Authors: Sarah Stonich
How he arrived in Minnesota around 1904 is less certain. In the wake of the labor influx to the Iron Range at the turn of the century came many merchants—the butcher, the baker, the steel-toe boot maker. He may have come at the behest of his brother, Stephen, luring him to the wilds of Minnesota where tailors were scarce. Joe thought he’d give it a go, wearing a green visor by day, Magritte bowler by night. After Vienna and Chicago, northern St. Louis County could only have been a shock. But love conquers some, and whatever magic Julia possessed apparently held Joe in more thrall than cosmopolitan life had. He either adapted to or gave in to his new surroundings and proposed to Julia. I know they wrote each other before marrying because she told me so; it was more convenient than walking or biking or borrowing a horse to travel two miles just to go courting. They married in the autumn of 1906, before early winter made commuting difficult.
As it happened, my grandparents were a copacetic match, each possessing the sense of humor and low expectations necessary to pull off a successful union. Of course, as soon as they were married, Julia, Catholic to the gills, started having babies at a speed as if in a relay race from husband to midwife to husband, finally stopping at ten. The Stonichs were a good family. Apparently Tower had its share of
bad
families, being essentially a frontier town much like those in the Wild West, only with fewer horses and worse weather. Driving through today you’re hard-pressed to
picture Tower as a rollicking burg with hotels, saloons, poker parlors, boardwalks, and women of the night, but it was. The sawmills were zealously clearing the forests, and iron ore madness was at full throttle. Men had money to spend on drink, prostitutes, and clothes.
I imagine the tailor shop as a slightly smoky, masculine space with the aura of a barber shop, maybe with a spittoon at the door and the tang of sewing machine oil replacing hair tonic. There was a bench outside to watch the action on Tower’s main street, where Joe could sit when the weather was fine and do hand stitching. In a reversal of roles, he was the family gossip, Julia always more tight lipped and judicious, often biting back her comments and wit, which Joe warned she might choke on one day if she didn’t just spit them out.
Joe was admired for his expertise and eye for a well-turned lapel but liked for his sense of humor, a trait which has trickled down the generations with no sign of abating. From a young age, Sam has provided nearly enough entertainment to offset the cost of his upbringing, which, according the MSN Money’s Child-Rearing Calculator, is roughly $225,000, not counting college tuition. He so definitely has Dad’s wry sense of humor that I sometimes wonder if he isn’t channeling. When I’m missing my father or feeling sad, it’s no longer about me, it’s for their loss, the jokes Sam and Dad didn’t get to tell each other, the witty retorts they missed lobbing.
When Joe ordered gift calendars to give to his customers, Julia balked, insisting they were too risqué. The calendar was a sepia scene featuring a shy beauty wearing the demure fashion of the day: chin-high starched shirtwaist and dark skirt falling to the
ankles of her button-hooked boots. She is perched on the knee of a dandy in a straw boater, who holds one hand boldly around her waist. Above the oval border is printed, “Joseph Stonich, Tailor.” Curving below in minuscule font, “Pressing done while you wait.”
“Clothes make the man,” said Mark Twain, who was still around during Joe’s time, but I imagine my grandfather preferred the quote in its entirety: “Naked people have little or no influence on society.” Over the years, Joe clothed countless naked men in two- and three-piece suits of dark tweeds and gabardines, garments appropriate for church, court, coffin, and anything in between. Two pairs of trousers came standard with a suit to extend its life. With the prospering mines came a new rank of customers: managers, supervisors, and engineers. Joe tailored everything from tuxedos to band uniforms and occasionally altered a wardrobe
gratis
for some unfortunate logger or miner, modifying sleeves or trousers to pocket neatly over stumps.
Customers came from all walks, and with his easy manner, Joe got on well with those who couldn’t get on with each other. Tension between American-born miners and immigrants was high. Ultimately there was tension between most miners and all management at the Oliver Mining Company. Reading the history of these times, it’s apparent corporate greed is no new phenomenon. In 1916, Iron Range mining receipts grossed the hysterical amount of $90 million while a miner’s pay averaged around three dollars a day—not even close to proportionate. Working conditions were grim, with backbreaking ten-hour shifts. Time off the job was no picnic, either, with company housing being sub-sub-standard, overcrowded with horrid sanitation and little
ventilation or adequate heat. Shopping provided no retail therapy since goods and groceries transported from Duluth were sold at the company store at prices inflated by 50 to 100 percent.
