The Fantastic True Story (Part 2)

The Fantastic True Story of Mrs Koppendrayer’s Spectacular Strawberry Jam (Part 2)

Dear Mattie, Nathaniel and Jacob,

Each of you had me as a Civics teacher, Bible teacher, and History teacher. I feel like I should apologize to you for that. I also taught those three subjects in Canada when you were very young. Standing in front of a class of grade 12 students in Ontario, I was trying to explain the modern nation of Germany did not exist, at least as a unified nation until nearly the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Germany as it is today, was brought together by the shenanigans of a powerful person who deviously orchestrated a war with France for the hidden purpose of uniting Germany under one government. His name was Otto Von-Bismarck. Mid-lecture my brain popped: Old Neb had named his dog Bismarck

The bank in Long Siding circa 1900.

Old Neb, Fred Witte, the Heinks, the Wilhelms, the Winkelmans, Weslohs, all lived very near us and close to Mille Lacs County Road 13, all had German names except Clarence Steeves. I don’t know his origins. He had a really nice barn but too often planted his corn late. Some were Lutheran. Some were Catholic. The Winkelmans were Catholic and were allowed to go trick or treating. Even my Dutch Calvinist dad was half German, but Old Neb was the real deal, the most German of them all.

Our long driveway lay north and south, and it's still there. The south end of it emptied onto County road 13. On that corner, where our driveway and County road 13, connected, stood a white A-frame house. And it’s still there. Old Neb lived in that house for the first eleven years of my life. I know it’s odd to identify him as the old man who lived at the end of our driveway. He had a name: Julius Neb. For the time that I knew him, he was called by me, my parents, my siblings,  “Old Neb”. Old Neb was the man who lived in the house at the end of our driveway. We didn’t know him well but in our defense I don’t think he wanted to be known. He lived alone like he wanted to be alone. He lived alone with Bismarck, a barking beagle that came with him when he walked up our driveway. In my early years I was amused that this somewhat solitary old man had a dog with the same name as the jelly donuts at Frank Weisbrod’s bakery in Princeton. Weisbrod is German for white bread. After Old Neb moved away for better care, Weisbrod’s donuts were still three for a quarter and really good.

Fall, winter, spring, he lived alone. During the summers his grandson David, came to live with him. Ann, his mother, took him there when David was not in school. Your uncles and aunts remember Ann and her daughter Sharon, but not very well. 

“David! David!” He would stand on the west side of his house and yell north, up our driveway. He had to call his grandson to come home for supper. The words seemed to exit his nose. When I was learning to read I thought Old Neb pronounced “David” as if the “D” were silent. I liked having David around. It was somebody else to play with.

He came up our gravel driveway often to buy raw milk from us. We were typically milking cows in the early evening when he showed up with a pitcher for the milk and coins to pay my dad. Walking to the barn he would reach into his pocket and pull out a miniature O’Henry candy barin its brown and yellow wrapper. For five decades I have never eaten an O’Henry candy bar without being reminded of Old Neb. In my memory, I was the only one to whom he gave an O’Henry candy bar when he came for milk. After kneeling down and placing his pitcher under the spout of the stainless steel tank, having it filled in two seconds, he would stand up, talk with my dad for a few minutes, and then walk back down the driveway with Bismarck and his pitcher of milk.                    

I assume someone along County Road 13, knew him well. I wonder if the patrons of the Long Siding Bar knew him well. He often walked the one mile to Long Siding. Red Sanford the bar owner and bartender might have known him a little. When the beer in his belly got into his blood and reached his tongue, maybe he let Red get to know him. It’s interesting to picture Old Neb sitting in a bar in a tiny village off Highway 169, that no longer had a post office. I wonder if he liked the deep-fried chicken basket with french fries that Red had on the menu. In the 1960’s Long Siding was a village fading from it’s former function like Old Neb from his.The bank building still stands next to the bar but has not been a bank at any time I can remember. Percy Clemens had a sawmill there and Junior Steinbrecher had a two-pump gas station and auto repair shop. I rarely gave any attention to the gas station until Junior started selling Moto Ski Snowmobiles there in the early 70’s. My parents made me take accordion lessons from Mrs. Mushrush, a resident of Long Siding. My dad said she was a Blackstocking. I could sense he was not referring to what she wore on her feet but I didn't know what a Blackstocking was and I’m not sure I do now. George Steinbrecher (German for stone breaker) and Virgil Schmatz (German for smacking kiss or smacker) each had a farm bordering Long Siding. I don’t think they knew Old Neb well. 

A certain compassion and sadness for old Neb causes me to think it would have been a nice gesture if, in that area with all those families from German origins, for a period of time, we would have re-named Long Siding, “Kleine Berlin'',  and the Long Siding Bar, “The Frolicking Fraulein.'' There could have been a set of beer steins called “Den Schmatzen”, a nod to both Virgil and the fraulein.  Would have been a fun way of bringing a little lightness to the step of the aging German-American widower who lived at the end of our driveway. 

