MOM'S FAMILY
Morfar (Mother’s Father), as the Swedes designate one’s maternal grandfather, was born in Bollsta Bruk, Ångermanland, on September 24, 1882. His given name was August, which he sometimes abbreviated to Gust, but we all knew him as Grandpa Gus. Earlier variations of the family name are Hällström, Hellström, and Hellstrom, but in this country it became Holstrom. Mormor, Selma Ester Viktoria Lundberg, was born near Sundsvall, Västernorrland, on June 8, 1885. “Gust Holstrom married Esther Lundberg at Anabel Station, Portland, on Saturday, November 21, 1908,” I read somewhere, but not in the Lundberg Familje Bibel, where all the twentieth-century entries are in Mother’s hand. She guessed that Esther was about 20, and Gus about 21 when their individual portraits were made; I have no idea when the pictures in Salvation Army uniforms were taken. Mother had one brother, Hilding Carl, born on October 10, 1911 in Portland. I learned recently from their daughter, Joan, that his wife, nee Helen Eastlund, was vice-president of her senior class at Portland’s Jefferson High School, from which he also graduated, and that Helen’s then future brother-in-law, Sigward (Sig) Edstrom, had been sergeant-at-arms of that very same class. Joan and her younger brother, Ken, are my only cousins, and Uncle Hill and Aunt Helen shared their unique status. I would guess Hilding’s age as about 20 in his younger portrait, but he is clearly a mature adult in the other. The photo of the young family in front of its North Portland home is dated June, 1963. Mother’s mormor, B. Kristina Wedin, was born on May 26, 1855, and her morfar, Johan Vilhelm Lundberg, on October 17, 1855. The couple was married on November 9, 1880 and had three children, of whom my grandmother was the youngest. The last family Bible entry in Great-grandmother Lundberg’s hand gives their birth dates: Agnes Maria Vilhelmina, November 2, 1881; Joh. Fr. Emanuel, November 11, 1882; and finally Grandmother. In Mother’s hand are added the notes that Great-grandmother Lundberg died on “November 25, 1923 at age 68 years plus 6 months lacking one day.” She added that Great-grandfather, leaving his family behind, “went to America in 1885. For a while he wrote to Sweden and then his [to him] letters came back unclaimed. Grandma never knew ‘how’ or ‘why.’” Few facts survive regarding Great-grandmother Lundberg’s train ride across the country in 1905, apparently from New York to Portland and definitely in quest of Great-grandfather, the rascal (or was he perhaps the victim of foul play?), but it is certain that she was accompanied by three children, not just the two I knew so well as adults; I have a marvelous portrait of all four, by Churchley in Portland. John and Esther are immediately identifiable, but Agnes is not someone I recognize. Mother wrote in the Lundberg family Bible that Agnes was married to Magnus Welin on March 10, 1906, but I don’t recall ever hearing anything about him, either. Ken recalls stopping at a town on the Columbia River to visit her family as part of some of his family’s visits to the ocean. John was a very good friend, however. In childhood I called him “Uncle John with the goats,” both because he raised those animals and also to distinguish him from a younger man in the family also named John; the latter was designated simply “Plain John.” Goat milk was definitely not a favorite of mine, particularly when Aunt Lydia presented it as the base of hot chocolate. In spite of this early antipathy for that animal’s byproduct, I quickly developed a taste for the Norwegian gjetost and in later life a distinct love of French chevre and various American goat cheeses; I didn’t even mind its flesh masquerading as lamb much later during Peace Corps days. After Lydia’s death John made at least two trips to Sweden, including one on the “Queen Mary,” but ultimately he returned to Portland to finish his days under the watchful eyes of Uncle Hill. On one return he brought a lovely Kosta vase as a wedding gift, an item I still very much cherish. Mother’s farfar and farmor, Per and Kristina Hellström, about whom I know little else, raised nine children: Dan, August, Anton, Per, Gustav, Johann, Mary, Hilda, and Margarethe. The picture of a baby in his mother’s arms has “Gust” handwritten on the back. In the picture of the family home Per and Kristina are to the far left, but the others are unknown to me. When in Sweden with her cousin, Evie, in 1961, Mother visited this site but was unable to go inside since the owners were away on vacation. She did visit Per (Jr.) and his wife Alma in their home, however; Alma was “in her early 70’s,” and Per “in his high 80’s,” Mother estimated. Ultimately, Dan, August, Anton, and Mary came to Portland; all but Dan remained and contributed directly to my childhood memories. I met Uncle Dan’s only child, Ingrid Karin, and her husband, Bror Sigvard Sundefors, when they visited Mother in Seattle in 1979. Gus was the first to leave Sweden, coming to Portland in 1904; he resided with his cousin Erick Ulin, as did Tony when he arrived the next year. (Erick’s daughter, Ruth, was Mother’s lifelong friend.) The two brothers earned their living