One of the first customers to use the new outhouse facility mentioned in last week’s column was our friend Carl Chrislock, a distinguished professor of Scandinavian history then and author of the official Augsburg College history. He assured us he admired all the accoutrements of our privy, then recalled the bathroom in his dorm room as a student during the Great Depression.

“Six of us shared a room in a ramshackle old house owned by the college. When we all left for Christmas break, we left a note to Gus, the Norwegian janitor, telling him that our bathtub wouldn’t drain. When we arrived back two weeks later, we discovered Gus’s repair efforts. He had built a 4-foot-high frame of 2x4s, detached the bathtub from its plumbing, placed the bathtub atop the frame, and attached the drain fixture to a garden hose which stretched across the floor to the toilet.

“To drain the tub, pull the plug, gravity would do its work and you just had to flush the toilet.”  One more app. 

“Gus had thoughtfully built a many-runged ladder that leaned against the raised tub allowing us entry to the tub. I asked Gus later if the plumber had given him the idea. ‘Plumber? Nay, ay called no plumber. Plumber aren’t cheap, y’know!’”

Neither is toilet paper, but unfortunately Monkey Wards no longer mails us free catalogs!

I never asked professor Chrislock what manner of library Augsburg provided him and his five pals. He’s probably UP THERE in a study carrel dutifully transcribing Landsmal texts to Bokmal, as any good intellectual would do, so I’ll just have to take a wild guess:

Complete back issues of the Decorah Posten. Ole Rolvaag’s “Giants in the Earth,” “The Boat of Longing,” and “The Third Life of Per Smevig,” Chrislock’s own “From Fjord to Freeway: the Bicentennial History of John Louis Anderson’s Scandinavian Humor and other Myths,” Martin Luther’s not so “Small Catechism.” And of course, “The Runestone Hoax,” by Theodore Blegen (who was one of Carl’s Augsburg profs)!