The Nevada County Historic Landmarks Commission launches an oral-history program to preserve lives and history, including perspectives on the Gold Rush era and global events shaping history. Torben Eriksen, a Danish immigrant born in 1943 on a Danish farm, recalls his schooling, being drafted at 17, and his military service in the Danish Army as a telegraphist (Sigma Corps) and later in the Danish Rangers in Greenland, where he faced polar-bear dangers. A pivotal family discovery on his father's farm revealed a Viking ship burial site with a chief's coffin and artifacts; the area was protected, though grave robbers had taken many items, leaving a stark archaeological story. Eriksen describes WWII-era activity in Greenland, including German weather stations and U.S. reconnaissance, a skirmish that led to a German leader's death, and the later discovery of a frozen German soldier; he also had a NATO assignment in Belgium handling highly classified material during the Cold War. After NATO, he moves to the Americas to work for a seaweed-based chemical company along the Yucatán coast, traveling through Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil, while learning languages and accompanying his multilingual wife. Following immigration challenges to the United States, sponsorship with a Key West treasure-hunting firm and Reagan-era amnesty enable them to settle in the West; they buy property south of Grass Valley, California, raise two daughters, and reflect on the diverse, international arc of their lives.

Full Transcript of the Video:

Good afternoon.

Welcome.

My name is Chek Simeka.

I'm a commissioner with the
Nevada County Historic Landmarks Commission.

We're here today to start an oral
history program to try to record lives of information so we don't lose our
history.

And history is a fluid thing.

It encompasses not only Nevada County's
history but history from throughout the world which all affected us especially at
the time of the Gold Rush when people from all corners of the earth came to
Nevada County.

Today my guest is Torban Erickson.

Torban is an interesting man.

He's Danish and he immigrated to this country several years ago.

And so Torban,
I'd like for you to say a little bit about your life when you were born and
where you were born.

I was born in 43 on a farm in Denmark where I grew up and
went to school.

We went to three or four different schools as we got more
older and older.

And then when I was 17 I was drafted to the military.

You were
actually drafted? Yeah.

I was drafted first 16 months and then two more years.

So was this the Danish Army or the Danish Air Force? I was at that time I had
educated, being educated to be a marine radio operator so I could travel and
therefore I went to the Army to the signal call.

Okay well let's step back a
little bit because I remember reading through your, you know, your bio, not
your biology, but your bio, that the small Danish farm you were born on itself, the
building that you lived in, went back more than a hundred years.

It actually went
back to the 1700s.

You lived in a building from the 1700s? Yeah and on my mother's side
we could trace the family back to the 1600s.

But my father was the one who had
the farm when I was born and you might want to talk about what he found.

I do.

So there was a lot of rocks in this property and he would have to disk and
farm and he was pretty familiar with the lie of the land I assume.

Oh, issue did.

And also we found a lot of other artifacts in the ground from all the way
to back to the stone age.

To the stone age? Yes.

The flint.

Okay.

Well what did you
dad find? It was a national significance.

Well what was really, what really became
very much talked about because it was unique was that most probably in around
year 950 a Viking chief died and as a coffin they used the Viking ship.

It was
not one of the largest ones but it was still about 60 feet long and it was
hauled a couple hundred yards away from the fjord and left standing and then they
put big boulders around it almost like you mark maybe the outline from a
lawn to a gravel path or something.

So it was it was marked by boulders.

Then it
was used as a great timber.

The Viking chief was put in there.

A lot of horses
and dogs were sacrificed and they also.

.

.

Horses and dogs were in fact in the ship?
Near by? No, no.

They considered the ship the long journey that he should take to the
next world.

So he needed the horses and the dogs.

They also put quite a lot of
jewelry in there and some artifacts that were more for everyday use and then they
put planks on top of the Viking ship and put dirt on top of that and I don't
forget there were already rocks lined out along the sides of the Viking ship
and then after so many years my father when he plowed he noticed that he ran
into more and more boulders in that area and as he lined them up he could see
they were lined up in the shape of a ship.

So at that time he went to and he went
to an archaeologist who then did the rest of the excavation and it became
quite sensational because they hadn't really found any Viking ships in Denmark
before then.

Of course that they had bound Viking ships in other countries?
In Norway, I see.

