By Tina Kitt

The Wauneta Breeze

Since she was a child in the 1920s, Viola Nordhausen Krausnick of Wauneta has pieced together various colors and textures of fabric, stitching them lovingly in beautiful, yet useful, works of art.

Like the array of handcrafted quilts she has amassed over the 90 years of her life, in all patterns and hues and sizes, each with it’s own set of challenges and joys, Viola’s life has unfolded, each life passage with its own share of challenges and joys.

Robust, energetic and vigorous at 90, Viola still lives in the home she shared with her husband, Elwyn, before his death five years ago. 

Through it all, this practical, no-nonsense woman of hardy German ancestry has embraced each new chapter, tackling life, come what may, confident that her faith and her family would see her through.

Farm girl at heart

Viola was the first daughter and the third of eight children born to Fredrick and Dorothea “Dora” (Steinbeck) Nordhausen at the family’s rural Dundy County home on Oct. 14, 1918.

Her father had immigrated to the United States from Germany as a 10-year-old boy, sailing to America with his sister, Emma, and their grandfather, Fritz Wicke, in 1905. 

Fred spent his teenage years in Ludell, Kans., later moving to Nebraska and the German community on Wauneta’s South Divide a few miles from St. Paul’s Lutheran Church. 

In 1915, Fred married Dora Steinbeck and the young couple began their life together on a farm 1 mile south of the Dundy-Chase County line southwest of Wauneta.

The young family first lived a small frame house which still stands near where Mick and Gwen Brunkhorst now live. Viola was born in that house, as were her older brothers, Alvin and Otto.

When she was still a babe, however, the family moved to a new house they had built a half mile to the west. That house has remained in the family and is now home to Viola’s nephew and his wife, Monte and Deb Nordhausen.

The lovely two-story house offered a large screened porch and room for Fred and Dora’s growing brood. Still, even with the added luxury of space, farm life in rural Nebraska in the early 20th century meant lots of manual labor and long hours. Water was hand pumped and no indoor plumbing meant an outhouse was a key part of the farmstead. Viola’s dad added a Delco plant with batteries, providing the family with electricity decades before the rural electrification projects of the 1940s and 1950s made power easily accessible across the region. He even showed his oldest 

daughter how to hook up and change the batteries when needed.

As the oldest daughter — with two older and two younger brothers before the next Nordhausen girl was born — Viola became her mother’s helper around the house, cooking and cleaning without any of the modern conveniences we take for granted today.

When her mother would host quilting bees, it was Viola’s job to serve lunch and supper to the ladies, keenly observing their skilled handiwork. Once the women were gone, young Viola would sneak over to the project at hand and add her own stitches. Thus another gifted quilter and seamstress bloomed within the family, following in the steps of her mother and her Grandma Steinbeck.

School days

The Nordhausen youngsters attended school less than 2 miles from home, walking together to the one room District 64 school house known as Sunny Slope. Memories come flooding back to Viola as she reflects on her school days. “Gwendoline Carpenter was my desk mate and Betty Krueger was my seventh and eighth grade teacher, a good teacher. Oh my, the things that come to mind,” laughs Viola.

Among her most vivid school-day memories of those of a paralyzing snowstorm — possibly the deadly blizzard of 1931 — which stranded the school children. 

After weeks of warm March weather, high winds and heavy snows fell during the school day, with conditions worsening as the day wore on, with the teacher and her students trapped in the school.

Living near District 64 in a large white house was the Melvin Judd family.  Melvin and his son made their way to the school during the blizzard. Using a rope for each young child to hold on to, the men led the entire 

group to the house with one man taking the lead and the other following the group of youngsters at back.

“There was a row of trees across there, and as we walked past the tree claim it wasn’t too bad. But once we were past the trees that wind just howled and you couldn’t see a thing,” recalls Viola.

Once they were all safely inside the Judd home, the family and teacher entertained the youngsters with games, songs and taffy pulling, while their families, unaware that they were safe, warm and well-fed at the Judd farm, prayed for their safety as the blizzard raged throughout the night.

“None of the parents knew if their kids were safe or not,” said Viola, shaking her head. “I can’t imagine how they must have worried.”

