Nordic American Voices Nordic Heritage Museum

Interview of Ulla Rudd April 19, 2014 Seattle, Washington

Interviewers: Gordon Strand; Michelle Eastman; Jette Bunch; Dan Kaylor

Michelle Eastman: [0:10] This is an interview for the Nordic American Voices oral history project. Today is April 19, and I’ll be interviewing Ulla Rudd. We are at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle, Washington. My name is Michelle Eastman, and I will be working today with…

Gordon Strand: [0:33] Gordon Strand.

Jette Bunch: [0:34] Jette Bunch.

Dan Kaylor: [0:35] Dan Kaylor.

Ulla Rudd: [0:39] Hi.

Gordon: [0:40] So, will you give us your name, date of birth- year you were born, where you were born, and then we want you to start with your immigration story.

Ulla: [0:49] Okay. My name is Ulla Rudd Bernadelli. I was born the 20 th of November, 1940, in Copenhagen. Since it was during the occupation, I was born at home. My sister two years older than me was born at the hospital close by. I would like to talk about my parents a little bit.

Michelle: [1:19] What were the names of your parents?

Ulla: [0:21] My father’s name was Harry William Christiansen. My mother was Elna Viola, and originally Petersen. There’s a lot of Petersens on my father’s side going way, way back. I have the

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genealogy papers to 1750, and there were Petersens based on my great-grandmother. But anyway, we were Christiansen. In Denmark, that was considered a little better than being a Christensen. I’m just pointing that out.

[1:57] Anyway, we lived in a small apartment that was part of a co-op, called… I’ll say it in Danish: [Danish words 2:09 – 2:12]. And my parents were members. When we were born- when my sister and myself were born, they signed us up to be members so that hopefully someday when we were adults, we would have been members long enough to get an apartment. It was very, very sparse with apartments in those days. Everybody we knew lived in an apartment, except for the families that lived out of the city.

[2:46] We lived in Bispebjerg, which is about fifteen minutes by streetcar from the center of Copenhagen. It was a very open area. We had lots of greenery. It was an almost new building, and we lived on the second floor. It was a walkup. My father was a tailor, and my mother had the same training that he did, although she was called a seamstress, but she was actually a tailor as well. They went through four years of apprenticeship to become a tailor.

[3:24] And my father had very different kinds of ideas. He did not believe in capitalism, for instance. He felt you would be taking advantage of another person if they worked for you. So he did everything himself, with my mother’s help. She basically never worked outside of the home. She helped him. So we actually had very small living quarters, because he took the one bedroom and used it for his workshop, basically. And we only had two other rooms, and a kitchen.

[4:07] I had my sister; my brother was five years younger, and myself, and the three of us lived in that other room. My parents lived in a pullout sofa in the living room. There was a small balcony that my mother loved. We didn’t feel like our circumstances were any worse, or different than anybody else that we knew at that time. But I’m talking about here after the war.

[4:37] Now, I want to get into a little bit during the war, because I do remember some things. One thing I personally remember is that right across the street from us was a brand new school that went all the way from the beginning through high school. And they had a big, huge play area with a lawn. And the school was kind of unique, because it was cut right down the middle. Girls were only on

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one side, and boys were only on the other side. So basically we never had school or sat in a classroom with any of the boys. We were not allowed on their side; they were not allowed on our side. In the middle, we had a big, huge hall room, like a ballroom where all announcements and so on took place.

[5:34] Anyway, on this big, huge playfield, the Germans had bunkers. They had their helmets on, and they had guards outside with guns- with the big, long guns with the bayonets at the end. And I remember that. And we had a very free, sort of… We could run around. Basically, we had a very big play area. I don’t remember being restricted. And we had lots of kids in the area there that we could play with.

[6:12] So when I was about three years old, we would go over to the bunkers, and tease the Germans, you might say. We said, “Nazi swine,” and they would point their guns at us, and we would squeal and run away. I mean, it was like a big game. I mean, they could have shot us, I suppose. Anyway, that’s one thing I remember personally.

[6:41] My father was in the underground. What that consisted of was not so much sabotage as delivering news- carrying on the news. We lived in… People that came to our apartment only introduced themselves by first name, and it was not their real name. They would then deliver news. My father would carry it on and deliver it to somebody else.

[7:18] We had a small electric… like a box. There was a hollowed-out area behind it, and that’s where the papers were kept. And I remember that we were told, even as young as we were, “No matter what ever happens, you never tell the Germans about that place.” And I knew that. I mean, I was only five years old, or four-and-a-half when the war was over, but I knew that you never… I mean, they could do anything to any one of us, and we would never tell them where that place was.

[7:57] So that’s one thing I remember. Another thing I remember is that when the Germans wanted to round up the Jews, we had a Jewish lady that lived across the street with her daughter. And my father… We had them in our apartment for one week, until they could get across to Sweden. And her name was Judy. I remember that. And I remember how… It’s kind of family history, lore- how proud we were of being able to do this.

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[8:35] So you know, we participated in resisting the Germans. Another memory I have is standing by, looking out… Of course, I remember the black curtains coming down every night. I remember the sirens, and we’d all run down in the basement. And I’d see all my neighbors in their nightclothes, and they’d bring their comforters. I remember sitting around the walls with comforters, seeing all our neighbors in whatever they were wearing when the sirens came down, and it was kind of fun. It was just normal to me. That’s what you do. [Laughter]

[9:19] And I remember once during the daytime there was a raid, and I was standing by the window with my mother, looking out. We could see into Copenhagen from there, and we saw the flights… the bombers coming in and dropping bombs. And of course, this was American and English dropping bombs on Copenhagen because they were trying to get the Nazi headquarters. They were not trying to get the Danes. We were definitely resisting the Germans, and they knew that. But what happened, they had an accident, and they dropped bombs on a Catholic school. Lots of children were killed. Hundreds of children were killed.

[10:11] That I didn’t remember, but I remember hearing about it. Then after I was born… I’ll get back to the beginning. My mother was not well. She always had problems with her thyroid, and she had a goiter. Three times in her life she had an operation where they basically would cut her from one end to the other. She had to be awake, and they would remove part of the goiter, and it always would come back.

[10:46] But anyway, after I was born, she was very weak. They went by bicycle to my father’s sister, who lived out of Copenhagen. And they went past the German checkpoint. I was a brand-new baby. I was probably only six weeks old, or whatever. And my mother fainted, and I fell out of the basket. So basically, that explains it, I guess. [Laughter] My sister was on the back of my father’s bicycle, since they only had two at a time.

