Review by Victor Volkman
The first thing I was struck by in reading “Farmed Out in Ontonagon County” by Pat Winton was the extensive overlap between this first-person memoir of growing up in the U.P. and the fictional “SideRoad Kids” series of books by Sharon M. Kennedy. You may remember my coverage of the SideRoad Kids book #2 in the April 2024 issue of Marquette Monthly. It goes further than just the subject matter—both authors Pat Winton and Sharon M. Kennedy were born within a year of each other around 1940. I found the parallels between young Pat Winton and Bernard Louis Elvis Wilfred (a.k.a. “Blew”), the fictional character in Kennedy’s Saga, who were both sent out to labor for relatives to be uncanny.
Winton’s tale begins in tragedy at age 7 and his life ricochets between a constant struggle with adversity and help from the kindness of strangers for the next decade of his life. His father collapses unexpectedly and he runs to the nearest neighbor’s house that has a telephone to get an ambulance. Alas, Pat’s father dies that very same night and now the family is without a breadwinner. The little family is now just seven-year-old Pat, his four-year-old sister Trish, and twenty-seven year old mother Signe—who cannot hold a job due to chronic back problems. A neighbor, trying to be helpful I suppose, leaves him with the cruel admonition “You’re the man of the family now.”
Signe decides to sell up and move closer to her two sisters in order to keep the family in Ontonagon County. They built a small two-bedroom house on a parcel of land on the Hietala homestead in Trout Creek the following year. Initially, they had neither running water nor electricity, although the latter was installed in 1948. That same year, around the age of 8, Pat begins running trap lines around the property to catch and skin weasels, as his young cousins do too. After properly being prepared, a white weasel pelt could fetch up to $1.50 in St. Louis, Missouri, which amounts to the equivalent of about $23 in 2024 money. He supplemented this cash with his ever-growing skills as a trout fisherman, bringing home brook trout as well as a few rainbows, thanks to frequent DNR restocking.
The simple act of trapping weasels marks a turning point in young Pat’s life. He has discovered that armed only with his wits, ingenuity, and hustle, he can keep the family alive in the most dire circumstances imaginable. He continues to trap weasels up until age 15, but as you’ll see if you read further on, he is always on the lookout for a better and more reliable source of income. Winton has remarkable recall throughout the book as he mentions people he worked for, the wages he earned, and how he propelled himself ever forward. This alone is a remarkable achievement for an eighty-four-year-old man. Together, his collected stories in this memoir are a triumph of the human spirit over adversity, as I hope you’ll see.
Winton recounts the traditions of living among the Finnish that many generations have grown up with, including Saturday night saunas that rotated amongst the various area families who were all friends with each other. He learned to speak very slowly with many older adults who only really spoke Finnish fluently. In Ontonagon County, church services were held in the Finnish language every week except for a special Christmas service in English! As church Treasurer, his mother Signe would make up for offering plate shortfalls out of the family budget out of a concern that the pastor be paid in full for his services.
When Pat was 10 years old, he found his world turned upside down when Signe married a 31-year-old World War II Army vet named George who took an instant dislike to the boy. Verbal abuse started immediately with complaints about how Pat was “too fat”. Physical abuse would start a few years later. First, George would execute his plan to move with Signe to Detroit to earn enough money to buy a farm. Pat and Trish were to be left behind and farmed out, at the ages of 10 and 7 years old respectively. Sadly, the two children were to be split up and farmed out to different households.
Pat first went to the home of childless aunt Naima and uncle Vic Aho and his father. Of course, the home was too small for Pat to have a bedroom so he was shunted into the airless, unheated attic where he froze in the winter and boiled in the summer. Although uncle Vic was the best trapper in the county, often bringing home coyotes, wolves, and muskrat for their government bounty or hides, all the hides were dried in the attic bedroom of Pat, which must have continually smelled of carrion.
When he was 12 years old, Signe and George returned to Ontonagon County to buy a rundown farm in swampland patently unsuited for agricultural use. Friction began to grow between George and Pat, such as when George ordered the boy to dive a “doodlebug” back to the farm—a vehicle with a dual transmission Pat had no idea how to drive. Violence, arguments, and abuse built year after year until George stabbed Pat in the back with a pitchfork. Following that incident, Pat ran away from home never to return until he was an adult some four years later.
Pat’s real adventure begins at this point, approximately one-third of the way through the book and I won’t spoil the many interesting details of this. Suffice it to say that through the kindness of strangers and teachers who recognize the boy’s innate brilliance, he eventually goes on to achieve greatness. Even so, young Pat is never more than one mistake away from landing in jail or being consigned to a life of drudgery. “Farmed Out in Ontonagon County” by Pat Winton is a true tale of “sisu”—courage and perseverance in the face of all reasons not to do so. As such it is both a historical record of growing up in the remote rural U.P. of the 1950s as a “sideroad kid” and a tribute to what a self-made man can be.
