A letter from Kansas City
Special rewards from writing a newspaper column are fan letters, even though there have been a few times when a “fan” called me bad names and didn’t agree with anything I’d written.
Get quite a few communications wherein the subject matter is Scandahoovians. Have no idea why. Got one of those over the holidays from Mr. Bill Trimble of Kansas City, Mo. There is no way of knowing if Mr. Trimble is a Swede, Norwegian, or what, but he did send us some “Ole and Lena” reports. Because I always give new friends full benefit of the doubt, we will assume these stories are absolutely true. Here is an example:
Ole was stopped by as game warden in northern Wisconsin recently while leaving a lake well known for its walleyes. Ole had two buckets of fish, and as it was spawning season, the game warden asked, “Do you have a license to catch those fish?”
Ole replied, “No, sir. Dese here are my pet fish.”
“Pet fish?” the warden replied.
“Ya sure, you betcha,” answered Ole. “Every day I take dese fish here down to da lake and let dem swim around for awhile. Den I vhistle and dey yump back in der buckets and I take dem home.”
“That’s a bunch of hooey. Fish can’t do that,” said the game warden.
Ole looked at the game warden with an expression of great hurt and then said, “Yumpin Yimminy! Vell den I’ll yust show you. It really werks.”
“Well,” the warden replied, “I’ve got to see this.”
Ole poured the fish into the lake and stood waiting. After several minutes, the warden said, “Well?”
“Vell what?” responded Ole.
“When are you going to call them back?”
“Call who back?” asked Ole.
“THE FISH!” growled the warden.
“What fish?”
That is one of the incidents reported by Mr. Trimble in his letter. Because he said, “I have enjoyed reading your column in the Hungry Horse News for many years,” I assume Mr. Trimble knows I have Swedish blood from my father’s side of the family; and knowing this, he probably just forgot to mention the game warden in this story … was a Norwegian.
Mr. Trimble says he will be coming out to Glacier National Park this summer and hopes to see me then. He also mentioned my columns and poem about the semi-truck driver who went over Logan Pass a few years back. He wrote, “I’m a little skeptical about the authenticity of that one.”
Well OK Mr. Trimble! The Park has photos and “eye-witness” accounts of that incident. Do you have anything like that to back up your story about Ole’s fish?
Finally, I do want to thank Bill Trimble for taking the time to write, and yust to show him my appreciation we’ll throw in a couple more of his “Ole and Lenas”;
“Ole is so cheap that after his plane landed safely he grumbled, ‘Vell, dere goes five dollars down the drain for dat flight insurance’.”
Lars asked Ole why he had sold Lena’s piano and bought her a clarinet. “Vell,” Ole answered, “Vitt a clarinet, she can’t sing.”
G. George Ostrom is an national award-winning Hungry Horse News columnist. He lives in Kalispell.