Past Years

In 1984 at age 66 my father, Harold Nielsen, bought a used Apple IIe computer. He had never used a computer before, but he was the treasurer of the church, and he was determined to improve the church bookkeeping. He was the first person I knew that owned their own computer. I was proud of him. He learned to use a spreadsheet to handle the church finances and he took on the project of writing this book. He spent many evenings writing about the summers he spent on his grandfather’s farm in Wisconsin and life in South Chicago when he was young. His grandfather Andrew Wikstrom (1868-1953) was born in Sweden and spent 15 years in the Swedish navy. He saw the world, but he wanted to live in The United States. He immigrated here, and eventually bought a farm in Athelstane, Wisconsin. Dad spent summers on the farm and his book contains many stories of life on the farm and what it took to work a farm in the 1920’s. During the rest of the year Dad was with his parents in South Chicago. This was during The Great Depression and the book gives a picture of what life was like at that time. Dad died in 1996. He never saw his stories in print. They might have been lost in an obsolete computer, if I hadn’t remembered them. On one of my trips home, I typed the command for print and took them all with me. Several years went by. I wanted to do something with them, but they were just printed copies and were hard to work with. Eventually I paid a friend to retype the whole project. Several more years went by before I was inspired by another friend who had self-published several books. He both showed me how to publish this book and inspired me to do it. I lightly edited the text and added pictures to put it in its present form, but when you read the pages, you will hear Harold Nielsen’s voice. The purpose of the book is primarily so that Dad’s four children, ten grandchildren and a growing number of great and great-great grandchildren will be able to know and keep some of him in the years to come. The book was published for family, but anyone who reads it will love it. Dad was a prolific reader. All the time he spent reading helped him to write clearly. So, open the pages and take a trip back to the Wisconsin farm in the 1920’s and to the South side of Chicago during the Great Depression. You won’t regret it.