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 rother, 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.