Star Tribune
Paying overdue tribute to his grandmother, a farmer re-carves family history
What began as a joyride photo op turned into a touching tribute to an overlooked grandmother. In the process, Jim Vannurden not only rewrote history, he re-carved it.
Two years ago, Vannurden and his wife, Barbara, drove their ′58 silver Corvette convertible from their central Minnesota farm to Maine Prairie Cemetery near Kimball, where they parked beside a large granite headstone.
“We wanted to take some pictures of the car by our family monument,” said Vannurden, 68, who raises draft horses south of Litchfield.
Jim’s grandfather, German-born Fred Marklowitz, purchased the cemetery plot before his death at 85 in 1953. Marklowitz had gone from sawing wood to amassing more than 1,000 acres of farmland along with 60 cattle, 40 hogs, a dozen horses and three sets of modern farm buildings. “This is the reward of honest toil,” he wrote in an autobiographical essay that ran in 1928 in a St. Cloud newspaper.
Nearly a century after his grandfather wrote up his life story, Vannurden sat at the cemetery and thought instead about his grandmother, Caroline.
Born in 1871, Caroline Skorupowsky had emigrated from East Prussia at 20, married Fred a year later and given birth to 18 children — eight of whom died before she did, six of them as young children.
In an email to me, Vannurden said he learned about his grandmother’s grueling life from his mother, Olga, who was Caroline’s 16th child.
“She told me that her mother would milk in the morning, then prepare breakfast for the family and up to five hired men,” he said. Then Caroline would “go into her room and have a baby and be expected to be back in the barn for evening milking.”
Sitting at the cemetery, Vannurden thought about “all the women that have not received their due respect.” That’s when he got the idea to carve Caroline’s name on the large Marklowitz cemetery monument, along with the words “LOVING MOTHER” and the names and birth years of all 18 of the children she brought into the world.
“I thought, what could be a greater justice,” said Vannurden.
His idea for the headstone began to germinate nearly 40 years ago, when Vannurden found a yellowed newspaper clipping in a box of his mother’s photos. It was the autobiographical essay by grandfather Fred, from the March 20, 1928, edition of the St. Cloud Daily Journal Press, in which he described his rise from dirt-poor immigrant to well-to-do farmer with three barns in Maine Prairie Township.
“I have always kept between thirty and forty cows and lots of young stock,” Fred boasted — leaving out any reference to the family members who did the bulk of the milking, namely his wife and daughters.
Vannurden showed the article to his uncle, Edgar Marklowitz, who was born a year after Olga in 1912.
“After reading it he began to cry and dropped it to the floor,” Vannurden said. “When he recovered himself he said: ‘That son of a bitch, he takes all the credit after treating his wife and kids as slave labor.”‘
“Back then the women did all the milking,” Vannurden said. “Can you imagine milking 40 head of cows twice a day by hand?”
Fred offered advice in his 1928 essay “to everyone who has an ambition to get to the top: ‘Work hard, save hard and pray.’ If you follow this advice you won’t have to kick about hard times.”
Having a hard-working wife and kids didn’t hurt, either.
Vannurden sent along to me a photograph of Fred, Caroline and 10 of their children in front of their farm house, circa 1915. Fred stands cocksure with his hand on his hip wearing a white tie and dark suit, while Caroline sits with a daughter on her lap and two young girls on each side. I’m speculating a bit, but she looks exhausted — and likely appreciative of a rare chance to sit down.
When Caroline died at 85 in in 1957, her obituary referred to her only as Mrs. Fred Marklowitz. Vannurden’s mother, Olga, was 95 when she died in 2007; she buried four of her husbands and two boyfriends, whose deaths ranged from drowning to cancer and heart attack.
“There were two other men who wanted to marry her but she refused,” Vannurden said. “So she put six men in their graves and I can only imagine she got that strength and resilience from her mother.”
Now the family headstone mentions Caroline and the children, just under the engraved letters MARKLOWITZ. Vannurden left Fred off the monument, he said, because “I wanted this to be all about my grandmother. He got plenty of credit during his lifetime, while she never did.”
“My point to all this is that women were treated as property and got little or no respect,” Vannurden said, “and never given the credit when credit was due.”
