Library of Congress Interview with Kenneth N. Skoug The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project KENNETH N. SKOUG Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: August 22, 2000 Copyright 2002 ADST Q: Today is the August 22, 2000. This is an interview with KennetN. S-k-o-u-g, Jr. - and how do you pronounce it? SKOUG: “Skohg.” It rhymes with “Rogue.” Q: And this is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, and I'm Charles Stuart Kennedy. Now, and you go by Ken. SKOUG: Ken. Q: Why don't we start off by telling me when and where you were borand something about your family? SKOUG: Okay. My roots are northern European. My ancestors arrived in the United States in the second half of the 19th century. On my father's side the background was strictly Norwegian. The name Skoug is from a little farm in Norway located in Ostfold, Southeast of Oslo, on the Glouma River. The name means woods, and in 1967 I found that farm in the woods with the river flowing past toward Oslo Fjord. The ancestor who came over in 1880 suffered through the severe winter of 1880-81 in Minnesota, where snow was on the Interview with Kenneth N. Skoug http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001077 Library of Congress ground until May and no trains moved through. He told us about it in his own memoirs. It was quite an experience for someone coming out of even a cold country. Q: Oh, yes. SKOUG: To be thrust into Minnesota just then. His son, Charles, was my paternal grandfather. My father's mother, Marie Noraly, was born in Minnesota. She descended from ancestors who inhabited the Hallingdal region on Norway, northeast of Oslo. Her father had come in 1861, getting across the ocean when the water was slopping over the deck of the ship in which they traveled. He died very young after his own dad perished in a Minnesota blizzard. This left his young widow with three little children, including Marie, in a brand-new country. Charles Skoug married Marie Nordly and made a go of it in Crookston, a town in northern Minnesota by the Canadian border. They both died of pneumonia while my father was still in high school. Q: Was it mainly farming or woodsmen or lumber or what? SKOUG: My great-grandfather, father of Charles Skoug, was trained as a carpenter. He was the second son of a little Norwegian family. The first son got the farm, and since he didn't get the farm he had to learn a trade. He had to milk cows from necessity out in Minnesota. He was at that time a man over 40, and he claimed that it was the first cow he'd ever milked in his life. He didn't like farming, but he did like trade, and he later went on out to Seattle. On my mother's side, just to round it off, my grandfather Charles Stevens, was born in New Brunswick, Canada. His family came from the area arounNew Brunswick meets Nova Scotia at the head of the Bay of Fundy, where all the whales are, and where the Tide is awesome. He came to Duluth, Minnesota after 1881. There he met a lady named Christine Johnson, who'd come from Sweden, and they married, and my mother was born there in Duluth in 1896. My father was born in a small town iMinnesota at about the same time, but grew up in Crookston. Eventually they met in Duluth, in part due to the drastic shake-ups caused by the First World War. Interview with Kenneth N. Skoug http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001077 Library of Congress Q: Did the family reflect at all in what you heard or saw the Norwegian-Swedish sibling rivalry, or whatever the hell you want to call it? SKOUG: There wasn't much of that, no. As a matter of fact, since both my father and mother were born in this country, they regarded themselves as main stream Americans, they thought of foreigners as foreigners. I never had the feeling that the ethnic composition made any difference. It wasn't until much later that I began myself to investigate the family. Everybody was dead. I mean the family research unfortunately came about without a chance to ask questions about family history. Q: That's one of the things, of course, about oral history. Usuallwhen you get cranked up to do it, they're not around to answer. SKOUG: It's too late. Q: I know. You were born when now? SKOUG: I was born on December 2, 1931, in Fargo, North Dakota. My father had been sent there by his employer, Remington-Rand. He worked for the forerunner of Sperry- Rand, and he was a sales manager for the Dakotas and Montana as a young man and felt lucky to have a job in the depression. But he always had one. Q: Did either your mother or your father go to college? SKOUG: No, no, they both were high school graduates. As a matter of fact, my mother was the first one in the family to graduate from high school. The others had to go to work. There's a letter from my father to my mother in the late 1930s when he gets a job as the Remington-Rand district manager in St. Paul, where I grew up, saying, “Now we can now be sure we can send our kids to college.” Till that point he couldn't have made that promise. Interview with Kenneth N. Skoug http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001077 Library of Congress Q: As a kid, when you first started to remember things, where weryou living? Was that in St. Paul or was it Fargo? SKOUG: I remember virtually nothing of Fargo. In fact, I've gone back in my own family files and found a couple of references to Fargo, but my first memories are of Duluth, as a little kid between two-and-a-half and four-and-a-half. I have a few memories of that. I remember my father voting in the 1936 election for Roosevelt against Landon. I remember the place where he voted. I remember that in part because we used to go back to Duluth. It was my mom's home, and she's buried there. But most of the memories are growing up in St. Paul. Q: Well, how many brothers and sisters did you have, or did you havbrothers and sisters? SKOUG: I had one sister. She's still alive and living near St. Paul. Q: Do you recall anything about being at home? Did you sit around the table and talk about things, or was it pretty much a working family where people were doing their thing? SKOUG: We talked a lot about what was going on. As a matter of fact, my first memories come from the late 1930s and early 1940s, and they had an indelible effect on my thinking. For example, one was the Winter War, and another was the Japanese invasion of China. We had a globe and I remember my mother pointing out how anomalous it was, this little place Japan was attacking this huge country China. And also there were motion picture newsreels of the Spanish Civil War. But the thing that struck me was the Russian attack on Finland. I even had the little Finnish soldiers. We were very pro-Finn. Q: They were white-clad. I got them at the five-and-dime. SKOUG: Yes, that's where I got them, too. Interview with Kenneth N. Skoug http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001077 Library of Congress Q: I can shut my eyes and see them. They are holding their riflesort of down here and they've got white - SKOUG: It was very comparable. They were ski-troopers. Q: Well, were people around you or were your family talking abouthese events that were happening in the '30s? SKOUG: Oh, yes, we discussed them, and particularly when the war began. Of course, I still remember, and I have at home, a Sink the Bismarck! video. I don't know if you have that, but anyway, it's got the memorable moment when the Hood is blown up by a shot from the Bismarck that landed in the magazine. I remember how discouraged my father was. He said to me, “The Germans always seem to win.” And that's the way it seemed at the time. Some people were extremely emotional. I found later, when I worked for Samuel Lubell, the political analyst, when I was a senior in college, that he thought that Minnesotans, so many of them being Scandinavians, were probably very, very neutral at heart about the war because they were neutral in fact until Norway got invaded in April of 1940. But as I recall, people were very sympathetic to the Allied cause. They didn't want to get into war, even after the shock of the fall of France, but after that time the isolationist feeling began to change. It made it possible to have things like a draft, even though it was extended by only one vote in the U.S. House of Representatives. Q: Did the “America First” movement or Lindbergh... Obviously, yowere a kid, but were you feeling the impact of this? SKOUG: As a kid, no. Lindbergh, of course, was a hero, and because of his feats and because of the murder of the baby and so forth, and people didn't think much about Germany.