A Legacy of Endurance

 “I’m here; the party can begin!”  So declares Erma Florentine Reiss, arriving at a large gathering of friends and relatives in 1999.  And indeed, she lights up the room with her entrance.  At 82 – with a beautiful head of curly white locks, a smile like sunshine, and the bouncing gait of a much younger woman – she has already been widowed three times and raised seven children to healthy, productive adulthood.  Some people wear hardship like a dented suit of armor, but not Erma.   

Born the first of five children to Paul and Lydia Engel in 1917, Erma and her siblings grew up in rural Minnesota during hardscrabble times.  The Great Depression overlapped drought conditions, only to be followed by World War II with its scarcities and the rationing of essential goods. 

“Love and sharing saw us through those difficult years,” writes Erma in a recounting of her family history.  There were extended family get-togethers for birthdays and special occasions, with homemade ice cream made with ice chipped from the family farm’s stock tanks in the winter months.  Visitors brought cakes and cookies, but no gifts were exchanged.  “We [children] didn’t know we were poor.  We were happy and healthy, as our Heavenly Father led us.” 

Much of that health and happiness derived from mother Lydia’s example of taking delight in helping others and in making the most of what you have.  At age ten, Erma would read bible passages to her grandmother, who suffered from cataract blindness, and watch and learn as her mother sewed children’s clothing and household linens from colorful cotton feed sacks.  “Sugar came in smaller white sacks.  They were softer and more absorbent and were saved to use as ‘Sunday dish towels,’ and to make petticoats and bloomers for the girls.” 

In that home, Erma learns that the basic, forthright offerings of time, grace, and talents are the true   acts of giving.  “All her life, my mother was quietly useful, gentle, and friendly.  She gave us all the simple pleasures to remember forever.”  Simple pleasures like perfecting the role of hostess with only the barest necessities at hand; giving parties for neighborhood children in an era when no one else did this; always having time for a game of checkers with her children; making mittens, doilies, and braided rugs for those in need; and filling long winter evenings with piano playing and singing. 

After graduating from the high school department of Dr. Martin Luther College in 1935, Erma moves to Larsen, Wisconsin, as a woman’s home companion for the disabled wife of the Reverend Weyland. 

A Life of Service

What’s the best thing about being a centenarian? To Viola Schweikert, who celebrates her 101^st birthday this July, it’s “Looking back and realizing how supremely blessed I have been, blessed beyond anything I could ever have hoped for.” To observers, one of the best things about Viola Schweikert is that very attitude of unqualified appreciation amidst the trials of life on earth. 

As the first of four children born into a modest household, Viola’s personal pilgrimage began in 1910 in Glencoe, Minnesota, just 46 miles west of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Decades later, French filmmaker Louis Malle was moved to document living conditions in this small rural community in his 1985 film, God’s Country. 

“We were poor,” she says, recalling the tiny two-story home she grew up in: three bedrooms upstairs; on the lower level, a kitchen, a dining room, and a parlor that served as her grandmother’s bedroom. Heat from the wood-burning stove didn’t rise to the upper level, “So in the winter time, we children would run as fast as we could up the stairs to get under the covers.” Bed-sharing among the siblings was a practical necessity, and it had its benefits during the cold months. “Viola, you’re like a furnace,” little sister Loretta would exclaim. 

With her father rising at 4:30 a.m. to empty the parlor heater of ash and putting in long days as a painter and a paper-hanger, and her mother efficiently operating a non-mechanized household of seven, Viola’s personal work ethic was molded by her parents’ examples of uncomplaining hard work and a desire to usher their children toward a better standard of living. 

Poor or not, their simple lifestyle with a family cow providing milk must have seemed downright luxurious, compared to the experiences of their ancestors. “My father’s father was living in Germany when he heard about the Homestead Act,” which allowed anyone who had never taken up arms against the United States government to submit an application for a freehold title to up to 160 acres of undeveloped federal land west of the Mississippi. In order to complete the contract, the approved applicant then had to improve the land and file for a deed. 

