Rememberment, Chapter XIX: From the Land of the Free

My grandpa was born in 1908 in the USA (most likely in Herbster, Wisconsin but this is not 100% certain). His parents were among the ~350,000 Finns who moved to the United States between 1870 and 1930. At some point the family then decided to move back to Finland, while two of my grandpa's uncles and his aunt decided to stay in the US.

The siblings of my great-grandparents, with their children.
The picture was taken in Wisconsin, somewhere in the early 1920s.

My great-grandparents and their kids.
Grandpa is in the back, close to his dad.

There's not much info about Grandpa's younger years. As an adult, he started working as a locomotive fireman for the Finnish national railroad company (VR) and then met my grandmother. My dad was born to them in 1935. Operating the trains was crucial during wartime too, so Gramps kept doing the same job over the war years as well.

Life wasn't always kind. Grandma caught tuberculosis when my dad was in his teens. One day when she was cleaning the house windows, she started to violently cough up blood and died soon after.

Granpa's younger brother also died at only 37 years of age. He was in the hospital because of a boil in is throat. His wife had just visited him and was having a chat with an acquaintance of hers in the hospital yard, when a nurse came running and told her that the boil had burst, and her husband had choked to death.

Grandpa remarried, but his second wife failed to outlive him as well and died when I was still little.

Gramps in 1955.

Grandpa was a skilled hunter and had lots of experience with dogs. He managed to obtain some top class Finnish Spitz, started breeding them and sold the puppies for a good price. When his cousin learned how much he was asking for the puppies, he said that he would never pay that much for a dog. "Would you take one if you had it for free then?" Grandpa asked and when his cousin said that sure, in that case, he was given a puppy.

Gramps was a loud and humorous man, often cracking jokes that were more than a little inappropriate for children's ears. He lived in a small house in one of the oldest residential areas of the town; the house was located on top of a small hill with a nice view over a meadow.

A lot of the surrounding land had been owned by the family even before the place became a town, and his inheritances made Grandpa a wealthy man. But he never seemed to spend a penny if it could be avoided; even electric light was only used in his house when there were guests.

I loved visiting him there when I was little. The place had lots of charm, and Gramps had many interesting old items and toys for me to play with. In his back yard he had a big old apple tree which I called the Monkey Tree (I had seen monkeys in a zoo, and was convinced that Grandpa's apple tree should have monkeys in it as well). His car was an old Saab 96, appropriately called "The Suppository".

When Gramps became old, Dad's sister started taking care of him until it was no longer possible. We kept seeing him occasionally in the nursing home too until his death in 1989. For the visits we always brought him meat jelly, his favorite delicacy.