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Show OLD WORLD AND NEW Chapter II In Copenhagen Father guided us to spots of tender and painful memory in that birthplace of his. He took us to the suburb of Valby where he was born in 1860. Sadly the house of his birth had been replaced. But in front of the newer place he told us how his mother held him up to kiss his father goodbye. Still a mere baby he did not understand how his father was in army uniform. About the time the American Civil War began, Ferdinand Culmsee marched off with the Danish army to fight the Germans over ownership of Schleswig-Holstein. Germany, I believe, wanted those provinces so that she could build the Kiel Canal from the North Sea to the Baltic. Alfred (my Father) knew more what it was all about two years later when the soldier returned with the defeated army. Father also showed us the Roskilde paper mill which the Culmsee family had owned. Here again Father was sad. The war with Germany seems to have brought ruin to the mill. When Alfred was eight years old his father had to sell the mill and move the family to Stavanger, a small port on Norway's west coast. There the Culmsees had owned a ship supply store and warehouse for a couple generations. Father took us on a little steamer to Stavanger to see the long rambling structure built on piles over the harbor. Living in the back, the family operated the business. From early childhood Father played in the warehouse and in boats on sheltered port waters. He and other boys even ventured at times out into the choppy North Atlantic. He always had a zest for adventure. When he wasn't sailing small craft or attending school Alfred sang in the boys' choir in the cathedral, for he owned good vocal chords. Those activities were wholesome. But in his middle teens he began to chum with riffraff that can be |
