 years.

In 1921, we went to Cook once and drove by to see them building a new school. We also went by the Cook Cemetery. My mother said to us kids, "How would you like it if I was in the cemetery?" We said nooooo!

In 1922, I remember my dad bringing over to our house, a neighbor, Mrs. Sjostrom, who was a mid-wife. We kids had to stay in the kitchen while they went in the bedroom to tend to my mother who was expecting a baby. When they let us in the bedroom, we saw a new baby on Mrs. Sjostrom's lap and she was putting some clothes on him. He was named Roy Arthur. Two years later another baby boy came with no mid-wife this time. My father told us that a little man came from under the bed. This was the birth of our brother Erling Lief, the last of the eight children born to our family.

One year my father planted potatoes and since we had no cellar, he buried them in the ground to keep over the winter. But, they all froze. The next year, 1924, he built a good cellar with bins in it and the vegetables kept real good. We had good gardens then. Some of the things we grew were rutabagas, carrots, potatoes, cucumbers, beets and parsley. When we planted potatoes, the plants would be full of potato bugs so we had to pick them off and spray them with Paris Green Insect Killer.

When I was five years old, a neighbor named Arthur Pearson came by to take a picture of me. It was March and very cold and windy. I went outside without a coat and my mother came out with a coat for me and the picture ended up with me having only one sleeve on. It is one of the few pictures I have of myself when I was a child.

My mother would buy yarn and knit mittens for all of us. It was my job to wind the skeins into a ball. Often she would stay up far into the night sewing clothes for us to wear. She made many nice things out of flour sacks.

Saturday night was bath night for the kids. We took a bath in a big wash tub in the kitchen, one after the other. The cleanest kid went in first. The water had to be heated on the cook stove and poured into the tub. My mother carried all of the water up the hill for household use and for washing clothes. She also carried all of the water for the cows and some would drink three pails at a time. In the winter, the cows would be locked in the barn. Once in a great while, my mother would let them out in the snow. They would go wild with excitement. The winters were very long and snow was on the ground from November 'til the last of April. The snow was deep in those years and the temperature would go down to 50 degrees below zero. We were not allowed to go outside in that weather.

We all had to move in one room (the bedroom) to keep warm. The windows were all white with frost and all kinds of Jack Frost designs would show up in the morning. Sometimes the walls were white with frost, too. There was no insulation and no storm windows. My mother would be frying pancakes in the kitchen and pounding her feet together to keep warm. Our house had no electricity, plumbing, running water, phone, radio, or TV Water was hauled from the spring. We had a cook stove and heater which burned wood which we got off the land. It was my job to polish the chrome on the cook stove with ashes, which worked quite well. We had very poor lighting, just kerosene lamps. When they smoked, my mother would fix the wick with a hair pin.

When we needed our shoes soled, my father would get his shoe repair box out from under the bed and cut up an old pair of shoes and make new soles out of them and pound them on the shoes. He never took our shoes to a shoemaker for repair.

My Uncle Nels would do a lot of hunting and trapping. He brought a deer over for us that he had shot and my mother made the most delicious meat balls and gravy, a real treat for us. He also brought over a mink to show us that he had trapped. Once my brother, Bill, and I stayed at his cabin for two days while he made us each a pair of skis. He had to plane the boards and cook them to get the right bend in them. He would tell us stories about the Indians. He said that years ago you could hear them beating their drums over the hill by the lake

An old bachelor who lived with my Uncle Nels came over to visit one day after he had been drinking. Someone noticed he was outside knocking on a tree instead of the door. Later, he was put in a mental institution in Fergus Falls.

My mother found out that some of the men were cooking moonshine (during Prohibition) at my Uncle Nels' place. She called the sheriff who came out and dumped it all out. One of the men commented, "We didn't even get a taste of it".

There were lots of mosquitoes and flies in the summer and we didn't have any screens on our windows. My mother would put cheese cloth over us when we slept to keep the bugs and flies away. The cows and horses would be covered with inch long horse flies and would have to be sprayed all the time.

My father was driving us home from school one day and decided to stop by the lumber camp. The cook, Florence, a big, strong, bossy lady, happened to notice that my father had been drinking. Right then and there, she made all of us kids get out of the truck and come into the camp. She wouldn't let us get back in the truck and she and my dad were arguing.

Finally, he had to go home without us and try to explain to my Mother where we were. We ended up spending the night at the camp and got picked up the next day. The lumber camps always had all kinds of good food on the table and Florence gave me a big piece of molasses cake, but I thought the flavor of the molasses was too strong and couldn't eat it.

My dad had many piece cutters working at his lumber camp. One was a family of Ojibways (native Americans). The woman worked right along with the men in the woods and they all stayed together way out in the woods. He also had three young brothers working for him from Southern Minnesota. The youngest brother, age 16, got lonesome for home and took off without saying a word.

My dad used horses for logging and once he was standing on the side of the road with his team of horses hitched to a load of logs when we kids came driving by with Myrtle Heglund (our driver) on the way to school. She tooted the horn as we passed by to greet him and the horses got so scared, they started running like crazy. They dropped the logs as they ran and arrived home with a totally empty sled.

In the spring, all the logs had to be hauled out of the woods before the snow melted in April. The pulpwood that had been cut all winter was hauled down to the lake and the landing was full of hundreds of cords of pulpwood and boxwood. All of the logs would be put in the water and chained together on the outside, then a big boat would come and pull the logs to the Tower sawmill, a distance of 16 miles. Working in the woods was not without its hazards. My dad was working with a fellow named Arthur Pearson who got a kanthook (a tool used to move logs) in his foot. Dad brought him home and my mother had to get the basin out and treat his injured foot.

