Nordic American Voices Nordic Museum

Interview of Robert Palm ID: 2017.126.001

September 23, 2017 Seattle, Washington

Interviewers: Saundra Magnussen Martin, Lindsay Ravensong

Saundra Magnussen Martin: [0:09] This is an interview for the Nordic American Voices oral history project. Today is September 23, 2017, and I’ll be interviewing Robert Palm. We are at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle, Washington. My name is Saundra Magnussen Martin, and my co-interviewer is Lindsay Ravensong. Good morning Robert— Bob, if I may call you Bob.

Robert Palm (Bob): [0:36] Hi.

Saundra: [0:38] Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed for the oral history project. Would you like to tell us a little bit about yourself and your family?

Bob: [0:47] Yes. My name is Robert Gunnar Palm. People call me Bob. I was born October 3, 1942, in Chicago, Illinois. My parents were Gunnar and Nancy Palm, Swedish immigrants. I’d like to talk about my father’s life in Sweden before he emigrated. My father, Gunnar Palm, was born on September 16, 1904, in Karlskoga, Sweden. Karlskoga is about 100 miles [west] of Stockholm in Örebro province. But my father always claimed that he was from Värmland province. I guess it was cooler to be from Värmland. There were two boys and two girls in the family. My dad was the youngest. His father, Karl Gustav Palm, worked at a sawmill. His mother, Emma Otilia, died of TB when he was 11. TB was rampant in Sweden at that time.

[2:07] They lived in a very modest house called a stuga. It had one room. To create space in there, they hung sheets from the ceiling, to create bedrooms and living rooms, and whatever else they needed for privacy. Dad had six years of formal education, which ended when he was 13. He was an avid reader. I remember him telling me he read all of Jack London’s books in Swedish, like Call of the Wild, for instance.

[2:52] He worked in a sawmill after school— the same mill as his father. At age 19, he was about to be drafted in the Army. He decided this was a good time to immigrate to the United States. So, that’s a summary of my father’s life up until the time he left Sweden.

Saundra: [3:14] Do you know what year he came to the United States?

Bob: [3:16] 1923. Nancy Elizabeth Aune was born July 22, 1905 in Öjebyn, Sweden. Öjebyn is just [west] of Piteå, which is a fairly large town on the Gulf of Bothnia, and it’s about 100 miles south of

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the Arctic Circle. So, it’s way up north. Öjebyn is in Norrbotten province. Her mother, Hildur, died at Nancy’s birth. Her father, Art, died two years later. He committed suicide.

[4:04] My mother’s maiden name, Aune, is Norwegian. She had relatives in Trondheim. She never met these people until she was in her fifties. My mother got shuttled around from different relatives. She suffered from a lack of confidence because of her upbringing. Her relatives were farmers, although later on, one opened a reindeer skin tanning factory in Öjebyn. After her six years of school, she worked as telephone switchboard operator in Sweden. Mom immigrated at age 18 to the United States.

Saundra: [4:51] It seems like your parents had quite a bit in common, both losing their mothers at such an early age.

Bob: [4:57] Yeah. Right.

Saundra: [4:59] And also having the same education.

Bob: [5:03] Yeah. That’s all you got in Sweden was six years if you were a peasant. You couldn’t afford to send your kids to school after that.

Saundra: [5:12] Did your mother have any siblings?

Bob: [5:14] No. She was an only child.

Saundra: [5:20] Why don’t you tell us now about how they came to the United States?

Bob: [5:35] This next page is their early life in Chicago. That’s where we’re going. Both my parents, Gunnar and Nancy, arrived in Chicago in the fall of 1923. They did not know each other. My father was 19, and my mother was 18. My dad’s sponsor was a Mr. Eckblum, who he knew from Karlskoga. I don’t know my mother’s sponsor, but she had quite a lot of friends and relatives from Öjebyn in Chicago. The names were Oland, John Oland, and Judith Oland, and the sisters Astrid, Alma, and Hanna Sandlin, and the sisters Iris and Ruth. So, they were all in Chicago. My mother had a big support group for her, which was good.

