KERMIT - Key Persons

Her father: Carl Nicolai Lund, born September 8, 1869, in Winchester, Wisconsin. Deserted the family somewhere between 1924 and 1930. Died in 1936 of cirrhosis of the liver in Long Beach CA. Mom's parents were both pretty old when she was born. Mom's mother: Hannah Engeborg Johnson, born July 4th, 1883, Nordland Township, Minnesota; died Sept 30, 1954 in Minneota, Minnesota. Her Norwegian name Johanna Ingeborg Jansen is listed on her death certificate. I never met her, but my mother went to see her shortly before she died when I was 9 or 10. Hannah and Carl were married in Wisconsin on April 12th, 1902, lived in Minneota until 1905, then in Streeter, North Dakota (where Carl's parents lived), and returned to Minnesota, living in several towns until settling in in Minneota about 1920. My grandfather Carl Nicolai Lund. The photo on the left turned up recently and is clearly the same person as the man in Mom's scrapbook, who my Mom told me was her father. The studio portrait on the right was passed down by Ella and is believed by some family members be Carl. But these are two different persons; leaving aside the total lack of resemblence, you can see that the younger Carl has a free earlobe while the older one has an attached earlobe. Luckily we have another, verified, photo of Carl from 1892 in which the face, the shape of the head, and the earlobe match the 1913 photo. Anyway, whatever he looked like, Carl Lund wound up as a drifter, alcoholic, and eventually a derelict. On the 1900 census he's listed as a blacksmith; in 1910 as a farmer (on his parents' farm in Streeter, North Dakota); in 1920 a farmer (in Otter Tail County, Minnesota); on my mother's birth certificate his occupation is listed as "laborer". At some point between 1924 and 1930 Carl walked away from the family. My cousin Sandy, Mom's brother's Zeke's daughter, says "Carl, from what my dad said was almost never home, he was a blacksmith and traveled with the builders ... spent most of the time in the tavern and when he left Hannah with all those kids he told the owner of the General Store that when they had eaten all of what the house was worth he could have the house." In 1930 Carl was living with daughter Mabel and her husband Lloyd and their baby girl in Casper, Wyoming, occupation "None", marital status "Divorced". He had left Hannah and the three youngest children - Vivian, Doris, and Shirley, who were still in school - and was mooching off his second child and her husband. To Hannah, Carl was as good as dead; she listed her marital status as "Widowed" on the 1930 census. Just as the Great Depression kicked in, she had to find a way to house and feed the three girls. I don't know the whole story but somehow she held it all together at least until 1940, when my Mom left home. Mabel and Lloyd must have kicked Carl out because he made his way somehow to Long Beach, California, where several other of his children lived, including Sandy's father Zeke. The next thing I know is that he was found dead on the beach, January 27, 1936, liver failure. Sandy says, "Ella at age 95 still cried about her dad... she just remembers he bought her a red dress. I don't think she saw him [when he came to Long Beach]. Ella loved him for the good memory of a new red dress. They were poor and everyone had to work to support 10 kids. Seems if anyone knew he was in Long Beach we would have heard Dad say something about it and Carl was never mentioned." Certainly Mom never knew what happened to him because Frank Rider hired a detective to investigate, only to find out that he died on the very same beach that their apartment looked out on.

Carrington Lewis was a featured actor in the racially integrated play "Stevedore" at the Civic Repertory Theater in NYC in 1934. In 1938 he was in the integrated cast of the George S. Kaufman / Moss Hart revue Swing Out the News at the Music Box Theater on Broadway, in which Hazel Scott also appeared. In 1939-40 he was a member of the singing group Josh White and his Carolinians which made a number of recordings on the Columbia and Harmony labels (some can be found on Youtube), and which was featured in the 1940 Broadway musical John Henry with Paul Robeson. In 1940 he was also in the radio drama Green Pastures on The Cavalcade of America. Mama Lori and Carrington Lewis were in the cast of the Harold Arlen / Johnny Mercer / County Cullen musical St. Louis Woman in 1946, starring Pearl Bailey, Ruby Hill, and the Nicholas Brothers. Lewis is listed in the cast (as "Waiter") but not Mama Lori; I suspect she had a nonspeaking singing-dancing role. She might be somewhere in the second photo. She probably did more than just this one play but I don't have any more information and there's nothing on the Internet that I found so far. Anyway, since she was a singer I would be surprised if she did not sing with the orchestras of her brothers Donald or Harry. Christine said of the Wilsons, "EVERYONE sang AND played an instrument, it was the Wilson way!" and that Mama Lori was "a regular on the chittlin' circuit". I think "Harry Wilson's Orchestra" had a regular show on WAAM in 1931 (it's listed in the NY Daily News radio schedules).