[11:21] So my aunt had me and actually took care of me for one full year. So I was always very, very close to my aunt. She was really like my second mother. Later on when I was a child, I spent all my summers at her place. She had a beautiful big house. They had the biggest plant nursery in northern Sealand. It was just a child’s paradise to play there. So every summer I escaped Copenhagen, the city

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life, or whatever. Even if we did have lots of space there, I was lucky to be out there. Okay, you want to ask me some questions, because I can talk a lot. [Laughter]

Jette: [12:07] How do you say your name? Is it Rudd?

Ulla: [12:09] It’s Rudd.

Jette: [12:10] Rudd. Okay.

Ulla: [12:12] Anyway, so when I was… Okay, more about the war. I remember when the war was over, and I remember the celebrations- people riding on top of the streetcars to go into the center of Copenhagen. They always had… Anytime anything happened in Copenhagen, everybody would go to the town hall square and celebrate. And I just remember seeing these people on top of the streetcars.

[12:47] I also remember the school was kept for German… let’s say sympathizers. A lot of women and children that had been German sympathizers were at the school. When the war was over, they actually walked right past our apartment, and their hair had been cut off. I remember the silence. Nobody yelled. There was just hostility. You know, hatred; silence. But nobody yelled. Nobody threw things at them, that I remember.

[13:29] But also I remember after the war, one of our friends who was in the underground had been sent to a concentration camp in Germany. Apparently he had been found out. He came back with a wound. I guess I never really thought about what happened, but I think they must have broken his leg. He came back with an open wound. You could see the bone on his… It could not close up. And I guess he died young. I don’t remember exactly what happened to him after that.

[14:09] I also remember we had a very, very bad winter. I remember walking on the ice on the ocean between Copenhagen and Sweden. And we almost… I mean, you get out to the middle there, and they had kept a small lane open. And we saw ducks frozen in the ice. They were still alive. We tried to cut one duck out of the ice, and of course it died anyway. But that’s one of my memories.

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Gordon: [14:46] Was that after the war?

Ulla: [14:49] I don’t know.

Gordon: [14:50] Okay.

Ulla: [14:52] I just remember walking on the ocean. Anyway, so later on after the war… Well, I’ll tell you about my father a little bit, because he was a very interesting man. He was sort of a leader, you might say- an intellectual. And people would come and listen to him. They would sit around the table, and he would carry on and talk about his beliefs. He believed in communism. And he was an idealist. I always heard that from everybody. “Your dad is an idealist.” He believed communism was the answer, and heaven on earth- that type of thing.

[15:38] So he was a very strong believer. I don’t believe he ever was a card-carrying communist, but he definitely believed in that. And in 1957, when the Russians invaded Hungary, he just fell apart. That was the end of his belief. He realized all his life he had believed the wrong thing, and he actually died a year later. He was only forty-nine years old. They said it broke his heart. Anyway, he was a very good man.

Jette: [16:20] What can you tell us about your grandparents, and maybe even further back?

Ulla: [16:25] Sure. I can tell you about a lot of things. Really, my father’s family came from Funen. They lived in a very small village. I also spent time there as a child. It was just like being in the Middle Ages. At the end of the street was the ironsmith. He would bang. He had a big, open fire. There were basically farms, and one street. And so anyway, in this one house that my grandfather lived in previously, there was a memorial in the front, in the stone, that somebody had lived there who knew one hundred and forty-eight languages. For some reason I remember that, and that’s what it said on this thing. Anyway, my grandfather… Do you want to hear the whole story? [Laughter]

Gordon: [17:27] Sure.

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Dan: [17:28] Sure.

Michelle: [17:29] Yes.

Ulla: [17:31] My grandfather, he had a unique history, because my great-grandmother, she worked at a big estate. There was a count. I could tell you the name, but I guess I won’t. Anyway, they had a castle there. She worked there. The son of the count got her pregnant. And so she was pregnant with my grandfather. So after that, before she had my grandfather, they sent her off to get married to this man named Christiansen, and that’s how we got the name. And his reward was, he got a ticket to America. So he got my grandfather to be legitimate. And she went on and married two more times.

[18:29] My grandfather was a very stately, very beautiful man. I remember him with a white beard, and very straight back, and pink cheeks. He was a very good-looking older man. And he was also very, very strict. He and my grandmother had seven children. My father was the oldest. He established the Methodist church in his village. I remember sitting on the stairs and listening to sermons, you might say. He prohibited any of his children from singing, or dancing, or having very much fun.

[19:12] He was also a tailor. My father… There were four brothers. Every one of them became a tailor. [Laughter] In those days, you didn’t have very many choices. Everybody else of these children- you know, four boys and three girls, stayed in the area, except for the one lady that ended up being my second mother. She became a nurse. But my father was a rebel in more ways than one, and so he left Funen and went to Copenhagen, and that was like going to America in those days.

[19:51] So that was his family. But later on here, I got the history of the family- of my great- grandmother. And her name was Petersen, and they came from the west coast of Jutland in the 1700s. And they were all Petersens, and they were all farmers, I guess, because they came from close to the Atlantic Ocean there.

Jette: [20:27] What part?

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Ulla: [20:29] Well, west Jutland. I don’t know… I mean, I do. I could look it up.

Jette: [20:36] Was that your mother’s family?

Ulla: [20:37] That was my father’s family.

Jette: [20:39] Okay.

Ulla: [20:40] On this grandmother’s side. My mother’s family was from Copenhagen. They were totally different. The two really didn’t have anything… I mean, it was like my mother married up when she married my father. And my mother’s parents were… I loved my grandmother. She was absolutely wonderful. But she was downtrodden by my grandfather, who was a bully. A very fiery type person; very huge temperament. He sure didn’t look Danish, but he was, of course, Danish.

[21:33] My mother’s two brothers both worked for Tuborg Brewery. One became a foreman; the other one did not. But I remember them talking about, if you worked at the brewery, you could drink eight beers a day. And so everybody there, I suppose, was high. [Laughter] It was a good place to become an alcoholic. Two of them were alcoholics, I guess- my grandfather and the oldest man there. The other one quit drinking and became a foreman at Tuborg. [Laughter]

[22:21] Okay. So that was basically the family. When we had Christmas, it generally was at our place. The second Christmas Day, we would be at my grandparents’ in Copenhagen. We would eat and drink all day long, from about noon to about nine or ten o’clock at night.

Jette: [22:51] On the 24 th ?

