Postcards from Uncle John

Postcard to his sister Mabel dated January 10, 1953, posted in Nebraska

Got your pkg of biskits & had 3 meals out of it. Everything fine & intact. Nothing broken or ground. While eating 'em I tried to imagine I was in your house & I did. There was your refrigerator with a bottle of wine in it, the piggy-headed jar with cookies in it, Judy with a "wet panny", & Patty Jo sleepin on your bed. We had a basketball game last nite & I sold $22 worth of pop & candy. That is my job at all doings in the hall & believe me the people turn out in masse for all  doings in Oelrich. Nice people! Many of them are Dutch original. Real spring weather today. Temp 60. Rain last nite. Snow all gone.     John

October 4, 1958 to Mabel

Hotspr. Sun.

Hi enjoyed your letter. In it u say the paint didn't cost nothing!! Then, what did it cost? Anything that does not cost nothing must cost something. Someday I'm going to force myself to write a letter. Nice and warm again today, but no frost here yet. I heard on KSTP that it rained down there yesterday & 62,000 people sat in it and watched a football game -- shivered & suffered. Crazy people! I am feeling very good. I go to town every other day. No rain here. We had a dust storm yesterday. I stayed home & inside all day.    J.M.U.

Postcard to Judy dated February 5, 1960

In 1960 when John was 73 years old his teaching career was just about at an end. He still lived among the Indian people that he loved. He also loved to visit his sisters and brothers and their families in the summer in his old car. So many cousins have told me that he had a great effect on them when they were children. John came to visit us too. I was  talking to one of the cousins on the phone and he said: "We thought he was INDIAN!" We did too. He had deeply tanned and wrinkled skin like an Indian. He talked in deep tones, like an Indian. He sat on the ground cross-legged like an Indian. He taught me to make a Sioux flute out of a piece of branch from a willow tree. He seemed gruff, but he loved us all. My sister Judy corresponded with him in those days. She was ten years old. She preserved this postcard where he writes of his solitary student, an Indian, the same age as himself who he gives a ride into town occasionally. John says of him that he is "kind and honest". Torsten and Johanna wanted John to be a minister (according to Hylma in her book). I think he was a minister in many ways. To be "kind and honest" were important Christian qualities to John, where he lived, far out in the Indian lands of South Dakota. He was a kind and honest man himself. And as for the children that played at his feet amidst apple and plum trees and willows, he would hope and pray that those children to grow up to be like that too.