The owner of the farmhouse you see was the sponsor in 1964 for another Swedish emigrant, Bengt Lindeblad, 22 years old then, now the founder of this Web-site named the AmericanWest. A young city slicker from Gothenburg (Göteborg), Sweden, went in early 1964 alone to face the big adventure in "the Big Country."
I had read an article about Lindstrom in a periodical published by the Swedish truck manufacturer Scania Vabis. I had had a desire to move to the U.S. for quite some time. I put in an ad in the local Lindstrom paper looking for a job. I received one response, from the farmer that would be my sponsor in the United States.
I had sold most of my belongings, including a "deposit" (actually "under-the-table" money as there was a shortage of apartments at the time) for my small non-modern rental apartment at Tellgrensgatan in the older section of Majorna in Gothenburg where most buildings were so called "Landshövdingehus." These buildings, built in the late 19th century or in the early 20th, were fairly large structures with the first floor erected in cement and the two stories on top made of wood.
I had gathered just enough of money to cover for the airline ticket from Torslanda, just outside Gothenburg (that was the airport in use then, now the airport in use is Landvetter), to New York and for a couple of days stay-over in New York and for the Greyhound bus ride from there to Minneapolis. I still remember how excited I was when I arrived in New York, the city on Manhattan bustled of energy it seemed like. I walked for many hours between uptown and downtown and I could not get enough of the sights and the people on the streets. The smells and the noises on the streets were much more pronounced there than anywhere else. I stayed at hotel Shelburn for 3 or 4 days. I had corresponded with several people before the trip and one of them was Joyce Simon from Flushing. I met her in NYC where she worked at Decca Records near Rockefeller Center. We walked around in the city and she invited me home to her parents house in Flushing where I stayed overnight.
The Greyhound busride to Minneapolis - St. Paul was uneventful. The trip took two days and one night, if I remember correctly. I was sleeping in my seat. There were frequent stops for rest and meals. At the stops, I was always worried whether the money would last for a snack or a meal. At one stop 4 or 5 men rushed over in a group to the bus very quickly in the snow and cold outside. Very efficiently they changed a wheel with tire at the back of the bus, it could have taken only 30 seconds or so. And then they rushed back to the bus terminal as quickly as they came. I was impressed.
I reached St. Paul without a dime in my pocket and it was late in the evening. I wondered how I could afford to stay overnight at a hotel. At first, I just sat at the bus terminal after I had called my sponsor in Scandia. He said he would pick me up in the morning. I realized that I could not sit inside the terminal all night so I went out to look for a hotel. At the first hotel I stepped into, I was foolish enough to ask if I could pay in the morning. No I could not! So at the next hotel, I didn't say a word. The receptionist asked instead if I was there for the convention. I said "yeah."
The farmer (Clarence Holcombe) and his wife (Selma) picked me up at the hotel in St.Paul. As I did not have any money, I asked Clarence if I could borrow $8.50 from him to pay for the stay at the hotel, which he did.
The farm was located in Scandia, adjacent to the main road between Scandia and Lindstrom. I was working there briefly, for about a month, as a farmhand. My duties were mainly to feed the chickens, a few geese and the steers (they had no milk cows), shuffle steer manure in the barn and pick the eggs.
There was no wait to get started with the work after my arrival on a cold icy morning. The same morning, immediately after a hearty and healthy breakfast of boiled eggs, hot oat porridge with sugar and milk, I went out to start digging in a rock-hard pile of frozen corncobs to put them in bags and deliver them to another farm they owned down the road to feed the chickens. Although I did not have a drivers license at the time, there was no big deal to drive down there in their 1940s Buick and walk into the barn and feed the chickens. On that farm there was an interesting older fellow living in a trailer, a Mr. Swenson. I walked in there every morning to hear him tell stories about the old west and how he was working on the railroads in his youth. Before he started to tell his tales, he cooked up a brew of hot water with vodka and honey in it and that warmed me up pretty good in the cold weather just before starting my chores there.
I was always "up with the morning sun" to start the chores, not because I naturally would wake up then but because Clarence opened the door to my bedroom and hollered "SUN IS UP!"
The room I slept in on the second floor was heated by a large iron stove in the kitchen with large metal pipes (about 8 inches - 20cm - in diameter) sticking up through the floor in my bedroom, but it was still icy cold. The large kitchen stove seemed to be on all the time, not only for cooking but for heating up the house. Two of Clarence's elderly sisters kept it going all the time. One's duties appeared to be to get the wood for it and the other sister appeared to be responsible for the cooking.
