Mari‑Ann Kind Jackson: [0:25] This is an interview for the Nordic American Voices Oral History Project at the Nordic Heritage Museum. Today is October 9th, 2010, and we are interviewing Einar Pedersen. We are in the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle, Washington. My name is Mari‑Ann Kind Jackson and the main interviewer is Gordon Strand.

Gordon Strand [0:35] would you please state your full name, when you were born and where, and then tell us your life story?

Einar Pedersen: [0:37] Now?

Mari‑Ann: [0:38] Now.

Einar: [1:07] I was born in 1939 in Seattle, at Swedish Hospital. I was raised in Ballard and worked in Ballard till I was about 30 years old. My parents lived in Ballard at that time and it was very convenient, everything was real convenient. [1:37] We'll start with my heritage. My father came from Northern Norway, 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, a tough place. I've been back there several times since and it's beautiful in the summertime, but it's a little tough to make money. It was a fishing community, built around codfish of course.

[2:14] My dad and his family moved to this country in the late twenties. His father came first and worked in the fishing business for a few years, and then sent for the family. Grandma then came over with the boys and the daughter, so there were five children and my grandma that came across, to Canada actually, and then entered the US at the Canadian border.

[3:00] My mother came from near Bergen, this is a good story. Well, let's say there were 10 kids in the family plus my grandma and grandpa. They came over in the twenties, but my grandfather was over here logging for several years and he went back a few times. Finally he went back and got the family. So, it was grandma and grandpa and 10 kids coming over.

[3:16] They actually had two more kids when they came here. They had enough money to buy a farm, out in Kent, and that's where they lived until they passed away quite a few years ago.

Gordon: [3:21] Einar, could you give us the names of your family, so we have them on the record?

Einar: [3:47] Sure. Let's start with my dad's side. My dad's father was Reinholdt and my grandmother was Ingeborg. Then the boys were Roald, Chris, Paul and Ludvik, and the daughter was Ronaug. Those would be my aunts and uncles. [4:32] I don't know if I can remember them all on my mother's side, but my grandma's name was Oleana [Sortun], and my grandfather was Martin [Sortun]. Then we start with my mother Herbjorg, and her twin sister Hulda. Then I'm going to have trouble keeping them all in order, but there was Clara, and Tordis, and Magnild, and Chellaug, and the boys were Henrik and Alfred. I think I missed a couple but that's OK.

[5:24] We have a family picnic on the Sortun side, the last name was Sortun, and of all the cousins, there's 35 first cousins, but some of them have passed away, but the cousins are the main attendees of this summer picnic. It's interesting that Einar is the most popular name at that picnic, so the heritage goes on in the family. I myself have a son named Einar and a grandson named Einar.

[5:27] Now I kind of forget where we are.

Gordon: [5:31] You were talking about your dad and what he did.

Einar: [5:34] Let's go back to...

Gordon: [5:37] To your dad.

Einar: [6:06] To my dad. Oh yeah. My mother's side, they came across Canada also, Halifax and across on the train to Vancouver and then to Seattle. But they all had a place to go, my mother's side were in Kent, my father's side was in Ballard. [6:47] My mother, she got some jobs being a nanny and I think she worked in that field for quite a few years, four or five years, before she met my dad. She was just on the border, I think she was about 14 or 15, and that was borderline, you didn't enter school at that age. Maybe a couple of years younger you would have entered school, but she didn't go to any public school. In the end she was well‑read and a smart lady.

[7:25] And my dad's side, they had a house, I think it was in Fremont, they bought a house and they had moved several times. My dad got a job right away in the fishing business, naturally. He was a tough nut, he was very capable of doing a lot of things, usually they were physical. He's a don't‑get‑in‑my‑way type guy.

[7:56] Right away he bought a half of a fishing boat. Well, he was here for three or four years and it was basically halibut fishing at that time, there wasn't much else going on, either halibut fish and tuna fish. But he bought a half of a boat and that was his start in America.

