Nordic American Voices Nordic Heritage Museum

Interview of Virginia Ormbrek April 7, 2012 Seattle, Washington

Interviewers: Brandon Benson; Lynn Tengbom Also present: Tom Ormbrek

Brandon Benson: [0:08] This is an interview for the Nordic American Voices Oral History project. This is the seventh of April, 2012, and we’ll be interviewing Virginia Ormbrek at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. My name is Brandon Benson, and I’m interviewing Virginia with Lynn Tengbom. So first, Virginia, could you spell out your name- first and last, and you tell us when you were born?

Virginia Ormbrek: [0:35] Yes, I was born in 1917- the fifth of February. I was six months old when World War One broke out. My father was Henry Wise. He was German-American. He was in the National Guard, and he went overseas to France. I was christened at Camp Lewis. In those days it was Camp Lewis, not Fort Lewis. And my mother and older brother and I rode in the troop train as far as New York, until he sailed.

[1:07] But my name is spelled V-I-R-G-I-N-I-A. And my maiden name was W-I-S-E. It was a German name in the beginning. That is not a proper name in Germany; it means meadow. It’s not a person’s name. But I was told by a couple of German doctors that I knew later on when I was in training that our name would have been W-E-I-S-S- the equivalent of White. And that’s the name you’ll find in many of the German people that came over. But our… I don’t know when our family name was shortened to W-I-S-E, but it was.

[1:57] But I was born in [1917] in Spokane, Washington, and both my older brother and I were home-delivered. We weren’t born in the hospital. And we were born right down by the Gonzaga River, about a block from the… not the Gonzaga River, the Spokane River, in the Gonzaga District, where the college is. And in 1920… Dad came back from France in 1919. And there were two… my younger brother was the first one born in the hospital, at Deaconess in Spokane. And when he was just a babe in arms, Dad was transferred to Seattle, because he was appointed the state adjutant at the American Legion, which was very active in, all his life, from his days in France. He fought for the veterans all his life.

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[2:57] So we were transferred to Seattle in 1920. I was three and a half. I remember coming over in a steam train, and that was a lot of fun. The windows were open, the cinders were blowing in our eyes, and Bud and I were racing up and down the aisle. He was [fourteen months] older than me. [We were] tearing up a catalog, and mother got after us for bothering the neighbors. They said, “That’s all right. They’re just having fun.”

[3:26] But I just… I’ve always known about Spokane because I still have relatives there and go back every once in a while to see them. But I grew up in Seattle, on the north end, over by Lake Washington. In fact, it was Laurelhurst, right across from the schoolhouse, in 1924 when we moved into a lovely, big old home. There were two of our neighbors that kept cows in the back. And 48 th Northeast was a meadow- no houses.

[3:58] And even Laurelhurst itself- the main part was on the south side of 45 th , but our side wasn’t paved. We were like in the country. And nobody locked their doors at night. It was just a lot of fun. And a lot of vacant lots- we’d go picking salmonberries, and hazelnuts, you know. We had little wet areas where you could go polliwog fishing. [Laughter] It was just really neat.

[4:27] That was 1924. And I grew up there, and graduated from Laurelhurst Grade School and went on to Roosevelt High. In those days, you crossed… took a little shuttle bus from Laurelhurst into the University District on University Way. You caught a streetcar over, and you had to go to high school over a wooden trestle. It was on 65 th Street, right straight across from Ballard- 65 th Northeast.

[5:04] It was just a lot of fun. And then I went to the university. I graduated in ’35 from high school, and I went into training in 1937. In fact, it was… how many years ago, yesterday? No, the fifth. It was Thursday. The fifth of April I went to training at Swedish hospital. It was a five-story hospital, where the big one, the main one is now. It was only… it was just a smallish hospital.

[5:44] But at that time, Providence Hospital, Seattle General, which no longer exists, and Virginia Mason, were all early hospitals. And Columbus Hospital down on Madison later became Cabrini. We had a lot of hospitals, and most of them were training schools. Maynard was the only one that had all graduate nurses. That was a small, very well run hospital down on Boren.

[6:12] We had cable cars; we had streetcars in those days. Until the late thirties, you went everywhere on streetcars. And we had cable cars on Madison until the buses came in. It was just a very different place. Seattle was more… downtown was more like a small town, you know. We had our department stores, but everything was so different. Now when I go through town, I don’t even know where I am. I can’t even find Madison Street. But in those days it was very different.

