Ellen and Jens Andersen in their living room, 1965
I wrote my first story while in kindergarten. I don't remember it, but my mother told me it was called "The Go-Away Dog."
Despite that sketchy information, I have a pretty good idea of what it was about.
Around that time I had a dog named Skippy. I don't know much about Skippy, either, because, well, he was a go-away dog;. I was told repeatedly that Skippy was my dog, but I don't remember him ever living in our house. He stayed mostly with my Grandpa Andersen, who lived a few blocks away. I remember them leaving Skippy at our house a few times, but he always left, ending up at Grandpa's house. I don't blame Skippy, really. Everybody loved Grandpa.
Jens C. Andersen was a character, in the best sense of the word. He was an immigrant from Denmark, coming to America in August 1920, just a month after he married my grandmother. Both were from the tiny island of Ærø, one of the most picturesque and remote of Denmark's 443 named islands. Grandpa was born Dec. 3, 1898, in the small village of Leby in the northwest portion of Ærø; Grandma was born Ellen Lauritzen a few months earlier on a farm near Søby, where she tended geese and herded cows.
At the age of 10, Ellen moved in with a seriously ill aunt and uncle to help with family chores. She left school after eighth grade and helped support her family by working in other people's homes.
In her spare time, Ellen enjoyed bike riding with her friends, often to the nearby lighthouse where she would watch ships heading to and from port. On one of those trips, she met Jens. As she often said, "I rode to the lighthouse with my girl friend and rode away with my boyfriend!" Jens and Ellen were a couple throughout their teenage years.
As Jens began a four-year apprenticeship to become a cabinetmaker, one of his duties was to help manage a herd of cows for his mentor. Ellen noticed.
"I was so crazy for Grandpa, I wouldn’t eat lunch," she later told a granddaughter, Sue Rushing. "I stood in our door at home and watched for that boy, that cabinet boy, go down to the dairy. ... When he was learning the trade he’d have to do those things and every day I saw him come with that bucket. ... I’d stand there and wait for him, pretty soon he’d be back across the street. So I’d get to talk with him."
During their courtship, Ellen continued to work for other families while Jens worked at learning his trade.
"He was a poor carpenter and I loved him," Ellen said, adding that she "paid for everything" in those years, including cigarettes and the rare nights out. Jens managed to scrape together enough money to buy Ellen a gift of a thimble. She responded by embroidering him some handkerchiefs.
When World War 1 hit, Jens was obliged to protect his country despite Denmark's neutrality in the conflict. While he served, Ellen moved on to Copenhagen, where she worked as an "in-girl" maid in charge of silverware and glassware for a wealthy family. Jens often visited Ellen while in his service uniform, taking meals with the help in the basement, out of sight of the owner. Ellen soon moved to another home where she was nanny to two small children.
After the youngest child died of a convulsion while in Ellen's care, the child's mother took on the extraordinary role of Ellen's comforter, steering her to several of the many churches in Copenhagen as she grappled with the guilt of losing someone else's child. There was plenty of work for Ellen, too, Beating carpets. Washing clothes, Hauling coal. Jens had taken work as a carpenter on another island and begged Ellen to join him.
"My mother was mad," Ellen said. "She said ‘What do you want to go running after him for?’"
When Ellen couldn't find work near Jens, he hinted that maybe they could do better in America. Two of his sisters had already made the move and raved about the opportunity. Well, Ellen said, if we're going to America, we'll have to get married first. Jens agreed and Ellen took the lead.
Jens' father died when he was a toddler and his mother was visiting her daughter, Johannes, in America when the decision was made to wed in Ellen's church. For three successive Sundays her preacher announced their intentions from the pulpit. There being no community objections, Ellen undertook the next phase of the process -- inviting guests. By Danish custom, this was an elaborate and cumbersome process. They retained a family friend who, nattily attired and brandishing a cane, accompanied an equally well-dressed Ellen to the homes of prospective guests to personally invite them to the service.
Ellen picked her bridesmaids and sternly warned Jens to be on time for their wedding, a caution necessitated by Jens' late arrival for the recent wedding of a friend.
