My name is Krist Anderson, and I was born across the waters in 1909 in a little town in Norway by the name of Loiten. It's situated on the Swedish-Norwegian border about the central part of Norway. I came over here with my grandmother and grandfather in November 1914 with two brothers and two sisters. There were five of us. My older sister had already got here before us. We first settled in South Acton because my father was workinq at the powder mills and we lived in a big, old colonial, I guess the second oldest house in the town of Acton. That's where I started my schooling in South Acton which has now been demolished and it's a fire station on its site. However, about 1918 my father purchased a farm on Harrington Avenue and that's where we lived and that's where I lived until I moved out on my own in 1923 or 1924.
Prior to that I worked after school and on Saturdays in a grocery store by the name of Adams and Bridges which is no longer in existence. This store was on Commonwealth Avenue in West Concord, which was then Concord Junction, across the street from the post office. When I got a little older I decided I wanted to be an automobile mechanic. On the farm we had a tractor; we were one of the first farms around to have a gasoline tractor; most of them had horses. We had a horse too but my uncle gave me a Model T and that started me off on auto repairing.
Then I got a job at Macone Brothers and I was there for a number of years. Then I worked for Tom Hollis in Concord and from there I worked in Boston for a year or two at Wentworth and Savage. Then from there I started my own business. In 1932 on Commonwealth Avenue I rented a place there from a fellow by the name of Kelly. He had a building there that was partly a garage and part of it was rented out to a fellow by the name of Megan who ran a laundry. Kelly died and his widow put the place up for sale so I had to buy the place. I was there up until 1964 when my health failed and I had to get out. So I rented the place to a fellow by the name of Hogan for a number of years and then in 1971 he purchased it from me. In 1964 when I quit, I was out two years and then I went to work again. I took an income tax exam from the Commonwealth and passed and became a tax examiner which I stayed at until I retired from that at the age of 72 in 1981.
...Tell me going back in time, when you came over with your grandparents in 1914, you would have been a very little boy then just five years old, do you remember hearing much about why it was that your family immigrated from Norway?
I don't remember my father over there at all, I don't know why I don't. I do remember my oldest brother who was 14 going up and cutting peat and sod and they were piling it up like you would pile up cord wood or brick, and they were getting about 100 a day, I guess. I think the feeling over there was America was the land of milk and honey with gold flowing in the streets. So my grandfather and grandmother were here already in this country and they came over and brought us and my mother back over there. We came by boat of course and I can't remember the name of the boat but it was a British liner. I have the records somewhere because my father became a naturalized citizen and it tells all that. He was naturalized in 1921 in Lowell. I remember that because it was just under the wire, my brother was of age and he didn't have to take out any papers himself he automatically became a citizen like my other brother and myself too.
... Did you all come into New York City or Boston?
We all came to Ellis Island and lined up just like all the others. It must have been something to greet all these people coming in with a foreign tongue. Of course, at that time we had only one language the English language, not like today if you're a Latin or Portuguese you can take an exam for a driver's license in your own tongue and pass. Cuban the same way or Puerto Rican. But we had to learn, I say we because it naturally came to me being so young, but my father had to learn the language. They didn't have it in Norway at the time but it's part of the schooling over there now. Any Norwegian now speaks and writes the English language.
...Did your grandparents and everyone in the family learn English pretty quickly?
Oh, yea.
...Certainly some immigrants never did, some never learned. Well, I'll tell you, the Norwegians were ashamed of their language, they were ashamed to speak. Now you go to a French family and they speak French or you go to an Italian family and they speak Italian just like it's natural for them even outside or in the home or anywhere. We never did that. They broke away from it quick.
...Why do you suppose that was the case?
I don't know why. The Norwegians or the Scandinavians al- though they came from a fighting people way way back, the Vikings, they became civilized more or less and they were neutral in World War I and they would have been neutral in World War II if it hadn't been for Hitler going in there. So they are not a fighting people and they like to be quiet by themselves, it's natural for them, it seemed.
...I think you told me your grandmother was a victim of that German occupation.
She was. She happened to go back. She liked to travel and she went back to Norway several times and the last time she was caught over there. She had a little home up in Groton, a little cottage and she couldn't sit still. She was the traveling type. She got caught over there by that invasion of the German army.
