Post FinnFest Depression Syndrome

PFFDS Taking Its Toll

By Chuck Altonen
FinnFest USA 2007 Committee

ASHTABULA, Ohio, August 29 – FinnFest USA 2007 concluded a month ago today with a stunning and honorable Memorial Service at Ashtabula’s Edgewood Cemetery. Approximately 10,000 Finnish immigrants and their Finnish American offspring are resting there. The bulk of the 750 blue and white Finnish flags decorating the graves, plus the one on the brand new Finns’ Point flagpole, are still catching the gentle breezes blowing off Lake Erie some three miles away. More people have visited this 190-year-old cemetery this year than in all of the seasons of the last decade. It is a deeply awesome and moving site.

Letters of thanksgiving and congratulations continue to pour in, finding their place in the Opine section of the daily newspaper or in our mailboxes from which they then get added to our scrapbook, now becoming a huge tome. I know about scrapbooks. When my Aunt Siiri left us for her final resting place in the family plot at Edgewood, I inherited all 18 of her giant scrapbooks, all tightly packed with local Finnish American history; I was also bequeathed with all of her personal diaries in which she had recorded family history and anecdotes and other tales of family life and the humorous side of it as well. You wouldn’t believe the stuff she recorded, even those long, long lists of what she gave the nephews and what the nephews gave her for Christmases so long ago.
All of my father’s 12 siblings and their cousins along with the “trickle-down” relatives in the first two Finnish American generations are gone now. The last two of them left nearly a year ago and 18 months ago respectively. But the memory of them all is still very much alive. They number close to 100 souls and every one of them became a highly successful contributing American.
As for FinnFest USA 2007, it was a huge three-year undertaking effort. Other than local politics, which continues to be a story of desperately bad political hackery, I’ve never written so much on a singular topic in all of my life. What’s have today in Craig Randal Johnson who is the remarkable pianist on that recording. Why did you musicians turn out to be so marvelous at what you do? Why is it that WHAT you perform and HOW WELL you perform it sends me spiraling through Alley Oop’s fabled “Time Machine,” way back to the days of my youth, to the lives of my grandparents and my father, and his 12 brothers and sisters, and to the huge temperance hall, and to the Humina Band, to the Sovinto Athletic Club, and to dear old Harbor High School where we not only learned your music but performed it as well and then let it trickled-down to our own late 20th and early 21st century families and beyond?

I play this stuff on my computer. I play this music in my car. Fellow drivers already know I’m going nuts. I play this stuff on our stereo and pipe it to my outside speakers at 28 decibels driving the heavy metal kids on the next street stark raving mad and irritating the Hillbilly Italian neighbors next door. My Bassett Hound howls. But I can’t get enough of it. I can’t get enough of the memories. I keep thinking back on how I wanted to take piano lessons as a kid and learn to be good at it. I keep thinking about my days in the school band and wish that I had listened more carefully to Opal Casbourn in eighth grade as to what I could have become rather than a so-so writer and a so-so artist and a so-so historian or one unworthy of preaching from the pulpit. (Doc Wargelin should have heard me. At that I was damned good.) And then I fall into a deep “Post FinnFest Depression Syndrome,” which I could easily get out of by turning off the music and shutting down the computer and sending the scrapbooks and diaries and my Finnish flag to the Goodwill store.

Or, I could reconsider the offer of “keeping company” tendered me a week ago by a 22-year-old beauty, who commented how much she adored my nearly white beard, stating she liked older men with nice beards. She was stopped dead in her tracks however when I told her the beard was cultivated over the last three weeks, grown to overcome PFFDS. I remarked that it was at best an interesting proposal to the ears of a vanha pieru; and then I asked if I could bring my wife along. Hey, I’m a half-century older than she and I would surely need an experienced nursemaid nearby familiar with all my other maladies which are many. That ended the exchange between us.

The longer we live and the older we get somehow brings us to thinking how we’re still kids. It might have been fun. What’s the big deal? The big deal is that I’ve been overcome by “PFFDS,” which fogs my thinking and for which there seems no way out, no cure, no prognosis, except through a really powerful yet unheard-of prescription, or something as simple as turning off the music and moving on to yet another threshold in a senior citizen’s life. Not even a ravishing, perfectly assembled 22-year-old. God Himself put me on this earth to accomplish a certain number of things. If I stop to fool around and refuse to cure the illnesses of FinnFest past, I’ll never get to die and rest in peace, let alone enjoy a Finnish flag on my own grave.

Chuck Altonen is both a skilled writer and painter. Below are paintings that he has exhibited and which are for sale (see below.) They are included in his book Paintings & Drawings, Old & New

"Eastern Upper Peninsula Farmland"

24" X 30" acrylic/brush and add-ons

2005, $300

"Midnight Sun"

40" X 40" acrylic using palette knife

1992, $500 unframed

"Sunset Over the Baltic Sea"

30" X 36" acrylic with brush and palette knife

1994, $300 unframed

To purchase Chuck's books or paintings, contact him at

Charles Altonen
1729 W 7TH ST
ASHTABULA, OH 44004