Jo-Ann Ulm

All of you should follow what you’re interested in. I’d like to say stay in school, too, but be sure to learn what you like to do and do what you like to do.

If you’re good at gardening, think about keeping on with that. if you’re good at engineering, do that. If you’re just a good friend, be the best friend that you can be.

Jo-Ann Ulm

Hi. My name is Jo-Ann Ulm. I was born Joanne Hoag in Excelsior in May 3rd, 1948. It was kind of a cool community. My father was born there in 1905 so their family were pioneers in the neighborhood out there.

I was kind of the town brat. We had ah…wonderful place to go and swim and we had an amusement park so we could go ride on the rides. Actually, one of our old rides is out at Valley Fair, at least one of them.

When I was a young girl, my family…we were pretty poor, but we worked hard to do the best we could to get by. And my mom got sick when I was six years old and was in and out of the hospital a lot. So eventually um…we ended up having to have to move out of our neighborhood up into a place called Crosslake. It’s a place in the Brainerd Lakes area.

When we moved up there, I was eleven years old. It was August 22, 1959. That was my brother’s tenth birthday. And I guess another thing I should fill in. I’m second of seven children in our family so we had a big family.

Once we moved to Cross Lake, I kind of think, looking back, how um…I was kind of lonely. It was really new. There were no people there. We were out in the woods. I…I…I love the kids here at HIE and I know that some people have moved a long ways to come here to be American. I’m sure it must be kind of um…scary.

It was scary for me not to be able to know anybody and have new friends because everybody was so far away.

Once we got up there, we learned to live in the woods. It was very interesting because we had to hunt for food and fish and grow vegetables ourselves. I had to take an hour bus ride to go to school to our neighborhood school which was in Pequot Lakes, but it was an hour away.

So um…we…I went through high school there and graduated in 1966. We had lots of adventures living up there. My brothers were accident prone and we didn’t have a phone so I had to run unto the neighbors to get help, to have my dad come home and take them to the hospital.

We got to go swimming and fishing a lot. It was really kind of nice for some things, but it was kind of scary at first. I was unhappy that I wasn’t able to be with my old friends and my old hometown.

And then I graduated from high school in 1966 and um…I stayed home for a year to help my mom ‘cause she was really sick still. So it was interesting because my baby sister was just starting school that year. We’re 13 years apart. That was an interesting year. A lot of hard work and a lot of fun.

Then I decided I’d start working in Brainerd, the closest town and um…then I came to the Cities to live. And that was ah…back in the late 60s. So we had lot of things going on in the Cities with um…protests for the wars, the Vietnam War and so forth.
I eventually got married and had my first child in 1969. And I lived back in Brainerd by then because his dad was going to college in Brainerd.

And we did more gardening in Brainerd. That’s one of the themes that keeps running through my life is the fact that I love to garden and raise vegetables and preserve things.

So we worked, we helped organize a community garden at the Brainerd State Hospital and it’s still going to this day. My son is 42 so he…that was my first exposure to community gardening.

Then we came back to the Cities and lived over in Powderhorn Park for a while. We decided that we would buy a hobby farm so we lived in Champlain and had a two-acre hobby farm in the early ‘70s, and that’s where my kids went to school.

I remember back then telling my kids, Look, do not save your money and go down to the feed store and buy any chickens. Well, they did. They could walk from their school to the feed store to our house.
One day I came home from work and there were four Leghorn roosters there. Oh, what are you kids doing, I thought, this is not a good deal because our henhouse is all falling apart. Well, the first night, the skunks ate two of our roosters. And then we got them all sheltered in the tractor shed so that they wouldn’t have any problems.

My younger brothers came over that weekend and we put in footings, they call it, cement in the ground to um…start fixing our hen house. And then they put up a couple layers of block and then they started fixing the bottom of the hen house so that it wasn’t all falling apart because it was rotting away. And they put a new roof on the hen house and then we had a home for our roosters, Killer and Spike.

And they were such crazy roosters. When we would go out in the yard, if they were loose, they would try to attack our ankles so we’d have to drag a hoe behind us. That’s how they got the names Killer and Spike.

