My mother didn’t know until a couple of weeks before her second baby was due that she would have twins. Two heartbeats. When my brothers were born, six weeks premature, their total weight was less than my birth weight of about eight and a half pounds.
It was touch-and-go there for a while with 1959 technology in a small-town hospital. But they had a healthy mother, two grandmothers (one next door), and plenty of aunties.
Before long, they looked like this. It's a photo captured by Daddy and Uncle's cousin, Oliver, at a family celebration. Despite the fact that Uncle Gaylon’s eyes were closed in the background, Mom could never throw it away. Two sets of brothers, two generations. And the twins were sleeping! Quiet and still.
They came into a family full of pairs. Dad and his brother farmed in partnership as Marty Brothers and were married to the Anderson sisters. Before them, the previous generation of Marty Brothers ran the farm, which had two barns and two houses. Gramma Marty had a pair of bachelor brothers on her home place a couple miles east.
There was a joke about the water near our farm because a set of triplets lived a mile west of us and another set of twins was born to our neighbors to the south a few years later.
Bruce and Blaine were a year old when major-league baseball came to Minnesota in 1961. The team was named the Twins for the twin river cities 60 miles south of our farm, Minneapolis and St. Paul. In the 1970s, researchers at the University of Minnesota began to study twins and established a Minnesota twin registry.
What’s more, the Bible had twins in it—two sets in the book of Genesis—and therefore offered some perspective. Jacob and Esau were the most famous, with a rivalry that made our twins seem downright angelic. Zerah and Perez, the sons of Tamar, were another pair of contenders. In the Christian gospels, Thomas was a twin, although it was never clear who or where the other twin was, which was kind of disturbing.
The story goes that my Marty grandparents disagreed about whether to support my dad going to college and seminary or to let him stay on the farm in order to ensure its future. Their older son had gone into the army, and Grampa had cancer before he let on to anyone else about it, so he prevailed in blessing my parents’ marriage.
But when my parents had a girl (me), Gramma took it as a sign that Dad could go to seminary after all. He was a bookworm, the class valedictorian—it was obvious. To her, my arrival meant the call could be answered.
Not so fast—Mom was expecting again in a little more than a year. This time it would be a boy, Grampa declared to the family. He somehow managed to have his Christmas shopping done early and bought the new baby a riding tractor—which, for a man who never gave up his horses, was something.
By the time Mom gave birth, Grampa was gone, but a set of twin boys gave him the last word anyway.
There’s no doubt that twins gave our whole family a sparkle. Look how proud Dad looks in this photo. I grew up hearing stories from him and Uncle as well as complete strangers about our late great-uncle Sam, Grampa’s brother, a fun-loving storyteller and extrovert. Having Bruce and Blaine was like have two Sams. I have always thought that somehow they inherited his huge spirit, larger than life.
Marty brothers photo by Oliver Westman at Hjalmer and Julia (Hendrickson) Westman's 40th wedding anniversary, Rock Creek, Minnesota, fall 1962. Kodachrome.
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