In 1939 he built a fishing boat [FV Susan], Sagstad Shipyard in Ballard. It was a 60 foot, wood, halibut boat, only the pilot house was in front, not in the back like the old schooners. He had that boat until he decided he had enough going on, so he built another boat in 1946.

[8:58] That was a bit of a tragedy, it was a tragedy, because the boat was built by Hansen Shipyard in Ballard and it only fished for about a year and then it rolled over off of Vancouver Island. One person was lost and I think there were seven or eight on the boat and the rest of them were saved.

[9:28] What they did with that boat was different than anybody else had tried before. They actually went out and dragged on the ground and got all sorts of different species of fish, whether it was codfish or some kind of a sole. They actually hand‑filleted this stuff, and put it in cartons, and put it in the freezer, and then came in and sold it.

[9:45] So, that was my dad's idea of modernizing the fishing fleet, so he was always trying to be ahead of the game. It was a tragic loss, so he had to go back and work on his first boat, the Susan.

[10:29] He did that until the crab business started. We started crabbing, I think it was '65, yeah, around '65. That was around Kodiak Island, we didn't go very far, we just fished around Kodiak Island, kind of a day boat. We didn't even have a live tank to put the fish in. But that was our first time in the crab business.

[10:52] Moving down, in '67 he built his first crab boat. It was one of the first crab boats built from scratch, a steel boat with all of the things that you needed to keep the crabs alive in the tank.

[11:31] From '67 to '79 he was either in a partnership or built by himself, I think it was eight steel boats, all of them built in the Northwest. A few built at Marco and a few built in Tacoma, there were three or four of them built in Tacoma. That was kind of the rush to get boats built in that era.

[11:58] Eventually the crabbing ran into trouble when the amount of resources out there was less than when they started. So they had to convert most of them‑‑no, not most of them. But two are natural crab boats today. All the rest of them were either sold or converted into trawlers.

[12:22] Trawling, the biggest volume of fish is in pollock. Pollock is a very plentiful fish out there. That's what all these big factory trawlers are all about today. They're out there fishing pollock.

[12:56] Then he had an opportunity to buy an old naval tanker in Hawaii with some partners. They built one of the first factory trawlers that actually catches and sends the fish through a factory line, and it comes out either a fillet, and then you've got your fishmeal, and you've got maybe some oil, and you've got some roe.

[13:35] It was built in Seattle, here, by Wright Schuchart. There weren't any other‑‑well, yeah, there was one other boat built for pollock in Seattle. All the rest of them were built in Europe someplace, either Norway or Germany. Anyhow, that was the start of the pollock fishing.

In 1979‑‑no, it was 1989‑‑we built, or we bought, the largest factory ship in the world. There were four or five partners that bought it. We bought a big ship and then converted it into a factory ship. That was..we had to capitalize at about 50‑60 million dollars to do that. It's still with us today processing pollock. All it does is process pollock. We have about‑‑collectively, our friends and partners in this thing—we have 10 boats that actually fish for it today.

[14:49] To complete that situation, we... I'm kind of getting away from it, but there's only... We added another factory ship just this last year. Not new, but used and then spruced it up a little bit. Used it for a factory ship.

[15:32] Going back to my mother's side, during those years I think the thing to do for the people who came from Norway was to hit the dance hall every chance they could possibly get. They're still pretty lively today, all the Norwegians. I can remember my mother telling me this story about they used to go to this dance hall, and then this dance hall, and this dance hall. There was no way you couldn't run into people. You had to run into people.

[16:05] But the initial contact with my mother and father was on the ski hill up at Snoqualmie Pass. I think, the way the story is told, is my father ran into my mother and knocked her down. That was the start of the relationship. Where they met again was in one of these dance halls. Then they found out that they got along and liked each other, and they got married. I can't remember the year they got married, but they got married.

[16:30] Siblings, my older sister [Susan Pedersen Hanson] plays a big part in the museum here. Then my brother [Mark Hansen] died of cancer at 40, and my younger sister died in 2000. I can't remember her age. Both of them got nipped by cancer.

