It’s Reagan Again

1984

The 1984 Presidential elections saw an overwhelming victory by Ronald Reagan and running mate George H.W. Bush over former Vice President Walter Mondale and Rep. Geraldine Ferraro for the Democrats, taking 49 states out of 50, with the challenger barely scraping by to retain his own state of Minnesota. Ferraro was the first woman candidate on the ballot for Vice President. Following the recession of 1981–1982, the economic recovery of 1984 was considered decisive to the incumbents’ victory. (I’ve forgotten who received my own write-in protest vote that year.) The most positive development of that period were the meetings of Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev that stepped back from the Cold War brinkmanship of the threat of war with the deadly weapons of mutual destructions both sides possessed, although no major treaties were consummated. Reagan wanted some kind of nuclear controls and Gorbachev breathing room to develop his country’s domestic economy.

KALEVALA STUDY GROUP IN BERKELEY

Around 1983, Irja K. Friend, 72, a retired community college and high school English and dramatic arts instructor, announced a weekly evening class on the Finnish epic poem, Kalevala that she would lead at her Berkeley home for those interested. (Irja was a New York City native whose mother had been an actor on the stage of the historic Fifth Avenue Finnish Socialist Hall in Harlem.). She was successful in attracting a core group including myself to participate in a chapter-by-chapter series that lasted more than a year. I had an old copy of Kalevala in the original Finnish I had purchased at the Raivaaja book store in Firchburg, MA, back in 1946, which I had never read. Of course, Irja’s class would be in English, so I picked up three English language translations in San Francisco: W. F. Kirby’s 1907 version, Francis Peabody Magoun Jr.’s 1963 edition published by Harvard University Press; and Finnish-American scholar Eino Friberg’s translation of 1983. (Dr. Friberg hailed from my hometown of Westminster, MA, a Harvard graduate blind from his youth, published in English in Finland.)

KALEVALA IN SUMMATION

This epic was the work of a Finnish MD Elias Lönnrot who gathered thousands of ancient Finnish folk poems of oral tradition, some dating back two thousand years, from story singers and bards in Eastern Finland, Finno-Russian Karelia and Baltic coastal areas, where he travelled in person for his research. He then edited and anthologized them into the epic Kalevala, like Homer did a millennium earlier in Greece to produce the Iliad and Odyssey. Lönnrot was conscious of being a Finnish Homer.

The first edition of Kalevala published in 1835 consisted of 32 runes, and the second published in 1849 included 50 runes and is considered the official version, now available in 61 languages.

Among the main characters of the epic were the four heroes, Väinämöinen, Ilmarinen, Lemminkäinen and the tragic hero, Kullervo. The main adversary of the first three was Louhi (Irja Friend), the powerful Mistress of the North, a matriarch with supernatural magic powers. Väinämöinen also had otherworldly powers and was an ancient sage from the beginnings of the world in Kaleva, the land of the Heroes. He was unsurpassed in his mastery of the kantele, a traditional Finnish zither with which he could charm both men and beasts and fishes of the river and birds and bees as he played. Throughout the epic, he is frequently referred in its verses as tietäjä ijänikuinen (or, “the sage eternal”)  But he was also something of a fool and clumsy blunderer with a yen for beautiful young maidens who would reject him outright. The young teenage Aino whose mother had approved her engagement to the rich and powerful Väinämöinen and jumped into the sea and turned into a fish instead of succumbing to the wiles of this “dirty old man.” He likewise wooed the Maid of the North, Louhi’s gorgeous daughter, who also rejected his amorous overtures with contempt. Lemminkäinen and Ilmarinen also bid for the hand of Louhi’s daughter. Over the objections of his mother, the reckless warrior Lemminkäinen, the amorous pursuer of comely women everywhere, abandoned his newly stolen bride Kyllikki to head north to also charm Louhi’s prize daughter, only to end up cut to pieces by the banks of the Tuonela River until mended and returned to life by the magic and charms of his ever-suffering mother. Ilmarinen spent his time at his forge to hammer out a magical cover for the Sampo, the bounteous mill of prosperity in the possession of Louhi, over which he, Väinämöinen and Lemminkäinen eventually went to war with her and bring it back to land of Kaleva to bring its riches for them. Ilmarinen on his trip to Louhi’s domain was successful in bringing home her prize daughter, only to lose her when she played a dirty trick on their hapless cow herder Kullervo who murdered her in an insane rage. Compared to the Iliand and Odyssey, and the Norse sagas that I’ve read, Kalevala is relatively nonviolent and full of down-to-earth old Finnish humor that the bards must have sung on lonely cold nights in the forest huts of Karelia for their enjoyment. Compare this to an early Icelandic saga I saw on film years ago with beheadings galore in ancient battles much like what is happening in ISIS-ridden Syria and Iraq today. I finally shut my eyes when I saw dozens of bloody stumps of heads flying hither and yon on the screen severed from horsemen in brutish battle. Comparatively considered, Kalevala is fun.

