Category Archives: History

History, The Baboon Congress

Timber! To an Era

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Today’s post comes from Clyde of Mankato

My last guest blog asked you to look closely at grass. This time I want you to examine two slides taken by my mother in 1954. They capture an end of one era in the forest and the beginning of another.

First I apologize that the horse’s head is at the semi-exposed end of the roll. Adeline and I long bemoaned that bad luck. We both recognize the photograph has family and larger significance. Today the ratty right end strikes me as appealingly quaint.

End of one era: the horse for one, which you probably realize. In 1955 it was rare to see horses used for logging, but more than my father were still using them. However, the images also show the tail-end of old growth trees in northeastern Minnesota. Look at the size of the those birch logs! How long had they lived? You perhaps think they were sawed into birch lumber. In 1954 it simply was not done. Birch was then a difficult wood to manage as lumber. Today those logs would be worth as fortune.

I feel an affinity for those logs. First because they are birch wood, as am I, being a German birchwood. Secondly because I spent the next eight years using pieces of the logs as chopping blocks, before which I spent many an hour swinging an axe. I was well acquainted with that birch tree before it was felled. Its grandeur appealed to me. For my father it was a massive temptation to cut down. Because of the girth of the stump, he did not attack it, not having a proper two-man whip saw to do the task. Then along came that yellow chunk of steel in the other image.

Logging 1

Beginning of another era: our nearest neighbor Floyd (man on your left) was a full-time time lumberjack (cutter of trees for lumber) and gyppo (cutter of trees for pulp wood). He was a famously surely tough old bastard, older than he looks in this photo. A couple years later while cutting pulp by himself in the Superior National Forest, he broke his back when a widow-maker fell on him. He had to crawl out to a road to get help, which took two days and nights. Three months later he was back in the woods alone. His personality made working solo a necessity. Being a bachelor, Floyd could not have made a widow.

A few days before these pictures were taken, he stopped at our house to show us his new prized possession, the chain saw. They had been around, but now they were mass-produced at a level that made them affordable for professional cutters. Also, they were dependable. They were still very heavy, nothing like today’s light-weight wonders. Yet even at that weight, a new era swept the woods, for one thing allowing old birds like Floyd to earn real money cutting alone.

The moment my father saw the chain saw before him, he pictured that birch tree. And down it came, my mother coming along, after the fell deed, it seems, to photograph the results.

What you see are only the two bottom lengths of the trunk, minus the two butt pieces on which I am standing, which became the chopping blocks. It took several loads to bring up all of that tree. My father knew how to coax every piece of firewood out of large trees. How long it must have cooked our meals and heated our house! You may wonder by what means the logs made their way onto the sled. My father and I did it alone. How that is done, I will leave a mystery.

If you had those birch logs today and could pay the cost, what use would you make of them?

History, Stories, The Baboon Congress

Chores and the Great Depression

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Today’s post comes from Jacque.

I am the first to admit that my life growing up was, well, unusual. I came from thrifty, hardworking, somewhat eccentric people. My parents were the first people in their families to go to college and graduate with 4 year degrees. Mom and Dad grew up in the Great Depression on farms where their frugal parents survived by using things up, patching, repairing, and saving money. Every one pitched in to help with family chores. They passed this on in their parenting. We had chores. We saved money.

My siblings and I grew up bearing a lot of responsibility given our young ages. Mom worked outside the home as a teacher during a time when Mom’s usually stayed home to care for the family. Our Dad stayed home with us because his illness, Multiple Sclerosis limited his life.   This arrangement demanded that we all pitch in for the common good of our family. We helped with Dad’s care, with cooking, cleaning, and gardening.

Now, in our adulthood, my brother, sister and I gather and regale ourselves (and any one who will listen) with the tales of our growing up, our chores, our travel stories, and our family’s attempts to save a buck. We roar with laughter at our own stories.  Our kids, now grown-ups, too, are a bit tired of these stories.  So we always seek new victims to listen to them, like, say, Baboons!

