Observations: Travel: Finland

About 50 years ago, I was working in my office as a young faculty member at Yale University, when the phone rang. The caller introduced himself as someone from the State Department and asked me if I might be interested in going to Finland to teach for a year. 

Somewhat surprised, I asked to think about it. And as soon as I put the phone down, I found a globe to figure out which country Finland was.

I did accept that invitation. It turned out that the Finnish and American governments had created a chair to bring in a different professor each for a year to teach American Studies. A distinguished senior professor had accepted the position, but then backed out at the last minute. The State Department was desperate, which is why I got the nod.

And it turned out to be a wonderful year. At the time, my daughter Jenny was 6 years old and reading already. She could have gone to a Finnish school, but that would have meant another year of kindergarten, and so she went to a British school, which she loved. My son David was two when we arrived, and went to a Finnish day care center and became totally fluent in Finnish as a child.

Me? I enrolled in a Finnish class and lasted a week. It’s a painfully difficult language, totally unlike Swedish, Norwegian or Danish, which are all somewhat like German. But I learned a lot of vocabulary, just sitting in the department coffee room. Once, when I was supposed to fly to a neighboring city, and the rain was pouring down and no taxis or buses were available, I flagged down a motorist. I said over and over, “Lentoasema,” the word airport in Finnish, and he took me where I needed to go.

I learned how to cross-country ski. We had a host family, with kids the ages of Jenny and David. Juhani, the father of the family, took me under his wing and every weekend taught me how to ski. By the end of the winter, I decided to enter the Finlandia Hiito, the 75-kilometer national race. Thousands were skiing as we started on a wide lake. The winner finished in 3 hours and 45 minutes. I came in at 9 hours, 15 minutes, but I beat a number of Finns.

My teaching was different than in the United States. A relatively few people, even in the university, spoke English. One of my classes was in the English department, for those students had the best command of the language. Midway through the term, I was lecturing about civil rights and brought my guitar in to sing a few songs, “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “We Shall Overcome.”

When the class was over, a young woman came up to me and said, “Sir, that was wonderful.” I smiled. She said, “Do you want to know why?” I nodded. “Because you were so bad.”

I was crushed. She was embarrassed. She tried to explain that what she meant was that I wasn’t professional, but was still willing to do it, but it kept me from performing for the next 20 years.

But now, 50 years later, I’ll be back in Finland by the time you read this piece. It is, I’m told, the happiest country in the world. And for me it makes me happy to return to a place overseas I know and love.

Allan M. Winkler is a University Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at Miami University, where he taught for three decades. He serves on the Board of Directors for the Oxford Free Press.