Nordic American Voices Nordic Museum

Interview of Yngve Hveding ID: 2017.036.001

March 18, 2017 Seattle, Washington

Interviewers: Brandon Benson; Marjorie Graf

Marjorie Graf: [0:00] This is an interview for the Nordic American Voices oral history project. Today is March 18, 2017, and we will be interviewing Yngve Hveding. We are at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle, Washington. My name is Marjorie Graf, and also here interviewing is—

Brandon Benson: [0:22] Brandon Benson.

Marjorie Graf: [0:24] So, we’d like you to start by just stating your name and date of birth, and go on with your family history.

Yngve Hveding: [0:32] My name is Yngve Hveding. I was born in Tromsø, in northern , in 1945. My grandparents came from and Vesterålen, just south of Tromsø. My grandfather’s name was Johann Hveding. He was born in 1867, in Lofoten. And my grandmother was born in 1878. Her name was Hilma Hansen. They were married in 1905 in [unintelligible] Kommune, , just north of Lofoten.

[1:13] They had two kids— my dad, who was also named Johann Hveding, born in 1908, and he had a sister called Gunvor, born in 1911. My dad married my mother, who was from southern Norway. Her name was Fredis Stannis, born in 1908. They met at a place up in Lofoten where my dad was working, and they got married in 1937. A year later, they moved to Tromsø. They lived there before the war started. After a few years, my older sister was born in 1942. Her name was Hilda. And I was born in 1945, in July, just after the war ended. They called me a “peace child.” So, that is my family.

Marjorie: [2:24] What did your grandparents do for work?

Yngve: [2:26] My grandfather worked in a shipping company. It was actually part of the Hurtigruten system, the coastal express in Norway. He was a bookkeeper. He worked there until he retired, just before the war started. He passed away in 1945, in June, a month before I was born. My grandmother was a homemaker all the time.

Marjorie: [2:52] Is this your father’s side of the family?

Yngve: [2:53] That’s my father’s side.

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Marjorie: [2:54] What about your mother’s side?

Yngve: [2:55] On my mother’s side, my grandfather was a school principal in a little town called [unintelligible]. It’s a few miles up from Drammen in Norway. And my grandmother was a homemaker. They had eight children all together. My mother was number five, I think.

Marjorie: [3:27] What kinds of things did you learn from your grandparents about their history?

Yngve: [3:32] They were a little strict, as it was back then. They taught me to respect older people, and everything around me. I think that was a good learning for me. I had a very good relationship with them. Of course, it was only my grandmother, since my grandfather passed away. I always spent my summertime down at their place. In the wintertime, I couldn’t wait for summer and school to get done, so I could go down and spend the summer. I had friends there, too, my age.

Marjorie: [4:15] What kind of things did you do in the summer with your friends?

Yngve: [4:19] Well, my aunt lived with my grandmother. She was married to a man from , who was evacuated at the end of the war from Finnmark to Vesterålen. They met there, and got married. He bought a little boat called a [Norwegian word], a wooden boat, 26 feet. A little gas engine onboard. We were cruising around in the summertime, islands around Vesterålen, fishing, and staying overnight. That was what I enjoyed the most. It was a good experience.

Marjorie: [5:03] So, it was a free childhood.

Yngve: [5:05] Yes.

Marjorie: [5:06] A lot of freedom.

Yngve: [5:07] Lots of freedom. Yeah.

Marjorie: [5:09] What kinds of things did you hear about that had happened to the family during the war? What kinds of experiences did they have?

Yngve: [5:18] My parents… I think they all were affected by the war, but not too much. There was a limited supply of food, and housing was a little different, too. I know they moved around a little bit. The family had a big house, and it also housed a few German soldiers or officers. That was a little experience, too. One story I heard— my grandfather was more in the countryside. He had easier supplies for food. He was going to send a bag of potatoes up to my parents in Tromsø, but he had to apply for a permit to do this. There was a government system that controlled all the supplies, and food and some other things. His application was rejected. [Laughter] So, it was kind of strange [inaudible]. Other than that, I think they were doing all right during the wartime.

