Surprise

        Instead of writing about an ancestor this week, I thought why not make it about me this time. And, as if that isn’t enough of a surprise in itself, I will tell you about a surprise that happened to me over 50 years ago. 

My husband and I were married in northern NJ in the early 1970’s in the little town that I grew up in. I never envisioned living anywhere else. However, we were only married about 8 months when he told me that the small business he was working for was needing financial help, and they had found a group of investors in the upper midwest. One requirement of getting this loan was that they would need to move the manufacturing to Fargo, ND. That meant that we would be moving as well.

Our Wedding Day

After that bombshell, the first thing I did was get out a US map and actually look at where Fargo, ND was. I knew North Dakota was out there “somewhere” but I had no idea which side of Minnesota it was on. Turned out it was bordering on the west side of Minnesota, so about 1,400 miles from where we were living.  Remember, there was no internet back then, so I couldn’t Google any information about the area. 

After this announcement, things started to happen very quickly. My husband flew out to Fargo in March of 1974, a short 9 months after we were married. His job was to find a suitable location to set up manufacturing for the small office copiers that the company made, and get a feel for apartments for us to live in.

When he returned to our apartment in Dover, NJ, he told me he had taken photos of Fargo, and was excited to share them with me. He was a big fan of slides instead of photos, so it took a few days for the slides to be developed. 

Finally the slides were ready to view. He had set up a slide projector and screen so I could get the full immersion feeling of Fargo. I remember some other folks were in the apartment too, sharing in this big reveal. I can’t remember exactly how many slides there were, and I also can’t remember at what point I started to cry!  But cry I did. I couldn’t believe that he would take me half way across the country to a place like this. What was he thinking?

?? Fargo?? 1

Well, as it turned out, he had played a huge trick on me. The pictures he had taken were not actually of Fargo, but of an old pioneer town and museum called Bonanzaville just west of Fargo. The museum replicated what life was like on the prairie back around 1860’s  or so, when many Scandinavians and other settlers immigrated to the area, cleared the land and started farming, living in very rough conditions through cold and brutal winters. 

    

?? Fargo ?? 2

As I remember it, he started to feel quite badly about this so-called surprise and had to fess up. Thank gosh he did. What I don’t remember is if he actually took some pictures of the real city of Fargo, as I was still in a state of shock. I think he did though, and that seemed to  look somewhat better that the pioneer town.

?? Fargo ?? 3

So, in May of 1974, three weeks before our first anniversary, we packed up all of our stuff (not that much actually, as we were newlyweds) and drove to Fargo. We had flown out there a while before and found an apartment, and I got to see the real Fargo for the first time in person then. Even though it wasn’t a pioneer town, it still was quite a culture shock to us. I remember we picked up the phrase “Ya You Betcha” quite early on. They did have a shopping mall there, but I remember driving to it the first time, and halfway there the road turned to gravel. So you get the idea. 

I have now lived in Fargo for over 50 years, and can’t imagine living anywhere else. I have grown to love it here, yes, even the cold snowy winters. The people are so very kind and welcoming, and I am proud to call it my home. I still go out to Bonanzaville (yes its still there) and soak up how life was here over 150 years ago. And I get a lot of laughs when I tell folks here the trick that my husband pulled on me before we moved out here. 

Just last week I was going through many older photographs, and found boxes of old slides. I wondered if it would be possible that those slides from so long ago still existed. Well, as you can see from these rather blurry images that I found them. I didn’t have any proper way to view them or digitize them, so I did the best I could by holding them up to a bright light and capturing the image with my iphone, followed by lots of editing. It wasn’t perfect, but it did the trick. 

To sum up, let me just say that this surprise move half way across the country so many years ago was and continues to be an amazing adventure. The only regret is that most of my family is not up here, and for some reason they only come visit in the summer. They don’t know what they’re missing!