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American from Sweden: The Story of A. V. Swanson
American from Sweden The Story of A V Swanson Author:Betty Swanson Cain When Axel Svensson moved from his tenement home in Bjuv, Sweden, at the age of eight, to ease his family?s financial burden, he began an odyssey that would extend over a quarter-century and thousands of miles. His life as an indentured farmhand made him resolve to improve his lot. With the sense of purpose he was to display throughout his life, ... more »he began saving from his meager earnings for passage to America. It took him four years to accumulate enough money for the trip, but when he left Sweden he was a third-class passenger?not herded with the impatient and desperate in steerage. In 1911, twenty-year-old Axel Svensson landed in Boston and headed straight to Chicago. There he changed his name to A. V. Swanson, began the study of English, and started his search for a job that would satisfy his need to succeed. That need would have him on the move for the next fourteen years, until he and his young family settled in Ames, Iowa, where he assumed the managership of the local J. C. Penney store. Swanson never returned to Sweden, but during the last years of his life he thought a great deal about the country and family he had left behind, and he shared those memories and stories with his daughter Betty. Cain draws on those private conversations and on her subsequent research in America and Sweden to tell the story of an American from Sweden.« less