More Los memories

What's left of an old country church, Purewater, SD

Peter Los was a city boy in the Netherlands. He'd never lived on a farm, didn't know how to milk a cow or harness a horse. 

I asked him [a former neighbor] if I could go along to America when he was going back. It all sounded so good to me to work in the big fields with horses and machinery and to milk cows and feed hogs and gather eggs by the pail full. He said I would be welcome to go along.

That was Pete Los's vision. His life began in Holland, but his story begins with emigration. "There was not much future for me in Holland, as Father and Uncle Koos were quite young yet and jobs were very scarce at that time. . . .I promised my sisters I would come back in five years. A promise I did not keep." 

There was little horror on the voyage over. It was 1911, not 1845. On deck, he says, people played shuffleboard. He says he ate too much, in fact--or at least ate more than his body required since did no heavy lifting all the way over.

After leaving the coast of England we did not see any more land until we arrived at New York. It was a wonderful sight! We arrived in the evening and all those lights from those high buildings made a wonderful sight. We did not leave the boat until the morning. Next was going through the customs. I had nothing of value so it did not take long.

What's clear from his memoir, as well as Hattie's, is that when the two of them died they had riches untold, even if their bank account hadn't grown all that much. Occasionally through their many years of marriage, they owned their own home; but for most of their married lives, they rented, first this place, then that. They married in Springfield, SD, lived for a while in Purewater, SD, then all the way out west in Ripon, CA, where they determined they missed the plains and moved back to Springfield. When the ground dried to dust and grasshoppers ate the onions right out of the ground, they moved east to Delavan, Wisconsin, then tried Pease, Minnesota, for a year and a winter when they were so totally snowed-in that they went back to southern Wisconsin. 

I think I hit them all. Oh no, late in life--Alto, Wisconsin, too.

But treasures?--nine kids, seven delivered with little help from anyone, just the two of them--Pete and Hattie. Hattie always wanted to be a nurse and got good at birthing, helped mothers down the road deliver babies. "She had functioned about a dozen times as a midwife for neighbors and friends," Pete remembers. "In our own family, she even did her own midwiving for the last seven of our nine kids," and then he adds, "only with a little help from her husband." If it could have been a one-person maneuver,  it's hard to imagine that Hattie would not have managed the whole business herself. 

She picked up midwifery at Purewater, when, with the help of the Rosebud reservation doctor, she helped out a neighbor. They were living in a chicken coop right then. "This really wasn't too bad," she writes, "because it was a two room chicken coop."

One of theirs, Etheleen, arrived at Purewater on the Sabbath, in a blizzard. They hadn't gone to church. How she tells the story is perfectly disarming. 

We spent the day reading Bible stories, singing hymns, and visiting together. After supper we put the children to bed at eight because they had to go to school the next day. By nine we had a new member in our family! Etheleen had arrived. She was a beautiful big baby. I am sure she weighed at least ten pounds, but we didn't have a scale to prove it. 

Then she explains what happened often when she remembers her babies: "Soon she was dressed and snuggled in my arms, so Dad and I went to bed and got a good night's rest."

Amazing.

Late in life, Dutch relatives sent them two tickets to fly to Amsterdam. Pete says flying was "a wonderful experience, one that we will never forget."

There was about a hundred passengers. It was not long and we were away from mother earth and above the clouds. It looked somewhat like we were traveling a hundred feet above snow covered prairies of South Dakota. . . .One thing they do on these jets is feed you plenty. We had a big supper right away, and going east it was soon dark. . . .When it was midnight in Darien, it was breakfast time already on board the jet, and a few hours later we were in Schiphol. . .

Pete died in 1978, Hattie in 1989. I spent an afternoon in her kitchen in 1981, almost forty years ago. Their Xeroxed memoirs, bound in plastic, move blessedly through lives that began in the last years of the 19th century and create, together, a delightful museum. 

Maybe it's a blessing to know that we won't be around to see how people read through our lives a century hence, what wonder and surprise they'll feel--how they'll smile at the memories of their quaint ancestors.

I hope they do. I hope they can. In life, I hope I smile as much and often as did Pete and Hattie Los. It was, after all, a two-room chicken coop.