In the Horse and Buggy Days
The Memoirs of
Agnes Grytnes Borgström
October 15, 1899 -- December 28, 1996
My mother, Agnes Grytnes, was born in the horse and buggy days, back in 1899, when radios were unknown and the first airplane hadn't yet flown. Telephones, electricity, and automobiles were not part of the world she grew up in. It wasn't until she reached adulthood that women won the right to vote. By the time she died, at the age of 97, she had seen a lot of change; her life had nearly spanned the 20th century.
She left heirlooms and photos, and also some memories in the form of letters which she sent to me during her last years when she was living in Everett, Washington.
In these memoirs she takes us back to the first decade of the 20th century, an idyllic world, in the cornfields of Iowa and later in the dark woods of Wisconsin, where a one-room schoolhouse was also the center of community activity. Eventually the family moved to Minnesota.
She shows herself a capable story teller with a talent for words, telling mostly about her childhood years, saying little about the rest of her long life. And there certainly was a lot more to tell. In an age when women had few options, she was an independent person who launched a career as a dressmaker by which she supported herself, traveled and worked in various places like Denver and Seattle. Eventually she went north to Alaska where she married a miner, Sett Borgström, and lived in a remote mining camp.
She was a quiet, unpretentious person that you might not think of as someone who was capable of living in a wilderness where she might open her cabin door and find herself saying hello to a bear.
During the final weeks of her 97 years she suffered severe pain, but refused pain-killing drugs which would have confused her mind. It was an agonizing but courageous end which tells us something of the person she was.
At various places in her narrative I've included commentary of my own, in brown color type as you see here, so as not to confuse it with my mother's account which is in black. She wrote these letters towards the end of her life, when she lived in Everett, Washington.
Daniel Borgström
danielfortyone(at)gmail.com
***
The First Years, in Iowa 1906 -- 1908
Here it is winter, we got snow again. This morning it is sloshing in the street and white in the grass. So it looks like winter will be with us a while, but at least the days are getting longer. I have been thinking about that letter you asked me to write that has history of times past; I just don't know what to write about that would be of interest to you. What about if I write about what we did when we were kids?
In those early years Dad used to rent farms, they were pretty good sized.As I remember they were spoken of as sections of land. And there was plenty of work to do as soon as we were old enough to do anything.
This was in Iowa, and the farm we lived on when I was old enough to take part in things, we called "The Hill Place". We must have lived there about three years. I was then about 6, 7 and 8 years old. (1906-1908.)
The happening that was most imprinted on my mind was when the cyclone came. It must have been the summer I was seven. It was haying time and it looked like rain was coming. Mother and Dad were stacking hay, trying to get the stacks topped off before the rain came. Dagny and Freda took afternoon lunch out to the field about 3:30 p.m. I was left at home to take care of the younger kids: Ralph, Olaf, and Einar. As the afternoon wore on it looked like a storm was coming. It got darker and darker. It was warm and the air was so we couldn't hardly breathe. Then it got dark as night, the best thing I knew to do, I took the kids upstairs. We got into bed and covered up. This blackness must have come on quite suddenly, the folks of course were in a grand rush to get home thinking of us little kids there by ourselves. When I heard they were home we all rushed downstairs, my fright was over when Mother and Dad were there.
Then we all stood out in the yard watching the cyclone as it moved, picked up things and dropped them down, it was too dark to see what they were. The following Sunday we went to visit at Uncle John's. We drove by farms where trees were uprooted like you pull weeds in the garden. Some houses and buildings were destroyed, others left untouched. There usually was a grove of big trees in around the farm yard. We saw many cyclones after that, but they weren't so close and looked smaller.
Corn was the big crop, and in the fall when the pasture got dry and the cows were let into the hay meadow to graze, Freda and I had to herd them or watch them so they wouldn't get into the cornfields. They were not fenced.
We took the cows out in the morning and stayed till late afternoon. We of course had lunch with us. We learned how to tell time by putting a stick in the ground and look at the shadow. When the shadow was straight it was 12 o'clock, time to eat lunch.
For a pastime when the cows behaved, we played we had farms. We had sticks we put in the ground to make barnyards and stalls and pastures. We had stones for animals: horses, cows, calves, etc. The stones were special to us, nice ones we had picked in the field when we were pulling weeds in the cornfield as Dad cultivated. For people we braided grass and had quite a family, they all had names. We played, we visited back and forth, and we talked about our farm work.
Then of course we were interrupted and had to chase after the cattle as they wanted to stray into forbidden ground. This was mostly in the afternoon as they were getting their fill of grass and were looking for better things.
It wasn't all work, we had fun too, and we had a great imagination. Some of those stones we kept for years later.
Those days we didn't start school in the fall until this work was done and that was when the corn was husked from those fields. That was next to the hay meadows.
Those days kids weren't put in any certain class or grade because of age or size. They were graded according to what they knew. Big boys always had to stay home in the spring and fall to help with the farm work. So often the big boys would be in classes with kids half their size. Nobody thought anything of that. Discipline was never a problem those days. At least I never knew of any.
Nowadays they might talk about one-room schools like they weren't much. But those schools were good schools, we stayed in the same class till we were ready for the next one. All the education I have had was in one-room schools, and I think I have managed quite well. They taught the basic things.
I remember I was never too good in history. Some parts were all right but I didn't care to study about old wars and such, and I was glad we didn't live in a time when there was war. That was in the time of the past, people knew better in these times, or so I thought. But it wasn't many years later till we were in World War One.
We moved across the state line into Minnesota. We lived only one year on a farm farther north; then we moved on a farm that bordered the state line. We went to school across the line in Iowa. But after a year or so we couldn't go there any more. With all the neighbor kids and us it got to be too many. Then we had to go where we belonged and that meant walking three miles in deep snow in winter across fields to make it shorter. We managed that too.
It was while we lived there, I was 10 then, when Dad had us all lined up in the yard looking for a comet with a tail. Now when they are talking so much about "Haley's Comet" that can be seen this year and was last seen in 1910. That was 75 years ago. That must have been the comet we were looking for and Dad was pointing out to us as were gazing into the sky. As you know Dad was always well read and well informed on what was going on in the world. Now when I hear them talking so much about this Haley's Comet and how they clamor to see it, I think and feel quite sure that I saw it 75 years ago.
It was also at this time I had my first car ride. Our landlord bought a car and came and gave us a ride in it. It was quite a thrill but I was concerned when we went down the hill how he was going to hold it back so it didn't run away.
It was also during this time I saw my first show. A traveling show with an elephant came by our place, they were on their way to Kiester, our town. Shows traveled from one small town to another in summer those days. This show was "Uncle Tom's Cabin". Then Dad said they would take us all to see the show that night. We were a bunch of excited kids. I can remember the elephant performing. All I remember of the show was little Eve so beautiful in a white dress. It was a memorable evening.
This farm was what we called the Røvang place. I have many happy memories from this place but I have written enough for now. If you are interested and care about these stories I can write more next time. We left this place when I was 12 years old. We moved to Wisconsin and bought our own land, which was a great event in our lives.
* * *
Norwegian Communities
These were Norwegian-speaking communities that they lived in. In church, the language was Norwegian and Mother was confirmed in Norwegian. "Decorah Posten" and "Skandinaven" were the Norwegian newspapers they read. And the storekeeper in Leland, who was a "Yanki," had to learn Norwegian. Mother says he learned it quite well.
Mother learned to read Norwegian at the age of 4, sitting on her father's knee. In those days it was the custom of many Norwegian families to teach their children to read Norwegian at home. Later, at the age of 5 or 6 she entered public school and learned English. So English came to replace Norwegian as her first language, and it was in English that she wrote these memories.
But she did keep up her Norwegian and throughout her life she corresponded in both languages. She also used to read me stories in Norwegian, and she once wrote me a letter in that language which I have saved as a memento of the fact that my mother was bilingual.
She was 86 years old when she wrote the first part of her story, that of her years in Iowa. It was another 5 years before she took up where she left off and tells of the move to Wisconsin, where her Uncle John had moved and bought a farm.
This uncle was her mother's brother. Johanes Kundsen Rotö¸ was his original name, but on coming to America he Anglicized and shortened it to John Knudsen.
Here is part of a letter in which my mother tells of a tragedy which befell her uncle and aunt:
We always just called him "Uncle". He and Aunt Kjerstina were the close relatives we had and they were very special people to us. How he came to buy that farm and move to Wisconsin I do not know or remember; looking back at the years it seems he could not have been there more than about 3 years or so.
When they were living near us in Iowa a young man who may have been a relative came from Norway and lived with them. After he had been there some time he came down with TB. He went back to Norway where he later died.
Later Uncle John and Aunt Kjerstina moved to Wisconsin. They had not been there very long when she also came down with TB. She evidently contracted it from this man. It must have been in the winter of 1911 that she died. Dad went up there for the funeral, and then he decided to buy land up there. We moved up there a year later in 1912.
* * *
Mother saved a few letters and post cards dating back to those years. There's one with a postmark of 1911 in which her sister Freda mentions the death of Aunt Kjerstina. Another is from Uncle John, written a couple years latter and sent from Colorado. What follows is a continuation of her account.
To the woods of Wisconsin
This is the finish of my childhood story that I wrote a few years ago. I was 12 years old now so most of my childhood is in the other story.
We came to Wisconsin in the winter. It was all so different from what we were used to. Now we are in the woods where farms are made by clearing the land to make fields and homes. We were used to the big open spaces with large fields and a grove of trees around the farm yard. Our new land was all woods.
We lived on my Uncle John's farm the first couple of years while Dad got some of our land cleared. He hauled the logs to the nearby sawmill to cut into lumber with which to build a house for ourselves as well as barns and stables for the cattle and horses. All was a new experience for us.
Us kids went to the Rocky Ridge school which was about a quarter mile to walk on a winding road through the woods. Myself and 4 younger brothers, we made quite an addition to the school. We were all made welcome by the school and neighbors. Neighbors lived closer here than in Minnesota. The farms were not so big, being carved out of the woods.
One of my first scary experiences was when my sister Dagny and I were going to a neighbor on an errand one moonlight evening. There was an owl hooting in the trees. We didn't know what it was. We got scared, turned around and ran home. Later we learned it was an owl. We had to get used to the noises of the woods.
Our nearest town was Lewis, just a small railroad stop with a store and a few buildings. Frederic was our address, a mail route went out from there. We lived about 7 miles from Frederic, I think that is where we went when we needed to shop for anything other than groceries. Lewis was about 3 miles, I think. Clam Falls was about 3 miles in the opposite direction; we were about in the middle.
Clam Falls was a river town on the Clam River and it had no railroad. In the real early days their transportation was the river and so when we were there it was not the town it had been in the early days, but the falls were still there. Also, our church was just across the road from the Clam Falls school. I walked there when I studied for confirmation at the church. The church is still there very much alive. We went by there to see the church when I was back there with Freda in 1968. The door was unlocked so we went inside, everything was new or updated, new stained glass windows with memorials, names on them of people that were leading members of the church when we were there. Also a basement equipped with kitchen and dining room or fellowship hall as we call them now.
In Wisconsin we had to take state exams to graduate from the 8th grade. They were taken in two parts; the first half at the Lewis school where the 8th graders met, and the second half at the Clam Falls school. At the county seat in Balsam Lake they had a big doings for the graduating 8th graders. That was 15 or 20 miles away, a long distance those days. We were three of us from our school that were there, 2 girls and one boy. We took the morning train from Lewis and came home on the afternoon train. There were a spelling contest and speakers, and diplomas were handed out. I was in the spelling contest, having won in the neighboring country school contest. But I didn't win that day. We had a big day with food and fun.
Not many kids from country schools went to high school. We would have to go to a nearby bigger town, live away from home and come home on the weekends. This was expensive and also inconvenient. It was something most parents couldn't afford. Later the country schools were consolidated and kids were bussed to town where there was also a high school. This took place many years after my school days.
The one room school house was the center of all social activities in the neighborhood. The teacher put on talent plays and basket socials to raise money for things needed at the school. When the school house needed a new roof they had a shingling bee. The men of the district came to shingle the roof, the women brought food for a picnic dinner. It was both a social and work day. When the day was done there was a new roof on the school house, and there had been lots of food and fun for the whole family.
There was no well at the Rocky Ridge school so my brothers carried a pail of water each school day. They were paid ten cents a day, and were happy for the job. We put a dipper in the bucket, that was our water system. We must have been a healthy bunch of kids, I never knew of us catching anything from one another.
The heating system was a wood burning stove with a sheet metal jacket around it in the corner of the room. Two brothers who walked 2 miles to school were the firemen. They came in the morning, started the fire to warm up the room by the time the rest of us came. They tended the fire all day.
It happened sometimes that one of the kids forgot to bring his lunch bucket into the schoolroom and left it out in the hall. By noon the lunch would be frozen so they couldn't eat it. We all shared our lunch with them and there was plenty for all.
