Interview with
P. Dale Gronemeyer
P. Dale Gronemeyer grew up in Odebolt, and has lived there all his life, except when he served in the Navy during World War II. His first name is Paul, and that’s the name he went by until he became an adult and his mail was getting mixed up with his dad’s mail. His dad was Paul Gronemeyer, but everyone called him “P. J.”
P. Dale made his living as a building contractor, and his late wife Marge was a school teacher. They raised their children in Odebolt, and hosted several foreign exchange students in their home over the years.
We sat down with P. Dale in April 2007, and he told us these stories. We were amazed that he knew the details of so many instances of juvenile shenanigans, but was never personally involved in them!Downtown and Some of Its People
P. J. Gronemeyer owned a produce store on the east side of South Main Street in downtown Odebolt.
“All the kids hung out there - John Ellis, the Simon boys and a lot of the kids. Deibert was hauling the milk and stuff for Sac City creamery and delivering ice cream and stuff. He had to stop at Dad’s to pick up cream, and on a hot day, man, that was a deal, because he’d always have some extra ice cream when the kids were all there. He had ice in the truck. That would be early 30’s probably.”
“You had to know Albert Fisher. My kids were afraid to go downtown when he was in my dad’s because he’d take his false teeth and stick them out at them. He was ornery; he liked to agitate everybody. And every dog in town was scared to death of him. I don’t care how vicious the dog was. When he saw Fisher he got out of the way. Fisher was smart, he had a good brain, and his wife was intelligent.”
Charlie Larson had a café at 122 W. 2nd Street. Harve Keller and his barber shop last occupied the building, which was torn down in the summer of 2006. Fisher liked to tell a story about Charlie Larson, a cat lover. “Some lady came to buy some oranges, and the cat was laying on the oranges, and he said ‘Kitty, you’ve got to get off the oranges; the lady wants to buy some.’”
Later on, Stickrods had a restaurant where Charlie Larson’s café had been. Pat Malone had a restaurant across the street; the D & E Café was located there in the 1950’s. Pat Malone’s wife, Louise, was a sister to the Stickrod that owned the restaurant, Wayne Stickrod’s dad.
One time a downtown business owner got carried away with painting. “He decided the front of that store needed to be painted, so he got some real dark green paint and he started painting, and he just kept painting. He painted the whole store, then he started down the street, painting the sidewalks and the lampposts and everything else. Everything was green. He didn’t care whose building it was; he just started painting.
“We used to go in the theatre during the day and run the short features and cartoons. A bunch of us would go in there and make popcorn. Maybe the guys would do some seat work for him, Carl Silkebaken, and those guys knew how to run the equipment. We used to take his show deals around to other towns. He’d drive us; we’d deposit them when he had to pass it on.”
Carnivals
P. Dale remembers carnivals sponsored by the American Legion. There would be wrestlers and boxers. The town cop, Muckey, was quite a fighter and would get up and fight at these matches. He was a big guy.
Town Characters
“High Pockets” Peters worked at the ranch and for Mandernachs. His pal was Otto Gotberg.One old character would go out to farms to look at horses, and if the people weren’t home he’d go into the chicken house and steal the eggs. His bachelor brother ran the livery stable that used to stand at the southwest corner of Second and Willow Street. Some gal brought in a fancy riding horse and he bred it to the Jack donkey!
Daddy Anderson and his wife Auntie Anderson lived on South Main. She was a mid-wife who delivered a lot of kids and did housecleaning. P. Dale remembers that she could use colorful language.
School
“I went to Catholic school through eighth grade, then public school. I was supposed to start in kindergarten in public school, and at that time the Catholic kids were ‘catlickers’ and the public kids were ‘puplickers’, and they didn’t get along. So I didn’t want to go to kindergarten there, so they’d give me my lunch, I’d start for school and go down there underneath the bridge there on the way. Of course we lived in the east part of town. Go down there at the bridge there and sit there until school was out, catching snakes and crawdads and everything, and then about the third day they called and said ‘How come Dale isn’t in school?’ So then they put me in first grade in Catholic school right away. So I didn’t get kindergarten.
“There were so many Pauls in that class - I think there were five or six Pauls in that one class. We had some tough old nuns there. They were strict.”
Q: Did they slap your little fingers?
“Oh, you bet. Take a ruler, hold your hand out. Of course, I didn’t get much.”
Q: I don’t believe it.
