Nordic American Voices Nordic Heritage Museum Interview of Virginia Ormbrek April 7, 2012 Seattle, Washington Interviewers: Brandon Benson; Lynn Tengbom Also present: Tom Ormbrek Brandon Benson: [0:08] This is an interview for the Nordic American Voices Oral History project. This is the seventh of April, 2012, and we’ll be interviewing Virginia Ormbrek at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. My name is Brandon Benson, and I’m interviewing Virginia with Lynn Tengbom. So first, Virginia, could you spell out your name- first and last, and you tell us when you were born? Virginia Ormbrek: [0:35] Yes, I was born in 1917- the fifth of February. I was six months old when World War One broke out. My father was Henry Wise. He was German-American. He was in the National Guard, and he went overseas to France. I was christened at Camp Lewis. In those days it was Camp Lewis, not Fort Lewis. And my mother and older brother and I rode in the troop train as far as New York, until he sailed. [1:07] But my name is spelled V-I-R-G-I-N-I-A. And my maiden name was W-I-S-E. It was a German name in the beginning. That is not a proper name in Germany; it means meadow. It’s not a person’s name. But I was told by a couple of German doctors that I knew later on when I was in training that our name would have been W-E-I-S-S- the equivalent of White. And that’s the name you’ll find in many of the German people that came over. But our… I don’t know when our family name was shortened to W-I-S-E, but it was. [1:57] But I was born in [1917] in Spokane, Washington, and both my older brother and I were home-delivered. We weren’t born in the hospital. And we were born right down by the Gonzaga River, about a block from the… not the Gonzaga River, the Spokane River, in the Gonzaga District, where the college is. And in 1920… Dad came back from France in 1919. And there were two… my younger brother was the first one born in the hospital, at Deaconess in Spokane. And when he was just a babe in arms, Dad was transferred to Seattle, because he was appointed the state adjutant at the American Legion, which was very active in, all his life, from his days in France. He fought for the veterans all his life. Nordic American Voices Page 1 of 17 [2:57] So we were transferred to Seattle in 1920. I was three and a half. I remember coming over in a steam train, and that was a lot of fun. The windows were open, the cinders were blowing in our eyes, and Bud and I were racing up and down the aisle. He was [fourteen months] older than me. [We were] tearing up a catalog, and mother got after us for bothering the neighbors. They said, “That’s all right. They’re just having fun.” [3:26] But I just… I’ve always known about Spokane because I still have relatives there and go back every once in a while to see them. But I grew up in Seattle, on the north end, over by Lake Washington. In fact, it was Laurelhurst, right across from the schoolhouse, in 1924 when we moved into a lovely, big old home. There were two of our neighbors that kept cows in the back. And 48 th Northeast was a meadow- no houses. [3:58] And even Laurelhurst itself- the main part was on the south side of 45 th , but our side wasn’t paved. We were like in the country. And nobody locked their doors at night. It was just a lot of fun. And a lot of vacant lots- we’d go picking salmonberries, and hazelnuts, you know. We had little wet areas where you could go polliwog fishing. [Laughter] It was just really neat. [4:27] That was 1924. And I grew up there, and graduated from Laurelhurst Grade School and went on to Roosevelt High. In those days, you crossed… took a little shuttle bus from Laurelhurst into the University District on University Way. You caught a streetcar over, and you had to go to high school over a wooden trestle. It was on 65 th Street, right straight across from Ballard- 65 th Northeast. [5:04] It was just a lot of fun. And then I went to the university. I graduated in ’35 from high school, and I went into training in 1937. In fact, it was… how many years ago, yesterday? No, the fifth. It was Thursday. The fifth of April I went to training at Swedish hospital. It was a five-story hospital, where the big one, the main one is now. It was only… it was just a smallish hospital. [5:44] But at that time, Providence Hospital, Seattle General, which no longer exists, and Virginia Mason, were all early hospitals. And Columbus Hospital down on Madison later became Cabrini. We had a lot of hospitals, and most of them were training schools. Maynard was the only one that had all graduate nurses. That was a small, very well run hospital down on Boren. [6:12] We had cable cars; we had streetcars in those days. Until the late thirties, you went everywhere on streetcars. And we had cable cars on Madison until the buses came in. It was just a very different place. Seattle was more… downtown was more like a small town, you know. We had our department stores, but everything was so different. Now when I go through town, I don’t even know where I am. I can’t even find Madison Street. But in those days it was very different. [6:50] In 1941, I came out the first of March. It was a beautiful day. There were still some of the mills going, but Ballard in the old days was a big mill town. It was the biggest… It was called the cedar shingle capital of the world, because Seattle Cedar was the biggest cedar shake mill. They had a Nordic American Voices Page 2 of 17 lot of them. A lot of the big lumbermen from the Midwest like Michigan and Wisconsin came out here- like Weyerhauser and Mattson, and what are some of the others, Tom? I can’t remember them by name. [7:38] Stimpson was another one. And the old Stimpson deal in Ballard is still there. They took the old family home, which would have made a nice museum, but they took that down. And I don’t think they ever let people come in there to tour or anything. They tried to save the old Ballard city hall, but it was too earthquake-damaged. But it was there when Tom was still a baby. It was there in the fifties. And they finally had to take it down. [8:10] But they just recently put the original bell back in the tower, and those four white pillars are from the original. There were several city halls, and the last one was one they were going to save for a museum. But the firehouse was there. Of course, by the time I came to Ballard, the horses were gone, but they all… All the stalls had names like Ember and Flame, and this and that, named for the horses. In the old days, before the big fire, all the cities had them, because everything was wooden, you know, before that. There were a lot of really bad fires. And Seattle had its fire. [9:01] But my mother came here in 1909 and went into training in what later became Harborview. It was the first city hospital, but it wasn’t the oldest hospital. It was down in the old Flatiron building. I think it’s still there, on Yesler. But that’s where the old city hospital was. She worked as a public health nurse until she was seventy-one years old. She was also a store nurse down on Second Avenue when old Bon Marche had a store nurse. [9:39] And during the big Depression in ’29, I was just starting going into my teens, and they had Red Cross clinics where people would go when they were sick that paid hardly anything, practically nothing. Where Mom was, they had what they called a well-baby clinic, and people could bring their babies and toddlers in there for free and have them examined. [10:06] Then she worked as a store nurse in the big Sears on Lander Street- the big one. And she worked under the state for that. She really saw the old Seattle before I was born, because they were still having Tong Wars in Chinatown in 1909 when Mom came. And the big expo was there at that time- it came in, and they had it out at the university campus. It was brand new then, because the University of Washington started on University Street in downtown Seattle- that’s where it started. They moved it out to the University District, and of course a lot of the old timers didn’t like that. So they didn’t send their kids there. But was just a different time entirely. [10:55] I can remember going on interurbans when I was little, between cities, you know.