This is a story of immigration. It’s also a story about love: love of family, love of heritage, and love of land. It’s a story about the people around us, around me, around you, whose patience and kindness touch us. You see, William Leinonen’s grandmother, Lydia Leinonen, worked for my grandmother Mae Bossert Cooney, taking care of a household of her eight grandchildren, sometimes eight at once, including me. William's grandmother Lydia was the one who did the housekeeping and cooking. And we were always trying to do it with her. Oh, the patience she must have had! Our little hands surely fumbled as we tried to help her hang the laundry. And my gosh, the mess we must have made as we tried our hands at rolling pie crust for her weekly blueberry pie. So, I carry inside of me this part of the story. But William Leinonen carries another side. And this story is about him. William is part Ukrainian-Jewish on his mother's side. And he's half Finnish from his father’s side, and this is the part that's about Waldoboro. Lucky for us, William likes to research genealogy. He started with his mother's side and filled in a good part of that family tree. His father's side was trickier. But he found Finnish roots that go back to the 1400s. But there are still many empty places. And William, who loves puzzles, recognizes that he might never solve this one. He's a mechanical engineer by trade. He’s worked for paper mills and seaweed companies and now he’s at American Kelp where he’s the head of maintenance, planning, design and new projects. It’s a job he loves almost as much as the farm where he lives with his wife Ginger and her mother Cindy. And the farm is the old farm where his Finnish great grandmother lived, next door to her childhood friend Aino Ylend. Now, here’s another story: William posted an ad on OK Cupid: “Looking for a woman who knows how to run a wood-cookstove, knows how to pronounce ‘sauna,’ and would think snowplowing a fun date. If you own your own tractor, send photo of tractor.” Ginger answered it. She didn’t have a tractor. She had a wood-splitter. So, she sent a photo of that.
I was born in Augusta and went to school in Augusta. But almost every weekend I could manage it, I was down here to be with my grandparents. They were Eino and Lydia Leinonen. My grandfather came over here from Viibori (on the border of Russia and since 1944, part of Russia) and my grandmother from another place in central Finland, in a town called Pieskamaki.
My grandfather Eino was following his father who had been a shipfitter in Viibori. I think he left for better opportunities. My great-grandfather went first and got himself established at Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, MA. Then he brought over his family. My grandfather was six years old. He ended up being a furnace man.
My grandmother Lydia on the other hand, was seventeen when she left, and she came over by herself. She landed in Philadelphia where her sister had come a few months before. She didn’t stay there long. I think she did the cooking and housekeeping. Then she went to New York City to work in a house where they had a long list of helpers and cooks. She stayed about a year and somehow ended up in Quincy. And she got work at a boarding house where a lot of people from Finland lived. I think she met my grandfather at one of the community dance halls. They both liked to dance.
When they married, they lived in the same house as my great-grandmother because her husband had died and she was living alone. Anyway, one day she learned that Aino Ylend, an old friend and neighbor from Pieskamaki, Finland, was living up in Waldoboro. So, she and my aunt took the train up to visit Aino. There was a of Finns in Waldoboro.
Well, Aino tells my great-grandmother, “The house next door. The bank took it back. It’s for sale. You ought to buy it so we can be neighbors like we were in Finland when we were little girls growing up.”
Well, my great-grandfather must have done alright because my great-grandmother was never hurting. So, my great-grandmother tells her daughter, “Take the train back to Boston and get my money and bring it up. And I’ll buy that place. They want $1,200?”
It was a three-story house, with a three-story barn, and carriage sheds and all kinds of buildings around there like a sawdust house and a sap house. And 200 plus acres or whatever it was. My great-grandmother bought it and then she just moved in here and started farming on her own, with a garden, and cows and a horse and she heated by wood.
Aino was about a little bit older than my great-grandmother, and when she died four years later, she left this place to my great-grandmother. But my great-grandmother didn’t have any use for it, so she just left it there.
Well, my grandfather had been working for Bethlehem Steel and he was just about to be vested in the pension program, and they said to him, “We don’t need you anymore.”
So he says to his mother, “Now what am I going to do?”
And she said, “You might as well come up here and start raising chickens.” And so that is what they did. They moved in with her because Aino’s place needed a lot of work. Eventually my grandparents fixed it up the best they could and moved in. They also added on another barn to the one there was. The original end that barn is the only part left that belonged to Aino Ylend.
Well, somewhere in there, Lydia started working for your grandmother in the summers. I remember the day the car caught on fire just before she was going to work. “But I got to get to work. I got to go down there,” is what Grammy said. They lived in North Waldoboro and the Cooney’s were in South Waldoboro.
So, they got the car downtown. But she wouldn’t be getting the car back for a couple of weeks because they had to order a part. My grandmother went out that day and bought another car. She didn’t want to miss work.
My dad wasn’t mechanical, but I was, and Gramps was always teaching me stuff. That’s why they called me “Gramp’s Shadow. When I got older, they’d come and pick me up, if I could arrange it, and I’d stay for the weekend. I loved being around my grandmother and the way she treated kids.
I started riding my bicycle down here from Augusta in at the end of junior high and in high school. I’d go down the weekend and I always got a ride back. But those last few hills! It was awful! And then I’d get here and mow the lawn. I don’t know what it was, but I have always loved it here.
Another thing. Every weekend we had cousins up from Massachusetts. There was always somebody up here on the weekend. And I saw all my cousins when I was here.
And people would show up at the door for a ‘door-yard call.’ That means they drive up and don’t get out of the car. They just talk to people and then they drive off. So, my grandfather would be, “We’re having supper.”
And they’d be, “Oh, we don’t want to interrupt your supper.”
And he’d roar, “Oh, come on. Bring them all in!”
“But I got a whole carload of people out in here.”
And Gramps would say, “Bring them all in.”
And there was my grandmother saying, “Oh no, what am I going to do now, how am I going to feed all these people?” But she always kept a freezer out in the barn, and she’d go out there and pull something, and she’d go out in the garden and pull some more stuff, and she’d whip up something, somehow, for all these extra people.
“Bring ‘em all in,” was the idea. Everyone just landed here. This is where I saw all my Finnish relatives.
In my high school yearbook, it says that I was going to live on Grammy’s farm in North Waldoboro when I got out of school. That was something I knew my whole life. And I’ve done it.
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