Gary Rohweder

Study hard and learn. Be habitual with your studies because it makes a big difference. I never was a good student…nobody was a…with living with different people, I never was made to do my homework. I don’t think I ever did homework so I was not a good student.

You have to train yourself to be a good student. To do your homework and be a good student. It’s important in life and if you have parents that make you do that, that’s better. That’s good.

Gary Rohweder

My name is Gary Rohweder. I’m ah…74 years old. No! Not quite. 73. Don’t rush things, right? So I was born in 1938 in a small town north of Minneapolis called Pine City.

I was born in a hospital, I wasn’t born on a farm or a house on a farm like um…a lot of my…a lot of the kids that I went to…that I grew up with were born on, around, in the farm house.

It’s a small…Pine City’s a small town about 2000 people. We lived in the country about seven miles out of town on the east of town towards the…between Pine City and the Wisconsin border.

When I grew up…as I grew up, I went to a little school, a school where there was 13 kids in the whole school so we every grade from the first grade through the eighth grade. Actually, I think I learned probably more because of that because when I was in the first grade, of course, I would sit in on the lessons for the eighth graders.

We didn’t have running water when I was a kid; we had a well and an outhouse. As I grew up, we’d gotten electricity when I was very young so I don’t remember electricity not being on our farm.

To go to school—I’d walk to school every day about a mile and walked home again of course. There was no school bus just for 13 kids. When I was in the sixth grade, I’d have to go to school…one of my jobs was to go to school and light the fire so that the school would be warm for all the rest of the students. I had to do that, of course, even if it was thirty below, I had to do that.

When I was in the fourth grade, it happened that there was no boys in my grade or in the fifth grade so the teacher decided that I should be with boys so she put me in the sixth grade. So I missed two grades of school at that time. But of course, I don’t know if I missed it or not because it’s like I say, you learn…you would learn lessons from kids who were in the eighth grade because they were being taught at the same time as the first graders were being taught.

And then when I was fourteen—no, when I was twelve, in the 8th grade, I decided um…my mother and dad were divorced. My mother lived in Minneapolis and my dad lived in Pine City on the farm. They decided, no I decided, well…somebody decided that I would go to the 8th grade in Minneapolis.

So I came down to Minneapolis and I went to a school called Seward Elementary, I guess. That was, that was, that was kind of a culture shock, too. ‘cause coming from a school with 13 kids in the whole school to a class of I ‘spose a hundred and fifty kids, I don’t really know how many there were, but probably a hundred and fifty.

I went to South High in 9th grade, that’s a school, a high school, in south Minneapolis.

Um…I didn’t like Minneapolis very well at the time. I think it was because I wasn’t a very big kid at the time and I got picked on a lot ‘cause I was kinda dumb farm kid, I guess.

I graduated from high school when I was 16. There weren’t many jobs around Pine City so I decided—another friend and I decided to hitchhike to Duluth and we applied to get work on the Orobo.

So I remember going up to Duluth. We had two dollars and seventy-three cents between the two of us. And we had to get…we had to wait to get on the Orobo, so we had to kinda watch our money there.

So it was kind of a happy time when I got called on the Orobo to work. Then I got…I was ah…I had a full meal, three meals a day then.
I remember thinking when I was probably about your age that ah…you know, living to the next century is going to be a long…a long ways away. Would I live that long? You know, I mean, people die, of course, younger then, but…

But I did and here I am about ‘leven twelve years later now so it’s beyond, beyond that ah…beyond the turn of the century.

Um…let’s see. Things we didn’t have, of course, when I was young was things like television. We would play the radio on a Saturday morning kinda like you guys watch cartoons, I guess. And we listened to the radio, different radio programs.

There was one called um….Grand Central Station, it came on every Saturday. And we’d lay around the radio and listen to…listen to the station or the program.

The television….the television, one of our neighbors had a television set when I was probably eleven or twelve years old. We’d go over on like Wednesday night and watch television and we’d have a little screen about 4 inches square. Not much bigger than about---actually small than an iPod…iPad.

We’d have a ah…the neighbors would have like twenty thirty people watching this little television and watching the wrestling.

Let’s see…hmmm. .oh, the things we did when I was your age—of course, there was no, there was no Gameboys and there wasn’t iPod, there wasn’t cell phones, of course. We had an old telephone and if you wanted to call somebody you would turn this crank.

Our phone number was two longs like that and a short. So if you…if I, for example, was dating or wanted to ask a girl for a date in high school, I’d call her up maybe three longs and three shorts or whatever her number was and then they would ah…she would answer. And every neighbor would pick up the phone at the same time to listen in to see who I was calling to ask for a date. So…all the neighbors knew whether I was dating a girl or not.

I use to have to do my chores before I went to work or went to school. The school bus picked me up about 8:00 and I had to help milk the cows. We milked about twenty cows every morning and every evening. I always joked that I really never had many dates in high school anyway because I kinda smelled like a barn most of the time.

But anyway…I…we were very poor. We had ah…we had…didn’t have much, didn’t have any money really or very little. But the things we did, you know, we…we raised our own food on the farm.

We would…we would butcher a couple of pigs and a…and a…and a beef cattle or beef cow every fall so we had…we had plenty to eat.

We always had chickens and like I remember my grandmother taking me to church. Before church we’d…we’d…we’d pick a chicken, we’d kill the chicken and clean it. Then that would be our dinner after we came home from church.

I think we all liked chicken so…and those were better chickens actually. They weren’t…they weren’t raised quite like they are now.
Let’s see…there’s so many things I can remember but now that we’re talking about it…

We had ah, oh, I used to go squirrel hunting when I was quite young—about nine, eight or nine years old I would squirrel un every fall. We actually ate squirrel—tastes like chicken, you know? What doesn’t?

So, ah, and then I did ah …we lived near a river, we lived about a half mile away from a river, so…when I was young, we’d always go there and go fishing and fool around, you know, whatever kids do. I’m sure you guys know what that is.

Times were different then. I could be gone all day and nobody would worry about me. Now people worry more about what you guys are doing. So, you know.

I went to college. I moved on to…when I moved back down to Minneapolis. I moved back to Pine City when I was in the 10th grade and the 11th grade and the 12th and then I graduated and then I moved down and went to the University of Minnesota for about three and a half years.

And then married, grandma—my wife, your grandma—then we had four boys. We actually had five boys, we had a baby that died of crib death when he was three months old. He’d be about 45…almost 50 years old now, so. All the boys went to college. Then we have nine grandkids. Well, I don’t know, let’s see…