[17:28] When I was 21 years old, I was up fishing crab with my father on the Susan in Kodiak. He was a member of the American Advisory Committee for Fisheries. So we had to quit a little early and come down for Christmas‑‑this was in December. So we came down around the 12th to 15th of December. I had a choice at that time to run the boat and probably become a fisherman forever. But then I said, "Ah, well, I need a break," because I had just gotten out of the Coast Guard.

My mother told me about this little sporting goods store for sale in Ballard called, "Dahlsbo Sport Shop." When I came down, I had some money, and I went down and talked to Haakon Dahlsbo and [17:57] and said, "I understand you're selling your store?" He says, "Yeah." I said, "How much?" He said, "Oh, just the inventory." I said, "What do you think the inventory is?" He says, "About $10,000." I said, "Yeah, we just set it at $10,000. I'll be back and pick it up."

[19:17] So I went back up fishing crab after Christmas, and had a few more dollars, and I came down. I bought this store in Ballard. It was on Ballard Avenue, the first triangle going on the southwest corner. Very small, old store. It didn't have much for inventory. But the interesting part, it had the HEAD ski franchise. Now, HEAD skis in those days, that was it. If you didn't have the HEAD ski franchise, you weren't a serious ski shop. It actually had a sign that they gave all their dealers, and it said, "HEAD Ski Shop, the Serious Ski Shop." That was kind of their logo.

[19:46] So it didn't have much inventory‑‑it had some baseball stuff there, it wasn't even up to snuff. We had some fishing gear and things like that. I was interested in that ski line, the HEAD ski line. Then there was another line of skis called the Hart ski line. He had that, too. So that was kind of a bonus to have both of those.

[20:21] As I say, I purchased the store... actually, I think I was 21 or 22 years old. Ran it for a couple, two, three years, right in that spot there. Actually, there wasn't much going on in the summer, so in the summer I would go fishing to supplement the little income that I made in the retail store.

[20:53] But then I moved the retail store twice. I moved it back on to 56th, and then I moved it to Market Street. Where there was a Scandinavian gift shop there, but now I don't think it's anything. I think it was a restaurant, and then they went out... Anyhow, the chalet type front, that's something I put on that years and years ago.

[21:38] So I want to talk about the side of my life that I don't have today, and that's the sporting goods business. It started in Ballard. During each summer, I went fishing to complement my income to stay alive in the sporting goods business. I had expanded every year with more inventory, and the right kind of inventory.

[22:06] First of all, let's talk about where I was born and raised, where I lived, before that. Because it all kind of ties together. Born and raised, I said, in Ballard. I went to the University of Washington. Then I went in the Coast Guard. Out of the Coast Guard, I went crab fishing. Then came home and bought this store.

[22:42] Well, that store‑‑it was a pretty good store. We didn't make much money there. All of a sudden I had the opportunity to buy a store up in Lynnwood. So I bought that store. At the same time, I took in a partner. His name was Monty Johnston. He went to high school with me, and he was kind of a skiing nut just like me. So he ran that store, and then I ran this store, and he ran the operation when I was gone, when I went fishing.

[23:11] I had a lot of fun fishing. I was halibut fishing a few years, and I was always salmon fishing on the coast, or up in the islands with my dad. It was kind of a break to get away from some boring place like a ski shop in the summertime. So my summers were well‑spent, and my winters were well‑spent working in a retail store.

[23:51] We bought another retail operation in Bellevue. Found out there was a heck of a lot more business in Bellevue than there was in either Ballard or Lynnwood. So we went and purchased some land and bought a building in Overlake. I got to remember which one was next. So then I built that and then I had two stores in Bellevue. One in downtown Bellevue and one in Overlake, and one in Lynwood.

