A Midwestern Life

By Barbara A. Stegeman

Speaking to his daughter in his own unique style of story-telling, an elderly man relates his personal journey through eight decades of life in the Midwest. He vividly recollects growing up during the Depression, proudly serving during World War II, owning a lakeside resort in central Minnesota, and finally retiring to a quiet country home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9781452091488

Barbara A. Stegeman

Barbara Stegeman was born and raised in Minnesota where her father and mother still live. She graduated from St. Cloud State University in St. Cloud, MN, with a BS in English and psychology. In 1965 she moved from Minnesota to Colorado where she taught high school English and psychology for eighteen years, eventually relocating to Florida where she completed another sixteen years of teaching before retiring in 2002. Barbara greatly enjoys time spent with her family(particularly two adorable grandsons), traveling, good books and movies, and cooking. She currently resides on the beautiful barrier island of Anna Maria on the Gulf coast of Florida.

Book preview

DEDICATION

For my father and mother, Earl and Norma Walters, with great love

PREFACE

The idea for this book began decades ago. My father has always been a great story-teller, and I wanted some way of remembering and sharing with others all the entertaining tales about his life. It all started when he was eighty years old. I began recording his stories on tape whenever I would visit in Minnesota or when he and Mom would come to spend time with me in Florida. Dad is nearly ninety-three now, and he still comes up with stories that I have never heard. I wish I could go on collecting and collecting, but it will give me such great pleasure to finally put Dad’s book into his hands.

Nearly all the words in this book are exactly what my father said as he told the story of his life experiences. The exceptions are in parentheses when I provided my own words to clarify.

Barbara Stegeman

Anna Maria, Florida

July, 2010

Contents

DEDICATION

PREFACE

EARLY LIFE

GIBBON, MINNESOTA

WORLD WAR II

BRAINERD, MINNESOTA

HUNTING AND FISHING

PILLAGER YEARS

EARLY LIFE

I was born July 28, 1917, at home in Gibbon(MN). I don’t know just exactly how many years we lived there. We must have been renting. I was pretty small then, but I can faintly remember the house I was born in. I couldn’t have been very old when we moved to the other place, the one I remember most near the schoolhouse. My dad bought Dr. Flowers’ house.

My father(Samuel)was from the Bird Island(MN)area. I think they lived on a farm. Maybe my dad was a blacksmith there before he came to Gibbon. Pa was a hard worker, and he had that blacksmith shop. When I was a pretty small kid, there’s one distinct thing I remember. He had a turning lathe in a little back room of that shop...or toward the back of it...it was just one big room, if I remember right. And he made me a baseball bat. He was a baseball fan and a player too. He got a piece of ash wood. Man, it was a heavy little thing. I thought the world of it. And he had the blacksmith shop for quite a few years, and he did pretty good there. My dad was an expert at sharpening plowshares. They made their own horseshoes. It was mostly wagon work and shoeing horses at that time in Gibbon, and it was all work with teams of horses and he had to go out to the camp and shoe.

Certain teams had to be shod, and once when he was out there shoeing horses one kicked him in the side. Some of the horses were mean. Then a couple of years after that he developed pleurisy, got water on his lung on that side. And, my God, he’d lay in bed at home, and I’d come home from school. Once the doctor was there and he had a big long syringe with a tube and a needle and he’d shove that in between his ribs and draw fluid out of his lungs. And my dad lay there in bed, no sedatives, no nothing. He kept getting worse and worse and worse. Finally they took him to New Ulm to the hospital. Our doctor was just getting a fraction of it out. They took over a gallon out of his lungs when he was there. Then he started picking up and he got better.