[6:35] My parents met several years later at a Swedish dance. My mother still had her Norrbotten province dance costume. Each province has their own costume. It’s somewhere in my garage. I have to find it. Mom worked as a domestic at first. She went to night school to learn English, of course. She became a citizen in 1930. Mom picked up her beautician’s license around 1930, also. The Sandlin sisters, Astrid, Alma, and Hanna, were also beauty operators. Mom often roomed with the Sandlin sisters.

[7:25] Dad worked as a construction laborer at first. He also went to night school to learn English. He became a citizen in 1929. Dad eventually purchased a carpenter’s union card in the late twenties. I guess you didn’t have to serve as an apprentice; you could just buy a union card, which worked out well for him.

Saundra: [7:44] May I interrupt just a moment? The man who sponsored your father— did he help

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your father find a job, do you know?

Bob: [7:54] He probably did, because my father didn’t speak any English. I don’t know much about this Mr. Eckblum. I met him once. He was a real old man, and I was a little kid. My father spoke very kindly about him. I don’t know. The construction business was going gangbusters in Chicago in the 1920s. They were building lots of three-flats. It was the roaring twenties. They came in a boom time, 1923.

[8:34] Getting back to my father purchasing his carpenter’s union card— I think at one point, every other Swedish male immigrant became a snickare. That’s Swedish for “carpenter.” Working with wood is natural, since wood is plentiful in Sweden. I’ve also read that even today, every other Swede thinks of himself as a carpenter, even if he just does projects on the weekend.

[9:07] Dad liked to wet his whistle after work. He lived near the Cubs’ park, where there were an abundance of speakeasies. One of his drinking buddies was Eric Olsson. Eric went back to Sweden during the Depression, and returned after World War II. My father bumped into Eric again in a Lutheran church pew in the 1950s. Eric was Ann-Margret Olsson’s father, the movie actress. Ann- Margret is a year older than I am. She was in my Sunday school. She had and has a beautiful voice. I remember my father tearing up when she sang Nidelven.

[9:50] Are you familiar with Nidelven? You ought to check it out. It’s actually a song about a river that flows through Trondheim. It was written during World War II. I think it was kind of a Norwegian nationalist song during the German occupation. It’s talking about how beautiful the river is, and at least that hasn’t been ruined by the Germans. Nidelven was also popular in Sweden, and there are Swedish lyrics to it, also.

[10:26] The Depression was very hard on my father. He delivered fliers at one point. Finally, he and his friend, Hjlamar Blod, scraped together a living shingling roofs. My parents married in the thirties, but I’m not sure what year. It was probably around 1935, give or take a year or so. They, with Hjlamar and Hjlamar’s wife, bought a rooming house in the thirties. This worked out well, and both couples were able to save some money.

[11:09] My parents’ first house was at 6147 N. Lawndale in Chicago. Dad did as much work as he could, and contracted the plumbing, masonry and electrical. They paid cash. My parents were frugal. They were savers. One Swedish phrase that I heard over and over again was mycket pengar, which means “a lot of money.” So, if they were talking about buying something, mycket pengar went back and forth between them. Dad joked that if everyone spent like they did, the country would be in a permanent recession, because they were saving so much money. [Laughter]

Saundra: [11:53] Did they speak Swedish in the home to you children?

Bob: [11:57] I’m an only child. Yes, they did. Often, it was just to keep a secret from me, but I was a very nosy kid, and I was able to pick out cognates. If there was a crucial word I didn’t understand, I would ask my mother two days later, “What does blah-blah mean in Swedish?” Then I was able to put together the story sometimes. Something like, “Ragnar came home drunk, and Elizabeth made him sleep out on the porch.” That was the story they told in Swedish. And I didn’t get the Swedish word for “porch,” so I would ask my mother two days later what the Swedish word was, and that

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turned out to be porch. So, I was able to understand. I was nosy.

Saundra: [12:46] You were clever.

Bob: [12:47] The first house must have been built before 1940, because rationing came in after that. During the war, dad got a terrific job as the house carpenter with the merchandise mart in Chicago. He kept that job all the way through World War II. He never missed a day of work. It was inside work. It was a really good deal for him.

Saundra: [13:15] Can you tell us about what kind of work he did there? I know he was a carpenter, but what were they doing?

