Interview with Jack Krusenstjerna

Bonnie Ekse interviewed Jack Krusenstjerna at his home in Odebolt on August 30, 2005. His father was Russell Krusenstjerna, son of Alfred and Ida (Hokanson) Krusenstjerna, who raised a large family in Odebolt in the late 1800's and early 1900's.  Biography on Alfred Krusenstjerna.
 

Jack named Alfred and Ida Krusenstjerna's family in order of birth:

George
Hazel lived in Des Moines.
Fred (Fritz) lived in Chicago after leaving here.
Mabel lived in Chicago after leaving here.
Russell
Ruth lived in California.
Florence lived in Minneapolis.
Art
Maurice
Helen - married Dr. Treman [an Odebolt veterinarian] - lovely, lovely lady.
Dick lived in Oregon.

Some of Shorty's (Russell's cousin Alvin Krusenstjerna's) family lived up in that area over there by where Merle [Sorensen] lived, near Marge Kennedy's folks (Russ Kennedy), way up there across the highway [on North Walnut St., north of Highway 175].

Sherry Grove Gritten wrote in an e-mail: "The house that was owned by Ida K. was originally 1/3 of the Odebolt Catholic School. [It was replaced by a brick school building.] Supposedly the other two pieces are in town but are not two-story homes. The character of the home indicates a school. The stairs are wide. Upstairs there is the main room and two rooms to the north and two rooms to the south. It always brought to mind a study hall and four classrooms. I was told Ida raised eleven children in this house. We bought it thirty-eight years ago."

Where Art's hardware store was [212 Main St.], next to the café, that was the first library.

I lived here in this town until I was fifteen or sixteen. I grew up with a lot of the original people in the community, names I'm familiar with.

My grandfather came here probably in the late 1870's, and his brother came with him. Then my grandmother's people--Hokanson was their name--I don't know how she got here, but I still have some of the old packing slips someplace that they sent her to board the ship and stuff like that in Sweden.

My grandmother was a Hokanson, and her brother Gust lived up straight on this street. I don't think it was the place that Merle Sorensen lived in, that old place fell down, but right in that area [North Walnut St.]. That was my grandmother's sister.

And her other sister--she had a sister by the name of Tekla Carlberg. She was married to a Wilken, and he had a pool hall here in the 1920's, late teens and 1920's. She had a boarding house down on [408 South] Main Street; it's the big one on the west side of the street. Tekla had that for years, and when she died we cleaned it out, we had quilts and stuff that she'd made over the years, and what did we do, we took them to the dump. Dad and I had to clean the place out. Isn't that sad? And look at things now.

(We talked about the shower house that Dale Gronemeyer's dad had operated, and that many of the customers on Saturday nights had been ranch hands from the Adams Ranch.)

Lange had a barber shop over there [on the east side of Main Street], and I think he had a shower back there, and up at Briggle pool hall, I think they had one in there. Those fellows would walk all the way into town, you know, and then get involved on Saturday night, and, if they could, they'd stagger back out there. Those were the times when there was still a walkway clear to the ranch, as I understand. And there was one to the cemetery, as you know.

B: Did you graduate from high school here?

I left Odebolt in 1936, and we moved to Sioux City. I went to school there one year, then moved to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I graduated from school in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

B: Had you already played your cornet or trumpet in Odebolt?

Oh, sure. Oh, yes. In those days it was kind of unusual; we didn't have music in the schools at that time, but they had a town band, and the kids who wanted to could play. My dad played in the town band, something, I don't know what. He got me an old horn and said "Sit down at the end and watch the guy next to you; see what he does." Probably the best player at that time in the brass department here in town was Charley King. Do you remember him? He had the popcorn stand. He came from England and was an excellent, excellent musician.

B: Yes, they have wonderful brass bands in Great Britain.

Frank Mattes was involved here somehow; I'm not really sure-this goes back to 1925, 1926, those years in there. [Newspaper articles from those years tell us that Frank Mattes conducted the band.]

B: What did Charley King play?

He was a trumpet player, a good one.

A guy by the name of Kermit Chase came to town as the first band teacher, as I recall. Maybe you've seen some of those pictures. They had exceptionally good musicians around these areas. We attended all the contests, all that kind of stuff, and each kid was supposed to learn to play contest music, and we had to do all that type of thing. So I'd play the cornet; my sister Dorothy would play the piano for me.

