Paula Pederson's Blog, page 4

China, Books, and Boxing

Our  2017 Christmas note never went out until  2018, then again on Chinese New Year, and now finally as a blog.

We joined a group of Shanghai American School (SAS) World War II alumni at a University of Michigan symposium.  Mike had been a part of the 1940 SAS boxing  team that prepared hard for their annual match with the British school.

Seattle Post Intelligencer photo

 

At the same time, in another part of Shanghai, Paula soon embarked with her mother and sister in Vancouver as one of the first families to arrive back in America when the Standard Oil Co. ordered all dependents evacuated in 1940 prior to World War II. I look worried because as we descended the gangway I figured we were being shot by the popping flashbulbs.

 

Mike the boxer

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fast-forward 75 years and check out Mike’s fancy footwork. At the age of 85 he joined a group called Rock Steady Boxing after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. It involves vigorous exercise over brief periods. Mike is spreading the word that it dramatically improves his energy level.

 

 

Meanwhile, Paula Pederson is out there blogging, Facebooking, and speaking as she promotes her memoir, MYSTERIOUS BUILDER OF SEATTLE LANDMARKS: Searching for My father.

Seattle Launch First Edition, March 2017 at Hans Pederson’s 1908 Washington Hall 

 

Someone gave Mike a t-shirt for his 75th birthday that read, “The Older I Get, the Better I was.”  NO WAY!!!  Keep on truckin’!

Trains, Ticks, Cowboys, and Cattle

 

deer tick, US. Dept. of Agriculture , courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Dire warnings of ticks fill 2018’s spring news. Fence out the deer. Spray. Strip when you walk in the door, then toss your clothes into the dryer. Sadly, last year I caught a possum in a Havahart trap and drove him away before I learned that possums eat deer ticks.

 

“The famous towns of the Wild west came about as a result of a tick.” In his book The Republic for Which it Stands,  Richard White offers some history in Delancey Place’s 1/29/18 blog on the  American Cowboy.

 

 

The American cowboy stands as a self-reliant rugged individual, as the epitome of the Wild West. Who can resist the romance of the menacing Texas Longhorn cattle on the range? Actually, 19th century cowboys soon became industry employees for corporate cattle ranches.

Texas Longhorn steer, Wikimedia Commons courtesy Clinton and Charles Robertson

White notes that “Texas longhorns were probably the three million worst-quality beef cattle on the continent, “eight pounds of hamburger on 800 pounds of bone and horn.” Ironically,  Texas longhorns deserve the credit for being the rugged individuals of the old West. Neglected, they survived and thrived on the open ranges of South Texas. Even though I once saw a photo of a little girl standing next to one,  few of us would want to meet one.

 

The challenge was to move them to market. The longhorns hosted two species of ticks that also caused Texas fever. Still longhorn cases were mild. Insteadthe ticks killed off the local farm-raised cattle stock.

Cowboys drove the longhorns on the long drive— a walk of 700  miles through Texas, Indian country and Kansas. The cowboys finally reached the railroad lines, situated beside scant towns with few settlers, desperate for traffic.

So these towns that came to epitomize the Wild West were creations of a tick.

(http://paula.pederson.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/train.jpg)

 

Then and Now, Old and New

 

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

 

 

Every 5 years some of us return to hallowed halls of ivy for reunions of our college classes. Women’s colleges, almost an anachronism today, seem even more so when we reminisce about the strict parietal rules in force at Smith College in the 1950s. Weeknight curfews at 10:15. Friday and Saturday nights at 12. One a.m. on Saturday. A student on watch to check you in and out and a house mother to enforce the rules.

Each September, I’d climb the stairs with my parents, my mother and I carrrying lamps and spreads, my father clutching suitcases as I called out the warning, “man on third” as we rounded a corner.

My generation doesn’t necessarily see coed dorms and bathrooms as progress. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what we think, we don’t live here any more—except at reunions when as old married folk we share dorm rooms and bathrooms.