Marjorie: [6:34] Did they still occupy the house with the German soldiers?

Yngve: [6:39] No. I can’t remember what they said; how long they lived there. But they moved to another place with a colleague from the company he worked for. So, they each had a floor. Behind them was a prison camp the Germans had built. One day, there was something going on up there.

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There were gunshots fired, and a bullet went through the house where they lived. That employer said, “Okay, we’ll move you to another place. Get away from there.” I think that was the closest they got to any serious interaction with the Germans.

Marjorie: [7:25] About your childhood— was that like for you?

Yngve: [7:29] This, I don’t remember, but we lived in an attic of a house when I was born, only three months after the war ended. It was kind of difficult to find a house. After two years, we moved to a house that was two apartments in a house. We had one apartment. The company he worked for owned the house, and they said we could have that apartment. And that’s where I start having memories of my childhood.

[8:06] Really, memories I can tell in detail were from 1949. My mother took a trip down to her place in southern Norway with my sister and myself. The way we traveled back then, we couldn’t hop on an airplane at that time. So, we took a bus to a neighboring town, which has a rail connection through Sweden. It was Narvik, where they were shipping iron ore by train and shipped them out to the world. It was an eight-hour bus trip, and it was a 20-hour train ride to Stockholm, and then overnight to Oslo, where we stayed all summer. I have lots of good memories from that.

Marjorie: [8:55] How was that different from where you were living?

Yngve: [8:59] It was a more populated area, for sure. My mother had the seven siblings around there, so lots of family. More family than we were used to. We went from family to family and stayed in various places. We had an extremely hot summer down there, which northern Norway doesn’t have very often. So, we were playing in the water, and swimming. I remember I had a good time, and I got to travel by train quite a bit, and that interested me very much. There were no trains where I come from, and there still are not.

Marjorie: [9:40] What kind of work did your mother’s family do in southern Norway?

Yngve: [9:46] Three of them were teachers, like their father. There was one aunt who was never married. She worked for a publishing company— books. She had a good job. She sent us books all the time for birthdays, and stuff like that. And one was an auditor for a company. I think that was what they were doing.

Marjorie: [10:22] Was your grandfather that was involved with the Hurtigruten, or was that your father?

Yngve: [10:30] My grandfather.

Marjorie: [10:33] What happened to that boat during World War II? Did it still carry people?

Yngve: [10:41] Yeah. They were on schedule all the time. Some of them got torpedoed, or ran into floating mines. So they hired smaller boats, even fishing boats, to carry people around. But they kept the same service going all the time.

Marjorie: [11:04] Because that was the ferry system.

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Yngve: [11:06] Yes. Actually, they went from Bergen up to Kirkenes in the northern part, up and down there.

Marjorie: [11:14] Tell us about your story, then. How did you get here? What brought you here?

Yngve: [11:23] It started out after high school. I went to Trondheim to go to technical university, where I met my wife. I was studying mechanical engineering, mostly. After school and service in the military, I got a job at a shipyard in Stavanger, in the southwestern part of Norway. We stayed there for 14 years all together. All three kids were born there. We have three kids— Cecilia, the oldest, was born in 1972; Frederik in 1973, and Camilla in 1977. So, we raised the three kids there.

[12:11] In early 1980, started thinking maybe we should try to go to America and work. My wife had a brother living here. We had been over here. He was actually living in Seattle. We came over here on vacation one time and liked what we saw here— the nature. Very similar to Norwegian— the weather can be, too. So, we thought it would be interesting to try it a few years.

[12:45] So, I was lucky to get in contact with a company that actually had Norwegian ties here in Seattle, designing fishing boats, and stuff like that. I was lucky to get a job there. We thought we’d try it for a couple of years. Thirty-one years later, I am still working for the company. So, that was what brought us over.

[13:11] We discussed it with the kids. The oldest was 13, and the youngest was eight. We said, “Would you like to go to America for a while?” The boy said, “Yeah, let’s do it,” right away. So, we decided to do it. We came here the first week of September, Labor Day weekend, the day after school started. So, we put them into the Mukilteo School District, where my wife’s brother was living. Then we started looking for a house, and we decided to stay within the school district. So, we lived in Mukilteo, and still do.

