Sigurd's Childhood and Youth

(continued)

In the summer of 1909 L.J. Olson became the state missionary for the Swedish Conference of the Wisconsin State Baptist Convention, and the Olsons moved to the north central Wisconsin village of Prentice. A logging town established along the Jump River in 1884, Prentice had already seen boom and bust. By the time the Olsons arrived the great pine and hemlock forests had been logged and burned, and only a few isolated white pines and scattered stands of hemlock remained. Farmers, many of them immigrants beginning new lives, were moving in and clearing the the land of stumps and slashings, enticed by cheap prices and false promises of good soil. "It must have seemed a raw and primitive place to mother and dad," Sigurd later said, "but to me it was beautiful and exciting."

It was at Prentice that Sigurd did his first hunting and trout fishing, and it was at Prentice that his grandmother Anna Cederholm began to play an especially important role in his life. She had lived with Sigurd's family since her husband had died in 1906, and this small, straight-backed pioneer woman was the only one in the family who understood Sigurd's passion for the outdoors. After a successful trout fishing trip, Sigurd would race back to show off his catch to his grandmother. He would tell her all about the creek he fished and about each fish he caught, and she would listen attentively, exclaiming over his victories and sympathizing when he told her about the ones that got away. Speaking in her native Swedish (Sigurd himself learned Swedish before English), she told him that trout were like flowers, the most beautiful fish in the world, and as she and Sigurd washed his catch, she would point out the colorful spots along the sides of the fish, glistening in the light. The red spots were rubies, she would say, the green spots emeralds, and the black spots diamonds. Then she would sprinkle the trout with flour and salt, and lay them side by side in a sizzling pan. When the tails had curled and the skins turned golden she would say, "Nu lilla Sigurd, skall vi festa"—"Now, little Sigurd, we shall feast." Then they would sit down at the table "and talk of robins and spring and the eternal joy of fishing." Sigurd would always remember his grandmother with great fondness: "I loved her as only a small boy can, for she was a partner of the spirit."