[24:27] But we bought some ground in Lynwood and built a building. That was actually a few years before we were in Bellevue or got to Bellevue. And it was a very good store. Kind of woodsy and a good location on 196th. Then built another store down on Federal Way. Bought the land. Didn't pay for the land. Bought the land and created a store.

[25:10] Then I created a store in Lakewood down in South Tacoma. And then bought the land and built a store in Tacoma. That was probably about 1995 or something like that. It would probably be more like '94 or '93. And then also about the same time in 1990, we built a very large store in Bellevue. I bought the land and built the store.

[25:45] So at the height of Olympic Sports, we had 450 employees. We were selling... Oh, wait a minute, I forgot one. And then Northgate. There was a gentleman who had a ski shop in North Gate, his name was John Saulburg. I got to guess at the year that we bought or merged him into the operation, and that was probably about '85, 1985.

[26:22] Then we were capable of buying the property that the store was on and that was like three acres of land or something like that. But at the height of the operation, we were selling 25,000 pairs of skis, and 25,000 pairs of poles, and 25,000 pairs of boots and 25,000 pairs of this and that. Probably 100,000 goggles and 75,000 gloves. We were really doing pretty good.

[26:51] In '95 I had open heart surgery. I did not have a heart attack but I had open heart surgery. And I said, "I have to slow down." I've been kind of on the treadmill here going a little too fast, not taking care of myself. So in the hospital I decided that I would either try and sell or close down some of those stores that I had just built.

[27:20] Selling them wasn't so easy because the competitors coming into town were some big, big, big, big Wall Street money and some big stores. A very competitive situation that didn't find room for a sale that was of a value to me. So I started closing them down while I was in the hospital. And said, "This is the direction we're going to go in."

[27:45] Well, we got down to thinking about keeping two stores. And then I got down to, I said, "The heck with it, I'm just going to have this one store in Northgate, and I'm going to sell the store to my managers, a couple of managers that wanted it real bad."

[28:01] So I kind of sold it, gave it away to them. They did well for three or four years, but then finally there was a no snow year. And they were getting older and they couldn't keep up. So they had to close the whole thing down.

[28:41] Well, that's the story on that side. Can we stop for a second? I'd like to go and talk about the fishing and the way it evolved. As I said, I think from '67 to '79, we were connected with partnerships that built eight crab boats, eight steel crab boats.

[29:11] Now during the early... Let's see, it would be in the late '60s we built a family boat called the Mark I, named after my brother. And then one of the first partners we had was Harold Rice. And that boat that we built was built in Tacoma. Kind of comical.

[29:59] I was working both for the retail operation and helping my dad all the time in every aspect of the work on the boat. Except I wouldn't go fishing in the wintertime because that was a conflict of interests when I came to... I had to sell some skis in the wintertime. So I can remember early on, the boats were built, and then the banks, there were some problems. This wasn't the biggest problem.

[30:25] But there were some problems in making their payments because they didn't understand the business. But that was really early on in the crab business. See, the crab business moved from Kodiak out west to Dutch Harbor and then throughout the Bering Sea. And they had never tested or fished the Bering Sea before that time, so they didn't know what was available out there.

[30:47] And when they got done with the direct winter fishing around Dutch Harbor, they kind of quit and came down. During some of those years that wasn't quite enough money to pay for the mortgage commitment. And so they'd have problems with that. And this one boat, I remember with my father and I and a partner.

[31:09] The partner went to the bank, because my dad wanted to handle it by himself. Just get a restructured loan or something. The banker told my dad's partner to just lay the keys on the table because he couldn't make the payments.

[31:24] So that was an interesting time. So my dad says, "Come on. You got to come downtown with me. We got to go down and talk to this banker." But all the banker said was, "Well, do you think the guy's got enough guts to make it?" And my dad says, "Oh yeah, he's got enough guts to make it."

[31:53] Well, then they extended the loan and everything was just fine. But early on there was another case where, and I don't want to mention names here, but there was another partner that was trying to build a vessel. And he said, "Well, I'm going to try and do this by myself. I think I can do it by myself."

