Figure 14 - Bruce & Dorothy's wedding picture

 Bruce was heartsick the year Dorothy went off to college in Corvallis (then known as the Oregon Agricultural College or OAC) and left him behind with a year to finish high school.  He saved all the letters he received from Dorothy starting in 1922 when she first left Thorp on her trails elsewhere.  Dorothy wasn’t as sentimental; she saved only a few of his letters.  The earliest letter from Bruce to Dorothy is in June 1922.  He has evidently just put her on the train after a day together; and he is trying to be funny about missing her so much.  He wrote “Gee kid I was terrible sorry to leave you Sunday nite no fooling….”  He bought some Chautauqua tickets “one for little Dorothy and one for me; your number is 6199 and mine is 6200.  Our numbers are getting close, I hope someday they will be the same.”

The letters reveal two people hopelessly connected, in love and instinctually jealous of the others’ intent.  By November 1922 their writings are fewer and farther between as both are engaged in either sports (Bruce) or school (Dorothy).  Something he’s written has bothered Dorothy as she writes “Now Bruce are you sure it’s been just 3 times that you’ve stepped out???  Do you know I don’t feel a bit bad about it when I’m this far away but you’d better look out if I get very close to you and be sure and don’t have anything that wears skirts near you either as I might scratch her eyes out, the cat.”  She continues with her intent “As to me falling in love again well I’ve almost forgotten I ever did to tell the truth.  It seems ages since I’ve been loved at all except the few caresses I receive from Helen, Claudia & Mildred (ed note: her family).”  The next year he joined her in Corvallis and together they went through college.  They were married shortly after graduating in 1925. 

David and I had a very small wedding in 1997 which Dorothy attended.  We invited our guests to give us some words of wisdom on marriage and I remember Dorothy telling us about her wedding night.  They were married in Thorp and it was summertime, she recalled.  Her whole family was going camping and they invited Bruce and Dorothy along.   The family staged a Chirivari (pronounced shi-va-ree) which is an old English wedding custom involving a discordant mock serenade which in this case took place around their tent.   Her siblings banged together pots and pans as they circled the tent.  Although shivaree’s in old days could mean community disapproval of the match, this shivaree was in good fun as a sign of welcome to Bruce to the Smith family.  

Although Bruce always felt that the Smith family disapproved of their marriage, at least at first.  He wrote many years later that he felt that they felt that Dorothy could do better.  He was forever grateful that she saw something in him that was more than outwardly he had to offer. 

Bruce remembered their wedding day this way:  it was a civil affair – they first went to Ellensburg and bought a wedding license.  Bruce’s foster parent Jim Brain went along and arranged it.  They brought along Dorothy’s sister, Edna.  They bought their license, went to the parish of a Methodist Minister who performed the ceremony.  Then the four of them went out for lunch in Ellensburg and had a sandwich.

But I’ll let Bruce tell what happened next:

“Only Edna went to our wedding, but it looked like a family reunion in that tent on our wedding night….when we got back to Thorp from our wedding trip to Ellensburg we loaded the Model T with odds and ends of camping gear like loose pots, pans, potatoes, eggs, bacon and blankets.  Among those things we also packed Bob and Edna and headed for Denny Creek Campgrounds at Snoqualmie Pass….No one wanted to attend our wedding but it seemed everyone wanted to sleep with us.  We would have had more privacy at a Quaker Camp meeting….after pursuing this girl with ardor and eager expectations for several years, after dreaming dreams of all that complete love has to offer, after overcoming all obstacles, and I pause here because I still can’t believe it, I spent my wedding night sleeping with my mother-in-law, my brother-in-law, my sister-in-law and somewhere in that tent, my wife.”

Within a year, despite the questionable beginning of their married lives, the couple had their first two children.  The twins, Jackie and Jan, were born in August 1926.  We’re celebrating their 90^th birthday this summer!  Now Bruce had three new family members within a year and more were on the way. 

Bruce had a growing family and had to keep them fed and taken care of, which meant that he had to go where the jobs were, and that meant he had to leave Thorp.  His first teaching job was in Idaho, and his separation from his best friend and babies was tormenting. 

This time, he doesn’t keep Dorothy’s letters, but she keeps Bruce’s letters.  They are heartbreaking.  On October 9, 1926 he writes from Homedale “Dear Sweetheart, this is Saturday, so far I have made $28.75 – not so bad, got a ringer this week….(he talks about his lousy football squad and how he is trying to coach them from getting beat so badly by other, larger teams)…Dear Honey Girl I wish I could hear from you, I am terribly lonesome, and I want you to come.  Things are terribly high here so squeeze onto all the money you can…”  All over the handwritten sheets he has written in the empty spaces “I Love You I Love You I Love You.”  He ends with “Good Bye Dear, your hubby – I love you.  P.S.  I hope to see you soon.  I love you.”

They finally arrive to Idaho and they settle into a routine there.  At some point, they have a picture taken of their twin girls.

Figure 15 - Jackie & Jan baby photo

It is the fall of 1926 and Bruce is lonesome in Homedale.  He has taken this new job and only learns when he arrives that he won’t be paid until he passes two exams, and he can’t take the exams until December.  He is not paid in October and November.  He has no money to send to his new wife and children, and he can’t afford to get them tickets to travel to him.  He has to rely on his mother-in-law, Delilah Smith, for money to survive.  He finally writes to the teacher association responsible for placing him in the job in the first place, and they give him a loan to be paid back when he gets paid. 

