Ole's Blog

Here is a video from the very first reel of my parents’ home movies. The year is 1948. Most or all of the clip is from a camping trip to the Mt. St. Helens area.

The dog is one of Harry Truman’s. In case you didn’t follow the Mt. St. Helens saga, Harry Truman (not the President of that name), obstinately stayed at his lodge in 1980, and was buried alive by the eruption, along with his dogs, the same breed as the one in the video. Of course the toddler on the snowbank is yours truly.

Other featured performers are my Dad (of course), Aunt Audrey, baby David, Joyce, Linda, Uncle Delmont, and Uncle Vernon (?- may be Ivan) roasting his sock. Enjoy.

48-st-helens

Well, maybe I have it together now. From Reatha’s home movies, Summer of 1957, at home in Longview. Same occasion as the still photo I posted earlier. Incidentally, this was the last all-inclusive Larson reunion. The digitized movies came out clearer than they show up here. The added graininess is from compressing the files for Internet use.

57 reunion

Please let me know if these won’t play for you. Next one is of each son’s family.

Families

Finally, another clip from the same summer, different occasion. I think it’s my 10th birthday party. Definitely my first guitar – I couldn’t play a note, but seemed to have the Elvis thing (or was it Buddy Holly?) down pat.

57 hams

I’m digitizing highlights from all of Mom’s movies and videos. Currently up to 1968 (the first 20 years), about 2 hours of highlights that I had already selected and spliced back in 1981. About 30 years left to go, probably 100-200 hours to review and select from. If you like these, I’ll be posting some more.

Uncle Ivan sent me this picture:

Lovell on Harvey the horse, 1939

Inscription on the back says “Thanksgiving 1939.” So, my dad was 25 years old, and apparently at the homestead on vacation. In his letter, Ivan told me all about that particular horse. Quite a good story.

Lovell bought or traded this horse from his cousin, Harvey Larson. By coincidence, the horse already had its name before cousin Harvey bought it. Dad got it prior to his moving away in 1934-35, but it stayed at Grandpa’s afterward. I’m pretty sure Lovell never had any horses in Washington.

Harvey was a fast, high-spirited horse, and very smart. One of his favorite tricks was somehow slipping out of his bridle while tied up. One evening, Lovell had ridden Harvey to a ranch 4-5 miles away to visit Reatha. After dark, the horse showed up at home, alone.

Fearing there had been an accident, Isaac sent Uncle Ivan on a work horse  to a neighbor about one mile away for help. Before Ivan reached the neighbor’s, Lovell caught up with him, riding Harvey. Lovell had returned on foot after Harvey rubbed off his bridle and made his own beeline for home.

On another occasion, Harvey got out of his bridle while tied up in the corral. As he escaped into the pasture, the boys started yelling at him. As if to make up for his offense, Harvey circled the pasture, herding all the milk cows toward the barn. It was hours before milking time, but maybe Harvey thought that doing the boys this favor would put him back in their good graces.  Like Ivan said, pretty smart horse.

After studying that photo, I am sure it is the same horse pictured below with Isaac and a girl about four years old (which Darlene would have been in 1939). Darlene says it isn’t her, and I have to agree the likeness is not perfect.

Isaac, Harvey, and (Darlene?)

So, if it isn’t Darlene, then who? And, isn’t that wacky outfit just the kind of thing my Mom loved to dress her kids up in? One more time, tusen takk to Uncle I for the  top picture and fine stories.

I was most grateful to receive this week the autobiography of Uncle Ivan Larson, the youngest of Isaac’s five sons. It is a fascinating 20-page document, filled with pictures, and a summary of his 85 years, up to now. Among other remembrances was the detailed account of his service in World War II, where he saw combat in the famous and decisive Battle of the Bulge. That will be coming in a future post, along with the WWII experiences of two other Larson brothers, Bob and Vernon.

For today, I would like to quote from Ivan’s account of his early life, which offers some new facts about the time just after his mother’s death, described earlier in Ike and the Boys.

My mother died on August 2, 1927, one month before my fourth birthday. My Dad had made arrangements during the early part of the year to move the family to Parkland, Washington and had sold the livestock and leased the farm to a neighbor. After my mother’s death he couldn’t bear to leave for Washington and since he had leased the farm we had to find a new place to live. We moved to the Erickson farm about a mile away and about a quarter of a mile from the Shadwell School. My Dad’s sister, Lucy, spent two summers with us to keep house and do the cooking while the farm work continued. We lived on the Erickson place for about three years and at the end of the lease on our original home, about 1930, we moved back.

This picture was taken in 1928 while we were living on the Erickson place:

While on the Erickson place I started school in September 1928 at the age of 5 years. It is said that since there was no one at home to care for me during the day I kept following my older brothers to school and the teacher finally said I might as well start school as long as I was there anyway. Thus, I got an early start in school and finished high school in 1940 at the age of 16.

