Perspective: Remembering the Good Old Days

92 is old. I can document that. Been there, done that.

At 92, you end up looking at all of life’s questions that were not solved during your term of life. Therefore, you must pass them off to the next generation where they will be kicked around some more but never solved.

As for my family, I had 10 siblings so parents were too busy dealing with crises from meal to meal. Life’s real problems were always pushed to the back of the stove until the potatoes were done.

Dealing with Dumplings

Sometimes Mom would make dumplings. Hard dumplings were made with flour and grated raw potatoes; soft dumplings were made with potatoes cooked in advance. We favored the hard dumplings because we were mostly Norwegian.

Most of the time we had one-course meals. And we ate a clean plate – not like today at all.

Our dinners were always at noon and our evening feed was supper. I don’t know who moved dinner to evening. If our family had done that, we wouldn’t have any supper.

Now when someone invites you to dinner you never know whether that is evening supper or noon dinner. The question doesn’t bother me because no one ever invites me to either one. You are safe if the offer is breakfast.

With 11 kids plus parents, our lifestyle approximated that of the Beverly Hillbillies. But there weren’t any hills to billy around Conway – only endless miles of flat ground. On a clear day, we could see Pisek. My older brother even saw the buffalo in Jamestown.

Summers were filled with the drone of mosquitoes for which we had no solution except for an outdoor fire using greens to smoke the mosquitoes away.

See the Wind

Winter was even worst. We lived in a Soo Line section house on the northwest side of town so it was our job to break the winter blizzards for the town folk. The barbed wire fence on Harry Kebosh’s farm didn’t help much.

We “banked” the house to keep the cold wind from coming up through the floor boards. Farmers to the north always left their fields black in the winter so on windy days we could see the wind as well as hear it.

In those days, our house was not filled with today’s gadgets that do the work. We did not have running water unless we were carrying it fastly. So in winter we heated snow in an outdoor fire pit for washing.

When we washed the long underwear, we hung them outside where they froze as stiff as an oak board. Then we took them inside where the temperature was probably five degrees warmer. Three days later in a good winter we could wear them.

Misery Haunted Us

There was no TV back in those good old days where misery haunted every step. Those were the good old days that old people talk about, trying to outdo each other with tales of hardship and how far they walked to school.

In our town of 120 (Now Pop. 7) we could always find enough kids to play pom-pom-pullaway or fox-and-the-goose. In summers, our entertainment was liberating the neighbor’s watermelon and corn.

Halloween was a little more exciting. Pushing the outdoor toilets over was a felony. In those days, every household had one. Nevertheless, some of the older boys would try it, half of whom would slip into the open pit – instant justice. At school the next day you could always smell who the casualties were.

So we have fond memories of those days, not because of the hardships but because we were young then. Anyway, that’s how I remember it.