OUR GRANDPARENTS

We had two sets of grandparents who were similar yet different.

The Horn grandparents known as little grandma and lttle grandpa.  Were farmers they started out in Missouri.  Nora Beatrice Lattimer was working in a store when she met Riley Horn.  She was eight years older than he.  They married and had their first child, Loren, who died at about age two.  I do not know what caused his death.  I have seen pictures of his headstone in a graveyard in Missouri.

They moved to Colorado, neat Ford Morgan and may have homesteaded a farm.  It was a full quarter of a section which 640 acres.  Don't be too impressed, it was dry land farming, no irrigation done.  Seed was sown and prayers were said for a good crop.

They weathered the depression as well as the dust bowl.  Mom told me she remembers seeing dust storms lasting for days and being told as a joke that the Brown's farm had moved across the road.

They had friends in Colorado who moved to Idaho and sent word raving about the wonderful farm land.  About 1938 there was a very good crop.  The boys,  Ralph and Clayton, took the livestock via train to Emmett, Idaho.  Their parents and my mother, Virginia, rode with them in their brand new car.  Aunt Wilma was working for a Jewish family and married Lester Kast not too long afterward.

The Horn family rented several different farms and ultimately purchased about 40 acres down the south slope.

The Berglund grandparents, Charlie and Nellie came to Idaho in the 30's I believe.  But first, Great Grandfather Piers Anderson, left Sweden with Charlie, Albert and Dorothy in 1900.  They departed from Charlottenburg and arrived at Ellis Island.  At some point they were given the last name of Berglund.  

They eventually wound up in Minnesota and settled and farmed there.  When it looked like his children had settled well in the new land, Piers decided to return to Sweden.  He married and started a new family. We met our cousin, Ander Pierson ( I probably screwed up his name) at a family reunion a couple of years ago.  We had a very good time.  Dorothy stayed in Minnesota.  Uncle Al had wanderlust and would touch base ever once in a while.  Charlie met Nellie Rose and they married.

I think all of the children were born in Minnesota.  Vivian is the only eldest sister, Carl, Ralph and Paul. 

At some point Charlie worked for Morrison Knudsen.  He was a large equipment operator, cranes etc.  During the depression he was on standby to work for MK and although no one has ever verified it, I am pretty sure he was generous to his neighbors. 

He left the Lutheran Church once they had left Sweden.  His motto was always "Live a good life."  

Once they had moved to Emmett and purchased a farm near Letha they settled into the farming life.  Charlie helped dig many of the canals when the Black Canyon dam was built. The canals still do a very good job.  They are drained of water in the winter and filled in spring. 70 years ago there were lots of orchards; apple, cherry, prune, nectarine and peach.  To this day I drool at the thought of a ripe Improved Elberta peach.  Wonderful! 

I forgot one particular popular crop, watermelons.  It was very common for people to steal watermelons, throw them into a canal and race downstream to retrieve them.  The Frisbee's grew particularly delicious water melons.  Yum!

To my knowledge neither sets of grandparents ever met.  Well, first being farmers, the demands of milking cows twice a day and various other crops demanded a great deal of time.

Grandpa Berglund kept a small dairy herd.   He would never let us noisy kids go to the barn when he went milking.  I sneaked up to the barn door once and saw that he just put grain in the stall for the cows and did not use hobbles on their hind feet.

There was a very deep canal that ran right by the Berglund farm, it was from this ditch that many of the cousins captured very large bull frogs.  I was never a member of the hunting party but the equipment involved a willow stick pared to a sharp point.  Strangely enough, we never had fried frog legs. Crawdads also grew in the various sloughs near Letha but that dish was not part of  that culture.  ..sigh..

Grandma Berglund did not garden much but she did keep berries.  She loved raspberries.  I remember that after she died the women folk cleaned out dozens of jars of ragged gray looking raspberries.  I remember her serving them to us in little glass dishes.

