Good Friday 1983
I first saw Superior, Wisconsin in the summer of 1964, after my freshman year at North Park Academy. I hardly noticed it because my eyes had been fixed on the hills above Duluth from the time they came into view south of Superior. The Duluth hills were mountains to this kid from Chicago. I remember no other sight as fine as these hills separating a single glowing blue of lake and sky. I couldn’t wait to get to them and the land beyond them.
We were headed to Ely, Minnesota in a van with North Park Academy basketball coach Ted Hedstrand. We were going to the only place where I thought any sane person would want to live — the North Woods. North of Duluth, the farm fields ringed with birch and pine reminded me of pictures of my great-grandparents’ farm in Hood River, Oregon. I wanted to live in that kind of place year-round and didn’t stop to think what immigrant farm life might have been like at its worst. We soon passed the open pit mine in Virginia and got to Eagle's Nest Lake just after dark. In two days we were on Basswood Lake.
After ten days of paddling and fishing and bugs and portages and mud, we were pretty glad to get back to Ely. The next evening we saw Bridge on the River Kwai. After the movie, I remember walking down the Ely streets in bliss. I only wanted more of Viking canoe heaven. I wanted to live a northern rural Scandinavian life and to find out what that kind of life had been like for others. And one day I would get the chance.
The opportunity came when God intervened in my life ten years later. God communicated in the form of a note from the college dean strongly suggesting I submit to a mandatory two-year absence from my schoolwork. I accepted his recommendation and took off to the land of my younger dreams. My dad and I had some fishing partners who were loggers, and they gave me a job cutting pulpwood in the glorious upper peninsula of Michigan. I was about to become part of year-round northern life. Soon after getting to Michigan, I knew my hopes of a Scandinavian Thoreauesque work experience would not pan out. I found myself living in an apartment in town and being part of a mechanized assault force on a jack pine forest planted by the WPA. I liked running a chain saw, but wished we didn’t have to cut so many trees. But each log was money. My boss Stanley Samion, had raised a large family by working in the woods with a hand saw, when every piece of pulpwood was insurance from poverty. I listened to him and others talk about earlier life in this beautiful land. Oscar Schleitweiler, a Covenanter who was 86 when we last went trout fishing, told me about working in a mine office when some miners were killed. Their bodies were brought into the office where company officials acted as if they weren't there. A Finnish fishing buddy of mine said that in the eyes of company officials, horses were worth more than people because people were replaceable without capital investment. Another friend told me about lumber company foremen using guns to encourage woodsworkers to load logs onto railroad cars during the Depression.
Hearing these things made me wonder what else had gone on up here. My younger pictures of hardworking farmers catching huge brook trout and taking saunas were now being challenged by darker images. I both did and did not want to know more.
New questions were also coming into my mind. The most important one to me was how the Covenant Church was affected by problems of industrial life. Who were Covenanters’ neighbors, and how did they get along with them? What were the sympathies of church members during times of strife?
Helga Skogsbergh helped me begin to answer these questions and sketch out a picture of northern immigrant life. In From These Shores, she wrote about two Swedish Mission Friend families who left Duluth around the turn of the century to homestead near what today is Port Wing, Wisconsin. She described homesteading lives of hardship and joy, lived by people who saw themselves as pilgrims passing through life on earth. These Swedes had Finnish neighbors in the nearby town of Cranberry. Skogsbergh describes the Finns as very poor, very hard-working people who liked to fight. The Swedes and the Finns got along well during this immigrant period. However, the book raised the question for me of what happened to each group after the homesteading years.
As I worked in the woods, I learned more about these earlier years. I heard about strikes, work accidents, emigration to the Soviet Union, and co-operative stores. I stayed in Michigan a year-and-a-half then returned to Chicago. But I kept thinking about Lake Superior country. When I would go back to Superior later on, an old Finn would tell me more about its history.
I drove there on Good Friday, 1983, to find out what was left of the consumer co-operative movement. During the Vietnam War period when I was in college, I had seen a photo of a Finnish-American co-op store in northwestern Wisconsin. I couldn’t believe my eyes but assumed that the store was just part of a lost age. Later when I was cutting pulpwood, I came across co-op stores in Bruce Crossing and Amasa, Michigan. Wondering what others might be left, I went to a co-op warehouse in Minneapolis and discovered a grapevine that led to Ernie Koski in Superior. Mr. Koski had a long experience of working in co-operative stores, including one in Phelps, Wisconsin. At Työmies, (The Workingman), a Finnish- American communist newspaper office, I got his address and then drove to his house. On a very grey Good Friday afternoon in 1983, a friendly Ernie Koski greeted me at the front door of his bungalow.
Ernie had left the piano to invite me in. He casually mentioned that he had just written a poem in honor of Angela Davis and was now setting it to music. Why was an 80-plus male Finlander writing a poem in honor of a black female communist? I told him I played the piano and didn’t know what else to say.
He told me he was from northern Minnesota and had spent his youth doing manual labor. Ernie Koski could have been one of the children of a Finnish family living in a town like Cranberry in From These Shores. He had been blacklisted as a striking miner and went on to work in co-operative stores before becoming the editor of Tyomies. He had been part of the network that sent several thousand American and Canadian Finns to Soviet Karelia in the early 1930s. I told him I had worked in the woods and needed a job. He said I should go to the Soviet Union and cut right-of-way for a natural gas pipeline. He added that they didn’t waste wood over there.