Ulla: [22:52] On the 25 th . The 24 th , Christmas Eve, was always at our house. It was very, very… At our apartment. It was very, very nice. We had a big Christmas tree, all the live candles. We never saw them lit until… We’d wait outside the door, and my father would go in and light the candles. And we would dance around the Christmas tree and sing the songs. And for the first time all year, we would see oranges. My sister and I just loved the oranges. That was better than anything else.

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[23:31] I remember after the war, I had never seen a banana, and there was… I guess every family got a certain number of bananas, and we were so excited about it. [Laughter] And so when I finally got a taste of a banana, I thought it was very, very horrible. I think we ate them green. [Laughter] We didn’t know how to wait. And I remember my father had a coconut that he tried to open, way after the war.

[24:04] So anyway, we lived in an area where the streetcar would come down. We lived sort of at the bottom of a hill. And I remember the screeching of the brakes coming down. It was just part of life. We always heard that. And then sometime either toward the end of the war, or maybe the first year after the war, there were hardly any cars around. And I remember everybody rode horses and buggies up and down the streets of Copenhagen.

[24:34] I was standing once on the side of the main street, and there was a horse and buggy, and the horses had gone wild, galloping from one end of the street to the other. Kids were being thrown off. There were four children on there, and they were being thrown off. And a man- I was standing right there- came right by me, and a man came out and stood right out where the horses were galloping toward him, and they reared up and stopped. So he was a real hero.

[25:12] I also remember… I don’t know why I had all these really horrible memories, but I remember a boy… I went to the baker one day, which I did almost every day, right across the street there. And a boy had fallen underneath the streetcar. All these men lifted the streetcar and got him out. And it was incredible. So he survived.

[25:43] So anyway, I was very, very active as a child. I loved school. I did very, very well in school. I loved math, especially. And whenever I’d do my homework, the whole class got to copy it. And so I remember once… I still meet my fifth grade schoolmates, all girls, once a year. We still meet. They still get together. And they were telling me last time I was in Copenhagen about three years ago that they remember once I made one mistake, and the teacher said, “Well, Ulla, you made a mistake this time.” Because the whole class had the same mistake. [Laughter]

[26:38] Anyway, I did a lot of acrobatics on my own. I didn’t really have any teacher or any coach, or anything else. But I would do my routine over there on the lawn. I guess somebody saw me, and so

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they wanted me to go to the circus when I was ten years old. So I was in the circus. I had a little show there. I was called The Little Tumbler. I loved it. I had no problem performing. The problem is that I was allergic to the horses. I didn’t know that. So I woke up in the middle of the night after a couple of these performances, and almost… I guess I almost died because I was unconscious. And I just woke up, and there was the doctor. He came in the middle of the night and gave me an injection.

[27:41] After that, with a very good… At the time… I don’t know what it’s like now, but the social medicine was very good. I got a daily injection for four years of antihistamine. I was sent away twice during my childhood to asthma homes- once in Denmark, in Jutland- [inaudible 28:10], which is way out in the boonies. It’s a very sort of dark place. Heath, it’s like a heath there. And very, very cold. I was there for four months- just jerked out of my existence two weeks before Christmas with no advance warning, and sent to this place. Of course I was devastated.

[28:38] But I quickly recuperated, and actually probably had a good time. When I came back to Copenhagen, I spoke the dialect, and I remember people laughing at me. And I remember I wrote a play, and I went into the principal’s office there in this big school, with my accent. And I said, “Can we please borrow the big hall, because we want to put on a play and make money for the children in Greenland.” And he said, “Sure.” So we put on a show. People paid money to see it. It was a play. I had written the play; I directed it, and I had the main role. [Laughter] So we put it on for two nights.

[29:27] Later on when I was thirteen and a half, I was sent to Norway for three months. I was in Kongsberg, and I loved it. The main cure in both of these places, other than getting injections, was we were outside. They kicked us outside from early morning until dinnertime. We came in to eat. We all wore wooden boots, and we all wore the same clothes- heavy wool. We weren’t cold or anything, but we were outside. It was also in the winter, for four months. Basically, I got cured there. I got cured of my asthma.

Gordon: [30:11] Asthma. I was going to ask you that.

Ulla: [30:13] Yeah. I was totally fine after that, and never really had any recurrence until I got a lot of bronchitis in my late forties, which I am practically over now. Anyway, what else can I tell you? I

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was always, like I said, very, very good in school. But when I was fifteen, sixteen, there was a lot of uproar in my family, because my older sister created a huge problem. She was very, very beautiful, actually, and she was number two Miss Denmark runner-up. She was a model. She was so talented. She was a painter. Her paintings actually sold when she was fourteen years old.

[31:08] She was, however, very beautiful, and my father was frantic that she not get in any trouble. She had a curfew. And I remember once I think she didn’t make the curfew, which was eleven o’clock at night. And he would hit her. I remember her being hit. And then after that, she once missed her curfew when she was almost eighteen, so she didn’t dare come home, and so she married the guy. So she got married when she was like barely eighteen. There was so much uproar there, so I got sort of rebellious myself, but in a fun way. I had a good time.

[32:00] Copenhagen was totally safe. It was the safest big city-small town. You could walk anywhere at night, two a.m., whatever, and absolutely nothing would ever happen to you. So I had three or four girlfriends. We would get in the streetcar, and we would go downtown on Friday and Saturday, and go to jazz clubs, when I was fifteen, sixteen years old. And I just loved the jazz. It was New Orleans jazz. Copenhagen was a center for New Orleans jazz.

[32:40] And we went to… there were two jazz clubs, especially- one called Montmartre, and one called [inaudible 32:48]. And we went to [inaudible 32:51] and heard Papa Bue’s Viking Jazz Band. It was very innocent. We drank tea. We smoked a pipe. We each had a pipe. We wore white fluorescent lipstick, long straight hair, and corduroy, and wooden boots. Wooden shoes, not boots.

[33:15] Anyway, so I chose not to go to gymnasium, because I just wanted to get out of school, and I guess I just wanted to get away from my family, probably, with my sister’s problems, and everything. So I went realexam , which is… You get ten… How many years do you get? I can’t remember. Ten years, I think, of school. I remember shortly before graduation, my teacher told all of us, “By the way, I have an opening, or a phone number if someone is interested in going to England to become an au pair.”

[34:02] Well, ten of us wanted to go. And I think about five of us ended up going. We were all in the same area of Leicester- you know, middle, England. And I was there. I ended up in a wonderful

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family. I absolutely loved them. And I had contact with them for about thirty years after that. They came and visited me. I would actually hire girls for them for the next six or seven years. Anyway, I was there after about, I think, a year… I stayed for a year and a half because I loved it so much. I went to college there.