            On top of that, his last host family, the Brains in Thorp, present him with a bill for Room and Board for raising him over the last few years of $200 plus interest.  This is an unbelievable sum of money to him, and again Grandma Smith pays off the debt, but kindly declines to pay the interest on it.  The Brains never spoke again to Bruce, and as he wrote, “that interest bit turned us sour.”   

            The State of Washington, and the magic of the internet, reveals that estate records of the early 20^th century from Kittitas County are now on line and open for inspection.  I don’t know if Bruce knew that when his father died there was an estate and that this estate was managed by Mrs. Orndorff.  When you go through the records, the names of all the people he wrote about in his boyhood come to life, but in a different way.  The Porter man, who owned the grocery store in town and whose kids had the dog and played with Bruce, the Porter man owed Mr. Schwark money.  He had borrowed over $500 from Mr. Schwarck, and when he died, he didn’t pay back the money he owed. Mrs. Orndorff paid the Hatfield & Brain gentlemen to appraise the Taneum House.  The estate paid for everything, including the burial and headstone for Charles.  There was about $3,000 in the estate when all was said and done.  By the time Bruce grew up and went off to college, some five years later, it was all gone.  Everybody in town got a piece of that estate; in exchange they kept Bruce fed and clothed, but nothing more.

            In Homedale, within a few months, Bruce found fast life-time friends.  The Johns family were grateful to have a young schoolteacher in town and adopted Bruce, as they had no family of their own.  Mr. Johns wanted to go with Bruce to Caldwell to meet the train that Dorothy and the babies were arriving on.  He was glad for his company.

            Bruce had no words, as he wrote his memoirs, of how it felt to see Dorothy and his two screaming baby girls again.  All he wrote was it was a relief to finally see her step off the train, with the faithful porter behind her with the basket of babies.  He writes “It was late in November and cold.  The side curtains were in place on the car.  There was an exhaust heater in the front seat.  I placed Dorothy there beside me wrapped in a quilt around her knees and over the heater for warmth.  With Dick Johns in the back seat quietly cooing to the girls I started for our destination, the desert town of Homedale, Idaho.  We had no home to go to but were accepted with open arms by the Johns.  I just can’t say too much about Coly and Dick.  Without these two wonderful people I have no idea, at all, how we could have survived.”

            You probably know Homedale Idaho and could picture the country he is talking about, but if you don’t, here are his own words about what that place was like in the winter of 1926-1927.  “[It] was a desert town.  The streets were sandy.  When the wind blew, which it often did, clouds of dust and tumbleweeds filled the air.  There were two grocery stores, a drug store, a hardware and lumber store combined, a small post office and a pool room.”   

            They would eventually rent a house near the school where he taught; it was a shack really, not much of a shelter; the toilet was outside in the yard.  There was a shed for coal and wood in one corner of the yard.  There was a small living room, a small kitchen and a small bedroom.  In front was a small screened porch.  Their possessions included (besides two babies) one basket to hold the babies, one cedar chest to hold what little they had, the clothes on their backs and a Model ‘T’.  Although their material possessions were few, they quickly made a bunch of friends in Homedale and considered that time of their lives very rich.

            The house was small, drafty, without electricity or running water.  The water available to them in that part of the world was very hard and tasted miserably of minerals, and was absolutely no good for washing clothes or diapers.  In order to get soft water they had to go to the town pump some two blocks away.  Since they had so little money they couldn’t afford to drive the car to the pump to get the water.  So, to salvage their pride a bit, they went for water after dark, the two of them carrying two milk cans; one five gallon can and one 10 gallon can.  The 10 gallon can they carried between them; Bruce held the five gallon can with his free hand.  They had to leave the babies alone when they went for water, and this became a dangerous chore. 

            The babies by this time were not too strong, except in their lung power.  They were feeding them every day but they had no idea how to correctly care for babies.  They were feeding the babies every two hours, and because Dorothy did not have enough breast milk (probably due to poor nutrition) they were feeding the babies’ raw cow’s milk. 

            They soon started noticing that the baby girls had knobs on their ribs and their poo looked like chopped alfalfa.  These were classic signs of rickets in kids (due to vitamin deficiencies) but they had no idea what was wrong with the babies.  They visited a doctor who told them to feed the babies’ eagle brand milk, a sweetened condensed milk that should never be fed to kids.  This led to a worsening of the rickets, the increased screaming of the starving babies and the inability for the parents to get any rest. 

            This is where Bruce knew that the good Lord took him by the hand and led him out of this desperate darkness of parenthood.  In this small town, where he and Dorothy were doing their best to assimilate and raise their tiny family, there was only one drug store.  He went there one day in desperation to find something to feed his babies.  The formula did the trick and soon the babies began to improve.  It wasn’t long before the rickets began to disappear and the green diaper water turned to a more natural poo-brown color.

            But Bruce had another problem that he had to solve, and solve quickly.  He still wasn’t getting a paycheck.  He had to pass two exams in the State of Idaho before that could happen and, worse yet, he had to pass with an average score of 85%.  He had no time to study for the exams because he worked all day teaching and when he came home he had to spell Dorothy from the exhaustion of caring for these newborns. 

            So off he went without a bit of preparation to take the exams nonetheless.  This was the second time in his life that he knew a force greater than he had the situation in hand.  He hadn’t done all that great in college and knew that he was no super Brainiac.  But he arrived at the state exams and joined a roomful of recent college graduates.  The exams were passed out and some of the college students took one look at them, got up and walked out. 

