Interviewed February 20, 1984
New Perspectives in Concord's History
Concord Oral History Program
William Bailey, Interviewer.
Ny name is Leif Nashe. I was born in Trondheim, Norway, which is the third largest city in Norway. I was born in January 1901.
...Whereabouts is Trondheim?
Oslo used to be Christiana in those days which is the largest city in Norway and Bergen is the second and Trondheim is half way up north, the farthest north for a large city at that time.
...Is that on the west coast or east?
Well, it's on a fiord called Trondheim's Fiord on the West Coast.
...Can you tell me a little bit about your family in Trondheim?
Well, my father was a cabinet maker and he came to this country in 1887.
...Did your mother come at the same time?
No, my mother was the daughter of a Lutheran minister who came from northern Norway about 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle and he, my grandfather, was 55 when he left Norway with a wife and eight children and my mother was one of them. They landed in northwest Minnesota and from northwest Minnesota my grandfather moved up and founded a town just outside of Edmondton, Alberta. This was about 1893.
...How did your mother and father meet?'
My grandfather arrived in Minnesota in 1876 and my father met my mother in Minnesota and they got married and my oldest sister was born in Minnesota. But then things didn't go so well so he took his new wife and child back to my grandfather on the west coast of Norway to a town called Molta. My other sister who is four and a half years older than I am was born on my grandfather's farm. Then he moved to Trondheim to engage in cabinet making and then in 1909 he decided to come back to this country.
...How long had he been back there in Norway?
Oh, about ten years or a little over ten years. He came back alone in 1909 and my other sister and myself and my mother moved down to live with my grandfather in Molta, Norway. It's actually about fifteen miles inside the fiord from Molta a place called Nessersung. My other sister came over alone after she graduated from high school to Chicago. She came back to Concord to live with us later.
...She never married?
No, she never married.
...Then your mother's father was still a minister up in Alberta?
Yes, he died in 1917. He was the first Lutheran minister in Canada. He was the only one for five or six years.
...So then you and your father and mother all came together. Did you come directly to Concord?
No, we came just before Christmas in 1912 and lived for a few months in North Sudbury and then to Concord in the spring of 1913. My father was a carpenter then and he met some Norwegians from Concord and they told him there were a lot of Norwegians in Concord and they had two churches, a Methodist church and a Lutheran church.
...Why did you go to North Sudbury to begin with?
Well, my father was working there at the time. He worked all over the east as a cabinet maker.
...So you came yourself in 1913 and how old would you have been then?
I was 12 in January 1913. I couldn't speak English and my parents wouldn't speak Norwegian to me so I picked it up fast. They knew English because they met in Minnesota and my mother had been in Minnesota since 1886.
...Where did you go to school?
In the public schools in Concord. I was in the Emerson School and the Peter Bulkeley School and I was in high school a couple of years. I got fired from high school because two other guys and myself, I talked them into going into Boston and getting work aboard a ship going to Brest, France and when we came back we all got fired. One of them was the son of a federal judge and he had money so he sent his son to Exeter and the other fellow got his father to come down and get him back in school. I went to work cutting asparagus in the morning. I was captain of the tennis team so I played on the tennis team and I never knew the difference.
...Even though you weren't in the school?
That's right.
...What year would this have been?
1920.
...How long were you over in France?
I never made it. We were planning to go to France but we got fired from school.
... I'm not sure why you got fired?
We skipped school and everybody heard about it.
...So you only skipped for one day?
That's right.
...What were the names of the other two boys?
Howard Jacobsen was the guy who got his father to get him back and the other one was, oh, I can't remember now.
...So then you picked asparagus?
I cut asparagus from six in the morning until two in the afternoon and I played on the tennis team in the afternoon.
...What did you do after that?
Well, I worked at all kinds of jobs. First, I worked at a variety of jobs and then I worked for the Boston & Maine Railroad in their freight receipts office and from there I went to work for John Hancock in the tellers division of the finance department and then I wanted some romance so I wanted to do something else. When I left they gave me a twenty dollar gold piece and told me if at anytime I wanted my job back I could have it. So I went to work in a lumber camp up in northern New Hampshire. I unloaded four-masted lumber schooners in Charlestown for quite a while before I went up to the lumber camp. Then I came back and worked for a wrecking crew at Camp Devens and from that point on I worked as an assistant manager in a grocery store and finally got a job as a tennis pro at Myopia Hunt Club in 1925 in Hamilton. I was fairly successful at that.
