Rural Youth Culture of the 1950s & 1960s

Narrators hold various beliefs surrounding religion, sometimes different from their religious education growing up. For many, the church provided a sense of community and social engagement.

Carla Riley

Carla: "Well, the expectations from my parents is that we attend Catholic school faithfully, we went to church in the morning before school, and there was no getting out of that, that was something that was pretty important to both of my parents. And it was a bit of an expense to send five kids to a Catholic school, but they did it somehow, they managed it."

Linda Krogsrud

Linda: "We belong to the local church here in town. So it was a Missouri Church. It's still here. Trinity Lutheran Church is the church we belong to. So we had Walther League, so we had meetings there once a month, and we'd always have a meeting, and then we'd play games afterwards. And sometimes we'd go out and do things."

Jay Ross

Jason: "Growing up, was church important to you, a big part of your family's life?"

Jay: "Actually, no, it wasn't. My mother was a faithful church goer, and she would get me to go once in a while. I don't know how in the world I got by with it. Back then, you did what you were told to do. Parents said you do this, you did it. But she didn't put a lot of pressure on me to go to church. I had friends that were faithful church goers, but I wasn't. I remember we used to have religious release time back in the old days. And every Wednesday in the afternoon, the last hour of the day was dedicated to church time where kids with parent permission slips went to church study. Although I have a feeling several of them snuck down into the city park for a quick cigarette and a sip at the local fountain. But where was I? Oh, church. Even now in later life, I am not convinced that what we read—am I going to go to hell for this?

Jason: "No. Not by my authority."

Jay: "I have a hard time believing some of the stories in the Old Testament, in fact, most of the stories, I guess. There is some history that is reliable, but tales of Joshua fitting the Battle of Jericho and the walls came tumbling down leave me cold. I guess you would call me an agnostic. There's something, I don't know what it is, I don't think it's a man with robes glowing or flowing whiskers who blesses some of us and curses others."

Annegine Vipond

Jodi: "During elementary and high school, there was—was there any religious training that was allowed for? I mean, were you—was that by your church, was that done by people in the school?"

Annegine: "Yeah. Oddly to say, we had what we call release time all the way from first grade until I was a senior, and it continued even afterwards. But every Wednesday, all the kids went to your respective churches that you had and had religious time. We would walk to the church, have our class classroom and stuff, and then it was all done, you'd walk back and go back to school. It was just a natural thing, everybody did it, and we—"

Jodi: "Did you have to make that time up?"

Annegine: "No. That was worked into the class, the actual school day that—I think it was—I suppose roughly, probably two hours by the time you walked there and had your little classroom and walked back."

Jodi: "And that was taught by the priest or by—"

Annegine: "Parents. And then we also had our Sunday, we had your Sunday school time and that was taught by parents, too, is what else. But no, it was, yeah, your parents—back then, most parents probably didn't work out of the home like some of them and they came in to teach."

Jodi: "Your youth group, did you have a youth group at church?"

Annegine: "Yeah. I have very strong youth group. We did a lot of hayrides with [unclear] and activity. We had a lot of kids in our church alone, but every so often we would invite other churches to join us. Not everybody would, but at least it was out there that we would have different events going on."

Vern Brown

Vern: "Yeah. My family went to the congregational church, we weren't a every Sundays attender, but, yeah, church—I think as I follow the news these days and so on, I think the church in our family was treated with a little more respect than maybe it is these days, I don't know."

Ward: "As a teenager, were you aware that there are different religious groups that you weren't supposed to associate with, like, Protestant versus Catholic?"

Vern: "Yeah. At that time, Ward—I'm trying to think how to put this, but it was almost you're—in some families, let's put it that way, you were almost excommunicated from the family if you got involved between the Catholic."

Vern: "I don't know where this is going to go, the Apostolic Christian, she was an Apostolic Christian, and they're a little bit like the Catholic church was in the sense that it's our church or we don't know where you are. Our church, meaning Apostolic Christian."

Dawn Benson

Dawn: "Murdock is avery Catholic community or at least really was at that time, there was maybe—out of our 25—about 25 kids in my class, I think there were 5 or 6 of us that weren't Catholic so we didn't go to catechism on Wednesday afternoons, and we got to go play on the playground."

Joe Riley

Sarah: "Anything you remember about mass that you want to share?"

Joe: "Yeah. The one thing I remember that is not good, it was said in Latin every—at that time, the Catholic mass was not said in English, it was said in Latin."

Sarah: "The whole mass?"

Joe: "The whole mass. Every—and I grew up, it was not a—no place at all was a Catholic mass said in English, it was said in Latin."

Sarah: "Did you understand?"

Joe: "No. Of course not, no. Never understood it and most people didn't either. I know they didn't, but it was said in Latin. And I remember one priest that we had, his name was Father Ziegler, church lasted an hour and a half every time. Most of the time a Catholic mass last 50 minutes to an hour and 10 minutes, depends on the priest. But this father, his name was Father Ziegler, mass was always an hour and a half, and my dad was never happy about it, he was always pretty disgusted with it. And then nobody thought nothing of it that the mass was said in Latin, it just—that's what it was, it was said in Latin, and you understood enough of it to know when you were supposed to stand and kneel and what it was all about, but it was—at that time, the mass was said in Latin."

Carol Swenson

Seth: "That was quite a thing, the religious differences among our parents whether Catholic or Protestant, wasn't that true?"

Carol: "And even within the Protestant community, whether you were Lutheran or Methodist or Episcopalian, that was also a big thing, and intermarriage there was not encouraged. And there was the Norwegian Lutheran Church and the Swedish Covenant. It was an evangelical church that I eventually ended up going to for most of my childhood."

Seth: "So there was a lot of people, your church was thriving then at that time?"

Carol: "Yeah, it was thriving. And my mother was the church organist and directed the choir, so we were participating and leading a lot of those activities, I guess you could say. And as I talked about earlier, it was largely around the church where we would get together at the town hall and have baseball games, softball games on Sunday, and church on Wednesday night, and Bible school, classic Bible school.

Seth: "Yeah. So a really central focus of your life."

Carol: "Yeah. I would say that's true."