The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1982, Page 38

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
SUMMER, 1982
sixty-five cents, Mother would sell her
homemade butter for twenty cents a pound
and her eggs for fifteen to twenty cents a
dozen, thus allowing us to buy a box of
twenty shells now and again. We were very
careful with these shells, and we never did
shoot at ducks unless we could line up two
or three. We seldom missed. There was no
other way to get along; most of our
neighbors, too, had very little.
I remember well the first money that Oli
and I made. We were snaring gophers,
which is done by making a running noose
on a string or twine, waiting till the gopher
sticks his head out of his hole, then pulling
the string. On this particular day we saw
two men driving a buggy and a team of
horses approaching along the trail which
passed in front of our house. The men
stopped and spoke to us in English, and
although we did not understand a word, we
did catch the name of the town that was
located to the east of Leslie, Foam Lake.
We assumed they were asking for direc-
tions, and because there was a fork in the
trail, one leading to Leslie and the other to
Foam Lake, we jumped into the back of the
buggy and motioned them to go on. After
arriving at the fork we pointed to the road
they should take. The men gave us twenty-
five cents each, which made us very proud.
We hurried home and gave our earnings to
Mother. Later in the summer we went to a
school picnic at Kristnes. We bought a ten-
cent bag of peanuts and ten cents worth of
striped candy, a treat for the whole family.
Mother added thirty-five cents to the thirty
cents we had left over, and that paid for
another box of shells.
In the fall of 1909, when I was nearing
my sixteenth birthday, my father got me a
job with a neighboring couple, Laki and
Ingibjorg Bjomson. This was a fine couple,
nice and kind folks, and I learned a great
deal from them. Laki was a steam engineer
and he hired out to run a threshing
machine, a Case twenty-five horsepower
steamer. Whereas most farmers in those
days used oxen, Laki farmed with horses.
He taught me how to drive horses, and one
day he put me to work cutting hay with an
old team. One of the horses of this team
had stiff back legs, causing him to fall
down if urged to back up, but I wasn’t told
this. One day the horse did fall, landing on
the mower pole and breaking it. I became
frightened, but Laki didn’t scold me. He
just said that the old horse was stiff, and
that he should have warned me of this. I
worked for the Bjomsons for two months
and received fifteen dollars in cash, which I
gave to my dad, and a two-year-old heifer
that later became a good cow. These were
the first wages I had ever earned; the first to
be earned by any member of my family.
The heifer was the first farm animal that I
had ever owned.
On January 1st, 1910,1 obtained a job at
a store in Leslie, owned by another Ice-
lander, S. B. D. Stephanson. Although my
English hadn’t improved too much, I didn’t
have much trouble as Leslie was in the
center of an Icelandic community. I lived
with Stefan and Inga Stephanson, the
owners of the store, a good and kind couple
who helped me to get along with people.
There was one time, though, that I did get
into difficulty with a big, old, burly Irish-
man named Bill Ireland. Stefan and the
other clerk had left to have supper and I
was alone in the store. Bill came in and
gave me his order for supplies, and one of
the items he wanted was sugar. I knew
there were three kinds of sugar: lump,
brown, and granulated, so I asked him
which kind he wanted. Bill replied in his
rough and booming voice: “I want white
sugar.” I asked again, “What kind?” Then
he really blew up. He called me a dumb
Icelander and said that I didn’t know any-
thing. I was scared, but fortunately Stefan
came back just then and he told Bill a thing
or two. This calmed Bill down and the in-