Intermission

Hi! This is Laurel writing now, Carl’s daughter. It has been suggested that I elaborate on my reasons for starting this blog, which isn’t a blog in the usual sense of the word.

My dad left several notebooks that he wrote during his retirement years detailing his recollections of growing up in a small Iowa town called Gowrie during the Depression. I started with two shorter essays, “Barney and Birdie” and “The Barn.” The entries that comprise “My Life in the Little Brown House” will be many greater in number. The original handwritten manuscript is 60 pages long, and each post covers 2 to 4 pages.

After “My Life in the Little Brown House” will come “Recollections of My Life” which fills up 4 notebooks, plus 5 pages of a fifth. Then there is “Education” which runs about 77 or 78 handwritten pages (there is a page 76a written between pages 76 and 77 — C.P. generally wrote on only the right hand page).

Then, if I want to continue, I have family letters going back to the 1970s that he sent to his brothers and sisters, as well as some letters he wrote to his parents in the 1940s after he moved to California. There are also other family letters, some written in Swedish that were translated by one of my grandmother’s sisters.

My motivation for launching on this project is twofold. First, I think his surviving siblings may like to read these reminiscences for the memories they bring back, and their children (my cousins) may find them of interest as well, for the family lore. Second, I can’t help but wonder that some academic might find them useful as original source material, kind of like an oral history only written, not spoken. I figure that by posting this material, over time it will percolate through the interwebs to find interested readers.

A couple of additional notes: First, the images included in the posts are, with few exceptions, not original source material. They are images I found on the web that, I hope, illustrate with some degree of accuracy items mentioned in the posts. Second, posts after October 18, 2009, include more paragraph breaks, at my sister Palma’s suggestion.