Paula Pederson's Blog, page 5

Books from Maine to Seattle

Any writer who publishes a book these days, whether through an agent/publisher, self publishing, or hybrid—(a combination of the first two) soon learns that writing the book is just the beginning. Next comes marketing. Since 3,000 books a week are published, how will anyone notice yours?

I haven’t been at this for long, but I’m learning to keep an open mind. I’ve sold books at an art show, book clubs, a Shanghai American School reunion, bookstores, the Christmas in July Firehall Fair in Maine, library, cocktail party, radio interview, shoe store, and a Tai Chi class.

Waiting for the YMCA book group to arrive

Monday I went back to my old aerobics class at the YMCA. I wore my “I make stuff up” T- shirt that I bought at the Imprint Bookstore in Port Townsend WA. Here I am with Joanna Katz, Book Group President, who invited me to speak to the members. I’m holding my little walrus to represent the other walruses that circle the exterior of Seattle’s Arctic Club, probably my contractor father Hans Pederson’s best known building. Along the left side of my book cover you can see those walruses  guarding the Club, built in 1917 as a gathering place for  alumni of the 1898 Klondike Gold Rush to the Yukon. 100 years later, now a luxury Hilton Hotel. My book describes several wild and wooly pioneer adventures.

So if you like tales of immigrants, intrigue, mystery, family conflict, and changing times, just tap the Amazon button on the upper right of the page, or ask for MYSTERIOUS BUILDER OF SEATTLE LANDMARKS; Searching for My Father at your favorite bookstore.

 

Expatriate Life in Old Shanghai

 

 

We lived in Shanghai, Honolulu, and Manila prior to World War II. My adopted father traveled the Far East for the Standard Oil Company while my mother stayed home with me, my sister, and assorted amahs and servants. Mom filled her days with luncheons, bridge, and parties.

“Get yourself a dress so we can go dancing on the roof of the French Club,” Dad told Mother.

Some clown had created a sign for the Shanghai tailor:

 

I.B. Jelly Belly

ladies have fits upstairs

In no time, Jelly Belly made Mother a gown of black panne velvet, a shimmery fabric that draped sinuously over her perfect figure. The bodice alone stopped traffic. Heavy, hand-sewn lace, intricately embroidered with leafy blossoms—any royal would have worn it with pride.

Many an evening Mother kissed us goodnight before she and Dad set off for a night of dining and dancing under the stars at the French Club. Signs of approaching war were everywhere in 1939 as Japanese troops moved from Peking into Shanghai. Chinese refugees streamed into the Shanghai French Concession, considered the safest area of Shanghai at the time. At six years old, I took no notice.

Somehow, I’ve never been able to part with Mother’s dress. In fact, I even bought a store display mannequin to model that gown. We keep it in the corner of our guest room.

When Phoebe, my five-year-old granddaughter, came to spend the night, she stopped before the mannequin to solemnly state, “When I grow up to be a teenager, I will wear that dress to college.” Phoebe, now a teenager, no longer offers to wear that dress.

I guess it’s an heirloom. I hope your family artifacts take up less space than a mannequin that models a79-year old evening gown.

Seattle—Early 20th to 21st Century

 1907 Seattle Theater, courtesy Wikimedia Commons

 

Back in Seattle’s heady pioneer days, my father Hans Pederson had his hand in building  many early 1900s vaudeville theaters: the Alhambra, Blue Mouse, Pantages, and McGovern’s Music Hall.

Neil Postman’s book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business notes that by mid century, two vision of future life competed in two best-selling books: George Orwell’s 1984, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

The two men prophesied different futures. Orwell feared those who would ban books. Huxley feared few would be left who wanted to read them. Orwell feared that Big Brothe would deprive us of our autonomy and history. Huxley figured that people would come to love the technologies that undo their capacities to think. Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

The September 7, 2017 Delancey Place blog, Orwell versus Huxley, notes that “Postman points out that this book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

What do you think?

