50 Years as a U.S. Immigrant: And How I Got Here.

By Svein Jenshus

My fore-father Vikings arrived in North America in ships like this one over 300 years before Columbus and you'll find the historic facts in this book. I arrived in a more modern vessel. My son Earl S. Jenshus designed both the cover, showing a likeness of "our Stavangerford" and the back page. He is an international known graphic artist. Reading these pages you may learn a little Hawaiian, learn how to shoot birds on the wing, train dogs, buy the "pick-of-the-litter", shotgun safety. How to make money investing in real estate and how to look at the similarities of languages instead of the differences. You can learn how to hypnotize chicken! More useful might be the secret of how to pronounce a-multi-syllable word the first time you see it (!) and how to have a long and happy marriage in the process. It covers 80 plus years of living on two continents, 50+ of them in different states in the USA, starting as a penniless immigrant in Brooklyn N.Y., working in different fields before I found my niche in sales. Including as well are hundreds of years of history, part of which I have actually lived and more still of what I have learned being an avid reader since early childhood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 25, 2008
• ISBN: 9781469103457

Svein Jenshus

My fore-father Vikings arrived in North America in ships like this one over 300 years before Columbus and you’ll find the historic facts in this book. I arrived in a more modern vessel. My son Earl S. Jenshus designed both the cover, showing a likeness of “our Stavangerford” and the back page. He is an international known graphic artist. Reading these pages you may learn a little Hawaiian, learn how to shoot birds on the wing, train dogs, buy the “pick-of-the-litter”, shotgun safety. How to make money investing in real estate and how to look at the similarities of languages instead of the differences. You can learn how to hypnotize chicken! More useful might be the secret of how to pronounce a-multi-syllable word the first time you see it (!) and how to have a long and happy marriage in the process. It covers 80 plus years of living on two continents, 50+ of them in different states in the USA, starting as a penniless immigrant in Brooklyn N.Y., working in different fields before I found my niche in sales. Including as well are hundreds of years of history, part of which I have actually lived and more still of what I have learned being an avid reader since early childhood.

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Svein Jenshus

Copyright © 2008 by Svein Jenshus.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2007903639

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-4257-8487-4

Softcover   978-1-4257-8481-2

ISBN:   ebook   978-1-4691-0345-7

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

THE ACTUAL

DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

CHAPTER FIFTY

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

In writing these memoirs, I wanted to include a couple of chapters about the childhood of my wife, Liv; but she turned thumbs down on the idea and said that These are YOUR memoirs.

But since she has been with me for over fifty years, I want to express my gratitude for her love and understanding as we, together, scratched ourselves up from penniless immigrants to where we are today; and believe me, it wasn’t easy sometimes! I can clearly remember once when we were driving around in a brand-new car with monthly payments due, a heavily mortgaged house, a high life insurance policy (a must for a young father), and no money for a couple of candy bars that we all had a hankering for!

I also want to thank our three children for allowing us to mold them into good, dependable U.S. citizens! Dag Svein Jenshus is our firstborn, then Gina Marie Jenshus joined us; and as an afterthought, the good Lord gave us child number 3, Earl Stuart Jenshus (who incidentally did the graphics for this book cover). And for the fact that all three, thank God, became good solid taxpaying U.S. citizens, I’m very proud to be the father of every one of them; and they naturally appear in various places in these memoirs.

THE ACTUAL

DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

Dozens of books have been written about the Vikings and the discovery of the American continent. I have been fortunate enough to have run across several of them, and the credit has uniformly been given to the Norwegian Greenland Vikings, and the findings of scientists and historians have been confirmed by famous archeologists digging at Leif’s place in today’s Newfoundland.

Several centuries before Columbus landed in America, the Greenland Vikings had climbed the high mountains behind their settlement and had seen the cloud banks hovering above the horizon to the west; and according to many years of sailing experience, this was an indication that there was land, however yet undiscovered over the horizon.

The family of Erik the Red had settled Greenland after Erik had become persona non grata in Norway following either a duel or a murder. (I guess it all depends on how you look at it!) Erik sired three sons and a daughter—all of who, in one way or another, had their place in history. We know that Erik actually settled in Iceland first but somehow made himself unwelcome there as well, so he headed west and settled in Greenland!

Bjarni, the youngest son, was actually the one that first discovered the new land; but after sailing up and down the coast, he decided that he was going to return to Greenland and bring the news about what he called the newfound land. He had decided that he had too few men to venture ashore.

He reported his sightings to his Greenland family and described the land as quite flat and well forested with large open fields. The land off his southernmost sailings was mountainous, and he described it as of little interest.

As interesting as all this sounded, believe it or not, it took another fifteen years before Leif decided that it was time to make a landfall and look a little closer at this land. The Greenlanders had been too busy raising cattle and growing a variety of grains.

In Greenland, you say? This may come as a shock to the disastrous—warming trend people, but the centuries up to these historic sailings had shown a steady warming trend.

Sailing west and south, Leif came upon the land that today is called Newfoundland. (I wonder why.) They landed without encountering any other humans and started to build themselves houses to live in and barns for the animals. It was simply called Leif’s place. (Many of the larger Viking merchant ships were capable of freighting ten to twenty tons of cargo in two holds, one behind and the other in front of the mast.)

