The first week of the year, my Seattle job finally moved to Bothell. Only a year and a half late. But this has meant I’m starting to feel the difference in the amount of free time I have, from not making that 1.5+ hour trek to the urban netherworld every day. It’s small, but significant. I’m starting to feel caught up. And like maybe I have some spare time, which I don’t think I’ve felt for a very long time. And this means I get to spend time doing some unnecessary things, thinks I just feel like doing. And this leads to the text of the Tobacco Incident.
My Great Grandma Josephine Cogan was born in 1895 (I think). By the time I was in grade school, she was elderly, and I was a little bit afraid of her. She was fat, and seemed big as a bred cow to me; she walked gradually with crutches, was hard of hearing, and smelled of too-old perfume. But her homesteading stories were spellbinding and endless.
My mom and grandma has the foresight to record her doing some interviews in 1978, when she must have been in her eighties. That was in those days when home cassette tape recorders were new fangled things. Those tapes sat in the bottom of my mother’s sewing drawer for several decades. A few years ago, the subject came up, and we decided to have the tapes converted to digital files so we could share them with the rest of the family.
I never listened to them all the way through. Until now. I decided to try transcribing them. It’s great to hear her voice, but I thought it would be nice to also have written down what she said. She had a fun dialect, which I remember well: a mix of Midwestern lilt, country farmer and compounded contractions, lisped by dentures and slowed by either old-age confusion or just a refusal to hurry. It’s funny to try to type it verbatim, MS Word keeps correcting me!
Here is her story of the Tobacco Incident, a well known tale to our family. Not a dramatic story, but well-told, in her own words. I think we have lost some of the art of storytelling in recent generations, we are too quick to get to the point; rather than weaving in non-critical details which round out the story and lead you down a meandering path to the end. In square brackets I’ve captured the quotes of whomever was prompting her. You can listen to it at the below audio file, as well.
[So you and John were close to the same age, and you used to play together a lot, right?] Well, I was older than John, and anything John could do, why I could do, too. Until we’d riding calves, he get throwed off… […and chew tobacco?]. Well, that was later. I was grown up then! [Would you tell us about that?]
Well, that was many years later. Dad had some land being broke up, with a steam engine, and steam engines have to have water to produce steam. So they had a water monkey, they called them, men that hauled the water in tanks. He had a big, heavy overcoat, ‘course this was in spring and it was cold, sometimes they’d have rainy weather. And he was Christ Hansen, he had ‘em haul that water, from the creek or something, down to the river or something like that. Well, he had a big long coat, he had it hanging in the shed, that was the shed we’d come into before coming into the house.
And in his pocket was a pound plug chewing tobacco, about so long. It was stuck in the pocket, but it was sticking out. We had to examine that! So, mama said, “leave it alone, that’s Christ’s property, don’t touch it!” Well, when she wasn’t watching, we took the butcher knife, we just cut off a little bit.
Well, about that time, it was time to go get the cows. So, we started over the hills, and we started chewing, too, right now, and before we got very far, why we were getting kinda sick, so we started chewing faster, and we swallowed all that! [Wasn’t it kind of sweet?] Yes! It tasted a little bit like licorice. I guess maybe that’s why [… maybe it was flavored with it?] I dunno, why, anyway, we chewed before we got to the cows, we got so sick we couldn’t see the cows!
But we managed, the cows knew they were supposed to come home, so they started, and we followed them. Brother John always had kind of a chicken stomach, everything would upset him. So he was so sick he laid down on the ground, and he’d heave and he’d heave. And I brought the cows home, while John took a shortcut for the house.
And mama met me at the door and she says, “you know what? Maybe John’s gonna die, because you went and gave him some of that tobacco!” Of course I was older than John, well, I was worried about John. [She thought she’d give you a good scare, huh?] Sure she did! [You were pretty sick yourself, eh?] Of course I was, I swallowed that stuff too! [Chuckles] Well, that was that.
The Collie Farm Blog 
February 12, 2012 at 1:11 am
What a gorgeous memory to preserve.
February 12, 2012 at 3:08 am
My sister talked my dad into writing his memoirs a couple of years ago. He stopped the story when he got it to the point of getting married to Mom. I have so enjoyed reading that. I think it’s very important to get stuff like this written down!
Thanks for sharing.
February 12, 2012 at 5:19 pm
So neat to hear an old story. Most of my elders are gone now, but will have to get a few to tell me stories about the old days….
Thanks for sharing.
February 12, 2012 at 9:36 pm
Congratulations on finally getting your job to a location where it works for you!
February 13, 2012 at 2:19 am
Listening to this left me missing my grandparents, who homesteaded across the Sound in Brinnon. Their dialect was similar, and they were of a similar age (1901 and 1903 respectively). You are so lucky to have stories you can listen to!
February 13, 2012 at 2:44 am
Oregon Sunshine- interesting, I wonder if the dialect and grammar was somewhat common at that time across Midwest and West? It’s certainly echoed in movies about the era, though one never knows how accurate they are. But I suppose most people were fortunate to go to school through eighth grade, many people probably had fewer years of school. I think maybe that is all my great grandma had, though I’m not certain. Her daughter, my grandma, had much cleaner grammar, but she was able to finish high school and had some college, enough to get a teaching certificate.
February 13, 2012 at 2:45 am
Sunny, thanks, it’s such a relief that the change is finally hear. I don’t think it’ll sink in fully for another couple of months, but I feel my life freeing up already!
February 14, 2012 at 3:55 am
The Midwestern dialect was prevalent in the Northwest. I know this, as some of my family had made their way to Olympia and settled by 1850. Both sides of my family have a very long history in the area, and yet my paternal grandfather was born in Missouri!