[6:50] In 1941, I came out the first of March. It was a beautiful day. There were still some of the mills going, but Ballard in the old days was a big mill town. It was the biggest… It was called the cedar shingle capital of the world, because Seattle Cedar was the biggest cedar shake mill. They had a

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lot of them. A lot of the big lumbermen from the Midwest like Michigan and Wisconsin came out here- like Weyerhauser and Mattson, and what are some of the others, Tom? I can’t remember them by name.

[7:38] Stimpson was another one. And the old Stimpson deal in Ballard is still there. They took the old family home, which would have made a nice museum, but they took that down. And I don’t think they ever let people come in there to tour or anything. They tried to save the old Ballard city hall, but it was too earthquake-damaged. But it was there when Tom was still a baby. It was there in the fifties. And they finally had to take it down.

[8:10] But they just recently put the original bell back in the tower, and those four white pillars are from the original. There were several city halls, and the last one was one they were going to save for a museum. But the firehouse was there. Of course, by the time I came to Ballard, the horses were gone, but they all… All the stalls had names like Ember and Flame, and this and that, named for the horses. In the old days, before the big fire, all the cities had them, because everything was wooden, you know, before that. There were a lot of really bad fires. And Seattle had its fire.

[9:01] But my mother came here in 1909 and went into training in what later became Harborview. It was the first city hospital, but it wasn’t the oldest hospital. It was down in the old Flatiron building. I think it’s still there, on Yesler. But that’s where the old city hospital was. She worked as a public health nurse until she was seventy-one years old. She was also a store nurse down on Second Avenue when old Bon Marche had a store nurse.

[9:39] And during the big Depression in ’29, I was just starting going into my teens, and they had Red Cross clinics where people would go when they were sick that paid hardly anything, practically nothing. Where Mom was, they had what they called a well-baby clinic, and people could bring their babies and toddlers in there for free and have them examined.

[10:06] Then she worked as a store nurse in the big Sears on Lander Street- the big one. And she worked under the state for that. She really saw the old Seattle before I was born, because they were still having Tong Wars in Chinatown in 1909 when Mom came. And the big expo was there at that time- it came in, and they had it out at the university campus. It was brand new then, because the University of Washington started on University Street in downtown Seattle- that’s where it started. They moved it out to the University District, and of course a lot of the old timers didn’t like that. So they didn’t send their kids there. But was just a different time entirely.

[10:55] I can remember going on interurbans when I was little, between cities, you know. There was one that went to Renton; there was one that went to Tacoma; Everett. And then there was a little private railroad line that ran along the west side of Lake Washington up to Bothell. And you could take the railroad up there. Because otherwise there were still a lot of boats in places like Everett where they’d come down the river and the side wheel or paddle wheel would be coming to Everett.

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But it was just a different time entirely.

Brandon: [11:36] Virginia?

Virginia: [11:37] But Seattle isn’t in the habit of saving old things like the little towns do. You’ll see a lot more of our history in Tacoma and Coupeville because they don’t tear things down. We tear things down and put condos in it, and parking lots, but they don’t do that in smaller towns. Tom is looking somewhat pained. [Laughter]

Brandon: [12:01] Virginia, you said your mother got here in 1909?

Virginia: [12:05] Yes, and she loved it.

Brandon: [12:06] Where did she start out from?

Virginia: [12:09] She was from Duluth, Minnesota, but her parents came out here probably around 1907. She finished high school at Lewis and Clark, which was right downtown Spokane. And the older high school is North Central, and that’s where my dad and his two sisters went. They were from LaCrosse, Wisconsin, and Iowa.

[12:35] They all came west because they had heard how great it was, and they had seen the colored pamphlets about the west coast. They didn’t know anybody here, but they just came out to Spokane. And then a lot of them drifted out to Seattle, but we still have a connection with Spokane. I’ve got a whole part of my family that lives there still. But it was just a different time completely.

Brandon: [13:04] Do you still visit Spokane to visit your family?

Virginia: [13:06] Yes. Oh, yes. In fact, we were over there not too long ago. Tom and I went over there to see my younger brother’s widow. She lives there with… three of her daughters live there. They have a couple… a son and a daughter that live here, and their grandkids are in Seattle. But the rest of them live in Spokane.

Brandon: [13:29] How about Duluth? Do you have any family back in Duluth?

Virginia: [13:31] If I have… I probably do have cousins back there, but none of them on either the German side or the Scandinavian side ever kept up with us after my aunts and uncles died. So I don’t know. I probably have relatives all over, and with all the moving around, who knows? They might not even be there anymore.

