President Kevin introduced the speaker, Joanne Lorraine Gunderson, a quintessential English mother originally from a quaint Yorkshire village who relied on a coin toss to settle on the East or West coast of the U.S., in search of the American dream. “’From Yorkshire with love:’ Joanne (she goes by Jo) thanked Kevin for that introduction and said she was going to try to use her best Queen’s English to start off with but warned us that she might be ‘going into dialect at some point.’ She also thanked Irwin for bringing her today, though they had met under ‘excruciating circumstance’ of his removing two ingrown toenails.
She grew up in Yorkshire, a ‘big county in the north of England,’ and people sometimes mistakenly think that she is Scottish by her accent. She is not; she emphasized that that is a completely different country. She said that Yorkshire is named ‘God’s country,’ and called it ‘absolutely gorgeous; similar to the coast here.’ “The first time she came to America she was 15; her mother had emigrated to San Mateo, and the first thing she saw here was Crystal Springs; she’d never seen anything so blue, and wondered if, being American, it might have food coloring in it. There weren’t many clouds around here, so the reflection gave it that blue hue. Upon her arrival, her mother’s friends picked her up at the airport and got her a sandwich she called ‘bigger than my entire body,’ and took her to Crystal Springs for a picnic. Her mother at that time was a bartender at the Harbor Bar, where she met Jo’s stepfather; they’ve been happily married for 30 years now. She has strong connections with the Coastside; she mentioned five stepsiblings and a brother who also immigrated and owns Firewood Farms with his wife. Her stepfather had been a commercial fisherman for crab and squid in the harbor after having built his first boat. He now works in medical supplies and owns the business which he started in his garage in La Honda.
She came to America and started hanging out here for a few weeks in the summer, and realized she could never be served alcohol; in England, she said, you can be served if you are 15 or 16; she was never a heavy drinker but found it ‘weird’ to never be served a drink at a bar – especially since her mother worked in a bar, where she could not even hang out. At first, she did not want to stay here, so she “trotted back to jolly old England” and finished high school – which, in England, you do at 16. Then you go to junior college till you’re 18, and then university, which she did. “To my grandmother’s angst,” her family put her through a private girls’ school, where she studied physical education. But she set her sights on being a writer or on TV or an entertainer, while using skills she’d honed on the soccer field in other sports you don’t find here, like field hockey or neckball; various things she did for years. But having “always had an affiliation for literature,” she figured she’d do something literary because she is English. There’s a lot of people from Yorkshire, she said, who became quite famous, such as the Bronte sisters, of whom we all have heard. There’s a film out now called “Wuthering Heights,” which she called “loosely based” on the novel of the same name. Like her, she said, the Bronte sisters grew up in a very tiny village, where there are literally more pubs in the village than churches; where she went to university in York, there were 365 pubs and she “probably frequented” about 200.