Nordic American Voices Nordic Heritage Museum

Interview of Lisa Hill-Festa March 28, 2015 Seattle, Washington

Interviewers: Mari-Ann Kind Jackson; Sarah Peterson

Mari-Ann Kind Jackson: [0:09] This is an oral history interview for Nordic American Voices at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle. We are interviewing today Lisa Hill-Festa, the former Curator of Collections here at the museum. We are at the museum, Lisa, so this is very nice to have you come back here. It is March 28, 2015. Interviewing is Mari-Ann Kind Jackson and Sarah Peterson. Welcome, Lisa. It’s wonderful to have you here.

Lisa Hill-Festa: [0:43] Thank you. It’s like being home again. [Laughter]

Mari-Ann: [0:44] Yes. I can well imagine. Would you start by stating your full name, your date of birth, and where you were born, and then share with us what you would like about your life, and specifically about your life at the museum.

Lisa: [0:59] Okay. Sounds good. I am Lisa Margo Hill-Festa. I was born on August 16, 1952, or as I tell my students or my former students, 19 [mumbles]. Laughter. But 1952, in Pensacola, Florida. I guess I can start by saying I was a Navy brat. My father was a Naval Commander, and I just want to say a couple words about him. He is no longer with us. He passed away at ninety-three, about three years ago.

[1:45] But he had quite a few accomplishments while he was in the Navy. One of which, he commanded the first dirigible, or airship, or blimp, across the Atlantic Ocean. I know this is about me, but I wanted to bring him in, just to honor him. He made his career the Navy, so therefore, I was in the Navy, too [laughter] as a dependent, so we moved quite a bit.

[2:20] Let me pull my little cheat-sheet out here. So, I was born in Pensacola, Florida, because Dad was stationed there, of course, at that time, with his family. My mom, Nancy Grant Hill, and my older sister, who is seven years older than I am- Andrea Joan Hill, now Swanson- we then went with Dad to Pensacola, where I was born.

[2:54] I lived in Pensacola for a year, and then we went… Dad was stationed somewhere. I’m not sure where. And we did not go with him, so we went back to Marblehead, Massachusetts, where my family on my mom’s side, the Grants, are from. We lived there for about three months while Dad was stationed wherever it was that we couldn’t go.

[3:26] Marblehead also is very near and dear to my heart. Moving around so much as a child, it is hard to really say that you have a place to call home. And I also very much envied a lot of the people here that I worked with, especially the volunteers, the first generations who came from Sweden,

Nordic American Voices Page 1 of 29

Norway, Finland etcetera, because they could call that home.

[4:03] And you know, I’ve never really had a home. So making a long story long, getting back to it- Marblehead, Massachusetts- I call that home, because that’s where my relatives on my mom’s side are from. I’m very close to a lot of my cousins who still live in Massachusetts, and then a branch that moved up to Maine. And that’s where we would go. Not every summer, but a lot of summers when I was a kid.

[4:30] We’d go back home, in a sense, to my mom’s home, but it was my home too. A very familiar place, and a very fun place. My very favorite beach in all the world is there, called Devereux Beach. I’m really disheartened about the fact that you have to pay to use that beach now. We never had to when we were kids. We just walked from Grandmother’s house- Grammy, we would call her, and we just walked down the road apiece, and just lived on the beach and lived in the water the whole time.

[5:08] So then according to my mother, I celebrated my first birthday in Marblehead, Massachusetts. That’s kind of fun. So then Dad was transferred to Coronado, California. So we moved to California. Of course, I was really young. I don’t remember it at all. Mom said we arrived in early December of 1953. So being born in 1952, I was still pretty young.

[5:41] Then from there, we moved to Elizabeth City, North Carolina, in 1954. We were there for about two years. And this was where my younger sister was born, Carrie Leigh Hill. But of course, I was so young, I don’t remember North Carolina, either. But at least I can say I lived there.

[6:09] Then we moved… Dad was stationed again. We moved back to California, to Castro Valley, California. This is where now I start remembering things more. I went to kindergarten in Castro Valley there. I remember Dad was able to get movies from just some perks, being part of the Navy. It was the old movie reels.

[6:40] And he got King Kong. I can remember this vividly. The original King Kong. And it scared the bejeebers out of me so much, that I swore King Kong, this huge, huge gorilla, lived in our basement. So I would not go in our basement. I was like, “King Kong is down there. No. I’m not going.” My mother was like, “No, King Kong is not down there.” [Laughter]

[7:09] Another really vivid memory I have is of our neighbors across the street, and they had kittens. My dad didn’t like cats. We always had dogs. We had German Shepherds at the time, Kip and Thor. I loved cats. I adored cats. And so I remember playing with the kittens across the street. One time my mom was watching me, and I guess I snuck across the street, and put two kittens under my arms and came back home, and my mom goes, “Lisa Hill, you take those kittens back.” [Laughter] I also remember there was a donkey that lived down the street that I used to go visit. I remember kindergarten. So those were really my first strong recollections of things.

[7:59] So from Castro Valley, California… We lived there from 1956 to 1958. We moved to Naha, Okinawa. That was in 1958, and we lived there for about eighteen months. For me, that was a really, really amazing, amazing experience. That was one of the great things about being a Navy brat- being able to move different places and experience so many different things. Here was experiencing a whole different country, a whole different culture.

Nordic American Voices Page 2 of 29

[8:47] I have great memories from there, some of them… Part of the perks of being a Naval Commander… spoiled my mom. We had gardeners; we had two Okinawan live-in maids, and cooks. She had a tailor. You would have thought we were really, really rich, you know, but it was just part of the perks of being there. So, my younger sister Carrie and I did learn some Japanese, some Okinawan, but we really don’t remember that much anymore. There are some things I do, and some of the songs I remember, that the maids used to sing to us.

[9:36] When the Okinawan women do their chores, they kind of squat. I really can’t show it. They just squat on their… Not on their knees, but squat down, and just kind of do things. I still do that. I mean, it’s just something I learned to do, just kind of squat, and work like an Okinawan. Just a lot of… Some quick memories- the Captain lived next door to us. Of course, the Captain was the Captain, and got a lot more benefits. But he had a fish pond with koi, and stuff.

[10:21] We had a little Japanese French poodle named [Japanese words 10:25]-Sake, which means “Rear Admiral Sake,” the drink, in Okinawan or Japanese. Every time Sake and my little sister were gone… She would just open the door and wander away, even with my mom and two maids there. She was quite something. It was always, “Okay, Lisa, will you go to the Captain’s pond and see if they’re there?” Sure enough, Sake would be swimming in the pond, and Carrie would be playing, or lots of times her shoes would be missing. “Lisa, will you go to the pond and see if her shoes are there?” [Laughter]

[11:02] One day, too, she disappeared. We lived pretty much across the street from the Naha Naval Air Station. One day we got a knock on the door, and a young airman was at the door with my little sister in tow, going, “Lady, is this your kid?” She was walking along the airstrip. It was like, “Oh, my gosh.” So, she was quite something.

[11:34] One of the things that I vividly remember, too, was every time we went out, the maids would say, “Watch out for the habus.” Habus are poisonous snakes there. There were a lot of kind of tropical, subtropical-type woods that we loved to play in. But they were concerned. They were just like, “Be careful of the snakes.” I don’t recall ever running across one. So I was okay.

[12:04] When we lived there, too, I had a little friend, a little guy friend, and then another little girl friend, and we used to hang around all the time together. One of the things we wanted to do that summer was to go barefoot and make our feet as tough as possible so that we could like walk on nails. [Laughter] I just remember walking on rocks and everything to make our feet tough. Trying to do that now, because I have such tender feet, would be like, “Oh, my God.” I don’t think we got to the point where we could walk on nails.

[12:44] One of my really vivid scary memories there- in town, there was an open-air market where all the Okinawans would go. It was jammed. I mean, people everywhere. And Dad was always very good about holding my hand, and stuff, but somehow we got separated. And there was a sea of people, and I didn’t speak Japanese, and I’ll bet most of them didn’t speak English. And I was just like, “Oh, my gosh. What do I do?” And of course, this was before cell phones, and all that. But Dad, my hero, he found me. [Laughter]

[13:29] But yeah, that’s where there were a lot of just really great memories. Another memory is we

Nordic American Voices Page 3 of 29

would take pieces of cardboard- me and my little girlfriend and my little boyfriend. On windy days, we would put the cardboard behind us and have the wind push us down the street. [Laughter]

[13:51] Anyway, so when we left Okinawa, it was around Christmastime, and we went to Tokyo then for a few weeks, because my mom wanted to spend some time in Tokyo before we went back to the States. I just remember that I wasn’t real happy about it, because we had to spend Christmas in the hotel, and to me it wasn’t like… Spending Christmas in a hotel was just not… I still think sometimes that that memory comes to me.

[14:34] But going around Tokyo and seeing Mount Fuji and all that- all that, I do remember. It was pretty amazing seeing the Great Buddha. I’d like to go back to see what I remember, because in my mind, we went into… You could go inside the Great Buddha, and there was this big, gold statue inside. But that’s how I viewed it as a kid, so it would be interesting now to go back.

[15:05] One other thing that I do remember vividly in Okinawa, too, was we used to have typhoons. At that time, the officer’s quarters were Quonset huts, and they were held down with really heavy, heavy wire or metal cables because of the typhoons. And we had banana trees in our backyard, and the bananas were just about ready to ripen, and I was all excited about getting real bananas off the real banana trees. And the typhoon came through. It was a pretty bad one.

[15:49] The Quonset huts, they were really nice inside. It was pretty amazing. But they leaked like crazy. With the wind and the rain, we had buckets everywhere. And I went out the next day, and the banana trees had been all blown over, and all the bananas were all destroyed. [Laughter] I was really sad about that.

