For Ethel Erickson Radmer, a child of the 1930s, life in Wisconsin was an adventure filled with imagination, fun, and curiosity. Hers was a simple life, without computers and cell phones. It was a time when people in a small town dropped in on each other to visit and paid their bills in person. It was a time when folks honored courtesy and neighborly affection. If you knew someone was in the hospital, you brought them flowers-from your own garden. Ethel grew up in a railroad town that bustled with supplies and troops for World War II. To a small girl from a small town, a Green Bay & Western Railroad passenger car represented nothing short of freedom. But Ethel found joy in the simple things-a playground for roller skating . . . a golf course made just for picnics and sled-ding (and swinging clubs) . . . nearby farmland and barns to explore . . . and a meandering river to quiet her heart. It was a simpler time, but Ethel Erickson Radmer was no simple girl. "Walking the Rails is everything a good memoir should be-generously detailed, disarmingly frank, and emotionally moving. With wit, irony, and generosity of spirit, Ethel Radmer has woven a heartwarming and lush tapestry of growing up in a loving American family during the difficult days of the Great Depression, World War II, and its aftermath". -Dave Wood, past vice-president of the National Book Critics Circle, former book review editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and memoirist
Walking the Rails
My Childhood in WhitehallBy Ethel Erickson RadmeriUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 Ethel Erickson Radmer
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4759-1008-7Contents
Preface.........................................ixA Girl Was Born.................................1Walking, Climbing, Falling......................11Arvid and Sarah's Courtship.....................24O! Segari!......................................35The Depot.......................................58Early School Days...............................71Dr Tyvand......................................90Moving Up.......................................97The Coulees.....................................108High School.....................................113
Chapter One
A Girl Was Born
"In the fall of 1935, when `the frost was on the pumpkin, and the fodder was in the shock;' when the green leaves were changing their colors to the many golden hues of Autumn; when Mother Nature was singing her lullaby to her brood in preparation for a long winter's slumber of hibernation in accordance with her Cyclic Laws, an event of great importance took place on November 6th 1935 at 12:30 High Noon; an individual in a small physical body was born into our world of storm and strife, albeit a world of beauty and order and system; born as a female in our house and we called her Ethel Mae. What a name! What a girl!" This was my dad's welcome for my arrival, written in his autobiography.
I came on a Wednesday and weighed in at 9½ pounds on the "fisherman's scale" that the doctor brought to my parents' home. I was laid onto a blanket with rings on a hook and a weight measure needle at the top. Dr. J. C. Tyvand, the physician who held me as I came out of my mother Sarah's womb, was assisted by nurse Mrs. J. C. Tyvand. It was a normal, natural birth, with my mother lying in her own bed, gently pushing me out the birth canal to introduce me to life outside my nourishing cocoon of nine months. I came to rest in my mother's arms against her breast.
Ah! What peace and love and adventure I felt from birth on through all my years growing up in Whitehall, Wisconsin. What good fortune I had to have caring, nurturing parents in a very manageable town of 1,035 to know and explore with ease and safety, filled with people who knew and cared about me and whom I in turn could trust and churches to inspire some morals and ethics.
In the center of my town of birth and in the center of our lives was the Green Bay and Western Railway Depot. The continuous ribbon of two parallel railroad tracks ran straight through the middle of the town and right through the middle of the state of Wisconsin, cutting it in half horizontally as it connected town to town east and west. We rode the trains across the state and walked those rails into the countryside surrounding my hometown, where we could roam freely and with abandon.
My mother was forty-six years old when she had me, and I was fortunate to not be a statistic for higher birth defects in children born to mothers over forty, higher still among first-time mothers. But I was not her first! My mother had at least ten pregnancies in her fertile life—seven survived through adulthood, two died young, and one miscarried. I was the last that I knew of of her conceptions. What a relief that must have been! And she seemed to show it with a grateful ease about life. She could sit back in her Mission Style, oak-stained wood and brown leather rocking chair and relax with me, enjoying the fruits of her labors at birth and in rearing her brood. I was a good girl all the way, as it turned out, and on occasion, she called me that.
