Transcript: Martha Kufner Schmaltz Oral History Interview

Conducted by Douglas Bekke, September 20, 2007 in Cottage Grove, Minnesota

DB = Douglas Bekke
MS = Martha Schmaltz

DB: This is a Minnesota Historical Society Greatest Generation Project interview with Martha Kufner Schmaltz on September 20, 2007 in her home in Cottage Grove, Minnesota. Mrs. Schmaltz, please say and spell your name?

MS: Martha Kufner Schmaltz.

DB: And your birth date?

MS: July 13, 1919.

DB: And your birthplace?

MS: St. Paul, Minnesota.

DB: And your ethnic background? You said your parents were from Austria?

MS: Yes. Both my parents were from Austria that I remember.

DB: And they were German Austrians?

MS: Yes. They were German Austrians. They came over on the boat when they were both eighteen years old.

DB: And you said you don’t know anything about great-grandparents?

MS: Nothing. Nothing at all.

DB: What about your grandparents?

MS: Nothing.

DB: And do you know where in Austria your parents came from? What city or town?

MS: I do know that on the birth certificates that I have for myself, it just says Austria.

DB: What do you know about your father? He was eighteen years old when he came over, you said.

MS: Yes. He came over about 1905, and I believe that he went to Dunwoody Baking School.

DB: Do you know anything about his voyage? Did he come through Ellis Island?

MS: They did come through Ellis Island. That I do know. But otherwise, I don’t know if they met on the boat. I believe in those days that a lot of the Germans had relatives over here that they came over and lived with. That’s how I believe my mother and dad met.

DB: So they met in this country.

MS: They met in this country. Yes.

DB: Was your father a World War I veteran?

MS: No. He was not.

DB: But you said he came over here and he went to Dunwoody?

MS: I believe he did. Yes. Dunwoody Baking School. He came over with three of his brothers, and they settled in Chicago.

DB: And then your father came here by himself, or did all the brothers come together?

MS: They came together. They came together, but the three other brothers settled in Chicago, and my dad stayed here in Minnesota.

DB: And at some point he met your mother.

MS: Yes.

DB: And when was that? When were they married?

MS: They were married in 1911.

DB: They never talked about their courtship or anything?

MS: Never. Never anything like that!

DB: No stories about the German community that they were living with?

MS: Nothing. No. I can’t tell you a thing about them.

DB: What about your mother? Do you know where she came from in Austria?

MS: No, I don’t.

DB: Do you know when she came over?

MS: She came over the same time as my dad did.

DB: The same time. But they didn’t know each other?

MS: No. As far as I know they did not know each other.

DB: And did your mother go to school here?

MS: No. My mother was eighteen years old, and I think she did housework up on Summit Avenue.

DB: You were born in 1919. That was the year of the big influenza epidemic. Did that affect your family?

MS: No. Not that I know of.

DB: No stories about the fact that they were Austrians during World War I living in this country, and we were at war with Austria and Germany and . . .

MS: No. They never talked about that.

DB: Do you have siblings?

MS: Yes. I had a brother. He was eight years older than I. And I had a sister, Anne, who was four years older than I. Then I had a sister, Helen, who was fifteen months younger than I. There was also a sister who would be five years older than I am, but she died before I was born.

DB: Where did you grow up?

MS: I grew up in the area of Frogtown in St. Paul, the vicinity of Victoria and Minnehaha streets. On West Minnehaha Avenue. That area was called Frogtown.

DB: Were you born in that house?

MS: No. I was born at 529 Blair Street, which is in that neighborhood.

DB: Did your parents own that house or did they rent it?

MS: They rented that. Then they bought the house that I was raised in.

DB: Do you know, was there a midwife attending, or a doctor?

MS: When I got my birth certificate at the time I got married, I found out I was delivered by a midwife.

DB: What type of a home was it that you grew up in? What do you remember about the way it looked? Was it a wood frame house? Brick house?

MS: It was a wood frame house. We had renters upstairs and we lived downstairs.

DB: Was it a duplex?

MS: It was a duplex. Yes.

DB: Intended to be a duplex, not converted?

MS: No. It was a duplex. It had everything upstairs. It was rentable.

DB: Your parents owned the house then?

MS: Yes.

DB: What kind of a heating system did you have in it?

MS: We had coal at first. I can remember when gas came out, and my mother was one of the first fifty that was selected to have gas. She had it put in right away. But we did heat with coal.

DB: Who shoveled the coal?

MS: We all had to go downstairs because we had no bathroom upstairs. We had a bathroom downstairs. Every time that someone had to go to the bathroom my mother would always say, “Shake the furnace.”

DB: You mean the bathroom was in the basement?

MS: We just had a toilet down in the basement. Yes.

DB: But you had a washroom upstairs?

MS: No. We had no washroom upstairs. We took baths in tubs that she washed the clothes in. I can still see my sister and I sitting in the tub.

DB: In the kitchen?

MS: In the basement.

DB: And how did you heat the water?

MS: We had a little stove down there. A little gas burner.

DB: And bath night was Saturday night?

MS: Saturday night. Only Saturday night. Yes. We had to wash in the morning.

DB: When it was bath night . . . you had four siblings, I think you said?

MS: Yes. I had four. We each took turns. I can remember my younger sister and I in the tub together.

DB: And everybody used the same water?

MS: Yes. We used the same water.

DB: And do you think that before you got there was an outside toilet then . . .?

MS: No, no. We never had an outside toilet.

DB: The inside toilet was always there while you were there.

MS: Yes. It was in the basement. And they had a toilet upstairs, and a bathtub.

DB: You mean in the upstairs of the duplex?

MS: Yes. In the upstairs of the duplex.

DB: They had a little bit more modernization.

MS: Yes. They sure did.

DB: Was that something you were envious of a little bit? Did you ever ask your parents, “Why we can’t live upstairs?”

MS: No.

DB: Never thought about it?

MS: I don’t think I had the guts to say that. You know.

DB: Do you remember the coal being delivered to the basement?

MS: Yes, I do. I do remember that.

DB: And what was the process of that? Do you remember the coal truck?

MS: The coal truck came out and parked in front, and then there was a boy that carried it in big tin bushel baskets. He had a little chute that he put down our basement window, and then he would just dump the coal into that chute and it would come into the coal bin downstairs.

DB: You had a regular bin in the basement?

MS: Yes. We had a coal bin downstairs in the basement.

DB: What about up in the house in the kitchen? If you wanted hot water, where did that come from? Did you have a hot water heater?

MS: No. We had to heat it on the stove. Then when we got gas, I believe there was something on the furnace that was used to get hot water. But I can remember my mother heating the water in a big boiler when she washed the clothes.

DB: And was there a specific day of the week that was laundry day?

MS: Monday. Monday, rain, shine or not. It was Monday.

DB: And what was the process of washing the clothes? Did you as a child get involved in helping her?

MS: Oh, yes. We had the two tubs, and then we had a wooden wringer in between. You washed in one thing and then you put it through the wringer and then it went into the rinse tub. And then it came back, and you hung it up.

DB: How long would it take to do the week’s laundry? Was it an all-day process?

MS: No. Just the morning.

DB: And the clothes were hung on a line?

MS: They were hung on a line, and I can remember in the wintertime they would freeze out there and my mother would bring them in frozen and hang them around the house.

DB: What about ironing?

MS: We had an iron.

DB: Did you have an electric iron, or did you have an iron that had to be heated on . . .?

MS: In the beginning we had an iron that had to be heated, but then we got an electric iron.

DB: And that was a big step up?

MS: It was a big step up. And we had an icebox, too. It was called a Coolerator.

DB: Let’s come back to that once we get into the kitchen. I want to stay with the ironing here. Now you had everything . . . there was no wash and wear.

MS: Oh, no, no.

DB: No permanent press.

MS: Oh, no.

DB: So everything had to be ironed.

MS: It had to be ironed. After it came off the line we had to sprinkle it with our hands, and then we had to roll it up like a towel.

DB: Dampen it a little.

MS: Dampen it a little, and then when it was ready to iron it was a little damp. It was done the old fashioned way.

DB: So shirts, everything had to be ironed.

MS: Shirts. Yes.

DB: Linens. Did you have linens? Did they get ironed too?

MS: No. They didn’t get ironed. They just got folded up and put back on the bed.

DB: Tablecloths and those things, they’d get ironed though?

MS: Yes. But my mother had to starch the men’s cuffs and collars. She had to make starch and dip them in starch so they’d be stiff.

DB: Separate cuffs and collars though, button on?

MS: No, no. They were attached. She would just take the cuffs like this and take the collars like this and dip them into the starch. And she made her own starch. It didn’t come in a box.

DB: What did she make it out of?

MS: She made it out of regular cooking starch and water.

DB: What about her soap? What did she use for soap in the laundry? Did she make her own soap?

MS: Most of the time we made our own soap. I can remember she used lye to make the soap. But I’ll go into that a little later when I tell you how we got the soap.

DB: Let’s remember to come back to it then. Let’s go up to your kitchen. You didn’t have hot water. You had to heat it on the stove. What kind of a stove was there?

MS: We had a little four-burner gas stove.

DB: Was there a gas tank? Were you on a city gas line?

MS: We were on a city gas line.

DB: What about lighting in the house?

MS: We had lights. Yes. We had lights all the time.

DB: So you had electricity.

MS: Yes. We never had lanterns.

DB: Did you do much of the cooking? Did you work on the cooking?

MS: No. I didn’t do any cooking, but I was taught how to cook.

DB: Okay. So your mother worked with you.

MS: Yes. She showed us how when she was cooking. But otherwise my mother did all the cooking. And my dad was a baker, so we didn’t have to worry about bread or rolls or pies.

DB: Did he bake at home?

MS: No. He brought them from the bakery where he worked.

DB: How far from home was the bakery?

MS: He worked for Schoch’s [Andrew Schoch’s Grocery]. I don’t know if you remember Schoch’s. They were down on about 10th or 11th Street in St. Paul, and then he worked for Freidman’s. They were big stores. They were the two big stores that furnished all the welfare.

DB: So they were like supermarkets, or they were wholesale?

MS: They were supermarkets, and they were assigned to bring the people their food for the month when you were on welfare.

DB: This was during the Depression?

MS: Yes.

DB: We’ll get back and talk about that again. Working in the kitchen, you think about a modern kitchen and so many people can have the opportunity to have a separate machine for boiling the eggs and a separate machine for doing this and a separate machine for that. What kind of appliances did your mother have in the kitchen to help her with the cooking?

MS: Just regular pots and pans. She would cook the eggs in a regular pan. And potatoes, too. They were just regular pans. I don’t even think they matched. Not like nowadays.

DB: And what kind of meals did your mother prepare most of the time? What do you remember?

MS: Very good meals. When we went to school we always had oatmeal or Cream of Wheat or toast, and then we had to have a lunch, because I went to Catholic school and we walked to school.

DB: You carried your lunch to school.

MS: We carried our lunch to school, and the only time that we couldn’t come home for lunch was when it was twenty below in the winter. Then we would have our lunch. But otherwise we walked eleven blocks home at lunchtime, and then walked back. But the only time that we got to carry our lunch was when it was twenty below. There was no milk in the school. You just ate what you had in your bag. But we always had good meals. My mother was a good cook.

DB: Looking back on it, would you say that she made traditional Austrian meals? Did you have schnitzel and . . .?

MS: She made strudel. She did make strudel. But we had potatoes and chicken and pot roast. And we had a lot of potato soup on Friday because we were Catholic, and there was no meat on Friday in those days.

