My Grandfather- a Profile

1/12/2020

 

Kenneth Hanson was born in York, North Dakota on January 18, 1929. The following is a short memoir by Ken, also known by the Hanson family as Papa, regarding lessons he learned as a child.

 

 

 

“These life lessons came mostly from my grandmother, Louise.

 

My grandfather and grandmother were named John and Louise. I worked for my grandmother at a very young age on the farm. I learned how to milk cows, separate the cream from the milk, I capped the milk… I had to clean out the barns. That was my responsibility. I had to take the manure and spread it around. That would cultivate the land…. My grandmother imparted a lot of good things unto me; what I should and should not do.

 

For instance, when I delivered milk to residents on Fridays, I would collect the rent and give it to my grandmother when I got back. One thing she said to me was ‘If any of the residents or patrons don’t give you money right away, you can assume they don’t have the money to pay. These are hard times. Just write the name down for Grammy so she can see what they owe.

Don’t stand there and wait because you will embarrass the people.’

 

One other lesson she taught me is to be respectful to elderly people, and always tell the truth, because if you don’t, it will come back to haunt you.

 

She told me once, ‘Grandpa John and I, we planned to give you a little change so you can go out and do little things, but if Grandpa John pays you first without me knowing, make sure that you tell Grandma. If both of us give it to you, you must be honest and tell that one grandparent gave it to you already. You must be honest about things.’

 

We had neighbors across the street who were honest people, but poor. A lot of times they couldn’t pay for the milk, and my grandfather planned on not even asking for money, but the matriarch liked to pay them back for things. So she would bring over our favorite pie, pumpkin pie, and my grandmother would say ‘if you hear me say ‘don’t touch that pie’, it means we are going to throw it out, you take that pie and you thank her very much, little white lies are okay sometimes, like telling her that the pie was very good.’ The matriarch of the poor family was happy and thought she had done a great thing by giving us the pie, which it was, but this was a situation where we wouldn’t eat her food because they were dirty.

 

Another lesson filters between my father and Louise. I was 17 years of age, had worked for the farm during the summer for my Uncle Olaf, and I had been paid very, very well. When I was 17, I had enough money to buy a car with a rumble seat. It was a nice little Ford Coupe. My older buddy Dwayne wanted to sell it to buy a bigger car, and he said ‘if you want to buy it, Ken, I’ll save it for you’. I came home very happy and Dad was at Grandmas, and I said ‘Dwayne wants to sell me his car and I have the money to pay him cash, and I’m planning on buying the car if it’s is okay with you.’ My father said “Is it okay with me? Who did the work on the car?’ I said, ‘Dwayne overhauled it.’ My father said, ‘I think you are not going to get permission from me to get that car.’ I was heartbroken. So I talked to Grandma because sometimes she would intervene for me.

 

I went to Grandma and said ‘I’m going to buy a car if okayed by my dad but he doesn’t want to give me permission.’ She said, ‘that’s your father and you can’t go against him. Your father said you can’t get the car, and so you won’t. He must have a reason for it.’

 

His reason was that a kid overhauled his own vehicle and he wasn’t sure he knew how to do it. He was afraid that I might end up with a vehicle and an engine that was no good. I thought, ‘now how the hell would he know that?’ but, I didn’t get the car. My grandmother said that my father was the boss. If my father said something, I shouldn’t go against it.

 

2 weeks later, Dwayne’s car broke down. What had happened was that the engine had frozen up solid. I was very sheepish bout that, thinking about how smart my father and grandmother were. I kept wondering how my father knew… But Dwayne was 20 years old and wasn’t smart on an engine… my father figured something would happen.

 

 

We had a big potato patch, and also had a garden patch where we put our carrots and other vegetables, but we had one big patch about half an acre that was just for potatoes. My job was to pick the insects from the potatoes and plants in the patch... my father didn’t believe in spraying, he thought it should be done manually.

 

Who was the Mr. Manual? Me. So what did I do?

 

There were a lot of potatoes to be picked. Those gardens, and particularly the potato patch, were my responsibility. A man had to plow the field… I would go behind the man who was plowing and would drop the potatoes in.

 

Being a kid, you are kind of lazy, so after he had done that, he would come over and talk to me, and he would say that ‘you have to water potatoes if there is no rain and you must pick the bugs’. So I had to go through and pick the bugs. And Harley, the man who was plowing, had a cultivator. I used to hook a ride sometimes, so he and I were good pals. I don’t remember what age I was. I said to him, ‘I bet that costs a lot to cultivate.’ If you cultivate, you don’t have to pick. He said, ‘Sometimes… why, do you want me to cultivate the patch?’ But my father said I must pick the bugs. But I said, ‘could I hire you?’ He said ‘Sure!’ But I said, ‘I think you might be too expensive.’ He told me, ‘I think 50 cents would be fine.’

