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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
Good evening and welcome to the Minnesota History Center. My name is Kent Whitworth and I serve as director and CEO of the Minnesota Historical Society. It gives me great, great pleasure to host tonight's conversation between two authors, David Hakenson and Annette Atkins. And I know many of you in the room know them both, and you are as excited about their conversation as I am. David's new book, Her Place in the Woods has received much praise already and I'll just share one excerpt from Betsy Bowen who is an artist and illustrator from Grand Marais and she states, her place in the woods add so much to the story of Helen Hoover's life and work.
Kent Whitworth:The contrast between holding her own as a woman in a mid century professional science and breaking away for her hermit life in the Northwoods plays out very descriptively in David Hakinson's broadly researched biography. Many of you know already that David Hakinson and Annette Atkinson have both served the Minnesota Historical Society exceedingly well. They probably don't need much of an introduction. So, so let's treat this more as a thank you. I'm going to begin with our interviewer, Annette Atkins.
Kent Whitworth:Annette is a professor emerita at Saint John's University in the College of Saint Benedict in Collegeville. A scholar, a teacher, a public historian, her real specialty is in transforming serious research into compelling stories. And this is especially evident in a couple of places. One is in her own book, Creating Minnesota, A History from the Inside Out. And then one of my favorite initiatives of Annette's was her annual gathering of historians for several years called Minnesota History, whatever.
Kent Whitworth:What was so great about that conference is it was all about posing questions and solving problems, building relationships, and and working together on all that is Minnesota history. Annette is both an emeritus and honorary council of the Minnesota Historical Society and she served as the co chair of the MNHS Creating Our Future Campaign. Annette, I know I can see you now behind the curtain. Thank you so much for joining us this evening for this conversation. And now on to David Hakinson, the author of the evening we shall say.
Kent Whitworth:David is a strategic and corporate communications consultant who joined the Minnesota Historical Society Executive Council, which is our governing board in 2012. After thirteen years of distinguished service, he is wrapping up his last year on the executive council as immediate past president. David served as MNHS president from 2018 to 2023. Think about what was going on during that five year span. And as immediate past president, David chairs the MNHS Governance Committee.
Kent Whitworth:Maybe that falls into the category of no good deed goes unpunished. So five years as president, what do we do to say thank you? We give you two more years as chair of the governance committee. And of course, he's done a splendid job with that role. David is an accredited member and a twenty seventeen fellow of the Public Relations Society of America.
Kent Whitworth:So that distinction as fellow is described in a couple of different ways. One is the gold standard for public relations professionals, and this is the one that I really lean into. And it's also described as the best of the best in their field. Well, I am telling you what many of you already know, David Hakinson is truly the best of the best. And I had the privilege of working very closely with him since I arrived in 2018.
Kent Whitworth:David's devotion to this organization is inspiring, almost unmeasured. David's depth of knowledge across multiple fields and disciplines is so impressive. He has helped us think deeply, and creatively, and innovatively about so many different parts of the organization. But there's one thing in particular that I want to name tonight, and that is David's ability to elevate in the midst of almost any moment. Remember, we lived through COVID together with him as board chair, and me as CEO.
Kent Whitworth:So I saw him in about every moment imaginable, and guess what happened in those moments? He elevated every time, and somehow or another he found a way to bring out the very best in the rest of us. For that, I am deeply, deeply grateful, and I continue to be in awe, David. We are so thrilled to celebrate you and your book this evening. As a steward of much of Minnesota's material culture, the Minnesota Historical Society of course has several collection items that relate to Helen Hoover.
Kent Whitworth:If you didn't see them already in the display case in the rotunda, I encourage you to check them out after the program concludes. David, I understand from Gretchen that you were directly involved in the acquisition of at least that wonderful manuscript, and probably several other things. You see David's handprints even, not literally, our curators and collections managers wouldn't like handprints, truly his impact, even in the collections that are on display this evening. We encourage you to take a look at that. Just a little bit of housekeeping, in the conclusion of David and Annette's conversation, we will have time for Q and A.
Kent Whitworth:If you have a question, we will ask you to please use a microphone, and don't worry, do I have to come all the way down on stage? We'll have a couple of runners that will bring a mic to you, but this is particularly important, because we're recording this evening's program, and we want the question and the answer to be heard. If you'll work with us on that, we'll make sure we accommodate you very quickly. David, I've gotta tell you, it has been such a privilege to observe your joy, and your passion during this book project, and also to witness your tenacity, and your perseverance. Something to behold over these past years, as you've researched and you've written your book, Her Place in the Woods, The Life of Helen Hoover.
Kent Whitworth:Without further ado, would you join me in welcoming to the stage, David Hakinson and Annette Atkinson.
Annette Atkins:Such generous introductions. We had to stand behind that curtain until you got done. Thank you. Thank you very much. What a pleasure it is to be here tonight, and what a pleasure to see so many people who I know, who I love, and so many who have you who I hope to get to know sooner rather than later.
Annette Atkins:It's a pleasure to be here with David tonight too. I too have paid attention from the sidelines as he's been working on this book. And I have to say, grew up in South Dakota. I didn't know anything about Helen Hoover except I have this vague memory of reading one of her books in a Reader's Digest condensed book. Sometime back there when I when I was growing up.