The Wisconsin Department of Health's Bureau of Vital Statistics wanted to know for the birth record if I was legitimate. Yes. The mother's full maiden name was Sarah Larson. (Her parents' generation of regular folks did not give their children middle names.) And the father was A. B Erickson. (He gave himself a middle initial "B" without a period because he liked the acronym ABE, signifying honest Abe, or Abraham Lincoln.) For color or race, father and mother were both "W" for White. Both were forty-six at their last birthday. The father's trade, profession, or particular kind of work done (as spinner, sawyer, bookkeeper, etc.) was railroad depot agent. My mother's trade, profession, or particular kind of work done (as housekeeper, typist, nurse, clerk, etc.) was housewife. The industry or business in which work was done (as silk mill, sawmill, bank, lawyer's office or own home) was not answered. And for the record, a sawyer worked in a sawmill and a spinner worked in a silk mill (or a midwestern or northeastern textile mill for flax, linen and wool—cotton mills were in the South) spinning silk thread from a silkworm cocoon. The eggs and cocoons came from China and Japan (until World War II started) and were transported by my dad's lifetime love, the rails, across the United States. Spinners found the beginning of the silk thread in the cocoon and unraveled it as it was wound onto a spindle. The thread was then made into a warp and woven into cloth to make silk stockings, hankies, caps, panties, dresses, scarves, ribbons, and embroidery thread, all of which our family used, plus some of my baby clothes. I owe thanks to the seven hundred perfect silkworm cocoons that it takes to make one silk baby dress. Silk parachutes we did not use, nor the silk kites the frugal Ben Franklin splurged on for his famous electricity experiments. We were consumers of silk, but we were not spinners, and there weren't any spinners nearby. The closest textile mills were in Milwaukee, where flax and linen were also spun. Those textile mills of yesteryear are now museums and funky locales for businesses. Sawyers, however, were close by in neighboring Jackson County, which was full of Jackson Pine. Sawyers were vital in the lumber mill business for which Wisconsin was famous. My grandpa, Nels Erickson, who was my father's father and who died five years before I was born, was a sawyer and a lumberjack and helped keep those mills filled with huge trunks of pine and fir. The sawyers sawed them into planks for the burgeoning construction demands in a growing state and nation in the early-to-mid-1900s.
Was 1 percent silver nitrate used to prevent infant blindness? Was child deformed or physically defective? Nature of the defect? The questions were left unanswered. And I appeared normal in every way.
The top of the Certificate of Birth Registration said, "The world of tomorrow is in the hands of the children of today." Yes, the future's changes were in my hands and the hands of others to come. For one, all those professions and trades listed on my birth certificate and typical at the time to one gender or the other would be infiltrated with both sexes. Some jobs faded with diminished need or were melded with other skills to make a new trade or profession.
But medical doctors were always in demand. People got sick, and babies were being born, including me. Dr. Tyvand's bill for $22 arrived in the mail on November 30, and my father paid it promptly in cash that Saturday in the doctor's office. Our family kept no debts. My parents paid cash for our new house in 1930 and for our new Ford four-door sedan from Auto Sales in Whitehall in 1934 (a year before I was born), when few people were buying new cars, to replace Dad's used Chevrolet of 1929. Before the Chevrolet, he drove a "Star" touring car that he bought from a dealer for $300 in April 1923. We paid cash for our health care or anything else with a dollar sign on it. I was home free and paid for.
I was born into a family of seven children: Benjamin Ward was twenty years old, Raymond Arvid was seventeen, Sherman Bernarr was thirteen, Myron Dallas was eleven, Avis Marie was nine, Leone Arvis was four, and I brought up the rear. The two grown-up kids were off to the university and jobs, and the four who were still around welcomed me into our family, genuinely happy to have a baby in the house again. Years later, my brother Ray spoke fondly of watching and listening to our mother in her rocking chair, holding and nursing me while softly singing Swedish songs.