[13:55] But my German grandmother who came out with my… she would have been my great- grandmother, I guess. She didn’t come west with my father and his family when they were… My

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grandfather- her son- she came… she brought him from Germany when he was just a baby. And he was either… My [great]-grandfather either died at sea and was buried at sea, or died in Germany before they…

[14:32] But she brought him over as a baby, and he had no siblings, at least none that lived, so he was an only child, and an only son in that family. And so was my dad, but he was born in Wisconsin. And his mother was German, but she was born in Galena, . Her people were from Alsace- Lorraine, Germany, and Germany. But my grandfather was from Dresden, Germany- my father’s father.

Brandon: [15:06] How about on your mother’s side?

Virginia: [15:08] My mother’s side- her people were from… Her father was actually a Swede- William Johnson, from Stockholm. He came from a big family of boys, and there was a kind of a connection with Minnesota. At one time one of my grandfather’s uncles had been governor John Johnson of Minnesota. Probably a very common name.

[15:34] But Mom was born in this country. Her birth father was born in Sweden. Her birth mother was… I’m saying this because she was adopted right from infancy because her mother couldn’t keep her. She had no relatives because she had married a Swede- her one connection here wouldn’t have anything to do with her. “Get out of my house. Don’t ever darken my door again. You married a Swede.” Because the feeling was very strong. At one time Sweden and Denmark ruled Norway for centuries, and they didn’t like the Swedes one little bit. But they married them. [Laughter] In fact, one of their favorite princesses was a Swedish princess.

[16:20] But anyway, Mom’s birth mother was born in Ullensaker, Norway, up the fjord from Oslo. Her mother died when she was four years old, and was buried there. There was never any mention further of the father. I don’t know what happened to him; whether he married again and moved away… but she was raised by a grandmother- my great-grandmother. Then my mother… my mother’s grandmother’s name was Helge Emily Olsen. She was the daughter of Gunnarius Olsen and Olena Andersdatter.

[17:16] The girls in Norway took the… they didn’t take their… Until they were married, they had their father’s name with “daughter” after it. But if course, the boys were all Olsen, Olesen, and Johnsen; Petersen and Andersen. But the girls changed their name after they got married, but their maiden name was birth name like Andersdatter or Johnsondatter- D-A-T-T-E-R.

[17:45] But anyway, she came over- my mother’s mother came over- she was probably in her twenties. Her grandmother died, and she had nobody in Norway that was interested in her. Or I don’t know, they were maybe dead, or something. So she came to this country, and came to St. Paul, and lived with an aunt who was married and had four children.

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[18:17] When Mom… When Hilde married a Swede, her aunt told her to get lost. So that connection was severed until the old lady died. Then the cousins got together and kept track of one another. But the ones on my mother’s side, I have no idea. I’m sure I’ve got a lot of cousins maybe all over the country, or down south, even.

[18:44] A lot of the Germans went south. They had cheap land. It was advertised in Germany. They came over here and settled in the south- southern states. So I had German relatives that lived in the south, and some of them fought for the south during the Civil War. The others were up in Illinois, places like , Illinois; Milwaukee, Rock Island, Illinois. Very German people, because there are a lot of Germans there; a lot of ; quite a bit of Scandinavians in the Midwest at that time. So… [Laughter] I’m getting…

[19:29] Yeah. So, anyway, thanks to my great-grandmother and my grandmother, and my mother, they loved to talk about the family. And from the time I was little, I heard all this from the women. And other countries, too- England did it in the old days, and I’m sure they did it in other countries, where the women of the family kept the family records. The men were too busy doing their own thing, working for a living or something. But the women kept the records.

[20:14] Both our families had these great big, beautiful old… beautiful scripted illustrations. There was a Norwegian bible and a German bible- with places for rites of passage in the back. They didn’t put one thing in- not one thing. I don’t know whether they thought it was sacrilegious to write in the bible, but why would the bible have it in there if it was sacrilegious? But they didn’t keep records.

[20:44] So it was my aunt and her mother, and her mother’s mother before that, and passing it down to my mother. And they’re the ones who told all these things to each generation. So I inherited all of this. My own siblings are all gone now, but I’ve always been fascinated by the things that my mother told me. And I feel very privileged that she gave me that, because otherwise I wouldn’t know anything about them at all.

[21:18] And I’d still like to know more. I know a little bit about my German family. I have a nephew whose dad was my younger brother, and he lives here in town. He is very interested. He’s retired from Boeing, and he loves to look up family history. So he’s finding out things for me that I never knew- just little snippets of things.

[21:47] I know that my German grandmother at one time was working in somebody’s house as a maid when she was sixteen years old, in Galena, Illinois, where she was born. But she had two sisters and a brother, and don’t know anything… I never heard from them after she died. I never heard anything more. I had one aunt that sort of kept up with that.