Annette Atkins:So I was thrilled to have David take up this project. Historians, we like to kind of be in charge of the history. So I was a little skeptical of this PR guy writing this biography of this historical figure, but in fact, it's a wonderful biography and it's wonderfully written. I thought to start that I would ask David to give us a little who is she?
David Hakensen:So yes, Helen Hoover was a nature writer as you've learned. And she lived on Gunflint Lake from 1954 until about 1971 with her husband Adrian. And she wrote four best selling books about nature, and three books for the children's market. Before she went to Gunflint Lake, she was a metallurgist in Chicago, which a lot of people don't know about, and we'll probably talk about that this evening. But she had a very successful career before she decided that she was just gonna walk away from corporate life and move up to the Gunflint Trail and live there permanently without a whole lot of experience doing that.
Annette Atkins:What's a metallurgist doing in Northern Minnesota?
David Hakensen:Well, good question. A metallurgist, if we can talk about that for a minute without getting too technical, is somebody who studies the different properties of steel. And Helen, she was doing work during World War II at different labs because all the men had gone off to war, she was able to get jobs there with a limited amount of college experience and learn how to use tools and how to use machinery, how to learn from the older men who knew all about metallurgy and taught her. And she moved around from lab to lab and after the war, she got this great job at International Harvester, one of the big farm implement companies that's during 1948. What she was assigned to do there, she was given a project.
David Hakensen:And I think, being that she was a woman in a man's world at that time, I think she was given this project to see if she could do it, she would have a job and if she didn't, it would be a pretext for firing her. She was assigned a project of trying to figure out this problem that Harvester had with farm implement, a piece of equipment called the disc harrow. And those of you who've been on farms know what that is. It's pulled behind a tractor and it turns over the the field. These these discs on the harrow would be breaking and costing Harvester a lot of lost business, a lot of people who were The farmers had downtime and they didn't like having to replace their discs.
David Hakensen:It was expensive and it was time consuming. But she was assigned how to figure this problem out and it's something that Harvester had been trying to figure out since 1900. And this is 1948, 1950. She takes on the project, and all this experience she had with different people working in different labs at World War II. And then she had reached out to the US Navy to see what they were learning from battleships that had been torpedoed, the strength and the tensile of the steel that they were researching.
David Hakensen:And then also US Steel itself, which was dealing with some of these because their customers were asking for help with how to harden steel differently. She figured out a way to harden steel using a salt bath, and I won't get into a lot of details. But it was the solution that everybody had been looking for, and she got two patents for it. So she was this very successful metallurgist and a woman without a college degree working among a lot of men. And she did not go back to her regular job after World War II.
David Hakensen:She stayed on. And she solved this problem and it created a lot of issues for her in terms of discrimination from other employees and lots of other challenges just because she had figured out this thing that no man had been able to figure out before.
Annette Atkins:And she's a city girl.
David Hakensen:She's a city girl. She grew up in Greenfield, Ohio, rural but had no really involvement with agriculture. But she went to Chicago after her father died with her mother and sort of clawed her way through jobs in the 30s and then got these lab jobs. Because she had a high IQ, which a lot of people don't know, and she didn't really test for it. But she did learn that she obviously had a good aptitude.
David Hakensen:She had a college advisor that quickly figured out that she should be studying the sciences and not literature and other things that women in the 1920s were going to college for. So that helped her give her the confidence to do things that were different from what was expected of her.
Annette Atkins:So what year is she born?
David Hakensen:She was born in 1910.
Annette Atkins:So she's born before women have the right to vote. That's right. So she's coming of age in a period when doing what she's doing is pretty unusual.
David Hakensen:Yes. And her, go ahead.
Annette Atkins:Does she think of herself as unusual, do you think?
David Hakensen:Good question. I think she knew that she was smarter than most people because she didn't suffer fools very well. And that became very apparent when she moved to Gunflint Lake. Because she didn't have a lot of tolerance for sort of the gossip and just the backwoods people that lived up there. And she wasn't one of those types.
David Hakensen:She was coming from Chicago with her husband with two patents to her name. And a certain amount of pedigree and intelligence that just wasn't happening around Gunflint Lake at that time.
Annette Atkins:She has two relationships that I'm interested in. One with her mother. Yeah. And one with her husband aide. Would you talk about each of those a little?
David Hakensen:Sure. Her mother's name was Hannah. Helen was born, like I said, in 1910, and her mother was 38 when she was born. Her father was 53. So when you look at that 1910 and those two age groups, these are two parents that came of age in the Victorian era in the late nineteenth century.
David Hakensen:Her mother was very overbearing and domineering and had a very distinct idea of what Helen was gonna do with her grade school, high school, and college life. And it was gonna be, you're gonna do ballet, and you're gonna do piano lessons, and you're going to be polite, and you're going to be respectful. And she didn't allow her to date unless there was an adult present with those dates. She was involved in the Methodist Church. And when she finally went off to college, she was able to rebel a little bit.
David Hakensen:But her mother was very much overbearing. In fact, mother would send her questions every couple of weeks in the mail when she was at college, and and then numbered them. And and if Helen answered them, then she would get points to get additional money from her mother to so yeah. So her father died unexpectedly in 1928, not when the stock market crashed, but in one of the stock market bubbles before that. And he had a massive heart attack when he learned that all of his investments had disappeared.
