No Room for Lazy People - Lorna (Niemela) Letourneau

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.

Lorna (Niemela) Letourneau

In our home, work was part of life. You grew up not thinking of it as a burden or punishment. ‘Course we didn’t have TV; we had radio and listened to The Lone Ranger, but our life was working.

If you’re a girl in a Finnish family, you learn to serve and not be reluctant. You didn’t know the perspective of women’s liberation; you wouldn’t think that way. I think the beauty of it was that you learned to serve graciously and that it’s a joy to serve.

My mother, Lempi (Korpi) Niemela, made it a joy; she had that kind of a heart. Everybody knew her and she took care of many people. She took in young men who arrived from Upper Michigan Copper Country and didn’t have any place to go. They were working for the construction company in New Ipswich and boarded with my mother: they looked upon her as their mother. It was work, too, to have these boarders and she never complained. Sometimes it would irritate me; she had already brought up 10 children! But she just kept going, work, work, work, and said, “When I get old, I think I’ll go into a nursing home so I can be of help...” Not because she was ill or tired!

There were times I hated to do dishes. You looked at the milk separator and all the little things and washed them and burned your hands scrubbing all the milk bottles and how many times you had to change the dishpan water because you had to make sure everything was shining, sparkling clean. And then twice during the summer, we had to take the kitchen chairs out and scrub them and all the rungs.

And my mother had the Finnish rugs. She would take them down to the brook in the summer and had those old-fashioned wooden frames. We’d put washtubs on two sides with a wringer in the middle and she’d wash the boys’ overalls because I had seven brothers. She’d scrub these rugs and we would jump into the brook and rinse them—push them down and get all the soap out. But she always made it fun. We could swim and play while she scrubbed and then when it was our turn, we had to put the rugs on the racks. These were cotton rag rugs, woven. When I was a young girl, I remember her making them at home on her loom.

As she got older, she didn’t have that much time for weaving because my mother was a wonderful cook. We lived in the community of Dublin, which had a lot of very wealthy people. They knew the Finns were honest and thrifty. And so my mother cooked for many of them. She’d be in the kitchens on their estates and I used to wait on tables and I’d have to be just so; they were using finger bowls. But they treated you with dignity. They used to treat my mother like gold. They respected her and they themselves were respectable people.

It was maybe the next generation or two down about whom my mother in her later years remarked couldn’t hold a candle to their grandparents because of the deterioration of society. After I got married, I did a party in Dublin and I couldn’t believe the attitudes. Because here had been these wealthy people and they treated you like one of them. And you saw that later on, with their children, sometimes that respect wasn’t there. And you see the old homes now and they’re deteriorated. Because the older generations respected their help and so the help wanted to work for them.

The Cabots from Boston: my mother worked for them. She used to work for Mrs. Jackson: Perkins Bass’s grandmother and Charlie Bass’s great grandmother. She was very gracious and during the Depression, I think she helped my Mom out. It was like they knew that this was a large family that we were self-sufficient on the farm to a certain degree, and I can always remember her being very polite and nice. Mrs. Brewster; I remember serving her. One of the 10 richest in the United States.

Had an estate that probably hired many of the Finnish people in Dublin. The Brewsters, husband and wife, were related in a sense, like cousins. Their estate was like a town within a town. But when my mother got older, she found it hard to get around and they would call her on the phone and she would love this. She’d buy the food and make it at home and they would come and pick it up. They knew her specialties and she knew exactly what they wanted and would be so proud.

Chicken with noodles and broccoli: a casserole sort of, like a big chicken divan. She’d make whole dinners, turkeys, pies. She made all those Finnish recipes, too. Nisu, pannukakku [oven pancakes], and dried-fruit soup with prunes and raisins and dried apricots and sugar and cornstarch with canned pineapple chunks and juice. You’d cook that all together and that would be wonderful.

She made pasty: four pounds of ground beef, four potatoes boiled and mashed, two cups of chopped onions, and two grated carrots. And you put the ground beef mixed with onion and carrot, all raw, in a Dutch oven and cover with water and bring to a boil and simmer two hours. Add a teaspoon of salt and some pepper, cinnamon, and cloves. Have four raw pie crusts ready. Mix the meat and potatoes together and when cool, spoon into two pie shells. Cover with top crusts, making a hole in the center. Bake at 375 degrees for an hour.

My mother made viili: she knew the secret to it. They passed that starter all around. Boy, I wish I had some! Because the milk would be fresh and the cream would be this thick [gestures a half-inch] on the top. We used to have that with reikäleipää and then you’d have the pickled herring.

My mother’s sister worked, doing the same thing. They’d go on many, many cooking dates in town together. And you know at my mother’s funeral there were so many people there. And it wasn’t so much from the Apostolic Lutheran church as it was the townspeople who honored her.

My son, who just got the police chief’s job in Dublin, said, “What are people always talking about Nana?” She was a saint. That’s all she did was help people. She lived her religion: she didn’t speak it. Her famous saying was, “Oh, so what! Just do good.”

[Next: The Teacher Was Supreme - Fred Meshna]