I've done all that I need to do here...

“I’ve done all that I need to do here”

Celebrating Julius Andreas Just on Father’s Day, 2014

On May 3, 1914, just a few months before shots rang out in Austria triggering the “war to end all wars,” commonly  known as World War I, a boy, the 5^th child, 4^th son was born to Karl and Katharina (Meidinger) Just in a little house on Karl Just’s rocky homestead in McIntosh County, North Dakota.

Named Julius Andreas, he would soon be followed by four more sisters.  Large families were common in that era and Karl and Katharina considered each child a gift.

Ephraim on Karl's lap, Adam, Aldina, Reinhold and Julius on Katharina's lap 1914

An opportunity to move to a larger farm a few miles closer to the grain elevators and train station at Zeeland, North Dakota, came in March 1920. The idea of avoiding rolling hills when hauling grain to market with a team of horses had great appeal to Karl and Katharina.

House on new Just Farm  1920

Julius was just about six-years-old and remembered the move well. His father, Karl, drove their Overland Touring Car while the older boys, eleven-year-old Adam and nine-year-old Reinhold walked the five miles to the new farm, herding the cattle to their new home. Seven-year-old Ephraim was in charge of the cat and the little girls - four-year-old Eva and three-year-old Katharina.  Almost twelve-year-old Aldina was in charge of two month old Elizabeth. Julius didn’t remember what his job was. Neighbors helped with the move and neighbor ladies had the big house warm and food ready when they arrived at their new farm.

 According to Julius, everyone lived and worked in harmony and they were a happy family.  He remembered his mother had a beautiful voice. She sang and played the organ and when neighbors and family visited, group singing was common.  Katharina had earned a teaching certificate and taught school before she married Karl Just. Religious and secular education for her children was important to her. Julius remembered a contented household where friends and family often visited. Karl and Katharina always took their turn hosting the local teacher. Julius remembered how much his mother enjoyed the company of another adult woman.

The new farm was a financial struggle. The house and the farm buildings were not in the condition they expected. A new furnace and building improvements began immediately. The two bottom plow and ten foot drill and other machinery they brought to the new farm were not sufficient to handle more acreage. Julius remembered that his father was a very kind and quiet person who was well respected in the community. One day little Julius was riding on the mower with his father at a section of rented hay land when they had to stop to change the sickle. In the process, Julius cut his finger. In an interview seventy-three years later, Julius could still remember how concerned his father was – how bad he felt - as he made a makeshift bandage to cover the wound.

The move meant a new school in Frieda Township. Julius remembered that they went to school in a sleigh pulled by horses. There was a barn at the school site to house the horses during school hours. A school year was seven months and regularly attended unless the student was needed to plant or harvest the crop. Many boys, including the Just boys missed school to take care of chores at home.

Julius 4th from right

The family continued to worship at their little Friedens Gemeinde (Peace Lutheran) Church even though they were now closer to St Andrew’s, the “mother” church organized in 1893 by Julius’s Meidinger and Just grandparents and where his parents, Karl and Katharina, were the first to be married in 1907, in the newly erected tall, white Carpenter Gothic style church that stands today as a “Beacon on the Prairie.”

Karl and Katharina on their wedding day, June 1907

Life moved on in harmony and happiness until the winter of 1922 – 23. Diptheria, a deadly respiratory infection was epidemic and four of the children were placed under the care of the local physician. Julius, Eva, Katharina and Elizabeth were terribly ill with the dreaded disease. Katharina’s niece, Katie, came to help the exhausted mother care for her sick children but Dr. Grace sent her home because he feared the newly married Katie could be pregnant and could become ill with the disease. The father, Karl, was also on bed rest, as he was many winters because of a weak heart and lungs resulting from an accident he had as a young man with a runaway wagon and team of horses.

