YOU WERE IN FINN COUNTRY - Dorothy L. (Patat) 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.

Dorothy L. (Patat) Somero

I heard that my mother-in-law Arline Somero’s family had told her she was getting too proud when she had indoor plumbing: that she was getting too good for everybody. Some of her brothers and sisters gave her a terrible time. Also, I couldn’t believe that a woman who had five daughters did not know how to sew; perhaps there was no money for a sewing machine. My mother sewed everything: coats, dresses, shirts, pajamas; she sewed for the whole town. No matter where she lived, she sewed. The Somero girls just dreaded when their mother made them dresses. She would take those flour sacks—they used to have printed flour sacks—and would make a newspaper pattern of just two flat pieces. An A-line dress, I guess you’d call it. I never felt poor because I always had plenty of clothes and plenty to eat and we were taken out to places” movies, the beach, historic locations, sightseeing. I didn’t realize how spoiled I had been until I got married. I remember my husband and his sisters saying for Christmas one year they got an orange each. They ate the peels and seeds and all. We got married in 1947 and lived in a two-room, single-car-sized-garage house that Martin built with no running water, no toilet, no anything. Martin’s mother had given us a heating stove. It had two burners that were set way down in the stove because it gave heat out of the sides. It took me half an hour to warm up a can of Campbell’s(™) tomato soup. I sure didn’t learn to cook on it. My in-laws, overall, were very nice to me and my husband’s sisters also. I didn’t have a sister, so I really appreciated them. Visiting each other was our social life. We all got together at someone’s house and the coffee was always out. Once I took coffee to my husband Martin and his cousin, who were building our house. In my presence, as if I didn’t have any ears, this cousin asked Martin, “How come you’re marrying a non-Christian?” Martin was kind of quiet and I didn’t give him a chance to answer. I said to the cousin, “How come you don’t have a long beard?” Because at the time, according to the Apostolic Lutherans, nearly everything was sinful. You couldn’t wear lipstick, you couldn’t dance, you couldn’t play cards, you couldn’t go to the movies, you couldn’t do work on a Sunday, you couldn’t drink, you couldn’t work on Sunday. I couldn’t understand this because it was alright with them to smoke cigarettes. Once when Martin and I were dating, he took me and two of his sisters to Jaffrey. We bowled a couple of strings and went to a movie. As we were arriving back at their house, which was new—Martin’s mother Arline was still having it finished—they said, “Don’t say anything about the movies. Just say that we went to bowl a few strings.” But I wasn’t used to that; I came home and told my mother everything, dirty jokes and all. Martin’s mother was there waiting for us. And to me she just seemed like an ordinary mother, wondering what we’d done for a good time that evening. I said, “Oh, we bowled a few strings and then we took in a movie.” And they had just got through telling me to keep my mouth shut! All three behind me just stopped dead in their tracks and, of course, I wished the floor would open up and swallow me. Martin’s mother never said a word. Later when we were first married, I complained to Martin that his mother had a lot to say. He said, “Until you stand up to her, she’s gonna be at you constantly.” I had been brought up that you don’t talk back to your elders. However, Arline saw me knitting one Sunday and said, “That’s work!” [Working on Sunday was forbidden.] I replied that, to me, knitting was not work. It was relaxing. It relieved a lot of stress for me to be able to knit. We women used to have our little club. Once a week we’d get together with young mothers from the Apostolic church and knit or sew. Then they kind of eased me and my husband’s sisters out because we didn’t go to their church. Before this, the women’s evening was like a get-together and the men took care of the kids. It was held at different people’s houses. One time we even did our ironing together. We ironed all evening long, and then we’d have coffee and treats. Everybody brought her iron and ironing board and sprinkled clothes because we starched everything in those days and you ironed everything. They’d set everything up in a couple of rooms. I guess it helped ease the drudgery of these chores. Before I went back to college when my kids were young, I ironed clothes for six or seven families to help our finances. Most of my customers would save the big, hard-to-iron things for me to do like tablecloths and white shirts. All the stuff they didn’t want to iron. I was getting paid $1 an hour. Our kids grew up half Finn and half whatever. My mother was English and my father was Austrian. My daughter came home from school in the second grade one day and asked, “Can I like Erik Krook?” I said, “No, he’s your cousin.” And that was it. I had impressed upon my kids that they couldn’t be interested in someone who was a cousin. In her first grade, there were about seven cousins; maybe their last names weren’t all Somero, but they were directly related through that side of the family. My daughter was satisfied with that answer. She said, “Okay,” and decided she liked Raymond Aho instead.

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