This year for Mother’s Day, my brother, sister and I went out with our Mom, now 87 years old, for supper. We teased her a bit, which she loves.   We made 2 lists, reflecting our unusual life together: our chores and our family methods of stretching a penny.  Today you get List #1, Our Chores. Items 1-3 are pretty standard stuff. Item 4 starts to stretch the limits, of well, normal? Of reliving the Geat Depression

Our Chores

  1. Saturday mornings clean the house. I vacuumed, my sister dusted, my brother emptied the garbage and goofed off. NO CARTOONS. This really meant that the moment Mom went grocery shopping, we turned on the TV. Dad never told. My sister and I posted our brother at the window to watch for Mom’s car so we could turn it off in time to stay out of trouble. We cleaned AND watched cartoons.
  2. Set the table before a meal.
  3. Often we cooked the meal.
  4. Wash and dry dishes after each meal.
  5. Light dad’s pipe when requested. Knock the old ashes out, clean it with a pipe cleaner, refill.   Do not pack too hard or it won’t light easily, then the match will burn your finger.
  6. Make dad’s coffee in an old-fashioned stove top drip coffeemaker which loaded the grounds in the bottom of the upper part. We had to pour boiling hot water from the bottom carafe into the upper part which fed the hot water through the grounds back into the bottom carafe. I learned to do this at age 9. Pour the coffee. Put Dad’s straw in it and place it where he could drink it.
  7. When my diabetic Grandpa lived with us, it was my job to watch him for symptoms of insulin shock. If he showed symptoms, I ran to the refrigerator, poured a glass of orange juice and assisted him in getting it down his throat. (I was 9 years old at the time)
  8. Get dad his urinal, run it to the bathroom, empty it, rinse it, and flush.
  9. Gather food scraps and take them to compost pile.
  10. Operate washer and dryer. Fold clothes. “Sprinkle” clothes which would need ironing, then iron them.

This list looks like we were slackers compared to Mom’s list of childhood chores, which consisted of tasks such as milk cows, churn butter, clean out the barn, so it is all relative I guess. The Great Depression really did influence our experiences in the 1950’s and 60’s despite its long demise.

Did you re-experience the Great Depression in your childhood?

History, The Baboon Congress

File Under T for Treasure

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Today’s guest post comes from Anna.

My father was a saver of paper and a filer of almost anything that could fit into a manila folder: tax documents, old report cards, receipts for car repairs, meeting minutes for committees that may have disbanded by the time the paper was in a file. I shudder a bit at how much paper I might find when it come times to clean out the house – though the task will be made somewhat easier knowing that each sheet will be in a properly labeled folder and filed alphabetically. Among all of these papers and files, my mother recently found a file that was, I’m sure, labeled “Vacations.” In it there was treasure: handwritten and typed letters from the owners of Castle Creek Camp in South Dakota.

lingerlong

Castle Creek was a former gold mining camp, nestled in the Black Hills outside of Hill City. The “unmodern” cabins (as one letter describes) rented for as little as $7 per day or $40 for the week, linens and dishes included, running water in or nearby the cabins, “modern” shower facilities were separate and there were outhouses for, well, outhousing. At least some of the cabins may well have been original to the place when it was a mining camp and they came with names like “Linger Long” (our cabin of choice) and “Tumble Inn.” The eponymous Castle Creek meandered through the camp and one letter shares that, “panning for gold is a lot of fun and we even find some once in a while” (shoes recommended as there are sharp rocks in the creek).

castlecreek (1)