[16:12] But anyway… I honestly can’t remember if we flew from Okinawa to Japan to Tokyo. Of course, Okinawa is the farthest southern Japanese island, and we went up to Tokyo. Or, if we took a ship, because somewhere we were on… at sometime or other, we were on both a ship and a plane. But I think we must have flown, because I think it was that time that friends of my parents were going back also, going back to the States, but they were on a ship going up to the main island, going up to Tokyo, and they took care of our dog Sake.

[17:16] And the dogs were not allowed in the cabins. Well, he was just this little toy poodle, and they felt sorry for him, because it was pretty cold in the area where the dogs had to stay in cages. So they would sneak him into their cabin. They trained him to… if there was a knock on the cabin door, to go hide in the shower. This little poodle. Knock on the door; he’d go hide in the shower.

[17:44] So I think we must have taken a boat as opposed to flying back to the States. I need to ask my mom that, because I can’t remember. I just remember being on the ship. I remember my little sister being put in a harness because she was such a wanderer, with a leash, so she wouldn’t wander off and fall overboard, or what have you.

[18:15] We had some very rough seas. I remember getting seasick, which was not fun, because you can’t go anywhere; you’re stuck there. I remember also having a meal, and the seas got so rough that things were… dishes, food, everything was flying off the tables. People were flipping over in their chairs. [Laughter] Yeah. So that was kind of a little bit of an adventure.

Nordic American Voices Page 4 of 29

[18:44] So once we got back to the States, my dad was stationed in Illinois, outside of the Chicago area at Glenview Naval Air Station. So we moved to a town… the suburbs northwest of Chicago, called Des Plaines. I still remember our address- 1160 Clark Lane. We lived there from about 1960 to 1965. I went to elementary school there. There was an elementary school just a few blocks down the road. At that time it was called Herzog. Now it’s called Einstein. Herzog was the name of the developer who developed our little community, little subdivision. I’m not sure when the name was changed to Einstein.

[19:54] We moved next door to a family of… Mom and Dad had three girls, and this family had three girls- Jean, Joy, and Jill. Jean was one year younger than my older sister Andrea; Joy was one year older than me, and Jill was one year younger than my younger sister Carrie. We all were great, great friends. Actually Joy and I were best friends. We lived on our bikes.

[20:35] Those were the days that we could just eat breakfast, get on our bikes, say, “Mom, we’ll see you at lunch,” and take off and be gone. Come back for lunch, eat lunch, say, “Mom, we’ll see you at dinner,” and take off and be gone. Those were the days. We never worried, our parents never worried, we never had problems. We lived outside. We played outside. Joy and I loved horses. There were times I think we wished we could turn into horses. We would do all these steeplechase things, and obstacle courses, and jumps. You know, we really got a lot of exercise between our bikes and playing horses.

[21:21] We were so close, and sometimes our moms would go… Because my mom and Mrs. Wilma Rossiter were best friends. And they would go shopping and buy us the same clothes. I remember there was this one day we were riding our bikes down the street, and this woman goes, “Are you two twins?” [Laughter] “No, we’re not even related.”

[21:46] Grade school there… A lot of kids in the neighborhood that we played with. I could tell a lot of fun stories about the neighborhood. The Midwest… I don’t know, to me living there for a long time, it’s a little bit different than here. You have very close friends here, but people really tend to stay more to themselves. Where in the Midwest, there’s more community. It’s really hard to describe. Maybe it’s changed now. Maybe it was that way because we were younger, and moms were home more, taking care of kids as opposed to working. My mom and Mrs. Rossiter, and all their friends didn’t work outside of the house.

[22:44] But it seemed more like community, and a community of a lot of different people. We had Italians that lived right behind us, and they would invite us over for big Italian dinners, and all this. Very loudmouthed, and very… In the summer, because we didn’t have air conditioning, all our windows would be open.

[23:11] And we’d hear Mrs. Severino yelling, “Eat it or wear it!” to her kids. They had three kids. If they didn’t eat all their food, she would throw it on them, dump it over their heads. [Laughter] And then she’d have to clean it up. Pretty crazy. Oh, she was funny. But I learned a lot about Italians. Very, very strong Italian communities in the Chicago area. So it was fun, learning about the different foods and things.

[23:54] But then from Des Plaines, we moved to a town called Barrington, which was forty miles northwest of Chicago. Mom and Dad just decided they just… I don’t know, they wanted to move

Nordic American Voices Page 5 of 29

out in the country a little bit more. And I have to say, it was really tough. I went to part of eighth grade there, to the old Hough Street School, which is no longer there. It was razed quite a long time ago.

[24:38] The school scared me. I mean, it was… it was a lot like this building, like the old museum building, the old Daniel Webster School. But one of the things that really scared me about it was that there were… From the third floor and second floor, there were escape chutes. They were really steep. They were enclosed. So if there was a fire, you’d have to go down these chutes. I was always petrified. Oh, my gosh, I don’t want to have to go down that chute. I mean, it was like… scary, all enclosed, until you got down to the bottom. But we never had to. Fire drills, we never had to go down the chutes. That was kind of an interesting memory of that school.

[25:29] Then from eighth grade, I went to Barrington Consolidated High School. It was consolidated. There were a number of smaller towns around Barrington where kids came in and went to school there, one of which was Carpentersville. It was a very tough place to have not grown up there, or gone to grade school, or been there in the early years, because it was a very affluent community, particularly the Barrington Hills area. These kids were extremely cliquish.

[26:15] One of my friends who lived down the street from us made it a point her senior year not to wear the same outfit twice, and she succeeded. I mean, her closet was like as big as my bedroom. So just kind of setting that scene. These kids drove to school in the latest sports cars, late model sports cars, and all this. It was tough, and I did not like cliques at all. I was not a cliquish person. I wanted to… and got along with everyone.

[26:55] The Carpentersville kids had the hardest time, because Carpentersville was definitely not an affluent community. It was quite the opposite. These kids who were absolutely wonderful kids were not treated very nicely by these snotty rich kids. I can remember at my ten-year high school reunion, one of my friends, Bob, who was from Carpentersville… Just loved the guy. Just a wonderful, wonderful guy. We also went through a year of college together.

[27:35] He came up to me, and he said, “Thank you.” I’m like, “Thank you for what?” “Thank you for being so nice to us C-ville kids.” I’m like, “What do you mean? I love you guys.” So just kind of that whole… Yeah. So high school was an interesting challenge. Whoever said high school are the best years of your life… [Laughter] They were crazy, because that certainly wasn’t. But I survived and got through it.

[28:15] My neighborhood, though, was great. I had great neighborhood friends. One of my best friends Caroline, they had moved out there from Maryland. She and I were just the best buddies, but we didn’t look anything like twins, so nobody ever asked us if we were twins. We didn’t dress alike, or anything. But we lived on our bikes in the early years, like in eighth grade and freshman in high school, and stuff.

[28:47] One of my memories about Caroline is, she would always wipe out on her bike, so we would have to carry a bottle of spray bactine with us wherever we went. So, okay, pick her up, dust her off, spray her scrapes, and then off we went. [Laughter] It’s just funny. We had a lot of fun. We did a lot of fun things.

Nordic American Voices Page 6 of 29

[29:12] Also, part of our neighborhood, there was a lake, Lake Louise, and also a pool, a big pool for our community, the Fox Point… Fox Point was what our neighborhood was called. So Caroline and I, during the summer, we lived at the Fox Point Pool. I mean, Mom… they didn’t have to ask where we were. They knew we were at the Fox Point Pool. So I would just be absolutely… My skin would be so tan.

[29:49] This was not a good thing, when I think back on it, but our neighbors across the street that I used to baby-sit for… I would get so tan that one day she said, “Wow, look at you, you are black. I didn’t know we lived in an integrated neighborhood.” I’m like, “Okay.” But there really weren’t blacks in our community. Of course, a lot of blacks in Chicago. But I knew at the time that’s not a good thing to say, you know.

[30:29] So after graduating from high school… Well, in high school, I kind of dated a little bit, but then I met a guy who went to another school. He lived in another town called Wauconda, Illinois. So then we were going steady. We went out. Rick and I went out for three or four years, something like that. So I really didn’t have… My boyfriend wasn’t really in the school with me since he went elsewhere.

[31:18] But then after graduating from Barrington High School, because I hated high school so much, and I really struggled… I made fair grades. I mean, I didn’t flunk out. I didn’t make D’s. I did make A’s, B’s and C’s. I wanted to go to college. I remember a counselor sitting down with me, my mom, and my dad. And this counselor told my parents, “Don’t bother. Don’t pay for college for her. She’ll just flunk out.”

Mari-Ann: [31:56] No.

Lisa: [31:56] I mean, can you believe that? I was like… That was probably one of the best things he could have said. I was like, “Oh, wait a minute, buddy.” I guess I’m kind of like, when somebody says, “Don’t do that,” when I know it’s wrong, I’m going to do the opposite. Well, they decided to send me to junior college, Harper College, which was a brand-new campus at the time. A lot of my friends from Barrington went there. So it was pretty good. I was, though, painfully, painfully shy. Painfully shy. I could not speak up in class. I just… It was amazing.

[32:49] My junior year… Well, a sequence of events happened which I would rather not go through. So, my junior year of high school, I decided I wasn’t going to be that way anymore. I had to work very, very hard to overcome. And I’m still very shy and very nervous and petrified inside. Looking at this camera is like, “Oh!” But anyway. So, even at this junior college, I wouldn’t speak up in class. I had one instructor saying, “I’m going to make you talk in class.”

[33:29] Until I took a speech class, which of course petrified me. I had to have speech to graduate. Of course, any classes that you’re really hesitant in taking, you take your last quarter. Back there it was semesters. So, this instructor was phenomenal. He really helped to bring me out of my shell, but in a very different way. I guess… I hate to say this on camera, but he was an extreme male chauvinist P-I-G. I mean, he was amazing. The very first class, he said to his students, particularly the women, “Don’t expect coming in…” Well, let me backtrack a little.