Leif spent the winter in the new land, and his writings shows that the cattle grazed outdoors all winter as there was no snow on the ground, and he described the nights as comfortable. Wild wheat grew everywhere, and both game and salmon were plentiful. The potential for harvesting timber in the large forests was great. They had found wild grapes, and since they made wine, they now called the place Vinland (Wineland). He recorded the shortest day of the year having the sun rise at 9 a.m. and set at 3 p.m., making the actual location identifiable for future scientists.

After wintering in Vinland, Leif returned to Greenland, full of praise for the new land and its pleasant climate. However, Erik had now died, and Leif was the one to take over the family responsibilities and decided that his exploration days were over.

Leif’s brother Thorvald decided that a real colonization attempt ought to be attempted, and he sailed for Vinland. During this landing, the Norsemen encountered their first natives; and as hostilities erupted, Thorvald was killed. The party decided that they should return to Greenland without making landfall, having lost their leader.

The Greenlanders were not of the marauding-Viking kind; they were settlers and colonizers and had no advantage over the natives in weaponry—something Columbus enjoyed, several hundred years later. His thundersticks easily subdued the Indians!

Now a fellow named (something like) Torfinn Karlsen arrived in Greenland, and he married Erik’s daughter (I don’t remember if I ever read her name anywhere). He decided that a real colonization attempt had to be made and gathered sixty men, and some took their wives along. Several heads of cattle and other animals were loaded as well. (The different sagas disagree as to the size of this colonization party.)

Their first encounter with natives was a friendly one, and the Norse colored cloth was happily traded for fine furs. However, three winters, increasing hostilities, loss of too many men, and arguments about their widowed women made long-term plans impossible; so they decided to return to Greenland.

A rapid cooling of the climate and of the increasing ice in the surrounding seas and Greenland fjords, plus shorter and shorter growing seasons, made Greenland a more and more inhospitable place to live; and it’s generally agreed that by 1020, no more westward voyages were attempted.

By circa 1400 (or possibly earlier), the Greenland Viking population had killed and eaten most of their cattle and returned back to Norway, literally frozen out of their new colony. Further history of the Eiríksson family is unknown to me. Increased hostilities from the local natives didn’t help either.

November 30, 1953

CHAPTER ONE

The old passenger ship Stavangerfjord bucked in the November North Sea gale, making life less than comfortable for a large part of the voyagers. The year was 1953, and stabilizers were still in the early stages of development among marine experts, so old Stavangerfjord certainly didn’t have them. The North Atlantic seamed to be angry today, with the waves baring their white teeth, slashing at the aged hull of the ship; but it only shook them off and plodded on on its merry way.

The old tub rolled from port to starboard, ten to fifteen degrees each way, sometimes enough to force all hands to get a hold of something solid to remain standing. The fore and aft seesawing was worse yet as the propeller at times came out of the water, causing the whole ship to vibrate and shake like a wet dog as the screws lost the resistance of the ocean. In short, sea legs were a great benefit for the ones in possession of this enviable quality!

We were encountering heavy fog now, and the ship’s foghorn was constantly wailing its forlorn alarm so as to make other ships aware of our location. There had been some talk about icebergs among the passengers, and since we were sailing in much the same sea-lanes as the infamous Titanic, the rumors were taken quite seriously by some. However, the average passenger didn’t let this put a damper on the otherwise rather festive atmosphere aboard the ship.

One morning, after sleeping the young man’s untroubled sleep, I kept running into people with bandages on various limbs and body parts. A couple of them had their heads covered in turbanlike wraps while another one had an arm in a sling.

What in the world has happened? I asked a close-by fellow.

You mean you don’t know? he asked.

Know what? I had to ask.

Well, it seemed that in the early morning, with the fog persisting, the Stavangerfjord had apparently been on a collision course with another ship; and the crew on duty threw the helm hard to starboard and screamed Full reverse! to the engine room (or so the stories went).

These combined maneuvers prevented the collision, but people who were still up and about were thrown into one another into bulkheads or onto decks, and a couple of others were unceremoniously simply dumped out of their bunks! Well, that was one experience I totally missed without regret, and I continued to enjoy undisturbed yet lonely nights.

I was taking full advantage of the superb food; however, there were times that only a sprinkling of people, seated here and there, were partaking of the culinary delights that the Norwegian America Line was so famous for. Meaning, of course, that most people were seasick in their cabins! The North Sea in winter really isn’t the best place in the world to find oneself!

It was the third day out of Oslo, Norway; and I, being a young bachelor at the time, was lonesome after leaving girlfriends in various places, my roving eye looking over the possibilities of a shipboard romantic interlude among quite a few seemingly unattached female passengers.

Repeatedly, my eyes fell upon a beautiful well-dressed girl that, at times, seemed to be returning my interest as I caught her looking my way. Wondering how I was going to meet her, not being an expert under these new and unfamiliar circumstances, days had passed without finding the right time to talk to her.

Now the musical dinner bell for the second table setting was echoing through the ship, and on the way to the dining room, I had a pleasant collision with that special female as she was coming from the first table setting. With the ship rolling, it wasn’t easy to walk in a straight line!