Our family vacationed at Castle Creek for several summers, going back each year to Linger Long. Along with the creek, where gold might be found, treasure could be had when you heard the whistle of the 1880 Train. Part of the train’s track ran along the far edge of the camp. When the train whistle blew, any kids in camp learned to stop what they were doing and run to the tracks and wait: the man in the caboose kept Tootsie Rolls with him and would throw them out to us by the fistful. A handful of Tootsie Rolls went nicely with an ice cold Orange Crush procured for a nickel from the pop machine that lived by the owner’s house. The machine was one of those red, rounded corner affairs that held a single row of glass bottles behind a tall slim door: open the door, put in your nickel to unlock the options and pull on the neck to free the bright orange, sweet goodness of a Crush.

goldie2

The other attraction, at least for me, was the resident donkey, Goldie. She had run of the place and roamed more freely than even the owner’s family dog. Goldie would come visit me in the mornings and eat sugar cubes out of my hand while I sat on the porch railing at our cabin. Since I wasn’t quite big enough to keep up with my brother and the owner’s two boys (nor did I have much in common with them – a red, white and blue guitar “just like Buck Owens” was not really a draw for me), Goldie was my friend at Castle Creek; my gentle, big eared companion. I looked forward to seeing her each summer as much as my brother looked forward to adventures with the boys.

Remember that 1880 Train? It did one other thing. It ran into Goldie. The last year we went to Castle Creek we found out that Goldie had been killed, run into by the train, while she was trying to get her foal off the tracks. I befriended the foal as well, but she wasn’t quite Goldie – in it for the sugar, not the companionship. Castle Creek wasn’t quite the same for me without Goldie. The Orange Crush was still cold, the Tootsie Rolls still flew out of the caboose, but I didn’t have Goldie. She was my real treasure at the mining camp. Treasure remembered and rediscovered again with a map provided in a letter saved by my father.

What treasure would you mark with a map?

History, Science, The Baboon Congress

All the News That’s Fit to Print in Blowers

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Today’s guest post comes from Clyde of Mankato

“Mr and Mrs. Harold White were the guests of Mr. and Mrs. Einar Rasmussen on Friday night. Mrs. Rasmussen served Swiss steak with pineapple upside-down cake for dessert. After dinner the couples drove into Wadena for dancing at the American Legion club.”

Hot news that story, is it not? Such items were once the staple of small town newspapers. As I recall, they were called “social notices.” Anything to fill space around the ads and the legal notices. (More on the legal notices later.) Who does not want to see their name in print?

Pix 1

My parents spent much of their childhoods and early married life in the central Minnesota town of Sebeka, home of the Sebeka Review, to which my parents subscribed after they moved away. Each Thursday they would read the paper and tell us stories, fully augmented by imagination, about the people mentioned, the kind of tales a newspaper would never tell. The Review published social notices by regions, one of which stood out in our childhood—Blowers Township. My sister got a kick out of the name, “The Blowers News,” which as a joke we always pronounced as you are pronouncing it now, unless you are up on your Otter Tail County geography. It is not bloo-wers, as in people who blow, but blau-wers, as if you were expressing pain with the ow, “oooww.”

Every week my sister read the Blowers social notices aloud. Over time we became acquainted with most of the few residents of this small very rural township. My sister plotted out friendships and feuds. She drew scandalous unfounded conclusions about what the notices really meant.

As for the social notices on our town, my parents’ comings and goings were hot news almost every week. The wife in the couple with whom my parents were socially active was the reporter of such tidbits. A common item would read “Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Birkholz were the guests of My and Mrs. ______________. After a dinner of chicken and dumplings several games of smear were played.” Mrs. ______________ was a devoted fan of passive verbs. In social notices women were always Mrs. His-First-Name Something, as if they had no first name.

If you do not know what smear is and how to pronounce it (Schmear), then you don’t know Northern Minnesota.

Another long gone item was a legal notice, the property tax reports. Each household was listed, by the man’s name of course, unless the woman was in some form single. After each person’s name was the amount of property taxes assessed and if paid or not. My father relished the anger he could express at how much more property tax the few farmers paid than the high-paid citizens in town. The newspapers made good money from printing those long reports.