Christine is the middle sister. Short bio (her words): "I graduated from [SUNY] Cortland. Was a media Assistant at [SUNY] Oneonta. Then taught at LaGuardia [Music and Art] then at Truman [in the Bronx near Co-Op City]. AP at August Martin [high school in Queens] then Bronx Science. Summer school principal at August Martin and Science. Summer school AP at Stuyvesant." Retired in 2017, saying: "I'm loving my oboe- Have you seen me in Mozart in the Jungle on Amazon Prime- It's a new career- got my SAG card! I'm in three orchestras and two bands- I even play in the band in Maine!!" Wants us to come to Kinapic. Like Lori, Christine went to PS 121 and PS 135 and then Music and Art (oboe).

John had another marriage, wife's name Ethel; they had a daughter Marjorie, who would be Granma's half-sister. Christine says, "John's sister (georgiana) had three children; one, the son Earl, was a first-class mechanic and my father (and I) spent a lot of time with him and my dad learned much about cars from him. I recall a feeling and a sense but can't pull up a face. (I was always dispatched with my dad on Saturday afternoons and we usually went to garages and such)... Great Aunt Ada, John's other sister, married a cook who was one of twins. My mother believes his name was Elvin. She kept her house immaculate and the pots hung on the wall as shiny as ever." By 1947 Mama Lori was married to Carrington Lewis, but I don't know when this marriage started or when it ended. Carrington was in show business like Mama Lori was herself, and at least two of her brothers, Donald and Harry, who both had orchestras in Harlem. Donald's orchestra was a regular at the Renaissance Ballroom, and brother Arthur was in it too, on sax. Another member was Clyde Eric Nourse who is remembered on the Local 802 website Requiem section, which says "he played with Donald Wilson at the Renaissance Ballroom in Harlem". As Christine says (quoting her Mom), "Donald played the violin and occasionally sang (he was only Okay)". "Don Wilson's Orchestra" turns up constantly in the New York Age, a Harlem daily, from 1931 until 1958. Christine adds:

Consuelo's mom: Laura Wilson (Mama Lori), b.1906 in St.Eustatius (Sint Eustatius, Statia). Died just short of her 100th birthday in 2006. Mama Lori was a Dutch citizen. Was she also an American citizen? Who knows!