[34:36] This was the days of miniskirts, micro-miniskirts, all of this. And he said, “Don’t expect

Nordic American Voices Page 7 of 29

coming into class wearing your…” This is actually what he said, so, sorry camera, but wearing your shirts unbuttoned with your tits hanging out and wearing your skirts so short that your ass is hanging out.” I mean, can you imagine saying that to a class nowadays? And just really all these things to the women. And one of my good friends was in class. For some reason, he just really started giving her a hard time.

[35:20] After that first class, I think probably about two-thirds of the women in the class dropped. But I was like, “Well, I have to take this class. So I’m staying.” Well, I realized through class, once you could break through this male chauvinistic demeanor of his, he was a phenomenal instructor. I learned so much from him, and I learned also not to be afraid, and to challenge him, and he respected that, so he respected me and wouldn’t pick on me.

[36:04] So, our very last day of class, it was a beautiful day. We sat outside in the grass. And just before that, I was in the student union one day, and I had a miniskirt on, but also it was the day of the maxi coats- the coats were down to your ankles. And I had a coat, and I saw him in the student union, and I grabbed my coat, and I put it on, because I knew he would say something about what I was wearing. I was like, “Whew, okay, he didn’t see it.”

[36:42] So, the last day of class, he wanted us to critique his class, and stuff. He went around to every person, and everybody was very open. He got to me, and I said, “I learned a phenomenal amount from you about speech, and about not being afraid to speak, and how to speak.” I said, “But what I didn’t like was your male chauvinist attitude toward the women in the class.” Particularly my friend Martha, who so many times, she would run out of class crying. But she had to take the class to graduate.

[37:19] He’s like, “Okay, Miss Hill, thank you for telling me. Oh, by the way, you really have hot legs. When I saw you in the student union with your miniskirt on…” And I said, “See what I mean?” Can you imagine being able to say that nowadays? This was, what… I graduated in 1970. This would have been 1972. Yeah.

[37:50] So then from there, I went down to Southern Illinois University. I got my Associates degree at Harper College. I went to Southern Illinois University, where my father went, and my older sister went, and where my uncle… My father and his family, the Hill family, are from a small town in southern Illinois called Carterville. Well, actually an even smaller town- a blink-and-you-miss-it town called Ewing. But my father’s family moved to Carterville.

[38:24] They were involved in the funeral business. My grandfather, my father’s father, was a funeral director down in Carterville. And in the early years, he and his father also had a granite tombstone business and sold furniture. So I guess when the tombstone business… The dying business wasn’t really going, then they could sell furniture and still make a living.

[38:56] So my father being from southern Illinois, that was another home for me. For some reason, I was more bonded to Marblehead, but I am really bonded to southern Illinois, because I did then go to Southern Illinois University, and I majored in Anthropology. As I was going through college, I just consistently made better, better, better grades- A’s and B’s. I realized I could have been a perpetual student. [Laughter] I loved college. I loved the social life. I loved my friends; I loved the professors.

Nordic American Voices Page 8 of 29

[39:41] In the Anthropology department in those days, if you were not a good partier, but were a good student, you didn’t make it in the department, because the Socio-cultural professors and Archaeology professors were nuts. They were crazy. They were just partiers. We would go to parties at their houses all the time. Just really… But it was more than that. It was a lot of really… Sitting around and doing think tanks and talking. Very intellectually stimulating. Those days were just tremendous.

[40:22] College, I just loved it, and particularly the Anthropology department. I could tell more stories about that, but I guess I won’t. Well, just one story… Ed Cook, Professor Cook… And we called them all by their first names. It was that laid-back, so to speak. Where the guys that lived next door to me at one place that I lived in, they were in the Business department, but it was all “Professor” this, “Professor” that; “Doctor” this, “Doctor” that; “Mr.” this, “Miss” that. You know. And it was like these two departments were so totally the opposite.

[41:08] But when I first started in the department, the graduate students… As an undergrad, I was able to take graduate seminars and things, which were really great. But the graduate students had a party for the new undergrads. And the professors were there, and Ed Cook- incredible, incredible man. Specialty in Micronesia and Melanesia. He liked to imbibe a lot, and it was the days where you wore the tops that tied and higher rise pants, so a little of the midriff showed. I was wearing something like that.

[41:58] And he walked up to me and his wife was standing behind him. I didn’t know who he was, or his wife. And he goes, “Do you have an innie or an outie?” And I’m like, “Excuse me?” And he goes, “Belly button. If you have an outie belly button, I hate outies, I’m not going to like you at all, and I’m going to give you a hard time in my classes. If you have an innie belly button, I’m going to love you forever.”

[42:31] I’m like, “I have an innie, I have an innie.” Then he pulls… He goes, “Prove it.” Susie is like, “Okay, Ed, it’s time to go home now.” But after that, “Ed, Susie, I, other students, we were all just best friends. Just great. And it was really tragic. He and Susie… He retired and eventually moved to Florida and passed away there. But just a great guy.

[42:59] Then from Southern Illinois University, I stayed out a year, because I knew I wanted to go to grad school. I got my Anthropology undergrad degree. I stayed out a year to work and make money, to be able to go back to school. Our dad had promised each one of us girls that they would pay for all of our undergrad, but that we needed to pay… If we wanted to go further, we needed to pay for any additional education and higher learning.

[43:43] So I knew I wanted to go back to grad school. So a new program just opened up. It’s kind of hard to describe it. It was the third year of the program, but actually the first year the program really was well-established at Eastern Illinois University, which is in east-central Illinois. Southern Illinois is a lot of coal-mining and all of that. Eastern Illinois is a lot of farming. As you’re driving from Chicago through central Illinois down to southern Illinois, there was a point that all you could get on the radio was the corn, hog, and soybean reports. A lot of hog farming, a lot of corn farming.

[44:48] One interesting area down there near Charleston, where Eastern Illinois University is, is

Nordic American Voices Page 9 of 29

Arcola, where they grow broom corn- one of the only places now where they actually grow broom corn, that brooms are made out of. So I applied for their new program, called Historical Administration, because I knew I wanted to go into the museum field, because I had done some projects with the university museum at Southern, and really liked it.

[45:29] So I applied, and I got accepted. I got an assistantship, also, which paid for my tuition, paid for my books, gave me a job. I worked for the chairman of the department, and I worked with the department archives, the historical administration archives. And it was an incredible experience. Historical Administration is really based on working in museums, but more historically and culturally-oriented museums. But yet there is historic preservation that is part of it. Architecture, decorative arts, collection management, fundraising, administration, archival management.

[46:31] But a lot of things that really went along kind of the history bent, which was… History, anthropology, culture- where I really wanted to go. And I thanked my father for the history, because he took us on a lot of trips around the U.S., and around areas we lived. But I particularly have a fondness for Massachusetts, too, and Marblehead, because of that history. And Dad would take us… There’s tons of literary historic sites, and all the literary characters, individuals. Thoreau, and all that. There’s of course Revolutionary War sites. There’s the Constitution, Old Ironsides.

[47:31] And Dad would just take us to all these sites. Some kids would be like, “Oh, God, we’ve got to go again?” And I’d be like, “[Excitedly] Where are we going today?” And I still do that. We try to get there, my husband and I, every couple years, at least, for family reunions. So I’m always dragging my cousins to all these historic sites. And my cousin who we stay with, Ardith, she was born and raised there. We started calling a lot of these places, “Ardie’s Firsts,” because it’s like you’re born and raised, but you’ve never gone to some of these places.

[48:08] So anyway, I owe my dad, taking us to a lot of these great historical and cultural places, to my love for history, my love for culture, and even art, because we would go to art museums, and things. Even though my dad came from this little almost blink-and-you-miss-it town in southern Illinois, he was very cultured. The program at Eastern Illinois University at the time was a one-year program, which was pretty amazing. The Museology grad program here at the U is a two-year program. So I of course was able to get through it in a year.

[49:04] It changed my life in one regard, because even though we had lived a lot of places, I was still always considered a suburban kid, because we lived in suburban communities. A lot of my growing up, what I remember was in towns or communities that were outside of Chicago. They were considered the suburbs of Chicago, so I was more a suburban kid. So living out in east-central Illinois, out in Charleston, it was really out in the middle of nowhere.

[49:47] And getting hooked up with the Lincoln Log Cabin State Historic Site- Abraham Lincoln’s father, Thomas Lincoln’s last farmstead… Doing living history there. It was the 1850s time period. The site supervisor, Tom Vance and his wife and I got to be very close friends, as well as some other classmates. We were all very close, and we would go out and help Tom with things, and do interpretation. Several of us helped Tom with the first exhibits. We did the first exhibits in the then- new interpretive center at that site.

[50:36] Doing the living history, because it was a log two-pen, which means it was a two-sectioned

Nordic American Voices Page 10 of 29

log house… So we did everything from cooking to farming to… There were live animals on the site. Tom and others through [inaudible 51:07] Association of Living Historical Farms and Museums were doing back-breeding of animals and crops to bring these animals and different seed crops back to the time periods to really try to get authentic as possible.

[51:26] We were also bringing in the dialect of that time period in east-central Illinois in our interpretation. It was amazing. There was a program that is done there every year called Fall Frolic, in the fall. All kinds of… making brooms, making split log fences, cooking, spinning, weaving, making quilts, all this stuff. People would come, and just partake. There were a lot of things they could experience doing, the general public.

[52:08] I can remember one day we had been in costume all day; we were playing the characters all day. We were using the tools of the time all day- nothing contemporary. Being a state historic site, there was a contemporary barn that was off elsewhere on the property with a lot of modern machinery and a modern tractor, all this stuff. So the event ended that day. We needed to finish building this split rail log fence. And we had changed our clothes, at least. We still were hauling these logs up this little rise. Just physically hauling them up.

[53:10] And I turned to the guy that I was helping, and we both kind of looked at each other at the same time, and it was like, “This would be so much easier if we would go get the horse.” We were still there. There was a tractor. There was a big, monster tractor that would have been the easiest. But we were still, “No, we’ve got to go get the horse to get this log up this little rise.” [Laughter]

[53:37] So, you know, just that experience, experiencing and living that history really changed me, and really gave me a much deeper appreciation of history, and what people went through. And that’s why it was always so fascinating here, to hear the stories of the immigrants and what the immigrants went through coming here.