[22:17] Her daughter never bothered to ask her anything. She grew up in Spokane. It was one of my

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dad’s sisters. And she would know a lot about my German side, but she’s gone, and Helen and her brothers never asked their mother about anything. But she kept in touch with her cousins, her German cousins.

Brandon: [22:42] So, Virginia, you said that your grandmother came to the United States?

Virginia: [22:46] Yes. My…

Brandon: [22:49] Your mother’s mother.

Virginia: [22:49] My mother’s mother. Yeah.

Brandon: [22:51] Do you know the reason that she left Norway?

Virginia: [22:55] Well, the grandmother that raised her, when her mother died when she was four, had died, and she evidently… the other relatives weren’t interested in her. I don’t know. But she came over here, and she knew she had an aunt- she had a young aunt, the youngest of the family. And she was living in St. Paul, and she went to live with her, and probably was kind of an unpaid housekeeper and babysitter, too. I don’t know. But…

Lynn: [23:26] So, how old was she at the time?

Virginia: [23:28] She was in her twenties. My grandfather was young. He was… I don’t have any pictures of him, because after he was killed, my grandmother and my older aunt and uncle- my mother’s siblings that she didn’t know anything about until she heard about it at a Christmas party one time when she was a teenager... And that’s why she moved away, because my aunt was bound and determined to get Mother back to her birth family, and she was kind of mean about it. And she just wouldn’t let up.

[24:07] In those days, she wasn’t officially baptized. I mean, she wasn’t officially adopted. So they didn’t talk about adoption. If you were adopted, they shut up about it. People grew up not knowing they were adopted. And then the records weren’t kept well. The records were kept in churches and schools, and they were all built of wood, and invariably they burned down, and the records went up in smoke. That’s what happened to a lot of people.

[24:38] During World War Two, Mom had to prove that she actually was who she said she was, because she had no records. Anybody that was born of foreign-born parents had to prove they were bonafide American citizens, and they were born here. And mom had to appeal to her sister, who was alive then.

[25:01] I think I still have the letter somewhere. “My sister is who she says she is.” She named

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names- who she was born to, and what their names were, and their years, and everything. But Mom had to get that information, because that’s what they did in World War Two. You had to prove that you were who you claimed to be, you know, because so many people didn’t have records.

[25:28] I know my sister and I would go over to Poulsbo thinking we would find records there, because my grandparents had died in a Norwegian nursing home in 1927. We found out they had gone to a different church, and we were looking at the little church on the hill that’s so famous in Poulsbo, and the real rocky hillside where all the graves are.

[25:55] I almost broke my ankle trying to climb up that hillside, and they weren’t even there. They were buried on the other end of town. And the records were gone, because during the night the church caught on fire, and it woke the town up because the bell started to melt, and it was ringing. Yeah. But all the records were lost, so…

[26:18] But anyway, the people that adopted Mother, Grandma Gina Olsen was born in Christiania, which is Oslo now. It used to be the capitol of Norway- so was Bergen at one time. What was I going to say? Oh, yeah. Grandpa Tegnander was half-Swedish. Tegnander is a pretty Swedish name. He was born up on Lofoten Islands- way up on the North Sea.

[26:54] The other grandmother- Mom’s real mother was the one I’ve been talking about- that came over here when her grandmother died, because she didn’t have anything that would keep her in Norway anymore. But they were young when they came here. Yeah, they were young.

[27:17] But both the Tegnander family… they adopted Mother. They couldn’t have a live child; they were all stillborn. They knew the Tegnanders. So when Grandma was distraught… They actually had to put my older… my aunt and my older uncle in a children’s home for a while because she had TB. She had no money. She had to go out and work for a living delivering babies, doing midwife and cleaning houses and things like that. She didn’t have any income.

[27:52] She didn’t know what had happened after her husband got killed. A woman that was living in the same boarding house… The family was in Duluth, where Mom had just been born, and Grandpa had gone to St. Paul to find work, and he lived in this boarding house. This woman had gone to the boarding house of the Great Northern Railroad, who owned the elevator that Grandpa had fallen from.

[28:27] And she had posed as my grandmother and got about five thousand dollars widows’ pension and skipped the country. And my grandmother didn’t even know about it until two years later, and she was long gone. They couldn’t trace her. So, she really had a tough time of it. That’s why she gave my mother up for adoption.

[28:55] But my mother was very… She found out she was adopted when she was a teenager. It was

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Christmas Eve, and there were two old ladies talking. And before that, I have to preface this a little bit. From the time Mom was young, this very pretty older girl was kind of stalking her. And she just thought, “Well, she has kind of taken a liking to me.” But she didn’t know it was her older sister. She lived down at the bottom of the hill on Lake Superior in the poorer district.

