A Memory of My Friend and Cousin Bert Palm
We buried him in the Palmville Township Cemetery, next to his wife, Nora (Dahl) who died suddenly at their home in
Roseau last year on October 15. Bert died in his sleep, on December 2nd, this year, one day after what would have been
their 65th wedding anniversary. I have an image of Nora, in Texas somewhere, dressed in a sombrero and serape astride a
magnificent longhorn steer, with Bert standing aside.
They were visiting their eldest daughter Diane Anderson, and her husband Harlan, of Wannaska, who were wintering there. Bert and Nora were great sports. They did so much together. Graveside, Gail wept as she and I embraced.
I said, “We all knew this day was coming.”
She managed, “Yes , but . . . and he didn’t suffer. He died in his sleep when he laid down for a nap. That’s the best way to go. I found him . .”
Marsha Pickar, the youngest daughter, said her dad had been so lonely, so lonely.
Diane imagined, thinking of the hereafter, “Grandma has just baked some lefse and he’s sitting down to a piece. . .
Grandpa’s smiling now.” “Yah.” I agreed that would surely put a smile on Bert’s face, no fooling.
Bert had a wry sense of humor he delivered with a straight face so often, that people, including Nora sometimes, had
to wonder if he was joking or not. Bert was oftentimes ‘full of the devil’.
At Bert’s 86th birthday party at Gail Eidsmoe, and her husband Grant’s home this spring, Bert looked thin and frail,
sitting in an easy chair, his feet resting on a foot stool, his great grandchildren playing on the floor nearby. Two of Bert’s
nephews, his brother Marvin Palm’s sons, Ron and Greg, sat together off to one side, where they exchanged stories with
Bert and laughed heartily. Those two could often put a smile on Bert’s face. There’s no shortage of laughter under a roof
with Palms or their descendents within.
After Nora’s passing, Bert was still mobile and relatively independent. He often drove his car or truck to Wannaska,
or went ‘uptown’ in Roseau to do errands. I found him at home one morning last summer, doing something in his garage.
He invited me in, where he could be more comfortable sitting down than standing as he suffered with a form of calcium
deficiency, that is somewhat rare in men, and poor circulation too because of his age, as I remember him telling me. As I followed him up the steps from his garage, it saddened me. I was
especially interested in that because his father, David Palm, was a brother to my grandfather, Wilhelm Palm, and his mother Ella (Berg) was a sister to my grandmother, Annie (Berg). I wondered if I was susceptible to his condition as well.
Among other things, we visited about the then-upcoming Palm Family reunion, happening in June this year, and who
might be there and who would not. I thought it may be difficult for him to be there only eight months after Nora’s death
as I recall my own dad’s anguished expression captured in a photograph at a Palm Reunion in 1982, two months after my
mother’s death, in which it appears he’s looking for her in a sea of familiar Palm faces and voices.
At his funeral, Bert ‘Rueben’ Palm, was said to have been meticulous. He had to be, working on clocks and watches as
he did part-time, after his retirement from farming. He learned much of what he knew about clockwork mechanism from
his cousin, the late Raymond Palm, a watchmaker and gunsmith of some renown in Roseau County for over seventy
years. I remember Bert peering at watchworks through a single eyepiece in Raymond’s shop on Center Street, in Roseau,
as Raymond explained something; or the two of them talking at length about either guns or watches during their long
tenure with one another.
steeped in throughout the generations.
My friendship with Bert grew after The Raven: Northwest Minnesota’s Original Art, History & Humor Journal, the
magazine my friend Joe McDonnell, my wife Jackie and I publish, did a story in the Volume 5, Spring Issue, in 2000, about
Palmville District 44 West, the one-room schoolhouse at Roseau County Road 8 & 125.
From its beginnings in 1904 to its closure in 1946, many of the Palms including Bert and his siblings, my mother Violet Palm Reynolds and her siblings; and many others, went to school at 44 West. Bert was one of the former students who came to the schoolhouse to offer us information about it. Here are some excerpts from that issue:
“Verna, Marvin, and Bert Palm drove to school in a caboose pulled by their big white horse, ’Tony’, who was kept in a little barn in the woods to the west of the school house (on Fred Johnson’s land.) . . . Bert recalled a time when they were taking the school teacher home . . . one particularly windy afternoon after school. The snow had blown and drifted much of the day. Marvin was driving their horse,’Silver.’ Bert, his sisters, and the teacher were inside, when the caboose suddenly ran up onto a hard snowdrift on just one side, and the wind caught it and tipped the whole caboose over --right
on the door.
Imagine the horse suddenly caught in stride, stopped in its tracks by the dead weight of the tipped-over caboose.
Picture the horse trying to turn its head and look back around the blinders, its mouth open against the bit, its hot breath vaporizing in the windy cold. The caboose on its side behind it, runners in the air; the black soot from the stove pipe salted plainly against the white of the snow; the voices of muffled surprise and the sounds of movement inside it.
Everyone wanting to get away from the heat of the hot stove, but no one panicking; the boys, in particular, trying to get
out somehow. Bert said he and Marvin got out and tipped the caboose back over on its runners. No one inside was the
worse for the experience and amazingly no one was burned against the stove or by the scattered coals.”
Bert and I didn’t get together very often, but our few trips were noteworthy if only in the sense of of mutual interest
in local history. He knew I was always willing to ride along on his forays, one of which was the search for a lost gravesite
off the Wilson Road in western Palmville. We took with us a long steel rod with which we plunged down through the
undergrowth there, in an area he thought may contain the graves, but without having a pinpoint location, we decided our
attempt was fruitless and gave it up.
Several years ago, Bert and I spent almost a whole day walking through the Louis & Inga (Anderson) Palm’s homestead, with Frank Cwikla’s permission as he owns the property. Louis Palm was Bert’s grandfather, and my greatgrandfather, for whom Palmville Township is named. Bert remembered the place as a child, so I took many pictures and extensive notes as he talked. One of the things he remembered vividly was a sawmill that the Palm boys had below the barn and a place on the river where they’d cross with the steam engine. We couldn’t find it that day; though I think I
found it a few years later while canoeing that section of the river with Joe McDonnell; it looked like so many large rocks in
one place from bank to bank.
Bert saw a great many changes throughout his life of 86 years; he knew the ins and outs of it, as we all will come to
know and I doubt that the ‘end of life’ was looked on any differently than being another change. For some it’s a relief, a
saving grace, when we can shed all the stress and tensions we’ve endured. Some people take their own lives. For others,
the end of life is terror, a great black hole from which there’s no escape.
For Bert, I think, it was just another afternoon nap, dreaming about his life with Nora.
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