THEIR TOP PRIORITIES - Earl Somero
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.
Earl Somero
Aiti (my mother) told me that when I arrived, they made a bathroom upstairs and I was the first in the family to have a bath in a bathtub. I think before that, everybody would bathe in the sauna or Aiti would wash the kids in a wash tub near the wood stove. We didn’t have a chimney on our sauna: ours was a smoke sauna.
When I was young, I remember my brothers set out to repair the sauna kiln or kiuas. First they made a wood form and then they would mix a batch of cement and throw rocks in and keep layering rocks and cement until it formed a dome-shaped, oven-type kiln. Then on top of that, somebody set a washing machine tub and filled it with rocks: that was our kiuas. We’d start heating the kiuas about one o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday. We’d go in there with wood, kindling, and paper, or whatever it would take to get the fire going, and all afternoon we’d have to go feed the fire with wood.
Whoever went into the sauna would go through the pukuruuma (changing room) and have to hold their nose and stay low because there was smoke everywhere, so thick you couldn’t see and so caustic you couldn’t breathe. The smoke went out through the luukku, an eight-inch hole in the wall near the ceiling. We’d keep adding wood until we could get the kiuas real hot. Usually about four or five o’clock, we’d start thinking the sauna might be ready. Once the wood had gotten to the point where it wasn’t releasing smoke anymore, hot coals, we’d go purge the rocks of soot. We’d haul a bucket of water to the sauna and pour two or three dippers on the hot rocks, which would release all the remaining soot from the stones. Then we had to get out again or the gasses would do a number on us. We’d wait fifteen or twenty minutes longer and shut the vent, and the sauna would be ready. We’d still have hot coals in the bed for a while, so the stones would generate heat for two or three hours, but there wouldn’t be any smoke.Then it was a matter of “Who’s going first?” That was when it was the hottest. There was creosote inside on the walls so it was pitch black in the smoke sauna. It wasn’t a glossy black; more of a satin. A real, velvety type of black everywhere. If you touched the walls, you’d get soot on yourself. We had buckets and a kuolli—individual containers for water. I never went running down to the brook like my older brothers, but I did roll in the snow; it had to be new-fallen snow. I didn’t use birch switches much; my mother used to make them and talk about them. Life was probably so hard that their muscles ached all the time; the switching probably felt good. At least when it stopped. My mother also used to massage people. Nowadays, there’s a guy, Heikki, a good Finn name, that comes up from the Cape on Saturdays and does massage. Usually he goes to Hilkka’s