Liv (as I later found out that her name was) and I were both embarrassed as we grabbed on to each other to prevent from falling, both of us apologizing and blushing as the touching released electrifying shocks through both of us. We hurriedly parted and went on our opposite directions.

I was furious with myself for being too bashful and inexperienced as not to take advantage of such a perfect opportunity to get acquainted with the girl I had been trying to meet for days! During those seconds we found ourselves face-to-face, I had noticed that she had grey-green eyes, just like mine (or so my passport stated). Later as we became friends and eventually lovers, Liv confessed to having had similar feelings after our not-at-all-unpleasant brief close contact.

After dinner, the intercom called on all passengers to return to their respective staterooms to don the Mae Wests and report to their respective lifeboat stations, and they were informed that instructions were posted on the inside of the cabin door.

*     *     *

Arriving on deck, bundled up against the cold and penetrating winds, I found that Liv was assigned to the same lifeboat as me; and as if magnets were at work, the two of us found ourselves at close quarters once again. A few casual remarks came quite naturally now; and we agreed that if push came to shove and we needed to abandon ship, we’d at least be in the same lifeboat, and we made promises to stick together if actually push did come to shove!

Looking over the railing, the blue-green waves were breaking, topped with white foam, indicating the strength of the gale that sometimes was blowing the foam off the top of the waves, sending a salty spray over the decks where we were standing.

The lead grey clouds, almost black in places, were hanging low over the ocean, not at all promising any improvement in the weather conditions. It would not be a good place for a small lifeboat out there, that’s for sure!

Casual conversation, becoming more personal, established that we were both unattached. (I later found out that Liv was engaged already but was having second thoughts about that other fellow.) As the drill came to its conclusion and everybody left for the warmth of the interior of the ship, neither one of us wanted to leave and possibly lose contact again—at least not yet.

Before we knew it, we ended up in each other’s arms, somewhat awkwardly hugging and kissing with two huge Mae Wests preventing a desired much-closer bodily contact.

Later, during the cocktail hour and dancing, Liv and I made up for the several days lost, dancing almost every dance in a fashion that only can be described as cheek to cheek from head to toe. Less romantic writers describe such dancing as dirty dancing. A cynic once called it legalized public sex with the clothes on.

It was around this time that I noticed that Liv turned her head so as to point her left ear to whoever was talking, and at other times, she’d ask for people to repeat what they had said.

She told me that as a small child, only four years old, she had suffered from an inner ear infection; and after the doctors had operated on her, she had lost most, if not all, her hearing in her right ear. There must have been a better way to operate on that poor little child! Today, they would have given her some antibiotics and sent her home, no worse for wear; and that would have been the end of it!

As time went by, we found out that neither one of us were supposed to be on this November crossing! I, through correspondence with Norwegian America Line, (NAL), had preferred to cross on the September ship. I was informed that the ship was fully booked, but space was available on both the November and the December Atlantic crossing. I decided that the December crossing would be too close to Christmas and chose the November-sailing date instead.

Liv, in the meantime, had preferred the September sailing as well and was given the same choices; and she also decided to take the November crossing!

Had either one of us decided otherwise, we’d never met! This began to look like we were just meant to meet and that forces beyond our control were at work!

After arriving in the United States when I had had my travel film processed and was sharing the snapshots with Liv, we found that I had taken pictures of Liv’s whole family waving Liv off on her American adventure! They were looking up above me, so Liv must have been on an upper deck at the time. My roving eye didn’t miss two gorgeous girls on the dock; and they now proved to be Liv’s sisters, Turid and Tullemor, together with their brother, mother, and father!

We decided later that I most likely was one of the first, maybe indeed the only young man in history, to actually take pictures of his in-laws even before meeting his future wife! Later in life, we realized that we had invented the love boat, and we have never been given credit for it!

The days went by in lovers’ bliss, and neither one of us cared if we ever got to New York, which was both our destinations. We spent all the time possible together, and it didn’t seem that either one of us could get enough of the other!

We were both sharing staterooms with fellow travelers, so no nocturnal French visits in the cabins were possible, something that bothered me to no end! We actually were hoping that this crossing somehow would just last and last forever, especially Liv who was not looking forward to telling her waiting beau that he indeed was now demoted to the new status of former beau!

During all this time, I was favoring my right leg as my doctor had told me that I had water in the knee, as his diagnosis was. Actually, I had a floating cartilage, something that was not possible to diagnose without x-rays.

I had doctor’s orders to take it easy and stay off my leg on the ship if I wanted to be an able-bodied man upon my arrival in Brooklyn when I had to look for work. A pastry chef’s day is spent either standing by a worktable or literally half-running between various machinery and the oven, usually on hard concrete floors.

I won the transatlantic ping-pong championship and danced the hours away, never giving my poor right knee a chance to rest, something that came back to haunt me when I had to work ten-hour days, seven days a week at my first job! (Later, after the x-rays, it became clear that only surgery could eliminate the problem anyway.)

I had my trusty guitar with me and was accompanying a group of assorted Scandinavians in more or less awful renditions of old Scandinavian folk songs, and when they called for amateur performers among the ship’s passengers, I was urged to sign up. I did a Louis Armstrong imitation of Some of These Days, complete with the growling lyrics and trumpet sounds created by lips.