[54:11] So then I graduated from grad school, got my Master’s. By the way, straight A’s, 4.0. I was like, I would love to throw my transcript into this high school counselor’s face and go, “You were saying?” [Laughter] But of course, I didn’t. [Laughter] But I guess, too, because I loved it… I mean, I loved every aspect of learning about museums and being involved in museums.

[54:51] Another claim to fame for me which made me really proud and happy was I had mentioned to Mari-Ann that we had oral history classes, too, and we had to do oral history interviews. It was hard for me, because I was still shy. I was still fighting that shyness. But we had to do it. And I wanted to combine… In architecture class, we had to go out and find old buildings, and we had to measure them; we had to document them. We had to do all this stuff.

[55:40] And I ran across this whole farmstead that was abandoned. Somebody still owned it, but nobody lived on it. And the owner- I found the owner- allowed me to poke around. Pulling some siding back, I discovered that these were old log structures. And there was a gentleman, a farmer, an older man, who lived down the street. He knew the history of that immediate area.

[56:16] There was also a little log school called the Salisbury School, and he had taught in that school, this other guy that I was interviewing. So I interviewed him about the history of this area where this old farmstead was, the Salisbury School, and also documented the Salisbury School.

Nordic American Voices Page 11 of 29

Every time I would go and interview and talk with him- I went several times- he and his wife were wonderful. I would leave laden with fresh vegetables and all this. One day he wanted me to take some of his kittens, but I couldn’t. I loved cats, of course, but I couldn’t have cats where I was living.

[57:04] As it turned out, in further documenting this old farmstead, the barn and the outbuildings were logs. The house was not, but it had all this other siding on it. It turned out that in the early years when it was first settled there in that time period, the 1850s or so of Thomas Lincoln living on his farmstead, the Sargent family lived on this abandoned farmstead. They were quite well-to-do compared to Abraham Lincoln’s father.

[57:52] Through the years, this house had been neglected, and fake siding, and all that put on it, and other siding put on the barn, and the outbuildings. When I left there, I left all my documentation with the archives that I was working on with the historical administration program. And the site supervisor, Tom Vance, of the Thomas Lincoln Farmstead decided he was really interested in this. I took him out.

[58:35] Well, he found out more and more about it, where finally he brought it to the attention of the State of Illinois, and they purchased it from this guy who owned the land. His attitude to me was, “Yeah, you can go out there anytime you want. But what to you want to bother with all these old buildings, and stuff?” I’m like, “Oh, my God. Do you know what’s out here? Do you know what you have out here?”

[59:03] So, eventually, the State went and moved the buildings, restored them to what they were. Now there’s two sites on the Lincoln Log Cabin State Historic Site. There’s the Sargent Farm, and then the Thomas Lincoln Farm. They’re comparing and contrasting kind of a more well-to-do farmer from the time period with a less well-to-do farmer.

[59:32] We also did historical archaeological fieldwork on the site, which was amazing. But it was tough because of it being a state site. In the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps had gone through and had graded the site to turn it into a park, which is kind of an archaeological nightmare. So anyway, let’s get onto the history… My history.

[59:59] Then at the time I was going to graduate, my father kept on sending me newspaper clippings and stuff. This job is open, this job is open, this job is open. He sent me a job opening for the Bradford Exchange, which was quite interesting. These were the days when collector’s plates… All the hype. They were really big. The Bing and Grondahl, and Royal Copenhagen, the American-made Knowles. All of these were really big. Some of these collector’s plates, because of this hype, were selling for amazing amounts of money. Now, they cost pennies. They’re a dime a dozen.

[1:00:50] The Bradford Exchange was owned by Rod MacArthur, very wealthy, lecherous man. Sorry, Rod, rest in peace. But it’s true. A lot of the museum was based on some of the original art. And there were some well-known artists who were involved with creating the artwork for plates, as well as all of the plates. So I was hired as the curator of this new museum. It was really a culture shock. The Bradford Exchange itself dealt with the secondary market, and really worked with all the hype.

Nordic American Voices Page 12 of 29

[1:01:45] But the building that we worked in was gorgeous. Oh, my God. I mean, lots of money that was put into this building. For lunch, we would sit in this beautiful atrium with plants. I mean, the food… there was a chef that created this wonderful food. So going from east-central Illinois, from the country… Well, first going from Chicago down to east-central Illinois was a culture shock. But then settling down in the country and then going back up to the Chicago area was really a shock.

[1:02:26] But it was interesting. Working for a corporate museum was something just totally different than working for a non-profit museum. Non-profit museums are really where I’ve spent most of my time. So, it was interesting. I curated and installed an exhibit in a building in West Palm Beach, Florida that Rod owned. It was an exhibit on collecting plates and stuff. I have no idea if it’s still there. I have since been to that area, mainly Fort Lauderdale, but when I was in Fort Lauderdale, I was like, “I don’t even want to know if that’s there.” [Laughter] So I never checked.

[1:03:22] I curated one really neat show that was called “The Originals,” and we were able to borrow the original artwork from a lot of the artists who had created the artwork for these collector’s plates. A lot of the artists came from all over the place- all over the country, and stuff, to attend the opening. You know, it was kind of a big deal for being a young museum person just out of college.

[1:03:59] Oh, but one thing I did forget- that year that I was out between undergrad and grad school, I was the director of two very small local historical museums. Non-profits, very, very small, part- time. One was the Barrington Historical Society, where I went to high school, where my parents still lived. One was the Des Plaines Historical Society, where I went to grade school. I did both of those part-time as a museum director. I was hired to do that out of undergrad school, which was quite an experience.

[1:04:47] Those gave me, also, that further love for history and for historical objects, because I could actually be working with the objects. You know, when you’re a museum director, even part-time, you’re doing it all. You have to worry about how you’re going to get the toilet fixed, to how you’re going to keep the doors open. That was quite an experience for being young and out of college. But also from there, I knew I wanted to go back to grad school. I was very honest with them, saying I’ll do this for a while, but then if when I’m accepted to grad school, I’m going on.

[1:05:31] So from the Bradford Exchange, I was hired to work at Naper Settlement in a town outside of Chicago called Naperville. Naper Settlement is a big open-air living history museum complex. How it started was the community rallied around. There were a number of endangered historic buildings. They rallied around and saved the buildings, and had them moved on to site. The City of Naperville administered some aspects of the site as well as the private non-profit organization. The City of Naperville paid for a lot of the salaries, but the non-profit organization… Very similar to here, at this museum. Other duties and fundraising, etcetera, to keep the doors open.

[1:06:44] So once again, I was able to get back into my first love, living history. So what I did was I worked with interpretation there. I worked with some other individuals on education, and worked on public programming. So there was already a previously hired Curator of Collections. I wasn’t able to really work with the collections, like I would have liked to, nor work really with the buildings themselves.

[1:07:24] But I could work with the Curator of Collections, as far as the interpretation of the

Nordic American Voices Page 13 of 29

buildings, and using collections to interpret the different time periods, and the different purposes, and why these different buildings were created. So, it was really… Yeah, just getting back into that living history was just wonderfully fulfilling. I also did exhibitions, too. There was a temporary exhibition hall there on that site.

[1:07:56] While I was working there, my parents decided… My dad had retired… Well, years ago, when we lived in Des Plaines, he had retired from the Navy. He took a civilian job working with the military division of Zenith Radio Corporation. While I was then working at Naper Settlement… I think, or maybe it was a little before, Dad retired from his civilian job. He had been stationed out here in the Seattle area years ago, and Mom and Dad had very close friends out here, living on Camano Island, from the Navy.

[1:08:43] Mom and Dad did a lot of research into where they wanted… They knew they didn’t want to stay in Illinois for their retirement years, because the winters are horrific. The summers are hot and humid, which don’t really bother me, but the winters… Ugh. When I hear about… I have a previous grad student who lives in Chicago, and we keep in touch. She’s always telling me about the snow, and I’m like, “That’s why I’m here. You need to come back to the Northwest.”

[1:09:16] But they decided it was either going to be the east coast or the west coast. Somewhere along the line, they decided the west coast. They decided it would be Camano Island. So they then decided to move. At that time, my younger sister Carrie was a professional actress, singer, dancer. She was on the east coast. She was in New York in the Annie company. She was getting really tired.

[1:09:55] She says that when you’re in a show like that, it’s the same thing over and over again. The cast members would do fun little things to each other on stage just to make it a little different, but the audience would never know. So she was getting kind of tired of the same thing, although she had great experiences, being able to go to Philadelphia and Boston and New York, and all this. So when my parents decided they were going to move, she was like, “Okay, maybe I’ll move, too.”

[1:10:32] And my older sister, with her daughter, decided that they would move out with my parents. So at the time that my parents sold their house in Barrington, Carrie quit the Annie company and moved out. She came out and stayed with me in Naperville for a month. And then she was going to head west. But she hadn’t really decided if she was going to go to L.A. and try to find more fame and fortune there, or head to Seattle to go back to college, because she had not finished college.

[1:11:21] Somewhere, I don’t know, maybe Mount Rushmore, she decided to head to the northwest, and headed up to Seattle. One of the reasons is that the acting world is absolutely… It’s cutthroat. It’s really, really challenging. So I was the only one… I had no intention of moving out here. I was the only one left back in Illinois. All my friends and my community, everything was there. No intention. My boyfriend at the time was there, but we weren’t really thinking of marriage, or anything at that point.

[1:12:00] So at Christmas, I was going to come out here to spend Christmas with my family. But my parents kept writing and calling- again, before the days of cell phones and camera phones and all that. But they would send me pictures and say, “You’d love it. It’s your lifestyle. You need to come out here. I’m like, “Well, you know, I’m really not ready to leave Illinois.”

