Lecture: Work People's College

2000

We've finally hit the 21st Century in my Memoirs. Memoir #37 will feature my lecture on the Finnish-run Work People’s College, a school for labor and retail cooperative activists at Smithville, MN, which I gave at the Finn GrandFest, a joint US and Canadian Cultural festival held at York University near Toronto, on July 15, 2000. At the time it was the first joint summer festival of US and Canadian Finns. Työväen Opisto, as WPC was named in Finnish, was one of several independent institutions of labor education in the United States in the early 20th Century. Others included Commonwealth College in Mena, Arkansas (1923–1940), and Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, NY (1921–1929), founded by the Rev. A,J. Muste, a Protestant clergyman and labor organizer. WPC was the first of these three to be founded in 1907 and the longest lasting, until 1941. Another unique feature was its founding by Finnish socialists with the Finnish language as one of its classroom subjects in its earlier years.

ORIGINS OF WORK PEOPLE’S COLLEGE

The school was founded around 1902 by a Finnish Lutheran denomination in Minneapolis that accepted both church and labor youth. In 1904, there was a widespread student strike in protest of compulsory prayers to open each session which was successful. As one wiseacre student acclaimed: “Let’s waltz!” The Finnish Socialist Federation ran a campaign to sell shares to grow the school, which was so successful that its ownership was assumed by the Socialists with the Lutherans left in the cold. H.A. Haataja was its first director in 1907 and it moved to Smithville, a Duluth suburb. Leo Laukki, a Finnish revolutionary socialist and Russian Cavalry lieutenant (1880–1938) who had fled Czarist rule became both its director and teacher in 1908. Under socialist control it became known as Työväen Opisto, awkwardly translated in English as Work People’s College. Most of its students were young working class Finnish immigrants and their practical curriculum included spoken and written English (which many were learning), written Finnish for those with language deficiencies although the Finnish educational system required a basic literacy for all its young, and second-generation American-born Finns who were growing up in a bilingual society and were still part of a community within which daily use of the language was still the norm. Other subjects included bookkeeping especially for those involved with the rapid growth of Finnish-run coop stores and warehouses in their new homeland. As a socialist institution then, basic Marxist economics was a must as a course to be taken as well as Darwinian evolution. SP Locals of the Finnish Socialist Federation chipped in generously during its socialist period for the operation of the school by tapping their memberships for contributions. It was also a residential school where the students roomed and boarded for free which didn’t run cheap for the FSF community to finance. For some it was their only formal education. Jack Ujanen, the last editor of the Finnish IWW newspaper Industrialisti, had never attended school in Finland but had learned to read by studying pages of the bible glued to interior walls of the humble shack where his family lived to help deal with the bitter winters. Following his coming to the US he worked as a quarry worker first in New Hampshire before enrolling at WPC. He rapidly developed skills in both languages to become a fixture in IWW newspaper circles, also translating English language into Finnish for their readers and learning typesetting along with the use of the Linotype machine. Niilo Wälläri who we wrote about in M36, was also an excellent WPC student.

The level of education at WPC was enhanced by the coming of a former Finnish Parliament SDP MP Yrjö Sirola to the USA where he joined the faculty and administration. Sirola (1876–1936) was the son of a well-to-do clergyman in Finland and had a middle-class education through teachers college, taught school, and worked as a journalist as he was turned on by socialist politics to be elected to Parliament on the SDP ticket. He arrived in 1910 and returned to Finland in 1913 where he had a leadership role during the Finnish Civil War of 1918 for the Red Government, fled to Russia when the Whites won and became an ardent Bolshevik, although a moderate parliamentary reformer during his younger days.

So after Sirola left, Leo Laukki (born Leonard Leopold Lindquist in Helsinki), a brilliant, charismatic speaker and writer became the administrative power house at WPC again. The late Finnish-American scholar Michael G. Karni relished telling a story about Laukki’s long-windedness. It seems Leo was in the middle of a lengthy lecture on Socialism to an immigrant audience. After six hours of spellbinding oratory he paused for a glass of water and in resuming, said: “and Secondly” — after which he spoke for another several hours! He was also noted for a fiery temper.
 