by constructing houses, but in 1914 tragedy struck when Gus rolled off a roof and broke his back. Whether it was medically impossible to repair the damage, or if it was inexcusably done improperly, I don’t know, but he lived out his remaining thirty years in a wheelchair. (Wes told me that Mother once told him that the injury was “only” a dislocated hip, which might have been treatable if attended to promptly, but that Gus was never told.) She was four at the time, her brother two, and their mother took in washing and ironing to help finance the family. They had finished their own duplex before the accident, with Gus and family living downstairs and Tony upstairs. About a year later, the latter married Metha, downstairs, and they then set up housekeeping, upstairs. “Friends and relatives raised money to start August in the grocery business after a long time of recuperation,” Inez, the older of Tony and Metha’s daughters, wrote in her history of the Holstrom family. The store was two blocks from the duplex, and Gus wheeled himself over in the morning, returned for lunch with Esther, during which respite Metha ran the store, and then rolled back to finish the business day, and this, of course, six days per week. In some notes compiled by Joan, I read that Metha “loved waiting on the people” and that “she wore a mask during the 1917 flu epidemic.” I don’t recall ever seeing this store, located at 25th and N.W. Upshur and pictured here in ca. 1925; evidently Uncle John and Aunt Lydia sold part of the lot on which their home was located, before they raised goats, I assume, to the Holstroms. I do have vivid and happy memories, however, of a two-story house on Portland’s west side near the old Vaughn Street baseball park, then the home of the Portland Beavers, a team like my boyhood favorite, the Seattle Rainiers, now long gone. Two families occupied the building then: the Tony Holstroms on the lower floor, and Mehta’s brother, Mike Rasmussen, like her born in Denmark, and his wife, Anna, on the upper level. Uncle Tony was a happy, friendly man whom I adored, and although Aunt Metha probably tried to control the activities of high-spirited kids a bit more, she was much respected for her delectable äbelskiver, a delicacy then available to me no place else on earth; the compulsory breakfast prerequisite of a teaspoon of honey dissolved in a glass of warm water was much less difficult than Aunt Lydia’s goat-milk hot chocolate. The younger of their daughters, June, figured prominently in the summer escapades that usually involved the old ballpark, somehow, but Inez was enough older to ignore us; besides, she had, by her own public declaration in later life, tormented Mother when they lived side by side, so to speak, in the vertical dimension. In 1927 the family moved across town into a house-store combination that Tony had constructed for them. It occupied both sides of the southwest corner of Albina and Holland; the house address was 806 N. Holland Street, and the store fronted on Albina Avenue (7237), then a major north-south arterial. An internal ramp made it easy for Gus to roll between the home and the grocery store he operated there. It seems to me that there was also a barbershop at the south end of the structure, accessible only from the street and operated by someone else, but since Joan remembers getting her first permanent there, in 1950 at age six, it must have been a beauty parlor at least part of the time. The rest of the building I remember well, however, for this is the very same house whose scary attic–there was even something up there that looked like a dentist’s chair– could it rather have come from the barbershop?–helped make the first semester of my seventh grade somewhat less than totally happy. It was in this store that I had my first practical chemistry experiment the evening the refrigerator compressor malfunctioned, and I learned the smell of ammonia gas. Although I had a lot of fun there, I do retain a bit of sadness that won’t quite go away. Gus lived all of those years in pain, particularly when he hoisted himself from the wheelchair by pulling on a rope attached to a support Tony had rigged in the ceiling and then lowered himself gingerly to the bed below after someone had helped swing his body away from the chair. I always felt sad when it was my turn to help, not because I didn’t want to, but because I could see that it really hurt. There were good points, also, in this unusual arrangement. The store offered a never-ending, but carefully controlled, supply of goodies for all of the kids in the family, and its operation gave me a very practical introduction to the values that Gus demonstrated so well by actions, not just words: honesty, courteous service, compassion toward the less fortunate, and above all acceptance of the adversities life offered with the ability to rise above them. The worst side effect, in my opinion, was that it foiled Uncle Hill’s objective of attending medical school; the family needed him at home, and there he stayed. He often mentioned his disappointment over this thwarted ambition, but if he did feel any animosity at his older sister’s being able to get on with her