No Room for Lazy People - Toivo 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.
Toivo Kangas
In Worcester there were two steel mills. Where my father worked, they made pipes, nails, barbed wire, and regular wire. They used some kind of a lye. A lot of people got poisoned from that. It affected their stomach. And my father almost had a leg cut off. The wire wrapped right around his leg. So he had to come home and rest a few weeks to recuperate from that. ‘Course there was no union at that time. They could hire and fire with a snap of their fingers.My father had an old Model T. Some days he would take two or three crates of eggs to Worcester and sell them. He’d work all week and come home Saturday late morning or noontime and bring groceries. All kinds of pastry and ham, probably five or six bags. Saturday afternoon he would cut hay and my oldest brother would help put that in the barn with my mother. Sometimes he went to Worcester on the train from Greenville, especially in winter. When he’d take off Sunday afternoon, I’d start howling and crying. He was my idol just like my mother. He never talked to us one on one.He must have started going to work in Worcester around 1931. My uncle Matti did the same thing. Those were terrible times. My Uncle Matti would come over and they’d talk about how tough working conditions were. But after eight years my father quit and got jobs around town, but there wasn’t that much for work. We raised our own food: potatoes, carrots, beets, kill a hog or cow for the winter. And picked berries. We got money from milk and eggs. We lived an average life.
Pretty much everybody was poor until Herbert Hoover was voted out. I went up to Matti Maki’s and we picked through the summer. I used to drive a blueberry truck down to Boston Load them up on the pickup and sold them to Adams Chapman in the market district it was Finns who picked blueberries. Yankees didn’t have farms and big families. They didn’t have to go through rigmarole to earn money My father would bring a couple of smoked ham shoulders home. Mother would boil those two or three hours on the wood stove and then put it in the oven for an hour-and-a-half to brown. Oh, was that good! We were just like starving hyenas. With homemade bread and all that. He’d bring home flour and mother would make bread once a week and pastry on a Saturday. She was a terrific worker. All these Finn women were expert homemakers. They must have learned that back in the old country. They were tough times yet we had enough food. Like Charlie Bailey said, “We ate off the land instead of the can.” He was from Maine. Not a Finn, but still a comical bird. We worked together at the mill. My father talked about life in Finland only when my Uncle Matti would come over. They sat around the kitchen table and we used to listen to conditions they had lived under: they were more or less serfs. ‘Course they were still under the czar. He wasn’t too bad with the Finns, the last czar we had: Nicholas. He pretty much left the Finns alone. Over there, owning your own farm was a big dream. Even though peasants lived on landholder’s farms, they had no hay of their own to feed their own cows, so they’d walk the cows along the side of the road to eat what grass grew there. Matti’s wife, my Aunt Fiina: they don’t make women like her any more. Women today couldn’t do a tenth of what she did every day, running that farm, having 10 kids, milking all those cows. She worked harder than a lot of men. Fiina had heart problems and when she started having chest pains, she’d go into the house, take one of those pills, then go out and start milking again. Later on the farm we had a horse, Harry, until I was 10 or 12 years old, when he got some kind of infection on his head. It got worse and we had to get rid of him up in that back sand bank. My father dug a good-sized grave and led the horse beside it and somebody put a bullet into his head: out of his misery. We bought a new horse and I don’t know if it had been abused but my father had a hard time to control him. With a little patience he turned out to be okay. His name was Pulli. Uncle Matti would bring his team of workhorses over and do plowing and we’d haul the manure out from under the barn up to the field with the dump wagon and spread it. Pulli would pull the mowing machine when my father cut hay. Then Pulli would pull the rake when the hay was dry and put it in piles. Once the hay was dry, we’d throw it onto the wagon. I used to level it off on the sides and back so we could get a pretty good load. My father must have been in his 70s when he was still haying. Didn’t faze him. None of us boys could fill his shoes to equal what he did for physical work.
Toivo mentions his uncle Matti. He should have mentioned that his uncle had Finnish sisu. Matti was cutting down a good size tree with an ax when the tree fell the wrong way on top of him pinning him to another log. He was there for hours before a neighbor notice that he was trapped. The neighbor came over and found him alive. Matti said "Get this damn tree off me". The neighbor and 2 other men after 3 hrs freed him. He suffered only bruises and was back to work after a day's rest.
There were and still are Yankee families that live off their farms (us Perry and Tuttle families then and me now) seasonally planting, harvesting, gathering and picking whatever is in season to preserve, can or sell. It's not a tough life if you know how and aren't afraid to work.