 

This was a big patch. Any man can look at that patch and know it was cultivated and not pulled. But I gave him the 50 cents and I said thank you. He laughed because he knew what was going to happen.

 

My father came home from work and looked at the patch. He didn’t say a word, we ate, and then he said, ‘You know, Ken, you did one very good job picking the bugs off the plants, even the furrows look like they have been done. Don’t tell your father lies. I come by there and it looks almost like Harley did that. Who do you think did that Kenneth?’

 

I was tempted to try to make a lie. But my father said, ‘I think you were trying to go against your father and try to fool me, but you can’t fool an adult.’

 

Then I got a little older and the weather was so dry. I had a horse named Babe, owned by Grandpa. It was a quarter horse. I had to go out and I would take the cows out of the barns, cross the highway, and take them to free graze on people’s land (there was free grazing in North Dakota, unless landowners didn’t allow it.) So I had to take all the cattle, and my grandmother said, ‘don’t you go to sleep out there, don’t ride your horse all over the place, you are working for me and I will pay you.’ She said, ‘oh by the way, make sure you don’t let the cows get into the mustard grass, if you do, it will taint the milk and it will all be lost.’ I said, ‘I can do that.’

 

But I didn’t do my job. The horse got away from me and the horse didn’t want to be caught. I wondered how I was going to get it. I looked and saw the horse in a corner. How was I going to get it without getting kicked? I didn’t know what Grammy was going to say when I got home. The horse kept walking, but the bridle buckle caught on the fence and I finally got him. But the cattle were everywhere and had gotten into the mustard. I didn’t know what to do. I went back and told her what I did. She said, ‘did you bring your funny book with you?’ Yes, I did. She didn’t mind, but I had to remember what she told me.

 

‘I’m sorry Grandma.’ She said, ‘I’m going to give you a lesson. You disobeyed your grandmother because you weren’t paying attention, and now we can’t use any of the milk.’ I don’t remember if I was crying, I don’t think I was. She said, ‘I’m not going to charge you anything’, I was so glad. Me, paying for that… but she said ‘always remember what your elders tell you. They know, they have been there.’ I said I would never do it again.

 

I was like a hawk after that. If they even came close to the mustard, I would whip them. There were haystacks out there and it was hot in the summer. She didn’t mind if I took a book as long as I did my job. I was always trying to do what I wasn’t supposed to do, but kids are kids.

 

I never lied. That was built into your brain in my house. You never lie.

 

 

My buddy Tom and I were like glued together. We had a lot of pranks. There was one little prank that my father did and I didn’t know about it till someone told me. The post master.

 

Andy Cochran, the Post Master, liked me. He would call me Mr. Hanson.

 

My mother would send me to get stamps, and the post master had an iron grill at the counter that went all the way across the counter. So I would hand the money to Mr. Cochran and he’d grab it. He would tell me that my father was tough, a farm boy who would come into town as a boy and other kids would like to pick on him. ‘Four boys picked on your father, and he chased them all off.’ After that I thought my father was ten feet high.

 

When he was a kid, you went to a little out-in-the-country school house.

 

Mr. Cochran said that a mother skunk had been killed, so there were a bunch of little skunks running around the yard of the schoolhouse. They didn’t smell at that age. My father said, ‘I’m going to put a little skunk in each little desk.’ Talk about pandemonium. People came to school and in their desks, skunks would come out.

 

I said ‘my father did that?’ Mr. Cochran said ‘yes he did.’

 

I had to change the pastures, Grandpa had two pastures, so I moved cattle form one to another. Grandma said, ‘You have to take those cattle to the other pasture and make sure none of them get away. That’s another chore. I don’t want you to mess up because some cows like to stray so you must keep them corralled. You should also check the water tank because it must be filled all the time.’ They had a well that went deep into the ground that never ran out. We also had a shack where we had a pump. We had chutes that would send the water from the tank to the pasture. Sometimes if the well was dry in the pasture, we would have to carry water by vehicle to fill the tanks in the pastures. We had a trailer that would keep water from sloshing. We had to empty tanks at the barn. I had to go along and help with that. That was hard work, I didn’t like that.

 

It was a sad day when the government told us we couldn’t sell milk unless it was pasteurized or homogenized. That was the law. It had just come out. My grandfather was 77 years old, and he said, ‘Ken, Grandpa can’t afford that.’”

 

 

 

Lessons to be continued.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2/23/2020 Installment 2

 

When I was 14, myself and another 15-year-old surveyed land in the county of Ramsey. Glenn Long. The boss was Mr. Long. Tubby was his nephew. The guy that was our boss, he was one-armed. He was later killed in a car accident. They were wonderful people. I used to play baseball with Tubby and his brother… Tubby was Glenn. He was called Tubby because he was a little big for his size.