The men who worked in the woods would buy crayons to mark the wood, but only used the colors blue and purple. They would give the rest of the colors to us kids, but blue and purple were my favorite colors so I wished I could have had those colors instead. There was a lot of snow down by Frazer Bay in the winter. It was usually about two feet high. We would like to make snow angels and snowmen. We would start with a little ball of snow and roll and roll it until we had a ball so big we couldn't push it anymore. Sometimes when we were pushing the big snow ball, it would clear the snow off the ground and we thought it was so funny to see bare ground in the winter. Once we found a big, frozen dead owl and brought it home. My mother always used to tell my little brother Erling that if he didn't go to bed at night the owl would come and get him, so we put the dead owl in the window at night to scare Erling.

I never heard of Santa Claus until I was six years old and in school. My mother said she never told us about Santa Claus because she couldn't afford gifts for us. We did have a Christmas tree though, and my brother, Bill and I would go out in the woods to find the "perfect" tree. When we found one that we thought was perfect in every way, we would cut it down and take it home. Then, we would find out it was way too tall for the house and would have to trim it down to size. My mother would decorate the tree with real candles and hang rolled icicles on the bottom of the tree which she made out of wax. We also made chains out of paper which we wrapped around the tree. When it was all decorated, my mother would light the candles, but only for 10 minutes, then they had to be put out so the tree wouldn't catch on fire. My sisters Signora and Lily would draw pictures and make a border high on the kitchen wall with their drawings. My mother made a Norwegian Christmas read called Jule Kage, rice pudding, beets, potatoes and lutefisk (cod soaked in lye). Sometimes she would bake a cake, too.

I saw a train for the first time in 1927 when I was nine years old. It went by a small store in Leander where we were visiting. It was exciting to watch and I was wondering why all the other people weren't excited to see it, too. Other things

I remember in the 1920's was money in the form of Indianhead pennies, buffalo nickels, half dollars, and silver dollars. The big news of the day was Lindbergh's flight alone across the Atlantic and the murder trial of Bruno Hauptmann who was convicted for the murder of the Lindbergh's baby. He was electrocuted, but I never believe he was guilty.

One spring, I ordered 40 packages of seeds to sell to try to make some money. I was going to sell them for 10 cents a piece. We had to walk all the way to Little Fork to sell them and I ended up walking a distance of 14 miles in one day. I would go in the swamp to pick iris. They liked to grow in water, so I waded in to get some nice ones when all of a sudden I started sinking. I quickly realized I was standing in quick sand and hurried out of there. Once I transplanted some giant ferns which grew in the woods. They were about five feet tall and really nice.

In the spring, suckers (a type of fish) would be running and Uncle Nels and my dad would take them out of the lake with a pitch fork since they were so thick. They filled a whole wagon with suckers and we kids would clean suckers for about a week. Everything smelled and tasted of fish. All the fish were smoked and we had them to eat in the winter.

We had gotten some new baby chicks and when they grew up, each of us kids had our very own pet chicken. My other, Roy, would sit on top of the barn roof with his pet chicken surveying what was going on.

My dad showed up one day with a gunny sack in tow. He dumped it out on the floor and out came a brown and white puppy. We named her "Dolly". When she got older, we found she had nine puppies under the garage floor. We raised one and called him "Bob". He was a real good dog. He killed snakes by biting their back bone. One day, someone shot him in the nose, but he lived through it. Another one of the dogs we had was very similar to a collie. Every time my dad started the car, the dog would get so scared, it would run 'round and 'round in the brush until it wore all the hair off on it's stomach. That's when cars were new and animals weren't used to them.

When my brother, Bill was about 10 years old, he was out in the woods walking on a logging road when he found and large amount of money. He saw that it was to pay the piecemakers with. He returned the money to the boss and all the boss said was, "Did you take any of it?" No thanks or anything. Bill thought he was pretty mean.

Bill and I liked to hang out in the horse barn. We had about five horses at that time. We would climb on their backs and under their stomachs and they never did anything to hurt us. When the horses went outside, I would follow, nudging heir legs when they stopped, they would go a short way and I would nudge them again. They were always very gentle and never tried to hurt us.

A cow we had named Bossie was quite mean. She bunted her calf, Molly, up on top of the gate with her horns. She was later attacked by a bear and died from her injuries. Molly, was usually very gentle, but one day, she got mad at me and chased me up the hill to the house. I just made it in time! We also had two pigs and I remember my sister, Astrid trying to milk the pigs when she was small. The pigs would come in the woods with us when we were picking blueberries - they were pretty tame. They liked to come down to the lake with us, too, and would follow us around, just like a dog.

Everyone was eating "mooseburgers" one year, when a moose got hit by a car between Virginia and Tower on Route 169. The carcass was given to the butcher who ground it up for burgers and sold them in his shop. One hunter went out hunting in the dark of night, and, seeing two sets of eyes, thought they belonged to a moose, so he shot at them. In the morning, he found he had shot two horses. He got a $500 fine, which was a lot of money in those days. Uncle Nels killed a bear and cut it up and put it in the cellar to keep. My father would go hunting and shoot a lot of partridges and rabbits. My mother would fry them up and make good gravy and soup with them. She would take the feathers and make quilts and my sister and I had a nice feather quilt on our bed.

