The Lindstrom Chronicles Part 1 of 2

In the Fall of 2006 my mom and dad were interviewed for the upcoming volume of "Gastineau Channel Memories" produced by the local historical society. Each volume is a series of short family histories. I believe the latest edition will be Volume III and should be published sometime in 2008.

When I was in Portland in March visiting Amanda and Leah, we were talking a bit about my folks. The gals knew dad was old...but I believe they were taken aback when I mentioned a couple of Fun Facts:

Dad was born twelve years after the Wright Brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk.

Dad was born two years before the United States went to war - that would be World War I.

Woodrow Wilson was President when my dad was born.

You get the drift...we're talking OLD.

The following is certainly not a complete oral history - something I damn well better get busy on sooner rather than later - but it does have its amusing aspects.

Elmer & Evelyn (Klump)
LINDSTROM
Interviewed by Dee Williams & Marie Darlin

Elmer: I was born on February 5, 1915, at St. Ann’s Hospital. My dad and my mother, Eli and Mary Lindstrom, had arrived in Juneau from Finland in 1912. Although born in Finland, they were Swedish speakers. The winter of 1915 we lived up on Starr Hill, on Kennedy Street, in one of the miner’s cabins. The winter was so bad that Ma didn’t take her clothes off for six weeks, just in case they had to get out fast. They were just shacks in those days and the wind could blow them over. My sister, Ingaborg, was born on August 1, 1916 and my brother, Bud, whose real name was Carl Victor, was born on February 26, 1918.

When I started school the high school was on the top floor and the elementary grades were on the first two floors. I graduated from Juneau High School in 1932. When I first graduated I was looking for work. The only place you could find a job was at the mine. I went down there every day for six months in a row and there would be 100 to150 others looking and they’d come out shaking their heads. “There’s no work, there’s no work today.” Well, I’d wait until it calmed down and I’d go in and ask if there was any work today. The personnel manager was Joe McLean’s dad, Hector McLean. He wouldn’t even bother to look up, he’d just say that there wasn’t any work that day. It took six months but I finally got a job down there. One day I went in asking if they had any work and he looked up and said, “Yup.” I started working on the dock and then I worked on the power line crew for a while.

Evelyn: Fred Newman, who would later become Elmer’s step dad, was a foreman. He wouldn’t let him work in the mine; he said it wasn’t a healthy place.

Elmer: When I first went to work at the mine we got 56 cents an hour and $4.85 for a day. You could buy a hamburger for 10 cents and a milkshake for 15 cents. Carl Jensen worked in the mine at the same time I did and Alex Sturrock, too. We were all friends and every night we’d go to the Triangle Club. This was after they did away with prohibition. Every night we’d go down there and have a beer and talk. Beer was 10 cents. Then we’d go over to Percy’s and have a hamburger and a milkshake before we went home. Emmett Botelho and Ben Burford started the Triangle Club. Then they split up and Emmett took the Triangle and Ben started a place over on the other corner, where MacDonald’s is now, Burford’s Corner. In those days the A-J Mine employed twelve hundred people. It ran twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week.

Evelyn: Someone new to the area once wrote an article for the paper and said that when the mines were running it was so noisy that you couldn’t hear yourself think. Well, I couldn’t let that go by as it really bugged me. I called her and asked how long she had been here and she said about two years. I told her that her comment about the noise was not so. The only time there was any kind of noise was when they had to blast rock; then the whistle would blow and there would be a boom.

Elmer: In those days people could go out and leave their doors unlocked. There was one policeman during the day and one at night. My mother had a cabin out the road where we spent weekends, and it was left unlocked. The cabin was about the third cabin past Minnie Field’s home. We had to pack everything down the trail to the cabin. I used to hate it because every time we’d go out there we had to spend half the time packing stuff down to the cabin; lumber, blocks of cement, everything! My mother had put in a big garden and every time we went out we had to weed it or mow the lawn. When we first built the cabin it was always work. Later, Mother wanted to give the cabin to me but I was fishing and gone all summer so I wouldn’t have been able to keep it up. She sold it in the 1950s. We are sorry now that we didn’t keep it in the family. George McDonald bought it. His brother Louie owned a grocery store in town. A lady called me a year or so ago and said they had just paid $200,000 for it. She wanted me to come out and tell her about the property.

Editor’s note: A September 9, 1929, newspaper article reported the following: Elmer and Buddy Lindstrom had a narrow escape yesterday afternoon when their rowboat capsized off Lena Cove as they were trying to land a salmon. Theirs was the only boat along that stretch of beach and neighbors watched helplessly as the boys clung to the capsized boat which drifted toward midchannel. Then Simon Hellenthal, local attorney, came around the point from the north with his outboard boat and picked them up. They were thoroughly chilled but had managed to hold onto the trolling line which had a 15 pound salmon at the end of it. [Excerpted from Gastineau Bygones by Robert DeArmond.]