YOU WERE IN FINN COUNTRY - Toivo Kangas
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.
Toivo Kangas
During Prohibition, my uncle got raided. The officials came and poured a barrel of wine down their kitchen drain, but someone ran around to the back of the house with buckets, undid the plumbing, and caught the wine in time. It was legal to make your own, but maybe they thought he was getting too far into it: two barrels, cooking in front of the kitchen stove. I guess he made it from red berries that grow on bushes alongside of the roads. I don’t know what they were; not choke cherries. Plenty of people were making that stuff. One time old Henry Royce, who lived in the next house down from Phil Thayer’s in New Ipswich, made a batch. A couple of teenage boys, a Finn and a Yankee, would sneak into Henry’s basement. He must have had whole a barrel down there. Henry wasn’t quite sure, but he had an idea who was stealing his wine. So he set a trap; put a bucket of crank-case oil above the basement door. And as soon as those two opened it, the oil came right down onto their heads. Henry told somebody, “Well, I got ‘em that time!” He was watching from a window. It must have been a nice job cleaning that up. Prohibition turned out a disaster. The Canadians would send it down here in o form or another. There was no way of keeping it out unless you had a minefield across the border and searched every ship. Alcoholism was a problem nationwide; people making their own rotgut and selling it. I don’t know if you had to have a prescription to use it for medicinal purposes. My father kept a bottle of rum in the closet by the stove, but I never touched it. My father had plenty to do on the farm when we were growing up: repair this and repair that. Once in the wintertime, he made these old-fashioned Finland sleds. They weighed a ton, each one. You couldn’t slide with those things: they were all right for a horse to pull. He built three: they were about as big as a dresser. He was pretty good at woodworking although he didn’t have much in the way of tools of any kind except for a hammer and a chisel and a few screwdrivers and a crude knife. He could do a lot of things just with that. He didn’t have the money to buy anything electrical. He cut wood through the summer and fall and through the winter for the following year. In 1938, that hurricane blew all those trees down except two oaks in the back of the farmhouse. All those old maples went down. I was a teenager, in the kitchen watching. That hurricane was a monstrosity, the way it was hollering and screaming. People thought the world was going to end. It lasted about two hours because the eye came right over us. We thought it was done. Everything was nice and quiet with just a little breeze for about half an hour, and then it started in again. Holy suffering catfish! I thought it was going to blow the barn, but it held. It was put together with those wooden pegs. It had a good roof on it: two Finns, Tom and Alfred Parhiala, shingled it. On the mountains and other areas where there were maples, it blew millions of them down all over New England. My father—a few days after he looked at the mess—was out there with a cross-cut saw by himself. And we did help him some. But he was very critical. If you didn’t do things just right, he would growl, “You don’t do it that way, you do it this way! Just pull easily on it! And don’t push too hard! And don’t pull too hard! Just go with the tide! Easy, back and forth! That’s how you cut with a cross-cut saw!” He spoke in Finn. Though he was cranky at times, he was a good father just the same. I think we had a four- or five-year wood supply from that hurricane. He cut it all himself. Boy, he was happy out there! I would say probably forty trees came down. Sawed them all up the right length and got the steel chisels and sledge hammer and split them all. He was a man of steel, I’ll tell you: Burton Lund is another one of them. He wasn’t that big of a man, either. We stored the cordwood right in the back of the barn; then we’d haul it into the shed and put some down in the cellar to keep it dry. There was the old-fashioned white stove in the kitchen and a big round stove in the living room: it was a wood hog, but it threw the heat even if it was 30 below zero outside. Above the kitchen, we cut a hole through the ceiling and put a grate up and painted it and three of us brothers would sleep above there. We had quilts made out of blue denim: cold as ice. So I don’t know if we took some bricks or stones to heat up the bed. The first one in bed froze; you had to have wool socks and union suits on. We boys picked up a baseball team. My brothers, the Somero boys, and my cousins.. Sometimes we’d go to Highbridge and play the French boys from Greenville. We also had a regular town team for the ones in their middle 20s. We used to have a game every Sunday in Smithville or Ashby or Ashburnham and play at Cushing Academy. The team that would lose would shed tears. My brothers were for the Yankees. I was a Red Sox fan. I didn’t care for the Yankees because they were the richest and could always afford the best players and I still don’t like them. Many times the Helsbergs would go down to Fenway and take a car full of guys. The Helsbergs were Swedish Finns.. Our neighbor, old Kusti Granfors, was a Swedish Finn, a powerful individual. His wife was a good-sized woman, too. They had four boys and four girls. There was Gus, Lauri, Adolf, and Matti. The girls were Fanny, Kayo, Walsie, and Bette. Bette was the redhead that gave me blood after George Silva’s horse stepped on my back. My father had brought two sleds from Worcester so we could enjoy sliding on the big hill. And like a crazy fool, I slid down in front of our neighbor George Silva’s barn. He was coming out, leading two workhorses with steel plates on their feet. I got a pretty good-sized cut out of it. As soon as the horse stepped on me, he must have realized there was something wrong and it scared him. The horse ran down in the field. I got up and ran to the farm. Course George felt bad, but there was nothing he could do. It was all my fault. John Somero had a milk truck and brought me to Peterborough hospital. They patched it up and put me in a bed in an old section and put a doll at the end of the bed. I’d get mad at that doll and kick it and throw it on the floor: I hated dolls. I needed a transfusion. Mrs. Granfors said to Bette, “You, Punapää [redhead], you go up and give blood.” I don’t know how they knew our blood matched. If the horse had stepped on my spine it would have crushed it, but it was a bit to the side. I couldn’t urinate for some reason. So my father figured if I was going to die, I might as well die at home. My folks put me in one of those oval washtubs as long as a kitchen table. They put in hot water and then put me in and this relaxed the bladder muscles. After that I was okay and didn’t have any problems: folk medicine. A few years later I saw those sleds. My father had smashed them to pieces.
Thank you Toivo for your service to the country from1944-1946. I heard that Toivo survived a serious car crash in Highbridge in which George Hill didn't. Enjoyed reading Patricia's interview with him. My maternal grandfather also made and sold alcohol in the 20s.