Carl Sandburg and his wife, Lilian "Paula" Sandburg, had three daughters. Sandburg affectionately called them his "Homeyglomeys," and also gave each girl a unique nickname. Margaret, the oldest, was "Spink." Janet, the middle child, was "Skabootch," and Helga, the baby, was "Swipes." Margaret was in her mid-thirties and Janet and Helga in their late twenties when the Sandburgs moved to Connemara in 1945. A year later, in a letter to friend Paul Angle, Sandburg wrote, "I'll tell you about my three daughters when I see you, all three having distinctive personalities and each making a pretty good life of it."
Born in the Chicago suburbs and raised on the sand dunes of Lake Michigan, the Sandburgs’ daughters were given lots of love and the freedom to develop their own talents, separate and apart from their famous literary father. Each daughter, however, shared Sandburg's love for words and writing, each expressing it in different ways.
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Margaret
Janet
Helga
John and Paula
Margaret served as her father's librarian. Janet maintained a steady flow of correspondence with friends and relatives. Helga wrote in a variety of styles, including short stories, poems, articles, and novels, and published nineteen books.
Sandburg shared a close bond with his wife and daughters. However, to earn a living and support his family, he was away from them for long periods of time, lecturing and researching. As a young man, Sandburg enjoyed life on the road, but as a family man, he grew weary of traveling and often yearned for home. Some of that homesickness seeped into his letters. While in Stockholm, Sweden, in November 1918, working as a news correspondent, Sandburg wrote a letter to Paula, saying, “I look forward to when I can go home and have the everlasting youths tousling my hair and giving me spitty smacky kisses."
As the children of a Pulitzer prize-winning poet and biographer, Sandburg's daughters enjoyed unique opportunities. But growing up with a writer in the house could also be aggravating. As Helga wrote, "There is only one law and it is in effect when my father is home. 'Quiet! Daddy's sleeping. Hush! Daddy's working.' 'Hush,' we tell each other, 'Shhhh.’" Sandburg's daughters were the inspiration for his children's stories, Rootabaga Stories (1922) and Rootabaga Pigeons (1923).
Margaret
Margaret Mary Steichen Sandburg arrived June 3, 1911, “a girl and a wonder” according to her jubilant father. Margaret was something of a child prodigy. She learned her letters and numbers by age four and was featured in the Montessori system's national brochure. Like her father, Margaret loved to read and also enjoyed art and music. A talented pianist, Margaret also liked to garden, read Shakespeare, and research French and Russian literature, Asian culture, and mythology. A member of the Carolina Bird Club, she traveled to attend bird club meetings and conferences after moving to Connemara.
Margaret edited Breathing Tokens in 1978, a collection of Carl Sandburg's poetry, and The Poet and the Dream Girl: The Love Letters of Lilian Steichen and Carl Sandburg in 1987. She also co-edited Ever the Winds of Chance, the second volume of her father's autobiography, and assisted Herbert Mitgang in gathering and editing The Letters of Carl Sandburg. Margaret died April 12, 1997, at 85.
"Margaret has become widely read, a scholar who often surprises me withher erudition, knows the Bible and Shakespeare better than I do."
Carl Sandburg, letter to Alfred Harcourt
September 24, 1953
Margaret
Many birds and the beating of wings
Make a flinging reckless hum
In the early morning at the rocks
Above the blue pool
Where the gray shadows swim lazy.
In your blue eyes, O reckless child,
I saw today many little wild wishes,
Eager as the great morning.
Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems, 1916
Janet
Janet Mary Steichen Sandburg was born June 27, 1916. "It's a girl and perfection frog legs fastened to a perfection torso,” Sandburg wrote to Poetry Magazine editor Alice Corbin Henderson, "Avoirdupois: 8.5 pounds. Wavy dark hair, this notably Northern French. Mother: 100%." In a letter to the same friend a few months later, Sandburg reported:"Janet, the new kid, has her mother's hair and face whereas the other daughter, has mine: so the household is at a glorious standoff." Herbert Mitgang, The Letters of Carl Sandburg
Janet Sandburg was quiet and shy around people, but around animals, she thrived. Her main job at Connemara was feeding and caring for the baby goats. She enjoyed accompanying her mother to goat shows, and helped around the farm with gardening and housekeeping. Every morning, she faithfully prepared and delivered her father's breakfast tray outside his third-floor bedroom. In her leisure time, Janet liked to bird watch, read, create scrapbooks, and correspond with friends. Janet died on February 16, 2001; she was 85.
