From the Farm

My family genealogical line goes back, like all do, way back. However, the record is somewhat sketchy. Beyond a few generations, darkness shrouds the hidden gems and ancestral secrets. Not that there is any earth-shaking embarrassment hiding in the past—at...

Grabbing hold with sap-sticky hands, my arms were outstretched along with my legs straight up. The sting from blood-streaked appendages mingled in my senses with the smell of fresh pine as I hung there dazed, feet caught, hands gripping branches tightly and...

Besides a droopy eye and crooked smile, my grandpa Jack Gianotti, Sr, had another distinguishing characteristic. He was missing part of his middle finger, down to the second knuckle. Memory fails to recall which hand, but I guess it makes little difference...

I was about 13 or 14 years old when I had my first smoke. My dad, who was a smoker most of his life, had inadvertently dropped a pack of cigs one day in the rec room of our modest bungalow in Blacksburg, Virginia. I think Mom was also a smoker at that time,...

Grandpa Gianotti (Jack Sr. as opposed to Jack Jr., my dad) had a crooked smile and a droopy eye that he was constantly dabbing dry with his handkerchief. It seemed normal to me, but that was all I knew him to look like. That was Grandpa. Those features were...

They were in their 70s, Grandma and Grandpa, and canoe tripping. Both were born with paddles in their hands. And they came by their love for wilderness adventures from living in the Mesabi Iron Range of northern Minnesota, on the edge of the BWCA (Boundary...

Giovanni and Elizabeth Gianotti emerge in the earliest record of this family’s historical brood. Giovanni was born December 31, 1859, in Turin, Italy, in the northwestern part of the country. Turin claims fame, among other accolades, as home of the famous...

Giovanni Gianotti, my great-grandfather, left Italy as a young man. Since he would have been twenty-nine years old when his first child was born (Tracy on January 9, 1888), he was probably in his early or mid-twenties when he arrived in northern Minnesota...

Semaphore commands a place in history as the oldest form of long distance communication. Technically it refers to any device that passes along a signal received: smoke signals, mirrors reflecting sunlight, flags waved in certain patterns, and, in the case of...

Jack Sr. was a man about town—but not in the worldly sense. Everyone knew Jack. His parents raised him there in Ely, and he married a hometown girl. They didn’t fit the mold in the least. As a boy, Jack was a ruffian, an outdoorsman of the original sort,...

My grandmother was a remarkable girl. One of my favorite pictures shows her as a cute, coy teenager standing in her gymnasium outfit, hair bobbed, holding on to a basketball, with the date 1908 and the letters EHS (Ely High School). She would have been in...

Many were the benefits of living on a farm back in the day, some not so evident to the untrained eye or thoughtless mind. In our spoiled, modern times, many people take their vehicles to the automatic car wash places, where you can get an underbody wash for...

Everyone knew it was my bus. Grandpa made that clear; that was his promise, and it was the first thing I looked for when we arrived at the farm every summer. What kid my age (or any age for that matter) was the proud owner of his own school bus? Grandpa made...

Gustava Gianotti lived an interesting life. She was born on November 17, 1895, four years after Jack. Her family home was shared by younger siblings Rudy (who died in his early twenties of tuberculosis), Lil, and Lydia. She grew quickly, having been, at age...

In his own words, Jack Gianotti (Sr.) was an uncontrollable ruffian as a boy. Fortunately, he left us an essay about the summer that changed the course of his life, when he lived with a man named Jack Connor on an island in the BWCA. “Tamed” might be too...

Our annual trek up to the farm one year (way back in the mid-1950s) broke virtually every one of today’s vehicle safety standards. The family car was a Studebaker, a product of a family-owned business that began in the eighteenth century, building wagons and...

Excitement crescendoed at the first sighting of the farm. Rounding the last bend along the rolling road, we cut through the familiar pine and white-barked birch common to northern Minnesota. The two-hour jaunt up from Duluth, a shipping harbor on the western...

She was an old spinster, Great Aunt Charlotte, but she became a profound illustration of life in many churches. Born in 1889 in Ely, Minnesota, one of the three older sisters of my grandfather, Jack, Sr., she lived to the ripe old age of ninety-three....

My grandparents’ farm was not all fun and games. Gramps put us to work. One of our jobs as kids was to serve on the wood detail, as he called it. There was no electric heat (that I knew of, but of course, we only visited in the summertime). The wood stoves...

