Louis Dahle Biography

"I was born July 26, 1923, in Denver, Colorado, supposedly in Boulder but more likely in Golden. They had a lot of home births in that time so I’m not quite sure of the exact location. Colorado has no record. I was named after my father, Louis Allison DAHLE." [*LAD]

His father was from Emporia, Kansas. He was a civil engineer who built roads and bridges through states. He traveled a lot in the western states, mostly Washington and Colorado. He was a religious fanatic.

His mother, Nina (McDOUGALL) DAHLE was born in Antigo, Wisconsin. She died in a car accident in Skokie, Illinois in April of 1955.

"After Nina died, I found a newspaper article from the Denver paper while cleaning up her things. It was about a child, a blue baby, who died at birth around 1920. His name was Charles DAHLE. The closest we can figure, it was three years before Louie was born. Nina would never talk about things unless you asked her directly. On the evening of her day off, Nina and I used to go to Evanston to go shopping. I said to her, "Mom, how come you divorced Dahle's dad? Was it because he was a drunkard, abusive, or what?" She said, "No, anything but. He was excessively religious." So after we found this article, we figured he wouldn't allow the baby to get a blood transfusion. The never really got a divorce, just separated." [*HHD]

"Nina was a Harvey girl. She traveled all over, ... Alaska, all over. There was supposed to be, according to this old farmer in Wisconsin, a friend of Nina's said, she was there for a reconciliation with his father but he never made it because of the automobile accident." [*HHD]

"When I was six years old my father died in an automobile accident in the state of Washington. my mother was working in a restaurant as a waitress. She had to support me. She brought me back to Chicago to live when I was seven. We lived in the Owl Hotel. The Owl Hotel was above the restaurant and was the waitress-term for 'home with lots of parties'." [*LAD]

"There were about twenty-three waitresses living in the hotel with their boyfriends and their bathtub gin and the whole bit. One fellow was a chiropractor. Another was in there making bathtub gin in a great big giant bathtub. His name was Eddie Moore. He was in the business. This was in 1930-31 before Roosevelt was elected. I used to make about $1 a week taking the Canada Dry bottles back to the store." [*LAD]

"My mother was the only person who had children in there. All the waitresses adopted me. Plus my mother had to work a lot of overtime because when there was a party all these waitresses wouldn't show up for work. The restaurant was open twenty-four hours a day. Oftentimes she was the only one at home so she had to work. The rest of them were all partying somewhere." [*LAD]

10 Jan 1953
Louis & Helen Dahle
Gus Harris & Katharine Langner
Connie Bakalis as flower girl

1991
Helen, Louie, Katharine, Desi
Colin and Carly

1995 Rafting Trip with Desi's family

"Then came Roosevelt in 1933 when I was 10 years old. He spoiled my business by stopping Prohibition so I didn't have any access to any money." [*LAD]

"When I was almost ten years old the World's Fair came to Chicago. I talked my mother into letting me go from Sheridan and Wilson to Soldier's Field involving bus transfers. The World's Fair went from 12th Street to 33rd Street and it was roughly four blocks wide. I talked her into allowing me go because there was this big kid, who was twelve years old, who was going to take me on the buses. I came home that night and told Mom that the big kid wasn't going to go. So, my mother woke me up at six in the morning and put a dollar in my hand and I went by myself to the gigantic World's Fair. From then on all summer long I was a tour escort. I would get a quarter apiece for all these kids that I would take. I would take about eight to ten kids a day. I would be responsible for them. Sometime I had twelve and fourteen year old kids in the group. I would take them on Friday because that was children's day. All rides on Friday were only five cents. You could walk around and go in the buildings for free." [*LAD]

"So, that is what my mother did for me. She believed in me being able to stand up for myself. She would say, 'Get your hands out of your pockets.' ... She would say, 'You're not that guy so don't act like him.'" [*LAD]

"I bought my first bicycle when I was about ten or eleven years old destroying my savings bank. It was a twenty-eight-inch high wheel Ranger with a great big tall frame. I couldn't reach the pedals in the saddle. I had to ride it on the bar. I had to leap on the pedal and jump on there. I rode it about two years and sold it for about the same amount of money as I bought it, about five bucks." [*LAD]

"My first bicycle trip was a little one. I took it to North Judson, Indiana, which was about 110 miles away from Chicago. I went by myself. I was about thirteen years old." [*LAD]

"Almost two years later, I was just fourteen years old in 1937, a friend and I went to St. Joseph, Michigan to pick peaches. It was the bottom of the depression, the second depression that they called a recession during the depression. Everyone in Cleveland, Ohio, was laid off. They hired everyone in Cleveland to work the excursion boats. We had ten dollars apiece so we went up there. But they wouldn't let city boys pick peaches. They had KYs and Oakies, and these people had five kids, and they knew how to pick without spoiling them, and we would probably eat as many as we picked. So, they wouldn't let us pick that year." [*LAD]

