But my father was a secretary when they still, when the meetings were in Norwegian, and they
met in Sonsenorway.
So Carolyn has been a member of Sonsenorway for longer than any of us.
And my mother was very active.
She was the first woman president at Piergant, and she was president several times.
I've been with Arson, and Leigh and I went to the St. Church.
We grew up together in Sonsenorway, and our families were close friends.
And Stanley, who is now her husband, his folks and I at least took up their house for
dinners and so forth.
So we've known each other since we were little kids.
Everybody got together in Sycamore Grove, right here in Los Angeles.
It was a beautiful park in which the 17th of May was celebrated.
And we kids at 10, 11 years old would have a great time together.
But we were used to get on a tree to get our picture taken on one side, and the type of
camera would rotate through the crowd to get this huge picture.
So we would go in one tree, and then whether we're taking the picture, we'd run around
the audience and get in the tree so we could be in the photograph twice.
We had a bowling league.
In Sonsenorway, the local logists used to have a traveling bowling league.
And we'd meet at a different bowling alley every month in different areas near that particular
lodge.
Thelma and I did join the dancing group by something we called the Laker Ring.
And we danced Norwegian folk dances on the stage at Sycamore Grove.
Well we had folk dancing groups.
We had, I belong to the Laker Ring, which is a Norwegian folk dance group, and we practiced
every week and performed different things, functions, 17th of May.
We had Ski Club.
There was always a dance and a dinner, probably once a month.
And we'd stop about 10 o'clock and they'd have homemade open-face sandwiches and homemade
cookies, and we'd have coffee, and then we'd start dancing again.
And they always danced until 12 o'clock and there were a couple hundred people there dancing.
And then the theme song would come up, it was always, Good Night, Sweet Heart, Tell
We Me Tomorrow, Bo Bo Bo.
The Solvay Club, well that was a women's group that got together.
We did things for the lodge, like bought things, especially when we got the hall.
We bought things for the kitchen and gave money to things.
We never had a lot of money, but we made, you know, donated it to the lodge, things that
they needed.
You know, Thelma and Stanley Thorson, I think, that people on.
He was president in 1948.
I think the apparent good of the lodge was desperate because I was elected president
of the Sunset Norway and to get, you know, I was probably 26, 27.
But anyway, it was a time of growth, it was a kind of doing things, and believe me, the
Paraget Lodge was on the move.
It was time to raise money, and so a lot of arguments because they wanted to get a home.
They wanted to get out of North Star Auditorium.
We had an association to save money to buy a hall, and we did buy this property.
And then I think we decided the property was not in the right neighborhood.
And then we met in different halls.
We met in Westwood, we met on Sepolveda for a while, and then we found this property.
And I went to the Palms Women's Club.
It was the Cover City Women's Club.
It was time for them to sell.
They had a building, they had a kitchen, they had a parking lot, and the deal was made.
And they, of course, did a lot of remodeling, there was a huge, a large stage there at that
time.
We thought we didn't really need a stage, and we got more room in by taking that away.
And they re-did a lot of remodeling in the kitchen.
They added all the storage rooms on this side, and they added this room, the storage room
over there, and the bathrooms downstairs.
And it was really nice to have your own place.
I know it has some, and nobody now can afford to get a place of their own.
I have to admit we're in a little bit too costly an area to have a lodge building.
But that's not our fault, Cover City decided to redevelop.
Some of the people who bought the same time we did, like the San Pedro Lodge, the area
got so bad that they had to sell, and now they're renting.
But, I mean, Cover City is building up more than, you know, running down.
Some of the big builders in Cover City are working toward trying to buy the property.
No matter what they pay for it, I don't think it would be worth the loss to the sons of
Norway.
Very nice to have your own building, and it's expensive.
But I think because some of our forefathers here at Pyrrhicent were thoughtful enough
to invest in some property that we have a little bit of money in the bank if I'm not
letting the cat out of the bag.
So we can afford to offer our building to other lodges.
If we've been blessed with a building, we should be willing to share it with others.
I joined Sanstern Norway.
What was then Sagatun, and we merged with Pyrrhicent about ten years ago now?
So it got to be where we were pretty sparse as far as our meetings went, and the same
thing was true with Sagatun.
I think Sweden was very instigative in getting the merger together with our two lodges.
He brought roots to the subject to me and to Pyrrhicent.
Both of us lodges were struggling because, well, I had been president and couldn't get
another—somebody take my place as president, and Pyrrhicent was having the same kind of
trouble.
They just couldn't get officers for their lodge, and he suggested that we merge, and
you can use the whole name of both lodges for a couple years.
So with that, why are we sort of inched in?
It was good for us.
It was good for our lodges and ours, Pyrrhicent.
Some of us were sitting around having some drinks, and one lady got up on the sofa waving
around saying, oh, it's hard to be humble when you're a Norwegian.
Well, it could be different.
My son-in-law, my daughter is born over there.
She was almost six when we came, but she's married to an American, but she's married
to an American, and he got himself a T-shirt, pray for me, I'm married to a Norwegian.
We can't get young people to join, and it's mostly old people doing the work month after
month, and I don't know why we can't get young people.
I think one of the problems is you get one young person to join, and he's the only one
there, or she is the only one at the lodge meetings, and then they don't want to come
back.
You know, we have a bunch of people that are really active in trying to get young people
to join and trying to get things started for young people.
It sometimes seems like kind of a hopeless job, because there's so much stuff.
I myself have six kids, and, well, my wife and I have six kids, I should say.
But we have one daughter and her husband that are members of Purgan Lodge, and the rest
of them are actually too busy.
To get people working in the lodge is to serve the lodge in some way.
But I think if you belong and try to attend the meetings, you get more out of it.
You get to know your friends more.
It's much better to participate, otherwise you'll always just feel in the outskirt of
them.
If your roots mean anything to you, and they should, that's why you're you, and you should
want to find out more about that.
And I'm not Norwegian, I'm Swedish.
We started realizing that we must make our place very welcome to the Swedes and the Danes
particularly, and also the Finns, and anybody else that would enjoy the same culture as
Sons of Norway.
It's great that they have opened up to their lodge, or Sons of Norway, to people that are
interested in the heritage or culture from over there.
If I talk to people at Sons of Norway, I like to always bring in our Christmas program,
which is free.
The Heritage Fair has been going on for 20-some years.
It was started by Sagatun Lodge, actually, and we inherited that with the merger.
I was the one that started the Heritage Fair.
It was my idea to have a daytime affair, because I was so tired of trying to get enough people
out to have a dance.
But when there is something to work for, things happen.
You might not get what you want, but things do happen.
Having our name out there at the Abbott-Kinney Street Fair is very important, because myself,
I had never heard of Sons of Norway until I was actually signed up as a member.
From the reports I got from the tenants last year at the Abbott-Kinney Street Fair, there
was a lot of people that they talked to that had never heard of Sons of Norway.
And if we don't see any direct results here, we don't know that this may have an effect
on the Lodge on the East Coast.
Somebody that was there at 150,000 people in one day walked past your booth, I don't
think spending a couple hundred bucks to have a booth there is outrageous.
But you know, I think what we come for, all of us more than anything, is the human contact.
How are you?
How have you been since last time?
How nice of you.
Paragate will keep going, and imagine a hundred years that has worked.
People work very hard to get where we are today, and I think they did a wonderful job.
They'd like to turn back the clock and say, we didn't do quite enough, but we did a lot.
