Mom's first jobs

Mom at 14
This is her confirmation photo from 1937.

"I remember the first time I got paid for doing work. I was still a little kid. The Anderssons i Mellangården were hoeing in the turnip field. That was one of the jobs where we helped each other because you needed several people. I had never been allowed to go anywhere else and help. I had done the job at home, but you had to be big to go somewhere else. Papa told me I couldn’t go. He said, “You’re too little. You can’t earn your wages.” But when Lydia and Henning heard that I wanted to come, they said, “Sure she can come.” Then Papa said ok. Lydia and Henning arranged that I got a row in between the two of them and when I got a little behind, they would reach over and hoe a bit in my row, so I kept up with everybody all day long. In the evening, Farbror Anderson was sitting outside and was going to pay everybody. The bigger kids got paid first, and I stood off to the side because I wasn’t sure I’d earned anything. He called me up and said, “They say you did a real good job,” and he gave me the equivalent of a couple of quarters. Oh, I thought I was rich.

Dagmar Johansson, 1937

I had my first job away from home when I was 14. I had been sent to Mormor’s friend Tant Johansson in Kisa. Mormor and Tant Johansson had been very personal friends. Now she was bedridden. She had a daughter named Dagmar who worked in a bank and so had to go to work. She couldn’t stay home and take care of her mother, but it got to where Tant Johansson couldn’t be home alone all day. I was sent there to watch her and help look after the home. One day as Dagmar went off to work in the morning, she told me, “There is a meatbone in the refrigerator. I want you to cook some soup for us to have for dinner tonight.” I didn’t want to tell her that I didn’t really know how to cook soup from a bone. After she left, I called Mama and asked, “What do I do?” Mama told me to start it right away because the bone had to cook a long time, and she told me what else to put in the pot with the bone. Whatever I did, Dagmar thought that was the best soup she had ever had. She said she could tell that Mama had taught me things. That was my first job away from home where I had to stay somewhere else overnight. I was very lonely, but I stayed until Dagmar’s sister came home. She had a sister who was an RN, but was now retired and was going to stay home and take care of her mother.

Margit Bengtsson, 1948

My second real job was in Kisa. I was working for one of the sewing teachers we had had at the Kjettestorp school, Tant Margit. She married an old bachelor teacher in Kisa named Mauritz Bengtsson who was a friend of Dad’s. I was to help clean or cook or whatever was needed. The funniest part of the job was this Mauritz Bengtsson. He was really what you might call a forgetful professor. They lived a little bit away from the school, so he used to walk to school. He worked at the Stjärneboskolan. That was the biggest school in Kisa in those days. He used to carry an umbrella with him when he left because it might be raining when he was walking home. Invariably, he came home without the umbrella. Then I would take my bike and ride over to the school and get the umbrella. Then sometimes if he was late in the morning, he would ask if he could borrow my bike. Again, almost every time he did this, he forgot the bike

Mauritz Bengtsson, 1957

I love that he's missed the

middle button on his jacket :P

and I’d walk over to the school and get my bike. One day I couldn’t find the bike at school. I looked in all the bicycle stands that I could find but no bike, so I went back home and said I couldn’t find it. “Oh,” he said, “I think I went into town before I came home. It must be in there somewhere.” Then he told me the different stores he had been to. So then I walked into Kisa. That was twice as far as to the school. I finally found my bike in the bicycle stand by the hardware store. It was evening when I found it.  I guess that’s what you call the good old days. That bike had been sitting there for half a day and nobody took it. We had never heard of bike locks. Well, I worked for these people for half a year. After that, they had a pipe that had frozen in the bathroom and they had a flood of water down the wall in the living room and the kitchen. They couldn’t use some of these rooms without a big remodeling. So then there was not much for me to do there.

The next job I had was at Centralföreningen. That was a cooperative owned by farmers. It was a countywide thing. We had a manager whose name was Vredman. I and Brita Hermanson from Korpklev were office workers there. We typed up bills and different things like that and kept the books. Out in the warehouse there was an old guy named

1940

Månsson and his son named Alf, but we called him Affe. At the same time, Margaretha worked at Skogsföreningen. That was a cooperative for forest owners. She did the bookwork there. Margaretha and I used to ride our bicycles to work. All summer, we got up and milked the cows before we went to work and when we got home in the evening. The offices closed at 5, and when we got home, we did the evening milking too. For that we got room and board. We used to make a lunch and take with us. We had fun riding our bikes back and forth. There’s one spot in the road where there’s a bend by Farsbo, and then it was really uphill. There were starting to be more trucks on the road at that point but they weren’t very powerful. They would almost have to come to a standstill before they could take that curve and then go up the hill.  Many times, Margaretha and I would stand up on our bikes and pedal hard, and we could pass the trucks on that uphill place. That was sort of a sport of ours. Then when you come to the top there it’s downhill almost all the way to Kisa, so we used to make it to Kisa before the trucks did."

Mom is in the middle here and I'm pretty sure it's Moster Brita to the right. I'm not sure who the third woman is. I love that they're so well-dressed and Mom's got a beret on :)