            Bruce read through the exam.  His hopes were soon dashed and his fears were realized.  One of the tasks was to write out a lesson plan for 3^rd grade penmanship.  There it was, his challenge.  Since he had been trained in junior high school methods and had escaped lesson plans, he was at an impasse.  But he thought of his family and how they all depended on him and he kept going.  He had no idea what he was going to write, but he heard the Lord say in his ear “Go on, start writing young man, don’t just sit there.”  And so he did.  He gave them their lesson plan for 3^rd grade penmanship, by golly! 

            But he wasn’t quite so certain when he got back home to Dorothy.  He told her to get ready to pack their meager belongings and make plans to move back to Thorp.  A week later a letter arrived from the State of Idaho.  He couldn’t open it.  He handed it to Dorothy to open.  With trembling fingers she began to open it and face the truth.  Bruce watched Dorothy’s face closely and almost at once he saw a smile pass across her face.  She handed him the piece of paper and here it was:

Course of Study           75%

Idaho State Law          95%

Average:                      85%

 

Bruce Schwarck was born in Seattle to newlyweds Charles Schwark and Irene Gamble Hulman.  While they may have been newlyweds, they weren’t all that young.  It was Charles’s first marriage, but Irene’s second marriage.  Irene had been married to Jefferson Hulman, and had a son with him, Harry Logan Holman.  He went by Logan, his middle name, and was Grandpa’s older brother. 

Grandpa was born in 1903 when Charles & Irene were both 37 years old – while that doesn’t seem so old now for new parents, it was very old then.  Bruce was born at home (like most babies were at the time) and like his older brother, Grandpa was C. Bruce Schwarck and went by his middle name Bruce.  We never knew his first name.  I always sort of assumed it stood for Charles, but I never knew until he died that it stood for Cyrene, which was a romantic mixing of his parents’ names, Irene and Charles.  Grandpa was very secretive about it, because I think it embarrassed him a bit.

Life in Seattle was hard, but the Schwarks decided to take on another assignment:  they moved their small family to a small town in the Kittitas known as Thorp. 

Figure 6 - Irene & Charles Schwark

Irene was a wonderful cook – many recipes for cookies and cakes in our family originated with Irene.  As a side note:  Aunt Roberta ended up with Irene’s cookbooks; after Roberta died, I have often wanted to write to Tom or Don and see if I can have those cookbooks, but I have never felt it was yet the right time. 

Charles was a jack of all trades; he tried at least to do a bunch of different stuff.  He worked originally in the engine room of a steam ship hauling logs; then he was a delivery guy in Seattle with a team of horses; then they moved to Thorp because there was a railroad being built through town and they needed lots of infrastructure to house and feed the hordes of workers.    He was a builder, a fixer, a cleaner, a hauler.  You name the job, Charles did it.   

Let’s be honest.  Charles and Irene weren’t the luckiest of people.  While they may have found love together later in life, their life together was marred by mishaps and misfortunes and, unfortunately, early deaths for both of them.

But first, it was 1909 and the World’s Fair had come to Seattle.  Schwark relatives from back East arrived for the affair.  Charles’s brother Chris and his wife Emily came from Minnesota to tour the fair.  The fair was held on what is now part of the University of Washington campus.  Bruce remembered riding in a very big Ferris wheel, and being enthralled with the new concept of “cars”.  This picture shows that big photo op at this World’s Fair was riding in the new contraptions.

Figure 7 - 1909 World's Fair Seattle - Bruce is 6 years old

When Bruce was about eight years old (about 1911) he contracted pneumonia and nearly died.    In the days before antibiotics there was little any doctor could do to treat fluid building up in the lungs.  So, in order to keep him from drowning, a doctor operated on his lungs, inserted rubber tubes to allow the fluid to drain out, and hoped for the best.  Grandpa noted that every day while he was in the hospital the doctor would come in, pull a little bit more of the tubes out of his chest, cut them off, and then leave the ends to drain.  The idea, evidently, was that when the tubes were all pulled out, the pus would be gone as well.  At least that was the theory developed by a five year old.

He was in the hospital in Ellensburg for several weeks.  Finally, somebody suggested that he be taken to a higher, dryer elevation.  Irene knew just the place – she took the opportunity to take Bruce to her father’s home in Grand Junction, Colorado.  There, George Gamble, Irene’s Dad, owned a fruit orchard and lived with some of his family.  What Bruce remembered were the ponies.  Irene’s brother Bill also lived there and Bruce relates that in his memory Bill Gamble was club-footed but got along fine. 

 

Figure 8 - from Left:  Bill Gamble (Irene's brother), George Gamble (Irene's Father) and an unidentified female, probably Ethel Gamble (Irene's half-sister)

George and Bill worked that orchard the old-fashioned way, with horse and buggies.

Figure 9 - Pa and Uncle Bill - Spring 1910

They all called the elder Mr. Gamble “Pa” – and Bruce and Irene arrived just in time for Pa’s 77^th birthday party.  Here’s a picture of Bruce with Pa, I do not know whose baby this is – Bruce is the five year old on the right with the funny hat.

Figure 10 - Pa and Bruce –June 3, 1911 – Pa’s 77^th Birthday

 While Bruce and Irene were visiting the Gambles in Colorado, they received news that the pool hall that Charles and Logan ran in Thorp had suddenly burned to the ground.  They did not go home right away, but stayed until Bruce felt physically better and could make the trip home.  That fire, though, was an omen for things to come.