The one mile walk back from the Long Siding Bar to his house at the end of our driveway took more effort. On the way he would pass Wilhelm’s farm where all the buildings were yellow. The tractors and other implements were exclusively green. My dad commonly bought the red, International Harvester/Farmall equipment. In 1968, he bought a new, International Harvester red, hay baler. It was standing on our yard when Tim Wilhelm drove his pickup up our driveway and, with his usual calm smile said, “If they painted cow manure red, the Koppendrayers would buy it”. My brother Kevin reminded him the natural color of cow shit was green. More than a half century later Kevin owns one of those very expensive, cow-shit-colored-combines, Tim owns a beige-colored tractor large enough to pull Long Siding, and Long Siding is experiencing a minor renaissance at the center of which is the bar.   

The best Wilhelm was Tim’s dad, Bernard. During WWII, he served on a destroyer in the Pacific. About a decade after he returned from the war, Bernard and his brother Alvin bought the Odegard-Thompson farm, a large complex of houses and farm buildings, dominated on the west side by an immense yellow dairy barn, 120 feet long. Easily one of the most impressive in Minnesota at the time.

Living just across the river from each other we got to know the Wilhelm’s pretty well. One night our cows broke through the fences and grazed in Wilhelm's corn field. They helped us get them back to our side of the river. Tim and Mark once tried to cross the river with their green utility tractor, a 2020 I think, the tractor sank in the mud and water nearly up to the engine. I was pitching calf manure into our manure spreader when they asked if I could pull them out. After unhooking our 656 International Harvester tractor, I drove the short distance down to the river on the south edge of county road 13 where they had another, less impressive, yellow barn. Putting the 656 in low gear was unnecessary but I was 13 and nervous. It worked

Your grandma and Tim’s mother Orene, were quite good friends who still met for coffee weekly at the K-Bob cafe in Princeton. Tim’s brother Mark was a really good football player for Princeton High School until he graduated in 1973. Mark and your uncle Kevin were in the same grade. My dad allowed Kevin to play football for just one year so Kevin and Mark played together their senior year. The next year, the fall of ‘73, Mark gave me his spikes to wear when I played JV football. More than 60 years after buying their farm, the Wilhelms and Koppendrayers are still neighbors living just across the West Branch of the Rum river from one another. They have attended the weddings and funerals of each other’s family members for decades. I think you met Tim’s daughter by our stand at the Maple Grove Farmers Market.

Old Neb was good at drinking beer, but not a frat-party kind of good. After World War I, for reasons unknown to me, he left Germany and went to work for a brewery in Milwaukee where he was able to become a professional beer taster and avoid the pressure to become a Nazi. Your Uncle Roger said that Old Neb told him he drank eight quarts of beer per day to make sure the beer tasted right.  Eight quarts. Two gallons! One wonders how, after even a half of a gallon, he could taste anything.

If Old Neb could not make it to the house at the end of the driveway, one of the Wilhelms  gave him a ride. We joked that he might fall in the river if they didn’t. If Bernard ever gave him a ride, I wonder if they talked about the wars in which they fought. Old Neb for Germany in 1914, Bernhard for the US twenty years later. I wonder if Old Neb ever told Bernard what he told my brother, Leroy. I was a child. I could not have understood the story of the man who gave me O’Henry candy bars when he bought milk from us. As a German Soldier in1914, Old Neb participated in one of history’s most interesting stories, the Christmas Truce. Four days before my dad’s birth, Germans on one side, the Allies on the other, came out of their trenches, stopped shooting each other, and celebrated Christmas together. Some say it was as many as 100,000 soldiers. Apparently they sang Christmas Carols. Some even exchanged gifts. Old Neb was there. 

They went back to killing each other on December 26, and for the next four years after that. Old Neb never told me what he saw and I was too young to hear it. The death toll was atrocious. Industry, technology, and depravity coalesced on European battlefields to produce some of the most tragic years in human history and Old Neb was there. Muck-filled trenches, bombs, bullets, gas, the first widespread use of the “Machine Gun”, whatever memories Old Neb carried with him, he did not share the details with us. We didn't know him that well.

Thinking about him one Saturday I sent text messages to my ten older siblings to see what they remembered of Old Neb. Wanting to evoke memory I asked: “Who was Bismarck?” Your Uncle Kevin immediately answered: “Julius Neb’s dog”. Somehow Old Neb received his name back after he died. Your Aunt Betsy texted that Bismarck was the name of an enormous German battleship in World War II. Then came a texting frenzy about their old Johnny Horton albums and his song celebrating the sinking of the Bismarck. Later that morning your Aunt Patty played her albums again for the first time in decades. 

Talking about Johnny Horton albums, watching him on Youtube, I had some great laughs. I just wish we knew Julius Neb better.