We lived in an old farm house that Mom and Dad had lived together in since their marriage in 1935. They had done a lot of remodeling and decorating so it was a very comfortable home. We have good memories of living there on the farm in southern Minnesota.
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| Shot from the top of the windmill (1948) |
The main rooms were the “porch” and the kitchen across the front of the first floor. The family room was an enclosed porch that had knotty pine walls and lots of windows. But it was always called the porch. It was our main play area with a big green wooden toy box in the corner. Along the south wall was a gate-legged table with one leaf raised where the current newspapers and magazines were kept. We received three daily newspapers - the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Fairmont Sentinel, and the Worthington Daily Globe. Also we received the weekly Jackson County Pilot and the Jackson Livewire. (At age 98 Mom still subscribes to the Worthington Globe and the Jackson County Pilot.) They would come in the US mail a day late, but it didn’t matter. We kids would spread the newspapers out on the floor when we were little so we could read the comics. An early favorite was “Peanuts” in the St. Paul Pioneer Press which Marita especially liked.

On one side of the table was “Mom’s chair” for sitting and reading. But I don’t remember seeing her sit there very much. She seemed to always to be on the go fixing meals (including lunches for mid-afternoon), gardening, mending clothes, doing the wash and ironing, running errands for Dad, and so on. On the other side of the table was Dad’s chair which was an old mission oak rocking chair with a leather seat. Dad would sit there and read in the evening. After noon dinner he sometimes would sneak in a little cat nap in that same chair. He could sleep sitting up really well.
Behind Dad’s chair was a reddish-brown wooden deco style desk where business papers were kept. Over it hung the big old telephone in a wooden case with a hand crank on the right side to ring up the operator at “central”. Mom would hold the ear piece up that was attached with a long black cord to the wooden case and speak into the trumpet shaped mouth piece. With her other hand she would turn the crank to call the operator. The operator would say “Operator. Number please.” Mom would say the number like “114J”, Grandma Hansen’s number (ours was 404M). The operator would either say “Thank you” or “The line is busy.” On Christmas day the operator would greet us with “Merry Christmas! Number please.” We were on a party line. Our ring was “one long” and our neighbor’s ring was “two shorts”. Sometimes we picked up the phone to call someone and instead would overhear some interesting conversations a neighbor was having. If you listened on purpose, it was called “rubbering”. The neighbors were all quite familiar with each other’s voices and business.
Mom didn’t have lot of time to talk on the phone, but it made a nice break in the work day for her. She and Grandma Hansen especially enjoyed visiting. I mentioned to my Mom once that it was strange that Grandma would not say goodbye when she was done talking, but would just hang up. Mom said Grandma didn’t like to say goodbye.
Grandma also liked to leave the little kids‘ fingerprints on her French Doors in her house. She loved her family, especially the little ones.
On the wall opposite the the windows was thumbtacked a big map of the United States from the National Geographic magazine. We would plan trips and look up the locations of various places we heard of in the news. (Kathy still often pulls out her atlas to look up locations of news events and places people are traveling to.) At Christmas time the kids’ stockings (one of the stockings we wore; not a fancy decorated one) would be thumbtacked to this same wall. We would get a coin in it.
In the back corner was a hall tree that held our good coats. Sometimes it would come crashing to the floor when it got overloaded or unbalanced. In front of it was a red leather modern style chair with a curving chrome frame. Over in the play area was a childrens’ little oak table and two chairs with red stars stenciled on it (WWII theme). Kathy remembers sitting on one of those chairs and doing her first hand sewing. She accidentally stitched the piece of fabric to her corduroy pants and was quite distressed! Everyone else thought it was funny.
The kitchen was a combination of kitchen, family dining, laundry area with a washing machine (dryer was in the formal dining room), and a small crib in the corner for little sister Marita. At times the kitchen also held an electric Free Westinghouse sewing machine in a wooden cabinet. The family radio sat on a counter in the back corner by the refrigerator. In those days there was only AM, but it was our link to the outside world along with the newspapers. We would pull up chairs around the radio and listen to the news, weather and markets (“quiet everyone”), political conventions, ball games, and various programs like Arthur Godfrey. There was linoleum on the floors and Kathy got to roller skate in the kitchen and porch.
