As I’ve been working with MBOB material over the months, I’ve been trying to learn how to do digital management of Dad’s slides and am slowly getting there.

Today’s MBOB is my first venture into “here are some my own fer real photos”–except this first barn!  This is not our barn.  That’ll come down the road somewhere.

All of the photos shared today were taken by my father in the 1950s with his 35mm slide camera, using Kodachrome film.  I am blown away by the stability of Kodachrome film and Kodachrome slides. These slides have just been in storage for fifty years. Two weeks ago I had them transferred to a CD so I could work with them.

It was quite a process back in the day.  Of all the hundreds of slides he took in the just-over-ten-years between his acquisition of the camera and his death in 1962, I doubt there were more than three or four that turned out to be wasted shots.  It was too expensive and too time-consuming to do wasted shots, so he just did the very best he could with regard to composition and getting all the settings right so each picture would be worth something in terms of a record of events. (more…)

This is not a warm fuzzy of an MBOB although it contains lots of good memories.

Disinterest in doing things well or, worse, living in a world where no one expects anything to be done well is where we are these days, to some extent.  Because I’ve had a couple of jolting interactions with employees in stores this week the business of practicing in order to do things better has been on my mind–and as I began remembering all of the things we practiced…….an MBOB emerged.

Practice does not make perfect but it does prepare one to be able to do things well and that was the goal as Mailboxes came and went and Old Barns played their part.

No one expected to be able to do everything well right off the bat but understood that the goal and the process were two different things and that was ok.  So they began–to practice.

Piano lessons were practiced twenty minutes a day at the very least.  There’s nothing private about either practicing or playing the piano. Every missed note, every hesitant bit of timing, every flawed rhythm pattern is apparent to everyone in the house which actually is ok since the purpose for practicing was not to impress, but to get better. (more…)

Today’s MBOB is a repeat: one of my personal favorites.

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Gifts for our mothers on Mother’s Day–a rite of spring in the classrooms of the 1950s.

I hated it because I wasn’t good with dainty things and had no patience for tiny handwork.  The worst of all was in third grade when each girl in the class was given a square piece of linen to be handstitched around the edge with tiny stitches to create “a lovely handkerchief.”

The second worst was the year we were driven through the process of creating hand-twisted paper flowers: white lilies with green sprout-leaves along the side.  Mine were all grubby because we often worked on them right after recess.   Farm girls made use of recess; we did not stand around displaying new socks or shoes or dresses, so recess remainders were transferred from my hands to the paper flowers as I worked hard on them, and when I gave them to Mom the Friday before Mother’s Day, the corners of her mouth twitched a bit.

I knew she had seen right away how smudged they were, but she suppressed the urge to laugh and just said quietly, “How about if we put them in the china closet?”  They sure looked nice laying there…safely behind the pretty glass where folks who might come for coffee could see but not touch. (more…)

Mailboxes along the roads and old barns set back in fields overgrown with weeds often served as landmarks in rural Montana.  These landmarks told us where we were and how far we had to go.

Sometimes they signaled “home”  and the end of the road.  At other times,  barely visible through swirling snow, they told us we had miles to go.

The things I share here each Sunday simply reference one of the mailboxes of my memory, one of the old barns along a distant road.  Today’s MBOB is a continuation of someone else’s Mailboxes and Old Barns–my parents.   Last month I shared Dad’s  January, 1926 courtship letters.   These are the February letters, written 87 years ago when he was 27 years old.  Their wedding was on April 10 so at the end of March one more round of letters, the last,  will be published.

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My grandfather immigrated from Frederikshavn, Denmark and arrived in New York Harbor on the Amerika on June 12, 1893–73 years to the day before the birth of our eldest son.  The ship records indicate that he was born “about 1867”  although family documents record his birth as December 15, 1869.

After the sailing ship deposited him and his wife in New York and they caught their breath, they got on a train and headed west to Nebraska where he worked as a farm hand for two years, putting cash together to be able to rent land.  Then they rented Nebraska farmland for ten years before heading north to Montana by train, my Dad and his brothers riding in the passenger car with Grandma while Grandpa rode in the immigrant car with the livestock and the farm machinery–now prepared to buy their own land. (more…)

Today’s MBOB is a monograph written by my late brother whose Naval career spanned from the Korean War into the 80s.

He relates memories of the water issues from dry prairie country which were triggered by a conversation he had with a fellow crew member from an aircraft squadron based in Jacksonville, FL in 1965.  As is usually the case when I’m preparing MBOBs, initials only are used to reference those he mentions by name.

On April 20, 1965, while at 30,000′ traveling at 450 kts (520 MPH or 8.5 miles a minute), I had just turned the cameras off as we finished the last flight line in mapping the flooding Red and Pembina Rivers in North Dakota for the U. S. Geodetic Survey.  As navigator, I gave the pilot the heading to take us to St. Paul International where we would spend the night. (more…)

Life back in the day was prioritized and practical.

It was prioritized in that important things were intentionally planned and taken care of.  It was practical in that everything, important or unimportant, was simply handled the best possible way every day, whether unexpected or planned.

In completing one of those personal heritage blank books that is titled along the lines of  Mom, Tell Me About Your Life Growing Up I came across a page that requested that I list home remedies or commonly accepted first aid and health-related truisms. The list:

• If you fall down, get up.
• If you get cut, get stitched if it’s gaping wide open about a half inch.
• If you are bleeding, stop it.
• If a tree falls on you, get x-ray’d.
• If a bee stings you, kill it.
• Don’t walk further than you can walk back.
• When climbing ladders, keep one foot on the ground.
• Don’t climb on the roof if you didn’t have lunch and breakfast.
• Drowning is very bad.  Don’t.
• Don’t play with matches.
• Sewing needles work for getting slivers out.
• The best treatment for a bad headache is ice. (more…)

The church was four miles from our farm and sat inside a chain link fence that surrounded about five acres of land that had been set aside in the early 1900s for the purpose.

About half of the acreage was occupied by the church building which was surrounded by a treeless and huge open yard on three sides.  The cemetery filled the other half, with the earliest dates of death around 1910, after the area was settled by immigrant Danes looking for some place to farm.  They had had to settle for eastern Montana, since most of North Dakota and Minnesota was already filled with Swedes, Norwegians and Germans who had arrived around the mid-19th century.

We would arrive at church about 15 minutes before the service was to begin and found ourselves in the same places Sunday after Sunday. The women would have taken their places with their children in the pews prior to the ringing of the bell while the men stood in a long line outside~~some just visiting quietly, some having a cigarette before going inside. (more…)

Today’s MBOB is a few word pictures taken from the records our father kept for January, 1941.  He kept this type of detailed record through every year he farmed.  I have the originals of these books beginning in 1923.  They are very precious to me, both for their historical value and the detailed portrayal of my Dad’s character, willingness to work and his habit of accountability. (more…)

Today’s MBOB is the transcription of the letters my Dad wrote to Mom during January of 1926, three months before their wedding.

These four were written in English, and there is a fifth  January letter, written in Danish,  which has not been translated.

He was already settled into farming on the old homestead one mile north of the eventual site of our family home, and she was working as a mother’s helper in a town about 45 miles away, quite a distance to drive in the 1924 Model T.

Neither of them attended school beyond the 8th grade one-room school houses that dotted the prairie.  Both of them spoke and wrote Danish and English.

Their wedding photo is included below.

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