Norwegian Tea

The Norwegian tea actually started with me. The picture that you see was a tea that was given to Anna Tarke when returned from Norway it was one tea given to her by the Sons of Norway, which both Anna and Nora were members of so that was just one tea one picture. Where the tea started is remember I only had sons, didn’t know you were coming Mel [Karla’s daughter who is 10 years younger than her youngest son] I read something in some magazine how nice it was to have a tea and so I actually tried with the boys and did like hot chocolate and stuff and they were like, not like Norweigen Tea but just like when they would come home we would do a tea, it didn’t go over very well okay. They were like, “we’ll drink some hot chocolate and you give us some food.” But then um I remembered a story from Shelley and her sister, one year before Anna passed in Maureen’s house which was Anna’s home, they dressed up in all the bunads and they made all the traditional Scandinavian desserts for a Christmas and that was one time thing a long time a ago. And I said, ‘I want to have a tea, my boys don’t like to have tea so I’m, this is seriously how it came about, so I’m going to have a tea and I’m’ going to invite all of the offspring of Anna and Nora who were sisters okay. Now I didn’t do their brothers and stuff, which is the Pederson side and I just don’t know them as well. And that’s how it started. So this started a long time, Maureen would know, before I even, I thought I was done, I never knew I was going to have a daughter. So I kicked the boys out because they didn’t like to have tea they just liked to eat the stuff and I invited you all over and that’s how it started. And I dressed up in the Bunad and I made horrible lefse, it was awful. Um because lefse is like a potato, every culture has a pancake. You got a tortilla and lefsa is a potato you know dessert. So I made lefse, and I wanted to make the Kransekake, and I had ordered on eBay that had the recipes in it. This was a long time ago before amazon and all that. It was a used book, notably Norwegian and that’s where I got the recipe for the Kransekake. So, that’s how the Norwegian tea came about. So actually, a lot of the things that we do at the Norwegian tea, the are more Scandinavian than they are Norwegian and they are not things that were done in our family. Okay so Doug, the owners of Doug’s company and they are Danish, and a few years into this they found out, I think Doug told her, and she asked ‘Do you do the almond in the rice pudding?’ And I said no, so that’s how that started. Okay so we had never done that in our family either. Actually, my grandmother had never made Kransekake, ever. I do remember Krumkake and so that’s how I got the recipe for that and I actually bought an iron for that, because I didn’t have an iron. But I do remember grandma making krumkake

The Bunad

The bunad came from my grandma. She gave it to me. The bunad has sort of a sorted history, so here’s the thing. If you look at that picture, that bunad was, that was Anna’s bunad, grandma’s bunad, you can take a picture of that picture, grandma had a less elaborate bunad. She didn’t have one that was from Norway. I mean look at that you can’t make those here okay you order and. Hers was just the black front with the white under it. The bunad that I use wasn’t Nora’s bunad it was Anna’s bunad. Anna was very large and as she got older she got larger and larger. And grandma didn’t, they were all so chesty, grandma didn’t get as large so when Anna had to change out into anther bunad grandma got this one. So there has been a little bit of a thing about the bunad because the bunad was originally Anna’s. Now it was given to grandma by anna before grandma died and then it was given to me before grandma died. So I’m like maybe one day, I might you know, but someone was like that one’s Anna’s bunad. And I was like well we didn’t go into the house and steal it. So originally it was Anna’s, it was here older sisters. So I did I talked to Shelley about that because one of the relatives was like well how does she have that bunad it’s right there in the picture. And I said Shelley someday that is going to make it back to your family but it may not be for a few generations. It’s going to go to whoever takes this over. I am not going to go here take it my grandma gave it to me. It’s like well sorry. It’s kind of funny. You guys were little when I started it and then here came along, I had Mel. I think it was three years before we knew Mel was going to be here. So that was kind of cool. So be careful about the Bunad it’s got some sorted history to it. Someone thinks that Nora went in and took it out. She didn’t no, I’m kidding, she didn’t take it it was given to her. So I asked Shelley and Shelley I was like should I give it back. And Shelley was like [makes hand motions like shoving it into a box or ruining it]. She’s like no, they’re just going to put it in a drawer and never do anything with it

Norwegian Phrase

One of my grandmother’s favorite phrase, and I’m not going to get this right at all. One of her favorite phrases was, ‘Stor, Stor, sta litt, sta vett.\u27 And that means ‘big head and little sense.’ And that was one of her favorite phrases. That’s lovely isn’t it. I am sure I got that a few times

Malene\u27s Immigration from Norway

My favorite story has always been the story of how Malene (pronounced Ma-lee-na) Pederson, her married name, came to America. She was married in Norway and her husband came to America first. In those days you had to have a job or have a sponsor and be healthy enough to work before they would allow you in to the United States. He came first and had a job with what is now US Steel. She came to the United States through Ellis Island with two young children, Anna and Ole. Her ship came in at a different time than it was expected and when she was processed her husband was not there yet. So here she was in America and probably being detained because they didn’t just let you go then not speaking more than a few words of English. Fortunately, he did arrive at the given time which was a few days later and she was able to join him. I have always thought about how terrifying that must have been to not speak the language, have very little means, two very young children and your husband not be there

