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Martin Rasmussen

“When I was a child, we ate out of a common big dish.”

Martin Rasmussen was born in 1896 to Danish farmers living in what was then German territory. He went through a traditional apprenticeship and served in the German army before his path led to Denmark and on to the United States in 1923. After several years in the Midwest, Martin moved to Tacoma, where he designed and made machinery for a plywood plant.

It was Germany at that time. North Slesvig, the Germans called it. Now the name is Sønderjylland [southern Jutland]. It used to be a Danish province, before 1864, that’s where they had the war between Germany and Denmark. It went back to Denmark in 1920; I saw the king driving over the border to take possession.

My father was born in Denmark and my mother in North Slesvig. I had four brothers and one sister. My oldest brother, Søren, inherited the farm. We brothers were all in German military service between 1914–1918, in World War I. One of my brothers fell in Poland—Peder Rasmussen; he was around twenty years old.^*

My father had a nice farm. It was good-sized—a hundred and fifty acres or something like that, fourteen to eighteen cows, and six or seven horses. You had to work on the farm. You had to get the cows out in the field and everything in order before you went to school in the morning. Later on, you had to be out and pull up the rutabagas and turnips and so forth. We had some hired help, too.

Martin Rasmussen’s unit, German Army, World War I

Potatoes, we’d get a special vacation for potatoes, two weeks in September or August. Then the whole family was in the potato field; that was nasty and cold. Had a wonderful appetite when we got home at five or six o’clock. There was a couple of men digging; the rest of us were gathering the potatoes in sacks. In many cases, there was dug a big hole in the ground, the potatoes down there, and straw on the bottom, and straw on the top, and dirt on it, and they would last all winter. There would be quite a few rotten ones, though. That was the same way with rutabagas—hauled to a hole and then covered up, but you didn’t dig down as deep.

In those days, we didn’t have much machinery, so we cut the straw for the horses by hand, with a hand machine. Out in the fields, the rye was harvested first. There would be four or five manfolks with a scythe cutting down. The women, they would gather the grain; they had some kind of a fork, and then they didn’t have any string, so they would use a handful of straw and bind it. I did that many times; it takes a certain amount of skill. Later on, we got a harvesting machine; we would have to go after and tie it up.

The womenfolks, they would be out helping in the field quite a bit. And they would do the milking of the cows. They had to be milked three times a day: in the morning, at noon, and around eight o’clock at night. A milkman came around in the morning and hauled all the milk from that village to the dairy to be processed. When the cream was taken out, the skim milk came back to feed the hogs and the calves. That was the ordinary procedure. The milk was the main income, and selling hogs.

In wintertime, snow would be plenteous; sometime the snow would go up to the roof. We would play in the snow. We did some skiing in the meadows. For entertainment, we kids did card playing, what was called sort peder [sorteper = Old Maid], blackjack, something like that. In summertime, the boys would all go bathing. We had a creek that went through there. And we played this here football, soccer. That was our entertainment. And then, of course, we all had a bicycle. But the cattle had to be taken care of on Sundays and every day. Work was the main thing. On Sundays, we would ride the horses sometimes. Sometimes my dad, he would buy a wild one that nobody could stay on.

My mother, and then there was usually one or two girls, they did the sewing. My mother did the weaving; she was a good weaver. The clothes, of course, was made by a tailor, usually very heavy clothing.

And then, of course, there was the fall butchering; that was another occupation for the womenfolks, they were helping. And then the baking. We had a big oven. My dad, he usually fired it up in the forenoon, made it real hot with wood. Then my mother would bake the white bread. The pumpernickel were put in the oven after the cake and cookies was baked. The pumpernickel would be about a foot-and-a-half long and there would be about thirty of those. They was put in and stayed in there for hours. After it was baked in the afternoon, these pumpernickel was taken out and laid upside down on the bed, I don’t know why, but that was the rule.

When I was a child, we ate out of a common big dish. Everybody had a spoon and dipped. My mother had an old-fashioned stove with wood or coal, and then it had a big pan on there. What we mostly had for dinner was sidepork and potatoes. Beans was conserved in a big jar, salted. And then the beets was stored in big jars, pickled. They would hang the hams around the stove and then they would put them on the top floor, in big caskets with grain. Upstairs over the living quarters, that’s where the grain would be stored. So it was a very warm building. The windows were single, not double like today. There would be flower pots in all the windows. The beds were enclosed, and then there was curtains in front.

Ghost stories, an awful lot of those. They had seen a woman without a head walking past the graveyard. Oh, that was very dangerous. They’d seen this and they’d seen that. The graveyard was something—you didn’t pass by there at night. Sometimes with a wedding, the horses would stop, and that was a bad omen.

Going to church, manfolks sit on one side and womenfolks sit on the other side. No mixed affairs, no. There was, like usual, singing, but there was no dancing. That was the Lutheran church. The minister, he was speaking Danish, because the majority were of Danish descent. There was a few Germans in the neighborhood up there, too, but it was all Danish [in church]. The pastor has a farm, but, of course, the farm was rented out to some other farmer. But he lives in that farmhouse; he lives nice and well.

For confirmation preparation you had to go there once a week, one forenoon each week, for half a year. In the lectures for confirmation, we had to learn a lot of songs and to know about the Bible. Then for confirmation the boys had to stand on one side and the girls on the other side. They [congregation] was sitting in the pews and we were standing up there. He asked each one certain questions; I almost remember what he asked, it was something special from the New Testament. We had to answer and we’d better knew the answer, too.

