At 12 years old, I came from Cleveland to live with my grandparents on their Halsey Valley chicken farm. I still remember my first sighting of the eerie colors and slow undulations of the Northern Lights in the clear country sky.
Self Sufficiency
The 68 acre farm on a slightly sloping hillside along Ellis Creek Road was quite self sufficient, at least by today's standards. There were barns, chicken coops, a summertime grazing pasture for two cows and fields for haymaking. There was a small apple orchard, a good-sized garden and usually a pig. All this provided a steady supply of chicken, pork, eggs, milk, butter and surplus vegetables for canning.
 The Anderson Farm; 1940s; Halsey Valley, NY (was Barton mail address) |
Grandmother (Sophie Torkko Anderson nee Jaaskelainen) was kept pretty busy in the summer months, gardening, cooking, baking and sharing in the farm work while also preparing food for the winter. I particularly remember that one of my favorite foods on a dull wintry day was her specialty of canned pork.
|
The pig never made it very far into the winter, being turned into pork as soon as the weather turned cold. The butchering project required the help of a couple of neighbor men.
After being killed, the pig was hoisted up on a wooden tripod for cleaning and then was lowered into a large vat of boiling water. This facilitated shaving off of skin bristles and probably provided sterilization prior to being sliced up into identifiable cuts of pork. I recall that the men helping in the job were paid with a share of the meat.
I was traveling in rural Belgium a few years ago and saw the identical pig-to-pork transformation underway in a farmer's back yard. It brought back vivid memories.
Each day's milk went into a hand cranked cream separator. The skim milk went to the pig and the chickens. The cream that was not generously poured into the many cups of coffee consumed daily was saved up for the wooden butter chum.
 Wayne Wirtanen on the farm in the 1940s |
Although I got the cholesterol-forming cream and the caffeine, and the pig got the healthy calcium-rich skim milk, the pig never got to see middle age and I'm now well into my seventies writing about all this.
Grandmother's baking, kept the table provided with a light brown, crusty, rye bread and, of course, no Finnish farmhouse ran out of the braided sweet coffee bread we called "nisu". The odor of yeasty, cardamom seed dough rising for hours in a warm oven preceded actual baking. A finishing touch on the browned tops of the loaves was egg white brushed on with a clean white chicken feather followed by a sprinkling of sugar.
A standard meal in Finnish households was "mojakka," a thin broth beef stew with bits of carrots, potato, onion and rutabaga. Saima has been making this meal regularly all these years. Our 7-year-old granddaughter, "Allie," loves it. I hope that this will continue to be a family tradition. We found this dish on the menu of a couple of fine restaurants in Finland and at a summer festival in Lapland above the Arctic Circle where it was made with reindeer meat. In Finland, it was called "liha keitto" or simply, meat soup.
A small "panel delivery" bakery truck from the Spencer Co-op visited the farm once every week or so. I remember the exotic treat of jelly doughnuts purchased from the shallow display shelves of baked goods that could be pulled out of the sides of the truck.
Firewood from the 30 acres of woods provided fuel for the furnace in the cellar and for the woodstove in the kitchen. There was a wood box at the kitchen wall next to the woodstove. There were access doors on the inside of the kitchen and on the outside of the house near the woodpile. One of my chores was to keep this wood box filled with a variety of sizes of split firewood to allow easy starting of a cook stove fire and the maintenance of a good steady cooking fire.
The primary source of farm income was from chickens and eggs that were sold to the Spencer Co-Op. (After marriage, one of my first jobs was driving - summer and winter, rain and snow - the very truck that went around to the Finn farms to pick up their weekly shipments to the Co-Op egg department.)
Early in the war years, grandfather, (Solomon "Sulo" Anderson), like many of the local Finn farmers, went to work briefly as a carpenter at Romulus in the Syracuse area where they were building military barracks. In later years, Sulo's oil paintings of Spencer-Van Etten scenes graced the walls of Tioga State Bank and local homes.
 Sulo Anderson ~1940s. |
Going to "Town"
A trip to Spencer, some nine miles away, in Solo's red 1937 Ford pickup truck, a couple of times a month, was a major excursion to renew supplies for baking ingredients and the few other necessities that the farm did not provide.
The Spencer Co-Operative Society was a multi-faceted supplier of fanner's needs in addition to groceries, clothing items and otherwise unavailable items such as smoked and salted salmon and dried codfish. (Soak the codfish in a strong lye solution, and then hang them in a flowing creek until the lye was washed out, before preparing them for eating.) We only had a Finnish name for this Christmas dish, lipeäkala; the Norwegians call it lutefisk. (It's served with a white sauce, but is an acquired taste that I never acquired.)