"We hung around for five days looking for work but we never found any. We slept in the dairy and we slept in the barn. We had a pretty good time. We decided to go for a ride to look for more work. We got on the road and this guy picked us up at an intersection. He had seven kids. He says, 'Why don't you come and stay with me. We have plenty of food but nothing else. Stay with us.' He had a DX station in Niles, Michigan. We stayed there for about three days. We lived like kings. And we had all these kids to play with. He had a lake there where we went swimming. We really enjoyed ourselves. After three days we left." [*LAD]

"Going down the road we saw a sign for Detroit 130 miles. So we said let's go see how Henry makes them. We went all through the plant and saw how he makes them." [*LAD]

"We get back on the road and we saw a sign that said Niagara Falls 257 miles. So we said let's go to the falls. So we pedaled our bikes and we crossed this bridge that took us into Canada. Nobody stopped us or did anything to us in those days at the border. We stopped in Windsor and everything was cheap. You could drink all the root beer you could drink for a nickel. You could get an eighteen inch hotdog for a nickel. Everything was real cheap. We stopped in this place and it was all the buttermilk you can drink for a nickel. They had great big, gigantic glasses. I don't like buttermilk, but I had this huge glass of buttermilk anyway. It was full of butter, the real McCoy. It was like a meal. Well, I was talking to my friend, Chuck, and this woman takes my glass and fills it up on me again. He says put salt in it this time, so I put salt in and drank it. I put it down and was playing with a pinball machine or something and she fills it up again! I had three of those giant glasses of buttermilk and got out of that place." [*LAD]

"We rode and we rode and we rode. When we got to St. Thomas they had a lot of sulfur water there so we drank a lot of sulfur water and got the runs. We were sleeping in people's barns. They would always asked if we smoked and we didn't so they would let us sleep in their barns. We would always check if we could do some work around in order to sleep in the barn. Well, there was one lady who had this giant lawn. It must have been three acres. She had a lawn mower for each of us and we made a few passes at it. It was like walking a mile this way and a mile that way. She called us in for chow and she had a great big board all spread out. She said, 'There isn't any of this because my husband ate it all, and there isn't any of this because my husband ate it all, and there isn't any of this because my husband ate it all.' Then her husband walked in and he was a huge, muscular, fat man and he just grinned the whole time." [*LAD]

"We went to Niagara Falls and then tried to get back into the United States but the cops didn't want to let us back in because they thought we were Canadian runaways. They asked us a bunch of questions. 'Who is mayor of Chicago? Who is the governor of this state? ...' But, we had all the answers to their questions so they let us back in." [*LAD]

"Fifty miles outside of Niagara Falls you get into the foothills of the Alleghenies. We got on the wrong road. We were going down steep ravines like there are in Winnetka and Lake Bluff. We were still full of sulfur water and having our troubles. We were riding our bicycles downhill at fifty miles an hour. Uphill we were walking them at no miles an hour. We made about fifty miles that day." [*LAD]

"We ran into a guy at Conneaut, Ohio. He wanted us to stay there and live there and he was going to adopt us. He was living by himself trying to run his farm all by himself." [*LAD]

"They had an interurban system all along Lake Erie. The street cars ran all along from Buffalo to Toledo, practically. This one would run twenty miles from this town to the next town and pick up all the farmers along the way. Then you could get on the next one. They actually had the electrified railways all the way along there." [*LAD]

"We would go anywhere from ninety to a hundred miles a day. That is with a swim in Lake Erie every day. We also swam in the Wieland Canal. It was all full of eels and everything. It was a mess. And I swear to God that we swam in the Love Canal too. It was right in the industrial area. We swam any place we could swim." [*LAD]

"One day we went 130 miles. We rode until midnight. The last day we went from almost Anderson, Indiana, for 140 miles. When we got on the outer drive we picked it up about at Calumet City. We went about fourteen miles an hour with those big old bicycle tires. We had muscles in our legs after that trip. We were kicking it up. We were happy. We were going like crazy. We had picked up the pace. Usually we just went leisurely. We took that outer drive all the way to Wilson Avenue in Chicago. I was a nice trip. 1,093 miles in twenty-one days. We came home broke." [*LAD]

"I hitchhiked twice to California. I hitchhiked to Minneapolis, Minnesota. I hitchhiked around a lot. I was too young for CCCs which was for the twenty year olds. I ran into good people, I ran into bad people, all kinds. People would pick you up in those days but there weren't that many people traveling on the roads like there are now." [*LAD]

