This print book includes the first singles catalogue that my stepfather ordered after he returned to his farm from World War Two in October 1945 and began his search for a wife. The $2.99 PDF download includes the compete book plus all the singles publications he ordered and a preview of Pawns (The Farm, 1950s), …
Lakeland Televison Interview
A few months ago I received the Minnesota Humanity Center “2017 Veteran’s Voices Award.” The following week I was interviewed by our local television station–I guess I forgot to post it on my blog.
Where’s The Beef?
This past week, we reached a milestone. In March, 2014, I visited with my former employer about a vision I had to supply our local food shelf with ground beef. The late Mr. Joe Lueken liked the idea and the program kicked off two months later. Sadly, Joe passed away, but the program continues on …
Angels on Earth
About six months after my friend, Deland, died in 1999, his widow and her family came to our farm, homeless and hungry. Angie is a proud lady and offered to repay our help. I told her that anything we shared with her was a gift. So began a journey that continues today. Deland and I …
WWII Veterans and PTSD
I recently read Thomas Childers Soldier From The War Returning (2009) in which he explores the lives of three Second World War veterans and their families. The book documents a part of our collective past—an inconvenient truth—that has been airbrushed from our national memory. Yet millions of Baby Boomers grew up in the shadow of …
70 Years ago, A Few Months After Victory over Japan
My grandmother’s diary entry: 11-18-1945: Walked through Central Park—a telegram from John Curry saying he had arrived in San Francisco from Tokyo and was leaving for New York on Friday. This picture, taken two years before I was born, jumped out at me perhaps because of the date. My mother Barbara, oldest brother Chris, about …
Ewa (Eva) Barbacka, my Mother’s Lost Friend from WWII
In September 1939 my mother wrote, Eva Barbacka was a typical Slavic type—a very pale complexion, a round sweet face, large grayish blue eyes and a head of reddish brown waving hair. To tell the truth I had always been a little afraid of her. At that time I did not know that the Slavic …
My Mother’s PTSD
I’ve prayed so much that her life would straighten itself out – the more I think of it the more I feel it is possible her war experience unconsciously to her was eating out her vitals – how tragic life is for the world. Henry O. Philips, January 23, 1943 Written by my grandfather, a …
Chickenhouse Chronicles—-Genesis
A few months after my mother, Barbara, died in 2010 I discovered a time capsule—including my grandparent’s urns— locked in the chickenhouse on our old homestead in northern Minnesota. (I stopped calling her Mom the spring of 1962. In 1960 she had been committed to Fergus Falls State Hospital—we children had been sent to foster …
First Thanksgiving Rememberance 1937 Thanksgiving Celebration, Brussels, Belgium
After my mother died in 2010 I discovered this church service bulletin tucked in a mouse-stained scrapbook, locked in the Chickenhouse on our old family homestead in northern Minnesota, USA. Holland played an important part in the first pilgrims–Separatists from England’s religious persecution. Apparently those roots were still celebrated in 1937. Are they still celebrated …