There was the day when a traveling show passed by on the road to town. Those days traveling shows went from one small town to another, they stayed a few days in town, they were tent shows. They had animals trained to perform cute acts among other things. This day they came by the school, and we all were stretching our necks to see. Then the teacher excused us so we could go out and have a good look. The teacher wouldn't take this small please away from us. She knew we wouldn't be studying anyway while this show was passing by. We all lined up for a good look. The animals were in colorful painted wagons drawn by horses followed up by an elephant walking behind. "A real live elephant walking by our school!" It was a red letter day for us. Maybe we would get to see the show while they were in town some evening.
Valentine's Day was appropriately observed with a valentine box. We all gave each other a valentine, they were mostly home made. But most kids managed to have a store bought one for the teacher. I didn't have a store bought one for the teacher so I made one. I cut out a heart shape, covered it with tissue paper. I made little pink tissue paper roses (with Mother's help), put around the edges of the heart a pink silk ribbon bow in the center with "Be my Valentine," and a ribbon to hang it up by. I was satisfied that I had a nice valentine for the teacher. But I was not prepared for what happened when the valentines were opened. The teacher held it up in front of the school for all to see this beautiful home made valentine. She wanted the kids to see how much she valued home made things. They did not have to be store bought to be nice. All eyes were turned to me. I should have been proud, but I felt so embarrassed. If the floor had opened up and swallowed me I would have welcomed it.
Then we had a young man teacher who was good at making up plays and programs with entertainment and basket socials. He used to ask the boys if they would stay after school, and he would cut their hair. He wanted them to look nice and neat. Parents were happy that he wanted to do this job. It was this teacher that named the school "Rocky Ridge". It was a very appropriate name and it stayed.
Rocky Ridge school got its name from outcroppings of rocks, on the north side I think. The school house was on level ground but on the north side was a steep rocky hill and like a valley below. The road made a bend around these rocks, but last time I was there with Freda (in 1968) the road was made straight, the rocks cut down as they do now with modern equipment. All those winding roads that I remember were made straight, sometimes that made it hard to recognize places, so many changes had taken place.
The school house was gone. Only cement steps remained. There were planks when I went to school. The cement had been put there later. It was sad to see the schoolhouse gone, it contained so many memories. Two years ago (apparently 1989) there was a reunion for all who had attended Rocky Ridge school. How much I would have loved to be there.
My sister Dagny's sons Merle and Dewey were going to school there when their mother died. Then I stayed there helping to care for them a while; that was in the early 1930s. So you see the school was there for lots of years after I was there, maybe all through the thirties. So there should be many of those pupils still living. I would be one of the oldest.
On the last day of school a picnic was held in a wooded area joining the school ground with benches or tables. The mothers brought food including the makings of ice cream. Some of the dads would be there to turn the ice-cream freezer so we had home made ice-cream. While the parents got the food ready the teacher entertained the kids with games and fun. I usually had a new dress for this day. The boys had new overalls with nice shirts. It was a dress up holiday.
In the winter evenings my brothers and I would play school. We learned the capitols of all the states. The leader we had chosen would name the state; then we would see who could be quickest to name the capitol. We also used the multiplication tables, beginning with the lower ones so the younger ones could take part, like naming 2 X 3 = 6. Who could answer quickest? Then we would build up to the higher numbers like 4 X 6 = 24 or 8 X 9 = 72. We also studied the counties of the state. We learned and we entertained ourselves.
In summer, neighbor kids got together and played outdoor games. "Hit the tin can" was a favorite. We also played ball and many others. We all had fun.
Then in summer there was berry picking. We picked black berries, raspberries and blueberries and others. We would take a lunch along and spend the day picking berries. This we enjoyed. It was a new experience for us. Mother was busy canning. Sometimes we sold some to an elderly neighbor couple so we earned some extra money.
In November of 1913 my twin sisters were born, Wilma and Lillian. I of course became the baby sitter for them. At this time I was also often asked by neighbors to help care for the children during busy times like thrashing and silo filling, canning and other times. I was kept busy. Now I was 14 years old. I quit sewing for my dolls and started sewing dresses for my baby sisters with Mother's help. My mother was a good teacher, as soon as we were old enough to hold a crochet hook and thread a needle she taught us to do the hand work. This in later years led into my career of sewing. But it wasn't until we were in Lengby that I thought of making a career of dressmaking. This I had to think about and work at, but I made it came true.
We had no library to go to for reading material in those days. Dad had the Norwegian newspaper Decorah Posten, this came 2 times a week. Once a week it included the story section called Ved Arnen. It had two continued stories going in it. Our neighbors had Skandinaven, a daily Norwegian newspaper. This one had a continued story part each day. We exchanged papers. I read them all and patiently looked foreword to the next issue.
It was about this time I heard the first radio. We visited at a neighbor who had one. We listened through earphones. We heard talking but it was hard to hear what they said. There was so much static. The important thing was we heard this voice coming out of this box. What would they think of next?
In 1917 we were entering World War One; then there was the bad epidemic of influenza. Dad sold the farm that year and we moved back to Minnesota, and bought a place near Nevis. He wanted a bigger farm, now the boys were growing older and could be of more help on a bigger place. My two older sisters Dagny and Freda were by this time married and were left behind. I was pretty much on my own, working on different jobs which led to my career of sewing.
I don't think Dad really knew what he was buying; it was not a satisfactory farm, the soil was too sandy to grow crops. Nevis is in a beautiful area of Minnesota; beautiful lakes around there, a real recreation area. It's not far from Cass Lake, a well known place. People from Minneapolis have summer homes all around those lakes. And the people living there make a living from these summer people in one way or another or at least supplement their income in some way.
This was like frontier days of northern Wisconsin. Farms were smaller, neighbors lived closer which resulted in a closer fellowship between neighbors which we enjoyed.
We weren't there more than like a stop over. It must have been early spring of 1918 when we came there. On November 11, 1918 when the World War ended we were getting settled in our home in Lengby. Through the banker in Nevis who had the Lengby farm for sale they made a deal and Dad bought it. The banker took Dad over to see the place in Lengby before he bought it. When we moved there our belongings were loaded on to wagons and moved by horses. It wasn't too far, a couple of days move, I think. That was the last move we made. It was here in Lengby Minnesota that my parents lived for the next 25 years, and my dad was treasurer of the school board for many years.
It was Wilma and Lillian's birthday on November 11, 1918, the day the War ended. They were 5 years old. When the news of the ending of the war came, train whistles were blowing. We lived close by the railroad and there were many trains those days. Church bells, school bells, anything that could be heard was making noise. Wilma recently told me she thought they were celebrating their birthday. She didn't know much about the war ending. There weren't radios and TV blaring out the news, kids didn't know so much about what was going on in the world.
These are highlights of my growing up years as I remember them.
* * *
Aunt Wilma, who is mentioned above, was the last survivor of 10 sisters and brothers. Here is a letter from her in which she recalls that memorable birthday celebration as well as some other events:
Lillian and I were born in Lewis, Wisconsin on November 11, 1913. We later lived in Nevis, Minnesota. From there we moved to Lengby in 1918. I remember we were 5 years old when World War I ended. I remember all the church bells, train whistles and anything that made noise was celebrating the end of the war. My family didn't think we would understand what the noise was all about so they told us that they were celebrating our birthday.
When we moved from Nevis to Lengby it was in a box car. Cattle and everything they had was loaded on a freight car. Dad rode in the freight car. I don't know how Mom came.
Dad was on the school board for many years but I don't remember anything special, newspaper articles or such. One incident I remember he took the train to a meeting in Crookston one time and also came home on the train, this was midnight or later. He went to sleep on the train, the conductor forgot to wake him up, so he rode to Bagley. they gave him a ticket to ride back the next morning.
All that time we lived on the farm. When they lost the farm they moved into town [Lengby] and had one cow. They bought Simmie's grandpa's house and lived there till Mom died. Dad lived for a while in the country with my brother Bill; then passed time with my brother Olaf. Then went to live with your mom and dad.
We moved to Post Falls Idaho in 1951 then Dad came to visit us in the spring and announced to us that this was where he wanted to live till he died. He died in 1961 almost 93 years old. He kept busy sawing and splitting wood. He lived with us 10 years.
* * *
The town of Lengby, Minnesota
And so after two decades of moving from farm to farm through Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota, Mother's parents settled at Lengby, Minnesota; a small town of some 300 people. That was in the spring of 1918, and this became their permanent home.
Many of the family lived there till the early 1950s, when those who remained migrated to Post Falls, Idaho. It is Lengby, that many of them still remember as "home."
Mother spent some of the 1920's and most of the 1930's in and around Lengby. Even on her way to Alaska in 1939 she gives her address as Lengby. Likewise, Aunt Wilma and Uncle Simmie often talk about Lengby; so do my cousins Ramon and Beulah. And for decades after moving to Post Falls, Idaho, Wilma and Simmie continued to subscribe to the weekly newspaper of that region, "The Thirteen Towns." The clippings quoted later in this story come from that newspaper.
"Hell Machines "
In the 1920's, cars became popular, and Mother told many anecdotes of people getting cars and learning to drive. The minister hated cars, and he preached sermons against them, denouncing them as hell machines. "But," Mother would add, "It wasn't too awfully long before the preacher himself was driving around in one of those hell machines."
People who were used to horse and buggies had difficulty making the transition. Horses had sense enough to stay on the road, but cars didn't. Martin Løvik was a cousin who bought a car and soon acquired fame for routinely winding up in the ditch. "It happened one time after another," Mother remembers, "And it got to be a joke among the neighbors about Martin Lövik going in the ditch."
Fina Kampstad was a neighbor woman who knew how to handle a team of horses, and she bravely set out to tame the auto. But while going down a hill her car begin to pick up speed, and she begin shouting, "Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!" The incident amused everyone and they teased her mercilessly. Poor Fina was so humiliated that she refused to ever drive again.
And cars could come apart. On one occasion Mother went riding with a carload of people, all of them girls except for the driver. As they were going down a hill, a tire came rolling down the hill from behind and passed them up. The girls laughed. "We thought it was funny," Mother remembers, "But the driver didn't see anything to laugh about because he knew the tire was part of his car."
Mother herself never learned to drive, but she thoroughly enjoyed the experiences of those who did. These anecdotes were some of her favorites which she would remember and tell as long as she lived.
While most of these stories were funny, some were tragic. Both Uncle John and her sister Dagny were killed by drivers who apparently didn't know how to drive very well. There may not have been many cars on the roads back in those days, but the few that were out there could be deadly.
When I bought my first computer I thought of Mother's stories of those early drivers and I felt deep sympathy for their suffering. The first several weeks of my computer experience was pure frustration; I could get it to do nothing I wanted it to do. Never have I been so humiliated by a machine.
The Dressmaker
Unlike most young women, Mother remained single and launched a career as a dressmaker. In 1920 she bought a peddle-operated sewing machine, and, together with a friend, Elizabeth Merry, she opened a dressmaking shop in Hibbing, Minnesota. This enterprise did well for nearly a decade, ending when Elizabeth died tragically, drowning while swimming. Mother never forgot her, often talking about her and showing me photos of her. In these photos she's an attractive woman with a good-looking husband and a young daughter. The year was 1929. Mother closed the shop and some time afterwards spent a year in Colorado.
Colorado is where Marie, Uncle John's daughter, lived. He had been a neighbor back in Iowa and then preceded them to Wisconsin, where his wife, Aunt Kjerstina, died of TB. Here Mother tells of Uncle John's tragic and rather ironic death:
Not long after Auntie died, Uncle John found out that he also had contacted TB. On his Doctor's advise he went to Colorado Springs and entered a TB sanitarium. He was cured of the TB. He was there for a number of years, he lived there and worked there I think as a maintenance man or janitor.
One summer he came back to visit us in Wisconsin; I still have a handkerchief box that he sent me for my birthday when he was in Colorado Springs.
Later he bought a place near Colorado Springs. He made this place into a small poultry farm and was doing very well.
Then a close friend of his died. He went to the funeral, and on his way home he stopped at a gas station to fill up with gas. This being done, he and the attendant stood outside there talking when a car out of control came and smashed into the gas station. Uncle was knocked against a post, was badly injured and died on the way to the hospital.
By this time his daughter Marie was married and had twin baby girls and was living with him. Her husband Earnest, being a telephone line man, was away from home much of the time.
This day happened also to be Uncle's birthday, June 9th, (apparently in 1928). Marie had planned a birthday dinner for him, and she had asked a few of his close friends over. She was busy preparing the dinner when this tragic news came.
* * *
It seems ironic that this man survived TB, only to be killed by an auto. He and his wife had been very special people in Mother's childhood. It was a family relationship which continued for generations; years later, their daughter Marie and her husband Ernest became very special people to me in my childhood, visiting us from time to time when we lived in Ferndale, Washington. Later when I was in the US Marine Corps and stationed in California, I used to visit them in Los Angeles.
Anyway, Mother spent a year in Denver and then returned to Lengby. Then her eldest sister Dagny was killed.
