Chapter 11: Some family history

"Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond." 

- Jalaluddin Rumi

My parents, grandparents, and ancestry have certainly had a role in bringing me to this place and this person. I weave a few of those stories in; they lend some insight. Some of the family stories include “secrets” that in times past just didn’t get told as it was not acceptable then to speak of such things. 

I think telling all the stories is important, whether the actions seem noble or ignoble.

My aim in telling is to honor the ancestor, recognizing that I am very much like they were. I have no judgments against them. My desire is merely to understand.

On my dad’s side:

My dad’s dad was a bootlegger. He was lots of other things as well, but it’s this role that put him in prison for six months and this deed that was hush-hush among my family elders. 

Edward Appleseth was born in 1893 to Johan Appleseth (spelled Appelseth by Johan’s brothers; there is more than one American rendering of the original Norwegian Apalset name).

I’ve been told that nicknames were prolific in the early 1900s. Edward’s nickname of Skid came from his first business in Clarkfield, MN, of repairing tires. Following that he had a scrap iron business during WWI and then opened Appleseth Produce in 1919, but his “Skid” identity remained.

It was a ‘shotgun’ wedding to Adelia Jorgenson in mid-January 1921; their firstborn, James, was born that year and five kids followed in the span of 12 years. My dad, the baby of the family, was born in 1933.

Before the prohibition-induced imprisonment, and when his kids were little, Edward drank. After the jail sentence, Edward was sober for 20-some years. Not until he was ready to retire and feeling bored – one of his kids was running the produce and he had little to do – did he start drinking again. Aunt Jean said of the Appleseths that “other people would go to church, talk politics, attend baseball games…not the Appleseths, they were all work, work, work.” Without work, it seemed Edward felt some emptiness. Not long into retirement, he shot himself.

On my mom's side:

Charles Hamilton Hubbard seemed as well to prefer work, and spirits. Charles – father of Edward Charles Hubbard and my mom’s (Adeline Marie Hubbard Appleseth) paternal granddad  – lived in Frederic, WI, and was the proprietor of the local pool hall and saloon. A parking lot is now situated where Charles H. Hubbard's pool hall once was located just a few feet from the train depot.  Originally a wood-frame structure built in 1901, after burning to the ground in the downtown-wide flames of 1908, it was rebuilt with brick. 

A picture from one of my grandmother's albums reveals the Hubbard brick building's adornment of a large mural painted by prolific yet affordable painter Al Brown. The place was an impressive presence in town. 

In the late 2000s, on a trip to Frederic - with my sister Cindy and cousins Pam and Cheryl - to investigate family history, the museum volunteer and Frederic-born native Ken told us a few stories. Ken reminisced that there were many "independent" characters in those days, and that nicknames were most common. He tells of one dairy farmer who got caught watering down his milk, and was then forever known as "Water Anderson."

When a child, Ken recalls weekend trips to town. The usual pattern was for all the country folk to make a Saturday evening run to the village: the ladies would go to the grocer and trade eggs for other food stuffs, the kids would go to the picture show place, and the men would go to the saloons. Fights would sometimes break out. He didn't differentiate whether the fights continued through the prohibition years (1920-1933) or not. In the 1922 high school year book, C.H. Hubbard's billiards establishment advertises "Cigars, Cigarettes and Soft Drinks."

With guarded but noticeable regret Ken mentioned that his grandfather was a regular customer of the Hubbard saloon before the prohibition years: he was sure his granddad had quite a tab going at our great-grandfather’s establishment. Some nights the guys at the saloon would carry his inebriated granddad to the horse-drawn wagon, swat the horses to git, and the horses would take his passed-out granddad home. Ken said his grandma, never happy with that scene, told him that on some rainy nights she’d just “leave him in the wagon ‘til mornin.”

I wonder what the townspeople said of that saloon and those Hubbards. With many of the Hubbard relatives being teetotalers, the speculation is that Charles was a black sheep, rather separate from the rest of his family. The story also is that Charles and his nearly-20-years-younger wife Georgia Mae Wheeler separated. In those days a history like that may have been the talk of the town. Intense. Shameful.

So maybe my tendency toward alcohol use, overwork, and intensity comes naturally.

We used to own Brittany Spaniels, dogs bred for hunting and described as high-strung. They’d get loose and irritate the neighborhood. I guess I’m more like those dogs than I care to admit: rather high-strung, and sometimes running amok.