The trip to Colorado, by the way, was the one and only time he ever met his Grandfather Gamble or his Uncle Bill or any of that family, for that matter.  In the 1960s Bruce and Dorothy went back there to see if he could find any trace of this farm, but found nothing. 

There are a few postcards in my possession from Ethel to Irene that show that the Gambles did fine in Colorado.  Here’s a picture of their fishing trip near Mesa, Colorado that Ethel wrote to Irene about a year after Irene and Bruce visited.

Figure 11 - Gamble in Mesa on a fishing trip – undated – probably 1912

 

When they returned to Thorp, they found Charles and Logan struggling to make ends meet.  But Charles was nothing but ingenious.  He found something to do to earn some money, and just kept going. 

            Irene was very social, and she belonged to a club known as the Royal Neighbors of America.  This was (and still is) an organization of women who banded together in a time before women had many rights in this country, including the right to vote and the right to own property.  This organization taught women how to be empowered financially during all of life’s turmoil, and stood firmly behind the women’s right to vote movement in the U.S.  They were based on biblical scripture from Proverbs “For better is a neighbor that is near than a brother that is far.” (Proverbs 27:10).  This organization still exists today, as a large insurance company (which specializes in insuring women and families) along with a separate foundation that still gives to causes of empowering women. 

Figure 12 - Royal Neighbors of America float, undated, Ellensburg, Washington

 One thing Irene enjoyed doing, like most Mothers, was show off her little boy to the other women.  She would take Bruce to her sorority meetings and have him recite poetry.  Bruce remembered the poems he recited as a little boy, including the one he used to tell me when I was a small child:

Bow wow wow!
Whose dog art thou?
Little Tommy Tinker’s Dog
Bow wow wow!

            By the time Bruce entered the third grade (about Fall 1911) he entered what he termed his “Tom Sawyer” years, which was a nice way of saying he was quite the handful.  By this time, his parents bought the Taneum House in Thorp and moved into it.  The Taneum House was a boarding house for working men traveling through Thorp.  His parents were very busy taking care of their business, so the restraints that they had on Bruce were loosened.

            The third grade was an important and, according to him, “a big excellent year.”  A new girl showed up in September in school, so of course all the boys had to show off to impress her.  She had moved to Thorp from Joy Minnesota, so he felt a kinship to her given that his relatives had come from Minnesota as well.  Her name was Dorothy Smith, but we would know her as Grandma.

 

Figure 13 - Charles, Bruce, Irene abt 1908

Charles was a cigar-smoking working man, from a stock of tough Michigan Germans who settled in the U.S. in the early parts of the 19^th century.  Irene Gamble was a pioneer woman, born in Indiana and came from her own immigrant stock from Ireland and Germany.  She married a man quite a few years older than herself the first time, had a son, then spent the rest of her marriage trying to figure out how to get away from his abuse.  Eventually she escaped Jefferson Hulman, with her son Logan in tow, and made her way to the logging ships in the Puget Sound.  Her culinary skills were admired by Mrs. Simpson, of the Simpson Logging Company, and she found work aboard their vessels.  Charles worked there, too, and somehow these two hard-working people found each other aboard ship, married and spent the next few years together. 

            While Bruce was learning how to be a boy, and doing all kinds of rambunctious stuff, including living like a hobo in a camp with other boys, making mulligan stew, stealing crops from peoples’ gardens, playing pranks on the townspeople and creating havoc as boys will do, his parents ran the Taneum House and spent their days cooking and cleaning after their boarders.  They served three meals a day to their boarders, family-style.  They washed all their work clothes.  They had no indoor plumbing so they emptied the chamber pots that their boarders used in the evenings, as well as maintained the outdoor privys.  They raised their own vegetables and farm animals, mostly pigs and chickens, to feed the hungry lot.

            Bruce’s Tom Sawyer years would come to a screeching halt shortly after a prank he and his friends played on the town confectioner, Mr. McClure (known to them as “Mac”) a Scotsman, with a temper.

            The Porter boys, sons of another storekeeper, had a dog named “Magar” or “Mags”.  This huge black Labrador mix dog was beloved by all the boys.  They could get this dog to do anything, including pull wagons, play with them in their favorite swimming holes, and accompanied them wherever they went.

One day Bruce had the bright idea to make Mac angry.  It was a hot summer afternoon in the Kittitas with a gentle wind blowing from east to west.  The boys were at the swimming hole, as usual, with nothing but their birthday suits on.  They started piling mud on Magar and themselves.  One of them said to the other “Let’s take this party to Mac’s store” and away they went (with their overalls on) but covered in mud with their beloved dog with them, also covered in mud.

When they got to the store, they implored the dog to jump up on the picture window of the store with his muddy paws, and Magar obliged them, being a good obedient dog.  Mac came boiling out from behind the counter of his candy store yelling at them in Gaelic (but making them understand in no uncertain terms he was angry).  They went away laughing, but then two things happened that made Bruce pause.

No sooner had they left the shopping area of Thorp when a sudden swarm of bees attacked them out of nowhere.  The muddiest among them was the dog.  Magar was suddenly covered in this killer bee attack and stung merciless; he laid on the ground wailing and panting.  He suffered on the ground for quite a while, the boys hiding from the swarm nearby, until suddenly he stopped breathing and died right in front of them.  The boys were shocked, then devastated.

Even though these are eight, nine, ten year old boys, death was not a foreign concept to them.  People, animals died all the time around them.  But now the death was one of their own.  Their beloved dog had died and they had done nothing to save him.  Indeed, in Bruce’s mind, old Mac had his revenge on the dog by sending the killer bees to get him. 