[29:28] One time she waylaid Mom on the way to school and dragged her into this house. There was a woman there. It was her birth mother, but mom never knew that. And the mother just looked her over and said something in Norwegian. And then one other time, she tried to kidnap my mother. She took her to Minneapolis on the train, and my grandfather had to go and fetch her back.

[29:54] She was just really obnoxious about it. And that’s why they moved to Spokane- just to get away from Marie, my aunt, which I later met. That grandmother married… years later, she married a Scotsman from Glasgow. They had a son and a baby daughter. The son lived until he was about fifty. He never married. He was kind of fun-loving. Sounds a lot like my Swedish grandfather.

[30:32] But anyway, so Grandma had two more children, so all in all she had five children that she gave birth to. But Harold died young in his sleep of heart trouble, and his father had gone to Scotland for his… when his mother died, and he died there of a heart attack. And they had a baby girl, but in those days, you know, they had no antibiotics, so a lot of babies… And it happened out here and it happened all over. A lot of babies didn’t make it to their first year. They were lucky if they lived six months, five months. There were no antibiotics if they got these awful fevers. And you see them everywhere in the old graveyards. That’s what happened to the little girl. I don’t even know her name, but there was another one.

[31:27] Dad… it was funny, he was from a very German family. His mother said all French women were hussies, and we had a little French connection. [Laughter] A Hugenot had married into the family. But he never… he didn’t speak anything but French, and that family didn’t either. But she thought all… Grandma Wise always thought that French women were ladies of the evening. [Laughter]

[32:03] But my father, being from a very German family… Both sides of the family, they were married in the Norwegian and the German language- very much so. They call us a melting pot, but we didn’t really melt. We kind of coexisted side by side, sometimes married into another bunch. But there were little pockets of Poles. At one time I think at one time there were more Poles in Chicago than there were in , .

Lynn: [32:33] Virginia?

Virginia: [32:34] Yeah?

Lynn: [32:35] What Scandinavian traditions have been passed down in your family?

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Virginia: [32:39] What?

Lynn: [32:40] What Scandinavian traditions have been passed down?

Virginia: [32:43] Oh, a lot of them. And especially after I married Ole. His folks were both from Norway- both of them. And they came over as young… His pa, Gilbert, was only about nineteen when he came here. He worked in one of the mills in Ballard. And Carrie came from Gudbrandsdal, which was a big area in Norway. And Gilbert came from Telemark.

[33:17] And that’s very famous for their Hardanger fiddles- their eight string fiddles that were encrusted with pearls and stuff. They’re beautiful; they’re beautiful. Even Fritz Kreisler, the violinist couldn’t master it. He said you had to be born to it. But they were a very musical family.

[33:41] Carrie and Gilbert actually met in the old Fremont Hotel. She was a maid where Harborview is now. It was a big… great big mansion. It was owned by a fellow by the name of Jacob Firth. It’s been written up in Paul Dorpat’s History of [Seattle].

[TAPE CUTS OUT 34:01]

Brandon: [34:03] So, tell us about some of your traditions… Nordic traditions.

Virginia: [34:07] Christmas Eve is a big part of Christmas to the Scandinavians. And I know my mother, when I was little, even though Dad wasn’t Scandinavian, we’d start that at an early age. Do you want to know something? I can remember when I lived in Phinney Ridge and I was four years old, we had real candles on the Christmas tree, still. Yeah. Yeah. So…

Brandon: [34:37] So you celebrate…

Virginia: [34:38] I’ve kind of made a big, long elliptical circuit, you know. I came to Seattle, and we rented four places. I know this is off the record. Dad was trying to find a place. He loved to garden. He wanted a nice, big home, and he wanted a place he could garden. He loved to garden. And we got the perfect place in Laurelhurst. But in the meantime, we rented… we were out here on the north end in four different places.

[35:16] The first one was Ravenna. The house is still there. The second one was East Greenlake. The house is still there. The third one was Phinney Ridge. I guess the house is still there. It’s right on 2 nd Northwest. And I went to kindergarten at West Woodland. The last one was Woodlawn Avenue. Then we moved out to Laurelhurst, and we were there until we were all grown up, and World War Two had started. And of course, I was in training at the time, or just got out of training. That’s when I came out to Ballard- just before the war started.