I was playing tennis with a master at Middlesex School and he asked what I was going to do for the winter. I said I would get myself a job at some office in Boston. I got a telephone call that the master at Middlesex wanted to see me. He was a member of the Board of Overseers at Harvard and he figured he could use me in some capacity there. So he asked me if I were interested in going to Harvard and I said "No" and he said "Why not?" I can pick up the equivalent of a liberal education by discriminate reading, I don't want to be a "fraternity Joe" or a "Joe college" I've seen too many of them. And he said "That's right! An education on paper isn't worth a damn it's what you can do that counts." So a few days later I got another telephone call and he offered me a job to take care of some fellows who didn't engage in athletic sports. I quit all other sport activities except tennis and skiing. I used to skate a lot and I engaged in all kinds of sporting activities so I quit all the others and stuck to just those two. So I got a job up there to build a ski trail for Middlesex over to Punkatasset Farm where I built a ski jump two or three years earlier at Punkatasset Hill.
The library up there had been poorly classified. They asked me if I could do anything about that so I said I could. I went down to the Concord Public Library and asked them what classification system they had there and they had the Dewey decimal system so I got the address of the place somewhere in New York state. I bought an abridged copy of that and I went to Lexington Public Library and they had the Dewey decimal system, I went to the Waltham Public Library and they had the Dewey decimal system, I went to the Boston Public Library and they said they'd like to convert to the Dewey decimal classification system but they couldn't afford it. So I came back and used the Dewey decimal system and classified the books. They had been classified about five or six times and they had stickers on the backs of the books so I put guys for punishment to scrape off the stickers and I'd mix lamp black and shellac and painted them three inches up above and saved the appearance of the books and identified them as library books and put on the Dewey decimal classification system. On a card one could look up the title of the book, the author of the book, and the subject so it was the same as the Dewey decimal classification system. I put the library in shape and I became librarian and I became a member of the faculty a year later.
...Just to back track a little bit. When your family first moved to Concord whereabouts did you live?
We lived in back of the depot among the Irish on Brooks Street.
...I remember hearing from others like the Ventis that there were Norwegians who lived in that area as well. So you were on the faculty at Middlesex?
Until 1938 and in the summer time I taught tennis for three months at Myopia.
...Were you still unmarried at that point?
Yes. In 1935 I learned something about ski equipment and to equip the guys properly up there. I took boys cross country over to Punkatasset for ski jumping and they used to have a study period called Room A from 5:00 to 6:30, 6:30 was supper time. Some of them would be late or tired, it was a little too far, it was about two miles over to Punkatasset so we built a ski jump across the pond, which at the time was the best school boy's ski jump in the country. The Board of Trustees lent me $1000 to build it and I paid them back with $200 profit from ski equipment, in other words the $200 a year made from profits from ski equipment paid back the trustees the $1000 in about five years. So we had a lot of fun out there.
In 1935 I learned a lot about the ski equipment and I talked to a lot of people about it. I talked to a friend of mine who was a ski jumper about starting manufacturing ski binding, some of the stuff they were using was ridiculous. The principle which we used originated about 1893 and we concentrated on that principle so we had a part time business. The headmaster at Middlesex told me there were three factors in business, production, distribution and exchange. In other words, production, selling, and working capital but I'm quoting him verbatim. So by the year 1938 my partner worked in a garage and was a damn good mechanic, Odd Overgard.
...Also a Norwegian?
Yea, he came over here in 1925 to Concord. He came from the section in Norway where the first Norwegians came, the next town to Loiten. He was a neighbor of a guy who lived in Loiten. Because most of the Norwegians came from Loiten at first, the first Norwegians who came here was in 1873 about four or five farmers. The first man in Concord to make skis was Lars Petersen. There was a lot of snow in the winter of 1876 so he made a pair of skis. Everybody snowshoed then. Skiing became very popular. And the first skis sold in Boston were made by another Norwegian, Peter Sevresen just a little later.
...I recall seeing the name Lars Petersen as living here in 1880. Did he live out his life here in Concord?