Brandon: [13:53] What were you doing in Norway before you left?

Yngve: [13:58] I worked in a shipyard in Stavanger. They were building gas carriers, LNG carriers, big , and other chemical tankers. So, I got experience in shipbuilding and systems there.

Brandon: [14:19] Were you doing a lot of the same work when you got here?

Yngve: [14:22] Here in Seattle, it’s smaller boats, smaller scale, but the same work.

Marjorie: [14:30] Are they commercial?

Yngve: [14:31] Commercial, yeah. Serving the Alaskan fishing fleets. Harbor tugs for the whole country, basically. And we do smaller passenger vessels, and also a little offshore work, too.

Brandon: [14:49] And your wife? What kind of work?

Yngve: [14:52] My wife was home for a while taking care of the kids. After a while, she said, “I need to find something to do.” She didn’t have any work permit, so she was looking around, what can I

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do? And somebody said, “You can start your own company. They don’t take out any salary, but you can take a profit at the end of the year, legally.” So, she started at the kitchen table with a phone, selling Norwegian marine equipment, of all things. And she is still doing that now. She has been very successful. She got clients like the U.S. Navy, and NOAA, and also private companies. So, she has been very successful. She has four employees, and has a little office in Edmonds. Doing well.

Brandon: [15:55] I imagine things have changed a lot since she started in the sales, and everything.

Yngve: [15:58] Oh, yeah. It has. One occasion, she was over in B.C. in a meeting. They call it NAV- C. They take care of all the Navy building projects. And she was sitting at the table, and there were all these higher-ups in the Navy with gold leaves, and everything. She said, “My goodness, what am I doing here?” [Laughter] She never imagined that. And she was controlling the southern shipyards in the Gulf area, where most of the shipping was happening. At first, they were a little skeptical. “A lady is coming in here? What’s going on here?”

[16:51] But after a while they got to know her, and they said, “Oh, Miss Kirsti, be careful when you climb up that ladder. Be careful.” [Laughter] So, they knew her, and they met quite often. She got some phone calls from shipyards— “Hey, Kirsti, can you find some equipment for me so we can get a bid?” And stuff like that. So, she got a name down there in the Gulf area.

Brandon: [17:18] I imagine Norway has quite an industry for products.

Yngve: [17:23] Yes. Oh, yeah.

Brandon: [17:25] Marine.

Yngve: [17:26] Everything. A good selection of products. Good quality.

Brandon: [17:31] That must make her job easier to have that source.

Yngve: [17:33] Yes, she has been doing well. There have been some challenges, but you kind of be persistent, and push on, and you get the order you want. So, it has been good.

Marjorie: [17:45] Did your children follow in your footsteps of engineering?

Yngve: [17:49] Not really. My oldest daughter is a special ed teacher up in the Lake Stevens School District. So, they live nearby. My youngest daughter works in the same company I work for, in the marketing side. She has been there for 15 years now. So, I guess she kind of [followed]. My son took a little while before he got done with his education, but he ended up as a petroleum engineer, chemist engineer, and worked for British Petroleum in Alaska. So, he’s based in Anchorage, and takes care of what’s going on up at the North Slope, and the pipeline. So, he has a good job up there.

Brandon: [18:39] So, you have two that are local— your daughters.

Yngve: [18:41] Yes.

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Brandon: [18:41] And your son is up in Alaska.

Yngve: [18:42] Yes. And in Alaska, he has two kids— a boy who will turn 12 this summer. His name is Anders, a Norwegian name. And a daughter who will be ten years old. Her name is Solveig— another Norwegian name. Their mother is American. She fell in love with that name Solveig. She said, “If we have a daughter she’ll be named Solveig.”

Marjorie: [19:23] When your family moved here, what was the biggest adjustment?

Yngve: [19:29] I think it wasn’t too much to adjust to. I think more for the kids, to get in another school system. For the most part, it went pretty well. It was something different, and they missed their friends from Norway, too, though. And of course, we missed our family in Norway. But other than that, it went pretty well.

