Scott Swanson
One of Angeline Kieper Fischer’s most vivid memories stems from when she and her husband Denny were living with their two daughters in Wisconsin, where the state’s Green Bay Packers football team reigns supreme.
“I had invited my sister and her husband and their kids over for dinner and we were going to watch the Packers game,” she recalled. The kids wanted Denny to saddle up a pony so they could ride. He said he would – at halftime.
“They were begging, ‘Oh, please,’ and he said the only way he’d do it sooner was if they brought it into the house.”
Fischer said a few minutes later the adults heard a banging noise.
“Here they came, up the steps, through the kitchen, through the dining room with that pony.”
Denny saddled it.
That’s one of many stories Fischer has to tell in a self-published memoir she recently completed with her daughter, Cindy Fischer Cutts, who writes and edits professionally in Hawaii.
“Then Sings My Soul – An Autobiography” is aptly named, given the role of music in Fischer’s life, but it could easily have been titled, “And Then Something Else Happened” or “My Wild Life,” because her 93 years have not been boring.
She said her family encouraged her to chronicle her experiences.
“My granddaughter used to love to have me tell her stories about when I was a little girl,” Fischer said. “Now she’s a grown woman. She gave me a book for Christmas called ‘Grandma’s Journal.’ It had spaces to fill in, but some of it wasn’t things I wanted to write down and there wasn’t room for the stories I wanted to tell.
“My daughter is a ghostwriter and she said she’d like to help me write my autobiography.”
They started last December and, Fischer said, she soon realized that she would be writing very much, not on a computer, at least.
“I’m not good on a computer anymore,” she said. “I’d touch something and it was gone.”
So she started writing her memories in longhand.
Some of the chapters in the book were written previously, but most were dictated over the phone to Cutts, who typed them up, editing along the way, her mother said.
“It was hard,” Fischer said. “I couldn’t just read my stories to Cindy; she stopped me all the time for clarification and she pushed me to remember more details.”
What resulted was a 410-page book full of stories, many of them reflecting Fischer’s active personality, chronicling her life from her birth at home on a farm in north-central Wisconsin as one of seven children, her marriage to Denny Fischer, their move to Oregon and her activities along the way thereafter.
Music was a key element in her life from a young age. Fischer says she started singing with her “Pa” as they milked cows in their dairy barn. As she grew older, she sang in church, at weddings and funerals, and at other events, including talent shows, some of which she won.
“I sing and play by ear,” Fischer said. “I’m not a trained musician. I started out right from scratch. I learned three chords (on the guitar) and that’s where I started singing.”
The book includes the story of how she was invited to host her own show at WATK Radio in Antigo, Wisconsin, when she was 17 and working as a live-in nanny/housekeeper for a wealthy farmer in the northern part of the state.
“The guy who owned the local newspaper in our town came to visit me,” she recalled. “He also owned a radio station and he brought a guy with him who was his salesman. They’d heard me sing at a veterans banquet. They wanted to know if I was interested in doing a 15-minute radio program three days a week. I was afraid to say no, but I didn’t have a sponsor. I didn’t own a car. Did I know enough songs?”
Her boss agreed to let her try it, and the radio station arranged to send a car to pick her up – women typically did not have their own cars in the 1940s.
The station found a sponsor for the program after a few months: the local utility company, which supported the show for approximately eight years. After that, the Purina feed company picked up the sponsorship for another five.
She sang a wide variety of music, accompanying herself on a guitar, and her show was eventually aired as far away as Green Bay, some 90 miles away. Fans would actually drive to the radio station to watch her perform through its windows.
“It lasted 13 years,” Fischer said. “That doesn’t happen to a lot of people.”
Also, she notes in the book, broadcasting was a male-dominated field, so she was, unwittingly, a pioneer.
One of her favorite memories is how she was recruited in 1948 to help with a March of Dimes event. The organization had been founded 10 years previously to combat polio, which was then “running rampant” in America, she said.
The local police chief and a local junior high teacher “who had a rich baritone voice – he could have read what was on a tomato can and people would have listened,” asked her to accompany them on a tour of the local bars on a Saturday night.
“That was a big surprise because I wasn’t old enough to be in a bar,” she said. “But the chief told me not to worry about it, so I agreed to go. I was pretty young, pretty naive.”
The chief had mapped out the establishments and they moved directly to the back of the bar at each one, next to the bartender, with cardboard banks shaped like iron lungs, the bulky respirators used to treat polio patients who suffered from paralysis in their breathing area.
“The chief of police would say, ‘May I have your attention?’ and when people quieted down, the junior high teacher explained why they were there. I sang ‘Dear Hearts and Gentle People,’ a popular song at the time.”
When she finished, the junior high teacher would tell the crowd, “If you can afford to be in a bar, you can dig a little deeper for a good cause, like the March of Dimes.”
“Just about every one of those iron lungs was bulging with cash,” she said. “I felt proud that I had been asked to help and to make it all happen.”
Though music played a big part of her life, there was a lot more. Hunting, for instance.
“My husband’s mother told me, ‘If you plan to see much of him, you’d better learn to enjoy the outdoors,” Fischer said. “He sure taught me a lot about what goes on in the outdoors.”
The book includes an entire chapter of her “Special Hunting Memories,” including her daughter’s first buck and a monster blacktail Fischer shot the next day, near Hamilton Creek School, which later earned her Boone and Crockett scoring as one of the largest shots in the state that year.
There’s also the story of her first – and only salmon – caught after an epic battle that included a torn net and the realization that the fish, which had escaped the net, was still on the line under the boat.
“He was bound and determined not to go into the boat,” she said.
“Some of these stories, hunting stories, I’d written before, for the benefit of the kids and grandkids. We were done with the book on the first of August. I could have written more, but I thought I should cut it off,” she said, matter-of-factly.
The Fischers moved to Ore-gon, where her brother and his wife had previously relocated to Lebanon, in the early 1960s, and stayed in the Lebanon area for a decade before moving to Sweet Home in the early 1970s.
Denny first went to work in the woods as a logger, then managed the 600-acre Bellinger Ranch before moving on to Farmers Insurance, which sent him to Sweet Home to take over its office there, where Fischer assisted him.
Approximately half the book covers the period from 1974 to the present, much of which the Fischers spent in Sweet Home. There was the fire that destroyed their insurance office in 1990, Fischer earning her GED, her daughters’ marriages (Cindy to Jerry Cutts and Penny to Craig Fentiman), her service with local church quilting groups and performing at local senior care homes – and much more.
It includes plenty of flashbacks – like the time she and Cindy, then 11, survived a plane crash in what she remembers to be a Piper Cub.
“It was a real hot summer day and there was not much lift in the air,” she said. “The plane stalled while we were landing.”
She saw the pilot throw his weight to the right as the plane listed left, so she did the same thing.
“As we were going down I could see the rows of oats and they were getting farther and farther apart.”
The plane crashed in a drainage ditch, with both the pilot and Fischer unconscious. Cindy was uninjured.
“I thought, ‘Thank God, we made it.'”
“Miraculously, none of the injuries were serious,” Fischer writes. “Both the pilot and I were treated in the emergency room and then released to go home. I had the biggest, blackest eye of my life. For about a month I had to wear my sunglasses to go out in public.”
Fischer’s book is available on Amazon.com at https://amzn.to/3pqIQ1N, or can be purchased at a reduced price of $12 per copy from her. She will hold a book-signing event at the annual Fall Bazaar at Fir Lawn Lutheran Church Nov. 19-20.
For more information, visit http://www.angelinekieperfischer.weebly.com.