Of course most of the wood had rotted but thank God there was
the boulders that kind of gave the outline.

I heard that it became a national
park at sorts.

Yeah, it did.

In Denmark the law says that nothing found on your
ground belongs to you, it belongs to the state.

So they claimed the land
around it and they built kind of like a tomb over the Viking ship and then they
did as much preservation of the artifacts that were still left in the
Viking ship as they could.

The problem was that it had been visited by grave
robbers.

Yeah, they had stolen most of it and also the dead Viking chief was not
in the ship any longer.

He had been taken out.

They think it was because as the
Danes became Christians one or two hundred years later they did not find
that they could have that guy there.

They was like psychologic.

I see.

So it was
a long time ago.

Yeah, it was on a long time ago but all the jewelry and the horse
and dog skeletons and many other things were still left there.

I see.

Well let's
change gears just a little bit and go back to when you said you were drafted
and I believe you said it was the Danish army.

Yeah, I was drafted to the Danish
army since I was a telegraphist and went into the Sigma Corps.

What does it tell
you? That's a guy who worked on freighters, on shipping in general.

You
could travel worldwide as long as it was only along the coast that you could
get.

But as a telegraphist it was a great job because when you were in port you
were not allowed to use your radio station.

So you were doing a non-audio
communication? Yeah, it was never done on shortwave radio.

It was done on morse
telegraphy.

Ah now I understand.

Morse code.

Yeah and we had to keep the owners
of the ship informed with how things were going.

I see.

Yeah.

Well when did you move
from that assignment to the Danish Rangers? That was when I found out that I
was being drafted for so many years.

I was kind of bought in the military
because if there's no war all soldiers are doing is parading and shining brass
and wasting time as far as I was concerned.

So there is a very very unique unit
of Danish special forces.

Only 12 guys that are based in northeast Greenland
and they patrol northeast and north Greenland by dog sleigh.

So they they can
patrol a little bit by boats in the summertime but most of it takes part in
the winter and then it's pretty involved because you are on patrol for close to
half a year without coming back home and you live out of depots and you have
12 dogs and a sleigh and a rifle and you have a partner and if you meet 5 or 10
other people during those four or five months that's that's pretty much it.

Did
you ever have any threats or from wild animals of any kind? Oh yeah.

Polar bears.

Polar bears.

I've seen hundreds of them and we tried very hard not to tangle with
them because the outcome was pretty much every time that you had to shoot the
polar bear because it was either wanted to kill and eat you or they wanted to
kill and eat the dogs and so if we could we made big detours so we so the dogs
did not see the polar bears.

Did you patrol alongside would it be the Inuits
or what native people? Nope.

There weren't any.

It's so desolate and it's so cold we
had temperatures down to 60 below in Fahrenheit and nobody lives there.

They
cannot live there.

They cannot hunt.

They cannot fish.

Everything is frozen.

I see.

So what was the largest Danish base in Greenland? The largest Danish base in
Greenland was in the West Greenland a little bit south of the capital but
the largest base in Greenland was an American air force base called Tully at
that time it was called Tully and it was doing a lot of clandestine stuff that
didn't really get out in the news but they were yeah in the news but they were
sending spy planes over towards the northern parts of Russia at that time
and they were also keeping an eye on what happened north of Greenland up in
the polar basin.

There was one remote landing strip for the spy planes in the
area we patrolled but it was only there if their spy planes got in trouble.

I
don't know if you have heard about the spy plane called U2.

Sure.

The ones with
the long wings and the other one was the SR-71 and that was the one that was the
fastest airplane in the world and those ones we saw them fly over.

I never saw
one on the ground but I know one landed up there on the emergency landing strip
but I was not around at that time.

Let me ask another question before we leave the
Danish Rangers.

There were two questions.

They were called what? The name of the
dog star is Sirius so they found Sirius was a really good name for the patrol so
it was called the Sirius patrol.

Now I understand.

Now again before we leave this
discussion I believe you made a reference at one time that you found a German
pilot in Greenland long after World War II.

Yeah it was the Germans, I'll go
further back, United States sent a lot of supplies to Europe during World War II
in Freitas and the German submarines tried to sink as many of those ships as
they could so that they wouldn't get the supplies they needed and in order to know
the weather forecast in North Atlantic it was very important for the
Germans to have meteorological stations along the east coast of Greenland.

