There's Hope For Me Yet..... [Archive]

Frank Walsh

01-14-2009, 09:35 AM

Should be able to click on my link. It just worked for me.
Here's the story without the pictures if you can't get it. More or less, a chick thing.

Classic romance sprang out of rustic setting
1947 magazine photos of woman drew Tier husband
January 11, 2009

Buzz up! Long before Robert James Waller's novel "The Bridges of Madison County" conjured up romance by way of a traveling National Geographic photographer, this true story happened to a young lady named Vivian Gemmeke, who since married and now lives in West Corners.

"A fella came up to our place and said, 'I'd like to take your picture,'" she begins, telling of the day in 1946 that changed her life. "He said something about it going in a magazine, but he didn't say which one."

The "fella," it turned out, was J. Baylor Roberts, a staff photographer for National Geographic Magazine, snapping shots to accompany a history-rich article titled "Men, Moose, and Mink of the Northwest Angle," written by William H. Nicholas for the August 1947 issue.

Wilderness home
The author explained that the Northwest Angle of Minnesota nestled against the Canadian province of Manitoba rather than the rest of the state, from which it's completely separated by water. The uncommonly isolated wilderness was reachable only by boat or air - or possibly by car, once the water had frozen. Muskrats and moose far outnumbered human denizens of the 130 square miles of the Angle.

An only child, Vivian had lived on the nearby island of Penasse, a 50-acre drop of land in Lake of the Wood, until she was 6 years old. She grew up in a log cabin at Angle Inlet, where a dozen or so other families - and a one-room school, minuscule general store and post office - constituted the entirety of a settlement.

She played with her many dolls, built wigwams and called the settlement's other children her friends.

"I was the only one in my class from first to eighth grade," she says. She longed for the larger world. "I always told my mother I'm going to find me a man to marry who'll take me so far from here I'll never come back."

Mail came three times a week in warm weather, and twice a week by plane in the winter.

"In World War II, all planes were grounded, so we didn't get mail sometimes for a couple months," she says. Everybody made their own bread in the wood-burning stoves that doubled as furnaces. In the 1940s, electricity hadn't yet found the Northwest Angle.

The day the photographer came was like any other. Neighbor boy David Colson was visiting, and the photographer asked Vivian if she could play the folding melodeon he spotted in one room of the cabin. "Not really," she answered. "Then fake it," he said - so she did.

Photos triggered letters
Pictured in a flowered cotton dress with bobby socks, Vivian (and David) appeared on page 277 of the magazine. On page 282, she was pictured again, this time pumping water.

Millions saw her photos; dozens of strangers from Rhode Island, California, Kentucky, Alabama, Massachusetts - and a man in a Montana prison - contacted her.

"I wrote to a lot of people who wrote to me," she says.

One of those people was 24-year-old Harold Chilson of West Corners. Home with a bad cold, he had been thumbing through the magazine when the article about that forlorn part of the country - and the photos of the pretty girl - stopped him. He wrote to Vivian, but his note almost went unanswered.

"I told my mother I had written to enough people," she says. But her mom coaxed her, saying, "What's one more?"

Harold found himself wondering what the Northwest Angle looked like, and 19-year-old Vivian invited him to come see it. He wrote that he might stop to see it on his way to visit a friend in Winnipeg.

He came, but forgot all about continuing on to see his Canadian buddy.

Weeks later, he mailed her a diamond engagement ring, and they married in October of that year, 1948.

She left the Northwest Angle, intending never to look back. They visited her parents every summer, though, and at one point Harold wanted to try living where she had grown up. That lasted two years, and the split-second he said, "Let's move back to Binghamton," she packed up all their belongings, she says.

She still much prefers life in the "big city," says Vivian, who lives in Harold's childhood home although he himself passed away in 1981. Four of their six children still live nearby.

Friend Joyce Kopansky, knowing the story, scoured garage sales and flea markets until she finally found the August 1947 issue, which she keeps encased in plastic.

"I just love that story," she says. "It's a classic romance."