Paula Pederson's Blog, page 9
June 8, 2017
Immigrants, Seattle, Travel, History, Family, Writing, and Maine
Features excerpts of our wide-ranging lives
All the themes covered in my updated book are finally published after years of work. For decades I believe my mother’s tale that Danish immigrant Hans Pederson left us penniless. Then I uncover the truth about my father’s wealth and prolific contributions to Seattle. I discover my mysterious father’s boom to bust life in the early 1900s as I grapple with family secrets and heartbreaking deception in this very personal memoir. My coming-of-age journey from Seattle to Singapore, Shanghai, Honolulu, New York, New Jersey, Maine and North Carolina.
Available on Amazon. Please check our Facebook page!
June 1, 2017
Maine Writer Elizabeth Strout Meets Immigrant Writers
“The novelist Elizabeth Strout left Maine but it didn’t leave her,” states Ariel Levy in the May 1, 2017 New Yorker.
Strout’s books resonate with me. Maine claims my heart too.
Strout’s people do not live in Maine tourist towns along the coast. The characters in Olive Kittredge, winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, either cannot leave the state that defines them, or or else they feel driven to leave it. The Congregational minister in Abide With Me must work his way through the family tragedy with his daughter in the inland hamlet away from the coastal Maine town favored by his wife’s summer-season parents. Drama is understated, inexpressible. People cannot communicate their feelings. In one interview Strout states that when growing up she had a sense of “just swimming in all their ridiculous extra emotion.”
Levy says “a recurring theme in Strout’s novels is the angry, aching sense of abandonment small-town dwellers feel when their loved ones depart.” It is almost as if they are emigrating to another country.
My parents were both immigrants to the U.S; my father Hans Pederson from Denmark, my mother Doris Huchulak, a Ukrainian Canadian from Alberta. My Danish friend and fellow blogger, mariaholm51, sent this wrenching painting that shows the pain of immigration to the Facebook page currently celebrating my memoir, (same title for both) “Mysterious Builder of Seattle Landmarks.”
Edvard Pedersen, Emigrants at Copenhagen Harbor 1890
My January 22, 2016 blog, “Maine Nonprofit Helps Immigrant Kids” described one young immigrant’s experience at The Telling Room a Portland, Maine youth writing program. On a recent visit to The Telling Room, Levy tells us that Strout met refugee and immigrant high schoolers mostly from Africa and the Middle East.
“The students stood in a circle and told Strout what they were working on. ‘My name is Abass and i’m trying to define what home is,” a teen-ager from Ethiopia said.’ Steff rom Burundi told her, ‘I’m writing about how I find my voice in America.’ Another boy said, ‘I’m writing about second chances.'”
After wrenching leave-takings from towns, cities, or countries, lives becomes either better or worse for those who leave and those who remain. They are never the same.
May 25, 2017
Pioneers Develop Jewelry to Stop Rapists
Pandora Beads Silver Bracelet courtesy Wikimedia Commons
How well do tools like rape whistles and pepper spray actually help prevent sexual assault? If you look at the statistics — like how nearly one in five women and one in 71 men have reported experiencing rape at some time in their lives, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention — you might not think so much.
Recent Harvard Business School graduates Quinn Fitzgerald and Sara de Zarraga are co-founders of Flare Jewelry, an early stage startup that’s developing technologically enhanced jewelry meant to help prevent sexual assault. They plan to make a product that will leave antiquated and ineffective tools in the dust and also empower women without making them compromise their personal styles, reports Harvard Business School staff writer Olivia Vanni.
“We asked each other, ‘what problems do we really care about?’ and sexual assault became an apparent answer,” de Zarraga told us of Flare Jewelry founding. Working with survivors, the Flare Jewelry team was able to zero in on specific features that would best serve people in compromising situations.
“It will be a modular piece that can be put in bracelets or necklaces,” Fitzgerald shared. It is meant to be discreet so it doesn’t impact the look of a piece of jewelry. “The modular component keeps it versatile and discreet, so no two styles look alike,” de Zagarra said.
