Uncle Otto visits from America

Otto Carlsson, sitting
in the yard at Kjettestorp

"There were eight siblings in my Morfar’s family, and it was only Morfar and Tekla who stayed in Sweden. All the others went to Minnesota and out of all of them, only one got married. That was Fredrick Carlsson. At least that’s what he was called in Sweden. He called himself Fred in Minnesota. His son was also Fred Carlson. The other siblings were John, Otto, Anna, Matilda, and Hanna, all in Minnesota.

One of the women, they used to say, had such a hard time learning English. I don’t remember if that was Anna or Matilda. She used to say, “Jag kan inte förstår varför de kalla en häst a Horse när det är en häst!” (“I can’t understand why they call a häst a Horse, when it is a häst!”)

Uncle Otto came home to visit once. It was in 1947, I think. Thorbjörn was about a year old; I remember him as a little baby in the pictures that were taken. Well, how it happened was one day, with no forewarning whatsoever, they called from the radio station and told Mama, “We have an American here who wants to come up to your place. What shall we do?” Mama asked if they could help him to the bus station and put him on the bus. They said they could. So then I was sent down to the road to meet the bus. 

Lennart carrying Onkel 

Otto's luggage

When I saw it coming, I waved it down and stopped the bus and asked the driver if he had an American on board. I saw a man jump up back there on the bus and he said, “O Elin! Ä’ de’ du?” (“Oh Elin! Is that you?”) He thought I was my mother. Well, we got his trunks off there but they were too heavy for us to carry up the hill.  I thought we could leave them there and someone could bring a horse and wagon back to get them, but he would not leave them down by the fence. He thought for sure someone would come and steal them. So we dragged and fought them up behind some rocks so they were out of sight. Then we walked home and Lennart was home, so he went and took a horse and wagon and got the suitcases.

Mom and Margaretha are sitting on the ground here. Thor, Uncle Otto and Elin are in the middle

and in the back row stand Henrik and Brita, Lennart, and Sara, Ingemar and baby Thorbjörn.

Uncle Otto stayed with us for several months. He was the first person I ever heard speak what now we’d call Swenglish. He didn’t like to walk on the gravel path. He walked on the grass instead. Someone asked him why he did this and he said, “The gravel cutter up skorna.” Meaning, “the gravel will cut up my shoes” but it was some real Swenglish. One day he was sitting outside and all of a sudden he didn’t know where his jacket was. He said, “Ja tenker dos

This picture has nearly the same group as the

previous one but here Astor joins Margaretha

in the back row and Mom must be the photographer.

kidsen tog den.” “I think those kids took it.” But again it was something of a mixture of Swedish and English. And we knew that was Inger and Rune Davidson. They were just little kids; what would they do with a jacket? We looked around and found it, of course. And we called him Onkel Otto, our version of Uncle.

We had many family gatherings while Uncle Otto was home and one time Nisse i Grönede asked him to sing something. Well, he started to sing “Nicolina,” an old old song. (I found a version of this song on Youtube which is sung in a very twangy English -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvyTcoEiSHw ).

I also remember he got sick. I don’t remember if it was a kidney stone or a gall stone. He was in the hospital and had surgery. Relatives went and visited him there just about every day but, nobody called and said that he was ready to come home. Well, one day, all of a sudden I came through the hallway and I saw him sitting out on the porch. He had gone out and gotten into a taxi and come back to Kjettestorp! He talked a lot about Minnesota and Minneapolis, in particular."

Mom labeled this shot, "Klar för återförd i Aug. -47" ("Ready to leave in August '47")

I remember the first camera I ever saw

This is Faster Hanna Carlsson and one of the playhouse pictures she took.
The photo of Faster Hanna says it was taken in Minneapolis :)

"The first camera that I ever saw was Faster Hanna’s. She was my

Mother’s Faster and she had come to visit from America. She took a picture or two of us in front of the playhouse. I think I’m about four years old there. AnnaLisa and Karin, our cousins from Rimforsa, are in those pictures too.

Tekla Carlsson

They must have come along with Faster Hannah. Hanna had come to visit her sister who lived in Turnvik outside of Rimforsa. She came to prepare herself to move home. When she got back to America, she got everything packed and came back and lived the rest of her life with her sister Tekla. Neither Tekla nor Hannah had ever been married. And what a treat it was when Margaretha and I were set on the train to go to Rimforsa and they met us at the station and we walked to Turnvik. We spent a whole week with Faster Tekla and Faster Hannah. They waited on us like we were princesses. Coming from a big family, we were used to waiting on ourselves or doing things to help others out.