Bob: [13:21] The merchandise mart is a huge building in Chicago. It was owned by the Kennedys. They had display rooms for a lot of furniture shows. They needed carpenters to build new display rooms, because they were always changing them. They also built stages for bond rallies inside the building. I don’t know what else the house carpenter did. [Laughter]

Saundra: [13:54] Anything he was asked. [Laughter]

Bob: [13:55] Right, exactly. He was lucky to get that job. I was born in 1942. My folks had a stillborn birth earlier. After World War II, the U.S., and especially the Chicago area, experienced a tremendous building boom. This was important for the Swedish community since so many were in the construction business. At last the promised land had come to them after learning English, the Depression, World War II… Finally things started to look up.

[14:45] After World War II, my dad got a foreman job, building houses in the north suburbs. He was so happy to drive to the jobs in a 1947 green DeSoto. We took our first family vacation in 1949. We drove to Hovland, Minnesota and fished in the Boundary Waters. I was seven, and thrilled that the northern pike and walleye practically jumped in the boat. Once, late in the day, we drove to the garbage dump and saw bears feasting on leftovers. Garrison Keillor, in A Prairie Home Companion, also mentions that his family also drove to the garbage dump to watch the bears. I guess that’s a thing in Minnesota.

[15:34] Eventually, my dad got a carpentry superintendent estimator job with C.A. Thernstrom. Dad would estimate the bid. If he got the job, he would order the supplies and supervise the completion. Thernstrom was mainly interested in pouring concrete frames for high-rises. So, my dad’s job was a sideline for them that he kind of ran by himself. His carpenters would put in kitchen cabinets, hang the doors, and chalk out the rooms on the cement of a reinforced concrete high-rise, for instance. His last job before he retired was the John Hancock Building in Chicago, the 100-story building. He was pretty thrilled to have the inside carpentry on that.

[16:31] My father was very intelligent. I’m sure on an IQ test, he would beat me. The Thernstrom office workers would have him check spelling and grammar on their business letters. He did the crossword puzzles every day, also. A neighbor who was in the occupation in Germany lent him some World War II Nazi propaganda books. Dad got a German-English dictionary to read them. Dad claimed between Swedish and German cognates, he only needed to look up every fourth German word. So, he claimed some knowledge of German.

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[17:12] In 1953, we moved to 7630 North Kedvale in Skokie. Skokie is a suburb just a little bit north of Chicago. Thernstrom’s offices were in Skokie, so that was convenient. The house in Skokie had a finished basement bar. My parents loved to entertain. Down in the basement, couples danced the hambo and the schottische, etcetera. Eventually, there was live music, with my father on accordion, Ragnar Iverson on guitar, and John Edwardson on violin. I remember several verses of Helan Går, the traditional Swedish drinking song, coming up from the basement. Some of the neighbor kids that were over to my house thought my parents’ parties were really cool— a different kind of music. They had never heard that before.

Saundra: [18:12] Were your parents’ friends mostly Swedish immigrants, also?

Bob: [18:16] Yes. I would say just about exclusively.

Saundra: [18:21] Were there any kind of clubs that they belonged to?

Bob: [18:26] Oh, here we go. Right here. Speaking of clubs… With all the post-World War II prosperity, the Swedish clubs in Chicago prospered, and some built swell new buildings. I remember the chorus from the [unintelligible] Club on Wrightwood Avenue, and the [unintelligible] Singing Club, and the Southside Swedish Club. They all had choruses. Swedes loved to sing. Fine meals were served at these clubs, and at least on club had a slot machine, which of course was illegal, but it was a way to pay for the furniture in the club. I remember dad picking me up when I put some nickels in the slot machine at one of those places, which is one of my fondest memories.

[19:26] Talking about the Swedish community in Chicago in general— the corner of Clark and Foster on the North Side became the center of the Swedish shops, restaurants, delicatessens, bakeries, etcetera. Schott’s Deli had long lines around the block for Christmas for folks to pick up their pickled herring, for instance. Simon Lundgren’s Tavern would cash your paycheck on Friday when you stopped in for a drink. So, Simon was not very popular with some of the Swedish wives. [Laughter]

[20:09] Signe Karlsson’s bakery was a little west on Foster, and was home to the best limpa bread. Limpa is rye bread flavored with sugar and molasses. I think it’s fine once a year, but I can’t handle sweet bread as a steady diet. By the way, Swedes tend to sugar up everything. Maybe that’s because sugar was a rarity in the 1800s in Sweden. I don’t know.

Saundra: [20:41] Did your mother cook Swedish dishes, or did they sort of acclimate to what was available in the United States?

Bob: [20:50] Daily, she cooked typical American stuff, I suppose. But they had big parties. The biggest parties were around Christmas. Let me tell you about Christmas. Christmas at our house was showtime for my mother. First she would clean the house, being careful to dust over the doorframes and doors. Then she would make a couple hundred pepparkakor, which are ginger snaps, if you don’t know. She had a meat grinder that would stuff potatiskorv. This is pork, potato, sausage… it’s a little on the greasy side, at least for a little boy like myself at the time.

[21:41] Sill salad was my favorite, though. It’s a mixture of herring, beets, onions, and potatoes. At

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some parties, my mother would feed 30 people. She had two stoves, with one in the basement. Each stove had dishes on top, and the oven going. I don’t know how my mother did it. She was quite a gal. My parents made several trips back to Sweden in the late sixties and early seventies, and I regret not going with them, of course.

Saundra: [22:26] Can we return to Christmas just a moment? So, you had this big party, but what about your private Christmas with your parents? Did you have a tree? Did you go to church? How did you celebrate Christmas?

Bob: [22:42] Yeah, we had a tree. The Swedes give their presents on Christmas Eve. Hanna Sandlin, one of the Sandlin sisters, would be Santa Claus. She would come down the attic steps, but she didn’t disguise her voice. So, after I was about five, I knew there was no Santa Claus. I caught on pretty early, but I didn’t tell my parents that.

[23:13] Frankly, I was spoiled, really spoiled rotten, because so many of my parents’ friends did not have children. In the case of the Sandlin sisters, they were single. One Christmas, I got six cap gun pistols. One had two guns in each holster. And I had the Lionel train going around the tree.

[23:43] As far as church was concerned, I don’t remember going in the early days going to church at Christmas. Maybe later on we did, but I’m not even sure about that. My parents did go to church when we lived in Skokie. I was in confirmation class, and they wanted to encourage their son to be religious, and stuff like that. But I don’t actually remember Christmas and church. I do remember, though, some of the Swedish Clubs had Santa Lucia pageants, where a girl walks down the aisle with candles in her hair. I do remember going to Santa Lucia pageants.

Saundra: [24:33] So, the Swedish clubs, of course, were mostly activities for your parents’ generation, but did they have activities that pulled in the children, like summer picnics?

[24:46] Yes, they did. Let me talk to you about the picnic situation. This page is kind of important sociologically. The Swedish clubs had summer picnics. They had games, food, dancing, choral performances, and most of them had alcohol, except one. This one was held at the Good Templar Park in Geneva, Illinois. The Good Templars were a temperance organization. This brings up a whole class of Swedes that I did not know about.

[25:48] They did not drink, and many of them belonged to the Covenant Church. The Covenant Church established North Park College and Swedish Covenant Hospital in Chicago’s North Side. These institutions are still there today. My hats off to the teetotaling Swedes. My parents didn’t know any of them. I only became aware of them when I was in my late teens, and I took a summer course at North Park College. Needless to say, none of my parents’ friends were Covenant Church members.

Saundra: [26:27] Through the clubs, did you learn the folkdances of Sweden, or did your parents teach you that?

Bob: [26:33] They didn’t teach me anything. They wanted me to assimilate. What really impressed me about Seattle is the Midsummer celebration at St. Edward’s Park, which is supposedly identical, and as good as anything in Sweden, where they decorate the maypole and prop it up on sticks until

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it’s standing straight, and then they dance around it. There was none of that in Chicago. Also, I never heard a nyckelharpa, which is a Swedish folk instrument (kind of a cross between a violin and a hurdy-gurdy), until I came out here. The Swedes in Chicago kind of did not keep up a lot of contact with what was going on in Sweden. The nyckelharpa got revived after World War II by the Swedish government, is my understanding on that.

Saundra: [27:39] You were very young during World War II, but do you recall any conversations that your parents might have had about what was going on in Sweden during the war?

Bob: [27:52] No. But I remember shortly after the war, they still had coffee rationing in Sweden. And about every other month, my mother would pack up six cans of Hills Brothers Coffee, and send them to Sweden. She said, “Bobby, these people haven’t had coffee for several years, and they really enjoy their coffee, so we’ve got to keep sending them coffee.”

[28:20] What struck me, of course, from a sociological interest is that there were two classes of Swedish immigrants. There were the non-drinking immigrants, and there were my parents’ people. At least in my parents’ case, there was no back and forth, as far as I know. They would go to Swedish Covenant Hospital, but there wasn’t much socialization. I don’t know why that is, but that’s the way it was.

[29:03] I want to talk about their trips back to Sweden in the late sixties and seventies. I mentioned I regret not going with them. On one trip, they brought the Buick along. This was a little over the top, in my opinion. They put it on the Kungsholm boat, and took it over to Sweden, and drove it around to impress all their relatives. I can’t imagine what it took to gas up a Buick in Sweden in those days.

Saundra: [29:44] That’s quite impressive. [Laughter]

Bob: [29:47] They also went to Trondheim, Norway, and started calling folks with the last name of Aune. So, my mother’s father was Norwegian. His relatives lived in Trondheim. They found one party that had mom in the family tree, and they had dinner with them, so that was nice. Of course, Gunnar and Nancy spoke English with a Swedish accent. My schoolmates were always interested, talking to my parents, listening to their accent. However, when they were in Sweden, they tried to speak Swedish to clerks in stores, and places like that, and the clerks replied in English, because by now my folks spoke Swedish with an English accent.

Saundra: [30:44] And your father still had family that they were visiting at that time? Siblings?

Bob: [30:50] Yeah, he had two sisters and a brother. I believe they were all alive the first time they went. His father died in 1947. He actually went to Sweden shortly before his father died. He did go in 1947 by himself. At any rate, they enjoyed their trips. One trip, they took a ride on a canal that goes from Gothenburg, through Värmland. I don’t know where it ends up. Maybe in Stockholm. Supposedly it’s a very nice experience.

[31:35] The only relative I ever met was Roland Palm, the son of my father’s brother. He was a photographer. He came to this country several times for work. He worked with a fellow named Bo Hanson. They wrote stories for Aller magazine. At one point, my parents moved to Florida, and I have an Aller magazine story about my parents’ life in Florida. One of the pictures shows them

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picking oranges off a tree in their backyard.

Saundra: [32:19] How old were you when they made these trips back to Sweden?

Bob: [32:23] I was in my late twenties, early thirties.

Saundra: [32:28] Oh, yeah, so you were off on your own.

Bob: [32:32] Yeah. Well… There are some things you regret in life, and that’s one of them. Around 1972, they retired to Florida. As I mentioned, there is an article in Aller about their life in Florida. Unfortunately it’s in Swedish, and I can’t understand very much of it. They moved back to the Chicago area in 1975 because they missed their friends. By then, I was back in Chicago. Dad died suddenly in 1979 of a heart attack. So many people that I never met came to his funeral. He was someone people remembered.

[33:20] Mom faded away slowly with Parkinson’s dementia. She broke her hip three times, once in the nursing home. After that, they kept her in bed. When I came to visit her with my kids, they were quite young. If I would yell at my son Karl, she would give me a real dirty look. She still had the instinct of a mother and grandmother. She died of pneumonia in 1992. That’s the end of my script.

Saundra: [34:03] Okay. Now we’re going to ask you some questions about yourself. So, you were born and grew up and went to school in Chicago. Did you go to college?

Bob: [34:13] Yes.

Saundra: [34:14] Where did you go to college?

Bob: [34:16] I went to the University of Illinois in Champagne-Urbana. I got a bachelor’s degree in ceramic engineering in 1964. I went and worked for Westinghouse Electric in their nuclear division in Pittsburgh for a long time. I also went to Carnegie Mellon, and got a master’s degree in metallurgy. I returned to Chicago around 1973.

Saundra: [34:48] Did you return to Chicago for a job?

Bob: [34:51] Yes.

Saundra: [34:52] And you were married?

Bob: [34:56] I had two marriages, actually. I was married when I lived in Pittsburgh. That lasted five years. I was a bachelor for a very long time. I got remarried in my early forties. I think I was 41 or 42. I had two children with that marriage, Karl and Ashley.

Saundra: [35:24] And your wife’s name?

Bob: [35:26] Lorraine.

Saundra: [35:29] Was she from the Chicago area?

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Bob: [35:31] No, she was from Youngstown, Ohio, but she lived in Chicago. She was a respiratory therapist at a hospital.

Saundra: [35:42] How did you end up out in Seattle?

Bob: [35:46] Well, when I got to be 61, I lost my job, and I couldn’t get another one. I trained to be a computer programmer. I had a job with the evil Goldman Sachs for two years downtown in an options trading shop they had. After that, I couldn’t get a job. So, I hung around Chicago until I was 63, roughly. When my son didn’t flunk out of Ohio State, I left Chicago. I felt certain that I’d have to stay in Chicago, because he’d be coming home, but he did wonderfully at Ohio State, possibly because he didn’t want to come home. At any rate, I always liked to hike. I’m a biker, and stuff like that. Seattle is a paradise if you want to play in the woods.

Saundra: [36:50] This is the place for you.

Bob: [36:51] So, that’s basically why I came out here. And I was friends with a married couple that lived on Lopez Island. They had lived here about three years. So, I had sort of a support group. I lived in Stanwood for the first year and a half, and eventually I bought a house in Lake Stevens. I’ve been there since 2007, so ten years in Lake Stevens.

Saundra: [37:18] Did you know that there is a huge population in the Stanwood area? Did you get involved with any of the Swedish clubs there?

Bob: [37:33] No. They have an annual lutefisk dinner. That’s a good story to tell. Mercifully, my parents did not like lutefisk, so I never was subjected to it when I was a kid, except once when I was in college, and I had it cooked by a lady who was a professional cook. The butter sauce was really good. What was underneath the butter sauce was jelly that resembled fish. Also, at one point I had a bumper sticker that said, “Friends don’t let friends eat lutefisk.” About two years ago, I had lutefisk at the Lutheran church at Poulsbo. So, this was Norwegian lutefisk. You know, you build up something in your mind about how bad it is. After 50 years, and you finally have it, it’s not that bad. But I wouldn’t go around looking for it.

[38:36] So, back to Stanwood. Yes, they have a Sons of Norway there. What struck me was when I would go in the grocery store there, I’d see so many people that looked like me. They’re not all Norwegians. There are Swedes up there. The Swedes built a beautiful church in Conway, which is the town just north of Stanwood. It’s a four-story white building, and it’s just a striking building, even today. So, there were a lot of Scandinavians. I didn’t move here because of the Scandinavians.

Saundra: [39:12] Isn’t that interesting that you ended up in a town so Nordic?

Bob: [39:17] Well, Lake Stevens has, I think, four Lutheran churches. So, Lake Stevens is not shabby, either. I met some ladies who grew up in Lake Stevens who are maybe ten years older than me. I guess there were a fair amount of Scandinavians in Lake Stevens as well. One thing that strikes me about the Seattle area is there is nothing like this museum in Chicago. They had a small little storefront Swedish museum near Clark & Foster when I left Chicago. It was okay, you know, but nothing on a grand scale, and certainly not on the scale of the new museum, with all the multimedia

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stuff. I’m not sure I’m going to like that, because I like this building, and I feel very comfortable here.

[40:11] At any rate, it is striking that Seattle as a people keep the customs up more. And I think especially the Norwegians keep the customs up more than the Swedes. I understand they’ve had a 17th of May parade for 120 years in Ballard, for instance. So, it’s a good thing to keep the customs up.

Saundra: [40:39] May I ask you about your children? What are their names again?

Bob: [40:44] Karl and Ashley.

Saundra: [40:46] Is Karl the oldest?

Bob: [40:46] No.

Saundra: [40:48] What years were they born?

Bob: [40:50] Ashley was born in 1984, and Karl was born in 1986. They’re in their early thirties now. Karl graduated from Ohio State with an accounting degree. He works in Youngstown for his rich uncles at Simon Roofing. He’s in their accounting department. Ashley has a very interesting story. Her mother was of Lebanese descent, but she was born in this country. All four of her grandparents were born in Lebanon. So, there was a connection with Arabic. Ashley went to the University of South Carolina, and she took some Arabic courses there. Then she got a EMSA scholarship to study Arabic intensively in Cairo for a year. She had a very good time in Cairo.

Saundra: [41:52] Did you go visit her?

Bob: [41:53] No, but I eventually got to Egypt. At any rate, she did a lot of partying, too. She learned how to dive at the Red Sea resorts. She got in with the young people’s Rotary group, and they would go to monasteries in Sinai. On one trip, she met Karim, her future husband. They got married about three years after she came back from Egypt. After the wedding, they moved to Cairo for a couple years. So, I did visit Egypt at that point. I went down the Nile to see Luxor. It was very exciting.

[42:58] Karim is a Coptic Christian, which is a 10% minority in Egypt. The Coptics have their own community, and they collect the garbage. They make a lot of money collecting garbage, and sorting through it. They’re the original recyclers. They’ve taken cliffs, and with jackhammers, have hollowed out cavernous churches in Cairo, which is really something to see. It’s a very interesting, old religion, Orthodox religion. Christmas is on the sixth. No Santa Claus. So, Karl has one child, and Ashley has two children. Karim eventually got a job in Chicago. He works for Kraft Heinz now, and they just bought a house. He’s in marketing in the Arabic world.

Saundra: [43:57] Do you go back to visit, and see your grandchildren?

Bob: [43:59] Oh, yeah. I’m a big gardener, so I like to go in the off-gardening season, after Christmas, and hang around for a while. Karim goes on long business trips, so I’ve actually been

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called to watch their three-month-old baby girl for 12 hours a day, three days a week. My daughter’s naiveté in my childcare skills was justified, it turned out.

Saundra: [44:29] Well, that sounds like a wonderful bonding experience.

Bob: [44:31] Yes. Exactly.

Saundra: [44:34] Have we covered everything that you would like to share with us about your family history? I forgot to ask— you said your mother had been trained as a hairstylist?

Bob: [44:47] Yes.

Saundra: [44:48] Did she work at all after she was married?

Bob: [44:51] No.

Saundra: [44:53] It would be unusual if she did at that time, but I just thought I would ask.

Bob: [44:57] Right. I think she maybe felt that she had let her skills go for so long. It would have been better for her to work, because when the kid’s in school, and there is only one child, and the house only was 900 square feet, you know, so it wasn’t a lot to take care of… She would have been better off if she’d had at least a part-time job. She had issues with confidence.

Saundra: [45:34] Understandably.

Bob: [45:35] Right. Exactly. Very good person, very kind to me, and all that. But even at a young age, I could tell there was a big difference between my father and my mother as far as being outgoing.

Saundra: [45:51] Well, we really appreciate you coming in today and sharing your story with us. One thing I forgot to ask— how did you become involved with the museum, or aware of the museum? Are you a member here?

Bob: [46:05] Yes.

Saundra: [46:06] Do you come to events here?

Bob: [46:09] I come to the chamber music events, and I drag my children and anybody else who visits Seattle into the museum to show them around.

Saundra: [46:18] Wonderful.

Bob: [46:20] I do enjoy the chamber music events. I don’t go to all of them, but probably three a year.

Saundra: [46:29] Well, that’s wonderful, because you’re coming in from Lake Stevens.

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Bob: [46:33] Yeah. I don’t mind going into Seattle. Lake Stevens is kind of boring. [Laughter]

Saundra: [46:40] How did you find out about the museum?

Bob: [46:43] My friends on Lopez told me about it. He’s half Swedish. He just mentioned where it was, and I checked it out. I’ve been coming more and more as the years have gone on, actually. I’ve also been to the Swedish Club on Dexter. I’ve been there for pancake breakfasts. They had dueling nyckelharpa groups for pancake breakfasts, which I enjoyed a lot. I’ve been there a couple times, also.

Saundra: [47:31] Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for coming in and sharing your family story with us today.

END OF RECORDING.

Transcription by Alison DeRiemer.

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