Viola’s grandfather booked unpaid passage to the United States on a cargo ship, and worked at the New York Harbor docks until his transport was paid for. Steered by his brother to “some real good land” in Minnesota, he got off the train in Paynesville and hiked for four hours until he saw “nice, loamy soil” underfoot, declaring that he would settle and make his living on that spot. 

But free land was not a free ride.  Viola’s grandfather then labored for local farmers to earn cash to buy tools to erect the permanent structures required by his Homestead Act agreement. Meanwhile, the enterprising immigrant often sought shelter from harsh winter winds behind a snowbank as he developed his own claimed property. His children would later recount how they “slept in the loft of a log cabin chinked with moss,” and had to shake the snow from their covers on frigid February mornings. 

Viola retains a razor-sharp recollection of long-past events, and a sincere respect for the tribulations endured by her father’s generation. Based on a century of life experience and a unique historical perspective, she confirms with authority the often-heard observation that today’s young people have no conception of what hardship is. “When my father was growing up, sugar was a luxury item. During the Christmas season, his mother would send him to the store with a quarter, and he would buy a small bag of it so she could make kuchen, a cinnamon coffee cake – a once a year treat which the family deeply appreciated.” 

In Viola’s own childhood home, her mother stretched the food budget by making potato dumplings. “They were very heavy, so I would try to get away with serving myself only a bite or two.” But homemakers proudly defended and protected their recipes in those days, and her mother resisted adopting a neighbor’s approach to feather-light dumplings made from the Calumet Baking Powder Cookbook. 

Stomach-ladening dumplings aside, country living was healthy living, with plenty of outdoor activities, a long walk to school in the fresh air, home-grown vegetables from the garden, and plenty of chores to help the children learn how to contribute and accept responsibility. 

As the oldest, Viola rose early to gather potatoes from the root cellar and prepare them for use at the noon meal. “They weren’t like you get from the store,” she remembers. “They were crusted with soil and my hands got too dirty to scrub clean. I was self-conscious about this, so I would try to hide them once I got to school, where all the other kids had nice, clean hands.” Still, school was one of her favorite places to be, especially reading class, and Viola ended up being the only one in her family to complete twelfth grade. 

“Most confirmation-age girls got sent out to work on neighboring farms from 6 a.m. until 9 p.m., and ended up marrying the farmers’ sons and being tied to the land,” she recalls, “so I was very fortunate.” She was also fortunate to be raised in a family that attended German evangelical Lutheran church services regularly, and she remembers giving thanks before each meal.

Viola’s vivid mental photo album retains a picture of a tall, stately pine tree placed at the front of the sanctuary each Christmas, decorated with the glow of many five inch candles. It illuminated the altar area so enchantingly that it captivated her childhood attention – and left her severely disappointed when the candles were too-soon doused by safety-conscious ushers wielding wet sponges attached to long poles. 

When she was 15, the town jeweler and his wife sought out Viola as a babysitter for their daughter. “My job was to feed [my charge], Holly, bathe her, put her to bed, and read her stories until she fell asleep.” Viola would then spend the night, and get up the next morning to make breakfast for the family and clean the house – a child-tender with a heavy load of household duties. Soon her reputation for diligence – learned from striving to satisfy a hard-to-please mother – led to a succession of domestic positions. 

As an older teenager, Viola took a job at the local drug store for $10.00 per week of nine-hour work days. Her predecessor, Leo, had lost favor with the boss when he broke eight glasses in one month. Conscientious Viola was soon making a full $12.00 a week, having completed three months of employment without smashing a single piece of fountain ware. From time to time her drugstore coworkers invited Viola to go out with them at the end of their shift, but she wasn’t interested. Her character-revealing response? “What I want in life, I am not going to find in a dance hall.” 

What she did want in life was an education. After she had helped her sister pay tuition for beauty school using money she earned as church organist, Viola enrolled at Stevens Seminary – a private, liberal arts college founded by a gentleman who believed that women should be as well-educated as men. 

