This month I want to start off with a thank you to Todd Montgomery for his kind words in a letter to the editor last month. Todd and I go back more years than we care to count. Back in the day, our telephones were on a party line. There were 8 or 9 farm families that were on our particular party line stretching from the Montgomery’s on the east end to the Wenzel’s on the west end. My earliest recollection and this can be verified from an old phone book in the WCHS Museum, we all had short numbers. The Kleven number for several years was 2106. Then, on the same party line, the numbers changed to either 305 or 325 with a letter behind them. Ours went to 305L. If I recall, without referring to the old phone book, the west end of the party line including the Klevens, Wenzels and Envalls, were in the 305 zone while from the Johnsons to the Montgomerys were 325.
Eventually we ended up with the 7 digit numbers starting with 527 for West Concord. I don’t know if the 507 area code was used when we had to short numbers. I do remember it was long distance to call Kenyon and it cost more to call long distance. My mom would talk really fast if she had to call all the way to Kenyon. It’s long distance you know! Even Skyberg was long distance back then.
I try to explain this to my kids and grandkids and I might as well describe it in Norwegian because they’d understand just as much. Grandkids especially; ‘You mean you didn’t keep your phone in your pocket?’ I tell them you couldn’t even take it into the next room. I remember when we got a longer cord that would stretch about 15 feet. That’s when I thought phones went mobile. My mom thought it was great as she could go from the sewing machine, which was always about 4 feet from the phone, all the way to the stove to check on things in the oven without having to end her conversation, unless of course she was talking long distance, then she’d say ‘I think my pot roast is burning, bye!’
I do have to correct Todd on one point. My radio career did take to many places from the White House to Australia and I did talk with and interview many people whose names you would recognize but I did not get sophisticated. Not even close. I’m just a farm kid who took an off the farm job but never lost my roots.
My wife Mary Pat and I have been organizing and preparing for a dance at the WC Historical Society gym on October 19th as part of the 30th Anniversary celebration this year at the WCHS. It’s going to be one of those old fashioned type dances that were very common in years gone by with polkas, schottisches and waltzes. If you like dancing to live music, you will not want to miss this event. Mary Pat is in her final year of being President of the Minnesota State Fiddler’s Association and they are co-sponsoring this event.
In all of our planning I got thinking back to the first time I danced on that gym floor. I was in Mrs. Stukel’s 4th grade class. We were being taught square dancing. Our class actually got to be pretty good at dosey doeing around the floor. I think we all liked it because it was more fun than arithmetic. Another time I recall dancing in the old elementary gym was for a talent show the school had one night during my senior year in high school. 4 or 5 of us guys from the basketball team including Wayne Miller, Matt Fellows and Bruce Bjerke, thought it would be a good idea to be up on stage and pretend we’re singing Ike and Tina Turner’s Proud Mary while doing a choreographed dance. That ended my dancing career in the gym. Now it’s being revived in October. I’m getting more dancing instructions, this time from Mary Pat. The first lesson learned was that we don’t Dosey Doe during a polka, at least not on purpose. We’ll see how the night goes. I was never sophisticated and I was never light on my feet when it came to dancing. Mark your calendar and be looking for more details on the October 19th West Concord Dance.
