The smoke alarm- with its incessant “BEEP-BEEP-BEEP”- meant dinner was ready. “Fuck,” I thought, “when will I get a women that can cook?”...
My Dad loved gamblin’. He woulda loved the casinos in Minnesota. Gamblin' and cribbage. If you came into his domain, it was 15-2 15-4 AND A PAIR IS SIX! A good player, he would steal your points if you didn't count. No mercy!
My old Pop usta say “a bowlegged, cross-eyed woman was 2/3rds perfect- the other third I would find out on my wedding night!”
He hadn't said a thing about cooking, maybe because he was a cook. He cooked at home, and had learned cooking in the pulp camps of Boise Cascade Paper Mills, International Falls, MN.
Oh, and if she was cross-eyed 'Ya never had to look in her eyes when ya lied.”
He could bake bread and apple pie, it ruined me. Never found a better baker or cook than ol' Pop. As long as he was the best cook in the Pulp Camp, he stayed in the warm dry Cook Shack. Them loggers liked his cookin'. It remained his domain until he quit, when he was beckoned home to take care of his widowed mother.
My Dad was the 11th of 17 children. He was born in February 1898 he would be around for 81 years. Worked as a butcher (Hormel, So. St. Paul stockyards), baker/cook (paper mill camps), hobo, welder on the railroad, and farmer, who could shoe horses, castrate pigs-cattle-sheep, build barns and houses, ran a sawmill, and raised five kids after wedding an educated woman 20 YEARS younger than he. My Dad was one hell of a man.
The only regret he had was not being allowed to serve in WWI after his brother Eugene was killed. When the U.S. entered WWII, he was 43 years old, way past the enlistment age, so he worked for the US government, welding for the railroad in Alaska from 1941-45.
Irish men that cared for their mothers knew better than to wed while their mothers resided in their homes. It was her house and hers alone. They knew that two women could not reside under the same roof. This is nothing new, as a lot of Irish men have known. George B., as he was called, would wait until his mother died, and then it was a few years.
He was in his 40s when he finally said the “I DUZ”, taking his new bride- she was a RN and 20 years younger than he- to Alaska in 1941. He told her it was a honeymoon, but when they got there, she would find out two things about this man. She had known him for a month, having met him on the train ride to Minnesota. She was from North Dakota and had been hired at Dr. Brathold's hospital in Watertown, MN. George B. had hopped this train as he knew it would take him home. He had been hoboin', crawling into the rails, riding trains for years. He loved this life, but was coming home when beckoned as he was the last of 17 to remain single.
Wet and cold, he crawled into a passenger car. This bearded, wet, smelly man sat down across from her, stuffing his wet coat under his seat. He produced a deck of cards which they played poker with, he won every game. Getting to Watertown, George B. walked her up the hill to the Brathold Hospital and then introduced her to theMatron, his sister-in-law, who ran the boarding house next to it. After getting her settled, he promised he would be back that evening to take her to dinner.
Lo and behold, at 6pm he showed up bathed and clean shaven, driving a model A. Three weeks later they were wed in the Catholic church by his friend- another Irish relative- Father Riehl. Half of Watertown's population were his Irish relatives!
He was a joker. He loved to laugh, and make people laugh. His “Irish Blarney” would nowadaze be called BS. He also drank and smoked too much, oh and the tickets he had won in a poker game were round trip for one or one-way to Fairbanks, Alaska, for two. Once in Fairbanks they found a converted garage to live in and she found out she would have to work to get back to Watertown where Dr.Brathold had hired her (who had originally sent her a railroad ticket, Reynolds, North Dakota to Watertown, MN). So she got a job with the largest cannery in Alaska as nurses were in demand. She would be flown by “Bush” plane to the Island canneries where Eskimoes canned fish for Libby's'. ’
Her duties for the most part were to vaccinate and de-louse Eskimoes, and every now and then, deliver a baby (it was where she learned to be a OB nurse, which she did for 45 years once she returned to the lower 48). My Dad had been hired to work on the railroad as a welder before he left the lower 48.
In 1941, most people never left their place of birth. George B. was a wanderer. Twenty years he rode the rails. He would laugh and say,”It's only gravity that holds us down”. In 1941, the Alaskan Railroad were still laying tracks. Alaska, at the time, was a U.S. territory- it would not become a state until 1960. Anyhoo, in December the USA entered WWII after it was attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Alaska was vulnerable to Japanese attack. The railroad and fisheries were “Nationalized”. They put on more shifts and would work around the clock for the next four years canning fish for the troops! This meant a guaranteed salary, permanent work.
Now, because of the War, they were stuck in Alaska, unable to leave as all ships- civilian and otherwise- were now used as troop transport ships. Thousands of troops and people would come into Alaska and the price of food skyrocketed. The cheapest commodity was Canadian whiskey, of which they both consumed vast quantities on their off time.
In 1945, with the war over, they decided to return to Watertown where the family farm Geroge had grown up on awaited him. She went to work at Dr. Brathold's Hospital, finally! They would sell the Doctor a polar bear rug they had purchased from an Eskimo. They got to fixing up the old farm house- it would soon be electrified, adding an indoor bathroom and plumbing.
George and Catherine would adopt us - my twin sister and I - when we were three years old. We would become known to one and all as “the Earley Indian Twins”. Our birth mother was 7/8ths Ojibwe and our good-for-nothin' semen donor was A WHITE MAN, whom we would never meet.
All went well until I became a teenager. My adopted mother was going through her “Change of Life”. Our two raging hormonal developments meant a lot of yelling, crying and gnashing of teeth. I would move away from home at 14 to live and work for an Irish bachelor and his widowed mother (another of Dad's “shirtail Cousins” as he called them). I would join the Marines at 17, spend 4.4 years in the Corps, two tours in Vietnam.
My dad finally quit farming at age 72. He and my Ma traveled to Ireland where he was a big hit with the ladies, who called him Me-Lord. Anyhoo, back home, he and his old drinkin' bunch, who were now elderly teetotalers, played poker in the back room of the old saloon they had built. As usual, he had a lit cigarette, sitting down to put on his loafers, he complained of not feeling well. My Ma suggested he skip the game. My Dad, who never did anything half- assed said “I won those tickets to Alaska in this game, only dyin' would keep me away.” He died. He was 81.
Had one of the biggest funerals in Watertown- the Church was packed. He would have sat in his Chevy Cheyenne pick-up in the church parking lot, smoking! Thanks for raising me Mr. George B. Earley!!!...
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