Stearns County, Minnesota | Little papa - 3/10/2024 21:00 Interesting. So did your families speak the low German tongue. When I entered kindergarten in 59 I had a hard time speaking English. My parents spoke low German and my grandmother lived in a smaller house on the farm I grew up on and I would go there daily and she also only spoke low German to me. I still can speak it some and enjoy visiting with some of the older folks in the nursing home and speaking with low German with them. Their eyes perk up and a smile appears. Even near their last days the old language seems to reappear. Both my parents talked Low German and I can completely understand the language, but I am not fluent in it anymore. My oldest sister, who was 6 years older than me, could not speak English, when she started school. This was a country school, and the teacher sent her home for 6 weeks, and my folks had to talk English, before they would let her come back to school. I started school in 1942, first grade. We had been in Minnesota, but moved back over the line into Iowa, in 1943. It was also a country school there, and several years later, myself and my younger brother were in school. At recess time, outside, we started talking German. The teacher heard us and pulled us inside, and forbade us to talk German, which was against her rules. We had to write the sentence, " I will not talk German in school", 50 times. From then on, my folks pretty much talked English to us as children. The other thing that changed German speaking, at that time, was World War II. They did away with all German services in our church, and most of the people started speaking English from then on. |
150th anniversary