 It was a cold, hard winter and the big house was drafty. They were almost out of coal. Karl got up from his sickbed, got dressed and announced he was going the sixteen miles to Zeeland to get a load of coal. Katharina protested saying that she was certain his younger brother, Jacob, could do it. But Karl would not hear of it and set off for town.

Underestimating his weak condition, Karl collapsed and was brought home by neighbors. Dr Grace examined him and announced to Katharina that Karl’s heart was weak and he likely would not survive. Overwrought, Katharina implored Karl to get well saying, “I cannot run this farm by myself. I cannot raise these children by myself!” Karl opened his eyes, took her hand, and said, “I’ll take some with me.”

Karl died on February 12, 1923. He had just turned thirty-eight-years-old.  Eva died on February 14, Katharina and Elizabeth died on the 19^th and 20^th. Karl took three of the children with him. Julius remembered waking up one morning, seeing sunshine and getting up from his sick bed at some point in the middle of all the illness and death. He walked into the parlor where people were assembled near two of his sisters laid out in caskets. While he was deliriously ill, he had lost a parent and three siblings. It didn’t stop there. The same epidemic claimed Julius’s Aunt Christina Just Thurn and her sons, Edwin, Julius and Jacob in those same days.

Karl Just cemetery marker.
Children each have granite markers  with their initials
at the foot of the grave.

The winter weather was unrelenting. Karl and Eva were buried at tiny Friedens Cemetery in one coffin. When Katharina and Elizabeth died a few days later, the grave diggers exhumed the coffin holding Karl and Eva and dug into the earth horizontally below the frost line to create a grave for the other two girls who were buried together in one wooden coffin. 

The sad family continued on. Julius remembered that sometimes he and his brother, Ephraim, would lie together under a feather comforter while their mother sang the lullaby, “Müde bin ich, geh zur ruh” Translated it means: “Weary am I, to Rest I Must Go”. Years later Julius would sing that same lullaby to his grandchildren. Still later, Julius’s granddaughter, Katharina, sang it in his honor at his funeral.

One night young Julius couldn’t sleep and walking into the kitchen of the big house, discovered his mother filling Easter Baskets for the children. Even in her sorrow, Katharina tried to keep life normal for her remaining children.

Taking care of the six surviving children and a farm with considerable acreage was a daunting undertaking. Katharina was able to lease some of the land to neighbors. Reinhold and Adam did most of the remaining farm work and the neighbors helped plant and harvest the rest of the acreage. Katharina’s father and father-in-law hired farm hands to help out. 

  

In November, 1925, Katharina Meidinger Just, since remarried, died while giving birth to her tenth child. She joined Karl, Eve, Katharina and Elizabeth in tiny Friedens Lutheran Cemetery, leaving her sixteen-year-old daughter, Aldina, to care for the remaining children. The infant son, Edwin, survived and was raised by his maternal uncle and aunt.

Everyone soldiered on. Julius, a good student, attended eight grades at Frieda School #2. In the eighth grade he achieved the highest math score in the county and was recommended by the McIntosh County Superintendent of Schools to attend high school. But Julius’s stepfather determined his fate and deemed that “Julius does not need a high school education to be a farmer,” – thereby refusing to fund the expense of room and board at the nearest high school. It is likely that, had she been alive, Katharina would have felt differently.

Ephraim, unknown friend, Julius and Adam

Julius with pets

Young Julius

Julius and his brothers worked for their stepfather on the family farm and on the stepfather’s acreage for the next many years until each emancipated at age twenty-one.  The happiness and harmony of their early years with Karl and Katharina never returned. Life with their stepfather was a struggle and unrewarding.  Their oldest sister, Aldina, took care of the garden, laundry, housekeeping and cooking while helping to raise the youngest sister, Marie, who was born just a year before her father and sisters died. 

Aldina and Marie 1931

Julius became Aldina’s right hand, carrying in the water, carrying out the slop and helping with the gardening and the milking as well as taking his turn with field work.  