I took my first piano lesson in the house on the corner where Wallace keeps his salt bin over there [on South Walnut Street]. There were three houses in there at that time. There was a man from Carroll who used to ride the railroad up here and he'd stay overnight with us because my mother would let him stay overnight if he'd give us piano lessons. So that's how we both were able to take some piano lessons. And then he'd go around town [giving piano lessons], then he'd catch the train back to Carroll.

Jack thinks the school band started about 1928. The first band director was Mr. Chase, and he later taught in Manilla, Iowa. We look at a photo of the school band)

Do you see how little I was? And the reason I learned to play the horn: I wasn't ever big enough to play football until I was about nineteen years old.

B: That's a good-sized band for the size of the school.

Oh, really-everybody played, and it was important. Excellent. We went to the state contest. In those days it was not segregated as to size of school. It was just bring your band, and whoever is best gets first place. Holstein had an excellent band. And none of these guys were certified-they wouldn't let them teach today--but they knew what to do. Holstein had a fellow by the name of Klaussen up there that came over from Germany and he could hardly speak English, but he had a big stick, and he knew what to do with it-he just whopped the kids.

B: So your dad must have sold his business?

Lost it. What happened is-it's quite a family history. When my granddad came to this country he worked for Henry Hanson in the elevator. I don't know how they got here, but he could speak English; my grandmother couldn't when she came. But anyway, he came to work, as I understand it, maybe in 1879, in that time-frame. Of course, all the old Europeans, the thing that they did was, "We want a farm for each of our boys". That was the typical thing, and my granddad had on paper, he had the place where Terry's [Cubby's] is out here 121 N. Des Moines St.]; that was 80 acres in there. He owned the farm to the north up where Drakes now live, he owned all of that; and where Clayton Larson lives [3181 Fox Ave.], he owned that farm; and one other one [pointing] over in here. And in the year of-must have been 1933 or something-he couldn't make the payment on his note. I still have the note with the Northwestern Mutual Insurance Company. That's fifty thousand bucks, which was a fortune in those days. I think he had a $10,000 payment to make at a certain time; he couldn't make it, and lost everything.

My dad, in 1916 or 1917, or in that era sometime, he and a man by the name of Coy were in the clothing business where the Harvey Keller building is. [The address was 122 W. 2nd St.] They had a clothing store. He moved out of that and he moved into this building I showed you and he went into the hardware business. And we were there until 1936, it was.

B: And what was the name of the hardware business?

Krusentsjerna Hardware. Art (Krusentsjerna) worked for him as a young man. In those days farmers would put everything on the books but pay it in the crop year. Grocery stores were the same way. He had money on the books he couldn't get, and so he didn't declare a bankruptcy, but he went into what they call a receivership. And he had to sell everything out, and it took him about 20 years but he paid off all his indebtedness over those years. He would never have a bankruptcy on it, because that was a real no-no at that period of history. So that went out in about 1936.

B: Quite an honorable man!

Well, that's the way people were in those days. That was very important. Nowadays it's a part of doing business if you don't-you know-another business deal, you work it out so you let the bank end up with what you don't want; start all over again.

B: But you were too young to have ever worked in the hardware store.

No, I used to help in there as a kid. What really, I think, tipped him off-some fella-he took in I think a thousand bushels of potatoes to store in the basement as payment on a debt, and the darned potatoes got rotten. I remember cleaning it up; oh, it was awful!

But they used to do tin work in the back. I think Hemer [plumber in Odebolt] still has some of the original equipment that they had for bending what they called tin breaks, bending metal and stuff like that.

B: Do you think they used it in their plumbing business?

Well, they'd use it for making gutters and tin pipes, and they had threaders; that's when they used hard metal for stuff.

B: From reading the old newspapers I've noticed that town people didn't drive or get their horses out except for going out of town. And there was a time when everybody walked around town. Nobody except the farmers had their teams out.

Ya, they'd have hitching posts downtown. I don't remember this. But around town there are still a few of those old hitching posts stuck in the ground. One is up there right next to Smith's place that got sold the other night. If you're up there there's a hitching post right next door.

Photo to the left is the hitching post Jack talked about to the north of City Park on Park Street in Odebolt.

B: I've driven through the alleys downtown looking for the hitching posts, because I know the farmers were kicked off the main streets, and then they had to park in the alleys, but I could never spot any.

