James Arthur Kjelgaard, 1910-1959
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Jim Kjelgaard - Personal History. Part I
Diana Hefti
James Arthur Kjelgaard was born on December 10, 1910 in New York City. The son of a doctor, he had four brothers and one sister. While Jim was still very young, his family purchased an 1800 acre farm in Potter County, PA. Here he and his brothers spent long days in the outdoors hunting and fishing. The family next moved to Galeton, PA. The people in the area were poor and this meant Dr Kjelgaard didn't bring in a lot of money. The Kjelgaard boys supplemented the dinner table with fish or other small game animals they hunted. During the Galeton years, Jim began to have a passion for writing, and spent time in his room writing poems and short stories.
Sometimes the boys skipped school to spend more time outdoors. In the February 1959 issue of Holiday House News, Jim has this to say about the lure of the mountains and streams surrounding Galeton:
"My brother John and I were so assiduous in our pursuit of fish and game that quite often we didn't have time to attend school. This was all to the good until one sad day when our teachers called at home, after we had been out for a week, to see if we were seriously ill. John and I took our meals standing up for the next week." (1)
Jim continued to write, and submitted stories to many hunting and fishing magazines. In 1928, his senior year at Galeton High School, Jim sold his first story for a two-year subscription to an outdoors magazine.
Fur-Fish-Game Magazine was one of the early publishers of Kjelgaard's stories.
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After high school, Jim and his brothers looked for jobs of any type. They harvested potatoes, dug ditches and then in the 1930s began to guide hunters. Jim took two years of Syracuse University extension courses, while working full time. Even though he didn't have a lot of formal education, Jim was a voracious and eclectic reader.
During this time he continued to write prolifically for many outdoors and nature-type magazines like Fur-Fish-Game, Argosy, and Liberty. One of Mr. Kjelgaard's readers, Eddie Dresen, began corresponding with him and quickly Jim learned Eddie was short for Edna. Jim traveled to Milwaukee to meet her in 1939, and they were married soon after and lived in Milwaukee. As a city girl, Edna did not want to live in the backwoods as Jim might have preferred. They had one child, a daughter named Karen. Jim enjoyed teaching Karen about the outdoors, and would delight in taking her hunting and fishing. " We went to Big Cedar Lake every summer, and I remember fishing from a pier and finding at least ten little warm water fish on my line when I pulled it in. Dad had swum under the pier and put them there. It was the sort of kindly, humorous thing that appealed to him." (2)
Trailing Trouble Jim Kjelgaard, Holiday House, 1952
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When Karen was in 4th grade, the family moved to Thiensville, Wisconsin. This small town was close enough to the city for Eddie, but provided a little elbow room for Jim. Jim, Eddie and Karen also made many trips out West, taking photographs and doing research for Jim's books. Later their family moved to Phoenix, Arizona hoping to improve Jim's health. While very different from the country he grew up in, Jim came to love the desert and its stark beauty. Several of his later books were inspired by this area.
Throughout his life, Jim suffered a variety of debilitating medical conditions. As a child, he suffered epileptic-like seizures that were eventually diagnosed as a brain tumor, and treated by drilling a hole in his skull. He also experienced back pain and arthritis all his life. Karen said: " My father's last years were marked by frequent depression and illness. No one really knew what was wrong with him. He spent more and more time with physicians, but we never knew for sure what his illness was. A brain tumor was never confirmed. He became suicidal, (and) was patently deeply unhappy." (3) On July 12, 1959, Jim Kjelgaard took his own life. Footnotes:
1. Jim Kjelgaard - From the Bigwoods to Hollywood by Dave Drakula, From the Mountain Journal, Volume 8, Number 4, July/September 1990, http://home.sprintmail.com/~charterbus/bigwoods.htm
2 & 3. Jim Kjelgaard, A Daughter's Memoir by Karen Kjelgaard, November 1998, http://home.sprintmail.com/~charterbus/memoir.html
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