My dad was a toughie. He wouldn’t look for trouble but.... Once Bill H. run the dray line and he was married to my dad’s sister, the only sister in the family. They lived in Gibbon and Bill was a drunkard. He never got along with my dad. We lived side by side down at the highway there. Bill had a Model T to haul stuff from the depot to the businessmen in town. We called him a drayman. And he had a shotgun, and he’s gonna shoot his wife. And my dad was doing carpenter work way down on the end of town, and someone came running down and told him so he dropped everything. He went uptown and caught Bill right in front of...Ben M. had a harness shop...big plate window in front. They wrangled there, and my dad knocked him right through one of them plate glass windows! My God, my pa had no money then. That window maybe even at that time cost several hundred dollars, but Ben M. said, Oh, you don’t have to pay. That was worth it! I don’t know what happened then. At least Bill never did anything about it.

And once Doc K. was supposed to be one of the toughies in the whole county. Him and Butcher Bill from Lafayette was supposed to be the two toughest guys in the county. Somehow my dad and him and Doc K. got fighting in the Gibbon Gazette office. I don’t know how they got fighting in there, but my dad came out with half his clothes tore off. Doc didn’t come out for quite awhile.

My dad was kind of a toughie. He was a strong man. He was a blacksmith all his life except right after he got sick. He was, oh, five eleven and a half and weighed 200 pounds at that time in his prime. Once down in the park...there were pretty big trees down there...they cut some dead ones of some cripples off. There was lots of eight-ten foot logs...big. He had an old truck there. I said, Pa, how you gonna get them on the truck? Oh, he says, if I can get one end up, I can load ‘em on there. He loaded them by himself.

Several years after(the pleurisy)he developed tuberculosis and he had to quit the blacksmith shop and then he went up to Walker for a year at Ah-Wah-Ching Sanatorium. I would say I was a teenager then. We moved in with Uncle Bill and Aunt Ottilia then and rented out our house. Pa had just finished paying the mortgage on our house, and they had to take out another $1,200 mortgage so we could live when he was gone. He spent a year up there. They sent him home and he was fine.

My father was mayor(of Gibbon)for awhile and policeman for many years after he came back from the sanatorium. He must have worked another 25-30 years for the city. He did everything for them, my God. Not much crime but a lot of work. He had to take care of the park and the disposal plant and the pumping station and the streets. I’d help him as much as I could. Taking care of the park was part of his duties, and I’d have to jump on the little tractor in the spring and we’d go all over town and grade all the alleys. We had a little grader and Pa would sit on the grader and I would run the tractor then. A lot of work was in the city hall. They’d have a meeting upstairs, and I’d carry the chairs upstairs. They’d have a meeting downstairs...carry the chairs downstairs. Sometimes the same day I’d have to get up that spiral stairway twice. I was maybe fourteen-fifteen, and then I’d carry two chairs at a time. Then he’d have to be policeman besides. I think he worked eighty hours a week, and dance night he’d have to stay up ‘til two o’clock at least and that was once a week. They mistreated my dad real bad. That was hard times then(Depression), and if you didn’t want the job, someone else would take it. It was that hard. So I guess he couldn’t squawk too much.

I always held that kinda against that one guy that was on the council ‘cause they thought he was such a saint, but I think he was part devil instead of saint. Once he used to ship coal on regular freight cars, and they’d have those bins along the track He called me once and said, We got a carload of coal, and if I’d want to unload it. I said, Yes, I’d like to, and we got out there and he said, It’s thirty cents a ton for moving it and there’s thirty ton in there. Well, that would be nine dollars! I got the wheel stake and jacked that car up to the opening of the bin, and then you lay boards down and they had a little chute with rollers or a little push. We could run it in there and get it or shovel some in there. You could get quite a bit in one load. I was alone. I had it unloaded before one day, and I went in to get paid and then he didn’t want to give it to me. I sat right down in the office and told him what I thought of him. That’s the guy I’m telling you about. He finally had to pay me. I wouldn’t move until he paid me. That was nasty, I thought.

But, you know, before Pa died he just shrank away. He started walking bent over and he had Alzheimers. They called it hardening of the arteries then. He stayed in a little one-room cabin we had(at the resort), and when he came up to the house to eat...in a little while he’s come up again. He’d forgotten. He got that way when he was 69 years