Remembrances of Christmas Past: Marge Hernandez: “I heard her say, ‘Ho-ho-ho!’ My dad had a much deeper voice”

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By LeAnn R. Ralph

COLFAX — One of Marjorie (Knight) Hernandez’s earliest Christmas memories is of her mother saying “Ho-ho-ho!”

At least Marge was pretty sure it was her mother.

“One year at Christmas Eve dinner, my mother said Santa Claus was coming and all of us kids should go into the bathroom,” she recalled.

“While we were in there, I heard her say, ‘Ho-ho-ho!’ I’m sure it was my mother. My dad had a much deeper voice,” she said.

When the children emerged from the bathroom a short while later, “our stuff was under the tree,” Marge recalled, noting that the gifts from Santa Claus usually were not wrapped.

Marge, the daughter of Della and Homer Knight, had five brothers and sisters.

The family moved to Colfax in 1947 when Marge was five years old. Her older brother and sister, Kenneth and Crystal, were eight and nine when Marge and her twin sister, Margaret, were born. Marge and Margaret were five years old when their brother Donny was born. And Donny was five years old when their little sister, Lolita, was born.

“You know the building where the vet clinic is (on East River Street)? It says 1947 above the door. That’s the year we moved to Colfax. My dad built that building. It was his plumbing shop,” Marge said.

The first house they lived in was a big house on University Avenue — known then as the Hovland house — where they resided for five years.

The upstairs portion of the house, Marge noted, was used as a rental.

When Marge was 10 years old, the family moved to a house farther east along University, and then later on, they moved to a small farm just east of Colfax.

Marge also recalls that her dad would bring home a new car at Christmas.

“It wasn’t every year, but maybe every other year. He would trade at Christmas time. He’d get them from Gilberts,” she said.

ALCAN Highway

One year, before the Knight family moved from Chetek to Colfax, and before Marjorie and Margaret had learned to walk, Della went to Alaska to see Homer.

“My dad worked on building the ALCAN Highway in Alaska,” Marge said.

The ALCAN Highway (or Alaska-Canadian Highway) is nearly 1,400 miles long and was constructed during World War II to connect the United States to Alaska across Canada.

Marge and Margaret stayed with an aunt and uncle while their mother was gone.

Marge says she does not know how long her mother was gone, but “we learned to walk while we were at my aunt and uncle’s,” she said, adding that there is a photograph of her and her twin sister standing next to a chair shortly before they started walking.

When Homer returned from Alaska, Marge said her sister recalls “we had a big Christmas” and that their brother got a toboggan.

Tobacco field

When Marge was growing up, there were only a few houses on the north side of Colfax along University Avenue.

Everything north of that, including where the Viking Addition is now, was an open field where tobacco was grown, and the hill heading down toward the river was a sledding hill.

She also recalls groceries coming in brown paper bags, and when they lived in the Hovland house, they would open up the paper bags and tape them onto the wall.

“Then we would take catalogs and cut out pictures of people, swing sets, you name it. We made a mural with pictures from the catalogs,” Marge said.

“There was no TV then. We played with paper dolls, too,” she said.

“My older brother, when we moved to Colfax, he went to school in Chetek. He was in high school, and when we moved, he wanted to finish in Chetek,” Marge said.

Her brother stayed with their uncle and their grandmother, who lived on a farm between Chetek and New Auburn.

Every Sunday, the family would go to visit Marge’s brother.

In fact, Marge has many fond memories of the farm.

“My mom would help Grandma cook, like for threshing,” she recalled.

“I got to drive a tractor. That was a big deal for me,” Marge said, adding that she always liked to be outside doing something.

Marge remembers driving the tractor during haying time, and one afternoon, the sky was getting dark and there was a storm brewing when she was on her way back to the barn.

“I cut the corner too short, and I broke something on the wagon. I remember my uncle yelling. When we got back to the house, my brother and sister got a candy bar, but I didn’t — because I broke something on the wagon,” she said.

