More Old Lore

 Eli's older brother Victor was the founder of a tiny town in Minnesota called "Finland." His brother Aksel was somewhat of a gymnast. He could hold a stick in front of himself with both hands, and jump over it, and he could tuck his feet behind his neck. When he died, it was from asphyxiation from a defective wood stove.
   Eli and Sofia's younger boys, Gene, Johnnie, and Vake, used to play in the slag pile of an old coal mine near their home in Coos Bay. One day Johnnie catapulted himself with a sapling, expecting to hit the slag and slide harmlessly. Instead, he hit a buried rock and knocked himself unconscious. Gene thought he was dead, and carried him home. He was madder than hell when he found out Johnnie was fine, and Gene had carried him that whole distance for no good reason.
    Johnnie was a "bleeder," so his childhood mishaps were more serious than for most kids. When the boys were running barefooted, one stuck a knife into the ground. Johnnie ran into it and got sliced between the toes. It took days for the wound to stop dripping. The same thing happened when he had a wisdom tooth pulled. According to Milly, when WWII broke out and he tried to enlist in the military, his wife Evelyn informed the recruiter that he was a bleeder, and had him immediately discharged.
   Johnnie was injured a few times, but everybody said that their childhood neighbor, Burt Saarempaa (sp?) was "accident prone." When they were high-school age, the wooden stick he was using for pole vaulting broke under him, and he broke his neck and died.  His brother George was inducted into the Army in WWII, and his unit was depicted on the cover of Life magazine. Vake kept the magazine, and circled what appears to be George's face, but George was killed by a sniper after peace had been declared. 
 Vake claimed that Johnnie could do a Russian Cossack dance involving bouncing in a deep crouch and kicking his legs alternatively out to the side. No wonder his hips wore out! And given the bleeding, it's remarkable, then, that in his older age, he had his hip replaced--twice. He received his first hip so early on when that technology became available, that he wore out his first artificial hip and had to have it replaced.
   Gene made his artificial hip last, but told of getting rambunctious on his crutches while his surgery healed, and throwing himself down on his back a time or two.
  Vake's grandson, Mark's son Drew appeared to have inherited the agility that made Eli's brother a gymnast; as a child, he could tuck both feet behind his head at once. However, he grew to be 6'5" tall, and that is not the right body type to be a gymnast.