by Monica Tikkanen

Handed-Down History
Capping Off One Family’s Tale

This is a family story about my son, Kyle Tikkanen, and his grandfather Eino Tikkanen and about how a simple wool hat sews together two men who never met.

Kyle’s grandfather Eino died in 1955 when Kyle’s father was only 8 years old. I met Kyle’s father in 1967 and we later married. He once told me that at his father’s funeral, he remembered being admonished by an uncle who said, “Big boys don’t cry.” That was one reason, he told me, that he found it hard to express emotions. (I tend to believe it was because he was Finnish.)

Kyle was born in 1982, but never really learned much about his grandfather. No one talked about Eino’s passing; family life had moved way beyond his tragic death. Eino’s wife, Sigrid, remarried another Lake Superior sailor, Ernest Gronroos of Bennett, Wisconsin. Eino, at the time of his death, was a captain on a U.S. Steel Company lake carrier. He was 35 when he died in the Detroit River, falling off the ladder to the boat while it was at the dock. No one knows what made him fall, but he drowned and that was for sure. As years passed, I learned pieces of Eino’s life: he was a hunter, he was a drinker, he could be hard to live with. He and his wife had only one paring knife to share when they were first married.

Finnish families were used to the hard life. Many of the men were sailors on the Great Lakes. Their women met the boat at all hours of the day or night when the ship came to port on this end of Lake Superior. At home, the women tended the children, the household, the gardens and the baking. The time to mourn was chased away by the demands and hardships of daily living, making bread with wonderful cardamom spice, heating water for the laundry, carrying baskets of wet laundry to the clothesline outside.

Over the years, little was said about Eino and even less about any personal effects. Kyle’s grandmother Sigrid had saved one thing: his hat, which looked very much like a Stormy Kromer. It hung on a nail in the basement for years. Even after she had moved two times, the hat moved with her. What made her take the hat with her through the next 30 years?

Wearing his grandfather Eino Tikkanen’s wool hat, a young Kyle Tikkanen strikes a cross-armed pose quite similar to the sea captain grandpa he never met. (The family photo has a blemish.)

One day little Kyle was riding his tricycle in the basement of Grandma’s house. Over his head hung the hat. Grandma took it down and put it over his little golden curls. He had no idea that the hat was his grandfather’s and that it was last worn 30 years earlier. But with the hat on his head, Kyle’s shoulders straightened as he held the tricycle’s handlebars, pedaling around the basement posts. He gave that hat quite a ride and it was proudly snug on his head.

The hat made another trip that day with Kyle, back to our home. I hung it with the other family hats for a time. Kyle wore the cap outside on cool fall days, still riding his tricycle around the block. As Kyle grew, the cap became too small and was placed away in a drawer to be kept as a remembrance of the grandfather he never knew, the Lake Superior sea captain.

Then one day I read “Much More Than Just a Hat” (in the April/May 2008 issue of this magazine). I decided to take the hat out of a desk drawer and study it.

Imagining the man who once wore the hat as a young, healthy, handsome sea captain, I sensed there was something sentimental about this hat, something that made Kyle’s grandmother keep it all those years.

Was it just a hat that her husband wore, or did it help her memories of the man come back much easier?

Kyle Tikkanen today.

This hat does not have six wool panels like today’s Stormy Kromer; it has only four. There are no labels in the four-panel gold flannel lining, no size, no markings of any kind. Four dark navy wool panels stitched together form the cap, and the seams are strengthened by topstitches. The familiar earflaps are stored inside and are lined with pristine black plush, as if not used. Those internal earflaps were a clue; Kromer hats always have the flaps outside. This cap, so reminiscent of our Kromers, is probably a Crown Cap and came from a company out of Winnipeg, Manitoba, that started in 1934, about 30 years after Stormy created his famed hat.

The Kromer, as your story said, is “much more than just a hat.” For my son this hat, too, is the link from a long-lost grandfather to a young grandson now grown. These men never met, but the same hat kept their heads warm.

By telling you this story, I hope Kyle will understand that the old navy wool hat, like our Northland history, is a piece of his family and is a treasure to hold.

This issue’s Journal writer: Monica Tikkanen has been director of human services for the Superior School District for 22 years. A huge fan of the Great Lake, she traveled the Lake Superior Circle Tour by car in 2007 and enjoys hiking the parks and cruising in her family’s boat to Isle Royale and other ports. “This Lake beats the plains of North Dakota where I grew up,” she says, “and the Lake will keep me here.”