The children slept on the floor scattered throughout the Judd house. The next morning, recalls Viola, the storm had broke. She looked at the window and saw her father with his team of horses making his way through the drifted snow to his children.

Viola isn’t certain of the date of that blizzard, but it may have well been during that same storm that another Dundy County youngster, 6-year-old Boyd Edwards, became lost and died while trying to make his way home from a country school north of Max.

Bright lights, big city

Viola completed her formal education by graduating from the eighth grade after passing the demanding county test given in Benkelman.

At the time, in the early 1930s, rural Nebraska was still reeling from the Great Depression along with the rest of the country. In order to stay current on land payments, Viola’s dad joined the road building crew at work on the gravel road being constructed between Enders and Benkelman. A few more decades would pass before that road was later topped with asphalt.

To help her family make ends meet, Viola went to work instead of attending high school. She did housework for nearby relatives and neighbors. The going rate at the time was $3 a week. When she worked for the Henry Wicke family, however, she was paid $5. She used that money to purchase a cedar chest to hold her “fancy work.” She still has that cedar chest today.

When she was 16, Viola spent a year working in New York City, making the trip east with her uncle and 

aunt, Ed and Dora Denker, and her brother Otto.

Viola earned $7 a week living in the Bronx taking care of a little girl after school while her mother was at work. On weekends she would take the ferry to New Jersey to visit family there. 

She took in the sites of the Statue of Liberty, Rockefeller Center and Yankee Stadium. Still, she missed the plains of southwest Nebraska. 

“I don’t like city life,” says Viola. “I’m a country girl.”

Plus, back in Nebraska was a quiet, handsome young man she was interested in spending more time with.

Challenges faced together

On her 16th birthday, Elwyn Krausnick had attended a birthday party where they had played croquet at night on a lighted court her father had set up. His Aunt Irene Krausnick made Viola a pink birthday cake for the occasion.

After Viola returned from New York, she would sometimes go to a movie with Elwyn. They dated casually after he graduated from Wauneta High School and later attended college in Lincoln at the University of Nebraska. When Elwyn’s father died, he returned to Chase County to help his mother with the family farm. Elwyn and Viola started dating steady, and in November 1938, when Viola was 20 and Elwyn was 21, they were married at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church on Wauneta’s South Divide.

They made their home 6 miles west of Wauneta along the Frenchman on “the river place,” where Elwyn raised hay and cattle while farming wheat up on the divide.

For Viola, who had grown up on the flat, open country of the divide, the Frenchman took some getting used to. “It’s like day and night, moving from the divide to the river bottom,” said Viola.

But the new locale did have it’s advantages, as well. Just a short distance to the south lived another young couple, Bruce and Nirene Kitt. The two couples quickly became the best of friends.

“We did about everything together — helped with chores, cleaned chickens, birthday celebrations — we were very close, and our kids were close, too,” said Viola.

In 1940, the young couple learned first hand how challenging life on the river can be when heavy rains 

upstream sent an 18 foot wall of water careening through the river valley between Enders and Wauneta. 

Viola’s brother, Otto, was boarding in town at the time with Elwyn’s mother, where warnings had been telephoned ahead. Unable to get word to Viola and Elwyn, however, Otto headed west to warn them, arriving at their farm just as the wall of water hit. They were all safely on higher ground, but their truck and sheep grazing along the river bottom were washed away. While the tractors stayed put, once the water receded they found them filled with water and mud. The house was spared, but the bridge connecting their farm to the main road to the south was washed out.

“But we didn’t give up,” says Viola. “We stayed right there.”

The young couple sat about rebuilding their farm, driving over the hills to the north to reach Enders or Wauneta until the bridge was rebuilt.

Soon, they welcomed the arrival of the first of their four children when Fred Wayne Krausnick was born in September 1941. Later that year, the United States entered World War II after Pearl Harbor was bombed. Two of Viola’s brothers, Otto and Edgar, served overseas during that time, with Edgar killed in action in 1944, shortly before Viola and Elwyn’s second son, Kenneth, was born.

“That war was very hard on my mother. Very hard on all of us,” said Viola.