In addition to a complete hardware store, the Co-Op had a large mill for the production of chicken and other animal feeds. It was a dealer for farm implements, tractors and International Harvester trucks, automobile tires and had a full service auto repair garage.
New Year's day at the Co-Op was inventory day and many of the employees came out to assist. The most complex part of inventory was "counting the nails" in the hardware store. Some of the women would have prepared a huge pot of "mojakka," and generous amounts of pumpernickel bread and coffee to feed the workers at lunchtime. I remember it as a pleasantly informal day when we all chipped in to accomplish the inventory.
In the post-war years, one of the mechanics, Arne Luuri, was single and was able to afford a new Buick every year! He traded in his "old" one for a new one for $300. This seemed to me a fantastic extravagance for someone like me with a smaller income and a new family to support. Arne's brother, Bill Luuri, was the manager of the co-op egg operation.
Halsey Valley
Beautiful downtown Halsey Valley had a dozen or so houses and a few farms in and around the "city limits".
There was a small general store with one gas pump. (I took the storekeeper's blonde daughter, Jean Jackson, to the junior high prom at Tioga Center School). A large two story wooden building across the road from the general store was the shuttered-up and deserted "Red Quick's Saloon" which was rumored to have had a wild and woolly past.
Farm Boys go to Hollywood
Mrs. Piipari, a Halsey Valley resident was the mother of Greta Peck. Upon graduation from high school in 1948, four Spencer boys Emil Huttunen, Donald Maki, Alfred Walden and Alga Vose and I took a trip to California in Emil's new Chevrolet convertible. Mrs. Piipari had arranged for us to visit Greta and Gregory Peck at their home in Hollywood (actually in Pacific Palisades). We spent most of an afternoon there. After meeting briefly with Gregory Peck, Greta served us cake and coffee and then invited us to join her in the backyard swimming pool. That was a really eye-popping and "gee-whiz" experience for us farm kids. (Alga and I are the only ones surviving, of the original five.)
 Left to right: Donald Makie, Alga Vose, Alfred Walden, Greta Peck's son, Greta Peck, Emil Huttunen. |
Tucker Automobile Dealership
The Spencer Co-Op took an ill-fated fling at being a Tucker automobile dealership at the height of the postwar automobile shortage frenzy. There was a waiting list for delivery that at first required a cash deposit. Later requirements to stay on the list were the purchase of Tucker seat covers and then expensive leather luggage that was "specially designed to fit into your new Tucker automobile's spacious trunk."
I never heard the details of how many Finn farmers went the whole way with waiting list requirements. I have to believe that, as they were level headed and generally tight-fisted, they did not get stung too badly.
A Modest Social Life on the Farm
On the farm in the early 1940 s, life was not very exciting. A major part of shopping was through the Sears or "Monkey Ward" catalogs. Postal rates were low enough that mail order was easy and economical. (There was a choice in most items of "good, better or best" quality.) Even baby chicks - a thousand at a time - were delivered by the RFD (Rural Free Delivery) carrier.
Our social life revolved around sharing sauna nights with neighbors and an occasional play or dance at the Van Etten Finn Hall. My connection to the outside world was the school bus.
I remember walking across the fields carrying kerosene lanterns to our Ellis Creek neighbors, the Natunens or to the Keturis, across the road.
It would be the turn of one of the small circle of neighbors to fire up his sauna stove early in the day, so that it would be hot enough to provide bathing for two or three families by evening when the farm chores were over.
While one family was in the sauna, the men played penny-ante poker while the women sat together and gossiped. Coffee and nisu were served and I have recollections of home-brewed beer being passed around.
Spencer Central School
For the three years that I attended Spencer Central School, classes through grade 12 were in a single modem brick building. A large several story old school building stood empty and neglected across the street adjacent to Nichols Park.
Class sizes were small - 15 to 18 students in each grade. The first and second generation Finn kids were often about one third of each class. The Finn kids were bilingual and as their exposure to the English language was primarily at school, their spelling and grammar skills were generally quite good.
The farm was in the Owego High School district and although the Spencer school bus went by our driveway, I could not get on or get off the Spencer bus within the Owego district. In order to attend high school in Spencer a neighbor boy, Dick Huopana, and I had to walk about a mile uphill ("through waist-high snow drifts in the winter" - as I've told the grandkids) in order to get on and off the bus within the Spencer school district.
Changing Generations
Young Finnish-Americans generally married non-Finns ("Yankees," as grandmother called them) as the Finnish influence in the community declined and as young people drifted away from the farms. To the best of our knowledge, Saima (maiden name Liuska) and I were the only young Finn couple to take the "pure-bred" Finn generation to the next level on the family tree with our six tow-headed children.