At the end of the school year, we would have picnics down by the lake with everyone coming. My mother was famous for her baked beans and always brought a kettle full. We would bring the wind - up phonograph with for music. One year we decided to boat over to an island across the lake. A fellow there gave me a big bag of candy. I must have eaten a lot because I got very sick and was laying on a rock all day and could hardly walk home. I was sick in bed for a week and wondered if I had gotten poisoned. I wasn't taken to the doctor. About the only time I ever was to a doctor in my early years was when I had a sore on my arm and the teacher in school told my mother and father to take me to the doctor. My sister, Signora, went to the doctor once when she had severe stomach pains. My dad had to sell our ducks so he could pay the doctor. He never had any money saved for emergencies.

A family from Duluth decided to camp below the hill near our place. They had two kids, a girl, Muriel, age 9, and a boy, Bobby, age 5. The five year old boy jumped in our well for a swim. He must have thought it was a pool! Later, we saw the two kids over in the barnyard wading in the manure. My mother had made some porridge and the girl took it and smeared it all over her face and was looking in the window that night with her face still smeared up. We thought city kids acted really strange on the farm.

Every summer we would have to pick blueberries and raspberries to sell. We would bring our lunch and leave it with the property owner who let us pick on his land. At noon, he brought out our lunch and decided to eat with us. He was a short, heavy guy who liked to eat all the time. We would ask him questions and I remember asking him where our dad was and he would answer, "He went to Frazer Bay". We would pretend we didn't hear him and say, "What?, What?, and he would keep repeating himself. We got such a big kick out of that. If someone was out picking berries and didn't return on time, dad would get the gun out and blow through the barrel, making a loud sound so we could hear it.

One summer, a man came by and asked if we kids would like to pick a plant we called wintergreen. It is a low lying plant that stays green all winter. He said it would be used to make Christmas decorations. We spent a lot of time that summer picking and picking and picking until we had many big gunny sacks full. After all that work, the man never showed up to pick up the bags.

One 4th of July, the whole family was headed to Tower for a holiday celebration. On the way, the car had a flat tire and my dad got out and fixed it. We went a little further and had another flat tire. He fixed that one and a little while later, we had another one. Finally, he decided we couldn't go any further and it would be best to turn around and go home. My brother, Bill, was so mad and was crying and crying. We were all very disappointed and there was no celebrating that year!

My dad said we could go with him to Tower and brought us to Martilla's Store and bought us an ice cream cone. We sat in the back of the store and he came back three times, but never allowed us to leave the store and walk around. He left us sitting there all day until it was time to go home.

Dad came home with the horses one day riding on the dray. He was in great pain and had broken his ankle. That summer, he was picking blueberries on crutches. We had two horses named Jack who broke their foot stepping in a hole in the swamp at different times. Dad had to come home and get the gun and shoot them. They were big losses for us at the time, as a horse would cost about $75. One horse we had named Colonel, would stand by the kitchen door all the time probably waiting for something to eat. We would give him a piece of bread if we had any extra. One time he got very brave and came through the porch, right into the kitchen. We kids were alone at the time and scared to think of what would happen to us if our folks found a horse in the kitchen, so we had to figure out quickly how to get him out. He took up the whole kitchen and was too big to turn around. We finally decided to back him out and that worked fine.

When I was six years old and ready for school, we lived so far from the school that I had to be boarded out to people who lived near the school. My dad did try to get a road built that would go by our place at Frazer Bay and even had many people sign a petition, but it never got approved. So we continued to be boarded out to go to school. We never had enough to eat where I stayed and I was always hungry. Once my dad came by to visit and the people put a big platter of meat on top of the warming oven. My dad went home and told my mother what good food we had. Later, I told them that we never got any of that food, it was only for show. He brought some apples and they took them and served baked apples to everyone. I had never tasted an apple before. That was the only time in a year my father came by to see us.

In those days, cars were not very dependable. At one point, my dad had an old Model "T" Ford and when he went out to start it up, it started going by itself toward the field with him running after it. Somehow he caught up to it and stopped the car. When the lights went out, he would hang a lantern on the front of the car and get home that way.

On rare occasions, we would be allowed to go to Virginia with my mother and father, but, we were never allowed to get out of the car. My mother would be sitting in the front seat with the latest baby in her lap, while my dad went around tending to his business. I remember seeing him walk by eating something, but I don't remember ever getting anything to eat or even getting out of the car for the whole day.

My mother was learning how to drive the car was supposed to follow my father to town. He looked back and saw that she wasn't behind him anymore and couldn't figure out what had happened to her. He went back to find that she had taken a wrong turn and ended up in the gravel pit. He neglected to teach her how to back up so she had to stay there until he came to get her.

My father had to leave for about three weeks one time and was burning brush piles from land he had cleared before he left. You could see smoke and flames from far away and my mother told us not to go near there. He must have thought the fire was out before he left, but before long the fire rekindled and got bigger and bigger until it was burning around the whole farm. Trees were burning like match sticks and flames were seen as far away as Tower, 20 miles from our house. Firemen came out to fight the fire and got water by putting their hoses in the well (which never went dry). They fought that fire for a week and my mother cooked for the firemen while they were there. She was so scared the entire time, but kept telling us she wasn't afraid. The firemen left, thinking the fire was out, but my mother found stumps still burning and she would carry pails of water to try and put the remaining fire out.

With all the kids in the family and our parents pre-occupied with all of their work, we kids had lots of opportunity to get into mischief. We liked to climb on the roofs of buildings and my brother, Bill, got the idea of going up on the roof of Barry's place (who was a piece cutter for my dad) and filling the chimney with milk cans. He had me up on the roof stuffing the cans into the chimney. When Barry came home, he couldn't get a fire going, but his stove was smoking like crazy. He turned the damper and down came all the milk cans. I don't remember getting any punishment.