David Hakensen:And he died on July 1928. So Helen had, there was enough money for Helen to go to college for one more year, which she did. So she had two years of college at Ohio University and then that was it. But she was not going to live with her mother and her mother's siblings in a house in Cincinnati and be a secretary or some other thing that she did not wanna do. She was going to Chicago.
David Hakensen:She wanted to see the city. And her mother had to tag along because she wasn't gonna let Helen go alone. So they had a very fractious relationship living in Chicago in a series of fleabag apartments that were furnished and unfurnished until Helen could find some work that could allow them to move into better places.
Annette Atkins:It did feel like she sort of she gets tempered by her mother.
David Hakensen:Yeah.
Annette Atkins:She gets formed and she gets strengthened by her mother's opposition. Absolutely.
David Hakensen:And aid? So Adrian, she met on a blind date through somebody at work. They hit it off very well right away. He was very much a gentleman. He had been an orphan.
David Hakensen:And back then what happened many times that I learned is that if parents got divorced and the mother was to take care of the child, if there wasn't enough money, people would take their child to an orphanage for maybe a year or two or three. And AID's mother had to do that because she couldn't take care of him during the depression or before the depression. So he was sort of somebody that just did pick up work and jobs all over the place. But he was an aspiring artist. He always wanted to be an artist.
David Hakensen:And Helen said to him, Aide, you should just go somewhere where they're doing art and you should just sign on and sort of be an apprentice and don't worry about getting paid because you're not making any much money right now anyway, it's the depression. And he took her up on that and he started doing some work for advertising for telephone books and things and so he could use his art. And then eventually, obviously, they became partners in life in terms of their work because Aide illustrated all of her books and Helen did the writing.
Annette Atkins:Talk a little bit about her Well, her
David Hakensen:books were interesting. She did a lot of magazine writing early on, and she figured out, and this is an interesting sort of marriage between her metallurgy world and her world of writing. She did the magazine work because it was very easy for her to see things and write about them in a clear and concise way. And part of that was because she had had all those skills in the laboratory when she was working in those in those lab jobs. She would have to write these technical reports for executives, so they'd have to be written in a way that they could understand them.
David Hakensen:So she was very good at writing technical things and observing things and being able to write about them clearly and concisely. So she was doing a series of magazine articles which led to a publisher approaching her about writing her first book which is called, The Long Shadowed Forest, which was in 1963. And that was sort of a book about everything she saw around her cabin. You know, plants, the animals, the fish, you know, mammals, birds, weather, all these sort of things. It's a very good book in terms of giving you a sense for if you were living in Northern Minnesota and wanted a guidebook to all the sort of things that go on in your yard at your cabin.
David Hakensen:If you read that, you would be able to relate to it. It's not terribly technical, but it's enough to give you a primer on sort of nature and different things.
Annette Atkins:Is she a better writer later?
David Hakensen:She's a much better writer later. Yes. Yeah. She had a lot of battles with her first editor. Again, here's where this high IQ comes in.
David Hakensen:She had an editor at this publisher in New York who wanted to challenge her on the fact that squirrels could not swim. There was no way a squirrel could swim. And Helen said, yes, squirrels can swim. I know this from technical books. And I also saw a squirrel swim.
David Hakensen:So I'm not gonna I'm gonna argue with you on this point because I know squirrels can swim. And she also had written about a certain bird. I can't remember the bird now, but she had written about it for Audubon. She had done a lot of technical research on it. It was a bird that was native to the area of the Gunflint Lake.
David Hakensen:And she wrote about it in her book and this editor, copy editor was challenger on it. And she had taken this piece that she had written and sent it to OS Pentengill who was the foremost bird expert in The US at Cornell University. Professor Pentengill. Professor Pentengill. And he had vetted it and approved it before it was ever in Audubon magazine.
David Hakensen:So she wrote back to the center and said, well, if you're gonna take this up with me, you're also defying Pet and Gil and Audubon and all the bird experts in the world. So she didn't, like again, she didn't suffer fools very well. So that led to her finding a new publisher, a new an agent. She never had an agent up to that point. And she landed at Alfred Knauf for her third her second book, was her her best selling book, was The Gift of the Deer.
David Hakensen:Probably most people know that book. That's the one that everybody seems to associate with Helen Hoover.
Annette Atkins:Yeah, can I ask, how many of you have read that book? Okay, there are gonna be copies available. You can buy them on your way out, right? But it's worth a look, would you say?
David Hakensen:Yeah, well this is the one that probably created a little bit of controversy for her because she what happened was a deer came into their yard in Christmas nineteen fifty eight and she started feeding the deer. And then it of course, more deer came and it got bigger. And she basically followed the life of Peter the buck, was the first one that showed up. And then mama, his mate, and then their subsequent two, three years of fawns that came along with it. Well, the problem was is Helen was loved this.
David Hakensen:I mean, again, scientific observation watching them all winter, feeding them, learning about them. And then word gets around that the Hoovers are feeding a lot of deer. And corn and all this other good stuff and they're nice and fat. And the hunters descend on the Hoovers after about the third year and a lot of deer were taken in over those next couple of years. And 's really nothing the Hoovers could do after they had sort of gotten the word out to the deer world that we feed deer here, so.
