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We were very fortunate when we could keep the upper part of the river because it has the famous Imatra rapids and is therefore most important to the whole industrial life of our country. By the way, Imatrankoski is the Finnish for the Imatra rapids. Near the rapids there is a big power station which has been the biggest of Finland so far but will not remain so for very long because they are building a bigger one in northern Finland. It is called the power station of [unreadable] and I just read in the newspaper that Mr. McFall, the minister of the United States in Finland happens to visit it today. The power station of Imatra can generate about 210,000 horsepower.
Near the power station there is an old and rather big hotel surrounded by a beautiful park. It is there my [sic] husband Pentti attends the meetings of the Rotary Club of Imatra, which has only thirty members so far. There are two other hotels at Imatra and some restaurants and a couple of cafés. We have lots of good shops here, too. Then we have a church and three chapels. For general education there are eleven elementary schools and four high schools. For cultural interest we have the theatre of Imatra, the orchestra, the College of Music (it started last autumn) and numerous choirs. The top floor of one of our latest elementary schools is reserved for a small collection of paintings and works of sculpture. There are only about 130 pieces of art so far. It is there we very often have art shows, too. We have four movie theatres but we usually cannot see the latest films at once. When the foreign films reach Imatra they are rather old. It was not until last spring I was able to see the famous film “Gone with the Wind’ which I enjoyed very much. The Finnish films we get [sic] pretty new here but I do not like them very much because their standard is not very high.
We are living very near to the frontier as you can see on my “map.” It is only about four miles to the iron curtain. We do not know what the people are doing on the other side. We can only see smoke coming from the pipes of their factories which once belonged to Finland. It makes one feel strange. We have only been living here for five years. We lived in the neighborhood of our capital Helsinki before we moved to Imatra.
Part of [Letter to Frances Keys from a Finnish pen pal, July 5, 1953]