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[35:55] But my mom was always very proud of being Norwegian. But she didn’t look or act Norwegian. She acted like an Irish girl. She was five foot seven, she had green eyes and curly auburn hair, and full of the old nick. And all of her nine cousins- girl cousins- Uncle [inaudible 36:20] and his wife had nine girls and no boys- they were all little blue-eyed blondes. [Laughter]

[36:25] So, she grew up in Duluth being kind of a ringleader and mischief-maker. She saw… I told you about her coming to Seattle at an early age. She really saw what it looked like kind of toward the end of old Seattle, and the beginning of new, because everything was down in Pioneer Square in those days when she came. She loved it. She didn’t like Spokane, but she loved Seattle. It reminded her of home.

[36:52] But yes, we practiced the Scandinavian things. We didn’t dress up in bunads or anything like that, but she spoke the language and was proud of it. And when she finally ended up retiring from nursing, she lived right down there at the Golden Sunset when it first opened up. She liked to tweak her neighbors, because they didn’t know she was Scandinavian.

[37:23] One time in the laundry room, these two women were saying, “I wonder how come they let a Jew in here?” And she didn’t say a thing, but when she went to the door she opened it up, and turned back and looked at them and said something very sweet in Norwegian and left them with their jaws hanging down. [Laughter] But she just loved to come to visit us before she actually moved here. Because she said, “When you’re grown up, I’m going to go to Ballard and live with the real people again.”

Brandon: [37:59] When you were growing up, did you ever go to a church service that was in Norwegian?”

Virginia: [38:03] I didn’t, no. But I went to the… of course, we belonged to the Lutheran Church over on University Way- right there in the heart of the fraternity and sorority district, right off campus. It was beautiful, the University District. Oh, it was just a lovely place. And that was our downtown, because we lived out in the sticks.

[38:27] But when I married Ole, I really… And Mom enjoyed that, because that’s what she was used to. But I’ve got pictures in my album of all her cousins dressed in their bunads- you know, their regional costumes. And Ole and I joined Leif Erikson. We moved to Ballard in 1953, but his folks had always been very active in things. Of course, his father was the charter member of the Norwegian Male Chorus. And two of Tom’s cousins sing in it now.

Brandon: [39:05] That’s great.

Virginia: [39:06] I think I better quit for a minute.

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Brandon: [39:09] Okay.

[Pause 39:10 – 39:14]

Virginia: [39:15] Of the four of us siblings, I was the second oldest. I’m the one that kind of took on the Scandinavian part from the early days. My sister eventually moved to Ballard before she died, but she was very interested in it, too. And we’ve always gone to the parades. I can remember the first parade we went to was a walking parade down on Market Street. It only lasted an hour.

[39:48] But I got some little outfits that looked like they might be Scandinavian. They were actually probably Girl Scout of camp deals- to two of my granddaughters and got them all dressed up. I made little aprons for them, and they were hopping along. But we used to stand outside the library on 24 th and watch the parades. We still go- Tom and I go, and some of the brothers that can get away.

Brandon: [40:22] Are you still involved with any of the organizations?

Virginia: [40:26] I belong to Leif Erikson.

Brandon: [40:28] Leif Erikson.

Virginia: [40:29] I got my twenty-five year pin this year. And Ole would have, but he died in 1998. We’d go there. But yeah… But you know, I’m only half, so… But I don’t think that makes my… But I was active in church. I belong to the Norwegian circle at at Ballard First. I’m the only one left now. But they were a sturdy bunch of people.

[41:03] But it’s just too bad that they didn’t fix the church up- the entrance, so it was easier for the older people to get in. They’ve done a beautiful job. They’ve got the ramp; they’ve got the elevator. And they’ve fixed the entrance in front so you don’t have to walk up a big flight of stairs. But I’m about the only one left of the old bunch, still alive.

[41:30] In fact, I was at the services on Maundy Thursday, and one lady turned around and smiled at me. I think there’s about two or three of us left of the old bunch. Bertha… I think it was Bertha… I don’t know; I think it’s Petersen or Andersen or something. Anyway, she wanted to live to see the bell put back in the bell tower. Well, she didn’t make it, but her daughter pushed it through. And it rings at noon now in Ballard and at six o’clock. That meant a lot to…

[42:09] But I just… I miss the old deli. We’ve got the lodge, and we’ve got our history here, but it just… I don’t know… it just… I’m glad the boys… my boys and my daughter- I had five boys- Tom is next to youngest, and I have a daughter. She’s in a nursing home- Columbia Lutheran. But

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I’m glad they had a chance to grow up in Ballard.

Brandon: [42:45] It sounds like you’ve seen a lot of changes in Ballard.

