Chapter 6
“Iron Brain”
If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads. Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Stefanus’ and Lydia’s son Arne was an especially precocious child. Older family members recalled that at the age of four he would pick up the newspaper, and they soon realized that he was actually reading it. He went on to excel in school, to such an extent that he acquired the nickname of “Iron Brain.” Arne’s education was accelerated because of a freak accident. When he was five years old, he suffered a severe leg fracture as the result of a sledding mishap. As he later told it, the leg was set incorrectly, and when the cast was removed, the doctors refractured it intentionally so that it could heal properly. As a result, he remained on crutches for nearly two years. Even later in life, he enjoyed showing off his dexterity and ability to climb stairs on crutches. With apparently nothing else to do but read and study, Arne skipped two grades in school and was ultimately graduated from a two-year business college at the age of sixteen. He obtained an entry level job with an Oslo based shipping company, Fearnley and Eger, where he caught the eye of one of the owners, Thomas Fearnley, and moved up the ladder quickly.
Among his many interests, Arne was fascinated by his family’s genealogy and sought to learn as much as he could about his forebears. He knew that his family had actually moved to Norway from Sweden in the late 1800s, and he found that the best sources of information were the parish records of local churches in the family’s ancestral home of Värmland in the western part of the country. His travels eventually took him to a rural farming community in Dalsland called Gesäter (pronounced YEH-say-ter), where he introduced himself to the pastor, Reverend Daniel Sillén. During his visit, he met Pastor Sillén’s youngest daughter Ingrid, a nursing student who happened to be home at the time.
In 1937, at the age of twenty-six, Arne’s company relocated him to the United States to help establish an American presence. His assignment was to first set up a branch office in New York, then one in New Orleans and one in San Francisco, taking six months for each, after which he would return to Norway. As it happened, the last two legs of his assignment were never to materialize. At the time of his departure, as best as we have been able to ascertain, he had seen Ingrid just twice.
Arne’s travel from Oslo to New York was by no means direct. He was issued a passport in Oslo on August 11, 1937, good only for the passage to the United States. He sailed on one of Fearnley and Eger’s cargo ships, the M/S Ferncliff3, leaving on or about that same day. His passport shows a stop in Copenhagen from August 15th through the 23rd; a stamp from “Passkontroll” at the Østfold Canal, near Halden, Norway on August 30; a stop in Bremen, Germany from October 21st to the 24th, where he purchased 75 ReichMarks in travelers checks; and his arrival in Baltimore on November 15. There he was granted a visa for one year. Other details of his ninety-six day journey remain a mystery, but it may be that during the first two and a half months of intra-European sailing, the Ferncliff was picking up various cargoes for their ultimate destination in the United States. If so, this would have given Arne an excellent opportunity to gain familiarity with the ship’s operations and to establish valuable contacts in each of the ports which he visited. He finally arrived in New York on November 17.
Over the next two years, Arne established a New York office for his company in lower Manhattan at 39 Broadway and leased an apartment in a complex called “The Narrows” in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, which was home to a thriving Scandinavian community. Its address was No. 1 74th Street, overlooking the Shore Parkway, the Verrazano Narrows and New York Harbor. Among its advantages was easy access to lower Manhattan via the B.M.T line of the New York subway system. He also became an active member at nearby Trinity Lutheran Church, pastored by the Reverend Paul Scaer.
During the first two to three years after his arrival in the United States, Arne continued to travel. His passport documents at least one trip back to Europe in November 1938, with stops in both London and Göteborg.4 In July of 1939 he sent a postcard to his brother Ragnar with a photograph of Victoria Falls, which he said he had taken on his most recent trip to Africa. In another card mailed to Ragnar on his birthday, February 8, 1940, Arne obviously had more than a premonition of what lay ahead. He wrote: “[This is] sent in troublesome times. So far, New York has only been slightly involved, i.e., with war traffic and exports...Bombers to England. One lighter sank off Staten Island. And the question arose, but was hushed down: Accident or sabotage?” Later that year, on October 5, as a consequence of the Nazi occupation of Norway, Arne was given full power of attorney for all of Fearnley and Eger’s affairs. By the start of the war the firm’s fleet had grown to twenty-two ships, with an aggregate capacity of more than 155,000 deadweight tonnage. He was not yet thirty years old.
Six months earlier, with his career on a rapid upward trajectory, Arne realized that something was missing in his life. Or perhaps it was someone. He decided to do something about it.
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