[34:45] Then I got a message: “Your father is dying.” So, I was only seventeen. I went back to Denmark and saw him in the hospital bed, and he died. And my mother had never worked outside of the home. She basically had a nervous breakdown, and I took care of everything. My sister was not able to do anything. My brother was too young. And so I took care of everything. And I took care of my mother. But you know, we quickly realized that because of my father’s strange ideas on economics, there was nothing there for her.

[35:32] And so, she actually… My aunt, my second mother, said to me, “Ulla, you need to get out of here, because otherwise you’re never going to be leaving.” Because she realized I was just taking care of my mother. And so I went back to England, and my mother went into a rest home for about three months. And then she took a course in typing, and went to work as a secretary, and she worked for ten years for this big clothing concern that my father had worked for.

[36:15] And it was just horrible. I remember her sitting there in this building. I came to see her, and I said, “Why don’t you try to get another job?” But she was so scared of doing that; she never really tried to get anything else. The place was full of dust. And she worked so hard. Anyway, she got breast cancer when she was fifty-two, and she died at fifty-four. But she was actually a widow when she was forty-two. So anyway, that’s what happened to my parents.

[36:50] Before… how did I get to America? Well, anyway, I was in England for that time, and became, of course, totally fluent in English. I actually had an English accent, a very nice English accent. Then when I came back to Copenhagen, I worked for a travel agency- Thomas Cook’s Travel Agency- right in the middle of the town hall, right on the corner of the town hall square, for about one year.

[37:26] Then I went to work for Associated Press, where I would get all the news coming in, and pass it one to the newspapers by Telex, which was really interesting. But I was more or less in the

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stock market department. But I also… If I was there late at night, would get all the news. I remember one time, Queen Elizabeth was having her fourth child, and everybody was wondering, is it a boy or a girl. And I was the first one in Denmark to know what it was and send it on.

[38:02] Anyway, I was there for one year, and then I went to work for a company. It was an import- export-type dental supply company. Basically I was the private secretary where I would write all the letters in English, and so on, and other… Well, yeah. English at first, then… Well, I guess I forgot something. After associated press, I went to Germany, and lived in Germany for over a year. And we tried… I went with a girlfriend. We each had a place to stay, you know, a very nice family to stay with in Frankfurt.

[38:54] Then we went to the university- Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität, twice during the week. But it turned out not to work out with the Germans. They did not understand the fact that were supposed to be members of the family. I was treated as a very low-lying servant. I remember once I was asked to polish their shoes, which I did, I mean, no problem. And she told me I should have been in Hitlerjugend and I would have learned how to polish boots. And that was the end of that for me. So I quit.

[39:40] But before I quit, it was kind of interesting living there. I had a walkup on the third floor, where I had a little tiny room. My staircase was on the outside of the building. She wanted me down in the kitchen at six or five-thirty, or something, getting ready to feed the baby. They had a lovely baby there. And I had to feed him on a silver tray. They had a beautiful, beautiful apartment- all high ceilings, and about eleven rooms.

[40:13] And the lady there complained that during the war, the Allies had taken over the apartment as a headquarters, and she complained that some of her things had vanished. And I said, “Well, you got it back, didn’t you?” [Laughter] “You’ve got your apartment back, and most of your furniture.” She said, “Yes. Yeah, well…” It wasn’t good enough. She also had the mistaken idea that the Danes were Allied with the Germans. I told her in no uncertain terms that is not the way it was, and that my father was in the underground. So she and I were a bit at each other’s throats, you might say.

Jette: [41:02] How long did it last?

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Ulla: [41:03] Two months. [Laughter] Then my girlfriend and I… She had the same kind of experience where she was. And this was in 1960. So you know, fifteen years after the war. Anyway, we got a job as faktoristen , meaning typists, in a German company [inaudible 41:29] Braun. They make kitchen… you know, all kinds of kitchen… Coffeemakers, all kinds of things.

[41:40] And we really enjoyed that. It was quite an experience. And we still went to University in the afternoon. When you got there in the morning- it was like three hundred people that worked there- you had to shake hands with everybody you could possibly see. And the same thing at night. “Morgen, morgen .” And then at night, you’d shake hands, and so on.

[42:07] We were very proud of being independent. My girlfriend and I, we found a room actually in a ruin. We lived in a ruin. Because if you looked at it from a distance, it was not finished on top. And we had kitchen facilities. But we were independent. We got no money from home, and we didn’t want any money from home.

[42:31] And anyway, so I remember once we were completely out of money, and we still had two days to get paid, so… It was in the winter. It was snowing, and so we’d walk to and from work, and on the weekend we’d peel potatoes in a restaurant. We got sort of tanned, and people at work would say, “Wow, have you been on vacation?” [Laughter] Anyway, so that’s where I learned my German. I did, of course, become fluent in German. Do you want to hear more about my German experience? [Laughter]

Jette: [43:11] How long were you there?

Ulla: [43:12] I was there for over a year. And in my little group… I’ll tell you about my little group. There were six or seven people, and we were all women. And we had one young man who was younger than some of the women there. And of course the rest of them were all German. And he was in charge. He was our boss. He was like twenty-one years old. One of the women was in her thirties, and I thought she was very old. She said… We talked about the war once or twice, very carefully. She said, “Well, at least Hitler did one thing good. He got rid of all those Jews.” I’ll never forget her saying that.

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[44:06] So anyway, after Germany, that is when I worked at the dental supply, doing all their correspondence in English, German, and I had taken Spanish classes on the side, and I actually got a degree in Spanish, so I did that, too. Then I was still only twenty-two years old. I lived with my mother until the day I came to America. My brother had gotten married, and there was just the two of us there. Same place.

[44:47] My grandmother saw an ad in the paper that Pan Am was looking to hire, and they were going to be interviewing in Copenhagen. I remember my mother was very upset that she told me that, because obviously she did not want me to leave.

[45:06] So anyway, I went for the interview. It was at the Palace Hotel in Copenhagen. There were three hundred women that showed up for this interview. And there was one young man from New York who was doing the preliminary interview. He had said to everybody, “If you pass here, you will get a letter in about two weeks. And I remember he said to me, “You don’t have to wait for the letter. You will come back for the second interview.” Okay. So then I got really excited.

[45:49] When I went for the second interview, there were seven people from New York that had come. And they sat in this big room with the window behind them with the sun coming in. And to me, they were like… I could just see silhouettes of them. I couldn’t really see their faces. I sat in the middle of the room on one chair, and they asked me a few questions basically in French. I had a little bit of French, too. None of them spoke German, I guess. So anyway, then they asked me to get up and walk back and forth. You know. [Laughter] This was a different era.

