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Growing up Finn in Skandia Township: Carlshend School and other surroundings
Written by Elsie Koski Waterman
The Upper Peninsula of Michigan was the destination of many Finns in the early 1900's. My father, Eino Koski (Koskinen) came as a young child to a lumber camp in Dorsey near Munising in 1909. He told me that he went to school through the 8th grade. As soon as he was able, he quit school and began to work in the woods along with his father and brothers. Then in about 1920, the Koski family homesteaded in Carlshend amongst the Swedes. I'm sure that is why the area was named Skandia Township. My father probably went with friends to the Finn Hall in Rock, Michigan, where he met my mother. They were married in 1929. My parents were separated shortly after I was born, which meant that I lived with my mother's family in Rock, Michigan the first years of my life. That is probably why I felt like I bonded with my grandmother (Aiti) very early in life. My mother tried to go to work in Chicago to help provide some money for the family. As I was approaching school age, my parents were deciding what to do. Divorce was practically out of the question in those days, so my parents reconciled when I was about four. My father built a little three room house (kitchen, living room, and one bedroom) near where his family home was in Carlshend, and my mother and I moved there with him. My first memory of being with my father's family was a fourth birthday party for me--a small cake had been made with four candles on it provided by my Aunt Fiina.
My grandfather, Henry Koski, had died while I was away, so it was just my grandmother, Amanda Koski, and the rest of the family who I came to know there. Amanda Koski was a very religious, formidable, matriarchal individual. As luck would have it, I think I inherited that stern appearance.
A relative of my dad's had been taken in as a foster child in the family because her mother had died. She told me that "Mummu", as we called her, was so strict that you couldn't even rake leaves on Sunday because "you were having too much fun," as you should be reading the bible and praying for most of the day. My memory of her has her rocking in a chair in the kitchen. She did make quite a point of discussing religion with me and Lutheranism. She reminded me always that "Jesus loved the little children." She was a midwife and delivered many babies in her sauna. She wore a pair of golden earrings which were pierced--which was very unusual in those days. I have a wonderful family portrait taken shortly before I was born, and there isn't even a tinge of a smile on one person's face. I have often wondered about that. When a friend of mine was looking at it one day and commented on that, I said, with tongue in cheek, "There was a rule against smiling in photographs." And she believed me momentarily. However, I don't have any recollection of a smile on Mummu's face.
Though the little house my Dad had built was without many amenities, we did have electricity. My father and his brother, Victor, did not have much education, but they seemed to have many skills such as carpentry and electricity. They "wired" many houses in the area, as electricity was moving into the area.
When I was 5 years old, I attended kindergarten at the Carlshend School. At that time, I remember that there were 2 rooms. Later, the sliding door must have been removed because there was only one room and one teacher. Originally, I believe there were two teachers, with the lower grades in one room and the upper grades in the other. It was the typical one-room school with the water pail with the dipper and cone-shaped paper cups, a pot belly stove in the back of the room (tended by the teacher). I loved school and found that it was a haven for me as my family life was not always happy.
The cold lunches usually consisted of peanut butter sandwiches, or if we were lucky, some large bologna. I was always concerned about some of the children who we looked on as "poor," because I thought they had lard on their bread. However, my mother assured me it was oleo before the coloring was allowed.
It was in those days that Hazel Lindholm (Paull) and I became very good friends. Hazel lived close to the school and we always checked out the coming of spring by watching for the arbutus in the woods between her house and the school. She recalls that our walking to my house meant a wonderful treat of "sticky buns" or some other typically Finnish coffee bread. I usually stopped at her house on my way to school to pick her up and I was always sure that her eating Wheaties for breakfast was the reason she was so good at sports. There were the usual games kids played in those days--hide and seek and pom pom pull away. Then, after school, there was croquet at Hazel's house.