David Hakensen:And we don't hunt them. And we don't hunt them. So it was tragic, but it was very it came at a point when the Hoovers were on Gunflint Lake. They had been up there about four years. So they had been through the toughest years of living there.
David Hakensen:She had started to make a little bit of money from magazine writing, so they were in a little bit of money, but not much. So it would and there was not a lot of development yet on Gunflint Trail and Lake. So it was sort of the most idyllic time, even though they were still not getting by. But it was to her the most peaceful. Yeah.
David Hakensen:And that's why that book was so important for her to write.
Annette Atkins:Well, it's idyllic in only the most brutal kind of way. Right? Describe their circumstances.
David Hakensen:Well, they bought the cabin in 1948 after looking for this place in the woods that they wanted to have. And they used it for six years in the summer like most people do. They would take their two week corporate vacations up there and spend the summer working on the cabin and doing all sorts of things. But when they decided to move up there in 1954, they had never experienced a winter on Gunflint Trail Or Lake. They had they had no running water.
David Hakensen:They've got water out of Gunflint Lake every day. They had electricity that not not real electricity, but electricity that ran off of a wind plant that occasionally worked. And they had a oil furnace that sometimes worked, but didn't really heat the place properly, and then a cook stove. So they really were not prepared to spend a winter of and Gunflint winters are harsh, we all know that. And 40 or 50 degrees below zero was common, and they had absolutely no business being up there, living there.
Annette Atkins:What was she doing there?
David Hakensen:Well, she had chased this dream. Aide had proposed to her at the at a state park in Illinois that had the farthest south growth of first growth white pine in The US. So and it's still there, I've been there. It's a very beautiful park. It's kind of a weird park.
David Hakensen:It's like all of a sudden you're driving through farmland in Western Illinois, and then all of a sudden there's this, it gets to be a little bit of a rolling hill. And all of a sudden there's sort of like the lost 40 in Northern Minnesota, except that there's no other forest. It's just like farmland. So you kinda go, well, this is weird. So but it's beautiful.
David Hakensen:And aid had proposed to her there, and they made a pact then that said, this is 1931. They said, someday we will live in the woods. And they both sort of agreed to do that and probably it was the moment of getting the engagement ring and romance and all of that stuff. They stayed committed to that idea and they eventually found their way to Gunflint Lake.
Annette Atkins:There were a variety of people who were escaping the city for the country in that same period. These these two go for very specific, very nature related reasons, which is really really to get away.
David Hakensen:Yeah. Although it's interesting, and Helen's correspondence that I did a lot of research on, she would say people always think that we escaped Chicago, that we ran away from something. And she said, we never ran away from anything, we ran to something. And I thought that was interesting.
Annette Atkins:Do you believe her?
David Hakensen:I do. I do based on the fact that she always wanted to write and that she was made this pact with aid when they got engaged. And then they started looking for places during the nineteen thirties, and but they were just never satisfied at finding something. They were looking in Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula. And all those areas had been pretty developed by then with people from Chicago and Milwaukee and Madison going that way.
David Hakensen:And eventually, a resort owner, when they were looking and frustrated said, you should really try Northeastern Minnesota because that's still sort of wild up there. So that's how they ended up going to Grand Marais and then farther up the trail.
Annette Atkins:We'll come back to the narrative in a second. Where did you do the research? Well, interestingly, it
David Hakensen:started right here at the Gale Family Library at the History Center. When I got interested in Helen after reading her books and and I wanted to learn a little bit more, I figured somebody had written a biography. Well, somebody had, a woman who lived in Saint Paul had written a paper for her MFA at Hamlin in creative writing. And she had tried to write a full biography that just didn't get published. But she had sort of written this praisy that she donated to MNHS and it was in the library and I found that.
David Hakensen:And when I found that I read it, I was even more fascinated because she'd done some of the early research on Helen's life. And she was a big fan of Helen as a sort of underappreciated, overlooked woman nature writer. And I can kind of understand that whole point of you having read her books. And that's where I learned that all of Helen's papers and ephemera and all the drafts of her manuscripts were up at University of Minnesota And that was just great to have all of that.
Annette Atkins:What constituted those papers? What was in there?
David Hakensen:My gosh.
Annette Atkins:What is in there?
David Hakensen:Well, it's interesting because she probably purged a lot of things over the years, which is unfortunate because there's a lot of correspondence that's missing. But the good stuff, well, it's weird. There's lot of interesting stuff that people save that they think is gonna be important to somebody in the future. Of course, there's correspondence between her and her agent and her editor at Knoff, Angus Cameron who was also Sigurd Olsen's editor. And then some fan mail that had been returned to her when she wrote her last book because she didn't keep diaries or anything.
David Hakensen:So she asked people she had corresponded with if they had saved her correspondence to them to send it back to her so that she could reconstruct the years of the forest. And her children's editor at, because she wrote a monthly column for Humpty Dumpty's Nature magazine. He was particularly intellectual sort of contemporary of hers. They were both both Illinois people and they were both for Stevenson both in '52 and '56. So they kinda had that in common.