Rush Limbaugh claims that America was built by rugged individualists. If he had had a chance to interview Ernie Koski and hear him talk about his years of farming, mining, and lumbering in northern Minnesota, he might have seen him as the consummate rugged individualist — until Mr. Koski asked him to subscribe to Soviet Life. I was shocked when he asked me.
Ernie Koski had probably been a communist for more than 60 years. I am sure he was younger than 25 at the time of the Russian Revolution and may have been so caught up in its spirit that he continued to support the Soviet Union through Stalin’s purges (which killed quite a few of the American Finns who went to Karelia) and the Non-Aggression Pact between Hitler and Stalin. I was scared by these positions, but beneath them I saw a very decent, hard-working man with high hopes for the United States of America which had never been realized. And now he was becoming my friend. I thought of how I had worked for Barry Goldwater in high school and how I had wondered who the shadowy American communists were. Now one was sitting in front of me. We both had Swedish and Finnish blood (his mother was Swedish), and he was from the land that I loved. And he never did anything but work for a living. He could have been my grandfather.
In college I had met a lot of communists. Despite what some of my parent’s neighbors may have thought, I never became one, even though quite a few campus communists had also once been Goldwater supporters. Some college radicals it seemed to me, studied so much math and science in high school that they thought all human relationships and interactions could be understood scientifically. We had good discussions about the Vietnam War, but I could not talk to them about girls. One once told me that if I was serious about politics, all of my relationships would have to be political. What if I met a girl who didn’t like politics? This would have been much worse than being Covenant and feeling I couldn’t marry a Lutheran! Anyway, after my experience of working in the woods, I came to feel that most of the campus communists I had known did not deserve the trust of workers, because they would never treat the workers as equals and as human beings. I was glad I probably would not see them again.
Emie Koski, on the other hand, was both a communist and real person. And, unlike so many of the people I had met in college, he deserved a response.
As the evening went on, he talked about the height and decline of the consumer co-operative movement. He said it had lasted about the same time as a family — about 50 years. To him it was dying out because of the growth of large-chain groceries. He saw other big businesses as responsible for the decline of the old Superior business district. He went on to paint a picture of an entire northern economy dominated by mining and logging forces that took what they wanted and left without concern for the people they left behind — like the dead miners on the office floor, I thought. I disagreed with him about the Soviet Union; but what he said about life here agreed with too much of what I heard and saw while cutting pulpwood.
We split a can of peaches and some homemade bread baked by his wife, Impi. He suggested I get a room at the Androy Hotel in Superior. When I said good-bye, he said I should say “näkemiin,” which in Finnish means “Good-bye, but I'll see you again.” I soon walked into and through though the lobby of a hotel that had probably not changed in forty years. I went up to a small room with clean sheets on the bed and looked out the window at the faint lights of Duluth through the spring rain. I wondered whom he had sent here in the past.
I really felt it was Good Friday. The only sign of spring outdoors was the rain. Downtown Superior was dying, the consumer co-op network was barely hanging on, and many northern towns continued not to recover from the loss of once-booming mining and logging industries. I thought of Ernie Koski’s picture of a north country ravaged by big business. For him, communism was the only thing that could have prevented this, and now communism did not seem to be in the cards. A man who probably was too proud to have hope in a celestial city was also losing reasons to hope for a better earthly one.
On the day I visited the Koskis, I asked an older woman in the Tyomies (Communist Party) office if there had also been a Finnish Wobbly (International Workers of the World) newspaper in Superior. She sternly said there had been one, but they had never had anything to do with the I.W.W. I had thought that, if two members of Finnish-American left-wing groups from Superior met on Mars, they might feel they had something in common; but apparently not. This kind of dogmatism isolated people like Ernie Koski from many of the people they wanted to protect from the power and whims of big business in God's country. I wondered if Christianity could have helped them see their ideology more as a working tool than as gospel truth.
I do not think I would have been either Ernie Koski’s political ally or his enemy if I had been alive in the 1920s. But after our visit, I knew it was my mission to be his friend despite our differences. And our differences gave us something to offer one another. In the six or so hours we talked, he shared his own history with me and helped me enlarge my view of Scandinavian immigrant life. And he also became my friend.
I am not so sure what I did for him. I wanted to help him get a vantage point from which he could see the stiffness of his own ideology. But most importantly, I wanted him to feel hope beyond the realm of politics. I did not want Ernie Koski to die with only his dreams for America. Since our talk, he has passed on.
The next time I drive through Superior on the way to Duluth, I will probably still look forward to Viking canoe heaven. But I might also stop in Superior and think about the Good Friday I once spent there. When I get among the pines and birches of my ancestors, I will know more about their everyday lives, which will make a canoe trip look like a luxury. And while I am out fishing some still evening, I might think about the America of Ernie Koski that could have been, and feel haunted.
That feeling might stay with me until some day, in a better land, we can split another can of peaches. Until then, I will quote Elder Lindahl quoting Carl Sandburg (“Immigrants and Politics,” Pietisten, Fall 1992) and wish my friend:
Dig and dream, dream and hammer
till your city comes.