North to Alaska
This is Part 2 of In the Horse & Buggy Days
Memories of Agnes Grytness Borgström
1899 to 1996
Seattle was the traditional port of embarkation for Alaska. Whether or not she 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 lay 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 2 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. 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:
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 2 years in Alaska, 2 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, the most depressing thing she experienced was the long winter nights when the sun would be up for only a couple hours a day. She recalls 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 of mines and 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 8 or 10 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 world and events outside.
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 rule.
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, and 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:
MOTHER WRITES:
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Aunt Lillian was the twin sister of Aunt Wilma. She left 3 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 before I was a year 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.
My parents bought the farm.
These were the war years, and Mother’s younger brother was in the Merchant Marine, a fairly dangerous occupation since transport ships were targeted by submarines. 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, and one day I got mad at him and told him to leave, "You’ve been here long enough!" I said. I was only 3 or 4 then.
But then the next day he did leave, much to my regret. After he was gone I missed him. And the truth is, I still even today kind of miss him. But apparently his leave was up and he would have gone anyway.
But even in his absence, there were mementos of his visits that continued to make an impression on me. From distant sea ports like Shanghai and Hong Kong, he brought exotic art objects. He gave Mother a beautifully carved Chinese chest which was made of very fragrant wood, and whenever Mother opened it, it would fill the room with that wonderful aroma.
And I remember a picture on our wall 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 don’t remember any of that, I was only 3 or 4. I just remember those pictures, and from them came my first impressions of the Far East. Actually, that picture was Chinese, but that’s beside the point. These mementos of the Orient were part of my childhood home, as was the sailor who brought them.
I found this letter from him. It’s dated July 25, 1946, a year after the war:
Uncle was married twice. His first wife was from some city back east and when he brought her home to Lengby, Grandma had to teach her all about farm life. One day she sent her out in the back yard to pluck a chicken for dinner. Soon there was some awful squawking and everybody ran out to see was going on, and there they found Uncle Ralph’s wife, plucking the chicken.
But that 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 with and went back to Minnesota to say good-bye. After several days on a train, 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 4 yet. She died the day after FDR, on April 13, 1945. Recently we found some letters which Grandma had written to my mother before she got sick, and in them she gave me loving mention. It was really good to read these letters, now half a century old, and find that I had a loving Grandmother who thought about me.
I do remember meeting several cousins including Ramon and Beulah, and also Ramona and Gene. Douglas and Russell were in the Service; this was during WW II. Merle and Dewey were also in the Military.
Like any little kid, I loved trains. And one of my uncles, Richard Engström, was a railroad engineer. So one day he took me to see a roundhouse, where the train engines were serviced. And when we got home, I asked my mother all the questions I should have asked Uncle Richard. Meanwhile, he was disappointed that I hadn’t asked him anything and he thought I wasn’t interested.
Strangely enough, I don’t remember seeing Grandpa at this time. 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 lived with his children. There were several he would stay with, including my parents from time to time. And so I lost a grandmother, but gained a grandfather.
We would go down to the railroad depot to meet him. I still remember that 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 here 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 then 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 his interest, 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. But whether reading or working, I can never remember him just sitting around with nothing to do.
One day he tore open the skin of his hand on a nail that was in some old fence he was taking apart. But he went right on working till at last my father happened to come by and found him, still chopping and sawing; and blood all over the place. And 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 what you’re doing.
Grandpa spent most of his later years in Idaho with Aunt Wilma and Uncle Simmie. There he eventually died in 1961.
We lived on this farm at Ferndale for 16 years, till my father died in 1958. We raised chickens. Those 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 it would be for only a single afternoon each year.
My father died at the relatively young age of 62, of black lung, basically. But a lifetime of overwork must have had a lot to do with it. Even back in his thirties, his doctor had advised him to take it easy, but of course he never did. Basically he worked himself to death.
Nevertheless, he was very efficient and systematic, and he had a head for business. The farm prospered. At the time it was among the most modern and mechanized chicken farms in the state, and people from agricultural schools would come here on field trips to see it.
Among the boxes and drawers of papers and letters that Mother had saved, I found the mortgage where they borrowed $5,000 in 1948 and spent 5 years paying it off. As I look at these old papers, I see something more than just money and hard work—I sense the commitment of two people working as a team together and making long range plans and sticking to them and basically achieving their goals.
