Coming of Age in a Town That Time Forgot

By Harold M Kolenbrander

Born and raised in the Midwest, Harold M. Kolenbrander is the embodiment of Midwestern values. Yet coming of age in the 1940s and 50s in a small farming town was not without its excitement and, at times, danger. And for Kolenbrander, it was an environment that bred curiosity, exploration and ingenuity. In Coming of Age in a Town Time Fo

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
• Release date: Nov 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822901209

Harold M Kolenbrander

Harold M. Kolenbrander is the author of the memoir In the Arena: The Story of a Blessed Life. He holds a PhD in biochemistry and spent his career in higher education. Retired from the presidency of the University of Mount Union, he is the recipient of three honorary degrees. Now retired, he lives with his wife in New England.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Lake Wobegon’s Twin City

T

his book is a series of vignettes, about a boy growing up in a small farming town in the southwest corner of Minnesota in the late 1940s and early 1950s. We had no idea about anything like a computer, we had never heard of a smartphone, and we had no concept of television until the early fifties, and then only for a few hours a day. We did have radios, but there was a limited number of stations, and all of them broadcast in the AM mode. We had not heard of FM.

Most of the roads we drove on were surfaced with gravel, but paved roads did connect the larger towns. Cars, relative to today, were primitive, and only a few, a very few, had automatic transmissions, and none that I knew of had air-conditioning. Lights on the cars did not come on automatically, and we never dreamed of pushing a button and having the window open or close. They were opened and closed with crank handles. The car my family had that I remember from early childhood—we never had more than one—was a 1939 Chevrolet. The back doors opened to the front. The windshield was made of two separate pieces of glass. There were small wing windows just ahead of the larger windows next to the driver and passenger. They were important because these cars were not air-conditioned and the wing windows allowed the driver and the passenger to direct some air toward themselves to help relieve the heat when driving in the summertime.

Telephones were primitive. They were large and hung on the wall. A central operator was needed to connect your call to another party. Dial phones had not yet reached the rural parts of the Midwest. Long-distance calls and most of them to reach anyone outside of the neighborhood were long distance, were expensive!

We not only had never heard of a computer, but we had no idea about things like calculators—even simple ones that did nothing but add, subtract, multiply, and divide. In school we learned multiplication tables and how to add, subtract, and divide. And, of course, we did not have the word-processing features, like spell check, of the now-ubiquitous computer. We had to learn to spell a wide range of words correctly and to write in the cursive form. To help us develop proper cursive writing skills, we followed the Palmer penmanship exercises that were part of a standard curriculum for elementary school students across America at that time.

What we had in abundance were parents who loved us and cared deeply about our welfare. Simple, but in nearly all instances, plenty of good food. A warm home even in winter and plenty of books to read and games to play. And we had an environment in which we could play and grow up both physically and socially with virtually no fear of being kidnapped or molested. It was in this kind of environment that I spent ten years (from the age of eight to eighteen) growing up. It was, at least for me, a rich and wonderful time. Not rich in a monetary sense but rich in the freedom to learn, grow, experiment, fail, and succeed. I look back on those ten years with a deep sense of gratitude and appreciation.

These, of course, are my stories. Yours will be different. But I hope, dear reader, that as you read them, they will, as they have for me as I wrote them, give rise to more than a moment of reflection on how the lives of others have improved your own.

You may find a few of the vignettes a little amusing, and you may find others thought-provoking. I know that in writing them, I found occasion to see my parents’ contribution to my growth and development in new and important ways. The time that my parents took, despite the many demands on their lives, was seen in a whole new light as I took the time to reflect deeply on what they sacrificed so that I could grow to be the kind of person they hoped I would become. I am certain there were times when they wondered if it was worth it, and I’m reasonably sure the times they did so were not limited to the years of my youth. But I hope that somehow they are aware of how deeply I appreciate all that they gave me.

Thanks to Garrison Keillor, nearly everyone who has spent time living in the greater Midwest has heard about Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average. In very interesting and colorful language, Mr. Keillor described this fictional town in his weekly monologues that were such an engaging part of his weekly Prairie Home Companion radio show. Mr. Keillor’s stories from Lake Wobegon are set in a somewhat more modern time than the years I will be describing. The small, very rural southwestern Minnesota town in which I grew up was rather similar to the fictional one that Keillor described so eloquently. But first a few comments about how I got to that small town in Minnesota.