The townspeople welcomed me too. Mother's church group, the Dorcas Society, wrote the sweetest of poems in the swirliest of scripts.
Welcome, baby dear!
Wee little ears and
a snub of a nose,
almost no hair
and tiniest toes,
Wee little bundle of
sunshine and cheer—
Welcome, sweet treasure.
We're so glad you're here!
Neighbors, friends, and relatives came steadily to our two-story yellow stucco house on the corner of Blair and West Streets, from the day of my birth and over the next month, bringing gifts. My mother was of such a calm, good nature that she received the company with grace. Her mother, Sarah, and her sister, Ruth, stayed for several weeks to help with chores, though my mom still had her hands full and must have been tired. But she was quietly proud to show off her new, plump baby, whom she loved tenderly.
My mother, a conscientious record keeper, wrote down in family records the names of her visitors and the gifts they brought. All the married women were called by their husbands' names. Mrs. Arne Rasmussen, from a big farmhouse and farmland on the edge of town, came over for a visit and to admire this child only hours after I was born.
Mrs. Sig Hegge, our neighbor across the street in perhaps the biggest house and biggest lot in town, brought over a batch of good donuts the next morning, made in her own kitchen. When I grew into a kid and could go to my friend Patty Hegge's house to play, I saw Mrs. Hegge put pressed circles of dough with a hole in the center into a pan of hot lard a couple inches deep, and when the donuts rose to the surface, she turned them over with a fork, took them out, and rested them on brown paper or a dish towel to soak up the excess oil. I remember them tasting dense from the fat, but sweet.
Mrs. Hallie Wright came with a nice pink rubber pantie of rayon for the light pink baby. Elsie Mae Johnson, a schoolteacher from across Blair Street, brought Ethel Mae a rattle and a rubber doll that my family called Elsie Mae. That added to the three rubber dolls my family gave me made for what my mother said was "a nice family of rubber dolls."
Mrs. Leonard Jorgenson sent baby a nice wool sweater for ninety-eight cents and a silk bonnet for forty-nine cents, both in baby blue to match my eyes. The tags were still on in case they needed exchanging.
Both Mrs. Talg and Mrs. F. Billman gave baby silk kimono goods for my mom to sew dresses and jackets for me, when she regained her strength, on her shuttle Singer sewing machine in a treadle stand in her bedroom during the winter months. In the summer she moved the Singer out onto the closed-in porch in the front of our house.
To top it off, I got my first penny. "ONE CENT" and "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" are stamped on one side, with two shafts of wheat wrapped along the side edges of bright copper and "E PLURIBUS UNUM" along the top. The other side, with President Lincoln's head and torso in profile and my birth year, 1935, to the side, remains unseen. My dad preserved it in my baby book under a seal that I have never broken.
The Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company of Chicago, Illinois, sent me in December, a month after I was born, a nice letter and my first stick of Wrigley's gum and, like my copper penny still sealed under cellophane, the gum is still sealed in foil and cellophane. They mistook me for older when they said, "And at two years, you are just about old enough to enjoy Wrigley's gum ... I think you will like the long-lasting, sweet, juicy flavor." They also said:
It is fine for children and good for children's teeth, which need more exercise than they get with modern soft food. Maybe your mother doesn't know this, and so be sure to tell her. Your mother always wants to know about everything that is for your good. Your friend, The Wrigley Spearman
P.S. If you still have a few teeth to come through, chewing Wrigley's gum will help you.
I didn't become a sweet-gum chewer, thank goodness, but later the sugar of occasional Three Musketeers candy bars did take a toll on my six-year molars, which were extracted when I was a teenager. Drilling and filling might have done the job instead, but dentists were not as skilled then, and pulling a tooth out was easier. I did have a few teeth left and a few teeth to come through—my wisdom teeth, to make me wiser in my choosing to not eat many sweets and to brush my teeth after eating.