The rest of what she wanted in life was gradually defined for her by a persistent young pre-seminary student named George who visited his sister, Viola’s neighbor, during his “last free summer” before going off to college in Springfield, Illinois. He was interested in Viola, but she thought she was too young for him. “Get lost,” she responded plainly when he wrote to her following his summer visit. “But he didn’t hear me,” she adds all these years later. 

A Crisis of Belief

It is June 19, 1954. The Tasmanian Devil makes his delayed debut in the Warner Brothers cartoon “Devil May Hare,” and Keith Wissman makes his premature debut at William Booth Memorial Hospital in Detroit, Michigan, weighing in at 3 pounds, 13 ounces. Today, Keith is a strapping, 5′ 11” guy; well-educated and well-traveled, with a Master of Science degree in Industrial Technology and Applied Statistics and an accomplished career with internationally positioned major corporations behind him.

Keith’s curiosity about how things work revealed itself in his early years, growing up in Allen Park, a Detroit suburb. From an alarmingly successful attempt at stirring up a batch of homemade gun powder at age ten to blowing up the household fuse box designing his first electrical engineering experiment a few years later, Keith’s patient parents accepted his inquisitive bent, relieved that he and his older brother and younger sister survived their childhoods unscathed. Less adventuresome – or hazardous – were his youthful forays into taking apart radios and watches, most of which were still functional after he’d reassembled them.

Those were also days of putting down roots in the religious traditions of the German Evangelical and Reformed Church – “high church liturgy with classic hymns and pipe organ.” Keith’s family worshiped virtually every Sunday, along with his mother’s grandmother, who lived in their home for many years. “It was pretty neat having a great-grandmother living with us,” he recalls. “I loved the stories, and she let me ‘help’ cook and bake.”

In 1970, classmate Robbie invites him to the Melvindale High School Spinster Hop, and ironically, Keith has discovered his life’s match. The two date throughout high school and college, marry in June of 1976, and set up housekeeping in Sycamore, Illinois. Here Keith enthusiastically dives into product and process engineering, and Robbie plants a foot on the ladder leading to health care administration.

The Welcome to Sycamore sign boasts a population of 6,000; Keith says he’s “pretty sure that included the chickens and pigs.” But this is a place where he can start to build material security for his family, ultimately “designing automotive widgets and being published in technical journals.” Meanwhile, that family begins to grow.

By the time son Andy is born in 1984, Keith and Robbie have returned to Michigan and look forward to raising their children in Royal Oak, closer to their childhood homes. They are also active members of a local evangelical congregation, where Keith serves on the Board of Elders and in teaching and administrative roles.

July 1989. Robbie is pregnant again, and they are elated at the thought of expanding their small family. When Robbie gives birth to a full-term but unexpectedly still-born baby girl, Rebecca Lynn, in March of 1990, those high emotions come crashing down around them like shattered glass in a violent traffic accident.

Putting on the Armor of God

   Jean Michaels is petite.  Casual observation suggests she’s not capable of hefting heavy loads.  This misleading first impression supports the adage that appearances often deceive. 

Jean has always had a bit of spunk to her personality, but she didn’t necessarily see herself as a warrior.  Born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1954 to a photographer dad and his homemaker wife, she spent her growing-up years working in the family business with her four siblings, and going to church every Sunday. 

“Dad was a good, frugal businessman,” says Jean.  He trained his children in every aspect of daily operations, and they established a solid, middle-class lifestyle.  “We had a lake cabin and snowmobiles, and we were the first family in the neighborhood to have a color television set!” 

When Minnesota winters became tiresome and Arizona friends spoke of good opportunities there, the family relocated to Phoenix.  Life seemed pretty good.

Still, being ripped out of familiar surroundings just as they were starting their junior and senior years of high school was rough on Jean and her older sister; finding a place among cliques of teenagers who had been together since elementary school was daunting. 

In 12th grade Jean joined the Vocational Industrial Clubs of America to get a head start on charting a career path, but a persistent sense that something was lacking impelled her to seek emotional connections outside of school.  Shortly after her 1972 graduation she became a licensed cosmetologist, and that same October married a slightly older fellow from a troubled family. 