Milk cow

When Marge was 10 years old, the family moved farther east in Colfax.

“There were hardly any houses there then. It was our house, the Burlings, Hoylands and Gilberts, who had the store,” she said.

The store was Gilberts Four Corners, located just before the bridge on county Highway M south of the intersection of M and Highway 40, which was destroyed in the June 4, 1958, Colfax tornado.

“Dad remodeled the house and put in a bathroom … it was all open field to the north, from one corner to the next,” she said.

The field often was used to grow green beans, which at that time were all picked by hand.

“When we picked beans, we were paid by the pound. I remember Mrs. Langel was really fast at picking beans. One summer I made enough to buy a bike,” Marge said.

“We didn’t get anything like an allowance. We did lots of cleaning on Saturdays, and we helped cook … We had to work for our keep!” she said.

When they lived in the house Homer had remodeled, Marge recalls that they had a milk cow.

In addition to the house, the place had a shed and lean-to, and the cow would be tethered in different places so she could graze on fresh, green grass.

“Sometimes we would take her across 40 to the creek,” Marge said.

“We had chickens, too. Every year at Easter, Dad would bring home colored chickens,” she said.

The chickens achieved their color by dye that had been injected into the fertilized eggs. When the chickens lost all their pin feathers, then their adult feathers would come in white, Marge explained.

“I think we were the only ones in town with a cow,” she said.

The family cow guaranteed there was always fresh milk — and fresh butter.

“We made our own butter. Dad would get big glass jars from the school, and then while we watched TV, we would shake those jars until the cream turned to butter,” Marge said.

“I never had butter from the store until after I left home,” she said.

Several other families in Colfax also got their milk from the Knight family cow, Marge recalled, including the Herb Ziebell family.

Marge also recalled the house had a very large yard and that her father had obtained some playground equipment from country schools after they closed.

“We had a teeter-totter, and we had one of those poles with chains,” she said.

The pole with chains had bars attached to them, and you could hold onto the bars, run around the pole, and then “fly,” Marge recalled.

More beans

When Marge was 14 years old, the family moved a little farther east yet to a small farm out in the country.

“This was in 1956, before the tornado. The house we lived in in Colfax blew away in the tornado,” she said.

The farm was 40 acres. Dr. Robert Gregory had owned the farm, but the land had not been worked for a long time. Two bachelor brothers had lived there before, Marge said.

Marge’s father had a house built on the farm.

“Dad wanted us kids to be busy, so he dug up the field and planted beans so we could pick beans in the summer,” she said.

Prior to picking the beans, the bean plants had to be weeded, and one day, Marge and her mother and her sister went out to weed the beans.

“I had one of my dad’s shirts on. It was hot and I was sweating. It had those long tails, so I kept wiping my face with the shirt tail,” she said.

When Marge and her mother and her sister went back to the house — they all started to itch like crazy and began breaking out in a rash.

Marge said her mother went to town to see if anyone could tell her what the possible cause of their discomfort could be, and when she came back, Della announced she thought they all had poison ivy.

“Dad said, ‘Poison ivy? There ain’t no poison ivy around here,’” Marge recalled.

Just to be on the safe side, however, Homer decided to ask for the assistance of Harlan Stone, the agriculture teacher at Colfax High School.

“He had Mr. Stone come out to check out the weeds, and he said we had poison ivy all over the bean field and all around the house,” Marge said.

Marge’s father hired someone to come out and spray the poison ivy with weed killer, but the poison ivy grew back again the next summer, and once again, Marge ended up with poison ivy.

By the third year in the bean field with the poison ivy, one half of Marge’s face was swollen from the poison ivy rash, and one arm was swollen as well.

“My home-ec teacher, Mrs. Lausted, said ‘well, if I look at this side of you, I guess I know what you’ll look like if you ever get fat,’” Marge recalled.

