The Origins of “Tild”

New reader asks: Is your name actually “Tild”? And my answer is: Yep. It is.

Here is why I am Tild:

***

My paternal grandmother Matilda Wulkan emigrated from Sweden at the beginning of the 20th century. Like many other young, impoverished Scandinavian women, Matilda got a ticket to America in the form of a job waiting for her: to be a domestic for an upper middle class East Coast family.

When her new employers in White Plains, New York opened their door to greet the new Swedish maid on the day she arrived in 1905, they beheld a massive 19-year-old farm girl, a shade over 6 feet tall, with an immense steamer trunk marked “Ostergotland Sverige” at her side.

For the next several years Matilda did the cooking, laundry and housecleaning for a family of 7. She chopped wood and hauled coal, did carpentry and plumbing repairs, tended a kitchen garden, and in general toiled like a stevedore from before dawn to past dusk six days a week. On her days off she would attend a meeting of the International Order of Good Templars (IOGT), a temperance society she had joined in Sweden, or some other social gathering of young Swedes living in the White Plains vicinity.

Matilda had grown up in a rural area but wasn’t uneducated. She read English far better than she could speak it, especially at first, and was a voracious reader of all types of literature. Like many of her friends she had a passion for poetry and oratory, and at meetings would often take part in patriotic tableaux or give dramatic recitations in her commanding, thunderous voice. With her impressive size and imperious demeanor (my father said she could give emperors lessons in how to be regal) she frequently portrayed American presidents, historical figures, and icons such as Lady Liberty, or (more often) Uncle Sam.

For several years Matilda carried on a penpal correspondence with a fellow IOGT member named August Brodin. August had emigrated from Sweden some years before Matilda, and various jobs had taken him all around the US. He had a job as a railroad clerk, then worked in an iron foundry. For a while he was a surveyor for one of the copper mining companies in Michigan, and then became a union organizer for the IWW . Finally he decided he would make his career selling insurance.

He’d done his share of carousing and hard living, but when a drinking binge nearly killed him he swore off alcohol completely and joined the IOGT. For the rest of his life he would be an active member and frequent speaker at IOGT functions. At 5′6,” August stood a half-foot shorter than Matilda, but his eloquence and abundant charm gave him a formidable stature all his own.

After ten years Matilda left her life in domestic service and in New Britain, Connecticut in 1915 Matilda married August. The couple soon moved to Minnesota, where they settled in Minneapolis and raised one son, born in 1925, my father Carl Gunnar.

Matilda worked all her life on behalf of numerous causes including temperance, the rural co-operative movement, civil rights, and the Red Cross. At the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis she lectured on the evils of alcohol. During WWII she participated in Swedish language radio broadcasts beamed at Nazi-besieged Europe. I have a newsletter clipping from 1943 that makes me laugh every time I read the headline. It says in big bold letters:

MRS. BRODIN BLASTS AXIS

[and then in smaller lettering underneath, like an afterthought, the rest of the story:]

In Weekly Broadcast

She fought for better working and living conditions for immigrants of all ethnicities, especially for immigrant women and children. Young people newly arrived from Sweden who needed a place to stay often found a temporary home with the Brodins.

In the 1940s Matilda would frequently call on the dynamic young mayor of Minneapolis, a crusading crimebuster whose political fortunes were on the rise: Hubert Humphrey. Matilda gave Hubert stern lectures about the many things he should be doing that he hadn’t done yet, as well as the many things he had done that were just plain wrong and that he should stop doing immediately. She was a familiar face and voice to many other members of city government and social welfare organizations over the years.

In 1963, in recognition of her lifelong public service, the King of Sweden bestowed on Matilda the medal of the Royal Order of Vasa, one of the highest decorations given to civilians by the Swedish government.

Having said all of this, I have to say one more very important thing about Matilda, and that is that she was the most terrifying person I have ever met.

For the first 20 years of my life Grandma Tild aka “Farmor” (Father’s Mother) scared the living bejeezus outta me.
It was agony to be the captive audience for one of her many lectures, delivered in her booming, heavily-inflected ‘Swenglish’. Which lecture would it be today: Truth? Hard Work? Eternal Vigilance Against Fascism? What Makes America Great?

