This Christmas season included some sad news in our family. From the Morrison County (Minn.) Record:

Evangeline Vangie Gwost, age 99, of Little Falls, passed away Thursday, Dec. 19, 2013, at St. Ottos Care Center in Little Falls. …

Evangeline Vangie Merchlewicz was born Aug. 2, 1914, in Little Falls, the daughter of Joseph and Frances (Sniezek) Merchlewicz. She grew up in Little Falls and graduated from Little Falls High School, Class of 1932. Following her schooling, she worked for the Farm Security Administration in Little Falls and across northwestern Minnesota. During World War II, she was a court reporter at Camp Ripley. She was engaged to George Gwost before he went to serve during the War in the Pacific. Upon his return, the couple was married April 10, 1945, at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church. During their honeymoon, they went to the Busch Gardens in St. Louis. It was there they got their initial inspiration to start a rose garden which grew to 500 bushes in their retirement. Vangie worked as a professional secretary for many companies in Little Falls and retired from Morrison County Social Services. Her retirement was short lived and she began working at the Morrison County Record as a proofreader. She was soon asked to begin a cooking column, Whats Cookin In The County, which she began in 1981 and continued until her second retirement in 1996. Vangies commitment to her church was life-long. She began playing the organ in the third grade and played until 2002. She and George were life-long members of the Senior Choir. She also played at St. Ottos for 10 years. Vangie was instrumental in the launch of the basement remodeling committee which she co-chaired with her husband, George. They published a cookbook, which she co-edited with Geri Wotzka, to fund the basement renovation. Vangie enjoyed working, cooking, flower gardening, was famous for her kolaches, dancing, music and with George, hosted many parties in their backyard log cabin. …

Vangie was preceded in death by her parents; husband, George (May 6, 2008); infant daughter, Mary Suzanne; brothers, Vincent, Dominic, John, Jerome Merchlewicz and sisters, Celia Rue, Helen Trebiatowski, Sr. Vincent (Lucille) DePaul, Esther Prestegard and Leona Janousek.

Vangie was my great-aunt, and, as far as I know, the first columnist in the family. The brothers and sisters were my great-uncles and great-aunts (five of whom, I believe, I met), and Esther was my grandmother, who died before I was born. I found out about her cooking column on one of our Little Falls trips, so I mentioned that to the cooking columnist at the newspaper I worked at in college, so Vangie got to be a guest columnist in Monona, and perhaps our cooking columnist was a guest columnist in Little Falls.

Vangie was the last of her family to pass on to the great Polish family reunion in the sky. Celia lived in a big white house in Minneapolis within view of a SuperAmerica gas station sign, which fascinated the four-year-old who visited one summer. On a previous trip, the story goes, my father took my brother and me for a walk, and for some reason I decided to take a slightly different path, into a pond, to where the only thing floating was my hat. I don’t remember that, but I do remember this sequence of events on the aforementioned 1969 trip:

• We visited the Como Park Zoo with Celia and Uncle Oscar. (Dad got to drive their late 1960s Plymouth Fury.) One of the stops was to the bird area, where a peacock stuck his head through the fence and bit me on my middle finger.
• That trip included a visit to one of Minnesota’s giant statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox (possibly in Brainerd). On the way, our brand new 1969 Chevrolet Nomad started knocking loudly enough to scare a back-seat passenger. The nearest Chevy station claimed the brand-new car needed a new engine. The owner of the car decided it was bad gas, and avoided the former Consolidated brand thereafter.

Aunt Helen, who lived in Little Falls, owned a Buick convertible that apparently had included as a previous passenger one Hubert H. Humphrey, which is why she kept it. Her late husband was the police chief in Little Falls, and my father would visit their son during the summer. I think Herman died before I was born, although I heard enough times the story of one of his officers who found a stray cat and put it in his squad car. Said officer found out that transporting cats in cars is a bad idea for the driver and, in his case, his squad, which overturned during said transport attempt. I’m told that Herman couldn’t usually get the whole story out because he’d start laughing and then start crying from laughing.

It is said you should write about what you know. Vangie knew cooking, at epic quantities. She once admitted she stayed up all night to cook for said reunions. Every Labor Day weekend for many years she and George would host enormous family reunions at their house outside Little Falls. Uncles John and Jerry (the owner of the second English springer spaniel I ever saw, the first being our own) would sit at a table and drink beer and brandy. Some number of their four children and 10 grandchildren, plus other nieces and nephews would be there — all cousins of mine to the extent I could remember who belonged to whom. Food was eaten, adult beverages were drunk, and music was played and sung. (Including by me when cousin Mary Ann gave me her trumpet to play.)

The reunions were so large by the late 1970s that the family rented out Lindbergh State Park. One year, the Morrison County Sheriff’s Department threw us out of said Lindbergh State Park. How do you fix that? You get one of the family to marry a sheriff’s deputy. He’s now the sheriff of Morrison County.

Someone once said that Merchlewicz family reunions, weddings and funerals were all the same event. I can’t speak to the latter, but that seemed to apply to the first two. George and Vangie sang at Mary Ann’s wedding (which was not at Lindbergh State Park). I forgot the reason, but that wedding included this joke: A duck walks into a pharmacy and asks the pharmacist for a tube of Chapstick. (If this was a Wisconsin joke, it would be Carmex, of course.) The pharmacist gave the duck his Chapstick, and then the duck said, “Put it on my bill.” In keeping with that joke, when the priest presented the new couple to the congregation, a bunch of the family was wearing duck bills on their noses.

(The worst thing I can say about this family came from this wedding: A bunch of us went out that weekend to a Little Falls bar. They were drinking Grain Belt beer on tap. Appallingly bad beer.)

This is the sort of thing you see less of these days, for two reasons. Vangie was one of 10 children. Vangie and George had five children, one of whom died at birth, and the other of whom gave Vangie and George a total of 10 grandchildren. Those children live from Minnesota to Washington. Smaller and more spread out families make big family events more difficult.

That doesn’t mean that family traditions can’t continue to future generations. Every Christmas, we get from my aunt two pans of kolaches, which are Polish pastry with a drop of fruit inside. You can guess where my aunt got the recipe. I just finished ours yesterday.