LAUKKI AND WPC GO WOBBLY

Laukki was a restless soul and after years as a political revolutionary socialist, became attracted to industrial unionism, anarcho-syndicalism and the IWW which was growing by leaps and bounds within the Finnish-American working class in the West and Upper Midwest. So a Laukki-led split ensued with the IWW line becoming dominant at WPC over the earlier political Marxism, and around 1914–’15, Work Peoples College became an IWW institution, with the political Marxists coalescing around the newspaper Työmies, published in Superior, WI which Laukki and his allies had tried to take over but failed when the East Coast social-democratic newspaper Raivaaja loaned its beleaguered sister paper $5000 to keep it under FSF auspices. So in 1915, the Finnish IWWs started a paper they named Teollisuus Työläinen (Industrial Worker) which was renamed Industrialisti (The Industrialist) in 1916 with Laukki its chief editor. Thus the ideological battle was joined between the Industrial Unionists and political Left Socialists among the radical Finns. Industrialisti was published by Finnish Wobs until 1975 when it folded shop. So WPC continued on under Finnish IWW auspices for years until its closure in 1941.
 

LAUKKI ARRESTED AMONG 166 IWWs

Related to the radical hysteria because of World War I, 166 members of the IWW were arrested for antiwar “subversion” including its best known spokesperson Big Bill Haywood, were all found guilty and sentenced to prison for varying lengths of term. (Five Finnish Wobs were among those jailed: Leo Laukki, Frank Westerlund, Fred Jaakkola, Charles Jacobson, and William Tanner.) With Laukki in jail awaiting trial WPC was in a precarious position and barely managed to survive. By this time the Russian Revolution had occurred and Laukki had undergone another major political metamorphosis and abandoned industrial unionism of which he was the leading spokesperson among Finns and became a Bolshevik for the rest of his life. The Federal Court found all 166 class war prisoners guilty in an Unconstitutional trial with prison sentences for all. Haywood and Laukki were treated especially harshly. Laukki, for example, got a 20-year sentence with a $20,000 fine. While out on bail awaiting appeal of their cases, Big Bill and two of the Finns, Leo Laukki and Fred Jaakkola fled the country to the Soviet Union.
 

BIG BILL AND LEO LAUKKI IN USSR

Big Bill Haywood led a lonely life in the Soviet Union. He hung out in a dismal hotel room and was given no responsibility except if a mass march was held through Moscow, he would be hauled up onto the viewers’ balcony with all the Bolshevik brass to see the Red Army tanks and infantry pass by, totally ignored. A far cry from the wide open American West where he was raised and in his prime had led great strikes in the heyday of his beloved IWW. He died in 1926 in Moscow, worn out by his travails as a class warrior, now ignored as a nonentity in his exile. His remains are buried in the Kremlin Wall along with those of journalist John Reed, the only Americans so honored.

Leo Laukki suffered a violent fate. When he first arrived in the Soviets he joined the Finnish Communist Party in exile and in 1921 was elected to its national committee. His high intellectual talents were recognized and he taught university-level classes in various parts of Russia. With his considerable journalistic background and linguistic skills, he was employed by Trud, the official Soviet trade union newspaper. Then the Stalinist late 1930s hit the fan. He was accused by Otto Kuusinen, the top-ranked Finn in the Soviet hierarchy, of associating in the 1920s with Eino Rahja, another Red Finn living in the Soviet Union who had been condemned as “an enemy of the people.” It seems like desperation, but Laukki tried to defend himself by saying he “had exposed dozens of Trotskyites and a number of Bukharinites as counterrevolutionary fascist traitors.” This did not prevent him from dying before a Stalinist firing squad in 1938.
 