Weather
stations? Meteorological stations, yeah they would take temperature on different things.

Also specifically wind but if you knew if you knew the weather in North East
Greenland you could pretty much predict how it would be in the North Atlantic
some days later.

So the Germans sent various groups of scientists and soldiers
to East Greenland and they were hiding out some lived in snow caves and some
lived in in the mountains and some lived in ships away from the coast and the
sledge patrol at that time was not created as a serious patrol.

It was local
hunters and fishermen who reported to United States that there was a German
group of Germans who were doing weather observations in a certain location and
then some of the Danish hunters were enrolled in the American military and
they had wireless radio so they could call not United States but they could
call American soldiers in Iceland and tell them okay here they are come and
bomb them.

Come and bomb them? Yeah and some of those some of those hunters and
trappers ran into a group of Germans that were hiding in snow caves and it
came to shooting they killed they actually killed a leader of the German
group and the rest of the Germans contacted Norway which German has occupied.

German has occupied? Yeah so a plane came and evacuated the Germans but they
left all the stuff there and it's still there hand grenades grenades radios I
guess the point is you found this man's body years later.

He was shot and he was
buried right next to where they were based and I was with a helicopter when
we landed there and I did not really like to disturb his grave but the crew on
the helicopter removed the rocks and the German is still lying there he was in
full uniform with sunglasses on and frozen solid and this was in the late
1960s so he'd been there since the 1940s so I understand yeah well let's shift
gears once again and talk about your experience in another organization
which is NATO.

Yeah that was that was kind of a weird thing I thought after
Greenland that I could just travel and use my money but it turned out that I
could not take my own money out of the country that's the Danish law except if
I worked abroad for two years so I got a job in NATO and I was the NATO
NATO military headquarter in Belgium and the job was extremely interesting.

I have
to tell you the classification because you always hear about top secret top
secret is not the highest classification we were classified as cosmic top secret
Atomol.

Cosmic top secret what's that last one? Atomol.

Yeah so we knew we knew where
in Europe they were nuclear weapons best you did for the defense and at that
time it was the iron curtain so a lot a lot of information came into the
military headquarter from sources in Eastern Europe who did not like the
Russians and we had to read all that stuff and we had to classify whether it
was secret top secret or whatever and then we had to well there were so many
different NATO countries based in the headquarter so that we had to send the
classified information to some of those people and there were other groups that
we were told don't send them anything because NATO did trust them.

Not trust us.

Other countries.

France for instance.

Okay and we could not talk about that either okay
and I was there for almost two years.

Well let's move along you've led a very
interesting life up to me it's obvious but I'd like to advance to the point when
you left Denmark and Europe and came to South America yeah that was you might
have been married by that time I don't know.

No not yet.

When you decide what to
do in life you have two choices you can either take a career and there's nothing
wrong with that or you can decide that you will take any interesting job that
comes around regardless almost regardless what it is and where it is so I
decided about the interesting jobs and I got a job for a company that used seaweed
to make certain chemicals from it and they also used citrus peel for the same
purpose and I was based first I was based in Mexico I worked there almost two
years along the coast of Yucatan which is what most people pay a fortune for so
I was there diving for seaweed and taking samples of the seaweed and at that
time my now wife was coming with me I had met her in Belgium and she was
traveling along with me and that was good because she was much better at
languages than I was.

So she spoke Spanish and so did you? In Denmark when you go to
school in Denmark it's so different from here because you have all those sports
baseball basketball football we don't have that in Denmark when we come to six
or seven grades we have at least two languages one of them is always Danish
and then next one is English and then they add German and then they add
French and then sometimes they add Spanish also and that's why we don't
have time to all that stuff I would have loved to do sports.

I spoke Spanish but
my wife my current wife spoke Spanish much better but after Mexico I was sent
to various countries but most of the time Argentina and in Argentina it was
citrus peel that I had to what I had to do was to observe those plants that
shredded, washed and dried citrus peel so that what they sent to Denmark was not
run so that's what I was doing there and then Paraguay I was mostly sent their
trying to make new contacts for my company for future plants and then Brazil
I spent quite a long time in Brazil visiting existing plants they were
also doing the peel and as I said in Mexico it was mainly seaweed along the
coast of Yucatan.

