Nordic American Voices Nordic Heritage Museum Interview of Mina
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Nordic American Voices Nordic Heritage Museum Interview of Mina Larsen January 12, 2013 Seattle, Washington Interviewers: Mari-Ann Jackson Mari-Ann Kind Jackson: [0:03] This is an interview for the Nordic American oral history project at the Nordic Heritage Museum. We are today, January 12, 2013, interviewing Mina Larsen from Mercer Island, one of our great volunteers here at the museum. Welcome, Mina. We are delighted that we can interview you and hear your life story. Mina Larsen: [0:29] Thank you. Mari-Ann: [0:29] Would you start by telling us your full name, your date of birth, and where you were born? Mina: [0:36] My name is Mina Bjerknes Larsen. I was born in Hokksund in Norway on December 17, 1931. And I was told that it was a stormy day, and my dad had to drive through the snowstorm to pick up the midwife. I was the fifth girl to be born, which probably was not so good for a farm, where you needed a boy to take over the farm. [1:04] But a little over a year later, my brother was born. And then after that, I had another sister, and my youngest brother was what they call an atpåklatt . I was thirteen years old when he was born. And of course our farm was about fifty miles from Oslo, and it lies between two little towns, Hokksund and Vestfossen. [1:32] And our address was Hokksund, but our school was closer to Vestfossen. Røkeberg skole . And we were a big family. We had two boys that worked on the farm, and we had two girls that worked in the house. And my grandfather lived with us. So we were about fifteen people in our household. [1:57] Back then, of course, things were very different. We didn’t have… we had electricity; we had a telephone, but we didn’t have any indoor plumbing, so we had a utedo [outhouse]. And of course all the farm work was done with horses. We had horses; we had cows, pigs, chickens, and sheep. And we all had to help out on the farm. [2:27] My grandfather was the oldest in his family, and actually he grew up further out; it was not so close to town. So as the oldest, his father bought the farm that I grew up on, and he chose to have that farm, because it was closer to town. So like I said, my grandfather lived with us, and he was Nordic American Voices Page 1 of 20 very, very strict. He was very religious. [2:58] And I remember hearing him pray at night, loud. And he also wanted us all to go to church, so on Sundays we all had to get dressed up, and he took us to church. And the prize for going to church was, on Saturdays, he’d ride his bike to Hokksund to buy store-bought cookies. So that was special. [3:29] And I also remember my grandfather… I never remember him not wearing a suit. It was a suit every day. And he was a great moose-hunter. We had some forest out further out in the country, and he’d go out there every fall, and he must have shot a hundred moose, so we always had moose meat, which was very good. [4:04] And… yeah, like I said, he was very strict. I do remember that after we had eaten, had our meal, he would sweep up the crumbs from the table because he didn’t want us to waste anything. But he had grown up during what they called the barkebrøtiden [bark bread time] where they ground up bark to put in the bread. So, we were not allowed to waste anything. [4:43] My dad had one brother and one sister. And his oldest brother immigrated to the United States… to Canada, actually to Vancouver, where he had an uncle. My mother grew up in Jostedalen, which is way up by the glacier. It’s just nothing but rocks up there. When she was… well, through school, which is probably, you know, only seven grades then, she was sent to another family to learn how to cook and take care of a household. [5:28] And then she ended up moving down to where we lived, and she worked with different families. And then she was hired as a housekeeper for my grandfather, because his wife, my grandmother, had died. Actually, I never did know my grandmother. [5:51] So, she came in to the family then as a beautiful little blond twenty-year-old, and we always wondered what my grandfather was thinking, being such a strict, strict man. Maybe he knew what he was doing, because he had a young son, and my mother ended up marrying my dad. Mari-Ann: [6:11] The son. Mina: [6:12] My dad was the son that was left on the farm, to take over the farm. My mother has a rather interesting history, too, because she grew up in Jostedalen, and back in the 1300s when the Black Death went through Norway and killed so many people, some people in Sogn would move up to the end of the glacier there to think they were going to be saved. [6:44] So, they lived up there, and in order to communicate with people in the other part of the valley, they had a stone that they put letters under, and nobody was allowed to leave, and nobody was allowed to come in. So, what happened is they still all got the plague, and everybody died except Nordic American Voices Page 2 of 20 one little girl. And she was left up there, and her mother that knew she was dying left food for her and put her in a feather bed. [7:20] And I don’t know how much later, but some of the animals came down over the valley and into another community, and so they went back up, and they found this little girl, alive. And she is called Jostedalsrypa. And so that is my ancestor. I belong to, they call it, the Rype familie . The Grouse family. Yeah. [7:53] So, anyway, so my mother then married my dad, and they had, like I said, seven children, plus my brother that was born much later. And when my mother moved, you know, became the wife on the farm, she would bring young girls from her community down to work for her. And they were… that family, that group of people was so different from my dad’s. My dad’s family was very strict, very serious. Here come these young people that are so full of life. And they were joking; they would love to tell stories. And so we had a lot of fun there. [8:44] So, like I said, we had girls that worked on the farm, and boys, and they were part of the family. You know, we all ate together, and worked together. We worked on the farm, too, from the time we were very young. We worked on the farm. [9:09] And… well, I want to tell a little bit about Christmas. Because Christmas was of course was a highlight. We started early, preparing for Christmas. My mother had a big plant that she put on a stool, and we would walk around that in early November, and we’d learn all the Christmas carols. And I still remember every verse of every one of them. [9:45] And of course, then we would go out in the forest before the snow came so we could find a Christmas tree. We’d all bundle up, all the kids, and my dad, and we found a tree, and he marked it, and then the day before Christmas Eve, he’d go out and cut the tree. [10:07] And of course, then we had to prepare all our food for the winter. When the butcher came, that was a really exciting time in our life. The butcher came, and butchered the cows and the pig. Of course, I remember the big pig lying on this big platform, actually. And this is something that is different from what people do here, but the blood was taken from the pig and my mother would make klub . Do you know what that is? Mari-Ann: [10:50] I love it. Mina: [10:50] Yeah. And that was the first thing we had. You know, a little fat in the middle, and klub around, and she, I think she put in boiling water, and then we got it fresh out, with sugar. That was very, very best. Very best. And then she’d have some people come from town to help prepare the food. They prepared meatballs and pork chops and all the meat. Some of it was salted down in big containers, so we’d have food for the winter. Nordic American Voices Page 3 of 20 [11:27] And of course, my mother was baking a lot. She was making the dough in the morning, and then she was rolling out the dough, and she put it on a big, huge plate. You know, the type that you put on your table. And she put them in a cold room, and then in the evening she’d stay up and bake. Sometimes she would fall asleep, and some of the cookies would get brown, and then we got to eat them the next day.