My performance won me a leather wallet, showing the ship with its name embossed on it; and it was used until it had to be replaced, totally worn out. Quite a few bucks must have come and gone to be able to wear it out!

I threw away my old wallet, and as I was shifting my early fortune over from one to the other, I became painfully aware of the fact that I wasn’t worth very much! Under $100 for sure! And we were not even halfway to New York yet. And I had a girl to impress!

Somebody mentioned that they’d like to play bridge but didn’t know the rules. I piped up and said that I’d be delighted to teach them the game, so four of us, (including Liv, of course) got together, and somebody produced a deck of cards. I had been taught the game at home as the four of us in my family played the game once in a while. The forerunner of bridge, whist, was much more popular at that time in Norway; however, bridge clubs were now popping up all over and eventually replaced whist with the much more demanding and interesting game of bridge.

(Whist is played as no-trump in bridge, and the bidding allows either pass or grand. If passed all around, the idea is to get as few tricks as possible; but if grand is bid and played, the bidder has to obtain at least seven tricks to win, played as no-trump in bridge.)

The language spoken as I started the bidding instructions was English, but I had never played bridge in English before and didn’t know the correct terminology (which I only found out later).

I told them that if they had fifteen to sixteen points, they could open with one grand, having no idea that I should be telling them to bid one no-trump! As the game progressed, somebody made game, and I informed them that now they were in the danger zone and explained the vulnerability of that stage of the game, never having heard the correct terminology vulnerable.

Later, in the United States, when we started to play bridge with American friends, they all had a good laugh at my expense for the Norwegian terminology of the game!

We also played bingo on board, and as luck had it, I added to my meager worth by winning the jackpot of over $200 one night, and a second prize of $50 at another time! With the value of dollars, factoring in inflation, it would be about the equivalent of winning $2,000; and the added cash stood me in good stead as my knee acted up something fiercely after our arrival.

As we approached the New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty, in her impressive majesty, came into view to oohs and aahs; a few tears and a big lump in my throat were hard to get down.

Many of us were certainly poor but not downtrodden as so many earlier immigrants had been, but still, the experience of seeing this welcoming lady of hope for the first time was an experience not soon forgotten. (During the Nazi occupation, we had tried the downtrodden part as well, and we didn’t like it one bit!)

Somebody in the crowd quoted the inscription on the lady of hope: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. Somebody else, more earthbound, stated that she was over 150 feet tall and weighed over two hundred tons! Another said that one could actually stand inside the torch and that several people could fit inside her head, but nobody would believe him! Some heavyweight lady, that one! She’s a gift from the French people to the American people, so you see, there was actually a time the French liked us!

*     *     *

New York City itself loomed with what seemed like spires out of some storybook castle, too huge to possibly be real, and somebody wondered how they could possibly keep from tipping over as tall as they were!

At debarkation in New York, I lost contact with Liv as my uncle Arne met me at the dock; and since he had always refused to drive, (I later found out) he had never owned a car.

The subway was an experience in itself, and I mentally made comparisons to the U-Bahn under Berlin and the underground railway under Oslo; however, it was the New York skyline that floored me!

None of the three Scandinavian capitals had more than a dozen floors, so the term skyscraper was certainly not an exaggerated term describing them, I decided as I craned my neck to see the tops of these magnificent structures.

Uncle Arne told me to be careful when crossing the street since he said, Automobiles kill almost fifty thousand people every year in this country! An awesome figure to digest when you come from a town of 3,500 souls!

So off I went to Brooklyn, and I only could guess that Liv went on to her family in Queens.

CHAPTER TWO

I came into this world on February 10, 1926, and as custom was at that time, I was born at home, my mother attended to by one of the local midwives. (My father was performing in an amateur play about a poor drunken fellow with an awful nagging wife.)

Luckily for me, my grandmother, herself having had twelve children, was looking over the midwife’s shoulder. I was wrapped, or tied as they called it, at the time, possibly to retain my body heat, arriving into this less-than-comfortable environment. One can only imagine how disagreeable it was to have to leave the cozy womb while a single woodstove was struggling to keep the whole upstairs floor livable, fighting the subzero temperatures outside.

I was fullborn at a husky 9 lb. and a happy fellow, which I was told later in life. Too quiet for my grandmother’s taste to be happy about it, though, so she asked the midwife to check on me by unwrapping me. In the midwife’s opinion, I was such a nice and quiet child! An argument ensued; but my grandmother won and demanded that I was to be unwrapped to find out why I was, what she said, so unnaturally quiet.

She said she had given birth to twelve children herself, and nobody was going to tell her that this child was behaving normally. Thank God (and my guardian angel on his first job) and my grandmother’s experience because I was discovered to be swimming in my own blood as the umbilical cord tie had become undone!

I had quite a struggle recuperating after that, but luckily for this immigrant American family, I pulled through and eventually grew and gained weight in a normal fashion.

I was told later in life that my father came home after completing the play, took his violin down from its peg on the wall, and started to play over my crib; and I smiled in appreciation. (It couldn’t possibly have been gas pains!) He, on the spot, declared that I surely was to become a musician!