[32:31] Well, he went to the bank and the bank turned him away. They said, "No. No deal. We're not loaning you any money." Then the guy came up and asked my dad if he would join him in this partnership so he could get this boat built. And he said, "I'm having trouble with the financing." So my dad says, "Come on. We got to go downtown and talk to these bankers." And the banker said, "Well you think they've got enough guts to make it?"

[32:57] And sure enough my dad says, "Yeah, they'll make it. They'll make it. I'll stand behind it." The guy says, "OK, you got a deal." [laughs] So in a couple of cases he was maybe 10 or 15 years older than these other guys and so they had smooth sailing with him in front, otherwise they wouldn't have what they have today.

[33:44] He's helped a lot of people out. Kind of fun. We quit building the crab boats in '79. And in the early '80s the crab business started getting poorer and poorer because... the biologists still don't know what happened. But we had to do something else. A lot of people, including us, had to take their crab boats and spend a lot of money on them and make them into trawlers and then get a market for this stuff called pollock.

[34:14] In 1976 was when the Magnuson‑Stevens Act was voted on and passed. And that means that the US was in charge and all the countries were in charge of 200 miles away from their shores. So all this fish that the Russians, and Japanese, and the Poles, and everybody else had been fishing up there, all of a sudden now is under American jurisdiction.

[34:33] And the pollock is a big number. There's a lot of pollock up there. The Japanese, first of all, they fished it by themselves. As long as the Americans were building these boats and capable, they had to turn the fishing over to the Americans.

[34:49] Eventually the processing turned over to the Americans too. So the movement to pollock and then alongside that codfish, was a good move because we're still in that business today.

[35:48] And the move out of crab was just right because the crab business has shrunk a lot since 1979‑80. It was actually two years that a season didn't open for red crab, and that was tough on the crabbers. But in this march to try and get different markets for pollock, we decided that we would join hands with these other guys that know how to run processing ships‑‑we didn't, we just know how to run catcher boats‑‑and build a processor.

[36:20] We had two family boats at that time, one called the Vesterålen, which is named after the area that my dad came from in Norway. Nobody had a better name, and everybody put a name in a hat, and no matter what name they drew it was going to be the Vesterålen because I wanted my dad to have the name with his choice.

[36:58] As I was saying, we had two family boats, and one was the Vesterålen, one was the Mark I. We had to refit them out with trawling gear, and that's a pretty expensive operation to try and take a true crab boat and move it into a trawler.

You have to have buy[37:20] winches and you're going to have more hydraulic piping, and a bunch of nets. And then you've got to train people because they don't know how to... the fishing is different, but smart fisherman can pick it up pretty quick. Then you've got all this electronic gear that finds all the fish, it tells you when the net's full, and all that stuff.

[37:49] We could have marketed it to somebody who has got a dock and is on the shore, a plant like Trident, or New England Fish, or Alyeska, or Westward, or something like that, but we chose to try and build our own processing ship.

[38:42] Our partners were partners in this ship called the Arctic Storm that was built in Seattle. I remember going to them and saying, "Well, we'd like to be a part of a processing ship." I was thinking of something in the neighborhood of 400 or 500 feet, something to use, I don't know where they would get it. The partner, Dave Galloway, probably in the 1980s sometime, he said, "We're already working on it." Well I said, "Show me what you're working on."

[coughs]

[38:45] Excuse me.

[39:41] He brings out these plans of this old ship that was built in '67 I think. It was converted into a container ship but it hauled raw cargo before that. Actually, the name of the boat was President Kennedy, from the President lines. So he says, "Look at this," and I looked at it and I said, "Boy, that looks pretty big." He says, "Yeah, it's 685 feet long and it's the largest processing ship, by a long shot, in the world." I said, "Well, it looks good."

[40:15] So, we got five or six other partners to put money into it, and we had to work with a Norwegian bank, and the end result was we had about a 50 or 60 million dollar loan on that boat, and that was our big processor. It's still working today and it's working pretty good.