My brother, Bill, and I would get into some heated arguments and sometimes get into a wrestling match. I was as strong as he was even though he was two years older. In the middle of the fight he would stop and say, "let's be friends". I didn't like that at all and it made me even madder. My brother, Roy, was an active kid and very good at acrobatics. He liked to run and jump onto the bed. One night, it was dark in the bedroom and he took a running leap right onto the bed only to land on top of my dad who was laying there sleeping. My dad awoke and said, "Has the kid gone crazy?"

My sister, Lily and I decided to give our little brother, Roy a sled ride so she tied the heifer (young cow) up to the sled. The heifer started out slow, but when she found out she had something behind her, she started running as fast as she could and ran right over the top of the haystack. Luckily, the rope broke and Roy didn't get hurt.

We would have to go to bed early at night and my mother and father would be in the kitchen talking, enjoying the peace and quiet. Soon, we would start laughing and talking and carrying on. My dad would come and stand in the door way of our bedroom and yell at us to be quiet and we would get so scared, you could hear a pin drop. He would go back to the kitchen and as soon as my mother and dad started talking, we would start up again and sometimes he would have to come back a second time to shut us up. Mr. Fogelberg, a neighbor of ours, came by to visit and left his car parked outside near the house. All of a sudden they looked out and saw the car moving. They ran out and found my brother, Bill, age 10, driving the car.

We liked to sleep in the hay barn at night on the nice soft hay, until we found out it was full of snakes. In the winter, we wore 'overshoes' instead of boots and I recall trying to get my overshoe off and having a difficult time doing so. I pulled and pulled and when it finally came off, it flew across the room and landed in the sugar bowl where by father was sitting having breakfast.

I decided to try to milk one of the cows and put a device known as 'kickers' on her to keep her from kicking the pail over. I didn't know that she had never had them on before and she started jumping up and down. My brother, Bill, had to come over and take them off. My sister, Astrid, spent a lot of time working with the cows. One of the cows kept bunting the other cows with her horns so my dad cut the horns off, which really upset Astrid.

Bill fell down on the ice once and got knocked out. When he came to, he was confused and started walking home the wrong way. My brother, Alf, had a hard time convincing him to go the other way. Sister Signora was tripped on the ice by a neighbor boy and was knocked out cold. The boys were trying to get her to come to. We went swimming nearly every day, living so close to the lake. I learned to swim by hanging on to a birch log; one day, I let go....and I could swim! On the way home from the lake, we were pretty hungry so we decided to each eat a cucumber we took from a garden we passed. It was owned by a fellow named Mike. He saw us and followed us home. We were afraid to go in the house when we saw him go in, so we stayed away that night and slept in a cabin on the property. Our dad came in to see us and we pretended to be asleep, but in the morning, after he found out what we had done, he came and gave us a good licking. My mother and father gave Mike a whole pail of vegetables from their garden so he wouldn't be mad. Once in a while, we would dip Mike's cat in the lake just to be mischievous. Another time, we came across a boat sitting by the shore with a gun and coat in it. We decided to leave the gun alone, but dipped the coat in the lake.

Uncle Nels would always come to our place for water. He would fill two buckets and carry them to his place. When he got to the end of the clearing, Bill and I would drop handfuls of sand into the buckets and he had to go back and get more water. One time, we did it twice; he would get mad, but didn't say much.

Some people hired my dad to build a cabin for them on Lake Vermilion. He hued every log straight with a broad ax, and even went so far as to buy (and pay for) the doors and windows. My sister and I would walk over the big, blueberry hill and bring milk to those people every morning. They would give us a plum or something like that.

We were invited there one night to listen to the radio. It was the first time I heard a radio since they were invented in 1923. Mostly what we heard was static. They didn't turn out to be as nice as we thought as they never paid my dad for the cabin. In 1925, my dad hired a lawyer to try and collect the money, but since no contract was signed, he couldn't collect. We kids had to pick blueberries that summer for the money to pay the lawyer.

The men used to make moonshine down by the lake during the '20's prohibition. One year, they decided to make some beer so they would have something cool to drink when they came back from working in the woods. Well, my dad started drinking and didn't stop until the whole keg was gone. It took him three days and he was acting real crazy. That's when my mother sent me and Bill to the town of Little Fork to get the sheriff. My father got a fine of $30 and he was very mad at my mother for having him arrested.

One day we heard a strange noise outside and all ran out to see an airplane go by. We stared at it as long as we could and my dad took his hat off and stood waving at the plane. The next time we saw a plane was on a visit to Tower where there was a plane sitting on the ground. We all went over to touch it and thought it a real treat to be able to see, as well as touch, a plane.

There were no good jobs to be had in the area during the '20's. Once in a while a man named Arthur Erickson would come by and offer three days work on the road at $4.00 a day, or $8.00 with a team of horses. In those days, that was big money.

During the school year, we were boarded out to a family who lived near the school. When we went home for a visit, we had to walk 10 miles there and back. My dad would drive right by and never once picked us up to go home. At the end of the school year in 1924, we went home. After that, Dad drove us to school (five miles one way). He had a hard time starting the car every morning in the winter when it was cold and below zero . He would heat the car oil in the heater in the house to help start the car and was running back and forth, all excited and mad, because the car wouldn't start. There were four steep hills on the way to school and we were sure to get stuck on one of them. We would all get out and push and get our clothes dirty in the process. Once the car stopped and wouldn't start up again, so we had to walk quite a distance back home. When we got there, my mother noticed my sister, Signora's, feet were all white. She and my dad were all upset, but we thought it was funny. They put her feet in a pan with snow and thawed them out that way, a method they used in Norway.

