FINNS: An Oral History- Keeping Services - Kathryn Niemela
New Ipswich Historical Society
FINNS: An Oral History of Finnish-Americans in New Hampshire’s Monadnock Region
Excerpted from FINNS: An Oral History... by Patricia Kangas Ktistes, 1997, all rights reserved.
Kathryn Niemela
To me as a child, the Apostolic church seemed very restricted and controlled. Its people seemed dour but sincere in their worship of God. I think they were really trying to do the right thing, but they were not questioning why they were doing things and if what they were doing was actually good for them or the church.
The women appeared conforming: not questioning adoption of a typical role and listening to their husbands, who interpreted the meaning of the church for them. I saw the women as selfless to a fault because I thought they were not allowed to come fully into themselves. Given this background, I don’t know how some men in the community rationalized their drinking. The men were supposed to be the leaders of the family, but I think some got away with a lot: affairs, which happened a few times. I saw some of the men as almost Hitler-like because if they strayed that was fine but of course their wives couldn’t. It looked like some of the men abused their power.
Last summer, I attended the 88th annual national convention of the Apostolic Lutheran church in Rindge, New Hampshire, and services were in Finnish, Swedish, and English. The English language services were in a huge gymnasium. I really enjoyed seeing people I felt some sort of connection to, like they were sisterly or brotherly or kinfolk somehow. And they were beautiful people. But the sermon seemed unstructured and repetitive and I couldn’t follow it. I thought, “How can all these people sit here in this heat and listen to this guy?
I saw some surprise on the part of my relatives that day; they should have been surprised to see me. I talked to them later; my aunt couldn’t believe I had gone. She said she didn’t think that was my type of religion. I said it wasn’t; we had just gone as anthropologists, basically. “Oh, yeah, yup, yup, Mmhmm.”
When I was growing up, my father was in the Air Force and our immediate family traveled all around and were perhaps seen as sophisticated by the rest of the family. Whenever we came home from tours, we came back to New Hampshire to the cabin in Dublin we had on Frost Pond. We had just come home from Norway at one point, and I don’t know how it was decided we’d go to the Apostolic Lutheran Church in New Ipswich, but I think it had something to do with my grandmother
Lempi (Korpi) Niemela, who attended there. It was a big white church; big benches. This must have been in 1974 or ‘75.
So we got up that morning and I remember thinking, “What shall we wear?” My Mom just said, “Pants suits. Those are fine.” My mother always made clothes for us because we didn’t like foreign clothes. Thus, we all had these pants suits. They were matching; probably polyester. We looked like “The Brady Bunch.” It was extremely hot that day and we were really uncomfortable.
We went to the church and mingled outside beforehand and sat toward the back with the whole family all in a row. We didn’t have any idea we weren’t supposed to be wearing pants in church. I remember sitting there; part of the sermon was in Finn and whoever was preaching ranted and raved. And then somebody did the same thing in English. It just went back and forth like that, really fast, and I couldn’t even tell what they were saying. So we all started to get bored and giggle.
After the service, we walked outside and that’s when my grandmother told us we weren’t supposed to have pants on and that it was shameful to her. People were looking at us: kids, adults, everybody. And at first I thought they were looking at us was because we were Lempi’s grandchildren. But no; it was because the girls in our family were wearing pants. My grandmother said people thought we had audacity to wear them: that it was disrespectful.
We thought it was hilarious that they were sort of ‘back woods’ for thinking that. But we were boiling in those pants suits.
Enjoy reading how life was for some Finns in New Ipswich. My experience was quite different. My Finnish grandparents were not religious and the women (my grandmother, my aunt and her half sister were not (from my perspective) subservient to their husbands. It looked like an equal relationship. When my aunt & uncle moved in with my grandparents, my grandfather told my father how he was upset on how my aunt was reconfiguring his living quarters against his wishes. I was surprised that the 'history' described today was in the mid 70s. It seemed more like the mid 40s.