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JG: Okay. We're here with Art Hansen. This is Jim Gatewood interviewing for Densho; the secondary interviewer is Martha Nakagawa, and behind the camera is Dana Hoshide. Thank you, Art, for agreeing to be with us today.

AH: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

JG: So we're going to start at the very beginning by asking you about your childhood. So when and where were you born?

AH: I was born on October 10, 1938. So my next birthday will actually fall on 10/10/10, and I'll be then seventy-two-years old. I was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in St. Mary's Hospital. And I lived in Hoboken until I was five years old, and then I moved to a little town called Little Ferry in New Jersey, and that is in Bergen County. Hoboken is in Hudson County. And I essentially moved from the city where my maternal side was living to the town where my paternal grandparents were living.

JG: What do you know about your last name, "Hansen"?

AH: Well, it's Norwegian, and the rule of thumb is if it's "E-N," it's usually Norwegian or Danish, if it's "O-N," it's usually Swedish. But that rule has been broken. I've met people who were "O-Ns" who are Norwegian and the opposite, too.

JG: Who were the first Hansens to come to the United States?

AH: I have no idea. I know that one person who was president of the so-called "United States" really before it was a nation, that was kind of like considered the presidential figure, was a man whose last name was Hansen, so they were there at least in the, you know, in the eighteenth century, but I don't know when the first one came. Some people will say, well, Leif Ericson came very early and he's, of course, Norwegian, too.

JG: What is your father's name?

AH: My father's name is Haakon, H-A-A-K-O-N. And he was named after the king of Norway. And he was the king of Norway after Norway broke away from Sweden and achieved its independence. That was in 1905; my dad was born in 1911. My grandmother and grandfather were very proud of the independence of Norway and very beholden to the king of Norway. And so my father carried, for them, really, the badge of Norway. It's interesting because when they came over and settled in the United States in 1911, my grandmother was pregnant with my father. And he was the first of nine kids. And the remaining eight kids did not carry Norwegian names, nor did they, like my father, know how to speak and write in Norwegian. He was the only person of the siblings that could do that. The rest were very quickly plunged into, you know, the bath of Americanization, and so they didn't have that kind of residual Old World aspect to their lives. Of course, they heard their parents speaking in Norwegian and ate Norwegian foods and went to visit Norwegian relatives and things like that. But my father was really kind of like a special child in that way, because he's the only one that could write a letter to my grandparents in Norwegian.

JG: What do you know about your father's early years?

AH: I know quite a bit about it. He talked a lot about it to me. My grandparents came to Ellis Island, and they had no sense of the geography of the United States. And they took a job . . . their first job was a job that they thought was going to be on Staten Island, and it turned out that it was in New Mexico. And here they couldn't speak a word of English, and they certainly couldn't speak Spanish, and my grandfather, who had a background as a sea captain, was put in charge of a Mexican work crew out in Las Cruces, New Mexico. And that was in 1911 -- and, of course, New Mexico didn't even became a state of the United States until 1912 -- so my dad was born in a territory of the United States. So that's quite interesting.

JG: Wow.

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