Jean worked as a hairstylist until her first son came along in late 1973.  Her husband attended church with her, but there were hints that living his faith did not come easily to him.  By 1976 she sensed that she had married for the wrong reasons and fled back to Minnesota with her son to make a fresh start.  When her husband followed, pleading to keep the family intact, they decided to try for that new beginning together.

Following their relocation, she welcomed two more sons into her family, one in 1978 and another in 1981, but her feelings of being controlled, of not providing the best environment for her children, and of not being “equally yoked” intensified.  After 20 years of good faith efforts, she finally left the marriage.

The Wounded Healer

  It is 1962.  The Cuban missile crisis has thousands sitting on the edges of their seats, anti-apartheidist Nelson Mandela is jailed in South Africa, and a baby named Suzanne is born in a Midwestern U.S. capital.  The nation’s children are not yet being exposed to an amoral, uncensored media blitzkrieg, but American society is on the threshold of an aggressive assault on traditional beliefs.

Meanwhile, Suzanne’s family is being led in a different direction.  Her older brother becomes a believer and a member of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in high school, and Suzanne, at age nine, finds herself moved by Billy Graham television specials.  Their changing hearts reflect a process that, “went beyond religion.  God was pursuing our family.  Looking back on the family’s history, you can clearly see it,” she explains. 

Suzanne’s 1980 graduation from high school is accompanied by a growing passion to do mission work, and a sense of urgency inspires her to finish her education quickly, without amassing an ocean of debt.  A three-year program in biblical studies that allows her to attend classes at night and work during the day fits the bill.  And things do hasten along, with graduation followed closely by marriage, the birth of her first child, and a call to India.

Brian and Ellen’s Story

  In the early 1970s, two children were born into two different households, 915 miles apart.  These two births had more dissimilarities than they did parallels:  One was a girl child, the other a boy; one was well under the average birth weight at two pounds, seven ounces, the other, above average birth weight; one came following a 26-week pregnancy, the other, later than expected.                                                                                                                              

Baby girl Ellen was a bright child, but there were quirks about her movement patterns that led to a diagnosis of cerebral palsy at age two.  Four siblings followed her into the family, all escaping the complications of premature birth that doctors cited as the cause of her disorder.

For most of her first year Ellen wore casts on both legs, and by kindergarten she was reading at a second grade level but couldn’t advance to first grade because she had seven surgeries scheduled for the following year – most of them heel-chord lengthening operations. 

By first grade, her parents had returned from Colorado to their home state of Minnesota where Ellen was the only special needs child enrolled in their small church school.  Struggling with a leg brace and orthopedic shoe hampered her efforts to keep up with her classmates physically, and she was often carted off campus for speech and physical therapies.  Introduce into the equation occasional episodes of spasticity which others sometimes misinterpreted as seizures, and Ellen would gradually develop a sense of separateness that followed her into high school.

Minnesota Miracle Worker

  You might expect a woman with twelve children to have a patient, motherly air about her, so no shock there.  You could also assume plenty of energy and common sense as essential to having a household of fourteen run like a handcrafted Swiss watch.  What does amaze is the sheer force of the drive to make a difference that pushed a reclusive and hurting Mary Jo Copeland out the front door of her family home and down the path of entrepreneurial benefaction at the age of 38, just as her last child was starting school.  Looking back at her troubled childhood, the surprise factor grows.

For the Love of Dakotah

The first two things you notice about Bill Pritchett are his sweet, cheerful manner and the twinkle dancing in his eyes.  Flash back to summer 2004, however, and you would have found him slumped in his easy chair in Guthrie, Oklahoma, trying to make sense of the death sentence he felt he’d been handed.  His wife DeAnna was taking good care of him, as usual, and he’d always figured that you’re way ahead of the game if you count your blessings, not your misfortunes.  But it’d been a rough couple of years and the ugly maw of depression had started to sink its teeth into him.