The Author’s Story, Part 1
December 10th, 2004,So what makes me such an authority on the Upper Midwest? I don’t claim any great authority beyond having lived in the region for about thirty years and being part of a family with longstanding ties here. So that readers may better understand my perspective, I’d like to use a few columns to discuss my own background and my experience in the region.
I was born in 1965 in St. Louis Park, Minnesota; our home was less than a mile from the western border of Minneapolis. My father, Ron Ostrem, grew up in south Minneapolis and taught fifth and sixth grade in Minnetonka for 34 years. His father, William A. Ostrem, was a third-generation Norwegian American and a Minneapolis native as well. Grandpa Bill was the first in his family to attend college. He went to the University of Minnesota and became a civil engineer, eventually overseeing the maintenance and expansion of the Minneapolis sewer system.
My father’s mother, Helen Ostrem, was born Helen Michales in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her parents were immigrants from Bohemia (today part of the Czech Republic) who met and married in Pittsburgh; the family name had been anglicized from Michalec. My grandmother’s family moved to Minneapolis when she was a small child and settled in the Seven Corners neighborhood. Just down the hill from her house was a neighborhood called “Bohemian Flats,” in the low area next to the Mississippi, directly under the Washington Avenue Bridge. Today the area is a park just below the newer part of the University of Minnesota’s Minneapolis campus, part of what is now called the West Bank.
My mother was born and raised in Duluth, Minnesota, a port on Lake Superior. Her family lived only a few dozen feet from Duluth’s border with Proctor, the town where she attended school. Her parents, Jack and Grace Hutchins, were descendents of Yankees who had made their way west from New England. Grandpa Jack, whose given name was Royal, worked as a clerk for the Duluth, Missabe, and Iron Range Railroad, which carried iron ore from the mines on the Iron Range to ships docking in Duluth. Grandma Grace’s maiden name was Peterson, and she traced her ancestry back to ancestors from Cornwall, England.
My mother, an only child, became the first person in her immediate family to attend college. She completed her degree at Hamline University, a Methodist school in St. Paul where she also met my father. She eventually became a public health nurse.
Like many other Upper Midwesterners, I embody an ethnic mix - Yankee, Scandinavian, and central European - that is characteristic of the region’s settlement. There are many other groups in the region, of course - among them Germans, Irish, Jews, African Americans, and Vietnamese to name a few - but not among my forebears. I also like to think that my family background gives me a link both to “greater Minnesota,” as it is called here, and the Twin Cities metropolitan area.
That American process of mixing groups continues today, of course. The ancestry of our daughter represents an even greater kaleidoscope of ethnicities. With an East Indian grandfather and a European-American grandmother on her mother’s side, the American blending continues.
I’d like to think this American multi-ethnic nationality rises above the suspicions and hatreds that cause one ethnic or national group to despise another. Multi-ethnic ourselves, people of my own generation manage to rise above those hatreds in ways that previous generations did not. However, we still fail in many ways to connect with those different from ourselves, and I expect my daughter’s generation will be enlightened and tolerant in ways that we ourselves are not.