Plan To Share An Audio

Linnea Jensen (1911-1986) was a talented piano player all her life.  On my blog, Spice Drawer Mouse,  I  include diary entries with photos she took as Linnea Gord, a nineteen-year-old piano accompanist with the Order of Runeberg Choir in Finland in 1930.  She became choir director for the Order of Runeberg Choir in 1934.  In 1978 The Trebleaires made a cassette tape, Linnea Jensen as accompanist,  the Audio Slideshow I want to include features a short selection from the tape.  She continued with the Order of Runeberg all her life.

Linnea Jensen was also a life-long member of First Lutheran Church in Tacoma and sang with their choir.  Today in Celebration of the 500^th anniversary of the Reformation, Pacific Lutheran University has scheduled a Choir Conference.  So I want to share this sampling which features Linnea Jensen, who was my mother, as choir accompanist.  I plan to share the Audio Slideshow on Facebook.

Betty Fukuyama Was in a Project at Camp Minidoka

Visited the Fair Museum Monday on a rainy day.  Found the name of Betty Fukuyama's husband at the exhibit for the 75th Anniversary of Japanese Internment at Camp Harmony.  So I signed the guest book in memory of Betty Fukuyama, who died in 1992.  She met her husband, I believe, as a ministering participant in a project at Camp Minidoka.  I once met Betty Fukuyama's husband Tom.  Betty Fukuyama was very active with the Washington Poets Association, and published a booklet of 25 poems. 

Add caption

Name lists arranged in the room

The Peninsula Park at Point Defiance which is looking for a name could feature one of the metal sculptures like the Top of the Ocean Memorial, but the new sculpture could show the whole Ruston Way Old Town Industrial Complex. My first home was above the Dickman Mill in Old Town. The size and level of destruction of the harvesting of natural resources in this area is hardly apparent to people who see it today. It cries out for an explanation that is true and factual. The name I submitted is: Old Town / Ruston Way Industrial History Park - 

And another poem from 1993:  A 25-year Reunion Directory, when the catering groups for reunions were only starting up,  was mailed over three months after the event...

A SERIES OF EVENTS IN JANUARY 1993

 

The arrival of the reunion directory

was supposed to culminate a series of four events.

I bought wool on sale

and sewed an A-line skirt,

gray plaid with a line of brown.

I biked in my black jeans for the Sunday

smelter smokestack demolition.

 

I stood two hours in cold on Sunday

in a clear view on a lot with many others,

until they set off charges in the stack

and a puff crawled up the base

and it began to tip, then collapsed

all in a shimmer, down, and that

was how it vanished.  Then I pedaled back.

 

I wore the skirt on Monday for the march

when they changed the name of K-Street

to Martin Luther King, Jr. Way.  It means

the area is African-American, now,

despite the Valhalla Temple.  Strange,

yet not at all, to walk below the temple

windows behind some Indians.

 

My mother would not have winked an eye.

And would have played piano,

my father filled prescriptions

where it is now Browne's Star Grill.

 

When the storm woke me

on Inauguration Day

I dressed in the skirt and a pink sweater.

In the cold and dark of the wind

a panel of fresh tar paper

blew off the roof past my window,

but my radio batteries were good.

 

Later, when I phoned about the directory, 

they explained rather riskily, already

over three months, they had been

out of power, like so many all weekend long.

This poem from 1993...

UNIVERSAL GRIND   October 21, 1993

 

Can opener wedged into

slit and slit only a dent

across the several gallon firmament.

 

Folger's Universal Grind

holds the larger plant up

to the kitchen light,

 

the Eastern Magician

carries the stars in a row.

But the sense within it

 

of the useless opener

thwarted and outsmarted

tinctures the idea of it.

 

Deaths falls out of the glass

like snow -  it fell and fell,

that box of candles

 

all the listed glass unwraps

tissue papers, all are crowds

of tears all balled

 

tear-filled hankies

on the floor.  Ice crackles

in the glass,  ice water

 

down again on the mat.

I want my pieces I've salvaged.

I dreamed last night

 

that a man carried off

my revere ware pots, I cried

those belonged to my mother.

 

And after it all, all pieces,

the sorrow chases me

without a brain, undoes

 

my strenuous agony,

the ministry, from its carport,

cries for charity.

 

My mind walks

to the cemetery again

to clear a leaf off our name.

Revision - Slideshow Audio

A day or two after I posted Vart skall jag köra hästar och vagn?   I revised.  Information had appeared on Facebook that pointed out changes necessary to improve the translation.  Also, I had seen the gap - between the two times the song was played - was too wide.  I had seen I wanted to enlarge the crops from the photo.  So I made a new copy from the song recording and made new slides with the improved translation.  So far I like the new version.

A Reeves Soundcraft Recording Disc contains two songs by the Order of Runeberg Choir:  Slumrande Toner and Vart skall jag köra hästar och vagn?  I did a slideshow audio for Slumrande Toner and posted it at Facebook earlier, yesterday I posted a slideshow audio for Vart skall jag köra hästar och vagn?  

 

Vart skall jag köra hästar och vagn?   was on the program at the April 30, 1955 Runeberg Songfest in Seattle.   This event was held at a Masonic Temple.

 

The song is not in the collected songbooks at the Scandinavian Immigrant Experience Archives and not on the internet.  Hasse Nygard shared a link to the three verses and the music through "Malax Bygden Forr och Nu" on Facebook.

 

It is possible that Order of Runeberg Choir Directors avoided the song  because of content.  A story had to be innocent of any wrong-doing, according to the principles of the Motion Picture Code established in the early 1930s.  Vart skall jag köra hästar och vagn?   is a song about a buggy ride. "The Surrey With The Fringe on Top" met the standard.  In Autumn, 1955, "Love and Marriage…" in a musical of Our Town, by Thornton Wilder, remained met the standard:  "...goes together like a horse and carriage.  Dad was told by mother, You can't have one without the other."

 

The buggy ride in Vart skall jag köra hästar och vagn?, is a duet about sexuality, and the couple portrayed is clearly not married.  It is possible that Order of Runeberg Choir directors avoided a song like this because of this content.

 

Much of the translation in the slideshow audio I did is from PLU Archives Director Kerstin Ringdahl.