Aunt Dagny had married Nealie Hanson and lived near Lewis, Wisconsin where their children attended the Rocky Ridge school. She was killed by an auto. Her sons Merle and Dewey were with her that day; they had driven to Frederic so the boys could sell popcorn to earn money for Christmas. On their way home they had a flat tire and they all got out and were walking along the road when Dagny was struck by a passing car. The road was icy and the driver lost control and hit her; she died three days later on December 20th, 1932.
Her husband Nealie refused to press charges against the driver. "It wouldn't make me feel any better to see that man sitting there in jail," he said.
"Dagny was always my protector," Mother often said of her sister, "I could always look to Dagny for help. She always stood up for her rights and for what she believed in."
Mother told me that when she was very small and first started school: "I often sat on the teacher's lap and she explained things to me." But the other kids made teasing remarks, and Dagny defended her. Dagny was the defender, the spokesperson.
Mother took take care of Dagny's children until other arrangements could be made.
She was now in her 30s. In photos she's very good-looking and seems to have had no difficulty in attracting boyfriends, but for some reason, she didn't marry till she was 40 years old. She spent most of the 1930s in and around Lengby. During those years she sewed for various families, and from time to time she entered sewing contests. Among her things were 2 blue ribbons which read:
FIRST PREMIUM
EAST POLK COUNTY FAIR
FOSSTON MINN. 1934
On another occasion she and Aunt Wilma entered a nationwide contest which they both won. A clipping from The Thirteen Towns reads:
Two Lengby women recently won cash prizes in a nationwide sewing contest sponsored by The Household Magazine. They were Mrs. Simmie DeMarre and Miss Agnes Grytness, whose entries competed against over 2,000 dresses entered in the contest from all over the United States.
So Mother spent most of the 1930's at Lengby, quiet years in a small quiet town. Those were the days of Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger and others who were shooting their way in and out of banks throughout the mid-west. One day some of the kids found an abandoned campsite out in the woods near the schoolhouse, and of course they were all firmly convinced that John Dillinger had been there. Not much ever happened around Lengby and so this imaginative interpretation of an abandoned campsite brought a touch of thrill and excitement into the kids' lives. Certainly it amused the adults; it was an anecdote Mother told often and always with a smile, "It couldn't have been anyone else. It had to be Dillinger," she would smile.
The twenties were in the past, and as the thirties eventually drew to a close Mother went to Seattle where she worked for a while in a dressmaking shop, and later took care of children on Bainbridge Island.
While there, Mother spent her weekends in Seattle with Aunt Olivia. This aunt was actually a cousin of her father, but they had grown up together back in Norway and had also come to America together along with her father and brother, Adolf and Alf Høstmark. The foursome had arrived in Washington in time to see it become a state back in 1889. By this time Aunt Olivia had been living in Seattle for half a century, but still seemed quite nostalgic about Norway. From this aunt, Mother learned more of her heritage.
Mother's sojourn in Seattle was rather brief, apparently not much more than half a year. A couple of letters give a brief glimpse of her life at that time and also provides dates and places. Here is a letter from a Seattle dressmaking shop; it was on printed stationary:
Dear Agnes,
Would like to have you come back to work when you can or let me know--called up and got your address from where you used to live--.
Sincerely, Dolly Madden
February 6, 1939 is the date on that letter. She must have arrived in Seattle some time in the fall of 1938. How she responded to the above letter I don't know, but by this time she was working for another lady, who gave her a letter of reference which is dated June 5th, 1939:
Agnes Grytness has been employed by me for some six months and it is with the greatest regret that we see her leave us. I cannot speak too highly of her. In the house she is cheerful and industrious. With the children she is understanding and completely reliable as well as a good influence. As a seamstress she is neat, capable and clever.
Mrs. Lawrence Peters
Port Blakely, Washington
That's a good description of Mother as I later knew her myself. She always got along very well with people, was very responsible, and always found things to keep herself busy with. She was a person you could trust and rely on.
North to Alaska
Seattle was the traditional port of embarkation for Alaska. Whether or not Mother had come to Seattle with thoughts of going north, I wouldn't know. But she seems to have carefully considered the move and informed herself on what might lie ahead. In addition to what she may have read about Alaska, she found people who had been there and could give her first-hand, up-to-date information of life in the north.
On June 13, 1939, she boarded the steamship S.S. Aleutian, bound for Alaska. She went in the company of two Fairbanks women whose names and autographs are on the ship's passenger list--which she saved as a memento.
Another memento of that voyage is a clipping from The Thirteen Towns, the regional newspaper which was read in Lengby. It so happened that Mrs. Eva Foss, the publisher of that paper was also on the ship, taking an Alaska cruise with a group of journalists. No doubt her friends and neighbors back in Lengby were surprised when they read this article:
COINCIDENCE . . .
Among the rare coincidences of the week was that related by Mrs. E. Foss in a letter from Alaska in which she tells of sitting down to lunch on board ship to find that the girl sitting next to her was Miss Agnes Grytness of Lengby. Miss Grytness was on her way to Fairbanks to start a dressmaking shop.
Alaska was then a territory, not yet a state; "America's last frontier" it was called. Recently I found a travelogue published back in 1939 which gives a contemporary picture of Fairbanks--and, for all I know, Mother herself might have read this before setting out:
Probably there are more log than frame houses: one story log dwellings, often with tin roofs; cozy and homelike and obviously snug and warm in winter. Nearly every little log house has a huge front window; all have electric lights; most of them have radios, many have telephones.
The library, also built of logs, has more window area and probably more books, at least books worth reading, than the public library of any town of that size in the States.
Signs of prosperity are general in Fairbanks. Not that is rough and splurgy for a mining town. There is an occasional drunken brawl, now and then, but on the whole it is a very respectable and above all self-respecting place.
To be sure, Fairbanks needs pavements and sidewalks. Few of its streets are paved, concrete has not replaced many of those resounding wooden sidewalks so general in Alaska, and Fairbanks has its share of broken slats, missing sections and weed-grown stretches. In places it is wise to walk in the street itself; . . . when it rains the unpaved streets are apt to be pretty gooey with fertile black mud.
That was Fairbanks, a town of 3,000 in the center of Alaska's vast wilderness interior, as seen by journalist Harry Franks the summer before Mother arrived. Franks also mentions a big new Federal Building, 4 stories high which had elevators, and also housed a very modern post office.
On arriving there, Mother got a job in a laundry. Perhaps she wanted to first get to know this place before attempting any business venture such as a dressmaking shop.
She spent two years in Alaska, two years of very memorable experiences which she often talked about. The snow and cold were not new to anyone from Minnesota, but here she saw the northern lights and the midnight sun. There were also interesting and often eccentric people who found their niche in this frontier world of Fairbanks. On the down side, her most depressing experiences were the long winter nights when the sun would be up for only a couple hours a day. She recalled feeling tired and worn out. Sunlight seems to have been what she missed most.
The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner was the local paper, and as that name might suggest, the town was a center for miners, many of them characters right out of a Jack London novel. One day Mother met Sett Borgström, a miner who was in town to spend Christmas.
After returning to the mine, he wrote her letters which she saved. The return addresses show that he then worked at Suntrana; later he worked at the Hi-Yu gold mine. In March he came to town again, to see the dog sled races. The Fairbanks Dog Derby was the big event of the year, one which brought miners from the outlying camps into town. And so they met again.
Sett Borgström was from Sweden and had come to America in 1920; there he settled in Washington and worked in the Bellingham Coal Mine. He'd also prospected in the Cascade Mountains and had been an Alaska fisherman in the Ketchikan area. He'd come to Fairbanks in 1938; apparently with intentions of saving up money to go back to Washington and buy a farm.
They were married the following July 3rd, 1940. And now Mother went out to experience the world of the mining camp where she and my father made their first home.
The Hi-Yu gold mine was one of numerous mines which were out in the wilderness of the Fairbanks area. It was a hard-rock mine, worked by eight or ten men who lived at the camp, some with their families. My parents lived in a wanagan, which was a cabin built on skids; there was no electricity. But there was regular mail service, and with a battery-powered radio they kept in touch with the outside world.
Not all news from the outside was good; the Nazis invaded Norway, and in letters from home in Lengby, Grandma expressed her fears for old friends and family back in the old country who now lived under Nazi occupation.
Here in the wilderness, they lived among bears; the mining camp and the smell of food attracted them. Mother remembered watching a mother bear who used to bring her cubs to play around the cabin. My father regarded the bears as harmless, and some miners even treated them like pets; others were frightened of them. The wife of one miner carried a Mauser rife wherever she went. My parents used to tell numerous amusing stories about the bears, and how they sometimes frightened people. But there seem to have been no injuries. No people were attacked and no bears were shot. Bears were part of life at the Hi-Yu Mine.
When they finally left Alaska in the fall of 1941, they took many good memories back with them. And of course that's also where they acquired me.
Not many children were born in Alaska, so I came into a world that showered me with attention. The miners and prospectors gave me gifts which included gold rings and nuggets, and also small fork and spoon with gold nuggets on the handle. One of these was from Inez Gustafson, the wife of the mine owner, and she told my father, "I want you to promise to teach him everything you know about geology."
Were the lady alive today, she would no doubt be pleased to know that I have a degree in geology.
But it wasn't all happiness that month. Just a week after I was born, another of Mother's sisters died. But before any news of the death arrived, Mother had a disturbing dream which she describes in a letter:
Lillian had a black cape over her shoulders and seemed to be in an awful hurry. "I just came to say good-bye! I have to go now!" she said, and rushed out of the room. Mother [Grandma] was there, and she said, "You know Lillian's in a hurry."
I awoke frightened and said to your father, "I know something's happened to Lillian!"
I of course knew Lillian was sick with tuberculoses. She was in a TB sanitarium near Crookston; I don't remember how long, I knew it was many months. The last letter I had from her said she was feeling much better. I did not know how seriously sick she was. I was far away and the folks were not telling me everything they knew.
At the time she died and I had that dream, I was in Fairbanks where you were born about a week earlier. Your father came into the room and I was quite upset; I had just had this dream and told him about it.
Later I got a letter that she had died later that day [Sunday, August 24, 1941]. She had taken a turn for the worse and was taken to a hospital in Crookston where she died.
* * *
Aunt Lillian was the twin sister of Aunt Wilma. She left three children, one of whom is Janet Teal who in later years was very close to Mother and did many things for her when she got old.
The farm near Ferndale
We left Alaska when I was a couple months old, and moved to Washington where my parents went to look at a farm near Ferndale. That was on a Sunday, December 7th, 1941, and while looking at this farm they heard a radio announcement of the attack at Pearl Harbor. So that's where I was that day, though of course I don't remember any of it.
It was the farm my parents chose to buy.
These were the war years, and Mother's younger brother, who had for many years been in the Merchant Marine, now found himself in a risky occupation, with transport ships in danger of being targeted by submarines. His ship had, in fact, left Pearl Harbor just six hours before the attack. This sailor was my Uncle Ralph.
When his ship docked in one of the harbors of Puget Sound, Uncle Ralph would take leave and visit us and stay for a week or two. He'd help with the farm work; there was always plenty to do. One summer he helped build the hay barn. And I remember riding on a horse-drawn hay wagon with him.
Ralph was a fun guy to have for an uncle, but he was also a tease. During his last visit I got mad at him and told him to leave. "You've been here long enough!" I said. I was only three or four then.
But the next day he did leave, much to my regret. His leave was up and he would have gone anyway. After he was gone I missed him. And the truth is, I still miss him.
Even in his absence, there were mementos of him which in their own right made a life-long impression on me. From distant ports like Shanghai and Hong Kong, he had brought us exotic art objects as presents. He gave Mother a beautifully carved Chinese chest which was made of a very fragrant wood, and whenever Mother opened it, it would fill the room with that wonderful aroma.
I remember a bas relief picture of a pagoda on an island in a lake that used to intrigue me very much.
"It's Japanese," Mother would tell me, "Your Uncle Ralph brought it back with him from the Orient."
And I asked, "Is that what Japan is like?"
We were then at war with Japan; but I wasn't aware of any of that, being only three or four. I just remember those pictures, which were my first impressions of the Far East. These depictions of the Orient were part of my childhood, as was the sailor who brought them.
Here's a letter he wrote my mother. It's dated July 25, 1946, a year after the war:
Dear Agnes,
Will write you a few lines to let you know what ship I am on. S.S. William Glackens (Coastwise Pacific Far East Lines.) Pier 24, Seattle Wash. We will sail Friday for Japan. I got your letter today, and when the next one comes keep it till I get back. I think this will be a good ship as we have a good crew on here, well I have not much more to write about so will end with best wishes to you, Sett and Daniel.
Your Brother, Ralph
In the late 1940's he retired from the Merchant Marine and bought a tavern in Proctor, Minnesota. Mother frowned on taverns, but she never said anything critical about her brother operating one. Somehow, when Uncle Ralph did something she would ordinarily disapprove of, it wasn't quite so reproachable.
