The Dahlberg Years
Don Johnson Journals and Letters
Dahlberg Free Seasons 1936-1945
Presented by Byrne Johnson
Part 9

As the train left the Falls with the Dahlberg family headed back to Chicago on Labor Day, there were sighs of relief, a short period of relaxation and then the job of putting the island to bed for the winter. The boats were pulled up manually using slings and chain hoists in the boat house, the plumbing was drained, furniture covered, final laundry done, windows shuttered and the electric generator was shut down until the following spring.

Although the Dahlbergs held the title and paid all of the taxes and bills, the island belonged to the caretakers for ten months of each year.

On very cold nights while the lake was freezing, the Johnsons would be entertained by the rumbling of the ice. When the ice was about an inch thick, they would walk on it but stayed a healthy distance apart. They also carried six to eight foot long poles in case they had misjudged the safety factor. Six inches of ice (or maybe a bit less) saw the lake car getting action.

In one unusual winter the lake froze to an acceptable thickness for car travel before enough snow had fallen to cover the glare ice. Masonite shutters from the big house windows were used for sails on sleds. With the west wind the children were able to sail the six miles to Sandpoint Island where Don picked them up with the Model A Ford and took them home to repeat the process.

When the first snow that made the use of a car on an unplowed road impossible, snowshoe trails were established across the lake to Bancroft Bay (now Franks Bay) and to the neighbors. The trail to the mainland was as straight as it could be made and marked with wood laths every couple of hundred feet. This way it could be packed down as more snow came. This packed trail could be walked on without snowshoes during much of the winter which was especially important during the times when there was slush on top of the ice. Until the snow melted in the spring, all supplies would be transported in pack sacks on backs or on the toboggan.

Another word about the snow. It has always been an article of faith in this area that an above normal amount of snow could cause roofs to collapse. This meant that in those winters of heavy snow, much of it would be removed from the roofs. Although shovels were used, the main tool used was a “plow” made from a long pole attached to a four foot piece of 2 x 6 plank. Someone would climb to the peak of the roof and push the snow off the eaves. At times there would be piles of snow five or more feet deep along the side of the building. After the work was done, the children would climb again to the roof and jump into the snow banks that had just been created. This was only done on the same day as the removal, as snow has a tendency to get very hard after it has been disturbed.

An interesting thought is that although the roofs were protected by snow removal all of the years that the Johnsons were there, there never was another shovel full of snow removed from any of the roofs after they left and none of them collapsed. So it goes.

All of the water for drinking, cooking, washing dishes, clothes and bodies,was carried in buckets from the lake. To avoid having to cut through a lot of ice each day, there was an insulated box with a cover over the water hole. There was still some ice to cut, but it was manageable. In bad weather and during the evenings, the family read, played cards and Monopoly, and listened to the radio. The radio was larger than most television sets today and was powered by a six volt car battery. Trivial Pursuit had not been invented, but there were “Quiz” books that served the same purpose.

Reading was certainly a very high value in the family. An excerpt from a letter written to Sam White by Don on October 20, 1938, replying to a September 6, 1938 letter said:

I should have warned you that if you wrote me before the middle of October you would have to wait for an answer. It takes at least a month after the Dahlbergs leave for me to settle down in the evening to write a letter. It seems that I read so little during the summer that I am practically starved for the written word by fall. There is no pleasure in writing when one’s mind is on reading.

One winter, after working with Jim DiOnne, Don became intrigued with the photographic process and ordered supplies from the Sears Roebuck catalog. He found that a Coleman gasoline lantern in the oven did a good job of replacing the bright electric light that was recommended for making prints. He would put the paper and negative in the holder, open the oven door and count off the seconds of exposure to the light and then complete the development.

It’s probably safe to say that there are few better descriptions of “togetherness” than a family spending a northern Minnesota winter with one stove for heat and one gasoline lantern for light.

The Christmas tree was always cut on the island and went through the ‘drilling holes and plugging with good branches’ routine that is necessary with a home grown tree. The final trimming of the tree was the placing of the lights. Without electricity, real candles in little holders that clipped to the end of the branches were used. Thinking of it now it is a bit frightening, but there never were any fire problems.

The nearest winter neighbors were Ernest Oberholtzer, who was often out of town lobbying for his environmental concerns, and the caretakers on other islands. Ed Johnson was at Sheldrup's, Frank and Audrey Weldon at French’s, Harry Robinson at Backus’s and, for much of the time, Sam Fosdick was at Camp Koochiching. The other lake people seen on a more or less regular basis were Ben Haskell who lived at the landing on Bancroft Bay, Gilbert and Katie Carlson at Bald Rock, Lawrence and Gladys Olson (commercial fishermen) on Cranberry Bay and Bud and Eve Herrem, caretakers at Island View.

In a letter to Dr. Henry Lysne in February of 1943, Don described an unusual trip, even for that day.

Carl Harrison and I have discussed taking a trip on snowshoes for the past few years but each time cleverly managed to talk ourselves out of it. Smarter men would have realized that even tho they were getting out of something at the time, they were continually getting more involved. We didn’t catch on until we kissed our good wives farewell, shouldered our packs and were on our way. That was a week ago Monday. We couldn’t have picked a worse winter for the trip. The snow on the lake is deep and hasn’t packed. The year’s worst storm caught us the third day out and we damn near spent the night in the bush. There is water on top of the ice over most of the lake so every now and again we would walk into it and slush up the snowshoes. To top it off, no one is traveling and wherever we went we had to break our own trail. We did manage to sleep in some kind of a shack each of the six nights we were out, which was a lifesaver – and Carl lost 9 pounds which can be called the same. Me? Oh, I’m still my skinny little self with nothing spare to lose! You will be interested to know that we took the mail to Chris Munson, the caretaker at the dam at Kettle Falls. He hadn’t received it since November 1. They tell us that in this day of global war, distances have shrunk so as to mean but little - yet there was a man 50 miles from town who hadn’t a word from the outside world for more than three months. It makes a difference if you travel by plane or on snowshoes…

Inspired by that trip, in March of 1944, Don and Layna drove on the ice to Cranberry Bay, left the car, and spent the next five days walking down the Kabetogama Peninsula to Kettle Falls and back to the car, camping out at night and melting snow for water.

One year during the spring ice breakup time, Jack Green delivered Sunday newspapers by dropping them from his Piper Cub. His aim was pretty good, and he only hit the open water with one paper.

Another ritual of spring was Layna’s teaching Don how to splice rope. The only rope she ever spliced was the demonstration splice, and Don spliced rope all summer, but for some reason he was not able to retain the skill through the winter.

The school year was quite unusual for the Johnson parents. They had three children, but from the fall of 1938 onward, they only had direct responsibility for them on the weekends, as the children boarded with other families on the bus line during the school week. The hosting families were the Finstads, the Blooms and the Halvorsons.