Chapter 39: A Visit to Dad's Relatives

The distance between Great Falls, Montana to Dad's hometown of Rockford, Illinois, is 1200 miles.  In July of 1955, Dad drove this entire distance by himself.  Uncomplainingly, as far as I can recall.  Mom didn't get her driver's license until two years after we moved to Warren.  Dad must have really loved to drive.

I have always been enamored of this photo of my grandparents, or Ma and Pa, as their seven children always called them*.   In most of the photos I have of them, they look so stern and forbidding, someone that a 5-year-old would prefer to avoid.  Even a 5-year-old grandson.

*In the Nelson and Luthgren families, the women were usually named first:  Ma and Pa, Grandma and Grandpa, Mom and Dad, Signe and George, Ruth and Rudy, Gen and Ed, Millie and Jerry, Edna and Walter.  On the flip side, I have no idea why these couples were the exceptions:  Ford and June, Frank and Stella, Min and Lila.

I was never completely comfortable around Grandpa Nelson.  He spoke English with a thick accent.  When he spoke to me, I'd turn to one of my parents, my face frozen in a mask of confusion, silently pleading for a translation.  My cousins never had this problem, but then they saw him on a much more frequent basis.  If not weekly, certainly once or twice a month at a minimum.  I wasn't even on a once-a-year schedule.

One of the few family portraits from this period of my life.  Larry and Barb look bored, Barb more interested in sucking her thumb, a habit she had developed by this time, and one that would continue well into grade school.  The photo was taken in Iron Mountain, Michigan, where Dad's brother-in-law, Frank Carlson, husband to his sister Stella, was pastor of First Lutheran Church.   Both Frank and Stella were prone to haughty, holier-than-thou airs when practicing their religion  Once we were older, the joke among the Nelson children was that Frank's prayers were as long as Dad's sermons.  Frank could be insufferably long-winded.