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| 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 90th 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.
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| 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 20th 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 3rd 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 3rd
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%
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