Yes, for a while, there was a school named after my grandfather up there in the frozen northern Yooper outpost of Sault Ste. Siberia. It wasn’t really called Finnelson. That was the most common way that people would mispronounce our family name and The Commander hated it and I just wrote it like that to bug her because she reads this here blahg. It wasn’t always easy growing up trying to be a hooligan under her watchful eye. If you felt like saying something like, “I ain’t got none,” you had better darn well be over in the schoolyard or someplace where she couldn’t hear you. I figgered I’d escape that as an adult but no. Not only does the Comm *still* correct my grammar, my blasted *daughter* does it too! For the record, my grammar is pretty dern good, fer kee-reist!

Anyway. I don’t know that Grandberry did anything specific to earn the honor of having an elementary school named after him. He was an old-school small-town bank president who came from pretty much nothing. He wasn’t too proud to take the ferry to Sugar Island (on foot) to collect collateral in the form of a cow. And during World War II, long before I was even thought about, he was a member of the Chippewa County Draft Board and he felt so guilty about sending other people’s boys to war that he told his own sons, who were in college and medical school at the time, that they had best get their effects together and voluntarily enlist. And so they did.

As I mentioned in that sorta tacked-on coda to yesterday’s rambling bunch of blather, Finnelson Finlayson School is now a charter school run by the Native Americans. It isn’t called Finlayson any more and I’m too lazy to google the current name. I can only guess, of course, but I think that Grandberry would have liked that idea. As all of my cuzzints, etc., know, he spent the earliest years of his childhood in northern Saskatchewan (Kinistino), where his parents were homesteaders and his dad and uncle were fur trappers for the Hudson’s Bay company. This was in the late 1800s. They had many friends amongst the Native Americans in the area and were given many artifacts from those friends. Alas. My great-grandfather and his brother died on a fur trapping trip much farther north in the wilderness. No cell phones in those days. My great-grandmother and her three small children did what you had to do back then, which was to live with relatives somewhere else, and somewhere else turned out to be Sault Ste. Siberia, Michigan.

There are only two public elementary schools up there in Siberia any more, Lincoln and Washington. I don’t totally understand the business rules surrounding all this but I’m guessing it is now cheaper to bus kids to larger buildings than distribute the schools around the area? I don’t know. I am thinking guessing that Grandberry probably had vague memories of his life in Saskatchewan and I think he was very interested in Native American culture. I have to guess that he would be happy that his namesake school went to the Indians when it was no longer feasible for the public schools to own it.

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