No trip to Grandpa and Grandma’s farm would be complete without visiting Schaller Bay on Burnside Lake, just north of Ely. Mike and Gertrude Schaller owned the entire bay, bought from U.S. Steel after World War II in the late 1940s. The property included...

The one downside to my grandparents’ farm was that it was not on a lake. But no matter. A half-hour ride around the Shagawa Lake (on which Ely was situated) up and around the end of Burntside Lake to the north side solved the problem. The road down to the...

There it was in a full, glorious black-and-white photo: a man standing on a straight-backed wooden chair, holding the wingtips of a bald eagle with its body hanging below, just off the ground. Have you ever seen a picture like that? I have, and the man in...

Summertime in northern Minnesota brought out a great harvest of blueberries, and they are part of what defines me as a person. Possibly that sounds like hyperbole but their taste is woven into the fabric of my psyche. To this day, I cannot eat even one...

What’s a farm without a barn? I want to give a short descriptive tour, which may be boring for some, but not for me. I remember every inch of this fascinating building; it should be listed in the National Registry of Historic Places—at least in my humble...

Grandpa (Jack) grew up Roman Catholic, being a good Italian. His father, Giovanni, left the old country, ostensibly, as Gramps told me, to avoid the pressure to become a priest. We have no indication of how faithful Giovanni was to that denomination or even...

Grandma’s Lutheranism seems to have run throughout her life, even to the hymnbook she kept. Gustava’s genuine faith was evidenced in her love for reading from the “Daily Bread” devotional. Her response to my testimony of coming to faith in Jesus Christ was...

My father, Jack Jr., was an outdoorsman, at least in his early years. He was born in 1918, five years after the death of his grandfather, Giovanni, an immigrant from Italy. His primary male influence was his father, Jack Sr., and he grew up hunting, fishing,...

Once I raced my dad, fully expecting to leave him in the dust. I was a fleet-of-foot, pre-teen boy—used to running, jumping, and climbing—who was just emerging into adolescence with all the hormonal changes, self-centeredness, and overconfidence that come...

At Brisson’s Lodge, we kids had to be on our best behavior; great-aunt Katharine Brisson was a very particular person with stringent behavior expectations. She was the second youngest of my Grandpa’s siblings, who with her husband Lawrence owned and operated...

There it stood in the upper reaches of the barn. With brass hinges and ornate handles, the solid oak icebox harkened back to the old days before the dawn of electric refrigerators in America (ca. 1927). This aged beauty cooled food probably from the late...

Farms have bugs, insects of all kinds. My grandparents’ farm was no exception. My memory is not of cows swatting away incessant flies with their tails, mercilessly tormented by the constant buzzing, especially around their eyes beyond the reach of said...

He could be obstinate at times. That’s not surprising, considering Jac was born with a canoe paddle in his hand, took over the patriarch duties at a young age after his father’s untimely death, put younger siblings through college, worked for the city works...

"Impossible! You’ll never get a loan to buy a house.” No provable job history, no current employment, no guaranteed income—in other words, no basis for anyone lending us money. My wife and I had been homeowners for twenty years and had a work history of...

Well, well, well, family secrets will come out sooner or later—in this case, about eighty years later! Are there no secrets anymore? No, there were no murders in my family tree, no spy stories where a family member lived a double life. I am sure there are...

Grandpa never swore, at least not in any way that I could understand to be swearing. My dad, in contrast, would occasionally burst out with an Italian-sounding phrase and then chuckle at his attempt at conveying an air of sophistication. Despite my suspicion...

Mary M. Mantel (January 31, 1894 - November 5, 1979) was a wiry character. In her eighties, she looked every bit like a woman you see in old-time, formally posed, black and white photographs, where everyone looks stern, taken when a puff of smoke accompanied...

The telegram was jammed into the letter slot in the front door of the old house we lived in for the summer on my first internship in Canada. Grandma’s funeral notice from my dad went unnoticed for two weeks because the mail slot was rusted shut on the...

Fifty years. That’s 5-0. A half-century ago, 1972. Forgiven, saved, redeemed, regenerated, baptized in the Spirit, restored, raised to newness of life, transferred from the kingdom of darkness into the realm of light, converted from being an enemy of God to...

Declining years took their toll. But, as the saying goes, “It’s hard to keep a good man down.” In his early seventies (or was it eighties?), he had a heart attack that landed him in the hospital. Upon his release, the doctor ordered him to slow down and not...