Pix 2

Doing a bit of research, I learned something new about Sebeka. It is the birthplace of one-time Twins pitcher Dick Stigman, which I knew, but is also birthplace of Kenneth Arnold, the pilot who made the first widely reported sighting of a UFO, or a flying saucer as he called it.

Have you ever been newsworthy?

History, The Baboon Congress

Hidden History

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Today’s guest post is by Cynthia in Mahtowa, and was inspired  by Reneeinnd’s July 12th blog “Overlooked Overlook” and Happy Valley Steve’s comment about “not noticing history.”

At our little long-time book club we recently read Prudence by David Treuer. The story takes place midst WWII somewhere in northwest or north central Minnesota with characters from Chicago who own a resort on a lake near an Indian reservation and a German POW camp.

germanpowcampmap

A German POW camp? In Minnesota?

None of the group had heard of such a thing. Did Treuer make it up? As it turns out, a Google search confirmed that there were indeed German POW camps in Minnesota – at least 15 of them.

Many other states also had them. Some 400,000 POWs were brought to the US to farm, work in factories, log or do whatever wasn’t getting done with American men fighting in the war. Most of the Germans were prisoners from North Africa, sent to the US by the British who no longer had room to house the number of prisoners they were capturing.

Two relatively recent MPR stories documented the camps: In March Tracy Mumford interviewed David Treuer about his novel. He grew up on the Leech Lake Reservation near Bemidji and had heard stories of a nearby camp. One of the stories told was of two prisoners trying to escape south via the Mississippi River in a row boat .

A second MPR story reported that in October, 2002 some of the former POWs and their families came from Germany to camps “to remember, learn and reconcile.”

Why had I never before heard of the camps in any of my (Minnesota or American) history classes?

Along this same line of “overlooked history,” our club also read The Assassination of Chief Hole-in-the-Day by David’s brother Anton.

2012_0406_images_05b_curio

“Bagone-giizhig, known in English as Hole-in-the-Day the Younger, was a charismatic and influential chief who played a key role in relations between the Ojibwe and the U.S. government in Minnesota. Yet he won as many enemies as friends due to his actions during the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 and his claim to be the leader of all Ojibwe. In 1868, Bagone-giizhig was assassinated by a group of other Ojibwe from Leech Lake. For many years the real reason for this killing remained a mystery.“

I have lived most of my life near the Fond du Lac Indian Reservation. I have had Ojibwe classmates and friends. We had Minnesota history in sixth grade.

Were we taught about this famous chief and I just don’t remember? Or, was it never included in our textbooks?

Other history I learned as an older adult are the hangings of the Sioux warriors in Mankato and the black men in Duluth. Not to mention the Dakota Conflict itself.

What history has been overlooked in your education that you wish you had known earlier?

History, Music, The Baboon Congress

A Late Great Morning Show Revival

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Today’s guest post comes from Sherrilee

At Blevins Book Club last weekend, a small pocket of us were reminiscing about some of our crusty old favorites from The Late Great Morning Show.  Most of us are still Radio Heartland devotees, but don’t hear the oldies but goodies as often as we’d like.

So it’s time for a LGMS revival!  If we pull together a list of titles, Mike will get them organized and we’ll have a rousing couple of hours of songs that elicit some of our great memories from over the years.  After we get the list to Mike, he’ll let us know the date and time.  No guarantee that he’ll be able to find all our titles and I’m assuming we’ll come up with way more titles that can fit into a couple of hours, but I think we should give it a shot.

I’ll start us off with two:  The Mary Ellen Carter by Stan Rogers and Canned Goods by Greg Brown.

What song do you miss from the LGMS?

History, Media, Words

Sleight-of-Brand

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Curious advertisers ask –  “Is it possible to draw attention to your product by starting a conversation about something else entirely?”

The rest of us, who have been marinating in a marketing stew for most of our lives, answer “Where have you been living?”

Much advertising is based on this.

