Vitality Stories

Bonnie

7 Year-old Detective Solves Her First Case In 1942

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I’m excited to continue sharing excerpts of Bonnie’s memoirs. As is my practice, I strove to capture her memories word-for-word out of respect for her voice, recollection, and perspective.

Bonnie shares:

Around 1942 while I was in the first grade in Canby, Minnesota, my dad went to a farm bureau convention. He came back on a Sunday afternoon and saw stitches by my nose, and he was just livid. He asked my mother what had happened, and she said the neighbor’s dog had come over and bit me. My dad grabbed his 22 and got back in his car and drove over to the neighbor’s place. Now in retrospect, the dog was right to bite me. He was a big dog, and I was riding him like a horse, but I thought I had better keep that to myself at the time.

But I never saw that dog again.

Then I found out what a bootlegger was. I had to look it up in my dad’s True Detective magazines. It just so happens that a bootlegger was the owner of the dog that bit me in the first grade.

Yellow Medicine County was a dry county meaning you couldn’t buy liquor, but my dad would always go see this guy right before our dances. And I thought, I wonder why he always goes over to that house. So this one day before a dance, I went and looked up everything in my dad’s magazines, which were my encyclopedias I tell you, and when he got ready to go, I asked if I could ride along.

True Detective, 1942, Vol. 39

He said that of course I could but that I couldn’t get out of the car. That didn’t sit well with me, but I did it. I sat there. They went walking down a ways into a shed, and my dad came back with a jar, or something or other, wrapped in brown paper. I found out later it was homemade booze. So he had that for the dance.

I asked my dad, “Does this man have a still?”

That’s the only time my dad got gruff with me. He said, “Shut up, Bumps (my nickname), you don’t talk about that.”

Well then, so that’s how I knew—yes, he had a still, but it was not something you brought up to other people. So I had that taken care of and understood it. I had known a bootlegger whose dog had bit me, and I was right there in the same yard that the still was, I just didn’t see it. Case closed.

And I thought, while doggone, that’s pretty good. I bet there aren’t many kids my age—I was about seven—who could say that.

~Bonnie

Federal agent with a 1942 illegal still; www.rmyauction.com

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What I learned

Bonnie reminds me of the power of curiosity, but to never ride a large dog like a horse or question your dad about his illegal activities (wink).