Then Marge’s mother heard about a doctor in Bloomer who had some sort of injection for treating poison ivy. The injections were given over a three-day period, and Marge said the injections were said to contain some kind of poison ivy serum.

Whatever was in the injections — Marge never got poison ivy again.

Even a few years later, when she would go out with her husband and roam the paths along the river at 22 Mile Ford to go fishing, she did not end up with a poison ivy rash.

“Of course, I don’t know if there was poison ivy along there, but if there was, I didn’t get it!” she said.

Tonsillitis

Another vivid memory for Marge is that she would get tonsillitis at least once every year if not twice.

“I remember Doc Felland coming with his black bag, and he would give me a shot. A penicillin shot. I wasn’t too thrilled to see him, but by then, I’d be so sick I wouldn’t really care too much,” Marge said.

When Marge was in third grade, her mother scheduled a tonsillectomy with Dr. Felland during teachers’ convention in October.

“My older sister was married by then and living in Chippewa. So my sister and brother got to stay with her so my mother could take care of me,” she said.

Marge recalled being in Dr. Felland’s office and that there were two beds in a recovery room and that her mother stayed with her all day after Marge’s tonsils had been removed.

“We went home that night, and I got to pick what kind of ice and cream and pop I wanted that my mother got for me from the restaurant. Doc Felland came out to the house to check on me a few times (in the following days). But I felt so bad because my brother and sister got to stay with our sister and I didn’t,” Marge said.

Later on, after Marge had recovered from having her tonsils removed, her mother took her to the train station in Colfax and put her on a train.

“I rode the train all by myself from Colfax to Chippewa, where my sister picked me up,” she said.

And did Marge enjoy her trip to Chippewa Falls?

Oh, my, yes.

“I got a train ride! And they (brother and sister) never did!” Marge said.

Pink pills

Marge has one other memory associated with the tonsillectomy — that she had to take some big pink pills a week before the surgery to help with coagulating her blood.

Since she only lived a block away from school, every day, Marge would come home for lunch.

And every day a week before the surgery, her mother would place the big pink pill by her plate so Marge could take it while she was home for lunch.

One day after Marge had gone back to school, her mother picked up Marge’s plate and saw the big pink pill.

Marge had forgotten to take it.

“My mother went outside to see if there were any other kids going back to school, and she gave my pink pill to a boy to take to the third grade. Mrs. DeSoto was my third grade teacher,” she said.

In those days, the student who sat closest to the door was tasked with answering the door when someone knocked.

Marge recalls that Clifford Fjelsted Jr. was the student who answered the knock at their classroom door.

“The kid with the pill was somebody’s brother in my third grade class, so the teacher took it to the boy’s brother and gave it to him. He thought it was candy — so he ate it,” she said.

Marge then told the teacher she thought that the pink “candy” looked quite a lot like the pink pill she had been taking.

Mrs. DeSoto called Marge’s mother, who in turned called Dr. Felland, to find out if the pill was harmful to the boy who had swallowed it and if it was harmful for Marge to have missed a dose.

As it turned out, “no one was harmed,” Marge said.

“It did look like a piece of candy. We had those big pink mint candies back then,” she said.

Doll house

Marge also has a Christmas memory from when her own daughters were little girls.

One year after Marge was married and her daughters were youngsters, the family was going on vacation for a week in the early part of December.

“The kids were in the car, and I said I forgot something in the house. I had bought a dollhouse for the two girls, so I got it out and set it under the tree so it would be there when we came back,” Marge explained.

When they came back from their vacation, Marge said her daughters were happy to see the dollhouse and that they played with it a little bit, although not as much as Marge said she might have expected.

At that time, Marge was working nights, and so she had a babysitter for her daughters.

“The babysitter made a dollhouse out of the box. They made curtains for the box. The flap was the yard. They played and played and played with their box dollhouse, way more than they played with the house I bought. They really used their imagination,” she said.

“If I’d known a cardboard box would be that good — I could have saved myself some money!” Marge said with a laugh.