On July 4, 1920, family and friends gathered for coffee and lunch before walking to the church for Jens and Ellen's wedding. After the ceremony, they all walked back to a local hall for the reception. A band strolled among the guests as they ate dinner, then took their posts to provide music for a marathon night of dancing, food and beer. A donation box was set up to pay for the band as celebrants carried on throughout the night.
"They eat all night," Ellen recalled. "And drink. They drink until they get so drunk. Grandpa and I … we didn’t come home. We had to go out in the field and milk the cows. They were out at night, so we have to go very early in the morning, about 6 o’clock. We didn’t get to bed until we milked the cows."
The newlyweds faced one major hurdle if they were to fulfill their dream of emigrating to America: they didn't have any money. Fortunately, Jens' journeyman status was enough to justify a small bank loan, just enough for steerage class on a 10-day trip by steamer to the United States.
On Aug. 5, 1920, they joined dozens of other Danish emigres as they boarded Frederick VIII of the Scandinavian American Line. It was a relatively new ship, having been built in 1913 at the A/G Vulcan Shipyard in Stettin, Germany. Its steam triple expansion twin-screw engines allowed it to cruise at 17 knots on its Atlantic crossing. It was built for a diverse range of passengers, too. It could accommodate 100 first-class passengers and 300 more in its second-class cabins. Jens and Ellen, however, would spend their trip in the bowels of the vessel, with about 950 fellow third-class travelers.
"We were so sick the first day," Ellen recalled. "We couldn’t get out of bed, we were so sick. Both of us. And everybody was sick. There wasn’t hardly anyone up to eat, at the table to eat. … You know the Danes they cook so much fat. On that boat they were feeding us some fat cabbage soup. No wonder we got sick. Grandpa always said, 'You know that they did that because they knew we wouldn’t eat the rest of the way'.”
Food wasn't the only issue. Lice were everywhere. Steerage passengers were perpetually seasick from the constant rolling of the ship. Plus, the ship's crew went on strike during the trip.
Before leaving for America, Jens quizzed his sister, Johannes, about what to bring. Johannes, who came to the U.S.in 1913 and married John Madsen of Audubon, Iowa, two years later, suggested that he bring plenty of warm clothes to help cope with the harsh Iowa winters. Fortunately, Jens had some toasty wool underpants.
"But we had no room for them in the suitcase, so he wore them," Ellen said. "It was so hot. ,,, He suffered so with those underpants."
Despite the austere conditions, the Danish contingent (which included several musicians) found more pleasant ways to pass the time on the tedious trip.
"We danced a lot on the ship," Jens said. "Oh, that was a good time! We danced to the Missouri Waltz and a Danish tune called Dukhe leis Waltz ... One of the games we played was this: One guy had to bend over with his head against the wall, then, everyone would try to hit his ass. If the guy caught who hit his ass then that guy had to put his head up against the wall."
When the ship finally arrived at Ellis Island, Jens and Ellen, who spoke no English, were especially apprehensive. Admission to the U.S. was far from a sure thing.
"We landed on an island by New York," Jens explained "It was near the New York stockyard. There were cattle all over the place. The inspector looked us all over after we had gotten off the boat. They checked our eyes, ears, nose and mouth...everything. They checked us for any little defects."
"That was the worse place ever," Ellen said. "All the immigrants have to go there and they just put them in like cattle. We were in there with one doctor, then another doctor and so on. [We were scared]. But we didn’t care. We had each other, you know?"
Apparently, they passed muster. They were given sardines and crackers and put on a train headed for Iowa.
"It was the slowest train," Ellen remembered. "There were no nice seats. We were used to third class anyhow. We were immigrants. And then they came around on the train to sell fruit. At that time they were bananas for a dollar. That was lots of money, but we didn’t know. We were thinking of dollars like Kroners."
After finally arriving in Audubon, Iowa, they stayed for two months with Jens' sister and family before moving to Shelby, Iowa, where Jens worked for the school system making cabinets and window frames. They started a family; my Mom, Elsie, came first in 1922 followed 18 months later by Ruth. When Jens landed a carpenter's job with Omaha Fixture and Supply, he and Ellen moved to Council Bluffs where they became American homeowners for the first time, buying two lots on the west side of town so Jens could eventually have his own small vineyard, a few apple trees and fire pit plus space for a replica windmill like those that graced the area around his picturesque Danish home.
