I was born in Malmo, Sweden on May 17,1908 and Baptized on May 20th. My father was Oscar Hakvin Lindgren, and my mother was Ida Natalia Malmberg Lindgren, they were married in 1907. They were born and grew up in Malmo, Sweden. My brother, Oscar, was also born in Malmo in 1910. My father was the third of four boys and three girls on my paternal side and my mother was the oldest of nine children on her side of the family. Two of the children died shortly after they were born.
My mother told me long ago that my dad's family looked down on the Malmbergs who teamsters and part of a freight haulers' group were. (Note: According to my mother the team of horses were the apple of her father's eye.) My father's parents believed that they were in a higher social class then my mother's family and this led to some problems for the new family when my parents married. My father's family operated a cabinet building factory. All my father's brothers worked in the family factory.
Dad and his brothers were very active in athletics, field sports such as running, high jumping, pole vaulting, and in wrestling. In later years, I learned that my uncle, the youngest Lindgren, became the armature wrestling champion of Sweden in the middleweight classification.
My father decided he wanted to be a bricklayer, a mason, and he went through the apprenticeship program and qualified as a bricklayer. I believe he was a rebel on his family tree. My father belonged to the Socialist Party in Sweden, and my belief is that the rest of my father's family were members of a more conservative political branch in Sweden.
I have always been proud to claim Sweden as the place where I was born and the United States where my family and I became citizens in the 1920's. My mother and father never revisited Sweden, but brother Art, sister Ida and I visited Sweden and Europe several years after World War II. I have read several books about Sweden. It is the fourth largest country in Europe in area, and the only larger countries are Russia, France and Spain. Sweden does not rank nearly as high when you consider population, Sweden is further down the list. Northern Sweden is within the Arctic Circle which is largely occupied by Laplanders. These people, some of archeologists believe, are related to the American Indians. Malmo the city was the third largest in Sweden, a position it still holds today. The population was approximately 40,000 in 1908. (Note: Norway was a part of Sweden and did not become an independent country until June 7, 1905, when Haakon VII was crowned King. Prior to 1905, Norway was under Denmark until 1814 when the country entered a union with Sweden.)
In the summer of 1965, I drove through Sweden but not very far north of Stockholm and Uppsala. I had landed at Stockholm Airport and stayed with a cousin who lived in Malmo where I was born. I found Sweden a neat, beautiful country with a Socialist Government where no one appeared poor and only a few seemed relatively rich. The country is governed mostly by a Socialist thinking group of officials, and a King and Queen have only minimal powers. This is very similar to the England. Malmo is located at the southern end of Sweden and the south end of the Baltic Sea. It is approximately 30 miles from Copenhagen which is located on the west side of the Oresund Strait that leads from the Baltic Sea to the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean 400 miles away. (Note: Today, the Orsund Bridge connects Copenhagen and Malmo is the second longest bridge in Europe.)
The temperature of Southern Sweden is relatively mild even in the winter months. One reason for the mildness is the Gulf Stream from the Gulf of Mexico flows up the east coast of the U.S., turns east, crossed the Atlantic Ocean and ends near the southern parts of Norway and Sweden. My mother told that me that some winters there was very little ice for skating. Both my mother and father loved to skate and whenever there was ice, they were on the pond. Summer comes early in May, and days are relatively warm for a country located so far north.
But back to early Sweden. It was a very pretty country; the southern part had a larger population of the people. Most of the farms are in this part of Sweden and are about 80 acres. Few farms could support a family; so, the boys usually found work in the towns for at least a part of each year. Each farm family raised their own vegetables. The wives and daughters made the meals, milked the cows and fed the stock. In the years when nature was not kind, families had a tough time. Potatoes and bread were a large part of their diet. Though times were hard the families still had fun. Throughout the winter there were usually parties and dances where they brought some food for the parties. There also seemed to be a few musicians to play for weekend dances.
The Swedish people were also very interested in politics with many different parties represented in the Riksday at Parliament that met in Stockholm where the King and his family resided. In the early 1900 the Socialist Party held the largest number of seats in the Riksday. This party supported the labor unions, and a liberal agenda was the result. The Socialist party ruled the country with very few interruptions until half of the 20th century had expired. They declared that the country would remain neutral during the first world war and second world war that began in the late 1930's. During the 1900 the King had few powers, the Riksday governed with a Primer Minster elected by the Parlement.
Sweden shipped a great deal of lumber to the European countries along with iron ore which was mined in the northern part of the country. The iron ore was excellent quality and in demand particularly during the wars. The country had bad times during both World Wars, but they were better off at the end of the wars then most of the war participants.
My father was a socialist and pacifist all his life and I believe his values forced him to leave Sweden and go to the new world prior to the first World War. He left Sweden and journey to Canada during the middle of 1911, before Sweden declared its neutrality in WWI. There also had been a general strike in Sweden and very little work if any for anyone. Why he selected Canada and Edmonton I never knew, he nor my mother would talk about the reasons, but he went to Winnipeg, Manitoba and from there to Edmonton, Alberta. (The second provenance west of Winnipeg.) Edmonton had become a station for the railroad that crossed Canada in 1905. It was a city of approximately 40,000 people, they were building up the population rapidly and this attracted my father, particularly because he could earn a living for his family as a mason. He loved his work.
