ALOYSIUS F. GRENGS:

Aloysius Fred Grengs was born in Dana, Saskatchewan, on July 12, 1909, the son of Frank and Rosalia Wermerskirchen Grengs. In 1913 the Grengs family moved to Minnesota, settling on a farm near St. Leo, Yellow Medicine County. When he wasn't needed to do work on the family farm, Grengs attended country school sporadically until the age of sixteen. He received the equivalent of a fifth or sixth grade education. German was the language spoken at home, and Grengs often found school difficult, particularly learning to read and write English. When he was ten years old he began doing farm work for others, plowing, planting, picking corn, hauling grain, and milling.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s Grengs moved around a great deal in search of work. He left home in 1929 and went to South Dakota. After working on a ranch near Belle Fourche for several months, he got a job on a farm near Sisseton. In 1931 he returned to Minnesota and performed various kinds of farm work in the Canby area of Yellow Medicine County. He took a body-building course by correspondence in 1932 from Joe Bonomo of Hollywood and began boxing in local matches. His interest in body-building continued throughout his life. In 1934 Grengs worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps (C.C.C.) at Sawbill Camp F-10, Tofte, Cook County, Minnesota. He then worked for his father, doing farm work and hauling gravel. On November 23, 1935, he married Mildred Thovson of Canby. In 1937 they had a son, the first of nine children. They were divorced in 1988.

During the next few years, Grengs worked at many jobs, mostly agricultural work and hauling. From 1936 to 1941 he sheared sheep. He worked as a truck driver for the Work Projects Administration (W.P.A.) at several Minnesota locations from 1937 to 1941. In 1941 the W.P.A. sent Grengs to California to work for the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, but he was rejected by Lockheed, because he had no birth certificate. At Tulelake, California, he got his first carpentry job working on the construction of an evacuation camp for Japanese-Americans. From California he moved to Oregon and Washington, where he worked at a variety of agricultural, factory, and construction jobs.

Grengs was called back to Canby, Minnesota, in 1943 by his local draft board to assist farmers with harvesting and threshing. From Canby he moved to St. Paul. He got a job with Minneapolis Moline Power Implement Company, where he remained until 1945, doing millwright work, carpentry, and brush painting. Grengs worked at several construction and maintenance jobs in the Twin Cities from 1945 to 1947.

In the fall of 1947 Grengs moved to Sisseton, South Dakota, where he rented a farmhouse and some land and spent a year farming. He returned to St. Paul in late 1948 and resumed working as a carpenter. He was a member of Local No. 87 of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America. From 1948 until his retirement in 1977, Grengs worked as a carpenter for numerous employers and projects in the Twin Cities area, except in 1953 when he worked at Babbitt, St. Louis County, Minnesota, and in 1954 when he did construction work in Greenland for several months.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1959, Grengs conceived the idea and did the preliminary drawings for his first invention, an amphibious rescue craft. The Grengs Rescue Craft, with improvements and modifications, was awarded a patent in 1965. On August 17, 1968, Grengs and his son Sheldon entered into an agreement with Eng-O-Prod. Industries, Inc. for the manufacture of the craft. His subsequent inventions included a wall-mounted television bracket, a pontoon watercraft, and a water buggy. He joined the Midwest Inventors Association in 1961 and served as its vice-president from 1965 to 1970.

Grengs died in South St. Paul, Dakota County, on August 21, 1997.

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Autobiographical scrapbooks (1889-1977) reproduced on microfilm, loose photocopies (1889-1988), a few photographs (1932, 1974), and audio recordings (1976-1987) documenting Grengs' life as an agricultural laborer, truck driver, carpenter, construction worker, and inventor in various locales in Minnesota, South Dakota, and the West. They also reflect his youth in Yellow Medicine County (Minn.), his family life, his health, the management of his household, and his personal interests.

The microfilmed scrapbooks contain a variety of materials, including autobiographical and genealogical narratives, letters, clippings, legal papers, personal records, newsletters, minutes, reports, memoranda, photographs, and memorabilia. The loose photocopies consist of duplicates of selected items in the scrapbooks (1889-1977) and similar types of materials (1978-1988) compiled by Grengs after the scrapbooks had been microfilmed. The audio recordings are homemade recordings of Grengs reminiscing, singing, and playing the harmonica.

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These documents are organized into the following sections:

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Availability:

The collection is open for research use.

Preferred Citation:

[Indicate the cited item and/or series here]. Aloysius F. Grengs and Family Papers. Minnesota Historical Society.

See the Chicago Manual of Style for additional examples

Accession Information:

Accession number: 12,317; 15,723

Location of Master Files:

Digital masters of the audiocassettes are maintained on the Society's secure digital collections storage servers and are managed and preserved in accordance with archival best practices.

The original audiocassettes were disposed after the material was digitally reformatted into wav files.

Processing Information:

Processed by: Tracey Baker, 1977; Deborah M. Kahn, December 2004

Digitization and encoding by April Rodriguez, February 23, 2022.

Digital audio transferred from the master audiocassettes by the Minnesota Historical Society for preservation purposes (February 2022).

Digitization was made possible by the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund through the vote of Minnesotans on November 4, 2008.