Nordic American Voices Page 14 of 29

[1:12:28] So I came out here for Christmas. As soon as I got off the plane, I knew it. I’m like, “They’re right. They are right.” I spent Christmas with them. I spent several weeks. I went back to Naperville and gave a month notice. I said, “I’m leaving. I’m heading northwest.” Which was very scary for me, to quit a job and not have another job to go to. I mean, you know, that wasn’t me. If I would switch jobs, it would be to go to another job. But my parents were like, “No, you’ll be okay.” They were very supportive. “You can stay with us until you get on your feet.”

[1:13:22] So at that time, one of my very close friends of Swedish heritage, Ders Anderson… He’s a city planner. He was going to be going to Portland, Oregon to a convention. And when he was in his early twenties, he walked from Chicago out to our coast, to the Washington coast. It took him months. People would stop and ask him if he wanted a ride. No. He wanted to experience walking. He would stop along the way, take odd jobs, just make money. Brilliant, brilliant man. His knowledge of historical events… You know.

[1:14:12] He said, “Hey, I’ll take some time and drive out with you, if you’d like.” So he planned our route out, and we did it all historically- the Trans-Continental Highway, the Lolo Trail, the Lewis & Clark Trail. I mean, it was amazing, the sites. He would give me all this homework before I moved to read and go, “Okay, this is what we’re going to do. This is where we’re going to go. This is what we’re going to see. So this is your homework, to understand.”

[1:14:48] Phenomenal trip. Phenomenal, the things that we saw. I think we were always very upbeat about it. At the end of the day, at dinner, we would be just chatting about what we saw, and the history of it. But the day we went to Wounded Knee, it was total… He had been there before, but it had been a long time. But it really hit both of us very hard. At dinner, we were both silent. Absolutely silent. Later, we were able to talk about it.

[1:15:31] But again, being able to be so immersed… Having that book knowledge from the things that Ders would give me to read, but then being able to… Not experiencing it firsthand, but being there, where these things happened. Or being at museums, to see some of the actual objects and artifacts. That’s why I love the museum field so much.

[1:16:03] So we finally… I think it took us about a week and a half, or so, to finally get out here because of all the things we were doing and experiencing. Then we went up to Camano Island to be with my parents, a kind of home base. But Ders had a few more days before he had to head down to Portland. So a couple of days, we decided to go to Neah Bay, because I had heard about the museum on the Makah Reservation and the Ozette Dig. Of course, at that time, it was all covered over.

[1:16:55] Ders was very knowledgeable about it. To me, having history, archaeology, that combination, was like, wow, yeah. So we went out and hiked out to Ozette. Of course there was nothing to see, but yet to be there and experiencing it… Hiking south at very low tide… You can hike south along the water and there’s the pictographs. They’re not actually petroglyphs. But on the rocks. To me, that was just absolutely magical and mystical. But just being there.

[1:17:37] So then we went up to Neah Bay to the museum. The museum, of course, has a lot of the artifacts on view that had been excavated from one of the longhouse sites. They had also created a mural of the scene of the ocean with a lot of things there… Kind of a recreation of part of a

Nordic American Voices Page 15 of 29

longhouse. And it was like, “Oh, my God. I’m there again.” Just amazing. Just amazing. And I haven’t been to that museum for a long time. I need to go back up.

[1:18:22] But again, just bringing the site… Ders had given me things to read. That book learning, and then the experience of it, and then seeing those artifacts. I would have loved to have been able to go further, and have been able to do work on the archaeological excavation, as well as handle the artifacts. But no such luck.

[1:18:53] It didn’t take me too long to find a job, thanks to museum connections throughout the state. I guy that I went to undergrad school with in Anthropology- we had done some work with the university museum, a project together at Southern Illinois University- he actually branched off and went into archaeology, and he went on to the southwest for grad school and became a southwest archaeologist, and also got his Ph.D. We kept in touch.

[1:19:32] When he was in grad school, another friend of his- they were actually in New Mexico at the time- Michael Warner, who is a pretty well known museum voice around our area here- he was going to grad school. They were going to grad school together. They were both married. Their spouses lived pretty far away. So Michael and John shared an apartment during school, and then on the weekends, they would go home to their respective spouses.

[1:20:07] John had told Michael about me and some of the things we had done as undergrads. So I had told John that I was moving, and he wrote back and said, “Oh, you need to get in touch with my good friend Michael Warner, who lives up in Bellingham and works up at the Whatcom Museum. He can just tell you about the state of museums in the Pacific Northwest and particularly the Seattle area.” Because I really didn’t want to go anywhere else.

[1:20:47] One of the things I have to say that disappointed me here… Although it has changed dramatically through the years, was having experienced a lot of the east coast museums as well as Midwest museums- a lot of larger museums like the Art Institute in Chicago and the Field Museum, etcetera, I was very disappointed in the state of museums at the time. This was 1984, I think it was. Yeah. 1984.

[1:21:35] Museums seemed really kind of behind the times in a lot of aspects in their public programming, in their collection management, in their interpretation, in their exhibitions. So I was kind of disappointed. “Oh, okay. I feel like maybe after being involved with some very progressive museums, other than the little historical society ones, I’m going to go backwards. But maybe I can make a difference.”

[1:22:05] So I called Michael Warner, and Michael said, “Oh, yeah. Let’s set up an appointment. Come on up, and I’ll talk to you.” So I went up and met Michael. There were not a lot of museum jobs that were available, even, but the Whatcom Museum was going to be working on a big catalog revision project, which was working on revising the cataloging and updating, upgrading, doing extensive work with various aspects of their objects, their artifacts, their collections.

[1:22:43] They had applied for… At that time it was called IMS- Institute of Museum Services Grant. And he said, “If we get this grant, there might be a temporary position for you.” Well, lo and behold, they got the grant. They were able to hire for two positions, me and another person. So I

Nordic American Voices Page 16 of 29

went up and worked at the Whatcom Museum for about a year. They have some wonderful Northwest Coast Native American artifacts, so I was able to really work with them and hold them with gloves, of course. It was just like, “Oh, wow.”

[1:23:38] So I worked on the catalog revision project. They had taken on a new building, which was going to be their offsite storage, so I was in charge of that storage facility. At the time it was called 208, because it was 208 Prospect Street, across the street and kitty-corner from the main Whatcom Museum building, the old City Hall building.

[1:24:05] So I was in charge of really getting that space… It was an empty space. Setting it up for storage of the segment of larger objects. And that was fun. That was a really great experience. I was able to train a couple of interns. Actually all through working… All aspects of my museum jobs except for the corporate museum, I’ve worked extensively with volunteers, which has also given me a great love for working with volunteers. So I was able to work with interns and volunteers at the Whatcom Museum, too. So we worked at turning 208 into storage.

[1:24:57] Now it’s something else. I don’t know. They’ve gone through a lot of different changes, especially with the building of their new Lightcatcher building. I think that’s what it’s called. So, a lot of changes since I worked there. While I was there, before my contract ended, I was looking for jobs, and of course very upfront with them. I’m like, “I have to have a real job.” I was hired as Curator of Exhibits at the Washington State Capitol Museum down in Olympia.

[1:25:28] So I left… Well, I had moved from my parents’ house when I was in Bellingham. I lived out in the country, in the Skagit Valley, which I absolutely loved. I left the Whatcom Museum and the Skagit Valley, and moved down to Olympia, our state capitol, which was a great experience living there. I did quite a number of exhibits, of course, being Curator of Exhibits there at the State Capitol Museum, and also Curator of Exhibits and Public Programming. In charge of public programming, did a lot of public programming based on the topic of the exhibits.

[1:26:11] So during the time I was in Olympia, my sister had met a man in college. They were both in college. They decided they would get married. She was living in Marysville. I was in the wedding party, so I went up one weekend to help her with things, and what have you, and also another weekend for the wedding rehearsal, and stuff. She would always tell me about this friend of her fiancée’s who was wild and crazy. He had been married before, and was divorced and sowing his wild oats. She was like, “Nah, you two wouldn’t get along. I’m not going to introduce you.”

[1:27:10] Well, he was in the wedding party, too. So we met during the rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner. The rest is history. We got married. Well, we dated. When I was in Olympia, he was living up in Bothell. Yeah, a little challenging, the long distance relationship. Of course, the days before cell phones and all of that, and internet and computers. We had computers, but the very early days of computers. So we had kind of a long distance relationship, but on the weekends he would come down, or I would go up. And we decided to get married.

[1:27:50] I had moved so many times and changed so many things in my life, it was like, “Okay, but I’m not ready to leave my job yet. So how about if I stay working… And he was building a house in Bothell. For about nine months I was able to work flex time, four ten-hour days down in Olympia. Then I could come up Thursday night and be with John Friday, Saturday and Sunday. And then

Nordic American Voices Page 17 of 29

Sunday night I would go back down to Olympia.

[1:28:32] In the meantime, Michael Warner had gotten a job down at the State Capitol Museum, too. He had gone through a divorce, so he and I shared an apartment together down there during the week. Here I was, probably spending more time living with another guy than I was with my husband. That was kind of the joke. So nine months of back and forth on I-5, and just not knowing if I was coming or going. If I was down there, and I would need something that was up north. You know. It just got really hard. So finally I said, “Okay, I’m ready to come up and move again.”

[1:29:23] So I left that job, again, not having another job to go to. Although that’s not entirely true, because Michael was hired as the director of… In the early years, it was called the Centennial Resource Center. We worked with mainly local museums and local historical societies, helping them prepare for the State Centennial- exhibitions, programming, all of that. So I was able to really get in… I really helped with this program early on.

[1:30:06] I did a little exhibit in the governor’s office- Booth Gardner was the Governor at that time. Jean Gardner, Booth Gardner’s wife at the time, she was on the Centennial Committee. I got to know her quite well. I worked on a couple little projects with her. It was kind of neat. I mean, I didn’t get to know her as well as being invited over to the Governor’s Mansion for tea, or whatever. But you know, it was kind of neat. She’s a great, great lady.