Until yesterday, I would have argued that this technique took hold sometime in the last 80 years or so, pushed forward by the creation of radio and television – two mediums that offer great advantages and even greater rewards to liars and deceivers.

But I was proven wrong while scouting about aimlessly on the Internet, when I stumbled across the odd marketing approach of a window shade merchant in Yonkers, NY around the turn of the 20th century.

The American Carpet and Upholstery Journal described it this way in 1902:

William Welsh, dealer in window shades, matting, oil cloth and linoleum, 5 North Broadway, Yonkers, N.Y., is a rather daring and novel advertiser. He makes use of a 6-inch space, in a good position, in the Yonkers Statesman, and always fills it with a semi-facetious matter, which is no doubt looked for and read by the subscribers of that enterprising daily.

While this style of advertising is generally considered bad, as Mr. Welsh conducts it, the effect is undoubtedly good.

Screen Shot 2015-05-31 at 10.05.45 AM

Welsh goes at his customers again and again from various odd angles, trying to get their attention with a barrage of words. Today’s advertisers use swimsuit models for the same purpose, but that wasn’t permitted in the Yonkers Statesman of 1902. Regardless of the chosen topic, he always brings it home to the real point – WINDOW SHADES.

Cold Chunks

Politically speaking, we have been lambasted, garroted, buncoed, gold-bricked, solar-plexed, sandbagged, knocked out, our picture turned to the wall, and otherwise treated with brotherly love and now we feel that we are not as other men – and to show our distinction we will have to wear a badge, but not one bought with the people’s money. It happened this way: Last fall, when the political bosses were fishing for suckers the bait looked tempting, and we swallowed the hook and were landed. Now, there would be no kick coming from lus if the bosses had not shoved whole chunks of cold political harmony down the back of our neck, remarking at the same time, “Peace be with thee, brother.” We are under the impression, from the chill it gave us, that it was not a “peace” of cold political harmony that went down our back, but the whole lump. Now the reaction is great, and our political temperature is 106 under the collar. There are sudden changes in some other things besides the weather, but no so with our WINDOW SHADES. They are always the same – A No. 1.

WM. WELSH, 5 North Broadway, Yonkers

Even when the talk is small and light, the payoff is as usual.

Surprising!

We met a friend of ours, this morning, who did not ask us if we liked this kind of weather, or if it was wet enough to suit us, or when we thought it would clear up, or even remark that we are having a wet spell. Now, this must seem surprising to you, but it is a fact; there are a few people in the world who think that some other people know when there is a wet spell without being reminded of it every few minutes in the day.

Now, we wish to say, right here, that we know when we are having a wet spell, and we also know when we have enough. The next time we have a dry spell we shall mind our own affairs and peg away at our WINDOW SHADES.

We have a large stock of Oil Cloths, Linoleums, Mattings, White Beds and Bedding:

 WM. WELSH, 5 N. Broadway, Yonkers

We forgot to say that the man who didn’t speak to us about the weather was deaf and dumb.

Like re-hearing a well-loved joke, you already know the punch line, but the fun is all in getting there.

Recall a character from your life who only wanted to talk about one thing.

History

Speeches That Didn’t Change The World

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Today is the anniversary of Newton Minow’s “vast wasteland” speech.  It’s a landmark in the history of broadcasting because Minow had just been elevated from his position as just a guy with a name that sounds like an idea for a fish-flavored soft cookie, to the the exalted chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, appointed to lead the regulatory agency by President John F. Kennedy.

Minow was talking to the 1961 convention of the National Association of Broadcasters and he didn’t mince words as he challenged his listeners to watch a day of television from the moment of sign on,  when the programming started, to sign off, when it stopped.

Yes, children, there was a time in history when the television stations would actually be quiet at the end of a day.

Minow argued that “a vast wasteland” was on display.

“You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials — many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you’ll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.”