CONTINUE NEXT COLUMN

So was our study group. Several months along, we saw the possibility of stage plays in some of the epic. With Irja agreeable to such possibilities, we decided: “Let’s do it!” So with her theatrical background and bilingual language skills, Irja tackled the project, by translating the dialogue of the characters into English and came up with the title: “The Joys and Sorrows of Väinämöinen.” So, we decided to do her script before an audience at Finnish Kaleva Hall, which hadn’t seen a dramatic production there since the 1960s. I was picked to play the principal character of Väinämöinen. Irja herself would play Louhi, the Matriarch of the North, besides directing the show. Dixie Fraser, our youngest at 37, would be Louhi’s daughter, the Maid of the North. Anna-Maija Middleton would be Piika Pikkarainen, Louhi’s servant. We needed two narrators who would read the parts of the one-act script which explained the actors’ direct dialogue who had both English and Finnish language skills as we would perform the play bilingually in the same show as both took twenty minutes apiece to perform. So we drafted Oiva Nurmela and Urho Tuominen from the Jack London Club of the Tenth Street Hall to read the descriptive narration. We actors knew both Finnish and English, except for Dixie who had a Finnish father and Norwegian mother, who had the hardest task of learning to pronounce the dialogue in both languages in memorizing and blocking our roles. But she was equal to the task as her natural acting flair helped her to overcome her linguistic shortcomings. Irja, had marvellous designing and sewing skills to create or adapt our Middle Ages costumes. Marian Steinburgh, a soprano of Finnish descent, opened and closed our show with an English language solo, accompanied by her sister Carolyn Curran, a Kalevala study group regular, on the piano.

WE PERFORM FOR NUMEROUS AUDIENCES

Our opening night in the main auditorium of Kaleva Hall (or Brotherhood Hall originally) around Finnish Kalevala Day, on Feb. 24, 1984, was before a large and enthusiastic audience. So much so that we went “on the road” mostly around Northern California for the entire remainder of the year to perform before numerous and diverse audiences, not necessarily all Finnish. As I recall, we did “Joys and Sorrows” at the Finnish-American Home Association’s (FAHA) hall in El Verano, for the Finlandia Foundation in San Mateo County, Scandinavian Society in Berkeley, Berkeley City Club, Strawberry Creek Lodge senior housing in Berkeley, Modern Times Book Store in San Francisco, and on Labor Day weekend at Hauli Huvila, a rustic Finnish-American river camping resort in Reedley, CA.

1985

By this time our fame had reached across Finnish-America. So much so that we were invited to perform our play at the 1985 FinnFest in Hancock, Michigan, the home of Suomi College, the FinnFest in its third season as the national celebration of American Finns, which also had its Canadian counterpart. It would be an expensive trip for our sizeable group with all our costumes and props, so our ever-resourceful Irja Friend negotiated a goodly settlement with the Rev. Ralph Jalkanen, president at Suomi College, which paid for our air flight expenses to Hancock and back. In addition, Suomi would provide us with free housing on the campus for our stay. “Joys and Sorrows” also proved a national success for our unique show at FinnFest. Dr. Jalkanen also had too more chores for me to do in my Väinämöinen character and costume at Hancock. One evening early in the celebration, he had me stand on a high bluff as part of the central campus overlooking a stream flowing far below where the great Finnish Olympic runner Lasse Viren jogged along a path along the river bed carrying a lighted torch until he reached some steep steps leading to the edge of the high plateau where I was standing. As Viren bounded up the stairs I was to read a stanza from Kalevala describing the ancient origin of fire. I was to conclude my reading at the moment Viren plunged his flaming torch into a scabbard near me. That instant marked the official opening of FinnFest 1985. My other participation came at the grand FinnFest banquet at the head table where I was to read briefly from Eino Friberg’s then new English translation of the epic. The blind poet himself was at a dinner table below as an honored guest of FinnFest. Before I started my reading from his elegant masterpiece I announced to the banquet guests that Dt. Friberg and I were fellow townsmen from the Finnish farming community of Westminster, MA and it was a great honor to read from his translation.

