Each week Reuben circulated around the state of Illinois from Springfield to Chicago and many points in between, but without fail he always came home to his family in Streator. It was paramount to his being and vital to his soul to share large Sunday dinners with the Merriners, walk with his wife and daughter to the park, or playfully interact with his five active grandkids at the home of his son Carl Sr. and daughter-in-law Virginia. He was a family man.

It can be surmised that Reuben’s role within his family—energetic, supportive and reliably strong—was his own creation. His father was a quiet, isolative man who could not pay the family bills. His mother struggled with “melancholy” and limited her community to a handful of friends. But even as a young boy Reuben had a sunny, energetic disposition and would soon grow into a man who loved being around people, actively providing guidance and loving support to the growing family around him. He would be amazed to see the greater Soderstrom family that has married and multiplied over the decades since he died. His spirit is alive and well.

He never seemed to hold resentment for the demands put on his childhood. As the second oldest son, he—not his older brother Paul—was sent away at age nine to work in a faraway blacksmith shop. His father’s tax bill accumulated to the point that the industrious young Reuben was the one who tackled it. He was so responsible that he was sent away from the family a second time as a teenager, this time to the faraway town of Streator, Illinois, where he worked on the trolley car lines and in the bottle factories. After he sent a steady stream of income back home to Minnesota, his parents uprooted the family and followed him to Illinois. In that regard, the sturdy teenager version of Reuben Soderstrom had already become the de facto leader of the Soderstrom family. He was the primary income-earner, steady and rational thinker and vibrant spirit that filled the family’s sails and propelled them forward.

He was best friends with his young brother, Lafe. Photos show an obvious and easy energy between the two; they clearly enjoyed attending a baseball game together as much as plotting victory in a local labor dispute. It was Lafe who worked side-by-side with Reuben to run for the presidency of International Typographers’ Union (Reub lost), and then pivoted attention to the presidency of the ISFL (Reub won). They shared a loving correspondence—with Reub based in Streator and Lafe based in Chicago—as well as political alliance based on inside information of upstate versus downstate labor politics.

1953, Reuben was devastated when Lafe died in a car accident. He lost too many family members to death, including two siblings in birth, his own son Robert at age two, his brother Paul, his parents, and, later in life, both his wife and daughter. It is perhaps this tragic collection of family deaths that brought him so lovingly to embrace those who were alive. The biggest smile on his face was the day his son Carl married Virginia Merriner; in a life full of too-frequent funerals, he presided over only one wedding. And what a union that turned out to be, yielding five terrific grandchildren to populate the subsequent decades with vacations, paper routes, science projects, sporting events, Christmas celebrations, birthdays, university studies, marriages and great-great grandchildren. His role as grandfather was to interact with the grandkids with playful poems, a regular presence at weekend dinners, and strong academic encouragement to learn about the world and obtain professional respect and independence.

His warm heart is on display in the letters he sent his grandchildren as they studied their way through college. He always sent $20, but more importantly took the time to write entertaining and insightful letters with political news, family news, and more. These letters hearken back to the early 1900s when he helped pay for his younger sister Olga’s tuition in nursing school. He was the leader of the family, and in a way played both the role of brother and father to her. As she reminisced in her biography of him:

I had seen a fake fur coat that I wanted so badly. I asked Mother if I could have it, she said to ask Reub. I remember I went to where he worked, he was running the linotype machine there and he was working right in front of the shop. Both the machine and Reub were in full view right behind the huge glass pane window that made up the store front. I went in, and I remember he put his arms around me and I asked him for the coat. He took his purse out, gave me the ten dollars, and I went home a happy girl.[1]

One of the sources of his greatest pride was the Springfield alliance with his son, Representative Carl W. Soderstrom, Sr. For 26 years, this father-son combo shared home life in Streator and work life in Springfield, where they stewarded formidable bills for labor, education, pensions, and many, many more. It was a delicate alliance that balanced local issues in the Republican district with Reuben’s increasingly progressive positions as a leader on the national stage. The political campaigns to elect Carl to office were colorful family affairs directed from the bustling Soderstrom home on Riverside Avenue in Streator, with every set of hands pitching in.

Many of Reuben’s legislative victories and labor policies were driven by a commitment to the values of family. This began with his desire to liberate workers from the old model of the company store, where many generations of workers were beholden to multi-generational family debt. It was also evident in his passionate pleas for retirement pensions that kept husband and wife united in old age, rather than separated in the county poor house. He also imbued the primacy of family into other bills, like “one day rest in seven,” the women’s eight hour work bill, pensions for widows, overtime and workmen’s compensation. No doubt this was all heavily informed by the poverty of his own parents as they aged, the struggles of local widows after the Cherry Mine disaster, itinerant workers and poor townspeople in his father’s congregations, and his own childhood lost to loneliness and long hours of back-breaking work. He set out in life to keep families together. His labor policies flowed from that principle.

Perhaps Reuben’s fondest family experience was Christmas, where he honored Swedish traditions, joyfully recited poems and celebrated the people around him: his wife, daughter Jeanne, Carl and Virginia and their five active grandchildren, and the always present and loving Merriners. One can imagine Reuben at the end of the year—with political reflections of the year behind him—settling in to his big white chair on a snowy evening to spend with his family. If he were to fall asleep into a deep Christmas dream, he may have had a future vision of the family; these grandchildren growing up, attending professional schools in medicine, law and education, marrying, having many more children who, too, would achieve admirable university education, a myriad of modern day experiences, travel, marriages and great-great grandchildren. The Soderstrom family is growing and expanding, all informed by the great compassion, energy, close-knit togetherness and strength of his making. He would wake up from this inspiring and curious nap to the sound of stomping feet on the front porch; he would look out the big window to see snowflakes falling outside on the evergreen trees on Riverside Drive, with his grandkids knocking snow off their boots on the front porch, and coming inside to open gifts. Carl and Virginia and Arley and Verna would come out from the kitchen and Reuben would rise and walk to the jolly huddle of grandkids with cold red cheeks. He would survey the festive scene and say, “Merry Christmas!”

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