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Written by Elsie Koski Waterman
Of my father's family, the one who I always looked on as the most colorful was my Uncle Victor. He came to the U.S. in the same way that all of them did—through Canada and on through lumber camps in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He was the second youngest of a family of six.
Even as a young child, I sensed there was something different about him—for a Finn, he was fun, charming, and obviously a ladies' man. It was by no means a result of a charmed life: he had faced many tragedies—one of which he actually made "lemonade out of lemons".
I remember being repulsed by the sight of his bare back. It was all scarred and ugly, the result of his first accident. He told me that he had been lying on the kitchen floor as a teenager when his father went to move a lid on the stove. It had a coffee pot of hot coffee on it and it fell and hit Vic in the back. It certainly scarred him for life.
Later, he worked for a power company. He was working on a light pole. He started to fall and grabbed a live wire. He was hospitalized for nine months following the accident. My cousin told me that they could hear him screaming from a lower floor when they went to visit him at the the hospital. It was a terrible burn from which he eventually recovered. He did win a settlement from the city due to the accident.
That wasn't enough. One time he borrowed someone's motorcycle. Being new to the cycle, when he finally got going he drove into a tree. Perhaps it was because of these accidents that his life did not follow the usual pattern of Finnish men—work in the woods, railroad, farming, or other manual labor. The insurance settlement from the city provided him with exciting opportunities. He used some of the money to see the world. He got in a car where the family farm was located on US 43 and followed it all the way to St. Petersburg, Florida.
He told me an interesting story about that trip: he said he fell madly in love with a girl there, and following a whirlwind courtship of two weeks, he married her. Her family wined and dined them after the wedding and then it came time for him and his wife to head back to Michigan. They started north on US 41 and stopped in Detroit to visit some friends. When the trip was to continue, she decided that she wanted to go home. He had to work out divorce arrangements via a lawyer in the mail. That marriage had lasted two weeks.
When he came back to Northern Michigan he did various things. Even as many of our current immigrants, he had a fascination with cars. So much so, that he went into the gas station / garage business in Marquette. He was a risk taker—what kind of Finn was that?
I believe it was during that time that he fell in love again. This time, he chose (heaven forbid) a divorcee with a young daughter. His family was not too happy about the relationship because it seemed that she had a questionable reputation!
I am told that right until the day of the wedding they hoped it would not happen because they were already having problems. However, they had a "white wedding" in my grandmother's apple orchard. I was there. The bride's five-year-old daughter was the flower girl! It was scandalous to the groom's 1930s strict Lutheran family.
Well, this marriage too, got off to a rocky start. They were divorced after two months. Uncle Victor's life was besieged with accidents and bad marriages.
After that, Uncle Victor became restless in the gas station / garage business. During that time he became acquainted with the needs of car mechanics and it was there that he learned that Snap-On Tools needed salesmen. A Finnish salesman was almost an oxymoron! However, he became quite successful as a tools salesman traveling around the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The whole area was his territory. Here was this Finnish immigrant, uneducated but with a rather glib tongue, always dressed up in a suit, always driving a fancy car. (My own father was so shy that he refused to be a clerk in an auto parts store but rather chose to be the stock man.) Evidently, that's why a young niece found this man to be so fascinating—and he did give me a lot of attention when I was around him—telling me the story of his first marriage and why he had these terrible scars, etc.
I have the feeling he was very popular with the ladies, but he finally settled for a wonderful, elegant Finnish woman (not a toiskielinen like the others) who became his third and last wife. She was a spinster lady who had worked as a sales clerk in a department store. That marriage lasted until his untimely death at the age of 48. By then he and his wife had a lovely home in Detroit, where he continued to be an "on the road" salesman.
By that time I was married and living near Detroit. When I had my first baby, I named her after Uncle Victor. I cheated a little—I called her Vicki Lou. As she grew older, I found she would have enjoyed being Victoria Louise.
Uncle Vic came to see our Vicki Lou and while there, he cried on my shoulder. It seems his wife had had a tubal pregnancy, which resulted in them not being able to have any children. He was a macho man, and he said, "It might have even been a boy!"
Shortly after that, he was diagnosed with liver cancer, and he died trying to receive treatment in Denver, Colorado.
I visited his wife just a few years ago in Florida. At the age of 90 she had been a widow for many years and depended on her sister's family for support and care. She made a remark when I visited her, indicative of the "elegant lady" which I described. She said, "When I became a widow, I decided that the two things I would not give up were leather gloves and cream in my coffee!"
As I traveled about in St. Petersburg, I looked at pictures of scenes of the city in the 1930s and imagined what it was like when Uncle Vic traveled to Florida. I wished I had known his first wife's name so that I could have checked to see if she was still living.
Uncle Vic had Finnish sisu—he took his tragedies in stride and learned to make a good living without an education. His disabilities kept him from doing manual labor, but he seemed to have Americanized quickly. He certainly was not a stereotypical Finnish man—but rather a ladies' man who fell in love madly and often! Perhaps he would have fit much better in the 1990s.
Publish in New World Finn, November 1999
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