THEIR TOP PRIORITIES - 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
Sauna: I didn’t know any other way to take a bath. I remember being in there even with my brothers but never knowing anything about it being wrong. It was just the Finn way. I guess they knew when to separate us, because I never remembered what my brothers looked like.
My mother used to scrub us up until our skin absolutely squeaked. And she would braid our hair and it would be so tight it would hurt. So in the morning when we went to church it would come out all like a big fluff. We’d have curly hair and off to church we’d go. She used regular Ivory(™) soap on us and Fels Naphtha(™) on the boys if they were really dirty. Later, she would go in the sauna with my daughter. And ice would be on the brook, but they’d go swimming in it after. My husband and I came over visiting once because my mother had these people up from Australia. And she wanted to introduce them to sauna and said, “Lorna, you can go in with this Australian lady.” And this woman had a little girl. And I had my daughter with me. So I thought to myself, ‘I bet she hasn’t told her anything about what happens in sauna.’ And sure enough, we go down to the sauna and my daughter, not thinking about anything, ran ahead with the little girl and stripped right down. And the Australian lady goes, “Do we go in NYKED?!” I told her, “Well, you can use a towel.” She had never seen her little daughter naked and I couldn’t believe this whole thing. That’s how private they were. Finally it ended out that she put her towel away; she realized that nudity was not a big deal. We’d be in and out of the sauna and then jump in the lake. But my husband went in with the Australian husband, who just couldn’t take it. He ended up putting on his underwear.
Saunas were only an occasional fun event in my family. We had a bathtub and my mother heated water on the stove for our baths and later we had a water heater. The stove required kerosene and the furnace had to be fed coal.