30. mars 2023 Stories of The Louis Palms Part 2

  Stories of The Louis Palms: Part 2

  Forty years ago, Janet Strandlie, of Thief River Falls, Minnesota acted as a caregiver for a week, starting on February 26, 1983, for my uncle, the late Raymond Palm, of Roseau, Minnesota, who at the age of 20 became paralysed from the waist down as a result of a tree-climbing accident in 1932. Raymond became a successful jeweler, watchmaker, and gunsmith. He had an adjoining living space and shop in a house on Center Street East, in which he lived with his sister, Irene, and her husband John. 

    Raymond ‘walked on’ in 2002 at age 91, after surviving 71 years in a wheelchair, at one point becoming a spinal cord injury survivor record holder. Janet writes: “These are Raymond’s words, written as fast as possible as he wove the tales and brought up story after story. This was done over one week in 1983. I think he really enjoyed it.”

Note: I've edited spellings, added death dates, and composed it chronologically. (WW/SR) 

The old Louis and Ingeborg Palm log house, built in 1896, on the south fork of the Roseau River as it appeared in 2013.

The Louis Palms 1895-1982

Introduction: 

    Louis and Ingeborg were both born in Varmland, Sweden, (married in 1878), and came to America in 1882. Raymond knew his Grandma Ingeborg (Ingegerd) (Anderson) Palm (1856-1932), who lived on their homestead, 'the old Palm Place', with her son Levi.

Levi Palm (1893-1962)

     Raymond's father, my grandfather William/Willie Palm came to Roseau County in 1895 from Alvarado, Minnesota with his father Louis, and his two younger brothers Sam, and David, looking for land that moreso resembled the forests of Sweden than the rich, but desolate prairie lands of the Red River Valley.                                                                                                

 Finding such land in abundance, Louis and Ingeborg homesteaded the NW quarter of Section 1 in what later became organized as Palmville Township in 1905. Named for the Palm family, as they were the first European immigrants to the area, Louis also became its first Township Board Chairman. Raymond had said the Palms maybe had its largest family of the time too, with five boys and three girls by 1895; eight boys and four girls by 1903.

    Raymond told Janet of an argument between brothers, Sam, and David Palm in about 1900, and that they were carrying 22s. Among the machine sheds, David had said, in Swedish, "Du bör se upp, annars ger jag dig en." (“You better watch out or I’ll give you one.”) Sam didn’t believe him, so kept on antagonizing him. Just as Sam came around a corner of a building, David shot him in the hip. They didn’t run to the doctor over every 'little thing' in those days, so likely their ma treated him. Later in his life, Sam told Raymond he was still carrying the bullet in his hip.

    Raymond told a story that his father Willie had told and his youngest brother Petrus, had backed up, that there once was a traveling salesman that would often show up at the Willie Palm place, (as was common in those days) right at lunch or supper time. The salesman was a slow eater and (as my mother Violet would tell) too often complained about something that he was eating. Grandma Palm, being a kind Christian woman bore his criticisms well and didn’t take such behaviors to heart -- 

    But Willie, who happened to be in the house at that moment, and witnessed such event, was not so forgiving, nor patient, and whereupon the salesman began his tirade, however well intended, when he lifted his fork to his mouth Willie shot the fork from his hand, scaring the guy from the house. Had Willie not occasionally shot flies off the kitchen walls up near the ceiling for practice, (of which I personally can attest), Grandma might’ve ran out of the kitchen with the frightened salesman. I wonder if she even jumped in surprise.

  March 1927  Willie Palm (1884-1937) and his son Ervin Palm (1921-1975)

 

    “Grandpa Amund Berg (1861-1930) and Willie went to Roseau in the old Pontiac and they came home heading west. Right north of the Lohre place, they hit ice and the car skidded and flipped over on grandpa’s side. They were both ‘souped up’ (drunk) of course, so when they landed on the side, Willie got out and asked Grandpa Berg if he was hurt and he said, «Nei, men jeg får ikke opp døren. Du?" (“No, but I can’t get the door open. You?”)

    In 1912 or so, Louis and Ingeborg Palm began planning to build a church on their land down by the South Fork of the Roseau River, but Louis died in 1913 before he could see it through to fruition. In 1915 or so, “The neighbors donated logs which were sawed into lumber at the Palm’s sawmill; then the community donated time and labor and built the church. The Palm family donated materials; Peter Sjoberg of Badger donated the windows”-- Page 72, Roseau County Heritage Book, 1992. The non-denominational church had services off and on, and even had a choir for awhile ... By the 1940s there wasn’t much going on and Sam Palm sold the church to the Baptists, and it was moved to Wannaska. 