Dad bought a truck and we tried going to school in that for a while. He put planks in the back for us to sit on and there was no heat. When we got to school the kids teased us about riding in a cattle truck. Then my mother and father decided it would be easier to get to school with a horse and wagon. Dad tried out one of our big draft horses who had never pulled a load alone, so all he did was stand up on his hind legs in protest. Next, we had an old mare named Maggie. She worked out all right, but sometimes she would fall down. Finally, we got a little horse named Topsy and she was great. She would run a mile at a time and then rest while walking, then run a mile again. My mother would put heated bricks in the bottom of the sled to keep our feet warm and wrap Army blankets around the sled, but it still was very cold for us at times.

In 1926, they hired an 18 year old girl from Cass Lake to drive us to school. For a while, she live with us. Later, another lady from Little Fork drove us to school and would pick us up a mile from our house where the county road started. We had to walk that mile and then stand there and wait for her to come and pick us up. Sometimes it was raining when she dropped us off an night and she told us to 'run between the rain drops'.

There were no snow plows to clear the roads in those days. My dad made his own plow and would have the horses pulling the plow to clear the road all the way up to Little Fork, a distance of about 4 miles. He never got paid for plowing and sometimes, the road would drift shut again. On a recent visit to the old homestead, all the buildings were gone, but I found remnants of that old snow plow sitting in the clearing.

When dad came home for dinner after working in the woods all day, he would be covered with snow and his mustache was thick with ice. My mother would take the broom and sweep him off before he could come into the house. He often brought work into the house during the winter where it was warm. He would spend all day repairing harnesses on the kitchen floor, or he would file (sharpen) his saws. The squeaky noise of the grinder used to drive me crazy.

The winters were brutally cold and we all tried many ways to keep warm. We laughed at the neighbor who would put a blanket on to keep warm and cut a hole cut in it for his nose so he could breathe. Winter was a difficult time for the animals, too. My dad was taking a team of horses across the frozen lake when one horse fell through the ice and drowned. He barely saved the other horse. Losing a horse was a major loss for us.

Walking over to a neighbors, it was so cold and blowing, I froze my whole ear. My teacher in school noticed it and made me go to a doctor. Another time, I froze my finger carrying my books home from school. In the morning, I would wash up without putting my dress on, and because it was so cold, I would slip my coat on instead. One morning, I was on my way to school when I noticed I didn't have my dress on. I was four miles from home and had to get out of the sled and walk all the way home. I could hear the men cutting trees in the woods and was afraid they would see me and ask what I was doing out of school.

When I was in the 4th grade, I was given an assignment to speak about Abraham Lincoln's life. The doors between the two rooms were opened up and I had to talk in front of the whole school. The girls at school had a big playhouse behind the school. One day, they decided to have a party and invited the teachers and students to come for sandwiches and cake. I wanted to go, too, but wasn't invited, so I stayed in the school by myself while everyone else went to the party. When a kid got sick at school, he or she was told to go upstairs and lay down. My sister, Lily, and I got the idea of saying we were sick so we could go upstairs and lay down, too.

I had injured my heel one time and couldn't walk home, so I got to stay upstairs with the teachers that night. I remember reading a book about Robin Hood to pass the time. Another girl, Alfreda, and I pretended we didn't hear the bell in the morning and hid in the closet. Everyone was looking for us, so we finally came out. At recess time, the teacher would sometimes have us run back and forth across the field. It was quite a distance and, in the spring, there were lots of buttercups growing in the water in the woods. One year, the river flooded and we all went down to see it. One of the girls and I saw a log in the water and decided to go across the river on the log. I made it, but she fell in up to her neck. I will never forget the look of fear on her face as she fell. She hung onto the log and somehow, made it out of the water. The teachers had to take her upstairs and give her a bath and clean her all up. Once during class, we heard a shot and looked out of the window to see a man running across the field. Here the janitor, Bernard, had just shot a deer. We had gas lights in the school (no electricity) and the janitor would put mantles n the lanterns. It was hard for the kids to resist poking their fingers into the mantles.

Angora Township

The time had come to leave Frazer Bay. My sister, Lily, had reached high school age and we had to move so she could get to school. We heard from a neighbor that school started a month later in Angora, only to find out later this wasn't true. So we had only one day to pack up our bed clothes, dishes, silverware and clothing. All 10 of us and the dog moved in our old Model T Ford. We had to sleep on the floor of our new two room house until my dad moved the furniture over. We got up early for school and took the bus, as it went right by the house. It felt strange being in a different school and we were surprised to find out that this school wasn't at all as nice as the one we left. The house we rented, however, wasn't very nice. The roof leaked and sometimes, when it rained, everything in the house was wet. We lived in that place for three years. Dad had bought 80 acres of land nearby and was building a house on it. He sold some cows to pay for the land. But, in 1929, the Depression hit and he couldn't keep up the payments or taxes. He lost the land, but went to see a lawyer to ask his advice about what to do about the house. The lawyer told him he could take the house with if he moved it within a year. He tore the house down and took the lumber with.

The new house was haunted. At night, we could hear water cans moving down by the well and a woman would walk around the house at night. It reminded me of when I was little and my Uncle Nels and my mother would sit around telling ghost stories. I would really get scared when I heard those stories.

The depression hit us hard with no work for my father and a big family to feed. I remember when dad didn't have a way to get to town and we were all out of groceries.

He had to walk to Cook (10 miles away) and brought back 100 lbs. of flour which he pulled home on a small sled. Free commodities such as cabbage, powdered skim milk and corn meal would be given out to people. At the Cook Creamery, you could go and get five gallons of buttermilk and the Nylund's bakery in Cook gave away day old bakery.

