First time I met Peter Nordstrom at the Swedish Church, SF, was just before the pandemic hit in in March 2020, when he had just stepped down as the President of Young Scandinavian Club (YSC) after 6 years.
In December 2021 I made an interview with Claes Claesson, who has an elder brother in Linköping where he has been a school administrator. As he was suffering from an advanced cancers the family gathered to say goodbye -it was uncertain if he would survive the holidays. Somebody in San Francisco had sent the interview with Claes, which had been distributed to the entire family in Sweden.
On our Advent Service in SF the mystery was resolved when Peter Nordstrom was in attendance with his family, recognized Claes from the picture and met him for the first time over coffee and Lucia buns.
We followed up with some questions to the Senior Software Engineer at Google.
- We were pleasantly surprised to learn that you are reading our church bulletin, how come?
I’ve been on the Church mailing list for a number of years, and typically try to glance through the newsletters from the Swedish Church and Consulate to see what interesting things are going on in the Swedish community.
When I saw the interview with Claes Claesson a few weeks ago I remembered that an old friend from my Linköping years in the 70s and 80s, Joakim Claesson, had mentioned that he has an uncle that lives in the Bay Area, so I forwarded the newsletter to him to see if the article was about his uncle, which indeed it was. I had lost contact with Joakim but a few years ago it turned out that my sister and family are neighbors with Joakim, and we reconnected then. Joakim has visited me a few times since on business trips to the Bay Area, and I also met Claes brother Peder a few years ago.
Tell us about your family and if there were any link to the Swedish church when you grew up?
My connection with the Swedish Church is very typical for most Swedes, i.e., mostly visits to the church for baptisms, confirmations, weddings and sadly also funerals. My confirmation pastor, and also friend of the family when I grew up, was Sten Philipson who also happened to be Mary Philipson’s ex-husband. Sten baptized all my nieces and nephews, my son and married me and my sisters to our respective spouses. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that Mary was Sten’s ex-wife until she was about to leave her assignment as vacancy priest here, but we were able to attend her last service right before the pandemic in March 2020.
I was also good friends with Charlotta (forget her last name) who was the Swedish assistant at the SF church back in the mid 00’s. Charlotta used to ride with us up to the Swedish School of Marin where she was helping out, and my children went for Swedish lessons.
How did you end up working at Google? Studies, early career?
I was born in Stockholm and lived there until I was 13, when my father got a position at the Linköping Regional Hospital and the family moved there. My father was later key in starting up the burn injury clinic at the hospital. I spent a year as an exchange student in Milwaukee, WI before I went on to study Electrical Engineering at the high school (gymnasium) in Linköping, where I also met Claes Claesson’s nephew Joakim. After high school I continued my engineering studies at the Linköping Institute of Engineering.
In 1986 I took a break from my studies and did my military service in the Royal Swedish Navy where I served onboard HSwMS Visborg and HSwMS Carlskrona, so it was with great joy that I was invited to the events surrounding Carlskrona’s visits to SF in 2005.
After my studies I got a job at the Swedish Defense Research Establishment (FOA) and moved back to Stockholm where I worked on underwater technology for submarine hunting which was highly prioritized at the time since this was at the tail end of the cold war and Sweden had problems with uninvited underwater visitors. During my time at FOA I got the opportunity to study Russian as part of my work and this sparked an interest in traveling to the Soviet Union which was just about then beginning to open up. Together with some friends I made several adventurous road trips in the USSR and later Russia and other former Soviet republics. It was on one of these trips to Crimea that I met my wife Natalia in 1992. After about six years of working for the defense department I left my job at FOA and started working for the Swedish Defense contractor CelsiusTech and Natalia and I were ready to settle down and start a family in our house that we had bought in Spånga outside Stockholm.
This must have been the time when you you became known in the Swedish Press through the “Peter Nordstrom Affair”. That must have been a life shaking experience for a young Swedish software engineer. Tell us what happened.
Parallel to my jobs at FOA and Celsiustech I was running a small import business together with a couple of friends in Stockholm. In 1994 I took a leave of absence from FOA and Natalia and I moved to St Petersburg, Russia for a couple of months where we started up a local office and hired a Russian guy to work for us there.
Over the next two years I made many trips to Russia to find products suitable for import, and on a trip to St Petersburg in February 1996 I was asked to bring a package for some Russian acquaintances over to their sick relative in St Petersburg. There was nothing strange about this since the former Soviet postal system was very unreliable, so it was very common practice to bring goods back and forth for people, which we had done before, and also had people help us in the same way. It turned out that this time was different, and when I handed over the package to the relative, I was immediately detained by the FSB (the former KGB), as I was given a plastic bag containing a Russian stackable doll as a thank you gesture. The package I had brought contained money and a letter whereas the Russian doll I had received contained a roll of film with pictures of what FSB claimed were Russian Naval secrets. I was interrogated by the FSB, but forcefully maintained my innocence, and was released later the same evening.