Jens Andersen's first house at 2520 Avenue F, Council Bluffs, Iowa
He built his first home at the back of the property and Ellen assumed landscaping duties, filling the area in front of the home with flowering shrubs and colorful climbers that made the home the envy of the neighborhood. As the family grew (there would eventually be five children), the house grew, too. With help from his Danish Brotherhood friends, Jens had a foundation dug at the front of the property, turned his house 90 degrees and had it moved forward atop the new basement before adding height to the second story. He would remain in that house for the rest of his days.
Although Jens had served his native Denmark in World War I, he stepped forward to help his adopted country after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In 1942, he joined a construction crew of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as they built the Alaska Highway. Jens helped build barracks for workers along the 1,700 mile route, a monumental task that took just eight months to complete. He returned home with a souvenir -- a small fir tree that he planted in the yard in front of his house.
While Jens was in Canada at work on the highway, his daughter, Elsie, was in a serious relationship with Walter B. "Jack" Lehmer, a Union Pacific railroad worker.
"By the time we started going together, I’d sold my car because as soon as the war broke out, as soon as they attacked Pearl Harbor, I was 21 years old and I knew I was bye-bye," Jack Lehmer explained. "I sold my car so I wouldn’t have to mess with it later. The railroad union came and told us that we were working for an essential industry and we weren’t going to get drafted. That’s when we went ahead and got married."
At the time, Lehmer had never met his father-in-law.
"I never met him until after I was married," Lehmer said. By the time they met in the fall of 1942, Jack Lehmer had, contrary to his union's advice, received a draft notice but hastily enlisted in the Navy instead.
Three years later, I met my Grandpa Jens, the first of many grandchildren Jens and Ellen would welcome in those baby boom postwar years.
My earliest memories of my grandfather are of watching wrestling, boxing, Uncle Miltie and the Voice of Firestone with him on a small television while lying on the floor of his compact living room. Christmas was the biggest unifying event for my mother's side of the family. Grandma fondly spoke of Christmas in Denmark, where her parents decorated the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve in a room separate from the children, only allowing them in to see it once the candles were lit. Grandma's mother divided up a bag of hard candy among her eight children, and each child also received an orange, a gift so precious that Grandma would sleep with hers for fear of losing it.
For years, the Andersen family gathered at Grandma and Grandpa's house for Christmas, where a small decorated tree protected gifts in a small unheated front porch and the dining-room table was filled with aebleskiver and applecake topped with whipped cream. Every Christmas there was also a party at the Danish Hall, home base of Chapter 10 of the Danish Brotherhood. While Grandpa and his Danish friends were drinking beer and swapping tales of the old country, we kids were loading up on pop and Danish pastries and racing across the dance floor, careful to avoid dancing couples before launching into lengthy slides on our knees on the freshly waved hardwood floors.
Their house was something of a refuge for me as a young child. We played hide and seek in the rows of Concord grapes that sat next to Grandpa's garage. The apple trees that dominated the extra lot were productive, with the sweet smell of bushels of ripe apples filling the back porch each fall. As far as I know, Grandpa only used his barbecue pit for burning trash, making it a swell place to roast marshmallows.
For reasons I don't remember, there was a time when I was in second or third grade and had to go to their house after school. Each morning my mother would tie a nickel in the corner of a handkerchief so I wouldn't lose the bus fare for the trip to their house. It was on one of those days that I was introduced to sour cream, mistaking it for mayonnaise as I was making a sandwich. It was pretty awful stuff, I decided.
Grandpa was a fascinating character to me. Watching him work in his basement workshop was a rare treat. He had planers, shapers, drill presses, band saws, circular saws and all sort of tools that looked excitingly dangerous. He had one area of his basement that looked like a walk-in cooler or freezer. Mom told me that he used that area to make beer and wine. She used to help cap the bottles and was paid as a young child to roll cigarettes for Grandpa.
One of my fondest childhood memories of Grandpa was when he'd take me on a root beer run. The Thomas Jefferson high school football coach also owned an A & W root beer stand across the street from the football field. Naturally, it was a hangout for T.J. students. Grandpa would park on the edge of the stand's gravel parking lot and saunter up to the service window where he'd order a large root beer. With the sleeves of his signature plaid shirt rolled up past his wrists, he'd grab the mug, hold it high for all to see, then drink it down in one long gulp. The teenage crowd would burst out in cheers and applause and Grandpa would proceed to wipe his grinning mouth with his sleeve while soaking in the adulation.