...And what happened to her?
Well, it's been told to me that they took all the woolen blankets and beddings for themselves, the soldiers, and food and cattle. They killed off the cattle for meat of course. Norway has a lot of goats there as well as cows and they were all destroyed by the German army.
...So she must have died of malnutrition or something.
Yes, they said she froze to death. She died in the winter. I have a picture of her gravestone over there. My cousin is a retired school teacher from Groton and she went over there and she made a diary of the whole thing. She's very artistic anyway and she made a record. She took a picture of the church where I was baptized in 1911. The graveyard was in the back just like it was here years ago. I guess West Concord is the only one that hasn't got a graveyard next to it. But that's what happened over there.
...Why did they come here to Concord and Acton? Were there other relatives here or friends?
They were farming people. My father worked on a farm I under- stand at first when he came over. But he soon got a job in the powder mills because it paid more. I did hear once but I can't remember now, there was one farmer [Lars Petersen] that came over and he did so well that he brought more over. In later years the Canadians did the same thing, like Comeau, he brought an awful lot of Canadians down here to work in his business.
...We were talking about how Mrs. Hojem must have come from around the same part of Norway because she came over with your sister. One of the things I'm trying to figure out is why Concord was an appealing place for Norwegians. There are not similar groups of Swedes or Danes just Norwegians.
Well, they were farmers and Concord was a great farm area at that time. There were all kinds of farms around here asparagus and strawberries mostly, they were the main crop.
...Is that what your father had?
Yes, that's what we had, a market garden like that. There were some that had cattle but very few had cattle, they seemed to have cattle in the old country that they wanted something different.
...Getting back to the Norwegians' eagerness to learn English as rapidly as possible, did that also mean that your parents didn't make any effort to encourage you to speak Norwegian?
No, they didn't encourage it at all.
... So you must have forgotten it then very quickly.
Yea, I guess it would come back to me if I went over there but I don't know.
...What about customs, was there any effort to preserve
Yea, they kept the customs like Christmas. In Norway at that time Christmas was celebrated for a month. They cooked and got things ready and that's all they did was eat and go to church during the Christmas season. I guess you couldn't do much more over there anyway because of the winter, you know. They skied a lot.
... So you do have a lot of memories of that?
I do remember that. I remember picking strawberries, putting them on straws. Then there was another berry. They tell me it's found in Canada, cloudberry and it looked to me like a big raspberry type and it was picked and I think they put it down in the attic and it ripened and turned yellow when it was ripe. Like a big blackberry you might say only it was yellow when it was ripe. I remember picking those. I don't remember picking a blueberry or a cranberry over there because they have cranberries and I guess they must have blueberries too but I do remember picking those other berries.
...Tell me a little more of Norwegian heritage, would it also have mattered not at all to your parents whether you married a Norwegian girl?
No, they weren't that way at all. I married a girl whose ancestors on her mother's side settled in Lynn in 1637.
Her grandfather on her father's side, they're up there on the wall, came from Germany, Schneider was his name and he was going with a girl in Germany but she was a poor peasant girl that worked in the home kitchen, she was a maid, and they wouldn't allow him to get married. So he came over here and got married here in South Natick and he started a shoe factory and now it sounds like it might be Jewish but there are no Jews connected at all. It was Schneider which means tailor in German. They had several sons and one daughter. One son made the first automobile that was in the town of Natick. He had just enough German ingenuity to do that. But when the father died the shoe business left these parts and went down to Brockton or somewhere down that way. So they sold the factory and that was the end but the factory is still there, it's a warehouse now.
...What about the church? There was a Norwegian church downtown right on Thoreau Street for quite a while then it moved to Lang Street.
They put up a tent down there but that was before my religious days, let's put it that way. I started in as a boy in the West Concord Union Church.
..And your parents also?
Yea, they were members there. But we were Lutherans over in Norway. I was christened or baptized in the Lutheran church but I don't know anything about the Lutheran religion outside of visiting some out in Wisconsin and several around here. My wife got acquainted with a lady here that was going to the Lang Street church so I went down there and I was a trustee there and I joined the church. I was a trustee until it folded up and then we moved on to the Congregational Church in Wayland, Dr. Ewing. We liked him. We heard him on the radio and he was a great preacher and that's where we're members now.