They had seen funeral processions before, so they decided to have a funeral procession for Magar.  They put his bloated dog corpse in the Porter’s wagon and pulled it through town, all the boys in town lined up behind the wagon making a doleful queue through Thorp and on out to the cemetery at the edge of town, where they buried Magar. 

Bruce notes in his work that they were a superstitious lot.  Someone told him around this time that you should never count the number in a funeral procession because one of your own will die if you do that.  He remembers taking that advice to heart and hoping that he hadn’t counted the procession.

The winter of 1915-1916 was tough for Bruce.  He was suffering from poor study habits, poor school attendance, poor grades, and his mother was very ill at home.  Eventually Irene would be moved to a hospital in Ellensburg, where she stayed for weeks.  Her social friends took turns visiting her in the hospital and making sure her husband and son were cared for.  However, Bruce noted that his father was despondent but that he, Bruce, didn’t realize that his mother’s health wasn’t to improve. 

Early that spring of 1916, Bruce’s teacher informed him that he wouldn’t be advancing in school, and would be held back in the 6^th grade for another year.  Learning this fact about him has helped me in so many ways over the years.  Bruce, or Grandpa as we knew him, spent many pages of his memoirs opining that once he became an educator, he would do everything he could to make sure a student advance grades.  When he became a junior high school principal he demanded to know from his teachers everything that they had done to advance a student that they were now condemning.  If there was time, he demanded they try harder to advance the student.

This meant a lot to me as I went through the Bar exam debacle.  For the first time in my life I hit a roadblock in my brain and abilities – I really had a hard time getting past that exam.  For whatever reason (probably because I wasn’t really that interested in the subject matter) I couldn’t concentrate on studying for that exam.  I had a copy of Bruce’s memoir and I started reading it.  It really shocked me to know that he went through the same emotions – but it heartened me no end to know that he did something about it. 

That spring when he learned he flunked out of the 6^th grade, Irene was discharged from the hospital.  Bruce didn’t know it at the time, Irene’s kidneys quit working and she died of uremic poisoning, which is what happens when your body’s filtration systems quit working.  It would have been a very painful, drawn-out death.  Bruce did not know that they had discharged his mother from the hospital to die at home.

Bruce lived in Room 3 of the Boarding House.  When you entered the front door of Taneum House you went left to the stairway and up the stairs and his room was the first room on the left.  It was also directly above the kitchen.  His father would wake him in the mornings in his room by taking the end of a broom and pounding on the ceiling from the kitchen.  But the morning that Irene died, May 8, 1916, Charles wearily went up the stairs to Bruce’s room, knocked on the door and said “get up, son.  Your poor mother is dead.”  He then turned and walked away.

            The custom at the time when someone died was to set up a period of mourning with the casket in the house for a couple of days before burial.  They also hung black crepe paper on the front doorway of the residence.  Friends of Irene took turns sitting vigil with her overnight while she lay in the house.  Bruce worried that he had killed his mother by counting the number in Magar’s funeral procession.  He was determined to never do that again – and reported that for the rest of his life he turned his head away whenever he saw a funeral procession.

            Irene was buried in the Thorp cemetery that spring, and Charles decided to take Bruce on a trip back east with him to visit some of their family.  They left Logan in charge of the boarding house.  Logan, according to Bruce, was not well-equipped to take care of this business.  Logan was newly married to Addie, and Addie didn’t know how to cook or clean, at least not up to the standards set by Irene.  So, every correspondence they received from Logan while they were gone that summer were cries for help.  Logan and Addie couldn’t take care of the Taneum House.  But Charles lost interest in running that business and was intent on taking Bruce to Minnesota and Michigan to visit with his family despite Logan’s dire predictions of doom.

            The night they left Ellensburg on the train going East, Bruce and his Dad were silent.  Charles had booked a first-class ticket – and that meant that they had bunks to sleep in.  Bruce describes this train trip as a gift to him from his Dad.  They were both so despondent; Bruce had failed the 6^th grade and his mother had died.  Charles had confided aloud to Logan within Bruce’s earshot that he couldn’t live without Irene and that he wouldn’t survive another year without her.

So on that train trip, a Pullman Porter made up their bunk and the two of them had to wriggle into it.  Bruce, although he was 13 years old, gratefully curled into his Dad’s big barrel chest and slept all night to the sound of the clickity-clack of the train.  It was the last time, he wrote in 1973 about events in 1916, he felt safe, secure and protected for a long time to come.

I remember Grandpa telling me that his father died of a broken heart once Irene died.  While that is probably true, the circumstances of his broken heart included a terrible injury, a doctor that refused to treat the injury, and an agonizing death of internal injuries sustained from the injury.  Charles died in December 1917, and left Bruce an orphan. 

By that time, Logan had disappeared, none of the relatives in Michigan or Minnesota were of any help, nor were any of the Gamble family stepping up to take care of him.  Bruce’s reputation as a scoundrel, along with his poor scholarly habits, probably discouraged anyone from wanting to raise the wild rapscallion of a boy.  Instead he would be traded around town by several families who took him in, never for love, but for the money.  Charles and Irene left a bit of an estate behind, and the courts took the money and paid anyone who took Bruce in.  By the time Bruce went to college, which no one predicted he would ever do, there was no money left in the trust.  Just as suddenly, no one in Thorp wanted anything further to do with him.  Except for his friend since the third grade, Dorothy Smith. 