The farmer was son to a Swede named Håkansson, his name was later changed to (Clarence) Holcombe. He learned English in school (he still had a heavy Swedish accent) because everyone spoke Swedish when and where he grew up. It was amazing to me to hear the old-time Swedes speak Swedish because I could hardly understand it. The language seemed to have been conserved in time for the last 100 years. Especially at farmer's auctions you had a chance to meet these old-timers, and we went to quite a few.
If I was up early, I went to bed late. Almost every night I wanted to see "The Tonight Show" with the best guy on television, Johnny Carson. I thought he was great, he was talking and acting just as us guys, much different from what I had experienced with much serious and stiffer TV-people in Sweden.
Clarence told me that his favorite movies used to be the Swedish
Edvard Persson movies, featuring a farmer character from the province
of Skåne. They were quite popular in Sweden during the 30s and 40s and most
likely in Minnesota at that time.
The picture you see was taken 1980.
While visiting Minnesota in 1980, I briefly stopped by the farm where I had worked 16 years earlier. I am standing to the left, then Selma and Clarence to the right. The Holcombes passed away some ten years later.
The Swedish influence
is strong
in Lindstrom.
This water tower, in the form of the always popular Swedish coffee pot, welcoming visitors in Swedish.
Picture of nearby Lindstrom from 1964.
The town was named for an early Swedish pioneer, Daniel Lindstrom. Population: 2,533 (1992 est.) Incorporated: 1894. Lindstrom is located in Chisago County, Minnesota. Center City became the county seat in 1875.
Gammelgården (the Old Farm) Museum
in Scandia, Minnesota.
This Swedish immigrant pioneer museum includes the
original log sanctuary of Elm Lutheran Church from 1856, the oldest log
parsonage in Minnesota from 1868, an immigrant log cabin, 1885, a
Swedish-style vacation stuga, and a gift shop. The 11 acres includes a park,
playground, and picnic facilities. Swedish log fencing encloses the area.
The present Elim Lutheran Church is visible on top of the hill. Open May
through October.
The Emigrants Statue at Lindstrom, Minnesota.
Karl Oskar and Kristina are fictitious
characters portrayed in
The Emigrants Unto A Good Land and
The Last Letter Home, written by the Swedish author Vilhelm Moberg.
They symbolize migration to America by Swedish peasants, who settled in the
Chisago Lakes area about the middle of the nineteenth century. The statue,
a replica of the original in Karlshamn, Sweden, is the vision of Willard
("Smitty") Smith, a Lindstrom businessman, who in 1969
commissioned sculptor Roger David to design a copy of the statue of Karl
Oskar and Kristina. The statue at the foot of Lindstrom's main street
represents the dual sides of the emigrant's dilemma, Karl Oskar faces
forward, looking west to America, while wife Kristina looks east over her
shoulder, back toward Sweden.
"The Karl Oskar House," winter 1995.
This is an old farm house typical of the farms inhabited by
Swedish settlers during the 19th century. The Swedish author Vilhelm Moberg
discovered this 1850s era farmstead when he visited Lindstrom in 1948 while
conducting research for his planned series of emigrant books.
The house
was donated by the Holt family to the Lindstrom Historical Society.
"The Karl Oskar House," June 1996
Restored by the Lindstrom Historical Society as an interpretive museum
that will house emigrant archives circa 1860s-90s.
More ABBA Links:
ABBA Discography
Lyrics on ABBA Albums
ABBA Midi Files
Elim Lutheran Church, Scandia, Minnesota
Established in 1854; built in 1930. 3rd oldest Lutheran congregation in
Minnesota.
Yes, it is me in the picture (and the girl Vada Hasselius from
upstairs). I shared the apartment with several other guys, most of us worked at
the same place (J.L.Marsh). Our favorite hangout was "CC Tap" on the same street
(2600
Lyndale Ave. So.). It was not only a beer joint, but they also had some
pretty good rock bands playing there.
Working on the farm, it was hard to resist the opportunities and the lure of the big city (besides, I was not getting rich by any means as I was paid $3 a day. However, I did not mind that so much as I found the experience invaluable), so after about a month I said farewell to the farm and moved to Minneapolis into this apartment building at 2504 Lyndale Avenue South (right).
