11th Finglish trip August 2011 #37 Kip Peltoniemi lives in Minneapolis. His grandparents had a homestead in New York Mills and he spent his youth in nearby Wadena, Minnesota. Kip is a folk musician who has performed at Finnish events in Minnesota and at venues from the West Coast to Florida. He began to play music in the 1970s. The idols of his early years were the Beatles and Bob Dylan. Kip Peltoniemi’s instruments are the guitar, bass and accordion. He has also been a vocal

11th Finglish trip August 2011 #36 Marianne Wargelin´s family traces itself to the early Astoria, Oregon Finnish fishing community, mining towns of Upper Michigan and Minnesota, the urban Finntowns of Brooklyn, New York, Worcester, Massachusetts and Waukegan, Illinois, and the industrial villages along Lake Erie. Marianne was raised within the Finnish American communities of Berkeley, California, Hancock, Michigan, and Fairport Harbor, Ohio, with Finnish as her first language

11th Finglish trip August 2011 #35 Armi Nelson´s father Aarne Koskinen was from Raisio, Finland. He came to Duluth, Minnesota, to work as a lumberjack. Armi´s mother was Signe Rintamäki from Neppolankylä, Finland. After they got married in Duluth they moved to Superior, Wisconsin. Armi Nelson worked as a teacher in Golden Valley and Edina, Minnesota, where she also was an administrator for many years. She lives in Edina in a senior house with her cat Osmo. The cat is named af

11th Finglish trip August 2011 #34 Christ Church Lutheran is a congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Its buildings, a sanctuary with chapel (1949) and an education wing (1962) designed by Finnish-American architects Eliel Saarinen and Eero Saarinen, have been internationally recognized. The International Style worship building was designed by the firm Saarinen and Saarinen, a father and son partnership of Eliel Saarinen

11th Finglish trip August 2011 #33 The Finns of Minneapolis gathered every summer to celebrate “juhannus”, midsummer, in Theodore Wirth Park, west of the old Finntown. In 1958 some 400 Finnish Americans gathered in the park to unveil a monument for Finnish Pioneers. The monument was erected by the Finnish American Society of Minneapolis. This granite monument features, on one side, a map of Finland, marking also the lands lost in Finland’s mid-twentieth century wars, and, on

11 Finglish trip July 2011 #2 The 28th FinnFest USA was held in Town & Country Conference Center in San Diego, California in 2011. FinnFest USA was first held in 1983 in Minneapolis, Minnesota establishing the concept that the festival would travel from site to site, year by year, always creating an opportunity to provide Finnish Americans and their progeny an opportunity to meet one another and to broaden and deepen their knowledge of Finland and Finnish American history and

8th Finglish trip May 2009 #3 One of the speakers on the FinnFest USA cruise to Alaska is Don Bibeau. He’s a Finndian, as Finnish-Americans say, half Chippewa and half Finnish. His grandmother’s surname was Muhonen; she had come from Finland to North Dakota, where his mother, Lempi Mathilda, was born. The mother was in close contact with her own Finnish family. The Finnish community, however, did not accept Don Bibeau’s family, and for this reason it was only towards retireme