Mary Jean

Mary Jean wrote once about this logging camp, in an historical journal.  She notes that she was raised in Chicago, and came to the camp as a married woman, a city girl cavorting out in the wilderness.  She is virginly dressed in a white suit and white pointy toed shoes when she arrives in Shelton and is headed into the wilderness to live in a logging camp.  Her story has this King of Siam-ish feel – a young, smartly dressed, well-educated woman arrives in a frontier town bringing with her all the comforts of home.  Her fantasy of what life would be like include a log cabin with a window box of geraniums.  She awakens that first morning to a much different reality:  breakfast, then a large greasy black locomotive that pulls into the middle of town belching smoke.  A soot-blackened man yells down at her from atop the locomotive whether she is Bill’s wife?  When she says ‘yes’ he reaches a greasy arm down to help her aboard, and will deliver her to her husband.  She rides what’s known as a “Crummy” out private train tracks into the woods.  After trials and tribulations aboard the Crummy, and after she has to traverse train trestles in white pointy high heels, she sees an old guy with a shaved head coming toward her.  Alas, this is her husband.  A guy she reportedly hadn’t seen since the wedding the previous year.  You can feel the disappointment she feels towards him.  The romance ends abruptly when he hands her a bucket when she asks for a drink of water, and points her towards some wild stream surrounded by sucking mud.  This is her new lot in life and she has fallen quite a ways from her big city upbringing. 

There is no doubt that life in a logging camp was brutal.  First, those early logging operations were not only primitive, but downright dangerous.  The numbers of injuries and deaths in those early operations were enormous.  And, depending on the severity of the injury, survival was not always the best option.  Logging happens in the roughest terrains, in the worst weather, in remote places.  The communication systems in the forests were primitive.  One of those large trees coming down could kill several people if they were standing in the wrong spots, and moving cylindrical logs rolling around in the forest could wreak havoc as well.

Young men started out their careers in the woods as whistlepunks, including Grandpa Stevenson.  What was a whistlepunk?  As far as I can tell, they were the communicators or conductors of the symphony of logging in the woods.  Here’s a description of their job duties from the book They Tried to Cut it All:

The whistlepunk operated a simple but ingenious apparatus.  It consisted of a long wire stretched from the donkey engine out to where the rigging slingers worked.  The wire was slung from hemlock saplings, high-butted stumps, old snags and eventually wound up at the spring poles projecting above the donkey roof.  A quick jerk or blow on the wire was carried from the spring poles to the whistle.  The jerk drew a jet of steam and a whistle to which the dunkey puncher was supposed to respond.

A good whistlepunk could skin the mainline back to the woods, slack the main or the haulback, go ahead slow or just put a strain on the line.  Or, upon signal, he could start a thunderous symphony of snorting engines and crashing timber.  It was something to see.

In his day, the whistlepunk was an important figure.  Upon his alertness depended the health and longevity of the men who snared the logs.  He had a carefully prepared and carefully followed array of signals, all of which had to be instantly given and instantly responded to.  There could be no delay or mistakes or the hooktender would come storming out of the canyon with fire in his eyes and his tongue spurting flames.

Dad was born into this business in June 1925.  It was part of his soul, but only a part.  He actually didn’t enjoy the culture of logging much, and he chose to live and work as a cowboy most of his life, and not a logger.  But he understood the woods and he appreciated the fruits of the forests and what they did for the rest of society.  He reverted to logging when he needed to make some quick cash; otherwise, he enjoyed the uncertainties of another frontier occupation:  ranching.  And he chose to raise his family on a cattle ranch in Oregon, and not in the woods of Washington State.

 

 

Figure 3 - Mary Jean, undated, as a child

Mary Jean leaves out some interesting facts of her earlier life.  In order to understand Mary Jean you have to back up and understand her mother, Goldie, and her father, William Stuart who was known as Will. 

Will was a lawyer, but of the shyster variety.  He was famous for womanizing, lying, cheating or bribing his way out of trouble.  Goldie met and married him when she was 18 years old; they married in Phoenix Arizona in 1905; what Goldie did not know is that Will had been married previously and had two children from his first marriage.  Hugh and Margarete were then presented to Goldie to raise “as her own.”  Margarete was 8 years old; Hugh was then 5.  A year later, Mary Jean was born in Phoenix – but soon thereafter Will moves the family to Madison, Wisconsin where he is practicing law.

Will dreams big about his future.  He runs for the 5^th congressional District seat in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1910 in a contentious campaign.  He is running against Victor Berger, who beats him, and becomes the first socialist in Congress.  After Will’s political defeat, things start to fall apart for him.  Early in 1911 he is arrested in a hotel room in Cincinnati with a young woman, and charged with forgery.  He fights extradition back to Wisconsin, but to no avail.  He goes on trial in Madison and in April 1911 Will is convicted of forging a mining officials name on some paperwork in a deal gone bad, and he is sent to prison.   From the Milwaukee paper, it reports the following conversation in the courtroom upon his conviction:

Stuart:  “The jury has rendered its verdict and I am willing to abide by their decision.  Only for the sake of my family and my children I ask the leniency of the court.”

Assistant DA:  “where are your family?”

Stuart:  “My children are at 375 Brady Street and my wife is in the courtroom.”

Assistant DA:  “How about the woman you were arrested with in Cincinnati?”