“I was such a nice kid. We had the outdoor toilets. You think back to those days, and you don’t know how you made it. That’s all you knew.
“We always said a prayer, then it was just like any other school. I took my lunch. We had some kids, farm kids, that boarded there. They had rooms upstairs. They’d come in on Monday and go home on Friday. If they lived out a ways they could board there. I don’t remember just how many of them there were, but there were several of them that boarded there.”
Q: What did you do at recess?
“Just like kids do now - play games or fight or something - get in trouble. We used to make a big pile of snow in the winter, then crawl up the tank [the Odebolt water tower], then jump off clear down into the pile of snow. You could go up partway, you know, there’s different levels, then jump into the snow until we got into trouble doing that. They put a stop to that; they were afraid somebody would get hurt. We had swings, a lot of stuff. I think that’s how I got in a fight one time. I was such an innocent little boy, though.”
Q: So who were some of your cohorts in high school?
“There were a bunch of Bernhardts and Cornish. We had so many in our class. It was the largest class to graduate up here until my daughter graduated. So they had to put the boys in a separate class. Now why would they do something like that - they don’t trust us? They put us in a separate class and they made us take agriculture. I think there was twelve of us. I don’t remember whether Wayne [Carlson - the interviewers’ uncle] was in that class or not - probably was. But he didn’t get in trouble like some of us did. But I never was in the superintendent’s office.”
Q: How about the principal’s?
“Nope, ‘cause I knew if I was going to be in there I was going to get worse when I got home.”
Q: Who were some of your favorite teachers in high school, or the ones you remember?
“I remember George Hilburn and Coach Covey. Nobody liked Covey; he was too strict. He’d go down the aisle and pretty near knock somebody out of a chair if they were doing something wrong. He taught economics or hygiene, one or the other. There was a lot of characters.
“Mrs. Lindberg was one of my teachers, and then Warren Hanson’s wife was one of my study hall teachers. She kicked me out of study hall because I was looking out the window. She made me go out in the hall. I kidded her about that” [in later years].
“June Coon, the superintendent’s daughter, sat right in front of me in study hall. Ahead of her was [this boy]. It was in study hall in the big hall, and George Hilburn was in charge of study hall. Anyway, [this boy] passed gas. Now this is funny! And it was terrible! And June Coon started laughing so hard that George Hilburn started on his way down there. He got just about there, turned around and went back. I’ll never forget that! But that [boy] was ornery; he was ornery.
Playing Football Out of Town
“Somebody would volunteer their car. We had one coach that liked girls, liked teachers. Sometimes we wouldn’t get home ‘til almost the next morning. Some guys would have to drive around for a couple hours ‘til we could get the coach organized to come home. He was a Casanova, a very handsome guy, but he wasn’t much of a football coach.”
“We played East Sioux City second team one time. Never will forget that, because we went to Sioux City to play an afternoon game. A bunch of the guys--good athletes--we went up there and they had these big warm-up coats you had to wear. And the guys got in the store, some of them, and started picking up stuff, and then they got in trouble. But they got it straightened out somehow. Incidentally, I wasn’t one of them.“
Playing Football at Home
Q: Did you have evening games in Odebolt? Were there lights on the field then?
“I think we had late afternoon. It seems to me that we played Holstein on Thanksgiving. We played them and had to have gloves and everything else on, it was so cold. But it seems to me that it was real late when we played Holstein; I remember that.
“They used to have that town team here - adults, I mean. They played out where the nursing home is now [801 S. Des Moines Street]. They had a football field there - Frank Mattes and some of the characters that used to be in this town.”
Swimming and Other Pastimes at Black Hawk Lake in Lake View
“We used to go over there fishing a lot. There were a lot of kids in our neighborhood.” They lived on Park Street, about the fourth house south of the corner of Park and Sixth streets. “That’s a lot of kids around there then. Dad would load them up, take them over to the lake on Sunday.
“They used to have the water slide. You got on that board-like thing and went down the slide into the water. Man, you wanted to watch where that board went. You could hit somebody in the head and knock them out.
“We used to go over to East End over at Lake View. A bunch of us would go over on Saturday night and watch the fights. They’d get drunk over there, then start fighting. When they had that in the joint there, in the dance hall, they had a screen with chicken netting in front of the band, because people were throwing bottles at them. I don’t think we ever got canned up, but there was always somebody with beer around there. They had a little restaurant there, and the dance hall, and the beer joint was in the little restaurant, I think."