WORK PEOPLES COLLEGE PLOWS ON

Despite these setbacks due to wartime and post-wartime political repression by the US Government, WPC soldiered on during the 1920s and 1930s, furthering the education of countless radical labor organizers and co-op activists. Outstanding in its administration was Fred Thompson, a Canadian Wobbly, who had done a brilliant job of organizing a number of small stove manufacturers’ workers in Cleveland into the IWW and who taught Marxian economics and labor history at Smithville and during the 1930s was the school’s director. Thompson (1900–1987), a native of St. John’s, New Brunswick, was a member of the O.B.U. (Canada’s One Big Union) of which the IWW was the US’s counterpart. In 1922 he moved to California, where he joined the IWW in San Francisco. He was sentenced to San Quentin on the unwarranted criminal syndicalist law for being part of an agricultural strike in Marysville, CA and spent 1922–1927 in prison. Released, it was back to Wobbly organizing. Thompson served the year 1936 as IWW General Secretary-Treasurer and also several years as editor of the Union’s newspaper Industrial Worker. (I knew Fred from my Chicago days in the early 1950s and we soon became fast friends and eventually Fellow Workers.) FW Thompson sustained a much better fate than did Leo Laukki. In his older years he was a highly respected member of the Illinois Labor History Society and was president of Charler Kerr Publishers, the oldest socialist publishing house in the United States, which was undergoing a revival in its fortunes at the time. Fred was also an author of two histories of the IWW: ‘The IWW — Its First 50Years” with Pat Murphin in 1955, and “The IWW, Its First 70 Years.” in 1976. It was a privilege for me to have known his Finnish Wobbly wife Aino, and Jenny (Lahti) Velsek, his life partner during his final years. Jenny, daughter of a Finnish Wobbly family in Northern Wisconsin, had also studied at WPC as a young woman.

Since the near shutoff of new immigration after 1920, the number of young Finnish working women and men at WPC declined sharply and second-generation American Finnish enrollment couldn’t close the gap. In 1941 with America about to enter WWII only about eight students were enrolled in its final sessions, the school closed its doors and became part of history. Schools of this nature became relics of the past, and a valuable one it was for radical labor education for so many years. Labor education nowadays can be obtained at colleges and universities around the country, also at two-year community colleges. For instance, both Laney Community College in Oakland. CA and San Francisco City College offer Associate of Arts degrees in Labor Studies. In this age of Donald Trump with finance capital and its political henchmen riding high and our labor movement greatly weakening since the 1970s, labor studies are more and more important for young working people to rebuild their own institutions to guarantee human dignity and conditions in the workplace and to develop a democratic society superior to corporate capitalism which increasingly benefits only the rich.
 

FAMILY REUNION AND KARELIAN ISTHMUS

In August of 2000 I continued on to Parikkala, Finland for a reunion of all folks with the family name of Siitonen who were abundant in the province of Southeastern Finnish Karelia (or what was left of it at the end of the Continuation War of 1941–’44 when the Soviet Union grabbed the Karelian Isthmus for itself as well as swaths of land which left the huge Lake Ladoga region entirely within Russian borders. The town of Parikkala was a border town left to Finland at the peace talks’ conclusion.) We had a clan meeting of people who were only remotely related to me through our common surname, Siitonen, most of whom I was meeting for the first time. It was a convivial enough gathering but the main diversion was a Siitonen extended family bus trip around the Karelian Isthmus (Karjalan Kannas), now part of Russia.

We reached a border crossing at a remote point on the way to the Gulf of Finland port of Viipuri which dated from the Hanseatic sea trade era and flourished as important trade center under Finnish rule from 1918 to 1944 when it was finally lost to Russia in the wars. The border crossing procedure was notoriously slow because of the Russian officials’ gross inefficiency. All of our passports were taken from us and examined in a guard shack which seemed to take hours. So we sat around talking and playing cards. The young Russian border patrolmen guarding our train bummed cigarettes continuously from equally bored passengers. Finally, everyone’s passport was returned except mine since all other passports were Finnish and mine was American. Since I wasn’t a Finnish citizen then, the leader of our Karelian tour Pentti Siitonen, a newspaper editor from Parikkala, was an old hand in visiting this ceded portion of Karelia and fluent in Russian, had a special document that showed my participation was legal. However, the Russian border bureaucrat was unsatisfied and asked that I accompany him back to their guard shack. Where I was able to prove my identity, my passport was handed back. I returned the bus and we were on our way.