Together, my parents made a good team. But though Mother probably worked as hard as he did, she was not really a workaholic. She was more like her father, a self motivated person who always kept busy and found things for herself to do, but never did anything obsessively or to excess. And she outlived him by 39 years.
Mother asked me if I wanted the farm, and I said no. So she sold it and moved to Everett, where she lived the remaining 4 decades of her life.
RETIREMENT IN EVERETT, WASHINGTON
Here she lived in semi-retirement, but she continued to do sewing projects. She made aprons for restaurants, projects and things like that. She still used her old pedal operated sewing machine which she’d bought back in 1920, and she continued to use it till a year or two before she died. It is now a treasured heirloom in the home of her niece, Janet Teal.
Two of her nieces lived nearby, Beulah DeMarre and Janet Teal. They visited her and as she got older they took her shopping and to the doctor and helped her with many things. Janet and Beulah were like daughters to her, and so most of the heirlooms that Mother had acquired over her lifetime went to them. For myself, I kept the photos, letters, and papers.
Beulah is the daughter of Aunt Wilma, Mother’s last surviving sister; and Janet is a daughter of Aunt Wilma’s twin who had died back in 1941.
From time to time I would come home to visit, and Mother would read me stories in Norwegian. I’ve always considered myself fortunate to have gotten some exposure to the language, though I must admit that I never learned it very well. 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 begin to take some interest in looking up the family heritage; and among old letters and things was a genealogy tracing the Grytness family back some 250 years, to a farm some 130 km southwest of Trondhjem. There was a list showing the births and deaths of many family members who had come to America in the 19th century. And there were photos from Norway, some taken as early as the 1860s, back when portrait photography was new and becoming popular. Among them were my great grandfather, who was born way back in 1834. Mother could identify many of the people those old photos, and together we labeled them. About some of them she knew anecdotes which had been handed down; But when things aren’t written down on paper, they tend to be forgotten after a couple generations or so.
For so many ancestors, we have 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 some 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 of us now look back on WW II as something of a heroic age when good guys fought Nazi bad guys; as a time when everything was larger than life. Almost a modern heroic age. But to Mother those years were "such horrible times." She liked to remember back to when she was a child and 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 2 couples for whom she’d been bride’s maid 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 died off; 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 it was only her and Wilma left.
It was the same with old friends from way back; she exchanged Christmas cards and letters with them, but as years passed, each Christmas brought fewer cards.
Of course she formed close friendships here in Everett too; but they were also dying off. 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 loneliness of old age.
Mother was always independent. She lived alone in her apartment, and did her own cooking and housework up till a year before she died. She liked to get out and walk, and enjoyed walking down town, but her walking ability declined. When I came to visit her in May 1996, she was barely able to walk across the floor; and that only with the aid of a walker. Some months earlier, she had fallen and broken an arm, and she might fall 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 always made me feel sad because I couldn’t imagine myself as ever being of any use in taking care of her. I know nothing about doctoring, and even the very thought of that stuff is kind of disturbing. Fortunately, however, it worked out in a way that I got to look after her for those last 7 months. It was awful to see her suffer the way she did, But I would have felt much worse to have had her go to some nursing home to die.
The efforts of several people made her wish possible. These included state social workers and nurses, as well as the volunteer efforts of ladies from the Church. 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.
She’d had too many birthdays, and there was no hope of her recovering from that. The task was make her as comfortable as possible while waiting for her to move on to her next assignment. It was very painful to see her sliding down hill, losing her eyesight and her ability to walk. The least movement became an agony for her. I wouldn’t want to see anybody get like that, certainly not my mother.
Although I had absolutely no training or background for this sort of thing, there were people I could turn to for practical advice and moral support. These were the ladies of the Central Lutheran Church Care Team. Since these included a retired teacher and two former nurses, they were ladies who understood the situation very well. Without their support, I simply could not have gone through those last 7 months.
Mother’s mind remained clear to the end; and when people stopped by to visit, even if it was just for 5 or 10 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 those 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 also in great pain.
Stronger pain pills were prescribed. But the drugs affected her mind and she got terribly confused. She understood that the drugs were the source of her confusion, and so she refused to 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 snow storm 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 could die in her own home, and did not have to 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. We who loved her were left with a feeling of mission accomplished.
Memories of Agnes Grytness Borgström
1899 to 1996
Seattle was the traditional port of embarkation for Alaska. Whether or not she 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 lay 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 2 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. 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 . . .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:
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.
