​Big thoughts from small towns

By Ed Raymond

‘Dakota Attitude’ should be read by all North Dakota students

I have been meaning to write about this book by James Puppe for several years, but the world has been in such a mess I thought I should write about messes. Last week it was reported that a huge pipe had broken in Washington and sewage was running in devastating amounts into the Potomac River and polluting it for many miles downstream. With the politics we have coming out of the Oval Office in the White House polluting the world, millions of gallons of sewage in the river could be coming right out of the Oval Office.

James Puppe is from Pembina County, where he attended a country school where in first grade at Hartje #53 he had only one other student in that grade. Hah! When I was a first grader in Morrison County, Minnesota, District #54 in 1938, I had Adeline and Jim as classmates.

Between 2004 and 2018, Puppe — a U.S. Army veteran who served in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969 —interviewed more than one thousand people from every small town in North Dakota. He ended up with 617 stories in a 638-page book. Many of those little towns don’t exist anymore — and one town consists of a mayor and only one other resident.

Many of Puppe’s one-page stories are from the Great Depression. I will not reveal real names or places. The incidents, interviews and stories reveal a lot about Americanus whether Boobus or Humanus.

I was born in 1932 on a farm with no electricity and a two-holer out back of the house. We finally had Rural Electrification Administration (REA) power in the barn first (which was much more important than in the house).

But one never knows what will happen in life. As a senior at Little Falls High School, I was traveling the Midwest with Miss America Bebe Shoppe, singing the tenor part in a mixed quartet known as the Winter Wonderland Quartet in a Miss America show assembled by Cedric Adams of Minneapolis radio and newspaper fame. Bebe, who just died at age 95, played the vibraharp. We sang many traditional and popular songs in programs in city auditoriums, theaters, high schools, colleges, universities and nightclubs. Our first two shows happened to be at Moorhead High School and on WDAY radio.

Stories from the book

Large families indicated North Dakotans were busy participating in many activities. There was the farm family who had 21 children in the remarkable span of 21 years — no multiple births. They lost only one child, killed at 19 in an auto accident. They had three large gardens, and the children were assigned in three groups to take care of three gardens, depending upon the age and skills of the children.

There was the family of 16 who had an evening celebration of life by serving a big meal containing peas that had been improperly processed. The parents, uncles, aunts and the oldest three children —a total of 13 in the family — died of botulism. It was the greatest loss from botulism ever suffered in the state. The three youngest in the family survived because they had been sent to bed early before the meal was served. Such is life and death.

There was a country school in the northern part of the state that had 22 students with the same last name.

In the 1930s, the father of a family of 12 would climb the windmill on the family farm when the wind didn’t blow and turn the wheel by hand so the cows had water to drink. The house had only one bedroom. The 10 kids slept in three beds in the attic which had a hole in the roof and the snow would blow in during the winter. The kids slept in tents outside all summer long. On Saturday the mother would kill one chicken and cut it into 12 pieces for Saturday night supper.

A girl graduated from eighth grade and got a job as a mother’s helper and was paid $2 a week. She was over 100 when interviewed, does all her own cooking and house cleaning and drives her car to church.

A man who came from a family where only four out of 16 children survived took care of the cemetery where they were buried. Some were born dead, some died at birth, some only lived a few days and some died of diphtheria.

Some people in this small town said they were concerned whether the mixed marriage of a couple would last. However, it was not about a Catholic and a Lutheran. The groom was a member of the Farm Bureau and the bride was a member of the Farmers Union.

In this country school, when the students had recess, they would drown out gophers in a field nearby. They would take the gophers home and feed them to their cats. One day they caught a weasel in a rock pile, put it in a five-gallon can and brought it back to the school. It escaped and urinated under the desks. The school smelled so bad the students were forced by parents and teacher to scrub the floor for two days.