Since our main destination on the Karelian Isthmus was the rustic Finnish-run fishing resort of Pyhäjärvi, we only made a brief stop at the historic railway station in Viipuri, under Finnish rule the second largest city in the country and a major eastern Gulf of Finland seaport. We got off to look around as there was a mini-tori (marketplace) where one could buy soft drinks and snacks. No sooner did I get out of the bus, I was besieged by a gang of young Russian toughs who preyed on innocents around the railway station, who tried to go for my wallet. I quickly retreated back into the bus and never left it again. Our tour leader Pentti Siitonen wasn’t as lucky. For an experienced below-the-border traveler he did a dumb thing. Bending over some item in a kiosk, he had a wallet thick with Euros bulging in the back pocket of his trousers. In a split second, some nimble-fingered youth had plucked it out and started running toward the railroad station. Some onlooker yelled at Pentti that he’d been robbed and he gave chase. but a stout middle-aged man was no match to catch the kid who disappeared into the maw of the station. Pentti reported it to the cops and railroad officials who were useless in dealing with it, if even interested.

CONTINUE NEXT COLUMN

The bus ride through the heavily forested lands of the Isthmus was spectacular with farmhouses and pastures spotted now and again. A couple of times we’d cross a bridge over a rapidly churning river. I wonder if one of them was the Taipale River over which particularly bloody battles had been fought during mid-20th Century during the Finno-Russian Wars? Finally, the bus left the well-paved two-lane road we had taken from Viipuri onto a narrow dirt road full of rocks and potholes so we slowed to a creepy-crawl for the rest of the way to nearby Pyhäjärvi (Holy Lake), our rural lakeside destination. Several dozen skinny, shabbily-clad Russian kids were standing on both sides of the road waving at us as we rode past them. Most of us Siitonen family reunionists heartily waved back. We made the youngsters’ day! Soon we arrived at the resort at a cluster of log cabins amidst trees by the large lake. The cabins consisted of dormitory space, a Finnish sauna, a building containing a full-service kitchen and a large dining room. Out by the docks at lakeside were a number of fishing boats.

Owner/Manager of the Pyhäjärvi resort was Antti Musakka (Muzak in Russian), a young Finnish man in his thirties who operated the place with his attractive Russian wife, who cooked breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the paying guests. The resort had been built by his father who was a native of the area in the prewar days while the Karelian Isthmus was still part of Finland. But when the Russians won the wars, its Finnish inhabitants, including those of the prosperous Musakka family farm, fled North over the new Finnish border. Antii’s father, as I remember the story, became a successful building contractor somewhere in Central Finland and quite well-to-do. Longing to see his family’s old lands of several generations on the Isthmus, Musakka would travel as a tourist to the area from time to time. He got to know and befriend the new Russian residents of their old stomping grounds.

With his eye on the Lake and its possibilities, he offered to buy (or lease) some of its acreage to build a fishing and vacation resort. He told the Russians that the resort would bring some fresh business into this remote area and contribute to its economic prosperity. The local bureaucracy acceded to his vision and the project became reality as the log buildings were erected to accommodate the expected guests. Rustic but well developed. Pyhäjärvi was rich in its fishing potential, and fishermen and others just loving the nature came to spend their vacations here. Tour busses like ours were standard fare. By our visit, the older Musakka had died and Antii and his wife took over the place to operate. Antii’s widowed mother lived with them and her young grandchildren. Svetlana, as I’ll call Antti’s wife, would drive over the nearby Finnish border early in the morning to buy top grade food supplies to feed their guests. There’d always be a couple of hours of delays at the Finno-Russian border even though the bureaucracy saw her as a frequent crosser with her food supplies for the resort. Efficiency was not the Russians’ strong suit. But the meals that Svetlana and her helpers prepared for us were ample and delicious at a reasonable price. I stayed in a single men’s dorm in a two-tiered plain wooden bunk, Sturdy but comfortable. There were also rooms for couples and families.
 

