Wilford Gundersen Speaks

Orson Wilford Gundersen was my grandpa. He was a tough old Norwegian ... and a Gundersen through and through! He was born in 1883 and raised on Gundersen Lane, and lived there his whole life. Grandpa had a soft spot for each of his grandchildren (and he had a lot of us!). He and grandma Ingeborg had 8 living children and (I won't take the time to count now) but there must be at least 50 grandchildren. I remember that whenever grandpa came to visit, he would grab my head in his right arm like a vise, rub the top of my head with the knuckles of his left hand and say, "You've got a good head." I don't know if this is a Norwegian custom ... or unique to grandpa Wilford, but I do know that none of his grandkids escaped this greeting! I noticed that he called all his grandkids by their first name, but when he saw me he always said my name twice. "You've got a good head, Shauna Shauna." He always said this with a little bit of a Norwegian accent (even though he didn't normally have an accent at all). My mother wondered why he said my name twice (she didn't really care for this) so one day she asked him. He told her that "Shauna" sounds like a word meaning "beautiful" in Norwegian. So he was just calling me beautiful Shauna. I liked it a lot after that.

On December 23, 1963 our cousin John Madsen (the son of Lou and Edith Gundersen Madsen) sat down with Grandpa Wilford and recorded some stories. The first one is "Neffs Canyon Chicken Hunt."



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I think you might enjoy hearing a Gundersen story ... told in typical Gundersen style!