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.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.
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.
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 2 years in Alaska, 2 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, the most depressing thing she experienced was the long winter nights when the sun would be up for only a couple hours a day. She recalls 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 of mines and 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 8 or 10 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 world and events outside.
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 rule.
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, and 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:
MOTHER WRITES:
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 3 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 before I was a year 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.
My parents bought the farm.
These were the war years, and Mother’s younger brother was in the Merchant Marine, a fairly dangerous occupation since transport ships were targeted by submarines. 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, and one day I got mad at him and told him to leave, "You’ve been here long enough!" I said. I was only 3 or 4 then.
But then the next day he did leave, much to my regret. After he was gone I missed him. And the truth is, I still even today kind of miss him. But apparently his leave was up and he would have gone anyway.
But even in his absence, there were mementos of his visits that continued to make an impression on me. From distant sea ports like Shanghai and Hong Kong, he brought exotic art objects. He gave Mother a beautifully carved Chinese chest which was made of very fragrant wood, and whenever Mother opened it, it would fill the room with that wonderful aroma.
And I remember a picture on our wall 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 don’t remember any of that, I was only 3 or 4. I just remember those pictures, and from them came my first impressions of the Far East. Actually, that picture was Chinese, but that’s beside the point. These mementos of the Orient were part of my childhood home, as was the sailor who brought them.
I found this letter from him. It’s dated July 25, 1946, a year after the war:
Dear Agnes,Some time in the late 1940s he retired from the Merchant Marine and bought tavern in Proctor. Mother frowned on taverns and drinking; but she never said anything critical about her brother Ralph owning and operating one. Somehow, when Uncle Ralph did something she disapproved of, it wasn’t quite so reproachable.
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
Uncle was married twice. His first wife was from some city back east and when he brought her home to Lengby, Grandma had to teach her all about farm life. One day she sent her out in the back yard to pluck a chicken for dinner. Soon there was some awful squawking and everybody ran out to see was going on, and there they found Uncle Ralph’s wife, plucking the chicken.
But that 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 with and went back to Minnesota to say good-bye. After several days on a train, 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 4 yet. She died the day after FDR, on April 13, 1945. Recently we found some letters which Grandma had written to my mother before she got sick, and in them she gave me loving mention. It was really good to read these letters, now half a century old, and find that I had a loving Grandmother who thought about me.
I do remember meeting several cousins including Ramon and Beulah, and also Ramona and Gene. Douglas and Russell were in the Service; this was during WW II. Merle and Dewey were also in the Military.
Like any little kid, I loved trains. And one of my uncles, Richard Engström, was a railroad engineer. So one day he took me to see a roundhouse, where the train engines were serviced. And when we got home, I asked my mother all the questions I should have asked Uncle Richard. Meanwhile, he was disappointed that I hadn’t asked him anything and he thought I wasn’t interested.
Strangely enough, I don’t remember seeing Grandpa at this time. 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 lived with his children. There were several he would stay with, including my parents from time to time. And so I lost a grandmother, but gained a grandfather.
We would go down to the railroad depot to meet him. I still remember that 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 here 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 then 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 his interest, 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. But whether reading or working, I can never remember him just sitting around with nothing to do.
One day he tore open the skin of his hand on a nail that was in some old fence he was taking apart. But he went right on working till at last my father happened to come by and found him, still chopping and sawing; and blood all over the place. And 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 what you’re doing.
Grandpa spent most of his later years in Idaho with Aunt Wilma and Uncle Simmie. There he eventually died in 1961.
We lived on this farm at Ferndale for 16 years, till my father died in 1958. We raised chickens. Those 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 it would be for only a single afternoon each year.
My father died at the relatively young age of 62, of black lung, basically. But a lifetime of overwork must have had a lot to do with it. Even back in his thirties, his doctor had advised him to take it easy, but of course he never did. Basically he worked himself to death.
Nevertheless, he was very efficient and systematic, and he had a head for business. The farm prospered. At the time it was among the most modern and mechanized chicken farms in the state, and people from agricultural schools would come here on field trips to see it.
Among the boxes and drawers of papers and letters that Mother had saved, I found the mortgage where they borrowed $5,000 in 1948 and spent 5 years paying it off. As I look at these old papers, I see something more than just money and hard work—I sense the commitment of two people working as a team together and making long range plans and sticking to them and basically achieving their goals.