And um…so when…after a little while, since we got the hen house fixed up, then we ordered chickens from the place where you get mail-order chickens. I don’t know if any of y’all have chickens, but it was kind of fun.

The first ones we got were Araucanas. It’s a South American breed and they lay green and blue and pink eggs. And our chickens were free-range, they’d run all over the place and we’d really have an Easter egg hunt because they were laying eggs everywhere: in the yard and in the tractor shed and all over the place.

So, um…that is when we started getting chickens. And another time we ordered what they call a mixed-breed special and you get all the left-over little baby chicks that they have at the end of the day. So we had all kinds of crazy looking chickens then. It was kind of neat to learn about different kinds of chickens as my kids were trying to raise these things.

What else happened back in the day? Well, we had um…guinea fowl and they are a black and a white kind of bird. I don’t know if anybody’s ever had guinea fowl. They go Gabble-gabble-gabble. They’re really loud.

And we had ah—we were the last house on a dead end dirt road so we had acres and acres of strawberry fields by us. They were all Goodrich’s strawberry fields. So we could get lots of strawberries.
One day I saw people walking from the development over by the creek, over towards our house and I thought, Oh, oh. Those guinea fowl had been really noisy that day. They’re kind of like watchdogs but they’re birds. And I thought, Oh, these people are going to be kinda mad at me because my birds are waaaay too noisy. And they came across and they said, You know, we just love hearing your guinea fowl because our grandparents had guinea fowl on their farm.

So I was really relieved I wasn’t disturbing the neighbors, but they were happy to hear our guinea fowl.

What else happened out on the farm? Well, we grew all of our own vegetables. I’ve been a vegetarian since 1978. Part of the reason I’m vegetarian is because I saw pictures of kids from Africa who were starving and their little stick legs and their big bellies and it made me think that we could do better if we…or I could do better by being vegetarian because you can feed more people with the grains and beans if we eat them ourselves than if we were having a…feeding them to cows and so forth.

So, um…we grew all of our own vegetables and we’d make things to put into the freezer and have for the winter time. And we canned food. And we’d do what you call dehydrating where you dry food. So we would have all of our own food left for the winter and we wouldn’t have to go to the store for those types of things, the vegetables at least.

Other things that we did? Oh, when my kids were little, we use to get a hundred bales of straw for and that kids would come over to our hobby far, ‘cause we were close to town and it was the only place that the kids could walk to to enjoy a hobby farm right there.

So I’d come home from work and the kids would build a new straw fort every day. They’d change the rooms and they’d do this and they’d do that, so… Then we put straw up against the house so it’d help to keep the old farm house from being too cold in the winter. They call that banking the house. Some people use leaves.

I have a friend here in the city who collects those bags of leaves and puts some around her house. And some day, oh, I’d love for you to meet her. She’s a fabulous lady. Her name is Lois Swenson.

At any rate, um…and then in the summer, when the spring would come, we would take all of that straw and use it for mulch on our gardens. Oh, we had the best soil and the best sunshine. And we had a well for our garden so it could get all of its own water. Oh, it was the best place to live.

And I know a lot of your families might have something to do with garden so you might be able to think about when you go out in the summer time how wonderful it is to grow our own food and to be out in the sunshine and enjoy that kind of life.

Um, what else happened? Oh! I forgot where I worked! I worked for Crib Diaper Service for 25 years. It was such a great place to work; it was a small family business. I kinda turned into a bit of an environmentalist because of working for those folks.

We delivered real cotton diapers for their babies instead of using disposable diapers. I was really..it was kind of an accident that I started working there. A couple of people had some problems over one weekend; two families had people that died in automobile accidents. I knew that they needed help and I knew they cleaned on Saturdays so I went in to start cleaning the diaper plant. It was in St. Louis Park. And because everybody was at funerals and so forth, I started working there. I knew the people who owned the place.

I got to do all the jobs there. I really didn’t think I was going to be a working mom. I was going to hang out and you know have fun with my kids and run around the neighborhood and grow gardens.

But um…so I started working there. I got to all of the jobs in production and then they needed somebody to drive for the diaper service, so I got to drive. It was the best job! I was at a funeral just the other day with these people and I was thinking it wasn’t really a job, it was so much fun to get out and meet all of the people that were new moms and dads and they thought it was kinda crazy that some lady was coming to their door, but I still know a lot of these people today. I met hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people from my job that was really not a job—it was a lot of fun.

