I must admit that I was determined to make it to Minnesota for personal reasons. I had been there before, 38 years ago, when my grandparents drove me across the country from California to their then home in Toledo, Ohio. We traveled through Minnesota where many of my grandfathers’ siblings and their mutual childhood friends still resided. Gramps showed us St Paul park,a small community near the Twin Cities, where he grew up and where Gram and him met. We drove past his childhood home and down the main street, however, being all of 12 years old I did not fully appreciate the history lesson that I was getting, nor did I retain much. I now had the opportunity to revisit the past and possibly dig up some of those long lost memories.

My great grandfather Carl Oase had immigrated to America with his parents and 9 siblings, in 1905, when Norway and Sweden had gone to war. Coming from Norway they had connected with other family members who had previously immigrated to the twin cities area. Ruth Sundquist, my great grandmother, was born in Minnesota to Swedish immigrants who had lost three children prior to Ruth’s birth so she was an only child. Ruth herself had survived being struck by lightning as a young person and shortly thereafter discovered that she had the gift of esp. She would spend her adult life telling fortunes. People from all over would write her letters in hopes that she could help them find lost items. It was a story that fascinated me my whole life and I still love to hear new things about her special gift.

Ruth and Carl married in 1913 and settled in St Paul Park. This poem was found many years later behind their wedding photo.
I’ve cantered around the country some, seen all the girls to see, and in the whole wide world, I have found there is just one girl for me. I see her everywhere I go, her face with laughter beams, for she is the idol of my heart, the girl of my dreams.
The Oases were able to obtain a small farm in St Paul Park when Mr Morley, a man who Carl had worked for in his youth, on his death bed asked that Ruth and Carl care for his wife Lucy, until her death, in exchange to buy the small farm. It was a deal that they kept and my gramps had fond memories of Aunt Lucy who had read to him and played games with him in those early years. That little farm enabled the Oase family to thrive throughout the devastation of the depression and beyond.

My gramps, Vernon Oase, was born in St Paul, Minnesota in December of 1922. He was the third of seven boys and the first child to be born in a hospital. Living on the farm the Oase family always had many animals around and Gramps had a great affinity for them. He worked to earn his spending money from snow shoveling, and lawn mowing, to a paper route, and later helping a farmer pull his equipment behind his tractor. He built an earthen airstrip that was later used by the Navy for training including by George Bush Senior. Gramps sense of community was great as well. As a teen he would stoke the wood stove on at church on those cold Minnesota Saturday nights so that the church would be warm for the Sunday worshipers.

One of my favorite things about Gramps was his sense of humor. I had once heard that as a teenager the car he drove had a hole in the cab and he would drive through the downtown and duck below the windows watching the road through the hole so that the on lookers would wonder how that car was driving on its own. I just had to drive that road, so I took a cruise through the downtown, past what would become his older brother’s hardware store, and the where the soda fountain frequented by the teens would have been. It’s a unique feeling to drive the street he drove and walk the sidewalks that he had so proudly strode down as a young man. Where he courted my grandmother.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I heard the story of his antics to get to school just in time for the bell to ring. You see the other students would be sitting in the classroom waiting to see if Vernon would make it in time. They would see him just beating the train and then rolling down the hill into the parking lot, jumping out of his car and letting the car come to a rolling stop on it’s own at the fence as he dashed to the front doors just in time. So I found those railroad tracks and followed them until I found a building that looked like a school. Turns out my instincts were right. I found the original location of the school where my grandparents had met just down the hill from the railroad tracks.

My time in St Paul Park brought to life the memories my grandmother had so painstakingly written down for us to have forever. The house, the school, the downtown. The stories of farm life, harsh Minnesota winters, and teenage shenanigans. I was so grateful for Gram passing these memories on and even more grateful to envision those stories in the places where they actually happened. Having the opportunity to be there, and to feel those stories come to life was a blessing that I had not counted but I highly recommend if you get a chance. The world we live in today has exponentially out paced that of our grandparents and it takes real effort to look back and see it at a slower pace and to appreciate the simplicity, the sense of community, family, and the hard work that it took to survive.