After father left for Canada, my mother, Oscar and I stayed in Malmo. I went to live with my father's parents. My grandparents lived in a large apartment complex. Each floor had about eight families. Additionally, each floor also had a toilet area and a bath area, and you took turns when you went to use these facilities. I also can remember the dark furniture in their quarters. The family seemed down, no one laughed very much. I remember one instance where one of my uncles criticized my grandmother when she cooked a special dinner for me because I didn't like the meal served for supper. My uncles and aunts seemed to quarrel a great deal; however, they all seemed to love and take care of me.
Oscar and mother stayed at her family's home in another part of the city in a similar building. Mother went to work in a chocolate factory to support the family. A short time after father left for Canada, mother rented an apartment over a retail store located near the harbor. Oscar and I were with our grandparents only during the day.
My mother's family seemed more cheerful, and they laughed a lot. Mother's father was a happy man and was loved by my grandmother and the children. I never remember hearing from my parents about their early life before they were married. She did tell me a story about one evening when my father along with his brothers and others all went to practice singing, my father loved to sing and belong to a Glee Club. It seems that on this evening my father did not arrive home at the usual time. My mother became worried and with her sister went out looking for father. They found him and his friends coming down the street. They had visited a Swedish version of a bar after singing and drank a little more than necessary. She and her sister stayed on the opposite side of the street as the men slowly headed for home. Their pace was slow because every 100 feet or so they would stop and sing a verse from a song. They would complete the verse from a song and start down the street but only for another 100 feet when they stopped and sing again. There were a couple of policemen watching their progress, but they did not bother them. My mother said he finally arrived home, and they put him to bed.
My father had to find a job and a place to stay before he could send money for us to come to Canada. It was in November of 1912 when my father sent for us, and we headed for Canada. The ship was a small freighter, North Star Lines, that had been converted into a passenger ship to bring immigrants to America. The holds were large, and the spaces were divided for families. The fares were inexpensive, and our share of space was very limited. We left Sweden in the middle of November1912 and arrived in Canada about three or four weeks later. We were supposed to land at Halifax, Nova Scotia but due for excessive ice we could not land, and we continue and debarked at Portland, Maine. From here we went by train to Quebec.
The trip across the Atlantic was very rough. My mother's family and the storekeeper where we lived bade us good-by early one morning. The storekeeper had given Oscar and I a bag of candy before we boarded the ship. The first few days of our trip were pleasant but on the third day we reached the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, and the sailing was rough. The ship was loaded to capacity, and the quarters were very primitive and uncomfortable. I bounced all over. Most of the passenger got very seasick. There were a lot of us, and the smell of sick people was almost overbearing. There were two large bathrooms one for men and one for women. If the bouncing of the ship in the rough sea did not make you sick, the people who were seasick made you sick and if that didn't, the smell from the restrooms sent you to bed. A few passengers died and were buried at sea and the rest of us survived and arrived in the new world in the middle of December 1912.
After getting off the ship we went by train to Quebec. We were very thankful as we set out by train to Edmonton, Alberta approximately 2100 miles away. It took more than a week and was uneventful. I don't remember if there were beds in the railroad cars, but we sat up in our seats during the day and slept in the same seats at night. There was one event out of the ordinary. We stopped at one station where there was a wait time while they put more coal on board for the locomotive. We wander about the town until the train was ready to leave. How it happened, I don't know, but we boarded the wrong train and were going north rather than west. The conductor soon found out we were on the wrong train. He put us off at the next train station and we took the next train back to where we made the mistake. I don't know if we caught our original train or how we got headed toward Edmonton, but we did get back to going west again.
There were Swedish people on the ocean voyage but most of them headed in different directions when we reached Quebec. I don't believe there were any Swedes on the train going west. When the train stopped for fuel, water and to change train personal, my mother would fine the closest grocery store or other store and purchase anything we needed. Food etc., were cheaper to buy at the station than meals on the train. How my mother was able to get the items we needed I will never know. It was at least 6 years later before I thanked my mother for splendid job, well done.
There was only one railroad that ran from the east of Canada to the west, and it had only reached Edmonton in about 1906. I don't know if the tracks had gotten to the Pacific coast by 1912. (Note: The Canadian Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1885. The spur from Winnipeg to Edmonton was completed in 1906, which was the northern most point of the railroad.) There were many tall mountains between Alberta and the west coast and Pacific Ocean. Our trip west in Canada took more than a week and my mother had written my father what our anticipated schedule was to be, but our exact arrival date was very tentative. My father said that he came to the train station for a least a week before we arrived. It was cold happy day when we left the train tired by happy. I don't know the exact date of our arrival in Edmonton, but it was late in December of 1912.
I need to say here, I really didn't recognize at the time the accomplishments of my mother. But later in life when this and other events came to mind; I concluded that my mother was one of the bravest persons I have ever known. Mother was a relatively small women, 5'-3" tall and weighed about 110 pounds. She could not speak or understand the English language and had never been more than 50 miles from home before she started the 7000-mile trip to Canada with two small children under almost impossible conditions.