Knot My Line

When I was in 6th grade we lived in the “Frog Town” part of Wabeno.  This was a small street that bordered the Oconto River than runs through Wabeno.  My uncle, Mitchell Neuville, owned his home there. My aunt Josie had died recently and Mitchell rented the 1st floor of the house to my mom.  At the other end of town was my uncle Curt’s Chevrolet dealership.  Across the street from it was the Green Lantern Bar.  Typical of many bars in Wisconsin at that time, there was a small bowling alley in an adjacent room.  There were, if my memory serves me correctly, only 4 bowling lanes there.

It was summer vacation and I had been down at Range Line Creek near the Green Lantern and had wandered in to the bowling alley to see if I could pick up some pocket change setting pins.  I had done this once or twice before and had been rewarded by the bowlers with a quarter or two for setting their pins.  In those days a quarter was all I needed to see a double bill at the movie theater and get a bag of popcorn too.

The way that pins were set was totally manual. At the end of the lane, between the gutters there was a machine with openings for each of the pins. After putting a pin in each of the openings I would jump up on and pull down with all of my strength a lever at the rear of this device.  This would lower the device and stand the pins up on their  proper position. Releasing this lever would cause the machine to return to its raised position and would be the signal to the bowler that they could now throw the next bowling ball. There was a small pit in back of the machine that would receive the pins that the bowler hit with the ball they threw.  The ball also landed in this little pit.  Adjacent to the pit was a raised platform for the pin setter to jump up on, lift their legs out of the way before the next ball arrived and pins were hit with a resounding crash. Occasionally a pin would ricochet off of the side of the pit and bounce up and hit the pin setter.  Bruises were a frequent occupational hazard.

On this day, Abe Estreen came in with some friends and he asked me to set pins for them.  There were 4 people, so I worked two lanes, jumping back and forth to set the pins. They came in early in the afternoon and bowled and bowled and drank and drank.  Abe was a huge man and his hands were so big that he put his thumb in the thumb hole of a ball and then wrapped his hand around the ball without using the finger holes. When a ball he threw arrived, pins flew everywhere.  The more alcohol he drank the harder he would throw the ball.  He even cracked a pin in two and I had to replace it with a new one.  Every so often at the end of a game he or another of his people would put a dollar bill in the thumb hole of a ball and roll it down the gutter and that would be my tip. The last time they did that there were 2 balls each with a $5 bill in the thumb hole. I was in heaven, I had earned exactly $20!  Exhausted, I looked at the clock and it was after 8pm at night and I was hours overdue at home.

Oh boy!   I feared I was in trouble with my mom. But then I remembered “money”.  I exchanged all of the bills the bowlers had given me for a $20 bill and headed home.  When I got to the front porch I took the $20 and held it in my hand so it was easy to see and extended my arm completely in front of me. Two more steps and mom was at the door with a ferocious look on her face.  But her view of me was almost completely blocked by the $20 bill. I said, “I was setting pins at the Green Lantern for Abe Estreen”. Then her expression eased and she opened the door took the money and said “go wash up and I will fix dinner for you”.  What a relief – she didn’t toss me across the room!

I later learned that the $20 I had earned was equal to a weeks wages for her. No wonder I was greeted so warmly.

When Walt, my step father, died, my mother accompanied his body back to Wabeno, Wisconsin for burial and I drove mom’s car from Phoenix to Wabeno so she could stay the summer and have transportation. She stayed with my sister and was very much herself which was not a good thing because mom had a penchant for driving other women stark raving mad, well almost that is. Regardless of how a woman might decide to arrange her own household, mother always had a “better” way and the instant the woman would leave the house, mom would immediately set about to, in her mind, completely restore order where none had previously existed. She had done that to all of her daughters in law as well as her own daughter just about every time she came to visit. And it went well beyond that, with how to raise your children, how to comb their hair, how much grounds to put in the coffee pot, which direction the handle of the pot on the stove should face, etc, etc, etc. I loved my mom and so did my siblings and we were really happy to see her when she arrived but it was always a true delight when she finally left and we got our homes back.

