Mrs. Gunkel Tells about Her Grandmother Olson

  Mrs. Gunkel was not my grandmother but it was through no fault of her own. She was the right age to have a thirty-something grandson like myself, she came from a rural Oklahoma background like my two honest grandmothers, and we were after all kinfolk. Like them, physically she had the dumpling plumpness of middle-age and didn’t care. Unlike them, her sharp blue-eyed glance had a quaver in it that seemed to me to reflect a wobble in her mental gyroscope since one of the first things she announced was that all of us with Olson blood were descended from the Queen of Sweden. And that included the actress Ann Margaret, who was born in Sweden and whose father’s name was Olson. 

Olson homestead, photographed 1990

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