Harry and Esther

In my post a few days ago about "seeing through" the current financial fog, I mentioned my paternal grandparents, who raised three sons during the Depression and lived their lives with dignity. Their names were Harry Waldemar Anderson and Esther Emilia (Olson) Anderson. Both were born of Swedish immigrants in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the 1890s. Harry's father was a locomotive engineer; Esther's father loaded iron ore on cargo ships in Lake Superior. Both their fathers were alcoholic, a fairly common occurence at the time given how dreary, hard and short life was for working men then.

Harry left home when he was just a boy, sleeping for awhile in the back of a saloon and earning coins by cleaning out the spitoons. Later, he and a friend tried a vaudeville song and dance act which didn't draw much applause. Then he met Esther and decided he had to get a decent job if he was going to persuade her to marry him. He got a job as a railroad bookkeeper which sent him to Minneapolis. In 1916, Harry and Esther eloped and my father was born in April, 1917. The picture above is of Harry and Esther with my father and his younger brother Kenneth sometime around 1922.

Harry worked for the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railway Co. off and on for almost 40 years. There were layoffs -- a lot of them -- in the 1930s, but he always managed to go back to work when times got better. He retired in November 1955, right after this 65th birthday. And he lived happily in retirement for another 22 years.

Harry and Esther were married for almost 58 years before she died in 1974. When his job with the Milwaukee Road transferred him to its western terminus in Tacoma, Washington, sometime in the early 1920s, Harry and Esther bought a new two-bedroom, one-bath house. Nothing fancy, but it did have a cellar, an attic and a garage. Behind the garage, Harry cultivated his vegetable garden. He raised corn, beans, tomatoes, cucumbers and carrots from the day they moved in until the day he died in 1977. We all enjoyed the bounty of that garden all year, which my grandmother canned and stored in the cellar. Her dill pickles were a particular family favorite.

Theirs was an unprententious life. One set of good china for use only on special occasions. Linoleum on the kitchen counter tops. One car, usually a Chevrolet purchased new and kept for at least a dozen years. No long vacations, just an occasional week in Reno after the kids were grown. But they also had no debt, a lesson they learned in the Depression. They never bought anything new until they had saved enough to buy it. Their lives weren't easy, but somehow they had control over them. Never foreclosed. Never bankrupt. Never homeless. All three sons grew up to be successful men. They had a lot to be proud of, but they were much too Midwestern and Scandinavian to boast. All they'd ever say was that they did the best they could. And that's saying a lot.

Harry and Esther with my brother Ron in 1964