Some colleges still segregate bathrooms. Not Smith. At my 50th reunion, having showered before bed, l left the bathroom, robed, rounded the corner,, and noticed a man, also robed, hugging the wall.

“Where can I take a shower?” he whispered furtively.

“The bathroom’s right behind me,” I said, as someone opened the door to the sound of running water, flushing, and cheerful female conversation.

The man looked pained.

“Try coming back about two a.m.” I said.

Progress?

 

 

John Muir, Pioneer Northwesterner

 

John Muir courtesy Wikimedia Commons

 

 

 

 

 

John Muir, an influential Scottish-born American naturalist, author and environmental philosopher was an early advocate of U.S. wilderness protection.

 

 

 

He is known to many as the father of the National Parks and the Sierra Club

Yosemite National Park

 

“Keep close to Nature’s heart and break clear, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.”

 John Muir

 

Children of Immigrant Parents

 

Paula and Doris (Domka)

 

 

 

My mother, Domka Huchulak, daughter of Ukranian homesteaders to Alberta, hid our family history. It took me 70 years to learn why she changed the subject whenever I asked her about my father or her own life. I finally learned that the web of lies she wove was born from a complex mixture of shame, regret, and revenge  that other North American immigrants have also faced.

 

Readers of my memoir, MYSTERIOUS BUILDER OF SEATTLE LANDMARKS: Searching for My Father, have told me that they encountered similar situations in their own families. Except for original native American settlers, our forebears were all immigrants. Our diversity is our strength, but while children of immigrants begin their lives as Americans or Canadians, their parents necessarily bring the old country with them.

An Italian friend lost his father when he was six. Turns out that because his mother’s German family looked down on Italians, his father’s existence was banished from the home. Late in life my friend regretted never learning that his father came to the US with seven brothers. He lost his own father, but think of the rich family life he might have shared had he known about his seven uncles and many cousins.

Another friend who grew up during World War II was forbidden to mention Germany, homeland of his parents, even though they spoke German at home.

The father of a young Chinese-American reader died when she was four. She felt her mother erased his memory as revenge because she was angry that he died and left her with a child to raise in a foreign land.

 

We all have stories. Mine seems to strikes a chord. If you’re around, I’ll be speaking about it and signing books at the Birkdale Barnes and Noble in Huntersville NC on Sunday, April 15 from 1-3.

 

Paula and Doris (Domka) My mother, Domka Huchulak...

 

Paula and Doris (Domka)

 

 

 

My mother, Domka Huchulak, daughter of Ukranian homesteaders to Alberta, hid our family history. It took me 70 years to learn why she changed the subject whenever I asked her about my father or her own life. I finally learned that the web of lies she wove was born from a complex mixture of shame, regret, and revenge  that other North American immigrants have also faced.

 

Readers of my memoir, MYSTERIOUS BUILDER OF SEATTLE LANDMARKS: Searching for My Father, have told me that they encountered similar situations in their own families. Except for original native American settlers, our forebears were all immigrants. Our diversity is our strength, but while children of immigrants begin their lives as Americans or Canadians, their parents necessarily bring the old country with them.

An Italian friend lost his father when he was six. Turns out that because his mother’s German family looked down on Italians, his father’s existence was banished from the home. Late in life my friend regretted never learning that his father came to the US with seven brothers. He lost his own father, but think of the rich family life he might have shared had he known about his seven uncles and many cousins.

Another friend who grew up during World War II was forbidden to mention Germany, homeland of his parents, even though they spoke German at home.

The father of a young Chinese-American reader died when she was four. She felt her mother erased his memory as revenge because she was angry that he died and left her with a child to raise in a foreign land.

 

We all have stories. Mine seems to strikes a chord. If you’re around, I’ll be speaking about it and signing books at the Birkdale Barnes and Noble in Huntersville NC on Sunday, April 15 from 1-3.