We kids all attended Sunday School at the Lutheran church and were confirmed. We were taken to Virginia by bus to have our picture taken after the confirmation. For a time, we went to the Miller's (a neighbor) for Sunday School.

In the winter of 1930, when I was twelve years old, we liked to go down by the beaver dam and clear the snow off the ice and skate with all our friends and neighbors. We would bring the phonograph and dance on the ice and play "Skip to My Lou". Everyone said it was the best time they ever had in their life.

The neighbors (Jack Aro's, Harold Miller's, Carl Brown's) and our family got together and built a cabin at a small lake in the woods across the road. The women and girls would go with and we would spend the day together by the lake. We also would go to the Aro's for a sauna and to Wilman's (now the South Switch) store in Angora.

In the 8th grade, I went to school in Idington. I had to walk four miles to Angora to catch the school bus. A German shepherd dog that had been taught to attack came after me one day, growling and showing his teeth. I put my jacket in front of my legs and stared at him, walking backwards the whole time and that got me away from him without being attacked.

All the kids at Idington School were Finnish. There were about 80 of them and I, being Norwegian, wasn't accepted at all by them. It was a very difficult situation for me. I got a letter from Mrs. Nordstrom who knew of my problem and she said I could come and work for her and go to the Cook School where I had friends. I was glad to go because there was no place for me at home with 10 people living in one room and I wasn't happy going to the school in Idington.

There were 10 of us at the Nordstrom's (6 girls--Bernice 12, Mary Louise 11, Geraldine 10, Donna 7, Rachel 4, Coleen 2, their father & mother, a hired hand and myself). The house was an old log house with two rooms downstairs and two rooms upstairs. I slept in one room upstairs with the whole family and the hired man slept in the other bedroom by himself.

We got up a six every morning and It was my job make breakfast and to milk two cows and separate the milk from 12 cows before I left for school at 8:00 AM. I would give the girls haircuts and fix their hair for special occasions. I also cut the father's hair and he would give me a quarter each time.

Every Saturday, I washed clothes (over a washboard, by hand) from eight in the morning until five at night. My knuckles would be raw and bleeding from scrubbing clothes and they wouldn't heal from week to week. The lady of the house told me to scrub the clothes and not my knuckles when she saw how bad my hands looked. I hung all the clothes outside and in the wintertime, they froze stiff and have to be thawed out inside. After washing clothes, I had to scrub all the floors, upstairs and down with a scrub brush. The floors were all big, wide rough boards and it was very hard to scrub. I finished at nine in the evening. I had only a light jacket with no lining to wear to school and during one period, it was 30 degrees below zero for the longest time, when we had to wait for the school bus in the morning. I stayed there for one year.

The town of Angora, which was about four miles from where we lived, had a big fire one year. The lumber yard, the post office, Maki's store, Loew's store and the school all burned down. After that, there wasn't much left to Angora and still isn't to this day.

We moved to another place in Angora when I was about fourteen years old. My mother and dad bought a farm with about 88 acres of land. There was a big house on the property, but it had been abandoned for years so my dad built a one room log house with separate buildings for the boys and girls to sleep in until he could get together enough money to fix the big house up. There wasn't any water on this place either which meant we had to haul water with the truck for use in the house and for the cows to drink. My dad was always trying to find water near the house and kept digging wells, but with no luck. One night when a neighbor brought my sister Lily and me back from a visit to his house, he backed up right into one of the holes my dad had dug. They had to pull the car out.

Another night, I was walking along with Lily and we were having a good time talking and laughing, when suddenly, it got very quiet. She disappeared and fell into another one of the old wells my father had dug. She didn't get hurt; luckily, by then the hole was full of weeds and bushes which broke her fall.

My father always liked to listen to the news on the radio and would come running in the house to listen when it was time for the news. There was a big can of buttermilk sitting in the middle of the floor and he came running in as usual. It was dark in the house and he didn't see the can sitting on the floor and tripped over the can spilling buttermilk everywhere. A neighbor, Sanford Nashland, told me about the time my dad was driving home from Cook when he had too much to drink. He came around a corner, going too fast, and ended up in the ditch. He had a can of buttermilk in the car which he had picked up at the creamery in Cook. The cover came off and dumped all over him. Sanford said he came by and asked my father what was going on. He said my dad was just sitting there swearing.

Bears would come around the farm at times and once, we heard the pigs squealing like mad in the shed. Bill, ran out with the ax in his hand and found the bear in with the pigs, but the bear took off and got away. Another time, when the car broke down at night, we had to walk home in the pitch black darkness when we heard a tramping in the woods. My mother got real scared and wanted to go back to the car, but my father said we had to keep on going. We were sure it was a bear we heard. I spotted something that looked like a big stick on the road and was going to reach down and pick it up to throw it on the side of the road out of the way, when it slowly started to crawl away. It was some kind of a big snake. My mother would keep a can of milk in the natural spring to keep it cool. When she went to get the milk she found a big snake on top of the can. She never did tell us about it until years later or we probably wouldn't have drunk the milk.

Once in a while a carnival would come to Cook which was an exciting time for everyone. During the show, a farmer named Little Johnson was outside the tent peeping in through a hole in the tent. Someone saw him and said, "There's two google eyes" and knocked him down from inside the tent. Timber Days would be celebrated every summer in Cook. All the lumberjacks would come to town to celebrate. When they would get loud and unruly, they would be put in a boxcar and driven around town.

They would always laugh and kid about who would end up in the box car first. Guns and knives were unheard of and even fist fights were few.

