Minnesota's Greatest Generation Oral History Project: Part II Minnesota

Reidar Dittmann Narrator Douglas Bekke Interviewer Northfield, Minnesota January 10, 2007 DB: This is a Minnesota Historical Society Greatest Generation Project interview with Professor Reidar Dittmann in Northfield, Minnesota on January 10, 2007. Professor Dittmann, could you give me your name, please? RD: Yes. It is Reidar Dittmann. Notice the double n. II DB: And your birth date. GenerationPart RD: January 15, 1922. DB: And your birthplace. Society RD: I was born in Tønsberg, Norway. Project: DB: And were you born in your homeGreatest or were you born in a hospital? RD: I was born in my home. Historical DB: You were. And was that typical of the time? History RD: That was very typical of the time. There were four boys in our house and they were all born at home. I remember waiting in the kitchen when my brother was born. DB: And Minnesota'swere you theOral oldest, youngest? RD: I was in the middle. Minnesota DB: And your ethnic background. Now this might seem a strange question, but remember that Grieg has Scottish ancestry. RD: Yes. That’s true. DB: And there was a Danish occupation in Norway. 11 RD: If you look at my name you realize that I have German background. Although my people came from Germany to Norway in the 15th Century. So I guess we had squatters rights. DB: So your family has been Norwegian for a long time. RD: Hundreds of years. DB: And your father. Can you say a little bit about your father. What was his background? RD: My father’s name was Gustav, and he was a civil servant. He was born and raised in Tønsberg like I was. In Norway people didn’t move a lot back in those days. Today they move a little bit more. But you stayed sort of in your hometown and my family had lived in Tønsberg maybe for three hundred years. Always in the same area. My father grew up there and grew up next door to my mother. They were friends from their childhood on. DB: So he married the girl next door. II RD: Right. Definitely. GenerationPart DB: And what about your mother? Can you talk about her a little bit? RD: My mother came out of a very old family that had originated in theSociety countryside. My father’s family was all city folk. My mother’s family came from the countryside, and her name was Solveig. Her mother came from about ten kilometers out of town in the rural area. My grandma was one of the five children, which was very typicalProject: in the country at that time. They had to have many children because they have to haveGreatest help on the farm. So she was a farmer’s daughter. DB: Now I have a Swedish background, and in my family, and I think it was true in Norway, too, the names would change every generation. Often.Historical RD: It would. History DB: For instance, my grandmother was named Persdatter, the daughter of Per. RD: Right.Minnesota's Oral DB: But her children wouldMinnesota have had a different name. Her brother was Person. RD: Right. DB: Your name survived over the centuries. RD: It survived because of its foreign origin and because of the fact that they were not growing up on the farms. If you grew up on the farm you took the name of the farm. So Norwegian to be topological. You know the Vangs and the Vangens and the Bresetts and the Langseths and all of 12 these are names of farms. But in the city there was no such option and we grew up with the same name all the way through. DB: So it survived over the generations. Your siblings. You said you had four brothers? RD: There were four of us in all. I had three brothers. I had three who were . one, my older brother Trygve, was seven years older than I am. DB: Can you spell his name, please? RD: [Spelling] T-r-y-g-v-e. Typical Norwegian royal name. Trygve. And he became a sailor and died abroad during World War II. My next brother Sigur, Sigurdnla, a royal Norwegian name, was a pastor and is a retired pastor and still lives in Norway at the age of eighty-seven. In good shape. And my younger brother, who is five years younger than I am, will celebrate his eightieth birthday this June. My younger brother was a college teacher and was, in fact, for a year a visiting professor at St. Olaf. II DB: Your grandparents. Did you know them? GenerationPart RD: I knew only one of the grandparents. My grandmother. My mother’s mother. DB: Who lived on the farm? Society RD: Came from a farm. They lived in town. He married into a city family. I remember her very well but she was very ill during the time I remembProject:er. I remember her funeral more than anything else. I was probably only seven or eightGreatest years old when that happened. My grandfathers I never knew. DB: Typically in Norway at the time you were growingHistorical up, because people lived close to the community where their family had always lived, was there a very close relationship between parents, grandparents and children?History Did they often live together? RD: Very close. Very close. And very often they lived together. In fact, in my situation we had an apartment in a townhome that belonged to my grandparents, and so I grew up with my grandmotherMinnesota's for the firstOral seven or eight years of my life. We had a very close relationship with uncles and aunts and cousins, and even with second or third cousins. So we did live in a very close family group and so Minnesotadid almost everybody in Norway. DB: Again, because everyone stayed close to home. RD: Very close to home. Yes. DB: And you mentioned that you grew up in a townhome. Can you describe what it was like physically? 13 RD: I shouldn’t have used the term townhome. I should rather have said a house in town. Our house fronted one of the main thoroughfares of the city and it was on the corner and it was sort of an L-shaped house. A very large house with maybe five or six bedrooms. It had a backyard and we had an outdoor toilet in the backyard. Always nice and clean but it was not the flush toilet that is common now. In fact, back in my hometown during my childhood there was a very important wagon that came by every week to empty the biffy. DB: The honey wagon. RD: Maybe that’s what it’s called here. DB: Yes. It is. And then was that taken out and sold to farmers or . RD: I don’t know what they did with it but it disappeared. DB: Got rid of it anyway. II RD: Yes. Got rid of it. Every week. And we thought . I thought it was one of the worst jobs in the world to be a coachman for that. It was a horse and buggy.Generation Part DB: Yes. How would you describe your economic situation growing up in the 1920s and 1930s? Society RD: I grew up in a middle class home. We had no financial problems, but we had no affluence at the same time until much later. In the 1920s and 1930s I can never remember that we had any hard time. My father’s job was reasonably good, Project:but to feed a family of four was still very difficult. But I can’t remember ever beingGreatest hungry. DB: And how would you describe your economic situation compared to other people in your community? Historical RD: We were better off than most.History There was a great deal of poverty back in Tønsberg at that time and it became particularly prevalent during the 1930s, which was the same time as the Depression in America. The Depression in America meant Depression in Norway as well because Norway lived out of her merchant marine and there was nothing to do for the merchant ships at thatMinnesota's time. ThatOral meant that life was pretty tough. Although we never felt it. DB: Your hometown was Minnesotaright on the coast. RD: Right on the coast. It’s a seaport. DB: Would you call it on a fjord? RD: On the fjord. DB: On the fjord. Yes. 14 RD: It’s Norway’s oldest city and one of the reasons why it was made there a thousand years ago was because it was a beautiful harbor. DB: So it was primarily a seafaring town? RD: Yes, it was. DB: Fishing industry there? RD: No. No fishing industry but seafaring. International waters. Rather large ship owners had their offices in my hometown. DB: You said your father had a civil service job and there was pretty good security in that. RD: Yes. It was very good security. He was the chief person in the office that hired seamen to the Norwegian merchant fleet. It was a very interesting job because even as earlyII as in the 1930s we would frequently at home get telephone calls from abroad. From Germany, from France, even from the United States where somebody wanted a telegraph operator, a first mate or a captain for a ship. They had to call my father. And it wasGeneration very interePartsting. My father would answer the phone and on the other side of the line they would say, “We need a first mate for this and that ship which is today in Boston.

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