Ralph Strom “I was with the worst—gamblers, prostitutes, everything you could think of.”
Hanna Sippala “They like Finnish girls.”
Grethe Petersen “We sold fresh-churned butter right out of the churn.”
Anton Isaksen “I have put in seventy years on boats.”
Margit Johnsen “I never did like housework.”
Ole Nissen “We haven’t got a tailor between 23rd and East Madison.”
Jenny Pedersen “Everybody’s gonna eat and everybody’s gonna wear clothes.”
Anne Hansen “The women had their babies at home.”
Olaf Sivertson “I started out just like the pioneers did in the wild timbers.”
Christine Emerson “Dad needed someone to stay home.”
Hans Fredrickson “You’re gonna go to school, if I can help it.”
Anna Johnson “There is nobody that can take a mother’s place.”
Gertie Hjortedal “I saw the little, beautiful girl and I was happy and satisfied.”
Part Five / New Lives: Tradition
Jon and Gudrun Magnusson “We had the Iceland library in our home.”
Julius Tollefson “It was just like getting a letter from home.”
Signe Steel “Everybody were your friends.”
Frederik Madsen “Because I am a Dane and have gone to folk schools, I think I am a better American.”
Hilma Salvon “All my life, I’ve been eating rye bread.”
Arnfinn Bruflot “I have my language from Norway, and my tradition.”
APPENDIX: INTERVIEW QUESTIONNAIRE
Foreword
In New Land, New Lives, Janet E. Rasmussen tells us what she, as a thoughtful and compassionate listener, found to be instructive and emblematic in the personal accounts of ordinary people whom she and her assistants interviewed orally over a period of several years. The narrators all shared a common experience of emigration from one of the Nordic countries—Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, or Iceland—and they all found a home in the Pacific Northwest.
Their evocative recollections cover a broad array of human experiences, ranging from the festive to the mundane tasks of everyday living, and give precious insights into their time and place in history. They all emigrated as children or young adults during the early decades of this century. Distant memories and emotions are recaptured as retrospective accounts of their childhood surroundings in the old country, the meaning of their arrival in America, and their lives as strangers in a new land. Here they for the most part entered the culture of the working class in occupational pursuits common to the earlier Nordic immigrants settling on the west coast of the United States. It is the voices of unknown everyday people, the participants in history who rarely speak directly to us, that we hear in these life histories.
Janet Rasmussen demonstrates her mastery of oral history in these interviews. She uses them with great care, with sensitivity, and with knowledge of the literature on the investigative techniques. She thereby avoids the pitfalls associated with this kind of documentation. The recorded narratives ring true to the historical situation and provide vivid impressions only possible in oral history of individual attitudes and values. She is currently Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of Modern Languages at Nebraska Wesleyan University. Rasmussen’s major scholarly focus, as evidenced in publications of high merit, has been on women and their life choices. In addition to a series of in-depth studies of Norwegian female literary figures, she has investigated and published articles on domestic service, marriage patterns, familial values, and feminist ideologies among Scandinavian immigrant women. Some of the latter pieces grew out of the same project as the present oral history anthology.
Finally, I wish to thank the University of Washington Press, and most especially its managing editor Julidta Tarver, for enjoyable and efficient collaboration on this important project. And, again, it is my pleasure to acknowledge with much gratitude the contributions of Mary R. Hove, my editorial assistant, in preparing the manuscript for publication.
Odd S. Lovoll, Editor
The Norwegian-American Historical Association
St. Olaf College
Preface
An experimental course on Scandinavian women in the Pacific Northwest that I taught during the spring of 1979 provided the initial impetus for documenting the life experiences of Scandinavian immigrants. My students eagerly sought out local female informants in order to learn about such things as food traditions, home remedies, and ethnic organizations. At the same time, they learned the value of first-person testimony.
In the months that followed, two of the students and I launched, with support from the President’s Office at Pacific Lutheran University (PLU), the recording of oral history interviews with persons of Scandinavian heritage. For this pilot project, we focused on individuals who had played important roles in the history of the university.
Expansion of the collecting effort was made possible by a two-year grant from the L. J. Skaggs and Mary C. Skaggs Foundation of Oakland, California. The grant allowed us to define a broader target population—first-generation