Lori is the youngest. She went to elementary school at PS 121 on Throop Avenue (2 blocks from home) and to PS 135 (which has disappeared) for middle school. Like both her sisters she went to the High School of Music and Art, her instrument was the cello. She went to Springfield College in Massachusetts for a while and then transferred to Lehman in the Bronx, where she graduated. Then she had a career in fashion, following her dad's flair for style and elegant clothing, ending up traveling the world (e.g. Hong Kong) as a top buyer for famous NYC department stores, and eventually moved to Chicago to work at Sears headquarters (world's tallest building at the time), making her the only daughter who ever moved away. Years later she married Mel Funchess, who I have not met yet. Since Mama Lori was born in St.Eustatius she must have been a Dutch citizen. Christine remembers when she was little and the family went to Canada, Mama Lori had to show a passport but nobody else did. Mama Lori was unbelievably sweet and loveable. People said she was like a little girl, with a giggly musical laugh and a big irresistible smile. When I first met her in about 1968 she lived alone in an apartment with her dog in some building in Bronx that was near Boston Road, but nobody can remember the details. About 1969 Mama Lori married Floyd Jackson, an extremely nice guy who was the night manager at a parking garage on Sixth Avenue and 46th Street, and who looked remarkably like Ike Turner, and they bought a house in Queens Village. Like John Bergen, Floyd loved cars but he also loved Mama Lori and the family. She would always come to help him with the accounting at the end of his shift, late at night. She was a genius with numbers, she could add up big columns of figures in her head and count huge piles of cash at superspeed. Aside from whatever jobs she had (e.g. as a waitress at IHOP on 34th Street) she was also a numbers banker in Harlem; I used to drop her at a storefront on 146th Street on the east side of Broadway. Mama Lori and Floyd's house was at 208-15 110th Avenue in Queens Village, Zip 11429, near Hollis Avenue and Francis Lewis Boulevard, a huge sprawling area of modest brick single-family homes with yards, 100% Black. The house is still there but many of the other houses in the area have been replaced by newer ones that aren't brick. Mommy and I were married in that house December 21, 1974. Mama Lori sang "Danny Boy" at the reception, she had a voice like an angel. We knew tons of people on Mama Lori's side of the family; there were big get-togethers at her house most weekends, especially Uncle Harry and his wife Lily and daughter Barbara. Aunt Lou, cousins Sylvia and Pearl, Phyllis, Sharon. Sylvia's husband Willie Netter, who was another former jazz musician; he could play the piano just like Teddy Wilson. I don't think I ever met Donald or Arthur. But when I knew all these people they never talked about their adventures in the old days, they just barbecued and played cards. That's why it's hard to put it all together 30-40 years later. Mama Lori was so beautiful that even in her 70s and 80s, young guys were hitting on her (I saw this happen). Her older sister Lou pretty much raised Grandma because Mama Lori was too young, and Lou's daughters Sylvia and Pearl were like her sisters. They were all very pretty. Sylvia married Willie Netter and had a daughter Phyllis who adopted a little girl Sharon and later got married. Anyway the inside of Mama Lori's and Floyd's house was painted bright colors and the furniture was elegant. Floyd had fixed up the basement. There was a big extended-family cookout in the back yard almost every weekend, even when it was pouring; Floyd had a huge tarp. About half the big holidays we'd go there for dinner, Mama Lori cooked huge dinners (the other half we'd go to the Bronx and Granma cooked huge dinners). We saw the first moon landing live on TV when we were at Mama Lori's house. They lived there for many years but Mama Lori had a gambling problem and eventually lost all of their money, so Floyd left her. She moved to the building at 3438 Fish Avenue, just off Boston Road, a few blocks from the Eastchester projects where Granma and Granpa lived on Adee Avenue. There were no elevators; Mommy and I used to drop her off after family gatherings and I'd help her up the dark stairs to her small apartment that was crammed with all the elegant furniture and the giant mirror from Queens (she gave us some of her furniture that she couldn't squeeze in, like a nice red velvet chair; we had it in 118th Street).

My grandmother Hannah Engeborg Lund, born Ingeborg Johanna Johnson (anglicization of Janssen, her father's patronymic), raised ten children in conditions of unremitting chaos and hardship, as far as I can tell. Carl was not a good husband; he was never home, he drank up much of whatever money he managed to earn, and he deserted the family when my Mom was somewhere between four and eight years old and Doris and Shirley were very little. I know little about the early years, but Sandy says her father Zeke (who was born in 1909) remembers living in a sod house; that's like a hole in the ground, typical of many newly-arrived Scandinavian immigrants who settled in northern plains states, where there are few trees; this would have been in either North Dakota or Minnesota, nobody is left alive who can say for sure. He remembered "having only flour and water to eat and if they were lucky they could sprinkle cinnamon on it for flavor." My own Mom had a similar story about eating snow. Despite all this, and despite the fact that all the children except Doris and Shirley had gotten the heck out of Minnesota at the earliest possible moment, most of them without finishing school, Hannah was much loved by her children. Mom, like all her brothers and sisters, couldn't wait to get out but when she was still on the cross-country train she was already homesick... Mrs. Hannah Lund, a resident of this community for years, died at her home Thursday of last week after a lingering illness of several months. ¶ She was buried here Monday afternoon following services at Hope Lutheran Church. ¶ Rev. Ott Dale officiated at the funeral rites, with the following acting as pallbearers: ¶ Arby Furgeson, Orrin Hanson, Henry Johnson, Irving Johnson, and Richard Lund. ¶ Hannah Engeborg Lund, a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. John B. Johnson, was born on July 4, 1883, in Nordland township. ¶ At the time of her death she was 71 years old. ¶ On April 12, 1902 she was united in marriage to Carl N. Lund and they first made their home in this community. ¶ In 1905 they moved to Streeter, N.D., and later to Underwood, Minnesota. ¶ They returned to Minneota in 1920 and since that time this has been Mrs. Lund's home. ¶ To this union 11 children were born of which 10 are living. ¶ She was preceded in death by her husband, one son, parents, five brothers and sisters. ¶ Mrs. Lund is survived by her 10 children: Palma (Mrs. Harold Blanchette) of San Francisco, Calif.; Mabel (Mrs. Mabel Poehler) of Sheridan, Wyoming; Clarence, Marvin, Raymond, and Gislie of Long Beach, Calif.; Ella of Glendale, Calif.; Vivian (Mrs. Francis da Cruz of Falls Church, Virginia; Doris (Mrs. Earl Jasperson) of Storden, Minn.; Shirley (Mrs. Leonard Hasel of Minneota. ¶ She is also survived by two brothers, Andrew Johnson of Ivanhoe, Gislie Johnson of Minneota; and two sisters, Mrs. Theo Furgeson of Minneota, Mrs. Carl Wigness of Fessenden, N.D.; 16 grandchildren and seven great grandchildren.