[1:30:46] So I was able then to get more contract work through the Centennial Resource Center. Then it eventually changed, when the Centennial was over, into the Heritage Resource Center. So I contracted a lot with the Heritage Resource Center, working with museums throughout Washington State, helping them with exhibitions, helping them with collection management, helping them with public programming. So I did that, did contract work, for seven years. It was great. Some of these small museums, it is amazing the collection objects they have behind closed doors. Oh, my gosh. Some of the things in our museums in this state are phenomenal.

[1:31:42] But it got a little… Again, it was either feast or famine. I didn’t know if I was coming or going. Sometimes it took weeks to get a contract. Other times they were just… And I was working on two, three contracts at once. So I worked for the Centennial, with the little Edmonds South Snohomish County Historical Society Museum. They wanted to re-do their whole lower level, which was very old, mom and pop, very old style exhibits. Just objects with a handwritten label saying, “An old butter churn,” or something. You know. So, they wanted to create a brand-new exhibit in their lower level on the history of Edmonds, the town of Edmonds. So I was hired, at first through the Centennial Resource Center, to help them make this dream come true.

[1:32:47] At the same time, another big project that started through the Centennial Resource Center was the Lake Stevens Historical Society. They had just built a brand-new building, right behind, attached to the little Lake Stevens Library. There was nothing in it. They had very few artifacts or objects to put on exhibit, and they really needed help. They didn’t know where to go with this. So I was hired to contract with them to help them create their museum, and also work with their few collections that they had.

[1:33:29] So I just kind of kept it to those, because there was no way I could do anything else. When the other contracts were done, then I didn’t take anything else on. At the Edmonds Museum, we

Nordic American Voices Page 18 of 29

created with volunteer knowledge and love and help. I mean, it was great. We created an exhibit on the history of Edmonds on the lower level called “The Changing Face of Edmonds.” We were really bantering about what the title was going to be. We had created a mural, enlarged a photograph…

[1:34:11] In those days, also… And I’ll get back to this story. Rod Slemmons was working with the Heritage Resource Center, and Rod was a well-noted… He had worked at the Seattle Art Museum. Well known for his photography skills, and very knowledgeable. Extremely knowledgeable about photography, and also taught at the UW. Also, Eric Taylor- I’m sure you know Eric… And the three of us palled around a lot and did a lot of contract work together. We traveled all over the state.

[1:34:58] Rod was so phenomenally knowledgeable about the geography and geology. He was another Ders Anderson. He would tell me and Eric about all this stuff we saw. So the three of us worked together on various projects with all these local heritage organizations throughout the state. Eastern Washington was particularly fun.

[1:35:23] Eric was hired then to build and to really work with “The Changing Face of Edmonds” exhibit. So Eric and I were standing in front of this mural that had been enlarged, and it had been mounted to the entrance of the exhibit. Just bantering back and forth with a volunteer about what we were going to call this exhibit. And the people… It was a street scene, but there were a number of people standing in the street and on the sidewalk, and they were all turned facing the photographer. I was like, “I got it. ‘The changing face of Edmonds!’” And everybody was like, “Yes!” Just all from seeing this enlarged historic image.

[1:36:10] So from that project, the Edmonds Museum decided, okay, they had done this… They really wanted to become more professional. They did not want to be a little mom and pop museum any longer. So they asked if I would be their part-time permanent museum director. And I was like… Been there, done that. I really did not like the headaches of being a museum director. And I really preferred to work with the collections and interpretation and all that. That was my love. You know, they kind of twisted my arm. So I did that for five years. And it was part-time, so I could still do other contract work.

[1:37:06] And at that time, I was helping Lake Stevens. So we created their historical exhibits. And also, I helped them extensively with their collection management. But I can remember one of the first meetings I had with the Lake Stevens folks. Wonderful volunteers. One of the hardest things for me in working with volunteers- many of them who are so vested in the history and in the local historical societies are older, retired, and we lose them. And all of the wonderful volunteers that I worked with at Lake Stevens, and the majority at Edmonds, now are gone. And every time I hear about the passing of somebody that I loved, it’s hard.

[1:38:03] But with these original volunteers, the real movers and shakers of the Lake Stevens Museum, we were all sitting around a table. A couple of them had their head in their hands, just going, “How do we do this? We barely have artifacts.” I said, “Well, what we have to do is, we come up with the storyline based on the history of the community here, and every community has a unique history. Some of the artifacts may be the same. And once we come up with the stories we want to tell, then we can decide on the artifacts that we need. And we advertise.” Well, we did that, and things were coming out of the woodwork. People were donating things. Then of course, I had to help them with the collection management. So we did that, got their doors open, and a great,

Nordic American Voices Page 19 of 29

great little museum.

[1:39:07] And then after seven years of contracting, the position at the Nordic Heritage Museum opened up, a Collection Manager/Curator of Collections position. I thought, contracting has been really kind of tough. And there were times… I remember one time, sitting at the Lake Stevens Museum, talking about Edmonds history, because I had just come from Edmonds, working with them. And they were so wonderful. They said, “Lisa, we know that you work with Edmonds, too. But this is Lake Stevens.” [Laughter] “This isn’t Edmonds.” [Laughter] So I thought, “Okay, it’s time.”

[1:39:52] So I interviewed for this job. I was hired. Frankly, it petrified me, because Nordic heritage or history was not my thing, or culture. It was not my thing. But I knew I could do it, because the principles and practices of working with objects and collections are the same, no matter what these objects are. As well as my love for learning… I have learned so much working at this museum.

[1:40:32] You know, I have even brought some of the… Even though I am not Scandinavian, that I know of- English, Irish, and Scottish, so there is probably Viking blood in there, but way distant. But I’ve even brought some of the Scandinavian traditions and decorating into my own life, because of having worked at this museum for over twenty years, and being so immersed with the history and the traditions and the culture.

[1:41:02] But I was really afraid, because I knew nothing Scandinavian. And sometimes in the early years, I would lament to Marianne, and go into her office and just go, “Oh, Marianne, I feel like a failure as a curator, because when one curates something, they really need to know their subject.” She said, “No, don’t worry. I didn’t hire you for that. I hired you for your collection management expertise. And our collections really needed to be managed.”

[1:41:41] Because in the early years, there were so many volunteers… wonderful volunteer committees working with the collections. There was only one person before me that was working with the collections, and these volunteers would have a hard time really understanding that the things they would bring in… Because they know their community, they know their history, they know what’s out there… But they would bring things in, and as their exhibition rooms up on the third floor were being created, they would just put these things on exhibit without bringing these things to the Collection Manager/Curator of Collections, to process into the collections, to catalog.

[1:42:31] And they meant well, absolutely meant well. They just weren’t professional museum people. So when I first started, Liisa Mannery, who works as a volunteer with the Finn Room, she was the part-time Registrar. But Marianne wanted to hire a collection manager. But Lisa warned me, she said, “Now, you’re going to see that we have very wonderful volunteers, but they’re very zealous. They’ll bring in artifacts and objects, but they’ll hide them in their little work rooms, or else they’ll put them on exhibit. We won’t see them.”

[1:43:14] Well, I was hired to try to bring order to some of this chaos, and to be able to then manage these collections, and to also help educate the volunteers as to the way that we… as this museum grew professionally, to professionalize working with the collections. And there are still some of the committee members from the early years that do work with the rooms and work with the collections. I hope I’ve educated them. I think I have. They’re wonderful. They’re still so devoted to

Nordic American Voices Page 20 of 29

working with these collections.

[1:44:00] There is still a lot of work to do with the collections, too. You know, it’s never-ending. Working with the backlog, the older things, and also keeping up with the new things that come in, and also working with professionalizing the management of the collection- what the museum collects and why the museum collects these things. But I have to say, as working with other volunteers in the other historical societies, we have lost a lot of the wonderful, wonderful people that I worked with, too, in the early years. It’s really hard, and I can look at some of the artifacts that might have belonged to them, and think about them.

[1:44:55] Not too long ago I was here, and there were some things from Si Ranta, who worked with the Finn committee. He was the chair of the Finn committee for a number of years. Just a great guy. There were some objects that had belonged to him, and I was like, “Oh, Si, I really miss you.” But still, bringing those objects, had some life, too, because I knew the person who owned them, or had some relationship to them. But I know that now Fred and Ariane, under Eric’s direction, and whenever we have a new chief curator- are going to continue to bring these collections forward into more professionalism. Am I running out of time?

Mari-Ann: [1:45:52] We want you to continue.

Lisa: [1:45:54] Okay. Because I just want to say some things about the early years of working at the museum.

Mari-Ann: [1:46:01] We do want to hear it all.

Lisa: [1:46:02] And of working… Being here at the museum for over twenty years. I was hired in early 1994. I actually started in April, part-time, in 1994, and then went full-time in May. Marianne agreed for me to start part-time because I needed to close things out at Edmonds and at Lake Stevens. Also, Marianne wanted somebody here in April, though, because in May… At that time it was called the American Association of Museums- now it’s the American Alliance of Museums- the annual meeting was in Seattle, and this museum was going to be one of the venues. There was going to be a smorgasbord, tours of the exhibits. All of this.

[1:47:00] Marianne wanted a collection person onboard- have a least a few weeks under their belt, and also to help with things, to help prepare for AAM coming to town. So AAM came to town, and it was a wonderful experience for me, because a smorgasbord was put on… I don’t remember exactly who it was- whether it was Elsa and Inge Bjorg and her mother [that put this on]. In the early days, they would do all the cooking, and stuff. Or [it might have been] catered. That I just don’t recall. But a phenomenal smorgasbord. All the AAM attendees that came to this museum…

[1:47:55] There was dancing, Scandinavian dancing. Marianne and her crew of volunteers put on a phenomenal event, and it was a great learning experience for me to see this. So all of the AAM people who attended the event here were just like, “Whoa, for those who didn’t get to the Nordic Heritage Museum, you really missed something tremendous.”