I'm not sure if there are any at the park; at one time there were two or three up there where that curb-there's a curb on the north side of the park-at one time which was, I think, was a parking space.

B: I always wondered about that; around the perimeter of the park there's a concrete ledge, and that must be where they parked.

I think at one time that was a parking for buggies or whatever was going on at that time.

B: Well, in Dorothy Groman's book about her family in Odebolt, what we now call "the parking", she called "the parking lawn". I think there's a reason it was called "the parking". I think they parked there!

That's where they parked buggies.

B: Who were some of the old pioneers you remember from your boyhood?

I knew some of the Hanson people. Henry Lewis Hanson's granddad set up the park and all this boulevard area. I didn't know these people personally because I was just a kid. I knew who they were. There were the guys working in the banks like Mr. Schmitz next door here, I knew who they were through the kids, but as far as the people, I wasn't familiar. They were my dad's peers or my granddad's peers, those kind of people. I used to run around as a kid with John Selby. They lived just back here. He ended up running the Michigan Power Company, the biggest power company in the world, you know. He donated money to the library up here, you know.

B: For the meeting room.

Ya. There were some people in this part of the country that have really done a lot of things in other areas. Henry Hanson's grandson Henry Lewis grew up down where Reese Johnson's place is. His father was killed, and he was an engineer for years with 3M in Minneapolis. Guy by the name of Carlson, Jimmy Carlson, his dad had the lumber yard here. I think he retired with, I mean big, big jobs-smart people. You never knew they were smart when they were kids, but they ended up…I think a lot of people, in those years, parents expected something out of you, whether they told you to do it. And the schools were the same way; it wasn't a matter of just "run them through and get them out", because as I said, particularly in the music business, the guy directing, if he didn't like it, he'd whack you one on the hand and say "That's wrong; do it again". And it was the same with the superintendent; if you were running up and down the stairs, grab your ankles, and whop!

B: You mean he'd trip you?

No, you'd grab your ankles and he had a board. Get one big swat and that'd straighten you right up.

B: Was that the fearsome Mr. Coon?

Well, before him; what was his name, the guy that I learned from. See, Coon came while I was still in school here. I can't think of that man's name that was before him, but he was a tough one too. In those days the superintendent and the principals not only ran the school, but they also taught classes, you know. A lot of them were football coaches, but they had other classes. And the county superintendent had all those classes out in the country. And those ladies had a tough time, you know. They started the furnace and cleaned the building and taught the kids till some of them were maybe about eighteen years old; some of them were about as old as the teachers.

Maybe during your time it was still required that all the lady teachers were single. Art and Velma [Jack's Uncle Art Krusenstjerna and his wife] were married a year before they let it be known that they were married, because she was teaching. She taught here a couple years and they didn't tell anybody because she had a teaching contract. Well, Warren Hanson's wife, Arleen, was teaching here; she must have quit when they got married. Charlie Krusenstjerna's wife, he had the clothing store. Doris was a school teacher.

1907 Mattes and Motie Fire, South Side of West Second Street

My father, Russell, was a cousin to Alvin; that's Bill Krusenstjerna's dad. Their father was killed when a building fell on him. And I still have the papers someplace--my granddad was appointed guardian of those boys until they were of age, and he took care of their mother-I know he supported until those boys were out of school.

The Hub Fire, West Side of Main Street

The one down by the café, that empty lot in there, I remember when that building burned down, that was about 1925-26, in there someplace.

A Huebner and another man owned that, and I'm not sure-that was a New Year's Eve or something; I mean, it was 25 below and it just burned everything up. And I still don't understand how that big brick building on the corner kept from catching fire.

B: Where did you live when you were growing up?

Well, as I mentioned, I lived on that corner for a while; we lived up next door to Jim Scott, that house right to the south of Jimmy Scott. Not the one the doctor lived in; McAllister built one there [216 W. Hanson Blvd.]; we were right next to it on the west side of the boulevard over here; just the first house south of where Jimmy Scott lives. Where Jimmy Scott lives [200 Hanson Blvd.] there was an old yellow house, and that was torn down. People by the name of Fry's lived where Bill Dreesen lives now [412 W. 2nd Street]; that's right west of where Jimmy Scott lives. That old house was torn down and another one put in. Right on that alley up there a family by the name of Coy had a beautiful home. You might have recalled that as a kid-on the south side of the street, on Second Street, it's a vacant lot now [west of the alley]. It burned; it could have been replaced, but they didn't want to spend the money to fix it up.

