Last week we posted Nancy Rekow’s foreword to the oral history she wrote from interviews with Minnie Rose Lovgreen, her neighbor of many years. This week we post an excerpt so you can experience Minnie’s voice and the skill with which Nancy selected transcriptions from the many interviews. There is more information about the book on Nancy’s website.

Far As I Can Remember As told by Minnie Rose Lovgreen Recorded and edited by Nancy Rekow (an excerpt)

So on Bainbridge Island, I went down to visit the dairy farm, there was a dairy farm there. And I’d always wanted to be either a dairyman’s wife, or a breadman’s wife, or something that meant something, that they had to produce.

So I thought I’d go and see this dairyman who was working with the farm there. And he liked me right away, and I kind of liked him, but I wasn’t quite sure. He was Danish. He looked real healthy and well. I went to see the dairy farm, and of course he was milking the cows there. I didn’t know anything about him then.

And then the people at the Country Club gave parties, and they wanted us to go to the parties. We went to all the parties then. He could dance quite well, and so I danced, too, we danced at the parties, and he was very good. 

We danced the Swedish polka and the schottische. And some waltzes. And then we had a medley waltz. That’s where they all join hands and go round, you know. I liked music and dancing, and of course he did too, very much. I had a pretty little yellow dress with black spots on it, and I liked that very much.

Leo wasn’t much taller than me and people wondered where that little couple came from all of a sudden. Leo was short, a real round face with rosy cheeks. And he was always happy. He smoked a pipe. So everybody was trying to do something for us, to make us happy. So anyway, in a year or so we got married.

We went to Oregon when we was married, for our honeymoon. When we came back, ‘course he had to come back to do some more work in that dairy. We both took hard jobs when we thought we could make a go of it. It was after that that I took up this baby route work.

I had a baby route at the Country Club. I used to go and pick up the babies and bathe them and make their formula for the day, and then go on to the next house and do the same there. It took me till about eleven o’clock to get all the babies done, a little bit over an hour at each place. And then I’d go home and get my husband’s lunch and my lunch, and little John was with us then– we’d got him back–so he got his lunch.

Then I would have a rest, and then I would go right back and start picking up the babies again and give them their lunches. There were about six babies. They were in all different houses.

By that time I was expecting Junior, and the people that had those other babies couldn’t go in the bathroom because they were pregnant and they had morning sickness, but I could go in the bathroom. It didn’t bother me one little bit, so no one knew that I was expecting.

But we didn’t have modern conveniences, so we had to set the children on an ironing board to bathe them and to change their diapers and everything like that. We didn’t have these proper little bassinets like people have nowadays. It was sort of a makeshift place.

Anyhow then this went on. I picked the babies up till about three o’clock and then took some of them to the beach for a little walk, a little stroll. And then I would go home. Someone else would put them to bed. They didn’t have to have a bath at night.

Then I would go out for the evening and wait table wherever they was having a dinner party. If I didn’t wait table, I cooked the dinner. So it just depended. Wherever there was a dinner party, they’d call me. And sometimes it was in the same house. Sometimes the work lasted till one o’clock in the morning. And we didn’t have any lights, any electricity.

My husband had been working at that dairy for eleven years, so he was milking the cows, and cleaning out the barn, and delivering some of the milk and meeting the ferry boats (part of the Mosquito Fleet, the privately operated marine transportation systems on Puget Sound) that came in at the Country Club, to take passengers where they wanted to go, and work like that.

But he had to get up at one o’clock in the morning to go out and get the cows, so he didn’t have too much time. After that he went home and rested. So when he went home to get his sleep, he always took the newspaper with him, and he’d have his breakfast, and he’d go right down, right in his room with the newspaper, and fall asleep right away, and sleep until almost one o’clock again. Then he’d get up and have his lunch, and start getting the cows in again. And that was every day the same thing.

He’d left Denmark when he was thirteen years old, so he was mostly going to school in Denmark. He got on one of the ships as a stoker, you know, building the fires, keeping the fire going. And then somehow or other, later on, he got to this country that way.

And then he worked in a dairy at Mt. Vernon, Washington, for a while, and he worked in a dairy in Alaska. That was before I met him. And the dairy in Alaska was the Kramer Dairy. It’s right near Anchorage. And when he came from Alaska, he worked near Bellingham in a dairy up there for a while.

And then World War I broke out in 1914, and he went into World War I, and he was there till almost the end of the war. He was in the Army, all over different parts of England. He didn’t go back to Denmark. He never did go back to his home after he left it. Thirteen years old. He never did go back to see them or anything until close to the end of his life.

There were seven children in his family. His father had left when he was a little boy, and the mother raised the seven children by herself. The father run off with someone else. I think he went to Argentina. I don’t know what he had in Argentina, but it seems like they had money and he went to Argentina.

After the war he worked around Mr. Vernon for a while, and then he worked at the Carnation Dairy. That was it. He was at the Carnation Dairy in what they called the “test barn.” They had to milk every four hours, so he would go to sleep, and when his four hours sleep was up, he’d have to get up and start milking again. But they wanted to see how much milk they could get from the cows by milking them every four hours.

So they had this large cow called Petra Segis, a large Holstein cow that was giving a lot of milk. And her udder was so big that you had to put like a dishpan under her to get the milk, it was so close to the ground. Then you had to milk her from two sides. So that was a tough job, but he took that. He took the tough jobs anyway.

It was after that he came to the Country Club. He saw an ad in the paper where he could work at that dairy there, so he’d been there eleven years when I met him.

We lived in a house with a lot of flowers. There was about 6 steps up, and on each step he had a little tub of flowers, and they were very pretty. They were geraniums and sweet alyssum, and they lit that whole little place up.