After moving back to our old place I had a little over a mile to walk to school. Shadwell School was a one room school with no electricity or plumbing, as was our home. I completed elementary school in 1936. In all those eight years the total enrollment in any one year was never more than 12 students—some years there would be some grades with no pupils.

In 1937 I was confirmed at Scandia Lutheran Church at Skaar, North Dakota. The confirmation class consisted of: Ivan Larson, Ray Amundson Virgil Woodkey, Mary Ann Larson and Esther Risdal.

(End qoute) We’ll leave it there for now. Once again, “Tusen Takk” to Uncle Ivan.

By the time Isaac moved to Longview in 1942, Lovell and Walt both had children, and Vernon was engaged to be married. Ivan, fresh out of Sidney High School, stayed with Lovell and Reatha while he attended business college in Longview. Bob, Vernon, and Ivan all served in the armed forces during World War II.

I was born six years later. I believe Isaac had worked in the mills for a few years, but by the time of my earliest memories, he had retired, and was living on a few acres of land just one mile from my parents’ home. As soon as I was old enough, my folks encouraged me to walk or bicycle to Grandpa’s to spend time with him, which I did very frequently through the mid to late 1950′s. He lived in a tiny attic apartment while renting out the rest of the old farm house. There was a single milk cow, a vegetable garden, and about a dozen fruit trees, mostly cherries, from which he sold the produce to supplement the rent and his Social Security income.

Grandpa and I played many games of checkers and cribbage, and walked to a nearby slough to fish for crappie and perch. I regret that it never occurred to me to ask questions about his earlier years. However, other grandchildren who did ask got very little information for their efforts. I was told that cousin Kenny once asked grandpa what his wife had been like. His response was, “Why do you want to know?”

All five of Isaac’s sons eventually had families, some of them quite large. By 1957 there were 16 grandchildren (all pictured below); the final count reached 22.

Also pictured here are the first two great-grandchildren, Rocky and Sandy.

By the late 1960′s, Grandpa had grown quite feeble. He lived with my parents for several years, then moved to a nursing home, where he died at age 85.

He is buried at Sunnyside Cemetery near Skaar, ND, not far from the old homestead. Also buried there are his wife Anna, and my father, Lovell, who died just a few months later.

(Grandpa Larson used the nickname, “Ike,” although I seldom heard it, as he was just “Pa” or “Grandpa” within the immediate family.) After establishing the homestead, Ike returned to Wisconsin to marry Anna Moen on 10 January 1912, and brought her to the new place.

Crops were plentiful, and their family grew rapidly. Their first son, Waldemar, was born in January 1913, followed by Lovell (1914), Vernon (1917), and Robert (1919).

(The names of Lovell and Walt may be reversed.) The fifth boy, Ivan, was born in 1923.

Besides the years of favorable weather, Isaac’s skill with horses probably contributed to his farming success.

In 1926, the Larson farm experienced its first crop failure (see Letter From Anna). By then, Anna’s health was already deteriorating, as also indicated in the letter.  Isaac traveled to Washington State, and located a farm for sale near Seattle. He did not buy that farm, perhaps due to lack of cash, but did make the decision to move west. Upon his return to North Dakota, the family began selling their horses and other possessions, in preparation for the move.

Unfortunately, Anna’s health went downhill rapidly; she died in the summer of 1927, and the move was not accomplished.  Grandpa and the five boys stayed put on the old homestead. You may be familiar with the popular radio show “A Prairie Home Companion.”  Its host, humorist Garrison Keillor, often refers to a favorite stereotype, the “Norwegian bachelor farmer.” Just take that stereotype, multiply by six, and you have my father’s childhood.

Isaac may have continued to entertain the notion of moving to Washington. In the fall of 1929, Waldemar enrolled in Pacific Lutheran Academy,  now known as Pacific Lutheran University, in Parkland, WA (now a part of Tacoma). Parkland is also the location of the farm for sale mentioned in Anna’s letter of three years earlier.

Waldemar left Pacific Lutheran after only one semester, for reasons unknown; possibly related to the Great Depression,  which began with the stock market crash just weeks after he enrolled. Grandpa and the boys remained on the farm through the  1930′s, despite repeated droughts and crop failures which exacerbated the nationwide economic distress. Waldemar and Lovell both married in the mid-30′s and moved to Washington on their own, while Grandpa stayed on the farm until the younger three boys had all graduated high school, the last of them in 1940.

Next: Longview.

“Grandpa Larson,” as I always called him, was born on his father Ole’s dairy farm in Vernon County, Wisconsin. He was the last of six children born to Ole and his first wife, Anne Samuelsdatter. Anne died soon after, and Ole married Helena Olsdatter, who had a daughter the same age as Isaac. Ole and Helena eventually had six more children together (see “Ole’sChildren“). Pictured below are Isaac and two of his elder siblings. The eldest brother, Smith Larson, not pictured,was probably living on his own by this time, while the other two siblings had died in their infancy.

