As an adult, Julia enjoyed making Norwegian Krumb Kaker, a wafer thin, crunchy, waffle-like cookie made with a special iron. Perhaps in her mind, when she made this treat, she was reconnecting with her Norwegian father whom she never really knew.
Julia would tell me that her mother was turned away by the church clergy when she was very small and her mother needed assistance. Her mother would have been pregnant, and then an unmarried woman with a child for almost a year, during an age when respectable folks didn’t tolerate such a situation well. It would be understandable that she would have turned to a church for help. This situation, Julia would tell me, made her an agnostic, which she remained all of her life. She left instructions, in fact, that no clergy be present at her burial. When she was laid to rest, there were only five people present at the graveside and one of these was the undertaker.

Julia was quite the business woman and is thought to have been the “brains” behind the Pine Tree Cottage Motel, Clarksville, (now Trenton) New Jersey, that she and her husband Fred operated so many years.

She was an accomplished cook. She made everything from scratch, using lots of butter, and she usually didn’t measure anything. Late in life she was working on a cookbook which she hoped to publish. Granddaughter Barbara (Hocking) Eckbreth still has the recipe for Julia’s Krumb Kaker.