Marjorie: [19:56] Was there quite a difference in the education system?

Yngve: [20:01] It’s a little different. You have a nine-year school in Norway, which includes middle school, and then you have high school, which is split in two. You can go a more academic way, or you can do more practical if you want to do more with your hands. You can get an education to get some trade skills. So, that’s different. There are different courses later. But they did pretty well.

Brandon: [20:54] You were probably in a technical path as a student?

Yngve: [20:59] Yes.

Brandon: [21:00] When you were growing up, did you participate in any sports?

Yngve: [21:05] Nothing serious. I like to go skiing. I go on a trip on an evening, or a weekend day. I like to go ice-skating, but I never did a competition, or anything like that. Tromsø has amazing ski terrain around the town. After the high school day had ended, I could go home and take my skis. There was a little ski gondola that goes up the mountainside, and you could go up there, and go skiing up in the mountains, and look over the town way down there, and then come back when dinner was ready. [Laughter] It was very convenient.

Brandon: [21:58] Have you done much skiing here?

Yngve: [22:01] I’ve done a little bit. It’s harder to get to the ski area. You have to drive for a while. But we have been up at Steven’s Pass, Chelan, Winthrop, and Whistler. We try to do a little skiing when we can. I do cross-country skiing. I don’t do much downhill.

Marjorie: [22:24] And traditions that you brought?

Yngve: [22:26] We celebrate Christmas Norwegian-style, Christmas Eve dinner. We have a nice little Christmas brunch on Christmas Day. We also do a Norwegian menu. We have pork ribs usually on Christmas Eve. We have julepølse, and ham, and pickled herring, and all that kind of stuff for Christmas. The kids like it.

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Marjorie: [23:01] Have your children carried any of that on in their own families?

Yngve: [23:04] I think we always get together at our place with the kids. And their American spouses also like the Norwegian food. [Laughter] So, that’s good. We also have a tradition in the fall— after we get some fresh lamb meat, we make lamb stew with cabbage— typical Norwegian. My son-in-law of my oldest daughter is from Nebraska. So, he was a beef kind of a guy. And he tasted the lamb— hmm, that’s interesting. After a few years, he started asking when we were going to have the fårikål stew again. He really got a taste for lamb, and really liked that.

[24:12] We try to celebrate Easter more than Americans normally do. Norway takes almost a couple of weeks off to celebrate Easter, going in the mountains, skiing. On Easter Sunday, we do have some lamb meat, normally. Easter lamb. Try to stick with that.

Marjorie: [24:38] Is Easter more of a religious holiday in Norway, or do they have an Easter bunny?

Yngve: [24:43] It’s a religious holiday. We have that Thursday and Friday off from work, and then Saturday is off anyway, and Sunday. And we take Monday off, too, similar to second Christmas Day, or Boxing Day. We take that off from work. We have all those days off from work. People add in… they go from the Friday before Palm Sunday, and maybe until the Wednesday after Easter, and go up in the mountains, skiing, or something like that. That’s typical Norwegian. We celebrate Easter. We do that.

Marjorie: [25:27] Is your sister still in Norway?

Yngve: [25:29] She is Norway, yeah. She lives in Oslo.

Brandon: [25:34] Do you go back to visit her?

Yngve: [25:35] Yes, we visit them at least… Not quite every year, but at least every second year. She is older than me, so she is retired. Her husband, too. I had my 70th birthday two years ago in July, and we were going to have a little party, and I was cleaning around the house, and my wife came home, and didn’t drive the car into the garage. I told her, “You can drive into the garage. Why are you standing there?” And she was standing there, laughing. I had to go a little closer and see what was going on there. There were more people in the car. It turned out to be my sister and her son. A big surprise. I had no clue. And we had visited them the month before. They kept it secret. So, that was a big surprise.

Brandon: [26:35] That’s great. So, your sister visits here as well.

Yngve: [26:36] Yes.

Brandon: [26:38] That’s good. When you go back to Norway, do you notice a lot of changes?

