Westward. Encounters with Swiss American Women
On the streets of Bern people turn their heads when they see the attractive senior woman with her partner who is 20 years younger; they recognize Linda Geiser as the legendary mother of the TV series Die sechs Kummerbuben (The Six Boys of the Kummer Family), or as Johanna from the TV soap opera Lüthi and Blanc. “John is amused – I believe he is even a bit proud of me. Of course, in New York this doesn’t happen.”
Linda stops short. “I should start at the very beginning of my life, or even before that. One thing is for sure: Folks in our family were not theater people. My father came from a very strict religious family of Anabaptists. He grew up in the Mennonite town of La Chaux d’Abel in the Bernese Jura. He was the only one of the thirteen children of this farm family who was allowed to attend a school of higher learning. He told us that little by little he had to pay back the loan the Anabaptist community had given him to attend the Teachers’ College Muri-Stalden. As a very young teacher in training he met my mother at that college where she was a student in secondary school (6th to 9th grade). Yet they did not really click until later. Mother also became a teacher. Eventually they married and together taught the primary and secondary grades in a tiny schoolhouse in Vorderfultigen.”