Mysterious Builder of Seattle Landmarks
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About this ebook
After decades of believing her mother’s tale that Danish immigrant Hans Pederson left them penniless, Paula uncovers the truth about her father’s wealth and prolific contributions to Seattle. She discovers her mysterious father’s boom to bust life in the early 1900s, as she grapples with family secrets and heartbreaking deception in this very personal memoir.
Her journey spans Seattle, Singapore, Shanghai, Honolulu, New York, New Jersey, Maine and North Carolina. Paula shares nuances of social echelons and how that affects one’s life choices.
Paula Pederson’s discoveries about her father Hans have filled an important gap in regional architectural history knowledge by revealing her father’s many accomplishments in the Pacific Northwest. The publication provides a partial list of a remarkable range and variety of buildings and infrastructure projects that he undertook during a long and successful career—commerce and institutions, hotels, theaters, apartments, schools, bridges and piers. Many of them are still standing, and that reflects on the knowledge and management skills of this prolific contractor.
LARRY KREISMAN, Program Director, Historic Seattle
_____________________________________
"...like a long, newsy letter from a friend...precisely what makes this book so charming and exceptional, and such an addictive read."
Paula Pederson recounts her exhaustive search for the father she never knew in a winding, evocative first-person narrative told “in the moment” as her journey unfolds before the reader with the turn of each page. Dismissed by her mother as “a struggling young architect” who was killed in a car accident and “left us penniless in the middle of the Great Depression,” Domka Huculak kept the identity of the man who fathered her daughter a secret for 60 years until, at the age of 92, she finally disclosed the truth. This incredible, emotional revelation catapulted Paula into the past on an incredible quest that not only would change her life, but change how she would come to see herself.
He was Hans Pederson, one of the leading architects, contractors and builders in the American Northwest, whose far-reaching vision left a distinctive imprint on his adopted Seattle. Pederson helped define the personality of what has become the 18th largest city in the United States today.
But it is the author who we get to know best in a story that begins in Shanghai and ends in Maine. And it is the manner in which Paula tells her story that makes this book read like a long, newsy letter from a friend rather than a biography or more to the point, her autobiography. And this is precisely what makes this book so charming, and exceptional, and such an addictive read.
LAURIE BOGART MORROW, author, The Hardscrabble Chronicles
Paula Pederson
Paula Pederson started her life journey in Seattle, Washington, but has lived in Singapore, Shanghai, Honolulu, New York, New Jersey, Maine and North Carolina. Educated abroad and on the east coast, her greatest challenge and reward has come from being the mother of five and grandmother of five. Parenting enlightened her insight into her own complicated relationship with her mother and fueled her desire to find out about her father Hans Pederson. Armed with this accumulated life experience and consumed with curiosity, Pederson's quest to find her father in spite of her mother's reticence became a passion later in life. Her fiction and nonfiction writing includes two unpublished novels, this memoir and a weekly blog. She formerly enjoyed technical writing and editing posts pertaining to medical, environmental, and engineering issues. Earlier years included development work for schools and handicapped children. She graduated from Smith College with a degree in English Literature and spent one glorious summer as a seaside gardener in a resort on the coast of Maine. Pederson writes about immigrants and pioneers who came by train to Northwestern North America, expatriates to the Far East, and her love for Maine. She believes fragments of the past help us to understand who we are. Hunting for her father's legacy and writing The Mysterious Builder Of Seattle Landmarks: The Search for My Father, has shown her the timeless imprint family leaves on husbands, wives, daughters, sons, and grandchildren.
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