Flare Jewelry is first designed with college-aged women and young professionals in mind. However, the duo sees other potential user demographics—people with disabilities, children, travelers, and grandparents. They also anticipate parents and partners of target users to purchase safety-equipped jewelry for their loved ones.
Flare Jewelry intends to take a socially conscious approach while handling it’s revenue. “We want to create a culture against sexual assault, so we’re donating part of our proceeds to fund education prevention programs. We want to be part of the solution every way we can be.”
Harvard Business School staff writer Olivia Vanni
May 19, 2017
World War II and The Shanghai American School
Mysterious Builder of Seattle Landmarks at the University of Michigan Peony Garden
Mike and I traveled to the impressive University of Michigan in early May to join a reunion of the Shanghai American School (SAS) — part of the conference, “China Between Two Worlds.”
Hans Pederson died when I was one month old. My mother remarried when I was two. We left Seattle, and so the mystery of the noted builder who was my father grew for the next 70 years. My new “Dad” took us to China where he was an agent for the Standard Oil Company. As well as Seattle history, the “Mysterious Builder” describes my Far Eastern early childhood in Shanghai, Honolulu, and Manila, along with Dad’s attempts to do business there during the turmoil of the pre and post-war World War II years.
The Michigan conference described “China Between Two Worlds” partly through the memories and photographs of American expatriate families —the missionaries, doctors, and businessmen in China between 1927 and 1949; years that bridged the Chiang Kai Sheck and Mao Tse Tung regimes withWorld War II in between. We, the children of these families, had all lived in China. We had lived those photos. We had felt that sense of straddling two cultures.
Such freedom we had. Missionaries upcountry had put their children on the train for Shanghai to board at the Shanghai American School sometimes at the tender age of nine. My husband, a day student at seven, roamed freely around Shanghai with his older brother, jumping over sampans on the Whangpo River. I, however, a five-year old girl, stayed with my amah. Conscious of her bound feet, I never ran away from her, because she never could have caught me.
Most business families were evacuated from Shanghai as we were in 1939, and most expatriates as well by the time the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The Shanghai American School closed from 1941 to 1946. It was another story for the missionary families in smaller cities upcountry. Some of them were interred in Japanese Prison Camps.
Japanese cruelty towards the Chinese was legendary. Brutality, in fact, was a part of Japanese military training. But one or two people at our reunion had filtered out the cruelty and remembered basically happy childhoods in prison camp, even though they were always hungry.
European and American prisoners organized their camps into rotating teams with specific jobs. With plenty of teachers around, the children had good schooling. They fielded sports teams and put on plays. They always invited their captors to sit in the front row. A few western camps run by Japanese consular officials, were seemingly able to maintain discipline without excessive cruelty.
And so we learned, sometimes there is light within the darkness.
May 11, 2017
World War II Car Travel
1941 Nash Ambassador courtesy Wikimedia Commons
During my World War II childhood in New York, my mother, my sister, and I escaped the city and went to Maine every summer. We left the car in the garage all winter, took buses and subways, and saved our gas rationing coupons for the summer trip.
It took two full days to drive the 350 miles to Maine since the wartime speed limit was thirty-five miles an hour. We watched the cows in the fields and read the Burma Shave shaving cream signs along the sides of the two-lane roads.
“His cheek was rough His chick vamoose
And now she won’t Come home to roost
Burma Shave”
The first night we stopped at a tourist home in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. Someone told my father about this new kind of place out West called a motel. You’d just drive your car right up to the door of your room and carry in your own suitcases. “Keep your eyes peeled for a motel,” Dad told us, but we never saw any. All we saw were cows and Burma Shave signs.
The next day we drove to Maine through all these little town on Route 1—York, Ogunquit, Kennebunk. More Burma Shave signs entertained us.
