{"id":85764,"date":"2023-10-04T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-10-04T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=85764"},"modified":"2023-10-19T10:49:36","modified_gmt":"2023-10-19T15:49:36","slug":"where-credit-is-due-oscar-berg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=85764","title":{"rendered":"Where Credit Is Due: Oscar Berg"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Nobody really knows where the name “Berg” came from. Oscar’s father, Andrew, was named Anders Olafson – “Andrew, son of Olaf” – in his home village in rural Sweden. He came to America in the late 1870s, and wound up in Lake Lida, Minnesota with the name Andrew Berg. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Berg? I have no idea. I have this 20%-serious theory that he arrived at the bureaucrats design at Ellis Island at the same time as a group of Hasidim from eastern Poland, one of whose descendants is trying to figure out why his family are the only Olafsons in their synagogue. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Andrew married Caroline Slorby, of and had two kids before she died in childbirth. Andrew them re-married Ida Venholm, another immigrant from Sweden, and their first son Oscar, born in 1889, was the first of ten more kids. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oscar was born in Lake Lida, and grew up working on Andrews farm – but he had other plans. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometime in the 1910s, he headed to Saint Paul. There’s a photo, somewhere, of him in a Saint Paul streetcar driver’s uniform, in front of the Como Park streetcar station, the one at the south end of Como Park. And then the trail goes cold again. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He popped up again in 1927, starting a photography studio in Jamestown, North Dakota. Business was good enough that he needed an assistant. He wrote to a couple of women in northeastern Minnesota, XXXXXX, who’d spent years establishing photography studios all over the upper Midwest, including one in Bovey run by Ralph Enstrom that’d already produced a photo that would become iconic in the upper Midwest…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

…but that’s coming up later on in the week. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But one of the aunts knew that one of the girls working at the Enstrom studio, their niece Beatrice, was looking for a move. Bea moved to Jamestown to take over as the assistant at Berg Studio. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They got married not too long later – 1930-ish, I think. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Grandpa Oscar and Grandma Bea. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My father, Bruce, was born in 1936. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oscar was, by all accounts I’ve heard, quite the outdoorsman; a hunter, a fisherman, a golfer, a man about town (in a fairly small town). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But neither I nor my dad knew much about that. Oscar died of a cardiac arrest in March of 1942.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s been said that my brother, sister and I would have been very different if Oscar had lived longer. Oscar was, by all accounts, a lot more brusque, a little more “direct”, much more “Type A” than Grandma. We’ll touch on that later next week. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

All I know is that Oscar, like a lot of guys in that era, had to adapt to a lot of circumstances in his day. I can’t imagine they romanticized it enough to call it “Reinventing Oneself” back then – it was more a matter of necessity spawning invention. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But as someone who’s had to do the same over the years, I would have so many question for Oscar. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nobody really knows where the name “Berg” came from. Oscar’s father, Andrew, was named Anders Olafson – “Andrew, son of Olaf” – in his home village in rural Sweden. He came to America in the late 1870s, and wound up in Lake Lida, Minnesota with the name Andrew Berg. Berg? I have no idea. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[454],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-85764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-wandering-line"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=85764"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":85952,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85764\/revisions\/85952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=85764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=85764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=85764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}