If My Heart Had Wings: A World War II Love Story(2)
This is the story of what my mother was like before she had me. It’s also the story of secrets, lies, a love that never died, and a woman’s long journey to self-discovery and fulfillment. It would take me decades to uncover these secrets, using letters, an Army personnel file, interviews with family members, and, of course, the many stories, vignettes, and insights that Mom relayed to me over the years. And in the process, not only did I learn the true story of my mother, but I also discovered the story of myself.
The white wedding dress - October 27, 1942
Chapter One
Beginnings
M ANY YEARS AFTER MY discovery of the wedding picture, when my sister and I were well into middle age and trying to come up with ideas for Mom’s eulogy, she got on my nerves when she kept referring to Mom as a “farm girl.” Mom had left the farm when she was two years old, for crying out loud, and had lived in big cities for the rest of her life. If anything, she was a “city girl.” But I knew what Dawn meant. Mom did come from farm stock and, as such, had a farmer’s outlook and approach to life. You know—work hard and take good care of what you’ve got; you may not be able to replace it. Don’t waste anything; there’s always another use for it. Stand on your own two feet; don’t expect others to come to your rescue. Save as much money as you can; rainy days are sure to come. Even at the end of her life, when she had plenty of money, she was endlessly thrifty and practical. But just about anyone could have predicted this simply by looking at her family history.
My mother, Nina Blanch Ostrom, (Nina rhymes with Dinah), was born in southern Minnesota in 1921 to a pair of hardworking farmers who wanted nothing more than to escape to the big city. My grandfather, Lloyd Ostrom, the eldest son in a family that included seven girls, had inherited the 160-acre farm carved out of the wilderness in the 1860s by his great-grandfather. Unfortunately, even though he’d been raised to this purpose since toddlerhood, Grandpa hated just about everything about farming: the endless work, the long, sweaty days in the field, the crushing responsibility, and the fact that he never knew how much money he would earn until harvest time. If the crop turned out to be poor because of a drought, a plague of locusts, or some other unforeseen circumstance, he was sunk. At best, farming was subsistence living; the lucky ones maintained the status quo, but never really got ahead.
My grandmother Blanch, another third-generation farmer, wholeheartedly shared Grandpa’s dim views of farm life. And she also had her own reasons for wanting to ditch the farm. A former teacher in a one-room schoolhouse, Grandma’s razor-sharp mind and keen attention to detail were much better suited to a research lab than a farmhouse. And while she had no illusions about becoming a scientist or even a lab technician, if she could move to the big city, she would at least be able to join some clubs or go to a concert now and again, which would help satiate her hungry mind. Even more important, the kids would have a shot at getting a better education, increasing the odds that they would one day have professional careers. Farming was definitely not what Grandma envisioned for them.
It would take my grandparents eight long years of working their tails off and searching for an escape before they finally got their chance. In 1923 Grandpa saw a newspaper ad announcing that Armour & Company, a recently-opened meatpacking plant in South St. Paul, was looking for strong young men who weren’t afraid of hard work. And it seemed he was exactly the kind of guy they were seeking: strong, full of stamina, and willing to work ten-hour days, six days a week for a weekly paycheck of $18.75. He was used to a workload like that, so that was no problem. And though the pay seems ridiculously low in modern terms, it was enough to support a family of four in those days. So, he applied for the job, deeded the farm back to his father, grabbed Grandma and their two kids—seven-year-old Ted and two-year-old Nina—and took off for South St. Paul. They would never look back.
Of course, working at a meatpacking plant was no picnic. But Grandpa would hang in there for the next forty years, mostly “slingin’ hams,” as Dad liked to say, although Mom insisted on the more genteel term of “grading hams.” Most likely, at least in the early days, Grandpa also took a turn in other departments, perhaps slicing and packaging finished cuts of meat, cleaning the sewers, hoisting slaughtered steers, and the like. He may have even spent some time on the killing floor, the worst place to work in the entire plant, where men used sledgehammers to bash in the heads of cattle, and the floors ran red with rivers of blood. Working at the plant was not for the weak, the faint-hearted, or those who lacked strong stomachs. Fortunately, Grandpa was none of those.
For the next sixteen years, the Ostroms occupied a two-bedroom house on a modest street in South St. Paul. And just like everyone else, they struggled to make ends meet, especially when the Great Depression took hold at the end of the decade. Grandpa took on an extra job washing down trucks after his regular shift, which lengthened his workday to a grueling fourteen hours. And because the family didn’t own a car, he walked a mile and a half to and from work, battling all kinds of weather, including Minnesota’s famous blizzards. But he never complained. By example he taught his kids to work hard, do whatever was necessary to meet life’s challenges, and swallow any complaints they might have had—there was no point in griping. Life wasn’t easy, he told them, but there was always a way to keep going.