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Grandpa Fred
SALUTATIONS!
Hi, Y’all!
There you go. A very uppity, and a very “down home” Good Morning!
My comments about having some of those four-inch vitamins with holes in the center yesterday provoked a few chuckles. Darlin’ even invited me to have some of her specialties: doughnuts glazed with crushed Flintstone vitamins. I said, Thanks, but “Yuuuuucckkkk!”
Think I’ll stick with my brand. I’m havin’ some more with my ultra dark roasted Columbian this morning. Went to the HEB (used to be Pantry Markets) yesterday and picked up another pound of their dark-roasted Columbian. Whewww! Now THIS is DARK-roasted!
What an aroma! Anyway, there’s a fresh pot made. It’s in the Nissan insulated French Press this morning, and there’s lots of it, so help yourself.
We’ve been on the topic of sowing and reaping for the past couple of days, and I’ve talked about it during previous Coffee Breaks, but I’d like to take a bit of a different tack with it today.
Frederick Lehtosaari was born in a little town in Finland just before the turn of 20th Century.
He grew up and married a young beauty queen, Laura. They were both quite young when they married – even by those 1917 or 1918 standards.
Frederick decided that post WW I living standards in Finland were not what he was looking for in life and – like so many Europeans of that era – boarded a steamship to come to America with his young bride.
Shortly after arriving and processing at Ellis Island, they moved across the country to Red Lodge, Montana where Laura bore Frederick two daughters, Laura and Lillian.
Frederick Lehtosaari was a musician, a dance-band leader and an orchestrator; and he found the Roaring Twenties to be an era made for his music.
It didn’t take long for him to form a first-rate dance band and begin getting gigs in dance halls, theaters, clubs – and any old place he found a waiting audience.
His forte was the accordion, and he worked that thing to death.
Like another of his contemporaries, Lawrence Welk, he became a veritable showman with his accordion.
He put on a show with his gyrations and dances that made the average person just drip with perspiration by watching.
He had a brass and string section to his band, and experimented with musical sounds and arrangements, always seeking something new that would satisfy and delight his patrons and listeners. His objective was to entertain, and entertain to the fullest.
Unfortunately his young bride, Laura Lehtosaari, was in poor health and though she traveled with him to many of his gigs, it soon became apparent that she needed medical attention.
Diagnosed at age 23 with lung and throat cancer (she was a chain-smoker), she succumbed to the disease at 24 years of age, leaving Frederick a widower.
His showmanship and musicianship had gained him many admirers and would-be suitors (Suitresses? Huntresses?), and it wasn’t long before he remarried.
His “roady” life-style was hardly conducive to married life, and throughout the years women became a problem for him.
One after another, a woman would be attracted to him, he would be attracted to her, they would marry, she never measured up to Laura, and they divorced.
No marriage ever lasted much more than five or so years, and he went through five divorces, ultimately spending his remaining years in bachelorhood.
In those early years after Laura Lehtosaari died, Fred would take his two daughters with him on the road.
Both of them learned the dances of the era and at age four, Lillian brought the Portland Paramount Theater down with thunderous applause dancing the Charleston to her dad’s music.
The years of constant travel and now the end of his second marriage provoked Frederick Lehtosaari to look for greener pastures minus the memories and heartbreak.
In the mid-1930’s, he moved with his family to Juneau, Alaska.
He also moved to the bottle in an effort to fill the empty spiritual void.
Lillian recounted how he would come home drunk time after time after a night of music, dancing and partying and yell at her and her sister, “If you ever turn out like me, I’ll kill you.”
Lillian, now age fourteen, decided she’d had enough of this lifestyle and ran away from home, eventually winding up in the Juneau Children’s Home.
She maintained contact with her father but would say to him, “Dad, I can’t live like this anymore.
If you want to go on living this dance and party lifestyle, I can’t be around you.”
At the Juneau Children’s Home, under the watchful eye of a Christian family, Lillian came face to face with the claims of Jesus Christ.
Before her fifteenth birthday she had a vision of Jesus standing before her with his hands outstretched.
In one hand was a fistful of crumpled tinfoil (or something resembling it).
In the other was an array and assortment of gemstones and pearls, gold and silver heaped to overflowing and spilling out of his hand.
He stretched out the hand with the tinfoil and said, “This is what you have chosen,” then withdrew that hand and stretched out the hand overflowing with gold and precious stones and said, “But this is what I have available for you.”
