The year was 1956. It was just past halfway through June. Mom was nine months pregnant with Mom and Dad’s firstborn (me) coming soon. Mom and Dad were a young married couple living in Blackduck, MN. Dad worked at the Blackduck American – a weekly newspaper. Mom worked at the bakery. Together they might have made about 50 cents per hour. Financially things were tough. Then I came along and there was another mouth to feed. Dad did what he could by hunting and fishing – sometimes outside the season, but he didn’t have much choice, he needed to put meat in the freezer since store-bought meats were too expensive for the family budget.
I don’t recall the first few years. My first memories are from when I was about four years old. I remember the first house I was raised in, it had a yard big enough to convert a lot of it into a garden – that too helped stretch the family budget with homegrown and canned vegetables. Mom made her own laundry detergent and tried to bake as much as she could to save money.
A little over a year later a second child was born. This time a girl. A little more than a year after that my brother was born. I was too young for those two arrivals to mean much to me, but I’m sure the family budget got that much harder to handle.
Before the arrival of child number four, the family moved to Sauk Rapids. For a reason I’m not sure of, Dad found a new job that forced the family to head south. Mom found work too once the family settled into their new home, which I believe was rented. There was another move to what we kids called the “hill house” (because it was located on a good-sized hill in Sauk Rapids) and I was old enough to start school. By this time my memory of things was growing and growing. I still remember some of the neighbor kids we met and played with outside – that’s right, we didn’t have toys that had batteries. There were no “screens” to keep us occupied, we had to go outside to find things to do. Another move was made to St. Cloud and by then the family had grown to six kids.
When I was about nine years old the family moved to Cold Spring and the seventh child was born. How Mom and Dad were able to make a budget work with four boys and three girls is beyond me, but they did.
Not long after our move to Cold Spring Dad and Mom bought this newspaper – with the help of a loan from one of my aunts. Other than mowing lawns, working at this newspaper was my first job working for a business. I was about 12 years old and reported to work every day after school except when I had extra-curricular activities to attend.
As time went on I started creating more of my own adult memories. Some of them are important and others are rather trivial and as I sit here typing this column I think about the things I remember from my childhood and adult life and wonder why some things stand out more than others.
I would imagine memories of things that happen in one’s life are much the same for all of us and each of us has different reasons why some are more important and have an impact on our life, but in reality, memories are what make us who we are. Good and bad memories have different influences on our lives, but I’m fairly sure we all have them.
As I turn 68 in less than a month I realize I am running short on memory-making time, but I still have some time left and I’ll try to do the best I can with it.
Now I just have to figure out how I’ll remember the memories I create because what my folks told me many years ago about fading memories is turning out to be another thing they were right about. Have A Good Week!
