Writing oral histories is a project of the heart. An author is struck with a strong desire to write the life of another in that other’s words because they find something colorful, endearing and valuable about that person’s experiences. This kind of writing, which contains as little interference as possible from the author’s updated mind, benefits a larger audience by preserving the tone of bygone years. Often oral histories are written from interviews with those who believe they led ordinary lives, but those lives seem extraordinary to those of us who came later; we relish knowing the details of how those before us faced life’s geographies, economic necessities, opportunities and disappointments, without the translations and embellishments of a contemporary author’s voice.

One gem of an oral historian is Nancy Rekow of Bainbridge Island, WA, as you will see from this foreword to her oral history, Far As I Can Remember: An Immigrant Woman’s Story, 1888-1975, about her neighbor Minnie Rose Lovgreen. Over the next weeks, we will share more writing by Nancy about writing oral histories as well as excerpts from her two books gleaned from Ms. Lovgreen’s life, memory and knowledge.

Foreword to Far As I Can Remember: An Immigrant Woman’s Story, 1888-1975

Minnie Rose Lovgreen was a mystery.

How did she–a 19^th-century English farm girl and housemaid with next to no education–narrowly miss sinking on the Titanic? How did she learn to read, write, cook, sew, and to nourish children, plants, and animals? How did she escape an abusive husband in the dead of winter? How did she wend her way from England to Canada to Bainbridge Island, Washington? Once there, how did she and her second husband manage to establish and run, for 30 years, a prizewinning dairy that grew to 75 cows on 170 acres?

How did she–dying of cancer at age 86–become the author of a popular book called Minnie Rose Lovgreen’s Recipe for Raising Chickens? And finally, how did she happen to leave us this dramatic story of her life, Far As I Can Remember? How did she achieve all this so many years before Women’s Lib? Well,” says Minnie Rose–a lifelong storyteller–”I had to use my head for something.”

This book tells the story, tape-recorded in her own words three months before she died. Born Minnie Rose Enefer in 1888, “down the fen” in Norfolk County England, she was the eighth of nineteen children on her father’s 200-acre wheat farm. When Minnie was four, her mother died and her father soon remarried. From then on, besides hard work on the farm, Minnie’s job was to help with the younger children, to “keep the babies from getting under Stepmother’s feet.”

At age eleven, Minnie took matters into her own hands and left home, setting out on the first of her many adventures. As she says, “I was all looking ahead.”

 Meeting Minnie Rose Lovgreen, decades later and on another continent, changed my life. But I could not have foreseen that. I’d grown up loving nature and books on an old fruit farm in New Jersey. With a BA in English from Oberlin College, I worked for Harcourt, Brace Publishers in New York, earned an MA in Education and taught grade school, then lived two years in England teaching for USAF, where I met and married Ken Rekow, an intelligence officer from Minnesota.

In 1964, Ken and I, both nature-lovers, bought an old dairy farm on Bainbridge Island, WA, from Charlie and Celine Clayton, who’d run a dairy there over 35 years. The farm, with apple and filbert trees, had a southwest pasture that sloped down to a creek surrounded by bigleaf maples and firs. There were weathered outbuildings–a big old hay barn, a milking barn and a milk shed. We never operated a dairy, though we did have beef cattle. And there was a big old chicken coop. So naturally we got some chickens.

Ken,an attorney, commuted by ferry to Seattle every weekday. But he also did most of the farm work, having spent much time on his grandparents’ farms in Minnesota.

Soon after we moved in, an elderly woman with an English accent started phoning. She said her name was Minnie Rose Lovgreen. She said she was an old friend of Celine Clayton’s. She said she lived up the road. She said she had a German shepherd named Prince we might like for a watchdog. Would we want to come see him?

At first, mired down with moving and settling in, we didn’t pay much attention. But Minnie Rose kept phoning. And phoning. An English accent. And phoning. And did we have chickens? Yes, we did. Then maybe we’d like to come see her chickens. Well, maybe. Finally one weekend we drove up the road to visit, with our three-year-old daughter, Sara.

Minnie Rose was then 74. She bustled around and showed us her chickens, her chicken coop, her sheep, her apple trees, her vegetable garden, and Prince, her German shepherd. She picked us peapods fresh off the vines. She talked and she talked every step of the way. Meanwhile her husband, Leo, stood quietly under an apple tree, talking with Ken and smoking his pipe.

I was young. Little did I know. Here was this old woman in flowered housedress and apron who talked non-stop in her unique English accent, who dyed her hair red, who never seemed to stop talking. I was pregnant. I was tired. But obviously she did know some things. Finally we drove off with Prince, who did turn out to be a good watchdog.