Mother, Home and Siblings
P. Dale’s mother raised her children before today’s home appliances, such as electric refrigerators, were available. “My mother had a well. She’d put a bucket down the well to keep stuff cool. My mother was an invalid. She raised four kids, and made all their clothes. They used to make them knickerbockers - you ever heard of them? Had to wear them things. Everybody hated the things. I don’t know why they made you wear them, but they did.
“One time they had some disease, and they fumigated the house. I don’t remember what the disease was, it wasn’t mumps - scarlet fever - would that be it? They fumigated the house. I remember old Johnnie Jones was the cop. He’d come around, tell you to get out, put the stuff in the house. I think we could get back, but P.J. was in business downtown, and he couldn’t sleep in the house, he had to sleep in the garage.
“Towards the end my mother couldn’t walk. She lost everything except her mind. My sister took care of her. We had a maid part-time, but nobody had any money then. My sister was going to school at the time, and I think she was also homecoming queen that year. She graduated two years after me.
“My mother died while I was in service. I was taking naval air training at the University of Georgia. That must have been in ’43 or ’44 and that’s when she died. She would have been the same age as the year; she would have been 44 then.
“My brother Lyle was in the Air Force, went through all the stuff over in England, Germany. I think he was a navigator for a group of bombers, but he took flying too down in Texas, but then he ended up in England as a navigator.
“Then came, me, then my sister, then my kid brother Tom, who was in service in the Navy. My sister Marian has Reese Music in Denison. Her first husband was killed in an accident, they had three kids, then she married Don Reese, and they have three. Sis is 82 or 83 now. Still running the music business.
“My oldest brother Lyle graduated a year ahead of me. He’s been dead for quite a while. My youngest brother and his wife are in Ames now in a retirement home.”
Grandfather, Gus Freese
“My mother’s dad, Gus Freese, had the barber shop. I think he was an auctioneer at one time too. Then he was a barber, then he turned into a fix-it-all guy, and then he had the cows - he had six cows in town.” P. Dale’s grandparents lived at 401 S. Main. “He kept the cows in that barn all the time and milked them, and then would sell milk. Warren Hanson and I used to talk a lot about that, because he was kind of a competitor of Warren’s. He kept them cows in that barn all winter, feeding them. He and my grandmother milked them. My granddad had asthma real bad. And then in the spring they had a pasture down southwest of the RV park, and they’d take the cows down there in the spring for the grass. And man, when they took those cows out of the barn, they just went crazy!
“Granddad had that building where the bar is now [215 South Main Street] and they were just using part of it. P.J. had this produce store in there. Farmers would bring their cream and eggs in, and then he sold seed.
Granddad and “King Oscar”
“He lived in the house right behind Grandpa’s barn and the second or third house down. Well, in the wintertime when they cleaned the barn out, my granddad just put the manure along the fence. There was a wooden fence south of his property over to the next property, and he’d pile all the manure there. Then in the summer, the spring, they’d haul that all out to the gardens, whatever, but all winter long it was there.
“On Halloween - now this is John Ellis and some of us--he’d have a wagonload of that stuff sitting there, and the Jones boys and the Bernhardt boys would get that wagon and pull it over. King Oscar hated Granddad. Their greeting was “cow-wheet* Freese” and “horse-wheet Johnson”, and that was their greeting in the street, which meant ‘cow manure Freese’ and ‘horse manure Johnson’. And on Halloween we’d get that old wagon with the manure on it, we’d pull it over on King Oscar’s yard. Some of the guys would go to the back door to get him excited, get him out there, then they’d dump that stuff in his front yard. Now is that nice? Dad never found out about it.
“All the kids hated King Oscar because he was always on the kids about something, if they’d touch his yard or anything. But you gotta remember that the Bernhardt boys and the Jones boys and John Ellis, the Ballard boys - that was quite a group.”
[*This is a phonetic spelling of the Swedish word, skit.]
Jordan’s Retreat
P. Dale built his current home on the site of the mansion of Hiram Wheeler, who owned the Wheeler Ranch in the late 1880’s.
