Cousins

Several years ago, Sharon did the whole Ancestry thing. She was able to trace her lineage back to Germany in the mid-eighteenth century. She even found a picture (supposedly) of the clipper ship that her ancestors came over on. My own family tree began and ended abruptly in Canada with no ‘came from’ or ‘went to’ ancestral lines past that spot on the map.

My own mother’s reluctance to talk about her past (well documented in past blogs) left me with little tangible facts or rumors to go on. She had left her past history cold and unforgiving except for those rare moments of clarity or lapses of revelation when something from the past was revealed. So, what I had to go on was the fact that four women, all sisters, were born in Sterns County, Minnesota on a small farm just outside of the small hamlet of St. Martin.

The four sisters were part of a family of eight; four brothers, four sisters. Each with their own hopes, promises and secrets. Never really very close was the common thread between them. Their children, the cousins, followed suit and never established strong inter-family bonds. That lack of kinship is a sad yet realistic result of ‘family dynamics’ so common among many families.

I always had the impression that my mother was a lot closer to her dad than her mother. She spoke more often of her girlfriends growing up than time spent on the farm. All four sisters ended up getting married and settled in different neighborhoods of Saint Paul. Two ended up in Highland Park, one in the Como area and the fourth in East Saint Paul.

From those four sisters came eight children, all cousins with little in common and less time for making acquaintances. There were a few family gatherings but not enough to solidify a sense of community among the group. Family secrets were still there but kept hidden as per their rural German Catholic culture.

All of which leaves many unanswered questions and fewer answers. For a while one of the cousins, Dr. Ron Pizinger, began collecting information on the Noll family and its many mutations since leaving the farm. He held several extended family gatherings and produced some fascinating information about our elders sailing over from Germany and settling eventually in Sterns County. Unfortunately, his early unexpected demise left many unanswered questions that have never been addressed or resolved.

Since then, offspring from the four cousins continue to grow, abet far apart and seldom in communication with one another. Whatever bonds began with the four sisters at the turn of the century has long since dissipated and faded away with the years passed.

I’m guessing this is probably more normal than not. For generations to continue a bond of friendship and familiarity in this era of constant moving, evolving interests and social changes must be a monumental challenge. Old bonds grow weak, splinter, and fail. New interests supersede old ones and new directions are followed by some and ignored by others. Nothing remains as it was. Nothing stays the same.

And as the cliché says: Life goes on.

A Mystery Unraveled

Only now, years after her passing, am I finally getting a closer look at the ambitious, liberated, free-spirited, adventurous woman gave birth to me over eighty years ago. Then forgot about the role she was supposed to play in my life after that.

Up until this point, with the rare exception of a couple of old black and whites, all I had to go on to retrace my mother’s life story was a series of hand-written notes detailing some of the sequences in her life growing up. It was a chronical of her experiences from youth to old age. Unfortunately, the notes were written later on in her life and was rife with errors, misstatements, and voids that she had purposely created to leave out specific parts of her story.

Then one day my sister, Marlene, met a cousin who had a treasure-trove of old pictures, many of which include our mother in her youth growing up on the farm. It suddenly opened up a whole new insight into our mother’s adolescence and young adult period. From the cars to clothes to rural surroundings it was a glimpse into a past long since shut dark by time and old age.

Closer examination of the pictures along with her own scribbled notes provided some clarity in my mother’s early life. There were pictures of her with her mother with whom she was never close. My grandfather whom my mother adored was there. There was her brother, Frank, a man wrapped in mystery, who died relatively young in his thirties.

Farm life around the turn of the century was a hard-scrabble life; twenty-four hours a day. Horse power provided the engine to harvest crops, move machinery and take folks to town. Our grandfather was the first in Sterns County to have a horseless carriage, one of the few in all of Minnesota at the time.

Fortunately, a few of the pictures had hard to-read-scribbles on the back that named names and connections. There were snapshots of mom’s close girlfriend, Delta, with whom she shared many adventures in and around Saint Martin, Minnesota and the twin cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Union depot always took my mother and her siblings back to the farm.

Our mother’s time, spent in the Twin Cities, was chronicled by pictures of girlfriends gathered on Summit Avenue where they all worked as domestics. Then there was an afternoon stroll over the Mendota Bridge with a friend.

There was a gap of time, sans photographs, between our family restaurant; ‘Frenchy’s Eats, our first rental on Smith Avenue, the six-plex we lived in among the DPs (displaced refugees from World War Two) and finally a real home my mother built herself on Randolph Avenue.

Unfortunately, there are only a couple of pictures of the house she built on an empty lot. I know she had the basement excavated by a contractor. Then professional framers came in to construct the walls and roof. After that, she and her brother, somehow managed to build the rest of the house from the frames on up.