Language Changes With Time
Immigrants from early in the 20th century brought with them a time capsule of the language spoken at the time. In America, early "flying machines" ultimately became known as "airplanes". If you spoke today about going up in a flying machine, people would think that you had been asleep longer than Rip Van Winkle.
The same language difference quickly revealed where and how you had learned to speak the language. We knew the archaic Finnish word for aircraft, ilmalaiva. The modem term in Finland now is lentokona. As soon as we used the archaic term, people in Finland would giggle and say, "We know a lot about you right away."
Social Differences Among the Finns
I remember that there was a modest social distinction between two loosely different groups of Finns. When many of the Finns came to America, Finland was administratively under the control of Russia. Around the time of the Russian revolution, in Finland, as in Russia, there were two political groups, the "whites" who were on the side of the Czar and the monarchists and the "Reds" who supported the revolutionaries.
The immigrants brought this political dichotomy with them to America. During my 1940s days in the Spencer area, I recognized that some families were "Church Finns" (Whites). Those of us who participated in Finn Hall activities and were more likely members of the Spencer Cooperative were "Finn Hall Finns" (Reds).
This differentiation was as subtle as now being Republicans or Democrats. There did not seem to be any real difference in the friendships between these groups of families, but as I remember it, families were more active socially within their Church/Finn Hall groups. This differentiation seems to have disappeared with the first generation that was born here.
Dances
Viola Turpeinen came to the Spencer Central School auditorium about once a year to play polkas, schottisches and other Finnish-American favorites that I still enjoy on CDs in my car. Ed Pylkas, a long time Co-op employee, was a one-man-band that performed at the Finn Hall. He played drums and cymbals with his feet and accompanied those with a banjo. Norma Liuska of North Spencer often added her accordion to the lively music.
In Halsey Valley, a meeting hall had an upstairs dance floor where a small band (Fraleys?) from Waverly came out for well-attended round and square dancing on summertime Saturday nights - admission 75 cents.
Electricity!
Before electricity came to the farm, there was a hand operated water pump at our kitchen sink that was connected to a well just outside of the kitchen wall. Milk and butter were kept cool in the summer by being suspended in closed containers in the chilly well water. Carrying hand pumped water by the bucket full from another well by the barns for the cows and chickens was a major daily chore.
The two-hole privy was about 40 feet from the house. We seemed to have managed to regulate our digestive systems well enough to minimize the frequency of the 80 foot round trip on cold winter nights.
The first electricity was supplied by a gasoline powered Delco generator and banks of batteries in the barn. This supplied pumped water and lighting in the house to replace the kerosene lamps.
The power lines came through during the war years; one of Roosevelt's projects, the Rural Electrification Program. There was no cost to my grandparents for the connection, except for the extra power pole that was required because the house was some distance from the main line.
Entertainment on the 1940s Farm
All this time until some time after 1945, the farmhouse still had no radio or telephone. We never went to a movie, and there were no books, magazines or newspapers in the house, except for a Finnish language weekly and a monthly Rural New Yorker newspaper that cost about $1 for a year's subscription. The Rural New Yorker provided exciting reading for a teenager; advertisements for Bag Balm, "The preferred treatment for cuts and bruises on cow's udders" and articles recommending "Improved strains of potatoes for your garden."
Farm evenings were occupied in cleaning and grading eggs in the cellar. A common amount of eggs produced on a farm during those days was 10 to 20 cases of 30 dozen eggs each. That meant that typically some 5,000 (plus or minus) eggs had to be cleaned, weighed, and packed each week. The cracked eggs went upstairs to the kitchen.
A wind-up phonograph supplied the only musical diversion and the thick, brittle 78-rpm records were Finnish language ones. If it hadn't been for the school library, I'd have had a severely deficient exposure to the outside world.
World War II
During World War II, I read the weekly issue of Life Magazine from cover to cover in the school library to follow the tides of the battles with the maps and arrows showing the movements of opposing forces. The "Japs", those days were caricatured with thick glasses and buckteeth. The Germans were scowling, evil-looking thugs.
I ultimately became somewhat of a "World War 11 buff ' when, years later, I was surprised to find out that some of the information I had absorbed had been patriotic propaganda. Some of what I had read in wartime issues of Life Magazine and newspapers turned out to be either outright false or quite misleading, apparently to keep up morale on the home front. An example was the heroic story of a bomber pilot, Colin Kelly, who, shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack, crashed his damaged bomber onto the Japanese battleship Haruna, sinking it. Years later it was revealed that Kelly's plane had indeed been shot down, but it fell into the sea. The battleship Haruna was nowhere in the area, and was, in fact, sunk somewhere else later in the war.