"Outside of someplace like Williams, Arizona, but I think it was in New Mexico, I was picked up by two guys who were drunk. One guy claimed he was a race car driver and the other guy was a dentist. He kept calling him Doc. Doc was driving a '37 or '38 Oldsmobile. Every time I see one of these cars I shudder. It had a special grill. The six and the eight had different grills. I remember it, this was a six. Anyway, they had lost one piston. They had a blown valve or something. They stopped the car to see what had happened to it. Well, I got into the car and threw out all the whiskey bottles. I got in figuring these guys were going to sober up and drive me all the way to California. I was in the middle. They got back in the car still drunk and driving 65 miles an hour. We were about fifty-five miles outside of Kingman. I was reading all the signs to them like 'S-curve.' He would get going too fast. It was a manual shift and I would kick it out of gear and he would get mad at me. And he would get going too fast and again I would kick it out of gear and he would get mad at me. Anyway, I said, 'S-curve.' And he said, 'Screw the S-curve.' And he stepped on the gas. He was going about 85 miles an hour at the top of this mountain. He didn't have any power to pull it around this S-curve corner. He went down into a barrow pit. It had eight by eight posts with wire cable strung through them. He sheared off about six of these things. And, he pulled about five of them out of the ground. We ended up down at the bottom of the barrow pit. Everybody was okay. They start saying, 'Get rid of the bottles! Get rid of the bottles!' But, I had already gotten rid of them long ago. Not a single thing happened. The car just sort of slowed down because of the posts and cable. It was about midnight, two, or four o'clock in the morning. It was cold. We were picked up by a guy in a pickup truck. We were sitting in the back of this pickup freezing and Doc says, 'Boy this guy is really kicking it in the ass, isn't he!' They were still drunk." [*LAD]

"I got into Kingman and I took a freight train at eight o'clock in the morning. It was a section train. It would travel thirty miles and stop, thirty miles and stop. They were carrying all these ties and fixing things. When I got on this train the guy says, 'Son, you better get some milk bottles. Fill them all up.' I had three quart milk bottles. I drank them and filled them and drank them and filled them. I drank about twenty quarts of water that day. I was sweating. I got to Barstow about nine o'clock at night. I was completely black with Cinders on my face, in my hair, and everything. I went into the gas station and went to the urinal. I think I stood there for three minutes before I realized I didn't have to go, I sweated everything out that day." [*LAD]

"When I finally got out to California to visit my friend, there wasn't any food and I had to work in a bowling alley to pay for my own food." [*LAD]

"The other time I went to visit Parks in Fort Worth. I was a bad student. I dropped out of school." [*LAD]

"The only two times I rode the train was from Kingman to Barstow and coming back from California. I had a guy in Reno who picked me up. I had a map and sure enough, thirty-three miles outside of Reno they had a junction. There was a section crossing and I hitchhiked. I had a cardboard suitcase." [*LAD]

"I worked in Walgreens delivering booze." [*LAD]

"I worked for National Tea for a quarter an hour to fix the produce. I would go on the south side of Chicago to learn how the National Tea ran their produce section in the ghetto. Then I would go to the wealthy neighborhood and see how they ran theirs. Day old bread cost a fortune in the ghetto, everything was high there." [*LAD]

The 1940 census records shows Louie living with his mother, Nina, on Sheridan Road in Chicago. He was 17 years old, working as a clerk in a retail grocery store.

Louis was in the Air Force during WWII as a flight navigator in a B-17. He was trained at Luke Air Force Base in Litchfield Park, Arizona, just west of Phoenix. He did a full tour of bombing missions. During one trip, he rode in the belly bubble of the plane. Normally, he stood behind and slightly above where the pilot sat.

Sung by Louie on 11 Apr 1993: “I bombed Cologne with all the flack and fighters around me. Why the hell don't they ground me? Build a desk all around me, so I'll be safe ..." There was a better one then that describing second tour men. They wouldn't allow them to fly combat anymore. The English had to go back and train or do air/sea rescue.

One of his squadron buddies, Clifford Digre, authored the book Into Life's School: My World War II Memories, published in 2009. There are stories and photos that include Louie.

Before he was married, Louis worked in the oil fields in Wyoming. This was when he popped his shoulder out. He has had trouble with it since that dislocation.

Louis Allison DAHLE married Helen HARRIS 10 Jan 1953, in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois. They had three daughters, Denise, Desiree, and Dominique. Lou became an accomplished carpenter.

Lou and Helen came to Phoenix several winters to enjoy the warm weather while visiting with 'Cousin Dodo.' And she visited them in Montana during the summer.

Weston and Daniel just loved to be with him. They strongly agreed that 'Uncle Louie is interesting. He is funny. He plays with us. It is fun to watch him do his yoga exercises. And, he bikes with us.' Lou taught Weston how to ride a bicycle.

Louis Allison DAHLE

1923 - 2011