We liked to listen to President Franklin Roosevelt's "Fireside Chats" and speeches on the radio during the Depression. The speeches he gave seemed so important to us. He started the C.C.C. (Civilian Conservation Corps) Camps and my brother, Bill, went to join from our family and was sent to Montana to work. He received $25.00 a month which was sent home to the family and he was given $5.00 a month for himself. There was a C.C.C. Camp in Idington and they had the boys clearing brush along the road. We girls would walk by and the boys would always be yelling and whistling at us. One of the boys, Jimmy Nichols from Missouri, would come and see me where I was working. He and I were walking to a neighbor's house in the middle of winter and I froze one of my ears solid. I put snow on it and thawed it out, but one of the teachers in school noticed my ear and made me go to a doctor. Later, when Jimmy left, we wrote to each other and he asked if I had frozen any more ears.

I remember listening to Adolph Hitler rant and rave on the radio in the 1930's. I also remember Orson Welles famous "War of the Worlds" radio program where he put on a drama about Martians landing in the United States. Listeners thought it was the real thing and panicked, even leaving their homes to escape.

During the summer of 1933, when I was fifteen years old, I got hired at a resort, working on an island in Lake Vermilion called Sunset Island. The people who owned it were name Soderstroms. I waited tables and helped with breakfast dishes, along with cleaning the cabins and washing the dining room floor before breakfast. Every week, Mrs. Soderstrom and I would wash clothes (including towels and sheets) starting at 3:00 AM down in the basement. We heated the water on the stove and then scrubbed the clothes on the scrub board. Then the clothes were rinsed, wrung out and hung on the line to dry. She would put all the sheets and flat items through a mangle. We finished around 7:00 AM. After that, I would wash the floors. My pay was $5.00 a month, working seven days a week. Once a guest gave me $2.00, which made $7.00 for the month. When I came back home, my father asked me how much money I made and I told him I made $7.00. He said, "Why didn't you stay there and get $7.00 more?"

One 4th of July, the family went to Tower with some of the guests and left instructions for me to clean the toilet and other miscellaneous jobs while they were gone. I didn't think it was very nice of them to leave me alone to work when they went to town to celebrate and I wished I could have gone with. The island was loaded with raspberries and I would pick pail after pail for the people I worked for. The sun was so bright and my arms got so dark from the sun.

One day, a neighbor boy from Angora, Lyle Miller, stopped by the resort to see me. He had been working in the C.C.C. Camp in Bend, Minnesota and was renting a cottage on Sunset Island. I didn't know he was going to come for a visit, but got bawled out anyway for having him there.

I liked playing baseball in high school. As a matter of fact, I was on the baseball team every year from the 8th grade through high school. The athletic teacher thought I was a good player and said about me, "We have a Babe Ruth here!". We played a lot of baseball during our lunch hour, too. There were 80 girls in our gym class at Cook High School. We also played basketball and one time we had to see how many baskets we could make in one minute, standing wherever you wanted. I made 16 in one minute which was the most anyone made.

I worked for another family during my last two years of high school. I would baby sit for their three kids, John Peter-4 years old, Beth-3 years old, and Billy -6 months old. I washed all of the diapers for the baby for two years. In the morning, before I started breakfast, I would run down to the Christmas Tree Factory to get wood to start a fire. One day, I couldn't get the fire going and the lady wasn't too pleased that nothing was started when she got up. I didn't have an alarm clock and would get up when it got light out. One time, the bright moonlight fooled me and I got up thinking it was morning and got ready for school only to find out it was 1:00 o'clock in the morning.

I graduated from high school in 1936. There were 46 graduates in my class. I was at the top of my class and they were figuring my score to see if I would be valedictorian, but the honor went to a girl named Gladys Johnson with Jane Storm, the salutatorian. They gave the speeches at the ceremony. We all marched into the big auditorium with our caps and gowns and had our pictures taken. By this time, I had met and been dating, my future husband, Jerry Beranek. He attended my graduation.

Love and Marriage

I met Jerry when Hubert Trygg, who was dating my sister, Lily, brought him over to the house as a blind date. He was a very tall, good looking fellow, with black wavy hair and striking blue eyes. I learned that he had grown up in Chicago, the youngest of seven boys born to parents who came to this country from Bohemia. His mother died in childbirth when he was a year and a half old, and his father placed the three youngest boys in the Bohemian Orphanage on the North Side of Chicago. His father, John, sent to the old country for a new wife, Hannah, who he was married to until he died in 1939. But, she didn't have any interest in raising the three youngest boys and they were left in the orphanage until they were old enough to work. Jerry left the orphanage at the age of 15 and worked in a department store. (His father actually changed his birthday to make him older so he could go to work). All of his earnings were given to his step mother, except 25 cents a week. A family friend from Cook, Minnesota--Charlie Kirch (who knew Jerry's father in Bohemia) asked if he could take young Jerry up to Minnesota with him. Jerry had never been anywhere outside of the orphanage or his neighborhood in Chicago and wondered what kind of a place he was being taken to. The trip took three days over muddy roads full of holes and ruts. The year was 1930. He started out working in a lumber camp and became the 'bull cook' (cook's helper). Later, he was hired as a farm hand at the Haley's farm near Cook.

We dated for a year and were married on August 6, 1936 in Virginia, Minnesota. After we married, the neighbors had a chivaree, where they come in the middle of the night making a lot of noise, trying to disturb us as much as possible. The ladies had a shower for me and I received many nice things.

We lived in an old school house near the Haley Farm when we were first married. Then we decided to moved in with Charlie Kirch since he had a nice, big house and offered to let us live there, rent free. Charlie lived there with his brother, Jim, and a fellow named Victor Dahl. I cooked for them and washed their clothes, also chopped enough wood for the entire winter. Our daughter, Jane, was born while we lived there in 1937.

