By Lori Ehde
Oh, the places he's gone and the people he's seen.
Jake Boyenga turns 100 Sunday, and he doesn't know where to start when people ask him what it's like to be that old.
"Oh, the changes," he said Monday. "I never expected to get this far."
Of all the advances in the areas of technology, transportation and even household efficiency, Boyenga is still enthralled by the telephone.
"I was 7 years old when they put those poles in the ground and they put a phone in the house," he said.
"And that crazy thing rang, and people talked. What a miracle. I could never get over that. My parents let me listen to the voices. Boy, was that something."
That was the same year his parents, Meinert and Rika Boyenga, started farming in Kanaranzi Township.
"It was March 1, 1910, when we landed in Ellsworth (at the train station). They picked us up by bobsled and horses," he said.
"There were no automobiles, there were no tractors, there were no airplanes, there was no television and there were no telephones."
Nation of colonies
Boyenga's father was 10 years old when he came to the United States on a ship from Germany. "My grandmother used to tell me how sick they got on the boat coming over," he said.
Like many immigrants arriving at the turn of the century, the Boyengas settled into one of their own ethnic communities Ñ in their case, German.
"When I was a boy going to country school, our nation was a nation of colonies," Boyenga said.
He remembered communities of Dutch, Norwegians and Swedes in Rock County, who spoke primarily in their native languages.
Subsequently, their children encountered the same language challenges Boyenga did when they became school-age.
"All I heard as a boy was German, and then they sent me to a school where everyone was supposed to speak English," he said.
At the center of each ethnic cluster was a church.
Boyenga was a member of Stateline Presbyterian Church near Ellsworth for 91 years, and for a good share of that time, the congregation worshipped in German.
"That really didn't change until the children grew up and started running things," he said.
Nothing but dirt paths in tall grass prairie
He remembers when most county highways were nothing but dirt paths between acres of tall grass prairie.
He saw the first county road built in Rock County, County Road 1, the east-west road between Highway 75 and Ellsworth.
Two teams of his father's horses later helped build a small section of road between County Road 1 and the state line.
His family lived two miles south of the rural Kanaranzi country school where he walked until graduating at age 16.
After that, he didn't attend high school because that would have required expensive boarding in Ellsworth, which had the nearest high school at the time.
"There was no transportation in the winter, so those who could afford it stayed in town while attending high school," he said.
Freedom to roam
A long-time bachelor, Boyenga capitalized on later advances in transportation to travel around the country.
He'd hit the road every year after harvest to explore life outside of the Midwest.
"In 1934, three of my buddies and I each had $50 in our pockets and we piled into an old Chevy and drove to Chicago," he said.
"When we got downtown, a police officer jumped (on the running boards) and took us right down Michigan Avenue to a hotel."
The big city offered plenty of excitement for the Minnesota farmers.
"We saw the Board of Trade, we saw the stockyards, we saw the Field Museum, and we took in a show at the Chicago Theater and a double-header White Sox game at Comiskey Park," he said.
"At the end of the week, when I asked what I owed, the hotel clerk said $5. It cost me $1 a day, plus 15 cents a day for a shave."
Today he drives nothing but the latest model automobiles. He's waiting for the 2003 Buicks to hit the market.
Marriage has
its advantages
Boyenga jokes that he dated many women in his life, but he didn't marry until he was 66 years old.
In 1969, he married Hazel (Braa) Schwartz, who is 13 years younger. Her late husband, Ralph, had been Boyenga's good friend.
He gives her some credit for clean living in his later years. "I'll admit, I've chewed Copenhagen, I've smoked a pipe, I've smoked cigars," he said. "But that all went out the window when I got married. I think the reason I lived so long is because I married a Norwegian and she taught me to eat lutefisk," he said.
He added, though, that marriage has had its benefits. "I didn't have to cook for myself or do laundry," he said.
The two, who now live in Luverne, had no children, but the Boyenga family (his nephews and nieces) is now on its fourth generation of farming near Ellsworth.
An open house birthday party for Boyenga will be from 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday in the Blue Mound Banquet Center, Luverne.