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[Ed. note: This transcript has been extensively edited by the narrator]

JG: Well, and at what point did your family return to the East Coast?

AH: Well, they stayed out west for a long time. They lived in Montana; then, of course, like a lot of Scandinavians, they went to the Dakotas. In particular, they went to the area in North Dakota near the town of Williston. They were on a farm, and my dad was educated in a one-room schoolhouse. And they left for the New York area when he was eleven, so it would have been 1922. And then Brooklyn had a very large Norwegian ghetto, and they moved to Brooklyn. And my father had just about read every book that they had in this little school library in North Dakota, and it wasn't very many books, probably. But he had skipped a grade and everything, and then he came to Brooklyn, and here he is surrounded by these very bright Jewish kids that were there in Brooklyn, too. Because the intellectual class of the United States, I mean, Brooklyn was like the crucible for that, New York and Brooklyn. And Brooklyn was a major city. If it had stayed a city instead of becoming a borough of New York, it would have for a long time been the fourth or fifth largest city in the United States. And you had to take competitive exams then to get into high schools that were really good. And my dad had gone to Dewey Junior High School, and then after that he took the tests and he got accepted in Brooklyn Tech, Brooklyn Technical High School, which at the high-school level is equivalent to being accepted in Cal Tech, California Institute of Technology. My dad was completely out of his element. He couldn't handle it at all. He didn't know what the hell was going on. So, in a sense, at a very early age, he took off from home. And he came back and forth to New Jersey, but essentially from the time he was about thirteen, fourteen years old, he was riding the rails all over the United States. He was hoboing, so he was kind of a working-class intellectual; he went to all these different places, got thrown in jail on Indian reservations, and things like that. He came out to San Francisco, slept on the steps of the public library of San Francisco, and was enthralled with writers like Herbert Spencer, so read all these things about Social Darwinism and such.

And so anyway, he had this sense about California, what a wonderful place it was, and that stayed with him. He came back to New Jersey, he met my mother. Ironically, my mother's family had lived in a house in Little Ferry before they moved to Hoboken, and then my father's family moved into that same house. My grandparents on the Hansen side were cousins. Both had the surname of Hansen, and they were like second cousins. So this explains some of my limited gene pool here. [Laughs] But my father and mother also came from the same part of the built environment, the same house on 66 Grand Street in Little Ferry, New Jersey. So it was a house where my maternal grandmother died, and it was also a house where, when my paternal grandparents were living there, I went to Thanksgivings and Christmases and everything for years. And so when I think of New Jersey, that is the family home. My dad got married to my mother in 1933, October 5, 1933, and my father got a job working for the railroad. But the railroad controlled boats, barges, that would go from the Brooklyn navy yard up to Buffalo, where one time, Jim, you and I went to an oral history conference, and I remember that after that conference we had real buffalo wings to eat, the legitimate sort.

But in any event, for about the first year and a half of my life, I lived on a boat. My brother was two years older than me -- my brother's name is Roy Allen Hansen -- and my brother was born in 1936 and I was born in 1938. So we have these photographs where there's a rope tied around both my brother and my waists because they, our parents, didn't want us falling into the Hudson River. So that continued until my mother didn't like that any longer, and so what happened, my dad continued living on the boat and working on the boat. And then my brother and I first lived in Hoboken and then we moved to Little Ferry. And we used to visit my dad on the boat. My dad was an autodidact in the sense that he was a very bright guy who was good at self-learning. And so he would teach himself all kinds of different things. And one of the things he taught himself was sign painting. He practiced this sort of thing, so when he came off the boat, he got a job as a sign painter. And we lived in a town, Little Ferry, which was a used car capital. And they had, all along the highway, which happened to be Route 6, on both sides, automobile lots, used car lots. And they all had these gigantic, garish, lurid signs that were put up there, and my dad would be painting those signs. And then he branched out a little bit when they started to develop these miniature golf courses. My dad designed these things, but then he also painted all of the signs for them. So this was how we made our living. But my dad started to drink quite a bit. He claimed that he needed to go where the customers were for the sign painting business, but he ended up spending quite a bit of time in the local bars. I would be sent to fish him out of the bar and then he'd bribe me, keep me there for a while by giving me Cokes and things like that. My mom desperately wanted him out of there. Also, my dad was working on these signs, and he was high up on these scaffolds, and it would be in the dead of winter, and it was really, really difficult to be painting signs. So he was amenable to moving. And then he had this image in his mind of what California was all about.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.