Peering at the Past Speaking Norwegian at Home, English at School

Part three of a series
Owen Hagen said when he started kindergarten in Spring Grove in the 1930s, he could not speak English, only Norwegian. “It was kind of hard for me,” he recalled. “Kids would laugh at me but that changed in a hurry,” he added without explanation.
For Tinka Bergrud Rud (1915-2004), speaking Norwegian at school in the early 1920s was not a problem with other students but with one particular teacher at her one-room school, known as the Bekken School, near Waterloo Ridge in Iowa, but not far from Spring Grove, Minn.
“It was difficult when we started school because we were all Norwegians. We were used to speaking Norwegian at home. Everything went fine the first year because we had a Norwegian-speaking teacher. When we forgot ourselves on the playground and hollered and called to each other in Norwegian, she never said anything. In second grade, we got a teacher that couldn’t understand Norwegian. She was so strict that if she heard anyone saying anything Norwegian on the playground, we had to come in and take our seats. We weren’t allowed to speak anything but English and that was tough.”
Tinka said it did not take long to adapt to school being taught in English. “We had heard it, so we could speak it when we started school.” But at first, the children were more fluent in Norwegian, since they used so much Norwegian at home.
These recollections were recorded in the winter and spring of 1997, when six Spring Grove students (representing grades six through 12) interviewed senior citizens about growing up in and near Spring Grove during the first half of the 1900s. It was an oral history project made possible through a grant from the Minnesota Department of Children, Families and Learning.
Pauline Anderson Bratland (1932-2018) recalled the school dress code. “We (girls) had to wear skirts or dresses all the time. We could only wear slacks when it was really cold. We went to school from 8:30 to 12:00 and then from 1:00 to 4:00. We had religious training five days a week in a building behind the school.
“We used to go to C and D’s (Café) after school and have our cokes. The kids used to go between C and D’s and the bowling alley … C and D’s used to be open until 11 at night. The bowling alley was open until midnight… There were machines to play and the juke box.”
Owen Hagen (1931-2020) admitted skipping school with a buddy or two to go swimming, roller skating and ice skating. “We used to have ice skating behind the school before they built on.”
There were still a few Indians in the area, who according to Hagen, “always wanted something to eat. They didn’t have anything… They were friendly. We never had any problems with them.” The Indians would take and use the bones and entrails the family threw away in the woods after butchering for pork or beef.
The boys at school knew Alma Sylling Hagen (1912-2005) did not like caterpillars. “I just shivered,” she recalled. “So, whenever they found caterpillars, they would tease me and scare me.”
In the summer, Alma and friends would attend six weeks of religious school at a country school building. They walked to school along a lane that was not used by cars but was often a gypsy campground. ”We were very frightened,” Alma said. “We would walk very carefully past there. “
When Alma’s class finished eighth grade in a one-room country school, there was a graduation exercise at the courthouse in Caledonia where the county superintendent spoke and presented diplomas. During her first year in high school, 1924-25, the new school was destroyed by fire at the start of the Christmas vacation. It had been only two years since the 1922 construction of an addition and remodeling of the majestic 1899 two-story, brick school building. The students thought there might be an extended holiday break, but classes were moved into various locations in town – church basement, Masonic Hall, machine shops, above store buildings, “wherever there was a room for us,” said Alma. “I remember I had an algebra class upstairs at the Arthur Evenson Implement Shop.”
After high school, Alma had one year of teacher training – also at the Spring Grove school building, which qualified her to teach in rural schools. She lived with a farm family while teaching in nearby Wilmington Township. “To get to school, I had to walk across the fields, over a bluff, down a bluff, under a fence and then proceed to school. I had to bring my books along and my noon lunch.”
She was her own janitor, which meant sweeping the floors, cleaning the blackboards and starting the fire in the morning to warm the room. There were no electric lights.
“Often during the year, we would have programs put on by the children,” she continued. “Some occasions were a basket social, which were lots of fun. After seven years of teaching, my license terminated. It was either go back to more school or to quit. I decided to quit. That was the year I got married.”
After being a student in Spring Grove, Audrey Liudahl Atchison (born 1926) became a teacher in her hometown. “I remember one time one of the boys that wasn’t interested in school fell asleep during class, and it was in the noon hour, and all the kids knew he fell asleep, so I motioned to them to tiptoe out the door and I locked it. So, he didn’t get any lunch that day, so he had to go right on to the next class. So, the next day, he said to me, ‘Mrs. Liudahl, you don’t need to worry about me falling asleep; I’ll make more money than you’ll ever have,’ and he turned out to be fine.”.
Source: ”Yesteryears of Spring Grove,” a published collection of interviews (1997)