And I got to…ah…then I started working in the office um…when my own daughter got sick and needed some help at home. We had a…I had a great time working for those folks.

And what else has happened in my life? Well, then I decided to move to the Cities after my kids got a little bigger. So I bought my house over on 24th and Upton in July, 1990 and I’ve been there ever since.
Part of the reason I bought my house there was because my friend, Lois Swenson, and I worked on Earth Day ’90, which was the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day and that’s how I met her and she lives in my neighborhood, too. That’s why I bought my house where I am.

But that Earth Day ’90 was, like I say, the 20th anniversary of Earth Day and I know that there’ve been something done for Earth Day in the schools, but it’s um…it talks about what we can do to help our environment. And maybe we can work more on that in our schools, too.

We really had a good time doing that and then when I bought my house, I…my own kids were old enough that they weren’t at home anymore. And I thought, why am I getting a three-bedroom house? I thought I was gonna be like Lois because she’s real into peace and social justice and environment and farming and all of those wonderful things.

I thought I’d be renting my rooms like Lois and running around having a good time helping people. Well, it turned out that my daughter was sick and she has had four children and that’s what lead me to this school.

I got Teelah when she was a little tiny girl and now she’s 20. She needed a school to go to so I started her at the school of extended learning. It was over in Golden Valley, but it was a Minneapolis school.

The kids there went all day long, kinda like we do here. And they went all year long. It was really a cool school. Then when they built this building that we’re sitting in right now, they came over here and Teelah was in the first classes that was in this building. So every day this school has been open, I’ve had kids in this school!

When they…she graduated from Henry in 2010. But then I got Jessie and some of you guys might know some of my other kids that are right here. And then I got Jonathan and Joseph, they’re the twins.
Well, so when we ah…my kids kept going to the Jordan Parkside school and ah…when our school closed, I don’t know, you guys are kinda young to remember that, but when our school closed, the neighbors were all kind of up in arms and we weren’t very happy that they were closing our schools on this side of town. They only…they closed five schools over here and this was one of them.

So my boys went over to the Lucy Laney school for a year. And then I knew about Hmong International Academy and Hmong school that had been housed here with our Jordan Park community school. I thought, you know, I would talk to Chi Lee when I was at the bus stop waiting for my kids to come out of the school and to Lyfu.

Then I decided when we all moved over to Northstar that I’d join up with my kids to come to a HIEE and that’s how I got into HIA because I thought, Hey, if we get enough kids coming to HIA, maybe we can get our school back.

You know, everybody worked hard trying to get this school back and we did get this school back. I’m so glad to know that we’re growing and growing and we’re having good people coming to work with our kids at school and wonderful folks going ahead and moving on to higher grades into Henry and so forth and going to college just out of this school. I think we’re pretty lucky.

One of the other things that I do in this neighborhood now is I volunteer over at St. Olaf Church, which is just a couple of blocks over from here. I don’t’ know if any of you young people went to the Arboretum program last year, but that’s one of the gardening programs that we’re working with over at the church.

We do a lot of gardening. We have a hoop house over there and we call it a farm because there’s Ag-dollars attached to farming, but there’s not according to…you know, there are no gardening-dollars really attached to gardening ‘cause gardening’s kind of a hobby they think.

So we um…we’re doing a lot of work in the community over there to bring a new system in. It’s called the HUB system where people can join for ten dollars and then…it was just brand-new last year. We had 200 people in the North side to join.

When you pay your ten dollars, you get seeds and plants once. Then you come again and you get more plants. Then we all talk about growing gardens in our back yard and in our community gardens.

We also had canning classes over there last year and we’re hoping to get some fruit trees this year so lots of good things happening right now in our own neighborhood.

I don’t know…I just love our school and I love our neighborhood and I…I’m so glad that we’re back here and that we all have such a wonderful opportunity to move forward and do good things.

I don’t know if you guys know, I only have one kid left in this school. His name is Jonathan. He’s in the 7th grade; he’s got long blond hair. So, um…I expect to be here for a couple of more years and hopefully we can do some great things together.