The message couldn’t have been clearer to a young girl raised in the glitter of night lights, music, dancing and partying with boisterous, hand-clapping crowds.
The hand with the tinfoil was the life she had grown up with – the life she couldn’t stand, yet knew nothing better.
The hand outstretched with jewels promised a life she knew nothing of, but it came with the voice of love, the voice of peace, the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Thus, at age fourteen, Lillian Lorraine Lehtosaari made a decision that would permanently affect the course of her life, and ultimately bring change and a peaceful end to the life of Frederick Lehtosaari, her father.
She accepted Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior.
Not long afterward her older sister, Laura Lehtosaari, met and married William Seymour – a decision that would ultimately separate the two sisters for most of the remainder of their lives.
Lillian began to share her new life in Christ with her father.
As long as he was sober, everything was…well….tolerable.
When he would drink, and the liquor overtook his mind, he would scream, “I’ll not have my daughters being any of those religionists.
If I ever get my hands on you, I’ll beat that religion out of you.”
I should probably mention that while they easily spoke English to the outside world, the mode of family communication in those days was in Finnish.
Fred had grown up in Finland, and Finnish was his native language.
Laura, his first wife, was also from Finland and she spoke Finnish.
It was simply the natural language of communication in the home and the family.
As the years passed, Lillian and Fred spoke less and less to each other.
Bill & Laura Seymour moved to the Seattle area. In late 1938 or early 1939, Lillian moved to Butte, Montana to be with the only stepmother she’d ever come to really know and love – and one who had also come to know Jesus Christ.
I’ve no certain recollection of that stepmother’s name, but it seems to me that her name was also Laura.
Another Laura Lehtosaari. This Laura’s parents had passed away and left her a sizeable inheritance, and she decided to invest it into the future of her step-daughter, Lillian. Lillian began to talk to her step-mother about her desire to attend Bible College and prepare for future ministry.
Laura told her that she would provide her tuition and living expenses, and provide her with all the clothing she would need if she made that decision.
She didn’t refer to it in those days as “sowing seed,” but that’s precisely what it was.
Laura Lehtosaari sowed seed into the future of a now-former step-daughter.
She sowed seed into the Kingdom of God, believing that it would produce a harvest that would never end.
She was right.
In 1941, while attending Northwest Bible Institute in Seattle, Lillian Lorraine Lehtosaari met a young pioneer preacher who was struggling to build a church and establish a ministry in the mostly Finnish-speaking fishing community of Ilwaco, Washington.
His name was Alvin Earnest Capener, and Ilwaco, Washington was simply an interim stop on the way to Alaska.
Not only was it love at first sight, it was “Thus saith the Lord” in both of their spirits, and less than six months later, Lillian Lorraine Lehtosaari became Lillian Lorraine Capener.
Hardly a year later, they had their first son, a young whippersnapper they called Regner.
See, daughters were the norm on both sides of the family.
Frederick Lehtosaari had two daughters, his daughter, Laura, had twin daughters, and Alvin Capener came from a family with three daughters – one of whom had died of sudden infant death syndrome.
They naturally expected to have daughters.
When this twerp showed up on the scene as a boy instead, they scrambled to find a suitable name.
The family doctor’s name was Dr. Regner Kullberg. It was an unusual name but it fit, and that’s how I got tagged.
Another nineteen months went by and another young squirt showed up – again a boy!
This time they were ready. He got a double grandfather whammy: Howard Frederick Capener.
Meantime, Frederick Lehtosaari was fighting another battle: diabetes.
His rough and tumble, late-nite music, dance and booze lifestyle was eroding his health steadily.
In the years that followed after our family had moved to Nome, Alaska (go back and read the Coffee Break article,
FAITH IN SHOELEATHER) a dance-floor injury to one of Fred’s legs wouldn’t heal.
Diabetes was taking its toll, and the doctors decided to amputate that leg below the knee.
So much for Fred’s music career! His father and grandfather had been shoemakers in Finland, and he had learned the trade as a child.
Fred had a “never say die” attitude and parlayed his importunity into opportunity, opening up a shoe shop in downtown Portland where he had moved to have access to good medical attention.
His accordion put away and his band scattered to the four winds, Frederick Lehtosaari began making shoes and boots for a wealthy constituency who could afford his hand-made, custom-fitted footwear.