Uncle was married twice. His first wife was from New York City. When he brought her home to Lengby, Grandma had to teach her all about farm life. One day she sent her out to pluck a chicken for dinner. Soon they heard the sound of dreadful squawking and ran out to see what was going on. There they found Uncle Ralph's wife plucking a live chicken.
That first marriage didn't last. His second wife was his partner in the tavern business, and this match seems to have worked out better. Her name was Alma.
Early in 1945, news came that Grandma was dying of cancer; and so Mother took me back to Minnesota with her to say good-bye. After a long train journey, I woke up one morning in a bed in a house, and I asked, "Did the sleep take us here?"
By then Grandma had only a few painful weeks left, and one day Mother told me, "Grandma went to be with God." That's all I remember, I wasn't quite four yet. She died the day after FDR, on April 13, 1945. Grandma wrote some letters to my mother before she got sick, and in them she gave me loving mention. When I came across them half a century later, it was really good to read them, and be reassured that I had a loving Grandmother who thought about me.
I remember meeting several cousins during that trip, including Ramon and Beulah, and also Ramona and Gene. I didn't meet Douglas, Russell, Merle or Dewey, who were all in the service; this was near the end of the war.
Like any little kid, I loved trains, so it was particularly exciting when one of my uncles, Richard Engström, who was a railroad engineer, took me to see a roundhouse, where the train engines were serviced. When we got home, I asked my mother all the questions I should have asked Uncle Richard, who was disappointed that I hadn't asked him anything and thought I wasn't interested.
Strangely enough, I don't remember seeing Grandpa during the journey. Apparently he was so overwhelmed with Grandma's impending death that he retreated to some quiet place and wasn't around.
After Grandma was gone, Grandpa sold their home and went to live with his children. There were several he stayed with, including my parents. And so I lost a grandmother, but gained a grandfather.
On his arrival, we would go down to the railroad depot to meet him. I still remember the huge train chugging in and slowing to a stop. It was fascinating, but also frightening, that big train. The engine would let off steam with a loud hissing sound, Grandpa would descend from one of the coaches, and then he'd be there to stay with us for a couple of months.
I always remember him reading the Decorah Posten, the Norwegian newspaper. It came once a week, and he would sit there for the next day or two wearing his glasses and holding his magnifying glass, totally absorbed in his newspaper.
Reading was one of his interests, but he'd also find tasks to work at for several hours a day. Mostly he'd chop and pile firewood, and in the summer he'd do the haying. Whether reading or working, I can never remember him just sitting around with nothing to do.
One day he tore the skin of his hand on a nail from an old fence he was taking apart. Nevertheless, he went right on working till my father discovered him, still chopping and sawing with blood all over himself. My father asked him, "What happened to your hand?"
"It's just a scratch," said Grandpa.
My father took him to see a doctor, and it turned out that this "scratch" required 10 stitches.
That's part of being an old-world Norwegian. When you need ten stitches you call it "just a scratch", ignore it and go on with whatever you're doing.
Grandpa spent most of his later years in Idaho with Aunt Wilma and Uncle Simmie, where he eventually died in 1961.
We lived on the farm at Ferndale for 16 years, till my father died in 1958. We raised chickens, having about 3,000 most of the time. Those 3,000 chickens had to be fed 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Each year we would pick a day on which we'd finish up the chores early and take off for the afternoon; on some years we'd go to the beach, other years to the mountains. But that would be for only one single afternoon each year. It wasn't much of a vacation.
My father died at the relatively young age of 62, of black lung and a lifetime of overwork. Even in his thirties, his doctor had advised him to take it easy, but of course he never did. Basically he worked himself to death.
He was very efficient and systematic, with a head for business. The farm prospered. It was among the most modern and mechanized chicken farms in the state, and visitors from agricultural schools came on field trips to see it.
Among the boxes and drawers of papers and letters that Mother had saved, I found the mortgage against which they borrowed $5,000 in 1948 and spent 5 years paying off. Looking at those old papers, I see something more than just money and hard work--the committment of two people working together, making long-range plans and achieving their goals.
Together, my parents made a good team. Though Mother probably worked as hard as Dad, she was not really a workaholic by nature. Like her own father, she was a self-motivated person who always kept busy, finding things to do, but never obsessively or to excess. Mother outlived Dad by 39 years.
She asked me if I wanted the farm, and I said no. So she sold it and moved to Everett, where she lived the remaining four decades of her life.
Retirement in Everett, Washington
Here she lived in semi-retirement, continuing to do sewing projects, some for money, some not, making aprons, quilts and clothing, even weaving rugs. She still had her old pedal-operated sewing machine which she'd bought back in 1920, and continued to use it till a year or two before her death. It is now a treasured heirloom in the home of one of her nieces, Janet Teal.
Another niece, Beulah DeMarre, also lived nearby. The two of them visited her often, and as she got older they took her shopping, to the doctor, and helped her with many other tasks. They were like daughters to her, so most of the heirlooms that Mother had acquired over her lifetime went to them. For myself, I kept the photos, letters, papers, and Asian art.
Beulah is the daughter of Aunt Wilma, Mother's last surviving sister; and Janet is a daughter of Aunt Wilma's twin who died in 1941.
Whenever I returned home to visit, Mother read me stories in Norwegian. I consider myself fortunate to have gotten exposure to the language, though I must admit that I never learned it as well as I would like. In later years I read stories to her, though in English.
Among her favorites were "Giants in the Earth" by Ole Rølvaag. She also loved "Rebecca of Sunnybroke Farm" by Kate Wiggin, which she'd read as a child, and when I read it to her I enjoyed it together with her.
It was during these later years that I began to take an interest in my family heritage; among the old letters was a genealogy tracing the Grytnes family back 250 years, to a farm 130 km southwest of Trondhjem. There was a list showing the births and deaths of many family members who had immigrated to America in the 19th century. There were also photos from Norway, some taken as early as the 1860's, when portrait photography was new and just becoming popular. Among them was one of my great grandfather, who was born in 1834. Mother could identify many of the people in those old photos, and together we labeled them. About some of them she knew anecdotes which had been handed down, and I recorded these as well. When things aren't written down on paper, they tend to be forgotten after a couple generations or so.
For so many ancestors, we know only their name, the day they were born and the day they died. There are so many names that have no story; everything they ever did, saw, felt or experienced has all been forgotten. It makes me sad to think of them. There is something tragic about the way entire lifetimes pass into oblivion.
I'm just glad that Mother left something to be remembered by. The memories she wrote would cover no more than 10 or 15 typewritten pages, but they are good memories, and what little she wrote, she wrote well. Ironically, she was surprised to find they were liked and enjoyed by people who read them. She wrote them because I kept nagging her till she did, but I don't think it ever occurred to her that in recording them she'd written anything of much interest.
She was a gentle unassuming person who rarely expressed opinions. Since she had seen so much of the 20th century, people would sometimes ask her what comments she might have on it. But she could never think of anything special to say. However, sometimes I'd be watching a TV documentary of WW II, and she'd say, "Those were such horrible times."
Documentaries and movies of WW II are very popular nowadays. Many look back on WW II as an heroic age when good guys fought Nazi bad guys; as a time when everything was larger than life, but to Mother those were "such horrible times." She prefered to remember her childhood, an era when war seemed like a thing of the past.
Mother kept in touch with her old friends, some from as far back as when she was a teen-ager in Wisconsin. In 1967 she took me with on a trip back to Minnesota and Wisconsin to attend the golden anniversary of two couples for whom she'd been bridesmaid back on April 21, 1917. Actually, it had been a triple wedding; three Hansons had been married that day, one of them to her sister Dagny who was killed by an auto in 1932.
As years went by, one after another of her sisters and brothers passed away; Lillian back in 1941, Olaf in 1954, Ralph in 1965, Freda in 1971, Ingvald in 1975, Einar in 1976, and Bill in 1979. And then only she and Wilma were left.
It was the same with old friends as well. She exchanged Christmas cards and letters with them, but, as years passed, each Christmas brought fewer cards.
Of course she formed close friendships in Everett too, but they too were passing on. One by one, she was outliving her contemporaries, and by the time she reached 97, there weren't many left. She missed those people who would never again come to visit. "I feel so lonely," she would often say during the last months of her life. That is the dreadful loneliness of old age.
Mother was always independent. She lived alone in her apartment, and did her own cooking and housework until a year before she died. She liked to get out, and enjoyed walking downtown, but her ability to do so declined. When I visited in May 1996, she was barely able to cross the room, and only with the aid of a walker. Some months earlier, she had fallen and broken an arm, and there was the danger of falling again. It was clear that she could no longer be alone.
Nevertheless, she adamantly refused to go to a nursing home; she wanted to stay in her own apartment. That was extremely important to her, and she had always lived with the hope that I would somehow be there to take care of her when she could no longer take care of herself.
That troubled me, because I couldn't imagine myself as being of any use as a practical nurse. Fortunately, however, it worked out that I was able to look after her during her last days. It was dreadful to see her suffer the way she did, but I would have felt much worse to have had her go to a nursing home to die.
Mother had had too many birthdays, and there was no hope of her recovering from that. The task was to make her as comfortable as possible during her final days. It was very painful to see her deteriorating, losing her eyesight, her hearing, and her ability to walk. The least movement became an agony for her. I didn't want to see anybody suffer so, certainly not my mother.
The efforts of several people made possible her wish to end her life at home. These included state social workers and nurses, as well as the volunteer efforts of ladies from the church--a retired teacher and two former nurses. Beulah had by then moved back to Idaho, but Janet still lived nearby and continued to get the groceries and came by to cheer Mother up with her visits. Without their support, I simply could not have gone through those last seven months.
Mother's mind remained clear to the end; and when people stopped by to visit, even if it was just for five or ten minutes, it would always cheer her up and make her day. On her 97th birthday, Aunt Wilma came over from Idaho to celebrate with her. That was the best present she could have had.
She loved to read. I'd get her books in large type print, and she'd go through a couple of them a week. But there came a day when she stopped reading. Her eyes had finally given in. That was a couple months before she died, and soon she could no longer tell day from night, nor could she identify people by sight. We became like shadows to her. Her hearing was also going, and she was in great pain.
Stronger pain pills were prescribed. But the drugs affected her mind and she became terribly confused. She understood that the drugs were the source of her confusion, and so she refused to take them any more.
I said to her, "It's either the pain or the confusion."
"Then I'll put up with the pain," she said, "I don't want to be confused."
After she stopped taking the pills, her mind again became reasonably clear. I thought that was very heroic of her.
She died during the snowstorm that hit us the day after Christmas. Her death was a jolt, but it was expected. She'd lived a long and good life; and, most fortunately, she was able to die in her own home, rather than end up in a hospital or nursing home. That was important to her. Given the fact of life that she had to get old and die, this was a best-case scenario, thanks to the kindness of many people.
danielfortyone (at)gmail.com
*** *** ***
*** *** ***
A letter in Norwegian
Here is a letter that Mother wrote in Norwegian in 1978 or '79. Usually she wrote to me in English, but I'd been asking her to write me in Norwegian and on this occasion she did. It's family news; not of historical interest other than that here we have a letter by her in Norwegian. She writes in the Danish-Norwegian of the late 1800's, the formal written language that immigrants of that era brought with them to America and taught their children. To a 21st century person living in Norway, the spelling and grammar probably look a bit archaic. And as American Norwegians often did, she includes a sprinkling of English words.
--- --- ---
Kjære Daniel,
Jeg gratulerer dig paa din fødselsdag.
Skulde ønske du var her saa skulde vi have cake og kaffee og have an hyggelg visit. Men nu bliver det bare et brev. Du har saa ofte spurgt mig om at skrive et brev paa Norsk. Saa faar dette blive i stedet for en fødselsdag gave. Det er ikke got for mig at komme ut og kjøbe noget. Det er saa vanskelig for mig at gaa med denne onde hofte. Jeg skal se doktoren paa onsdag saa faar jeg vide mere om hvad som kan gjøres for den.
Vi har saa deiligt veir, har varet saa i flere uker. Jeg husker ikke naar vi har haft en saa pen sommer.
Jeg var ute hos Janet og Dave og havde middag med dem nogle dage siden, dem planer paa og reise til Idaho og spende Labor Day uke enden, saa vil dem jeg skal gaa med dem. Jeg ved ikke nu om jeg kommer hjem igjen med dem eller at jeg bliver lidt længere. Det kommer an paa hvorledes jeg føler.
Har du nogen plan for at komme hjem i høst? Bill (din onkel) har varet og endnu er saa syk, han har hvad dem kalder Valley feber, en slags virus. Han fik det i Arizona da dem var der i vinter. Han har været daarlig siden og da jeg talte med Wilma nogle dage siden var han paa hospitalet. Haaber at høre at han er bedre. Haaber du can læse dette, det er de beste jeg kan gjøre. Ønsker dig alt godt med dagen. Hils Lidia fra mig. En kjærlig hilsen.
