It’s coming up on the last part of August, and naturally my thoughts turn to my folks, Norman and Evie Busk. My dad was born on August 21 1916; my mother on August 30, 2014. When it came time to set a date for their wedding, she didn’t want to be called a “cradle robber” and refused to marry him while he was still a teenager. As a result, they married on August 24, 1936—three days after he turned twenty.
My father grew up in an entirely dysfunctional family. Mary and Henry Busk from Marvin, South Dakota, were not nice people. On the other hand, the Andersons—Cecelia and A.G, from Summit, South Dakota, ten miles away—were wonderfully normal.
I’m not sure exactly how my parents met. They didn’t go to school together because they were from different towns. My father graduated from high school and did a year of normal school before going back home determined to be a farmer because being a teacher didn’t pay enough to raise a family. My mother came down with rheumatic fever in seventh grade, so she had to repeat the same grade the following year. That was enough of that. At age fourteen, she dropped out of school and went to Minneapolis where she went to work as a maid caring for the invalid wife of the man who drew the Red Ryder comics.
Eventually Norman and Evie did meet, and when my father encountered a normal at age eighteen, he was smart enough to grab hold of it and hang on for dear life. The way Grandpa Anderson liked to tell it, originally my father came to their house courting one of my mother’s two younger sisters. “I told him, Norman, in this house we eat the old bread first, and that’s how he ended up with your mother.”
However that happened, they were a matched pair in a marriage that lasted for sixty-eight years. I heard them quarrel exactly once. After being pregnant nine times and giving birth to seven children over the course of twenty years, Evie allowed as how it was time my father did something about that. He demurred. The next thing I knew, our mother had piled the five kids remaining at home into her Dodge Coronet, and off we went—home to her mother IN SOUTH DAKOTA!
My father got the message. Soon after we left town, he went to see Dr. Saba who performed the “snip-snip.” My father was in the contracting business at the time, and when the procedure was over, he asked if there was anything he should avoid doing. “Just take it easy,” Dr. Saba told him.
My father, and his partner, Lloyd Coon, were in the process of remodeling a house at the time, and they were about to lay tile. As far as my dad was concerned, laying tile was easy. When he ended up with an unfortunate and spectacular case of swelling, he went back to Dr. Saba who looked at him and said, “My, God, man. What have you been doing? Crawling around on your hands and knees?” Yup. My dad’s idea of what was easy and Dr. Saba’s were worlds apart.
My mother may have been in a huff when we left for South Dakota, but once we got there, it was a good thing because Grandma Anderson’s health was failing. We ended up staying longer than we would have otherwise. Meanwhile, back in Bisbee, while working on another job, my father was injured when a scaffold broke, leaving him on crutches with two broken heels. When he learned that Grandma Anderson had passed away, he caught a train from Benson to South Dakota. The train wasn’t supposed to stop in Summit, but when they got there, the conductor pulled the emergency brake and let my dad get off. That trip home is the only one I ever remember where my mother was at the wheel while my father was in Evie’s usual co-pilot’s seat managing the road atlas.
My mother was a bit of a tomboy growing up and loved working with tools with her dad. When there were jobs to be done at our house, Evie wasn’t afraid of putting on a pair of coveralls and going to work. When a remodeling job on our Yuma Trail house was slow getting off the ground, she enlisted my younger brother one day when he came home from KINDERGARTEN!! Armed with a crowbar and a sledge hammer, the two of them proceeded to take down the block wall separating the living room from the sun room. That night when my dad came home for supper (We had suppers not dinners!) that long-delayed remodeling job was officially underway. When my mother turned seventy she announced that she was no longer going to help him with roofing. And around that same time, when they were about to leave on a cruise and their passports ended up locked in the garage? She was the one who figured out how to take the garage door off its hinges to retrieve those necessary documents.
Some of my favorite memories from growing up stem from all nine of us sitting around the gray Formica kitchen table eating the evening meals my mother created from scratch each day, using her trusty pressure cooker. The three boys sat on a bench with their backs to the windows, the three girls sat on chairs on the far side of the table facing the boys, with the baby, Janie, in a high chair next to Evie’s end of the table. During those meals there was lots of joking and laughter going on, but there was also a lot of incidental education.
Our father was interested in all kinds of things and he liked to hold forth during those evening meals. It was from him telling us about Pompeii that I first heard the term pyroclastic blast which didn’t resurface in my life until Mt. St. Helens blew her stack decades later. Norman talked about the ancient pyramids and other structures around the world that couldn’t have been built without the help of outside architectural and astronomical knowledge from some alien source. And he was full of stories about the commonalities in world-wide folklore. Every culture it seems has some legend featuring the Great Flood. Oh, and did I happen to mention that as a youth, my father was tossed out of the Lutheran church back home in Marvin because when the Bible said Ezekiel saw a wheel “way up in the middle of the air,” what he was seeing really was a wheel and most likely a UFO.
For their 50th wedding anniversary, the folks decided to spend their kids’ inheritance by partying in a big way. They celebrated by chartering three busses and took three loads of friends and relations on a grand tour of northern Arizona, including the Grand Canyon, the Painted Desert, Meteor Crater, and the Petrified Forest.
On the occasion of their 60th anniversary, it was just our family, and we celebrated in a small reception room at a hotel in Bisbee. It was the last time all seven of us were together since our brother Jim passed away suddenly from an undiagnosed heart ailment shortly thereafter. But that night we sat around singing all the songs Evie had taught us—Sweet Violets, Vivi La Cookery Maid, The Old Pine Tree–while we were on long road trips or cleaning house or doing the dishes.
By the way, our father never participated in those singalongs. As my brother, Arlan, once said, “There are 88 keys on the piano, and Daddy sings in the cracks.” Norman Busk may have created great batches of hot cereal for school-year breakfasts, but he couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.
But back to that 60th anniversary party. As Bill and I were leaving and walking back to our car, he asked, “How did all of you learn to sign in harmony?” I turned to him in astonishment and asked, “Doesn’t everybody?” Evidently not, and the reason we did? That was entirely due to Evelyn Anderson Busk who never had a formal music lesson in her life!
So this coming week, as the days tick off my parents’ two birthdays and their wedding anniversary, I’ll be thinking about Norman and Evie Busk, all the while being grateful for the wonderful life they gave me.
I’m willing to bet some of you will be too.