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.

Part 4

Once the painter was done with the painting, then the tiler came in - this is now Week 3 of this project.

It took five days this week to get all the tile in that small space, but the effect is well worth it.

Bathroom Remodeling Part 3

Then, after the inspections were done, the fun stuff started.  First the drywall came in (after they shoved a bit of insulation in the spaces)

And then a new cabinet was installed - we opened up the wall to the hallway (which had been closed off in the old configuration) so we can access the bathroom cabinet from either the hallway or inside of the bathroom itself

Then the painting happened - and things are starting to take shape - this is from the inside looking out - we kept the same green color on the walls, but added a nice soft white to the trim as a finish

from the outside hallway looking in, we painted the trim the same as the rest of the hallway

Bathroom Remodel Part 2

Once everything was ripped out, then the reconstruction could begin, starting with a new outside wall and a new window

The tub is gone, as you can see (no easy feat - Ben hauled it out of there by himself and I hope to golly he didn't hurt himself in the process) and then a shower had to be rebuilt where the tub was.

They used self-leveling cement to build the shower stall floor.  The "chimney" in the center is keeping the plumbing drain open and cement free.

The electrician and plumbers then came in and re-did all the wiring (old knob and tube got an upgrade) and water lines (old galvanized out and pex came in)

New Bathroom

We have finally gotten around to remodeling our bathroom.  Here's what the old bathroom looked like (in case you've never been to our house)

Notice the old tub, the stained tile, the linoleum floor.  It actually doesn't look so bad in this picture, but in reality it was kind of gross.  What you cannot see in this picture is the hundred-year-old corner-tank toilet, and a funky corner cabinet that has doors that run into everything if you try to open them.  This bathroom is small and pretty hard to function in.

Remodeling is a long process; we are doing our bathroom in the month of May 2016.  This is what it looked like after the first few days:

We had to go down to the studs to rip everything out.  Once out, we found that the outside wall was completely rotten!  the only thing holding up that side of the house was the stucco.  Further, it had been rotten for probably 50 years.  No wonder there was so much mold and mildew on the tile!