Fra din Moder
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Agnes Grytnes Borgström
October 15, 1899 -- December 28, 1996
My mother, Agnes Grytnes, was born in the horse and buggy days, back in 1899, when radios were unknown and the first airplane hadn't yet flown. Telephones, electricity, and automobiles were not part of the world she grew up in. It wasn't until she reached adulthood that women won the right to vote. By the time she died, at the age of 97, she had seen a lot of change; her life had nearly spanned the 20th century.
She left heirlooms and photos, and also some memories in the form of letters which she sent to me during her last years when she was living in Everett, Washington.
In these memoirs she takes us back to the first decade of the 20th century, an idyllic world, in the cornfields of Iowa and later in the dark woods of Wisconsin, where a one-room schoolhouse was also the center of community activity. Eventually the family moved to Minnesota.
She shows herself a capable story teller with a talent for words, telling mostly about her childhood years, saying little about the rest of her long life. And there certainly was a lot more to tell. In an age when women had few options, she was an independent person who launched a career as a dressmaker by which she supported herself, traveled and worked in various places like Denver and Seattle. Eventually she went north to Alaska where she married a miner, Sett Borgström, and lived in a remote mining camp.
She was a quiet, unpretentious person that you might not think of as someone who was capable of living in a wilderness where she might open her cabin door and find herself saying hello to a bear.
During the final weeks of her 97 years she suffered severe pain, but refused pain-killing drugs which would have confused her mind. It was an agonizing but courageous end which tells us something of the person she was.
At various places in her narrative I've included commentary of my own, in brown color type as you see here, so as not to confuse it with my mother's account which is in black. She wrote these letters towards the end of her life, when she lived in Everett, Washington.
Daniel Borgström
danielfortyone(at)gmail.com
***
The First Years, in Iowa 1906 -- 1908
Here it is winter, we got snow again. This morning it is sloshing in the street and white in the grass. So it looks like winter will be with us a while, but at least the days are getting longer. I have been thinking about that letter you asked me to write that has history of times past; I just don't know what to write about that would be of interest to you. What about if I write about what we did when we were kids?
In those early years Dad used to rent farms, they were pretty good sized.As I remember they were spoken of as sections of land. And there was plenty of work to do as soon as we were old enough to do anything.
This was in Iowa, and the farm we lived on when I was old enough to take part in things, we called "The Hill Place". We must have lived there about three years. I was then about 6, 7 and 8 years old. (1906-1908.)
The happening that was most imprinted on my mind was when the cyclone came. It must have been the summer I was seven. It was haying time and it looked like rain was coming. Mother and Dad were stacking hay, trying to get the stacks topped off before the rain came. Dagny and Freda took afternoon lunch out to the field about 3:30 p.m. I was left at home to take care of the younger kids: Ralph, Olaf, and Einar. As the afternoon wore on it looked like a storm was coming. It got darker and darker. It was warm and the air was so we couldn't hardly breathe. Then it got dark as night, the best thing I knew to do, I took the kids upstairs. We got into bed and covered up. This blackness must have come on quite suddenly, the folks of course were in a grand rush to get home thinking of us little kids there by ourselves. When I heard they were home we all rushed downstairs, my fright was over when Mother and Dad were there.
Then we all stood out in the yard watching the cyclone as it moved, picked up things and dropped them down, it was too dark to see what they were. The following Sunday we went to visit at Uncle John's. We drove by farms where trees were uprooted like you pull weeds in the garden. Some houses and buildings were destroyed, others left untouched. There usually was a grove of big trees in around the farm yard. We saw many cyclones after that, but they weren't so close and looked smaller.
Corn was the big crop, and in the fall when the pasture got dry and the cows were let into the hay meadow to graze, Freda and I had to herd them or watch them so they wouldn't get into the cornfields. They were not fenced.
We took the cows out in the morning and stayed till late afternoon. We of course had lunch with us. We learned how to tell time by putting a stick in the ground and look at the shadow. When the shadow was straight it was 12 o'clock, time to eat lunch.
For a pastime when the cows behaved, we played we had farms. We had sticks we put in the ground to make barnyards and stalls and pastures. We had stones for animals: horses, cows, calves, etc. The stones were special to us, nice ones we had picked in the field when we were pulling weeds in the cornfield as Dad cultivated. For people we braided grass and had quite a family, they all had names. We played, we visited back and forth, and we talked about our farm work.
Then of course we were interrupted and had to chase after the cattle as they wanted to stray into forbidden ground. This was mostly in the afternoon as they were getting their fill of grass and were looking for better things.
It wasn't all work, we had fun too, and we had a great imagination. Some of those stones we kept for years later.
Those days we didn't start school in the fall until this work was done and that was when the corn was husked from those fields. That was next to the hay meadows.
Those days kids weren't put in any certain class or grade because of age or size. They were graded according to what they knew. Big boys always had to stay home in the spring and fall to help with the farm work. So often the big boys would be in classes with kids half their size. Nobody thought anything of that. Discipline was never a problem those days. At least I never knew of any.
Nowadays they might talk about one-room schools like they weren't much. But those schools were good schools, we stayed in the same class till we were ready for the next one. All the education I have had was in one-room schools, and I think I have managed quite well. They taught the basic things.
I remember I was never too good in history. Some parts were all right but I didn't care to study about old wars and such, and I was glad we didn't live in a time when there was war. That was in the time of the past, people knew better in these times, or so I thought. But it wasn't many years later till we were in World War One.
We moved across the state line into Minnesota. We lived only one year on a farm farther north; then we moved on a farm that bordered the state line. We went to school across the line in Iowa. But after a year or so we couldn't go there any more. With all the neighbor kids and us it got to be too many. Then we had to go where we belonged and that meant walking three miles in deep snow in winter across fields to make it shorter. We managed that too.
It was while we lived there, I was 10 then, when Dad had us all lined up in the yard looking for a comet with a tail. Now when they are talking so much about "Haley's Comet" that can be seen this year and was last seen in 1910. That was 75 years ago. That must have been the comet we were looking for and Dad was pointing out to us as were gazing into the sky. As you know Dad was always well read and well informed on what was going on in the world. Now when I hear them talking so much about this Haley's Comet and how they clamor to see it, I think and feel quite sure that I saw it 75 years ago.
It was also at this time I had my first car ride. Our landlord bought a car and came and gave us a ride in it. It was quite a thrill but I was concerned when we went down the hill how he was going to hold it back so it didn't run away.
It was also during this time I saw my first show. A traveling show with an elephant came by our place, they were on their way to Kiester, our town. Shows traveled from one small town to another in summer those days. This show was "Uncle Tom's Cabin". Then Dad said they would take us all to see the show that night. We were a bunch of excited kids. I can remember the elephant performing. All I remember of the show was little Eve so beautiful in a white dress. It was a memorable evening.
This farm was what we called the Røvang place. I have many happy memories from this place but I have written enough for now. If you are interested and care about these stories I can write more next time. We left this place when I was 12 years old. We moved to Wisconsin and bought our own land, which was a great event in our lives.
* * *
Norwegian Communities
These were Norwegian-speaking communities that they lived in. In church, the language was Norwegian and Mother was confirmed in Norwegian. "Decorah Posten" and "Skandinaven" were the Norwegian newspapers they read. And the storekeeper in Leland, who was a "Yanki," had to learn Norwegian. Mother says he learned it quite well.
Mother learned to read Norwegian at the age of 4, sitting on her father's knee. In those days it was the custom of many Norwegian families to teach their children to read Norwegian at home. Later, at the age of 5 or 6 she entered public school and learned English. So English came to replace Norwegian as her first language, and it was in English that she wrote these memories.
But she did keep up her Norwegian and throughout her life she corresponded in both languages. She also used to read me stories in Norwegian, and she once wrote me a letter in that language which I have saved as a memento of the fact that my mother was bilingual.
She was 86 years old when she wrote the first part of her story, that of her years in Iowa. It was another 5 years before she took up where she left off and tells of the move to Wisconsin, where her Uncle John had moved and bought a farm.
This uncle was her mother's brother. Johanes Kundsen Rotö¸ was his original name, but on coming to America he Anglicized and shortened it to John Knudsen.
Here is part of a letter in which my mother tells of a tragedy which befell her uncle and aunt:
We always just called him "Uncle". He and Aunt Kjerstina were the close relatives we had and they were very special people to us. How he came to buy that farm and move to Wisconsin I do not know or remember; looking back at the years it seems he could not have been there more than about 3 years or so.
When they were living near us in Iowa a young man who may have been a relative came from Norway and lived with them. After he had been there some time he came down with TB. He went back to Norway where he later died.
Later Uncle John and Aunt Kjerstina moved to Wisconsin. They had not been there very long when she also came down with TB. She evidently contracted it from this man. It must have been in the winter of 1911 that she died. Dad went up there for the funeral, and then he decided to buy land up there. We moved up there a year later in 1912.
* * *
Mother saved a few letters and post cards dating back to those years. There's one with a postmark of 1911 in which her sister Freda mentions the death of Aunt Kjerstina. Another is from Uncle John, written a couple years latter and sent from Colorado. What follows is a continuation of her account.
To the woods of Wisconsin
This is the finish of my childhood story that I wrote a few years ago. I was 12 years old now so most of my childhood is in the other story.
We came to Wisconsin in the winter. It was all so different from what we were used to. Now we are in the woods where farms are made by clearing the land to make fields and homes. We were used to the big open spaces with large fields and a grove of trees around the farm yard. Our new land was all woods.
We lived on my Uncle John's farm the first couple of years while Dad got some of our land cleared. He hauled the logs to the nearby sawmill to cut into lumber with which to build a house for ourselves as well as barns and stables for the cattle and horses. All was a new experience for us.
Us kids went to the Rocky Ridge school which was about a quarter mile to walk on a winding road through the woods. Myself and 4 younger brothers, we made quite an addition to the school. We were all made welcome by the school and neighbors. Neighbors lived closer here than in Minnesota. The farms were not so big, being carved out of the woods.
One of my first scary experiences was when my sister Dagny and I were going to a neighbor on an errand one moonlight evening. There was an owl hooting in the trees. We didn't know what it was. We got scared, turned around and ran home. Later we learned it was an owl. We had to get used to the noises of the woods.
Our nearest town was Lewis, just a small railroad stop with a store and a few buildings. Frederic was our address, a mail route went out from there. We lived about 7 miles from Frederic, I think that is where we went when we needed to shop for anything other than groceries. Lewis was about 3 miles, I think. Clam Falls was about 3 miles in the opposite direction; we were about in the middle.
Clam Falls was a river town on the Clam River and it had no railroad. In the real early days their transportation was the river and so when we were there it was not the town it had been in the early days, but the falls were still there. Also, our church was just across the road from the Clam Falls school. I walked there when I studied for confirmation at the church. The church is still there very much alive. We went by there to see the church when I was back there with Freda in 1968. The door was unlocked so we went inside, everything was new or updated, new stained glass windows with memorials, names on them of people that were leading members of the church when we were there. Also a basement equipped with kitchen and dining room or fellowship hall as we call them now.
In Wisconsin we had to take state exams to graduate from the 8th grade. They were taken in two parts; the first half at the Lewis school where the 8th graders met, and the second half at the Clam Falls school. At the county seat in Balsam Lake they had a big doings for the graduating 8th graders. That was 15 or 20 miles away, a long distance those days. We were three of us from our school that were there, 2 girls and one boy. We took the morning train from Lewis and came home on the afternoon train. There were a spelling contest and speakers, and diplomas were handed out. I was in the spelling contest, having won in the neighboring country school contest. But I didn't win that day. We had a big day with food and fun.
Not many kids from country schools went to high school. We would have to go to a nearby bigger town, live away from home and come home on the weekends. This was expensive and also inconvenient. It was something most parents couldn't afford. Later the country schools were consolidated and kids were bussed to town where there was also a high school. This took place many years after my school days.
The one room school house was the center of all social activities in the neighborhood. The teacher put on talent plays and basket socials to raise money for things needed at the school. When the school house needed a new roof they had a shingling bee. The men of the district came to shingle the roof, the women brought food for a picnic dinner. It was both a social and work day. When the day was done there was a new roof on the school house, and there had been lots of food and fun for the whole family.
There was no well at the Rocky Ridge school so my brothers carried a pail of water each school day. They were paid ten cents a day, and were happy for the job. We put a dipper in the bucket, that was our water system. We must have been a healthy bunch of kids, I never knew of us catching anything from one another.
The heating system was a wood burning stove with a sheet metal jacket around it in the corner of the room. Two brothers who walked 2 miles to school were the firemen. They came in the morning, started the fire to warm up the room by the time the rest of us came. They tended the fire all day.
It happened sometimes that one of the kids forgot to bring his lunch bucket into the schoolroom and left it out in the hall. By noon the lunch would be frozen so they couldn't eat it. We all shared our lunch with them and there was plenty for all.
