For Ethel Erickson Radmer, a child of the 1930s, life in Wisconsin was an adventure filled with imagination, fun, and curiosity. Hers was a simple life, without computers and cell phones. It was a time when people in a small town dropped in on each other to visit and paid their bills in person. It was a time when folks honored courtesy and neighborly affection. If you knew someone was in the hospital, you brought them flowers-from your own garden. Ethel grew up in a railroad town that bustled with supplies and troops for World War II. To a small girl from a small town, a Green Bay & Western Railroad passenger car represented nothing short of freedom. But Ethel found joy in the simple things-a playground for roller skating . . . a golf course made just for picnics and sled-ding (and swinging clubs) . . . nearby farmland and barns to explore . . . and a meandering river to quiet her heart. It was a simpler time, but Ethel Erickson Radmer was no simple girl. "Walking the Rails is everything a good memoir should be-generously detailed, disarmingly frank, and emotionally moving. With wit, irony, and generosity of spirit, Ethel Radmer has woven a heartwarming and lush tapestry of growing up in a loving American family during the difficult days of the Great Depression, World War II, and its aftermath". -Dave Wood, past vice-president of the National Book Critics Circle, former book review editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and memoirist
Walking the Rails
My Childhood in WhitehallBy Ethel Erickson RadmeriUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 Ethel Erickson Radmer
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4759-1008-7Contents
Preface.........................................ixA Girl Was Born.................................1Walking, Climbing, Falling......................11Arvid and Sarah's Courtship.....................24O! Segari!......................................35The Depot.......................................58Early School Days...............................71Dr Tyvand......................................90Moving Up.......................................97The Coulees.....................................108High School.....................................113
Chapter One
A Girl Was Born
"In the fall of 1935, when `the frost was on the pumpkin, and the fodder was in the shock;' when the green leaves were changing their colors to the many golden hues of Autumn; when Mother Nature was singing her lullaby to her brood in preparation for a long winter's slumber of hibernation in accordance with her Cyclic Laws, an event of great importance took place on November 6th 1935 at 12:30 High Noon; an individual in a small physical body was born into our world of storm and strife, albeit a world of beauty and order and system; born as a female in our house and we called her Ethel Mae. What a name! What a girl!" This was my dad's welcome for my arrival, written in his autobiography.
I came on a Wednesday and weighed in at 9½ pounds on the "fisherman's scale" that the doctor brought to my parents' home. I was laid onto a blanket with rings on a hook and a weight measure needle at the top. Dr. J. C. Tyvand, the physician who held me as I came out of my mother Sarah's womb, was assisted by nurse Mrs. J. C. Tyvand. It was a normal, natural birth, with my mother lying in her own bed, gently pushing me out the birth canal to introduce me to life outside my nourishing cocoon of nine months. I came to rest in my mother's arms against her breast.
Ah! What peace and love and adventure I felt from birth on through all my years growing up in Whitehall, Wisconsin. What good fortune I had to have caring, nurturing parents in a very manageable town of 1,035 to know and explore with ease and safety, filled with people who knew and cared about me and whom I in turn could trust and churches to inspire some morals and ethics.
In the center of my town of birth and in the center of our lives was the Green Bay and Western Railway Depot. The continuous ribbon of two parallel railroad tracks ran straight through the middle of the town and right through the middle of the state of Wisconsin, cutting it in half horizontally as it connected town to town east and west. We rode the trains across the state and walked those rails into the countryside surrounding my hometown, where we could roam freely and with abandon.
My mother was forty-six years old when she had me, and I was fortunate to not be a statistic for higher birth defects in children born to mothers over forty, higher still among first-time mothers. But I was not her first! My mother had at least ten pregnancies in her fertile life—seven survived through adulthood, two died young, and one miscarried. I was the last that I knew of of her conceptions. What a relief that must have been! And she seemed to show it with a grateful ease about life. She could sit back in her Mission Style, oak-stained wood and brown leather rocking chair and relax with me, enjoying the fruits of her labors at birth and in rearing her brood. I was a good girl all the way, as it turned out, and on occasion, she called me that.
The Wisconsin Department of Health's Bureau of Vital Statistics wanted to know for the birth record if I was legitimate. Yes. The mother's full maiden name was Sarah Larson. (Her parents' generation of regular folks did not give their children middle names.) And the father was A. B Erickson. (He gave himself a middle initial "B" without a period because he liked the acronym ABE, signifying honest Abe, or Abraham Lincoln.) For color or race, father and mother were both "W" for White. Both were forty-six at their last birthday. The father's trade, profession, or particular kind of work done (as spinner, sawyer, bookkeeper, etc.) was railroad depot agent. My mother's trade, profession, or particular kind of work done (as housekeeper, typist, nurse, clerk, etc.) was housewife. The industry or business in which work was done (as silk mill, sawmill, bank, lawyer's office or own home) was not answered. And for the record, a sawyer worked in a sawmill and a spinner worked in a silk mill (or a midwestern or northeastern textile mill for flax, linen and wool—cotton mills were in the South) spinning silk thread from a silkworm cocoon. The eggs and cocoons came from China and Japan (until World War II started) and were transported by my dad's lifetime love, the rails, across the United States. Spinners found the beginning of the silk thread in the cocoon and unraveled it as it was wound onto a spindle. The thread was then made into a warp and woven into cloth to make silk stockings, hankies, caps, panties, dresses, scarves, ribbons, and embroidery thread, all of which our family used, plus some of my baby clothes. I owe thanks to the seven hundred perfect silkworm cocoons that it takes to make one silk baby dress. Silk parachutes we did not use, nor the silk kites the frugal Ben Franklin splurged on for his famous electricity experiments. We were consumers of silk, but we were not spinners, and there weren't any spinners nearby. The closest textile mills were in Milwaukee, where flax and linen were also spun. Those textile mills of yesteryear are now museums and funky locales for businesses. Sawyers, however, were close by in neighboring Jackson County, which was full of Jackson Pine. Sawyers were vital in the lumber mill business for which Wisconsin was famous. My grandpa, Nels Erickson, who was my father's father and who died five years before I was born, was a sawyer and a lumberjack and helped keep those mills filled with huge trunks of pine and fir. The sawyers sawed them into planks for the burgeoning construction demands in a growing state and nation in the early-to-mid-1900s.
Was 1 percent silver nitrate used to prevent infant blindness? Was child deformed or physically defective? Nature of the defect? The questions were left unanswered. And I appeared normal in every way.
The top of the Certificate of Birth Registration said, "The world of tomorrow is in the hands of the children of today." Yes, the future's changes were in my hands and the hands of others to come. For one, all those professions and trades listed on my birth certificate and typical at the time to one gender or the other would be infiltrated with both sexes. Some jobs faded with diminished need or were melded with other skills to make a new trade or profession.
But medical doctors were always in demand. People got sick, and babies were being born, including me. Dr. Tyvand's bill for $22 arrived in the mail on November 30, and my father paid it promptly in cash that Saturday in the doctor's office. Our family kept no debts. My parents paid cash for our new house in 1930 and for our new Ford four-door sedan from Auto Sales in Whitehall in 1934 (a year before I was born), when few people were buying new cars, to replace Dad's used Chevrolet of 1929. Before the Chevrolet, he drove a "Star" touring car that he bought from a dealer for $300 in April 1923. We paid cash for our health care or anything else with a dollar sign on it. I was...