[40:55] What happens is that we have a big, huge, cargo hold and it's mostly frozen. We can go out in the season with six or seven boats, catcher boats, fishing, we can move around the ocean until the holds are filled up. When the holds are filled up it's like 10 million pounds of frozen product, and that 10 million pounds comes into harbor, and it takes them four or five days to offload, and then they go out again.

[41:42] It makes that type of fishing a lot easier than it is to be working for a shore plant, on a dock, because you can move around the ocean. Sometimes you have to go out four or five days from Dutch Harbor north, and that run, if you were fishing for a shore plant, that run would be four or five days out and four or five days back. That's just way too much fuel and too hard on the equipment. So, it's been really, very successful, I would say.

[42:22] Then just recently we purchased, that company purchased or merged with another company, with a ship called the Excellence. That's a big ship, it's 365 feet long, and it also processes. They call them motherships versus a factory trawler. A factory trawler is one that catches, and processes, and sells its own fish. A mothership receives fish from other boats on the high seas. So, it's an interesting concept but as I say, it's been very good.

[42:47] When we come into town we've got a lot of product on, as I said. What we make is‑‑because this is really all pollock, we catch a few salmon we're not supposed to catch and boy they keep track of our numbers.

[43:21] By the way, the fish that we catch is all viewed by observers. We don't have them on the catcher boats because we don't need them there, but we have them on the mothership because the fish go up a stern ramp and go on into the factory. They can check every fish as it goes by them. I think we have two or three observers on the ship because it's a 24‑hour operation, it never stops, until they can't find fish and then they run around the ocean and try and find some more fish.

[44:11] Anyhow, the product that we have, we make this pollock into, in this situation, we head and gut it. There are several things we do here, we head and gut it and then we sell it to China, or we send it to China, and it's frozen. They reprocess it, they take it out, and take the fillets and make fillets out of it, and then it's sold to McDonald's of Japan. So, McDonald's of Japan is a pretty big market for us. The McDonald's of America is a big market but we just don't need it, we're satisfied with our market with McDonald's of Japan.

[44:56] Other things that we make are fish meal, and that is sold to China. There's a lot of fish meal because you have a recovery of say 25 or 30 percent in the flesh and then what's the rest of it? It's all ground up and cooked into meal. That goes to China, or Indonesia, for food for eel farms mainly. We get a fairly good price for it, it's something that's really good.

[45:45] We also make, the biggest food source that we make is surimi. Surimi is something that you take the pollock, and you skin it, and try and get all the dark material out, and then you run it through these screw presses. You just run it through these screw presses three or four times, or something like that, until that meat is just white, there's no darkness to it. And then you add some sugar and sorbitol and put it in a... It's kind of like a mincemeat.

[46:08] It's then sold to Japan for fake crab, and shrimp, and anything else. So it could be used as a protein filler because it really doesn't have much fish flavor left, it's just a filler at that time.

[46:35] Them we make some fish oil, and that's about it. All these things, like the fish meal takes up a lot of room for storage, so we're capable of handling a lot of material.

Gordon: [46:41] So, how big a crew on this boat, on your processor?

Einar: [47:10] Yeah, the crew side. Let me just say, in the winter, that's a season that there's roe. The roe is kind of a gift you get, it's a lot of money, there's a lot of money in roe. The Japanese buy it, some Koreans, but it's not a European thing at all.

Transcription by CastingWords

Part Two

Einar: [0:02] Another fishery that we have is a smaller fishery. It's not even 10 percent of our operations. It's the Hick Fishery off the coast called Pacific Whiting. That is another situation where we head it, gut it and we'll make some of it into surimi . Our market for that is in Europe, the eastern European countries. I don't know what they use it for. It's not much of a fish. We get fish meal, fish oil, and surimi[0:28 and headed and gutted fish. They might just put it in a soup pot. I'm not sure what they do. It's cheap. Cheap, cheap, cheap.