DB: You didn’t have fish. You had potato soup.

MS: We had potato soup every Friday. We never had fish. We had chicken, but never fish unless my dad went fishing and caught some crappies or something.

DB: You said that your father would bring baked goods home from the bakery.

MS: Yes. He’d bring things home.

DB: Was he allowed to just do it on the side or . . .?

MS: No. He had to pay for it. Yes.

DB: He bought it then.

MS: Yes. But my mother never had to bake much at home. It is very seldom that I can remember my mother baking, because my dad was a baker. But he didn’t bake at home. He brought it home.

DB: Did your father have a car?

MS: We didn’t have a car until about 1935. We had a Model A, and it had what they called a carriage lugger on the side where the driver was, and that’s where we put our luggage. You had to get in from the passenger side to get to the driver’s side because that’s where the luggage went. It was like a touring car. It had Eisenglass windows.

DB: Was that a big thrill, getting a car?

MS: Oh, yes. Because we’d take that up to the lake and go fishing. We stayed at the lake.

DB: Before that you took the streetcar around town?

MS: All the time.

DB: How much was it to take the streetcar?

MS: Streetcars were six tokens for forty-five cents.

DB: Did that seem like a lot of money?

MS: It did. Yes.

DB: When your father went to work, was he able to walk to work or did he . . .?

MS: No. He had to take the streetcar until he got the car.

DB: What kind of hours did he work?

MS: He usually went to work about midnight, and then he came home about eight o’clock in the morning. Very seldom did we see our dad in the morning, because we were gone to school.

DB: Because he was sleeping.

MS: Yes. And then sometimes when we came in the afternoon he was sleeping. Because he had to sleep during the day.

DB: Sure. So you had to be quiet around the house.

MS: Yes.

DB: Did you have a radio in the house?

MS: We had a radio, and my dad was the boss of the radio. We had to listen to “Myrt and Marge” and “Amos and Andy” whether we liked it or not. That was the big entertainment.

DB: That was forced family time together.

MS: That was it. “Myrt and Marge” and “Amos and Andy.”

DB: What about the news? Did he listen to the news very much or was there much news programming?

MS: I don’t believe there was. I can’t remember news at that time.

DB: Do you remember a time before you had the radio?

MS: We had a Victrola sitting in the corner that was about five feet high, and it had a top on it, and you had wind it up and then put the needle on the record. That is how we played records.

DB: As a child you were allowed to do that?

MS: Yes. Oh, yes.

DB: One of the things I hear from people is that before they had a radio they did more self-entertaining, that they’d stand around a piano and sing or they’d do things . . .

MS: But, you see, my dad always worked nights. We never had my dad home at night because he was gone to work.

DB: So that wasn’t so much that was going on then.

MS: No. But we were real active. My younger sister, Helen, and I were active playing ball. We were like two little tomboys.

DB: So when the radio came in . . . now the first radio you had wasn’t one with the headphones?

MS: No.

DB: You had a big box radio.

MS: It was a box radio. Yes.

DB: Floor model or table model?

MS: A little table model. And then we also had a Victrola that didn’t have the regular records on. It had copper records with little holes in it, but it was a Victrola.

DB: What about clothes? When you think about kids today . . . I look in my daughter’s closet and you can barely walk into the closet there’s so many clothes.

MS: My mother made most of our clothes. She made them out of hand me downs from other people. But we went to Catholic school where we had uniforms, so the clothes problem wasn’t that big of a problem. But our Sunday clothes were ones which my mother always made from things she got from other people. I can remember my mother making a coat for my sister. She got the coat from somebody else and she turned it inside out and made my sister a coat.

DB: Turned the fabric so the fresh side was out?

MS: So the fresh side would be out. When we got on welfare we had to go to the welfare office and get our clothes. But we had uniforms when we went to St. Agnes School.

DB: And the uniforms had to be purchased?

MS: Yes.

DB: Do you remember if that was burdensome to your parents?

MS: My sister was four years older than I and I got her hand me downs. And then my younger sister got the new one.

DB: What did the uniforms look like?

MS: They were a blue jersey, and they had ivory cuffs and ivory collars that were detachable. You had to wash them and starch them until they were perfect. You couldn’t come with dirty cuffs or dirty collars. The uniforms were navy blue serge. Real dark navy blue serge.

DB: Now this was just a girls’ school? There were no boys?

MS: There were boys. They’d be sent in regular pants.

DB: They didn’t have to wear a special uniform at all?

MS: No. But the girls had uniforms.

DB: When you think about what you wore when you were a kid, did you think about it? What did you wear when you were out playing with your friends or something like that?

MS: We had overalls. We had high bib overalls.

DB: What about shoes?

MS: We had high tennis shoes that came up above the ankles.

DB: In the summer did you go barefoot a lot?

MS: We were barefoot all the time. All the time barefoot.

DB: But otherwise it was mostly bib overalls and tennis shoes.

MS: Yes.

DB: Now if you think about today, in the wintertime we have all these high-tech fabrics and they breathe and everything. What kind of a coat did you have in the winter?

MS: It was a good winter coat, and then my mother knitted us caps and she knitted mittens for us. She kept us good and warm, and we had good overshoes. We had the buckle overshoes with the four or five buckles on them.

DB: For entertainment did you ever get to go to movies?

MS: There was the Faust Theater, and that was up on Dale and University. It cost about a dime to get in. But about two blocks down on University was one called the Como Theater, and you could get in for a nickel. And sometimes we would stay for two movies. We had to walk to the movie house.

DB: How far was that?

MS: It was about twelve blocks.

DB: How old were you when your mother would let you go to the movies? Did you go with an older sibling?

MS: Usually it was my younger sister and me, because she was only fifteen months younger. We were very close. But my other sister, she was four years older and she was a little . . .

DB: She didn’t want to hang out with the little kids.

MS: She didn’t want to hang out with the little kids anymore. You know. She was eighteen and we were fourteen.

DB: So at what point would your mother let you go off to the movies by yourself?

MS: I’d say when we were twelve or thirteen years old.

DB: What kind of movies did you like? What was there? These were matinees that you went to most of the time?

MS: Yes. They were always black and white. We didn’t have color. Then they had a comedy hour. They had the “Our Gang” comedies.

DB: Do you remember the silent movies?

MS: Yes, I do. But I can’t remember the names though.

DB: Was there somebody playing the piano up in front?

MS: Yes. Then there was the writing on the board up in the front or the curtain.

DB: Was that an incentive to learn to read so you could go to the movies and read the captions? You just took it in stride, I suppose.

MS: Just took it in stride. We were very good in reading because my brother was eight years older than we were, and we had a lot of tutoring from my brother and sister. So when we went to school in the first grade we knew how to read and write.

DB: What was your favorite kind of a movie that you enjoyed seeing? Typically if you go to a matinee, what would there be there for you? What kind of movies were there for you to see?

MS: It was the “Our Gang” comedies. I remember Farina. He was one of the boys in the movies.

DB: Were there serials?

MS: Yes. We watched serials. Westerns with cowboys. Things like that.

DB: What about travel and vacations? You talked about after you got the car in 1935 you could go to the lake.

MS: Oh, yes. We’d go up to the lake and we’d take the tent, and then we had folding cots that we would put in the tent. I can remember going up to Coon Lake one time with another couple and their daughter. They had a cottage. Because we couldn’t afford a cottage, we were in the tent. And a big storm came up. It just blew our tent right over and then we got to go into a cabin. And from then on we always had a cabin; we never slept in the tent again.

DB: The cabin was rented?

MS: Yes. We rented the cabin on Coon Lake.

DB: Was that a big thrill for you to go on those vacations?

MS: Oh, yes.

DB: Getting out of town.

MS: It took us all day to get there in the Model A.

DB: And where is Coon Lake?

MS: Coon Lake is right up by Coon Rapids. But it took us all day to get there. [Chuckles]

DB: Did you often have flat tires?

MS: No, but we went slow.

DB: Other than that . . . you say that started about 1935 when you had the car . . .

MS: Yes. I think about 1929 we had a 1929 Ford, and then we got a 1935 Ford sedan. Then we got a 1938 Plymouth. I remember that. My sister Anne and my dad went up to Duluth to get that Plymouth and they paid $700 for it. It was brand new because it came over from Detroit.

DB: A monumental fortune.

MS: Yes, yes.

DB: I was thinking about vacations. You went to the lake. What other options might there have been? What was your horizon for taking trips or things that were possible for you?

MS: There wasn’t any other thing to do. We played softball at night. My mother and dad would come to the games when my dad could get off of work. But my mother always came to the games. That’s about the only vacation we ever had. We never went out of town on a trip like they do now.

DB: You had your father’s brothers, your uncles, in Chicago.
MS: Yes.

DB: Were there any trips to go visit them?

MS: Not until we got to be teenagers. In our twenties, I would say.

DB: So it was quite a bit later.

MS: Yes.

DB: Did you have cousins in Chicago?

MS: Yes. I had cousins.

DB: Did you have much contact with them? Did they ever come and visit you?

MS: No. The only time I can remember them coming is for a death in the family or something like that.

DB: So you didn’t really know them then?

MS: No.

DB: Did your mother have any siblings that came over here?

MS: None at all.

DB: Okay. So she was really pretty much alone.

MS: Yes.

DB: Now the neighborhood that you grew up in, was it a lot of Germans in that neighborhood?

MS: No. The people next door . . . they were kind of mixed. There were Polish people there, and there were Hungarians. The people next door were Swedish. I can remember that. But they were mixed. All mixed up, I would say.

DB: And everybody got along?

MS: Yes. We all got along. We played together.

DB: Did your parents speak German around the house very much?

MS: All the time. I would say most of the time.

DB: And did you learn German?

MS: We would say to my mother . . . I can remember saying this to my mother. “Ma, talk English. You’re in America.”

DB: But did you learn German from them?

MS: Oh, yes. And I took German when I went to school, too.

DB: But as a child you wanted them to speak English.

MS: When our friends came over, she talked to us in German. We’d say, “Ma, speak English. You’re in America.” I can remember when my mother got her citizenship papers. We had to teach her how to answer the questions. We would question her. She had a little book, and I remember when she became a citizen.

DB: For your parents, were their accents very thick?

MS: No. They were pretty good.

DB: There were German language newspapers around the Twin Cities. Did they subscribe to those?

MS: No. Not that I can remember.

DB: What about contacts from Austria, from the Old Country? Was mail a regular thing?

MS: No. The only time I can remember my mother getting letters was when her father died. That would be my grandpa. That’s the only thing that we ever learned about them. I can remember my mother crying the day she got the letter.

DB: So for the most part your parents came here and stayed here. They were cut off.

MS: That’s right. Yes.

DB: And your father had no siblings here either?

MS: No.

DB: So they were pretty much on their own.

MS: Yes.

DB: Around your home, when you celebrated events like a birthday . . . let’s say it’s your birthday. Let’s say you’re ten years old. Just pick a date. You can change it if you want. What kind of a celebration might you expect for your birthday?
MS: We always got a cake. My mother made a cake for us. And we probably got one or two presents, and it was very seldom that they were clothes. They were usually doll clothes that were made for our dolls.

DB: And your mother made the clothes?

MS: My mother made the clothes. They were homemade gifts. Yes. Very seldom would we get a bought gift.

DB: What kind of dolls did you have? Were they homemade?

MS: No. We had bought dolls, but my dad did make us doll beds. He made them out of the ends of apple crates. Then he would paint them. He was a baker, so he could do real good designs like he did on cakes. I can remember him doing that on the backboard of the beds.

