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Note: Mel Soderlund Biography (1906-1971)
Mel Soderlund the eldest child of Anton and Emma Soderlund was born October 28, 1906 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. While being delivered at home, the attending doctor dropped Mel and as a result he suffered from a deformed leg and the middle finger on one hand. He had a younger brother Clarence (Clary) and a sister Clara (Lala). Anton was a carpenter and Emma a homemaker. The family lived in several houses in Minneapolis before moving to Port Arthur, Canada in 1913. The stay in Canada was short however because work was not abundant and the climate was unpleasant; they returned to Minneapolis in 1914.
The first day of school for Mel was difficult because he was unable to open the door on the school. He returned home and announced that he was not going back to school, but nevertheless he did return the next day. Both of Mel's parents were born in Sweden and so his first language was Swedish. When a child, Emma read to Mel to practice her English. Because Emma did not have much contact with non-Swedish people, she did not have a lot of practice speaking English. She tried to improve her English speaking ability by reading to Mel but many times she mispronounced the English word. Mel therefore learned to speak English with some mispronounced words. On one occasion while reading a story aloud to the class, Mel's teacher read the word "horizon". Mel corrected her saying that the word was pronounced "hor-izz-on" because Mama said it that way.
Mel met his future wife Pearl Hamel at a Farmer-Labor Party sponsored dance. The couple began to date and they were married on September 1, 1928 in the rectory of Our Lady of Lourdes Church, the home parish of Pearl. Because Mel was not a Catholic, the marriage was not allowed to take place in the church.
When he got married Mel was working at the Ecklund Bus Body Company in south Minneapolis. The couple rented an upper duplex and Pearl worked as a seamstress. In October 1929 the stock market crashed and the economy began to decline drastically. Mel kept his job until Christmas 1930 when he was laid-off from work. Jobs were very scarce and he could not find work. The couple struggled trying to get by on Pearl's meager earnings. Eventually Mel worked for Pearl's mother doing handy work at her duplexes. This helped the couple put food on the table but little more.
Mel seemed to have a natural ability for drawing and so he enrolled at a correspondence school to learn cartooning. He began to sell some of his ideas for cartoons to other cartoonists and he eventually became fairly successful at his work. Finally in 1936 Mel and Pearl bought their first house at 4015 Penn Avenue North in Minneapolis. They rented the house to Mel's Aunt Lina and his grandfather Magnus Soderlund and Hulda Carlson, a friend of Lina's. Finally in May 1940 Mel and Pearl moved into the house where they would both live until they died.
During World War II Mel was drafted into the armed forces. He spent a few days at Fort Snelling but was eventually exempted because of a hernia, which was discovered during the routine physical examination prior to induction into the army.
Mel and Pearl had 3 sons, William (Bill), Joseph (Joe) and Raymond (Ray). The family began to struggle again in the summer of 1948 and in the fall of 1949 Mel suffered a heart attack. When Mel returned to cartooning after his hospital stay, he found he could not longer support his family with cartooning. The couple was forced to change financial directions after nearly 25 years of marriage. They purchased their first apartment house, a converted mansion at 1711 Emerson Avenue North, in the fall of 1952. Mel worked as the fixit man and Pearl was the financial person. Eventually the couple had several apartment buildings and their financial stress was over.
Mel was a good family man who was kind and gentle to his wife and children. He remained close to his parents throughout their lives. Mel stood about 6 feet tall and weighed about 175 pounds. He had curly reddish blond hair, which never stayed combed. He had a lively sense of humor and was always ready with a "wise crack". Mel did not like sports much but he loved to fish. Mel was a very private person and never went out of his way to socialize. He enjoyed the company of his closest family. He liked to visit his mother on Friday evenings when she became very aged and play Chinese checkers with her. His wife, Pearl, was his best friend. They would go to the "joints" nearly every day. Many times the day did not began until after lunch because they would frequent rummage sales in the morning. Mel loved sweets and ate Danish pastry or cookies whenever he could. When Pearl worked out of the house, he would help her by peeling the supper potatoes before he left the house to pick her up from work. Mel's major bad habit was smoking which he began as a boy and was never able to break. Mel did not drink alcohol to excess but in later years he did have a glass of wine almost every evening before bedtime. Mel was soft-spoken and was an inveterate wise-cracker. Many times he would laugh so hard he could not catch his breath.
Mel loved his sons and daughters-in-law and grandchildren. He had an especially close relationship with Bill's wife, Joan who also liked to draw. All of Bill's children, Billy, Daniel, Patrick, Anne Marie and Margaret and also Joe's son Eric were born before Mel died. He never knew the rest of his grandchildren. He liked to give the older children gum and other treats. He entertained the children by drawing cartoon pictures while they stood next to his rocking chair in the dining room of his house.
