Kirsten Bendiksen

Location of Interview
Collection Name

Workers on the New Bedford Waterfront

Description

These oral histories were produced in 2017 as part of the Workers on the Waterfront Oral History Project conducted by New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center with funding from an Archie Green Fellowship provided by the Library of Congress.

Interviewer
Date of Interview
02-13-2017
Transcribers

Millie Rahn

Biographical Sketch

Kirsten Bendiksen talks about her work in her family’s business, Reidar’s Manufacturing, a gear manufactory/support industry in New Bedford, formerly in Fairhaven. Talks about her Norwegian immigrant heritage and marrying a Norwegian fisherman, and later starting their busy gear shop, one of the few left to serve the industry. Kirsten works as bookkeeper in the business, which also employs her husband and their two sons and other workers. Talks about work in the shop, serving the industry, contrasts fishing industry in 1960s with today’s industry with more fishermen from Maine and Virginia and elsewhere working out of New Bedford, and how she hopes that industry will revive so that more young people will be attracted to it—and that there’s an industry to hand on to future generations. 

This oral history was produced in 2017 as part of the Workers on the Waterfront Oral History Project conducted by New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center with funding from an Archie Green Fellowship provided by the Library of Congress.


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