DB: Did he do that kind of traditional rosemaling with the flowers?

MS: Yes. It was really nice. He was good at that.

DB: Did you save any of that? Did any of that survive?

MS: No. I wish I would have. Should have. But who thinks of that?

DB: The dolls had the porcelain heads and hands?

MS: Yes. But we weren’t too much into dolls. My sister and I were more tomboys. We played outside. We went up in the sandpit and jumped in the sand and did things like that.

DB: What about Christmas? How did you celebrate Christmas?

MS: At Christmas I can remember we got one present. It usually was a homemade present.

DB: Again, something for the doll or . . .?

MS: Something for the doll or something to wear. My mother probably knitted us a cap.

DB: You were hoping for a baseball mitt, maybe?

MS: I had that.

DB: You had it already. And where did you get that?

MS: We had baseball bats and we had . . .
 
DB: Were they hand me downs, again?

MS: They were hand me downs. I can remember my mother sewing the ball for us. Every time we played ball we’d bring the ball home, and she had to sew it together.

DB: Re-stitch it.

MS: Re-stitch it. Yes.

DB: And at Christmas did you have a tree?

MS: Yes. We had a tree. I can still remember lights. Not lights, but candles. There were candles with the little tray on the bottom, and you had to light the candles. The candles were about five inches tall and about like my finger, I would say. Probably like this pencil here. We had to be real careful. Then we had our own decorations. I still have a couple of things.

DB: Let’s talk about the candles a little bit. How often would the tree be lit? Just on Christmas Eve?

MS: Oh, yes. One time. It was never lit during the day like they do now.

DB: No, no, no. And just for a short time.

MS: Oh, yes. Just for a short time, because you had to be careful.

DB: How long was the tree usually up?

MS: Probably a week, I’d say.

DB: Where did you get the tree?

MS: I can’t even tell you where my dad got it.

DB: But they had lots around town where they would sell the trees just like today?

MS: Yes.

DB: And then you said that you had the decorations. Were they homemade?

MS: Oh, yes. We strung popcorn.

DB: What else? What other kinds of decorations?

MS: We had little things made out of cardboard that we painted. Then we made little things in school. But we had bought things, too. A lot of the ornaments that my mother had were cotton. They were heavy cotton and painted. They weren’t glass like they have now. In fact, I have a few of them still on my tree.

DB: Germany early on was famous for blown glass Christmas ornaments. Did your mother ever make an effort to get any of those?

MS: No. We never had any of them.

DB: Did you as a child make an effort to get gifts for your parents or for your siblings?

MS: I think all we ever gave them was a card. I can’t remember giving them gifts. If my mother bought a pair of slippers for my dad, that was from all the kids. That’s the only present he got.

DB: National holidays. The Fourth of July. How would that be celebrated in your neighborhood?

MS: At that time you could buy fireworks wherever you wanted to. We always had a good Fourth of July. We had fireworks going all the time.

DB: Mostly the kids? The parents got involved, too?

MS: Yes. Right out in the front yard. We could throw them right out on the street. And I can remember when the Fair was out there. We would go up on the hill and watch the fireworks from the Fair with our parents. All the neighbors would come, too. We’d sit up there on this big hill and we could see the fireworks. But the Fourth of July was always good. We’d start early in the morning, and we had those cherry bombs and everything.

DB: Were there official fireworks around the Fourth of July?

MS: Not that I can remember. The only one I can remember is from the Fair.

DB: What about parades? Anything like that?

MS: No. Not that we attended. I know that. They probably had them but we didn’t go.

DB: What about Memorial Day? Let’s say Armistice Day. November 11th. Was that something that was celebrated a lot, with veterans marching or anything? Was that just a day off? Did your father get the day off?

MS: No. I don’t think so.

DB: Okay. What about May 31st, Memorial Day? Were there any celebrations, anything with that?

MS: No. Not anything special.

DB: Labor Day in September?

MS: No.

DB: Nothing again. Okay. School. You went to St. Agnes Catholic School. And that was from kindergarten through eighth grade?

MS: No kindergarten. First grade to eighth grade.

DB: And your teachers were nuns?

MS: Nuns. All the time. There were no lay teachers. None whatever.

DB: And were they good teachers?

MS: Very good teachers. In fact, one is still living. Her name is Sister Nicollet, and she’s living in the Notre Dame home. She has a write up every once in a while in the paper. She’s ninety-eight years old. She was my teacher in the third grade.

DB: Did you have a lot of homework?

MS: Lots of homework. We had a big geography – a big thick geography.

DB: The book.

MS: The book. Yes. We had to go to church every morning before we went to school. We went to eight o’clock Mass.

DB: Where did you go to high school?

MS: I went to Wilson Junior High after I left St. Agnes. First of all, when I went to St. Agnes School, I skipped the third grade. I went from second to fourth because I was kind of smart. I have to tell you that because I had good training from my brothers and my sister.

DB: From your parents, too. Was there a lot of emphasis on education? The importance of getting an education?

MS: Oh, yes. Yes.

DB: Did they have expectations for you?

MS: Not really, but there were five of us that skipped the third grade. We went from second to fourth.

DB: You didn’t feel like you missed anything and had trouble catching up or keeping up?

MS: No, no. Then I went to Wilson Junior High. That was a junior high school then, and they only had seventh, eighth and ninth grade there.

DB: Was it difficult going to a public school? Was that a difficult transition? Did it seem strange?

MS: No, because I knew a lot of the kids that went there.

DB: And the lay teachers there were good teachers?

MS: Yes.

DB: And again, a lot of homework?

MS: A lot of homework. From junior high I went to Mechanic Arts High School for the tenth grade. I had a teacher by the name of Miss Williams, and she wore two kinds of dresses. She wore a brown one and a navy blue one, and she wore boots up to her knees. Everybody said to me, “You didn’t get her for homeroom teacher, did you?” And I said, “Yes, that’s who I got.” I got her.

I had very good grades from Wilson Junior High. At that time they gave you As and double As. I always got double As in German, and I always got double As in gym. I always had As on my whole report card. So when I went down to Mechanic Arts . . .

DB: What about that teacher? Was the teacher a good teacher for you? Miss Williams.

MS: I’m coming to Miss Williams. She was my homeroom teacher. So at that time the homeroom teacher got your report card from your junior high school. I wanted to take a secretarial course like math, social history, English and things like that. She looked at that and she said, “No. Your grades are too good for that. I want you to take a college course like algebra, math, or ancient history.” Well, in fact, she had me taking off of the gym, which is compulsory, so that I could take another credit. So I had seven solid credits.

DB: So she was focusing you toward academics.

MS: She was focusing me towards academics, and it was just too much for me. I was like thirteen or fourteen years old. So I finished out that year and then I said to my mother, “I’m not going back to school.” So my mother and I got back on the streetcar. We went down and we saw the principal at Mechanic Arts High School. I wanted to get transferred to Washington High School, which was on the other side of town. He said, “No, you cannot transfer to Washington because that’s out of the school district.” So I said to my mother, “I’m not going back to school.” And I never did. I only finished the tenth grade.

DB: It was just . . . school just wasn’t right for you at the time? It was too much work?

MS: I couldn’t take that. It was too much work. I was a young girl. I had other things to do too, besides having my nose in the books all the time. But it was from that homeroom teacher.

DB: She was too tough on you.

MS: She was really tough. Yes.

DB: Well-intentioned maybe but . . .

MS: Yes. That’s right.

DB: But wrong timing or something.

MS: So I quit school when I was fourteen years old.

DB: But you did go to Mechanic Arts High for a time. As a child, let’s say before you were ten years old, did you do chores? Did you do things to earn money? Some people tell me that they picked up bottles or . . .

MS: No. The only thing that I can remember, I babysat for a quarter an hour next door when I was a young kid. Then I can remember going out to the city dump. At that time they had Northfield Condensed Cream in the can and it had a coupon on it. If you got so many coupons you would get a pen or a bowl or something. I can remember going out to the dump and picking the coupons off of the cans.

DB: How far away was the dump?

MS: About four blocks. It was the biggest city dump. Everybody in the city dumped at that dump. It was where the Minnehaha bowling alley is now. If you know where that is. It is on Oxford and Minnehaha Street. It’s a shopping center now. But that was the city dump for everybody.

DB: You got a quarter an hour for babysitting. That was pretty big money.

MS: Yes. That was big money.

DB: What did you do with it? Did you spend it right away?

MS: I spent it, I suppose, like any other kid did.

DB: Was there any emphasis to try to get you to save money at all?

MS: My mother never made us save it. It was so scarce.

DB: As you got a little bit older, let’s say you’re fifteen or so, were you working then? Did you do anything on the side?

MS: I did housework for four dollars a week when I was fifteen years old. I got my carfare paid. I got my streetcar fare paid and four dollars a week. I worked up in Highland Park. Then I went to the American Can Company, which was on Prior and Minnehaha and I put my application in there.

DB: This is after you dropped out of high school?

MS: Yes. I was only fifteen years old, so I lied on my application. They called me and told me I had a job. I went there and I had to take big pieces of tin and then I pushed them into the machine, and then they came out curled for making cans. But the boss came up to me and he said, “Martha, could you bring your birth certificate tomorrow?” And I said, “Sure.” Well, I was only fifteen years old, and I didn’t have a birth certificate. [Chuckles] I didn’t have a birth certificate. So I never showed up.

DB: They had labor laws. You were supposed to be at least sixteen.

MS: You had to be sixteen years old, and I was only fifteen then. So I never showed up. So my sister’s girlfriend worked there and she picked up my paycheck for one day. And then when I was sixteen years old, then I worked in a bakery. I worked there until 1938 and then I crossed a picket line at Montgomery Ward and I got a job at Montgomery Ward in the packing department and I stayed there until 1950.

DB: We’ll come back to work, too, as we get into the Depression and talk about how things changed with that. Now let’s mention Church. You went to Catholic school.

MS: Church. We went every Sunday, and every day at school. School days every day and Sundays twice. Sunday for Mass, and then they had what they called Children’s Devotion at two fifteen. And you had to go to Children’s Devotion, because the next day at school they would have you tell what the priest talked about at Children’s Devotion. She knew if you weren’t there. It was a very strict Catholic school. Very strict.

DB: Did the church organize activities for children? Trips, any kind of social things?

MS: Not trips, but we did play softball. Father Schmidt had a girl’s softball team—the St. Agnes softball team—that we played on. My sister and I both played. But that’s about all.

DB: Choirs?

MS: Oh, yes. We sang in the choir. I sang for a lot of funerals. The whole class did. And we had to go to choir practice. The whole school did. Not just one person or one class.

DB: Now, I think this is going to be a big topic for you. Sports. You loved your sports.

MS: I sure did.

DB: What all did you play? What did you do?

MS: I was mostly a pitcher and left fielder.

DB: Softball or baseball?

MS: Softball. I played in the state championship for the first team I played on. I was sixteen years old. I played for Berman Sporting Goods.

DB: And these teams that led to you being on the state championship team. Were they formally organized teams?

MS: They were formally organized teams, through the parks and playgrounds. I have a letter stating that I was selected for the All Star Team.

DB: Were there a lot of sports activities and things for girls through the parks?

MS: Yes. I went to the playground a lot, and I was a very good broad jumper, a high jumper. And very good at track. And then we had tournaments where we went to Dunning Field and competed against other playgrounds.

DB: So they had track and field.

MS: Track and field.

DB: And then you got involved in basketball later, but baseball was your passion.