1986

FinnFest 1986 was held on the UC campus in Berkeley, CA and of course “Joys and Sorrows” was included on this celebration’s programmatic agenda. In addition, Irja had translated a new Kalevala play which she entitled; “Väinämöinen’s Journey to Tuonela,” the mythic Finnish abode of the dead. Again I was cast as the “Big V” and in “Journey” we had a couple of new recruits, Mickey Frykdahl from Oakland and a fellow race walker, and Irma Tuominen, the spouse of our narrator Urho Tuominen. We pulled them both off, although at this point Irja was on the point of collapse from total exhaustion in addition to personality clashes with Mickey who was rather contentious in her own right although she was a talented stage performer. Despite our internal stresses, the audiences appeared to enjoy our work. My sister Irma and Terry and their younger son Paul, a grade school kid, came to FinnFest from Southern California and they saw our Kalevala plays for the first time. Lauri Rissanen, our Berkeley Finnish community’s sports impresario, had organized a kid’s track meet for FinnFest and had recruited Lasse Viren to come to our FinnFest as well as Hancock’s. Olympic champ Viren gave out the awards to the kids athletes as his FF contribution. I was so proud when he pinned a silver medal on my nephew Paul’s shirt for his second place in his boy’s age group long jump, an event he excelled in on his grade school team in Hawthorne, CA.

ENJOYING EARLY RETIREMENT

On March 18, 1986 I celebrated my 60th birthday. SF Newspaper Agency had recently come up with a revised incentive plan for early retirement to enable them to reduce the work force whose lifetime jobs were guaranteed by the Kagel attrition arbitration. This time they offered printers turning 60 a special cash offer of $800 a month until age 65. Health benefits would also continue to age 65 when Medicare kicked in. We had an excellent arrangement with Kaiser that gave complete coverage except for a $3 co-pay at that time per doctor’s visit. (In an earlier offer the monthly incentive pay was only $600 a month.) So I figured if I took Social Security retirement and union benefits at age 62 in addition, for the three year period until 65, my cash income would almost amount to my regular take-home pay if I’d continued to work full-time for the final three years. So on April 1, 1986 I pulled my slip from the union’s chapel board and called it a day as a working proletarian in a shop where I’d spent over 26 years of my life. It was a bit heart-wrenching to take leave of my long term union sisters and brothers at the newspapers, but since I’d continue to be a union meeting regular I’d see the more active of them at our local 21 monthly meetings. I also joined the BATU Local 21's Retirees Club, to which I still belong.

But I had plans for another career. With my involvement with the Kalevala Players, the acting bug had hit me really hard. So even before retirement I had enrolled in evening acting classes at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre (ACT) to develop my thespian skills. Following completion of ACT’s evening offerings I enrolled in all the acting classes available at San Francisco City College for the following years. Once I had retired from the newspapers, I was hired as an extra in films that Hollywood would shoot from time to time in the Bay Area. I recall working on several episodes of a TV serial “Midnight Caller.” I hesitated to join the Screen Extras Guild, because of rumors it would soon fold into the larger Screen Actors Guild. So I worked non-union at minimum wage, except for the frequent overtime pay when we would work on film shoots. (Oh, never say you were a movie extra on the set. It would demean the professional status of SEG members. You were a “background actor or performer.” Also, I hoped in the near future to hit the casting call circuit for stage play auditions as soon as I had further classes to hone my acting skills. The stage had more appeal to me than filmwork.

End of Installment 28