![\"\"](\"https:\/\/farm8.staticflickr.com\/7556\/15405420263_602edc961f_n.jpg\")
<\/p>\nMr. Gerdejanson (Spelling?) 1989<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
My sister Becky was part of a string quartet at Mankato West High School and Mr. Gerdejanson was her string teacher. I’m not one hundred percent sure this ornament was modeled on the teacher but I sort of think that was the case. By the time my Mother made this one she had been making Christmas tree ornaments for a decade. By 1989 my Mother had left Duluth and was no longer a regular part of Harpies Bazaar but she had a hard time giving up her popular ornaments. By this time they were getting far more elaborate.<\/p>\n
In the early years she made simple figures and painted arms on them. Eventually the arms budded and like this musician took on such things as this violin. <\/p>\n
Mom had been working with paper mache since I was a kid and may have learned the technique in her college Art classes. By the time I was little and my Dad was in law school she put her art to work as a window decorator at a local Topeka department store called Nightengales. We would take the bus downtown where she dropped me off at a daycare\/nursery while she continued on to work a few blocks further. <\/p>\n
I have an old yellow newspaper clipping from those years of large paper mache figurines Mom had made of singers for some Christmas event. I also recall that we had half a dozen hand sized doves that she must have made as center pieces for some table arrangement. <\/p>\n
When I was in fifth grade I enjoyed some momentary celebrity in my class when Mom volunteered to help my class make paper mache puppets. It was probably a week long project and our teacher got her husband to make a puppet theater where we could hide ourselves while having our new puppets perform. That’s also my first recollection of making an audience laugh with an extemporaneous quips. I must have had a particularly clever puppet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mr. Gerdejanson (Spelling?) 1989 My sister Becky was part of a string quartet at Mankato West High School and Mr. Gerdejanson was her string…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reminiscences"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12383"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12386,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12383\/revisions\/12386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}