MS: Oh, yes.

DB: And you said that your father was working. He couldn’t go to the games very often.

MS: No, but my mother did. I still have passes from 1935 for Dunning Field. We played under the lights.

DB: And was that a big thrill?

MS: Oh, yes.

DB: To hear the cheering crowd.

MS: Oh, yes. The cheering and the booing. The competition.

DB: What kind of coaches did you have? Were they semi-professional?

MS: They were just men from the regular run of life. Joe Meyers. I forget what he even
did. And Mr. Murray, he was kind of a big shot at Montgomery Wards. Then there was
Ed Famen, who was a detective at Wards. They all coached our team. They were just regular men.

DB: You always had male coaches?

MS: All male coaches.

DB: Did you ever have aspirations to go further with this? Were there opportunities? Girls’ professional leagues or anything like that?

MS: Not at that time. But when I got to be twenty or twenty-one, they did have a professional team. But at that time I had other things to do, and then the war came and there was no more softball during the war.

DB: Why was that?

MS: They just didn’t have teams. They dropped it.

DB: What about Girl Scouts, were you ever involved in that? Was that something . . .?

MS: No, no.

DB: I talk to a lot of the boys. They were involved in Boy Scouts. But it wasn’t something that was . . .?

MS: No. But the people next door were Swedish, and they had four girls. Every Saturday we could go up on University and St. Albans to a Lutheran Home. Even though we were Catholic, my sister and I could go with them. We would go up there every Saturday, and we’d play games and we’d learn how to sew and how to do different things. It was like the Girl Reserves, not the Girl Scouts. It was called the Girl Reserves.

DB: Was it a fun thing? Something you looked forward to?

MS: Yes. Oh, yes. We looked forward to that every Saturday.

DB: What about social clubs or anything like that? Was that an activity?

MS: Not really.

DB: Dances?

MS: No. I was too boyish to go to a dance. [Chuckles]

DB: What about dating? Was that something that went on much?

MS: We had friends that gathered at our house all the time. Boys and girls. But nobody dated anybody. I mean the bunch of us would go to the movies. We walked. Or if we had an extra nickel, we would walk to the store and get some candy or something. But I really didn’t date until I got out of the service.

DB: And so most of it was just a group of friends getting together and doing things.

MS: Yes. And they usually gathered on our front step and my mother would make the tea or make nectar or something.

DB: What about stores, department stores? Just store bought things. Was that something you frequented? You think about girls today. A huge percentage of them list shopping as their primary pastime.

MS: Oh, no. If we had any extra money it was spent at Grant’s or Woolworth’s or Green’s Dime Store downtown on 7th and Wabasha. We’d have to take the streetcar down there.

DB: And what would you spend your money on?

MS: Well . . . on anything. Maybe little knickknack jewelry or something. But very seldom did we have clothes from the stores. Not until I was a good nineteen or twenty years old.

DB: What about other activities? Things that you did with your friends, social things. What would you do? Just say it’s a Friday night and you’re with your friends.

MS: A lot of times it was spent at the playground. That was a block and a half away. We’d go down there. We could be at the playground for a whole day. Or we would go to a movie or go to the store and get an ice cream cone or something like that.

DB: What about restaurants? Was that something that you went to?

MS: Never. Never went to a restaurant. Never.

DB: Were there restaurants around the area?

MS: There were beer joints where you could get a hamburger or a hot beef sandwich or something like that. I can remember the Criterion, which was really a top place over on University. That’s where all the rich people went - to the Criterion. But we never got to go there.

DB: At home, did your mother have a garden?

MS: Oh, yes. She had a garden.

DB: What kind of things did she grow?

MS: She had kohlrabi, she had lettuce, she had tomatoes, she had beans. She had everything. She had a nice garden.

DB: Did she do a lot of canning?

MS: Oh, yes. Very much. She did a lot of canning. She canned peaches, pears, cherries and plums.

DB: And you said she stored a lot of things in the basement.

MS: Yes. We had a regular little cellar down there. It was next to the coal bin.

DB: Was it a dirt floor in there?

MS: Yes. It had a dirt floor and it had shelves in there.

DB: That helped preserve things more?

MS: Yes, because it was cool down there.

DB: In 1929, the Depression hit. You were ten years old, so you might not remember too much of those specific events, but how did it affect your family?

MS: I can’t remember 1929, but I can remember 1931. My dad got laid off from work. He was a baker and we had four kids. He got laid off and we had to go on welfare. That just hurt my dad so bad, because in order to get welfare he had to go out to the city dump and help unload trucks that came to dump. That was what he had to do in order for us to get welfare.

DB: So he had to do some work.

MS: He had to do some work. Yes. We got our clothes . . . that’s where we got our bib overalls. We had to go up on Marshall Avenue right off of Dale Street. There was a house there, and we got our shoes and our overalls from the welfare. And every month we would get a box from Schoch’s downtown, as I told you before. They were the distributor to all welfare people. They would deliver a box of food for us. In it there would be salt pork and there would be oatmeal and farina. There would be no meat except the salt pork. Then they had a lot of dried fruit like apricots and plums, which were prunes. But that’s about it. Then there was bread and things like that. But we had a hard time during the Depression.

I can remember one Christmas, a knock came on the door and my mother went to answer it. There was a huge box with hams and everything in it. My mother said, “You must have the wrong address.” They said, “Is this the Kufner address?” “First of all,” she said, “I think that belongs next door, because those people, they’re poor.” And they said, “No. This is where it belongs, at 840 West Minnehaha.” Then she found out that my sister, my older sister, had written a letter to the Santa Claus Club, and that’s how we got that box of food for Christmas. My mother wanted to give it away.

DB: That was probably very welcome.

MS: Yes, it was.

DB: How would you compare your family situation to the situation of your neighbors during the Depression?

MS: We were all on welfare. All of us were on welfare.

DB: Everybody was the same.

MS: Except there were two neighbors down there who weren’t. I can remember the Miko family and the Miletski family. Both their fathers worked for the railroad. They had jobs. They never were on welfare. But everybody else in our neighborhood was on welfare.

DB: Mostly their dads were laid off?

MS: Yes.

DB: Was there ever a threat that you remember of losing your home?

MS: No, no. We always made the payments. But I can remember, too, that my mother had a little jar up in the cupboard. The fee for going to St. Agnes was seventy-five cents a month for each of us kids, and she had a little jar up there where she put that seventy-five cents a month for tuition. That’s what we paid to go to St. Agnes School. Seventy-five cents.

DB: Tough to get the seventy-five cents.

MS: Yes. And everybody knew that’s what that was for, so nobody ever dared touch it.

DB: In the Depression, do you remember the bank closings and business closings?

MS: No. Really, I don’t. I can’t even remember my mother having a bankbook. We were so poor. Every little bit of money that she did have, she probably had either tucked away in a jar or hidden someplace. I can never ever remember a bankbook in our house or a savings account book.

DB: You had mentioned that your father lost his job and had to work in the city dump and do odd jobs.

MS: Yes.

DB: Did he ever get back into baking?

MS: Oh, yes. My dad was a baker, and in 1938 we did buy a bakery. We did have a bakery that I worked in and he was the baker.

DB: So he had a family business.

MS: Yes. It was a little business.

DB: In the neighborhood?

MS: It was at 1605 University.

DB: And it did okay?

MS: It did okay. I think we had it about three years and then he sold out. But he sold out to the Lighthouse Bakery, where I got a job as a clerk and he got a job as a baker. Then, of course, he passed away in 1940.

DB: What was the circumstance of that? How did that . . . did he have a heart attack?

MS: Yes. My mother went to wake him to go to work for his night job as a baker and he was dead in bed. It was a heart attack.

DB: In those days was there life insurance? What did you do?

MS: Never. No. Nothing. My mother went out and did housework.

DB: So it was catastrophic . . . a catastrophic loss of income.

MS: Yes, it was. Yes, it was. But we all had jobs. My sister got married in 1943, so it was just my mother and me, but my mother went out and did housework and washed shirts for different people, different businessmen. She also worked at the Medical Arts Building, cleaning doctor’s offices.

DB: That was enough to save the house.

MS: Yes.

DB: There wasn’t a threat of losing the house or anything?

MS: No, and she never got Social Security, because I can remember my mother getting a lump sum. If I can remember right it was like $750, and that’s all she got. She didn’t get Social Security. Because Social Security was only four years old. I guess my father never had enough in there to qualify her for Social Security.

DB: Now your father had bought a car in 1938.

MS: Oh, yes. We had a 1938 Plymouth.

DB: And when he passed away . . .

MS: I bought that car from my mother and I paid $500 for it.

DB: Was it difficult to get the $500 or had you saved that amount?

MS: No. I worked at Montgomery Wards, so I saved it. And then I don’t think I paid her cash. I paid her in little installment payments.

DB: So it was possible to do that.

MS: Yes. But I had to take her where she wanted to go. I mean that I bought the car with the understanding that I got it that cheap if I would provide her with transportation.

DB: Do you remember Prohibition at all?

MS: I can remember . . . well, this goes back a long time, when we were still in school. My dad made his own beer and bottled it. We had to bottle beer every day when we came home from school.

DB: The kids did?

MS: We had to bottle his beer.

DB: You bottled his beer.

MS: We bottled his beer every day when we came home from school. In fact, I still have the bottle capper.

DB: So you’re ready for the next Prohibition.

MS: [Chuckles] Yes.

DB: Do you remember the heat waves of 1935 and 1936?

MS: I don’t remember it in 1935, but I do remember it distinctly in 1936. We slept on the grass, and even the neighbor kids came over. We all slept on the grass on a blanket because it was too hot. Nobody had air conditioning. Nobody even owned a fan.

DB: On nights like that you could leave the house open?

MS: Oh, yes. We never had a lock on our door. Never. I can’t even remember having a key to get in our front door, because our doors were always open.

DB: And everybody felt secure with that.

MS: Yes. Everybody did. And I can’t even remember anybody ever getting robbed or attacked or anything.

DB: You said you had one sister who got married in 1940?

MS: Yes.

DB: What kind of a wedding did she have?

MS: It was a very small wedding, because the day that my sister and brother-in-law went to arrange their wedding at the church, that was the day my father died. That was in April, and they had it all set for June 28th. So she did have a church wedding with one bridesmaid, but it was just small. She did not have it in a hall. It was just a little party at home. That was sad.

DB: Think about the 1920s and 1930s. People were lots . . . generally the average height was smaller. You were five foot ten.

MS: Yes.

DB: Was it difficult to find clothing for people taller than average?

MS: I had no trouble finding shoes, but I had a little trouble finding dresses and coats. I did go a few times over to Minneapolis to the tall girl’s store when I could afford it.

DB: So they had a store over there even in the 1930s.

MS: They had one over there, and then they finally did have one over here in downtown St. Paul. But a lot of our things were made, too. We made our own clothes.

DB: Did you personally make clothes?

MS: My mother did. My mother was a very good sewer, and she made a lot of our clothes.

DB: And altered clothes regularly?

MS: Yes.

DB: You were real active in sports. We talked briefly about your baseball activities.

MS: Yes.

DB: But you also did ice skating.

MS: Yes.

DB: On several venues. One was in the Hippodrome.

MS: That was 1935. I still have the season pass in my scrapbook. A season pass to the Hippodrome for indoor skating.

DB: That was more couples skating and dance skating.

MS: No. It wasn’t dancing. It was couples, I would say. It was long blades, and they had an orchestra there. A real live orchestra or a band. And they had like fourteen numbers, and you skated with a boy or skated by yourself until somebody picked you up. Then I also did some speed skating. I did win one time at the Minnehaha playground.