BUS TOUR TO KÄKISALMI

Next day we went on a tour of the Isthmus in our chartered bus with Antti Musakka as our guide and narrator. We traveled east through heavily forested country to the northwestern shore of Lake Ladoga (Laatokka in Finnish), Part of our busload got off at a dock to be taken to an island that I believe was Korela for a few hours by a battered old Lake steamer while the remainder of us proceeded north along the coast of Europe’s largest lake to explore the town of Käkisalmi (Priozersk in Russian, Keksgolm in Swedish. (Apparently the Isthmus had been a bone of contention between Russian and Swedish armies a few centuries back.) During our visit the population of the town was about 19,000 with a furniture factory (formerly a paper mill) the main industry. The center of town where we got off the bus was a dismal, shabby place, its square highlighted by an open-air flea market where vacant-eyed impoverished women were peddling old clothes and boots and shoes to the thin crowds who passed their tables. There was never a smile on any of their worn and dreary faces. The town reflected a place which had been a lively market town during its Finnish Era before the wars, but now low-lighted drabness and defeat. Käkisalmi lost its Finnish population after the 1940 armistice of the Winter War, who returned during its recapture in the Continuation War but left again over the redrawn Finnish border when Soviet troops took it again in 1944 for good. The currant population is composed of Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian migrants. I walked away from the center feeling as depressed as the local population to look over a medieval fortress about a mile south of downtown. I shared the gloom of the town all the way back to Pyhäjärvi on our bus.
 

SHOPPING STOP AT VIIPURI TORI

On our return trip to Finland we made a lengthy stopover at the large tori at Viipuri, full of Finnish shoppers who had crossed the border for the high quality goods at bargain prices available. A far cry from the poor man’s street tori at Käkisalmi. American cigarettes could be bought for a song as well as booze of every description. Blankets, fabrics, clothing and perfumes and other luxury goods of all descriptions were available at the huge open-air arena. Apparently a giant smuggling operation in Eastern Europe must have been the suppliers of these high standard commodities, ones which would cost the Finnish and American consumers appreciably more at home. This indicated the high level of corruption that prevails in modern capitalist Russia, where the thieving bureaucrats of the collapsed Soviet Union were rank amateurs in comparison. Play ball with Putin and Vladimir and his gang would turn a blind eye unless someone was fool enough to cross him. He wasn’t trained by the KGB for nothing with his command of the rules of power, illicit or straight. All my Siitonen tribe tore their way out of the bus the minute we stopped near the marketplace, except me, who didn’t plan to spend a kopeck in this town where my father and his older brother Pekka had operated a small-time bagel-making shop back in 1908. Outside of two walking sweeps through the Viipuri Tori, I just hung around the bus chatting with our driver.
 

MY FLIRTATIOUS 12-YEAR OLD AT THE BUS

While hanging around the bus, I was approached by a cute Russian school girl of about 12 in a nice stylish dress who solicited me for some spare change. I was hooked by her child’s charm and gave her about a Euro in change. But she kept hanging around me at the bus and in Russian began flirtatiously to inveigle me for more without letup, which I declined to do. I talked to her in Finnish which I figured she knew to an extent because most of the foreigners who came to Viipuri Tori were shop-till-you-drop Finnish border crossers. I noticed her makeup, red lipstick and all with manicured and polished fingernails and pretty short skirt as she began to flirtatiously play to my senses. Hey, this is jailbait and I’ve got to get rid of her like now! “Mene kotia ja heti! Et kuulu tänne!” I yelled at her. (“Go home and right now! You don’t belong here!”) She came closer and continued to try to charm me. I kept insisting she leave and go home! (The driver had gone to the Tori and I was alone with the preteen who was just beginning to bud out in her sexuality.) Already a precocious whore at her young age! I was practically yelling at her at now, pointing into the distance and barking: “MENE KOTIA JA HETI!” Finally, still offering me a lascivious smile, she danced away.