 

Seattle Starts the 1897 Klondike Gold Rush

 

Seattle newspaper announcing the first arrival of gold from Klondike courtesy Wikimedia Commons

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Everyone was glad to get back to work after the 1893 Depression. Still, many were not satisfied with the mundane careers that stretched ahead of them..

Nimble Seattle took off when gold was discovered along the Yukon’s Klondike River. Once The ship Portland first disgorged prospectors laden with sacks of gold in San Francisco in 1897, front-page headlines screamed the news to the East Coast where many felt stifled in factory, office, or low-paying retail jobs. Here was achance to tackle the real frontier — a wilderness so vast that anyone could come back a millionaire.

Flyers sent all over the world touted Seattle as the gateway to Alaska. Most of those who bolted to the Yukon were Americans or recent immigrants who had left their homelands for just such an opportunity. Canny Seattle natives stepped up to supply the prospectors with provisions. By1898, countless mining firms opened offices in the Pioneer Building. Hotels, theaters, and outfitters sprang up to meet the needs of hordes of miners who fought for space on ships destined for the gold fields.

“He was among the first to answer the call of the North when the manhood of the world stampeded toward the arctic and the sparkle of gold,” notes my father, Hans Pederson’s obituary. He and a partner crammed themselves aboard a ship and joined the throngs of prospectors who washed up on Alaskan shores like flotsam on the tides.

 

MYSTERIOUS BUILDER OF SEATTLE LANDMARKS: Searching for My Father by  Paula Pederson VIE Publishing

World War II and Audrey Hepburn

Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer on the set of War and Peace

 

 

 

Audrey Hepburn, the lovely winsome movie actress of the 1950s and 1960s starred in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Roman Holiday, Sabrina, and War and Peace. She was just ten years old when the Nazis invaded Holland.

 

Audrey’s mother, a baroness, worked for the resistance. She enlisted 13-year-old Audrey to help. The chhid messages in the soles of her shoes and carried them across town to her tutor.

The Germans stripped Audrey’s mother of her assets in 1942. Food was scarce. Audrey and her brother ate endives and tulip bulbs. She watched Jewish children wearing their yellow armbands lined up at the train station for deportation to the death camps.

Just before the war ended, Audrey escaped a German work group and hid in a darkened cellar for three weeks with neither food nor water. Determined, she survived. She emigrated to America and became an actress. But never forgetting her childhood, she retired early and became an ambassador for UNICEF.

She said: “Nothing is impossible. The word itself says ‘I’m possible.'”

Thanks to Delancey Place, 5/22/17 and Wikipedia.

 

Depression Hobo Train Travel

Freight-hopping youth near Bakersfield, California (National Archives and Records Administration) courtesy Wikimedia Commons

 

Riding the rails became a common means of transportation after the Civil War as the railroads moved west. The practice took off during the Great Depression.  These mostly migrant workers were known as hobos. Depression hobos were often just migrants out of work. Some had hard luck lives and took to gambling or booze.

Figuring out which freight train to hop takes planning and ingenuity. Hobos might hide at a rail yard and catch a train before it starts moving. They’d better know in which direction it is going. Box cars, grainers, and gondolas are rideable if hobos catch the train on the fly. Hobos ride above, beneath, or between cars.

 

It is no fun riding on a coal car and then hopping off again. Hobos often form communities. They “jungle up” for dinner and heat canned food over a fire.  They jump on and off of moving trains in case they are searched by the bulls at stops.

Railroad police are known as bulls. Enforcement varies. In some places train hopping is a crime. In others, bulls look the other way.

Freight train riding is dangerous. Today more hobos are ex-convicts, making violence more common.

Courtesy Wikipedia

 

America’s Liberty Bell

 

Ring the bells that are  still counting

Forget your present offering

There is a crack in everything

It’s how the light gets in

Charles Cohen

 

My Seattle Author Interview

My radio interview with Seattle’s Bill Kenower

 

William Kenower, the face of the Pacific Northwest Writers’ Organization,  celebrates authors. An author himself, (Check out his new book FEARLESS WRITING, on williamkenower.com), William produces a monthly author video, a weekly radio author interview, and a daily blog while simultaneously handling multiple challenges at home. He manages to do all this while making his interview subject feel that we are absolutely the writing star of the day.