[1:48:27] Not to say that the events aren’t tremendous nowadays, because they absolutely are. But because there was a very strong kitchen crew back then, especially Elsa, as kind of the queen of the

Nordic American Voices Page 21 of 29

kitchen crew, and particularly, too, when her mom was alive, there was always something cooking in the kitchen. Always something. And then there was always something for us to eat, too, because they would always cook something extra for us- pea soup, or open-face sandwiches, or something.

[1:49:01] So we were eating pretty well back in the early days, despite the fact that money was extremely tight. There was one winter that Marianne… Because we had the old boiler system going before it was converted to gas… Extremely expensive to run. We were really pinching pennies. The heat was not on very often, so we all invested in long underwear. We wore long underwear. We wore heavy socks and boots, fingerless gloves. Seriously. To try to help conserve. Yeah, it was cold, sitting at desks. Yeah. We did everything. Not only…

[1:49:53] Let’s see, when I started there were five to seven of us. We did it all, even with all the ambitious exhibitions and programming that Marianne did. In those days, not only did we have the second floor changing exhibit gallery, but there were two changing exhibit galleries on the third floor. There was one that was where now the collection department- the collection workroom is, and one directly across the hall, where the development office and more collection storage is.

[1:50:30] In the early years, because there were only… I can’t remember… There were five to seven of us on staff, over half of which, if I recall correctly, were part-time. There were only a few of us that were full-time. We did everything. And then with the very ambitious exhibition programs and exhibition spaces, the changing exhibits were happening probably every two months. Some would be once a month in all three spaces, the two galleries on the third floor, and the big gallery spaces on the second floor. And all of the exhibits would open concurrently.

[1:51:34] So we were putting up three exhibitions, and as I said, with the very, very ambitious but pretty incredible exhibition schedule. Quite a variety between art, cultural exhibits, historical exhibits. You name it. Marianne was just so knowledgeable, of course, about the Nordic cultures, and with having come from Sweden, and with her Swedish connections, or Scandinavian connections, would go back over to the Nordic countries. A lot of connections, and would bring in a lot of exhibitions from the Nordic countries, too, as well as locally, from Nordic-American artists, or exhibitions that we even created in-house, which we did a number of times.

[1:52:37] So not only in my case, although I was working full-time, was I working with the collections, which is a phenomenally full-time job in itself, and working with all of the volunteers, and really trying to drum up a volunteer… Some good, core volunteers, steady volunteers to help us with processing and administering the collections. But I was working with this extremely ambitious and wonderful exhibition program, and working with Marianne. Just learned a phenomenal amount from Marianne Forssblad. Just phenomenal.

[1:53:23] But also, the special events… Because we did not have a development department at that time. Development was Marianne and Junius Rochester- Junius was part-time- and later Marianne and Gordon Strand. But we didn’t have a department that worked with these major programs or major events like Viking Days, Yulefest, the auction. Just other big, big programs like that. We did them. We all did them.

[1:54:11] In working with Viking Days in the early days, it was called Tivoli. Then later, because a decision was to bring in the Viking aspect, because the public likes Vikings, it was called Tivoli

Nordic American Voices Page 22 of 29

Viking Days. Then later it was just termed Viking Days, particularly when the Society of Creative Anachronism came in, and we had the Viking encampments. See, I still say, “we.” This museum is still in my heart. But the Viking encampments, and all of that, in the early days, when it was Tivoli, even Tivoli Viking Days…

[1:54:57] We all… The staff members took extremely strong part in creating these events. I was in charge of signage. I was in charge of… this would be like for Viking Days, or Tivoli. I was in charge of set-up, working with the crews with set-up. I was in charge of working with the kitchen crew on what the menus would be for all of the food. Then working with all of the groups out in the parking lot on what their menus were going to be. And then determining what the costs would be.

[1:55:48] I was just in charge of all… So much of that. Because it was staff. You know, we were such a small staff. Later, when Gordon Strand came onboard, and as technology became more sophisticated, then we still created the signage, but we were also able to… I could say, “Okay, Gordon, this is what we need.” And he could lay it out and do it all in color. He had the printer that printed things out in big print. But yet it was still us. There was not the development department of several people or one person whose job was specifically to do that, working on that.

[1:56:35] So it became quite interesting for me as staff increased here and people were hired for specific jobs, for things that we did a variety of in the early years. Then those were taken away from us. Then we no longer had to do them, because they were done by one specific person. So I would chuckle if I would hear complaints about being overworked, and go, “You have no idea. No idea on what we did in the early years. None whatsoever.” You worked, and you worked on such a variety of things. As I said, me, from collection management to exhibit, to major events. Just, yeah. You had to stop when Viking Days or Tivoli, Yulefest came up.

[1:57:45] There was a time I was in charge of the vendors for Viking Days, too. All of it. When that time period came up, everything else stopped. Collections? What collections? For several weeks. You had to put your regular… what you were hired for, kind of on the back burner to attend to these major events, because of course, they were major fundraisers to help keep the museum going.

[1:58:13] I would always absolutely marvel at Marianne Forssblad and what she did, what she created here at this museum. The energy of twenty-five people, at least. And her knowledge, and her memory. Photographic memory, I swear. And her knowledge of not only Nordic culture, but the community around us- the Nordic communities throughout the state, even throughout the U.S. so I always knew I could go to her and learn, with those questions.

[1:59:01] And even objects that I would find in the collection and just go, “I have no idea what this is.” I could go to her, or the wonderful volunteers- the Finn committee, the Swedish committee, the Icelandic committee, and say, “Hey, what is this? Tell me how this is used.” So, I just learned so much from working at this place. And because the volunteers, in particular were so wonderful and took me under their wing, my fear of, “Oh, my God, how am I going to work here? I don’t know about Nordic heritage.” Just gone. Because I knew they would help me. You know, they would be there for me and help me understand. Okay, what is this? What this is, and what it’s used for.

[1:59:59] In the early days, our committees were a lot more involved than they are now. A lot of the reasoning… I think why they’re not as involved now is because of our continuing professionalism of

Nordic American Voices Page 23 of 29

all aspects and activities of the museum, but particularly with exhibitions and with programming and with collection management. But a lot of those volunteers, as I said before, we’ve lost. And a lot of that knowledge is gone, which is sad, but it’s inevitable. That’s why these oral histories are wonderful.

[2:00:45] And also, a lot of the volunteers who are still working are tired, too. They’re like, “No, we do want staff to take over.” You know. It’s time. But yet when I was here, and I hope it still continues, it was important to me… and I’ve heard this from Eric, too, so I’m pretty sure this is going to continue… To keep the volunteers involved. Because they’re still… They were such our lifeblood in the early years, but they still are now, still, in so many ways. Some of their functions may be changing and may have changed.

[2:01:27] We may rely on volunteers for different functions differently now. For instance, we rely more heavily on keeping the doors open by people at the front desk or the telephone desk or the gift shop, or whatever, until maybe in the new building, staff are hired. I don’t know what the plans are. So some of those functions have shifted, but I think the importance of the volunteers still remain. They still need to know and understand, too, that they are so, so important.

Mari-Ann: [2:02:11] And we are appreciated, and we feel appreciated.

Lisa: [2:02:17] Yes. And I feel that through Eric, and I felt it through other staff members, and through the volunteer appreciation get-togethers. That’s another thing- the volunteer appreciation, the fall one that’s Halloween- that one, from what I understand, started out as… Mari-Ann, maybe you know better. I’m not sure how long you’ve been involved, like with the auction.

Mari-Ann: [2:02:48] Only twenty-eight years.

Lisa: [2:02:50] Okay. But that’s before… Correct me if I’m wrong, please, but from what I understand, it started out a couple of the volunteers from the auction wanted to have a get-together at their home as a thank-you for the auction workers. Correct? Yes. And then Marianne and whoever started doing it at the museum. So, as a thank-you for all the phenomenally hard work that the volunteers do, and nowadays, too, the staff, for the extremely important aspect of our fundraising, the auction.

[2:03:32] So, when I first started, that fall, the volunteer appreciation was exclusively for the auction. As I got my feet wet, and experienced more of… like Yulefest, like Tivoli, and more of the programming and stuff, I turned to Marianne, or maybe the staff in a staff meeting, and said, “You know, I’m kind of the new kid now. Kind of looking in and learning and thinking.”

[2:04:12] And I said, “We have this volunteer appreciation in the fall for one event, but we have so many events that go on. Yes, we have volunteer appreciation in the spring. A lot of that is also centered around the National Volunteer Appreciation Week.” I said, “We have so many events, like in the summer, and all this- not just the auction. Why don’t we open up the fall volunteer auction thank-you to everyone for all of these events, and make it really big. Then we’ll have these two appreciations- two a year, for the volunteers. Of course, you all deserve more. [Laughter]

[2:05:05] But anyway, Marianne was like, “Oh, yeah! That’s a good idea.” And because it was close to

Nordic American Voices Page 24 of 29

Halloween, and because I love Halloween- it’s one of my favorite holidays- I kind of pushed and pushed and said, “Let’s make it a Halloween party!” And everybody agreed. So the rest is history. I think people have had a lot of fun, dressing up, and the Halloween decorations, and the judging of the costumes. It just makes it fun and festive.

[2:05:38] But yeah, I’ve seen a lot of growth, of course- positive growth. Change. It’s been interesting. One very interesting change has been the physical aspects of the use of this building. And it’s been very challenging, as it 99.9 percent of the time is, to take a historic building like the old Daniel Webster School building, and do an adaptive re-use of spaces that were never intended for a museum, and turning it into the needs of a museum.

[2:06:19] This building, through the years, is a phenomenal challenge for us, particularly for Marianne Forssblad and Donna Antonucci, the live-in caretaker. Extremely lucky that we’ve had her onboard all this time. I don’t know how things would have survived in this building without Donna. There were times the roof needed repair, or actually needed to be completely redone for a long time. We did not have the money. There were areas that were patched, continually patched.

