Maxine Lee, today’s guest author, is also the grandmother of our good friend carterzest. Please make her welcome! Over recent days it’s been my pleasure to visit via email with carterzest and Maxine and get acquainted with two very special people who are part of a large and loving family – a family with full hearts who certainly do have a story to tell.

Maxine was born in 1929 on the South Dakota plains and published Some Assembly Required in 2005. The gathering of her stories in the book was a result of her dream “to leave a printed account to my family, of my beginning, my birth place and childhood, and a few of the lessons life has taught to me.”

Her faith is part of her story and she says “Since it was my privilege to put together some slices of life with spiritual applications, for my church and since I had lots of stories of the past to tell, I included a section of those essays. There is much of my history in those stories.” One of these essays is included in today’s post as well.

Today’s post is Maxine’s opening narrative from her book –  Part One – In the Beginning and also includes an additional word picture, We’re Moving Again, as the extended family narrative begins to unfold.

Part One: In the Beginning

It all began somewhere in Sweden from where my great grandmother and family came to this country. I never knew them. Their family name was Matson. One daughter was named Ida who had a brother, Olaf and a sister, Sadie. I remember them only vaguely. There were others whose names I do not recall.

These newcomers to America built simple homes in an area between South Dakota and Minnesota, where many Swedish and German families had settled. When my grandmother Ida was about sixteen, she fell in love with a Jewish boy whose last name was Stanhope. She was soon expecting a child. However, it was against the young man’s religion to marry outside his faith, which left my young grandmother in a sad predicament.

To have a child out of wedlock in those days was an utter disgrace. So my Catholic, Swedish grandmother agreed to marry a German man, by the name of Chris Lenz, a widower with five children who needed a mother. This marriage of convenience produced a dozen more children. (more…)

Consider the poem
that carries the
same title as the
march.
  

The Stars and Stripes Forever

    Let martial note in triumph float,
And liberty extend its mighty hand,
A flag appears ‘Mid thund’rous cheers,
The banner of the Western land.
The emblem of the brave and true,
Its folds protect no tyrant crew,
The red and white and starry blue,
Is Freedom’s shield and hope.

    Other nations may deem their flags the best
And cheer them with fervid elation,
But the flag of the North and South and West
Is the flag of flags, The flag of Freedom’s nation.

    Hurrah for the flag of the free,
May it wave as our standard forever,
The gem of the land and the sea,
The Banner of the Right.
Let despots remember the day
When our fathers with mighty endeavor,
Proclaim’d as they march’d to the fray,
That by their might And by their right,
It waves forever!

    Let eagle shriek From lofty peak
The never-ending watchword of our land.
Let summer breeze Waft through the trees
The echo of the chorus grand.
Sing out for liberty and light,
Sing out for freedom and the right,
Sing out for Union and its might,
Oh, patriotic sons!

    Other nations may deem their flags the best
And cheer them with fervid elation,
But the flag of the North and South and West
Is the flag of flags, The flag of Freedom’s nation.

    Hurrah for the flag of the free,
May it wave as our standard forever,
The gem of the land and the sea,
The Banner of the Right.
Let despots remember the day
When our fathers with mighty endeavor,
Proclaim’d as they march’d to the fray,
That by their might And by their right,
It waves forever!

(more…)

Have you ever had a dish of peaches and cream?
Not half-and-half. Not Cool Whip. Cream.
The thick cream from our cow’s milk would be called whipping cream in today’s check out lines but it was just every day cream on the farm, kept in the cream can in the fridge.
The cream can was galvanized tin and probably held something over a quart. It had been re-purposed from some grocery-store purchase, perhaps orange juice since fresh fruit wasn’t available in winter. Juice from cans like that always had a metallic taste. The paper that announced the original contents had been stripped off and sharp edges around the edge ground away and the shiny can is now, forevermore, the cream can.
There was another cream can made of sturdier stuff that stood about three feet high. It held five gallons accumulated over a period of weeks in the cool basement before it would be taken to the train depot where it was put on the next freight to Williston. It was delivered to the creamery where it was combined with hundreds of gallons from other five gallon cream cans, bottled and delivered to all the grocery stores in the same towns from which it had come, and then returned as an empty on the same freight train westbound. My father always got the very same can back because it had a metal name tag with our rural route box number in raised metal letters, attached with a small wire to the handle.
Some of it became became homemade ice cream on a hot July Sunday afternoon- in the shade of the old porch on the north side of the house – the one that always had daddy long legs spiders under it.
Those daddy long legs were a favorite weapon in the hands of older brothers. It was routine entertainment to pick one of them up by one or two legs and toss them toward any girl in the vicinity whether she be sister or the sister of a friend.
The boys threw the spiders and the girls dodged them, yelling a bit as they did.
The very quiet girls who were held up as worthy role models (for the consideration of those of us who were not quiet) seldom had spiders thrown at them. I still think the reason is that the boys were afraid they’d start crying, instead of yelling like we did just before we started planning some harmless revenge.
But I digress – back to the warm-from-the-cow cream and the peaches. (more…)

