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Family Stories
A potpourri of stories about various family members or events
Leaving Michigan
Before I was born, in the early part of September 1956, my parents and my three siblings departed for Ann Arbor, Michigan. They had previously lived in North Dakota (Bismarck by 1952, then Windsor in 1955, and then Jamestown). They may have left from there, but perhaps from St. Cloud, MN, according to a brief article in the St. Cloud Times:
To Ann Arbor – Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Hibbard left Friday for Ann Arbor, Mich. the former will attend the university and work for his Ph.D. in zoology.
Ken is ready to go to Michigan
I had always known that my father, Ed Hibbard, had gone to Michigan with the intentions of completing a doctoral degree in zoology. He had been working for the North Dakota Game and Fish department for a number of years, and zoology was his strength.
I was born about a year and a half after my family arrived in Ann Arbor (January), and that made for four children from ages 0 to 9 while my father was a graduate student. My own experience as a graduate student for 4 years while having two children confirmed that it is not easy to simultaneously be a student, spouse, and parent.
Trailer home used while in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and later moved to MN. Date is 1956-1957. Keith thought this was a 12×38
About 6 months after I was born, my family moved from Ann Arbor to St. Cloud, first living in a trailer park on the east side of town and within a year or two moved the trailer (but likely a different one) to the farm yard of my grandfather Jesse Hibbard with his wife Edna Westphal. My father began teaching biology at St. John’s University, west of the farm about 25 miles, starting in the fall of 1958.
Al and Lou in front of trailer home in the Jesse Hibbard yard in December, 1960
Why did my father and our family leave Michigan and stop his graduate work in zoology? I had always assumed I knew the reason. I hadn’t connected the dots between (1) my grandmother’s death in 1960 (my father’s mother, at whose home we had imposed ourselves by moving the trailer into their yard), (2) knowing about the years that my grandfather had been dealing with her sicknesses by going to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, and (3) our move back to the area.
I had always assumed that since the move was shortly after my birth and I became the sixth member of a family that was trying to live on a student’s meager budget, that it was my fault. Of course, I didn’t do anything wrong, and so I didn’t blame myself directly, but I carried the burden of knowing that I was the piece of straw that had broken the back of the budget of my father’s education. I never articulated this thought to anyone, except Marcia, until about 2009, when I talked to my mother about it (a year before she died). When I asked her why the family moved, she answered, with no hesitation, that it was because of Edna’s failing health. I offered her my perspective, and she assured me that I could remove that burden from my shoulders.
The Ed Hibbard home in Windsor, North Dakota in January 1956, where they lived before leaving for Michigan
We first lived in the Cloverleaf Mobile Home Community just north of E. St. Germain St. near the clover leaf intersection of U.S. 10 and MN 23
Published 2021-01-09. Revised 2025-06-07.
If you find any error(s) in the text, please let me know. Thanks. Contact me with errors or comments using hibbardac@gmail. [Back to the top] [About the author, Al]
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