Mel was raised a Lutheran but because of a conflict with Anton's sister, Melina, Mel was never baptized. He never practiced his religion until almost the end of his life, during a life-threatening illness, when he was baptized into the Lutheran church. Upon returning home from the hospital after his recovery, Mel called his mother to let her know that he had finally been baptized. Almost immediately he began to attend the Catholic Church with his wife Pearl and remained a Catholic until his death. He confided to Pearl shortly before he died that if he had known the peace he experienced from his faith earlier in his life, he would have converted long before he did.
Mel died December 17, 1971 at Glenwood Hills Hospital in Minneapolis after suffering a mesenteric artery clot. He had been hospitalized for only a few days. He was buried at Crystal Lake Cemetery.
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Personal Reminisces of Mel Soderlund by Bill Soderlund, Sr.
Mel Soderlund, my father, was a very kind and gentle man. He stood about 6 feet tall and he weighed about 165 pounds. His hair was reddish blond and quite wavy. I always thought his cheeks were "fluffy" because his face, though not fat, had a fullness about it. When I was a child he did not wear a mustache, though when he was about 53 he grew one. He was extremely shy and did not like to answer the telephone, but when he was in a group of people he knew, he usually was the humor and joy of the group.
My earliest memory of my father was at Christmas time, 1939. He pulled me in my sled to visit a dry goods store about a block north of our house at 1510 5th Street Northeast. There was a moving Santa Claus in the window standing in front of a fireplace.
When a small boy, I attended the Northeast Neighborhood House because Mom worked and Dad also worked at home. He took me to school every morning and picked me up every afternoon. The routine was always the same. One afternoon Mom came to pick me up because Uncle George Rooney was in town. I believe this was in 1940. Mom did not follow the regular routine of stopping at the fountain on the way out of the building. I remember being very upset with her, why didn't she know the routine?
Dad liked to fish. When I was little, he and Mom would go fishing in the summer many times. We usually went to Rock Lake at Rockford, Minnesota, or maybe a lake out west of town. We would take a Thermos bottle of coffee, unsweetened because that is what Dad likes, and maybe a few liverwurst sandwiches. We always ate in the boat because they did not want to return to shore to eat. Dad liked minnow for bait, but he sometimes would try an exotic bait such as salmon eggs. A couple of times Dad and Grandpa and I went ice fishing. We never had an icehouse and we hauled all our equipment out on the lake with a little sled. We all dressed very warmly but we all were very cold by the time we returned home.
After I got older, Dad would take me fishing out to Twin Lake in Robbinsdale. There was a farmer who rented boats there for only $1.00. We usually would go Saturday evening for a couple of hours and usually caught a nice slew of fish, mostly sunfish or crappies. There were a couple of times that I came out of school at St. Bridget's and found Dad and Lina waiting for me in the car. We would then go fishing together. What a treat!
Dad did not get his first automobile until the spring of 1940. We needed a car because Mom worked and we did not live on the streetcar line. We got our first car, a 1937 Hudson Terraplane, about the same time we moved into the house at 4015 Penn Avenue North, Minneapolis. Dad loved that car. It was not fancy but it seemed to have a personality all of its own. It was a little two-door model and it was black. Dad kept it in first class shape for the eleven years that he owned it. He always brought it to the mechanic in northeast Minneapolis who sold it to him. His name was Joe Cowette and Dad liked and trusted him very much.
Dad was Lutheran but he always saw to it that I would get to Sunday Mass and he always took me to school at St. Bridget's. It did not matter what kind of weather we were having, we always made it to school. During World War II when there was gasoline rationing, Dad bought a bicycle. During the fall and spring he rode me to school on his bicycle. When I came out of school, there often was a bunch of kids gathered around him sitting on his bike waiting for me to come out.
As I was growing up, Mom and Dad and I went to the show every Saturday night, without fail. Most of the time we went to a local theatre such as the Alhambra or the Camden. After the show, we would go out for a hamburger at the Bandbox or maybe White Castle. When Joe and Ray were small, Dad would take me to the show on Saturday nights, just the two of us. There were several times we went downtown to the Aster Theatre or the Gopher and would see a whole show made up of only cartoon comedies. He knew what a little boy liked and he did too.
Dad knew that kids liked horses. He took me to a riding stable out the Golden Valley Road in Golden Valley, near Sweeney's Twin Lake. It was a Sunday morning after Mass and he waited for me while I went out with a group of people. I remember being scared because the horse ran.
