Monson native pens ‘From Moosehead to Misery Bay’

By Mike Lange
Staff Writer

    HANCOCK, Mich. — The well-traveled Lauri Anderson has learned a lot of things during his 72 years on Earth.

Finlandia University photo
LAURI ANDERSON

    A Rambler sedan is no match for a moose.
    You can play basketball outdoors in the winter, but the ball doesn’t bounce very well.
    Never put a Koran face down on a surface or drink beer while reading it.

    If you’re going to rob a bank, don’t use a snowmobile and park it near your residence.
    Anderson, a Monson native, is chair of literature and language at Finlandia University in Hancock, Mich., where the climate is much like Maine but with more average snowfall. “It’s a beautiful place with two universities and an amazing amount of snow,” Anderson said during a recent phone interview. “The record here is 390 inches in one year, and that was set in 1978 — two years after I arrived here.”
    He has also written eight books, all with Finnish themes and characters, including his latest: “From Moosehead to Misery Bay,” a memoir about growing up in Monson, serving in the Peace Corps in Africa and teaching in northern Michigan.
    Sometimes events seem to occur at a dizzying pace, but Anderson said that he chose to write in vignettes purposely “because I wanted a high emotional impact on every page. Novels don’t do that very well. Sometimes I had to condense things down to two or three sentences instead of two or three pages.”
    The first part of “Moosehead to Misery” focuses on his boyhood days at Monson Academy where the championship-caliber basketball team played in small gymnasiums like Somerset Academy in Athens to an outdoor court at Ripogenus Dam. “We wore gloves in that game,” he recalled.
    Car-moose accidents were common in Monson, but the meat was never wasted. Hunters would always keep sharp knives in their vehicles just in case they needed to butcher fresh road kill for the freezer.
    Anderson’s brother, Sam, still lives in the family home in Monson and his sister, Joy, lives next door. “I left right after high school when I went to UMaine and I usually come back to visit for a week or two every three or four years,” he said. “We had a family camp on Lake Hebron, and that was an ideal place to spend the summer.”
    While his Monson days were spiced with humor, his tenure as a Peace Corps volunteer had some harrowing moments. He and his wife escaped villages that were eventually attacked by rebel forces. “In Biafra, more than three million people died and people have already forgotten that it happened,” Anderson said. “There was no government, for all intents and purposes. Then the military took command. It was crazy. Nigeria could have been a model government and the economy has the potential of being strong. But today, it’s a basket case.”
    The Koran incident happened when he and his wife, Michelle, were on a Turkish passenger ship. He was reading the Koran on the deck when he paused and placed the book face down so as not to lose his place.
    Almost immediately, he was surrounded by a group of Pakistanis who protested loudly that the holy book could not be disgraced in such a manner.
    Then they saw him sipping on a beer while reading the book and complained again. He finally tossed the book over the side of the ship. “I have given the book back to Allah,” he said aloud. The Pakistanis never bothered him again.
    The bank robbery was pulled off — very badly — by two Finlandia college students who snowmobiled to the nearby town of Dollar Bay, waited for the bank to open and told the teller to turn over all the cash they had. Then they went back to the dormitory.
    The sheriff’s deputies showed up, also with a snowmobile, and simply followed their trail in the fresh-fallen snow back to the dorm where the perpetrators were arrested.
    But that was a rare moment of excitement at the university, Anderson said. “We’re very laid back up here, which is a perfect setting for me.”
    Anderson describes himself as “old and broken down” and just finished a round of chemotherapy. But he plans to work indefinitely. “I’m still teaching full time,” he said, “and I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t enjoy it. And of course, if I didn’t enjoy it – I wouldn’t write about it.”
    For more information about Anderson, visit www.northstarpress.com and click on the Finnish-American link.