Stuart:  “That is an absolute falsehood!  Those detective in Cincinnati spread that report to gain notoriety for themselves and to further their own nefarious ends!”  He continues “The picture of the woman published in the newspapers there was a very dear friend of my wife and myself.  We had almost raised that girl, and I want to say that if I have done wrong I want to be punished for it.  They have robbed me of everything, my manhood, my ambitions, my hopes, my wife, my children, but they cannot take from me the consciousness I have in my own heart that I have done no wrong.  Who is going to feed my wife and babies while I am in prison?”

Assistant DA:  You should have thought of that before. 

Assistant DA turns to court:  “While I feel sorry for the family, Stuart was an attorney-at-law and should have known better than to pass a forged instrument.  He is an officer of this court and as such his crime is doubly heinous and I ask that an example be made of the case.  He knows what forgery means, he knows the significance of uttering and for a man of his education to commit this is a disgrace to the entire legal profession.”

The Court:  “Honesty and integrity are the essential features of a lawyer.  No matter how great the ability of an attorney, if he is dishonest he is a menace to the community.  No trust is greater no office is higher, and the lawyer who betrays that trust, whoever violates the oath which he has so solemnly given the court when he is admitted to the bar deserves severe censure and punishment.  Mr. Stuart, you are a disgrace to the profession.  I have a profound respect of every member of the bar and you have violated the confidence of the court, and of your brother members of the bar.  Your name shall be stricken from the rolls of this court and of all courts of record in this state.  A committee of the bar association will be formed and a copy of the testimony submitted to them.”

The newspaper article goes on to talk about my great-grandmother Goldie.  “During the entire time in court….Mrs. Stuart sat with her eyes downcast and not until sentence was pronounced did she raise them.  As she did she encountered the gaze of her husband; then he reeled and fell but she made no move.  The deputies came and took the man from the courtroom and into the corridor, but still she sat, as if she could not comprehend what had happened.  The judge came down from his seat and the clerks began leaving the room, when suddenly she stood up, turned and asked a deputy where she could find her husband.  He told her and she went to him.”

Poor Goldie.  This young woman married a shyster and endured a lot from him; not the least of which raising two children she had no forewarning about and then surviving as he was sent to prison for his misdeeds. 

The paper trail and reporting of their life is sketchy from that point forward.  But we know that Will registered for WWI from a Chicago address, where he lives with Goldie and the children at 5558 S Drexel Avenue which is in Hyde Park near the University of Chicago.  Regardless of his prison term in Wisconsin, he is practicing law in Chicago.    

In 1919 Al Capone moves his family to 7244 S Prairie Avenue in roughly the same neighborhood in Chicago.  The only reason I bring this up is because there was a rumor in our family that Will worked for Al Capone as his lawyer.  Grandpa told me that Will, a shyster lawyer, worked in some capacity for Al Capone, but betrayed the mobster by stealing some money and had to flee town. 

And indeed, the paper records show that by January 1920 Will and his family moved to Tacoma.  While practicing law in Washington, Will managed to anger a client he was representing, and the client pulled out a gun and shot him.  It wasn’t a fatal wound; and his client pleaded guilty to 2^nd degree assault and was sentenced to Walla Walla state penitentiary.  Sometimes between 1920 and 1924 Goldie has had enough and divorces Will. Will is now on his own, first traveling to San Francisco.  Goldie, on the other hand, has to survive.  And she does it in one of the only ways women had at that time to survive.  She finds another man, a butcher named Louis Strickland who lives in Seattle, and she marries him as fast as she can. 

Figure 4 - Will Stuart Passport Photo 1926

As for Will, the end of his life is coming fast, but he doesn’t seem to know it.  He travels like a guy with a lot of money, from San Francisco to points further south, eventually taking a steamer ship from New Orleans to Central America, traveling first to Honduras, San Salvadore, Nicaragua and Guatemala.  He lists his occupation as “legal advisor” and says that he is traveling on business.  He is gone for the year 1925, returning back into the US in 1926, crossing the border in Louisiana and settling for a time in Mineral Wells, Texas. 

This is where family lore and fact converge; the wonder of the internet brought me in contact with a distant relation of ours (Will’s sister’s great-grand daughter) who reported to me that she has an undertaker’s invoice and that a local newspaper obituary reads as follows: “A Prominent Attorney Passes Away Here - The funeral service of William A. Stuart, age 52 years who passed away here Friday afternoon at a local hotel will be held Sunday"   It declares that Will bled to death after a tonsillectomy.  However, our family lore, reported to me from Grandpa, is that Al Capone caught up with him and had his throat ripped out.  What is true and what isn’t – well, who knows.  He lays in an unmarked grave at Elmwood Cemetery in Mineral Wells, Texas, so, he’s not talking about it.

So Mary Jean was no debutante showing up in the wilderness in 1923 to find her husband.  She was under-educated (she was only 17 years old) and I have no idea how she met Grandpa (he was 4 years older than she was).  She was a survivor with nowhere else to go, with a father who was a bit of a rogue and a mother who needed to find another man to support her.  Mary Jean’s fantasy many years later about her own life was that she was some white-clad innocent arriving in an unknown destination, already married (for a year!) to a man she met in college.  The truth was much less romantic:   she was broke, from a broken home, had probably had not graduated from high school and had nowhere else to go and no one else to support her.  She is a scruffy young thing, married to an ambitious man (not unlike her own father?) with a young baby, living in a primitive logging camp. 

Figure 5 - Mary Jean and Dad, 1925

Family Stories

I have been writing down some family stories, and including old family photos, for my brother Jeff.  Other members of my family have expressed interest in these stories, so I thought I would share them on this format, save some paper, and then let whoever wants to read about this do so at their leisure.

Happy reading....