Dad had an evening ritual of walking to the mailbox on 41st and Penn to mail his daily output of cartoons. Many evenings I would accompany him. We always had a good time on those walks. In the wintertime he would push me into the snow banks on the boulevard and we would both have a good laugh. Some night we would walk up to the drugstore on 44th and Penn and he would buy a comic book for me. On the way home he would pretend to make it disappear up his sleeve and then make it reappear.
There was a time in the late 1940's when Dad and I would go downtown to a used bookstore on Washington Avenue to purchase old comic books that contained the artists' work of men to whom he was submitting cartoons. There were usually bums and panhandlers and drunks hanging around the place. It frightened me to the point that I vowed I would never use alcohol. During that time, there were no drug addicts in that area and the bookstore did not sell pornography.
It was always a treat to go to Grandma and Grandpa Soderlund's house. Most of the time Dad and Grandpa and I would go down the basement and Grandpa would show us his latest project. Grandpa was always working on some new project and enjoyed showing them to Dad. Dad also liked to do most of the fixing work around our house. When something presented itself that he felt he could not handle, Grandpa was usually called in to help. The first summer we were in our house on Penn Avenue, Grandpa came over and built Dad a new workbench, one he used until Dad died.
Dad's first language was Swedish. He spoke only Swedish until he started first grade. Dad used to like to make puns in Swedish and mixing it with English words. This made Grandma very upset, but usually they would both laugh because she had the same sense of humor Dad did.
After he and Mom bought their apartment buildings, I would go with him many times to help repair things. Many of my memories are of being with him on some fix-it project. We usually had words during this time, but none so bad that we did not laugh again after we had finished. He had a sense of frustration and I also did, so when things did not go according to plan, we became angry. He would say the "little men" were fighting us.
Dad did not like to travel. On a couple of occasions Mom talked him into a trip to Duluth. We never had much money so we usually slept a house with "sleeping rooms". He would walk up and down the street looking for a restaurant that had inexpensive prices on the menu. The trips were always a challenge.
When Dad and Mom came to Virginia with Joe and Ray in 1962, Dad was released from the hospital the evening before they left on the train. He was extremely uncomfortable and nervous about the trip. It took him a couple of days to settle down after they arrived in Virginia, but then he had a great time visiting the historic sites.
Dad liked to read and he often stayed up past midnight reading. Aunt Lil also liked to read and they often exchanged books they had read. Some of those books were quite racy, but they shared a pastime.
When I began dating my future wife, Joan Haskin, Dad always waited up for me. I remember him sitting in his room at his drawing table just waiting for me. After I got home I would always go in and see him. Dad liked Joan very much and always enjoyed her visits. I knew that Dad approved of my relationship with her. His advice to me when I told him that Joan and I were engaged to be married was "don't ever come home to me and share your personal problems of your marriage". Many times we would discuss and visit for an hour or more before going to bed. We both enjoyed each other's company. We discussed history or religion or the day's news or whatever. Most nights I would kiss him goodnight before going upstairs to my bed in the attic. This practice continued until I was married.
Dad was always good to my own children. When we returned from Virginia, he and Mom would take one of our children and keep them for the day or sometimes over night on weekends. Many times they would just drop by our house long enough to put a package of gum into our mailbox and then drive on. The kids always liked to look in the mailbox to see if Grandma and Grandpa had been there. When they had the kids, always one at a time, they had a regular routine and going to White Castle was always part of that routine.
Mom and Dad always came to Christmas and birthday celebrations for our kids. Dad liked to draw and when he was with our children he usually drew something while telling them a story. They would stand beside his chair and watch and listen to his yarns while he illustrated them. Sometimes Dad would get down on the floor and wrestle with the boys, just as he had done with me years before.
When Dad had an operation on his leg in 1968, he nearly died. Knowing that he never had been baptized I suggested that he should be baptized by a Lutheran minister I knew. He was baptized and made a miraculous recovery. The first thing he did when he returned home after his hospitalization was to call Grandma and tell her that he had been baptized. It was not too long that he began to attend church with Mom and eventually converted to Catholicism. His was a very long walk with the Lord, but he did it at his own pace.
Dad went into Glenwood Hills Hospital on a Monday to have his carotid arteries cleaned out. I took my son, Billy, with me to visit him on the next evening and at the suggestion of Joan, brought him some cookies. We spent about an hour with him that evening visiting and joking about old times. We left because it was a Tuesday evening and Billy had to go to school the next morning. I was never able to visit with him again. He became delirious with a mesenteric artery blockage later that evening and died on Friday morning, December 17, 1971, at the age of 65 years.
I loved my Dad and wish I could give him a "goodnight kiss" again tonight!
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