Soon it was time to leave and the Siitonen shoppers came back laden with commodities from their Tori binge. Many hauled cartons of American cigarettes and bottles of whiskey. A truck pulled up and loaded several cases of American canned beer into our baggage compartment some shoppers had splurged on. Young kids in our entourage came laden with candy and other chocolates galore. A young clergyman Siitonen, attired in a light blue blazer and turned white collar bought a nice supply of alcohol more than was needed in church rites. Before we left Viipuri we took a bus tour of the historic city itself, with Sakari Siitonen, Helsinki city architect, who was my marathon running buddy in the 1977 Masters World Championships in Gothenburg, Sweden, was the narrator of this city tour through a hand mic. Sakari had lived as a young boy in Viipuri where his father was a teacher, I recall, and knew the Viipuri’s architecture well. He was on our tour with his wife Irja. There were many impressive buildings from before the Russian occupation that had stood up well despite the neglect of the province’s new Russian masters. Gigantic workers’ apartment houses built by the Russians who worked in Viipuri’s industry during the postwar period were shockingly drab and ugly in comparison. Finally, it was back on the road toward the border. Along the way, boxes and boxes piled high lined the roadside holding Pepsis and other Western soft drinks, stretched for miles trying to entice Finnish tourists so no one would go home empty-handed. There was one more liquor stop a mile or so before the border station for some last minute bargains. Passengers were limited now to one bottle of booze each. Tour manager Pentti Siitonen approached me to buy an extra jug to give him, as he knew I wasn’t a drinker. No skin off my nose as he reimbursed me. Finally, at the Russian side of the border Pentti went into a long huddle with the Russian border officials at their office, came back with a big smile and we were off to Finland. Whether any bribe money was paid for something because of the contraband nature of some of goods, will forever be a mystery to me.
 

2000
U.S. Presidential Elections

This Presidential election brouhaha was the tightest in US history, which was basically decided by the conservative majority of the Supreme Court by 5–4, stopping the recount of the Florida vote which would determine the winner between the Democrats’ Vice President Al Gore and the Republicans’ Texas Governor George W. Bush. It was also the first time in over a century that the winner of the popular vote was Gore, but Bush had the larger Electoral College vote. The Florida recount would have decided the difference, but on a GOP petition the recount was stopped because of a December certification date deadline. Gore’s popular vote totals were 50,990.897 million votes, to Bush’s 50,456.002. So the electoral vote was in Bush’s favor, 271–266. And he and rich oil man of ugly politics. Dick Cheney were elected. Ralph Nader for whom I voted on the Green Party ticket for the second time, became a hate object for the Democrats as the “spoiler” in the elections enabling Bush’s victory. In the initial count, before the recount, Bush edged Gore by only by 468 votes out of 6 million cast in the swing state of Florida, where his brother Jeb Bush was then governor. My old Socialist Party comrade David McReynolds was the SP’s Presidential candidate on the Florida ballot and received 622 votes. As the Democratic Establishment’s anger mounted against Nader where his very name became a curse word in their vocabulary for all time, David pointed out that every one of the eight minor party candidates had a larger vote differential than Gore’s and could be charged as spoilers. Since my vote for Nader was in the Democrats’ electoral majority status in California, it had no bearing on the outcome. The election of Bush brought us the obscene war he initiated in Iraq in 2003 on the basis of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s possession, which made him one of the worst presidents in US history. Only the election of megalomaniac capitalist Donald Trump now in 2016 looms even worse.
 

1999 Postscript:
The Christmas Revels

MY GOOF! When I began my Year 2000 account in this Memoir #37, I recalled that the annual Christmas Revels musical celebration held in Oakland, California in which I played a significant role, completed my year. A quick memory jog proved me wrong. My Christmas Revels year was in 1999, So, I’ll just tack this at the end of 2000 to conclude #37.

Christmas Revels is an annual entertainment feature held at the Scottish Rite Auditorium in Oakland on Lakeside Drive across the street from Lake Merritt every December as a major music, song and dance extravaganza that can involve a couple of hundred entertainers, featuring the Winter Solstice tradition of various cultures around the world. Revels does ten shows every season that can draw audiences of up to 10,000 people. The theme for 1999 in Oakland was on the Northland Theme of the Nordic culture that covered Finland and Northern Russia, based on the Finnish classic epic poem, The Kalevala, compiled from the folk poetry of ancient Finnish and Russian Karelian cultures and brought to life by Finnish medical doctor Elias Lönnrot, as the Homer of his country in the 19th Century. As an old Kalevala performer cited earlier in these Memoirs, I had acted in a couple of plays on the Epic as Väinämöinen, the pagan half-deity and hero of the epic in the 1980s and done several personal performance tours as that character, including an appearance on Finnish national public television. So I was contacted by the longtime director of Christmas Revels, David Paar, who had been my acting for film instructor at San Francisco City College, to see if I’d be interested in being part of the Revels production in Oakland. It sounded like a great gig and I met with David over the possibilities. But I wouldn’t play my old Väinämöinen character but as Dr. Elias Lönnrot, the author of the epic with the only speaking role in the show! WOWSA!