Sixteen Months
On the lips of the child Janet float changing dreams.
It is a thin spiral of blue smoke,
A morning campfire at a mountain lake.
On the lips of the child Janet,
Wisps of haze on ten miles of corn,
Young light blue calls to the light gold of morning.
Carl Sandburg, Cornhuskers, 1918
Helga
Helga Mary Steichen Sandburg was born November 24, 1918, while Carl was in Sweden. Initially named Mary Ellen, after a friend, Helga was given her new, Swedish name soon after her father's return home.
"Helga seemed blessed with a double portion of the genetic gift for words, as if both her brilliant, articulate parents had endowed her with the power of language. She had inherited, too, her father's pride and sometimes willful stubbornness. They were two of a kind in ego and temperament, these two writers, father and daughter."
Penelope Niven, Carl Sandburg: A Biography
Like her literary father, Helga enjoyed writing. She began her writing career by typing manuscripts for her father in a barn loft at the family's Chikaming Goat Farm in Harbert, Michigan. In 1958, she won the Emily Clark Balch prize for "Witch Chicken," published in the Virginia Quarterly Review. In addition to her published books, her work appeared in Saturday Review, Harper's, The New Yorker, McCall 's, Seventeen, and Georgia Review.
In North Carolina, Helga raised not only goats, but registered Siamese cats and Doberman Pinschers, and cared for Black Angus cattle, chickens, ducks, geese, and honey bees. She also raised two children, the only Sandburg daughter to marry. At Connemara, she shared the responsibilities of the dairy goat operation, typed Sandburg's manuscripts, painted portraits and landscapes, and wrote poetry.
Helga
The wishes on this child's mouth
Came like snow on marsh cranberries;
The tamarack kept something for her;
The wind is ready to help her shoes.
The north has loved her; she will be
A grandmother feeding geese on frosty
Mornings; she will understand
Early snow on the cranberries
Better and better then.
Carl Sandburg, Smoke and Steel, 1920
John and Paula
“(The) grandchildren were almost too good to be true,” Sandburg said in a letter to his friend Lloyd Lewis, “And a fellow wonders what time will bring. They have loveliness and rare lights and shake the house with their promises.”
Carl and Paula Sandburg were active and nurturing grandparents, encouraging their grandchildren to discover Connemara, to be inquisitive and adventuresome, to sit quietly and listen, and to take part in its lessons.
John Carl, the freckle-faced, carrot-topped grandson of Carl and Paula Sandburg was the older of the two grandchildren, born in 1941. He and his younger sister Paula, with their mother, Helga, were a part of the Connemara mountain farm for seven years. Helga managed the goat herd, assisted with typing her father’s works, worked on her own writing career, and spent long hours capturing Connemara, and the family on canvas. Meanwhile, her children were riding horses over the mountainside trails, swimming in its crisp spring fed waters, investigating nesting birds, creepy crawlies, or other forest creatures. They often would lie under the magnificent pasture oak tree looking up at the million acres of sky until dinnertime. After dinner they might settle into their grandfather’s lap to be told fanciful tales from his repertoire of children’s stories or they performed their own puppet shows for Aunts Margaret and Janet, Gramma, Buppong (the grandchildren’s nickname for their grandfather), and their mother. Connemara was a special place, one that granddaughter Paula wrote about in her book of reminiscences, My Connemara.
“…so it was I grew to regard Connemara and all that lived on her rolling land and mountainsides in a personal way. I was devoted to her and felt her promises: delight in the early morning and in the sun hot on one’s back; in the feeling of power seeing Buppong lift the oaken chair high over his head and look beyond the pines to the mountains blue in the distance; in the newborn creatures and generous earth. She seemed to speak of a faith in the cycles of nature, and in the infinite capabilities of the human mind and heart. I once turned to Gramma, in whom I had immense trust, and asked her how it could ever be bearable to live elsewhere.”