Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of my mother Layna Ann Cobb Johnson who has most recently been a frequent mention in the diaries of Don Johnson excerpted regularly in The Journal.
Certainly more than a footnote in my father’s writings, her story is still only embedded in the background. One of my few misgivings about the publication of the journals has been that Dad, every bit the wise, complex and engaged individual portrayed there, has become larger than life. He, more than anyone, knew the profound and pervasive part she played in his story.
In December of 1964 while in the hospital recovering from hernia surgery, Dad wrote, “Layna came about noon. I could see her coming down the hall 100 feet away. I got the same thrill I used to get when meeting her in Hibbing Junior College (a building shared with Hibbing High School) corridors in 1925. It must be love.”
If you do the math, you will see that Mom was just 15 when my dad was having those feelings. It was that December 23 when they eloped to Forest Lake.
Layna was the youngest of six children born to Arvista and Lincoln Cobb in Silica, Minnesota where Lincoln worked as a pumpman for the railroad. He died when Layna was 13. I know very little about their circumstances except that they were very poor and when Don Johnson, a college boy, no less, asked to marry Arvista’s “underage” daughter, Arvista gave her willing blessing.
They had to keep their marriage a secret so that Mom could stay in the tenth grade but that spring, pregnant with my brother Buck, she was forced to quit school. That was the end of her formal education.
With that and whatever it was that first stirred the in the heart of Don Johnson, Layna lived the life of a pioneer woman. She got her first central heating in 1953 when they moved into their house on Island View Route. In their years as caretakers at Camp Koochiching and Dahlberg’s Island (1929-1945) my mother spent endless hours first with her babies and then alone in marginally insulated, wood heated houses while Dad was hunting or working. She cooked and washed clothes and knit mittens and sewed clothes. I was born at the end of these years but when she spoke of them she did so with neither complaint or romance. She spoke both of hard work and of fun. She and my dad sang together in harmony; he read to her while she knit. They had friends who came to dinner. Her holiday dinners were legend among the other caretakers on the lake.
In 1944 when the opportunity to purchase Norway Island was presented to them, my father was deeply worried about carrying debt. My mother told me that she said to him, “ If we don’t do this, we will never have anything in our whole lives.” It was she who went to Minneapolis to negotiate the sale with Mrs. Hvoslof and it was she who went to Chicago to the sports show to promote the resort that they opened in the spring of 1945. And when Dad went to work for the Mando, it was she who ran the resort.
People get Masters Degrees in Business Administration come out with less business sense than my mother had. She was guided by, as she said, “the golden rule” which she practiced with unequaled persistence and determination. She had uncommon common sense and resourcefulness and a great sense of humor. But most of all, she really loved people and endeavored to find and bring out the best in them.
This was nowhere more so than with her children. Twenty years separated me from my brother Buck, sixteen from Byrne and fourteen from Sally. What stands out for me as I remember her years as my mother is her uncritical acceptance, her open admiration and appreciation of my accomplishments, and her unfailing “can do” attitude. She sewed most of my clothes as I was growing up. I would pick out an outfit from a catalogue or a magazine and she would find a pattern and fabric and make it, often sewing the last bits of hemstitch as I ran out the door. I was a handful as a teenager and I tried her over and over again. I could be a verbal tyrant who could drive her to tears, but her capacity to rebound and forgive always subdued me in the end.
And she had this great capacity to leverage her resourcefulness to make enjoyment or fun.
I think I was six when we made a day trip to the Island on the Saturday before Easter. She and my dad and I took a canoe across the ice. It was a perfect day, warm and sunny, and late in the afternoon they decided it was just too nice to go back to our house on the mainland where we had lived for the winter. We would spend the night. We had brought some minimal supplies and there was macaroni and some food that had wintered over. I, however, was miserable. How would the Easter bunny find me on the island? I was reassured somehow and we stayed. She must have stayed up all night to make a little green corduroy skirt and jacket and a matching tam from some old curtains. She also located somewhere in the attic, a white wicker basket that appeared filled with real grass and dyed eggs that we ate for breakfast. I was delighted then and my appreciation for that effort has held for nearly sixty years.
When I was a Brownie Scout, my mother was one of my troop leaders. I can still remember how impressed I was that she knew all the knots for the Knot Badge without even looking at the book.
I think I appreciated her most after I had my own children. She came to take care of us after each of my three babies. I said that if Dad had died first, and Mom’s health held, she could have hired herself out to take care of new families. She was completely at ease cleaning and cooking and creating ample space for us new parents to discover the ins and outs of the transition into parenthood for ourselves.
Layna had a great sense of adventure. She loved trying new foods at home and in restaurants. And she loved to travel. It was she who, after traveling with Arden Barnes and Lou Moe on a buying trip to Mexico, convinced my dad to go back with her. They both came to love Mexico and the South West as well as other places, often at Mom’s initiation.
Their first big vacation after I was born was in the early fifties when Captain Billy Green, pilot of the Delta Queen extended an invitation for them to join him and his family and friends on the riverboat trip between Cincinnati and New Orleans. Captain Green had stayed on Norway Island while waiting for his son to finish a time at Camp Koochiching. Mom distinguished herself as a boatwoman on a stormy trip after the Grand Council at Camp. Impressed by Mom in many ways, Green asked her if she and my dad would be available to accompany him the coming September. Mom enthusiastically accepted without consulting Dad who was away working on the Mando houseboat. When he got home Mom shared the news. “I don’t know,” says Dad. “That’s during duck hunting season in Canada.” Mom may have anticipated this because she said, “That’s okay. The Greens haven’t met you. I’m sure I can find a man willing to say he is Don Johnson so he can get a free trip down the Mississippi on the Delta Queen” They went. It was one of the great trips of Dad’s life.
I write this to prime the pump to tap the great well of stories about this amazing woman whose spirit of graciousness and hospitality and kindness and warmth and good humor inspires me every day. May those of you who knew her, pause a moment to share a thought or memory; have a little scotch and soda; sing a little song and pick up the tenor; tell a dumb joke and laugh until you cry; try a new food; hug an old friend.
Happy birthday, Layna.
Love, Karen
