My father has always been a snappy dresser. He thought nothing of pairing a garish paisley tie with a striped shirt. Pull up his suit pants and you might discover lime green socks hiding underneath like an obnoxious polka band that you can’t quite ignore. Wore a suit everyday to work and belted slacks in between. Like I said, snappy.
Karl Frederick Wojahn was born in 1926, the son of a German immigrant. My grandfather Emil had done well farming the Minnesota earth with his brothers and, after marrying, took a job at a brewery earning a good wage and plenty of free thirst-quenching beer on every shift. But the call to work the land was in his blood. So, in the 30’s Emil moved the family to just outside tiny Wibaux, Montana. Know it? I thought not. Wibaux (pronounced Wee-bow) is the easternmost town in the state. Population under 600, not counting the cows. Its heyday was probably the late 1880‘s as a way station for large cattle drives and for a legendary incident that is said to have bestowed the nickname “Old Four Eyes” on Teddy Roosevelt, who had just moved to the Badlands from New York.
My grandfather bought a homestead in Wibaux and launched a small family farm. Despite most all the good land having been previously snapped up, he made a go of it. Of course, the decade brought a full order of biblical-scale disasters complete with the dustbowl, drought and grasshoppers. They had to give up the farm. My dad says he can remember as if it were yesterday the auction and the last item to go, the family tractor, its loss the symbol of his father’s wayward choice and misfortune.
The family moved west to Oregon, acquired some acres in the lush Willamette Valley and began again. Emil built a house and finally found his farming niche in the green, moist land of Hillsboro, where young Karl attended Hill High School.
Everyone has an older relative with stories of hardship unappreciated by the younger generations. “You kids today have it so easy! I had to walk three miles in the snow to school and back - uphill both ways!” Karl has a story like this. But it’s about clothes. He tells of how his family was able to afford for him only two pairs of pants per school year. Each fall, my grandfather would take my dad to buy new pants, always corduroys. Dad loved how the new fabric “whisk-whisked” as he walked. He would wear one pair while the other was in the wash. Worn thin and threadbare come June, the tradition would be repeated each September. My dad never wore any other pants to school but those corduroys. And I never thought too much about it. After all, they were a frugal, depression era, dustbowl-suffering, farming family.
But I learned yesterday the “rest of the story”.
The reason my father always wore cords to school wasn’t because of the comforting, familiar sound. It was because he refused to wear jeans, which were the trousers of choice for the farm kids at Hill High. Blue jeans stood for helplessness against the elements. Blue jeans meant struggling families, dreams lost and buried in the dust. Blue jeans meant the heartache of beloved loyal tractors removed from your own property by strangers at public auction. Blue jeans represented everything my dad, deep inside his 14 year old heart, didn’t want to be. He loved his father but had already made a silent vow never to become a farmer himself. Karl Frederick Wojahn would wear cords instead of blue jeans. And to this day, at 85 years old, he always has.
A 70-plus-year-long silent commitment to something better. Pretty impressive.