David Hakensen:And they they would correspond about issues of the day like nuclear war and things that weighed heavily on people's minds in the nineteen fifties. Because back then, the strategic air command planes would fly over the gun flint and make a lot of noise and it was very distracting for people up there and there was nothing you could do about it. But it was something that was a fixture in daily life up there. But then there was a lot of the insurance papers, passports. She did have a very good three by five recipe cards of all the articles that she'd submitted to magazines and whether they accepted them, whether they rejected them and what they paid for them, and when they ran them in the magazine.
David Hakensen:So I had all of that to look at and then I could go find those. And then she had lots of scrapbooks of all of her clippings about her books and reviews and things like that.
Annette Atkins:How how much personal information was in those?
David Hakensen:Not as much as I wanted. That's just
Annette Atkins:Yeah. What didn't you find that you would like to have found?
David Hakensen:You know what, I took a note on that because I knew you were gonna ask me that, and I knew I'd forget if I didn't. So yeah, the one thing I really wished I could have found, well it exists but I, and my publisher was not able to get it either, is the, she did an NBC Today interview on 07/03/1969 when A Place in the Woods came out. And she was interviewed by Joe Garaciola and Hugh Downs for ten minutes. Wow. Ten minutes, national TV.
David Hakensen:And the fan mail she got from that was like off the charts. And it just made her crazy. Because being raised by a Victorian mother, you always respond to every letter you get. Mhmm. And she tried to do that in her life and it made her crazy.
David Hakensen:And and I talk about that in the book. That it just makes her nuts. She had a boyfriend in college that got away, and then she learned later that he died. And I never was I I went to Ohio University to find out about him. She had said something in a letter to her agent that a boyfriend had drowned one day in the spring.
David Hakensen:And I went to the Ohio University and they found the story about this guy who died. But he was a medical student and there wasn't any correspond she had correspondence with some college kids, but it wasn't him. And I was just like, I wish I would have figured that whole story out. So that was sort of an unfortunate thing. And then the other thing was that parents, a magazine press, like many publishers today, they get acquired by other companies and it just all the archives get lost and most companies aren't very good about keeping things.
David Hakensen:All of their archives were destroyed over the years. They're owned by another licensing company now. Because Humpty Dumpty's is still published, but there was none of that. Although I was able to benefit from the letters that Elvin Trussell, her editor at Humpty Dumpty's would send back to her. Because he did after she asked for send all of the correspondence from their files But to what she did to make her writing easier is she cut them all up paragraph by paragraph and pasted them up to sort of create content for the manuscript.
David Hakensen:So there's all sorts of stuff, but it just doesn't make sense. So I really missed some of that. Whereas the conversation she had with Angus Cameron, I was able to find all of the letters that she wrote to him in the Alfred Knoff papers at the University of Texas at Austin. Because they have all the Knoff corporate files there, The early ones from when Alfred Knoff was still involved with the company because he's the one that donated the papers to them. So and then I had copies of everything that Angus sent to Helen because she had it in her business folder.
David Hakensen:I put those two together and I could basically eavesdrop on their conversations. And the other thing is that she wrote so much of her letters to him in handwriting, and she only used carbons in the most important business related things. It was interesting sort of puzzle to put together. So why does she deserve a biography? Well, she was a beloved nature writer at the time.
David Hakensen:I mean, she sold incredible amounts of, I mean, the first book did about 20,000. The Gift of the Deer sold like 50,000 books and that's just unheard of for a nature book. Her subsequent books did well. And as you referenced earlier, one of the big things that happened after she did The Gift of the Deer is that Reader's Digest, her agent had shopped it to Reader's Digest as a possible future condensed book. And for those of you who are too young to know, Reader's Digest would take best sellers of the day, they would condense them to a degree so you didn't lose the story, but you still had the book.
David Hakensen:And they would put four of them in one volume and they'd come out quarterly. So they were four a year. So what they would usually do is wait for a book to become a best seller and then it would be bought for the condensed books. Well, the people at Reader's Digest were so smitten with the with the early manuscript they saw in the gift of the deer. They said, we're gonna take it right now.
David Hakensen:We want it for this fall because Knauf wasn't planning to publish it for another year in '67. So Kanaf, which is very unusual for a publisher their size, moved up the publication date a year and condensed the production timeline into months. And so the book came out, sold 50,000 copies. Reader's Digest had it. It sold a million copies.
David Hakensen:She was paid $20,000 by Reader's Digest for that. Dollars 5,000 from Knoff for the manuscript for the book. So suddenly they're in money. In fact, they're in such money that aid gets to go to a Grand Marien and buy himself a new Mustang. So a maroon Mustang with no air conditioning because they didn't think they'd need it and they didn't think they needed to splurge on that.
David Hakensen:So go figure.
Annette Atkins:Do you My first question when I finished the book was whether David liked her. Do you like her?
David Hakensen:Well, people keep asking me that and now I'm starting to taint my view of her. I do like her. I think she was misunderstood being that she was intellectual. And I can see being dropped down on the Gunflint Trail that she wasn't necessarily gonna get along with people. She certainly locked horns with a few folks.