Family lore had it that relations were strained between Isaac and his stepmother and/or his stepsister. Of course Grandpa never mentioned anything like that himself, nor indeed anything at all about his early life. But if true, it might help explain why he never remarried after his own wife died in her 30′s, choosing instead to raise five young sons alone on the farm. That can’t have been easy.

Rewind to the year 1909, when 25-year-old Isaac set out with three of his brothers to claim homesteads on the western edge of North Dakota, about 25 miles southeast of Sidney, Montana. It was very late in the homesteading period, and the available land was marginal at best. Only a long spell of unusually favorable weather enabled any of the homesteaders succeed even briefly. The eldest brother, Smith Larson, “proved up” his claim, but apparently soon sold or ceded the land to the others. Smith was a merchant sailor, and died a bachelor in 1923.

The other three brothers, Axel, Isaac, and Oscar, stayed on to raise their families. In this, they were in the minority. Most of the homesteaders had given up even before the Depression and Dust Bowl years of the 1930′s. Today, nearly all of the area is a National Grassland, owned and administered by the federal government.

The image below is of Oscar, Isaac, and Axel, in front of one of the first dwellings they built on their claims. Imagine spending a North Dakota winter in a shack like this!

If the dwelling appears uninviting, the land around it looks downright forbidding. As early as the Lewis and Clark expedition, explorers remarked on the radical change in the landscape as soon as they crossed the Missouri River, which  separates the eastern and western halves, approximately, of the two Dakotas. On the eastern side, grass was tall and lush, nourished by plentiful rainfall and favorable soils. To the west, the grass was short and sparse, the land much drier, and the prairie interrupted by badlands — arid hills of colorful, wind-eroded soil where nothing at all will grow.

Of all our relatives, one cousin, Ron Whited (grandson of Axel Larson), still lives and ranches in the area, holding parts of the original homesteads, and leasing grazing rights on federal and private lands. Ron and his wife earn a modest living raising high-quality beef cattle on more than 12,000 acres of (mostly leased) land. Compare that to the homesteaders who expected to make a family livelihood on their claims of 160 acres!

Another cousin, Larry Larson, tells of his father Oscar returning home from a day trip to Sidney in the 1940′s  to find that a massive swarm of grasshoppers had not only decimated his crops, but had even eaten the paint from their house! Within days, Oscar moved his family to town and gave up farming for good. By this time, Isaac had moved to Washington, where his two eldest sons had established themselves and were raising families of their own.

Next: Ike and the boys.

The Letter from Anna, posted Dec. 22, generated quite a few comments, some of which were posted by readers, and others emailed to me. They followed 2 threads; the first I am addressing here.

Anna died Aug. 2, 1927, about 10 months after she wrote this letter. The cause of death was listed as diphtheria; which was not plausible to the family members who remembered it. When my father (Lovell) was battling lung cancer in 1969-70, he became absolutely convinced that it was the same illness that his mother had 43 years earlier. In Anna’s day, cancer was not only not talked about much, it was not well-known and I speculate it often was not correctly diagnosed.

Cousin Lois Hall wrote me with several remembrances on this issue. Her father, Waldemar Larson, was the eldest child, 15 years old when Anna died. Walt told Lois that he believed his mother died of a staph infection. That actually fits quite well with the cancer speculation, in that staph infections are often spread in a hospital environment, and if Anna did indeed have cancer (undiagnosed or mis-diagnosed), it may well have put her in the hospital, where she could be exposed to staph,with suppressed resistance to any such infection.

Lois also wrote about some recollections of her mother, Irene Nelson Larson. One was that Anna sometimes seemed to be “in a fog,” such as inviting company for dinner and forgetting she had done so.

Here is a rather poignant anecdote, quoting now from Lois’ email:

“Our parents’ [both Lois' parents' and mine-g.l.] cousin Gladys Moen (oldest of George & Lenore Moen’s children) was born in Sidney at same time as Uncle Ivan.  George (Anna’s brother) and Lenore lived either nearby or with Isaac and Anna at that time.  Gladys told me that her mother talked about how Anna sometimes wouldn’t nurse Ivan so she (Lenore) would nurse both babies.  This could be an indication of some possible health issues, physical and/or mental, that Anna was facing. “

Here are three images Uncle Ivan sent me. They are the first three pages of a letter (Ivan could only find those three) from grandmother Anna Moen Larson (Isaac’s wife). The letter was to Hazel, the wife of Isaac’s cousin  Harry Samuelson. The Samuelsons lived in Ontario, CA at the time. My comments below the letter. Just click to post your own comments.

Thanks, Uncle Ivan! The letter clarifies a detail I was a little vague about – I knew that they were planning to move to the west coast, in fact selling their horses and making preparations, before Anna took sick and died about ten months after this letter. But I did not know that Grandpa had come out on a scouting mission.

Interesting produce prices, 2.5c. per pound for cabbage, 3c. for carrots. Still, that 3c. was probably hard to come by when your cash crop had failed, along with your vegetable garden. And dig the price of real estate near Seattle.

Happy Holidays, everybody! I’m looking forward to your comments.