I was born in Sibley, Iowa, with my early years (age two to eight) in Springfield, South Dakota. My family moved to Steen, Minnesota when I was eight. In fact, the moving van that took our household furnishings from South Dakota to Minnesota was being loaded on October 7, 1946—my eighth birthday. I vividly recall my disappointment that no one had any time to pay attention to me. I am sure my mother did all she could to help me have a special day, as that was her nature. Mom loved her children!

Unlike Lake Wobegon, Steen, Minnesota is not a fictional town. In 1946 when we moved there, the population was about two hundred people. It was a small farming community town with two grocery stores, two cafés, two garages/gas stations, a post office, a lumber yard that also housed an Allis Chalmers farm machinery dealership and included a grain elevator, a blacksmith’s shop, a staffed railroad depot serving the Illinois Central rail line, and an elementary school for grades one through eight. My wife, Judy, and I drove through the town in the fall of 2021; it had changed a great deal. None of the businesses are there now, and neither is the school. The number of houses looks to be about the same, but it is clearly not a growing community. Some information from the 2020 census suggests that the population has slipped to about 180.

Steen, like the fictional Lake Wobegon, is a little town that time seems to have forgotten. But, in 1946 it resembled the fictional town in several ways. Lake Wobegon’s Chatterbox Café was found in Ferd’s Café. But Steen, being somewhat smaller than Lake Wobegon, could not support both a Chatterbox Café and the Sidetrack Tap, so Ferd’s Café also served beer—though there was none on tap. Jack’s Auto Repair was replicated as Dick’s Garage. The Farmer’s Union Grain Elevator was found in the complex of lumberyard, machinery dealership, and grain elevator all run by the same individual, Mac Mithun.

Unlike Lake Wobegon, Steen did not have Ford and Chevrolet dealerships and had no Catholic church. There were three churches in town when we arrived in 1946, but the small Lutheran church closed its doors within the first year leaving the Evangelical United Brethren Church (the denomination was later merged into the United Methodist Church) and the Steen Reformed Church, which my father came to pastor.

Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery found its counterparts in Aykens’ Grocery and Goman’s Grocery. Steen had no equivalent to the Café Boeuf; there were too few people who might have needed a place where the elite meet to greet and eat.

Clearly, Lake Wobegon had many more special places than Steen, but I choose to chalk that up to the relative ease of creating them in a fictional versus a real place. In any case, Steen was a very fine place for a young boy to grow up in the late forties and early fifties. One of the things that made it so was the presence of a softball diamond on the edge of town. Steen, as was true of many small communities at that time in rural Minnesota, had a fast-pitch softball team that played a couple of times a week in the summer months. We kids could go to the ball game for a nickel. We did not have a lot of nickels but enough to be there most of the time. It was great fun to chase the foul balls and the occasional home run. The balls of course needed to be returned to the field—no souvenirs. All the players were adults who worked all day on the farm or in their businesses and enjoyed playing ball at night. We kids thought of them as heroes, and some of them had nicknames of some of the Major League Baseball players of the time. The second baseman was known as Ted Williams, though his given name was Cornelius Bosch. (His dad was the owner of Dick’s Garage.) Cornelius (he was often called a shortened version of the name—Connie) worked all day at the John Morrell meat-packing plant in nearby Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Another of the players was Stub Elbers. He was the shortstop. That appellation was due to his rather short stature. Our Steen softball team was very competitive in the league of which they were a part and, as a consequence, were a source of pride in our small community. One of the side benefits for all of us kids was the availability of the ball field all day during the summertime, and we spent many an hour playing ball on it.

But let me return to telling you about our arrival in Steen. When we moved there, my older sister, Aletha, and I were in the fifth and third grades respectively. We had moved from a one-room schoolhouse in rural South Dakota, the Kirkwood School, to a four-room school with separate rooms for grades one and two, another for grades three through five, and a third room for grades six through eight. The fourth room was used for storage and a shop with a few wood-working tools that could be used to make rather simple items.

In addition to Aletha and me, our family of six included Mom and Dad and two younger siblings, Paul and Eunice. Paul was four, and Eunice was only one year old when we arrived in Steen.

When we arrived in early October 1946, the school year was already underway. We would subsequently learn that the school year always began on Labor Day. All of the students would assemble to meet their teacher, perhaps for the first time or perhaps to come together again after the summer recess. The first day of school was very short. After greeting our teachers and enjoying seeing our friends, we were dismissed. The primary reason, I have always supposed, for the very short first day of school was that our Steen softball team always hosted an eight-team Labor Day tournament. It was the culmination