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 the door.
We made pie in Sweden, because so many Americans had come back and they taught people how. There was a tremendous influence by people that had come back for a visit. It was tremendous, really. They almost committed suicide, the Swedes. Everybody left.
About 1907, there was hard times in Sweden. The brick plant was shut down and my dad could not get anything to do. An aunt, my mother’s sister, was over for a visit in Sweden from this country. She had a boarding house down on “I” Street in Tacoma. “Well,” she said to my mother, “I can take Alfred”—that’s my dad—“he can come over to Tacoma and stay with me for a while.” It only cost thirty dollars for a ticket. So it was decided that 1908, he come to the United States. Dad was in the militia and they wouldn’t let him go; he had to write to get a special permit from the high court in Stockholm. So he was delayed a couple months.
Dad was working here in Tacoma in one of these fuel yards selling wood and coal. He was a teamster, them days. Then 1912, my mother’s brother Magnus and my sister’s husband John came back from America and they were going to stay [in Sweden]. But John had been back two months and he says, “No, I’m not staying. I’m going back to United States.” Then my mother wrote my dad, “I’m not going to stay all by myself.”
In 1914, we all came over. My mother sold everything. You put an ad in the paper that you intend to sell your home and there would be an auction. You auction off all your chairs and furnitures and all your belongings at a certain date. Then we sold the house and the contract that we had with the farmer to somebody else. The money we used for a ticket. At that time there were a lot of competition between the different steamship companies, because they wanted the immigrant trade. We got leaflets from Scandinavian-American Line, from the Cunard Line, from the White Star Line, heaven knows what we didn’t get from. And agents even come and visited us.
I had a good time in Sweden. When I was in my teens, I would have gone back any chance I had. At that time, there was an awful lot of jokes and fun made of the immigrants. I could never open my mouth and talk without somebody making fun of me. It happened fifteen, twenty times every day. “You goddamm Swede, go back where you come from.” At work, you heard that all the time. “You dumb Swede,” and so on. I come out with the rough and tough workers and all other nationalities and they just cussed you down something awful sometimes, they really bore down on you. I just hated it! I hated to go to work; I hated to be here; I hated everything here.
Even in our Swedish church I was very unhappy.