Yngve: [26:46] Yes, we do. It’s a different country than we left 30 years ago. It’s different. But I guess every country changes over time. If you’ve been away, you’ll see it right away.

Brandon: [27:00] Is it different in the whole setup of the city?

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Yngve: [27:05] Well, it’s changed in many ways. First of all, the immigration has increased quite a bit. So, there are more foreigners in the country. You see persons from Africa, or the Middle East talk with an Oslo dialect. It makes you wonder. [Laughter] That’s unusual. There are also more ethnic restaurants in the country. When I left, we had maybe a Chinese restaurant, or something. That was it. Now you get everything. And also, things have developed. New buildings are coming up. The train system has changed, and everything. A couple times we took the train from Oslo to Trondheim, and also to Bergen. It used to be a long, bumpy ride. Now it’s a smooth ride, and high speed. So, that has changed quite a bit.

[28:15] My hometown has grown from about 30,000 when I left, and now I heard it was 75,000 people. There was a university established after I left, so it’s a school city, and quite a popular tourist destination, also, because it’s a kind of unique place up there in many ways. The Northern Lights are spectacular up there. That is one of the major reasons for tourists to come up there, to watch this. For us, it was something we saw every day. [Laughter] What’s so special with this? But it is. It’s special. It’s spectacular.

Brandon: [29:00] So, you get some tourists in that part.

Yngve: [29:03] Yes.

Brandon: [29:04] That’s great.

Yngve: [29:04] It is. Yeah. There are also ski possibilities around that city. Tourists come up skiing. The Norwegian Crown Prince is there every year to go skiing in some of the mountains up there. It’s his favorite.

Marjorie: [29:24] Have you been part of any Norwegian-American organizations here?

Yngve: [29:28] I am a member of the Norwegian Commercial Club here. And my wife was a member of [unintelligible], the other Norwegian-American commerce club.

Marjorie: [29:43] So, professional Norwegian-American organizations.

Yngve: [29:46] Yes. That’s pretty much what I’ve been a member of. We have Norwegian friends around here, quite a few of them. We spend time with them. We also have a boat. We cruise around the San Juan Islands, and Canada. With other boat friends, we cruise together. We’re members of Edmonds Club, so we have cruises within the yacht club, also. It’s an amazing area to go boating, and crab-fishing. So, it’s good.

Marjorie: [30:36] Is there anything else that you’d like to have recorded? Anything we didn’t ask?

Yngve: [30:45] The company I work for was a small company back in 1985. There were eight people. It was owned by a Norwegian company doing the same kind of work, serving the . The founder of the company’s name is Jensen. He was a third-generation Norwegian from Helgeland, Nordland. His father came to Seattle around the turn of the last century. He came to Seattle, and he thought Seattle was too big a city. He didn’t like it here.

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[31:33] He toured up in the islands, and came to Friday Harbor, and said, “This is where I want to live.” So, he settled in Friday Harbor, and started with wooden-boat building at Jensen Shipyard. He was building wooden boats. So, his son took over. He said several kids. One was the one who founded the company. His name was Benjamin Jensen. He designed some of the wooden boats for him. He served in the U.S. Coast Guard. After that, he studied at the University of Washington, studying naval architecture. He became a designer. He designed some crab boats— lots of crab boats. They’re still around here.

[32:28] After a while, he got sick, and he sold his company to the Norwegian company. Then he passed away in 1980 from an illness. I joined in 1985, so I never met him. So, we kept on going up until 2008. We had grown to 18-20 people by then. And we got a letter from a big company here in Seattle, Crowley Maritime Company. They offered to buy our company. We were looking at naval architecture. We tried to build up our own stuff, and hadn’t been successful.

[33:26] So, they said, “Why don’t we buy the company?” So, they did, and they offered us a price, and we negotiated a little bit, and we sold the company. At that time, we were eleven shareholders in the company. I was one of them. So, we sold it, and became part of Crowley Maritime Corporation, which I think has 5,000 employees, all over, from the Caribbean, and Alaska, and the U.S. That has been a blessing for us. Just after 2008, 2009, we had the downturn of the economy in our country. Our workload and profits just went up and up. It was very strange to see around you, where some were struggling. So, we were really blessed with that transition.

