Enjoying learning opportunities in the city

Alert readers may recall I often lament the annoyances of spending extended time in the Seattle area when my wife and I take on our dog-sitting duties each fall. The daily hassles of living amongst four million other people wear me down. I enjoy our time with family, but our extended stays can be difficult at times.

The upside of being in a big city is having access to cultural and educational experiences that are rarely available in small towns or rural areas. During our current five week stay in the Pacific Northwest my wife and I enjoyed two totally different experiences that I thought worth sharing with readers. Here's some of what we learned about Anne Frank, a 14-year-old Jewish girl who lived for two years hiding from the Nazis in the Netherlands during World War II, and how and why Thomas Dambo, a Danish artist, is creating gigantic sculptured trolls from recycled materials all over the world.

Traveling exhibit: "Anne Frank-A History for Today"

Our daughter wanted to take her two youngest boys to see a traveling exhibit about the diaries of Anne Frank, so we tagged along. The 30-paneled traveling exhibit was created to share the story of Anne Frank, a young Jewish girl whose family fled to the Netherlands when the Nazi Party in Germany, under Adolph Hitler, began a series of actions to "take care of the Jewish problem." In 1933 Anne's father and another investor started a business in Amsterdam and Anne's family settled in to a new life in the Netherlands. They hoped to be far removed from the increasing laws and policies in Germany aimed at isolating Jews.

Anne was 10 years old when World War II broke out with Germany's taking control of Poland. By 1940 Germany had taken over the Netherlands and the persecution of Jews began. In 1942 Hitler began instituting his infamous "labor camps" to deal with political dissenters and soon built death camps for Jews. Anne Frank, by then a teenager, was keeping a diary recording her take on life in general and, especially, the changes in her world and the effects of the Nazi policies toward Jews.

Sensing that things would get worse for Jews in Holland, Anne's father, Otto, and his business partner made plans for a secret place to hide their families in part of the factory they owned in Amsterdam. In July, 1942 the two families and a trusted Christian employee moved in to the "Secret Annexe." Supplies and news of what was going on was provided by four employees still working at the plant.

For nearly two years the families successfully hid. Then armed Nazi and Dutch police came to the Secret Annexe and arrested all the residents, sending them to different camps. Anne and her older sister, Margot, were sent to a labor camp where they both died of typhus in February of 1945. Anne was 14 years old when she died. In her last journal entry she wrote, "I still believe... people are truly good at heart." Of her nuclear family only Anne's father, Otto, survived. He was in a concentration camp when it was freed by the Russian army. Her diaries were returned to Otto and his family encouraged him to make the diaries public.

In a diary entry Anne wrote her wish was "...to be a famous writer." In a tragic way her wish was granted. Her diaries have been published in 60 languages and 30 million copies are in print. The 30-panel exhibit that tells the story of Anne Frank's diaries was created in 1996 and has traveled to 3500 locations in 77 countries. The exhibit was specifically created for students to learn about Anne Frank's life and history. It is currently in several schools and locations in the Puget Sound area.

Learning about "Northwest Trolls: The Way of the Bird"

Thomas Dambo, a Danish artist, has gained the reputation as "the world's foremost sculptor using recycled materials." For the past decade Dambo has been building huge (some more than twenty feet in height or length) trolls all over the world. He uses recycled materials, mostly wood, that he and volunteers gather locally.

In late October as we arrived in metro Seattle Dambo and a small paid crew, plus several hundred volunteers from Portland and across the Puget Sound, were finishing up their "NW Trolls: The Way of the Bird" 100-day tour of the United States. During those hundred days they built 10 trolls, one in New Jersey, three at other locales in mid-America and finished with six in the Pacific Northwest. That was not Dambo's first tour across the U.S. building his trademark trolls. In fact, one of his goals is to have at least one troll in every state in the U.S.

In addition to formal education in design the young Dane grew up with what he describes as hippie/artist/parents who allowed and encouraged him to try all sorts of artistic approaches. One of his early loves was building bird houses from recycled materials. Even now he incorporates bird houses into his trolls. And as part of finding the trolls, "Kind of a treasure hunt," he says, he puts wildly colored birdhouses along the way to the troll sculpture. "Why the trolls theme?" you ask? A college professor of Old Norse explains, "Trolls are large in Scandinavia, like us but different and more dangerous."

We visited Jakob Two Tree, a troll along the Ranier Trail in Issaquah, an eastern suburb of Seattle along I-90. It was Black Friday and lots of folks were off work and out of school. We didn't need the wildly colored birdhouses to find Jakob, we just followed the crowd along the trail. There was a sizable line of folks patiently (unlike how they drive out here on the freeways) waiting to have their picture taken with Jakob. Like all of Dambo's trolls, Jakob is guaranteed to be in place for three years, his long- term future will be determined later.

The heads for each troll are built in his shop (he has 26 employees there) and shipped from Denmark to each troll's locale. Then his paid crew and volunteers gather the materials, build the superstructure and do all the detail work. It takes about 10 days to complete a troll. Most of the 'skin' of Jakob is made from the boards off pallets.

Financial support for the projects in the Puget Sound came from two major foundations: the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation (Allen was a co-founder of Microsoft who died several years ago) and the Scan Design Foundation (a foundation created by a Danish couple who started a chain of modern furniture stores in the Seattle area). Dambo has said, "We could build 2.4 million trolls in America just from the wood we throw away." He added, "There is so much of the American dream hidden in your own trash cans." He's certainly practicing what he preaches when it comes to building his iconic "trash tolls."