[46:35] Anyway, I got hired. There were two other women that got hired. I never saw them until we were on the airplane, going to New York a year later. And it took a year to get the visa. There was a quota system for the Danes. They only let in six hundred and fifty Danes a year into America. Other countries had much bigger quotas. I don’t know why. They didn’t want too many Danes coming in, I guess. [Laughter] So I took a year. I remember going to the American embassy, and being questioned, and so on. I even had to get an x-ray to show that my lungs would be okay.

[47:27] So after a year, I suddenly got a telegram out of the blue sky, because I almost forgot about

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it. “You have to be in New York in seven days.” And I thought, there’s no way in the world I can just pack up and leave my job, my everything, my life in seven days. So I said I couldn’t do it. Anyway, so I got an extension of about ten days, and that was it, and then I had to be in New York. Anyway, that of course, was wonderful. It was exciting. I was thrilled. My mother was not thrilled.

[48:08] So on the way to New York, I had my first martini, and I thought it was a martini and rossi, which is sort of a brown drink, like a wine. And this was something else, you know. And then when we finally got to New York, there was turbulence, and we were circling three or four times before we finally landed. And I thought, I am taking the boat home tomorrow.

[48:42] Pan Am had not really made very many arrangements for us, you know. That’s when I met the other two girls on the airplane. All they had done was make a reservation at a very expensive hotel. We had to start training at the airport. We came in on a Saturday; we had to start training at the airport on Monday. So we went out. We obviously could not afford staying at this place. At the time, all an immigrant could bring into America was seven hundred and twenty dollars, and we each had our seven hundred and twenty dollars, and the hotel was like fifty dollars a night. [Laughter] So that wouldn’t last very long.

[49:30] So we asked, “Where do the airline people live?” And we were told they all live at Kew Gardens, New York, especially in this one building. So we went out there, and we got an apartment right away, and we moved in with our one suitcase and our seven hundred dollars, whatever was left of it. There was all plastic furniture; it was furnished. But we thought it was great. [Laughter] And so anyway, that’s where we lived while we had the training. And then three weeks later I met my husband. He was a pilot with United Airlines, and he lived in the same building. So that’s how I met him, and we were married fifteen months later. So… Anyway, now I’m in America.

Gordon: [50:25] How did you get up here, in this area?

Ulla: [50:29] Well, basically he was an east coast-type person. I always lived on the east coast. Actually, before I quit Pan Am… Of course, I had a fantastic time at Pan Am. I lived in Manhattan for the last three months because my roommate, one of them, went back to Denmark to get married. She got an ultimatum from her Danish fiancé- if you don’t come back right now, that’s it.

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So she left. And we kind of… You know, so we kind of went different directions.

[51:05] For a short period of time, I had a roommate out there in Kew Gardens who was actually John F. Kennedy’s favorite stewardess- a beautiful Norwegian girl. Of course, when I arrived in America, he had been killed two weeks before I got there. But I heard a lot about John F. Kennedy, because my husband actually flew him around on charters when he was running for senate, and knew that whole group of people there. Also… I roomed with his favorite stewardess for a short period of time. Later on, interestingly enough, she ended up marrying the young man who was the first one interviewing me in Copenhagen, and I believe they’re still married.

[52:06] Anyway, so I moved to Manhattan. I got an opportunity to live in a penthouse with three other stewardesses, two of whom I never saw. They basically used it as an address, or a place to have their mail sent. We were not allowed to be married at that time. Stewardesses could not get married. So a lot of the girls, I guess, had that kind of an arrangement. So I think the penthouse must have belonged to somebody with a lot of money that I never saw. We paid not very much, and I just saw this other stewardess there, who was German- a girl. And she was followed around by photographers, because she was the girl that made good. She was on the front page of Der Spiegel magazine.

[53:05] Anyway, so then my future husband and I decided to go to the west coast. He got to go to L.A. I couldn’t get to L.A. I was based in San Francisco for the last three months that I flew. And he lived in Redondo Beach; I lived in Manhattan Beach and commuted to San Francisco, and then we got married. We got married in Redondo Beach. My mother came over for the wedding. Since I had actually promised her before I became a stewardess because she was so much against it…. After I had flown for one year… Because they would give us a trip around the world. Pan Am would do that. I had said we were going to go around the world.

[54:00] So anyway, I now was getting married, so I couldn’t really hold that. So instead, I took her to Hawaii. We went to stay at the Pink Palace there that we always stayed at with Pan Am in Honolulu, and had a great time. So here I was just getting married, and my husband had to fly, and people would say… I told them I just got married. And here’s my mother. [Laughter] And people are saying, “Well, where’s your husband?” “Well, he couldn’t make it.” [Laughter] Anyway, so after that,

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she went back to Denmark, of course. Little did I know she would die just two or three years later. She died of breast cancer. But anyway, so we lived in Redondo Beach. I had my first baby there.

Jette: [54:55] You had to quit Pan Am?

Ulla: [54:57] Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. I loved Pan Am, but I was getting married, so… We lived in Redondo Beach for about two years, two and a half years. We actually had a view of the ocean. We were half a block from the ocean. It was just wonderful. Absolutely loved it. I would take my little boy there and walk the pier. We lived in a place where they said you could only have single people there. We were the only married people, and certainly the first ones with a baby. So that baby was very, very spoiled. He was passed around from woman to woman. It was mostly single women that lived there. But it was a fun place. It was so much fun.

[55:59] But then we decided it wasn’t a good place to raise children, and whatever, so then we decided to move back to Virginia. Really, he loved Virginia. He started his career flying out of D.C. National Airport. All his friends and buddies were back there. So we drove back. That was our first cross-country trip. We went through Las Vegas. I remember it was just a small place in those days. And we bought our first house in Springfield, Virginia. We basically lived in Virginia for about ten years.

[56:48] He had a big place out near Warrenton, Virginia. He had bought a farm out there when he was just a young pilot, like twenty-one years old. He was thirty-two when we got married, and I was twenty-three. He had then remodeled his place. So it looked a little bit like Gone With the Wind . It had the pillows out front with the big… It was two hundred years old. Really it was a mansion in a way. It had handmade bricks and the wide pine floors in the entry hall. Eight rooms. I remember every room was seventeen and a half by seventeen and a half, even the kitchen. But it was out, way out in the country. And we didn’t live there. We lived closer to Washington. We started in Springfield, Virginia.

