My father would never dress in brown or allow my mother to buy us brown clothing. Brown was a color he hated. He always insisted that brown was the color of poverty.
Some of his distaste for the color rubbed off on me. I can't even look at brown clothing, much less consider wearing anything in that color. I have a free tote bag that was given to me and all the other registrants at the Empty Spools seminar at Asilomar earlier this year, and despite the fact that it looks like a handy device, I've never even considered using it. The reason? It's brown.
But it wasn't until I saw this photo that I really understood the source of my father's distaste for the color. This is the passport photo from when my father Bjarne Slind and his family emigrated from Selbu, Norway, to the U.S. in 1922. Everyone came in on one passport. Dad is the baby in the sailor-collared shirt sitting on my grandmother Ingeborg Klegseth's knee.
Notice how foreign-looking all the clothing is. Dad told me that his mom sewed all the clothing for the trip, and that it was made of home-dyed wool. Each of the boys--except Dad--had a home-made heavy black wool immigration suit, and the two girls are both wearing black wool dresses that were also home-sewn.
Imagine how sticky and miserable it must have felt to have arrived at Ellis Island in this heavy clothing in the middle of June! And it was equally unsuited for a long hot train trip across the northern tier of the country, until the journey ended in Washington State's Whitman County.
I wouldn't characterize my family as desperately poor when they arrived, but they were thrifty peasants, disinclined to waste anything. So as each of the boys grew out of one of the immigration suits, it was passed down to the next child. The older boys got American clothes like bib overalls and began to look and feel like real Americans. Meanwhile, Dad was stuck in what must have seemed to him to have been an endless series of scratchy heavy foreign-looking wool garments that were totally unsuited for life on the farm in the Palouse.
Apparently the black dye was fugitive, so over the years, the black suits became brown suits. But they still has some good wear in them, so they got passed down and passed down. And Dad was stuck with the clothes that got browner and browner over the years until he finally managed to grow out of the last of the suits. That must have been a happy day.
Everyone in this photo is now gone, with the immigrant generation extinguished. My uncle Ole Slind, who is the boy on the left in the back, was the last to die, leaving us last September. All of them worked on the farm, doing the backbreaking work of growing and harvesting wheat.
There's a funny story connected to this passport. Years later, when my dad took one of his periodic trips back to ``the old country'' after he retired from Boeing, he brought the immigration passport and presented it at passport control at the Oslo airport. (He also had a valid U.S. passport). The border control officer stamped both passports and told Dad ``welcome home.''
Alas, I don't have the original passport. It somehow got misplaced in the frantic shuffle involved with moving Dad into assisted living and, later, into a nursing home. So I am very grateful that one of my cousins gave me a photocopy I could scan into the computer.
Fascinating story. Interesting how people interpret colors.
I was born brown so I must have screamed poverty a mile away. I guess that's why the rich, white parents wouldn't let me play with their kids. :-)
Posted by: Philip C. | July 20, 2009 at 09:32 AM