There are only a few pictures of my mother and her new friend, Erwin, a recent widower. She met him at one of the many dance halls in the Cities and they eventually got married. My sister thinks there may be more photographs coming from that cousin. That would be a good thing. Any image would help in filling in the gaps of this mysterious, fascinating woman whom I called Mom a long long time ago.

Hilde and the Old Man

Back around the turn of the century, Martin Noll’s neighbors would have been polite and simply said that Martin had a stern expression on his face most of the time. Today, medical research has a name for it: RBF. RBF, or ‘Resting Bitch Face’, is a configuration of facial muscles that make a person seem to carry a perpetual frown most of the time. Truth be told, it said a lot about him. Martin Noll was a stern task master of his farm, his large family and the surrounding community. To many folks in Sterns County, Minnesota, he was simply known as the old man.

Martin Noll was a taskmaster over his children and hired farmhands. He dabbled in several business ventures. He purchased the first automobile, a Studebaker E.M.F., in all of Sterns County. It had solid rubber tires, a fake door in front and carbide lamps on the front fenders for headlights.  Martin knew his way around local politics and never suffered fools in the town council who didn’t know how to run their town the way he knew farming. Over the years Martin bought and traded more cars but that first one was his most prized possession. 

Much to the chagrin of her older brothers and sisters, the youngest of his brood became the apple of Martin’s eye. Hildegarde, Hilde to her friends, wasn’t like the others. Her father sensed in this young child a longing for something more, something better, something undefined yet rock solid in its determination. He took a liking to his youngest and showed it. He taught her how drive horses at four, a car in her teens and travel solo in her twenties. Hilde always claimed her love of dancing came from her father teaching her how to dance the polka on Saturday night barn dances. He instilled in her a love of dancing that lasted a lifetime.

Life was always tough on the farm even for the youngest. It was a regular routine of field work, caring for the livestock, feeding the chickens, sewing old clothes and walking miles to school in nothing more than a woolen coat and rubber boots. A fireplace heated the farm house and there were corn husks for bed mattresses.

At four, Hildegarde took the horses and wagon out into the forest to gather wood. At seven, Martin let her take the wagon into town for supplies. She rode in her papa’s automobile and thought it great fun when he backed up over the outhouse by accident. By ten she was in charge of cleaning out the barn and managing the chickens, a main source of food and income. That same year, her father shot an American Bald Eagle that was killing their chickens. Hilde rescued the bird and when she realized it could no longer fly, she persuaded her father to sell it to the zoo in Minneapolis for ten dollars which she got to keep. Hildegarde shared one winter coat among her three sisters; each going to mass at a different service in their brand new Sears Roebuck catalogue coat.

Farming kitchen

Farming with horses

Hildegarde went as far as the sixth grade at the Catholic school in St Martin then dropped out to take care of the chickens and other livestock. Since she was the youngest it was expected that she would stay home to help out her aging parents and work the farm as her siblings gradually left for greener pastures.

The depression hit everyone very hard but especially the farmers. Sterns County was an agrarian society back then. Martin Noll had to free-range his cattle further north so they wouldn’t starve. A lot of his brothers and fellow farmers lost their farms. The largest town was St. Cloud which served as a magnet for most of the uneducated and unskilled young women anxious to get ‘off the farm.’ Hilde’s sisters all went off to secretarial school in St. Cloud. Hildegarde stayed home to take care of the farm.

Hildegarde grew up a beautiful and ambitious young woman. The Twin Cities of Saint Paul and Minneapolis proved irresistible to Hilde when she cautiously toe-stepped away from home for the first time. She was hungry enough to break free of the life-choking reins of farm work by testing herself in the cities. But with just a sixth grade education the only work she could get was house-keeping for wealthy clients, odd jobs as a seamstress and cooking. She became a maid on Summit Avenue. Not quite Downton Abby but close.

In her early twenties, Hildegarde struck out for the West Coast. She went to California at the bequest of an old girlfriend and for a short while led the life of a single young starlet. Together, they moved from San Diego to Salinas. By then there were four of them, young working girls just wanting to have fun. They had their employer’s new Lincoln to tour around town in. 

Hilde got a new job on ’17 Mile Drive.’ Even back then it was an exclusive enclave of retired Army Generals, titans of business and industry and movie stars. Her employers had her over to their house on the Del Monte Golf Course regularly to meet movie stars like Joan Fontaine and Olivia DeHavelund. Together they went to the horse races in San Francisco, the youngest trailing along as their guest.

Working days and hanging out with the movie stars at night. Hilde was making good money, dancing every night and having a grand old time. Then her father fell ill and wrote for his youngest to come back home before he died. She did and shortly afterwards Martin Noll died.

