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.