At first Joe was neutral in the midst of fractious populations: management, American-born miners, immigrant miners, the Finnish socialist union organizers, the pro-union and the anti-union miners. Oddly enough, even some
miners
were anti-union, and considered lily-livered and summarily despised. Wobblies moved in to stir the pot to boiling. The waves of incoming scabs were protected by ranks of Pinkertons along with armed thugs deputized by the mining companies, comprising a security force that in 1916 numbered nearly fifteen hundred, three times the current population of Tower. It wasn’t long before Joe’s sympathies turned toward the men who couldn’t afford his clothes.
During the first decade of Joe and Julia’s marriage, most days brought news as bad as or worse than the day before. Strikes ground away at normalcy across the Range, and morale frayed. There was a world war on the horizon. Forest and brush fires roared in the wake of the lazy logging practices, leaving entire towns burnt. Feuds were common; crime was rife.
On any given day, my grandfather might have walked through the thick of the labor conflict, twining through picket lines, crossing barricades on both sides of a parade or protest or squabble or picnic. And while he couldn’t know what was in the hearts and minds of these men, he did know one thing for certain: who dressed their tackle to the right and who to the left.
By their tenth anniversary, my grandparents had WWI under their belts, had produced half a dozen children, had served a community often in tumult, and had survived a pandemic. That
accomplished, they then took on even more children and the Great Depression.
My aunts recalled their childhoods not as the chaos one might imagine in a family of twelve but as simple, sunny years, chalking up the peace to the fact that their parents were fair, good-humored people and that Julia was a better-than-average cook. As for the rare disharmonies between my grandparents, there are two family stories. One regarded the 1918 influenza outbreak, when Joe did something few immigrants did at that time—took a trip back to Europe, ostensibly on a buying tour for Italian woolens, though my grandmother claimed it a lark. When the time came to leave, two of the children were ill, but Joe went anyway. My father and Julia told their very different versions of this story over coffee and strudel at the kitchen table. Dad, who would have been only eight in 1918, piped up in Joe’s defense, frowning. “We weren’t
that
sick.” To which Grandma replied in her croaky snort, “Jesus wept.
You
weren’t sick at all!”
The other story was that Joe came home one day with the deed to an island, having bought it on the sly.
But really, how bad could a guy who sewed his bride’s wedding dress be?
The family weathered the Depression by being clever. They made do. Meals were stretched, added to. Things were reused, jerry-rigged, repaired, passed around, shared. Clothes were made, then remade. The Stonichs of Tower probably made it look fairly easy—a handsome, bright gaggle, as poor as everyone else but awfully well turned out. Under my grandparents’ tutelage, all the girls learned to sew and tailor. “You can be wearing a burlap dress if it’s well cut,” Grandpa would say. Grandma gave essentially the
same advice about coats, “because in a good coat, you can walk through any door.”
That fashion acumen apparently did not filter down to my generation. At lunch one day with my sisters, our Aunt Margaret took one look around the table and declared that the lot of us could rob a bank and never be identified, our clothing was that nondescript.
Even after retiring, Joe continued to sew clothes for his grandchildren, and somewhere exists a photo of my oldest brother as a toddler in the 1940s wearing the requisite plaid hat with flaps, standing like a starfish in his new quilted and belted snowsuit from the House of Joe.
When WWII came, four of the ten Stonich offspring were deployed in Europe and the Pacific, including our Aunt Mary, who was an army nurse-anesthetist in field hospitals and M.A.S.H. units, first in France and ultimately at a surgical unit in Germany, where her patients included both Jews liberated from the camps
and
their former captors, German POWs held in U.S. military custody.