Nellie was also very social.  She and Charlie liked to play card games with neighbors.  I do not know if it was pinochle or bridge. But she always brought home little crocheted and starched nut baskets.  I adored those baskets.  Mom merrily tossed those as well at the clean out.  I would have cherished those baskets. 

Nellie was Seventh Day Adventist and drove the old Blue Studebaker like a bat out of hell.  

Grandma Horn did not drive.  She gardened extensively and wore a broad brimmed sunhat.  She grew all sorts of vegetables. When they grew corn in the fields we had gloriously boiled sweet corn with butter and sprinkle of salt.  Nothing better!

As for fruit, she did not grow any but she did have a goose berry bush that grew on top of the cellar.  They, being from Missouri, built a cellar in case of tornado but none ever happened.  However it made an excellent place for the water heater, of all things and her canned garden produce.  I would beg her to make me a gooseberry pie and she would shudder the whole time she made the pie.  I loved them.  I was full grown before I realized there was such a thing as RIPE gooseberries!

When Paul and his wife Ollie milked cows, Grandma Horn skimmed the cream off until it was blue with her crooked fingers (Courtesy of a childhood bout of Rheumatic fever).  

The milk was separated into 25 gallon cans and trundled to the country road where there was a cement container with water deep enough to come to the neck of the cans.  The cart held 6 to 8 of the cans.  The milk truck came about daily to pick  up the cans.  The water was from the irrigation ditch and refilled continuously.

We kids were not allowed to swim in the cement pond.  Dang it!

The Horns kept chickens.  Grandma Horn fed them and I loved to help sprinkle feed on the ground.  She would not let me play in the hen house because of mites and the inherent disturbance of her laying hens.

She carefully washed and candled the eggs into a large crate.  Every two weeks or so, Riley drove them to town to Albertson's where she sold her eggs. That was her money.  If I was a very good girl, I would get to go with them and they would purchase something called Horehound candy which tasted medicinal and something called chicken bones which was a version of butter fingers.

Gandma Horn attended church every Sunday.  I would sometimes go with her.  It was the First Christian Church. 

Grandma Horn was slender and always wore dresses.  I think she wore her hair long then but it was bundled into something to keep it out of her face.  She gave me her five gallon butter churn.  She said that when she made butter it felt like she was marking time.  

Grandma Berglund, was large busted.  She could have served dinner plates on them.  She wore a very complicated girdle thing made of whale bone and lots of tabs, snaps and zippers.  It was fascinating.  

She always wore dresses.  I remember that her dentures were loose and they clacked when she talked or chewed.  Very bustling woman, hardly sat down a meal without jumping up to get this or that and stopping to briefly sample out of anyone's plate.  This particular act drove my mother nuts and we didn't eat at the Berglund's very often.  Grandma Berglund had a pressure cooker, she pressure cooked all meats.  It was was good, but mom never adopted that particular method of cooking,  Might have helped with the liver and onions.

I remember asking Dad what he at for breakfast as a kid, assuming he got a bowl of oatmeal mush like I did.  He said that they were so poor that they had to have beef steak for breakfast.

Grandpa Berglund, was very tall and had wavy dark hair.  He wore overalls that had a pocket inside of which was his pocket watch.  we would beg to sit on his lap to listen to the pocket watch.  He smelled of snoose which is a comforting smell for me.

Grandpa Berglund had a hay stack which he had used a hay rick to stack the hay.  We were not allowed to climb on the hay stack.

Grandpa Horn was short, bald, nearly deaf and bad tempered.  Grandma Horn kept us grand kids out of his way But they had hay bales.  Those we could climb all over, it was so much fun.

Grandma Horn had a feather bed mattress.  I got to help her make it by staying out of the way.  The few times I got to sleep with her on that old feather bed, I discovered that it lost the loft almost immediately.  But it was still fun.

About the only socializing the Horns did was with family.  The dinners for haying or harvest were fabulous.  Sometimes an old family friend would bring a movie projector and play films of a white face cattle drive and other interesting things.

That is all I recall at the moment.  Any siblings can chip in with what they remember.