Yes, he did.
...Does he have any descendants?
He has a daughter-in-law still living in Concord.
...What's her name?
Well, her name is Mrs. Petersen. She's still living up on Monument Street.
...That's interesting because I've been curious about some of these early Norwegian immigrants. You said you thought there were about four who came in 1873. Martin Helsher may have been one.
Well, four or five. They were all farmers. Martin was one of the early ones.
...His family that live out on Lowell Road, is that the same Helsher family? Would he be a grandson of Martin Helsher?
Great grandson.
...Then there are the Thorpes.
Yea, the Thorpes came early and they stayed. There's one Thorpe left, Everett Thorpe. Have you seen him or talked to him?
Oh, he about's a year older than I am. He can tell you more than I can.
...Was he born in Norway himself?
No, he was born in this country in 1900.
...This is another Thorpe, Emil Thorpe.
Emil Thorpe was Thorpe's father. Ole Thorpe was a shoe maker and minister both.
...Were they brothers, Emil and Ole?
Yea. Everett will tell you more than I can. I'll call him up.
...Well, I will ask him then. When did you go back to Norway?
In 1952.
...And how was your Norwegian?
Well, they mistook me for a Norwegian traveling salesman. I didn't forget the language at all. I was guiding some people around town here after I had been in Concord for three years showing them the points of interest, Emerson, Thoreau, battle at the Bridge and they said to me, "I suppose you're an old Yankee." I said "Yep".
...You don't have any accent at all. Did you lose it immediately?
Well, I don't have any accent in Norwegian either. But I know guys that were born in this country that have accents.
...So when you came to this country did your parents find it very easy to be accepted by Americans or did they uncover any discrimination or anything?
Oh, no, no trouble at all. They mixed with anybody and everybody.
...Did they join the Norwegian church?
Well, they went to it. Probably they did.
... That was the church on Thoreau Street for a while?
No, not that church. I was born and baptized a Lutheran. No it was part of the Congregational Church.
...And where was that?
Well, it was down on Hubbard Street and Walden Street where the Congregational Church is now.
...So they had a special service for the Norwegians there too or what?
They had the Norwegian church in a section of the church and Ole Thorpe was the minister.
...Did you marry Norwegian?
No, I got married very late. I was retired when I got married. I married a German girl. She lived in Maynard.
...Were you ever involved in the Sons of Norway?
No, my father was but I never was. I never belonged to anything. I only belonged to two clubs, the Piss-Out-The-Window Club which was started in Dovre Ski Binding and I belong to the International Order of Old Bastards.
...So you founded the Dovre Ski Binding?
No, Overgard and I started as partners. I talked him into it and we started in part time in 1935. We worked at it part time for three years and it became bigger and we both worked full time in 1938.
...I understood from talking with Olive Berglind that her father and his friends when they first came to the United States, they came to Boston and they got jobs working in a factory in South Boston and that there was a place there that hired a lot of Norwegian immigrants. Are you familiar with that place?
No.
...Why was it that so many Norwegians went into farming here?
Were they farmers back home?
Yea, I guess so.
...Did they buy farmland from Yankees is that how it happened? Where were they farming?
All over town. The population since I've been in Concord has tripled and all the farms are gone and housing developers have taken over. But that farm where Mrs. Petersen's still living up on Monument Street that's still left. So things have changed. Seventy years ago Concord was the largest market gardening town in the state and they used to drive by horse and wagon to Boston to market to deliver the vegetables.
...Did you have a sense back in the 1930s or maybe even earlier say when you were in high school of any real gulf between either immigrant groups or between catholics and protestants?
Well, I mean there was a little distinction between catholics and protestants. I always got along with them. Sandlot baseball didn't give a damn whether you were protestant or catholic or jewish, the important thing was to play ball.
...Yes, they tell me about that and they even tell me how they were really able with their humor to make fun of each other and call each other names like I guess the Norwegians were called "squareheads".
"Scoops" and they called the Irish "micks" and Italians "waps" or "guineas".
...What would be the origin of the word "scoop".
I don't know. We weren't called that very often. There's a tremendous religious and racial tolerance today compared to what it used to be. I know some priests that I'm friendly with. Religious prejudice is ridiculous.