The glass eye sat in a box on a high kitchen window sill. Olga Dahl King left it there because she found it uncomfortable, preferring to raise her children with her lid closed over her vacant eye socket.
"My grandmother loved to cook, but when she'd leave the kitchen, I'd sneak up to look at that artificial eye in its box when I was 5 or 6," said Jack McCauley, now 64. "I'd pull some chairs over to the ledge and climb up."
When family members asked about her missing eye, Olga blamed some naughty boys with a slingshot. McCauley didn't learn the real story until years after she died in 1974 at the age of 80, he said from his home in Chaska. "She didn't want to talk about it, which made sense," he said.
Born in 1894, Olga Dahl was the daughter of Swedish immigrants living near the tiny Itasca County town of Warba. After graduating from Grand Rapids High School, about 15 miles northwest of the Warba farm, Olga became a teacher at 22 in the rural Round Lake school in northern Itasca County's Good Hope Township.
Leaving work during the first week of school, on Sept. 20, 1916, Olga was attacked, dragged into the woods at gunpoint, raped, shot twice in the face and left for dead near the smoldering embers of a fire, her right wrist tied to a small balsam tree.
A.A. Clampett, an aging woodsman who lived nearby, smelled the smoke of the fire and found Olga in a spot that "had evidently been selected with great care" behind an uprooted spruce that provided "a sheltered retreat," according to the Grand Rapids Herald-Review.
Barely conscious, Olga was taken to a nearby house, where a doctor from Blackduck prescribed morphine and said surgery would be futile. One bullet had pierced her left cheek, while the second entered her left temple and destroyed her eye. The attacker had left a barely literate note, saying something about Olga being "too pretty for [her own] good."
The next morning, according to the Herald-Review, Olga was still alive. Two doctors, M.M. Hursh of Grand Rapids and a Dr. Binet of Deer River, "operated at once and pronounced the girl's chances of recovery to be excellent."