Aldina Just 1940's

In later years, Aldina worked as a housemaid for their stepfather until he died in 1953. She never married and was the glue that held that sad family together for all those years. Their stepfather saw no need to provide land, livestock or machinery to help his stepsons get established and no dowry for his stepdaughters to get a start in life - as was the custom in our Germans from Russia culture.

Helen Dockter

In November, 1939, Julius married a local girl, Helen Dockter, and they embarked on a sixty-three-year marriage. They rented land in McIntosh County until April 1944 when they purchased a run-down farm just north of Berlin, in LaMoure County, North Dakota, some 80 miles to the east. Two of Julius’s brothers, Reinhold and Ephraim, and their wives were already established on farms nearby. Julius and Helen raised five children on that farm. Their two oldest sons, Donald and Myron, remember as small children planting rows of trees north and south, then east and west to shelter the house and out buildings. In February 1945, a large hip-roofed barn was moved onto the property. 

Julius and Helen Just Family 1950
Don, Walter, Julius (hanging on to Carol) Marcella, Helen and Myron

Over time, every shabby out-building was replaced and in 1949 the run down farm house was remodeled and modernized. Over time, more acreage was added to the farm operation.  Switching from cattle to raising sheep with sons, Myron and Walt, took up much of the 1960’s.

House on Just Farm 1/2 mile north of Berlin, ND  circa 1960's

Julius on tractor

Julius counting sheep

Walt and Julius surveying freshly sheared sheep

In 1969, twenty-five years after their move to Berlin, Julius and Helen retired to five acres of land at the edge of Berlin, ½ mile south of their farm. There they raised bumper vegetable and flower crops and hosted their children and grandchildren for every Christmas and a reunion round-up every summer. They enjoyed their retirement years, including travel across the US and Europe. 

Helen and Julius enjoying retirement in Berlin, ND

Helen and Julius Just Family at Just Farm  1982
Helen and Julius in front
Walt, Carol, Don Marcella and Myron in back 

Their son, Myron and his wife, Ruth, took charge of the farm for the next twenty-five years and at the helm today is their grandson, Christof Just and his wife, Kelli. Julius and Helen can be assured that Just Farm at Berlin, North Dakota is alive and in good hands.

Brothers Julius and Reinhold enjoying a beer during harvest circa 1970's

Julius Just was my dad. He lived to be 88 ½, outliving his mother and father by seventy-seven and seventy-nine years. Almost every Memorial Day in my memory, Dad and my mother, Helen, would make the pilgrimage back to Friedens Cemetery in McIntosh County, lovingly attending the graves where his parents, three sisters and one brother are buried.

Myron with Julius, Fall 2002 during
Julius's last visit to his beloved Just Farm at Berlin

Not long before he died Dad told me, “I’ve done all that I need to do here. When it is my time, I’ll be ready. I miss my parents, sisters and brothers and I look forward to a reunion with them.” The image of him in reunion with the ones who were taken from him when he was so young sustained me in the years after he died. I still miss him but he is happy because he has even more company now. Mother has joined him along with Uncle Reinhold and Aunt Lydia. I’m pretty sure they are playing some fantastic rounds of Pinochle or Whist and talking politics from on high

.

Happy Father’s Day in your centennial year Dad! 

Carol Just, June 2014

Much of the information for this story came from interviews I conducted with my dad, Julius, and his brother, Reinhold, the two remaining children of Karl and Katharina (Meidinger) Just, in September, 1996. They were the men I admired the most in my life and I will always be grateful to them for sharing their stories with me.  The deathbed scene between Karl and Katharina was shared with me by Rosina Wiest (Just) Schauer in an interview at her home in Ashley, North Dakota, November, 1974. Rosina and her first husband, Andrew Just, witnessed the exchange between Karl and Katharina while they were sitting vigil at the bedside of Karl Just in February, 1923. 

A big Thank You to Myron Just for generously sharing 50 years of family photographs for this essay.