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.