...The reason I was asking the question was that again what was interesting to me when I talked to the Hojems and the Berlieds was the fact that their families and most of the Norwegians that they knew in the Grove Street area had not joined the Norwegian church on Thoreau Street and had instead gone over to the West Concord. It seemed to me to be just one bit of evidence of how being Norwegian didn't necessarily mean that you did things like all other Norwegians did.
No, well they spoke Norwegian I guess at one time down there. They preached one service in Norwegian and one in English so they tell me. You see the form of religion is different in the Lang Street church. It is a fundamental, evangelical type of church. They preach Christ and the rebirth which they don't in West Concord now. It was that way at WCUC back in the 1920s when they had a preacher that preached the Bible and it was a fundamental church.
...Mr. Stone?
Yea, Alfred Wheeler Stone. He was a Wheeler and he just passed on. Oh, we went to the Union Church after I got married because he christened my oldest daughter. He always got a kick out of that. We'd have things going on in different churches around and Stone would be there and Gerry [daughter of Krist], of course, she's fifty now but we would remind him of it and at first he didn't remember but after a while every time we would meet him he would get a kick out of it. He was a nice guy. He had that church in Somerville at the end.
So we had him. And through this woman, Watson, Mrs. Watson, she was organist there for years but the preaching changed when he went. But I had them all for customers. I had more ministers and priests for customers down there. And I liked them. The last one they had and I can't remember his name, he's down in Florida now but I used to go up and have coffee with him at the parsonage. I think he was Scandinavian. He was chaplain here at the legion -- Ed Nyland.
...Tell me about the Sons of Norway? Were you ever involved in that?
Never. The only time I was ever involved with Sons of Norway was last when I was in Seminole, Florida and this fellow that lived next to me down there was a German and he's got a friend that belongs to the Sons of Norway, a German and he said "I want you and your wife as my guests to go down there Saturday night." We were supposed to meet but he wasn't there at all. But we went in anyway. We had a great time. For 256 we had all you could eat and they had a big map of Norway and of course, they were all born in this country except myself I guess, so they had to put a pin on where they came from and then whoever came the furtherest that night to this meeting. I thought I'm going to get this one coming from Concord, MA but there was a lady that had just come from Norway.
...Was there any particular reason why you didn't join the Sons of Norway?
Well, I was never with the crowd. See I was out. I wasn't with any Norwegians. I didn't travel with them. I didn't stay with them. I didn't go to their church growing up. I went to WCUC growing up. Then the Boy Scouts and we chummed with everybody and then when I had the business, I had eighteen men working there at one time and the only Norwegians were a fellow from Acton and my brother at that time and the rest of them were Irish or Italian and French and everything else. So we didn't clan at all. I proved that when I ran for selectman in 1946 I ran against an old Irish fellow that had been a selectman, and I beat him out. He had a recount and I still beat him. I picked up more votes. They gave me a party at Howard Johnson's, the master of ceremonies was an Irish fellow and I was sponsored at the caucus by an Irish town clerk, Ed Loughlin, first Irishman [from Concord] to go to Harvard. He sponsored me.
... Did he come and seek you out to see if you would be a selectman?
Yea, this Garrity was the town clerk and tax collector at the time and he's the one that asked me.
...What led to the decision to challenge Ed Sheehan because he was already in, wasn't he?
Yea, he was in. I don't know. I often wondered whether this Loughlin had anything against Sheehan. The Irish, you know, can get mad at each other sometimes. I know brothers and sisters that don't speak to each other.
No, we never had that trouble in our family. I suppose because we were hard workers and we didn't have a lot of money to leave to this one. Now it might be different when I go and the wife goes if there is anything left behind. We have three children and sometimes it's hard to divide it evenly. Especially if you have some real property that you have to dispose of or different things but it didn't work out that way. My oldest brother stayed on the farm and he stayed there until almost to the end. He got so that he couldn't work anymore and he sold it. He came and lived in my little house out here. After a while he went to a rest home and he passed on there. But we spoke to each other, we never had any problems.
...One of the things that I have been interested in trying to get are people's impressions of other ethnic groups, of the Irish and of the Italians and of the Jews and to try to talk about things that concerned people as issues in the town. Your experience in politics and your whole approach to living in Concord suggests little or no awareness of people's backgrounds other than just being plain old Concordians.
