Alden Nolette

by David Nolette

Alden Nolette was born November 30, 1912 in Cohasset, Minnesota. He was the second child and oldest boy of Napoleon Nolette and Ida Anderson. He lived in Cohasset almost his entire life. The family was poor. They grew their own vegetables, raised their own pigs for meat and read by kerosene lamps at night. They burned only wood. They had two stoves, one for cooking and one for heating. Alden started working at an early age, both at home and at outside jobs.

Alden said, "When I was about ten years old, I got a light job. Turn the lights off and on in Cohasset. You would have to get up at daybreak in the morning, every day of the year and then you would have to turn them back on at night. We got five dollars a month for it. We bought all our own clothes. Shoes and everything."

He was also responsible for the firewood. When his brother Ervin was older, he also helped. Alden related one unique way they had of getting firewood. "You know we lived right beside Bass Brook and every year we use to go down there in the summertime and the spring. We started in the spring and we picked little popple bolts in the water. It was, oh, laying on the bottom. We used peck poles to pick 'em up. Bring 'em to shore. We always made a raft so we could pick a few up, put on top of the raft and go to shore and unload and go back and pick up some more. There use to be a sawmill right behind there for years and years. And so we got enough wood in the summertime to last all winter. We use to saw wood all summer. If we didn't saw wood my Dad would say 'Time to saw wood,' so we had to saw wood."

They also raised pigs for pork. Alden's Dad did the butchering. They used most of the pig, even catching the blood so his mother could make blood dumplings. His mother also made head cheese. They also had some chickens but pork was their main meat. They usually butchered in the fall but Alden remembered one year, a sow was getting so big, they butchered in the summer. The pig was so big they couldn't dip it in a barrel of hot water in the usual way. Because it was summer, they had to salt it down. Alden laughed, "I ate so much salt pork, it started coming out of my eyes."

They also had a big garden every year. As Alden said, "We'd have beans, beets, carrots, potatoes, onions. Everything . . . so my mother use to can everything. We never had to buy vegetables . . . so the only thing we had to get was flour and stuff like that . . . We always had to keep the garden going. Hoeing in the garden."

When he became about twelve years old, he had to help his Dad work in the woods in the summertime, a time when the mosquitoes were extremely thick. "Oh my Dad would cut the trees down and I'd trim 'em and then he he'd cut 'em in lengths. When my brother got old enough, my Dad would cut 'em up down, I'd trim and then he'd cut 'em up in lengths and my brother would peel 'em."

But he did not work all the time. They played with the neighbors. They played games such as hide and seek. They played cards. In the summer he went swimming. In the winter he went skating. He related one story, "Whole bunch of people skating around and I was wondering what that black spot was so I touched my toe in it so I went clear up to my . . . my leg . . . in the water was an air hole. So I stood beside the fire until my pants dried before I went home," he laughed.

When he was young Alden attended catechism and church at St. Augustine's Catholic Church in Cohasset. My father often mentioned that he had once been an altar boy. He attended church every Sunday until he was sixteen years old. Although he was later married by the priest in Deer River, he never attended the Catholic Church regularly after his youth.

His days as a child ended early. He never finished high school. By age sixteen he had dropped out of school to work full time. It wasn't easy work either. Working in the woods is hard physical labor. I asked him once about being poor. He said, "It wasn't too bad. We always had stuff to eat . . . but we didn't have any money to spend."

During the depression under the Roosevelt Administration, Alden joined the C. C. C. First they went to Ft. Snelling to train and then returned to Northern Minnesota. He worked in a camp in Itasca County. Most of the money he made was sent back to his parents.

In the late thirties he got a job at the creamery. He stayed with Uncle Joe and Anna Clairmont, his mother Ida's sister. Their house was in Grand Rapids and he payed room and board. My father always related one incident from that time. He received a raise at work and went home and told his Uncle and Aunt. They promptly raise his room and board wiping out his raise.

In the late thirties he made a trip to Saskatchewan to visit his Aunt Teana Schimerhorn. He drove all the way and took photographs when he was there but the photos weren't of good quality.

After a long engagement, Alden married Jennie Reed January 25, 1941 in the parsonage of the Catholic Church in Deer River. After the marriage they ate dinner at her folks and then later they ate supper at his folks. Alden had to go to work the next day. They rented a house in Cohasset after their marriage.

One thing that should be mentioned about my father is his hearing. As he got into his twenties, he started to become hard of hearing. He went to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota to see if they could cure his problem, but they couldn't do anything about it. He eventually bought a hearing aid. At first he didn't wear it all the time but later came to accept it. I remember when I was very small how large the hearing aid was that he had to carry. He had the hearing aid hanging around his neck which was connected to two battery packs. One battery pack consisted of two large round batteries which he carried in one pocket and the other was one large rectangular shaped battery which he carried in another pocket. As he got older, the hearing aids became somewhat smaller and the batteries were contained in the hearing aid. When he didn't have his hearing aid on, a person could stand behind him and yell as loud as he could and still he wouldn't be able to hear them.

In a video clip, on January 6, 2006, Ronnie asked our mother, Jennie about our father's hearing and she talked about when he first got his hearing aid,  " It was so exciting, cause he came home, he said, 'I hear birds. I haven't heard birds for years," --- and other noises'. And he would ask me, 'What is that noise?',  just like I do sometime,with my hearing aid.  I know what what he went through, because if there is too much noise around I can't hear either."

Then Ronnie asked if he had trouble at work.  She said, " "A few people said something, and the boss told him, 'You should do something'.  So,----we went to Duluth, and his first hearing aid was a Maico, which was high priced, and the batteries were so expensive."

Ronnie asked her if he got this before David was born and she said, "Yes." Ronnie then asked, "So he hard David cry when he was a baby.

" Yes, he did. When the nurse carried David out of the room, he said 'David had his eyes wide open.'"

When World War II started, he was declared 4F because of his hearing. He had mixed feelings about it. He felt bad not going off to War with the rest of the men but he also was happy that he could stay at home with his wife.

Before David was born, they moved to Grand Rapids. They rented two houses in the time they spent there. In 1944 they bought a house in Cohasset. It was a house my Dad had walked by many times as a kid and he always liked the looks of it. The house was old and had plenty of defects but the price was right. The price was eight hundred dollars. Although that seems very cheap now, they had to take a mortgage out on the house.

This is the house that David, Douglas, Ronnie and Dennis grew up in. They lived in this house until they left home. Except for summers Alden lived in this house the rest of his life. In April of 1984, having some heart problems, he walked from this house and never returned. He died in the hospital two weeks later on Sunday, April 29,1984.

He was a hard working man whom I never saw call in sick in the time when I was growing up. I remember him sitting at the kitchen table doing his report late in the evenings. In later years after he had a stroke and was forced to retire I remember him reading his bible at the kitchen table in the evenings. His wife and children were always most important to him. After he retired, when his health permitted he enjoyed burning wood. After his stroke he often had breathing problems caused by asthma. But he always said, "Better days are coming."

David Nolette, written sometime in 1990's
Revised January 12, 2006

Source:
Interview with Alden Nolette in 1975
My own first hand knowledge
A video clip with my new camera on January 6,2006