There was the day when a traveling show passed by on the road to town. Those days traveling shows went from one small town to another, they stayed a few days in town, they were tent shows. They had animals trained to perform cute acts among other things. This day they came by the school, and we all were stretching our necks to see. Then the teacher excused us so we could go out and have a good look. The teacher wouldn't take this small please away from us. She knew we wouldn't be studying anyway while this show was passing by. We all lined up for a good look. The animals were in colorful painted wagons drawn by horses followed up by an elephant walking behind. "A real live elephant walking by our school!" It was a red letter day for us. Maybe we would get to see the show while they were in town some evening.
Valentine's Day was appropriately observed with a valentine box. We all gave each other a valentine, they were mostly home made. But most kids managed to have a store bought one for the teacher. I didn't have a store bought one for the teacher so I made one. I cut out a heart shape, covered it with tissue paper. I made little pink tissue paper roses (with Mother's help), put around the edges of the heart a pink silk ribbon bow in the center with "Be my Valentine," and a ribbon to hang it up by. I was satisfied that I had a nice valentine for the teacher. But I was not prepared for what happened when the valentines were opened. The teacher held it up in front of the school for all to see this beautiful home made valentine. She wanted the kids to see how much she valued home made things. They did not have to be store bought to be nice. All eyes were turned to me. I should have been proud, but I felt so embarrassed. If the floor had opened up and swallowed me I would have welcomed it.
Then we had a young man teacher who was good at making up plays and programs with entertainment and basket socials. He used to ask the boys if they would stay after school, and he would cut their hair. He wanted them to look nice and neat. Parents were happy that he wanted to do this job. It was this teacher that named the school "Rocky Ridge". It was a very appropriate name and it stayed.
Rocky Ridge school got its name from outcroppings of rocks, on the north side I think. The school house was on level ground but on the north side was a steep rocky hill and like a valley below. The road made a bend around these rocks, but last time I was there with Freda (in 1968) the road was made straight, the rocks cut down as they do now with modern equipment. All those winding roads that I remember were made straight, sometimes that made it hard to recognize places, so many changes had taken place.
The school house was gone. Only cement steps remained. There were planks when I went to school. The cement had been put there later. It was sad to see the schoolhouse gone, it contained so many memories. Two years ago (apparently 1989) there was a reunion for all who had attended Rocky Ridge school. How much I would have loved to be there.
My sister Dagny's sons Merle and Dewey were going to school there when their mother died. Then I stayed there helping to care for them a while; that was in the early 1930s. So you see the school was there for lots of years after I was there, maybe all through the thirties. So there should be many of those pupils still living. I would be one of the oldest.
On the last day of school a picnic was held in a wooded area joining the school ground with benches or tables. The mothers brought food including the makings of ice cream. Some of the dads would be there to turn the ice-cream freezer so we had home made ice-cream. While the parents got the food ready the teacher entertained the kids with games and fun. I usually had a new dress for this day. The boys had new overalls with nice shirts. It was a dress up holiday.
In the winter evenings my brothers and I would play school. We learned the capitols of all the states. The leader we had chosen would name the state; then we would see who could be quickest to name the capitol. We also used the multiplication tables, beginning with the lower ones so the younger ones could take part, like naming 2 X 3 = 6. Who could answer quickest? Then we would build up to the higher numbers like 4 X 6 = 24 or 8 X 9 = 72. We also studied the counties of the state. We learned and we entertained ourselves.
In summer, neighbor kids got together and played outdoor games. "Hit the tin can" was a favorite. We also played ball and many others. We all had fun.
Then in summer there was berry picking. We picked black berries, raspberries and blueberries and others. We would take a lunch along and spend the day picking berries. This we enjoyed. It was a new experience for us. Mother was busy canning. Sometimes we sold some to an elderly neighbor couple so we earned some extra money.
In November of 1913 my twin sisters were born, Wilma and Lillian. I of course became the baby sitter for them. At this time I was also often asked by neighbors to help care for the children during busy times like thrashing and silo filling, canning and other times. I was kept busy. Now I was 14 years old. I quit sewing for my dolls and started sewing dresses for my baby sisters with Mother's help. My mother was a good teacher, as soon as we were old enough to hold a crochet hook and thread a needle she taught us to do the hand work. This in later years led into my career of sewing. But it wasn't until we were in Lengby that I thought of making a career of dressmaking. This I had to think about and work at, but I made it came true.
We had no library to go to for reading material in those days. Dad had the Norwegian newspaper Decorah Posten, this came 2 times a week. Once a week it included the story section called Ved Arnen. It had two continued stories going in it. Our neighbors had Skandinaven, a daily Norwegian newspaper. This one had a continued story part each day. We exchanged papers. I read them all and patiently looked foreword to the next issue.
It was about this time I heard the first radio. We visited at a neighbor who had one. We listened through earphones. We heard talking but it was hard to hear what they said. There was so much static. The important thing was we heard this voice coming out of this box. What would they think of next?
In 1917 we were entering World War One; then there was the bad epidemic of influenza. Dad sold the farm that year and we moved back to Minnesota, and bought a place near Nevis. He wanted a bigger farm, now the boys were growing older and could be of more help on a bigger place. My two older sisters Dagny and Freda were by this time married and were left behind. I was pretty much on my own, working on different jobs which led to my career of sewing.
I don't think Dad really knew what he was buying; it was not a satisfactory farm, the soil was too sandy to grow crops. Nevis is in a beautiful area of Minnesota; beautiful lakes around there, a real recreation area. It's not far from Cass Lake, a well known place. People from Minneapolis have summer homes all around those lakes. And the people living there make a living from these summer people in one way or another or at least supplement their income in some way.
This was like frontier days of northern Wisconsin. Farms were smaller, neighbors lived closer which resulted in a closer fellowship between neighbors which we enjoyed.
We weren't there more than like a stop over. It must have been early spring of 1918 when we came there. On November 11, 1918 when the World War ended we were getting settled in our home in Lengby. Through the banker in Nevis who had the Lengby farm for sale they made a deal and Dad bought it. The banker took Dad over to see the place in Lengby before he bought it. When we moved there our belongings were loaded on to wagons and moved by horses. It wasn't too far, a couple of days move, I think. That was the last move we made. It was here in Lengby Minnesota that my parents lived for the next 25 years, and my dad was treasurer of the school board for many years.
It was Wilma and Lillian's birthday on November 11, 1918, the day the War ended. They were 5 years old. When the news of the ending of the war came, train whistles were blowing. We lived close by the railroad and there were many trains those days. Church bells, school bells, anything that could be heard was making noise. Wilma recently told me she thought they were celebrating their birthday. She didn't know much about the war ending. There weren't radios and TV blaring out the news, kids didn't know so much about what was going on in the world.
These are highlights of my growing up years as I remember them.
* * *
Aunt Wilma, who is mentioned above, was the last survivor of 10 sisters and brothers. Here is a letter from her in which she recalls that memorable birthday celebration as well as some other events:
Lillian and I were born in Lewis, Wisconsin on November 11, 1913. We later lived in Nevis, Minnesota. From there we moved to Lengby in 1918. I remember we were 5 years old when World War I ended. I remember all the church bells, train whistles and anything that made noise was celebrating the end of the war. My family didn't think we would understand what the noise was all about so they told us that they were celebrating our birthday.
When we moved from Nevis to Lengby it was in a box car. Cattle and everything they had was loaded on a freight car. Dad rode in the freight car. I don't know how Mom came.
Dad was on the school board for many years but I don't remember anything special, newspaper articles or such. One incident I remember he took the train to a meeting in Crookston one time and also came home on the train, this was midnight or later. He went to sleep on the train, the conductor forgot to wake him up, so he rode to Bagley. they gave him a ticket to ride back the next morning.
All that time we lived on the farm. When they lost the farm they moved into town [Lengby] and had one cow. They bought Simmie's grandpa's house and lived there till Mom died. Dad lived for a while in the country with my brother Bill; then passed time with my brother Olaf. Then went to live with your mom and dad.
We moved to Post Falls Idaho in 1951 then Dad came to visit us in the spring and announced to us that this was where he wanted to live till he died. He died in 1961 almost 93 years old. He kept busy sawing and splitting wood. He lived with us 10 years.
* * *
The town of Lengby, Minnesota
And so after two decades of moving from farm to farm through Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota, Mother's parents settled at Lengby, Minnesota; a small town of some 300 people. That was in the spring of 1918, and this became their permanent home.
Many of the family lived there till the early 1950s, when those who remained migrated to Post Falls, Idaho. It is Lengby, that many of them still remember as "home."
Mother spent some of the 1920's and most of the 1930's in and around Lengby. Even on her way to Alaska in 1939 she gives her address as Lengby. Likewise, Aunt Wilma and Uncle Simmie often talk about Lengby; so do my cousins Ramon and Beulah. And for decades after moving to Post Falls, Idaho, Wilma and Simmie continued to subscribe to the weekly newspaper of that region, "The Thirteen Towns." The clippings quoted later in this story come from that newspaper.
"Hell Machines "
In the 1920's, cars became popular, and Mother told many anecdotes of people getting cars and learning to drive. The minister hated cars, and he preached sermons against them, denouncing them as hell machines. "But," Mother would add, "It wasn't too awfully long before the preacher himself was driving around in one of those hell machines."
People who were used to horse and buggies had difficulty making the transition. Horses had sense enough to stay on the road, but cars didn't. Martin Løvik was a cousin who bought a car and soon acquired fame for routinely winding up in the ditch. "It happened one time after another," Mother remembers, "And it got to be a joke among the neighbors about Martin Lövik going in the ditch."
Fina Kampstad was a neighbor woman who knew how to handle a team of horses, and she bravely set out to tame the auto. But while going down a hill her car begin to pick up speed, and she begin shouting, "Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!" The incident amused everyone and they teased her mercilessly. Poor Fina was so humiliated that she refused to ever drive again.
And cars could come apart. On one occasion Mother went riding with a carload of people, all of them girls except for the driver. As they were going down a hill, a tire came rolling down the hill from behind and passed them up. The girls laughed. "We thought it was funny," Mother remembers, "But the driver didn't see anything to laugh about because he knew the tire was part of his car."
Mother herself never learned to drive, but she thoroughly enjoyed the experiences of those who did. These anecdotes were some of her favorites which she would remember and tell as long as she lived.
While most of these stories were funny, some were tragic. Both Uncle John and her sister Dagny were killed by drivers who apparently didn't know how to drive very well. There may not have been many cars on the roads back in those days, but the few that were out there could be deadly.
When I bought my first computer I thought of Mother's stories of those early drivers and I felt deep sympathy for their suffering. The first several weeks of my computer experience was pure frustration; I could get it to do nothing I wanted it to do. Never have I been so humiliated by a machine.
The Dressmaker
Unlike most young women, Mother remained single and launched a career as a dressmaker. In 1920 she bought a peddle-operated sewing machine, and, together with a friend, Elizabeth Merry, she opened a dressmaking shop in Hibbing, Minnesota. This enterprise did well for nearly a decade, ending when Elizabeth died tragically, drowning while swimming. Mother never forgot her, often talking about her and showing me photos of her. In these photos she's an attractive woman with a good-looking husband and a young daughter. The year was 1929. Mother closed the shop and some time afterwards spent a year in Colorado.
Colorado is where Marie, Uncle John's daughter, lived. He had been a neighbor back in Iowa and then preceded them to Wisconsin, where his wife, Aunt Kjerstina, died of TB. Here Mother tells of Uncle John's tragic and rather ironic death:
Not long after Auntie died, Uncle John found out that he also had contacted TB. On his Doctor's advise he went to Colorado Springs and entered a TB sanitarium. He was cured of the TB. He was there for a number of years, he lived there and worked there I think as a maintenance man or janitor.
One summer he came back to visit us in Wisconsin; I still have a handkerchief box that he sent me for my birthday when he was in Colorado Springs.
Later he bought a place near Colorado Springs. He made this place into a small poultry farm and was doing very well.
Then a close friend of his died. He went to the funeral, and on his way home he stopped at a gas station to fill up with gas. This being done, he and the attendant stood outside there talking when a car out of control came and smashed into the gas station. Uncle was knocked against a post, was badly injured and died on the way to the hospital.
By this time his daughter Marie was married and had twin baby girls and was living with him. Her husband Earnest, being a telephone line man, was away from home much of the time.
This day happened also to be Uncle's birthday, June 9th, (apparently in 1928). Marie had planned a birthday dinner for him, and she had asked a few of his close friends over. She was busy preparing the dinner when this tragic news came.
* * *
It seems ironic that this man survived TB, only to be killed by an auto. He and his wife had been very special people in Mother's childhood. It was a family relationship which continued for generations; years later, their daughter Marie and her husband Ernest became very special people to me in my childhood, visiting us from time to time when we lived in Ferndale, Washington. Later when I was in the US Marine Corps and stationed in California, I used to visit them in Los Angeles.
Anyway, Mother spent a year in Denver and then returned to Lengby. Then her eldest sister Dagny was killed.
