THANKSGIVING SAN DIEGO-STYLE

The weekend after Thanksgiving, after I got back from my Baltimore conference, Ann invited me down for a late turkey meal with her and Cam and Cam's younger brother Doug. (They had spent the holiday itself at one of Cam's cousin's, while I spent it with old Urbana friends now living in Princeton, NJ.) Talk, as usual, centered on the woeful adventures of their oldest brother (and my ex-Dhahran classmate), who has been on and off the wagon many times (mostly off). They are fond of their sister-in-law, however, so they aren't too thrilled that older brother (unemployed, unemployable, and not really seeking) is suing her for support in their messy divorce. Doug, in the midst of a separation himself, and fathering three small girls, is looking into a career in nursing (pays surprisingly well, these days) - after night school for a few years.

HAPPY TRAILS

Rummaging around in one's family history is fun! And it's inexplicably breath-taking each time you come across the name of a late relative, especially one you never knew. "So they really were real!" you think. Some recent adventures in family research (post-Riverside) packed into last weekend:

December 3 (Saturday)

Went to a LA Philharmonic concert with Norwegian guest piano phenom Leif Ove Andsnes playing Grieg's famous piano concerto at the new Walt Disney Concert Hall, an LA landmark architecturally. (See more on the building at: wdch.LAPhil.com/about/overview.cfm).

Since I was downtown, I decided to head over to the main public library building - also an architectural landmark from a previous era to start some genealogical research. This "library" is more of a city unto itself with restaurants, study rooms, lecture halls, computer labs - state of the art. I've never seen a library like it! Taking the escalator down the cavernous addition (ceilings 100 feet high like some Hollywood set for Ancient Babylon) to level 5, there is an entire floor dedicated to genealogy and history.

A very helpful Chinese-American woman librarian got me started and I got a lot accomplished in a short two-hour span on what was mainly a reconnoitring trip. I discovered I could look up keywords from the LA Times archives going back to the 1880's! (By comparison, most newspapers are searchable online only back to the 1990's.) I was a bit skeptical that the lives of an immigrant Swedish tinsmith from Omaha and his high school math teaacher son would play prominantly in the annals of a city like LA, but a search of "Sundberg" turned up a surprising amount of relevant articles:

* A celebration of Gustavus Adolphus day planned by the Swedish community, including my great-grandfather (1899)
*A long article on the tragic drowning of my grandfather's brother Hjalmar at age 16 swimming off Long Beach (1902)
* The sale of some LA property by my great-grandmother Elsa (1906)
* An article on the mortal fall off a ladder that killed great-grandfather J.E. Sundberg (1909)
* Death notices for my grandfather (1958) and grandmother (1963)
* A marriage article on Mom and Dad's wedding in Bahrain (1955)

December 4 (Sunday)

After contacting Angelica Lutheran Church and its hispanic pastor Carlos Paiva months earlier, I finally got to a service there - the English Service (they also have Spanish, Korean, and Maya) at 10:30. I am not exaggerating when I say that there were only 8 people there; I counted them all! (Not too demanding.) And that number included Pastor Todd (an ordained Catholic priest who teaches high school normally), the organist, and (I'm sure) a professional singer in the form of a regal young Korean-American woman. They invited me to coffee afterwards - we all fit comfortably around one table. They were interested to hear of my family connection with the church (my great-grandparents, grandparents, and father and aunt attended). Apparently, the scattered sons and daughter and ex-members living in other parts of LA still have a paterntal feeling towards their old Swedish parish and have reunions periodically, so the actual number in attendance on any one Sunday don't reflect the real "base" Angelica has in LA. And then there are the current "members" who are in their '80s or older - many shut-ins, in hospital, or in hospice care. This is, I think, typical of urban ethnic congregations that have suffered "white flight" to the suburbs over many decades.

The Pico-Union neighborhood the church finds itself in today is mainly Hispanic, and not even Mexican, but from other parts of Central America. In 1925, it was mainly a white neighborhood - my great-grandparents lived just two blocks south. The church secretary (a Danish-American woman doctor married to a Mexican-American) told me that nearby blocks are still considered Cripps turf - a notorious black gang, even though most blacks have left the neighborhood, as well. "I wouldn't walk around here after dark," she warned me. So, it's a sign of health that the church is administered by a Latino pastor. Pastor Paiva and that the Spanish (and Korean) congregation members are numerous. And he has been extremely involved socially as an advocate for the mainly poor, non-English speaking residents of his church turf - getting day care started, involvinv the city council members in improvements in law enforcement, services, etc. I asked the secretary why she stayed (she had joined in the 1950's). She said it was habit, and also a fear (not her words) that, when the old white congregation was gone, the current inexperience (non-Scandinavian) congregation wouldn't properly respect its past traditions and infrastructure or keep it up properly. She did express a lot of respect for Paiva, however.

The pastor kindly allowed me to look at the ancient church membership books dating back to 1888, when Angelica was first founded. I was thrilled to see my great-grandmother Elsa Sundberg's name written in it, along with her two (surviving) children: my grandfather Arthur and his sister Esther (Astrid Elvira Ingeborg). Just as in the huge book at Eden Lutheran in Riverside, Angelica's book contained fully two pages per entry: name, birthdate, birthplace, dates of baptism, confirmation, reception into membership, discharge of membership to other congregations, marriage, death, address. A genealogist's dream.

The most exciting tidbit contained in all the dry data was the year Elsa (and kids) arrived in LA from Omaha: 1896. In family oral history, we knew the J. E. Sundberg's had arrived in the 1890's SOMETIME, but we didn't know the exact year. Now we know. And in 2006 it will be 110 years since the first Sundberg's arrived in LA!

December 6 (Tuesday)

Since my UCLA extension class this term has been on Monday evenings, it has been a plan for many weeks to get to UCLA main campus to walk around and research Dad's years there, when he was a chemistry major (1939-43) and later in the MBA program (1946-48) after the war. Somehow, I always ended up finishing my class assignment Monday afternoons and not having the chance to get to campus early. So, the day AFTER Monday this week, I decided (since it was very late in the term) to go Tuesday.

I parked in one of the many general parking garages, and walked up some very extensive stairs to the main quad, where I sought out Murphy Hall, where admissions and records offices are. Dad's UCLA ID was obviously antique: 000063035. (In the 1940's, you could get away with 5-digit ID's, apparently.) $16 and a death certificate got me his white-on-black microfilmed transcript - and all his grades! (Our parents made critical use of our report cards when we were small and defenseless. Now the tables are turned!)

Next, I visited Powell Library. (You've probably all seen UCLA's Italianate gold and cream buildings in many Hollywood movies. Powell is one of those beauties.) I was first on a hunt for the old UCLA yearbooks, which turned out to be in another library altogether. I found them finally: "Southern Campus" was the unimaginative name - from an earlier era when Berkeley was obviously the prestige "Northern" campus of the University of California (THE University of California), and brand-new UCLA had to distinguish itself. It was obviously the height of the war years. Page after page listed different military organizations. Dad was on the "Coast Artillery" page. He also showed up on his Christian fraternity (AGO) page, and a wanna-be basketball team page: the "145 lbs. Basketball" team (those who didn't quite make the weight cut-off for the varsity or even "frosh" teams). He was also part of an honorary chemistry fraternity: Alpha Chi Sigma, along with opera singer Jerome Hines (they were both chemistry majors in their early years). Did Dad ever look young - and skinny! Ann and I only knew him when he was battling his weight. (He got up to 220 lbs. in the year before he died.)