With my working knowledge of The Kalevala, I offered to assist in other aspects of the Northland show. I auditioned for my role and maybe the only one who did as David may have had me in mind for it from the very beginning. One beautiful aspect of the show for me was that I wouldn’t need to memorize any lines for the production. My role on the stage would be to sit at a table on the stage writing The Kalevala and reading out loud from it as the good Doctor Elias, while the singers, musicians and dancers would be whirling all around me, inspiring my creation, plumed pen and ink well at hand. Scottish Rite is a huge venue with tiered balconies so my period costume would have a mic hidden under my coat lapel with my booming voice reaching the farthest rafters. The huge cast included performers from as far away as Sacramento and Santa Rosa who would commute to our nightly rehearsals with Revels sponsors hiring catererers to feed us our evening dinners backstage at the hall for the weeks it took before opening the show. We also had a chorus of children doing several numbers of song and dance directed by an immigrant Russian woman of formidable talent.

I was offered a certain monetary sum in a contract for my speaking role by the Revels producers, but as a professional actor, I negotiated successfully for a decent increase in my remuneration. It was an expensive production put on by the nonprofit civic endeavor as a group of musicians and a dancer were contracted, all travel expenses paid, and a salary from Russian Karelia and one young instrumentalist from Norway to further diversify the show. Three musicians came from Petrozavodsk in Russian Karelia where the Kalevala tradition is strong: Arto Rinne, the late Aleksandr (Sasha) Bykadorov, and Igor Arpihov, and an outstanding Karelian dancing talent, Raisa Kalinkina. On my 1991 visit to Petroskoi I had met Arto Rinne, a Russian of Finnish descent, who had just returned with a group of his young compatriot street musicians after a summer of show biz in Stuttgart, Germany. Arto, who speaks excellent Finnish as well as English, inquired then about playing in the United States, in which endeavor I had no clout. The dancer Raisa, a mother of three, and I had had a conversation in a Petrazavodsk cabaret in 1994 about a possible dance tour as I reported earlier in these Memoirs. They were advertised as the Karelian Folk Ensemble on their Revels appearance here. Fortunately, they had lucked into performing in the Northland Revels in other US cities earlier in the 1990s. Several other American cities besides Oakland also sponsor the colorful Christmas Revels shows annually to this day. Arto Rinne has a day job as music director of the Pertrazavodssk radio and TV Station. Sasha Bykadorov was a music professor at Petroskoi University. During the summer months Igor Arpihov worked as a bell ringer on Kishi Island in Lake Onega, the location of numerous wooden Russian Orthodox churches. Raisa Kalinkina was a professional folk dancer and dance teacher in her Russian Karelia region. All have performed all over Russia and Siberia and a number of European countries as well as FinnFests in North America, starting in Toronto where the men played in the expanded Karelian band Myllärit (The Millers) and elsewhere as well.

I got to know the members of the Karelian Folk Ensemble very well at Oakland. Sasha appeared as Väinämöinen in Revels singing several solos in Russian as that character. As Lönnrot I was dressed as a proper bourgeois gentleman of the Mid-Nineteenth Century, and the Russians were clad in their regional Karelian costumes. (Although the Christian term “Christmas” appeared in the title Christians Revels, there is very little religiosity expressed in the Revels; it is primarily a secular show highlighting the grandiosity of the Winter Solstice.) Our show was a great hit that drew a capacity audience of 1,000 every night, so by the time we were done, 10,000 people had seen it. Media reviews were positive. As I had the only real speaking role, I was identified by name in the San Francisco Chronicle as “a Berkeley actor.” It was the most grandiose live show in which I was ever featured. The entire East Bay Finnish community came out in force to see it. My best lifetime friend, the late Niilo Koponen from Fairbanks, Alaska, made a special trip to the “Lower 48" to see it. The crowds we drew were comparable to when I acted in the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival’s 1988 season’s selection of “As You Like It,” in the grand sylvan vistas of Golden Gate Park.

End of Installment 37