[57:50] Then he had the opportunity to go to Illinois, so we went up and lived in Barrington, Illinois, for over a year. He went and bought a house before I had seen it. At that time we had two children. The house was ultramodern, contemporary, with a spiral staircase going up three stories that

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anybody could have fallen through, with a stone floor down below. So when I saw it, I wasn’t about to go any higher than the basement. But we put chicken wire all around it. But I couldn’t get out of there fast enough, because I could never leave my kids alone in that house. Anyway, we were there for a year.

Jette: [58:36] What was your husband’s name?

Ulla: [58:38] It was Bob.

Jette: [58:38] Bob. And his name was Rudd?

Ulla: [58:41] Oh, yeah. It was actually J.R. Rudd- John Robert Rudd. People called him Bob. And he was a wonderful pilot with United Airlines. His career spanned thirty-eight and a half years with the airlines. When he retired, he was number four of the seniority list of ten thousand pilots. And he had a wonderful career. Really fine career. He opened up several cities for United. I remember Singapore, for instance. He was the first United plane to come in to Singapore. He cut the ribbon.

[59:26] He flew internationally. I would say the last maybe fifteen, twenty years, he only flew internationally. He flew the biggest planes they had. One of the flights he had was an expanded DC- 10 that flew nonstop from Chicago to Hong Kong. That flight just went on and on and on. I went with him on that flight, and I remember, I mean it was like it would never stop. It was like a day and a half. Anyway, then we had forty-two hours in Hong Kong, and that was great.

[1:00:16] So all those years that we were married, almost thirty years, I felt like I never really left the airlines, because we had a lot of wonderful fringe benefits. I could go on SAS to Copenhagen, for instance, for one hundred and twenty dollars, first class. There weren’t as many people flying, so I’d go on a pass. I’d always get on, usually first class. You know, I didn’t really take enough advantage of it. But we basically did things... We went to Florida; we went to Hawaii. Those were our favorite places. We went to Mexico.

[1:00:58] So of course, I was involved in raising the kids. We had a third son, so we had three sons. He was involved in a lot of different things. When I first met him, he was racing hydroplanes, and

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flying. I would go up and down the east coast with him to all these hydroplane races. I remember one race, his boat flew up in the air and went upside down. And everybody would fan out, so they wouldn’t run over the driver, which was him. But then for a long time, we were standing on the other end of this course. We didn’t know if he had survived or not, and then he came out just fine. macho, macho. He was fine.

[1:01:52] He was a very macho guy. [Laughter] He was a man’s man. He could do anything. He was incredibly talented. He built his own engines, and he built another boat from scratch. Okay, so how do I end up here? So, we were in Barrington, Illinois…

Jette: [1:02:13] Can you tell us about his background?

Ulla: [1:02:14] Pardon?

Jette: [1:02:14] What was his background?

Ulla: [1:02:15] He came from Kentucky.

Jette: [1:02:17] But where? Further back.

Michelle: [1:02:20] Was he of Nordic heritage?

Jette: [1:02:22] Was he British?

Ulla: [1:02:24] Yes. His background was British. There is a town in England. I never really got to go there, but I guess there are a lot of Rudds there. And the Rudds were educators. In high school, or college, they were just educators. His father was also a schoolteacher. Further back… I actually met his mother before she died. It was a different era when they were raised- his father- my boys’ grandfather. Yeah, when he raised.

[1:03:10] His… So it would have been their great-great grandfather. He actually was a bad guy. She gave birth to my kids’ grandfather, and he kind of took off, from what I understand. Then he came

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back, got her pregnant again, and she had Aunt Bessie, and then he was gone for good. So, same name. Bob Rudd was his name- J.R. And he was never heard from again. Back in those days, there was no social security, no welfare. And she was left a widow with two children to raise.

[1:04:01] So Aunt Bessie, who also went to college- she was a first grade schoolteacher for something like forty-two years. She basically gave up getting married- at least that was the story I heard- to take care of her mother because her brother, who was Bob’s father, didn’t do that. He got married, and he was in the Second World War, by the way. And I was kind of always angry with him, because he left his son, which was Bob, to fend for himself- there were no other children- because his mother was very, very ill. She had Parkinson’s. So basically he raised himself and had to take care of his mother.

[1:04:54] But he went to war. He was in the invasion of… and basically liberated a Belgian town, is what I understand. They know his name over there. He came back many years later, and they had a big thing about him. He was a Major in the war. He got some medals. He was a nice man.

[1:05:21] But anyway, Bob’s mother died a month after we were married, from Parkinson’s. He remarried. That was his second marriage. And she never really cared for the boys- my boys. So obviously I didn’t have a very good relationship with her. She was a very selfish woman. But they ended up living in Fort Myers, Florida until he died. He was seventy-two when he died.

[1:05:54] Anyway, so what happened to Bob... He had this wonderful career. He had lots and lots of friends. Everything was great. At some point… We lived back in Virginia. We came back from Barrington. We moved into the house- the old house. And we could have stayed there to this day, but being Danish, I didn’t like the racial conflicts they had there. It was out in the old South, you know. Warrenton, Virginia is definitely not close enough to D.C. to be influenced by… It’s the old South.

[1:06:40] We moved there, and then very shortly after that, Martin Luther King was killed. Our house was actually an original… It used to have like five hundred acres. And they had slaves, because it was over two hundred years old. So the slaves back in those days were given little houses on the other side of the street, and they still lived there. So in order to get to this very beautiful

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place- we had one hundred and twenty acres left- I had to drive through this little street outside of Warrenton that was all black.

[1:07:26] And so after Martin Luther King was killed, I drove out there one day. I had my two kids in the car. There were rocks thrown at us, and one of them went through the window, and just missed my son. So I thought, “I don’t think I like this.” You know. I’m a Dane. Can I put up my flag? [Laughter] I didn’t want my kids to grow up and be southern gentlemen with all that… what that involves, in those days. So because of that, we moved to Maryland. We lived across from Mount Vernon on a little creek. We were there for about five years.

[1:08:14] And he had also bought that land as an investment before I met him. There was five acres there, and that had never been lived on. So he designed and built a very, very pretty house; a very beautiful house. And I did all the landscaping. I landscaped all the houses we ever lived in. And I think we had nine houses in twenty-seven years, all over the country.

[1:08:42] But anyway, I remember once my kids were out there digging, and they found all these little eggs. I said, “They’re turtle eggs, so don’t do anything. Let’s just cover them up.” Well, next thing I knew, they had opened them, and they were little rattlesnake eggs. [Laughter] So they were alive. But anyway, nobody got hurt. We also had lots of turtles. We were close to the creek, so we had all kinds of turtles, from regular box turtles to snapping turtles, and all these different snakes that they would be bringing up to the house, that mostly were good. But you know, we also had copperheads, and other nasty things. So it was… But nobody ever got bit.