The Finnish/Russian wars
The "Winter War" between Finland and invading Russia had occurred in 1939-40 before I moved to the farm. I found out later that many of the Spencer area Finns had sent generous amounts of money, clothing and other scarce items to their relatives back in Finland during those days. Years later, on a trip to Finland to look up relatives, Saima and I found out that they still fondly remembered and appreciated individual family members in America who had sent them valued assistance during those troubled times.
A relative that we visited in Finland in the 1980s showed us the bullet that he had saved from his World War 11 wound. (Finland had been allied with Germany and there had been many German soldiers stationed in Finland.) He said, with much bitterness, "After we drove the Russians out, we had to fight to drive the Germans out!"
Van Etten's Prisoner of War Camp
While reading about World War 11 history, I was surprised to see the listing of a German prisoner of war camp in Van Etten, New York.
I wrote a letter to the editor of the Spencer Needle, inquiring about such a camp. An old friend wrote back to say that, "Yes, there was briefly a POW camp on Jackson Hollow Road. During the late war years German soldiers made regular visits to area Finn farms to purchase chickens, eggs, butter and other food items. The Germans had been well behaved and they and the Finn farmers had enjoyed a pleasant relationship.
According to government records, a previous CCC Camp was activated as a POW Camp in December 1944 and housed a maximum of 77 Germans before being deactivated in April 1945.
It was a great coincidence to discover that the Jackson Hollow Road house that we owned after marriage was right next door to the old prison camp that the Germans had left only a few years before!
A Few Fat Years for the Chicken Farmers
During the war years, there were price controls and food rationing. With the resulting black market in relatively nearby New York City, the local chicken farmers were provided with a brief period of unusual affluence.
I remember that the "ceiling price" for live chickens at the farm was 29 cents a pound. The local dealer who bought chickens from the area farmers for delivery to New York City was Hyman Etess, the only Jew I had ever met at that point in my sheltered existence. He had a splendid rapport with the Finnish farmers and with a sterling reputation for honesty, had a lock on the local market. He hired the local Finn boys for the heavy work of catching and loading the chickens and he paid extravagantly high wages.
Farmers would routinely sell flocks of chickens when egg production declined. 'Hymie," as we cordially knew him, wrote my grandparents a check for the legal price of 29 cents a pound. The actual price that he paid was one dollar a pound. He paid the difference in thousand dollar bills that I remember being laid out on the dining room table. A thousand chickens, not an uncommon quantity, at say, six pounds a bird "on the hoof," would generate some six thousand dollars at a time when a new Chevrolet, when they became available, cost $1100.
By the time our chickens got to the "under the counter" area of a retail butcher shop, the price must have been in the area of $3 a pound when wages were in the area of $1 an hour or less.
Comparing, costs then and now requires some hipshot approximation, but I tried to compare the relative levels with the price of gasoline as an indicator of the cost of living.
Gasoline was 20 cents a gallon then, and in recent years has been as high as $2 a gallon. Those black market chickens cost the New Yorkers the equivalent of about $20 a pound in today's dollars. Yesterday I bought 2 four pound frozen chickens at 49 cents a pound from the local supermarket for a total of $2.36 each. The New Yorker in the 1940s had paid as much as the comparative equivalent of $80 in today's dollars for their black market bird!
 Alfred Walden with Gregory Peck |
Changing times
All of that unusual prosperity declined in the post war years and the small chicken farms began to disappear. During the "golden years," farmers got 60 cents a dozen for their eggs. Yesterday, sixty years later, I bought eggs, admittedly at a "special" price for the same 60 cents a dozen. It's no wonder that the small chicken farm soon become uneconomical.
I understand that Hyman Etess retired, married a Finnish-American woman and bought a house off of the Spencer-Ithaca road.
The Anderson farm on Ellis Creek Road is still there. When we visited it a few years ago, the chicken coops and barns had been lost to fire and collapse. The present residents were happy to invite us in to hear some of the farm's history. The old sauna and the two-holer are gone, but the farmhouse is essentially as it was in the 1940s. The attic had been converted into two extra bedrooms.
This has been a narrative from my best attempt at accurate recollections. If some reader has corrections or additions to these paragraphs, we would appreciate hearing from you. Saima and I reside in a house built for us by Spencer's master carpenter, Ronny Sundberg.
Placerville is in the foothills of the Sierras, and reminds us a lot of the rolling hills and winding roads of Spencer-Van Etten. An important difference is that we rarely get any snow, and as I write this in January 2003, last night's low temperature was 32 degrees and it was sunny and 50 degrees this afternoon.
 The Wayne Wirtanen's California house that Spencer's Ronny Sundberg built for them. |
Our e-mail address is wayne@innercite.com;
postal mail is 4341 ,Shangri-la, Placerville, CA 95667.
 Wayne Wirtanen in 2003, at the Sea of Galilee, Israel. |