David Hakensen:But there were several people there who Peg Heston, whose family owns, still owns the Heston's Resort was a dear friend of hers and stayed in touch with her after Helen moved away from Gunflint Lake. And I think the thing about her that you asked in the previous question that I didn't really get to is nature writing doesn't age. We still read Thoreau. We read Walden. We read other nature writers, Muir, other folks.
David Hakensen:They stand up the test of time because they're about nature. Certainly, every author brings a certain amount of their time to the book, like in Helen's case. But I still think as you read them, nature stands on its own. And you should be able to pick up any nature book from any time and be able to read it. And I think that's why we should be revisiting what she wrote fifty years ago now and or more.
Annette Atkins:Well, I'm interested to know, David, what what about her connected to you? Why did you, why do you care about her? You spent years and it's clear, all the research that you did, she spoke to you or speaks to you in a particular way that I'm interested to know.
David Hakensen:Well, I think it was her writing. It it just was interesting. It was, you know, if you read all of her books there, autobiographical to a degree because she's talking about her experience. But I think that part of it was interesting. I think everybody has this wanderlust of walking away from their job and moving to Gunflint Lake and or somewhere.
David Hakensen:And just deciding that I'm done with the real world and I wanna look at birds all day and feed them and do read books and go off the grid or however you wanna define it. I think there was a certain amount of that romance that I kinda bought into with what she did. So I think and I kinda liked her sort of outsider story. Particularly the parts about the being a metallurgist and having to fight her way against sort of the norms. And that she wasn't accepted for the brains that she had, but that fact that she was a woman who didn't have a college degree, so therefore she didn't count.
David Hakensen:And I just thought that was, of course, anybody that studies history understands that you look at it in the times that they happened, well that's what happened. Like for instance, after World War II, she was expected to quit and go back to being a housewife or do this or do that. Whereas she stayed and all the men were coming back going, well what are you still doing here? Didn't you get the memo that says you're supposed to leave? And she just kept plugging along.
Annette Atkins:Like many women who didn't go back. Right. And we only have a few minutes left of this part, though we have 10 more questions that we haven't even begun to get to. To what extent is biography a craft and to what extent is it an art?
David Hakensen:It's both. Okay. So it's an art. It's an art in the sense that everybody who writes a biography comes to it with a point of view or maybe a pre point of point of view that changes. But the art part of it is understanding it and writing about the person and giving shining a light on them and giving them a voice that they don't have anymore since they're no longer here.
David Hakensen:And hopefully, help a reader of their writing better understand their motivations and how they came to do the things they did. I think that's an art to try to to distill that, to synthesize that and make that happen. The craft part of it is the research and being able to, I learned a lot of stories about Helen, but I wasn't able to verify them and other sources. I really wanted to try to get two sources for every sort of anecdote or thing that she said. Because she could be in some cases a bit grand and bragging about certain things.
David Hakensen:And if I couldn't validate that or verify it in another piece of correspondence or something she wrote to this person, I didn't wanna use it. And there was several things like that. So I think that's the craft part of it, is being able to be true to yourself and to your audience, and then also still tell the story. Mhmm. That makes sense.
Annette Atkins:Excellent, thank you. And I think we're gonna take questions. We have microphones out there. Who has microphones? Yeah.
Annette Atkins:There are two at the top. Any questions? And it's always good to take a deep breath, say talk to each other for a second. There's always this awkward pause when you ask for questions in public. So I'm happy with awkward pauses.
David Hakensen:Usually Annette asks us to get up and do a stretching exercise. Yeah. So I'm surprised we haven't done that tonight.
Question 1:Very good. You really enjoyed it tonight, David. I'm intrigued by the fact that it seemed like you came across to writing later in your life. Whereas I read her books many, many, many, many years ago. That Well,
David Hakensen:yeah, well I guess we have to define later in life. Know I actually I first read Helen Hoover in about 2001. And a dear friends of ours who are here tonight gave me and my wife a place in the woods because we were looking for a cabin. And if you read a place in the woods, it's the story about Helen and Aiden and their search for a cabin and the frustration with the search and then buying the cabin and then all the crap that happens when you buy a cabin that you don't realize you're getting stuck with. And it was that's that was a really really interesting book for us to read.
David Hakensen:I don't know if our friends were giving us a subliminal messenger. But I think they were warning us about the things that would would would come. So then I started to read the other books, and this is in the February. And I really didn't decide that a biography was, you know, or that I was interested enough in pursuing that until 2008. So I guess I was still in my middle age when I was doing this, so.
David Hakensen:Still are. So to speak, so to speak.
Annette Atkins:Yeah. One wonderful little story he tells in the book is about Aide and Helen realizing that they wouldn't get deliveries of food during the winter. So they needed to order all of their food in the fall Yeah. To last them through into the winter. That as a just as a problem in imagination is a wonderful piece about this.
Annette Atkins:Well, when you
David Hakensen:think about Helen being this high IQ person, calculating how much food they're gonna need for the winter. And I did pull something out of that was one of the things that was in her, the papers that was sort of ephemera. It was her grocery list that she'd order. And it would be like 10 pounds of flour or it was more than that, was like 50 pounds of flour. But I put a list in the book of just one sample of her.