About 70% of the horses used on North Dakota farms in the 1930s were of the Percheron breed, the largest draft horse in the world, weighing about a ton. On our Minnesota farm we kept a team of Percherons, a team of Belgians (another big breed) and a spare grey. When I was about 13 (and the youngest male in the family), I was the driver of the bundle wagon used for picking up bundles of shocked grain and hauling them to the threshing machine. Driving a loaded wagon up to a very noisy horse-eating threshing machine and steam engine for the first time was always an interesting experience for both horse and driver. Although we had five horses, I have never ridden a horse in my life. They were too big.

Many young teenagers made money during the potato harvest by picking potatoes for a penny a sack. A 13-year-old girl and her younger sister picked 300 sacks on a good day and earned $3. They would often work in the potato house, sorting seed potatoes and shipping them out. When I was in eighth grade, I sorted potatoes for seeding for a local potato farmer. He paid me 50 cents an hour to throw out the stinking rotten ones.

Most farmers would insulate their homes for the winter by banking the foundation of their house with manure.

Sears & Roebuck continued to sell homes through the catalog in the 1930s. Many are still used in small North Dakota towns. Corky’s foster parents bought a 10x20 Sears & Roebuck garage which they turned into their first beach cabin on Pelican Lake. It is still used for storage by the present owners.

Many veterans of World War II were interviewed for the book. One North Dakota farm boy drafted in 1941 had a number of interesting experiences. Captured by the Germans in a battle in North Africa, he was flown with his squad to Italy and then sent by boxcar to a prisoner of war camp in Germany where he spent 27 months. Near the end of the war, he and 300 other prisoners walked 300 miles under guard until they were liberated by Allied forces in May 1945. Back in North Dakota he often told students about his experiences.

“I know what freedom is because I did not have it for 27 months when I was a prisoner,” he said. “I was on the other side. I know I can’t imagine living in a country where you can’t do what you please, but we are free as a bird. When I see the flag go by in a parade, it sends chills right down my body. It means so much to me.”

A small town that had started in 1912 held a 100th year anniversary celebration in 2012, when only one person lived in town. But over a thousand people registered for the event! The resident sat in his garage and watched the parade.

“I was happy when it was over and they cleared out,” he said afterward. “I wouldn’t want to live any other place.”

This resident of a small town carries a small stone in his pocket, so when somebody bullies, argues vociferously, or threatens to attack him, he gives them the stone. They usually ask him why he gave them the stone. His response? “Since you are without sin, you may cast the first stone.” Surprise, surprise.

This small-town guy was drafted for the Korean War and had an unusual response about his tour in that dangerous country: “I was up far enough so we didn’t have to shine our shoes, but yet not far enough so it was dangerous.”

It reminds me of the choice I had after I graduated from Marine Officer’s Candidate School in 1955. A friend in the Pentagon told me I should request a base on the west coast if I didn’t want to go to Korea, so I thought I would give his suggestion a try. I officially chose the west coast and was immediately assigned to Camp Lejeune on the east coast of North Carolina! It’s hard to explain…

During hard times a farm girl got two heifers from her parents as a wedding gift. She immediately sold them and bought a refrigerator and an electric washing machine before the couple had electricity in their house. Another small-town bride thought her husband-to-be was rich because he had a drawer full of S & H green stamp books you could buy things with.

During the Great Depression, this family of nine children lived in a two-room house. The parents slept in the kitchen and the nine kids slept in two beds in the other room. If kids were late getting to bed, they would sleep on the floor. In the summer, most of the children slept outside behind a chicken coop with a big tarp on poles to keep the rain off. They raised pigs and chickens and fed them by crawling under the elevator and getting all the screenings that fell through. They gathered the screenings with old car hoods which they also used as sleds in the winter.

There was an expression from India that spread around the world during the Great Depression that summarized the situation: Buzard’s luck: ”Nothin’s flyin,’ nothin’s dyin’,’”

Will there be a movie called ‘Judgment at Washington?’

I watched the Academy Award winning movie “Judgment at Nuremberg" about four German judges on trial for committing crimes against humanity under the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler. If there is a trial about the crimes committed by Trump and his two administrations, the director will be able to use the same dialogue.