whence cometh our strength

we're going to a fiftieth birthday party in a few minutes, for Oddgeir. Not a regular American name, and he is not a regular American. He is instead, a Norwegian, a Norski as some of my high school buddies would have sneered. But the Olsen twins used to say, "ten thousand Swedes ran through the weeds, pursued by one Norwegian".

Odd how your life unfolds. I married a girl whose grandmother emigrated from Oslo Norway, three years before the 1905 revolution from Sweden. Then, as luck would have it, my first seatmate at HP was Johann Sverdrup, whose grandfather was the admiral of the navy in 1905 when they won independence from Sweden. When my daughter Cindy and I traveled to Tallberg Sweden and then toured Norway, we landed in a small village and found a statue near Alesund erected in his honor. Our discovery included the fact that he mostly ran a small ferry boat service, and that was a prime source of his Admiralty title. In fact, his father was Prime Minister and earlier had been Minister of the Navy, and they did have two gunboats.

Kristiania was the capital of the new monarchy in 1905; the name was changed later to Oslo. Oddgeir is from a town 200 miles south, Kristiansand, as is Signe Churton, married to Jenny's nephew David. I visited Kristiansand in 2005, staying with them and touring the area, including a lot of the Nazi armament areas, especially out on a neighboring island, Ny-Hellesund. As it turns out, Oddgeir has built a war commemoration for his homeland that attempts to capture some of the horror and anguish that such events cause for humanity. He has been at Stanford for a term, studying in the Communication school, and leaves for home this month.

Ironic too that another Sverdrup, Harald, is credited with leading Scripps School of Oceanography to new heights of excellence, and hiring Roger Revelle as his replacement in 1947. Revelle and James Lovelock would use Don Hammond's HP temperature probe to begin the deep ocean measurements that underpin much of our current knowledge about global warming.

Yet another relative, Otto Sverdrup, became known for his Arctic sea explorations, including claiming three islands off the coast of Canada for Norway, still known as the Sverdrup Islands. Norway ceded claims to these in 1930.

The world is a wonderfully small place. We are privileged today to go honor Oddgeir.