Edd Lorig left Mt. Pleasant, Iowa and moved west eventually settling in Seattle shortly after the Great Seattle Fire of 1889. He would have been about 24 years old. Mikkeline (Americanized to Maggie) Oliva Landaas arrived from Bergen, Norway in 1892 at age 20. They were married 28 July 1894 in Seattle, Washington.
During a taped interview when I asked how his parents met Walt, their youngest son, told me the following story.
“My mother knew some gal who worked in a bakery in Seattle. I don’t know if she (my mother) was buying for the people she worked for, or just for herself, or what. But the gal, working in the bakery she knew was going out with my dad. And she seen my dad coming and it was just about closing time and my dad was already there. So he didn’t want to meet my mother for some reason. And so they had kind of a closet thing there but the door was up so she could see the bottom of his feet. And she asked the gal who that was, so she said that it was the fellow she was going out with. Then she dragged him out and introduced him to my mother and he liked my mother better than he did the other gal. So that’s the way that ended then. The first thing she seen was his shoes.”
I have heard from other sources that Maggie liked the look of Edd’s shoes and that was what tipped the scales in his favor with her.
The next post will tell a little about Maggie’s journey to America from Norway and what happened to her when she first arrived.
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