“To kiss a mug That’s like a cactus
Takes more nerve Than it does practice
Burma Shave”
We stayed a couple of days in Portland with our aunts and uncle. Whenever our uncle had fun somewhere, he’d say, “Gorry, it was a real whiz-bang.”
They saved their meat coupons for our visits. Aunt Edith cooked huge roasts. If we stayed over a Saturday night, she made baked beans and brown bread. Aunt Edith knew a good bean baker. She took her bean pot over in the morning, he baked it all day, and then she picked it up that night. I loved the spicy smell and the soft dark bread.
We stayed in Portland long enough to get gold fillings from Dr. Woods, Dad’s dentist. He never used Novocain. “If I hit a nerve I want to know it,” he’d say. Boy, did I know it. He drilled awhile, squirted cold air on the tooth when it got hot, then swabbed the cavity with iodine or something before he filled it. It was awful, but it was only once a year.
Next we drove up the coast to the camp. Dad stayed a few days before he took the train back to New York. In August he’d take the train back up to get us and we’d drive back to New York in time for school.
We were so lucky we could spend summers in Maine away from hot New York City with its danger of polio.
May 4, 2017
Seattle Sparked the Yukon Gold Rush
SS Excelsior leaves for the Yukon, 1897 Courtesy Wikimedia Commons
After the 1893 world-wide depression brought commerce to a halt, Seattle took off in 1897 when the steamer Portland struggled into port, her decks filled with prospectors guarding their sacks of gold. Soon headlines and flyers proclaimed the news around the globe that Yukon gold was there for the taking along the Klondike River. The mad dash to claim the nuggets really lasted not much more than a year.
The headlong rush to the Yukon came shortly after a depression where many who had found work again felt trapped in office, factory, or low-paying retail jobs. Eager hordes grabbed the chance to set off for the real frontier, the vast Canadian wilderness that offered the bold an opportunity to earn their fortunes.
My father, Hans Pederson, a risk taking Danish immigrant, joined the exodus. “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 his obituary. He and a partner soon crammed themselves aboard a ship and joined the throng of prospectors who washed up on Alaskan shores like flotsam on the tides.
He didn’t stay long enough to make his fortune. He returned to Seattle, became a builder, and grew along with the city until the next depression in 1929 ended contracting along with everything else.
April 27, 2017
Roosevelt,Polio, and a World War II New York Childhood
Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at Yalta, 1945 two months before Roosevelt’s death courtesy Wikimedia Commons
I spent my World War II childhood in New York City. My parents allowed no talk during dinner as we listened to Edward R. Murrow or H.V. Kaltenborn describe the battles — these commentators often said we’d won. Before the days of TV, they didn’t tell us much. We listened to the radio or watched the newsreels at the movies. We didn’t know.
Every home had rationing books filled with coupons to be used for butter, sugar, meat, and gas. we kids rolled all our gum wrappers into tin foil balls for the war effort. My job was to pull down the blackout shades every night so that the German, Italian, or Japanese planes would not see our lights and bomb the city.
How fortunate we were compared to the rest of the world where there was no escape from bombs, occupation, hunger, and death.
Our big fear was polio, or infantile paralysis, a disease that ran rampant until 1955. Just imagine: one afternoon you’d send your kids to the swimming pool. Two days later they’d start running a fever or throwing up. The next morning they might wake up paralyzed.
Polio got strong support. Although primarily a children’s disease, President Roosevelt contracted it when he was 39. In his photos he is always seen sitting at a table, or in a chair. His condition sparked the creation of THE MARCH OF DIMES, a charity established to help those with polio, and to do the research to find a cure.
Polio victims required months of physical therapy so that their paralyzed limbs wouldn’t atrophy. The most serious victims were paralyzed in an iron lung.
President Roosevelt enjoyed lifelong therapy in Warm Springs Georgia. We kids all had cardboard folders containing slots for dimes. We filled them up for THE MARCH OF DIMES.
Today, the vaccine is given routinely as a childhood inoculation. Few remember the scourge of polio.
April 20, 2017
Turmoil on the Eve of World War II
Davidson College Chambers Building Davidson, North Carolina
“Davidson College’s Dean Rusk International Studies Program
invites the public to a lecture ‘Mothers and Daughters From Wartime China to the American Dream.’
“Davidson residents Paula (Pederson) Palmer and Anna Pai will discuss their memoirs, which focus on their mother-daughter relationships tested by mid-20th century turmoil in the U.S. and China. Both authors lived in China on the eve of World War II, and spent the post-war period in the U.S. Their talk will touch on history, China, memoir-writing and their fascinating, frustrating mothers.” April 4, 2017
Our stories were so different! Anna Pai’s mother, daughter of a Manchurian Warlord, left China where she had lived as a virtual princess. When the Japanese invaded Manchuria, they executed Anna’s grandfather. Anna’s mother left China in 1939 for the U.S. and brought her family. At the time, Anna was 3 years old. Forced to try and become a U.S. housewife, Anna’s mother never learned to speak English and retreated into isolation when she found the adjustment impossible.
Paula’s mother married Seattle’s Hans Pederson, Paula’s father. After he died, she remarried and moved on to live a pre-war expat luxury life in China. Returning to America, the luxuries ended as she lost her servants and coped with rationing coupons for gas, meat, and butter. No stranger to earlier privation, she adjusted, but her brief years in the Far East remained as the highlight of her life. As Paula conducted her research on Hans Pederson, she also learned the hidden story of her mother, Doris Huchulak.
April 13, 2017
Immigrant Ukrainians keep the Easter Customs
Orthodox Cross Courtesy Wikimedia Commons Withgol the Webmaster
In 1898 my great grandparents,Stephan and Sanxira Tokaruk, along with my grandparents, Wasyl and Anna Huchulak, left the estate in Ukraine where Stephan attended the horses when their landlord offered them passage to the new world. They crossed Canada on the Canadian Pacific Railroad and became Alberta homesteaders.
In 2009 I went to a family reunion near Edmonton where we gathered at the now derelict 1910 family homestead and I met fifty first cousins. The clan helped me understand my grandparents’ early challenges and my mother’s childhood. I wish there had been time to watch my cousin Judy design her intricately patterned Ukrainian eggs.
We stopped at the onion-domed Orthodox Church filled with the religious icons that became my grandmother’s passion during her life as a struggling homesteader. The little cemetery is filled with pioneer graves. Every headstone bears the characteristic Ukrainian cross with its slanted crosspiece below the arms of the conventional cross. After the long winter, descendants of these pioneers still gather at the cemetery for picnics on Orthodox Easter.
It was a privilege to meet my mother’s family at last. While today’s shifting lifestyles often create a sense of impermanence, my trip “home” showed me that fragments of the Huchulak DNA had seeped through earlier generations to my own in ongoing customs and habits.
April 12, 2017
Seattle, Gateway to Yukon Gold on the Klondike
SS EXCELSIOR embarks for the Klondike, 1897 Courtesy Wikimedia Commons
After suffering through the 1893 world-wide depression, Seattle took off in 1897 when the steamerPortland groaned into port and expelled a ship full of prospectors guarding sacks full of gold. Headlines and flyers announced the news to the world and sparked the Klondike Gold Rush — a migration that lasted not much more than a year.
The headlong rush to the Yukon came shortly after a depression where many who had found work again felt trapped in office, factory, or low-paying retail jobs. They grabbed the chance to set off for the real frontier, the vast Alaskan wilderness that offered the bold an opportunity to earn their fortunes.
My father, Hans Pederson, a fearless risk taker, joined the exodus. “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 his obituary. He and a partner crammed themselves aboard a ship and joined the throng of prospectors who washed up on Alaskan shores like flotsam on the tides.
He didn’t stay long enough to make his fortune. He returned to Seattle, and during the first half of the 20th century, instead became one of the city’s largest contractors..