At the end of what had to be a very long summer for my sister, I took a week’s vacation and drove mom from Wabeno back to Phoenix. She had the entire itinerary planned. Not on paper where I could study it and get mentally prepared but in her mind and everyday she would tell me where we were going that day and with whom we would be staying that night. There was one place she had told me about from the beginning and that was the Hutterite Commune in South Dakota.

For years mom had been in communication with a lady in the commune named Becky. She had told us stories about her letters to and from Becky and about their relationship. Becky knitted and crocheted  items for mom and mom sent Becky money, coupons, books, magazines, chocolate, and other items that Becky was unable to obtain from the commune.  All of this was under the table so to speak.  The elders of the commune did not approve of many of these items and so mom mailed the items to a lady in a town near to the commune and the lady would mail Becky’s letters and packages to mom. Sometimes several months would pass without any mail and then mom would receive a number of items all at one time.  Becky would say that she had been unable to leave the commune and mom suspected that she was somehow being kept under a tight rein by the elders of the commune. I never did learn how this complicated relationship came about.

After a few days on the road and stops along the way, we arrived at the commune in South Dakota. We met Becky and her husband and their son. The son had to be in his mid 40’s and so Becky and her husband were well beyond retirement age. Their home almost identical to those around it. It was a small 2 story house and had no kitchen because everyone in the commune ate at the common building. We arrived midmorning, spent a night and left the following noon.  While there the family gave us a nice tour of the farm and a number of buildings. They took us to a huge building about a 1/2 mile from the homes where the commune raised turkeys.  There were 8,000 turkeys in that building they said. The noise level and the odor were both overpowering. We did not spend much time there.

We also got to see Becky’s husband’s shop.  It was a small 10×10 building adjacent to their house where he made brooms. Out in the fields he had an area planted with broom corn that he harvested and then turned into brooms and whiskbrooms. He made several hundred each year and he demonstrated this to us and made a small broom. This provided income for the benefit of the commune.

Their son Ernie was the pig farmer. He had three barns for his pigs. A big fancy barn with heated concrete floors that had slots in it to drain the pig poop and urine. In that barn there were only sows on the verge of giving birth or those with nursing piglets. Each sow had a comfortable cubicle with ample food and water and each cubicle was hosed down daily. There were hundreds of sows there many with lots of little piglets. That barn had been constructed so the poop and urine was collected on the floor below where tractors hauled the putrid mixture out into the fields for fertilizer etc. There were plans for the future to build a processing plant that would reclaim methane and market the dried material somehow.

There was a second barn that contained sows that had been recently bred and they were being fed special foods to ensure their little piglets would be healthy and strong. That barn was very old and looked to be on its last legs. The last barn was where all the sows were sent to recover from birthing and nursing their young. Ernie took us in there in the middle of the day and we entered a completely dark room. He then hit a switch and turned on the lights.  There were pigs everywhere, 3,000 in all he said. They kept the room dark to keep the pigs calm and nonaggressive.

We had arrived during tomato harvest and for lunch we all enjoyed tomato sandwiches. On fresh baked bread from their own ovens that was a delicious sandwich. Becky and her husband did not impose on us the communal meals and the accompanying scripture lesson and prayers. They had food brought from the commissary and fed us in their home which I, being an atheist, very much appreciated.  Not wanting to upset our hosts neither mom or I mentioned my atheism.

The most pleasant part of our visit, for me, was that after dinner a dozen or more of the girls in commune came to the house and sang traditional songs for us. Then we all sat and talked for another hour. We exchanged stories about our lives and how different they were. They were amazed that I worked on the 25th floor of a building.  That I would willingly go up that high on a daily basis was astonishing to them. One of the girls, probably in her late teens, was albino and had vision problems as a result.  Although very attractive, she was very frustrated with her appearance and recently had obtained some dye and had darkened her hair color.  She told us that this had resulted in her being severely restricted.  She was not allowed to leave the commune at all and she thought that the elders were going to transfer her to another commune in Manitoba Canada.  I asked if her parents opposed this and she said they did not want her to leave, but would not oppose the elders.  She also seemed resigned to this and spoke of it in a matter of fact voice.

Everyone we met spoke English but with a strong Germanic accent.  When speaking to each other they generally spoke in a Germanic tongue.  I later learned that this was a language variation of their own. I enjoyed my visit, but was very happy to leave and be back in the free world.