Virginia: [42:46] Oh, yes. Of course, there’s so much history. The one that can really supply you with background… Because he was born, actually, out in Woodinville, on part of the old farm. The folks, they moved in 1901. They had two sons born here on Leary Way [at the Westin House, now Senor Moose café], after they were married here. And then they moved out in 1901 and had eight more children. My husband was one of eight boys and two girls.

[43:23] One son, the second one born here in Ballard died of TB and the Spanish Flu, probably in 1919. He was about twenty years old… 1920. But they all lived to a ripe old age. My husband was eighty-nine. Most of them were… One of his older brothers was ninety-eight. He lived up Norse Home. But there was a real rich history. Of course, my mom gave me an early insight to our Scandinavian background, but the German side never talked about anything. [Laughter] They didn’t.

Lynn: [44:09] Did anyone in your family stay in touch with anyone…

Virginia: [44:12] Pardon?

Lynn: [44:13] Did anyone in your family stay in touch with family members back in Norway?

Virginia: [44:20] Well, my mother didn’t have anybody left, but oh, yes. In fact, one of my brother- in-laws and his wife went back there for several trips, because her father was born in Norway. [Inaudible 44:33]- the Gundersens. She was born right over here in Interbay. Myrtle was older than I was. But no, they were very close to their family history.

[44:49] And they had… Their mother’s people, the Fosbergs, lived across the Sound, and they traveled back and forth between Woodinville and Ballard and Poulsbo and Central Valley. They were big families. They had so many relatives. My kids have over twenty-one first cousins alone. I only had six, and only knew two of them that grew up here in Seattle. But I met them eventually. And I have three left that I correspond with on my side.

[45:23] But the Ormbreks were very… and the Fosbergs- family was a big thing to them, and it still is. But Howard Ormbrek, who lives over on the east side, was the oldest son of Ole’s oldest brother- Theodore Howard. He finished high school. He came over here as a young boy to live in Ballard, and he grew up in his grandmother’s home. His mother had become ill, and she was in a hospital for years. So his father kind of shipped his kids around to foster homes and everything, but they always kept up with family.

[46:14] And we’re the only ones that keep that pioneer picnic, so-called- the Sammamish Valley

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picnic out in Bothell every July. Because of the Ormbreks, we still have it, but they were almost ready to shut it down because all the old-timers are dead. It used to be a huge picnic, because it was a valley picnic, from all over Hollywood, and all over, you know. Hollywood Hills, and all that area. And of course… what am I thinking of, the little town out there. What is it, Tom?

Tom Ormbrek: [46:55] It was Bothell.

Virginia: [46:56] Bothell? Yeah. Bothell. Yeah. Yeah. But no, they’re very much for family and family history. My mom was, too, in her little way. She just kept things going. She was very, very… And then she was a night nurse for years before she did retire… until she retired and had more leisure. She loved to come over here. She loved visiting with my in-laws, you know. Of course, she could speak Norwegian, too, and I couldn’t. [Laughter]

[47:40] But I did go to night school with a neighbor. Ole’s family are very clannish, and they still are. We get together for birthdays. And I’m… because I’m the oldest one left now, they kind of spoil me. We get together for birthdays and go to Patty’s Eggnest or wherever. We get together. Howard still sings in the Norwegian Male Chorus, and one of his cousins, Harold Edwards used to, too, but he moved out to Edmonds, and it’s hard for him to come in now. Their grandfather was a charter member of that. For a while my son Karl sang in it, but he was too busy with his own affairs and his wife.

[48:35] The boys were all… Tom especially, but they are all interested in their dad’s family, because there are so many of them, you know. They also got to know my family, too, because there weren’t that many of us. But it just boggles my mind, because I only had two cousins on my side, growing up. I always thought it would be fun to come from a big family and have a lot of cousins. [Laughter] And my kids sure do. They don’t even begin to know them all.

Brandon: [49:14] So Virginia, did you ever visit Norway?

Virginia: [49:17] No, I never did. But I would have loved to have gone up to Alaska. My sister, who is the baby of our family- she married her high school sweetheart in a log cabin Lutheran Church in Fairbanks, in 1953. They lived there when it was a territory. Both their children were born there, and when they got their statehood… And I thought, “Oh, I’d love to…” We were going to take a trip on an Alaskan ferry, go up and see all the sights. But she died of breast cancer. She had just turned fifty- eight, and she died of breast cancer the year I moved up the hill to the apartment where I live on 24 th , now.

[50:04] But we lived in… we came here when Tom wasn’t quite two years old, from the south end. We nearly always lived in the north end, but we did a lot of moving around during our marriage. Finally we lived somewhere, thank goodness. When our last son was born, we lived on Jones. Then we had a big old house on 18 th and lived there. That was our longest home. But Tom was just a baby

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when we moved to Ballard. Norman is the youngest. He’s the only one that doesn’t live out on the north end. He lives in Federal Way. But he works for Blackstock Lumber.