That August our son Alec was born. That winter it rained. The sky was gray. The kids kept catching colds. I was lonely. And Minnie Rose kept calling. What to do, I asked her, for the fevers, the sore throats, the earaches? What to do with the firstborn chicks that always seemed to hatch out when my husband was away on a business trip? She offered her often creative solutions. And they always seemed to work. Soon I began to phone Minnie Rose with farm and garden questions too. And I found out others were phoning her with questions. She always loved sharing her wisdom.

One spring day, holding our third baby, Mitch, I watched Minnie Rose gently insert two fluffy, peeping young chicks into Sara’s and Alec’s coat sleeves. “There,” she said. “Feel how soft and warm. It’s cozy in there, just like under the mother hen.”

Right then I said, “Minnie Rose, do you ever babysit?”

“Oh, my dear,” she said. “I’ve been taking care of children all my life.”

So Minnie Rose, by then a widow, became our babysitter and friend. And she certainly had her ways with children. Fixing a bowl of oatmeal, she’d scoop holes, fill them with milk, and call it a duck pond. For a snack, she’d spread a slice of bread with peanut butter, and serve it cut into strips she called “ladyfingers.” In late August, she’d have our kids bring slabs of cardboard to toboggan wildly down the steep hill of brown, sundried grass behind her house.

She sang old songs and chanted old rhymes. She told stories of folk and fairies, frogs and cream. But best of all, she told stories of her own incredible life, begun as a motherless, hardworking farm girl in England, then sailing over an ocean to a new life. She told her stories matter-of-factly, cheerfully, but we learned how hard she’d worked and how, when her life got hard, she’d always invented solutions.

In January, 1975, Minnie Rose was diagnosed with cancer and hospitalized in Seattle for tests. I rode the ferry into Seattle, appeared in her hospital room with a tape-recorder, and said, “Okay, Minnie Rose, now we’re going to start your book.” She’d always wanted to write a book on how to raise chickens, but was always much too busy.

So Minnie Rose lay in that white bed, in that white room, and dictated all her chicken-keeping secrets. In the weeks that followed I transcribed, then decided to hand-letter, her words.

One day our friend Elizabeth Hutchison Zwick — chicken-raiser on a nearby farm–said she’d like to illustrate Minnie Rose’s book. I’d had no idea this very capable farmwoman was also an artist! She showed me her beautiful drawings of plants, animals and children. “Yes. Please be the illustrator,” I said.

Elizabeth illustrated Minnie Rose’s words with original pen and ink drawings of Minnie’s farm–of chickens, coops, setting hens, chicks, and fighting roosters. With those exquisite drawings, and her creative ideas about format, Elizabeth transformed the book from text only into a work of art.

We had no time to spare that spring. Because we knew Minnie Rose was dying, we worked long, long hours. One afternoon I took Minnie Rose out for a drive along Puget Sound. She sat in back with my four-year-old daughter, Rebecca, who knew she was very ill. After a quiet stretch, Rebecca said to Minnie, “You’re going to die some time.”

Minnie Rose didn’t skip a beat. She said, “Yes, dear. Just like the flowers.”

That April of 1975 I published the book. Both the title (Recipe for Raising Chickens) and the subtitle (The Main Thing Is To Keep Them Happy) were Minnie own words.

Minnie Rose died that July. But not before she appeared on King TV, not before she signed books at an autograph party, and not before she knew her book was selling widely to chicken-raisers and book lovers across the country.

Our 1,000 copies sold out in a month! What to do? With four young children, I had little time to market the book (not to mention know-how). I showed the book to Pacific Search Press in Seattle, who took it on and printed 20,000 copies. After Minnie’s death, her book continued to sell until 1988, then was out of print over 20 year–until May, 2009, when Everett Thompson and I published a 3rd edition.

As of now, May, 2010, Minnie Rose Lovgreen’s Recipe for Raising Chickens has sole over 24,000 copies. Would Minnie Rose have been surprised? Perhaps not, because she knew her chicken-raising advice really worked. But she certainly would have been pleased and proud.

Now about this book you hold in your hands. Back in 1975, after tape-recording Minnie’s chicken wisdom, she and I went on to record her whole life story. I transcribed it all, but then it sat in my files for 35 years. At last now, as I promised her, we are pleased to publish Minnie’s second book, Far As I Can Remember: An Immigrant Woman’s Story, 1888-1975.

As co-editors, Everett and I have preserved Minnie’s original words as she spoke them in her unique storytelling voice, which simmers and jumps and sings along. Here and there, for clarity, we’ve changed or added a word or punctuation. And sometimes, because she often backtracked or leaped ahead, we’ve moved sections around to maintain continuity. Hers was a conversational style all her own — spirited, dramatic, humorous, opinionated and wise.

Minnie Rose loved telling her life story. We hope you enjoy reading it.

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[You can visit Trillium Press’ website for more information and Nancy and Everett’s projects.]