The difference in inflection and dialect came about much more recently, with the advent of tv and the popularity of Hollywood. Do you remember how Hallie Mills had an accent? And we used to associate that with New England? Yeah, well, that’s not so common any more.
I live in the Atlanta Metro now. When I moved here from the Portland Metro, I really expected to hear a lot of thick, Southern accents. The reality? Yeah, not so much. There is a little bit of an accent, but there was such a huge influx of people from up North (I refuse to say “Yankee”) that coupled with the Hollywood dialect now, there is very little accent here.
In short, with the way television has changed things, we all speak “Hollywood” now.
February 15, 2012 at 4:57 am
LOL, that’s funny Oregon Sunshine. I heard a radio interview recently on NPR, they were interviewing some kind of lingual expert on local dialects. They wanted to know if everyone has an accent, or just some people, with the assumption being that we don’t in Seattle, of course. 🙂 I think a Seattle NPR guy was saying how historically, he had always been told he had sounded “like the network” and had gotten TV/radio jobs on the East Coast that way, because he was perceived to not have an accent.
But the expert confirmed, everyone does have an accent. The interviewer asked her “do I have an accent?” She said yes, that she could tell the woman was from Seattle because she said the t’s in Seattle with a “D” sound. Haha, that sounded funny to me, I can’t imagine pronouncing Seattle with a “T” sound! 😀
March 3, 2012 at 4:57 am
CF, Great Grandma’s story sounds like something you’d find in a Willa Cather novel. What part of the mid-west was she from? It saddens me to think of how much human experience is lost each time an old person passes. I’ve always thought it would make a great sci-fi short story where a scientist creates a machine that would deprogram all life experience from a person on his or her deathbed, collate, arrange chronologically and save that information for the generations that follow. Call it the “Biography Machine,” perhaps? Such experiences as G Grandma’s are invaluable, especially to the surviving generations of family. It is a good thing you do in saving those those stories and experiences, transcribing the oral to the written.
I have a friend in E. WA. who was born in 1916, will be 96 the thirteenth of this month. She grew up on the Waterville plateau on a dry-land wheat farm, one of five girls (her maiden name was Baumgartner; she and her sisters were called “Bummie’s Boys.”) Her stories are like “The Tobacco Incident.” When I was in my late teens and going through a period of rebellion, for two months she took me in, gave me free room and board and paid me a daily wage to work in her orchard. As you can imagine, this old pioneer lady has a special place in my heart. Over the years I have been fortunate to know some remarkable old men and learn from them. I often thought I should write their stories: “The Old Men in my Life.” My pioneer friend would be the third “man.”
Each time I visit her, I try to ask a question or two that will get me close to her–for lack of a better term–philosophy of life, religious views, her values, but she is pretty tight-lipped about her personal feelings. We have exchanged countless letters over the years, two or three a month sometimes. I have saved them all, stacks and stacks. The topics are mostly idle conversation: her garden (she has already planted her tomato seeds for this year’s garden), the weather, family news…. But every once in a while she’ll make a statement or let drop an opinion that gives me a peek into her thoughts and character. One day I hope to arrange all her correspondence chronologically and sometime later sift through it all and try to put together a profile that captures the essence of who she is. A few years back she had a stroke and her letters changed: more misspellings (she only has an eighth education), disconnected thoughts, sentences that seem to have holes in them. The last three letters I received were addressed to “Jerry” instead of Terry and my last name has been subject to a variety of spellings the past couple of years. This wonderful lady has lived a “hard knock” life but a life ever so rich in experience. Her story(s), like your Great Grandmother’s, needs to be told, transcribed, and preserved.
Thanks for sharing. TMJ
March 3, 2012 at 3:44 pm
TMJ, ok, first, I have to pause to say “What!?! You were a rebellious teenager?” It reminds me of those ads in the backs of magazines for farms where you can send errant teens to straighten them up with good hard work and real life! 😀
Oh, I do hope you get to transcribe some of this! What a treasure.
I am 3/4 of the way through our recordings of our GG. The funny thing about these, and maybe it’s true of everybody, is she didn’t think her life was extraordinary. So it was hard for her interviewers to get her to elaborate much. She had kept daily diaries most of her life, too; but I remember when we went though them after she died, there were just SO many of them. And 90% of them just had descriptions of the weather, mundane things they did, what they ate for dinner (sounds like Facebook, eh?) that they weren’t deemed worth keeping. I’m sure buried in those thousands of pages were meaty stories, but it would have taken a lot of reading to unearth them.
She was born in Nebaska, then later lived in both South and North Dakota.
March 3, 2012 at 5:00 pm
CF…Shhhhhhhh! Yeah, for a while I was NCWashington’s “Rebel without a Cause” I was used to hard work already, so that wouldn’t have straightened me out. I just had to get away from my parents for a spell. Certainly nothing unusual about that.
Re: life stories. There’s not a soul who goes through this vale of tears without collecting a story or two. I firmly believe each human being is a book waiting to be written. I guess that’s why some of my favorite books and stories are memoirs. Other people’s lives are so interesting….
My old pioneer friend would be one to say the same thing, that there wasn’t much extraordinary about her life, and I would just sit there and shake my head as I looked at her right hand which is missing two fingers. (She lost them to a table saw a few years back when she was helping a lady cut a “bord.” She searched in the sawdust for her severed digits, could only find one, which Drs. could not reattach. She has it saved in a jar of formaldehyde. “Let me see, it Dorothy.” ‘NO! You’re not going to see it. Nobody is until they put it in my coffin with me!” And I could go on and on about her “ordinary” life….) TMJ