It was like watching Ingrid Bergman playing Golda Meir doing an Eleanor Roosevelt impersonation, only scarier.

I discovered the true meaning of horror when I was caught in her steely gaze as I suffered through a hideous adolescence. When the family went to her house for Sunday dinner, she would greet us each at the door with a flurry of comments and questions which instantly summed up all of our many imperfections. She had a knack for putting into words and blurting out each and every opinion she ever formed, with no regard for the pain or humiliation she might dredge up. Her Sunday assessment of me usually went something like this:

“Yah. Well then. I see you’re getting fatter. Your skirt is too short. You have a lot of pimples today. Don’t you wash?”

She was never malicious, and in a very self-effacing, Scandinavian Lutheran masochistic sort of way she was always more than willing to admit all of her own faults and deficits, but her words still stung. I lived in abject dread of her for the first 20 years of my life.

She loved mottos and proverbs — the lamer the better, I thought at the time. If we were watching TV and a news story came on about a civil rights march she would turn to us and say, with absolute sincerity and righteous fervor:

“You know, it takes the white keys and the dark keys to play the Star Spangled Banner!”

I finally summoned up the the courage to comment:

“How can you say that? You’re calling black people “darkies”. It’s, like, a pun. Kind of an insulting pun.”

She looked at me, her eyes widening with shock. It turned out that she had always been saying “dark keys”. She had never realized that it sounded like she was saying “darkies”. Horrified, she announced that she would never utter that sentence again.

She was not a devout churchgoer. When she went with us to Mount Olivet she would fidget all through the service; tapping her foot and riffling impatiently through the Green Book (which was the Red Book back then) and humming along half-heartedly with the hymns. She was tone-deaf.

She viewed many Christian and quasi-Christian denominations with suspicion. Once she was trying to say something about Holy Rollers and couldn’t remember what they were called so what she said was:

“Those Holy Jumpers, they’re just crazy.” (Need I add that she pronounced the word Jumpers as “Yumpers”?)

We all burst out laughing, which miffed her, until somebody pointed out her mistake, and then Matilda herself started laughing too, and laughed so hard the tears ran down her cheeks. Finally when she was able to stop, she wiped her face with a handkerchief and muttered :

“Yah, you are sure a nutty old lady. ‘Holy Jumpers’!” And that started us all guffawing all over again.

My parents brought Grandma Matilda along to visit me at college one weekend in 1970. She was then in her 80s and hip surgery and arthritis had slowed her down somewhat, but I can still see her purposeful stride as she walked forward to greet me and my motley, rainbow coalition gang of friends in the campus coffee shop. Grandma said hello to me, then turned to slowly survey the faces of my friends.

Her gaze stopped at the dark countenance of an enormous young black man named Davis, a philosophy major and militant. In his every glance and motion Davis bristled with barely-concealed contempt for not just white folks, but also, and particularly, *old* white folks. This tough old battle-axe stopped in front of him, planted her feet, and said:

“Yah. Well then. It’s good to see boys like you off the streets and into college.”

[Total silence. One beat. Two. Oh Jesus we're all going to die.]

Then, mirabile dictu, Davis smiled and simply said “Yes. It is.” And we all started to breathe again.

Years after she died, I found a cache of letters stashed in the bottom of her steamer trunk; the one she’d hauled to America from Sweden all those years ago. The postcards and letters were from the years 1905 to 1915, and were from many friends, but mostly from August, whom she later married.

The cards were addressed to Miss Matilda Wulkan, but most of the messages began with “Dear Tild” or “Dear Tildy”. I was dumbfounded. My stern, ferocious grandma was a “Tildy”? A frivolous, lighthearted, girlish name like that for an imposing presence like hers? Grandma was someone who could be addressed simply as “Tild”? Apparently so. I have a hunch too that she enjoyed very much those short and sweet nicknames.

When I started doing some freelance writing and then going online in the early years of the intertubes, I decided I wanted to use a pseudonym, and ruminated for a considerable length of time on what attributes the ideal pseudonym would have. I decided that more than anything else I wanted a name that bespoke strength to me. A name with power that I could draw on. To come up with a pseudonym like that, in the end I didn’t have to search very far. I’ve been “Tildy”, or “Tild”, for many years now. I hope I can always be worthy of that name.

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