Flannelgraph Memories

Sunday School Flannelgraph story time

Awhile back, I was reminded of a very specific art form to the religion of my youth - the flannelgraph. During many a Sunday School, I was riveted to the stories portrayed using this technique, often begging to be allowed to change the scenery and the characters between scenes. I then watched a video while reminiscing, remembering how the stories would deeply connect with me, especially when told by particular ladies of my church.

I recall one person in particular.  She had a soft, engaging voice that drew me in.  Looking back now, I can see that it was also one of my early experiences of ASMR; I got tingles when letting myself immerse into the story, on a combination physical/emotional level through the sounds of the flannel moving across the soft surfaces, the teacher's voice, etc.

Trivial Me

I Grew up in the oldest village in my state - St. Vincent, Minnesota.

But I was born in Emerson, Manitoba.

I am only 4 degrees of separation away from the Hillside Strangler serial killers.

I learned to read at 3 years old (and yes, I am a voracious reader who likes nothing better than to lose myself in a good book, fiction or non-fiction...)

I have moved over 27 times (so far).

It took me 50 years to find the love of my life.

I once met Vincent Price at a baggage carousel in LAX.

I once went at midnight to observe the annual grunion run at Huntington Beach, sponsored by a local marine museum; we waited, and when the guides saw them, we were told to turn on our flashlights; males wrapped themselves around females, which in turn laid their eggs in the sand; as quickly as they came ashore, they were gone.

A friend and I once rode our horses along with a wagon train for 10 miles, during the American Bicentennial.

Speaking of horses, I have been lucky enough to have ridden in the Rocky Mountains, along the shore of the Pacific Ocean, in the deserts of New Mexico, as well as my own home prairies.

After leaving a bad marriage, I became a single parent at age 25, went back to school at 27, sought and obtained a good government job at 29, bought my first house at 31, and bought my first new car at 33.

I left that good job after 23 years to follow a new dream, which brought me full circle, back to a rural life on a small hobby farm like the one I grew up on.

I grew up in the house my grandparents built, that my mother grew up in, and later me and my children lived in for 18 months with my parents while I began getting back on my feet.

I have a deep love for my home village and its surrounding villages, which are really one, big extended family (and many are related to one another...)

I love writing as much as reading - in fact, I daresay I may like it more. It is like breathing to me, necessary to my life, the ability to document and express, to create and to share. 

I have a deep passion for animals, and for several years dedicated my life to the goal of becoming a veterinarian. Life had other plans.

My best friend growing up was a cat named Dusty. He was a great mouser, who worked part-time as my alarm clock during the school year.

I nearly drowned when I was 4 years old. My mother and her friend took me to a swimming pool one hot summer day. They had me go in to the wading pool while they visited nearby. I somehow sneaked away to the big pool which I evidently thought looked much more fun. I slipped in holding the side, not knowing how to swim. A wave pulled me away and before I knew it, I was sinking, looking up at the sun through the water, the world going dark. Next thing I knew, my mother's friend was giving me mouth to mouth, then I was choking up water. She had just saved my life.

I used to play the piano fairly well, as an accompanist at my school, church, and as a soloist, including in competitions. 

I once had a grand mal seizure. 

I survived an 18-month bout of clinical depression by walking, writing, and with the help of two people - a very special friend, and my daughter.

1966: A Very Bad Year

Family Photo: After the flood but before my seizure.  Dad is sitting due to his broken leg.

Sometimes Grand Mal - or as they are more commonly referred to now, Tonic-Clonic - seizures can be isolated. Thankfully mine was. At the time, my parents were fostering a classmate of mine. I was the youngest of three girls, my two older sisters being significantly older than me.  Since I had never had a sibling near my age, there was a learning curve on how to get along, and even how not to and then make up and go on.  One night at bed time, we were not settling down and Mom separated us. I felt angry that I was the one that had to leave 'my' bedroom. In my big sister's room, I purposely held my breath over and over, increasing the length of time I held each breath. At the same time I tightened my facial muscles until I felt my head was about to explode.  Then, it did.

It was 1966 and I was only 7 years old.  During the seizure - except when I came to for a few seconds where I was being carried and remember seeing the old telephone cubby between the kitchen and living room - I was unconscious.  I asked my sister Betty to share whatever she could remember...