Curt Brown’s tales about Minnesota’s history appear every other Sunday. Readers can send him ideas and suggestions at mnhistory@startribune.com. His latest book looks at 1918 Minnesota, when flu, war and fires converged: strib.mn/MN1918.
“I have done everything in my power to remedy this situation, and it continues to get more and more violent by the day,” Moturi wrote. “There have been numerous times when I’ve seen Sawchak outside and contacted law enforcement, and there was no response. I am not confident in the pursuit of Sawchak given that Sawchak attacked me, MPD officers had John detained, and despite an HRO and multiple warrants — they still let him go.”
On Friday, five City Council members sent a letter to Mayor Jacob Frey and Police Chief Brian O’Hara expressing their “utter horror at MPD’s failure to protect a Minneapolis resident from a clear, persistent and amply reported threat posed by his neighbor.”
Council Members Andrea Jenkins, Elliott Payne, Aisha Chughtai, Jason Chavez and Robin Wonsley went on to allege that police had failed to submit reports to the County Attorney’s Office despite threats being made with weapons, and at times while Sawchak screamed racial slurs. Sawchak is white and Moturi is Black.
The council members also contend in their letter that the MPD told the County Attorney’s Office that police did not intend to execute the warrant for “reasons of officer safety.”
At a Friday afternoon news conference at MPD’s Fifth Precinct, O’Hara said police had been working to arrest Sawchak since at least April, but “no Minneapolis police officers have had in-person contact with that suspect since the victim in this case has been calling us.” The chief pointed out that Sawchak is mentally ill, has guns and refuses to cooperate “in the dozens of times that police officers have responded to the residence.”
O’Hara put aside the option to carry out “a high-risk warrant based on these factors [and] the likelihood of an armed, violent confrontation where we may have to use deadly force with the suspect.” The preference, he said, was to arrest Sawchak outside his home, but “in this case, this suspect is a recluse and does not come out of the house.”
ROCHESTER – The Federal Transit Administration has green-lighted an $85 million grant supporting the development of the city’s planned Link Bus Rapid Transit system.
The FTA formally announced the grant on Friday during a ceremonial check presentation outside of the Mayo Civic Center, one of the seven stops planned for the bus line. The federal grant will cover about 60% of the project’s estimated $143.4 million price tag, with the remaining funds coming from Destination Medical Center, the largest public-private development project in state history.
Set to go live in 2026, the 2.8-mile Link system will connect downtown Rochester, including Mayo Clinic’s campuses, with a proposed “transit village” that will include parking, hundreds of housing units and a public plaza. The bus line will be the first of its kind outside the Twin Cities — with service running every five minutes during peak hours.
“That means you may not even need to look at a schedule,” said Veronica Vanterpool, deputy administrator for the FTA. “You can just show up at your transit stop and expect the next bus to come in a short time. That is a game changer and a life-transformational experience in transit for those people who are using it and relying on it.”
The planned Second Street corridor is already one of the busiest roads in Rochester, carrying more than 21,800 vehicles a day, and city planners have talked for years about ways to reduce traffic congestion in the city’s downtown. Local officials estimate that the transit line, which will rely on a fleet of all-electric buses, will handle 11,000 riders on its first day of operation and save eight city blocks of parking.
Speaking to a crowd of about 100 people gathered on Friday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar said the project shows Rochester is thinking strategically about how it handles growth.
“If you just plan the business expansion, and you don’t have the workforce, you don’t have the child care, the housing or the transit, it’s not going to work very well as a lot of communities across the nation have found,” Klobuchar said.
A St. Paul man who was in critical condition following a fire last week at his home in the Battle Creek neighborhood has died, marking the city’s eighth fire death this year.
According to a news release from the St. Paul Fire Department, the man was found unconscious in the basement of a house on Nelson Street early in the morning of Oct. 17, after fire crews had extinguished a fire at the two-story residence. Paramedics undertook life-saving measures before taking him to the hospital.
No one else was injured in the fire, which was found to have been accidental and started in the engine of a car parked in the tuck-under garage. The fire was confined to the garage, but heavy smoke filled the house. Smoke detectors enabled others in the house to exit safely, officials said.
