My Life. A Story of God's Grace

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My Family Background and Early Years (1941-59)

I came into the world on December 5, 1941, two days before Pearl Harbor. I grew up in a small 720 sq. ft. WWII house at 1015 N. Baltimore Avenue in Hastings, Nebraska (population about 15,000 at the time). I was the second of three children in a simple working-class family.

My dad, Harold, was a hard-working automotive machinist who put in long hours grinding crankshafts for two car parts shops in town (L.J. Messer and Sidles).

My mom, Helen, was a faithful stay-at-home mom, though she later worked in the high school cafeteria and in a hot laundry downtown.

My family background has enabled me to relate with appreciation to ordinary working people (the secretaries, security guards, custodians, and people working in the physical plant at Whitworth), and I’m grateful for that.

My Dad’s Family

My dad, a second-generation German Russian, grew up across the tracks in the older, German-speaking part of town. My grandpa, Conrad Mohrlang, worked on the railroad, laying ties. He and Grandma Anna were early 20th century immigrants from German colonies in the lower Volga region of Russia.

By way of background, in 1763 the Russian Empress Catherine the Great, a former German princess, invited German farmers to come develop the Volga River Valley agriculturally. Four years later, Johann Christoph Morlang (sic) and his family left Weiler Martinstein, their village in western Germany, and emigrated to Russia, settling in the Volga German colony of Walter on August 25, 1767. ¹ Grandpa Mohrlang grew up in Walter.

Grandpa and Grandma Mohrlang fled Russia in a time of growing restrictions on the Germans because of the government policy of Russification, which forced non-Russians to give up their culture and language and adopt the Russian culture and language. These restrictions greatly intensified following the outbreak of war with Germany in 1914. Under Stalin’s rule (1924-53), the government seized the property of German Russians and forcibly relocated them to eastern Russia, many to Gulag forced-labor camps in Siberia. A great many of them were executed or starved to death. ²

But in the providence of God, in this time of growing restrictions, my grandparents became part of a large exodus of Germans fleeing Russia because of the difficulties. (I’m told that Grandpa and his brother George were stowaways, running away from conscription into the Russian army.) Though I know none of the details, my grandparents, who knew no English, eventually made their way separately across the Atlantic to the United States, entering at Ellis Island. From there, together with other Volga Germans, they made their way west by train all the way to the farmland of the Midwest, where many of them settled in towns along the railway.

My grandparents ended up in a community of Volga Germans in Nebraska. After they met and were married in Lincoln (it was an arranged marriage, I believe), they traveled from place to place with Grandpa’s railway crew and finally settled along the railroad tracks in the German-speaking part of Hastings, among other Volga Germans.

All life long they spoke broken English and ate Grandma’s German cooking, which we occasionally enjoyed at their home at 304 S. Boston. Short, white-haired Grandma was cheerful and always encouraged us kids to eat more, while black-haired, pipe-smoking Grandpa was quieter. When they got their first black-and-white television set, they could be found glued to the screen whenever there was professional wrestling on. Our family would occasionally go over and watch it with them after supper. (In the Midwest, the evening meal is called supper, and the midday meal, dinner.)

They had five children, two of whom (Alta and Archie) later migrated with their spouses to Portland, Oregon for work in the factories in the early days of World War II. The other three (Harold, Kathryn, and Raymond) remained in Hastings.

Kind Aunt Al faithfully kept us all informed of what everybody in the family was doing, in her handwritten letters from Portland.

Uncle Ray, who lived only two doors away from us, drove a semi-truck to Lincoln every night, though he was frightened to death (he put it more graphically) by the strong winter side winds on the icy highway. He loved playing ball, and I tried to imitate the tricky things he could do with a baseball. His language was colorful: swear words were his way of emphasizing things. Uncle Ray was the classic Mohrlang hoarder, stuffing his small WWII home and garage with all the bargain buys he accumulated over years of chasing daily garage sales; he lived for garage sales. He also went to church with his pockets filled with candy for the kids.

Aunt Kass expressed in her last words to me what I take to be the Mohrlang philosophy of life. Waving goodbye on her porch, with an absolutely straight face she said, Rogey, enjoy your food while you can. We Mohrlangs take those words seriously.

My Mom’s Family

My mom, an O’Donnell, grew up on a farm near Trumbull, a few miles northeast of Hastings. The farm stood only a half-mile away from the home of the Pearsons, her maternal great-grandparents, Swedish pioneers who settled in the 1860s on the rich farmland of the Nebraska plains. Mom’s maternal grandma, Erika, married Peter Larson, and in 1883 they established the farm where Mom grew up.

My mom’s dad, Grandpa Lloyd O’Donnell, came to Trumbull from Illinois with his Irish-Welsh family in 1906, when he was 16. After he married Grandma Emma in 1911, they took over the Larson farm.

My mom met my dad at Trumbull High School, when Dad and his family were living in Trumbull while Grandpa Mohrlang was working on the railroad in the area. After two years at Kearney State Teachers College, she became a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse close to the farm, before she and Dad were married in 1936; they then settled in Hastings.

As I remember the farm, there was an old wooden house, a couple of barns, a windmill and water tank for the animals, a chicken coop, and an icehouse. (In winter, the farmers brought blocks of ice from the Platte River ten miles away, covering them with straw to keep them cold.) There was also a wooden outhouse that I remember as frigid in the cold Nebraska winter. The house was heated by a single coal stove in the middle of the main room, and water was drawn up by a hand pump in the kitchen. In my growing-up years, there was no electricity on the farm, only kerosene lanterns.

Chubby Grandma Emma was outgoing and fun-loving. Grandpa Lloyd, in his overalls, with cheeks reddened by the sun, was more reserved but kind to us kids. One hot summer day, he drove us to Doniphan for cold bottles of pop at the local store, and that was special. I have warm memories of the big meals we enjoyed at the farm on holidays, together with uncles, aunts, and cousins, followed by softball pitched against the side of the barn.

Grandpa and Grandma O’Donnell had three children: Evelyn, Helen (my mom), and Paul. My mom grew up feeling somewhat unwanted; she felt her parents really wanted a son who could take over the farm, instead of another daughter. When Grandpa Lloyd died and Grandma Emma moved from the farm into Hastings, at 1105 N. Hewett, only a block away from our home, my mom ended up doing much of the work of caring for her. Mom’s sister, Evelyn, lived only a block away, but I don’t have a sense that the two sisters were close — or that Mom felt close to her younger brother, Paul, who took over the farm, either. Mom’s affections were for her immediate family.

The Churchgoing Background of Our Family

Both sets of my grandparents and their children, our uncles and aunts, were faithful churchgoers. Grandpa and Grandma Mohrlang attended the German-speaking Congregational Church near their home (my dad was catechized in German), and Grandpa and Grandma O’Donnell became part of the Methodist Church a few miles away in Trumbull.

I don’t know who among my grandparents, uncles, and aunts had a real experience of Christ. Though both sides of the family were regular in their churchgoing, I don’t recall any of them speaking of the Lord or the gospel in a personal way. In the Midwest of those days, churchgoing was a traditional way of life; most people would be found in church on a Sunday morning. As my Uncle Paul said to me once, In our family, we go to church out of custom.

My dear Aunt Eunice (Paul’s wife, a nurse from Evangelical United Brethren background) would be an exception, with her warm personal faith in Jesus and her love of scripture. Their daughter, my cousin Nancy, was converted to Christ when she was a nursing student at Nebraska Wesleyan University; she and her husband, Stephen Swanson, later served as missionaries in Bangladesh with the Bible and Medical Missionary Fellowship (now Interserve). She and I corresponded quite a bit in her early days as