David Hakensen:But they would they had this they bought another cabin next to theirs before they moved up there. It was just an opportunity that landed in their lap. So they ended up having like 800 feet of lake shore. So this was the summer cabin which they could only use in the summer because it wasn't insulated. And then the winter cabin which they you could use in the winter and that was the original one they bought.
David Hakensen:So they would order this food, it would come up in the fall in pallets and they'd have to drag it down the hill. And there would be, they didn't eat, they didn't hunt and they didn't fish. So they didn't partake in any of that, which was right out their door. And they didn't accept it from their neighbors because Helen was morally opposed to hunting. So they would order canned meat.
David Hakensen:How gross is that? Canned meat, canned chicken, canned beef, deviled ham, those kind of things.
Annette Atkins:And they didn't even keep chickens.
David Hakensen:They keep chickens. They kept chickens because of the eggs. They needed the eggs. Okay. They wanted the eggs.
David Hakensen:But then they kinda died out giving eggs and they just kept them as pets. So another mouth to feed beside all the deer and the birds and all this. The animals ate better than the hoovers. I can tell you that much in the early years. But then cases of canned fruit, cases of canned vegetables, and then all the staples, salt, sugar.
David Hakensen:And then occasionally she'd order some sort of a dessert type thing, maybe jello, I don't know. And then it would get shipped by a wholesaler up the trail in October, and they had to figure out where they were gonna put six months worth of food in two small cabins. So all the dry material went to the summer house where it wouldn't freeze. And the stuff that had liquid in it went into the cabin which had heat, so it wouldn't freeze. And I tell you, they did that for years.
David Hakensen:It was just crazy.
Kent Whitworth:So Dave, why did they leave Gunflint and where did they go?
David Hakensen:Good. Great question. So there's a lot of dynamics at work here. So after the deer were killed, and this is about 1961, '62, and Helen's busy writing, getting her book contracts and all that. There's more development on the trail.
David Hakensen:The roads are getting widened. The resorts are the REA is bringing electricity into the resorts. And better telephone lines are being brought in. The road gunflint Trail is being widened and paved. And the REA approached the Hoovers about putting electricity into their, excuse me, into their cabin.
David Hakensen:And she said, well, what's it gonna what does that entail? It's like 200 feet your woods have to come down so we can run the line down and not have any concerns about trees falling over. And they said, no, no thanks. We're not gonna take electricity. So all of that kind of started to wear on her.
David Hakensen:And I think the other problem was that once she became an established writer, fans just descended on the cabin in the summertime and seeking autographs and wanting to meet her. In fact, she documented in a letter to one of her to her agent that she had, I think it was the '8, like a 176 people dropped in on them during the summer. And she's trying to write a place in the woods at this time. And because she had a high IQ, she had a writing style that was she organized the whole book in her head pretty much in an outline form. In her head, she didn't like write it down.
David Hakensen:And then she would get to a point where she felt she had it down, and then she would just go to the typewriter and it would just pour out. And if she got interrupted, there would be hell to pay. Like if a neighbor dropped in to say something. So aid ended up guarding the door literally to keep people away while Helen was writing. So all of that became a stress.
David Hakensen:She couldn't finish a place in the woods, so they ended up going to Laramie, Wyoming. And she wrote it in a motel there over the period of several weeks and aid did the artwork and they were left alone and nobody knew who they were and that was fine. And then I think just because of all of that, they just kinda got tired of it and they decided did some traveling and landed down in New Mexico, Ranchos De Taos. And they lived there for about seven years, always promising to come back to the cabin and visit, never did. And she would write that every year to Peg Heston at Heston's and other friends she knew because I've read the letters and she said, we're very busy, we're doing this, we're doing that, and I'm writing this.
David Hakensen:And we'll be back though because we we love it there and all of that. But she they never they never went back. They got run out of New Mexico because Helen had this affinity for stray cats. And they really accumulated a lot of cats, like 30 of them. And the authorities in Ranchos De Taos passed an ordinance to not allow stray cats anymore.
David Hakensen:So Helen was so indignant. I remember she wrote a letter to somebody invoking the fourth amendment, in fact. For some whatever the fourth amendment is, and she was outraged. So they just moved back to they went to Laramie where she had stayed at this motel and befriended this motel operator. And that's where they ended up spending their last seven years before she died.
David Hakensen:So so and they never went back to Gunflint Lake after 1971.
Annette Atkins:Can I ask you a question? I'm interested in what's the value of biography? David is gonna have an opinion on that, do you like biographies? Do you read biographies? Anybody wanna speak in defense of biography?
Annette Atkins:So many historians who are who make it under the National Book Awards list and the Pulitzer Prize are biographers. Teddy Roosevelt, there are apparently 16,000 biographies of Abraham Lincoln, for example. But the and Americans seem to love biography, and I'm interested in that as a phenomenon. It's story. It's story.
Annette Atkins:Yeah. But their novels are stories too, right? But it's connected to reality somehow. Okay. True.
Annette Atkins:Yeah.
Question 2:Goes into a question that I had. I believe it was CS Lewis who wrote his autobiography and had said that he was unable to get the time and space to not be influenced by outside factors for it to be the piece that he wanted it to be. So, I guess my question is do you think that that was accomplished through Helena Hoover, through her biography, and through your biography as well as this.
