My Grandma Bea was not an effusive woman. If there’s a stereotype of rural Scandinavians in America, it’s that they are pretty emotionally reserved, in a way that comes across as cold to some, passive-aggressive to others, and often just funny for those who get it.
Example: when I was born, Dad called his mother to tell her it was a boy.
“What’s his name?”, Bea asked.
“Mitchell”.
There was (so the story goes) a few seconds of silence on the line.
“Well, it’s not too late to change it…”, she averred, before the conversation moved on.
We lived six blocks from Grandma Bea for my entire childhood. Sundays, every week, involved dinner at Grandma’s, followed by “Wild Kingdom” and “Wonderful World of Disney”. Grandma was an amazing cook, and even made lutefisk that was utterly edible and enjoyable (if only as a garnish – never an actual meal). And her lefse was the highlight of most holidays.
She died when I was 17 – and while shes didn’t talk about her childhood a lot, I learned a thing or two over the years.
Bernt “Oleson” Greslie married Mary Nilson, the daughter of the postman in New Solem, Minnesota – a township that is the “suburbs” of Thief River Falls. They had four kids.
The youngest was my grandmother, Beatrice.
They spoke Norwegian at home; Bea didn’t learn English until she was in third grade. Like a lot of immigrants and their children, they kept the old language at home in the new country – which, as a young language geek, used to frustrate me immensely. I wanted Grandma to teach me Norwegian.
In retrospect, it may have been a good thing she didn’t; Berndt spoke the Trøndelsk dialect from the hills east of Trondheim – more or less the Appalachian accent of Norway. Still, it would have helped…well, today.
The family moved to a house up in Middle River, Minnesota when Grandma was very young. As always, I don’t know a lot about her childhood.
What I do know is that she had two aunts who must have been absolutely fascinating people. They were a couple of sisters who were proto-tycoons in the photography business. traveled the wilds of Minnesota and the Dakotas. starting photography studios all over the place and selling them off to new photogs. Some of those studios still exist. One that still does – thanks to a Chamber or Commerce that knows where its bread is buttered – but in any case has lived on in Minnesota lore, was the Eric Enstrom studio in Bovey – a stone’s throw from Coleraine. Grandma apprenticed with Enstrom, and one day in the early ’20s was involved in the staging, shooting, development and hand-coloring of this photo:
Bea carried on as a photographer’s assistant, and then photographer, in Bovey for another 7-8 years, until one of her aunts heard that a photographer in Jamestown, North Dakota needed another photographer. And one thing led to another…
….anyway,, we talked about that yesterday.
The interesting part, to me at least, was what came 15 years later.
In June of 1942, as the grit from the dust bowl was still getting swept out of corners, and while World War 2 is at its most uncertain moment, Oscar died, leaving (as the legend goes) $50 in the bank [1].
And Bea…just kept on. She worked, as Dad described it, sixteen hours a day for the next twenty-odd years, keeping the studio going.
Mommybloggers and child psychologists use the term “grit” today. Grandma Bea had grit. Forget the modern fripperies – she was tough.
I often think of Grandma Bea (not to mention the aunts who helped her get started) when I hear modern feminists – most particularly some of the Twin Cities feminist-bloggers of the 2000s – yapping about being warriors. I don’t think they’d have been able to keep up with Bea for 24 hours.
[1] Of course, after inflation, $50 in 1942 would be closer to $1,000 today, but still. .
Agreed about the “grit” comparison of then and now. Loved the story, thanks for sharing.
They sure don’t make them like they used to.
One of my grandmothers was born in MN, in some German speaking community around Wayzata, IIRC. She didn’t learn to speak English until she was in her teens. When I was a tween, I asked her to teach me to speak German, but after all those years, and despite speaking with a heavy German accent all of her life, she didn’t remember much German, at least not consciously. She only knew how to count to twenty in German, how to say “left” and “right,” and phrases like “sweep the floor” and “washing the clothes.”
In her last days, though, as she lay dying, she would sing hymns in German. Learned them at church when she was young, I suppose. She said angels were all around her and she responded in German when you spoke to her.
MP.
My maternal grandmother spoke in primarily Italian. She understood English, but spoke broken. My paternal grandmother spoke very little German. Interestingly enough, when my little brother was born, back in the days when women were kept in the hospital for a week after childbirth, my dad was out of town on a job. My grandmothers came to keep my brother and I from killing each other and starving to death. Despite the language barrier, they worked together like a well oiled machine, cooking, cleaning, doing laundry and watching their “stories”. It’s a good thing that we were growing boys, because between the daily homemade bread, cinnamon rolls, bread pudding and fresh made pasta, we would gain one hundred pounds. They stayed another week after mom got home, because dad was out another week.
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