Gayla Marty

Gone to the lake

Gaylon and Gordon Marty, ca. 1941. Photo by Viola Marty. 

Uncle Gaylon and my dad loved to fish. Their dad and uncle loved to fish, and so did their mother. My theory is that Grampa and Gramma's marriage was decided on a row boat on a Minnesota lake, maybe on a rainy day because that's when farmers generally got to go fishing. This sunny photo was almost certainly taken on a holiday picnic and outing. Is it Rush Lake? I would love to know.

As he got older, Uncle's love of the outdoors only seemed to get stronger. It was fishing in particular that gave him joy. By the end of his life, his house contained several trophy fish.

I didn't end up to be much of a fisher. My idea of a good time is to sit in a boat and read a book while somebody else fishes.

On the day Uncle Gaylon left this world, I was coming home from a trip to Michigan on a Northwest flight routed around the north end of a storm. It was an unusual path, coming down out of the clouds south of Duluth. Beneath me I recognized Mille Lacs lake, then the adjoining twin lobes of Rush Lake. I picked out our farm and the winding trail of woods that marked the creek flowing out of it to the east. To the left of the plane was the St. Croix River. There was Goose Lake, and Fish Lake, and Horseshoe Lake—the first lake where I remember catching fish with Daddy and Uncle on an interminable overcast afternoon.

There I was, aloft in a red and white craft, its familiar markings that I first learned on trips to the airport with Uncle Gaylon and Auntie Lou, just to see planes take off and land. From his army days, he liked to keep up with the airplane models. Now I was doing as he'd taught me, traveling, flying. Looking down on our landscape of fields and forests and lakes.

It was perfect, that descent. As I returned to earth, his spirit soared.

Viola

Viola Hendrickson and friends, ca. 1925. 

Sometime in the roaring '20s, someone took this photograph of my grandmother. Nobody has ever identified the friend or wagered a guess about the identity of the person in the car—so if you have a clue, let me know. I assume it was taken somewhere in east central Minnesota, maybe at a picnic by the river. If it was taken in 1925, she would have been 17. She kept it in one of the photo albums that came down to me. 

She's such a serious girl, holding her hat and squinting in the sun. She was the fourth of eleven children, born in a small town in Wisconsin on June 18, 1908, where her Swedish Baptist parents had a store. But they would soon move back to Rock Creek near the Hendrickson home place, so she grew up at various homes around the township. One of them was a store in Rock Creek that burned down in November 1918.

In real life, everybody who knew Viola as a child said she was fun, active, and hard-working, a tomboy, ready to fish or pick berries or walk a mile. She could knit, crochet, embroider, darn socks, play croquet, bait a hook, drive a car or tractor, raise chickens, and shock oats. At 21, she would go to work on the Marty farm, where Mamie Marty had fallen ill. She learned to prepare German-Swiss foods, lots of pork and sauerkraut along with the Swedish recipes she knew—baked rice and potato sausage and pie. 

She would marry before her 24th birthday and have two sons by the time she turned 30. I was her first grandchild, born when she was still 49.

Waiting for first crop

Marty barn rafters, east end. Kodacolor. 1991. 

In June, the hay mow was empty just before first crop. The fields of clover, alfalfa, and timothy would be mowed, conditioned, raked, baled, and then unloaded by ropes and pulleys, wagon by wagon, into the barn, up to the roof by summer's end, fragrant and green.

This is the barn that Jacob Marty and his family built in 1902. It was made with a kit of white pine lumber, huge beams of virgin timber from the St. Croix Valley. The crew of barn builders included two men who caught the eyes of the eldest Marty daughters. The next summer, Jacob and Susanna's firstborn would be married, with a wedding dance that night on the floor of the new barn.

June wedding, 1932

On June 4, 1932, my grandmother, Viola Hendrickson, was just shy of 24. She had been working more than four years on the Marty farm, since Mamie Marty's illness and death, keeping house for the Marty brothers—widower Sam and his bachelor brother, John.

Her own parents rented a farm a mile north of the Martys, and it was there, in a beige crepe dress, carrying a bouquet of lilies of the valley and sweet peas, that she married my grandfather. He was 39. This is my favorite picture of them.

Gramma kept her wedding pictures in an album that begins with their honeymoon photos from the Black Hills (Mount Rushmore under construction) and ends with mementos of their silver wedding anniversary. I found the Rush City Post clipping about their wedding in the newspaper archives of the Minnesota Historical Society...it was one of five that week in a front-page column, "June weddings prove popular." It said the Hendrickson home was decorated in pink and white carnations, and chicken salad lunch was served to 60 guests. Grampa's two older sisters and their families came from Cannon Falls, and his cousin came with her family from Stillwater.

A month later, the Dow Jones Industrial Average would bottom out at 41.22, the lowest point of the Great Depression. That year, U.S. unemployment would reach about 25 percent. When 3,000 unemployed workers marched outside a plant in Dearborn, Michigan, police shot four of them; 15,000 World War I veterans marched on Washington in May through July; and a Midwestern farmers' revolt began in August. Herbert Hoover was president, to be beaten by Franklin Roosevelt in the November elections. In 1932, Jack Benny was on the radio, the first Disney cartoon in Technicolor premiered in Los Angeles, and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was published. It was the year of the Lindbergh kidnapping, the year in Germany that an ambitious Austrian-born politician was elected to public office to swiftly become dictator and challenge the world.*

Gramma and Grampa loved God, hard work, and fishing. They would be plagued by illnesses, but they would raise two sons and keep the farm. They outlasted the Great Depression, World War II, and Grampa's depression.

In 1957, less than a month after their youngest son returned from his own honeymoon to the Black Hills (Mount Rushmore complete), more than a hundred relatives and friends came to the Marty farm to celebrate John and Viola's 25th wedding anniversary. An identical lunch to the June 4 wedding was served, with a program of music and original poems. One duet was sung by their sons, another by their new daughter-in-law and her sister. This, too, was all recorded in the Rush City Post, clipped, and taped into Gramma's album.

Hendrickson-Marty wedding, June 4, 1932. Left to right: Harold Marty (nephew of the groom), John Marty, Viola Hendrickson Marty, Amy Hendrickson, Rev. Walter Olson. From a photo album of Viola Hendrickson Marty.

*Wikepedia; information gathered June 3, 2010.