Beverly and Dale Johnson: “I set somebody’s hair on fire at the Sunday School Christmas program.”

By LeAnn R. Ralph

COLFAX —  “Catastrophe” is not generally a word that you like to think of in association with a Sunday School Christmas program.

For Beverly Johnson, one particular Sunday School program when she was a little girl started out as a catastrophe — but ended all right, anyway.

Beverly and Dale Johnson are residents at the Havenwood Residential Care Apartment Complex in Glenwood City and recently moved from their home in Colfax.

Dale was a barber for more than 50 years and closed his shop in Colfax in 1989 after 38 years. 

Their son, Peter, who died of pancreatic cancer in January of 2010, lived in Boyceville with his wife, Lois, and had lived there since 1979.

During Pete’s 37 years of employment, the company he worked for changed from G.T.E. to Verizon to CenturyTel and then to CenturyLink. 

Beverly grew up on a farm in the Rock Falls area in southern Dunn County.

“The Christmas programs at school and at church were a big deal. The one at school we practiced a lot for it. We had to know our parts,” Beverly said.

But then there was that one Sunday School program she has never, ever forgotten.

“At Sunday School one year, well, this was quite a catastrophe,” Beverly said.

“The superintendent of the Sunday School was an elderly lady. I don’t know if she didn’t realize how rambunctious kids could be, but we carried lighted candles up the stairs to get in line,” she said.

“I set somebody’s hair on fire! Somebody bumped me from behind, but I had the presence of mind to put it out with my hand. And I didn’t burn my hand, either. Somebody was watching out for me,” Beverly said.

“I was so afraid that her mother was going to be so mad at me. But, nothing came of it. We never had candles again after that,” she said.

The incident left Beverly with an uneasy feeling about holding lighted candles in church that continues to this day.

“You know, I never liked the candles we lit at our church when we were adults (for the candlelight Christmas Eve services). I thought, ‘This is dangerous! We shouldn’t be doing this!’ So I almost quit going to church on Christmas Eve. If we didn’t carry them in and out, it wasn’t so bad. But it’s so dangerous to hold them through the service,” Beverly said.

“The Christmas programs were fun. We’d get a bag of candy and an apple afterwards. Santa Claus came at school. The superintendent passed them out at Sunday School,” she said.

Dale says he certainly remembers practicing for the school Christmas programs and the Sunday School programs — but nothing happened that was quite as dramatic as setting someone’s hair on fire.

Dale Johnson grew up in Eau Claire, and he and Beverly moved from Eau Claire to Colfax in 1956.

Christmas baking 

When Beverly was growing up on the farm, there was no electricity.

“My mother would start Christmas baking early in December. She would bake pans of sandbakkels and fattigmand and rosettes and lefse and flat bread. Our front porch was our freezer. Nobody used the front porch in the wintertime. It was screened in, so she could lock it up. And that’s where the baked stuff was,” Beverly said. 

Beverly’s maiden name was Dahl.

“My dad and his brother owned the farm. It was a big farm for doing the work by hand. It was 180 acres. We all pitched in, of course. There were four of us, two years apart all of us. I was the oldest, and I’m the only one left. I had one brother and two sisters,” Beverly said.

Christmas in Eau Claire when Dale was growing up was quite a different experience from Beverly’s Christmases on the farm.

“My folks both worked. My mother had a beauty shop on Barstow Street. My dad had the barbershop. When they’d come home Christmas Eve, we’d have supper, some lutefisk and lefse, and then we’d open up Christmas presents after supper,” Dale said, noting that when he first started as a barber, he worked with his father at the Eau Claire shop.

Dale’s mother was busy with the beauty shop and did not do much Christmas baking.

“I had some relatives who did, though, who made sandbakkelsand that kind of thing,” Dale said.

“His step-mother wasn’t Norwegian. She learned to be after a while,” Beverly said.

Oh Christmas tree

When Beverly was growing up, there were not many pine trees on their farm.

Finding and cutting a Christmas tree was her dad’s job, but few pine trees meant there was not much for him to choose from.

“The tree — my dad would go out in the woods and cut one, and it was some pretty funny trees. Lopsided. Bare in spots,” she said.

“We didn’t have lights to hide the tree because we didn’t have electricity. There were icicles and balls that we decorated the tree with. It would get decorated the afternoon of Christmas Eve,” Beverly said.

Once the tree was up, the anticipation began to build.

“On Christmas Eve, all of us kids would be sent to the barn to help with chores so the men could get done early enough to come in. There were no gifts under the tree when we went out to the barn, but when we came back in, there it was — all of the gifts. Santa Claus had been there!” she said.

“We always missed him. He always came while we were in the barn,” Beverly added.

Dale remembers cutting Christmas trees, too, but they were a better caliber of Christmas tree.

“We used to go out in the country to a tree farm to get a Christmas tree. We’d picked one out and cut it,” he said.

“I hope your dad was a better picker-outer than my dad!” Beverly noted, adding, “Since we didn’t have many pines on the farm, you took what you could get.”

Hi-ho Silver

How many children, do you suppose, have wished for a pony at Christmas?

Beverly and her brother and sisters did not necessarily wish for a pony — but they got one.

“Our best present was — a pony. A little white pony named Silver,” Beverly said.

“My dad disappeared that evening, and later on, there was a knock at the door, and there he was with the pony, with a big red bow on its bridle. I was about ten,” she said.

The pony was not meant to be a gift only for the sake of being a gift, however. The pony had a job.