A lot of dishes were washed in the big farm sink. In the early 1950‘s Dad bought Mom an automatic dishwasher that was installed in the counter beside the sink. From then on we listened to the comforting sound of the dishwasher as it ran each night while we did our homework around the kitchen table. That same dishwasher was moved to the new house they built in 1955. The sink was also used to hold a big wash pan for a Saturday night bath for the little kids. At other times the women in the house washed their hair by bending over a smaller pan of water in this sink.
The white wooden kitchen table with its slick oilcloth tablecloth had numerous functions too. We ate 3 meals a day and numerous snacks (called “lunch” on the farm). Our three meals were breakfast, dinner, and supper. Around the table were the kitchen chairs which were a mixture of dark wooden chairs that our Ringkob grandparents once owned and white wooden chairs that matched the table. There was also a wooden youth chair with longer legs that the youngest kid would sit on. Mom and Dad would sit by the table after supper and have a cup of tea (one of them usually had the cracked “singing” tea cup) while planning the farm business. Marita preferred tea to milk. One time when we older kids were babysitting her, we fooled her into drinking her milk by pouring it out of a tea pot (brother Tom’s idea). Another favorite of Marita’s was sugar sandwiches. Mom always figured out when Marita made those because the telltale gritty sugar would be all over the table and floor. Marita would flash her big dimples at Mom and say that the sugar sandwiches tasted “awsol good”.

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| Dying Easter eggs |
Mom used the table as her business desk and kept meticulous records over the years. All the records were in her beautiful cursive handwriting. When she took teacher’s training in normal school, she had to learn and practice the Palmer method. In addition to doing homework at this table, the kids would do projects and play games. The table was also used as a work area to clean chickens (farm kids knew what hearts, gizzards, and livers looked like) and can food. Sewing projects started on the table as kitchen knives were used as paper weights to hold the paper patterns on the fabric as it was cut out. Another time a basket of newborn kittens that the kids had found in the barn were dumped on the table. That did not please Mom as she did not like pets in the house.
The other two rooms on the main floor were the living room and the dining room. The living room had a piano that Mom had bought while teaching back in the early 1930’s. All four kids took piano lessons. Occasionally Mom would sit down and play some pieces that she had memorized. She had a good sense of rhythm and played well. The song she played the most was about drifting down the Ohio River. She had a lot of old piano music - both sheet music and Etude magazines. She also had her mother’s old sheet music from the late 1800’s for the “pianoforte”. A couple favorites were “Silvery Waves” and “Rustic Dance”. Her granddaughter Julie Rouse now plays both of those songs. Julie played “Rustic Dance” at her cousin Keri Brusven’s wedding in 2006.
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| Kathy & Mrs. Grottum- Piano lessons (1958) |
The Christmas tree each year would be put up in the living room. From our grove of Colorado blue spruce trees we would cut a fresh tree. Under the tree would be piled our Christmas gifts. We kids would separate them into individual piles so we could see how many gifts everyone was getting. Our favorite Christmas lights were the bubble lights which we would tap to get them bubbling. Usually the tree was part of a double tree and consequently there would be many more branches on one side. To keep the tree from falling over we would put some heavy book like an encyclopedia on the other side of the Christmas tree stand. One Christmas when our Hansen cousins were visiting, little cousin Bobby crawled under the tree to pull out the encyclopedia to read. And the tree came crashing down! No one was hurt, but it made for a lot of excitement.
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| Christmas (1952) |

The dining room had a heavy dark wooden ornately carved table, chairs, buffet, and dish cupboard with the tall glass front. In our house we also had a modern clothes dryer and a crib for kids to take their afternoon naps in this room. This was the room we walked through to reach the stairs to go upstairs.
On the second floor there were three bedrooms with a bathroom in the corner of the master bedroom. In the far corner was a very nice crib with sides that slid shut. It had the bunny rabbit quilt that Grandma Hansen had made. On the other side of Mom and Dad’s double bed was a large bassinet for the newest baby.
