My grandma told me about a state spelling contest she won in high school. Seventy years later, she still remembers being on that stage and even the dress she wore. After high school, my grandma went to Mankato Commercial College to study Accounting. My grandpa was at Northwestern which was only a Junior College at the time, working his way through by sweeping the floors of Zwemer hall and playing on the basketball team. He often tells of how he'd go visit grandma in Mankato and although there were two movies theaters (one sold 3-cent tickets and one sold 5-cent tickets) he claims he never saw the inside of the 5-cent theater because they were so frugal. Grandma entered more contests in college, traveling to Minneapolis to compete in a typing test that she lost because she could only type 100 words a minute, and a calculation test that she won, adding 25 4-digit figures in a minute.
A job opening came up in Mankato at a Real Estate/Insurance firm, and even though she had 6 weeks to go in her Accounting courses, the college presented her the job. She was grateful for a good job that she didn't even have to apply for and said the two partners and their wives were so good to her. They took her to their lake cabin on weekends and gave her a nice set of real leather luggage when she got married. She lamented that she brought the luggage on a furlough trip one time and some soldiers used it as a card table, marring it with cigarette burns all the way around it. She still has this luggage, 60+ years later.
After being stationed in Boise, ID for a short time, my grandma moved to San Francisco when grandpa's Air Force unit was mobilized in WWII. She was the accountant for four doctors in a building downtown and had to ride the cable car to work. When she received a telegram stating that her husband was Missing In Action, she moved back to Iowa to be near family and wait to hear any news. She finally found out that grandpa's plane had been shot down and he had parachuted into enemy territory. While he was a Prisoner of War, she took a job in a packing plant in Sioux City, doing daily audits of the amount of meat they were processing. After her husband was liberated after 1 year and 1 day in POW camps, he came back home to Hull and began working the family trucking business with her dad. Once grandpa took over Vander Kooi Freight, grandma did the bookwork for their business. I remember playing in their office downstairs, typing gibberish on the old-fashioned typewriter while sitting at the big metal desk.
I cherish stories like these from my grandma and hope to record more about her 88 years of experiences.
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