life, he never showed it in my presence, but remained a close friend and supporter until his death. He was tall and fair, had a strong tenor voice, and played the trumpet. He was also the first person I knew who took home movies, which by now, Ken, I have seen more than enough times. When I was very young he often carried me on his shoulders and also took me for rides in the family car, a coupe that he used to deliver groceries to Gus’ customers. In later life he was a great source of encouragement to me during my graduate studies in nearby Corvallis. Tony continued to build quality homes in Portland, and with the help of Inez, June, and June’s husband, Dale, I have viewed, admired, and photographed a half dozen of them from outside. The house he built for Mary and Albin Hogland–the latter also came to Portland from Bolsta Bruk–at 3146 Northeast Forty-eighth Avenue, I know well, both because I was there quite often, and also because the complexities of its owners’ family tree cause me some hesitation even now. This is the very same Mary who accompanied Uncle Dan to rejoin their brothers, Gus and Tony. The Hoglands’ lives were shadowed by more than a little tragedy. Their firstborn, Paul, died at age five, and Mary died in childbirth in 1925; that baby was stillborn. In between, happily, Elsie appeared and lived a full life, and she, like Inez and equally happily, was sufficiently older than I to have offered no threat to my formative years. Now, since Tony, Gus, and Mary were siblings, Elsie is a true cousin of my mother. Albin subsequently married Ingeborg, and I knew them both quite well as the parents of Evelyn: “Cousin Evie,” we called her. Technically, I suppose, she is not Mother’s cousin, but that is of no consequence. The three of us, June, Evie, and I, operated as cousins during our summer get-to-gethers, or perhaps they are better labeled get-in-troubles. In retrospect each of us separately concluded that she or he was picked on mercilessly by the other two; in pairs we inevitably blamed everything on the absent third; and in our rare tripartite meetings we ascribed the entire mess to plain bad luck. It’s my recollection that Aunt Ingeborg was the greatest of the pastry chefs contributing substantially to my boyhood girth, but that assertion in no way diminishes my appreciation and respect for the many other Scandinavian women who produced high-quality baked goods; I’ll always appreciate having grown up, to the extent that I did, before cholesterol was taken so seriously. Evidently I was not the only one to hold her in such esteem, for as Joan reports, “When Gus knew a shortage of sugar and flour was coming, he would arrange for them [Evie and Ingeborg] to have 50 lbs of sugar and 50 lbs of flour so Ingeborg could continue baking. They kept it upstairs on 48th St.!” After Uncle Albin’s death, Aunt Ingeborg married Birger Hult and happily continued producing pastries in that same house. He was the last family member to live there. But life in Portland is best described by those who lived there at the time. June: “When you look back at our roots, it’s a remarkable heritage you see–poor folks–intelligent–salt of the earth people. They had a strong sense of loyalty to each other.” Inez: “The Gus Holstrom family fared better than most people in their circle of friends and relatives–They had cars–vacations at the beach every summer–Mildred and Hilding had good educations–Hill learned to play the trumpet–Mildred had piano lessons–They both had many friends. Aunt Esther had a beautiful new home to move into. Gus always made a good living and always had money.” Joan: “When the Holmes family moved in next door to Ingeborg and found out Gus and Esther were related to them, there were many accolades. Gus had carried their account for months (without interest of course) and never said a word! He had allowed the Holmes family to save face during the Depression. They thought the world of him.” Joan again: “Dad told us kids how often people would go in for groceries, have no money, and Gus would tell them to leave as if they had paid. He was always tender-hearted toward the small businessman and was not happy when Fred Meyer went into business and put the small grocery stores out of business.” Inez again: “When I think of the times Dad carried Gus upstairs, and lifting him into the car–I think of the phrase, ‘He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother’–They were true pals.” Two areas of limited information continue to intrigue me: What were the relationships between the Ulin and Holstrom families in Sweden? And why did Great-grandmother Lundberg choose Oregon as the area in which to seek her missing husband? One obvious answer to the latter is that his last known address was in that state, but another possibility, that she had family already there, is suggested by a photograph from The Morning Oregonian, Tuesday, March 10, 1936. In it are pictured an infant girl, her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-great-grandmother. The oldest woman is identified as Mrs. Mary Nordlund of Astoria. Across the top of this picture Mother wrote, “Mary Nordlund was Grandmother Lundberg’s sister.”
11 May 05