[1:06] The number of people on a big ship like that, normally these factory trawlers around here, they have about 100 or 115 people on board. This thing is so big that we have to have 215 people on board. If you could imagine, it doesn't have a galley actually built for that many people. So, I think they eat in five shifts or something like that.

[1:38] It's a real monumental task to get that thing going. It's very interesting. We kind of crossed our fingers and said, "Will it work?” Yeah, it worked.

[1:51] The ship was actually purchased from an American company and then we sent it to Norway in Rollo. It was a gentleman there named Gunner Carlson with a shipyard and they were creating some subsidies, so if you brought it in, it actually didn't cost you the amount of money that... They got some money from the government for doing the job, just keeping people employed.

[2:27] And then, we finished it off in Portland when it came over here. It's got to be hauled every two to three years. We use one of the big yards just locally here.

[2:46] But we used to fill that ship up and then drive it to Japan ourselves and offload it. That became a little more difficult in time because once we got to the fall, some of those people would be missing Thanksgiving and bumping up against Christmas in order to get that ship all the way back here.

[3:14] After they go over spend 10 or 15 days offloading or something like that and then bring it back, it became too big off a project. So, now we ship it all. That was an interesting concept. We did that for about four or five years.

[3:35] Then he went to Hawaii. He called me every other day or so and he asked me if I had found a place to build the boat. [laughs] "You got a place to build a boat?"

Gordon: [3:44] Let's talk about that, about your dad, his character, this larger than life person.

Einar: [3:50] Yeah. He's larger than life.

Interviewer: [3:52] Did you want to do that and then move to your mom?

Einar: [3:53] Yeah. I'll do that first. I'd like to talk a little bit about my dad and his character. [4:10] During the height of the crab business, a little bit earlier than that, he saw the opportunity to build another crab boat. The shipyards in the northwest were pretty much filled up with what they were doing, building crab boats.

[4:37] It was hard to find one like Marco or the local guys who build good boats, so he didn't have to babysit them. They'd build it for you in the right way. But sometimes, he would say, "Well, we've got to build another boat." I'd say, "It's really hard to find a place to build a boat. Everyone seems to be really busy."

[5:05] And then, he'd go to Hawaii. He'd call me, I don't know, once a week and ask me if I had found a place to build a crab boat. Finally, I did find a place in Tacoma. They were kind of an upstart and it created a little bit of problems for us in the building side, but we did get it built. He was just happier than a clam to get that boat built.

[5:33] He had visions all the time. He was the one who pushed all these guys. In fact, I was in Norway last year or the year before. I was in Karmoy. There was this gentleman I was talking to there, a Norwegian. He had lived in Ballard, also. He's got a home in Karmoy also.

[5:58] And he says, "Yeah. I remember your dad." He says, "We were in a bar in Ballard, on Ballard Avenue." And he said, "He asked me if I wanted to build a crab boat with him." [laughs] So, he was kind of always out there selling himself in some way, trying to find partners to build boats with him. [laughs]

[6:21] I'm going to talk about my mother [Herbjorg Sortun Pedersen] a little bit. She was a sweetie. She lived a long life. My grandparents lived until they were 95, 96 and my mother lived until she was 95. She had to put up with a lot of stuff. First of all, she had to put up with two boys. Her daughters were pretty good, but the boys...

[6:58] We'd come in and we'd raid the refrigerator and there wasn't anything left after we got done with it. And if it was something good, like cakes or something like that, they'd just disappear. Oftentimes in the kitchen, she'd have to come after us with a broom to get our fingers out of the bowl.

[7:23] I can remember my brother had ice cream. Ice cream didn't last very long. The gallon of ice cream in there, it wouldn't be a gallon of ice cream in there. He'd have it down in ten minutes. It'd be all gone and she'd come and ask where the ice cream went. Well, she knew where the ice cream went.

