These stories can also be heard on Sunday mornings around 10 am on WILD 102’s “Look Back in Time” program. Each week’s radio story will be posted here on our website.
Weekly radio stories are researched, compiled, and read by Sheila Winstead, RCHS Board Member.
May 10, 2026
Today is Mother’s Day, so our story pays homage to a mother who was loved and admired by her family. The descendant we talked to about Viona (Paulsen) Wiskow was with her grandson, Kerby Eidsmoe, from Roseau. He had nothing but good things to say about her when my sister Tallie Habstritt and I interviewed him at the Roseau County Museum, describing her as the living example of empathy, who taught her descendants how to be a good neighbor.
He remembered the constant cooking and baking that went on in her home. Before she married Marshall Wiskow in 1923 when she was just 19, she had already worked on a cook crew in Stephen, Minnesota. Marshall was 30 when they married. He bought a steam engine and made it pay off by using it to power a threshing machine and a sawmill. Viona said, “I hope Grandpa never has to decide between me and the steamer, ‘cause I think he’d pick the steamer.” He had that a year longer than her at that time. Viona got used to cooking for big crews, baking 10 loaves of bread at a time, twice a week.
She had her specialties that her grandson remembered. One was a green tomato mincemeat pie with two crusts. He said it had an unusual flavor that most people either loved or hated. It also contained apples, raisins, currants, orange peel and spices. He came across a similar recipe in a 1910 Encyclopedia of Cooking that called for a cup of cold coffee, too. In the summer there would be homemade ice cream. Kerby remembered being sent out to the haystacks to push the hay aside and find ice still there to bring in to use in the ice cream maker.
He called her the “Queen of Rhubarb”. She made a lot of sauces using rhubarb in many combinations, including one with bananas! Sauce was served with morning coffee every day. Kerby said she was a prolific berry picker and did a lot of canning, including meats. He said, “If it didn’t outrun her, it got stuffed in a quart jar and canned!”
Kerby’s mother Gertie was one of Viona’s daughters and often made potato klub, cooking it in a broth made from pork hocks. Kerby and his siblings like to cook, too, in the family tradition, and all five of his sons are great cooks, he said, some working their way through college as short order cooks. His dad Orlen Eidsmoe had a sweet tooth, and Gertie made him a cake every day. His favorite was a white cake with white powdered sugar frosting, baked thin in a jelly roll pan.
But Grandma Viona’s sugar cookies are the ones all the kids remembered the best. Kerby has been trying to replicate them for quite a while. Her recipe is in the Roseau County Museum’s 75th anniversary cookbook, with the name “Soldier Boy Cookies.” The name was because Viona remembered helping her mother make them and sending them overseas to loved ones during World War I. She would roll them thin, about 1/8” thick, and sprinkle the dough with a little sugar before finishing the rolling. Then they’d be cut out using a can about 3” across and packed
in an oatmeal carton with popcorn surrounding them to help prevent breakage. Lots of letters from grateful soldiers said they were delicious, even if they arrived as just crumbs, and the popcorn was delicious, too, because it tasted like the cookies. Kerby remembers benefiting from that tradition while he was in the service. The same rounds of dough were also used to make filled cookies, folded in half over cooked dates or raisins.
Kerby showed us a couple of his Grandma’s old cookbooks. They looked well-used. One contained clipped recipes glued to any empty spots in the book. At the back of the book had been glued several recipes for potions to cure whatever might ail you. He remembers her using outdated phone books to make scrapbooks. Nothing went to waste back then. Scraps of fabric from other sewing projects or repurposed clothing were made into quilts. He personally has five of her handmade quilts, sewed on an old treadle sewing machine which is now owned by Kerby’s daughter Shanny. Viona would make Stars and Stripes quilts for the boys in the service. Kerby received his made by his grandmother when she was 75 years old.
When Viona got older and retired from all the cooking for huge groups and crews, she also quit making bread. After Marshall died, Viona said she couldn’t make just two loaves. Kerby wonders how she could have done all that baking in the summer with a wood stove. She never had a separate summer kitchen.
Kerby enjoys baking bread with his own 110-year-old wood stove, and the aroma always reminds him of his Grandma Viona.
He described her as always kind and thoughtful, someone who never had a bad thing to say about anyone. She had been a neighborhood midwife in Huss Township and often took in kids whose families needed a little extra help. When her own mother, Carrie (McFarlane) Paulsen, couldn’t live on her own, Viona took her into her house to live with her, saying 18 years later, that now they were even. Her mother had taken care of her for 18 years, and now she had done the same for her mother.
Kerby also brought an example of her handiwork, a beautiful piece of filet crochet, with two deer in the center of the pattern. That had been his wedding gift from her. She always remembered family birthdays, sending cards to all the kids and grandkids. Often, they were recycled cards but they came with a personal note and maybe a stick of gum or a nickel. Everyone treasured those cards. Viona lived to be 100 years old.
Thanks to Kerby for a very interesting interview about his grandmother, Viona Wiskow, and thanks to WILD 102 for this time to share the story.
Thank you to 
for letting us share our county’s history with your listeners by donating air time, studio time, and production staff every week.