EVERYBODY’S DANISH Store & Grandma War at Chipping from the Rough

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EVERYBODY’S DANISH Store & Grandma War

By fred | September 23, 2008

This week you will get to know my grandma, my mother’s mother, one tough lady, Grandma Marie lived with us throughout my childhood. Looking back, with Mom and Dad so busy with the business, she was a big part of raising me.

I would have to say the word ‘raising’ is not quite correct, it was usually ’war’ – her with her Danish, old country idea of what is clean is not really clean, it needs another washing or two and her stiff-necked attitude about so much a young man wanted to do to conform, to be accepted with his friends and teammates. Dad and Mom were not the problem, Grandma was!

That Grandma Marie loved me, I have no doubt, still I believe someone once said that love and hatred are often related to each other, I believe that to be true at least in this case.

CHAPTER (The Store & the Grandma War)

In the late 1930’s my father bought a small Scandinavian store from the widow of the storeowner. The deceased was a Norwegian by the name of “Lundsing”. That was the beginning of Lundsing & Company. Dad began importing small shipments from Denmark, Sweden, and Norway – cheese from Denmark, fish-balls, fishcakes, cod roe, sardines, etc, from Norway, crisp bread, cookies, matjes herring, and other fish delicacies and from Sweden..

We developed a small wholesale business quite by accident, when some of the Jewish Delicatessens on Fairfax (near Hollywood) called and said they wanted the Matjes Herring, Spratts (sardines), Danish Cheese, (very common in stores now, but not then) and other food items we were importing.

At eight or nine years of age – the small ice cream freezer in the corner of the store was one of the most exciting events in my young life. Always sneaking ice cream, Mom raising hell, so one day my father with his sound Danish logic said, “Helga, let him have all he wants.”

Mom said, “He’ll get sick, eating all those sweets!” Dad got his way, and the feast began, Popsicle’s, ice cream cups, chocolate coated, banana ice cream bars, cones with chocolate topping and nuts, heaven on earth.

I will never, ever, forget how sick I became – I was on my knees over the toilet bowl throwing up all that wonderful stuff. It is a fact that I never ate another ice cream bar, cone, cup, or anything else from that freezer for over a year, then very sparingly. While Mom was quite upset with Dad over the whole thing, thinking back on it, it was a very smart economic decision on my Father’s part.

Now there is no way you could say that I was a perfect child. I certainly got into my share of trouble, my buddies and I would pull some wild stuff. Throwing ‘bombs’ at night at neighbors down the street we did not like, for one thing.

Don’t know what a ‘bomb’ is? Well— you take an fresh egg, drill a hole in it very carefully about the size of a dime, drain the egg of all the egg stuff. Then let the egg dry out for days on end – then stuff it with white flour. If you are in a rush to make bombs dry the empty eggs in the kitchen stove oven. After drying the egg is loaded with white baking flour – seal the end with wax and maybe a piece of paper and you have a ‘bomb.’

Some of my paper route customers that did not pay up, dragged it out for weeks on end – gave me a hard time, would likely get a few bombs late at night thrown onto their front porch, especially around the holidays. Just a nine year old getting his back! The flour spreads when the egg explodes - if it is damp, or moist in the morning or evening, it is a bitch to clean up. Flour and water are like glue, tough as hell to clean up. Not nice? Hey, it is not nice to try and get away with out paying a paperboy his money either is it?

When I was so bad and did something over and beyond redemption, Mom would say, “I’ll have to tell your father.”

Dad would look at me with a hurt look and say, “Did you do that?” The tears would flow, why?– I don’t know to this day. He never touched me, never threatened me in any way, in my entire life my father never laid a hand on me in anger. He was just hurt that his son would do something bad.

Looking back you have to call it respect. Dad never did treat me as a child, he always talked to me as an adult, asked for my opinion, just like it mattered. For that reason, I was darn careful to make sure that my ‘bad deeds’ were corrected before Mom had to bring Dad into it.

Now I have to say here that Mom was always somewhat of a health nut. She was always trying to make sure we all ate a healthy diet. Sometimes she came up with some weird ideas, like apple cider vinegar was a cure all for darn near anything.

As a kid I had to take a teaspoon of Norwegian Cod liver oil every morning. Now this is probably the healthiest thing in the world for you if you have no taste buds, try it sometime. Follow it down with orange juice, bacon and eggs, toast and jam, and you still burp up the taste of Cod liver fish oil. I would hope every morning that Mom would forget. Some mornings when she was at the store early I would hope it was forgotten. No way, my Grandma would say “Freddie, don’t forget your Cod liver oil, your mother said to remind you.” As if I could ever forget the damn stuff!

My Grandmother, Marie (Kjeldsen) Pedersen, my Mother Helga’s mother lived with us all of my young life. A truer love and hate relationship could not exist on this earth. While all of her children, like my mother, were fairly tall, she was short, slightly over five feet, to be polite, let’s say she was stocky. White hair, blue eyes with a temper, a very determined lady. She had led a very hard life having five children, three boys and two girls. Her husband never seemed to be able to want to stay in one place long, and the constant moving and stress had given her a nervous breakdown. According to my Uncles, Mom was the one that raised them, sometimes I wished my Mom had the time to raise me – because having Grandma horn in was a big pain in the ass.