B: It was next to where O. W. Larson lived.

Ya, where Oscar Larson lived.

B: Where I went for my piano lessons.

Ya, Justina took your piano lessons! And Nate Skalovsky built the house where Gary Schroeder lives [413 W. 2nd Street]; that's where my dad lived. That's right across the street from that on the alley. The big one, a man by the name of John Schramm, lived in that [west of alley on north side of W. 2nd St.], and my dad bought the one from Kalin-or Nate Skalovsky.

B: Across the alley there?

Ya. So I lived in that place, and then I lived in the one where Marshall Fox just sold to young Hoefling [100 S. Hanson Blvd.]; that's down at the end of that boulevard on that corner. It kind of looks like two houses put together. Those were the three places I lived as a kid. And we never owned homes; never could get enough money. A house would cost $2,500-2,600; could never come up with that money. In those days there was no such thing as financing; you bought a house, you paid for it. Most everybody, when they bought a house, they had to have the money to pay for it.

B: Well, there weren't any savings and loans?

They didn't have what you call savings and loans in those days; a bank would lend money on land and stuff. Most people never owned a home unless they could pay for it. And I know the first home my dad bought in Sioux City, he was able to pay for it in full. I think that house cost him $6,000, and he had enough to pay for it.

B: Well, I bet he was very proud of that.

Oh, yes! Oh, yes! Things have changed a lot. No dollar down on a new house.

When I was a boy the Helsells lived up on that big corner where they did have the museum. That was a garage, and he had a couple old Pierce Arrow automobiles with headlights about three feet long. And we kids used to go up there and watch him shine them-big brass headlights on those cars-and we'd go up and watch the mechanic shine the Helsells' lights on his car.

And where George Dresselhuis lived, that house was built prior to my time, and a Petersmeyer family built that-the great big one up there.

B: I thought Helsells lived in the second house from the corner [208 S. Lincoln Avenue].

They did, but he owned a garage [512 W. 2nd Street], that garage back there, where he kept his cars. As a matter of fact, my uncle, who was Maurice Krusenstjerna, he's only ten years older than me, but he was my uncle, he owned that Helsell house at one time. In fact, his wife still lives down in that little house a block down, north of the corner, a little house back in there. She was a Swanson…

B: Oh, Adele Swanson, the librarian.

Ya. See, she lived back of my grandmother there, and her husband fell off the scaffold and killed himself, and so she and my uncle got acquainted across the alley, and so that's how that came about. And a man by the name of Sallstrom lived in there originally, John Sallstrom, who was an old-timer carpenter. And when I was a kid I used to run around with his boy, who was named Ed. Ed Sallstrom went to Des Moines and was a highly successful jeweler down there. The old man was a bachelor all those years, and when I was a kid, maybe 14-15, I'd help him shingle. And I know when they built the house right next to Gritten, to the west, when that house was built, I helped put the original shingles on that [309 W. 2nd St]. That was my claim to fame as a roofer.

B: That's pretty young to be up on a roof shingling.

Really, in those times there was no work provision; if you wanted to work, you worked. My grandmother had a barn. Right behind where Wallace is now [120 S. Walnut St.] there was a barn in there-big two-story barn. I'd have to go down and get the cow every night, bring the cow back and milk the cow and keep the cow in the barn at night, milk the cow in the morning and take the cow back to the pasture down by the creek.

B: There wasn't milk in the grocery stores-everybody had their own milk?

Oh, ya, everyone had their own milk. A milkman delivered around town.

Another thing that will be of interest to you: In the old Swede families, beer was a staple. My grandmother had a big crock back of her cook stove going all the time, brewing up good homebrew. And when that was out, in the thirties when I was a kid, and my uncles would come in from threshing or something-I mean she did cook until she was 90 years old-on the old cook stoves. And if they were out, they'd send me down to Malone's to get a bucket of beer for dinner.

B: And now, that's something that couldn't happen nowadays either; you were too young!

Everybody'd be in jail! But that was normal in those days. And kids worked; as a boy my dad took in a couple of goats on payment, and I had to milk goats for a year or two 'til we got rid of those nanny goats.

B: Was he able to sell a lot of the things he took in trade?