During this same year, in Washington, DC, in America, they were completing the Lincoln Memorial in honor of former president Lincoln.

*     *     *

Some of my earliest memories was from returning home after visiting some relative, most often my paternal grandparents, Anna and Oscar Jenshus. Their little farm—producing berries, vegetables, and flowers that on City Square Day was offered for sale to the citizens of Steinkjer—was located out in the countryside, about six miles from town.

They, like all other small farms, also raised chickens for eggs and meat; cows for milk and eventually beef, butter, and cheese; and of course, pigs for bacon and pork. I was totally engrossed in all that animal life and enjoyed every trip to their farm.

Returning home from such visits, I was off and on asleep in my mother’s lap in the backseat of my father’s company car, and the new-car smell existed already at that time. And I really liked it, I remember, even if it was seventysome years ago! (Closer to eighty actually!)

My father was an insurance manager (he was called an insurance inspector in Norway); and he was running an office of fifteen to twenty agents and was hiring, training, and firing for one of the largest insurance companies in Norway. His performance as a salesman landed him the top position in the branch.

He would take the new agents out into people’s homes and demonstrate how to present the sales pitch and how to close the sale. (Just what I’d do, thirtysome years later, however, as sales manager and real estate broker.)

A few years later, I had what apparently was a psychologically shocking experience with a huge Norway rat. (Sorry to tell you children, but it’s the worst of its kind in the Rattus rattus family!) It scared me half to death by running up my leg, and apparently as a result, I started having speech problems and started stuttering very badly.

This went on for quite a while, and my grandmother (God bless her again!), decided to go to see a naturopath that was called Hilda in the Hills. I don’t remember when I realized that this wasn’t her actual name! (My mother pooh-poohed the whole idea, I’ve been told; but while my mother was away one time, my grandmother visited her on the sly anyway.)

If my mother had heard what my cure involved, she’d never have allowed it! My grandmother had instructions to give me another shock so as to snap me out of my affliction. (I warn you that this is gory stuff!)

Coinciding with all this, my grandparents’ Christmas pig was to be slaughtered, and my grandmother was instructed to hold me over the gasses escaping from the opened stomach cavity of the pig until I gagged!

I have only been told about this and have no memory of any of it, but already when my mother came back home from her trip, she noticed a marked improvement in my ability to talk! After that, Hilda took on a new aura of importance in our family; and several years later, my mother went to her for another problem I had, but I’ll return to that as my life story continues.

When I tell people that I was stuttering once, they have a hard time believing it since today, I’m known to be such a talker!

*     *     *

I got my first pair of skis as soon as I could walk steadily; and I remember being bundled up with a woolen hat, mittens, and a scarf wrapped around my neck and being helped into the leather straps that held our wooden skis on at the time.

In the United States, two generations have now used the TV as the main babysitter; but during my childhood back in Norway, it was the skis and the hills that served as such. A lot of credit can surely be given to the outdoors for the fact that there’s hardly anybody fat in Norway! With so many immigrants in Norway today (without any intended discrimination), I have to limit that last statement only to include people born and raised in Norway.

In spite of Norway’s subarctic cold winters, I was cozy and warm and sent off to ski on the hill below the house. We had a long-legged hound called Pan, and he would answer to the call of one short blast of a whistle, and I would respond with two blasts from the same whistle!

By the time the whistle sounded several hours later, I had fallen so many times that snow had melted down under my clothing; and I clearly remember being stripped in front of a hot woodstove, washed down with a warm soapy cloth, (showers were unheard of at that time), wiped, dressed, and readied for lunch.

I can’t remember having any other lunch besides hot oatmeal with milk and sugar, and I couldn’t wait to get back out unto my skis again! We didn’t just ski, of course; we had made a ski jump, and the landings sometimes were less than controlled! Because my generation was raised that way, I never met an able-bodied Norwegian that was not an avid cross-country skier!

Rebundled and pushed off again, I returned only after two bursts of the whistle sounded as darkness fell. In Norway (at our county’s latitudes) midwinters, this occurs already around three to four in the afternoon.

By now, I’d be soaking wet again and had to be undressed, washed, and redressed with indoor clothing for the long evening hours. I can clearly remember the smell of my wet clothes, steaming and drying on a line stretched above the wood-burning stove in the kitchen! In the living room, a coal-burning stove kept us all cozy and warm.

On summers, or for what passes for summers in Norway, I’d play along the shoreline a lot, catching crabs and eels from under the rocks. Sometimes, we’d light a small fire and skewer a wooden stick into an eel, fry it, and munch on it. (Some less-than-kind foreign visitors have classified the Norwegian summer as the green winter!)

I had to live down for years the story told by my mother that she’d signaled me to come home for dinner—not once or twice, but an insistent third time! By the time I finally was able to break off from my play and decided that I had to go home, I was confronted by an angry mother with her hands on her hips, demanding an explanation why I hadn’t come home when she whistled!

According to her, I excused myself by explaining that I only had heard the whistle the third time! That excuse was so hopelessly lame that my mother burst out laughing! Thank God for the sense of humor both my parents showed while I was growing up! They needed it!

