Hjuerdis Hjordis Cleven

Birth Place: Tonsasen, Valdres Hjordis Eddal (Spelling of First name was changed in Kindergarten or 1st grade). Source given by her sister (Elsie) Illinois State Journal Springfield, IL Sunday April 20 1941 Page 5 Mrs. A. M. Cleven Recalls Work For Engineering Firms by Beulah Gordon, State Journal Staff Writer. When Knute Edahl was working a s a civil engineer on the railway being constructed from Oslo to Fagernes, Norway, he would have been considerably astonished if anyone had told him his baby daughter, just born at Valdres, would grow up to become a mechanical draftsman in America. That is what happened and the daughter, now Mrs. A. M. Cleven, resides at 1800 South State Street. Life plays strange tricks and Mrs. Cleven, whose early ambition was to become a domestic science teacher, turned instead to mechanical drafting and now as a housewife is putting domestic science into practice. But to begin at the beginning. When a break came between Norway and Sweden and a depression followed, Knute Edahl took his family to America. Mrs. Cleven was then two years old. For a year they lived in Schenectady, New York, and then moved to Chicago. Mr. Edahl became an engineer on the Santa Fe railroad, and his daughter when she entered high school expressed her ambition to become a domestic science teacher. Her father frowned. The World War was then in progress, and to conserve food, domestic science course had been dropped from the school curriculums. To train the teach the subject seemed futile. Following her natural bent, inherited from her father, the daughter studied mechanical drawing, and when she graduated from high school, accepted a position as tracer at Western Electric Company, Chicago. From Western Electric she went to the Yellow Cab Company, then located in Chicago, where for four years she did tracing, detail work, figured the strength of frames, made charts to show the bending moment of the frames and did various other phases of work. Most of her employers considered a draftsman something of a phenomenon. They never advertised for girls, and were rather startled when she applied for a position. Yet her ability was such that she moved from place to place when desire for change possessed her, and never found difficulty in securing a job. She worked for Hanna Engineering Company, and the Alemite Division of Steward Carner Company both of Chicago, and did a considerable amount of special work wherever she was called. Special and detail work she especially enjoyed. Once she was called to draw a blue print of a machine that was in court litigation. She found her work fascinating and took increasingly difficult assignments. Then in 1924 she returned to visit her native Norway. She was impressed by the beauty and the carefree mode of living. At Voss, she visited her father's former home, where Knute Rockne and Knute Nelson, late senator form Minnesota, once lived, and at Oslo, her mother's home, to which her grandfather, captain of a sailing ship, once returned from his voyages. Now a housewife, she lives in Springfield, where her husband is employed as comptroller of Hummer Manufacturing Company. Her father at 69 lives in Chicago, and is retired. In his leisure he works six hours a day on engineering designs and patents. Ideas constantly occur to him and he hurries to put them on paper. "Engineering is like that. It gets into your blood, and you can never quite escape it," said Mrs. Cleven, fingering her blue prints wistfully, for she, like her father, is an engineer at heart.