Jan (Fitzgerald) Dobson
Second of Miles’ and Ruby’s eight children




First memories of Berlin, North Dakota could more accurately be termed impressions. I remember the metallic, sweaty smell of Dad’s blacksmith shop and a purposefully cultivated fearfulness of red-hot welding equipment within. And going around to friends’ houses with Mom on May first with tiny paper May baskets filled with candy. I remember Adele, always soft and warm and smiling. Most dramatic of my Berlin memories is opening a newly purchased package of raisins that contained an unadvertised bonus—half a dozen or so cockroaches! There was much screaming. Both raisins and roaches were immediately returned to their place of purchase. I think it was Matt’s store.
My preschool years saw two trips to California to investigate a possible family relocation. I still have an image in my head of looking out the car window while riding through a mountain pass and seeing only a steep, long drop the to canyon below. Very scary. My fondest memory of those trips is the birth of my sister, Marianne, the only one of us kids to be born in California.
A permanent move west was not in the cards, but in the mid-nineteen fifties our growing family packed up, headed for Minnesota, and left Berlin for the last time. Mom and Dad bought a beautiful farm east of St. Paul. Living there was a kid’s dream come true. It was, to us, a twenty acre playground. Kittens and puppies were fixtures. It was a simpler time then. Television was still more or less new-fangled and Nintendo was not yet even imagined. There was always something to do, though. On sultry summer afternoons, walks down to the apple tree to climb and pick fruit were regularly organized. Or a young girl could safely fill her days alone with exploration in the woods and bicycle trips down the road to where the wild strawberries grew.
An especially nice memory of life on the farm is “Candy Bar Day.” “Candy Bar Day” was never definitely predictable, except that it always fell on a Friday. That little element of surprise somehow made it even more special. On that sweetest of days, Dad would come home from work with a bag full of assorted chocolate bars. The first of us kids to notice the treats would yell out, “Candy Bar Day.” Word traveled fast and the bag of candy bars was emptied in no time at all.
A more serious memory is the Cuban Missile Crisis. I wasn’t old enough to grasp the importance of all the political maneuvers involved in the incident, but I did know that it was a dangerous time and I understood the grave repercussions of nuclear warfare. Shortly after the crisis was defused Dad actually started construction on a fallout shelter next to the garage. Though the shelter was never completed, the fact that it had been begun served as a reminder of how frightening the confrontation had been.
It’s fun to remember those old times from childhood and talk about them with my own children. But I don’t think they quite believe that there were neither VCRs nor DVDs when I was a kid.