 

The Jesse James Gang and Western Train Robberies

 

Transcontinental railroads opened the West to immigrant pioneers, restless North American settlers, and also gangs of train robbers. Rootless Civil War veterans, seeking opportunity like everyone else, instigated many of these late 19th century crimes.

Outlaw gangs boarded the baggage cars of trains, made their way cross the roofs of the cars, and descended to force the driver to stop the train, notes Delancey Place in their Sept. 19, 2017 blog. Later bandits realized they could wreck a train by merely removing a rail from the track.

Jesse James 1847-1882 courtesy Wikimedia Commons

 

 

 

Jesse James and his brother Frank personified this post-Civil War era. Former Confederate guerillas, “Bushwhackers,” their gang of ruthless murderers captured the public imagination, especially after the Pinkerton Security Agency, hired by the railroads to protect the trains, tossed a bomb through a window of their family home. The bomb killed their brother and injured their mother.

James’ father a Missouri farmer of commercial hemp, had owned six slaves. He travelled to California to minister to prospectors searching for gold during the Gold Rush. He died when Jesse was three years old.

Much of the public saw the James brothers as Robin Hoods heroically standing against the corrupt and all-powerful railroads. Although the criminals never shared their loot, Southern sympathizers saw them as embodiments of a Confederate insurgency. Those with no sympathy for the railroads, saw the attackers as heroes.

Courtesy Wikipedia, Delancey Place, 9/19/17

 

Seattle’s Sunken Sidewalks

M.B. Henry is a military historian and poet who makes your heart ache as she brings fallen warriors to life along with those back home. My father-in-law used to quote Milton: “They also serve who only stand and wait.” She is also a general historian.

my father’s sidewalk imprint (logo)

 

I’m reblogging her post about Seattle’s Underground Sidewalk Tour because this tour is part of my memoir. My Danish immigrant father Hans Pederson, a Klondike Gold Rush prospector, worked on the Seattle regrades where they tore the tops off the city’s hills to create a waterfront. He then not only built some the downtown sidewalks that sank, but also the ones that replaced them. His logo—his sidewalk imprint is shown here.

M.B. Henry carried me right back to subterranean Seattle in this blog!

 

“Well, you have to visit the Underground,” a friend told me over dinner last fall. It was just before I was due to take off for my first trip to Seattle. 1,456 more words

via The Seattle Underground — M.B. HENRY

 

 

 

A Writer for the Ages — E.B. White

E.B. White on the Maine coast with his dog Minnie courtesy Wikimedia commons 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I always learn from the timeless writing of E.B. White. I read Stuart Little at school as a child. Later on, Charlotte’s Web as a volunteer mom to a class of first graders. All my children loved The Trumpet of the Swan. 

This photo of White with his dog Minnie shows his love for animals and, I like to think, most everyone else..

Not just a kid’s writer, White’s book The Elements of Style (with Strunk),sharpened my own writing. White spent his adult life as a staff writer for the New Yorker.

 

Today’s media bombards us with never-ending negative copy that reminds me of White’s quote:

“One of the most time-consuming things to have is an enemy.”  

E.B. White

 

Building Preservation in Maine

 

Union Station, Portland Maine courtesy Wikimedia commons

 

In the 1950s I took the train from Portland’s UnionRailroad  Station to college in Western Massachusetts. Built in 1888 in the style of a French châteaux, the station was a city landmark with its 188 foot clock tower. The building’s Victorian elegance created a dignified beginning to any journey.

After World War II, ships and trains gave way to trucks and planes. Train service to Portland Maine ended in 1960. In 1961 Union Station was torn down and replaced by a seedy strip mall. Enough angry people formed a nucleus to begin Portland’s historic preservation movement.

Train travel has returned to Maine via Amtrak, but today’s utilitarian terminal is no Union Station.

My father, Hans Pederson, was a prominent Seattle builder in early 20th century Seattle. Research has shown me that many of his buildings are still in use, thanks to the preservation efforts of such organizations as the Historic Seattle Foundation.

Before we rush to destroy our past, we should consider if the replacement will be an improvement..