FINNS: An Oral History- You Were In Finn Town Here - Ralph Kangas
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.
Ralph Kangas
My father always said his father, John Kangas, our grandfather, got screwed out of some land. That little gray house on the corner down from us: that should have been our land. And the piece going up from there along Temple Road should have been ours, too. But back then, you weren’t sure.
He thinks whoever did the surveying kind of gave that land away: someone paid underneath the table saying, ‘There’s an old Finn down there, he doesn’t know what’s going on. Here’s 100 bucks. Give me a couple of acres.”
I think even John Preston [a New Ipswich town surveyor] told my father when he looked back into the records that land showed as being part of the property. The Finns were trusting. They lived on good faith. They didn’t know anything about surveying. Growing up, there were a lot of Finn families in New Ipswich. Koivulas, Hills, Salos, Kangases, Heikkilas, Keurulainens: you were in Finn town here. A lot of them have since moved to Minnesota, Michigan, Washington State, Florida, South Carolina. The Finn tradition, the Finn dominance, is slowly dying.
I remember my grandfather Kangas from the day I was born, it seems. Every Sunday morning he made rice pudding: we had to eat rice pudding. Sometimes my mother would put brown sugar on top. We didn’t have maple syrup: too expensive. But he’d have this big pot on the stove and he’d be there stirring it. He’d sit and drink his coffee like the Finns did. He’d pour it from the cup into the saucer, a lump of sugar between his teeth, and sip.
The other traditional food was lutefisk [lipeäkala]. My father and grandfather used to go to the Co-op in Fitchburg to buy it, then cook it on Christmas Eve. It would stink up the whole house and we couldn’t stand it. My father would eat that until it was gone. I mean, there was nothing left.
My grandfather lived above the kitchen and was always smoking his pipe. Whenever he walked in the room you could smell it. That guy never rested a minute. I hear stories from old Finns who said he was one of the best scythers in town. Nobody could keep up with him. If there was a blade of grass sticking up beside a rock, he would go and hit it and not hit the rock. He was a cantankerous old guy, too. He had no use for anybody who didn’t pull their weight. When he yelled at us, it was in Finnish. But he would always build us nice toys. He’d take a log and made each of us a train: a locomotive to sit and ride around on. Then he took another log, put wheels on: you had a little seat. We had more fun with those cars.
I remember my grandfather not being overly friendly with us as kids. I think he really liked us a lot, but had a hard time showing his friendship so he would do it through making things. He’d come down for breakfast and supper, but then at night he’d go upstairs and sit and rock. There was no radio or TV. Smoke his pipe a little. He’d always give us his pipe cans to play with. We could always go up in the room, but he’d go to bed very early. ‘Course he had that big white dog, Huppi. That was his friend. Huppi could do no wrong.
One brother of our grandfather was a Communist and lived in Worcester: [we called him] ‘Comrade’ Willie. We used to go down to his house a lot. Kind of a neat little house on a hill. I didn’t even know he was a Communist until I was older. But we had plenty of good Finn food there: nisu and salmon.
Our Uncle ‘Charlie the Barber’ was the hit of Worcester, a guy I was terribly proud of, Charles Ahti [In The Kalevala, national epic poem of Finland, a prankster named Ahti is guardian spirit of the waters ]. Charlie would come up to see us in New Ipswich. His wife, our Aunt Tita, would drive and he’d sit in the back with his cooler right next to him, all loaded with Budweiser. He’d be drinking and he’d get out and he’d be blitzed. But he was a very lovable guy.
And he’d always come out of the car with some kind of magic trick. They’d drive up on a Sunday afternoon and he’d have Tita scoot into the house and hide a coin or tell my father, “Go put a coin underneath the TV.” And he’d go, “Come here, boys!” and he’d make a rubbing motion with his hand with a coin: it would disappear.
We’d go, “Where is it?!”
He’d say, “Go check in the house under the TV set,” or, “underneath the book on top of the TV.” And we’d go rushing in and there’d be 75 cents. He’d take us down to the store and roar, “Give these boys and girls anything they want!”
REF: Elias Lonnröt, comp. The Kalevala or Poems of the Kaleva District, with a Foreword and Appendices by 13 Francis Peabody Magoun, trans. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 386.
Then we’d go down to Worcester and Charlie would take us some place and we’d run into a cop. The cop would say, “Hey, Charlie, how ya doing?” And we’d get to look at the cop’s car. And wherever Charlie went, everybody knew him. He was the best pool player in all of Worcester. No-one could beat him. And supposedly there was some big pool shark that was coming to Worcester. He was going to play Charlie, but then the guy never showed up.