The farm was sold shortly after that and as had been tradition for hundreds of years, the boys got all the money. The girls got nothing. So Hilde hired an attorney and sued her brothers. They finally settled out of court.  Hildegarde and her sisters each got $4000 dollars. The brothers each got $6000 dollars. There was no extra compensation for the youngest and all the years she had spent caring for her elderly parents. Nor did her sisters ever pay her back for the money she lent them over the years. But that’s the way it was back then.

Hildegarde continued to do summer chores for her mother and work during the winter months in the cities. It was the height of the depression but the youngest had ambition. She worked hard, saved her money and knew how to spend it when she had to. While others were going broken because of the depression, Hilde took whatever jobs she could get and thrived. At her father’s encouragement she alone traveled to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1934.

Hilde earned enough money to pay $326.00 cash for a practically brand new 1934 roadster. The previous owner had bet on the farm and lost both it and the car when the bank came calling. Her brother, Frank, lusted after that car but Hilde was no fool. It was never available for his forays into St. Martin Township or the Twin Cities.

Hildegarde met her future husband at an ammunition plant on the outskirts of Minneapolis around the beginning of World War Two. That chapter in her single life ended with her marriage to Arthur in 1942. 

It’s truly a shame that none of this rich fascinating ancestral information was passed on to me until just before Hildegarde died. She wrote out her life story in long hand on a faded gray tablet of paper. Ten pages, single spaced, documenting a lifetime of hard work, unbroken faith in her God, loss, rejection, betrayal, heartbreak, and a tremendous (though hidden) pride in her own survival and personal accomplishments.

Unfortunately by then they were just fractured words pulled from a failing memory that left me with many more questions than Hildegarde could possibly answer and leaving a vacuum in my life that has never been filled.

Mom and us kids

Martin Noll, my grandfather, died seven years before I was born. That’s really a shame. I’m guessing he would have been one hell of an influence on me had he lived long enough. So it was left up to his youngest, my Mother, to show me the value of hard work and steel hard, forged determination to get ahead. A legacy that has driven me all of my life.

Deep Data Mining

Some people are adamant that you shouldn’t go back in time and revisit your past. ‘What’s done is done’ they argue ‘and can’t be changed or altered anymore.’ Often times these people don’t want to go back to their early childhood, high school or college years, past relationships, old jobs or collateral experiences of a life long since lived. They’ve closed the book on their past and only want to dwell on the present.

I find myself shouldering up to the other end of that spectrum. I would argue that you can go back and examine with the cold, calculating eye of a time-warped traveler relevant questions such as ‘why did things turn out the way they did?’, ‘what really happened between me and someone else?’ what was reality instead of ‘what if?’ In short, I think you can search your past for the building blocks that brought you to your present state of mind. I call it data mining or fact-based research reflecting on your life.

I have a friend who has defined three stages in our lives. With an apology upfront for possibly misrepresenting some of his findings, I believe he has defined the three stages as: Self-discovery, self-exploration and finally self-examination.

He believes we spend the first part of our lives discovering our own identity. Who were we as children growing up, experiences in education, finding a spouse and becoming a parents? The second stage is work-orientated where we hone our job skills, find a career that moves us forward and cements our place in the world of adults. The third and final stage is that of reflection and self-examination. Where are we relative to everyone else and how did we get here?

I have always argued that if you are comfortable with your present state of affairs, you can go back and examine your past with your feet still firmly planted in the present. You can look, without a jaundice eye, at what went wrong and why, what worked and why, where you are today relative to those around you.

Many would argue ‘who cares?’ and maybe they have a point. If you don’t care why you turned out the way you did then it probably doesn’t really matter to yourself or those around you. If you care but realize you can’t change the past then what’s the point? Because, I believe, in the end you had a life and it’s into the fourth quarter now. So how did things turn out? And if you don’t like what you see, what can you do about it.

I’m giving a workshop this fall in ‘How to Begin Writing.’ Just like the workshop I conducted last spring, I expect most of my audience will consist of seniors sprinkled with a few of the younger sect. To a person they want to write but don’t know how to get started. Few if any want to become published authors. They just want to fulfill a lifetime ambition of putting thoughts to paper in some readable form and fashion. I’m going to tell them how to begin that process.

Part of that process will be an examination of their past and what they’d like to share with others about it. It might be painful. It might be exhilarating. It will be revealing; peeling back the layers of their lives that haven’t felt the touch of a pen or keyboard in a lifetime. For all it will be enormously satisfying…if only for themselves.

I guess in the end it doesn’t really matter if a person reflects on their existence or leaves it closed shut in the darkness of the past. Each of us is on a journey called life. Some live it day-to-day and others like to cast a glance over their shoulder once in a while. We’re all going to get to the end of the trail one way or another.

I like where I’ve been and don’t mind ruminating about those old adventures every once in a while…and look forward to many more in my future.