[7:47] She was a real sweetie. But for coming from Norway, and with not much of an education. But she was a reader. She was a reader all the time. She always liked school, and she told us, when I was young... I liked school, and she said, "I was ahead of everybody else, as far as reading and everything else."

[8:19] My dad was gone most of the time so she had to raise the kids, and she did a pretty good job of that. Then her interest went to the hospital - the Ballard Hospital and art. She loved art.

[8:38] For years there, I can remember that she was kind of in charge of the art gallery down at the hospital down there. I couldn't figure out how she had enough time to do all that and take care of that big house out there on Golden Gardens Drive. But she did. She did a great job of it, no question about it.

[9:04] She was also interested in, of course, the museum. The museum... I'd always go down and visit her and she'd tell me how the things were going at the museum, and what she did in the Norwegian room, or what she did with this and that.

[9:21] My dad as a real supporter of the museum. He was more in the archive thing, trying to round up stuff for the different rooms like the fishing room and the Norwegian room or some other room.

[9:40] They introduced us to the museum. We've been patrons of the museum ever since. My sister and I. We do a pretty good job.

Gordon: [9:57] What sort of Norwegian traditions did you grow up with that stand out in your mind?

Einar: [10:07] That's interesting. A very large family on my mother's side. I had 35 first cousins. They're not all living today, but... At Christmas they still have a lutefisk dinner. You either get lutefisk or codfish with lefse. You get peas and butter. Just put a lot of butter on the lefse with the peas and potatoes and lutefisk. It was pretty good. [11:04] My dad's side of the family, it was religious. We spent every Christmas Eve out at camp with my mother's parents until they got too old, and then the cousins are doing it now. My uncle's doing it, too. They're still having that Christmas Eve.

[11:28] The attendance today is probably in the neighborhood of 100. It never goes down. Of course, there's so many doggone many people in family, they should be able to get that many people there. They did a great job.

Gordon: [11:45] Is that Henrik?

Einar: [11:47] Henrik. That's the second most popular name at the summer picnic, is Henrik. Henrik and Einar's the most popular. It's kind of neat.

Mari-Ann: [12:04] Talk a little bit about your home place in Burr in Vesteralen.

Einar: [12:17] The first time I went back to Norway was with my parents in 1960. We spent a month in Europe, along with two or three weeks in Norway. That's about right. I think we spent two and a half months over there. That was really close to after the war, and Norway's so much different today than it was back in those days. But Vesteralen [12:43] 21] , it was... My dad at that time, I remember distinctly he still had people that he knew other than relatives back there like school chums and other people. My recollection of it was that all we did was go from house to house and all we did was eat.

[13:25] You'd be mistaken, because you didn't ask as to what meal this was. Because it could look like breakfast or lunch or dinner. It kind of all got scrambled together. In other words, you wouldn't know during the middle of the day whether they were putting out dinner or just a kind of a lunch.

[13:50] But you'd better watch out, because around noon or one o'clock, they'd lay out some food and then by six o'clock at night they'd have another big spread. I'll tell you, they were really welcoming people, a lot of fun.

[14:12] My wife and I, we go back to Norway maybe once every three years or something like that, and we enjoy going up to northern Norway. A lot of people say, "Well, what are you going up there for?"

[14:25] I say, "Well, I kind of like it up there."

[14:29] We still have relatives up there. Not so many anymore, but we still have relatives up there. And my mother's homestead down near Bergen is still there. We don't have any ownership in it or anything, but it's always fun to go by and see where she was raised so you could connect with the stories that she told us when she was young.

[15:10] I always got a kick out of my mother's stories because they were kind of foreign. Unique to Norway and not unique to America. And so, it was always kind of fun to listen to her stories. I don't have...

Mari-Ann: [15:35] We neglected to ask you, what year were you born?

Einar: [15:43] '39.

Mari-Ann: [15:44] 1939.

Einar: [15:45] Yeah.

Mari-Ann: [15:46] OK.

Einar: [15:50] There were a lot of things going on, because the fishing vessel Susan, which was named after my sister, was built in '39.