The south bedroom had nice flowered blue wallpaper that was eventually going to be the girls’ bedroom. This was the bedroom that the boys slept in. The other bedroom where the hired man slept was going to be the boys’ room and had “cowboy and Indian” wallpaper. But Kathy ended up in there after the hired man left. The switch of rooms was never made as Mom and Dad decided to build a new house instead in 1955.
The basement was an old time cellar with two different levels of concrete floor. In the stair well on the right side were nails and hooks to hang our “everyday” coats and snowpants (overalls). Our heavy winter coats had high sheepskin collars that kept one very warm and gave you a stiff neck. On the edge of the wooden steps near the bottom of the stairs was attached a milk separator to process the milk we got from our cow. And then Mom would pasteurize it in a special appliance that sat on the kitchen counter.
The basement was used a lot. There was a huge old furnace that burned heating oil. A small bathroom with very old fixtures was on the far wall. I think that was the bathroom that the hired man used. Another wall had a wooden bench which held the big cardboard box that we packed the fresh eggs into to sell to the egg man. Packing the eggs was a good job for the kids. Little kids held one egg in each hand, a little older and you held two eggs in each hand, and those with the big hands could pack six eggs at a time. We were always counting the eggs; both when gathering them in the chicken house and when packing them into the big egg carton. “Even number plus even number = even numbers; even number plus odd number = odd numbers.” Math skills were an important part of farming.
Across the back of the cellar were wooden shelves to hold all the canned goods. Then we got a “Deep Freeze” chest freezer that sat near the shelves. From then on Mom froze more foods than she canned. We always had ice cream in the freezer. We kids would help by running up and down the steps to bring up canned or frozen foods for meals. Brother Tom loved ice cream and would slip down to the freezer with a spoon and a dish to get some ice cream in the middle of the afternoon.
Before we bought a modern washing machine and dryer, Mom washed our clothes in an old Maytag wringer washer in the middle of the basement. There were two adjoining metal tubs to soak and wash the dirty clothes. It was quite a production to watch. The washed clothes were then carried upstairs in bushel baskets with special oilcloth liners. In good weather the clothes were hung outside on the clothes line with wood clothes pins to hold them on the line. The socks were hung on a nearby woven wire fence. The clothes would usually dry in an hour or two. If it started raining when they were out on the lines, we would have to hustle to get them down so they wouldn’t get wet again. After we got them into the house, the laundry would have to be prepared to be ironed. We would sprinkle them with water from an old pop bottle that had a special sprinkler attachment on top. Then they would be wrapped up tightly to wait to be ironed. The ironing had to be done in the next day so the laundry wouldn’t get mildewy. We didn’t get to wear a different outfit every day when there was that much work to launder clothes. (Mom said when she was little, kids only had two outfits; an everyday set and a dressy set.) In the winter time laundry would be dried on wooden racks in the house.
At the front of the house was a stoop which consisted of a little roof over a deep concrete step. It was the perfect spot to sit and watch a gentle rain. On the windows were glass storm windows in the winter and screen windows in the summer. These windows had to be changed in the spring and fall.
In 1955 Mom and Dad had a new house built beside our old house. It was a most fascinating year as we got to watch every step of the carpenters building it. After Christmas was the best part of the whole adventure when we moved into our new house. We even put planks between the two upstairs and carried stuff across. Then Dad did some wheeling and dealing. He traded our old house for a new green Ford pickup! The old house was jacked up and moved 12 miles away to Sherburn, Minnesota, where it is still a home 55 years later.
-Kathy
So what must you first know about these two people - Esther and Tom - that we were blessed to have as parents? They began their married life against the backdrop of the Great Depression, the biggest downturn in history, and with World War II, the Great War, raging overseas. They tragically lost their first child. But they saw quick and important changes - electricity, mechanical farming, and a family of four children by the end of the 40’s.
So what must you first know about these two people - Esther and Tom - that we were blessed to have as parents? They began their married life against the backdrop of the Great Depression, the biggest downturn in history, and with World War II, the Great War, raging overseas. They tragically lost their first child. But they saw quick and important changes - electricity, mechanical farming, and a family of four children by the end of the 40’s.