Through a private employment agency (fee-based) I found work in downtown Minneapolis on North 9th Street at a well-known record production and distribution company. The original company, J.L. Marsh, was owned by two Jewish brothers, they were nice fellows. They were a record distributor, mainly of LP's to department stores across the Tri-State area (Minnesota, Wisconsin and South Dakota). Our job consisted of filling orders by walking in the warehouse with carts where we put the LP's and later packed them into boxes for shipment. We were probably 6 to 8 people doing this job with a supervisor monitoring what was going on. We also sealed LP's with plastic foil. That year we wrapped a lot of Beatles albums. The summer of 1964 was extremely hot and humid so they had mounted huge fans, like airplane propellers, in the area where we worked. I still remember a large sign that had been set up in our working area. It said: "Any jerk can spit on the floor - spit on the ceiling!" J.L Marsh was a distributor that many years later turned into K-Tel International, a giant record company. But now and then the Marsh brothers recorded some songs for fun. They got famous when they (by mistake?) recorded "Surfin' Bird" with The Trashmen, a surf-rock quartet from Minneapolis-St.Paul. This record went all the way up to the 4th position on the U.S. Top Hundred singles in December 1963! The song sounds like "trash" but they had fun doing it they told me.
You may have noticed that music played an important role in our lives then. Look into this separate page on how I was swept away by the tremendous wave of Early Rock n' Roll.
Up on the combine in shorts, visiting a friend's farm in Dawson, Minnesota (1964).
Another spot we visited a couple of times was The Flame Theatre Cafe, the
"Home of Western & Country Music" on 16th & Nicollet.
One evening a C&W and Rockabilly performer named Bob Luman
had a show there and I had a friendly chat with him after his
excellent performance. He was an interesting guy because in 1960 he had a
tremendous hit with "Let's Think about Living" that went up to the 7th
position on the Billboard's Top 100 hits. He was only 23 years old when he
had that hit. Unfortunately, I learned later, he did not live long, he died
2 days after Christmas in Nashville in 1978.
"The Gang": These were the guys I used to hang around with most of
the time, several of them shared the apartment and later, the house, with
me:
Our supervisor at J.L. Marsh, was kind enough to invite us for a beer party. A few of us were assigned to go and get a "kegger" of beer. These are large containers made as a steel cylinder and would probably contain about 10 gallons of beer. So we got it and went to the supervisor's apartment. We did not realize that a car ride with a "kegger" in it is not a smooth one. When we were ready to drink the beer we opened the "kegger" and up came a fountain of beer. It flooded the entire living room and it was quite a job to clean it up, bucket after bucket. The beer had been moving around inside the car and that created an explosive pressure inside the cylinder. I don't remember if we had any beer left, but I think we had a gallon or so left. However, we did have a good time that evening.
(Picture to the left: Ronnie and Frank -on the right- in front of the
DuPont house and Frank's VW.) After a few months, we found a house a few
blocks away on 3023 Du Pont Avenue
South (near Lake Street)
where four of us rented the first floor (the second floor was rented by five
girls). Sometimes we kicked around empty beer cans in the living room as we
attempted to play indoor soccer - often with the song "Where Did Our Love
Go" by the Supremes playing loudly in the background - a hit in summer
1964. We stopped that practice after we kicked an empty beer can through
one of the windows. Another practice we stopped doing was to wash the dishes.
We could not agree on which one of us would be next in turn, besides all of
us were always busy. So we simply took the dirty dishes down to the basement
and stacked them there. After that, we had to dine out.
There was a lot of students living in the area, most sharing apartments and sometimes large single family homes. There were many parties almost every night, a little bit of a mixture of "American Graffiti" and "Animal House" over it. There could be 50 - 100 people or more attending a party, lasting all night. Sometimes they got too wild and got raided (by the police). I guess you're in the twenties only once in your life. Even though we drank a lot of beer and hard liquor, I never saw or heard anything about drugs. It was still an innocent era. Illegal drugs probably came much later. Eventually this party-oriented life-style took its toll and I simply got tired of it and thought it was time to move on. A buddy of mine, Frank Yanish, and I talked about moving out of town, to warmer areas such as Tenessee or Florida, but we decided to move to Los Angeles. Frank drove his Volkswagen beetle all the way to Los Angeles (I still had no drivers' license). It took us about a week to get down there with four overnight stays at Motels on the road. This was before the freeway system was completely built. We went partly on Route 66. I thought it would take forever to drive through Los Angeles to Hollywood but when we eventually arrived there, we found a cheap hotel on Hollywood Boulevard and I stayed there for several weeks. Frank stayed about a week in Los Angeles and then headed back to Minneapolis.
