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 were built in the late 19th century or in the early 20th, fairly large structures with the first floor erected in cement and the two stories on top were 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 noices on the streets was 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 receiptionist 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.
Elim Lutheran Church, Scandia, Minnesota
Established in 1854; built in 1930. 3rd oldest Lutheran congregation in Minnesota.
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 in to this
apartment building at
2504 Lyndale Avenue
South (right). Picture taken 1980.
Through a private employment agency (fee-based) I found work in downtown Minneapolis (left) 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 4:th 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.
This picture of downtown Minneapolis is
from 1964.
Up on the combine in shorts, visiting a friend's farm in
Dawson, Minnesota
(1964).
The same apartment building in 1964.
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. 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 Nasville 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:
Ron & Loren Ladwig, Leroy, Frank & Gary Yanish, Jerry Taylor, Ronnie, Norm Ponsford, Russ Rundblade, and Dwight Flemming, the first guy I saw that had managed to buy the brand new Ford Mustang from money he had earned in an insurance settlement after a traffic accident. Dwight had a steel-plate in his head as a result from the accident.
Most of my friends were from
Annandale some 50 miles from Minneapolis. We went there several times. On the 4th of July the summer of 1964 the town had a big parade and some great fireworks down at the lake.
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 was 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 liquoir, I never saw or heard anything about drugs. It was till 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.
On the road again...
...having left Minneapolis, passing the Main Street in
Gothenburg,
Nebraska. This is a sister city to Göteborg, Sweden.(left picture) Click HERE if you want to check out their Pony Express Station! 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 
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 show 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 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 was 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.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.
This web-page was last updated: 12/13/96
By Bengt Lindeblad., summer 1996
Chisago County Support its Presence in Cyberspace!
Space reserved for Local Advertisers
Return to the American West homepage.