Aunt Dagny had married Nealie Hanson and lived near Lewis, Wisconsin where their children attended the Rocky Ridge school. She was killed by an auto. Her sons Merle and Dewey were with her that day; they had driven to Frederic so the boys could sell popcorn to earn money for Christmas. On their way home they had a flat tire and they all got out and were walking along the road when Dagny was struck by a passing car. The road was icy and the driver lost control and hit her; she died three days later on December 20th, 1932.
Her husband Nealie refused to press charges against the driver. "It wouldn't make me feel any better to see that man sitting there in jail," he said.
"Dagny was always my protector," Mother often said of her sister, "I could always look to Dagny for help. She always stood up for her rights and for what she believed in."
Mother told me that when she was very small and first started school: "I often sat on the teacher's lap and she explained things to me." But the other kids made teasing remarks, and Dagny defended her. Dagny was the defender, the spokesperson.
Mother took take care of Dagny's children until other arrangements could be made.
She was now in her 30s. In photos she's very good-looking and seems to have had no difficulty in attracting boyfriends, but for some reason, she didn't marry till she was 40 years old. She spent most of the 1930s in and around Lengby. During those years she sewed for various families, and from time to time she entered sewing contests. Among her things were 2 blue ribbons which read:
FIRST PREMIUM
EAST POLK COUNTY FAIR
FOSSTON MINN. 1934
On another occasion she and Aunt Wilma entered a nationwide contest which they both won. A clipping from The Thirteen Towns reads:
Two Lengby women recently won cash prizes in a nationwide sewing contest sponsored by The Household Magazine. They were Mrs. Simmie DeMarre and Miss Agnes Grytness, whose entries competed against over 2,000 dresses entered in the contest from all over the United States.
So Mother spent most of the 1930's at Lengby, quiet years in a small quiet town. Those were the days of Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger and others who were shooting their way in and out of banks throughout the mid-west. One day some of the kids found an abandoned campsite out in the woods near the schoolhouse, and of course they were all firmly convinced that John Dillinger had been there. Not much ever happened around Lengby and so this imaginative interpretation of an abandoned campsite brought a touch of thrill and excitement into the kids' lives. Certainly it amused the adults; it was an anecdote Mother told often and always with a smile, "It couldn't have been anyone else. It had to be Dillinger," she would smile.
The twenties were in the past, and as the thirties eventually drew to a close Mother went to Seattle where she worked for a while in a dressmaking shop, and later took care of children on Bainbridge Island.
While there, Mother spent her weekends in Seattle with Aunt Olivia. This aunt was actually a cousin of her father, but they had grown up together back in Norway and had also come to America together along with her father and brother, Adolf and Alf Høstmark. The foursome had arrived in Washington in time to see it become a state back in 1889. By this time Aunt Olivia had been living in Seattle for half a century, but still seemed quite nostalgic about Norway. From this aunt, Mother learned more of her heritage.
Mother's sojourn in Seattle was rather brief, apparently not much more than half a year. A couple of letters give a brief glimpse of her life at that time and also provides dates and places. Here is a letter from a Seattle dressmaking shop; it was on printed stationary:
Dear Agnes,
Would like to have you come back to work when you can or let me know--called up and got your address from where you used to live--.
Sincerely, Dolly Madden
February 6, 1939 is the date on that letter. She must have arrived in Seattle some time in the fall of 1938. How she responded to the above letter I don't know, but by this time she was working for another lady, who gave her a letter of reference which is dated June 5th, 1939:
Agnes Grytness has been employed by me for some six months and it is with the greatest regret that we see her leave us. I cannot speak too highly of her. In the house she is cheerful and industrious. With the children she is understanding and completely reliable as well as a good influence. As a seamstress she is neat, capable and clever.
Mrs. Lawrence Peters
Port Blakely, Washington
That's a good description of Mother as I later knew her myself. She always got along very well with people, was very responsible, and always found things to keep herself busy with. She was a person you could trust and rely on.
North to Alaska
Seattle was the traditional port of embarkation for Alaska. Whether or not Mother had come to Seattle with thoughts of going north, I wouldn't know. But she seems to have carefully considered the move and informed herself on what might lie ahead. In addition to what she may have read about Alaska, she found people who had been there and could give her first-hand, up-to-date information of life in the north.
On June 13, 1939, she boarded the steamship S.S. Aleutian, bound for Alaska. She went in the company of two Fairbanks women whose names and autographs are on the ship's passenger list--which she saved as a memento.
Another memento of that voyage is a clipping from The Thirteen Towns, the regional newspaper which was read in Lengby. It so happened that Mrs. Eva Foss, the publisher of that paper was also on the ship, taking an Alaska cruise with a group of journalists. No doubt her friends and neighbors back in Lengby were surprised when they read this article:
COINCIDENCE . . .
Among the rare coincidences of the week was that related by Mrs. E. Foss in a letter from Alaska in which she tells of sitting down to lunch on board ship to find that the girl sitting next to her was Miss Agnes Grytness of Lengby. Miss Grytness was on her way to Fairbanks to start a dressmaking shop.
Alaska was then a territory, not yet a state; "America's last frontier" it was called. Recently I found a travelogue published back in 1939 which gives a contemporary picture of Fairbanks--and, for all I know, Mother herself might have read this before setting out:
Probably there are more log than frame houses: one story log dwellings, often with tin roofs; cozy and homelike and obviously snug and warm in winter. Nearly every little log house has a huge front window; all have electric lights; most of them have radios, many have telephones.
The library, also built of logs, has more window area and probably more books, at least books worth reading, than the public library of any town of that size in the States.
Signs of prosperity are general in Fairbanks. Not that is rough and splurgy for a mining town. There is an occasional drunken brawl, now and then, but on the whole it is a very respectable and above all self-respecting place.
To be sure, Fairbanks needs pavements and sidewalks. Few of its streets are paved, concrete has not replaced many of those resounding wooden sidewalks so general in Alaska, and Fairbanks has its share of broken slats, missing sections and weed-grown stretches. In places it is wise to walk in the street itself; . . . when it rains the unpaved streets are apt to be pretty gooey with fertile black mud.
That was Fairbanks, a town of 3,000 in the center of Alaska's vast wilderness interior, as seen by journalist Harry Franks the summer before Mother arrived. Franks also mentions a big new Federal Building, 4 stories high which had elevators, and also housed a very modern post office.
On arriving there, Mother got a job in a laundry. Perhaps she wanted to first get to know this place before attempting any business venture such as a dressmaking shop.
She spent two years in Alaska, two years of very memorable experiences which she often talked about. The snow and cold were not new to anyone from Minnesota, but here she saw the northern lights and the midnight sun. There were also interesting and often eccentric people who found their niche in this frontier world of Fairbanks. On the down side, her most depressing experiences were the long winter nights when the sun would be up for only a couple hours a day. She recalled feeling tired and worn out. Sunlight seems to have been what she missed most.
The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner was the local paper, and as that name might suggest, the town was a center for miners, many of them characters right out of a Jack London novel. One day Mother met Sett Borgström, a miner who was in town to spend Christmas.
After returning to the mine, he wrote her letters which she saved. The return addresses show that he then worked at Suntrana; later he worked at the Hi-Yu gold mine. In March he came to town again, to see the dog sled races. The Fairbanks Dog Derby was the big event of the year, one which brought miners from the outlying camps into town. And so they met again.
Sett Borgström was from Sweden and had come to America in 1920; there he settled in Washington and worked in the Bellingham Coal Mine. He'd also prospected in the Cascade Mountains and had been an Alaska fisherman in the Ketchikan area. He'd come to Fairbanks in 1938; apparently with intentions of saving up money to go back to Washington and buy a farm.
They were married the following July 3rd, 1940. And now Mother went out to experience the world of the mining camp where she and my father made their first home.
The Hi-Yu gold mine was one of numerous mines which were out in the wilderness of the Fairbanks area. It was a hard-rock mine, worked by eight or ten men who lived at the camp, some with their families. My parents lived in a wanagan, which was a cabin built on skids; there was no electricity. But there was regular mail service, and with a battery-powered radio they kept in touch with the outside world.
Not all news from the outside was good; the Nazis invaded Norway, and in letters from home in Lengby, Grandma expressed her fears for old friends and family back in the old country who now lived under Nazi occupation.
Here in the wilderness, they lived among bears; the mining camp and the smell of food attracted them. Mother remembered watching a mother bear who used to bring her cubs to play around the cabin. My father regarded the bears as harmless, and some miners even treated them like pets; others were frightened of them. The wife of one miner carried a Mauser rife wherever she went. My parents used to tell numerous amusing stories about the bears, and how they sometimes frightened people. But there seem to have been no injuries. No people were attacked and no bears were shot. Bears were part of life at the Hi-Yu Mine.
When they finally left Alaska in the fall of 1941, they took many good memories back with them. And of course that's also where they acquired me.
Not many children were born in Alaska, so I came into a world that showered me with attention. The miners and prospectors gave me gifts which included gold rings and nuggets, and also small fork and spoon with gold nuggets on the handle. One of these was from Inez Gustafson, the wife of the mine owner, and she told my father, "I want you to promise to teach him everything you know about geology."
Were the lady alive today, she would no doubt be pleased to know that I have a degree in geology.
But it wasn't all happiness that month. Just a week after I was born, another of Mother's sisters died. But before any news of the death arrived, Mother had a disturbing dream which she describes in a letter:
Lillian had a black cape over her shoulders and seemed to be in an awful hurry. "I just came to say good-bye! I have to go now!" she said, and rushed out of the room. Mother [Grandma] was there, and she said, "You know Lillian's in a hurry."
I awoke frightened and said to your father, "I know something's happened to Lillian!"
I of course knew Lillian was sick with tuberculoses. She was in a TB sanitarium near Crookston; I don't remember how long, I knew it was many months. The last letter I had from her said she was feeling much better. I did not know how seriously sick she was. I was far away and the folks were not telling me everything they knew.
At the time she died and I had that dream, I was in Fairbanks where you were born about a week earlier. Your father came into the room and I was quite upset; I had just had this dream and told him about it.
Later I got a letter that she had died later that day [Sunday, August 24, 1941]. She had taken a turn for the worse and was taken to a hospital in Crookston where she died.
* * *
Aunt Lillian was the twin sister of Aunt Wilma. She left three children, one of whom is Janet Teal who in later years was very close to Mother and did many things for her when she got old.
The farm near Ferndale
We left Alaska when I was a couple months old, and moved to Washington where my parents went to look at a farm near Ferndale. That was on a Sunday, December 7th, 1941, and while looking at this farm they heard a radio announcement of the attack at Pearl Harbor. So that's where I was that day, though of course I don't remember any of it.
It was the farm my parents chose to buy.
These were the war years, and Mother's younger brother, who had for many years been in the Merchant Marine, now found himself in a risky occupation, with transport ships in danger of being targeted by submarines. His ship had, in fact, left Pearl Harbor just six hours before the attack. This sailor was my Uncle Ralph.
When his ship docked in one of the harbors of Puget Sound, Uncle Ralph would take leave and visit us and stay for a week or two. He'd help with the farm work; there was always plenty to do. One summer he helped build the hay barn. And I remember riding on a horse-drawn hay wagon with him.
Ralph was a fun guy to have for an uncle, but he was also a tease. During his last visit I got mad at him and told him to leave. "You've been here long enough!" I said. I was only three or four then.
But the next day he did leave, much to my regret. His leave was up and he would have gone anyway. After he was gone I missed him. And the truth is, I still miss him.
Even in his absence, there were mementos of him which in their own right made a life-long impression on me. From distant ports like Shanghai and Hong Kong, he had brought us exotic art objects as presents. He gave Mother a beautifully carved Chinese chest which was made of a very fragrant wood, and whenever Mother opened it, it would fill the room with that wonderful aroma.
I remember a bas relief picture of a pagoda on an island in a lake that used to intrigue me very much.
"It's Japanese," Mother would tell me, "Your Uncle Ralph brought it back with him from the Orient."
And I asked, "Is that what Japan is like?"
We were then at war with Japan; but I wasn't aware of any of that, being only three or four. I just remember those pictures, which were my first impressions of the Far East. These depictions of the Orient were part of my childhood, as was the sailor who brought them.
Here's a letter he wrote my mother. It's dated July 25, 1946, a year after the war:
Dear Agnes,
Will write you a few lines to let you know what ship I am on. S.S. William Glackens (Coastwise Pacific Far East Lines.) Pier 24, Seattle Wash. We will sail Friday for Japan. I got your letter today, and when the next one comes keep it till I get back. I think this will be a good ship as we have a good crew on here, well I have not much more to write about so will end with best wishes to you, Sett and Daniel.
Your Brother, Ralph
In the late 1940's he retired from the Merchant Marine and bought a tavern in Proctor, Minnesota. Mother frowned on taverns, but she never said anything critical about her brother operating one. Somehow, when Uncle Ralph did something she would ordinarily disapprove of, it wasn't quite so reproachable.