I was at play practice - it was my Junior year in high school. When I got home, you were laying on Dad's bed downstairs.  They had a bed set up for him after he broke his leg. Mom was on the phone frantically getting ahold of Wim Surface to come help. You were starting to turn blue. I had just had CPR training in school and began giving you mouth to mouth.  Mom had carried you down stairs. Mom said: that every night her and Dad played cards and listened to music; but for some strange reason they DID NOT turn the music on that night. Mom said, she heard something and told Dad that is a weird sound coming through the ceiling vent. She ran upstairs and saw you in a Grand Mal seizure and carried you downstairs crying. Dad couldn't move off the bed. I can't imagine how he must have felt. Before we knew it, Wim was there. He carried you to the car and us three sat in the back, praying you would not die. Wim drove like 100 miles an hour. The ambulance meet us on this side of Humboldt. We were instructed to blink our lights at every car to know it was the ambulance. Mom went with you in the ambulance. Wim and I went to the hospital and I don't remember anything about that part, except they took you by ambulance to Grand Forks, and Wim took me home.

There are many reasons someone may have a seizure.  The only logical trigger of the many I've read about, in the case of my isolated event, is stress.  It had been a very stressful year for my entire family, including me.  My oldest sister had graduated high school, and in the fall had boarded a passenger train at the depot my father worked at, and the rest of us waved tearfully goodbye to her.  In the meantime, I had had more kidney and bladder infections involving many tests and procedures to try and determine what was going on.  It rattled me badly every time I had to go through them, plus nightly I was wetting the bed.  During the early spring, my father had been removing storm windows on the second story of our home when the old wooden ladder suddenly dropped from under him with no warning.  He fell straight down, his one leg compound-fracturing upon impact with the ground.  He was in a cast for months, and was still at the time of my seizure.  That same spring, we had one of the worst floods ever of the Red River of the North, after a historic blizzard.  Our town didn't have a dike yet, so much of the town flooded, including our home and outbuildings.  We had to move everything possible upstairs, only the piano staying downstairs up on bricks.  That still wasn't enough to keep it entirely out of the water.  In the fall, my parents felt led to bring a classmate of mine needing a foster home, into our home.  Unbeknownst to us at the time, it may have led to a level of stress that my mind and body just couldn't cope with...

Where I Came From

"It's a sad country, but it's the most beautiful God ever made. There's a wildness to it, a richness of colour, a sweetness on the wind you couldn't know unless you'd smelled it. It's a very old land where once heroes and saints and scholars lived and now the memory of those days aches in the colour of the earth, the standing stones, the trees against the sky, the sound of a storm." - Ann Perry

My ethnic background is a mixture of many cultures. My father's was Norwegian and German/Scot/English stock, from his mother and father respectively; my mother's was Irish/English (both parents).

While I did hear about the Norwegian side of things in passing conversation while growing up, my general sense of who I was, was of being Irish. My mother’s family was overwhelmingly Irish, with a wee bit of English thrown in just to keep it interesting.  I grew up with brown bread, strong Canadian tea, roast beef dinners, making do, passionate ‘discussions’, and knowing the value of hard work and faith. Family was important, and that included laying your cards on the table even if feelings got hurt; honesty was prized, and unkind words quickly forgotten. While you might feel like killing someone for a split second, you hugged them the next. Life went on.

While I eventually grew to appreciate my father’s family, learning there was more to my father's family history than I at first had realized, I’ll always think of myself as an Irish girl.

Home Remedies

Mustard Plaster Recipe: This is made of different strengths, depending upon the length of time it is desired to keep it on and the sensitiveness of the skin.

1. Equal parts of mustard and flour.
2. One of mustard and two of flour.
3. One of mustard and three or four of flour. White of an egg added makes it better and not so blistering.

A paste is made with warm water and spread between the layers of muslin and left on no longer than ten minutes. When the skin is red remove the plaster. This is used when you wish a quick counter-irritation.