DB: This was organized by the parks?

MS: Yes. It was organized by the parks and playgrounds. And then whoever won out there could compete for the city title, or whatever you would call it, at Como. That’s where you were skating against the real professionals. They were trained. We were never trained. I remember going around that rink once and I fell down, and that was the end of my speed skating.

DB: You were just embarrassed.

MS: I was so embarrassed, and I said to my mother, “That’s it. No more speed skating.” But I did skate at the Hippodrome until it closed during the war, and then after I got married I even skated at Aldrich Arena on Thursday nights.

DB: When you were skating at Lake Como, you said most of the kids had a uniform.

MS: Yes. They wore tights like they do now, but everybody usually had a sponsor and they had real nice outfits. But my mother made mine. It looked just as well as theirs. But it wasn’t the same.

DB: But you still quit when you fell down.

MS: Yes. I quit when I fell down.

DB: Was it difficult to get skates?

MS: No, no.

DB: You could afford them?

MS: Yes. We could afford them. I always had a pair of long-blade skates.

DB: You said you bought your dad’s car in 1940 after he passed away.

MS: Yes.

DB: You had learned how to drive before that?

MS: Oh, yes. I got a driver’s license when I was fifteen, because we had a car before that. That wasn’t our first car. We had a Model T and we had a Model A. So that’s what I learned on.

DB: Did your father teach you?

MS: We taught ourselves. We kind of taught ourselves. But I know we paid thirty-five cents for a driver’s license and we took no test. Just went to a building downtown someplace and gave them thirty-five cents and we got a driver’s license.

DB: All you had to do was register then?

MS: That’s right.

DB: About 1940 you started bowling, too.

MS: Yes. That’s when I started league bowling.

DB: Had you done just casual bowling before that?

MS: Oh, yes. I can remember going to a bowling alley downtown. I believe it was on Robert Street. It was called Feister’s. We had no shoes and we had no bowling balls of our own. We bowled in our stocking feet, and it was ten cents a game, and they had pin-setters. They did not have electric machines like they do now. I did that until I started to bowl in the league.

DB: Were you hooked into it right away?

MS: Oh, yes. I was hooked in it. Because I was a pretty good athlete.

DB: And you were still playing softball at this time, too?

MS: Yes.

DB: When you were doing that . . . your teams were playing big time. You were playing night games around town.

MS: It was big time for the time it was. We played at Dunning Field under the lights at eight thirty. There were two teams from St. Paul and two teams from Minneapolis.

DB: And you had good sponsorships, too.

MS: Yes, we did. I played for Berman Sporting Goods and I played for Meyer’s Dairy. Later I played for Dayton’s Bluff Commercial Club and I played for Wards.

DB: And they’d help you with your uniforms and . . .?

MS: They had nice uniforms. We had nice jackets and we had knickers and we got shoes. We got the whole outfit.

DB: Did you draw big crowds for the games?

MS: Oh, yes. They packed them in at Dunning Field, I’ll tell you. One time we did play the girls from Winnipeg, and they put a canvas around the whole field out at Dunning Field so nobody could look in. You had to pay.

DB: Was this pretty prestigious to be on these teams?

MS: Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. You had to be pretty good.

DB: And you had your picture in the paper quite often, too.

MS: Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

DB: You’ve got your scrapbook showing all of those pictures.

MS: Oh, yes. And we had big headlines in the paper when I played softball. You know, we made the headlines like they do now. We were on the front page. I can remember that back then the sports page was green.

DB: And your younger sister played on the team, too.

MS: And my younger sister played. Yes.

DB: And she was what? Only fifteen months younger than you? Something like that.

MS: Fifteen months, younger, and she was only like five foot four. [Chuckles] But she was a good player, too.

DB: I’m wondering when was it you went to Wards and got the job? Was that in 1938?

MS: It was in 1938. I went through a picket line.

DB: And what was going on with the picket line? They were having a strike?

MS: I believe they were trying to organize the union. But I really don’t know.

DB: Wasn’t that risky going through the picket lines?

MS: Yes, it was, but you just went through there and got a job. I was lucky I got a job.

DB: No threats against you or anything?

MS: No threats, but they hollered at you and did things like that to get attention. But nobody got hurt.

DB: What were you doing at Wards then? What kind of a job? What was the process of getting a job? You just applied and they called you back?

MS: I applied, and they called me back, and then I worked on the packing floor. Wards had a big, thick catalog where people could order things. The farmers would send in their orders. The orders would come in and we would pack them; we would wrap them up and send them to get stamped and go to the billing department. That’s what we were called: Packers.

DB: Was it pretty hard work?

MS: Yes. It was hard. Very hard. And we made thirty-nine cents an hour.

DB: It sounds terrible now, but that was probably pretty good money in those days, wasn’t it?

MS: Yes, it was. [Chuckles] It was better than twenty-five cents a day for babysitting.

DB: Twenty-five cents a day for babysitting.

MS: Yes.

DB: A lot of people talk about getting twenty-five cents an hour at work. So thirty-nine cents was hard work but pretty good pay. What about any benefits? Were there any benefits with the job?

MS: No, I can’t remember any benefits. We worked on the . . . it wasn’t commission, but you had to stamp the order that you were doing. We each had a stamp, and you had to stamp your initial on there. Then if an order came back and said you were missing something in their order, they penalized you. They took your bonus away for that day.

DB: So what kind of a bonus? If you had no mistakes then you got a bonus?

MS: You probably got a bonus like a dollar a day. Yes.

DB: A dollar a day. That adds up.

MS: Yes, but if they took it away from you, too, you know.

DB: Then it hurt.

MS: Yes. And a lot of times it wasn’t the packer. It was probably the customer not being honest.

DB: In those days you would get how many days vacation?

MS: I remember a week after I had been a year there. And then two weeks. But you never got paid when you were off for a day if you were sick or anything. You never got paid like a lot of jobs do now. When I worked at Curtiss, I got paid every day. Sick or not.

DB: Oh, so there was no sick leave or anything.

MS: No. There was no sick leave at Wards.

DB: Of course, when you worked at Curtiss, that was a different era, too.

MS: Yes.

DB: That was the post-war era.

MS: Yes.

DB: In the winter and spring of 1941, the National Guard was getting mobilized, and you knew some of these guys who were getting called up.

MS: Yes.

DB: Some of them went to the Philippines.

MS: They went to the Philippines. They went all over.

DB: Who were some of them you knew?

MS: I knew Howie Anderson. He was with the 109th . . .

DB: Aviation?

MS: Aviation. Yes. I can’t remember all their names.

DB: Harold Kurvers?

MS: Harold Kurvers, yes. I don’t think he was with the National Guard. I think he was drafted.

DB: Okay. He went to the Philippines.

MS: Yes. He went to the Philippines and then he was a prisoner of war. He was taken prisoner at Bataan and he was, I think, one of seventy that survived.

DB: Yes. What did you think about the stuff going on? The start of the draft and the guys going off? Drumbeats in Europe and Asia? Did you pay much attention to that?

MS: I suppose we thought about it.

DB: Just kind of took it in stride?

MS: Just took it in stride. Yes. Went to work every day. And griped, I suppose. Like they all did.

DB: Yes, yes. Was it noticeable when the guys were leaving though?

MS: Oh, yes.

DB: So every one was very conscious of it.

MS: Yes, yes. Even at work. Every other day there was someone going to war that you worked with.

DB: Somebody got drafted.

MS: They got drafted. Yes.

DB: We’re still before Pearl Harbor here though.

MS: Yes.

DB: In the summer of 1941, the draft prompted you to take a trip. You and some girlfriends got in your car and took a trip to visit one of the guys. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

MS: There were four of us from Wards, and one girl had a boyfriend who was stationed at Camp Roberts, California. That’s why we really took the trip, so she could go out there to see him before he shipped overseas. We stayed with our aunt. They were up on Monterey Bay. I can remember that’s where the big golf course is now. But we had a good trip.

DB: Pretty adventurous.

MS: Yes. She saw her boyfriend go.

DB: Did you spend some time on the beach? Swim in the ocean?

MS: No. We didn’t swim in the ocean. We just bummed around. We went to Knott’s Berry Farm and a few other places like that.

DB: That must have been a huge adventure at that time though. You were twenty-one years old. To drive across the country.

MS: If I remember right, I think we each only had $75 to spend, and we rented an apartment on Hollywood Boulevard for $15 a week. That’s where we stayed—all four of us in this one little apartment.

DB: But as far as finding gas stations, and the quality of the roads, everything was in place and you could do that in 1941?

MS: Oh, yes. Yes. There were only two-lane highways, and you couldn’t go very far in one day. It probably took us four days to get to California, if I remember right. Then four days back home. So that only left us about three days in California.

DB: You told me a story once about how hot it was driving through the desert.

MS: Yes. We drove in our pants and our bras when we were driving across the Mojave Desert. We had to do that at night because it was too hot to do it during the day. I can remember that if you stopped at a filling station, and if you didn’t buy gas, they would not give you water for your car. You had to buy gas, because that’s how it was.

DB: You came home and went back to work at Wards.

MS: Oh, yes. I went back to Wards.

DB: Now this was in the summer of 1941 when you took the trip. You’re back at work. The draft has been reinstated and all of a sudden it’s December 7th, and the world started to change. Do you remember hearing about Pearl Harbor?

MS: I can’t remember. I have to be honest with you. I can’t remember what I was doing that day. Really I don’t. I probably was upset, but I just can’t remember what I was doing. Otto remembers, but I don’t.

DB: Did things around work start to change a lot?

MS: No. But we went on rations. Everybody had to go on rations. We got rations for gas. We got rations for food.

DB: There was a big change in your sports activities because of the war.

MS: Everything stopped. Everything stopped. There were no more baseball games. There was no more ice skating. The Hippodrome closed down. Everybody was war-minded.

DB: Was a lot of the baseball shutting down . . . was it just the girls’ leagues? Did the boys’ leagues . . .?

MS: The boys, too. They closed down Dunning Field.

DB: Did they re-open later in the war then or was it just something that started at the beginning of the war?

MS: No, never. I never played ball then after. No.

DB: What about bowling? You’d started that in 1940. So that was your main sports outlet then during the war?

MS: Yes, it was. That’s about all we did. Bowl, and probably go to a bar once in a while. That’s about it.

DB: Was it difficult getting gas for your car during the war?

MS: Oh, yes. You were rationed. You got coupons.

DB: So you could get enough?

MS: Yes. I don’t remember having any trouble with the coupons.

DB: Was there any real shortages of food that you remember? Again, you had to have coupons, but . . .

MS: We had coupons to get dairy and meat during the war. You had to have coupons. We never had butter. We had oleo, and you had a little orange pill that you mixed with it that made it look like butter.

DB: The oleo margarine was white.

MS: Oleo margarine was white.

DB: It looked lard then, I suppose.

MS: Yes. In fact, I think it tasted like lard.

DB: So you continued working at Wards.

MS: Yes. I worked at Wards until I quit there, I believe, in 1942.

DB: And how did you get in working with the airlines?

MS: I put in my application, because everybody was getting a war job and the war jobs were paying a lot more than Wards. So I put in my application at Northwest Airlines, and I worked right down in St. Paul at the big hangars down there.

DB: How did you hear about the job?

MS: Everybody heard about jobs during the war. Anybody could get a job during the war at a defense plant. A lot of people went out to New Brighton.

