First Home in Willmar

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Pictures of houses that I lived in as a child bring back memories. This is the first house my family lived in when we moved to Willmar. To tell of it, I need to go back a few years before.

Mom lived in Blackduck all of her life, and Dad lived on a farm out the Scenic Highway from Blackduck all of his life. When they married in 1945, they rented a little house in Blackduck. But they found that jobs for Dad were scarce, and those that were available didn't pay enough for them to raise their family, so the decision was made to move to St. Paul where job opportunities would be better, and stay with Grandma Paul while Dad looked for work.

Dad found a job working on an assembly line at a factory called Seegers, where refrigerators were made. He hated it. He was a country boy, and although he was never afraid of hard work, he just didn't like living in the city and working in a factory. So he kept at it, but looked for jobs somewhere else where he could raise his family in a smaller town. In 1951, after Libby was born, he found an ad in the Sunday newspaper for a job working for the State of Minnesota taking samples of grain in Willmar.

Now, this was at a time when men wore suits much more often than now. Men wore suits to church, to go to a restaurant or to the movies, and especially when they went to interview for a job. So after consulting a map to find out where Willmar was, Dad set off wearing his best suit, to apply for the job. He thought that perhaps the job was in a lab of some sort, testing grain for whatever they tested for. He was wrong.

After applying for the job, he was put to work immediately. He found himself in the railroad yard at Willmar, climbing into boxcars, wearing his suit pants and starched white shirt. He carried a brass probe that was about 6 ft. long. The probe was made of two brass pipes about 4 inches in diameter, one inside the other. Both had holes on the sides that, when the ball knob at the top of the probe was turned, would line up and allow grain to pour into the inside pipe. The knob was then turned again, trapping a sample of the grain inside the center pipe. He pushed the probe down into the grain and took several samples in each boxcar, and the samples of grain were emptied into a long cloth sack that was then sent off to be tested. Upon arriving back in St. Paul that evening, he first told Mom that they were moving to Willmar. The second thing he did was to go out and buy a couple of pairs of bib overalls. He would work this job until he retired 25 years later.

Dad worked with Lowell Ekbom, who was to become Dad's best friend. At that time, Lowell and his wife Ellie ran a small neighborhood grocery store located in an older house on the east end of Willmar. They lived above their store. Lowell told Dad about an apartment for rent in the same block as their store. It was the upper floor of a house owned by a rather large, homely Swedish lady that I knew as Mrs. Larson. She had a heart of pure gold. She helped Mom and Dad furnish the little apartment and was lenient on the rent until Dad was back on his feet.

The apartment had a small living room located at the front of the house, facing the street. There were two small bedrooms, a tiny bathroom and a kitchen. The kitchen was at the rear of the house, and was accessed from the outside by a wooden staircase. I still remember the white painted table and chairs in the kitchen, and mittens drying on the radiator just inside the door.

There was a little girl just my age living in the house next door. Her name was Annie, and we were best of friends. A large hedge separated the two houses. It was not a hedge that was kept trimmed, but one that had branches hanging down, and when the leaves came out in the spring, it made a wonderful place for two little girls to play. We played house, using the branches as the walls of our house. We also played "Indians." Most kids at that time played "Cowboys and Indians." Roy Rogers and Gene Autrey were popular then. The neighbor boys weren't allowed in our make-believe tee-pee under the hedge, and if you played "Cowboys and Indians," you had to shoot people when the Indians attacked the cowboys, and we didn't want to shoot anybody, so we played "Indians." We spent some time feeling sorry for ourselves, as we both had baby sisters who took our parents attention away from us, but mostly we just had fun together. We learned to ride bikes at the same time, and when the training wheels came off, we explored our end of town. I lost touch with Annie when our family moved way across town.

We didn't have a television then. I had seen television. Grandma Paul had one. But we had a marvelous big console radio in the living room. It was a piece of furniture that was about table top high and maybe 2-1/2 feet wide. The radio part was in the top third of the console, and had a dial that lit up and lots of knobs for tuning in stations from all over the country. The speakers were built into the bottom two-thirds. We listened to the radio in the evenings. We heard music from the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, and listened to serial stories like "Fibber McGee and Molly." This was a comedy that had a running gag. In each episode, McGee would open his closet door, and everything that was crammed into it would come tumbling out, with appropriate sound effects that seemed to go on forever. Music to a kid's ears. Dad loved cowboy music - Gene Autrey, Ernest Tubb and Hank Williams, and Mom liked the crooners - Frank Sinatra, Frankie Laine and Bing Crosby. I liked the stories. There were detective stories like "Dragnet," and "Johnny Dollar," and the westerns, "Gunsmoke," and "Roy Rogers." We listened to the comedy of George Burns & Gracie Allen and Jack Benny. The first major news event I remember listening to was the election of Dwight Eisenhower as President. Recently I found on the Internet a website where I can listen to radio from the 40's and 50's. It is fun to listen and remember while working on my computer.

One winter while we were living in the apartment, I remember a snowstorm that roared through Willmar. I don't think it was a major blizzard, but it dumped quite a bit of snow and then the winds blew it into big drifts. After the snow stopped and the wind died down, Dad and I bundled up and headed the block down the street to Lowell and Ellie's store for some badly needed supplies. The wind had piled snow in some places so high that a couple of cars were completely covered. Dad let me walk over the drifts right on top of the cars. When we got home, we took Libby out to play with us in the snow. She was just a toddler then, and she managed to toddle right off the edge of the porch. She disappeared from sight in the snow. Dad dug her out and then decided that we'd had enough fun in the snow for one day.

We lived in that apartment about three years before moving to a little house on the west end of Willmar.