I got acquainted with Dan this past Thursday.
I had taken our son and grandson to the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum at McMinnville a week ago yesterday and that day I purchased a membership so that I could go again and again and again during the year. Thursday was my first again.
Dan is a national treasure and a new friend. As we wrapped up our thirty minute conversation he offered me a home phone number for himself and his wife of sixty-seven years (V) in case I had further questions about the P-38.
Dan was only twenty-two in the winter of 1944 when he was working as a ground mechanic on the P-38s based in England, stripping them of their armaments so they could be effectively used for photo reconnaissance flights deep into territory controlled by German forces, five months before D-Day.
As I understood the nature of the mission he was describing I asked with some astonishment, How on earth did they carry out such missions?? His answer – very carefully. (more…)

For recent new readers, here’s the how and why that the Mailboxes and Old Barns weekly post got started over three years ago:
Mailboxes along the roads and old barns set back in fields overgrown with weeds often served as landmarks that told us where we were and how far we had to go in the high dry prairie country of northeastern Montana where I grew up. Sometimes the mailboxes signaled “home” and the end of the road; at other times, barely visible through swirling snow, an old barn told us we had miles to go. When I started compiling word pictures of those times a few years back, I realized they were like those mailboxes and old barns–still identifying important places along the road, still signaling where I am and how far I have to go.
Today’s MBOB is a wandering-around-the-Treehouse-trails-visit – coming as it does on the heels of a two month hiatus for me.
(more…)

Picking up the story of my grandfather’s book, we jump back into the story of settlers in Kansas, just as the Civil War starts. The first part of the book is told here.
My grandfather titled his book Pioneer Problems and Present Day Perplexities. It was written in 1965 for our family, and has never been published. A copy was given to each of his children and grandchildren.
Soon after their little cabins were completed, the civil war broke out and a goodly share of the men were taken into service. During the next few years, those broken families saw some very difficult times. Because the war came so soon after their arrival, they had very little land broken out and no reserves to carry them over. Grandmother used to tell us kids how she and the girls knitted socks and sold them in Manhattan. Manhattan at that time consisted only of tents and little old shacks. Food of any kind was very scarce and hard to get. They had no flour or even wheat so they had to ford the river with an ox team in order to get to Manhattan where they had corn ground into corn meal. (more…)

Growing up in the 60’s and 70’s, I didn’t have to undergo the tough times and conditions that my dad did, with no electricity until 1948, and no indoor plumbing until long after he had left home.  I did grow up in a much simpler and more carefree time than my grandchildren today.

One of the things that sticks with me even today, is how our parents let us explore.  In the summers, after some breakfast, I would get on my bike and head for town.  The city limit was just about a half-mile away, but we were “country kids”.  We rode the bus to school.

I would head straight for the Little League park.  I knew that there would be a passel of friends there no later than about 9:00 every day.  We would pick teams and just start playing baseball.  Visions of the greats of our time in our heads.  Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, and even some from our beloved Chicago Cubs, like Billy Williams and the great Ron Santo.  It was always two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning when each of us was up to bat.  You could hear the radio announcers in your head.  The dulcet tones of Vince Lloyd and Lou Boudreau making the call.  Sometimes we were the hero, and on more than a few occasions, it happened.  Steeee-rike three!  You’re out’a here.  I can’t remember how many World Series rings I won and lost. (more…)

My paternal grandfather, born to a pioneer family in 1881 on the plains of Kansas, wrote a book for our family, a collection of his memories of a life that spanned a time when he still saw Indians water ponies in the creek to seeing a man walk on the moon. The following is pulled from the introductory pages from the book. It is a glimpse of a world unknown to us, a little picture of why so many of our ancestors were willing to risk all and sacrifice much to come to America, and their struggles to build a home in the wilderness.

My father was born on January 8, 1831, in Luxemburg, a small country. I believe it lies between France and Germany. In those days an education was not considered important at all. My father and older brother spent much of their teenage years working in a stone quarry from early until late for ten cents per day. Naturally, they became discouraged and decided to come to America and look for something better. After borrowing a few dollars from their uncle, they got passage on a ship, and by working at anything they could find, they finally landed at Leavenworth Kansas. (more…)

Last week I put out a request for some guest-written MBOBs from our good company who reads here every Sunday, and ZurichMike’s was the first one in over the transom. Thank you, ZM! You’re the best. 😉

I grew up in a very middle class family in Connecticut. We lived in a small typically New England town, with a white steepled church on the town green facing the red brick town hall, with the old watch factory behind it and the little cluster of “new” buildings on one side:  a bank, a notions shop, a general clothing store, and a diner. Down the street was the cinema, where I remember my dad taking us kids to see our first film on the big screen:  Bambi. I was frightened of the large images and noises and to this day I do not like the film. (more…)

Our large tree belt filled about ten acres in a long L-shape around the farmstead and provided some shelter from winter storms.

They surely didn’t keep the sub zero temps or winds away but the five and six foot drifts that might be thirty or forty feet from end to end and which lasted for months were more likely to be in the tree belt and less likely to be blocking buildings in the yard itself – like the cave, the house, the outhouse, the granaries, the well sheds, barn, chicken coops, and garage.

The tree belt was six or eight rows deep with ten feet between the rows and with lots of open dirt –  room enough to drive a tractor/cultivator through twice a summer to control weeks on the bare soil.  Our soil wouldn’t win awards for nutrients, but it wasn’t gumbo. It wasn’t clay. It was just good clean dirt and I will say this for it – it made really great mud. (more…)