Carl's father: Peder Nicolaisen, born 1841 in Løiten (now Løten), Hedmark, who became Peter Nicolai Lund when he arrived in the United States in 1868. Carl's mother: Bergit Høljesdatter, born Gransherad, Telemark, in 1834, who arrived in the US in 1842 and became Betsey Lund when (after a first marriage) she married Peter Lund. Peter and Betsey met in Wisconsin, were married in 1869, lived in Winchester, Winnebago County, where the had four children: Carl Nicolai (1869), Martha Oline (1871), Eliza Elise Sophia (1874), and Melvin Bernard (1878). They also had Betsey's four children from her previous marriage to Knud Hanson, a Norwegian immigrant and Union soldier who had died in 1865 in Andersonville prison camp in Georgia: Ragnhild (1857), Caroline (1858), Anna Maria (1861), and Henry (1863). I have to say that the Peter (Peder) Lund in these group photos appears to have a normal body, whereas there is an authenticated photo (right) of Peder Lund in the book Wisconsin My Home[8], and he is very small. The book says Bergit "..was a tall woman and ... he was a short hunchback ..."; elsewhere she says "this small Norwegian man, who had been so crippled with some kind of rheumatism when he was eleven years old that he had a big bump on his back and chest. Both his head and arms were the same size as any other grown-up man, but his legs were so short that I don't believe he could have been over four feet tall. Because of this deformity his parents in Norway had educated him very well ... [he soon married the [Civil War] Widow Hansen (Bergit)] [and] there were four children [including Carl] born to this union, and a better father, husband, and stepfather has never lived, I am sure."

Ulysses Samuel Scott, born Lockhart SC February 12, 1917, died NYC July 5, 1996. Grandpa was one of 13 children, including himself, James, Charles, John, J. Roy, Port Royal, Pauline, Kate (Katie Lee), Elizabeth - the others died young. To a lesser extent we saw Granpa's side of the family, which also had a large number of uncles, cousins, nephews, etc. Some of them were at his funeral but I can't remember any names. Dorothy? Supposedly Max Roach and Diahann Carroll are in the same family but we never met them (Wikipedia says Diahann Carroll's father, John Johnson, was from Aiken SC, which is not far from Lockhart, where Granpa is from; Diahann herself was born in the Bronx and went to Music and Art when it was next to City College, just like Judy, Christine, and Lori). Look her up, she did a lot of amazing things, for example the 1961 movie Paris Blues, a song "Cantarice" with the Modern Jazz Quartet, and she starred in a 1962 Broadway show "No Strings" about an interracial couple, pretty daring for the time. Also she was the "first African American actress to star in her own television series in a non-stereotypical role". She's also in one my favorite movies, Claudine (1974), with James Earl Jones. Coretta Scott (King) is also rumored to be a relative.

Vivian da Cruz Vivian M. da Cruz, 80, of Indio died July 26, 2002, in Palm Desert. She was born March 5, 1922, to Carl and Johanna Engeborg Johnson Lund in Minneota, Minn. She was a medical legal secretary for the Orthopedic Group. She served in the Navy. She is survived by her companion, Frank Rider of Indio; her son, Frank of New York; her sister, Ella Lund of Orange County; and two grandchildren. She was preceded in death by her son, Dennis in 1978