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About Mom

Irma Novak Teigen, born 1918

Before Alzheimer's, this is who my mother was. She still is, underneath. I want people to know her.

The schoolteacher

Mom was born on a farm in southeast Nebraska to Czech parents and didn't speak English until she started school. She graduated from high school in the normal training course, which is how a lot of country girls became teachers back then, and at nineteen she was teaching in a one-room schoolhouse with fourteen kids in eight grades. She taught in country schools for thirty-one years, and went to summer classes at the teachers college in Kearney until she had her degree.

Everybody in three counties has a story about Miss Novak, later Mrs. Teigen. The one I grew up on is the blizzard of 1949, when she kept eleven children at the schoolhouse for two nights, fed them on the lunch pails and a sack of potatoes, and had them sing rounds to keep their spirits up until the fathers could get through with a tractor. Two of those kids came to her 80th birthday party.

The farm wife

She married my dad, Arvid Teigen, in 1941. He was Norwegian Lutheran and she was Czech Catholic, and in 1941 that was a bigger deal than it sounds. They farmed a half section west of town. I was born in 1945 and my sister Donna in 1948. Dad passed away in 1985.

Mom did everything. She taught school all day and came home to cook for the hired men, can two hundred quarts of tomatoes and beans every August, and keep the books. She could butcher a chicken, play the piano at church and do the Sunday crossword in pen, and I never once saw her sit down before 9 at night.

The things she loved

Kolaches. Apricot, prune and poppy seed. Carol has tried to make them from what Mom can still tell her. They're close. Mom says they're very nice, dear, which is what she always said about food that wasn't quite right.
Quilts. She made one for every grandchild, seven of them, each with the child's name stitched in the corner.
Hymns. She played piano at church for forty years. She can still play "How Great Thou Art" all the way through, though she can't always find the bathroom.
Lawrence Welk. We still watch the reruns on public television on Saturday nights. She knows every singer's name. She doesn't always know mine. It's all right.
Her students. She kept a list of every child she ever taught, over four hundred names, in a green notebook. She reads it sometimes and smiles at the names.

If you had Mrs. Teigen for a teacher, please write and tell me your story so I can read it to her. She may not remember it, but she will love hearing it. [email protected]

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Last updated September 16, 1999