As a matter of fact, we'd milk those goats and I'd take the goats' milk up to Mrs. Hart-Minnie Hart. Doc Hart had a place up there [505 S. Lincoln Ave.], and they had people in there, and they'd feed them goats' milk because that was good for them. It was awful!

B: I'll bet! Probably good for making cheese.

Well it would pick up grass-it would smell like-oh, it was awful. But he'd sell it. And we raised pigeons-we had pigeons-we'd sell pigeons up there. Squabs, you know, for pigeons. They'd cook pigeons up. They were very good. Things of that nature where you'd make a dime or nickel. And many times at night we'd go out to some barn out in the country, and they had pigeons-we'd catch pigeons. We'd climb around those barns and as I recall we'd box them up and ship them to Chicago for some sports club there, and we'd get a dime apiece for pigeons. And they'd shoot them-they'd use them for shooting birds.

B: Well, that was pretty good money then.

Yes, it was. And kids in the country would catch gophers, you know-get ten cents a pair for gopher feet. Go over to the county courthouse and they'd pay you for gopher, 'cause I guess they didn't want them around. They have holes, you know-dig up mounds all over. You don't hear much of that anymore. Kids have energy, and you gotta burn it off somehow. It's too bad that they don't still have classes in picking corn by hand. Send the kids out in the fall. There was a job! They'd pick corn sometimes in December in the snow.

In those years in the downtown part of Odebolt in the wintertime the pool hall and places down there, there would be all kinds of guys sitting around because they had no work to do. They'd sit around all winter, wait for the spring to come, go back to work. So the pool halls had people in them in the morning.

We had a couple of cafes at that time, in those years, and I know up in Charlie Krusenstjerna's clothing store [Mattes building at southwest corner of S. Main and Second; south door] he must have had seven or eight chairs, and they were filled up every morning. Guys would come, sit around, do nothing until noon, go home for dinner, and come back in the afternoon-things of that nature.

And you've seen the picture of some of some of the old-timers in front of the store, sitting out on the benches out there. The guys would sit out there all morning, whittling and talking if the weather was good. And the ladies wanted them to get out. In those years women for the most part were homemakers and family ladies. They weren't running off to have to go to work someplace just to pay the bills, like today.

I left Odebolt in 1936. This [showing photograph] was our band at Central High School in Sioux City at that time. This was the old Central High School building in Sioux City-the Castle on the Hill-and the guy that was directing that band had never been to school. We went to Des Moines several times with top honors. We didn't know the difference, except to do it right, I guess.

This is where I got started in the entertainment business in 1937-Billy Roy Band. Kids in Sioux City-that's how it all started. I learned how to play up here, and didn't know any better, and in those years these guys wanted me to play with them, to play popular music.

It started out in a Chinese restaurant down on Fourth and Nebraska Street, upstairs. We'd play from nine o'clock until two in the morning-going to high school-- and they'd give us $2 apiece a night. And my dad was making $25 a week as a salesman, and it helped out because he wasn't making much. I forget what our rent was-we had to rent an old house-and all those things together, but that's how it started.

Went to school all day, nine o'clock in the night, a lot of times we'd fall asleep there because there'd be nobody in the place at one o'clock in the morning, so everybody'd be sleeping until time to go home.

I played in dance bands and show business from that time on-symphonies (primarily Sioux City Symphony, and Omaha some), musicals. Did a lot of back-up work, backed up different acts. We got all kinds of people we could show you pictures of-Hope and Crosby and all those guys we used to handle everything for them.

But Phyll was always a homemaker. No, she did teach school to get me out of college. We were married while I was in Morningside after World War II. Went up to school there because it was a free education, and I'd been around people enough to know that that's what I should be doing--I should learn something. It was well worthwhile. Phyll taught school for two years until I got out, then after that two more years.

I got into the insurance business-I got into the sales business--what's now the Principal Financial, Bankers Life then. I had my own business in Spencer and various places.

In all those years I stayed in the entertainment business. We were just looking at some pictures of an army band I was in that was taken, I think, in Naples, Italy. I was with the engineer battalion, but I was a bandsman, and when no fighting was going on they'd give you instruments, and say "Here, start entertaining again." As soon as that was over it was back to digging mines up again. Ya, that's another story.

(See an article from odebolt.net "Moving Back to Odebolt", featuring Jack and Phyllis Krusenstjerna.)

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