Dave Wood

Recently, I was invited to my hometown to talk about writing and discuss our family’s connections to Whitehall, Wis., now celebrating its 150^th birthday. My first appearance was at the auditorium at the high school where I was to talk to 200 elementary schoolers and then 300 high schoolers, which scared the bejesus out of me because I hadn’t appeared before a class since I gave up pedagogy 40 years ago. 

I was saved especially by the grade schoolers’ penetrating and cunningly sophisticated participation. (Sample: Me: “Always inform your reader the make of the car your character is driving, to let the reader know something about the character’s status in life.” Fourth grader: “You mean like who was richer, the owner of a Chevy or a Tesla? Or an Aston Martin?”)

Having survived the colloquy with 300 students in the afternoon, I next faced 60 adults at the new public library to talk about my new book of recollections about my growing up years in Whitehall, from WWII on. My connections to many in the audience led to renewed acquaintances that put some real spring in my feeble step. 

Most springy was Eileen Johnson, of nearby Osseo, whom I had never met. She phoned me weeks earlier to ask why I always wrote about my Grandpa Wood’s side of the family, but seldom about my grandma’s side, Charlie Johnson’s clan, also pioneers who were just as important in settling our community.

I explained that to my knowledge there wasn’t much written about them because they were immigrants and got less media attention than my New England relatives.

“Is that so?” replied Eileen. “I’ll see you at your celebration and maybe you’ll be in for a surprise.” As the event opened a couple I didn’t recognize came right up to me with some very impressive material. “I’m the person who called and I brought you some material I hope might interest you.”

This is the caller, Eileen Johnson, just as tall as my Swede cousins, and married to Gregory Johnson, a distant cousin of mine and settled by my Grandma’s family.

I was floored. She opened a file of ancient photographs of Charlie, who arrived from the old country with his family, genealogical charts going back to the early 19^th century. Maps of the family’s agricultural holdings. And best of all, long biographies written and published in pamphlets by florid prose stylist Judge Hans Anderson, the county judge who knew everybody who was anybody. I had already read his obits about the Wood family, but the Johnson bios were much longer and more effusive than he had lavished on his Yankee Wood sagas, probably because the Judge shared Johnson’s Nordic roots. I knew scraps of details about this great grandad told to me by my grandma, his youngest of 10 children, but was totally unprepared for the judges’ account told with Victorian pomp and circumstance. Here’s a sample about Charlie’s early career in the Swedish merchant marine:

“[Charlie] has heard the call of the sea; its voice of thunder as it flings from the foam of its wrath into the screaming seagull’s nest; its long-drawn sighs as it beats in vain, hour by hour against the mountains that limit its sway; the boy who has listened to the wonderful whisperings of the sea…such a boy cannot long be restrained by fear of bodily discomfort from venturing upon what has been the greatest highway of adventure, so when his term of farm contract was ended, he went to sea and was fortunate to find work on a merchantman that sailed the Mediterranean.”

Whew! That was a mouthful, Your Honor. But as I read between the lines of the judge’s poetic exhortations, I realized Grandma Wood was probably not exaggerating when she told me Great-Grandad Johnson really did speak eight languages, probably picked up during the years he “sailed the Mediterranean.” That’s about as far as I ventured into the files of the Johnson family, an added boon to a very satisfying day spent in my beloved hometown.