DB: How much did it pay? Do you remember? Roughly? Compared to the thirty-nine cents.

MS: I don’t remember, but it was better. Oh, yes. It was a lot better than thirty-nine cents.

DB: A dollar an hour maybe?

MS: Yes. Probably. A dollar five, maybe.

DB: Were taxes a significant chunk out of your wages?

MS: All I remember is taking Social Security out. I can’t remember taking taxes.

DB: So it wasn’t a big issue anyway.

MS: No. I don’t think so.

DB: What were you doing at Northwest Airlines?

MS: I worked what they called the tool crib, where all the tools were stored. They had drills and hammers. Then the people would come to this tool crib and check out the drills they needed. They were working to modify the B-24s at Holman Field. They worked three shifts. They had the morning, they had the afternoon, and then they had the midnight shift. And you worked two weeks on each shift.

DB: Now the people who were working there, most of them probably had someone in the service.

MS: Yes.

DB: Was there a lot of patriotism? Were people really motivated to do things and do them well and to support the troops? People seemed to be really on board with the war effort?

MS: Yes.

DB: So you worked at the defense plant or at Northwest until about when?

MS: I worked there until early 1943. Then I quit because I didn’t like the three shifts. So I got a job at Northwest Aeronautics, which was another war plant. That was up on Minnehaha and Prior, and we made gliders there. We put the fabric on gliders, and from there I went into the service.

DB: So when you were working on the gliders, were you actually working on the production lines?

MS: That’s right. Yes.

DB: Was it difficult working on the gliders? Was the pay good?

MS: The pay was good, but it was hard on your hands. You had to work with this glue.

DB: You were working on the wings, mostly?

MS: No. On the whole plane. On the whole glider body and all over.

DB: Did you get your picture in the paper?

MS: Yes. They had a little paper that the company put out, and I have the picture that they put in there. We were two of the best girls that could do that kind of work.

DB: You got some recognition for being good with glue.

MS: Yes. Good with glue. Bad hands.

DB: And how long did you work there?

MS: I worked there until I went in the service in 1944.

DB: And here, working on the gliders, was there a strong sense of commitment from the people working there or was it just a job? Did people feel they were really part of the war effort?

MS: Everybody worked together.

DB: You had a good job. What prompted your decision to go in the service?

MS: Well, my girlfriend worked at Wards, and I worked at Northwest Aeronautics. One day we talked about it. There were no men around and nothing much to do. We wanted to do something for our country. So we went down the Federal Building, and we wanted to go into the WAVES. The recruiter for the WAVES was on his lunch hour, and the Marine Corps officer said, “Come on in here, girls.” So that’s how we signed up for the Marine Corps. We really wanted to go into the WAVES, but we went into the Marine Corps and we took our physicals.

DB: What was the process of that then? You signed your papers. You had to take a physical. Where did you go to do that?

MS: We went to someplace in Minneapolis to take a physical. We both passed that and then you got your letter telling you where to report. We had to go to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. That’s where we took our training.

DB: So they just gave you a train ticket and a bunch of women went down together?

MS: Yes.

DB: You never went through Fort Snelling at all though?

MS: No. We never went through Fort Snelling.

DB: The Marines and the Navy had their own situation.

MS: Yes. We just got our orders and went on the train.

DB: What time of year was this?

MS: It was May of 1944.

DB: And what was the trip to Camp Lejeune like? Were you apprehensive?

MS: Well, yes. We were anxious to get there. When we got there it was hot. It was hot in North Carolina at that time. Then we took our training, and we stayed in the same unit until we got done with our boot camp. Then she went to San Diego, and I stayed there and I went to Motor Transport School for a month.

DB: Do you remember your first arrival in the Marine Corps, your first day? What kind of a reception did you get?

MS: We had our own barracks. The men had theirs. But it was tough. We had tough sergeants. Boy, they checked on you all the time. If you didn’t do something right, you got it. So that six weeks was pretty tough.

DB: Were there physical punishments, push ups, sit ups, that sort of thing if you messed up?

MS: No, no. We never had anything like that. If you got punished you had detail to do. Like clean the mess and the heads. The toilets were called “heads” in the service. You got duty like that to do.

DB: Were the Marines able to instill a lot of pride in you in being a Marine?

MS: Oh, yes. Yes. Every Saturday we had to march on the parade field. Even when I was in El Toro we had to do that. They had marching, and the band played.

DB: What was the experience of marching with . . .?

MS: It was very nice. Yes. It was nice and it was really military.

DB: It’s kind of exciting, isn’t it?

MS: It was exciting. Yes. I would say I had a good time in the Marine Corps. I really did.

DB: So you said you were trained to be in the . . .

MS: Motor Transport. We worked on cars. We could work with batteries. We didn’t do any motors, but we could change spark plugs and things like that. Then we learned how to drive different kinds of cars and trucks.

DB: Was this all at Camp Lejeune?

MS: That was at Camp Lejeune. Then I got my orders to go to El Toro, California, and my girlfriend got her orders to go to San Diego because she had kind of an office job.

DB: And so you took a train across the country?

MS: I took a train across the country. We had a train wreck in Amarillo, Texas, on the way down.

DB: What happened there?

MS: It was not really a train wreck. Something hit the train and all of us were late to get to Camp El Toro. We had to get a written note from the conductor; otherwise we would have been AWOL. I don’t remember what happened on the train. But we had a train derailment or something.

DB: So you got to El Toro. What was the situation you found there?

MS: It was kind of like at Camp Lejeune, but we had a lot of freedom there. You had a day job. You only worked like from eight to five and that was it. You could do whatever you wanted at night. You could go to the movies or go up to the PX and have a couple beers and have a hamburger or whatever you wanted. I usually went bowling. My mother sent my bowling ball down, and I found a bowling alley there.

DB: What were your quarters like? Where were you living? Were you living in a big bay with a lot of other women?

MS: We lived in a big place with bunk beds. One on top and one on the bottom. And all you had was a footlocker. You didn’t have any mirror or anything like that. You had a footlocker. Of course, you didn’t need any clothes. All you needed was your uniforms and your underclothing. I would say there were probably a hundred girls in the barracks. They were doubled up, and there were a good fifty double beds.

DB: Was it difficult living in that situation?

MS: No. But the lights were out at ten o’clock. If you didn’t get in at ten o’clock you had to find your way to your bed. The lights went out at ten.

DB: It was a good bunch of women?

MS: Yes. Very good bunch.

DB: Good sense of camaraderie?

MS: Yes.

DB: Proud of being a Marine?

MS: Proud. Yes.

DB: So what jobs were you actually doing there then?

MS: At Motor Transport it was mostly driving. You would drive officers or you would drive the bus around the base. The base had a big double bus like they have now and you would stop at different stations to pick up men or women that had to go to their barracks. This was a big place, a big compound. All you did is drive around the base and stop and pick up. I did that. We called them the cattle wagons. Then I drove officers. I drove Melvin Maas at one time. He was the instigator of the Women’s Marine Corps. I drove him one day, and he was from here in Minnesota. Then I also understand that I drove Vern Gagne. At that time he was a staff sergeant, and he trained second lieutenants. I would have to pick them up at the Officer’s Quarters and take them out to the training field, and then probably go back there in the afternoon and bring them home. But he was their instructor.

DB: But at that time you didn’t know him at all.

MS: No. I didn’t know him at all until I got out of the Marine Corps and found out about him.

DB: And you continued to be very involved in sports activities in the Marine Corps too, primarily bowling.

MS: I bowled on a women’s team, and then I bowled on the men’s team and we would go over to Santa Ana and bowl the men over there. I also played softball and I played on the basketball team.

DB: They were post teams?

MS: They were post teams, and then we played other camps. We’d go down to Miramar and we’d go down to San Diego, to Camp Pendleton and play those girls. We always flew down there. We did not fly in a regular airplane. It was a paratroop plane, and it just had one long seat on each side of the plane.

DB: Bench seats. C-47.

MS: Yes. It was just a little plane, but it had the seats on the side. We always flew to our games. Sometimes it only took us twenty minutes to get there. Our team won the championship in bowling. We also won the championship in basketball and we won the championship in softball. So that kept me busy. We played three times a week.

DB: And you showed me how it was written up in the post newspapers, and the prestige that went with that.

MS: Yes.

DB: In May the war in Europe ends and in August the war in Asia ends. What were your plans? You were having a pretty good time in the Marine Corps?

MS: Yes. I think I would have stayed in the Marine Corps had I not had my mother still living alone. I think I would have stayed in. But I didn’t. I chose to take my pay and get out, and I got out in March of 1946.

DB: And took a train home?

MS: I took the bus home from California. I remember taking a Greyhound bus with the motor on the front.

DB: In uniform?

MS: In uniform. Yes.

DB: And how was that? Were people respectful of you?

MS: Oh, yes, and most of them were uniformed people.

DB: Everybody had a connection there.

DB: You came home. You knew you were getting out of the Marines, and you started thinking, “What am I going to do when I get out?” Did you have plans? Did you consider going to school, or you just wanted to go back to work, or . . .?

MS: Not at first. I didn’t continue going to school, but I did go back to Wards. I stayed home a week, and I got some civilian clothes. I knew I’d get a job at Wards because I knew I could get in. So I went back to Wards after a week. I never did take what they said was a “fifty-two twenty.” That was twenty dollars a week for fifty-two weeks when you got out of the service.

DB: It was a type of unemployment benefit that they gave you while you were getting situated.

MS: Yes, it was unemployment. I never had the fifty-two twenty. I went right back to Wards.

DB: Was it difficult to get your job back at Wards?

MS: No, no. I just went up there. I think I went to work the day I went up there to apply.

DB: There were a lot of people getting out of the service, obviously, at this time. Was it difficult to get a job in general? I realize you had something of an in there. But generally, from what you talked to other people, was it difficult to get a job after the war?

MS: I don’t know about what happened to all the people that worked at Northwest Airlines or at New Brighton, if they had a hard time getting work.

DB: What about by March of 1946, you said you bought some clothes? Was it difficult to find clothes?

MS: No, no.

DB: Stores were full again?

MS: The stores were full again.

DB: And you were going to be living with your mother?

MS: Yes. I lived with my mother then until I got married.

DB: Did you still have the 1938 Plymouth?

MS: No. In 1950 I bought a brand new Chevrolet.

DB: How about in 1946? Did you still have the car you bought from your dad?

MS: No. I sold that to my brother-in-law and my sister during wartime, when he got discharged.

DB: So in 1946 you used public transportation?

MS: I used the streetcar.

DB: That was able to get you everywhere you wanted to go?

MS: Oh, yes. It could go anyplace you wanted. I can remember carrying my bowling ball on the streetcar coming home at midnight. I would come walking up the alley with my sixteen-pound ball.

DB: And feeling completely secure.

MS: Secure. Not afraid to walk up the alley.

DB: And of course in those days there were no lights in the alleys.

MS: [Chuckles] That’s right. Yes.

DB: There weren’t lights in the middle of the block. There was only a light on the street corner.

MS: That’s right.

DB: Was your mother real excited to have you back?

MS: Oh, yes. She was. She was happy to have me back.

DB: How long did you work at Wards?

MS: I worked at Wards until 1951. Then I took a Civil Service test, and for being in the service you got five points, so I passed that pretty good and that’s when I got my job at Fort Snelling. I worked in an insurance company at Fort Snelling.

DB: Regular government job?

MS: A regular government job.

DB: Do you remember what you were making then? What kind of an income?

MS: No. If I look in my book, I think I was a class 5. Whatever they paid. But it was good pay.

