LITMIR.BIZ

       Andrew Johnson

      “We were raised like regular puritans.”

      Andrew Johnson and his family left Sweden for Tacoma in 1914. Andrew was fourteen years old and wanted to go to school or learn a trade; instead, he took a series of factory and caretaker jobs before becoming a machinist during the Second World War. He married an American of Swedish descent and had two daughters. As a young immigrant, Andrew endured a rather hostile reception.

      My name, Anders Johansson, was changed in the immigration papers. I was told to call myself Andrew and change Johansson to Johnson. I don’t know why. I was born in Hallarum, Jämjö parish, Blekinge province. That’s in the southeast part of Sweden, right on the coast of the Baltic. I was born March 4, 1900.

      My mother was born out on an island. Her folks were small farmers and fishermen. My father’s folks were crofters. A crofter is a person that gets a piece of land from a larger farm; he uses it as he wants to, only he pays a rent. He has to pay either in money or in labor, so many days’ labor a year, to the big farm.

      We were also in a way crofters. We first started in a small house that was on this farm, with no land, and then we got some land. Later on, we owned a building and put it on the land. But the land belonged to this big farm and we paid fifteen crowns^* a year, or fifteen days of labor in task tax, for that land. That’s what we had when we sold the place and came to this country.

      We lived close to a village that mainly existed on brick manufacturing. My father was a brickburner. To bake the bricks, you have to be skilled. You have to know exactly how hot it is. If you get it too hot, it will melt together. And if you don’t get it hot enough, you get a brick that is not any good. I played there all the time. That’s where I got my love for machinery, because I was always helping somebody doing something.

      We’re eight, four boys and four girls. I’m the oldest. Mother took care of us. She was the boss and she knew how to work both ends against the middle. She had to. Father was gone quite a bit. When the brick plant was down for improvements, he worked in the sugar-beet fields in Skåne.^*

      In Sweden, I finished what they call grade school. I was supposed to go to school for seven years; but I skipped a class, I only went for six. School started at nine o’clock and we started out walking about seven o’clock. We usually were three or four in company, so we were never lonesome. The first three years, I had a very, very, very strict teacher. I didn’t get along too well with her. Then we had a young woman teacher and I fell in love! The last two years, we had a man teacher. He was understanding and had a way about him. I have to admit, I was more relaxed and learned more. He had care of the manual training. Manual training was very important for the boys; the girls, of course, had their classes of sewing and so on. I really enjoyed school. I loved to study.

      I was confirmed in Sweden, too. We didn’t break away from the state church, but our religious affiliation was missionshus, mission house. A lot of people were dissatisfied with the way the state church kept its services; they were much too formal. So, the laymen got together and held services in chapels all over. They were freer and you were allowed to express yourself; it was more of an awakening. That’s how the Covenant Church started. In Swedish, it’s called missionsförbundet, mission covenant. Waldenström favored these mission houses and became a leader among them.^*

      There was a lot of trouble in Sweden. It was against the law to have a religious meeting in a home or in a chapel unless the parish minister was present. The statutes were finally taken out of the books about 1850.^† The pressure got so hard on the state church that they had to change; it wasn’t the religious freedom that people liked.

      On my mother’s side, people were very religious. Out the islands there, many of these old fishermans know the real thing. When my mother was small, sailors used to come out to her dad’s house; they had private prayer meetings together. And she used to tell me, some of them, they had long whiskers and they used to pray and sing, and be real happy in the Lord together. My mother grew up under that influence and she made sure we got it, too.

      Christmas Day, early in the morning, we always had a julotta [Christmas morning worship] in the Lutheran church. When I was small, the service started at four o’clock in the morning. On Christmas Eve, we give presents and had a tree. Sometimes we managed to get some lutfisk^‡ and we loved gröt [porridge] made out of milk and rice. And, of course, my mother was a good baker. She baked all kinds of coffeebread and cookies.

      Then we had another thing we ate, and were famous for down there—kroppkaka. You take potatoes and you grate them, and you take all the starch out and you put flour in so it has a consistency. You make a ball and on the inside you put meat. Only we’d put onions and pepper inside with the meats. Then you boil them. Kind of a potato dumpling; we liked that.

      Of course, we lived out close to the water and there was a lot of fish to eat, especially cod. Then around March we had a Baltic herring that was running. They would catch tons of it. It was bigger than smelts. You used to fillet and fry them and my memory is that it tasted just wonderful. [Also] they used to take this herring and salt it and use it anytime.

      We had chickens and we had rabbits and then we always killed a pig in fall. And my mother knew how to make all kinds of sausage. It’s too bad that we lost that; none of us took a hold to learn it. And we took the rye to the flourmill and had it ground and mother did the baking. We had a great big oven and we made a big, big fire in that. Then they raked all the coal and everything out of it. Mother had a wooden shovel; she put so many big round cakes in there and closed

Скачать книгу