    There got to be a bit of a feud over this because Levi Palm and his sister Ida, among others, hadn’t wanted the church moved or dissolved. Levi vowed to build another church and fix it so no one could ever again sell it --and he did it. In the late 1950s, he built a community church on that same spot. There were Sunday School and Bible School services there. (The church was moved to the Wiskow Threshing Bee site in the 1980s, to be used as a church building and preserved, where in 2022 it was still being used.)

   Raymond remembered Petrus Palm reprimanding him, when he was 4 or 5 years old, to stay back from the edge of the river so not to fall in, as his dad, Willie, and some of his brothers fished moose meat out of the Roseau River just north of their Grandpa (Louis) Palm’s. Willie and the others had been hunting moose and came home with the meat packed in wooden barrels. They were driving their sleigh across the river by the old Palmville Church when the sleigh broke through the ice and the barrels of meat fell into the river. 

    In 1916 or ‘17, Willie left home for ‘pulp camp’ in Beltrami Island State Forest to earn some money, as did many farmers across the region after harvest, but stayed there for so long one time that Grandma Palm placed a wanted ad in the Roseau Times-Region asking for anybody who knew the whereabouts of William Palm to please contact her. (Willie was no teetotaler, and I understood he had been on a-drunk for much of this time.) This ad appeared in the Sixty Years Ago column in the Roseau Times-Region in the later years (and in an issue of THE RAVEN: Northwestern Minnesota’s Original Art, History, & Humor Journal).

    In 1919, Prohibition was voted in and enforced --or tried to be anyway. About all the Palms cooked their own moonshine, although it was said that Willie’s brother David, never did. They set up stills with copper tubing and water coolers. They made the mash first and let it ferment and then cooked it in the still and the alcohol would come through the coil. These little stills were usually hidden back in the woods or in some shed. The Revenuers would check and were at old Palm’s (Louis’s) and at Sam’s with the sheriff. (Sam’s place was the Arnie Beito farm.)

   Once at Willie’s, a cow got into the mash barrel and got drunk, then passed out along the fence. The pigs happened to get out, and don’t you suppose they started chewing on the cow’s hip bone protruding through the fence? Clifford Palm especially liked that story and would ‘illustrate’ it in his particular comedic fashion as he did so many of his stories. Sadly, it’s unknown at this writing whether any of his recorded stories still exist.

   Another time, the mash made from corn meal was fed to the pigs, and they got drunk. Well, it happened that the job planned for the next day was castrating pigs, so it seemed the opportune time to do it when the pigs were feeling no pain, so the job was done a day early!

   About 1922, Raymond, and his friend Helmfred Johnson, his sister Amy, and Raymond’s sister, Violet, were going to a Polish wedding, south of Kruta Hall. (I think Kruta Hall was on Branch A, a mile north of Marshall County Road 48.) “We started out in an old Overland, even though we didn’t know where the wedding was, exactly. We heard that a Polish wedding celebration lasted three days, so we asked around (for a general location) and just took off. We drove and drove.  It was getting late anyway, so we stopped again and asked somebody. When we finally got there, they were all gone! It was all over! It was about that time that the car started to overheat, sputter and spit. (Now this was during the era when there were no yard lights out in the rural areas; no one had cellphones; often many rural homes didn’t have phones or even electricity, and headlights on cars were poor. It was just the way of life back then, and people made do; they didn’t know a different life.)

   “Then the oil pump had gone out in the car; [I had an earlier issue with it, had taken the crankcase off, etc, and thought it would hold together for awhile longer] I couldn’t do anything about it anyway --all dark -- so I pulled into Olaf’s place to get some oil from him. Olaf was old and always talked slowly with a thick Norwegian brogue, but he knew us ... I went and pounded on his door. 

      "Olaf was sleeping; it was late at night. “Snore, snore,” we kept pounding on his door and finally woke the man up. «Har du olje?”(“Have you got any oil?”) I said to him in Norwegian, for it was his first language. (This would have been an Old Norse dialect as he was an immigrant’s son.) “Vi trenger olje til bilen. Olje til bilen!”(We need oil for the car. Oil for the car!”) 

   “He went and found a light, got me some oil,” Raymond said. “I paid something like fifty cents or so for a gallon. I took off the crankcase, pulled the piston out, put the crankcase back on, and filled the crankcase back up with oil. The car ran good on three cylinders.”

   Raymond managed to get Helmfred and Amy home, and he and Violet home in the early morning, with one piston laying in the back seat and after taking the crankcase off twice in one night! They had fun, but had no dance!

    In about 1924 or ‘25, the Revenuers were back at the old Palm’s and found enough to incriminate Oscar Palm, the youngest of the Palm boys. He served two days in the jail in Crookston and Grandma Ingeborg was pretty upset. They never did search Willie’s place, so the cooking went on in peace, though there were several scares. Eli Brandt was the deputy then and they saw him walking the woods over at Sam’s, looking, but Sam was never caught.