He dropped the last half of his name because folks just couldn’t seem to get the pronunciation right.
Americans who’ve never spoken any language but English often have trouble rolling their R’s, and “Lehtosaari” has a rolling lilt to it.
Frederick Lehtosaari became just plain old Fred Lehto.
I was eleven years old when I first walked into Lehto’s Shoe Shop in downtown Portland with my parents and my brother.
It was 1953, and we were taking our first family vacation since moving to Alaska nine years earlier.
Grandpa Fred had seen me as a two-year-old, but I had no recollection of him.
He was sitting at a bench in the back of the shop, carefully fitting the sides of a pair of elegant boots he was making for one of his customers, a crutch leaning next to him.
Tears came into his eyes when he saw his youngest daughter.
“Lillian,” he said, breaking, “I’m so glad to see you.”
When he looked at me, his face broke into a big grin.
“My, my, my!” he exclaimed. “Another me. Why, you look just like me when I was your age!”
We went to lunch together as a family that day. Even though her father still called her “Lillian,” Mom had tried to put away the memories of her show-biz childhood.
Lillian Russell was a big name in Hollywood in those days, and Mom didn’t want the name association.
Dad preferred to call her “Lorraine,” and she decided it was better to be known by her middle name.
Bill and Laura Seymour, Mom’s sister and brother-in-law, disappeared from her life about that time.
Laura’s priest was afraid she might be contaminated by Mom’s “heresy” and ordered her to cut off all communication on pain of excommunication.
The choice of names and her father insistence on referring to her as Lillian despite her aversion to using her first name notwithstanding, father and daughter had what was likely their first really peaceful and heartwarming conversation around the table together in more years than either could remember.
The doctors had warned Fred that he could never partake of alcoholic beverages again if he wanted to continue living.
And he had listened to them.
Thus the conversation around the table that day had a tinge of irony and humor in the recollections of the drunken threats Frederick Lehtosaari had made against his daughter for “becoming one of those religionists.”
He was ready that day to listen to his daughter and son-in-law as they talked about the Lord Jesus Christ, about the ongoing ministry in Alaska, and about all that God was doing in their lives.
Mom sowed seed into Grandpa Fred that day.
Two years later, the harvest came. She received a letter in the mail from Fred Lehto with the Portland return address, along with another letter from a Lutheran pastor.
In the course of making a pair of shoes for this pastor, he had quietly and graciously prayed with Fred as he accepted Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior.
Two more years passed and a phone call came from that same Lutheran pastor.
He had gone to pay a visit on Grandpa Fred and found him dead in his bathtub.
In those four years since we had seen him, he had undergone three more amputations to stem the diabetes, one more to the leg that had already been amputated – this time just below the hip – and two similar amputations to the other leg.
They had not been able to stop the infection, and it took his life.
Grandpa Fred had sown seed his entire life. The problem was that the seed he sowed brought a harvest of destruction, ending his life prematurely at age 59.
Nevertheless, good seed was sown toward the end of his life.
He never lived to see the harvest of that good seed, but the letter he wrote just weeks before his death was posted on the bulletin board of the Lutheran church whose pastor had sowed seed into Fred’s life.
That letter was a testimony to the change that came about in him, and a clarion call to all who read the letter to recognize that “Only one life, ‘twill soon be past: only what’s done for Christ will last.”
The seed he sowed with that letter brought about a harvest that is still being reaped to this day.
Seedtime and harvest are laws of the universe. They are inviolable.
What we sow, where we sow, and how we sow determine the harvest we reap.
We either sow life, or we sow death.
What we say with our mouths is seed – for good or bad.
How we use our money is seed – for good or bad. Whether we tithe, give of our abundance, or deliberately sow money with purpose is seed – for good or bad.
Whether we vote in elections, or not, how we vote, and who we vote for is the casting of seed.
For all of it; there is a harvest – for good or bad.
The law of seedtime and harvest is inescapable, and how we utilize that law is what produces curse or blessing – in our lives, the lives of the people around us, and the future of our children.
And I’ve still only scratched the surface on this subject.
More to come. Stay tuned.
Pour another cup, have another “vitamin” on me, and enjoy your day.
Let me sow some seed into your life today. Blessings on you!
Regner
A. Capener
CAPENER MINISTRIES
RIVER WORSHIP CENTER
700 South 6th Street
Sunnyside, Washington 98944
(509) 837-4657
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