DB: And you were living with your mom.

MS: I lived with my mom until I got married in 1952.

DB: And you continued with your bowling?

MS: Oh, yes.

DB: And you joined a league right away?

MS: Oh, yes. I got on another league soon. In fact, when I got out in 1946, I was already substituting in a league. They knew I was home and they called me up to substitute. I bowled from 1946 right on.

DB: Now everybody is coming home and some of them, like Harold, had been POWs. Did you reconnect with him when he came home? What were some of the things that people talked about, veterans, when they came home? Do you remember?

MS: I don’t think they talked about the war.

DB: Did they talk about their plans, their future aspirations, things they wanted to do?

MS: Not that I remember. No.

DB: A lot of small talk? After the war you’re older, you’ve traveled, you’ve been around, you’ve done things, and there’s lot of people coming back from the war. Did it seem like the economic situation was better after the war? Did it seem like there were still the effects of the war going on? Were there shortages or did it seem like there was a lot of opportunity and people seemed to have hopeful attitudes towards the future? What do you remember from the way people talked at that time? What were they talking about?

MS: I can’t remember how people talked, but to me it didn’t make any difference. I could do what I wanted. I could buy what I wanted. I had no trouble that way.

DB: And when you applied for jobs, they were there. You could get the jobs.

MS: Yes. They were there. There were lots of jobs to get.

DB: Now you continued with your bowling, and in 1952 you met somebody through bowling.

MS: Yes. I met Otto at Larry’s Bowling Alley in downtown St. Paul. It’s gone now. There’s a high rise there now. We dated until we got married November 8th.

DB: What kind of dates did you have? What did people do on dates in those days?

MS: We went to movies, and we went out to beer joints and had a few beers. We bowled in a lot of bowling tournaments in doubles, where men and women bowl against each other for prizes. We did that a lot of times on weekends. That didn’t take too much time from January to November. [Chuckles]

DB: And Otto is six foot four.

MS: Yes. Six foot four.

DB: Nice to have a tall guy.

MS: Yes. In fact, as you’re interviewing me now, we just had our wedding anniversary last week. Fifty-five years.

DB: Congratulations. Do you remember his proposal?

MS: Yes. I can remember that we were sitting out in the front of our house after a date, and he got the ring out of his pocket and he asked me to marry him. It was in the front of the house where I lived, sitting in the car.

DB: Were you surprised? Did you see it coming?

MS: I kind of did, because we hung around with another couple and they got married on July 12, 1952. Otto was a bartender at their wedding and I was the maid of honor.

DB: He was just back from Korea when you met him.

MS: Yes. I think he got back in December of 1951.

DB: How was he doing with all that? He’d been in some pretty significant combat.

MS: He never talked about the war when I was going with him. Do you know what I mean? He never talked about it at all. But he had a job. He got back to work at Cudahy’s.

DB: Did you ever talk about the Marines with him?

MS: I imagine I told him I was in the Marine Corps, but I can’t . . .

DB: And he told you he was in the Army.

MS: Yes.

DB: But it just was old news.

MS: Yes.

DB: Looking toward the future. Where did you get married?

MS: We got married at St. Agnes Church. He being a Lutheran and I being a Catholic we could not get married upstairs in the big church. We had to get married downstairs in the chapel at that time. And we could not get married in the morning. We had to have an afternoon wedding, because that’s how strict they were then. But now I understand they have rabbis, the Lutheran pastors and the priests all together at one ceremony. But times have changed.

DB: Was that a source of friction in the family or was that just . . .?

MS: No, no.

DB: Okay. Just the way it was.

MS: Just the way it was. There was no friction because one of us was Catholic and one was Lutheran.

DB: Was it difficult finding someplace to live?

MS: We lived upstairs at my mother’s. She had an apartment upstairs, so she gave her tenants the notice to move because she knew we were getting married. We lived upstairs at my mother’s from 1952 to 1954.

DB: Did you pay rent?

MS: Oh, yes. We paid $75 a month rent.

DB: And was your mother still pretty healthy at this time?

MS: Oh, yes. Yes. My mother was in her early sixties. It was real nice, because my mother did a lot of cooking for us and did a lot of things for us because we both worked. It was a good situation, a good setup. Of course, Otto cut the grass and he did things around the house, too.

DB: But at some point you wanted to get your own place.

MS: Yes. At some point. Then we bought that house at 615 North Street, and in July of 1954, we moved over there.

DB: And what kind of a house was it?

MS: It was a fifteen-room house. It’s a beautiful house, and it still sits there. They had a receiving room and a big circular stairway going to the upstairs. It was a nice house.

DB: A Victorian house?

MS: It was like a Victorian house. It had fifteen rooms, and we bought that and divided that into three apartments. One upstairs and two downstairs. We lived there until 1956.

DB: And you were doing all the work yourselves?

MS: We did all the work, and Otto had an uncle that was a carpenter. He’d come every weekend and he would help us. We divided the house off and made two apartments out of the bottom. But it was a lot of work.

DB: You had tenants then?

MS: Yes. We had tenants. Upstairs and one downstairs.

DB: Now to do all this work on the house, you quit your job?

MS: I quit my job. I quit my job with the government because Otto was still working at Cudahy’s.

DB: Was that tough to quit your job, or something you wanted to do? Something that just needed to be done?

MS: I didn’t want to do it, but we had to do it.

DB: So you were helping with a lot of the carpentry and . . .?

MS: Yes. I wallpapered and painted during the day, and then Otto would help at night. Then in October of 1954, Cudahy’s closed.

DB: What prompted that?

MS: They just closed the plant down. I don’t know.

DB: So Otto is out of work.

MS: So Otto is out of work and Marge is out of work.

DB: Did Otto get unemployment or anything?

MS: He got a severance pay. He never got unemployment, but he got a severance pay. It wasn’t very much at that time.

DB: Because he’d been there about ten years.

MS: Yes. It was probably like $700 or something like that. But we had bills. We had a plumbing bill. We had a carpenter bill. We had a paint bill. Oh, boy! We had so many bills.

DB: You had a mortgage?

MS: And a mortgage and everything.

DB: And nobody’s working.

MS: And nobody’s working. However, I had a sister who worked at Curtiss 1000.

DB: Which is . . .?

MS: A stationary store. They printed forms and sold pencils and erasers and made bankbooks, and little savings account books. It was like a stationary store. It was up at 1000 University Avenue. She got me a job there. So that’s where I went to work in 1954. Then Otto did odd jobs from 1954 to 1957 when he got a job down at Harkins—a steady job, I would say. But he did a lot of jobs in between.

DB: How long did you live in this house on North?

MS: We lived there until July of 1956. Then we moved to Roseville.

DB: And both you and Otto continued to bowl all the time?

MS: Oh, yes. We bowled. I bowled three or four times a week and he bowled twice a week.

DB: On the same team?

MS: No. I bowled with the women. He bowled with the men.

DB: Okay. They didn’t have mixed teams?

MS: No, we never bowled mixed teams. We only bowled in tournaments, mixed tournaments . . . but we never bowled on the same team together.

DB: You had a lot of achievements when you were bowling.

MS: Oh, yes.

DB: Talk about some of your achievements in bowling.

MS: I started to bowl over at the Mohawk Lanes in 1940, and I continued bowling there until about 1976, a total of around thirty-six years. I bowled in the Midway Majors, a city league down at the Hamm Building, in the Harkins Classic, the traveling league, and the All-Star league. I maintained an average of 187 in the league for three years. I bowled in the Classic and the All-Star League for twenty-six years. I was a member of the city tournament in 1966, with 611 scratch. I was named to the championship team six times: in 1955, 1956, 1964, 1965, 1967 and 1968. I was named to the All-City Team in 1956-57, 1957-58, 1958-59, 1960-61, 1961, and 1956-66. While working in the Marine Corps in 1945, I won the Service Tournament Team, the doubles, and all events with entries from the California area. I shared the doubles title with my sister, Anne Grandl, in the Northern Bowling Tournament in Fargo, North Dakota. I placed second in the doubles WIBC Tournament with Bunny Weidell in 1958. I participated in the WI Queen’s Tournament at Portland, Oregon, had a high 687 series average and a high total team of 278, which was also high in the city in the 1962-63 season. I appeared on the Sunday Night Bowling All-Star Team for seven straight weeks, had a lifetime average of 182 and well over 600 totals. I served as Vice President of the City League and All-Star League, and as Vice President of the St. Paul 600 Club for seventeen years. I was elected to the St. Paul Hall of Fame in 1984 for superior performance.

DB: Okay. Now, just recently, you got an even greater honor.

MS: Now just recently I received a greater honor. About a month ago, I received a letter from Austin, Minnesota. I wondered, who do I know in Austin, Minnesota . . .? So I opened it up and here is what it says:

You have been elected to the 2008 Minnesota Bowling Hall of Fame in the Pioneer Category.

Which means I have been honored at the Hall of Fame, which will be held in April of 2008 in Roseville. And, believe me, this was quite an honor to receive this. I just was mortified. I didn’t know what to think. After all these years. I haven’t bowled since 1976. Here I get a letter that I’m into the Minnesota Hall of Fame, which is quite an honor. It really is.

DB: It proves that others haven’t forgotten about your bowling skills.

MS: Yes. Thank you.

DB: There were a lot of changes that took place after World War II. Now you grew up in the center city of St. Paul in an older home, and then you got married and you bought an older home and rehabbed it. You turned it into apartments with your husband. Then you were one of the . . . what should I say? The early people to move into Roseville, a new and developing suburban area.

MS: Yes. We were the first house to be built on Clarmar Avenue in Roseville.

DB: What had that been beforehand?

MS: That was just farmland. All farmland. And that is just one half block from Arden Hills, where Roseville and Arden Hills come together. Ray Kroiss built the houses.

DB: That was the developer?

MS: That was the developer. We were the first house built there, and they used our water and our electricity to build the houses next to us and the houses behind us. Even the houses across the street from us.

DB: How fast was the development going up there? Pretty fast?

MS: It took three months for our house to be built.

DB: It was a rambler?

MS: Yes. It was a two-bedroom rambler.

DB: Do you remember the address?

MS: It was 1409 Clarmar.

DB: Was that a pretty thrilling thing, a pretty exciting thing for you to have a brand new home?

MS: Yes. It was. A brand new house, after having to live in this little house that we lived in upstairs with my mother. That was just a little house. Then when we moved over to North Street, the house that we bought and put together, we just had three little rooms over there until we rented it out and built out in Roseville. We lived there until 1961.

DB: Was it exciting and easy to go out and get the furnishing for a new house? The stores and everything were in place? You could do all that?

MS: Yes, yes.

DB: It wasn’t difficult.

MS: No, no. There were furniture stores out there. That was easy.

DB: Did the companies make deliveries?

MS: Oh, yes.

DB: Telephone service?

MS: Yes. We had telephone service.

DB: One phone in the house probably?

MS: One phone. And then we had a cesspool. We had a cesspool when we first started there, and then about two years later they put in the sewer in the street. Then we had city water out there in Roseville.

DB: When did you see your first TV set?

MS: I would say when I bought the first TV from a company on University Avenue. It was an Airline, and I put it on credit, and I was still living at home with my mother. I would say 1950 was the first TV I owned.

DB: And you had a credit card in those days?

MS: Not a credit card. I put it on lay-by. You know, where you had to pay every month. It was an Airline TV. I can remember that.

DB: A big wooden box and a little tiny screen?

MS: Yes, it was.