[50:53] Tom has a great memory, and he loves to collect information about our family, and he just keeps it going. Of course, Ole wasn’t one to visit much, and travel much, but we’ve gone… We’ve seen some of the places… I haven’t been to see where my mother lived in Minnesota, or my dad in Wisconsin, or my grandmother in Galena. But I know a lot about the Ormbreks. But I love to write, and I’ve been writing all this stuff about my family since before I was ever married. Because I just like to write. I can’t make up things, so I’m more of a journal writer- diary writer.

[51:52] But my mother just… She just told me things in such a fashion that fascinated me. She gave me all this information about her side of the family. And then… but there’s a wealth of information about the Ormbreks. And Howard remembers so much, because he’s one of the older cousins. And he’s in his eighties now. And so is Harold- Harold Edwards, and Corky Dragland. The Dragland family- they were married into the Ormbrek family, too. They were Norwegians. But…

Brandon: [52:39] Well, Virginia, it sounds like you lived a rich life.

Virginia: [51:43] Oh, well, you know…

Brandon: [51:43] You’ve had a lot of great experiences here in Ballard and Seattle.

Virginia: [51:46] You know, I don’t know whether time is gone, but it’s like a million light years away since I was young, but you live many lifetimes when you live to be as old as I am. I don’t know how come I’m still around. None of my family ever lived this long. Never. My mother was eighty- two and a half. But Dad died young, at seventy-one. His sisters both died before they were sixty-five. But Mom lived to eighty-two and a half. She would have kept on working past seventy-one, but she lost her eyesight. But she still talked about going back for a couple days a week to keep her hand in it. [Laughter]

[53:32] But she was very proud of being Scandinavian. From what I gather, because I was going to mention the fact that her father of course had been killed. Her family was in dire straits growing up. They really had it tough. They lived down toward the shores of Lake Superior. And there was a terrible fire, and people just got out with the clothes on their back, and all their family records were burned up. There were no pictures of them.

[54:11] Of course, I knew my aunt and uncle, because I met them when I was older. I was married and had children. We stopped there one time when we had gone back to see Ole’s brother Gilbert, who was in a nursing home in Wisconsin. We went to Madison, Wisconsin. And that is one beautiful, clean state. You don’t see litter anywhere.

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[54:40] Even, you know, in Milwaukee, the big old beer town, you don’t see litter in the streets or out on the freeway like you do around here. They were super-clean, I tell you. That was a lot of fun, but I didn’t get to see where my folks actually grew up, you know. But I saw Ronald Reagan’s home. Because everywhere you go on the Mississippi you’re in one state after another, you know. You cross the river, and you’re in another state. So that was a lot of fun.

Brandon: [55:17] That’s great.

Virginia: [55:18] Yeah.

Lynn: [55:19] I think we’ve gotten a lot of information.

Virginia: [55:22] Oh, yeah. I know. You’ve heard a lot of talk, jumping around. My mom was very, very proud of being who she was. But she… when people would ask her if she was Norwegian, she said, “No, I’m an American of Scandinavian descent.” But some of them, to this day, they say, “I’m Norwegian.” Well, they’re not. But a lot of their parents came over, and they talked broken all their lives.

[55:52] I know my mother-in-law did not… I never met my father-in-law, because he died before I met Ole. But they never lost their accent. But Mom was very… She was very proud of who she was. But for some reason or other, Dad being German, he liked the French better than he liked the Germans. [Laughter] I think it was World War One- he must have met a mademoiselle over in France.

Lynn: [56:23] You certainly have a very rich family history.

Brandon: [56:26] Yes.

Virginia: [56:26] I just love talking about it. It would have been nice to go to Norway, but I really wanted to go to Alaska. But Tom has been. Yeah. He’s been to Alaska.

Brandon: [56:42] That’s great. Thanks so much for spending your time this morning, and telling your story.

Virginia: [56:44] Thank you. And I hope you get something out of this with all my rambling. I know I take off and kind of wander around. But it just… to me, writing is like painting with words. And I love to write. And I love to write about something I know of, or have heard of. I can’t make up stuff. I can’t make up fiction. I can’t do it. You have to have a special kind of imagination to do that, but I don’t have it.

Lynn: [57:15] Well, we certainly appreciate you sharing with us today.

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Virginia: [57:17] Yeah. Yeah.

END OF RECORDING.

Transcription by Alison Goetz.

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