Uncle was married twice. His first wife was from New York City. When he brought her home to Lengby, Grandma had to teach her all about farm life. One day she sent her out to pluck a chicken for dinner. Soon they heard the sound of dreadful squawking and ran out to see what was going on. There they found Uncle Ralph's wife plucking a live chicken.
That first marriage didn't last. His second wife was his partner in the tavern business, and this match seems to have worked out better. Her name was Alma.
Early in 1945, news came that Grandma was dying of cancer; and so Mother took me back to Minnesota with her to say good-bye. After a long train journey, I woke up one morning in a bed in a house, and I asked, "Did the sleep take us here?"
By then Grandma had only a few painful weeks left, and one day Mother told me, "Grandma went to be with God." That's all I remember, I wasn't quite four yet. She died the day after FDR, on April 13, 1945. Grandma wrote some letters to my mother before she got sick, and in them she gave me loving mention. When I came across them half a century later, it was really good to read them, and be reassured that I had a loving Grandmother who thought about me.
I remember meeting several cousins during that trip, including Ramon and Beulah, and also Ramona and Gene. I didn't meet Douglas, Russell, Merle or Dewey, who were all in the service; this was near the end of the war.
Like any little kid, I loved trains, so it was particularly exciting when one of my uncles, Richard Engström, who was a railroad engineer, took me to see a roundhouse, where the train engines were serviced. When we got home, I asked my mother all the questions I should have asked Uncle Richard, who was disappointed that I hadn't asked him anything and thought I wasn't interested.
Strangely enough, I don't remember seeing Grandpa during the journey. Apparently he was so overwhelmed with Grandma's impending death that he retreated to some quiet place and wasn't around.
After Grandma was gone, Grandpa sold their home and went to live with his children. There were several he stayed with, including my parents. And so I lost a grandmother, but gained a grandfather.
On his arrival, we would go down to the railroad depot to meet him. I still remember the huge train chugging in and slowing to a stop. It was fascinating, but also frightening, that big train. The engine would let off steam with a loud hissing sound, Grandpa would descend from one of the coaches, and then he'd be there to stay with us for a couple of months.
I always remember him reading the Decorah Posten, the Norwegian newspaper. It came once a week, and he would sit there for the next day or two wearing his glasses and holding his magnifying glass, totally absorbed in his newspaper.
Reading was one of his interests, but he'd also find tasks to work at for several hours a day. Mostly he'd chop and pile firewood, and in the summer he'd do the haying. Whether reading or working, I can never remember him just sitting around with nothing to do.
One day he tore the skin of his hand on a nail from an old fence he was taking apart. Nevertheless, he went right on working till my father discovered him, still chopping and sawing with blood all over himself. My father asked him, "What happened to your hand?"
"It's just a scratch," said Grandpa.
My father took him to see a doctor, and it turned out that this "scratch" required 10 stitches.
That's part of being an old-world Norwegian. When you need ten stitches you call it "just a scratch", ignore it and go on with whatever you're doing.
Grandpa spent most of his later years in Idaho with Aunt Wilma and Uncle Simmie, where he eventually died in 1961.
We lived on the farm at Ferndale for 16 years, till my father died in 1958. We raised chickens, having about 3,000 most of the time. Those 3,000 chickens had to be fed 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Each year we would pick a day on which we'd finish up the chores early and take off for the afternoon; on some years we'd go to the beach, other years to the mountains. But that would be for only one single afternoon each year. It wasn't much of a vacation.
My father died at the relatively young age of 62, of black lung and a lifetime of overwork. Even in his thirties, his doctor had advised him to take it easy, but of course he never did. Basically he worked himself to death.
He was very efficient and systematic, with a head for business. The farm prospered. It was among the most modern and mechanized chicken farms in the state, and visitors from agricultural schools came on field trips to see it.
Among the boxes and drawers of papers and letters that Mother had saved, I found the mortgage against which they borrowed $5,000 in 1948 and spent 5 years paying off. Looking at those old papers, I see something more than just money and hard work--the committment of two people working together, making long-range plans and achieving their goals.
Together, my parents made a good team. Though Mother probably worked as hard as Dad, she was not really a workaholic by nature. Like her own father, she was a self-motivated person who always kept busy, finding things to do, but never obsessively or to excess. Mother outlived Dad by 39 years.
She asked me if I wanted the farm, and I said no. So she sold it and moved to Everett, where she lived the remaining four decades of her life.
Retirement in Everett, Washington
Here she lived in semi-retirement, continuing to do sewing projects, some for money, some not, making aprons, quilts and clothing, even weaving rugs. She still had her old pedal-operated sewing machine which she'd bought back in 1920, and continued to use it till a year or two before her death. It is now a treasured heirloom in the home of one of her nieces, Janet Teal.
Another niece, Beulah DeMarre, also lived nearby. The two of them visited her often, and as she got older they took her shopping, to the doctor, and helped her with many other tasks. They were like daughters to her, so most of the heirlooms that Mother had acquired over her lifetime went to them. For myself, I kept the photos, letters, papers, and Asian art.
Beulah is the daughter of Aunt Wilma, Mother's last surviving sister; and Janet is a daughter of Aunt Wilma's twin who died in 1941.
Whenever I returned home to visit, Mother read me stories in Norwegian. I consider myself fortunate to have gotten exposure to the language, though I must admit that I never learned it as well as I would like. In later years I read stories to her, though in English.
Among her favorites were "Giants in the Earth" by Ole Rølvaag. She also loved "Rebecca of Sunnybroke Farm" by Kate Wiggin, which she'd read as a child, and when I read it to her I enjoyed it together with her.
It was during these later years that I began to take an interest in my family heritage; among the old letters was a genealogy tracing the Grytnes family back 250 years, to a farm 130 km southwest of Trondhjem. There was a list showing the births and deaths of many family members who had immigrated to America in the 19th century. There were also photos from Norway, some taken as early as the 1860's, when portrait photography was new and just becoming popular. Among them was one of my great grandfather, who was born in 1834. Mother could identify many of the people in those old photos, and together we labeled them. About some of them she knew anecdotes which had been handed down, and I recorded these as well. When things aren't written down on paper, they tend to be forgotten after a couple generations or so.
For so many ancestors, we know only their name, the day they were born and the day they died. There are so many names that have no story; everything they ever did, saw, felt or experienced has all been forgotten. It makes me sad to think of them. There is something tragic about the way entire lifetimes pass into oblivion.
I'm just glad that Mother left something to be remembered by. The memories she wrote would cover no more than 10 or 15 typewritten pages, but they are good memories, and what little she wrote, she wrote well. Ironically, she was surprised to find they were liked and enjoyed by people who read them. She wrote them because I kept nagging her till she did, but I don't think it ever occurred to her that in recording them she'd written anything of much interest.
She was a gentle unassuming person who rarely expressed opinions. Since she had seen so much of the 20th century, people would sometimes ask her what comments she might have on it. But she could never think of anything special to say. However, sometimes I'd be watching a TV documentary of WW II, and she'd say, "Those were such horrible times."
Documentaries and movies of WW II are very popular nowadays. Many look back on WW II as an heroic age when good guys fought Nazi bad guys; as a time when everything was larger than life, but to Mother those were "such horrible times." She prefered to remember her childhood, an era when war seemed like a thing of the past.
Mother kept in touch with her old friends, some from as far back as when she was a teen-ager in Wisconsin. In 1967 she took me with on a trip back to Minnesota and Wisconsin to attend the golden anniversary of two couples for whom she'd been bridesmaid back on April 21, 1917. Actually, it had been a triple wedding; three Hansons had been married that day, one of them to her sister Dagny who was killed by an auto in 1932.
As years went by, one after another of her sisters and brothers passed away; Lillian back in 1941, Olaf in 1954, Ralph in 1965, Freda in 1971, Ingvald in 1975, Einar in 1976, and Bill in 1979. And then only she and Wilma were left.
It was the same with old friends as well. She exchanged Christmas cards and letters with them, but, as years passed, each Christmas brought fewer cards.
Of course she formed close friendships in Everett too, but they too were passing on. One by one, she was outliving her contemporaries, and by the time she reached 97, there weren't many left. She missed those people who would never again come to visit. "I feel so lonely," she would often say during the last months of her life. That is the dreadful loneliness of old age.
Mother was always independent. She lived alone in her apartment, and did her own cooking and housework until a year before she died. She liked to get out, and enjoyed walking downtown, but her ability to do so declined. When I visited in May 1996, she was barely able to cross the room, and only with the aid of a walker. Some months earlier, she had fallen and broken an arm, and there was the danger of falling again. It was clear that she could no longer be alone.
Nevertheless, she adamantly refused to go to a nursing home; she wanted to stay in her own apartment. That was extremely important to her, and she had always lived with the hope that I would somehow be there to take care of her when she could no longer take care of herself.
That troubled me, because I couldn't imagine myself as being of any use as a practical nurse. Fortunately, however, it worked out that I was able to look after her during her last days. It was dreadful to see her suffer the way she did, but I would have felt much worse to have had her go to a nursing home to die.
Mother had had too many birthdays, and there was no hope of her recovering from that. The task was to make her as comfortable as possible during her final days. It was very painful to see her deteriorating, losing her eyesight, her hearing, and her ability to walk. The least movement became an agony for her. I didn't want to see anybody suffer so, certainly not my mother.
The efforts of several people made possible her wish to end her life at home. These included state social workers and nurses, as well as the volunteer efforts of ladies from the church--a retired teacher and two former nurses. Beulah had by then moved back to Idaho, but Janet still lived nearby and continued to get the groceries and came by to cheer Mother up with her visits. Without their support, I simply could not have gone through those last seven months.
Mother's mind remained clear to the end; and when people stopped by to visit, even if it was just for five or ten minutes, it would always cheer her up and make her day. On her 97th birthday, Aunt Wilma came over from Idaho to celebrate with her. That was the best present she could have had.
She loved to read. I'd get her books in large type print, and she'd go through a couple of them a week. But there came a day when she stopped reading. Her eyes had finally given in. That was a couple months before she died, and soon she could no longer tell day from night, nor could she identify people by sight. We became like shadows to her. Her hearing was also going, and she was in great pain.
Stronger pain pills were prescribed. But the drugs affected her mind and she became terribly confused. She understood that the drugs were the source of her confusion, and so she refused to take them any more.
I said to her, "It's either the pain or the confusion."
"Then I'll put up with the pain," she said, "I don't want to be confused."
After she stopped taking the pills, her mind again became reasonably clear. I thought that was very heroic of her.
She died during the snowstorm that hit us the day after Christmas. Her death was a jolt, but it was expected. She'd lived a long and good life; and, most fortunately, she was able to die in her own home, rather than end up in a hospital or nursing home. That was important to her. Given the fact of life that she had to get old and die, this was a best-case scenario, thanks to the kindness of many people.
danielfortyone (at)gmail.com
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A letter in Norwegian
Here is a letter that Mother wrote in Norwegian in 1978 or '79. Usually she wrote to me in English, but I'd been asking her to write me in Norwegian and on this occasion she did. It's family news; not of historical interest other than that here we have a letter by her in Norwegian. She writes in the Danish-Norwegian of the late 1800's, the formal written language that immigrants of that era brought with them to America and taught their children. To a 21st century person living in Norway, the spelling and grammar probably look a bit archaic. And as American Norwegians often did, she includes a sprinkling of English words.
--- --- ---
Kjære Daniel,
Jeg gratulerer dig paa din fødselsdag.
Skulde ønske du var her saa skulde vi have cake og kaffee og have an hyggelg visit. Men nu bliver det bare et brev. Du har saa ofte spurgt mig om at skrive et brev paa Norsk. Saa faar dette blive i stedet for en fødselsdag gave. Det er ikke got for mig at komme ut og kjøbe noget. Det er saa vanskelig for mig at gaa med denne onde hofte. Jeg skal se doktoren paa onsdag saa faar jeg vide mere om hvad som kan gjøres for den.
Vi har saa deiligt veir, har varet saa i flere uker. Jeg husker ikke naar vi har haft en saa pen sommer.
Jeg var ute hos Janet og Dave og havde middag med dem nogle dage siden, dem planer paa og reise til Idaho og spende Labor Day uke enden, saa vil dem jeg skal gaa med dem. Jeg ved ikke nu om jeg kommer hjem igjen med dem eller at jeg bliver lidt længere. Det kommer an paa hvorledes jeg føler.
Har du nogen plan for at komme hjem i høst? Bill (din onkel) har varet og endnu er saa syk, han har hvad dem kalder Valley feber, en slags virus. Han fik det i Arizona da dem var der i vinter. Han har været daarlig siden og da jeg talte med Wilma nogle dage siden var han paa hospitalet. Haaber at høre at han er bedre. Haaber du can læse dette, det er de beste jeg kan gjøre. Ønsker dig alt godt med dagen. Hils Lidia fra mig. En kjærlig hilsen.
Fra din Moder
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Labels: Agnes Grytnes Borgström, Grytnæs, Grytnes, Grytness
posted by Daniel at
12:09 PM