The Neilo Jarvinen's had a house trailer across the road from us and we became pretty good friends with them. We would play cards together and the men hauled logs to the road for the train to pick up.

I would get up at 4:30 in the morning to cook breakfast and make a lunch for Jerry who was still working at the Haley Farm. He walked two miles each way, morning & night since we didn't own a car. It was his job to take care of the horses before they went out in the morning and bed them down at night as well as doing other farm chores. He would come home at night very tired. I would walk over to nearby neighbors to visit--the Crooks', Schulze's and Refsdahl's. I would take the baby with in a buggy someone had given me, but it had the habit of collapsing in the road all the time.

We stayed at Charlie Kirch's for a year and then Neilo Jarvinen heard there was a job digging ditches up at Ash Lake, about 60 miles north of where we lived. We moved into a little house which was built into the side of a hill. They wanted $15 a month rent, but Jerry said he would only pay $10. There was a hole in the roof and when it rained, we would have to keep a big tub under the hole and keep emptying it. It rained for two weeks while we were there and the water came up about two feet above the bridge. The house was about 20 feet from the edge of the lake and Jane was 15 months old by now and had to be watched every minute. Jerry and Neilo went all the way to Orr to buy shoes for their job and when they got back, they opened one of the boxes only to find out was only one shoe in the box. They had to drive all the way back to Orr to get the other shoe. The job of digging ditches didn't amount to anything because they were supposed to be paid by the cubic yard, but it turned out that the men would have to cut trees down first, so the job fell through.

So we left Ash Lake, and moved into a little two room house outside of Cook, renting from Amanda Carlson. The rent was $3.00 a month, but Amanda didn't want to take any money, but instead wanted Jerry to do the haying. I also worked haying for them. There was no water or electricity or plumbing in the house, so I got water from the river which flowed nearby, or melted snow in the winter. Our son, Jimmy, was born while we lived there in 1940. Jerry worked at several different jobs while we lived there. He worked for 35 cents an hour on the dray line, did some building in Cook, also bartended in the liquor store in Cook, and even worked at the granite quarry in Ely. For two months, he worked for the W.P.A., Works Progress Administration (a program started by President Roosevelt). He earned $15 a week and said they didn't work hard at all. The men joked that W.P.A. should have stood for "We Poke Along".

Eventually, in 1941, Jerry had to return to Chicago to find work as jobs were very scarce in the Cook area during the Depression. He found work in Chicago and stayed with his brother, Otto and his family. It wasn't long before I sold our possessions and packed up a few things and moved to Chicago with Jane, Jimmy and my brother, Erling, who drove us down in his old Model T Ford. We stayed with Jerry's brother, Otto, for a few days and then rented a flat on the West Side of Chicago. So it was, that I left behind my family and friends in Minnesota to start life anew in Chicago.

Although I have spent 58 years living in the Chicago area, my thoughts and memories always come back to the days when life was simple and my family was together On Frazer Bay.

Sylvia Nelson Beranek

1999

Epilogue

Sylvia currently lives in Cicero, Illinois with her youngest son, Terry who was born in 1956. Her husband, Jerry, died in 1982. Jimmy, her oldest son, married Sharon and had two children, Judy and Ricky. He and Sharon divorced and he later married Janet. He died at the age of 55 in 1995. Her daughter, Jane, (the author of this book) lives in Deephaven, Minnesota and is a widow. She had five children, Debra, born in 1956; Dale, born in 1960; Dawn, born in 1962; Heidi, born in 1968, and Christian, born in 1974. Four of her children live in the Minneapolis area. Her oldest son, Dale, died in 1996 after a brutal assault while fishing in a park northwest of Orlando, Florida.

August (Gust), Sylvia's father, spent most of his life working in the woods and farming. He died in 1955 when he was hit by a truck while flagging down help when his car broke down on highway Highway 53. Anna's lived her life for her family on the farm in Angora until her death in 1953 when she was 70 years old.

Signora (1988), the oldest child of August and Anna married and gave birth to three daughters, Arline (1983), Alice, and Dorothy (2003). She and her husband, Ward Kossow, split up and the children were raised in foster homes. Sylvia's oldest brother, Alf (1981), lived at home most of his life and never married. He worked odd jobs and cut pulpwood for a living. Bill (1991), served in the Army in World War II in Sicily, Italy, and North Africa and was discharged as a Corporal. He spent most of his life in the Cook area, was never married and worked for the railroad, the town of Cook's Water Dept., also, cut pulpwood, and farmed. Lily (1990) married Hubert Trygg and had two children, Ernest and Marlys. They moved to Evanston, Illinois in 1941 and later to Glenview, Illinois. She worked for Wieboldt's Department Store in Evanston and retired from there.

Astrid, the youngest girl, married Wilmar Johnson. She had two children, Arvid (Butch) and Violet. Butch was killed accidentally at the age of 21 when his car went over Loveland Pass in Colorado. Violet died of cancer in 1999. Astrid died in 1964 at the age of 44 of breast cancer. Roy served in the Army Infantry in World War II, was captured by the Germans and spent 14 months in a German prison camp. He has lived in Virginia, Minnesota for many years and never married. Erling also served in World War II in the Army's Tank Division, fighting on Anzio Beachhead. He married Clara in 1951, had two children, Edward and Lorraine, and lived in Evanston and Des Plaines, Illinois. He worked for Nabisco Co. until his retirement whe he moved to Las Vegas, Nevada. He passed away in 2001.