We almost didn’t know what to do with ourselves. And Faster Hannah let us look at things from America. She had one of these viewers that you put two pictures in side by side and through the viewer they look three dimensional. Oh we thought that was the greatest thing.

One of Farbror Folke's pictures.
Left to right on the bottom step are
Margaretha, Mom and Henrik.
In the middle is Karin. The back
row has Brita, AnnaLisa and Sara. 

The next camera I saw was Farbror Folke’s. He brought it with him when he came home. It amazes me now that I think about it how he was able to afford a camera. And he had a car! Someone must have given him the car in one of the congregations that supported him. He took a picture of us kids on the front steps once. Henrik and I are sitting on the lowest front step. Of course it was hard for me to be still long enough to take a picture, so I’m sitting crinkling my skirt in my fingers and digging with my feet in the sand. He also took a picture of the older folks, Mama and Papa, Midi, Hildegard, Ragnar and Farfar. And there stands Margaretha in front. She wasn’t supposed to be in that picture but she was curious and just a couple of years old. I think Henrik snuck in the middle there too somewhere.

Somewhere in my photo albums I have pictures that were taken by a photographer who went around the neighborhood and took pictures of people. So there lined up in front of the barn are Ragnar who’s holding Grålla. She was a grey mare and grey is grå in Swedish so that’s how she became Grålla. In his other hand, he holds a horse named Bläsen. The white mark on a horse’s face was called a bläs and this horse had a big white mark so there he got his name. Then there was Farfar holding Gulli. Gulli was a golden mare with a black mane. She was a brood mare and had foals ever so often. She was such a gentle nice horse that any of us

kids could ride on bareback. We did this even before we were big enough to get up on her back by ourselves. Someone else would lift us up and we would hold onto her mane. Then there's Henrik holding Flora which I think was just a nice horse name. Then there’s Dad with Ayax. Where he got his name I don’t know but he was a son of Gulli. Then there stands Mama and she’s holding Lennart on her arm, and he can’t be more than a year or two old. Then standing a little in the front her, there is Margaretha and I. And I’ve laughed looking at this picture so many times because as a small child, I was always pretty shy. I didn’t like to have to stand still and look up at some man I didn’t know with his black box, so I look so troubled in these pictures. Then next to me stands Margaretha and she smiles and poses even though she was only three or four years old. I thought she was such a pretty little girl. I’ve laughed at that picture over and over to see my frown and her smile.

We also have a picture from that same day of the family in the yard in the front of the house. Ragnar and Papa look like they hadn’t shaved that day. Hildegard and Midi are in it. Mama is sitting holding Lennart in her lap. Brita and Sara are dressed in black dresses with pearl necklaces. They must have been going somewhere or coming home from somewhere; I don’t remember all those details. I think that might be part of why I was somewhat unhappy that day; I was stuck at home as one of the 'little girls' not old enough to dress up and go along."

More on Tant Midi and Tant Hildegard

Hildegard and Midi

"Well, Papa had a sister Hildegard. I’ve talked about how she was crippled from the time when she was nine years old. When we were kids, Hildegard couldn’t put on her own stockings and shoes or do her hair. When she was older, she learned how to do her hair in a different way. She put it up in a net, low on her neck.

In later years, I think I’ve already said that Midi and Hildegard moved to Kisa and then later, they moved to Linköping, and they lived in an apartment there that belonged to the Pentecostal church. The place was called Läroverksgatan. When you came in the door there, the place smelled of natural gas. We had never had any experience with that, and I thought it smelled horrible. They didn’t live there too long before they moved to Kungsgatan 30.

For a while, in Linköping, Hildegard got a job sewing children’s clothes for a store, but she couldn’t earn enough money to support herself. She got a pension for sick people because she couldn’t make enough. Farfar had given her a knitting machine, so she could knits socks and things like that for people, and she still kept using that knitting machine, but she still couldn’t really make a living off that either. Midi worked as a housekeeper for people. Then it happened that Hildegard got a notice from the county that she wasn’t going to receive the pension anymore. Well, Papa went to the next meeting for what we would call the county board of supervisors, the Lanstinget. They said that somebody had reported her as able-bodied. Dad found out that it was the school teacher, Gunnar Brolin. He was in the opposite political party from Dad, and he could be pretty hot-headed. Well, Dad told them that he would be back at the next meeting and he was. He demanded that at least two people had to come with him. Midi and Hildegard lived nearby where this board of supervisors met. He made these two men walk to their house and see for themselves. He told Hildegard to walk across the floor. Both of those men said there was no question that she should have the pension. So she got her pension back.