Country Boys

Well we uh, Jim and Kerm [Kermit] always, well uncle Eldon was very successful so he always had money and the boys always had money and cars and stuff. So that’s where I spent my time. We had an old, well it was new then, tin motor boat with a 10-horsepower motor. All of us skinny kids learned how to water ski behind it. On a pair of skis that we made ourselves that we didn’t know what we were doing. We took two planks and some innertubes from some old tires and made the foot pieces on it. We used an angle iron to make the toes go up. Like I said we used two pieces of wood and used a piece of metal to make the toe go up and that was our first set of skis and we didn’t know how to make them work because when you ski on a flat board you can’t steer it. And when you would get on them they would just do this [uses his arms to show that the skis would go in all different directions]. So we learned you had to put a fin on the bottom of each one so we nailed a piece of tin underneath there to make them so that we could steer them. It would cut your leg off if you weren’t careful, it was so sharp. We skied behind a tin motor boat with a little 10 horse power motor. But you know none of us were big. You know all of us were about this big around [makes a small hole with his fingers]. Didn’t take very much to pull us out of the water

The Movies

We used to get fog a lot worse than we did now, so I used to get out and walk the white line with a flashlight. He’d drive right behind. [Karla: so you were walking?] Well I mean they had fenders then so we would ride on the fenders. I went with grandpa every Friday night. Grandpa was a Western Cowboy movie freak. So they had Westerns at the movies in Colusa every Friday night. If anybody wanted to go with grandpa to the movies they just had to show up

I am My Grandmother\u27s Grandaughter

I was just rummaging through and trying to organize and but away all of the decorations and things my mom had sent back with us to Logan for our wedding in June. As great as the stuff is, both my fiancé and I have very small living spaces. I decided to take out the recipe box we had used to collect recipes at our engagement party. I opened it to find something I had not seen before, tied in a bow there was an old photograph in an old frame and some recipes that belonged to my grandmother. This may not seem significant to most people but it caused me to burst into tears. There are few pictures of my grandmother when she was younger, and I only knew her after she had Parkinson’s disease for a number of years. Growing up and still now everyone tells me how much I look and seem like my grandmother but I never knew her. By the time I was old enough to talk with her, the Parkinson’s had taken over so much so that she couldn’t really talk anymore. She died when I was 10 years old. My hands move like hers, I have her eyes and her nose, I don’t look like either of my parents. I am told often that the genes came straight from her. These are some of the only items of hers that I own and they are extremely special to me. Seeing her handwriting on recipe cards makes me feel connected to her in a way, like part of her can live on through me. She was an amazingly strong woman from what everyone tells me I wish I could have known her. It is so strange to be told you are so much like someone you never knew

Grandma & Grandpa

Met grandma when I was going through flight school in Texas. Blind date. Bruce had met a girl, Bruce DeVries had met a girl in Corpus [Corpus Cristi, TX]. And so she found a date for me and that was Zoe. [Interviewer: How did you know she was the one?] Grandma, mmm, she was a girl that all I know. It was fun. Butter and Marie [my grandmother Zoe’s parents]. They were they had a household that was very welcoming you might go in there walk over people sleeping on the floor. Uh they had a friend who came from El Paso to Corpus he was in the Navy, a seamen down from Corpus. And he and his buddies were there a lot beause he worked for your um great grandpa had a service station in El Paso and he worked at the service station. And he was in the Navy and he was stationed down there when Butter and Marie moved down to Corpus. So he would come down and he’d have buddies with him and they would spend the night just sleeping on the floor. I didn’t know grandma too terribly long before we got married. I can’t remember when we first started dating. When I got out of the service I came home. I think before that though I took leave or something her mom came out here and we drove out [journey from Corpus Christi, TX to Meridian, CA, 1936 miles in the 1950s]. That’s when she met my parents, they lived where Eric’s house is now, but not in that house. Interviewer: How’d you know she was the one you were going to marry?] Couldn’t find anybody else. I was 21 she was 18. I was 4 years older so I guess I was just about 22. We got married in El Paso, not Corpus because that’s where they came from. Butter and Marie, all there family was in El Paso. It wasn’t very big because everyone had to come to it. From my family there was only my aunt and uncle Tom and Gene and mom and dad. Jim and Kerm came, I think that was about it from my side of the family. There wasn’t very many. They liked Mexican food. Zoe and Marie knew how to make that. Marie did a lot of the cookin because when mom started getting her Parkinson’s she wasn’t able to do a lot of that stuff. So as long as Marie was here we ate dinner with them almost everyday. We were living in Sacramento and I got a chance to buy this little place. The company I was working for down there was in an uproar. They laid me off then hired me back as a fee appraiser like your dad. You work for the individuals and not a company. You know they didn’t want to pay all the benefits and stuff so they would just pay you by the appraisal. So then we moved up here cause I can that anywhere. This place came up for sale

Julebukking

Now um no one has ever taking me up on the Julebukking, I would really like to do that. Julebukkinging a way. I don’t know if it was on Christmas eve or what but it was when they would put on a goat’s head and go around and scare people. And demand, it’s kinda like trick-or-treating, they go out and they demand treats and stuff like that. So you know check it out. Yeah they did that back it Norway. But the girls probably never did that, Anna was 5 or 6 when they came through Ellis Island and grandma was born in North Dakota