There was a time when my brothers and I were obsessively gathering up scrap copper after hearing it was worth something like 30 cents a pound. We found that by keeping our eyes peeled while walking the railroad tracks between home and church on Sunday mornings, we could fill our pockets with coppery-looking objects. But, alas, much of it was fake copper, apparently, so we turned our ambitions elsewhere. Like our own basement.
"Hey," my brother Ron said, pointing to a small knob-like thing on our unfinished basement ceiling while exploring when our parents were out. "That looks like copper."
So, one of us climbed up on a stool for a closer look. A little twisting worked it loose. Soon it was free, followed immediately by a blast of cold water that soon had all three of us drenched. The water wouldn't stop, even when holding a towel tightly over the opening.
"Hold on. I'll call Grandpa," I said.
It took only a few minutes, but it seemed like an eternity before Grandpa arrived. He could barely contain himself at the sight of three soaked ragamuffins holding a towel against a free-flowing water line. He turned off the water and, still laughing, sat down to get the story of what happened.
"I think I'll stick around while you boys dry off," he said.
When my parents got home, he was still laughing when he talked to Mom.
"Now don't you go punishing those boys," he told her. "They were just being curious."
That was Grandpa. For the entire time I knew him, he was pretty much a kid himself.
When I was in high school, I got the shortwave listening bug. Listening to radio stations from around the world had great appeal to me. Grandpa had put together a music system from a kit, so I decided to give kit-building a try. I bought my first shortwave radio from Heathkit in Benton Harbor, Michigan. After putting the radio together, it didn't work right so, naturally, I took it to Grandpa, who showed me the proper way to solder electronics. It worked fine after that.
I soon decided that a tape recorder would be helpful in my radio hobby, plus it would give me a chance to record music off the radio instead of spending my money on expensive records. I bought a $50 Mayfair reel-to-reel at an Omaha pawn shop and soon found that it wouldn't maintain a steady speed, making for warbly recordings. Again, I went to Grandpa and we diagnosed the problem as an improperly lubricated capstan. We never got the Mayfair to work properly, but we both learned a lot about tape recorders in the process.
I progressed through several shortwave radios and dozens of tape recorders over the years, but Grandpa was always a step ahead of me. In his later years, he used a top-of-the-line war-surplus Hammarlund shortwave radio to tune in his beloved Danish music programs and an equally impressive Sony stereo reel-to-reel to record them for his own enjoyment.
Grandpa spent most of his professional career in the U.S. hanging doors. That's a much more difficult task than it sounds, but it's not that challenging for a journeyman cabinetmaker from Denmark. A true artisan, Grandpa made most of the furniture in his home, almost all of it of Iowa walnut, his wood of choice. In my career as a personal historian, I often told the story of how Grandpa got his wood.
"He'd go for a ride in the country," I explained, "looking for a fence or barn in need of repair. If the barn was made of walnut (which was pretty common at one time), he'd knock at the door and tell the farmer, 'You know, your barn is in rough shape. If you give me some of the wood from it, I'll build your wife a nice set of kitchen cabinets'."
The tactic apparently worked. His basement was full of weathered wood that he'd magically turn into something beautiful with a pass or two through his planer.
The first piece of furniture I commissioned from home, though, was much less grand. For $15, he built me a plywood record cabinet with additional storage space. It's still used in my basement today. When he heard that wife Linda and I played chess, he built us a nifty chess table. When we were shopping for a hutch to store our dishes, we were torn between two Ethan Allen creations, preferring the base of one and the top of another. No problem, said, Grandpa. I'll make one that matches what you want. I think it cost us $200 plus finding the handle hardware ourselves.
But our most prized piece of Grandpa-built furniture is our grandfather clock. Grandpa started making them in the 1960s, first for his own children, then for the next generation. Each clock was constructed primarily of walnut veneer created by Grandpa himself. He was proud of the fact that he didn't use a single nail in the clock body's construction. In all, he made about 40 of these beauties. He built ours when I was in California in the Air Force. For a year or so it resided in my in-laws' house in Omaha.