Catalog ID number: 990017154950104294

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The microfilm reproduces twelve autobiographical scrapbooks compiled by Aloysius F. Grengs during the 1970s from things he had saved during the course of his active and varied life. Grengs loaned the scrapbooks, which he called "One Man's Life for Survival," to the Minnesota Historical Society for microfilming in 1977. They contain a rich variety of materials documenting various aspects of his life, including his maternal and paternal ancestry, his childhood and youth, his marriage to Mildred Thovson and their nine children, his employment, the operation of his household and automobiles, his health and that of his immediate family, and his activities as an inventor. Although the inclusive dates of the scrapbooks are 1889-1977, most of the contents date from the mid-1920s to 1977.

Grengs' arrangement of the materials within the scrapbooks has been maintained. Each volume contains many types of documents relating to several aspects of his life and covering a fairly broad time span. Short narrative descriptions of various aspects of his life and work are scattered throughout the volumes, along with correspondence, church and civil records, newspaper clippings, membership and identification cards, instructions, employment and unemployment records, insurance policies and forms, legal papers relating to his inventions, personal financial records, newsletters, minutes, reports, memoranda, and photographs. The inclusive dates of each volume and the subjects documented in it are indicated in the reel contents list that follows this description and on the target that precedes each volume on the microfilm.

Volume 1 is primarily a genealogical photo-history with explanatory text. Volume 3 consists largely of a lengthy autobiographical narrative by Grengs describing the period from his birth in 1909 to 1948, when he was farming in South Dakota.

Some of the photographs in the scrapbooks have been copied and are available in the Minnesota Historical Society sound and visual collections. The Society negative number has been stamped near these photographs in the scrapbooks.

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The loose photocopies (1889-1988) consist of duplicates of selected items in the autobiographical scrapbooks (1889-1977) and similar types of materials (1978-1988) compiled by Grengs after the scrapbooks had been microfilmed. The majority of the photocopies (1906-1986) were sent by Grengs in four installments (in 1987) to historian David E. Schob of Texas A&M, University, who was researching midwestern farm labor and who subsequently forwarded them to the Minnesota Historical Society. There are also photocopies of miscellaneous autobiographical materials (1889-1988) and a Grengs family genealogy, written by Grengs in 1984.

Grengs' arrangement of the photocopies has been maintained. Like the scrapbooks, each of the four sets of photocopies sent to Schob, as well as the miscellaneous materials, consist of many kinds documents relating to several aspects of Grengs' life over a number of years and are not necessarily in chronological order.

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Location

Internet

Audio recordings:

Recordings of Grengs reminiscing about his family and his life, including during the Great Depression; singing cowboy, railroad, and other country-western and folk songs, some from the 1920s and 1930s; and playing the harmonica.

Tape 1, September 5-6, 1976. 1 master audio file (1 hour, 31 minutes): WAV (460 MB) and 1 user audio file: MP3 (79 MB).

Digital audio

Tape 2, April 6-7, 1977. 1 master audio file (1 hour, 32 minutes): WAV (466 MB )and 1 user audio file: MP3 (81 MB).

Digital audio

Tape 3-5, July 25, 1977. 1 master audio file (3 hours, 36 minutes): WAV (1 GB) and 1 user audio file: MP3 (223 MB).

Tape 3 0:00:00-01:31:00

Tape 4 01:31:00-03:01:00

Tape 5 03:01:00-03:36:00

Digital audio

Tape 6, November 17, 1984. 1 master audio file (1 hour, 4 minutes): WAV (324 MB) and 1 user audio file: MP3 (55.6 MB).

Digital audio

Tape 7, March 23, 1986. 1 master audio file (1 hour, 29 minutes): WAV (456 MB).

Quality of audio is poor due to volume issues of the dialogue.

Tape 8, November 11, 1986. 1 master audio file (1 hour, 34 minutes): WAV (474 MB).

Quality of audio is poor due to volume issues of the dialogue.

Tape 9-11, February 11, 1987. 1 master audio file (3 hours, 34 minutes): WAV (1 GB).

Tape 9 0:00:00-01:31:55

Tape 10 01:31:55-03:03:29

Tape 11 03:03:29-03:34:58

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Original scrapbooks were loaned for microfilming by Aloysius F. Grengs, St. Paul, Minn.

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This collection is indexed under the following headings in the catalog of the Minnesota Historical Society. Researchers desiring materials about related topics, persons or places should search the catalog using these headings.

Topics:

Bodybuilding.

Rural families -- Minnesota.

Rural families -- South Dakota.

Home economics -- Accounting.

Labor.

World War, 1939-1945 -- United States.

Persons:

Grengs family.

Thovson family.

Wermerskirchen family.

Organizations:

Civilian Conservation Corps (U.S.) -- Minnesota.

Minneapolis-Moline Power Implement Company.

United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America. Local 87 (Saint Paul, Minn.).

United States. Work Projects Administration (Minn.).

United States. Work Projects Administration (Calif.).

Document Types:

Microforms.

Photographs.

Sound recordings.

Occupations:

Agricultural laborers.

Carpenters.

Construction workers.

Inventors.

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