When I interviewed George Anderson and he asked me how old I thought he was, I guessed 78. He was 88. He has had a varied and interesting life for a fellow born in small town, Iowa, the son of a minister who could preach only in Swedish. As much as he didn't like his high school experience, he got himself a college education and became a teacher, a school principal, and more. He tells us his story. My thanks to Ione Jensen and the Douglas County Historical Society for this transcription.
Vagabond: You said you offered incentives to 9th graders who didn't want to come to school. What incentives did you offer?
George: In the 9th grade, you see, they could be gone so many days. If they would come then they could have this block of time to help on the farm or whatever.
Vagabond: Was there some of that when you were principal then where farm kids were actually helping with the harvest in the fall and helping with the planting in the spring?
George: Ya.
Vagabond: Then that disappeared?
George: Now they don’t have that. They all have cars now.
Vagabond: One of the issues in Alexandria is the school bond, building a new school. It didn’t go through.
George: That’s too bad. Because now they’re going to have a hard time. They planned for a beautiful new school, a new auditorium and everything. But too many people didn’t want the increase in taxes. Another thing I used to do when I was the principal, I had the best, or least amount of absenteeism from teachers. I had a rule if the teachers wanted to go hunting for an hour in the morning, they could go, but they’d have to get a substitute for their class. Or I would take one hour from them. That was for the men teachers. I had the least turnover in teachers. They had some flexible for their lives. Some women, could take off the whole day but they’d have to get, I’d take one hour of their class and then they’d have to get another teacher to take the other hours. That went over. The morale was good. You gave them a way to be honest.
Vagabond: Let's go back and talk about the horses at your resort, if we could.
George: When we ended up, we had 70 horses. We had 20 at Sibley State Park and 20 at Carlos State Park. And 40 here. Most people don’t realize we had that many, they just don’t believe that.
Vagabond: Did you get to be a pretty good judge of horses then? You yourself?
George: No, I wasn’t.
Vagabond: Somebody else was buying the horses?
George: No, no, I could do that. We had a guy over northwest of town, he dealt in horses and had a good sense of what kind of horse we wanted. So we’d get a lot of our horses from him. And furthermore we would let a kid take a horse for all winter, a farm kid. He’d have a saddle and everything and we’d pay for all the sickness and everything. We’d farm out probably 15 or 20 horses a year.
To be continued....
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