The grownups went to church Christmas Day. That was very important. But Christmas Eve was the greatest affair for the children. You usually had a Christmas tree in the biggest room, the hall. There was no electric lighting in those days, we had candlelight. We were all dancing around our Christmas tree. Before that we had our best and finest dinner in the year. That usually consisted of pork and all the things that goes with it, because that was extraordinary. After dancing around the Christmas tree, we got the gifts. After that they had pebernødder [peppernuts, small cakes]. They are prepared before Christmas. We helped cut those in the evening and they had big bags of it, that was especially for the kids. My dad put out the grain for the birds; everything had to be taken care of right.

New Year’s Eve, we boys went out in the afternoon to the relations, far off, with these Chinese fireworks and then we usually got cookies. That was us kids. Then in the evening the grown-ups would come around in droves. You go from one farm to another and then they would shoot fireworks and then they would be invited in for coffee, cake, and cookies. And that was up to twelve or one o’clock. But then after that, some of the neighbors would come and get into the cow barn and steal the wheelbarrows and take the gates away from the fence and things like that, be mischievous. They would haul things way up on the hillside or put it on the roof or things like that. That was the grown-up boys. My brothers had to be awake all evening so they didn’t do too much damage. That was New Year’s Eve.

I went to a German school, quite strict, and finished my eighth grade. German in school. Well, we had two hours of Danish Bible class. Our schoolteacher, he could talk Danish, too. The pastor, he was the head of the schools in that district; there were probably five or six schools. The teachers didn’t like to see him, because it meant criticism. Everything was very strict in those days. The teacher, he knew how to use the rod. And at home it was the same thing. My mother, she had a nine cat tail [cat-o’-nine-tails] that was used to keep us in line. But life was still wonderful.

I went to be an apprentice in a machine shop in Vojens. I was apprenticed for four years; I started in 1910 and I get out in 1914. I lived among the people down there. You had to pay a certain amount for room and board. Father had to pay that because we didn’t get hardly any wages for an apprentice, started in with five cent an hour. Apprenticeship was very strict. The boss, he would hit you. I stayed home one Christmas. It was that week between Christmas and New Year and I could help with the threshing. When I came back, he hit me right and left—I didn’t have permission.

The journeymen, they were allowed to wear a hat, kind of round and old-fashioned; but the apprentice wasn’t allowed to wear that. When someone tried, they’d just throw that hat off and down in the dirt. The journeyman, he told me one day to oil his shaft. I thought I didn’t have to do that, but maybe I should have done it because he sure gave me a dandy licking. Ja, they were tough. I think we were about twelve apprentices to the place. And we became powerful after a while because there was almost more apprentices than journeymen. They changed a little bit.

After I was through apprenticeship four years, then I went down to Hamburg in 1914–15. The war had begun at that time. I went out on the Flugplatz, the flying field in Hamburg. There I was doing some machine job. These big balloons—zeppelins—would go from there up along the coastline and watch out for the fleet and they would go to England, too. One day, it was kind of blowing. They didn’t have enough [men] to haul the zeppelin down, so we from the shop had to go over and help haul that thing down and get it into the big hall. We held on and then a storm, a kind of heavy wind, came and it went up. I let go, most of them just let go. But there was a couple that kept hanging on to that darn thing, and they went up with it! Of course, they came back down. Then I saw the bombs—the ones that they used against England. They were stacked outside; they were kind of pear-shaped.

Then I came home. My oldest brother, he was a strong Dane and my sister, too. They went across the border and had their meetings over there. The Germans were not always too sweet. You couldn’t sing. The newspapers could be anti-German, but if you had festivities, certain hymns you couldn’t sing. There was a wedding in town and there was some of those younger guys that want to sing these here songs that they were not supposed to sing. This Hans, he was from Jutland, but he was a strong German. So he mentioned about this here singing they did. The judge and some of those Germans found out and they went to court about that. And right close to the border, they had some rough guys that went into the school. There was usually three pictures on the back wall. That was the Kaiser, the former Kaiser, and Kaiser Wilhelm. And they had damaged the pictures. That was very serious. They had to skip the country; they got up to ten years in prison. That was terrible to damage the image of the Kaiser.

Then I was drafted into the service. When you’re young like that, you hear them talk about all what went on, war and so forth—you hear it from school. It was worked on you constantly, this here propaganda about how wonderful war was. We had a teacher, he knew our Danish sentiment. He didn’t like that. He was from further down in Germany. I didn’t have any special interest in going off to a German war, because our sentiment was rather Danish. But still, I liked to see what went on, so I could tell when I came back what I’d seen. Boys, they have that kind of spirit.

There was two million students in Germany that volunteered. When they came to the front, they found out they didn’t like it. And I had the same experience. The frontline, that’s where reality shows up. There is nothing beautiful about a war. If there is a hell on earth, it is right there. I was down in France. Then I contacted typhus and came back to German hospitals and was taken well care of by the nuns. Especially one, she was the sweetest. I wasn’t supposed to have any black bread or any pumpernickel, but she come after work and give me something. I don’t want to go on about the war.

After the war, in 1918–19, we could come to Denmark; the border was open. I had my four years of apprenticeship that was necessary to enter the engineering institute in Copenhagen. We got a good education there, about three and a half, four years. After my schooling, I got a job in a dairy machinery outfit in Kolding, Denmark.

I went to the United States in 1923. I was getting to be up in years, twenty-seven. There was not enough work in Denmark. They couldn’t use all the technical men they made. I had been ’round in the world, been working in Germany, in the war. To go to America, I didn’t think there was much to that!

^*Some six thousand Danes from Slesvig died in German uniform during WWI; an additional seven thousand ended the war as invalids.