Life Story

I was born July 5 1932 in Saint Joseph hospital in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and named Michael Joseph Felgen. My father, Erwin George Felgen, worked for Bell Telephone as a lineman–a pole climber–but also played saxaphone well enough to play in a band. His father Michael Felgen, whom I was named after, immigrated from Luxemburg around 1880 and homesteaded in Barnum, a small town in northern Minneasota. Above is a picture of him on his buckboard taken in the 1800’s when he was in his thirties and another of him and his wife (my grandmother)in 1938 . They were in their eightes then.

My mother, Kathleen Mary Rager, who was his third wife, also worked for Bell Telephone as a telephone operator. She was 26 when I was born. Her family, going back to at least 1805, was from Coshocton, Ohio. Coming from a farming family, she had only one year of High School. Above is a picture of my mother. I don’t know when or where it was taken.

My sister Jacqueline was born 14 months later. When I was three we moved to Geneseo Illinois, then shortly after, my father and mother purchased a night club outside of Brainerd, Minnesota and named it the Lonesome Pine Nightclub. There was a large dance floor containing a player piano and a slot machine. Once in a while my sister and I were given a few coins to play the slot machine, something we always looked forward to.

Both of my parents were severe disciplinarians, not unusual for the times (spare the rod and spoil the child) but my reaction was to spend a lot of time outdoors, a good bit of it in the top of a tree. I loved the wind that swayed the top of the trees.

When I was five my parents separated. As settlement my mother got the nightclub.She continued to run it, now as a restaurant. In 1938 she put it up for sale but before the sale was complete the nightclub burned to the ground–see the newspaper accounts of both:

After the night club burned my mother moved us to a small resort outside of Merrifield MN, close to Brainard. She became ill and was unable to work and started to receive welfare (we were on welfare most of the time until I completedf High School).We lived in a tent during the summer and moved into a small house during the winter when we were the only people living there other than the owners.

When I turned seven I entered first grade. The school was a typical one-room country school and it was located a long country mile from the resort. I went barefoot all summer, even going to school barefoot until the first snowfall. I remember one time that it snowed while I was in school so had to walk home barefoot through the snow. Then the first really traumatic event of my life happened. My mother became ill enough that she sent my sister and I to live with her relatives. I ended up living with my uncle Roy and aunt Pearl in their home outside of Minneapolis. They had two children of their own, Robert, one year younger than me, and Carolyn, six years younger. I stayed with them until I was nine, then returned to live with my mother who rented an apartment in Minneapolis and worked as a telephone operator. This was 1941. On December 7th, my mother sent me down to the store to buy a bottle of milk. Everyone in the store was listening to the radio as the news about Pearl Harbor was broadcast. My father, as I later learned, was at Pearl Harbor working as a telephone repairman. He was awarded a citation for repairing overhead telephone lines while the Japanese were strafing.

Around 9 years old my interest in science, nature, and model airplane building began. My mother would give me a quarter for lunch. With that I could buy a 10 cent model airplane, a 10 cent hamburger, and a 5 cent big dill pickle from a barrel. Typically, I would buy a model of a Japanese Zero fighter or a German Stuka dive bomber. I would quickly build them (not very well), light their tails on fire, and throw them off of our second story balcony, making machine gun sounds as they crashed to the ground. I and my friends also carved pistols from orange crate wood, our favorite being the German Luger because we thought it looked really cool.

At age 10 I became a paper boy, delivering morning, evening, and Sunday papers for about $4 to $5 a week. My mother took the money and used it to buy clothes for me. When I turned 12, two traumas happened.

Our original apartment building had been in a four-alarm fire so we were forced to move to another–I panicked for years when I heard a fire siren. In the back of the building was the remains of another with just the covered basement still there. It was a haven for rats because people threw their trash into the basement. I have a vivid memory of getting up one morning to start my paper route and seeing a rat trying to crawl out of a garbage can. I raced over, grabbed the garbage can cover and trapped the rat between the cover and the garbage can, then tried to reach something to hit him with. The only thing I could reach was a dried slice of bread. I kept hitting him with the bread until he at least became unconscious. Whether he died or not, I don’t know.

The next huge trauma was that I was sent to live with an uncle and aunt living on a simple dairy farm in central Wisconsin. 

The farm had no electricity or running water. Food was cooked on a wood-burning stove. Their home was heated with a stove in the living room using either wood or coal. Without electricity we milked by hand. I got to milk three of them. My uncle would wake me at 4:30 so I could jump into my clothes and run down to the barn. My bedroom was on the second floor and, in the winter, was heated only by the kitchen stove pipe running through it. Their home was not insulated so, in the winter, I would often wake to snow inside my bedroom under the window. I would jump out of all the blankets piled on my bed, run over to the stovepipe and tie my long-johns around it, then jump back under the covers. When the long-johns were warmed up, I would again jump out of bed and into the long-johns, finish getting dressed and then run down to the barn and cuddle in the haunch of the cow I was milking. The cow’s haunch was wonderfully warm. The first year my uncle plowed with a horse and tried to harvest using a scythe. He quickly invested in a small tractor. Finally the REA (the Rural Electrification Administration) installed electric poles and we had power. No more hand milking, no more kerosene lanterns for light, no more battery powered radio. The telephone was still a party line meaning everyone’s phone rang when anyone called and you could pick up your phone and listen in–very impolite.

When I turned 14 I came down with scarlet fever and became seriously ill. My mother now was well enough to bring my sister and I back to live with her, renting a small apartment in Wisconsin Rapids, a small town in central Wisconsin. She wasn’t well enought to work and so we lived on welfare, at that time called “being on relief”. My scarlet fever turned into rheumatic fever and I was confined to bed for over a year. Rheumatic fever was often fatal and, at one point, I received the last rites as I was close to death. Penicillin, invented during the war, saved my life.