[1:09:36] Anyway, we lived there. Bob was commuting to San Francisco out of D.C. So he wanted us to move again, and move to the west coast. I was really not very anxious to move again, but basically he wanted to move to Lake Tahoe. He and I would get a babysitter, and we’d go out for like four weekends in a row and look, and look, and look, and I turned down every single house, mainly because I could see that if I lived at Lake Tahoe I would be very isolated in the winter. He would be flying in and out of Reno. And twelve feet of snow, whatever, in the winter. I might not see him very much.

[1:10:34] So we never did move to Lake Tahoe, but then we heard about a house. A United pilot was

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retiring who lived by Eatonville. It was Eatonville. So everybody had this pressure on me: this is it, you know, for many reasons, also because he was commuting. You’ve got to sort of say yes to this house. So we flew out. When I drove south from Seattle… I had never been to Seattle before. I thought, “My God.” I was surprised there were so many houses here. [Laughter] Because like a lot of people that come to Seattle, they think, you know, it’s an outpost.

[1:11:22] Anyway, so, we landed. Driving south from Seattle, I didn’t like it. I did not like the area, I have to say. People had told us about Anacortes on the flight. I said, “Let’s go up north.” So we had one weekend, so we went up north. When I saw the refinery at Anacortes, I didn’t think it would be a good place to live, either. So then we drove down south, all the way through Whidbey Island. And the most beautiful place I’d ever seen, I thought. And then when we came down toward the south end, we saw all these farms, you know. And I said, “Let’s go and see if something is for sale here.”

[1:12:13] We took a side road, which was south Bayview Road. And I said, “Why don’t you stop here, and we’ll look.” And I went and talked to this man who was out on a tractor. And he said, “Oh, our neighbor might think about selling.” So we went and talked to him. And we bought the twenty-acre farm there with a handshake, and moved right out. This was in 1975. There were signs, you know- “Last person leaving Seattle, turn out the light.” Things were incredibly inexpensive.

[1:12:52] So anyway, we moved out to this house, which was built in 1912. It used to be a dairy. We totally remodeled the house- tore down the garage, rebuilt it, built a big barn. And we paved the road all the way from the street. I named the street. It’s on the map now- Sunshine Lane. And… anyway, we lived there. The kids absolutely loved it. That is the place they think about when they think about where did they grow up. My oldest son moved back there. He’s still there. He loves it. We all love Whidbey Island.

[1:13:33] But it was impractical for a pilot to worry about the ferry. And I guess my husband was always on the move, so he wanted to get off the island after about six years there. So we moved to Mukilteo. And we just moved. The house was not sold yet. It was on the market for five years. That must have been a bad time. So in the meantime, I got my real estate license, and I signed up with Bayside Realty, which is downtown Mukilteo. I was actually in real estate for fifteen years; got a broker’s license. And I sold it in six weeks. I sold it myself. Anyway. So that’s a lot of my history.

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Gordon: [1:14:28] Wow. Yeah.

Ulla: [1:14:29] So I lived in about five or six different states. When my husband retired in 1992, we had built a very beautiful house in Naples, Florida, on a private airpark. He had airplanes. You know, he always had an airplane. At the time, to tell you how actually brilliant he was, he had put together a Polish jetfighter from nothing. He didn’t have instructions. It came in boxes. And he built the plane. He built the engine down in Texas somewhere. I’m not sure where. So I didn’t see him a whole lot after he retired. He was down there getting the FAA to approve it. And he got it approved. It was the first Polish jetfighter in private hands that had been approved by the FAA.

[1:15:29] And he flew one flight with it, and he thought, “That’s not for me.” But at least he did that. And then when we built the house down in Naples, there was a hangar as part of the house, where he could have both the Polish jetfighter and his little biplane. Now here’s the sad, sad story, which is... He retired. He was working on the plane down there. He came back very anxious. In the meantime, we had moved. We had moved all our furniture, two cars, to Florida. I had a buyer for the house we lived in. We basically went out the door, told everybody I’m quitting real estate. That’s it.

[1:16:22] So he was going to fly down to Naples in the biplane. That would be it for him, because we were basically moved. He kept the biplane up at Arlington. And he had any number of pilot friends that were United pilots that were anxious and willing and wanted to go with him. But a storm was coming in. It was October coming up. And he was concerned that if I don’t get out now, I may have to wait until spring. And flying over the mountains.

[1:17:08] And so there was a lull in between storms. Nobody that had wanted to go with him could make it at that time, because it was so sudden. So he got another person to go with him. I won’t mention his name, but he was not a professional pilot. And so I said goodbye to him up there at Arlington. Next thing I know, I was at an open house three days later. A call came in that he had crashed in Mississippi and was dead.

[1:17:50] And… It was an incredible choice I had there. If you can imagine, everything at one time.

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All the worst things that can happen to a person. My husband had died. We were in the middle of a move. I had given up my job. I had to decide what to do with the body. He was in Mississippi. Where would he want to get buried? I had never thought of that before. Anyway, my decision was not to bury him in Kentucky, because he didn’t really go back there anymore. He was not fond of Washington State, although… you know. And we were moving, anyway. His heart was in Virginia, and that’s where he started his career.

[1:18:56] So he wanted to be buried in a military… you know, as a military service place. So I got him buried at Quantico, which is by Fredericksburg, Virginia. He is in the front, beautiful area by the trees. And that is your approach of the airplanes to the national airport, right over where he started his career. Then I actually got special permission after the funeral and all of that, from the service people there to put up a park bench and we planted seven or eight different trees around it. Anyway, so…

Jette: [1:19:50] So there is a note that he was a Korean War vet?

Ulla: [1:19:54] Yeah, he was a vet. That’s why he was in a veteran’s cemetery.

Jette: [1:20:00] Oh, okay.

Ulla: [1:20:01] At Quantico.

Jette: [1:20:02] Yeah.

Gordon: [1:20:03] Quantico, yeah.

Jette: [1:20:04] I didn’t know. Yeah. Okay.

Ulla: [1:20:05] Yeah.

Jette: [1:20:08] So what about your sons? Are they around?

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Ulla: [1:20:12] Yeah, they’re here. My son lives on Whidbey Island. He is with Boeing. He has been with Boeing now for about twenty-three years. He is forty… either forty-eight or forty-nine. You forget after a while. And my grandson is twenty-three. My son there is married for the second time to a Japanese lady. Her daughter Sayaka was a prima ballerina here with the Whidbey Ballet Group. And she now lives on the Big Island of Hawaii. She’s twenty-one. And I think the whole family is moving to the Big Island.