“Did I ever tell you about the fellow that owned this place before I got it? Of course, it was Wheeler’s estate - his mansion. And then it was a hospital, and then it was an apartment house, and then this guy by the name of Doc Jordan - he wasn’t a doctor, but he called himself “Doc” Jordan. He looked just like Colonel Sanders, with the little white goatee - a perfect picture of him, but he was something else. But anyway, he had this place. He bought it on time, and then he had a lot of work done on it. And then he was starting a home for women, I think. We had tanning beds and all that kind of stuff in here. They called it ‘Jordan’s Retreat’. And he lived here in it, all by himself. But what a character! Ask Richard Swanson about him sometime. Richard invited him out for a meal because Richard lived right over here. Richard invited him out for a meal, so he was going to retaliate, so he invited Richard over and he had hamburgers! He was a dignified looking old gentleman.
“When I got the place and started cleaning it out, there was letters from women all over wanting their money back - you know, that kind of a deal.”
Wheeler Post Office
P. Dale served on the Sac County Conservation Board at the time The Maples was established as a county park at the corner of Highway 39 and County Road D59 south of Odebolt. The site had been the farmstead of John and Blanche Nelson. Before the town of Odebolt was established, there had been a post office called “Wheeler Ranch” on that corner. When the trustees of the Nelson estate turned over the property to the conservation board, both the house and the building that had served as the post office still stood on the farmstead.
“The sign on the post office and everything was there, and I tried to get the Iowa State Historical Society to give us some money. It needed some repairs on it, but it wasn’t in bad shape. It was a wooden building, wooden floors and everything, but we couldn’t get any money, and we didn’t have any money. Somebody stole the sign. I sure would have liked to have had that back. That old house that was there too, that was a big old house. But they started stealing all the stuff out of it. See it was quite an antique deal. But then we had to tear the house down, then we had to put that big stone there. We called it The Maples. That was a project we had to do in order to get it.”
Q: Do you remember what the post office sign said?
“Just U. S. Post Office. It was a wooden sign but it could have been - you know. What I should have done, I should have taken it down and taken it over to the county conservation board, and I didn’t. But things happened so fast, then the next thing I knew, it was gone. We didn’t have any money, the county didn’t, to renovate the house. It needed a roof and stuff. So when we burned the rest of the property we just burned it too. And I think out there the cave is still there, and that’s where they had all the batteries for the electricity in the house at one time. That’s all there was down there, was batteries, I guess - it was a cave. And they wanted to push that in, and I said, no, that’s something you don’t see very often any more, a storm cave. So we did put a roof over it.
“I remember John Nelson and his wife. You never saw her very often, but she was quite an artist, and some of the stuff she had in the house were works of her art and they’d keep stealing them, and I guess they were quite valuable.”
Fairview Farm, Locally Known as “Adams Ranch”
There was a sidewalk beside West Highway and up the angle road into the Adams Ranch. Ranch workers could walk from the ranch into town and back again. When someone wanted a job at the ranch, the mule boss would give them the meanest mule.
“I worked out there for Adams for a long time, and I worked for Bridge from the time he moved there ‘til he left. We built that new house on contract. He was very particular, old Bridge was. He had three or four kids. My wife used to tutor his boy. He was a character.”
P. Dale and his crew made Bridge an office in the old scale house. The sidewalk was deep in dirt by then, and Bridge wanted it uncovered, but never got it done.
A True Story without Names
An Odebolt man was working on [his house]. And Mrs. B. lived next door. Of course this man was always cussing and swearing. She went over there one day and said “You know there are some people that just can’t do a thing unless they’re cursing and swearing.” He said, “You know, Mrs. B., I’ve got a brother just like that.”
The Old Presbyterian Manse
An old home at 541 West Sixth Street was torn down recently. It had been built at 316 Third Street and was the Presbyterian manse before it was moved to Sixth Street. “I don’t know how they got that thing moved from down where the new house is, up here, because that’s a three-story house. It used to be a block west of church [on the south side of third street where the current manse is located.] I think it faced north. There were two big houses they moved. Where Lila Anderson lived; it wasn’t Anderson then. They had the old clothing store that burned down - her husband. The one that’s the empty lot next to the Mattes Building” [on the southwest corner of S. Main Street and Second Street].
Class Reunions
Marge and P. Dale Gronemeyer hosted several class reunions at their home. “We’ve had more class reunions, I think, than any class. We were a very holy class because we had two ministers and a priest in our class.”
“Marge used to take care of all the class; in fact, our fortieth, must have been, or before that, maybe, she was doing all the work for our class, so we elected her honorary member. She had all the book-work. I just took it back to Chuck [Hanson] a couple weeks ago. He’s organizing the next one. I took all this stuff back. She had a record of everybody that was there, when they died and everything else. It was the class of 1940.”