 

That land surveying kept the farmers honest because they could only plant so much wheat; if they put oats in an area that was supposed to be wheat, then they would be fined. The boss, Mr. Long, would be the one penalizing the farmer.

 

We did the whole county. I was from Benson county but I was working for Ramsey. It didn’t make a difference. That was pretty good job at age 14. There were different people out there who did different counties. We would walk through the wheat fields and our legs would be all wet coming out of the fields if we started early in the morning from the dew. I don’t recall how much money we got per county. We each took $18 a township.

 

If you had a guy that was a big farmer, he wouldn’t divide his land up like the poor did. If we came into a large farmer’s place and he had a full 60 acres, we didn’t have to count anything, but we would get paid for it still.

 

If a farmer had a whole large section of land that was designated as one type of food, then we wouldn’t have to count, but we would get paid. The township would still pay our boss. He would have to put down what townships we did and all that, but they would know what’s going on. Our boss was very good at that, he could have been cheating the other guy and saying we did more than we did, but he didn’t. The lesson here is honesty and providing services and feedback to the boss that were accurate. We got paid for what we deserved.

 

After we finished, he would look it over and would tell us when the township was done and we would get our pay eventually.

 

We learned to be very adept at making sure that we got all of the county that we were supposed to do. We made sure it was accurate when we gave it to our boss. The lesson is if we did a bad job, we would get canned. For a 14-year-old kid, it was a job that all of the other guys in town would have liked to have had. A lesson is to watch for jobs that give you money and that you like.

 

We would be gone for the whole day when we were doing the surveying, we would take our lunches with us. When we got $18 for a township we were very happy. Every weekend we would get paid the number of townships we finished.

 

We wouldn’t know how long it would take and what we would find in each township. We had to be very diligent. Tubby was very helpful to me. He lived on a farm, and I was a town boy.

 

 

 

 

 

When I was the youngest I would pick the bugs. We would take a gallon pail, pour oil in it, swirl it around, so when you picked a bug it wouldn’t crawl out. There was no particular day or week to do that, just when my father thought that they should be picked.

 

I lied when Harley did the plowing and I told my dad that I picked the bugs. He told me it was a beautiful job, and I confessed because I was guilty. He said that he knew right away what had happened and I didn’t want to hurt you. I was pretty tricky.

 

Harley McGowan used to let me ride with him when he would go to town… we became good friends. I was around 13 or 14 years old.  

 

 

 

 

My father had a horse named Babe. I was never to ride him up town in case he kicked any of the kids. Then business would be all over.

 

 

 

Lefsa – the Norwegian delicacy, we had two potato patches the big patch was for selling of Lefsa. It was a big … she had it mixed in the dough, she patted it out, and we had a cook stove with four burners. She used to have a long wooden stick to flip them. They would come out looking like… it was flat, with brown spots all over the lefsa. Different spots. She would package them in wax paper. She would fold it over and take it to the grocery store or anyone else who wanted to buy it. Everybody liked Anna’s lefsa.

 

 

This is back when we were kids. Tom and I were like two brothers stuck together. We were into everything. We did a lot of pranks. There was one that we were very proud of. The main street of the little town, one side was higher than the other, so Tom and I figured “let’s see how this works.” We took a fine wire, strung it across the yards (from the high to low side of the road) and then a car would drive through… back then, cars had long antennas. The car would come through and the antenna would go “whack” because they couldn’t see the wire. They would get out of the car and say “what the hell was that?” and we would ask them what happened. They would exclaim that the car made a loud noise and we would say “we would look into that if I were you” and we would do it again and again to the cars. The antenna would spring and make a loud noise. They probably only figured out it was a prank if they all got together and said that it happened to each of them.

 

We had another prank that we used to do. We used coal, big chunks. There was a guy in town that would go up in the north country and fill it up and bring it back for many people in the town… Lenny Ritterman. People would pay him to do this. He liked to drink a lot. It took almost all day to go up and unload everything… at night he would park his car outside the bar. Tom and I and some other kids would push the truck away from the door and around to another street so he couldn’t see it. He would come out and would look all over for it and he couldn’t see it or us.

 

I must have taken after my father because he went to a little country store and it was always open… one day my father found this skunk’s little kittens (that didn’t stink yet). He took those little kittens and walked to the school and put the kittens in the desks. Then the little skunks would jump out in school and people would freak out because they didn’t realize that the skunks didn’t smell yet.

 

We would go up town for stamps, they had one little window with a metal grill. Andy Cochran was the post master. He was a trickster too, even though he was old. I went up town and he had pushed the money under the grill and then he would grab you by the arm. “How’s your trigger finger?” and he would bend it until I snapped back. “Your father would take it better.” Today he’d go to jail for doing that probably.