Who You Gonna Believe?

Bartlett:

Link.  Or Frum:

Link.  Or heck, let's just relax with Alyssa:

Link.    Just as wild speculation, I'd guess that people in earlier generations also felt a letdown in their 20s as the burdens of adulthood came crashing around their shoulders.  For men of my cohort, you woke up one day married and with kids and a mortgage and not the slightest idea how it all happened.  Oh, and the high likelihood that if you did not meet these new responsibilities, you would go to jail.

Family Picture, Plus a Note On Growing Up in the 20C USA

My niece Marilyn just lately surfaced this on her Facebook page--a family picture:

That's my grandmother, second from left, with her seven (surviving) children, some time in the mid 1920s.  My own mother, Esther, is at far left.  I guess I've seen it in the past but it offers insights now that I never thought of before.

Some background: mama and papa, Swedish immigrants, met and married in the early 90s.  Papa died about 1910 (the family tradition says that an eighth child and another close relative died the same week).  That is: papa died and left mama with nothing aside from seven young mouths to feed, none out of their teens.  The fact that gets more astonishing to me with each passing year is that she held this family together.   It surely couldn't have been easy: apparently she had to call on her own family.  My own mother, never particularly religious, used to recall with nostalgia and gratitude the kind of support they got from the (Swedish Lutheran) church.  The older three had to leave school early.   My mother --she would have been fifth, I think--did finish high school.  She told me years later that she had wanted to go to "college" (I think she had been hoping for a one year teaching certification program), but there wasn't any cash.

So far, so good: but recall that calamity befell them something like 15 years before this picture.  And now they all look so prosperous.  Or at least solvent, stable, dare I say bourgeois.  Which is not to say they were rich.   Evert (the oldest, far right) was already on his way as a successful salesman, but he had a new family of his own.   I think at least three of the girls--Esther, plus Elin and Selma, the two with glasses, would have been working, but at secretarial jobs where they can't have been earning much.  Yet everything about this picture radiates a kind of middle-class respectability and security.

From the time of the picture on, there were ups and downs.  Elin and Evelyn both died before the end of the 20s--I forget of what, I think one or another of those implacable diseases that swept people away in those days (so also their father and brother).  The men and the surviving girls married--except Selma: too picky, a friend said of her in her old age, but I suspect she thought she was just picky enough.  None divorced.  Mama died in 1936, the year I was born.  "I assume of exhaustion" I used to say--but I wonder: here she seems to radiate a quiet pride and satisfaction, and  who can blame her?--looks like a job well done.

In my youth I often encountered all five surviving sibs together at family gatherings.  Most of their marriages were happy but you got the sense that their ties to each other might be more durable than anything they had acquired later in life.

Oh, and another thing: look at the posing.   It's quite artful.  Except for Evelyn who seems to be trying to hide behind her oldest sister (Louise), everybody seems relaxed and presentable, with just enough personal space.   In its groupiness, it could almsot be a Velázquez or  Rembrandt.  For future reference, then: an artifact of middle-class life. Wonder what an American-family portrait would look like if taken today.

More on New England Farms

Afterthought on my grandparents and New England farming: from family lore and fragmentary records, I determine that my grandparents, Carl and Augusta Nordstrom,  moved their brood from Manchester to Bedford, NH, in 1901 and back to Manchester in 1907.  Yesterday I wrote that he "failed at farming."  Strictly speaking, I don't know this to be true, although I guess the family more pretty much stipulates that the farming foray did not go well.  Anyway, here they are now in the massive  (1132pp) History of Bedford New Hampshire from 1737, entered as "Published by the Town" in 1903 (at page 627):

 At the four corners of the Goffstown and New Boston road is where David Sprague, Jr.(343) and Walter Gage lived...Going south from the four corners on the east side of the road, David Sprague, Sr. (344), William Hobarat, a blacksmith, Ephraim Kendall and his son Ephraim, and George F. Steward lived where Carl A. Nordstrom now lives.

[Those of you keeping score at home will find it in the neighborhood of the Joppa Hill Cemetery, although we appear to have left no one behind here.]

At any rate-- just now, for the first time ever, it occurs to me to marvel at the folly or desperate optimism that would have prompted a city boy with a flock of kids to cart his brood out into a life on the land--a man with, so far as I know, no prior experience in farming (though I suppose he may have been a farm boy in Sweden).

In The Changing Face of New England, Betty Flanders Thomson provides context.    Farming in general in New England was not a pretty business, she shows,  but with a lot of internal differentiation.  There are (or were) potatoes in Maine; tobacco in Connecticut; cranberries in Massachusetts.  There were good farms on "fertile, relatively level" near "towns [thaat] provided a reliable market for cash crops [and] they prospeered mightily."  But:

In the steeper, stonier hill country, on the other hand, much of the soil was too poor, or often merely too scarce,  for profitable farming even when the land was first cleared.  There the farms are smaller, and houses and barns are far more modest both in size and style.  Many of them were occupied for only as generation or two and then deserted, left to a fate that has obliterated them except for cellar holes and stone walls running through the second-growth woods.

 --Thompson, 158 (Houghton Mifflin ed. 1977)

 I'm not completely clear where Bedford fits in this analysis.  I spent a good bit of my own childhood there (long after, and quite unconnected to, my grandparents' attempt).  I offered a few thoughts on cellar holes some months ago; I could have been talking about Bedford although my recollections probably applied more directly to Bradford,  where I also spent some time.  The Bedford of my childhood did harbor abandoned farms; perhaps more surprising, it had a number of operating farms, where people persisted in wrestling out a living in an apparently traditional way.  I can only assume there would have been more in 1903.  Still, I don't suppose the land was ever very hospitable to cultivation and I suppose I can only guess at the sense of disappointment that must have overcome the  Nordstroms as they packed their possessions to make their way back to the city at the end of their six-year venture.

Grandparents

The other day I offered grandchildren.  I herewith present my grandparents: Carl Albert and Augusta Lindquist Nordstrom, once of 91 Byron St., Manchester, NH.  I don't know precisely when this picture was taken but Carl died on February 11, 1910 (his mother in law died there just nine days later, and a son, just a few months before).  They were both born in Sweden; they married in Manchester in 1894 and had eight kids in all. 

Handsome as the appear there, their life must have been pretty marginal.  He seems to have tried his hand at various occupations, none, so it seems, with great success: he seems to have failed at farming.  My memory tells me that at his death he was a milkman.     Augusta lived on until 1936, the year I was born; somehow or other, she held the family together--a fact that strikes me as extraordinary, progressively more the older I get.

For more on the Nordstrom daughters, go here. 

Source:  I got this just yesterday (I had never seen it before) from another Carl Nordstrom, their  grandson and my cousin.

Sophie

Here's Sophie, the dog who visited at Christmas. She got her rabies shot today; this is before, said to be the happiest she looked all day.