Dad was one tough Swede who never knew a stranger.
Born into a large immigrant family, Elmer Swanson left school after the eighth grade to help support his family on their Colorado farm. Farming was interrupted by World War I, where he was a machine gunner in France. He spoke little of what happened there except for the mud and hunger.
It was in a foxhole that he experienced an event that changed his life. The German bullet came in low and was slowed by the dirt around the hole. It lodged in his neck. Thinking he might bleed to death, he poked his finger into the wound. He received medical help, but the bullet was never removed. In those days, surgery was not an option because of the placement of the bullet, as confirmed by an X-ray.
He returned home after the war, met and married my mom, started a family and became a homestead farmer in western Nebraska. As he worked, he experienced coughing spells in greater and greater frequency. During one of those violent spells he coughed up the bullet. He took the bullet to the veterans’ hospital where his doctor, who had made periodic X-rays, was amazed by his story. The doctor told Dad that he would not have given a “plugged nickel” for his life, because the bullet had lodged next to the aorta to his heart. Somehow over the years it had moved toward the windpipe, which caused coughing and expulsion of the bullet.
The Great Depression that followed threw the nation into abject poverty. Toward the end, Dad lost the farm. We packed all that we had into a small trailer, pulled by our old Plymouth with the six of us in it. We headed west to warmer winters and work, and we stayed with relatives in Vancouver until Dad was able to buy a small farm. During World War II, he worked at the shipyards, but after the war work was scarce, and Dad experienced unemployment, which was hard to accept for a man as hardworking and independent as he was. He spent many days at the labor union looking for work, where he met men in the same circumstance. Each week we would “go to town,” where Mom and I would shop and Dad would go another way to meet us later at a designated corner. Often Dad was holding the bullet, regaling a new friend with his story.