Left to right, Gunilla, Mom, Brita, Birgitta, and Henrik
in Linköping, 1950

When they lived at Kungsgatan 30, I started to have even more admiration for my brother-in-law Henrik, Brita’s husband. We had gone to school together and had known each other quite a long time, but it’s still nice to see how people grow up. Well, Henrik worked in the post office, and the post office was at the end of Kungsgatan. Every day after a full day’s work -- every day -- he stopped by their apartment to see how my aunts were doing. He stopped to check on his wife’s old aunts, and if they needed anything, he’d go and get it for them before he went home.  I always admired him for that. It showed his good heart, I thought.

Henrik Kindeskog -- I assume this was taken

when he was doing his military service :)

Well, Midi died while they lived there at Kungsgatan 30."

I almost died of Whooping Cough

Kjettestorp Norrgård

"Another thing I thought about while I’m sitting here – medical care has certainly changed in my lifetime. They used to tell me about the first time I got really sick. When I was about three months old, my siblings came down with the whooping cough. The doctor told Mama that there was no need to isolate me because I was nursing so I wouldn’t get it. If by chance I did get it, it would be so slight that they wouldn’t even notice. Well, that doctor was wrong. I got it real hard. I coughed so much that they said I didn’t take any liquid for 24 hours, and I was limp like a rag. They started to mourn me because they were sure I wouldn’t make it. But obviously, I did. It was pretty common for babies to die in those days.

Another time when I was little, I was really sick. I don’t know what was wrong with me that time. They put me in Mama’s bed. Word got around the neighborhood, I guess, and here came Farbror Fredrick from Gräsvederna. I heard him when he came in the kitchen door and he asked, “Is she still alive?”  Then he came in and stood by the bed where I lay and tears were running down his cheeks. I had never seen a man cry before then. He said, “Oh, poor child. Poor child.” Right then I thought he needed more help that I did.

Later on then, when I was bigger, we got the mumps. Everybody got it one after the other and Mama got it. She couldn’t even turn in bed, it hurt so bad. Papa had already had it when he was a kid and I got a light case, so Papa and I took care of all the rest of them.

Carl Adolf Carlsson

I remember a time when it wasn’t me who got hurt; it was Sara. Morfar had a horse named Stjärna because she had a star on her forehead. She was a peculiar horse. Morfar was the one who got along best with Stjärna. She was fine if someone sat in the wagon and held the reins but he could not tie her up to a hitching post. She would pull and fight until she pulled loose or pulled the whole thing over. Then she would just go home. If Morfar needed to go in somewhere, someone had to sit in the wagon and hold onto the reins. It didn’t matter who it was. One time I remember he had come from the store and then he was going to stop at Mama’s and have a cup of coffee. So Sara and I were supposed to sit in the wagon and hold Stjärna. Well, it was really cold out there. I don’t know if there had been some ice on the iron rod by the wagon seat or why Sara bent down and was going to lick on it. You can imagine what happened next. Her lips and her tongue got stuck and she pulled back so quick that she pulled off some skin on both! She started screaming blue murder! Out came Morfar and Mama and what did Morfar say? “Dum unge!” (“Stupid kids”)

Well, and then there’s teeth. It wasn’t at all uncommon to have most or all of your teeth gone by the time you were 60. Sometimes Morfar and Mormor would come by our place on their way to church. There was no other road to Grönede in those days. It took them at least an hour and a half to get to Kisa by horse and buggy. So sometimes, if it was a week

On the right here is Mom's 

Mormor, Anna Matilda, and

on the left is her sister whose

name I can't find right now :( 

when our family wasn’t going to church, they would pick me up or sometimes both Margaretha and I would go along with them to church. Mormor would meet a friend there and they both had black silk scarves around their heads and tied under their chins when they went to church. They both had ginger root to chew on, so they could stay awake during the long sermons. Well, neither one of them had any teeth, so that’s where Margaretha and I would come in. The whole ginger root was too big to put in the mouth at one time -- ginger root is a pretty strong spice -- so Margaretha and I would bite off small pieces for them to chew on. Then they would give us a piece of candy to get the ginger root taste out of our mouths. Both of these ladies couldn’t have been any older than in their 60s, and here I sit with pretty much all my teeth."