William interviewed me for his November 17 radio show when I was out in Seattle preparing to launch the second edition of my memoir, MYSTERIOUS BUILDER OF SEATTLE LANDMARKS: Searching for My Father. Actually, the book is launching officially with its  January press release, shown in the “press room”under my website’s “about” section. It is now available in print and ebook through Amazon, Kindle, Barnes & Noble, Baker & Taylor, Kobo and where books are sold. The press release has a Northwestern focus, My Danish father settled in Seattle—my mother’s Ukrainian parents in Alberta. My mystery memoir ranges all over the world since I only lived in Seattle until I was two.

At the end of the interview, William closed by asking me the question “Writing has taught me…?”

I responded that “Writing has taught me that people keep right on living after they are gone.” This is because I only learned to understand my parents, Domka Huchulak and Hans Pederson by writing about them after they had left this earth.

 

Immigrants Choose New York

1894 New York Tenement House Committee Maps courtesy Wikimedia Commons

 

New York grew to prominence only seventy years after Unites States independence. “By … 1853, English visitors marveled that Broadway’s stores and hotels were ‘more like the palaces of kings than places for the transaction of business.’ scarlet and yellow omnibuses thundered up and down Broadway with private carriages, hotel stagecoaches, and two-horse hackneys …

“And yet there was another side of New York, one that could be glimpsed by peering down Broadway’s side streets where ragged women carried bundles of broken boards and old timbers from demolished buildings trailed by children loaded down with only slightly lighter burdens. … In 1851, a fourth of the 16,000 criminals sent to City Prison were younger than 21 — 800 were younger than 15, and 175 were younger than 10.

“Many of the poorest New Yorkers were recent immigrants — by 1850 nearly half of the city’s residents had been born overseas. The newcomers, most of them Irish and German, were packed into squalid, suffocating tenements … where cholera, typhus, and tuberculosis were rampant and the murder rate was the highest in the Western world … fewer than half of the children born in the 1850s survived to the age of six.”

Agitation for reform brought new laws that culminated in the New York State Tenement House Act of 1901 that banned construction of dark, poorly ventilated tenement buildings. The law required that new buildings must be built with outward-facing windows in every room, an open courtyard, proper ventilation systems, indoor toilets, and fire safeguards.

The opening of the West gave immigrants new choices if they could face the arduous  journey and settlement requirements.

We have made some progress in the way we treat pioneering immigrants.

 

From Delancy Place’s December 8, 2017 blog, excerpt from The Unexpected President by Scott S. Greenberger.

New York State Tenement House act, Wikipedia.

 

 

Grandparents Move Around North America

 

Seniors and Shuffleboard Courtesy Wiki Commons Hassocks 5489

We North Americans are a restless lot. All our immigrant forebears came from somewhere else. In addition, we seniors are also on the cusp of an emerging trend according to The Wall Street Journal, Hipsters (http://%20Hipsters Discover the Shuffleboard Set).

Personally, we have downsized twice, each time to smaller condos in small college towns—first in Maine, next to North Carolina.

 

We know how cool it is to step out the door and stroll across manicured campus lawns shaded by venerable trees to attend concerts, ball games, and plays. We seniors keep the Active Older Adults classes filled at the Y.

One young man told the Journal, “If you love Jethro Tull, you’ve got to go where the seniors are, where they pump ‘Locomotive Breath’ into the yoga center 24/7.

The Journal tells me we’re transplanted ourselves to “slumbering, unsuspecting college towns—auditing classes, biking through the quad, hanging out in student cafes.

True. When I audited a Memoir course at the local college, the class encouraged me to tell the story of my immigrant forebears—Ukrainian grandparents to Alberta and my Danish father to Seattle. Recently, I’ve published my research in a memoir, MYSTERIOUS BUILDER OF SEATTLE LANDMARKS: Searching for My Father—now in a second edition

The North American continent has always had room for people who want to start again. Pollination between generations is good. College students see through fresh eyes. Seniors have a lifetime of experience behind their cataracts.