I was born into the Great Depression and the events leading to World War II. My dad, in his written welcome to me, had said I "was born into our world of storm and strife." That was so true, but I, the infant, didn't know it. Many people lost their jobs and their savings. But we were lucky that Dad had a steady job as depot agent and telegrapher, made even more important by the need for the delivery of vital goods and news during hard times and building up to war. So we were able to stay in our house, buy and grow our food as my father and mother always had, and provide for other needs. Our parents thanked the good Lord for it, and Mother showed her compassion for others in need with meals for the hungry that appeared at our back doorstep. The "tramps" as they were called traveled the trains, hitching a ride in a boxcar as the train came whipping by. They grabbed a handrail on the outside of any of the train cars if they were speedy enough, or if the train was going slowly, they reached for the outstretched arm of another helpful "bum" leaning over from inside the boxcar. And they were off to the next town and the next, a virtual network for survival. The tramps hopped off and on the trains outside of town in order to not be seen. The railroad only allowed paying passengers and would have had the police arrest the nonpaying tramps if they were caught. They gathered in a grove of trees outside of town near the County Mental Hospital on the hill to sleep and to cook over a fire. When they ventured into town, they knew where to go. Ours was a marked house. A large "X" was drawn by the tramps with a white stone on the front, gray cement foundation that could be seen a block away. And with my mother's goodness—she prepared a plate of scrambled eggs, fried home-grown potatoes, and homemade bread with butter and a piece of home-baked cake, accompanied by a cup of hot coffee with cream—her house was known on the traveling railroad grapevine as a safe place for food. I learned about this as I grew into a child, and I remember standing at our pantry screen door in the back of our house, as my older sister Leone did, and looking out at these quiet, polite men eating on our back stoop. My mother tried to scrub the "X" away to not draw too much attention, but it would reappear.
There was hardship among the residents of the town as well, years before I was born. Mary Louise's dad, Mr. Hughitt Johnson, lost his job and joined the Civilian Conservation Corporation, or CCC, camp that the government set up to give people work and the chance to make a little money. The one bank in town, owned and run by Mr. H. Hegge, collapsed. The assets dried up and disappeared, and people didn't get their money. He had just enough left to buy a feed mill and then use the income to pay ten cents on the dollar, as was required by law, back to the people who had lost their money. At least it was something to help with their losses, and Mr. Sig Hegge was honest and hardworking to try to make amends. More kindness came from Dr. Tyvand, who saw patients for free if they couldn't afford to pay him.
People were quiet about their hardship. They didn't wear their plight on their sleeve. They felt embarrassed and humiliated and frightened, not traits you wanted to let others see or know about. They tried hard to work their way out of it and would take any job, however menial.
The Great Depression originated in the United States with the stock market crash of October 29, 1929, known as Black Tuesday, six years before I was born. It had already spread to almost every country in the world when it hit the United States. Many countries set up relief programs, and most underwent some sort of political upheaval, pushing them to the left or right. In some countries, the citizens turned toward nationalist demagogues, the most infamous being Adolf Hitler. The Depression lasted for a decade and faded with the advent of World War II in 1939, when I was 3½ years old. The massive rearmament buildup of the United States and of Europe and Great Britain leading up to WWII helped stimulate those economies. America's late entry into the war in 1941 finally eliminated the last effects from the Great Depression.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president of the United States when I was born, and Adolf Hitler was the leader of Germany. The first concentration camp existed, having opened at Dachau in 1934, the year before my birth. The Nuremberg Race Laws stripped German Jews of their rights. And a year after my birth, German troops occupied the Rhineland, covering the whole demilitarized German region to the west of the Rhine River. Benito Mussolini's Italian forces showed their aggression by taking Ethiopia, and civil war erupted in Spain. And unbeknownst to me, the contented babe in a homemade cradle, the war was building up to even more tumultuous times.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Walking the Railsby Ethel Erickson Radmer Copyright © 2012 by Ethel Erickson Radmer. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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