FINNS: An Oral History- You Were In Finn Town Here - 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
I’ve tried to explain sisu to other people, but they just look at me like I’m crazy. When I say it’s one of the things that helped Finns succeed in the Russo-Finnish Winter War, they sort of understand. But they want to know exactly what it means and when you say it’s a combination of traits, their eyes just glaze over. But to explain sisu, the thing that helped the Finnish Army hold back the Reds [during the Winter War], I’ll have to tell a story.
This old Finn guy named Villi, who lived near my Niemela grandparents, went down to Frost Pond in Dublin, New Hampshire, and was chopping ice and drinking and somehow fell down drunk. He had his vodka either before he went or with him while he was chopping the ice; probably both. He didn’t fall through the ice, but passed out cold. And somehow his feet became frozen into the ice of the pond and he didn’t wake up.
My grandfather, Pappa, was worried about Villi and decided to go by the pond on his way home and found him stuck. My grandfather may have been out logging in the woods because he had his tractor. So he matter-of-factly chopped Villi out of the ice, put him on top of whatever load he was pulling, brought him to the farm, put him in the kitchen; probably the summer kitchen. They poured warm water over Villi and thawed him out, woke him up, and he was fine. That’s sisu.
My father has it in how he taught me to work outside. Once, he was fixing the barn roof at our home in Dublin. We had horses and wanted to get the roof in shape because we were selling the farm, but also the horses were right below the leak. He was up the ladder, walked on the roof, fell off, and landed on his tailbone. It was about 30 feet. He goes in, rests for a minute, then goes out and keeps working. He was 60, but he was fine.
When my family visited Finland, relatives took us swimming in the coldest water I’ve been in, the Baltic Sea. It actually hurt. They were laughing because we couldn’t take the cold. I don’t think I would have the stamina to do what my father did. But when I’m working and something gets in my way, I just deal with it. Or I get a cut and wrap something around it and go on. My dad has sisu since he’s a full-blooded Finn: more than I do. But I have some of it.
I remember watching my grandmother, Lempi (Korpi) Niemela. She had these big black boots and was always wearing some kind of long skirt and the boots would go right up under the skirt and I assumed there was something warm under there, like tights. And she wore a big old woolly coat.
She was really closed about talking about her life: her work as a mother. I know she was not old enough to know how to really take care of a kid because she tied my father to a tree to keep him from running around like the poor kid wanted to. I think she must have had at least four children that she was busy with at the time. Maybe she tied a couple to the tree together so they could play. I’m sure it was in the summer. I hope. She could have been stoking the sauna, which was way down by the tree he was tied to. We played under it as kids.
A woman I will call Helvi: nearly everybody in our family hated her. She was a blonde, buxom Finn, 100 percent. She spoke Finn most of the time. She could speak English, but it was accented heavily. She was mistress to a man who had married into our family and this guy didn’t hide the affair at all. Helvi at the time was in her late 20s and he was probably in his 50s and she’d always turn up at family functions. She emigrated from Finland because she had relatives in America and I guess she fell in love and stayed; I think she worked as a maid. She wasn’t beautiful, but she was just a sturdy, blonde, good-looking Finn.
And she kept her Finnish ways, taking off her clothes around other people, because in Finland it isn’t a big deal. One time at our cabin on the lake at Frost Pond we were having a barbecue and a lot of the relatives came and Helvi showed up; it was late afternoon and they started drinking. I’d say by six or seven o’clock, Helvi decided to take off the top of her bathing suit and just walk around.
My mother came up to me and said, “Helvi is walking around with no top on and I want you kids to just go somewhere else.” So I went trying to find Helvi and I saw her: chest just sticking right out. She was going in the lake in front of our cabin and just swimming around. She was probably drunk and was trying to flirt with yet another of my male relatives.
My father disapproved of her. He was the leader of the family and if anyone would have been the one to get her out, it would have been he. Plus it was his home. Nobody had invited her. And she would just show up at family functions because no-one would invite her. She left mad the night of the barbecue, screaming.
I only came into consciousness about being Finnish as an adult. When I was a kid, my family was traveling all around the world and we were Americans and our heritage was secondary and I didn’t think about it except when we were with our cousins; they were all blondes or light-haired and all very similar-looking, but I just thought that was normal.
My father still uses some Finnish language now. I love it. He’s definitely 100 percent Finn every waking moment. A home boy. He used to be a diplomat to Norway in the embassy. He was chief of ODC, the Office of Defense Coordination (or something like that), selling fighter jets to the Scandinavians and doing some other things that he wouldn’t tell me about. Spy stuff, that’s for sure. He loved it there.
It bothered my mother, especially when we were in Finland, when he would speak Finn to our relatives and she was left out. Among my father’s family, there were other wives in her situation. The brothers always married wives who were not Finnish for some reason, and so she had those women as allies. But I think all the wives were accepted to a certain degree because they had Northern European blood: Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Scots, even Russians. They were accepted maybe because their people had to endure a lot because of the weather. That’s my psychological analysis of it.
Enjoyed Kathryn Niemela's story. I now understand myself better. When I was 39 I was installing a knotty pine ceiling in my dining room and stepped between the planks of my staging, fell up to my waist, suspended by my rib cage, felt some pain but not enough to make me stop working. I became dizzy, told my I was going to take a nap and would continue later. She grabbed my wrist, felt my pulse, and said we're going to the emergency room. I said that wasn't necessary, she insisted. I said OK but I needed to shower and put on clean clothes. She then drove me to the emergency room. Dropped me off the door and went to park the car. I went in and told the receptionist that my wife thinks I'm hemorrhaging internally. She gave paperwork to fill out and told me to have a seat. When my wife came in she was upset that they weren't attending to me. She went up to the desk and told the young doctor to start an IV on me. When he told her to have a seat and that he would get to me she called the Chief of Staff of the hospital who she personally knew. He told the young doctor to follow my wife's instructions! The Chief came to the hospital (this a Saturday). Xrays with a dye showed internal bleeding in the area of the kidney. The Chief happened to be a surgeon. He called in a urologist. The two of them opened me up and found my right kidney in 2 pieces and 5 pints of blood in my abdomen. The urologist sewed the kidney together and 53 yrs later it's still working. Is this an example of Finnish sisu?
I'm sure you're wondering why the emergency room would pay attention to my wife. When the Chief was a medical student he did a rotation in an emergency room many years before that in which my wife was head nurse.