Listen to Your Elders' Photographs

Have you ever turned to an old photograph to help you move forward with purpose?

My Aunt Marjorie suffers from dementia and congestive heart failure. But don’t count out this 87-year-old North Dakota woman. For crap's sake, she just kicked Covid 19’s arse by recovering from it in her nursing home. “What? I’ve been sick?” she asked when she was taken off oxygen and returned from isolation to her room in the nursing home.

Marjorie was a history teacher who minored in math and had a knack for recognizing patterns in numbers and people. She was an avid golfer, hunter, bowler, and, well into her 30s, performed energetic and point perfect cartwheels as she tried in vain to teach my sisters and me how to do them.

Since the 1960s, the history teacher was also the photographic historian for my Dad’s side of our family. When she moved to a care facility four years ago because of her dementia, I assumed her role as curator of the Stoa treasure trove of photos that she had kept---enough photos and old movies to fill a lifetime of lifetime storytelling.

I've wondered if maybe Marjorie picked me as her glossy, matte and 8 millimeter successor. Maybe my grandparents framed me for the job years before. Or maybe I simply developed into it. In any case, now that I’m in my 60s, old family photographs speak to me. I'm not exactly the "I see dead people" kid in the "Sixth Sense," but I have my ways.

For instance, take a look below at the lovely ladies from Marjorie and my dad’s mother’s side of the family—Marguerite Rose Benning Stoa, my grandmother. These grand and fierce Irish dames, photographed around 1905 or so, were Marguerite’s mother (front left) and aunts.

The faces and body languages of these women make me smile. They make me proud. They inspire me. I see strength, attitude, and beauty. And okay, yeah, maybe they scare me. They exude a bit of a “don’t mess with a suffragist gang from the Minnesota prairie” look.

Wouldn’t you love to know what they were saying at that moment in time 115 years ago? Especially the one in the front right with her hand on her hip. Maybe she’s muttering, “Hurry up with that newfangled camera bub. I’ve got to establish the women’s right to vote and my dress is damn constrictive, itchy, and hot!” Or maybe she’s getting ready to belt out a few lines from Nancy Sinatra’s yet to be written song, “These boots were made for walking And one of these days, these boots are gonna walk all over you. Dah dut da DUT dahh. Dah dut da DUT dahh. Dah dut da DUT dahh”…

Yup. Aunt Marjorie’s mom and my Grandmother Marguerite Rose Benning Stoa was born into a family of strong women—Minnesota strong, snowballin, let's laugh hard at our own jokes—women. You can see their sense of humor on display in this photo of young Marguerite with her mom and aunts itching for a snowball fight.

As a grandmother many years later, Marguerite would say it was a good thing we kids had some fun-loving Irish blood in us to offset the stoic Norwegian and German in us. She shared that humor and confidence throughout her 92 years on this Earth.

I lived in California during Marguerite's final year of life. She moved into a nursing home, and I visited her at Christmas, one month before she passed. I walked into the room where she was sitting in a wheelchair and eating popcorn. She spotted me, dropped the popcorn, raised both arms in glee and said, “Hello Dearie. Come on. Get me out of here. Let’s go get a beer!”

Now, I rarely saw Grandma drink liquor, but I do know a few things about her and alcohol.

1. As a kid, Marguerite and her parents lived in Moorhead, Minnesota near saloons by the Red River, where she watched distributors arrive on horse-drawn wagons to deliver whiskey to the saloon owners. I think she may have been slightly fascinated by saloons and by moonshining because she taught me a song that she and others had sung during Prohibition (1920-1933)—“Moorhead will shine tonight. Moorhead will shine. When the sun goes down, the foam goes up. Moorhead will shine!” Move over Nancy Sinatra.

2. At the lakes, Marguerite liked to set her hair with beer. I swear on a six-pack it's true. Marguerite used to slather a little beer on her fingertips as she rolled her hair into curlers. I'm not sure how well her hops and barley idea worked, but most agreed she had a good head on her.

Marguerite grew up as an only child because one sister died at infancy and another died at the age of two from scarlet fever. Those traumatic events made Marguerite’s parents, Rose and Joseph Benning overly protective of their only surviving child.

But who’s protecting whom in this photo of a precocious 6-year-old Marguerite hanging with her parents?

And below, that’s Marguerite, circled, as she received her high school diploma from Fargo North Dakota’s Sacred Heart Academy, June 10, 1917.

According to a 1986 interview of Grandma that my sister Angie wrote for school, the newly graduated Marguerite told her mother that she was going to get a well-paying job and Rose laughed at her daughter’s spunk.

But Marguerite did as she had proclaimed and got a job doing statistics at the North Dakota Agricultural College (now North Dakota State University). That same year in 1917, she met my grandfather, Theodore Ellingson, who was a young agronomist with the college and who would lead the Agronomy Department from 1920 to 1960. After working in the male-dominated job, Marguerite enrolled in the college that is now known as Moorhead State University to earn a degree in education with an emphasis in art.

During the five years that they dated, they took a lot of photographs of picnics by themselves and with other couples. Can you imagine dressing up to that degree to sit in the grass on a warm day and have lunch? Hats off to them.

I imagine their fun-loving courtship was filled with music as well because Ted played the violin and Marguerite taught herself to play ragtime on the piano. As a child, many times I watched Marguerite stand at the piano and pound out ragtime songs by ear while doing a little jig.

In my mind I see her in the roaring 20s both dancing as well as modeling the way for women to get out and vote in the Fargo-Moorhead area for the first time after the 19th Amendment was ratified.

After Marguerite and Ted married in 1923, they had two children. While Ted was busy heading the College's Agronomy Department and doing research and judging crops around the U.S. and Mexico, Marguerite settled into raising their kids, traveling with Ted on his trips, substitute teaching, and being a Fargo socialite, chalking up decades of participation and leadership tied to the university and city doings.

She also liked helping others to see and bring out the best in themselves. I discovered a letter written to her by a young woman in 1935 in which the woman wrote that she didn’t know how she could repay Marguerite for helping her restart her life in another city. However Marguerite helped the woman, it must have meant a lot to my grandmother as well because she kept the letter in the original postmarked envelope for me to find 84 years later.

During many of my cherished moments with Grandma, I remember her advising me, “Dearie, be sure you study and get a college degree so that you can do something meaningful in the world and not be financially dependent upon anyone. And learn a second language—I recommend Spanish—because this huge world is getting smaller each day and who knows where you will go and who you will meet.”

Thanks Grandma.

Let's close with a lesson. You may be looking for relief from the troubles of today or for inspiration to meet your future with gusto. Take a peak at a few of your own old family photographs. If you sit quietly, and look and listen long enough, you will learn that your ancestors' photos have a lot to say to you. Carry on with their greatness and yours!

Judi Stoa's Donchyaknow Life Lessons to see and bring out the best in yourself and others

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