Part of my first two school years were spent in a school learning the New Norwegian language. Norway’s country schools taught New Norwegian and city schools taught Norwegian. (What they do today, I don’t know.) So living in what we today classify as the suburbs (even if the term hadn’t been coined yet) but outside the city limits anyway, I ended up in a school that was teaching New Norwegian.

I had already been taught the rudimentaries of reading (Norwegian) by my mother, who was what we call a stay-at-home mother today, making sensible use of the long dark winter afternoons and evenings she’d homeschool me; and the differences in the languages were not that great.

I was kind of thin at this age, and some bigger boys were teasing me; but my sister Mary, five years my senior and built like a wrestler, trounced the teasers and chased them away! Somebody told me that later, they had heard that a potential bully had been warned by a friend that You better leave that guy alone! Mary is his big sister! After that, I was left alone!

However, after my first grade and in the beginning of the second grade, my father was informed that his company had plans to transfer him to Bodö, a city well north of the Arctic Circle. (He was good at his job, and after this move, he became known as someone who could put a failing office back on its feet.)

My teacher was informed of the fact that I was going to move to a city school after Christmas and that she now must start to teach me Norwegian in preparation for that move. Norway, in addition, has a multitude of dialects as different sounding as the differences between some languages—mainly, I presume, because of the high mountains and wide fjords, isolating the different communities from one another for centuries, preventing the otherwise natural intermingling of groups of people that in reality lived quite close to one another. Some of the mountains were impossible to cross during most of the year, if they indeed were passable at any time.

CHAPTER THREE

Arriving in my new surroundings, I was suddenly facing a group of children who spoke a dialect radically different from what I spoke. This put me in a position of ridicule—mainly by teasing, pushing, and shoving as children do; but sometimes it developed into fisticuffs.

It was during this period that I decided to learn the rudimentaries of boxing. It didn’t take long to learn the basics of the gentlemen’s art of self-defense. (I was in luck as a boxer lived in the same complex.) After a black eye and some sore ribs were distributed, the teasing ended; and I became part of the in-group; and some of the worst teasers now became my closest friends. Human beings are really some strange animals! (The establishing of the alpha male in a wolf pack is not that much different!)

The county, aptly named the Northland, has a miserably cold climate; and the snowfall was sometimes plain unbelievable! Located well north of the Arctic Circle, it had a right to be cold, all right!

I remember one time when blizzards lasting several days had piled up hardpack snowdrifts that allowed us kids to climb up and look into the second-story windows of the bank building, right on the main thoroughfare of the town, the King’s Street. (Every Norwegian town has their King’s Street [Kongens gate], and the rest of the royal family had their titles represented in practically every city in Norway.)

Money was a very scarce commodity among us children, so some ingenuity was required if we wanted to get our hands on some; so at one time, I sold the local Northland Post newspaper on the streets.

When I was calling out the name of the paper, many people became curious, reached for their coins, came over to me, and inquired about where I was from. There apparently was an unfamiliar sound to my voice, so people’s curiosity help me sell more papers. But when the winter cold set in with its customary vengeance (sometimes in the latter part of August!), I was not allowed to spend the necessary hours out in the biting winds.

During the summer (I remember wearing a woolen sweater almost all the time!), another source of pocket money was the unending supply of fish that teemed around the pilings of the docks!

A few yards of handline, a heavy heave-and-haul lure, a wooden crate to keep and haul the catch in, and only a few hours of fun were all that was needed.

I can still see the vast schools of fish, the various sizes separated by three to six feet in depth. As if by agreement, they stayed at different depths as a comfort zone, all the way down to ten to fifteen feet.

Close to the surface were the layers of fingerlings, and the next layer was schools of about one-foot-long bluefish; but ten to fifteen feet below that, the huge cods could clearly be seen, majestically gliding around the pilings of the docks.

We were too scared to let that much line out! We were afraid that they might pull us off our feet! It was the foot-long ones that were our targets; and after just about filling the crate, we hauled it up to the back door of a local candy/magazine store to see the proprietor, a Turk who was involved in raising minks, who would purchase all we could catch and pay us a few pennies per kilogram.

Sometimes while fishing, the fish schools suddenly all turned in one direction in panic and huge eider ducks, flying underwater at the six-to-ten-feet level, would be chasing fish like cowboys herding cattle! It was quite a sight!

The fish caught from the piers were considered unfit for human consumption because of all the oil in the water around the docks. For the equivalent of about 5¢ (U.S.), one could buy fish to feed four people from the fishmongers!

After receiving our few coins, we’d promptly walk around the building, through the front door of the Turk’s candy store to buy hard candies, caramels, and chocolates. He surely had a good thing going!

During a really dry period, I had gotten my hands on a one oere coin (our smallest denomination, worth something like one-sixth of U.S. 1¢!) and went to see the Turk. Do you carry two-for-one oere caramels? I inquired.

Looking over his glasses down his ample nose, towering over me, he replied with gusto, NO! THANK GOD! This caused me to turn and run out of the store with all due haste! It took quite a while before I dared go back into his store again!