DB: What kind of programming? Dave Garroway? [Editor’s note: Dave Garroway was the founding host of NBC’s “Today” program.]

MS: I can’t remember that. I can remember my mother and her lady friend had to watch wrestling every Friday night.

DB: Is that where the name Vern Gagne reoccurred?

MS: No. I don’t know how that got in there. I don’t know how I ever found out that it was him. I’m trying to think now. They used to sit on the end of the davenport and say, “Give it to him, give it to him!” They used to fight all the time about who was going to win the match. That was the first TV that I remember.

DB: And transportation. You had to drive a few miles to get to work at the stationery company. Was driving there any problem?

MS: My sister lived next door to us in Roseville, and she worked there too, so we would ride with one of the workers at Curtiss. He would pick us up, and then her husband worked at American Hoist and Derrick, and he would pick us up at night.

DB: You carpooled.

MS: Carpool. Yes. But she lived right next door.

DB: And you got to see the freeways get built.

MS: Yes. I did see them. I remember Interstate 94 getting built, because that used to be Rondo Avenue and Central Avenue over there. When I was a young girl, we used to go down to Central and Western when the Holy Rollers had their tent down there. We would sneak underneath the tent and watch them roll on the floor and have their prayers or whatever they did.

DB: And the coming of the big grocery stores. Was that a big change or did you just take it in stride?

MS: Yes, we took that in stride, because when we got married we had a Country Club Market right up by our house on the East Side there. They weren’t big stores like Cub or Rainbow is now. They were pretty good. You could get anything you wanted.

DB: A big change from your mother’s days.

MS: Well, yes. In the days, when we were kids, we just had a little butcher shop. They didn’t sell groceries. They just sold the butcher things. Then the grocery store was maybe down a of couple streets.

DB: You went to the bakery for bakery goods, and went to the butcher shop for meat products.

MS: Yes. And I can remember we always had a charge account at the grocery store. Whenever we paid the bill, my mother would probably send us down with a couple of dollars to pay the bill that she owed him. Then he probably gave us a can of peas or a can of corn for paying the bill.

DB: He gave you a little bonus, you mean.

MS: Yes, a little bonus. That was a big deal.

DB: In the 1950s you had difficult work schedules. You worked days. Your husband worked nights.

MS: Yes. After Otto got laid off at Cudahy’s he got a job down at Harkins, and he was manager of the bar. I was working at Curtiss 1000, and I went to work at eight o’clock in the morning and I got out of there at three thirty and got home about four. He started to work at six in the evening at Harkins, and worked until one in the morning. So we just about met each other in the kitchen. He’d have supper ready when I was coming home. He was already eating and ready to go to work, and I sat down and did the dishes and then he worked all night. He came home at two o’clock in the morning, and I got up at eight o’clock in the morning and went back to work. That was our life.

DB: So you saw each other on the weekends.

MS: Then he did have Thursdays off. He worked Thursday during the day, and he had Thursday night off. That was his only night off from bartending. Of course, then he did have Sundays off. But there was always a tournament down at Harkins, and he had to be there to open the bar. That was our life until Harkins burnt in 1968. It burned right to the ground. Everything was destroyed.

DB: Harkins was a restaurant or . . .?

MS: It was a bowling alley. It had twenty-four alleys upstairs, and down below they had a restaurant and a place where men could come to play pool. They had regular teams down there. And they had a barbershop in the basement. The whole thing burned down, and so Otto was out of a job. And he stayed out . . . his boss said, “You know, Otto, we’re going to build. We’re going to rebuild. Don’t look for another job. Don’t look for another job.” Well, it got to be November, and I said to Otto, “Otto, pretty soon winter is going to be here. You better have a job. We can’t live here . . .” Of course, he did a lot of work around the house. He did all this stone work and everything.

DB: So you were living out here in Cottage Grove then?

MS: Yes. We were living out here when Harkins burnt, because we moved here in 1961. And Harkins burnt in April of 1968. So I said to Otto, “You’d better get a job. Winter is coming pretty soon.”

DB: Was he getting any unemployment compensation at all?

MS: No. He didn’t get unemployment either, because his boss said, “Don’t get another job. We’re going to open. We’re going to rebuild.” Well, they never did rebuild. I don’t know how he got to hear about this place in Newport that was for sale, but we went down there and we made the deal. I quit my job at Curtiss, and we both worked in the store for fifteen years.

DB: But it ended up being a real good move.

MS: Yes, it was. It was a very good move when you look at what we have now. We were well taken care of.

DB: And how did you find this house?

MS: We moved to Roseville in 1956, and we had a nice yard, flagpole and everything. Otto really had nothing to do. It was just a home, and he always had to have something to do. He got to talk to some real estate man at the bar at Harkins. I think it was Rothchilds. And he said to Otto, “I’ve got a place to show you. It’s not a place on a lake, but it’s a place on a river, if you’d like to take a look at it.” And Otto said, “Well, yes, I’ll take a look at it.” This, I guess, was in February of 1961.

So they took him down there, and there was snow on the ground and everything. Then he took me down there. He brought my mother along, and we all looked it over, and then we thought, yes, this is kind of a nice place. But it was nothing like it is today. This was all woods down here. The house was in a wooded area. But Otto saw a lot of potential and things that he could do with it, and that’s when we bought this house. And then we moved here in August of 1961.

DB: And were you happy about that?

MS: I didn’t mind. I had pretty far to go to work, because I was still working at Curtiss. But they arranged for me to come in early and leave early so I would miss the traffic. They were good to me. I was sad when I left Curtiss, because I had a good job there. I left a good paying job and a good pension, which I lost because everything that was in the pension, it was arranged so they kept it if you quit. Had I been laid off, or some other thing had happened to me, I probably would have got the money. But I lost all the money that I had in a pension at Curtiss.

DB: But again, you got into a scary situation but it turned out to be a good situation.

MS: That’s right.

DB: And made up the difference in the long run.

MS: Yes. Some days you didn’t have any business. When it got to be twenty below zero in the winter, nobody came to the liquor store. [Chuckles] And then I kind of worked days and he worked the nights.

DB: So, again, you had alternating shifts.

MS: Yes.

DB: Did you have to get into managing employees, too, or were you just pretty much the two of you?

MS: It was pretty much the two of us until maybe three years into it, and then he got a full time boy. Then we kind of rotated. When the kid couldn’t work then I would work, or if he had to go take his kids to school or take them to the doctor I’d go and fill in.

DB: It gave the two of you more compatible shifts anyway.

MS: Yes.

DB: Now this area when you moved out here—in fact, probably until just fairly recently—was all farms.

MS: All farms.

DB: What’s happening now?

MS: Up on the hill there? I can’t tell you how many houses have been built up there in the last five years. I have to say two hundred houses, just up there on the hill. But nothing down here, because anybody that has property down here won’t sell it. And often their kids want it. There is no property for sale around here. I would say when we moved here I think there were eighty . . . if I’m right now . . . there were eighty families down here on what they call the island and around this area. Probably now there’s a hundred. There may have been twenty houses built in the last forty years.

DB: So in your immediate area, the character has remained pretty much the same.

MS: Yes, yes. But like next door. They’ve been here for fifty years. Our neighbors up there all been here fifty years. They were here before us.

DB: And at some point you sold the liquor business?

MS: Yes. We sold the liquor business in 1983. We have been out of that now for twenty-four years. And we just lived here and retired. Otto quit working when he was sixty.

DB: Able to take good vacations?

MS: Yes. Oh, yes.

DB: Vacations that you couldn’t even have dreamed of in the 1920s and 1930s.

MS: We’ve been to Hawaii nineteen times. I’ve been to Europe five times.

DB: Do you ever go back and try to trace your ancestors in Austria?

MS: A couple times we went over, and when you go into different places they have big books that you can look up family names, but we never did. We never did find the Otto Schmaltz name or the Kufner name. We never did when we were over there. But we’ve been to Europe five or six times. Otto has been over there more because he went over there for the D-Day celebration.

DB: So you had a good life.

MS: We had a good life. Yes. Still have.

DB: You had an interesting life and lots of achievements with your sports.

MS: Yes. I only have one sad thing, I think, in my life and that was in 1995 when I lost three family members in eleven months. I lost a brother, brother-in-law, and a sister. And Otto lost his sister.

DB: Just natural causes.

MS: Yes. Well, cancer. Three of them were to cancer and one was a stroke. That was sad. You had to take care of their houses and have garage sales, and those are sad years.

DB: Hard business. Yes.

MS: Then in 1996 we had the storm here that almost took our house. It took the roof off of our house. We had $70,000 worth of damage.

DB: What kind of a storm was that?

MS: It was a tornado, and it took the roof right off the house. We didn’t live in this house for three months.

DB: Were you home at the time?

MS: Yes. It happened at one o’clock in the morning.

DB: Did you know anything was coming?

MS: Oh, yes. It was coming. Otto said to me, “We’d better go downstairs.” The lights were out and it was storming. We got to about the first step going downstairs and this great big boom came and I said, “Oh, my God. That’s got to be the lime kiln. It has knocked the lime kiln over.” He said, “No. That’s the roof off of our house.” The water just came pouring in. Just pouring in. We had buckets, those big thirty-gallon buckets all over. The water came through the lights. It came through the sockets. Water came in everywhere. We had to get out. At nighttime we lived at the Holiday Inn across from 3M up there on I-94, for three months.

DB: Good insurance coverage took care of everything?

MS: Very good coverage. The St. Paul Insurance Company. It was very good. They took very good care of us. Everything we wanted and more.

DB: You told me that Otto liked to work around the house, so it probably gave him plenty of projects.

MS: Well, no. They gave us a construction company and they did everything. They did everything. This used to be a flat roof house and it took the roof right off. But when we had the new roof put on, we had a hip roof put on it.

I think, if I remember right, we lost about seventy trees. We had a tree on every building. We have five buildings here, including the house, and on every building there was a tree knocked down. We lost about seventy trees. This was all trees out here in our backyard. And I had just planted maybe a hundred or a hundred and fifty plants the day before over in my garden. The roof came and fell right into my garden. Our neighbor next door had one of those little utility sheds. That blew away. To this day, she hasn’t found it. She doesn’t know where it landed . . . it was just a terrible storm. All the trees were down. Oh! It was something else.

DB: What was the date? May?

MS: May 19, 1996.

DB: You’re lucky you survived. You ended up putting big tarps on the house?

MS: Our house was encased in a blue tarp. They had a little canopy out here that you had to walk through to get in the house. We stayed at the Holiday Inn, and then we’d come here every day. We would come here every day to see how they were doing. But the insurance company was very good to us, and they gave us the name of a construction company that took care of everything. And they did. They treated us very good. All the floors in here are hardwood. When the inspector came . . . he was out here the next day from the insurance company . . . he said, “The first thing you’ve got to get out of here is those rugs.” Because they didn’t want to have to pay for the floors warping. So they sent men in here and they hauled all our furniture out into the garage. All we had in here was a TV and two chairs.

DB: The garage was saved somewhat?

MS: Yes. The garage was okay, although it had a tree on it. In fact, the stump is still out there. Everything had a tree on it. But they came in and they took care of everything. This back porch here, that was six inches off of the foundation. That back porch is all new. It was something, but everybody in the neighborhood had the same thing, too.

DB: Everybody was supportive and helped everybody else out.

MS: Yes, they did.

DB: You’ve had a lot of achievements and you’re having an interesting life. As you said, it continues. So thank you very much.

MS: You’re welcome.

DB: It was a great interview. Thank you very much.

MS: Thank you too. It was very nice.