In later years she would be among the members of her family to travel to Europe to visit Edgar’s grave at Anzio, Italy.

Growing family

In 1946, Viola and Elwyn welcomed their first daughter, with Janet arriving in August. With their growing family nearly bursting the seams of their small house, Elwyn and Viola purchased the C.E. Johnston home, a large house just a mile to the east.

C.E. Johnston home, a large house just a mile to the east. The weather turned wet as they were making the move, recalls Viola, forcing them to haul one load of household items on a hay rack pulled by a tractor.

The new house had electricity, a novelty to the young Krausnick children, thanks to a light plant located in an outbuilding.

One night as Viola and Elwyn milked cows in the barn, wonderfully aglow with electric lighting, 2-year-old Kenneth scampered in, his jaw dropping as he stood and stared at the lights overhead. “Lights” he gushed at last. The family milked 20 cows, with a milk truck from McCook stopping regularly for pick up. Later they added a milking machine in the big white barn near their new house, which today is home to their son, Fred, and his wife, Betty.

In the mid 1940s, Elwyn and Viola’s family officially became a part of the Wauneta Methodist Church, with Kenneth, Janet  and Denise baptized there, instead of at St. Paul’s as Fred has been. 

St. Paul’s lovely country church had long been a part of Viola’s life, with Walther League and bunco games filling many of the evenings of her youth. But it was hard for her young family to participate regularly. Her dad told her, “I don’t care where you go to church, just go as a family,” so the young Krausnick family 

became active in the Wauneta Methodist Church, where Viola helped with Bible School, and later served as president and as secretary of the United Methodist Women as well as chairperson of the Board of Trustees.

Viola continued with her handiwork — quilting, crocheting, sewing — with everything she made intended for use. The beds of their home were covered with lovingly stitched quilts and afghans. Janet’s little dresses, as well as daughter Denise’s, who arrived 10 years after Janet in 1956, were hand-sewn by Viola.

Education was always important to the Krausnicks, with Elwyn an avid reader. Fred and Kenneth graduated from UNL, with Kenneth going on to become a doctor of veterinary medicine. Their daughters went on to raise families of their own. Elwyn and Viola have been blessed with nine grandchildren and 23 great-grandchildren.

Life in town

Around 1970, Fred and Betty moved onto the home place, with Elwyn and Viola moving into Wauneta. In 1971, they purchased a recently built house located on the hilltop subdivision of new homes, with some of the finish construction still needing tackled as well as a yard needing established. Viola took charge of the yard, planting trees, sowing a lawn and creating a rock garden, which she still tends today.

Even in “retirement,” Elwyn spent his days at the farm. When farm work wasn’t beckoning, there was time for travel, including a tour of Europe and a stop in her father’s hometown in Germany, visits to Canada where Elwyn’s family lived as well as journeys around the U.S.

When their children were young, Elwyn battled bladder cancer, surviving that bout. In the '90s he battled lymphoma. Elwyn and Viola travelled to North Platte for his treatments, spending the weeks there with their dear friends, Bruce and Nirene Kitt, who had retired in North Platte.

Mirroring the days when they were young newlyweds, they laughed often as they played games and told stories of the old days on the river. “Elwyn was still able to really enjoy things until the last few months,” said 

Viola. 

With the help of hospice, Viola took care of him at home. Only the last three days of his life were spent in the hospital.

Elwyn died five years ago, in 2004. He and Viola had spent more than 65 years together, raised a family and watched as another generation of Krausnicks, Fred’s son, Wayne, picked up the reins of the family’s farming and ranching operation.

While battling her share of aches and pains — knee surgery was considered earlier this year to fix the bone-on-bone grinding she lives with — Viola says “no thanks” to prescription medications and painkillers, preferring to let good nutrition and aspirin keep her on the go.

She stays busy making quilts and afghans to mark the special milestones in the lifes of her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren — afghans for graduations and quilts for weddings, baptisms, too.

Stitch by stitch, Viola continues to weave a tapestry of love and faith, threading in a measure of good, old common sense and perseverance, as a legacy to her family. 

For more photos of Viola Krausnick's life, see this week's edition of The Breeze