[2:07:02] But I would dread, as a curator, every morning coming in to the museum after a weekend of heavy rain, going, “Oh, my God, where is the next leak going to be?” You name it, I’ve experienced leaks in every aspect of this building, from in here- we’re in one of the old library spaces… We had leaks in here on the books, on the stacks, which scared the bejebeers out of me, because I was very afraid of a mold outbreak with the books. We’ve had leaks on top of computers in here and other spaces. I think Gordon had water on his computer. I think I had water on my computer up on the third floor.

[2:07:50] We’ve had leaks… One of the worst was after a huge, heavy, heavy downpour and wind and rain that went through the roof, and also some tuck-pointing had disintegrated, and bricks, and all this. It was not only coming through a faulty drain in the roof, but also coming through faulty chinking in the bricks- sideways, down. The water went through the Swedish room- one wall of the Swedish exhibits and Swedish workroom, down through one wall of the logging exhibit room on the second floor- Swedish room on the third, and the saw-filers room, and then down into large object storage, which really got it worse.

[2:08:49] When I came in that Monday morning, I was one of the first ones in. I walked down the hallway. The old carpet was soaking wet, coming from the large object collection workroom. I was like, “Oh, my God.” I ran and got the keys, opened the door. Water literally came… It was literally raining in there. The water had traveled down along the wall. It had traveled along the pipes that were in front of some storage shelving and stuff. It was raining. The water was… Well, it was deep. It was like ankle-deep. It was amazing.

[2:09:42] So as each staff member came in, or volunteer, I said, “Drop everything. We have to get everything out of this room.” Which fortunately we did, quickly. There was very minimal damage, because we were able to dry things off quickly, because we were able to get to it quickly. After we removed everything, the ceiling collapsed. It was the old lath and plaster ceiling. The whole room had to be redone- the whole ceiling, everything. All painted… I had the wonderful Thursday crew build risers in order to put the pieces that had to sit on the floor up on top of the risers in case it ever happened again. We had a lot of work to do to dry things out and repair things in the logging

Nordic American Voices Page 25 of 29

room, the Swedish room, and the workroom.

[2:10:38] That was the very worst. There were other bad ones, but oh, my God. It was like… Finally, money was acquired. I think it was through a capital projects grant, years ago, where the roof could be redone, although from what I understand, when I retired in September and left, Donna Antonucci, the caretaker, was saying, “We’ve got some places that are very, very iffy.”

[2:11:11] Not only those leaks, and the physical aspects of the museum and the changes, but also office spaces- a lot of collection and exhibition spaces have been moved around, have been changed as the staff has grown. Of course we have to have a place to put the staff. So the library, which was originally in the mezzanine, as well as in this space where I’m sitting, and where the Gordon Tracie Music Library is, as well as the Swedish and Danish books used to be in this space. Stacks of library shelving, of books.

[2:12:11] The library was very important to Marianne Forssblad, because I think in another life she would have been a librarian. She went to school, from what I understand, in Library and Information Sciences, and then ended up a museum director. Where Eric’s office is, and the administrative offices and things are, that was the Norwegian, Finnish, and Icelandic library. And then the mezzanine was English.

[2:12:52] Through the years, as staff increased, we would pack up library books, particularly the other languages, because they aren’t as extensively used as the English language books. We’d try to find homes for them. There are still boxes for them, many places. The majority of them are in offsite storage. We needed to create office space for staff members. Even the collection office changed.

[2:13:26] I was put in on the third floor, when I first started, in a space which is now, and has been for a long time been the… I called it the special collections archives, where I gathered, with wonderful volunteer help, all the photographs and special collections materials- the audio and visual things, the memorabilia, the ephemera, all of the paper materials. And created the special collections archives in a space that was my office, because it really wasn’t fit for an office space. There were no windows. There was a vent that blew cold air. No matter what, you couldn’t escape it. The first day I started, this room was filled- absolutely filled to the brim- with stuff.

[2:14:27] The wonderful, wonderful Monday crew- Richard Paquette, Will Siddons… I can’t remember who else. They took me under their wing. They helped me clean the space out. Marianne was so busy, she just couldn’t. Glen Krantz- he was the other one, from the Monday crew. She couldn’t help. She said, “I’m really sorry to leave this for you.” We cleaned it out. We went downstairs to the boiler room and found an old desk, found an old chair that was all taped together. As uncomfortable as anything. But this is how it was in the early days.

[2:15:14] So then eventually, Liisa Mannery, being the part-time Collection Registrar, she was in the collection room. She felt really sorry for me, so she said, “Look, why don’t we clean up the collection room? This is also where the computer is. And you move in, and we’ll share the collection room.” And I said, “Yeah, because this space… as I see around this building that the photographs, all this ephemera… everything is everywhere. We need to centralize it. We need to centralize it in a great location, a good atmosphere for climate control for this type of collection. And I think my old

Nordic American Voices Page 26 of 29

office would be perfect.” And Marianne agreed.

[2:16:06] So the Thursday guys and Monday guys helped. We went to Boeing Surplus, when Boeing Surplus was there, and got a Boeing Surplus grant. We got shelving, and the Thursday guys cleaned it up, and repainted it. We created the archives. My instruction was to make sure everything was strapped down because of earthquakes. Once they got it all done, beautiful job, I joked, “This building will probably fall down around us, but by God, those shelves are going to stay up in an earthquake.” [Laughter]

[2:16:42] So I moved in with Liisa Mannery, and that got two Lisas working in the same place with one telephone. So the volunteer at the desk would call up and say, “Phone call for Lisa.” And we’d be like, “Which one?” And so I don’t know to this day which volunteer started this, but the volunteers started calling us “One I” and “Two I,” because Liisa Mannery is L-I-I-S-A, the Finnish spelling, and my name is L-I-S-A.

[2:17:17] So she was “Two I,” and I’m “One I.” And a lot of the volunteers and old staff members and stuff, you know, it still has it stuck. If we’re called that in front of new people, they look at us like, “Huh?” So after that, all the volunteers would catch on. “Phone call for Two I’s, or “Phone call for One I,” so we would know who the phone call was for.

[2:17:47] So again, those early years of spaces, and not having money, and having really, really to make do. There were a lot of… I guess I can say maybe not primitive, but a lot of make-do and hand-me-down things. Donations. And those are still important, of course. But oh, my gosh. They were far more important then.

[2:18:16] As soon as a board member would get wind of somebody’s office closing, they were, “Okay, so-and-so’s office is closing. You need to go over and look at the office furniture.” You know. And I think it still happens today, but it was really… Yeah. Really, a lot of make-do and do the very best we can with what we have. But that’s all part of a museum, particularly of its early days, and going through the growth pains and growth triumphs.

[2:18:52] I don’t know… I could go on and on about the early days. It was hard for me when Marianne Forssblad left, because I absolutely adore working with her. Her knowledge is phenomenal. I learned so much from her. But Eric is here to bring this museum into a whole new era, which is so exciting.

[2:19:22] I thought in the early times when Marianne was still here, and they talked about the move and working with the board, and all that, I thought, “Well, I’ll probably still be here for the move, and I can experience it and be in the new building.” But with the economy, and fundraising took longer, and things got more expensive, and time progressed. I was like, “Oh, I can’t stay this long. It’s time for me to retire.” But yet I’m still looking so forward to when the new building is created and done, and being able to see it.

[2:20:10] If I lived closer, I would be coming in as a volunteer, and working with Ariane and Fred. Wonderful collection volunteers. But it’s just too far away, living way up north, almost Arlington. But as I said earlier, this museum will always, always stay near and dear to my heart. It was such a wonderful experience, despite the hard times, despite the water leaks, and the earthquake we had

Nordic American Voices Page 27 of 29

here. But fortunately, nothing was badly damaged. But that was a scary time. That could be another day, another story. It was hard to leave. It was hard to leave. So, I think that’s it for now. [Laughter]

Mari-Ann: [2:21:01] Well, you have certainly been a very important part of the growth and the professionalism of this museum. I, as an old volunteer, appreciate what you said, also, about the volunteers. I do feel that we wouldn’t be where we are today if it were not for Marianne and the volunteers.

Lisa: [2:21:25] Absolutely.

Mari-Ann: [2:21:25] And we wouldn’t be where we are with our collection today without your help.

Lisa: [2:21:29] Thank you.

Mari-Ann: [2:21:30] Wonderful.

Lisa: [2:21:30] But don’t call yourself an “old volunteer.” You’re just an experienced volunteer. [Laughter]

Mari-Ann: [2:21:36] A many-year volunteer.

Lisa: [2:21:38] A many-year volunteer.

Mari-Ann: [2:21:40] Yes.

Lisa: [2:21:41] Yeah. Because your knowledge is so vitally important, and your contributions to this institution.

Mari-Ann: [2:21:46] Well, it is such a rewarding place to be giving your time to.

Lisa: [2:21:50] Absolutely. I agree. When I first started, as I said earlier, I worked a lot with volunteers through the years. But this was a very special and unique place for working with volunteers. Very special. Phenomenal. I love each and every one. It’s so hard to hear when we lose someone, or somebody becomes ill. It’s all part of it, and part of life, but it still doesn’t make it any easier.

Mari-Ann: [2:22:30] That’s true.

Lisa: [2:22:30] Because everybody has their unique skill sets and their unique contributions, and phenomenal contributions to this institution, and have worked to make this institution so wonderful and so strong. And such a community. Such a wonderful, welcoming, warm community.

Mari-Ann: [2:22:55] Yeah. It really is that. That’s very true. So, thank you for your huge contribution, and thank you for sharing your life story, your professional, your entire life story with us today. We wish you all the best and hope you will come back as a volunteer.

Lisa: [2:23:14] Oh, I would like to. I would. Maybe on some short-term or quick projects or

Nordic American Voices Page 28 of 29

something where I don’t have a forty-mile drive. [Laughter] Yeah.

Mari-Ann: [2:23:27] Good. Okay. Thank you very much.

Lisa: [2:23:29] Thank you.

END OF RECORDING.

Transcription by Alison DeRiemer.

Nordic American Voices Page 29 of 29