YOU WERE IN FINN COUNTRY - Patricia (Kangas) Ktistes
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.
Patricia (Kangas) Ktistes
New Ipswich in the 60s could be strange at times, especially for girls, because of the bizarre social balance that had to be struck. When I was 14, I attended confirmation classes at the Missouri Synod Lutheran church, which was largely Finnish-American. My maternal grandmother Arline Somero was outraged when my parents left the Independent Apostolic Church, which Arline had helped to found, to attend this new, ‘liberal,’ church. So it was a courageous thing my parents did, joining the Missouri Synod so their children could experience Sunday School, which the Independent Apostolic Lutherans couldn’t offer. But my parents paid a heavy price for this decision. The Missouri Synod ministers had no idea of the heartache and browbeating my mother endured from her own mother when we joined the new church. My paternal grandfather John Kangas died while I was enrolled in confirmation school. There were two students in our confirmation class, Linda Dicker and me. Linda’s family was Finnish but not religious and it was an act of courage for her, a young girl, to take this step on her own. My family held my grandfather’s funeral at the mother church, the Apostolic Lutheran, even though he’d been part of the breakaway group that formed the Independent group. I sensed no discrimination on the day of his funeral from the Apostolics, however. My grandfather had been the sexton at their church for a time and used to wind the mechanism that rang the town chimes. I grew up hearing that bell strike every hour on the hour and loved the sound of bells ever since. My grandfather’s funeral was sad because he had been committed to the state psychiatric hospital for 10 years after he sustained a traumatic head injury in a haying accident at his farm. He started hearing voices and admitted himself to the hospital in Concord, thinking he was crazy. I remember my sister and me wearing white dresses, arriving with our parents at the hospital, waiting on the lawn for this mysterious grandfather to appear. He would come out and my sister and I would hide behind a tree.He hadn’t enjoyed a peaceful old age and was always begging to be let out, saying in Finnish, “Grandpa let himself in the hospital so Grandpa can let himself out.” Once when we visited, he accused my parents of bringing along the children of Hjalmar and Elmi Aho [another family in town] instead of their own; he didn’t recognize us because we had grown.The Apostolics put on a good funeral for him. Even the older boys were crying. Afterward, I wanted to just hang out and listen to my relatives’ stories and learn more about my grandfather. I hadn’t known him very well. I felt worn out from all the emotion I’d seen at the funeral. But my mother made me attend confirmation class. Upon arrival at the Missouri Synod church, the pastor opened class by grilling me about the service at the Apostolic Lutheran Church. I still felt emotionally raw from the funeral but he pushed and pressed me for details. What was the sermon about? What hymns had we sung? “In the Sweet By-and-By.” Upon hearing this, he launched into a rant about how that wasn’t a real hymn because it didn’t mention God enough and that it was sentimental; meaningless pablum. Interspersed with lessons from Luther’s Small Catechism the pastor began his usual harangue about taboos regarding adolescent rites of passage. How he once had dated a professional model and it only took her 10 minutes to put on her makeup, therefore we shouldn’t take any longer than that. What kinds of necklines we could wear, i.e., nothing low-cut. As if our parents could have afforded or would have allowed us to ever wear such attire anyway. But what really upset me was when he described how he kept a prayer ready on his lips for climactic moments during physical intimacy in bed at night with his wife so he “wouldn’t be overcome by lust.” I always wondered what his wife would have thought if she’d known he discussed their relationship with a couple of teenage girls. At the time I knew the basic facts of human reproduction but didn’t quite understand what was meant by being “overcome by lust.” The pastor’s wife was a dignified young woman and I admired her poise and polished manners. I thought her husband was disgusting but I didn’t dare tell my parents about him. They would never have questioned his authority. In our home, you couldn’t express any religious doubts or ask why certain doctrinal rules were in place without inviting a firestorm of wrath down upon your head. After my confirmation experience, I wanted nothing to do with this kind of religion. It felt empty to me and this feeling was frightening. I didn’t know where to go for answers. I left home as soon as I could, at age 17 to marry a non-Finn. Later, I told the story about this pastor to a relative in New Ipswich who suffered from chronic depression. She repeated it, and many other painful personal encounters with religion, during her initial visit with a psychiatrist in Peterborough. She said the doctor laughed so hard at her stories, he almost fell off his chair. As she described her own experiences growing up in the Finnish-American community, the doctor continued to guffaw. He finally stopped her and said he doubted he could help her because he found it “all so funny.’
Thank you Patricia for doing those interviews. I now have a more complete view of Finnish life in New Ipswich. I lived in a less religious household and straddled the Finnish and French worlds which were only 3 miles apart. My father and 2 of his friends (Leo Ylonen and Lennie Ypya) married French Canadian women from Highbridge in 1938. In the 60s I also had the experience of visiting a family member at the Concord Hospital.