Grandpa bought the German-made works for his clocks from DeCovnick's, a clock company with a showroom in Concord, California, not far from where I was stationed in the early 1970s. The works cost $250 at the time. Grandpa charged just $400 for the entire clock ("I made about 10 cents an hour on those clocks," Grandpa said.) Linda and I made a visit to DeCovnick's and the owner checked his books and said "Yes. Jens Andersen, We've done quite a lot of business with him." The DeCovnick showroom had lots of grandfather clocks, most in the $1,200-1,500 range.
I asked the owner, "What if I could get a hand-crafted clock like one of those, built by a Danish cabinetmaker, for $400?"
"I'd buy a dozen of them," he replied.
We reclaimed our clock after my discharge and return to Iowa, but I saw Grandpa only occasionally throughout the 1970s. There were family gatherings every July 4 to mark my grandparents' anniversary and the Christmas Eve gatherings had long since moved to my aunt Norma Jean's farm, but that was about it. Grandpa, of course, was the same old Grandpa, with his hearty laugh and inappropriate pawing of Grandma, whose response was to curl into a ball, fending off Grandpa's advances with her own hands while uttering something like, "Suh, suh, Daddy. Suh, suh."
This went on for years before my brother, Ron, finally asked Grandpa: "What does suh, suh mean?"
Grandpa, with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes, didn't miss a beat while answering, "More, more."
Grandpa was not shy about showing his affection for Grandma, usually in a ribald manner. But my brother, David, once witnessed a gentler, more intimate, side of their relationship.
"There was a time when Grandma had her "spells" (whatever that meant)," David explained. "[Brother] Ron and I were at their house one day when Grandma called out for Grandpa. She was lying on the bed in the north bedroom and her voice sounded desperate. "Daddy !!" (she always called him Daddy). "Ya' Mama" (he always called her Mama). "Get in here" (rich Danish accents - both of them). Grandpa's rough and tough exterior was betrayed when he heard beautiful music and tears formed in his eyes ... he was also reduced to a mere mortal when Grandma had one of her "spells." When he got to her she was trembling and in a panic. He extended his carpenter-rough hand and held her until she settled down.
"I was about 20 years old and it was the most affirming display of true love I had seen. I don’t think I can ever forget it. Ron was there and I'm sure it impacted him as well."
Grandpa's child-like nature was challenged in his later years. Diabetes led to amputation of both legs below the knees in 1981. While hospitalized, doctors told him that he would have to cough more and do deep breathing exercises now that his mobility would be even more limited. When I saw him for the last time that Christmas, he was in good spirits, "dancing" in his wheelchair and showing off his new, prosthetic legs.
But deep breathing and good spirits weren't enough. On the morning of Nov. 22, 1982 -- my Dad's 62nd birthday -- he was rushed to Jennie Edmundson hospital in Council Bluffs where his heart gave out at the age of 82 years, 11 months and 19 days.
Grandma soon sold the house Grandpa built and lived out the rest of her years in a succession of care facilities, without her beloved Daddy. She developed a serious fondness for pizza, lost her youngest daughter to cancer and survived breast cancer herself before dying at the age of 97 on April 17, 1996.
A cousin delivered the eulogy at Grandma's funeral:
"Ellen's favorite time of year is Christmas because her family has kept many of the Danish traditions. In our family celebrations everyone gathers at Norma Jean's home, on Christmas Eve. Everyone brings a favorite dish which is enough food to feed an army. And it is almost that..... There are 70 and that number continues to grow. After plenty of good food, much of it Danish, the children join hands and dance around and sing Christmas carols.
"The evening is finished off with a visit from St. Nick himself. Ellen always gets to sit on Santa's knee and tell him what she wanted for Christmas. She would always say she just wanted to have all her family around her. I personally feel her fondest wish for the last 14 years was to be back with Grandpa."
Wouldn't we all.
Ellen and Jens Andersen with their children: Richard, Elsie, Harold, Norma Jean and Ruth on their 60th wedding anniversary.
Author Larry Lehmer's book about Dick Clark and American Bandstand -- Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll --is available from Sunbury Press. His book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- The Day the Music Died -- is available at Amazon.