After spending the night at the Swedish Consulate I was put on a plane back to Sweden the next day, having to leave my car behind. Half a year later the Russians released video footage of the incident to the Swedish media. While I was at the Farnborough Airshow in England, representing Celsiustech, I received a very unexpected phone call from the Swedish radio news program Ekot asking me about what had happened in Russia. Over the next couple of weeks, this became headline news in Swedish and Scandinavian media, and Natalia and I eventually went into hiding. This later became known as the "Peter Nordström affair" which ended up changing our lives.
My wife and I had some very turbulent months but eventually I were put on a paid leave and got the opportunity to travel around the world and eventually go and study at Berkeley and so we ended up in the Bay Area in the spring of 1997. I studied Business Administration and eventually landed an internship in the marketing department of a high-tech firm. I soon realized that marketing was not really for me, but with my engineering background and through some networking within the company I soon got a full-time job as a software engineer and sponsorship for visas and eventually green cards.
Over the years I’ve worked for startups and a few major corporations (HP and Texas Instruments to name a couple), but in 2015 I ended up at Google where I am really happy and there are many opportunities to transfer within the company when ready to try something new.
Tell us about your wife and family. Where did you meet your wife? What are your children doing and how have you all been coping with the pandemic?
My wife Natalia is from Western Ukraine and happened to be on vacation in Crimea when I was there on one of my roadtrips mentioned above. I immediately realized that she was “the one”, even though we in the beginning were only able to communicate thanks to my, somewhat limited, knowledge of Russian. But after she moved to Sweden, she quickly learned to speak Swedish much better than I could ever hope to speak Russian.
A few months after we arrived in the Bay Area, our oldest daughter Johanna, now 24 years old, was born and she was baptized in the Norwegian Seamen’s church by pastor Dagfinn Kvale. The timing wasn’t right to have the Swedish pastor baptize her, but since I have lived a few months in Norway I only saw it as natural and a fun perk to have a Norwegian pastor perform the ceremony.
We also have Alexander who’s 22 and Isabella 18 years old. We only communicate in Swedish with the kids, and all three also went to a Chinese immersion school and are fluent in Cantonese and Mandarin. The school is a San Francisco public school located only two blocks from our house in the Inner Sunset where we’ve lived since 2000.
At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic the two older kids had moved out, but decided to move back home when the lockdown started, which made the isolation a lot more bearable and pleasant and felt like we got a bonus year as a family, but it was a bit chaotic in the beginning with someone being on a conference call in every room in our house.
Johanna moved to Sweden last summer and now works at Södermalmsskolan in Stockholm, and Isabella left for college at UC Santa Cruz in September last year. Alex just got a job at a startup company where he works as a video producer and still lives with us together with his girlfriend.
Natalia worked a few years at the kitchen department at IKEA, and later had her own kitchen showroom representing the Swedish cabinet maker Kvänum but has since 2015 worked at the Scandinavian School and Cultural Center as a preschool teacher.
How did you become a leader in our Scandinavian Community? Tell us more about Young Scandinavian Club - first time I met you in March 2020 you had just stepped down as President. Then the pandemic hit. What happened in the club during this challenging time?
About ten years ago, we were at a party with some Scandinavian friends, and all decided to go to the Young Scandinavians Club’s cabin in Tahoe over New Year. We were not yet members of the YSC at the time but applied for membership and then were able to book a room for us. My immediate thought when seeing the cabin for the first time, was that it’s a fantastic place, but it was lacking one essential thing for a Scandinavian ski cabin - a sauna. To try to correct this problem I joined the committee responsible for the Tahoe cabin, and before I knew it, I had suddenly been elected to the YSC board of directors. My first year on the board I was responsible for the Tahoe cabin, but was then elected president, which I served as for six years, and became the longest serving president of the YSC. Being president was a lot of work, but it was also a very rewarding time, and I got to meet a lot of fantastic people of all ages in various Scandinavian organizations.
The Young Scandinavians Club is, despite its name, a club for people of all ages and we own two properties, one ski cabin that I already mentioned and a lake cabin at Clearlake. Both are are available to rent for our members at very affordable rates. When there is not a pandemic the YSC organizes events throughout the year, most of them in San Francisco, e.g., Christmas Dinner at the Norwegian Club, Easter luncheon at the Swedish American Hall, picnics, hikes, but we also have camping trips and a number of events e.g., midsummer party at our lake cabin. Lisa Wiborg is a lifetime member of the YSC and actively involved in our Sankta Lucia event at the Swedish American Hall every December.
During the pandemic all of our events were canceled, but our cabins opened up as soon as the local restrictions allowed it, so our members could rent them. We also took the opportunity of doing needed upkeep and renovations of the cabins when theywere still closed.
How can we build a stronger collaboration between Scandinavian organizations and what role can the churches play?
One of my priorities as President of the YSC was to increase the collaboration between different Scandinavian organizations and we succeeded in organizing a number of events together with primarily the Vasa Order and the Sons of Norway, but also had a few events with the Norwegian Club, and the Finnish organization in Sonoma. The YSC bylaws state that we are a non-religious organization, which makes collaborating with the churches a bit more complicated, but I’m sure there are many cultural and secular events that could be organized together.