*     *     *

We did a lot of skiing, but this was the time in my life that I hurt my right knee for the first time, forever weakening it but not preempting years of skiing, gymnastics, and other sports. I was running down a slalom hill, using trees for gates; and as I slid by one gate, the tip of my right ski hooked behind a tree and stayed there as the rest of me passed by!

It twisted around, temporarily pointing backward with my foot and leg with it; and I developed water on the knee causing it to swell up immensely! It did snap back, of course, but the permanent damage was done. As many other times, later in life, I was limping for a while but no worse off for wear.

I also vividly remember my first encounter with the aurora borealis, or the northern lights!

I was out playing around in the snow when somebody said Look! pointing to the sky. From horizon to horizon, the multicolored flashes rushed across the sky, seemingly just over the rooftops! I screamed and ran home crying, thinking that the world surely was coming to an end!

This was nothing like the pale light pastel colors that one sees in the northern sky in locations farther south; this was surely a total disaster in the making! It took a bit of calming down by my parents before I accepted the fact that I was safe and that it was not dangerous at all!

This was also about the time my sex education began. One of the games we were playing was hide-and-seek; and at this particular time, when a friend had started to count to one hundred, a nice-looking seventh-grade girl grabbed me by the wrist and said, You hide with me!

She pulled me into the dark hallway of a walk-up in an apartment building and, with apparently trained fingers, undid my fly and started to massage me vigorously. With the other hand, she forced my hand inside her panties, onto her crotch, and started a rubbing motion.

She was panting by now, and an unfamiliar explosion occurred in my loins. I felt like running, but I was held firmly in place by her strong grip. What she was performing was a two-handed masturbation! We were eventually found. Luckily, it was too dark for anybody to see what we were doing, so I escaped the whole thing without being discovered!

For a long time, I was making sure that I didn’t run into her again; and when I spied her, I’d run in the opposite direction! I obviously was not ready for a continuation of a relationship! It took many more years before I obtained any more sex education.

Also in Bodö, I remember when our family was invited to one of my father’s top agents’ beautiful house for dinner, and the agent showed us his library. A whole wall was full of books, many of them children’s books, and they all impressed me greatly. So when he became aware of my keen interest, the agent said that his boys were all grown now and that I could pick myself an armful of books as a gift; and I, of course, jumped at the opportunity!

This would be an experience that exposed me to the world of books (if not exactly the classics), but in a short time, they made me interested in all kinds of literature. I will always remember the first real book I ever read from cover to cover as a nine-year-old: namely, Tarzan the Ape Man (in Norwegian translation, of course). The whole series was later devoured, and my life as an avid reader was established. Many more books came my way from this generous man, and my life was changed forever.

Some of the books were about cowboys and Indians, and I became quite fascinated by life in America. It makes me wonder how much later in life would I have discovered books, had it not been for this dinner invitation. All our lives are really full of these what-ifs!

*     *     *

The second half of second grade, the third grade, and part of the fourth were spent in Northland—only once again to have to move to the other end of the country, this time to the county of Telemark, located in the south central half of Norway. (Reading this, the name Telemark might ring a bell as one of the most important of all WWII sabotage operations occurred there. More about that later.)

It’s also the name of a type of ski turn originated in that Norwegian county where one ski is pushed forward, forming a semisnowplow with the other ski, which then will turn you into the desired direction. To change direction, you repeat the performance with the other ski, actually enabling you to slalom down the hill. This was the only way one used to turn before the parallel turn came into use.

The Rjukan (the name of the town) insurance office was reeling under a fired, incompetent manager; and some alleged embezzlement had as well taken place, so off goes the troubleshooter again! And the whole family uproots still another time, and everything (again) has to be packed and crated and readied for sea and rail shipment. This was the time I realized what strong sea legs I had! (We must have had good weather going north because I don’t remember that trip!)

The smallish coastal steamer bucked like an obstinate pack mule as she was negotiated in and out of the narrow fjords, delivering and picking up goods in towns and little communities that had no other connections to the outside world. However, between stops, the steamer had to face the full fury of the open North Sea, known to have some of the worst sea-lanes in the world; but after diving into the waves, decks totally awash sometimes, she’d right herself and plow on.

In spite of strict orders that no one was allowed up on deck, I, of course, had to sneak up and make my path all the way to the ship’s bow where I could duck under the cowling as the ship dove into the next wave; and I’d pop my head up as the cascading waves had passed over me, the cowling keeping me quite dry! Boy! Did I have fun!

I was soon discovered and hauled back down under deck after receiving a severe scolding from a crew member and an even more severe scolding from my father. A few raps on my butt punctuated the seriousness of my crime.

CHAPTER FOUR

We arrived at the little town of Rjukan, a town located at the bottom of a deep valley, just wide enough to facilitate three parallel streets on one side of the river Maana and a few streets on the other side alongside the railroad track. At the time, its only claim to fame were the hydroplant and Rjukan Waterfall with a several-hundred-foot free fall, landing with a thunderous crash among the river rocks below.

They actually had tamed it already, creating a vast amount of hydroelectricity by the Vemork power station, supplying electricity to large parts of the country and resulting in unbelievably inexpensive hydroproduced kilowatt-hours! Not even one penny per kilowatt!