[1:20:52] My other son, my second son… This is the most tragic thing, because of what happened to his dad. Because the whole family was basically relocating to Florida, and I think my youngest son would have followed. So he was already a pilot. He got a degree from Florida Institute of Technology as a computer… I think he was a computer… had a degree in computer engineering and then also in aviation. And he got all of his hours there. So when he graduated, they hired him as an instructor pilot. They had seventy-five airplanes. So that’s how he started his flying career.

[1:21:45] It was very, very tough to get into aviation at that time. There were too many pilots coming in off of too many wars. They of course, would be the first pick. He flew with a lot of different airlines, small airlines. Then eventually he got his big break and got with American Airlines. He married a girl who had her own company down there. She was from Brazil. When I first met her… My son had lots of girlfriends, and they all were just crazy about him. When he called me up and said, “I’m getting married,” I said to him, “Well, who’s the lucky girl?” I really had no idea, because it could have been any one of three different ones.

[1:22:45] So, I had never met this one. So he brought her out the next day- flew her out, and I met her, and my first question to her was, “Well, if he is relocated or if he needs to relocate for his job- which of course had happened to us so many times- would you be willing to give up your business and go?” And she said, “Sure. I’ll follow him anywhere.” Well, famous last words. Because she really couldn’t give up her business, and he really would have liked to come out here, because I ended up staying here, I didn’t want to be single in that house we built out down there in the airline community. Anyway, so he’s still down there. And I think he’s always felt cheated more than anybody else, because the family is up here.

[1:23:45] But anyway, he has done very well. He has two children, a boy and a girl. They are twelve

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and sixteen. He is divorced, and he is remarried. His second wife, I absolutely love her. She is Russian. He met her in the Dominican Republic. They dated for about a year and a half. She was teaching children how to surf, and where they go… kite-flying, which he does, and has done for years. So they have the same interests. And she is just a lovely person. I met her mother recently, and you know, she doesn’t speak English, and I don’t speak much Russian. I say [Speaking Russian 1:24:41 – 1:24:44] and whatever. But we had a great time. So he is happy again. I think that, like I said, he always felt left behind. But anyway.

Jette: [1:25:01] So that’s your youngest, right?

Ulla: [1:25:02] No, that’s my second son.

Jette: [1:25:03] Okay.

Ulla: [1:25:04] My youngest son Steve has had a tough time with employment. He got a degree from Pacific Lutheran. All of that happened… He was like in his second year down there when his dad was killed. And what happened after that was a huge lawsuit, which I haven’t told you about. I was being sued because of the plane crash by the widow of the other man who was in the plane. They went so far as to suing me personally. They said that because they found an old law, Mississippi law that said if you’re co-owner of an airplane, then you’re responsible. So they sued me. They sued for everything we had.

[1:26:02] And it turned out during the course of that lawsuit- we interviewed everybody on the route- and found out they took turns flying, and that the other guy was actually flying when it happened. Apart from that, it was the other man’s small personal bag that was caught in the rudder, because he hadn’t secured it. So anyway, my husband was completely innocent in that plane crash. But that didn’t make any difference. The lawyers went for money. That’s all they wanted. I was the easy one to get it from, I guess. It took eighteen months. It was a nightmare. And it took my husband’s entire estate.

[1:27:00] Anyway, I am doing fine. I mean, I survived. But it was twenty-one years ago. So I am doing fine. I met my current husband about three or four years later. I never really wanted to be

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formally married again. We got married in a church- we got married in a Lutheran church, but the state doesn’t know about that. And we’ve been very happy. A very quiet life compared to my previous life, and that’s what I wanted. And he is a local man.

Jette: [1:27:43] Do you belong to any of the Danish organizations?

Ulla: [1:27:48] I used to belong to the museum here. I also used to belong to the Danish Club, but I don’t at this time. We have an informal Danish group. We get together every now and then. And there’s ten of us Danish women. We are actually going to meet in about a week. We do different things. We either go to dinner at somebody’s house, or… We’re going for a happy hour this time.

Jette: [1:28:20] So, do you uphold any Danish traditions? Do your children know about…

Ulla: [1:28:25] Absolutely. Risalamande.

Jette: [1:28:28] Yes.

Ulla: [1:28:29] At Christmas, that everybody wants to have. When they were little… They can all say [speaking Danish 1:28:38 – 1:28:43]. You know. Little things. But really I found it difficult to teach them Danish because I was the only one. I think you need to have at least two people. The ones I’ve known who have been successful at teaching their kids another language, it’s because they married somebody, you know, so they spoke it in the house.

[1:29:08] So anyway, they don’t speak Danish. They all have a very, very high opinion of Denmark, and love Denmark. They’ve been over there several times, but not as… Not past the point when they were teenagers, really. Oh, yeah, that’s not true. My third son, he went over there as a graduation. That’s not true, either... No. They’ve been over there. So… any other questions? [Laughter]

Jette: [1:29:39] It’s been quite a life, I must say.

Ulla: [1:29:41] Yeah.

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Gordon: [1:29:41] It’s been quite a story. You’ve spanned a lot of territory in the world, too.

Ulla: [1:29:46] Exactly.

Gordon: [1:29:48] Did you know Raiti Waerness?

Ulla: [1:29:50] Pardon?

Gordon: [1:29:50] Raiti Waerness? She was a Pan Am…

Ulla: [1:29:53] Raiti, yeah. I know the name. Yeah.

Gordon: [1:29:55] Yeah. She lives up on Lopez Island.

Ulla: [1:29:58] Yeah. We talked about out there…

Gordon: [1:30:00] Oh, did you? Okay.

Ulla: [1:30:00] Because there’s so many ex-Pan Am stewardesses. I belong to the World Wings.

Gordon: [1:30:06] Yeah.

Ulla: [1:30:06] Which is ex-Pan Am.

Gordon: [1:30:08] Oh, okay. Yeah. I think Mari-Ann probably asked you.

Ulla: [1:30:12] Mm hmm.

Gordon: [1:30:13] Well, we appreciate you…

Jette: [1:30:16] Do you want me to turn it off?

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Ulla: [1:30:18] Did I talk too long?

Gordon: [1:30:19] No, no.

Jette: [1:30:19] Absolutely not. No.

Gordon: [1:30:21] We thank you so much for coming and for participating in the project.

Ulla: [1:30:23] Okay.

Gordon: [1:30:25] You gave us quite a story. Thank you.

END OF RECORDING.

Transcription by Alison DeRiemer

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