Figure 1 - Dad and Mary Jean abt. 1926

Dad was born in a logging camp, Camp 5, in a chain of logging camps owned by Simpson Logging ompany in the Olympic Peninsula.  Nothing exists of this particular camp.  But at one time, early in the 20^th century hordes of immigrants descended to live, work and raise their families in these work camps.  They were communities of bunk houses, cookhouses complete with camp cooks, machine shops for all their gear and outdoor latrines. 

Figure 2 – Partial Map of Simpson Logging Company Camps

 As you can see, there were many Camp 5s in the Forests – Early Camp 5 is due North of Shelton on the Skokomish.  There is another Camp 5, named “1900 Camp 5” which is due West of Shelton, near the circle marked “The Big Tree”.  But Dad was born in the Camp 5 a little to the West of that, along the dotted line that was the railroad line, on the way to the last Camp in the wilderness that Simpson built, known as “Grisdale.” 

For Dad, a rambunctious boy, the woods smelled like home.  Even later in his life, when I knew him, he was always happiest when in the middle of a fir forest.  The denser the canopy, the deeper the green, the happier my old man. 

Though happy is not an adjective I can use much with Dad.  When I was a kid, Dad would disappear into our woods in the south pasture, about a 200 acre wooded hillside where you could lose yourself in old growth forests, canyons, and creeks.  Every step in that forest crunched as your boot sunk into decades of decaying needles.  John and I would ride our ponies, sneaking behind him and follow him to wherever he was off to.  We’d see our old man pull on his rounded toe logging boots, different than the narrow-toed cowboy boots, and put on his red suspenders and metal hat, and we knew he was headed to the woods, away from the flatland of cattle, haying operations, irrigation.  He would climb into an old WWII Willy’s Jeep we had at the ranch – a Jeep so raggedy over the years that as parts fell off, they just never got replaced.  First it was the top that rusted out; then the seats.  Soon it was just a frame with four wheels and a wooden platform over the top.  He’d climb into the Willy’s Jeep, drive to a clearing at the top of a hill, then hike the rest of the way in.  He would sit down on an old rotting log or on top of one of the enormous glacial rocks and stare out into space, unaware that his two youngest children were watching his every move from atop our ponies. 

Or so we thought.  Later in my life, about junior high school, when he needed money, he had to log a part of that hillside.  One day he was working in the woods with his skidder, a crazy machine whose front two wheels moved independently of the back two wheels and is used to skid logs down hillsides.  I was hiding behind some bushes and watching him work with his machine.  He nearly backed the machine into me but turned around just in time to see me in the bushes.  He was startled, then his face turned purple and he became enraged, jumping off the machine and coming after me.  I turned and ran, high-tailing it out of his reach.  Much to my surprise he never said a word of it when we met that evening around the dinner table.  

It wasn’t until many years later, after he had died, and I was grieving his loss when I decided that I needed to know everything about him.  I started to understand what went through his mind that day when he saw me spying on him.  All I knew about Dad was that he was born in the woods, raised by unhappy parents and that he spent the second World War as a Seabee in the South Pacific before meeting my mother, moving to Oregon and beginning his life anew as a cowboy.  He never talked about his experiences in the Navy at all, and if it was brought up, he would just shake his head and walk the other way. 

The Seabees were a construction battalion that were full of skilled labor that built airstrips and supply lines on the chain of islands that we defended during the second World War.  Some of the fighting that happened on those islands were horrific.  The Japanese dug themselves into cave systems on some of the islands and had to be burned out because they would not surrender.  They were taught to fight to the death. 

From the official military website:  “In the North, Central, South and Southwest Pacific areas, the Seabees built 111 major airstrips, 441 piers, 2,558 ammunition magazines, 700 square blocks of warehouses, hospitals to serve 70,000 patients, tanks for the storage of 100,000,000 gallons of gasoline, and housing for 1,500,000 men. In construction and fighting operations, the Pacific Seabees suffered more than 200 combat deaths and earned more than 2,000 Purple Hearts. They served on four continents and on more than 300 islands.”  When you dig into the story of how these Seabees earned these sometimes posthumous awards you realize that although they’re a construction brigade, they are constructing everything in the middle of a raging war with enemy fire all around them.   One example of the kinds of tasks they would accomplish is the construction of the roads or bridges or airstrips necessary for war as the war is being fought.  For example, a brigade would land on an undeveloped atoll on the trek towards Japan and the fighting between the Marines and the Japanese would be heavy.  In the midst of this fighting, the Seabees would need to get the military wherewithal to the island.  They would off-load their caterpillar tractors in the surf and drive them up the beach and then (with the blades of the caterpillars raised) move towards enemy positions.  When they got close to the Japanese bunkers, they would lower the blades until they were scooping as much sand and earth and boulders as possible and then bury the Japanese alive in their bunkers, while the Marines with wands of fire would burn any survivors or simply shoot them.

That day, when he saw me spying on him, did he flash back to an episode of the Japanese hiding in the bunkers?  Was his rage directed toward me, or directed toward an episode earlier in life that most likely scared the hell out of him?  Or did he think, ‘god, I could have run over my child and killed her,” and he confused fear for my safety and rage at me for just being there?  Or was it my mere existence that just enraged him?  I will never know. 

Friday pm - Bathroom

So all the tile is up today - and now on Monday Brad will be back to grout - another thing we agonized over - deciding the grout color.  In the end, we went to basic old white grout.  We flirted for a moment with a light green grout that matched our wall color, but chickened out at the last minute.