Together, my parents made a good team. But though Mother probably worked as hard as he did, she was not really a workaholic. She was more like her father, a self motivated person who always kept busy and found things for herself to do, but never did anything obsessively or to excess. And she outlived him by 39 years.
Mother asked me if I wanted the farm, and I said no. So she sold it and moved to Everett, where she lived the remaining 4 decades of her life.
RETIREMENT IN EVERETT, WASHINGTON
Here she lived in semi-retirement, but she continued to do sewing projects. She made aprons for restaurants, projects and things like that. She still used her old pedal operated sewing machine which she’d bought back in 1920, and she continued to use it till a year or two before she died. It is now a treasured heirloom in the home of her niece, Janet Teal.
Two of her nieces lived nearby, Beulah DeMarre and Janet Teal. They visited her and as she got older they took her shopping and to the doctor and helped her with many things. Janet and Beulah were like daughters to her, and so most of the heirlooms that Mother had acquired over her lifetime went to them. For myself, I kept the photos, letters, and papers.
Beulah is the daughter of Aunt Wilma, Mother’s last surviving sister; and Janet is a daughter of Aunt Wilma’s twin who had died back in 1941.
From time to time I would come home to visit, and Mother would read me stories in Norwegian. I’ve always considered myself fortunate to have gotten some exposure to the language, though I must admit that I never learned it very well. 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 begin to take some interest in looking up the family heritage; and among old letters and things was a genealogy tracing the Grytness family back some 250 years, to a farm some 130 km southwest of Trondhjem. There was a list showing the births and deaths of many family members who had come to America in the 19th century. And there were photos from Norway, some taken as early as the 1860s, back when portrait photography was new and becoming popular. Among them were my great grandfather, who was born way back in 1834. Mother could identify many of the people those old photos, and together we labeled them. About some of them she knew anecdotes which had been handed down; But when things aren’t written down on paper, they tend to be forgotten after a couple generations or so.
For so many ancestors, we have 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 some 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 of us now look back on WW II as something of a heroic age when good guys fought Nazi bad guys; as a time when everything was larger than life. Almost a modern heroic age. But to Mother those years were "such horrible times." She liked to remember back to when she was a child and 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 2 couples for whom she’d been bride’s maid 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 died off; 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 it was only her and Wilma left.
It was the same with old friends from way back; she exchanged Christmas cards and letters with them, but as years passed, each Christmas brought fewer cards.
Of course she formed close friendships here in Everett too; but they were also dying off. 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 loneliness of old age.
Mother was always independent. She lived alone in her apartment, and did her own cooking and housework up till a year before she died. She liked to get out and walk, and enjoyed walking down town, but her walking ability declined. When I came to visit her in May 1996, she was barely able to walk across the floor; and that only with the aid of a walker. Some months earlier, she had fallen and broken an arm, and she might fall 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 always made me feel sad because I couldn’t imagine myself as ever being of any use in taking care of her. I know nothing about doctoring, and even the very thought of that stuff is kind of disturbing. Fortunately, however, it worked out in a way that I got to look after her for those last 7 months. It was awful to see her suffer the way she did, But I would have felt much worse to have had her go to some nursing home to die.
The efforts of several people made her wish possible. These included state social workers and nurses, as well as the volunteer efforts of ladies from the Church. 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.
She’d had too many birthdays, and there was no hope of her recovering from that. The task was make her as comfortable as possible while waiting for her to move on to her next assignment. It was very painful to see her sliding down hill, losing her eyesight and her ability to walk. The least movement became an agony for her. I wouldn’t want to see anybody get like that, certainly not my mother.
Although I had absolutely no training or background for this sort of thing, there were people I could turn to for practical advice and moral support. These were the ladies of the Central Lutheran Church Care Team. Since these included a retired teacher and two former nurses, they were ladies who understood the situation very well. Without their support, I simply could not have gone through those last 7 months.
Mother’s mind remained clear to the end; and when people stopped by to visit, even if it was just for 5 or 10 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 those 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 also in great pain.
Stronger pain pills were prescribed. But the drugs affected her mind and she got terribly confused. She understood that the drugs were the source of her confusion, and so she refused to 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 snow storm 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 could die in her own home, and did not have to 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. We who loved her were left with a feeling of mission accomplished.