She said yes, then she said no. Any other time I would have written a person off for being flighty and unreliable. But this time, when I discovered the cause of her indecision, I became excited that she had turned me down. I had been sorely disappointed the...

Gustava (1895-1982, married 1917), my grandmother, beloved wife to Jack Sr., nicknamed ’Tava by some family members, was of Finnish blood, with a smattering of Swedish. Her parents immigrated to the US, where the patriarch of the family, Samuel Gustafson,...

The fun stories from the farm give way to, of all things, death. Ironically, the termination of life integrates directly into life itself. We are all affected by it. One generation comes, and another goes (Ecc. 1:4). Yet, however macabre that sounds, there...

During our Christmas visit with my parents in Florida, we had a very cordial, even warm time, this coming after seven years of a strained relationship since my spiritual conversion. The year was 1979. After much prayer and God’s supplying the airfare, we...

We kept it a secret, but could only keep it under wraps for so long. We adult children had suspicions but dared not bring them up among ourselves or even with him. But our mother’s memory was slipping, and Dad couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge that. By...

Now that Dad was gone, what about my mother? Her Alzheimer’s had progressed to the point where she could not live alone in the Babbit, Minnesota home. At seventy years old, she was otherwise healthy. We were able to move her to an assisted living facility in...

As a young girl, she did all that was expected of her from the church. Baptized as an infant, she received her first communion in a little white dress with white gloves and shiny patent-leather shoes; she faithfully went to confession and attended church...

My conversion to faith came like a lightning bolt from the sky—well, sort of. My heart resonates when I read the story of the apostle Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus (as told in the Bible in Acts 9). Granted, no visible light burst out and blinded...

So there I was, having spent my best arguments against her, the college student working a summer job where I was employed. In my mind, I won all the arguments, if winning meant having the last word. But although I was convinced on one level that I was right,...

Not able to convince my friend that she was brainwashed with religious superstition, I told her I didn’t want to waste any more time on any of this religious stuff. This was it; I wanted no more. What was happening inside of me was turmoil. The conversations...

The decision was staring me in the face. God was inviting me to surrender to Him. No one told me I had to change and quit smoking, drinking, swearing or anything else. He wanted me to have a relationship with Him and to free me from my selfishness and guilt....

Pulling into a gas station with a friend from work, I noticed a large advertising sign with a single word emblazoned in red letters, “Save!” Underneath was the standard marketing ploy showing the old price of other gas stations crossed out and the new,...

Early in my Christian life I was a skeptical sponge. By that, I mean I couldn’t learn enough about God and His Word, the Bible. I checked out everything I heard against the Word of God. I would rush home from work to devour it, initially trying to speed read...

My wife Mary grew up in a solid Christian home with parents fully committed to the Lord and His people. Church was a second home, with three services on Sunday (they attended all three) and a mid-week prayer and Bible study service. In a land-locked...

As I write this (December 2022), the city of Buffalo, N.Y., is digging out of the worst blizzard in its history. Situated on Lake Erie's eastern end, the so-called lake-effect snow is part of life there, but this one was a doozy. With the death toll reaching...

A three-month notice was unheard of in the corporate world. But, after two-plus years of my working at Marine Midland Bank, which had recently been acquired by what is now known as the HSBC bank (then the 4th largest bank in the world), we were setting out...

So how did Mary and I determine it was God’s will for us to leave everything behind and study theology for four years and then embark on a new career of serving the Lord full-time? It began for me on the day I surrendered to God by accepting that I was a...

Believing we were in the center of God’s will, having left everything behind, committed to not borrowing money for school, having no job, no home of our own, staying with friends, already enrolled in the seminary, partway through the first semester, our...

As a car pulled up next to mine at a stoplight, I had an olfactory flashback to my past. My window was open and wafting in from the beat-up old vehicle on my left was a whiff of stale gasoline, the kind that comes from old fuel-soaked upholstery or wood that...

After my first year of Dallas Theological Seminary, Mary and I learned the ropes of life in Dallas and adjusted to the academic environment. But let me allay some misconceptions. Some people think of seminary as a quiet place where people spend a lot of time...

God used the World’s Strongman Contest to meet our needs during my seminary years in Dallas! No, I wasn’t a contestant, though I proudly regale my ability at twisting off bottle and jar lids for my wife. But God worked in an interesting way in 1980 to...

A few years ago, I went back to the farm. I could call it a blast from the past or a weird experience, but it was more the closing of a significant chapter in my experience of bygone generations. It was long after my grandparents passed away (the last being...

Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt and my great-grandfather were contemporaries. Teddy was born in Oyster Bay, New York, in 1858; Giovanni Gianotti was born in Turin, Italy, in 1859. The former outlived my ancestor by six years, with Teddy dying in 1919 at age 60...

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in 1859, the same year as my great-grandfather Giovanni Gianotti. Doyle was, of course, a British physician and celebrated author of four books and 56 short stories featuring the exploits of the fictitious Sherlock Holmes. The...

He harshly rebuked the young boys who walked up his driveway on a hot day. All they wanted was a drink of water. “Go to your own home and get a drink.” As Mary tells the story, a short while later her father grabbed a pitcher of water with some cups and...

He loved to sing hymns and choruses. Not that Ross McIntee (my father-in-law) had a refined voice, he sang loud, on tune and with gusto. To keep congregational singing in church from dragging, he would often bellow out the beginning of a verse just before...

Born with a paddle in my hand in northern Minnesota, near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA), I come by my love for canoeing honestly. It’s in my genes; it flows through my blood. For some people, their continuity of life is etched in tattoos on their...

Someone coined the phrase “Business as Mission” to refer to the strategy of entering a mission field with a business as a “full-time” day job and therefore gaining a work visa to the country, but with the expressed purpose of gaining a foothold where...

It happened in slow-motion. While trying to steady the rock of the canoe from gunnel to gunnel, the windward side slowly dipped in the trough between waves, and we took on water—in the middle of the lake on a chili October afternoon. Canoeing mishaps do...

White caps were everywhere, the wind competing against us, water spray nearly blinding us, and the headway difficult. We were halfway to the island where we planned to spend the night. Fourteen campers and four leaders in six canoes loaded with camping gear...

In the middle of Big Trout Lake in Algonquin Provincial Park in Canada, the lost camper alarm pierced through the air. One of our 18 group members turned up missing for dinner call. Launching into emergency protocol, we immediately sent two canoes around the...

Majestic eagles, ospreys, and loons with their four distinct and haunting calls; iconic Canadian geese, Great Blue Herons, owls, wood ducks, hawks, and an attack by a horde of seagulls—we-ve seen them all. Otters, beavers, bears, moose, and the occasional...

It was a hot, sultry day in Dallas, Texas. We had arrived a month early to settle in for my start at Dallas Seminary. The year was 1979. At 29 years old, I was launching with Mary into a complete career change, walking away from eight years working in the...

Reprising my grandparents’ canoe tripping in the Boundary Water Canoe Area (BWCA) of northern Minnesota along par of the 5,529-mile border with Canada (marked by the 49th parallel), three of us brothers set out to chase the mythology of a generation and an...

My father (Jack Gianotti, Jr.) had an interesting quirk about him, one that I enjoyed often and which I have sometimes fallen prey to. He was a dignified man in many ways, and I learned a lot from him. He had a master’s degree in political science and, after...

God’s glory shows up in the most unexpected ways, in the most supremely mundane places. In one of my more pensive moods, sitting on a hillside amidst a cascade of wildflowers, I was enjoying God’s beauty on a warm, sunny day, relaxing with little care in the...

He came out of the locker room and stood in the hallway looking me up and down. His head was covered in permanent welts from his role as an enforcer. Already stripped out of his upper body pads and jersey, one gloved hand held his stick, the other clenched...

Grandma was an adventurous gal—ahead of her time. She reminds me, metaphorically, of the security we have in Christ. Hearty, resourceful, and meticulous, she lived through World War I (1914-18), the U.S. Great Depression (1929-41), and World War II...

The date was June 3, 1970. The place was Northern Minnesota, in a small town near the Canadian border called Ely. My grandpa was 78 years old, my grandma 75, and they had been married for 53 years when he wrote the following letter to their son (my father)...

When I was a young boy, our family vacation was always a two-week visit to my grandparents’ farm in northern Minnesota. What was it about them that has so captured my imagination, which I am sure is completely outsized, seeing them through my eyes of a...

The farmhouse of my childhood is no longer there. After my grandparents died, the property was sold, which was scandalous to me. How could Dad sell all my memories? On a visit back to the farm, I was mortified to see an old travel trailer desecrating the...

I once mentioned to a cardiologist friend that I would love to observe a live medical operation in person and in real-time. This was circa 1993 when we were living in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. I’ve always been fascinated with learning and experiencing...