The above recipe for a mustard plaster - a very commonly used home remedy in the early to mid 20th century - was taken from the medical volume of The People's Home Library: A Library of Three Practical Books; sold door-to-door by salesmen, published by the R.C. Barnum company, "...a well-known subscription book company at that time."  Many is the time I watched my mother make mustard plasters, sometimes for my father, and sometimes even for me (and this was in the 1960s yet...)  When I was small, I tended towards chestiness, and had more than my share of terrible colds, flu, chicken pox, measles, not to mention ear and tooth aches.  My mother nursed me very well through them all, with help from my grandmother who lived nearby, this book, her own common sense, and experience.  It may have been old-hat by then, but old tech doesn't mean irrelevant or outdated.  Sometimes the old cures are very effective.

My Grandma bought a 1920 edition of the first in the series, called The People's Home Medical Book, by T.J. Ritter, MD. It described Dr. Ritter as a "...Graduate of both the allopathic and homeopathic schools; formerly asst. to the Chair of the Theory and Practice of Medicine, Michigan State University, Ann Arbor, Mich."

My Mother grew up under the care of Grandma using the advice of that book, together with her own common sense. In turn, my own family, including myself, came under it's influence in due time. Where some may have learned about human anatomy from National Geographic or girlie magazines, I learned from the People's Home Library.¹

As I raised my own children, I didn't have the book to refer to, but I remembered my mother's examples, and carried on the tradition of common sense home nursing care, and not running to a doctor every time my children sneezed.  I provided simple but effective remedies like gargling with warm salt water when there was a sore throat, providing a comforting (and chest/nose opening) warm 'steamer' (aka vaporizer) at night when they slept, had oil of cloves on hand for tooth aches and ear aches, etc.

¹ - I also learned some interesting facts of life from my Mom's Bible, which was illustrated in color with reproductions of famous painter's renditions of scenes from the Bible. I must admit that I was, even at a tender age, very appreciative of the curve of the nearly nude derriere of Samson as he pushed the mill stone around...but that's another topic altogether!

Dad & the CCC's

My Dad grew up on a farm in northwestern Minnesota.  He only went through 8th grade, which wasn't unusual back then.  When you were part of a farm family back in the 1930s, every hand was needed to make it run.  Farming was a labor-intensive job back then, with many farms, including my Grandfather's, still using horses for some of the work right alongside machinery.

Dad, 1938

When Dad got to be around 19, he went further north to a town called St. Vincent, where his Uncle Gail and Aunt Liza ran Short's Cafe.  It was actually part soda fountain/ice cream counter, part restaurant, part saloon, and - if rumors were true (and I have heard stories from people who knew, that they were), part backroom gambling hall.  He went there to work in his uncle's establishment and there met my mother (age 16), one of the village girls stopping by for a soda.  While the rest of that story, as they say, is history, Dad had more personal history to forge before he and Mom were married and walked the rest of their lives together.

Dad's discharge papers from the CCCs.

Sometime in 1940, Dad decided to check out the CCC, or Civilian Conservation Corps.  The CCC was one of the New Deal agencies, offering work programs to young men seeking employment during the Great Depression.  To put it simply, the program provided training/experience for the young men, and much needed works projects for the public - a win-win for everyone at the time.

Dad worked in Company 718, stationed near Big Fork, Minnesota, which is in the north central part of the state, not far from the 'arrowhead' region.  His company was part of a group that worked in the Pine Island State Forest.

Dad's time with the CCCs were cut short, when he was notified to report for medical examination, the precursor to induction into the military.  It was then only a matter of time before he was called up for training, active duty, and sent overseas to fight.  But that, that is another story...

Call to Duty

FBI's Most Wanted

My mother's older sister Irene had eight children, seven of them girls.  One of those girls was named Lois.

Some time in the late 1950s, Lois crossed paths with a man named Everett Leroy Biggs.

Biggs was from another Illinois family, like my cousin.  He had served in the U.S. Marines in post-war Korea.

At any rate, they met, married, and had several children together.  And during their marriage, Everett became a wanted man.  A very wanted man.

He was so 'wanted', that he made it onto the FBI's most wanted list on November 21, 1966, as #240.  The FBI described him as a "serial armed bank robber".

He wasn't on the list long, only two weeks.  On December 1, 1966, Everett was arrested,  taken by surprise outside his Colorado home.  It is said that they tracked him down through his children, who were enrolled in a nearby school.  He served his time, was released, and to my knowledge, walked the straight and narrow thereafter.

I'm not sure when my cousin divorced him, but in 1979, he married again, and he and his second wife were together until his death in 1997.