“There was a reason we got a pony. My brother and I were to go out and get the cows each morning. We took turns getting up at 5 o’clock every other morning to get the cows, otherwise my uncle, who also owned the farm with my dad, would be wet to the knees, getting the cows in. So that was the deal with the pony. We used him to get the cows,” Beverly said.

“We got other gifts that year, too. I was wondering if we would, but we did,” she added.

Silver became a beloved member of the family.

“He was a good pony. He wasn’t as stubborn as lots of Shetlands are. We could never have a saddle, though. My dad was afraid we’d fall off and get hung up (in the stirrups),” Beverly said.

“Few neighbor kids rode him because they couldn’t ride bareback. He was our pony. My sister never rode him. She wasn’t the outdoor type. It was my brother and I, we were the ones that used the pony. Our youngest sister fell off and got stepped on, on the leg. So she never rode him much after that. He was pretty much mine and Gene’s,” she said.

Dale says he does not remember receiving any particularly special gift at Christmas when he was growing up — certainly nothing like a pony, anyway.

“We had twin uncles with us. The one who lived next door married my mother’s sister, and his twin. They lived there until they were 30. They didn’t get married until then,” Beverly said.

“And they always gave us big gifts. One year, Betty and I, we would get gifts together a lot, and one year, we got a red doll trunk, and Betty just loved that doll trunk. And they gave us a whicker doll buggy. That was mine, we decided,” she said.

In spite of its intended purpose, the wicker doll buggy never carried any dolls.

“I never used it for dolls. I pushed dogs and cats around. Through the sand and all over, and it survived,” Beverly said.

When Beverly says the doll buggy survived, she means it.

“One of my uncle’s daughters is going to have it fixed up again. I didn’t think my daughter wanted it, but I asked her, and she said she might never get at it to get it fixed. And this one said she would. So it’s waiting to be fixed up. It was wicker, so it has to be woven again,” she said. 

Family get-togethers

Both Beverly and Dale remember family get-togethers at Christmas.

“We would always get together with the uncle next door and his family, but his oldest was ten years younger than me. They would always be to our house or we would go there. It was a house full,” Beverly said.

“We went to church on Christmas day. We didn’t have a Christmas Eve service,” she said.

“We just had a regular Christmas. We would get together with relatives. Some of them lived out in the country, and some of them lived in Mondovi and Strum, and they’d come and we’d have a meal together,” Dale said.

“We would always go to church on Christmas, First Lutheran Church,” he noted.

“Our church still stands, the one I went to in the country. And they still use it. It was just a mile from the farm,” Beverly said. 

“My cousin still lives on the farm. He doesn’t farm. The barn caved in. It had to be torn down. He tore it down to the where the blocks were and made a shop out of it. He’s very handy with woodworking. He has that for his shop,” she said.

“Things have changed. He has a different house than what we had. There were two houses on the farm. One for my uncle and his family, too, although that house is gone now,” Beverly said. 

“We used to go over to Altoona to ice skate. I had an uncle who lived over there. A Thurston. He was an uncle to Fuzzy (Thurston),” Dale said.

“We used to go over there to visit him, and then we would ice skate,” he said.

“We used to ice skate with our teacher,” Beverly said. “On the pond right below the country school. Every noon, we’d be skating. He loved to skate too.”

Colfax 

Dale and Beverly raised three children: Pete, Chuck and Jackie.

When the children were growing up, “we would always spend Christmas on the farm, as long as my mother was alive, anyway. All of the cousins. There were 12. They were all within 15 years of each other. It was quite the excitement,” Beverly said.

“Sometimes my dad would take them on a sleigh ride for Christmas. I suppose that was the last of the horses. They liked going to Grandma’s and Grandpa’s. Some years it was slippery. One year we came upon a herd of cows loose in the road (H south of Elk Mound),” she said. 

“Chuck always liked cowboys and Indians, and Peter always liked trucks, and Jackie liked baby dolls,” Beverly said.

The house where they lived in Colfax when their children were growing up is a big white house along Eighteen Mile Creek, east of Iverson Park.

“We lived there longer than we lived in the little house,” Beverly said.

After their children were grown, the Johnsons moved to a one-story ranch-style house several blocks away.

“The big house was a nice place for kids. They had the gully to dig around in. And they had the lake (Mirror Lake at that time, which has since been restored to Eighteen Mile Creek). Peter liked to swim, and Chuck loved to skate. The lake was polluted by the time Jackie came along, she had to take swimming lessons in Menomonie,” Beverly said.

“It used to be the Emmerton house.  That’s who built it,” Dale said.

“Chuck loved to skate (on Mirror Lake). The rule was, I would flash the outside light, and that was his signal to come home and come in the house. But he never saw it. Conveniently,” Beverly said.

“He told me years later, of course, that he saw it, but he didn’t admit it,” she said. 

“I was a barber for 52 or 53 years all together,” Dale said.

He served on the USS Midway, an aircraft carrier in World War II.

“The war had just ended, and I got in on the tail end. We operated out of Cuba and the Arctic Circle. They were testing all the old airplanes left from the war, to see how they stood up to the cold weather. We spent a month up there in the ice fields,” he said. 

When they lived in Colfax, Beverly worked nights at U.S. Bank for 22 years in the computer department.

“I’d go in nights at 10 and be done at 6. It was handy for the kids. We’d get them to bed, and I’d go to work, and then I’d be home to fix their breakfast,” she said. 

The Johnsons have four grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

“We do so appreciate all of them. They always make sure to include us,” Beverly said.

Their son, Chuck, lives in California and installs stereo equipment, and their daughter, Jackie, works at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis.