Dave Wood

Here’s some good advice. If you have a grandpa or a grandma who likes to talk, to entertain, and above all, to reminisce, PAY ATTENTION AND, IF POSSIBLE, DON’T BOTHER THE SPEAKER OR RECORD HIM OR HER.

I only wish someone had given me that advice when my grandma told me that I should “Talk a lot to your grandpa. He’s not much for what’s happening these days, but he loves to talk about the past, which you damned well better know something about. After all, knowledge isn’t heavy to carry. You should be learning to speak Norse from me. That’s not heavy either.”

Of course, in my youthful ignorance, I ignored her advice, never learned Norwegian and grew up to regret it when I hired on at Augsburg College where all the administrators granted raises and promotions to profs who could really schnakka Norsk!

As for Grandpa, a Yankee who did speak Norse fluently (probably at Grandma’s orders!). I loved to sit with him as he smoked his pipe and remembered in English the old days. Little did I realize that hidden in the horse barn behind Grampa’s house in Whitehall was box after box of diaries kept by Grandpa’s father Dave Wood. When I finally discovered them long after my Grandpa’s death I found there were 57 volumes in number, the longest American farm diaries —by decades — ever recorded. And my grandpa didn’t even know they were out in the barn before I discovered them under a pile of 2x4s I needed for my hobby farm. Of course, I read through more than 3,000 entries, which turned out to be an account book punctuated by births, deaths, comedy, tragedy and names of people I knew little or nothing about.

I wept when I imagined the fun we’d have had in our lawn chairs as I read the entries to my dear Grandpa! (“Who’s Shubal?” That’d be Shubal Breed, Dave’s brother-in-law!” “Frits?” “That’d be Fritz Sielaff, my dad’s hired man!”)

All this and more had been included in Grandpa’s reminiscences, but of course I had let them disappear in a cloud of Grandpa’s Prince Albert smoke as I sat there without a notebook.  Feeling a sense of guilt, I transcribed ten years of the diary, got to work on family correspondence, genealogies, newspaper items, then inserted that material in footnotes and introductions and prepared to publish when I discovered another set of diaries penned by Dave’s second son, Jim.

Slow down, I said to myself. Try to remember the days on the lawn with grandpa. Any names he mentioned that might have mentioned that are still alive. THINK. Cousin Clark Getts who now lives in New York. Nephew Elmer Wood an accountant in St. Paul; Joe Emerton, my grade school shopkeeper; Grandma Wood, I’ll bet she remembers more than is fit to print, and how about Harold Wood, my own father.

NEXT WEEK: THE RESULTS OF MY INTERVIEWS