Before the war, my aunts enrolled in Ely Junior College (now Vermilion Community College), earning their tuition working as maids or waitresses in the resorts. They were usually required to board for the summers, meals and bed provided. Helen and Dorothy worked one summer at an upscale lodge that is still in operation and on the National Register of Historic Places or, as Dad would say, famous for having never burnt down. While dining at the lakeside restaurant of that resort a few years ago, Aunt Helen, a very put-together and genteel lady nearing ninety, looked around the picturesque dining room, reminiscing a little
regretfully and offering in a whisper, “We were worked awfully hard here, and the owners weren’t very kind to the girls.” After just one season, they moved on. Helen fondly recalled another resort, Pearson’s, where they ate meals with the Pearson family and were treated like kin. The boys worked, too, my father as guide for an outfitter, and at the peak of Prohibition, he delivered liquor by boat to resorts on Lake Vermilion. He called it “hooch” and did outrageous impressions of the old drunk who worked the still. By then, Grandpa Joe was growing his own grapes, sending his younger children out to harvest chokecherries and Juneberries. As the son of a European wine vendor, Joe likely couldn’t fathom Prohibition, and Julia claimed that during the Noble Experiment, Joe had concocted quite a few less-than-noble experiments of his own, blueberry being the worst, though she admitted some of his more vinegary vintages made decent enough salad dressings.
My grandparents’ marriage played itself out during riveting times. They witnessed one advance and invention after another, from automobiles and safety razors to the Pill, DNA fingerprinting, digital media, and the Internet. “When sheets were white” was my grandmother’s reference to any era pre-Eisenhower. And when sheets were white, Tower would have been a constrictive, humdrum sort of place, its very size determining the shape and limits of life. Everyone knew everyone else, and everybody’s business was broadcast. Village society must have sometimes felt like a huge dysfunctional family, though in some ways I think, how ideal, to have only your own tribe to worry over and care for when the world beyond town is only a distant concept rather than the bloated, too-busy, hyper-connected place it often seems today.
In the forties, my grandparents moved from their neat, two-story white house in Tower to a neat, two-story house in Ely. Their children fanned out to where jobs and wars took them, many going far. Only one returned to live, Uncle Ted. Ted was the youngest, a slight, nervous fellow whom our aunts always spoke of in either sympathetic or frustrated tones, the sum of their comments translating to a shrug: “Mother’s eggs were stale by the time Teddy was hatched.” When Ted came back from Korea, he had a tic that would never still and that metal buckle in his skull locking in whatever memories of war had left him so trembly. To me, Teddy just seemed an average guy, an afterthought baby tacked onto the end of a large, quick-witted family (an unenviable position). He lived with Grandma Julia until his forties, when he surprised everyone by getting married and staying married long enough to father a son.
The youngest Stonich daughter, Mardi, married a local boy, Lew, described in the oxymoronic as a jovial Finn. Though he’d married in, Lew was the uncle we saw the most. Dad would haul me along to visit him out on Johnson Lake, where Lew’s old mobile home was parked but never plumbed or improved, kept rustic to discourage females. He and my Dad would have a bump and a beer, a bump being three fingers of whiskey, neat, enough to paste my lightweight father into his lawn chair.
Most blood uncles are only murky memories. All seemed so
old,
and most had gone off to become businessmen, returning only sporadically for visits or funerals. Dad’s sisters drifted off to marry men from elsewhere. Aunt Mary’s first husband was such a long-harbored secret that I was in my thirties before I learned of him, a dashing, high-rolling architect from California
who was either abusive or alcoholic and probably both. They’d lived unmoored and fast, had dined at Hearst Castle and spent a few tumultuous years traveling before divorcing. Divorce was relegated to the family closet of Unmentioned Things; it simply wasn’t
done
by Catholics. Another aunt’s husband was murdered by his mistress, an event that was vehemently never spoken of.
All five of our aunts returned home each summer. I recall them best during the 1960s, when they filled the large pine-paneled cabin on White Iron Lake. The kitchen was loud as a chicken run with everyone trying to get their points and arguments across, along with jokes, gossip from town, discussions of best sellers, and cries over bad hands of bridge. Back when they could put it away, there were gin and vodka cocktails and always a lot of lemons. There was the occasional guiltily puffed cigarette on the porch, though never when Grandma Julia was around. Arguments about politics were often started by Dad and ended by his going fishing. The Aunts might not have agreed on everything, but they all got very nonpartisan when recalling poor, dear Jack Kennedy, growing gin maudlin until they were sidetracked with the details of Jackie’s new wardrobe or her antics in Greece.