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Mattie on the Homefront is a podcast about a father and a son discovering their family. After finding wartime letters from my great-grandmother to my grandfather, I get to read them aloud to my dad, bringing together four generations of our family, week-by-week, in an almost daily look at life in the Twin Cities during WWII.
Hey, Ted.
Hans Buetow:Hey, Hansel. So I'm gonna do the least podcast y thing or the the most un podcast y thing that I can, and I'm gonna show you physical objects that no one can see. Oh. Can you tell me, first of all, who you are and who this is?
Steve Buetow:That is a photo of my grandma, Mattie On The Regineaszabelle Buto Mickelson. I spent a lot of time with her in the fifties as my allergies would prevent me from living in the twin cities in Minnesota, and I would be farmed up north where Mattie had a cabin with her husband at the time, her second husband, Matt. So the reason that
Hans Buetow:I hand you this is because this is a photo that I found amidst a collection of photos that I found in my house. I inherited the house from your parents. I mean, I bought the house from your parents, but I inherit a lot I know what I inherited was a bunch of stuff that was in the basement of that house. In it is this photo of Mattie she's a middle aged woman. Yes, a little grim big grim lovely smile kind of a rounder face curly darker hair.
Hans Buetow:Yep short Bob and I never knew that much about Mattie. She was just kind of a name on the list as a lot of, I think, ancestors become, which is just a name maybe you know, I remember years ago you telling me about a family member. You said his name is Max. Everybody called him Sport, and he died of syphilis. Yes.
Hans Buetow:This man lived a full life, and now he's Max Sport who died of syphilis.
Steve Buetow:And that's that's it.
Hans Buetow:That's it. And so Mattie was one of those figures in my life. A name, if I remembered it, my grandfather's, your father's, mom. Yes. So what makes this photo special and the fact that I found it is that this is probably taken around the time that my grandfather, your dad, her son, was in the army for World War two.
Steve Buetow:That's my guess. That is about the age she was. Yes.
Hans Buetow:I also found
Steve Buetow:Wow. Wow.
Hans Buetow:We're pulling off the, the dry cleaning bag to reveal
Steve Buetow:A uniform. A uniform. A sergeant's uniform from World War two, army. This is
Hans Buetow:your dad's? It's my dad's. This is your dad's uniform. Wow. And the reason this is significant is because I, again, knew vaguely that your dad was in the army, but I didn't really know much about his service.
Hans Buetow:And what I really had never thought about was Mattie's experience of Ken going to the army. Yes. What would that have been like for her? What would it have been like to be at home worrying about him, middle of World War two? You don't know what's happening.
Hans Buetow:You don't really know where he is. I hadn't really thought about the world that she existed in while he was away at war.
Hans Buetow:Don't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me. Ross. Walt Disney, the world's greatest storyteller, brings the world's greatest love story to the screen. Lambda.
Bogart:If that plane leaves the ground and you're not with him, you'll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.
Hans Buetow:But what about us?
Bogart:We'll always have Paris.
Hans Buetow:Out of a clear sky came the treacherous Japanese attack on Hawaii. A date which will live in infamy. It happened in Singapore about a short while The Battle of Midway became America's outstanding success, one that may decisively change the balance of striking power in the Western Ocean. The second United Nations offensive was on the North African front. The undying will to resist against seemingly hopeless odds is the verdant story of Stalingrad.
Steve Buetow:He was never in combat. It's not a story of going from foxhole to foxhole. Yeah. And but yet what happens to moms left behind as their sons travel off as soldiers?
Hans Buetow:It was not a thing I ever thought I would have access to, and then I kept digging through the things that I found in the house, and I found something else. More visuals that people can't see, but you can hear all of the paper that's in here. Can you describe what we have?
Steve Buetow:We have a cardboard box that perfectly fits the size of an envelope, and it is letters. Letter after letter after letter. You can see the red, white, and blue of the air mail envelopes, and the stamps are all 3¢ stamps, United States postage, and the postmarks are from World War two.
Hans Buetow:1942 to 1945. This is a box of Mattie's letters. In order. In order. She wrote to Ken Weekly.
Hans Buetow:Basically weekly, sometimes multiple times a week. And he wrote back. He wrote back.
Steve Buetow:And we do not have that part of the conversation. This is Mattie's story and what she wants to communicate to Ken.
Hans Buetow:We get to hear her tone. We get to debate whether she's is she funny?
Steve Buetow:Is she sarcastic?
Hans Buetow:Maybe both. We get to meet her friends because she's the center of the social world that she's around. We get to meet all sorts of people in her neighborhood, people in her church, people she volunteers with. Family dramas. They're the beautiful sorts of of dramas that, like, coincide with her joys and her interests and the everyday life that she leads back home while this war is happening.
Steve Buetow:She lives in the house that Ken grew up in Yeah. And that all I also grew up in. So I have some insight into or at least a visual, a very strong memory of the places she talks about, the things that engage her, the neighbors, the churches, the the streetcars, the neighborhood. And this is
Hans Buetow:all stuff that I don't know because she died in 1974 before I was born. I have never met her. But if we go through these together, I kinda get to meet her a little bit. Yes. So we're gonna start going through these letters, letter by letter, from the start all the way through the war.
Hans Buetow:You and I, we're gonna read them to each other, and we're gonna find out what Mattie was doing. We're gonna then research what was happening around Mattie at that time. What is the stuff she would have been reading in the newspaper? What are the movies that would have been playing down the block?
Steve Buetow:Right. Was she interested in the music?
Hans Buetow:Did she like sports? Fashion. What was her world like? Part of what's exciting to me is discovering this together with you and being able to share that with folks. You've been inducted into the family.
Hans Buetow:You listening are now a part of our family, and we'd be happy if you wanted to come along to meet Mattie, get to know her, what her quotidian life was that she was leading on the homefront, worry and fear and weddings and funerals and shopping trips and weather events, and there's all these petty disagreements and jokes or maybe not jokes. We're not sure. Dinner with friends, lots of trips to the cabin up north. It's a family living a life in a time that we get to learn about. So if you like history, genealogy, or just hanging out Yep.
Hans Buetow:Please join us and special guests that we're gonna have on family members, historians, people who might be able to offer some context and or interest into Mattie and what her world was like. We invite you, please, come along every week to come in and be a part of our family. Get to know Mattie. Get to know Ken. Get to know us, I guess.
Steve Buetow:Yeah.
Hans Buetow:Spend some time with Hans Buto
Steve Buetow:Steve Buto. And Mattie on The Homefront.