But you did a lot of diving there.

Yeah I did a lot of diving.

I was a
diver from the while I was in the Navy but we did not dive very deep because it
had to be an area where the local people could dive to the bottom and pick the
seaweed or else there was no point in it but yeah we did a lot of diving every
we did the whole coast of Yucatan every 500 yards we went out and look for seaweed
and then we took samples and sent the samples back to Denmark it was very
interesting.

Well let's bring the discussion in another direction at what
point and why did you arrive in Florida? Oh yeah that was a bit later because now
we were also I was also sent to the Far East to Indonesia which is a beautiful
very very interesting country and should you ever learn a language learn to
speak Indonesian because it's so simple the grammar has no exceptions and if you
can remember the vocabulary then you are doing fine you make future sense tense
by saying tomorrow you don't change the sentence but you just put tomorrow in it
in it and past tense you say yesterday and plural you say you say the word
twice.

I find that's pretty simple.

Well let's get you in towards the United States.

Okay yeah.

So you were in Florida for a while.

Yeah I
Denmark is a very nice and well-organized country but pretty born because
everything is done everything is said and so I took a two-year language course
in Copenhagen Spanish English French and then my wife and I left so hopefully get
into United States as an immigrant but just be aware for a person from Western
Europe it's extremely difficult it is very very hard because at that time they
had all the refugees from Eastern Europe and they got in first.

I see.

So one of the
few options we had was to get an American company to sponsor us as employees
that they really needed.

So we located a company in Key West Florida that did
treasure hunting.

They were diving for gold and I convinced them that they needed me
because I spoke Spanish which they spoke some places in Caribbean and because I
was the diver from the Danish Navy and because it was a radio operator.

So I
signed on with them for about a year and a half and we spent about a year in the
Caribbean.

We went to quite a lot of islands in the Caribbean and look for
gold and we also went to the Northern part of South America to look for gold
again.

We didn't find any gold and I didn't really care because I was not
interested in the gold I was interested in getting sponsored.

The reason I was
almost hoping we wouldn't find any gold was because the people who ran that
company were like pirates they would have stolen everything.

Gold in pirates and
ships.

We would never have seen a piece of that gold.

We had a good time at a
certain period there were about 30 young guys on board all divers plus the crew
that sailed the ship.

So we had a lot of fun.

Well take us to the point when you
did get I guess you first were with the green card and then when you settled
down.

Yeah it was kind of odd because the green card was I wanted to get and at
that time Reagan was the president and he gave amnesty to everybody including me.

But I have I'm not quite sure where my amnesty was because I Reagan had done it
always because I had spent my time with that company but anyhow we got we got the
green card my wife and I and I bought a truck in Florida and we drove very very
slowly across America zig-zagging up and down and around and the further west we
got the better we liked it.

In fact it was strange in some of the southern
states I had shorts on and people made cat calls and kind of it's like oh come
on give me a break.

So when we got out around Arizona, California and Nevada we
noticed that almost whatever we did even if it was really really crazy they would
say oh that is really neat different culture.

They were really to accept
anything.

So my wife and I bought a piece of property here south of Grass Valley
and started building a house in 81 and we had hardly any money left at that
time because I had spent most of it bumming around.

So we started building
and we had I think we had six hundred six hundred six five no six hundred dollars
that's true but strangely enough we got jobs right right away good jobs.

I work
for your college I work for the hospital my wife worked for the hospital
she worked for the county so I have no complaints it did fine.

And you settled
down and you had children? Yeah we had two daughters one is now living in New
York the other one just took a PhD she lives in Denmark and we'll see where
they end up.

Yeah when my wife knows where they will end up we'll most
probably somebody wants to be here the kids.

Yeah she misses her.

Yeah well you
know in a nutshell that's that's a very fine story and I wish we had a little
more time hopefully sometime he might come back again.

You'll see how it goes
with this one.

Okay well I think it's gonna go just fine I want to thank you again
Torben.

Yeah okay sure you're welcome.

I appreciate you talking to us.

And I hope I
didn't use any really weird foreign words or speak too fast.

No I didn't get you just fine.

Thank you.

All right.