At school we had the old connected desks with ink wells. The Christmas Programs were the big events in our lives. It always amazed me that we could set aside classes for a couple of weeks to prepare for the program. This meant we would put up a stage, curtains, practice our pieces or plays. Then the final evening would come. Our parents would come to see what we had accomplished and Santa would bring treats.
One year we had a visit from some Gideons, who left us with some treats and a new testament. (We hadn't heard about the ACLU.) One year, I had pneumonia in the winter and my mother insisted that I wear my snow pants well into spring over my long brown stockings. Well, the hot days of May came and I was forced to roll up my snow pants and roll down my stockings on the way home from school--what a pretty sight that must have been.
My one problem with Carlshend School was the lack of library books. One year, I found that I had read all the books there. However, I was pleased that my grandmother's home contained some wonderful children's books. They had Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys Books, so that helped me through the long winter nights with reading. As I look back on that, it surprises me that some of the Finnish families had much in the way of books in their homes, and often owned an automobile.
I felt a form of discrimination in school like my father had in life in the community. Children can be very cruel to one another and names like "dumb Finn" were also part of the playground language.
Another problem with the school was that the small population often resulted in very small grades. I was the only one in 5th grade one year. As a result the teacher (Mrs. Valli) had me do the work with the 6th grade. Thus she promoted me from the 5th to the 7th grade. I had already skipped 2nd grade--probably for the same reason. So, here I was 2 years younger than my classmates. It became a problem when they decided to bus the students to Marquette to Howard Junior High School. The principal, Miss Deasy, looking over her glasses wasn't very accepting of a 7th grader who was 10 years old.
Well, it seemed we were shipped back to Carlshend School for 7th grade anyway because some of the parents objected to their students being bussed. The next year I went there as an 8th grader and she accepted me. However, I was pretty timid and "marched" carefully from class to class so as not to get yanked out of line and get scolded by Miss Deasy.
As I look back on my one-room school education, I felt that the teachers were very good, considering most of them had a limited preparation of one or two years at a normal school, as it was called.
The one area in which the country students felt slighted was in music and instrumental music. Our music teacher, Miss Johnson, seemed to assume that we all knew our do, re, mi's when I was actually wondering what language she was speaking. However, I wasn't daunted and thought I should give the violin a try. After all, the violin teacher was Finnish, if that was good for anything. Being a bus student, I was asked to come up for a special lesson as soon as the bus arrived in the morning. The only orientation I got was that I was handed a 3/4 size violin, told the names of the strings, and what the difference was between a whole note, half note, and a quarter note, and off I went – nowhere. I took my place in the orchestra and didn't realize how poorly I was bluffing my way through. I had been able to do well at my classes, how come this was so hard? The truth was that I had no talent for music.
However, when the Sunday School teachers heard that I was playing the violin, I was invited to play in church. One of my most dismal memories was playing the violin in Sunday School--I can still hear the squeaking in my ears. This was at the Christmas Sunday School program. How come Jeanne Paulson's clarinet could make such a melodic sound in comparison? Then there were the vocal duets between Lee Johnson and Hazel Lindholm--which were so beautiful. My father had a nice tenor voice and he played the piano by ear--I sang "under the bench."
Getting a "good seat" on the bus to Marquette was quite a challenge at times. Then there were the political arguments. I did have one moment of glory when Franklin Roosevelt had been predicted to lose by a landslide and it turned out just the opposite. (I think I was the only Democrat on the bus.) Thus began my interest in politics.
Growing up Finn in Skandia Township ended for me at the end of my sophomore year at Graveraet. The war had begun, and I was asked by my mother's family if I would go to live in Rock with my other grandmother so that the family members there could go to Detroit to work in the factories. I have always wondered if the orchestra director didn't send up a cheer as I didn't return to orchestra that year. I can't believe it, as I look back on it, that I continued to fumble along with the violin for three years.
I was quite happy to go, and found Rock High School a welcome change from being a "bus student" at Graveraet.... also a form of discrimination.