...having left Minneapolis, passing the Main Street in Gothenburg, Nebraska. This is a sister city to Göteborg, Sweden (left picture)and is the site of one of the American West's Pony Express Stations! We had our first overnight stay at Erin Holiday Motel in Fremont, Nebraska. The picture to the right exposes the endless prairie in Nebraska.
.
In the Rocky Mountains region at Idaho Springs,
Colorado, an area that was very scenic, where we had our second
overnight stay at Peoriana Motel, and the third at a motel in Green River, Utah.
.
.
...We're on the way to Los Angeles.
.
.
The fourth overnight stay was at a hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, across from the
railway station. We visited the Golden Nugget (the one that features the
large "Howdy pardner...!" cowboy neon sign) where we saw Buck Owens sing
his latest country hits.
.
.
.
"California, here we come..." (Picture to the left shows us leaving Nevada
close to the border of California).
.
.
.
.
.
.
We arrived in Los Angeles October 30, 1964 and drove right
in to Hollywood and found a hotel that we could afford, named Hotel St.
Francis at 5533 Hollywood Boulevard. Frank left after a
week because he could not find a job, but I stayed another week at the
hotel, even though I did not have a job either, but I thought I could get
one soon, which I eventually did. Later on, I moved in with another guy,
Lars Arvidsson from my home town Göteborg, to an apartment complex named
"Lorimar Villa" at 1310 North Gardner,
located just a few blocks from Sunset Boulevard. This was a pretty nice
apartment-building with a swimming pool just a few steps from our apartment.
Lars worked for the Swedish Trade Commissioner on Wilshire Boulevard on a two-years assignment.
The picture above shows me standing in front of the Capitol Records building at Hollywood and Vine.
I did not meet a lot of Movie Stars but I met one, Steve McQueen on the 
"Whisky a Go Go"
nightclub on Sunset Strip (while Johnny Rivers was playing). After a
short conversation with him I received his autograph.
(Steve McQueen passed away only 50
years old in 1980 after a bout with cancer.) This nightclub was the place
to go to in the mid-sixties. They had small tables where you could put your
drinks and a medium sized dance floor. It was always extremely crowded.
Another favorite of mine was the "Palladium" (6215 Sunset Blvd) with a very large dance floor (Lawrence
Welk's place) and the "Continental Club" near the Capitol Records building
(I don't think it exists anymore). The crowd there was truly continental
with people from South America, France, Spain and many other countries. I
also visited the "Swedish Hollywood Club" many times where Lars was the
Cashier.
I met another famous moviestar once, but that was not in Hollywood - it was in my hometown Göteborg, of all places! In 1958, when I got my first job after high school, I worked on the third floor of "Amerikahuset" (The American Building). It got its name from the tenant on the first floor, The Swedish-American Line, they owned large luxury passenger ships such as Kungsholm and Stockholm. I worked for a paper and pulp export agency named Arthur Sjöholm AB and I used to run arrends among the shipping companies all the time. On one such trip I came back to the office building and was prepared to enter it when this beautiful lady of common courtesy was holding up the door for me. That lady was Ingrid Bergman! We did not exchange any words other than I thanked her for holding up the door and I did not ask for her autograph (I was just taken by surprise). She intended to see her then husband, the theatre director Lars Schmidth, who had an office on the second floor of the building.
Many of us Swedes used to meet at "Anders Little Place" at 1439 N. Highland in Hollywood. Most of these people had film aspirations and one of them, a guy in his 40s, was traveling back and forth between Sweden and Hollywood several times a year during the past unknown number of years, with the hope that he eventually would get a casting role at one of the movie companies. I remember that I was thinking for myself, "what a waste of time and money!" I believe that most people meeting there had unrealistic hopes about their chances in the film industry. But on the other hand, if that is your life's dream - go for it! At other times we met at "Cafe' de Paris" not far from there and it was basically the same crowd. The closest I ever got into that kind of ambition was to apply for a job at Columbia Pictures, but in the accounting department of their credit union. I did not get it because I had no background in accounting whatsoever. The latter is an interesting observation, by the way. When I got the job at StenoCord Corporation (see below), I responded for their need of a Carpenter, and I had no experience of that either! But instead, I ended up as the assistant to the Advertising Manager. I noticed that some people are willing to take chances like that, which is uncommon in Europe. The drawback is, of course, if you hire someone you may risk a poor performance and dissatisfaction with the job done (unless the guy learns quickly while on the job).