It would be foolish to dispute that she loved me, but with my mother and father so busy in the business we were bound to clash, and clash we did. When in high school the clashes became open warfare.

If you were a real stud going to high school there was a very strict dress code for boys, a solid white T-shirt, not blue, not green, but sparkling white. Heavy white cotton socks, again only pure white. Heavy cordovan shoes polished to a gleaming surface, with a medal cap on the heel. You could hear us coming a mile away. If you could top all this off with a heavy cardigan football letterman’s sweater with a big Poly High ‘P’ on it – then you were a stud of studs. Now here was the problem, the pants had to be either dirty cords (corduroy), or dirty Levi’s that were not just dirty, to be really cool they had to practically stand up by themselves.

Dirty is something that Danish ladies do not like!

Grandma would grab my cords and Levi’s when I wasn’t home and wash them. I raised hell, I would hide my pants under the mattress, behind boxes in the closet – still she would find them. Finally one day when the war was at it’s peak I came home from football practice and found she had cut up my corduroy pants and burned them in the incinerator! The Levi’s were still in the washing machine! I think I could have killed her.

That night I told Mom and Dad. Now my mother had no control over Grandma, but I knew my father did. So I begged Dad to get her to lay off me. Dad said to Grandma, “Let him dress as he wants, he’s always clean otherwise, the pants are just a kid thing.” Grandma was mad as hell, she got up and went to her room – you could hear the door slam. She never washed my cords or Levi’s again without asking.

She got even– she said it was an accident, but it never happened before nor ever happened after. She put a new red store kitchen apron in the washing machine with my beautiful snow-white socks. Do you have any idea what it is to be a big stud high school football player, hot shot running back, big man on campus – walking around the campus with PINK socks. My buddies did not let up on that one for many a month. The girls were nicer, but little giggles would follow my footsteps down the hallways.

Grandma Marie was a heck of a cook, she could make pies and cakes that would knock your block off. There was not such a thing in those days, as diet anything. Butter, eggs, sugar, chocolate, was thrown into the mixer with zest. None of the weight watching recipe stuff you have now.

It is funny, as much of a health nut as my mother was my Mom never reduced a recipe to eliminated some fattening thing. Taste was king – I have to believe the Danish cooking rule was, ‘If it tasted good, it just had to be good for you.’ Of course, everyone seemed to work harder in those days, so you could get away with that kind of cooking and not end up a big fat pig.

Many recipes were from Denmark. Now if you live in a cold climate you can get away with eating more sugar, more products with butter fat. It is no secret that the Danes love cheese, pork roasts, pork liver pate,’ thick rich gravy and everything heavily loaded with butter. Butter cookies, Danish butter rings coffee cake, abound. I never looked at a statistic, but I will bet the Danes live as long as anyone, maybe a little longer.

Grandma wanted to make sure all of us ate, and ate a lot. If I did not have at least two heaping plates of food for dinner plus several glasses of milk and several pieces of cake, pie, pudding, or whatever was available for dessert, she would feel my forehead and say to Mom, “Helga, maybe Freddie is sick.” This used to drive me nuts! Heck, I might have stopped at my best buddy Hugo’s at five P. M. after football practice and had four or five big tortillas wrapped around some hot beans and a quart of milk to wash it down only a hour or so before on the way home. So I only could eat two helpings of chicken or roast beef, and only one hunk of pie, I wasn’t sick.

One of Grandma’s favorites was my cousin David, actually she enjoyed having all the cousins over because she loved to watch the food go down those healthy throats. Often we would have Danish rice pudding for desert. The Danish tradition was that if a raisin was found in your dish of rice pudding you got a prize. For some reason the kids always got the prizes. The adults would all act very upset that they did not win the prize. At these family get to gathers, David was definitely her favorite. If Olga and Chris and my cousins Soren and Dave were coming over, she would be so busy in the kitchen, I would hear her say to Mom, “Better fix two Chocolate cakes David is coming.”

Sometimes Grandma could get sort of strange. She would take the cage with the canary’s out of her back corner bedroom, she would open both of the windows in her room all the way up, and put her rocking chair in the middle of the bedroom, then she would go down to the store we had built on our front lawn. She would say to Dad, “Andy, can I have a package of cigarettes?”

“Sure, Grandma,” Dad would say.

Grandma sat in that rocker, just rocking back and forth for hours, the smoke would be pouring out of her windows it really looked like the house was on fire. When every one of those twenty cigarettes was smoked, one right after the other – that would be it, Grandma would never smoke another cigarette again for months. It could be six months to a year before she would do it again.

She would leave the windows open for a long time afterwards, letting the room air out. Then she would go get her canary cage and put it back by the open window in her room where it belonged. She was willing to contaminate her lungs with all that smoke, but her flock of canary’s would never be allowed to inhale anything like that.

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