The newspapers informed people of times when the power station would release water by opening the locks in the dam, which would allow the falls to run freely for a while, and multitudes of people would make the trek up the valley to see the unbelievable amounts of water released and the waterfall in its original full fury.

I especially remember the colorful rainbows forming in the fine mist that always hung over the area. Because of its high precipitation rate and mountainous terrain, Norway has a multitude of hydropower plants furnishing it with what we today call a renewable source of electric power.

We have no shortage of rain in Norway! The huge snowpacks accumulated through the winter added to this renewable resource.

Apropos to the present-day drought in Arizona, I remember one single dry period when there was an admonishment made in public toilets.

The sign said Do Not Flush for Bimmelim, Only for Bammelam. Two nonexistent words in any language but still quite easily understood!

After having been of some help with the unpacking, my father told me that I could go across the street to the playground just below our second-floor apartment. Buying a house probably never entered my father’s mind since our family, at least so far, was quite without solid roots anywhere.

Down at the playground, a fellow of about the same age as me, was sitting on one end of a seesaw; so it seemed natural for me to walk up and ask if he wanted to play.

He looked strangely at me and clearly didn’t understand me. After breaking the ice, it became clear that the dialect used by the Telemarkings was not too far off the Norwegian I had learned in Bodö (sometimes referred to as book language); and I, again, had to readjust my dialect.

My parents told me that in Bodö, playing outside with the children, I spoke Northlander; but inside, with my parents, I spoke my native Trönder dialect. This would repeat itself now as I soon spoke Telemarking with the children and Trönder with my parents.

I didn’t think of this at the time, but my brain was probably being preconditioned to comprehend foreign languages and to understand words and sounds with similarities and differences, a benefit denied to the person growing up without such exposure. So when, in the fifth grade, English became part of the curriculum, I took to it like a duck to water and got good grades right off the bat, this without doing much studying.

Because of its location at the bottom of the valley, with the upper part of the valley angling off northward, the sun never reached the level of the town at all during the winter months. For months on end, the city’s population (including me) was longingly looking up the mountainsides where the sun was shining bright as the area is enjoying a pretty good comparatively dry inland climate.

Then the new year and the first months of the year passed; and slowly but surely, every day, the sun would creep closer and closer down the mountainside toward the bottom of the valley. (We used to say, A rooster step closer each day.) And on one glorious day, lo and behold, there it was—fully illuminating the sun-starved people of the town of Rjukan!

It stands to reason that such a momentous occurrence had to be celebrated, so the annual Sun Fest with all kinds of fun and feasts was off and running.

My father didn’t need legal aid very often, but this was one of the times he needed a law firm in connection with his life insurance business. Translated, the team consisted of two gentlemen, Mr. Big and Mr. Little; and since life is full of inequities, of course, Mr. Little was six feet two and Mr. Big was five feet eight!

To satisfy the citizens’ hunger for sunshine during the winter months, or possibly just for profit, the town had installed a cable car operation, also known as a tram, with a capacity of twentysome people in each of two cars—one heading straight up the mountainside, hanging precipitously over the steep incline while the second one coming on its trip down from the bright sunny top of the mountain.

Outside ski racks enabled everybody to bring their skis for a day of skiing in the sun. When the door closes, the operator would ask all passengers to take hold of the overhead straps; and before he could explain why that was advisable, the story tells of an obviously nervous woman who inquired why they had to do that.

Seeing a chance to have some fun, the operator explained, with a deadpan face, that quite often the bottom would fall out from under them; so they would be hanging from the straps the rest of the way! She reportedly promptly fainted, and the joke was not so funny anymore.

The straps would come in handy though when wind gusts could make the car swing like a pendulum, disturbing a lot of nervous people. The worst moment of the trip would occur on your return trip back down from the station on top, the first stretch on just a slight decline. But then the cable car goes over the support structure at the edge of the drop-off; and the car would suddenly seem to free-fall, just for a second but long enough to make most people cry out, grunt, or otherwise show their fear. Then the straps come in handy as the sudden change of the angle of travel would make the car pendle at least seemingly quite precipitously.

Looking down the mountainside now would show that the next support is hundreds of feet below as the cable is hanging almost freely at a very steep angle, not necessitating another support before the hillside starts to flatten out again. I have not been there in over seventy years, so I hope my memory stands me in good stead. I DO remember that the view was absolutely breathtaking!

On top, one could ski for days in one direction and never run into signs of human habitation as the infamous trackless Hardanger Plateau stretches out on the forbiddingly icy windswept tundra. The heavy annual snowfall and the below-zero temperatures only allowed the sparsest of vegetation to survive the onslaught of the forces of nature, so the old Texan saying And not a tree to spoil the view comes to mind.

The area became famous during the heavy water battle of WWII as a well-trained group of English and Norwegian commandos in gliders met their untimely demise there, their intended target was the heavy water plant that had been withstanding various attempts of sabotage and bombing runs. (Again, I’ll get back to that.)

The years went by, and before we knew it, there came another order to move; however, this time, the move would be back to Steinkjer in Tröndelag. So, at least, no new dialects had to be learned!

I was now in the second half of the fifth grade and head over heels in love with the daughter of the local glass maker. She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever