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Interview with Nils Hasselmo Interviewed by Professor Clarke A Interview with Nils Hasselmo Interviewed by Professor Clarke A. Chambers University of Minnesota Interviewed on March 16, 18, and 19, 1998 in Tucson, Arizona Nils Hasselmo - NH Clarke A. Chambers - CAC CAC: This is Clarke Chambers. I'm picking up, again, the oral history project of the University of Minnesota the past fifty years. This is an unusual one because we're doing it in Tucson, Arizona, where Nils Hasselmo is recovering from the presidency and from surgery. Florence and I, Mrs. Chambers and I happen to be vacationing here so that we have the leisure, without the interruptions of the university phone and so forth, to have a conversation about our common experience and your experience at the University of Minnesota, not only in the presidency but at other places as well. The date is the March 16, 1998, and the interview is being conducted in the little casita in the desert that Florence and I are renting in the western suburbs of Tucson. Nils, welcome aboard. NH: Thank you. CAC: As I suggested, I have approximately 130 of these interviews and with I think all of them-I try not to make the interviews mechanical-it's kind of nice to start with an informal commentary going way back to family, to early education, to what turned you on. I mean you became a scholar in linguistics and how does one get interested in that? It's your story. Why don't you start with family and proceed? NH: I was born in a little village in western Sweden, right on the Norwegian border, six miles from the border, called Kola, a spelling that confounds everybody. My father was from Skane, from southern Sweden, and my mother was from Lapland. They met in Varmland, in this part NtIs HasselDio Interview of western Sweden. They met because my father took a teaching job and the position as organist in the local state church. CAC: He taught music? NH: No, he was a school teacher. They had a position in Sweden that is teaching school and being the organist in the state church. It's a combined position and the title for the position is kantor, k-a-n-t-o-r, which is well-known from other cultural contexts. My mother came there after receiving her teaching degree in mathematics and science in Stockholm. She came there as the governess of the children of the local parson. She had come down from the mining district in Lapland, where my grandfather was a bookkeeper. He sent his daughter to Stockholm to get a degree in mathematics and science in the 1920s, which was quite unusual. They met and they settled down and lived for thirty years in that particular community. My father continued in that particular position and my mother eventually took a position in a nearby town twenty miles away and taught high school there, mathematics and science. My sister and I, after I did some early work, my junior high work, by correspondence in the little village which has only a six grade school ... CAC: What was the population of that little village? NH: I'd say seventy-three. CAC: Good heavens! NH: It was small. It was very small. CAC: So, family really amounted to a great deal? NH: Yes, it did. The region, the district, had about 2,500 people but they were scattered over a fairly large area so that the village itself had just the church, a post office, and a couple of stores. That was it. Then, of course, there was the minister. Then, there was the local estate. Then, there was the school teacher's family and the local sheriff. That was about it. CAC: I'm guessing, apart from the schooling, that you must have had a lot of home teaching? NH: I did. My parents were avid readers. My father played the piano and had a choir and we had music at home all the time. When I hear Chopin, I always conjure up a sunny summer day in my home in western Sweden with my father playing the piano and this wonderful music is wafting out the windows. CAC: Lovely memories. Nils Hassehllo Interview 2 NH: As I said, I did my junior high work by correspondence and, then, tested into the regular school in town when my mother took a job there. We had a little apartment where my sister and my mother and I lived. I went through the gymnasium in that little town. CAC: You say "a little town." NH: It had about 11,000 people. CAC: And how far away was it? NH: About twenty miles. CAC: Oh, only that? NH: Yes, but, of course, we didn't have a car and if you took the bus in the morning, it took a couple of hours for it to get to town; so, you had to board in town even though it was only twenty miles away. You just couldn't commute. CAC: Your gymnasium experience was how long there? NH: Three years. I did that on the mathematical and science line because they didn't have the classical languages line there, which was the other alternative at the time. CAC: But, in the meantime, you were learning languages? NH: Yes. You had to take seven years of English and six years of German and three years of French in order to get into the university. In the humanistic subjects, you also had to have three years of Latin; so, I did those languages before I really entered my university work. CAC: Then, you test out on these for admissions? NH: For admission, yes. CAC: You have standard tests? NH: Yes, there was a national standardized test that you had to pass. CAC: Speaking as well as written? NH: It was both written and oral. Of course, the emphasis on speaking the languages was not what it is today. It was more reading and translating. Nils Hasselillo Interview 3 CAC: I'm guessing that the tri-lingualism of many Scandinavians was not as well-established that early? Now, everybody speaks English almost, don't they, in Norway and Sweden? NH: Those who had a university or college education in my parents' generation usually spoke German. My mother, for example, spoke German quite fluently and English was a second language with her and with my father also. Although, they could speak English reasonably well, German was really the fIrst language. After the Second World War, English became the fIrst language. That language, I started that in approximately seventh grade. CAC: Did you know this early on that the structure of language would become a compelling interest in your intellectual . ? NH: I loved to read. I was an avid reader. I started writing quite early. I wrote adventure stories ... CAC: Ahhh. NH: ... and messed around quite a bit with writing. My father had many interests and ended up writing a couple of books. He was very interested in the local history. I got drawn into that particular orbit. My mother was very interested in language; although, her fIrst love was mathematics. She was very interested in language and in grammar. I think it was a combination of my parents' humanistic interests and also my mother's interest in mathematics and grammar that eventually got me into linguistics. Although, I went to the university to study literature as my primary subject and it was only when I got there that I discovered that linguistics really was my cup of tea. CAC: Were there any particular persons in the gymnasium who opened that world for you? NH: Yes, I had a couple of teachers in Swedish, which would be like English in our curriculum here, who were quite influential in many ways because they really took my writing seriously and they put me through a certain discipline in writing but also encouraged me very much. I did one particular project. I did a study of a couple of novels of the Swedish Nobel Prize winner, Harry [Edmund] Martinson. He didn't win a Nobel Prize until much later ... CAC: [laughter] Maybe it was your essay that did it. NH: Maybe it was. He was my favorite writer and I really became interested in serious literature through this Harry Martinson. I did a study of some of his work in gymnasium and that was the first time that I really began to look at literary criticism and literary analysis and also language as a study. Martinson has a very distinctive prose and poetry which I think also influenced me very much. If I look at an early influence beyond my parents, I think it was that experience through that teacher of Martinson's work as literature and as linguistic-language expression. Nils Hasse1Illo Interview 4 CAC: You're describing a secondary-to use that word-educational experience that is much richer than most of the persons I've interviewed who have had American education at that level. NH: The system at that time was that at seven, you started in first grade. In my case, I had a woman teacher for first and second grade in the two-room schoolhouse where she taught with my father. Then, from third grade through sixth grade, I had my father as a teacher. He taught those four classes in one classroom. That was an interesting enterprise because we did a lot of independent work. I often smile when I see all of these innovative pedagogical methods because my father used most of them back in the 1940s in this little village with workbooks.
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