When we were kids growing up in town, you knew everybody. I knew everybody’s car, everybody’s license plate number. I knew how many kids they had in their family and all their names. You went in the store: they knew you. “Hey, little Kangas boy!” I remember New Ipswich being very small, very quiet, very pleasant. You could slide down Town Hill in the middle of a snowstorm. There were never any cars. We built up a toboggan jump on our back hill and threw water on it and froze it at night. It was my brother Kenny’s and our pal Dickie Flinkstrom’s and my idea. Our neighbors Peter and John Somero would come over and we would book it down that hill.
Skating was a highlight, too. Phil Emma had that little Jeep and he would plow our pond up after every bit of snow. And we’d be down there right after school. We’d have bonfires and cook hot dogs: kids used to come from all around. Once my brother fell in through the ice and I ran home and told my mother. She said, “Well, why didn’t you help him out?” I said, “Well, I wanted to tell you first.”
They only thing I regret: kids that grew up in Los Angeles or New York would have things that came out right away like the new toys, the new films. The first movie I ever saw was The Great Locomotive Chase by Walt Disney, in 1954 or 1955. The culture up here was very far behind. The only place we’d go was to Fitchburg to go shopping. Down on a Friday night, park behind Sears Roebuck, walk up and down Main Street, or go to the Co-op, it was all Finn, to buy groceries. Or we’d go to Greenville to get our hair cut or to the Boston Shoe Store and get sneakers for two dollars a pair. Red Ball Jets or PF Flyers.
We used to go downtown when we’d have our cousins the Korpis over for a cookout on Saturday night. We’d go at one or two in the morning and sit in the middle of Town Hill and a car would never come. But the biggest thrill was to go down in the summertime to the town pool. We spent hours swimming, playing basketball, Home Run Derby, baseball, tennis, and riding bikes all over creation. We had the freedom to go wherever we wanted and no-one ever worried or questioned where we went. We spent a lot of time at the Barrett Mansion with Butch Bursiel or at Dick Ransom’s house on top of Town Hill. We never vandalized anything. We weren’t like some of the kids today.
We never used to go in Duke Johnson’s store much because he was kind of intimidating. Duke would sit in the big window there: “Hey, Loh!” Duke would sell you beer. If you said, “I’m bringing beer home for my father,” he would give it to you to bring home to your father. That’s when Mountain Dew first came out:
But we spent most of our time at New Ipswich Market because of the Baker family. The mother was a Finn. You’d go in and Henry Baker would be there chopping meat and we’d be quietly walking behind. All of a sudden, he’d take his big meat cleaver and go boom! “What are you boys doing here?!” I remember walking into the store and there was a juke box and that was all I heard: “Hound Dog” by Elvis Presley. I said, “Who the heck is that singing?” And whoever was playing the juke box must have played it five or six times. That was in 1955: I was in the first grade. And their son Dick Baker was a great basketball star in this town from 1957 through 1959.
We wanted to go swimming down at the town pool, which was the best thing. It was black with a mud bottom. And cold! We’d go down and sit in that mud and the water would be pitch dark and no-one ever drowned. You had one life guard, someone local like Dick Baker or Lynn Jones. We used to have a peephole in the boys’ room and be looking at the girls. Dick or whoever would cover the peepholes up and we’d take a pencil and drill them out again.
‘Sixty-four was the last summer I spent there because I had to go to work. My father found me a job working for Fred Somero, at the highway department. Did I ever tell you what he did to me? I came into the office and this reclining chair was there. And everyone, including Fred, was standing around talking and I said to myself, ‘Well, that chair’s free. A nice recliner.’ And as I started to walk over, I noticed everyone kind of looking. You think, ‘I wonder why they’re looking at me?’ but it doesn’t faze you. I sat down and all of a sudden I see Fred reach over.
And you remember the old phones we use to crank: he started cranking that phone and I go, “Whoa!” He had hooked it up and generated electricity through the chair. It kicked me right out of the seat: shocks going through me. But I played it down and they got a big kick out of it. I was 16.
What else I miss is when Memorial Day would come and all the Kangases who went off to war would march in the town parade. And you had the Leonard I. Kangas American Legion downtown and were so proud of that. R.P. Kangas would come up from Arlington. They’d all get together at my father’s place or maybe Korpi’s and you saw everybody. And slowly that died out.
I probably would have tolerated the Army when Vietnam was going because I couldn’t have gone anywhere. But if I had gone to a college in the Midwest or something, I probably would have quit and come home. I came home every weekend from Keene State [College in Keene, New Hampshire]. It was nice: you had three meals. And it seemed like all the parties ended up at our farm [in New Ipswich]. That lifestyle is gone: Finn kids are not like they used to be. Well, none of the kids are like they used to be. Kids now are more sassy, but back then, like the Hakalas and Saaris; they were always nice kids. They never back-talked or anything. And kids today: everybody back-talks.