I thought I had a very good job at a company
called the "StenoCord Corporation" (see picture to the right) located at
Beverly and Vermont
(3755 Beverly
Blvd)
in Hollywood, well, closer to L.A. This was the U.S. headquarters
for a company that imported, marketed and serviced German made dictation
systems, actually they were third in size after Dictaphone and IBM. I was
the assistant to the Advertising Manager and in charge of the mail room and
I learned a lot. In August that year, the switchboard operator at the main
entrance downstairs locked the entrance doors since we heard on the radio
that there was a huge riot down at the Watts district, not many miles from
our office. The blacks living in that slum area were rioting and burned
buildings so the L.A. Police and the National Guard were down there trying
to put an end to the riots. There were all kinds of rumors circulating then
so we thought it would be safer to lock the doors.
The President of the StenoCord Corporation, I learned later, was Swedish, Lennart Appelqvist. He was an easy-going fellow and loved the convenience of the Southern California climate compared to Stockholm. I remember that some employees felt uneasy when we, at rare occasions, talked Swedish only. However, the military had a draft board at the time and I was eligible for service, which I did not think was fair because I had already finished my compulsory military service in Sweden 3 years before in the army at the I4 regement in Linköping. The Vietnam war was going on at that time so I had to make up my mind whether it was possible to stay in L.A. I stayed almost one year in the Hollywood area before I decided to return to Sweden, which I did just a few days before I was supposed to show up at a local military registration station, and God knows what would have happened then. I left in a rush, I remember I called my girlfriend at the time, Ofelia Otero (originally from Ecuador) from the Hollywood Greyhound bus station and said good-bye, she was crying and had expected me to come over that evening as she had baked a cake for a reason I don't remember. I never saw her again. The greyhound bus eventually took me to Montreal, Canada where I boarded a ship destined for Göteborg, Sweden.
I returned home to Sweden on a ship from Montreal and arrived via Liverpool, England, in Gothenburg, Sweden a few days before Christmas 1965. My parents picked me up at the harbor. The journey across the Atlantic was quite an experience. There was some stormy weather with the ship heavily rolling from one side to the other. The Atlantic and the North Sea is far from calm in December. In bed at night I was listening to the sounds from the storms and I quietly wondered how far the ship would roll over on each side. While rolling, I heard a squeeking sound, escalating until the ship stabilized and started to roll on to the other side. I thought that we were very close to completely roll over, and that kept me awake. Luckily it did not completely turn over.
As the only passenger on board, I was singled out by the Steward because he wanted to have someone to talk to in his loneliness over a bottle of beer. I remember that the Steward was a heavy smoker and story-teller as well with an unlimited memory bank filled with his experiences over a life-time on the seven seas, but it was difficult to endure the clouds of smoke in that small cabin. And since the trip took about 3-4 weeks, we consumed quite a bit of beer to the extent that the Captain wondered where "all the beer went?". This together with the rolling ship sometimes made the trip less than convenient. Every day I dined with the Captain and the Chief Machinist. They had rather good "husmanskost" but they were rather stiff, did not converse much. I guess it had to do with the age difference and the fact that they seldom had passengers on the ship (there was only space enough for one passenger at a time).
Sweden today is a far different country compared to the one the 19th century emigrant left. After World War II a war-torned Europe were screaming after Swedish products and many multinational industries had been formed in earlier years (many based on Swedish inventions) with their growth accelerating after the war bringing prosperity to the country. Emigration has almost ceased to exist although there are always adventuresome people (like myself) that want to test their wings somewhere else and for different reasons than a century ago. I left Sweden in 1964, not because of economic necessity but because of the desire to experience adventure and new horizons at a young age.
My family and I have now been living in the U.S. for many years and we have no plans to move somewhere else. But Sweden will, of course, always have a place in our hearts.
The SAS airplane ticket to the USA,
March 13, 1964.
The ticket home to Sweden, November
20, 1965.
(Arrived in Göteborg, December 22, 1964)
This web-page was last updated: 12/13/96
By Bengt Lindeblad., summer 1996
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