Grace Berg Schaible
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Grace Berg Schaible May 18, 2006; June 28, 2006; November 21, 2006; December 5, 2006; December 15, 2006 Recommended Transcript of Interview with Grace Berg Schaible (May 18, 2006; June 28, Citation 2006; Nov. 21, 2006; Dec. 5, 2006; Dec. 15, 2006), https://abawtp.law.stanford.edu/exhibits/show/grace-berg-schaible. Attribution The American Bar Association is the copyright owner or licensee for this collection. Citations, quotations, and use of materials in this collection made under fair use must acknowledge their source as the American Bar Association. Terms of Use This oral history is part of the American Bar Association Women Trailblazers in the Law Project, a project initiated by the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession and sponsored by the ABA Senior Lawyers Division. This is a collaborative research project between the American Bar Association and the American Bar Foundation. Reprinted with permission from the American Bar Association. All rights reserved. Contact Please contact the Robert Crown Law Library at Information [email protected] with questions about the ABA Women Trailblazers Project. Questions regarding copyright use and permissions should be directed to the American Bar Association Office of General Counsel, 321 N Clark St., Chicago, IL 60654-7598; 312-988-5214. ABA Commission on Women in the Profession Women Trailblazers in the Law ORAL HISTORY of GRACE BERG SCHAIBLE Interviewer: Donna C. Willard-Jones Dates of Interviews: May 18, 2006 June 28, 2006 November 21, 2006 December 5, 2006 December 15, 2006 VOLUME I INTERVIEW OF GRACE BERG SCHAIBLE May 18, 2006 2 P R O C E E D I N G S MS. WILLARD: It is May 18th, 2006. We are in Fairbanks, Alaska. My name is Donna Willard-Jones and with me is Grace Berg Schaible who I am going to interview for the American Bar Association's Women's Commission Oral History Project. And with that, Grace, it's great to be here with you. I've read all of the materials that I could find about you. You have a fascinating life and I think that any future audience is going to thoroughly enjoy most certainty its most unique aspects, situated as we are in the great State of Alaska. So with that, could you tell me, please about your family background? MS. SCHAIBLE: Certainly. My father was born in Norway in 1887. He came to the United States in May of 1910 on the first trip of the Mauritania from Liverpool and went west and spent some time with a shirttail relative in Jamestown, North Dakota. And then went to Tacoma and spent more time with another shirttail relative in Tacoma. Because English was not taught in the schools in Norway beyond, oh, I think maybe the second or third -- equivalent of the second or third grade, my father felt that his English was sadly lacking and so he enrolled in Pacific Lutheran Academy which was a predecessor of Pacific Lutheran University. And while he was there, of course, he played basketball. He was six foot tall and 3 there weren't that many tall men so he played basketball and really learned to speak English. And -- but when basketball season was over and he thought his English was improved enough, there was a gold strike in Alaska in what they called the Shushink country~ I don't know how it's spelled, but we always heard it as Shushink. So he made his way to Alaska arriving in Cordova and then taking, I think, the railroad as far as McCarthy and then he walked into the Shushink country. MS. WILLARD: What year was that, Grace? MS. SCHAIBLE: That was 1913. Of course, he didn't strike it rich and he went back to Cordova to wait for transportation back to Seattle/Tacoma. And when he was in Cordova he met Anthony J. Dimond, also known at "Tony" Dimond, later our delegate to Congress, as well as territorial district judge. He also met Eustace Paul Ziegler, a very famous Alaskan painter who was at that time running an Episcopal reading room where my father spent most of his time. In addition he met a fellow Norwegian named George Osborn who asked my father, on returning to Seattle, if he would take some money to his daughter Lillian. He was divorced or separated from his wife, but he wanted to support his daughter and so asked my father to take the money. My father did and this little girl opened the door. My father said who he was and he was bringing something from her father. Gave her the money. Later she was 4 Lillian Crosson, the wife of one of Alaska's great airplane pilots. He was the man who recovered the bodies of Will Rogers and ..... MS. WILLARD: Wiley Post. MS. SCHAIBLE: ..... and Wiley Post from their crash near Barrow, but in any event it was an arrangement that I've known all my life, that my father was fortunate in meeting all these people. Mr. Osborn later moved to Juneau and remarried and had a large family and was a very successful jeweler there. Incidently, when he was in Cordova, he was a partner with Harry Avnkoff who later became a famous jeweler here in Fairbanks. He went back to Tacoma, packed up his bags and said I'm moving to Alaska. And it was because Southeastern Alaska reminded him so much of Norway. He was born in Noraijord and at that time Noraijord had almost been logged off, but the new growth was just starting to come back and Southeastern reminded him of that, so he walked off the ship in Juneau and asked what are they building and with his accent they knew he was Scandinavian and so they said go see old man Jaeger. He's building a hotel. My father was a master carpenter from Norway, having started at the age of 11 to train as a carpenter and he went and, of course, was immediately hired. You didn't find too many master carpenters in Juneau. After the hotel was built, he was asked to operate the pattern shop at the Perseverance mine. The pattern shop is where they make wooden molds to hold the sand to repair mining machinery 5 and so he did that at the Perseverance mine. And the master blacksmith at the Perseverance mine was a Swede named Oberg. Now this Berg and this Oberg became good friends and my father just loved to ski, of course, and so he made his own skis. Probably the first pair of skis in Southeastern Alaska and used to ski from the Perseverance mine which was, oh, five miles maybe back in the mountains from Juneau. Ski down to Juneau and visit people. In 1915 my mother came to Juneau. Her story was that she was born and raised in Sweden. She came from a fairly large family and she had lots of half-sisters and brothers, as well as her own sisters and brothers. And at the age of 14, I think, she went to work as, sort of, a maid/companion to a very wealthy family in Stockholm and just loved the job. The oldest daughter of the family was married into one of the German principality nobles and she spent a lot of time in Sweden, in Stockholm, and proceeded to teach my mother to speak German because that was where they thought she was going to go after she finished this long term arrangement with this family. But my mother decided no, she was going to go to the United States. So she took a steamer from Gothenberg Gotaborg to Harwich in England and crossed over to Liverpool and then caught the second voyage of the Mauritania in May of 1910 to New York. She always mentioned on her arrival in New York seeing the Statute of Liberty and also seeing Halley's comet that -- and so 1976, of course, when it appeared again we all celebrated my mother's arrival in the 6 United States even though she and my father were both deceased at that point. She went to Minnesota like most Scandinavians, but didn't like Minnesota, thought it was too cold and moved to Iowa which I couldn't see was that much warmer, but she worked in Des Moines for a family. I can't remember their name, although I knew it for years, but she worked for this family in Des Moines who lived next door to Henry Wallace's family and so she watched Henry Wallace grow up. The family moved to Colorado Springs every summer and so my mother spent in summers in Colorado and her winters in Des Moines until her sister, who had immigrated to the United States several years before, wrote to her and said you must come visit me in Alaska. I am married to another Swede named Oscar Oberg and so my mother went to Juneau for a two month visit and at a wedding of people who became later very, very close friends of the family, my parents met. So my father persuaded her to stay a little longer than two months, made her a pair of skis and persuaded her that maybe 1915 wasn't a good year to get married, but 1916 would be, so they were married in 1916 at the Lutheran Church in Douglas, Alaska, there being no Lutheran Church in Juneau at that time. And so they lived in Juneau. Their first house was on the hillside, I remember that and my father was called away to work at some of the smaller mining 7 operations north of Juneau, the Comet Mine and the current Kensington Mine.