John Macone was telling me when he was a boy, he had problems being an Italian family in school, you know children can be mean and cause a lot of friction between other kids. I didn't have that problem although being Norwegian and coming from a northern country and coming into a town where there were people from say Italy or southern countries it was quite a difference. I remember one child in school was sent home because she was eating garlic. I guess the teacher couldn't stand it so she sent the child home. That's the only thing I can remember about any of the groups. I never heard anything against Irish people. My best friends are Irish. Charlie Byron, of course he married a girl of German background too and my wife being a Schneider kind of sticks with the German background. She didn't go for joining the DAR. She's not like me, I joined the Minutemen and have been with them since they started. It will be twenty years next month.
... Did you go down to Washington when they went down?
Oh, I've been down there three times. I paraded three times down there but my parading days are over, I guess. Can't do the hiking any more!
...What kind of memories do you have of Jewish people in the town when you were growing up?
The only thing I can remember about the Jewish was this Arkin. He made a suit for me that he bought in Sears Roebuck. That turned me against him. Maxie Arkin.
...But you also remember the London family too?
Yea, I remember them having the store. We would go in there and by clothes and also Fritz across the street, he had a clothing store. They were competitors in a small town like this. The competition was right there. Yea, I've kind of forgotten all that stuff. You forget over the years. I've been married fifty-two years now so a lot of things have happened.
...One of the things that I haven't really started work on but part of my project is to find out something about black people in Concord and I have interviewed a couple of black families but they're new to town.
There's only one black that I can remember in town and he worked for the town of Concord and his name was Sam and he lived on the Asparagus Farm down on Bedford Street. He retired and he went down to that island in the Caribbean, I can't remember the name of that island now. One of the retired cops went down to visit him a couple of years ago.
...Did he have a family?
I don't think so. He did get married though in late years. It was a short name and it was a name that might come from a southern name although he wasn't from the slave group, he came from this island.
...Back in the 1870s and 1880s there were half a dozen black families.
There were slaves in town, I understand.
...Oh, yes, way back.
And there's one buried up on the hill there. About the customs that were kept in this country after getting here the only thing I can remember where the celebrations of the holidays such as Christmas and Easter and things like that. They did keep the same type of food. They had goat cheese, dry cod, salt herring and things like that so they did observe the Scandi- navian foods but that's about all I can remember they did observe outside of the 17th of May which is National Independence Day in Norway.
... How would you have celebrated it? What would you have done?
Well, they would go on picnics. I never did it but I know they used to do that. They used to come to me and asked me if I was going to go. It didn't interest me at that time. But they did stay with the food part but about everything else, the language and everything else, was dropped.
...Mrs. Hojem invited me over to have some Christmas cookies.
Oh, yea, they made cookies and they made levser which is made of potato and flour and its fried, it's something like the Irish fried bread but it's flat like a pancake and it's called levser. It's sold in the stores in Wisconsin and Minnesota, of course there are so many Scandinavians out there. My sister makes it and I've had a friend of mine that travels out through the midwest sometimes pick me up a couple of packages of levser.
That's real nice, it's just like a pancake, it's real thin. And of course, in those days, they made it right on top of the stove. Now they use a frying pan I guess. Norway is a great potato country and I guess they made liauor and everything else out of it. They made potato starch.
I think vodka is to. Those countries are great grain countries. But it's strange how some of the Irish food ties in with the Scandinavian food. How it happens, I suppose the latitude is almost the same over there.
...Yes, and on the water.
And they had the thatched roofs in the old days, I've seen old pictures of Norway where they had the thatched roofs just like Ireland and of course, there's talk that the Norwegian Vikings were in Ireland conquering and of course, the British Isles were under Danish rule for a few years under King Harold. I suppose they adopted the customs.
Now that flat dried out cod, I was trying to think of the name, the Italians have it, the Irish have it, they call it finan haddie in Ireland, and the Norwegians have it but I can't think of the name. But it's the same thing, it's just like a board. You have to soak it. The Italians have it; they have it down in the North End hanging up along the street. I can't remember the name they called it too. But they have it around the Christmas season. They stock up on everything for the Christmas season and all they do is celebrate for a month during the holidays.