Annette Atkins:Yeah, so here he is, a twenty first century white male, getting into the head and the experience of this real, kind of mid early twentieth century woman. It's a kind of the magic of biography, I think, is that you can you can be in somebody else's life for a minute. Anybody else have a Yeah.
Question 2:It's
Annette Atkins:true. Have a view on this?
David Hakensen:The audience didn't expect you to
Annette Atkins:answer I your
Question 3:love history, I have a hard time reading just dates and things that happened. But people bring it alive and so when I can get into their heads, I've learned and remember so much about that period of time.
Annette Atkins:Yeah, then in some ways it's a kind of critique of some of the work that historians do. Right? Yeah.
David Hakensen:Well, it's interesting. When I was writing the book, my editor said to me, when I finally turned the manuscript in and he was reading it, he's going, you know, you need more dates in here. And the point is, when you're writing like this, you are so knowledgeable and you're so in the head of the person and you're so much of the time that the dates are meaningless because you know them, you're living them. Right. But you have to remember the reader is being brought along on a journey.
David Hakensen:Right. And then I have to insert dates in there so that I can keep the reader grounded and tracking. Because if they just read my the way I wrote the first draft, they would be lost most of the time. But so these little inserts of a date or a place or something are there to help tie the story. And the other thing my editor did that is very helpful is, I need you to draw more about what happened in the depression.
David Hakensen:To tie it to their own hardship so that people have a context for Helen and Aide were living in the depression just like all these other stories we've heard about the depression. But this is how they adapted and how they dealt So with I think that that's another important thing that editors bring to this process.
Annette Atkins:Yeah, I'm defensive about the attack on historians about dates. But, I also hate dates. But, what seems to me really important is time. When is it that this happens? And then, how does it relate to all of those other things that are that are happening around, sort of around What the is it that makes her, her?
Question 4:Back to the question, can you hear me, on biography. I thought she was a fascinating person and I wanted to know more about her. And that's why I read biographies, to get to know the person better.
David Hakensen:Yeah. I have an interesting story to add to that. So Helen, after she wrote The Years of the Forest, was her last book and somewhat of a melancholy book because it looks back on all the changes that she and Aide endured and talks about it more frankly. And if you read it, it's kind of a sad ending. I kinda was bummed out after I read that book and kinda felt really badly that the world had changed so much that it left the Hoovers behind and and Helen in particular.
David Hakensen:But in 1976, Jim Campbell Kimball, who was the outdoors writer for the Tribune, like way before Ron Shera. He was sort of the Ron Shera of the 60s. And he had worked at the Minnesota Department of Conservation at the time, and Helen had known him because she had needed to reach out to him for fact checking on some of her books and magazine articles. So he went and visited them in Ranchos because she was stuck on what she was gonna write about next. And she was toying around with this lifestyle book of looking at her own life through the different years of hardship and different decades and different eras.
David Hakensen:And and her editor and her publisher were kind of like, yeah, we could that sounds like if you wrote it, it could and you brought your writing to it, this could be quite an interesting story. So she was still not convinced of it. And Jim Kimble went down to and visited her and wrote this column and basically reported on her angst about what's her next thing. Because she knew that she wasn't gonna write another Northwoods book because she wasn't living in the Northwoods and she thought it would be intellectually dishonest to try to write another one when she didn't live there anymore. And he wrote this column that basically said all that she was struggling with the next book, and would you like to see her write an autobiography?
David Hakensen:And then he published her address. Post office box, post office box. And she got all of this fan mail. What's curious is that's the only fan mail that she kept. And I've read all of it.
David Hakensen:It was bindered together. It was all the responses to this column and she wrote everybody back. But I read all of them and everybody said, I wanna know more about Helen Hoover having read all of her books. And she was ambivalent about that because she she when she write she had some writer friends that she would write to, particularly one, a science fiction writer named Andre Norton. They were very good fast friends by mail, and then got to meet each other and spend time together in the seventies.
David Hakensen:But she would say to Andre, they would, you know, convince about publishing and the lack of royalties and the slow payments on royalties and all the things that writers complain about. But she would talk about herself to Andre and say, I'm just afraid about what I can write because all of my readers think of me as Saint Helen of the forest. And that they will never view me writing about anything else and I don't know how I can ever escape that. And she had a very clear idea, even though she was quite opinionated with her editors and like Elvin Tressel at Humpty Dumpty and Angus Cameron, particularly about hunting. You don't wanna get me started on that.
David Hakensen:She was very cautious about her doing anything to upset her readers. She knew that she had to keep things in balance because she knew that there'd be probably wives of hunters that were reading her books. And and that there were other people that were true conservationists that would embrace her books. So she kind of had a clear idea that she needed to be careful, but she knew who they were and they were Middle America people that wanted to get away from it all and live that sort of romantic life up the road.
Annette Atkins:And she's not much present in her books, in her books about nature. No. You feel her restraint and her pulling back.
David Hakensen:She's a scientist. She's observing. Yeah. And she's interpreting what she sees and writing what she sees for her audience.
Annette Atkins:Well, thank you for not just observing Helen, for giving us her story, for taking us into her life. Thank you. Yeah.