Brandon: [34:23] Did that change your job?

Yngve: [34:25] No, the same job. There had become more bureaucracy in the system. It’s a big company. But we have financial backing, so we have more freedom to do more things that we want to do. The owner of the company, Tom Crowley— it’s a family owned company— he really wants to push his naval architecture service to a higher level. So, he is 100% behind us. He’s going from designing fishing boats and small tugboats. We now have what we call production engineering. We supply detail drawings of the shipyard to build from, ready-cut from the steel mill. You just put the pieces together like you build [unintelligible].

[35:21] We have construction management, where we take care of new build for the company. They are building tankers in Philadelphia shipyards. So, we have a crew watching the progress and quality control of that. We are also building a new container ship in Puerto Rico, where they serve from Jacksonville to Puerto Rico. So, we have the construction management of those two boats. And we also have an offshore group. They’re struggling a little bit now. There’s much going on there. They also have Sea Lift transport for large equipment at sea on barges.

Marjorie: [36:07] Are those materials made here in the United States, or are some of the companies overseas?

Yngve: [36:16] The materials are all steel materials. American steel. They have to be, for U.S. flag vessels, American steel. The equipment comes from all over. Engines, for the most part, for bigger boats, are from Europe or Asia. Mostly Asia. The smaller boats are local, from Caterpillar, or other U.S. companies.

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Brandon: [36:44] Do you ever travel for your work?

Yngve: [36:47] Not too much. A little bit. I am involved in environmental stuff— the treatment of ballast water. You are not allowed to carry ballast water from one area of the globe to another, and dump it. So, that is a big thing. Crowley Maritime has a large fleet of oil tankers where they go— loaded one way, and with ballast the other way. So we need to treat that ballast water. That has been a challenge. I’ve worked with that for two and a half years now.

Brandon: [37:37] Sounds like an interesting project.

Yngve: [37:38] It’s interesting. This fall, the first plant is going to be installed.

Marjorie: [37:45] Where do they treat the ballast water?

Yngve: [37:47] They have equipment onboard. There are different types of treatment systems they can use. Crowley doesn’t want to deal with chemicals and dangerous materials, so there is ultraviolet radiation of the water that will kill, or kind of make the little critters unable to reproduce. That’s the idea. They pump the water through a reactor with ultraviolet light of various intensity, and treat the water, and then pump the water. We test it to see if it’s okay.

[38:34] It’s a complicated system. It’s expensive, also. To fit this on an existing boat can be a challenge. For the tankers, we put it on the tank deck, which is classified as a hazardous zone, because of fumes from oil or other products, and electric equipment. So, we need to make sure the atmosphere inside those systems are safe to have electric equipment going. So, that adds to the cost, too. But there’s no way around it. That has been a big part of my job the last few years. They call me the expert. [Laughter]

Marjorie: [39:30] So, you can share this DVD eventually with your children and grandchildren. Is there anything else that you’d like to record for them?

Yngve: [39:41] I’d have to think about that a little bit. I will say that this country has been very good to us. We have been successful. I’m not sure if the same thing would have happened to us if we had stayed behind in Norway. I’m not sure about that. But it has been easier for us, particularly my wife, with her company, at the table with the phone in the kitchen, and taking off from there.

[40:13] Also, taxation here… To start a company in Norway, you need to start with a big stock of money. You have to have the capital ready. So, we asked about the rule here. “No, you just start.” [Laughter] You don’t need anything. Just start. So, it’s a financial burden to start a company in Norway in the first place, but not here. And the kids have gotten the education they wanted. They all have university education. I think it has been good for them, also. So, I feel we are blessed. It has been good.

Brandon: [40:55] That’s great.

Marjorie: [40:54] Anything else to add before we close?

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Yngve: [41:00] No. I think that should be it.

Marjorie: [41:04] Thank you very much.

Yngve: [41:05] You’re welcome.

Marjorie: [41:06] It’s very interesting.

END OF RECORDING.

Transcription by Alison DeRiemer.

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