The speech was a challenge to broadcasters to change their programming approach and do their work in the public interest. Wikipedia claims it was selected as one of twenty five “Speeches That Changed the World,” which is a ridiculous claim.

Minow didn’t change the world.  Broadcasters pretty much ignored him and went about their business.  When Gilligan’s Island debuted three years later, the shipwrecked boat was named after Minow.

Years later, Minow said he was really advocating for providing more choices for viewers, and in 2015 we can see that technology has certainly taken care of that.   But the broadly uplifting and ardently educational medium he imagined at the time did not materialize outside the creation of Masterpiece Theater and Sesame Street.

If Minow did anything at all in 1961, he merely predicted the empty, miserable, disappointing future of broadcasting.

When have you said the thing your audience didn’t want to hear?

History

Bad Day for Gasbags

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We’re dipping into the archive today to re-visit a Trail Baboon post from two years ago.  Did you realize that next month this online conversation will have been going on for five years?    That’s just an eye blink in the vast span of human history, but it represents a prodigious amount of tippy-tapping on various keyboards throughout Baboon-land.  

Today is the anniversary of two cataclysms, the Sack of Rome in 1527 and the explosion of the Hindenburg in Lakehurst, New Jersey in 1937. Both were sudden and somewhat unexpected, though there were hints of what was to come – Rome had been sacked before (in 410) and a string of other hydrogen-filled airships had already crashed and burned.

Still, one always hopes for the best and an optimistic soul is surprised when things turn out otherwise.

In our time, the Hindenburg is a better-known calamity, but only because there isn’t compelling footage of the Sack of Rome.

Historians say the Sack of Rome marked the end of Italy’s High Renaissance, and significantly pushed forward the protestant reformation. The Hindenburg disaster called an abrupt end to the development of rigid airships – most certainly those filled with hydrogen.

So it goes.

Although we try to prevent catastrophic events and want to have some positive influence over the great changes that sweep over our world, it often feels that we are stuck in the role of an interested, but powerless, observer. Perhaps this explains the popularity of parallel-world games like Minecraft, where one can start from scratch and construct an environment with just a few elements, an assortment of building blocks, and a blank canvas.

You could take advantage of this technology to try to build a make-believe world without Kings, Armies, Popes, Nazis and New Jersey. But you’d still probably need gravity, fire, hunger, ambition and hydrogen.

Things might turn out pretty much the same.

Is there such a thing as creative destruction?

Business, History, Speeches

Macy’s Doth Murder Sleep!

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Thanks to Linda, who gave us all a lovely gift in the comments section of yesterday’s post with a link to Clyde’s excellent Thanksgiving Day essay from 2011. Sometimes the oldies are golden indeed!

I’m going to take a cue from Linda and do the same for Black Friday, in part because the newest B.F. trend seems to be finding a way to make it easy on yourself – witness the uptick in people who hire surrogates to stand in line for them.

In this post from 2010, we explored the Shakespearian potential of the annual Black Friday drama.

MACBETH
Methought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more! 
 Macys does murder sleep,” the innocent sleep, sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of Ladies Charter Club Cashmere Crew-Neck Sweaters, only $39.99 before 10 am on Friday alone!

LADY MACBETH
What do you mean? Who was it that thus cried?

MACBETH
It was the owl that shriek’d, or some Tribune. The Star, perhaps, or the News of Duluth, formerly the Herald. It was a sorry sight.

LADY MACBETH
A foolish thought to say a sorry sight. Such sales will make us mad! Summon again the page!

MACBETH
All great Neptune’s ocean will not wash this ink clean from my hand. I am afraid to think what I have seen. Look on’t again I dare not.

LADY MACBETH
Infirm of purpose! 
 Methinks the doors are already open and the surfeited clerks do mock their charge with snores. Give me the plastic daggers. I’ll gild the aisles of Macy’s withal; 
 That which hath made them drowsy hath made be bold; what hath pinched them hath given me fire. Hark!

What is your greatest shopping drama?