Prairie Lights: Prairie Tribute

Alvin Reinhold Just was born 3.10.1911 in rural McIntosh County, ND. The 3rd child, 2nd son of Karl and Katharina (Meidinger) Just, Uncle Reinhold, would have been 100-yrs-old this week. I write this to honor a most beloved man on the centennial of his birth.

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When I was a girl on our farm in North Dakota, I lived with my parents and four siblings, wrapped in the arms of a loving family.

Then, there was my “bonus” family a ½ mile to the west where Uncle Reinhold, Aunt Lydia and their three sons farmed. Their only daughter died at birth in 1941 so I got to be “their girl”. Uncle Reinhold and Aunt Lydia were my Godparents and a favorite aunt and uncle to all of us.

Growing up in that place and time, I felt loved and nurtured, guided with a gentle hand as I learned, by example, about the satisfaction that comes from hard work, about acting with integrity, about family values and about how to live a moral life.

Our families, with Uncle Ephraim, Aunt Marion and their family another two miles south, were an extension of each other. Helping one another in the planting/harvest cycle, butchering and sausage making, attending church events….the families seemed one. Memories of the many holiday meals together as I was growing up kept me from despair when I left the fold and moved away. Leaving always makes a person value the things we took for granted before we knew better.

My father, Julius, was just three years younger, but Uncle Reinhold always seemed somehow ‘the elder,” for more than chronological reasons.

Maybe it was because he was the first one to leave his family of origin, a sad, direction-less group of orphans in McIntosh County, held hostage by an angry stepfather and a culture that discouraged challenging the patriarchal system.

Karl and Katharina with (from left) Ephraim, Adam, Aldina, Reinhold, Julius

Uncle Reinhold was about 12-yrs-old in 1923 when the family began to unravel. His father, Karl, and three little sisters died within days of one another due to Influenza and a raging Diphtheria epidemic. As if that wasn’t enough for the remaining six children to cope with, their mother, Katharina, overwhelmed with grief and struggling to keep the family farm afloat, married their Uncle Christof. The uncle was carrying his own unspeakable grief having lost his wife, Christina (sister to their father Karl) and their three sons in the same ruthless epidemic.
Katharina gave birth to a boy, Edwin, in November 1925 and died doing so. Reinhold was 14-years-old. The surviving children, ages 2 – 16 were left to cope in an environment so dynamically different from their early years with Karl and Katharina that they simply operated in survival mode. The stepfather, hardened by the tragedy of his own life, turned his anger toward his stepsons. There were no societal advocates for children in the 1920’s so they could only endure. Uncle Reinhold hated injustice and often took the verbal and physical blows intended for the others. It hardened him to the outside world while the tender inner part of his soul was somehow compartmentalized until it was safe to expose it.

Karl and Katharina (Meidinger) Just homestead, rural Zeeland, McIntosh Cty, ND

Life for Uncle Reinhold and his siblings was a kind of war zone. Growing up, we children heard the cruel stepfather stories. What the brothers couldn’t bring themselves to share – it was just too painful – was the loneliness and grief they never fully processed over the loss of what was a happy early childhood with parents who loved their children and each other. Parents who were tender and demonstrative, who sang and laughed and enjoyed life and each other. After 1925 it was only a painful memory.
Psychologists of today would have a laundry list of impairments that our parent’s childhood would have caused for them but on that sad homestead in McIntosh County, there was no time to bleed. Survival was the only goal.
Call it luck, or more likely a heavenly guided hand, one day Uncle Reinhold had his fill of abuse and, as he told it, without much forethought he simply mounted his horse and left home with only the clothes on his back. He was 21-years-old and chose emancipation rather than wait for the stepfather to find a moral code and help his stepson get established with some acreage, machinery and livestock, as was the tradition in our Germans from Russia culture.

That act of courage in 1932 shaped the future of all the “Berlin” Just descendants. We owe a debt of gratitude to our Uncle Reinhold for breaking out of the cycle of abuse. For taking a stand, setting an example and paving the way for two more brothers, Julius and Ephraim to leave. We cousins often marvel about the statistics declaring that abuse breeds abuse. We children never encountered it. That is a tribute to our fathers’ early exposure to Karl and Katharina's happy marriage, to loving parenting, and to their own fine marital choices.

Uncle Reinhold found employment working for Friedrich and Christina (Weisser) Eckman, emigrants to McIntosh Country from Kassel, in South Russia. Both sets of his grandparents emigrated from the same village many years earlier. The Eckman family took Uncle Reinhold in to their home and the healing of his soul began.

Uncle Reinhold fell hard for their daughter, Lydia. They married in September of 1933, when he was 22 and she was 19, and for the next 70 years he never wavered in his devotion to her.

The new couple needed to be on their own. The Great Depression was in full swing and unemployment high. Drought conditions made cattle feed scarce and good farming acreage was hard to find. Uncle Reinhold took a wagon and a team of horses 70 miles east to LaMoure County to find hay for cattle feed and to look up a relative who had taken his family to farm in that area.

Once during a visit with him, Uncle Reinhold shared his memory of that trip. “I had never been out of McIntosh County and I didn’t speak English very well. I think I had a quarter or two in my pocket so I couldn’t afford a place to stay. I camped out under the stars that first night. I was so lonely for Lydia, for my parents and my siblings that I cried myself to sleep.”

Needless to say, that first trip to LaMoure County altered the rest of his life – and ours. Aunt Lydia and Uncle Reinhold found some acreage to rent near Cottonwood Lake, the first of several rented farmsteads, until they saved enough to make a down payment on the old Ness farm, ½ mile northwest of Berlin. When I asked him why they bought that farm, he replied, “So our children could walk to school.” Such was their desire to ensure a better life for their descendants.

Lydia with Clarence and Dennis, late 1930's

Uncle Reinhold encouraged his brothers, Ephraim and Julius, to leave McIntosh County, while scouting land for them to purchase. By 1944, the three brothers and their families were settled in close proximity of one another.

Over the decades, frugality, making-do, leaps-of-faith, and a shared goal of financial independence made success a reality for Uncle Reinhold and Aunt Lydia. She worked as hard as he did. He always valued her many talents and they made most decisions jointly. My generation pointed to them as the standard for a good marriage. Theirs was a mixture of loyalty, endearment, acceptance and genuine caring. I delighted in watching them interact and stay the course together and I never tired of their playful banter with one another.

Lydia with Harold 1945

They delighted in their sons and daughters-in-law, and cherished their grandchildren. All nieces and nephews were special. I kept my role as “their girl” through my adulthood and I always felt their unconditional love. All of us owe Uncle Reinhold a debt of thanks for his courage that day in 1932. His decision to change the course of his life altered our future as well. He would be uncomfortable with any kind of “hero” status. But for me, Uncle Reinhold will always be a hero.