THEIR TOP PRIORITIES - Oiva Anderson
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.
Oiva Anderson
Luhtala’s farm in New Ipswich was a beautiful place. I used to visit Kusti and Mary quite a bit and was very fond of them. I went to sauna almost every week; you didn’t call or anything. You just showed up with your towel. I always wanted to know what the heat situation was in the sauna: the fact that you throw water on the stones and it feels so much hotter. I took a chemical thermometer from MIT, a lab thermometer, which was one of those long glass things. The sauna started out at 185 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s a little on the hot side, but not bad. I started throwing palio lölyä [plenty of water] on the rocks. That’s the funny thing about it. I threw as much water as I could bear and thought I was going to die in there. It stayed right at 185 degrees. That tremendous increase in heat is just a sensation. I’m sure you could get the temperature higher, but mostly what you feel is the condensation of steam on your skin and that transmits a lot of heat.
The practice of blood-letting in the sauna used to be a spring-time ritual. A practitioner used to come around with the kuppasarvi [hollowed-out cow’s horn], open your vein, and drain out some blood. Many Finns considered this to be very therapeutic. My father had it done but my mother didn’t. And sauna duty was something I had to do ever since I could remember being big enough to fire it up and carry the water. You’d have to rake the coals and get them out of the firebox before you took a sauna because if they were hot at all, any glowing embers, you’d get tikua [fumes], and an awful headache from it. Early on, I was young enough to sauna with my mother and the ladies. Then I got bigger and had to go with the boys. The women kicked me out when I got old enough to appreciate it.
Then when I went with the boys at a neighbor’s. I remember them jumping into a shallow well afterward, right outside, spring-fed. They jumped in feet first. Later I made a sauna in our garage with boards from our old sauna pine paneling. I was able to get them loose and turn them inside out: “hurricane” wood, felled in 1938, and they still bleed pitch.
Enjoyed reading Oiva's piece on saunas. In case you're wondering why he used a MIT thermometer to measure the temperature in his parents' sauna on Fox Farm Rd it's because he was a civil engineering student at MIT. He was a very smart man who served in WWII from 1942-1945 and then served the town of New Ipswich on many committees and was a volunteer EMT.
I remember going up to Kusti and Mary Luhtalas with my dad . Mary used to make Villi, a Finnish yogurt starter and give some to my dad to bring home. I never really liked it but my dad loved it. Also remember the house always being very dark inside, with many throw rugs. We also went to use their sauna, maybe every other week.
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