Personal History for Glenn Surguine
Dedication Chapter
Title of Your Autobiography
Hard Work and a Few Miracles:Recollections of a Pulaski County Kentucky Girl in the 20th Century
About the Author:
Beatrice Harper SurguineBeatrice Surguine, born Beatrice Harper, was born in 1913, and yes she was ACTUALLY born in a log cabin, in what is now Daniel Boone National Forest in Pulaski County, Kentucky, For the most part, she tells the story herself, with a few chapters contributed by friends and cousins...oh, and by my dad and her husband Glenn Surguine. I am also Glenn Surguine and, by the way, not a "junior," because they forgot to include it on my birth certificate. For the record, and for any future culpability with regard to what is written here, I go by my nickname: Skip. As regards culpability my mom, though she left Kentucky in her early 20s, was "Kentucky" thru and thru as they say down there. She was a very private person, very careful to NOT share her "dirty laundry" with anyone, and had some real doubts about letting anyone EVER see any of this. But her story, and her life, are just too beautiful to just abandon to a few fading memories, including mine. But I have read this over and over and, frankly, I have been unable to spot ANY "dirty laundry." So, with great sensitivity and very little editing, and hoping she forgives me, I am putting her story online.
Date of completion.
April, 2002. This has been sitting around for a while.If you would like to be contacted by someone who reads your biography, please include a current e-mail address. Remember, it is entirely up to you if you would like to make your biography public and it is entirely up to you if you would like to include your e-mail address for others to contact you.
skipsurguine@gmail.comJust The Facts
In a few pages, what is summary of your life story?
Hard Work and a Few MiraclesRecollections from a Pulaski County Kentucky Girl in the 20th Century
by
Beatrice Surguine
(as told to her son: Skip Surguine)
Table of Contents
1. KENTUCKY 1913 1
2. MAMA 4
3. LAFAYETTE 1916 8
4. TOYS, ENTERTAINMENT, AND FRIENDS 13
5. READING, OHIO 15
6. OPAL (BURDINE) TURNER 20
7. BACK TO THE COUNTRY 23
8. HELEN 28
9. CLYDE 33
10. CLYDE JOINS THE NAVY 38
11. NICKNAMES AND COUSINS 39
12. CHRISTMAS IN THE COUNTRY 42
13. OUT OF THE COUNTRY 45
14. STARTING A NURSING CAREER 47
15. WILD ROMANCE 50
16. GLENN 52
17. WW II 57
18. SAN FRANCISCO 1946 66
19. SUNNY SAN MATEO 77
20. DOWNEY 82
INDEX 84
NOTE: page numbers refer to printed version
1. Kentucky 1913
My father's family was like most south-central Kentucky families of the time: BIG! There were 16 brothers and sisters. My dad was eight years old and had four younger siblings when his mother, my grandmother Harper, died at age 43. She was married at 14 years old, so she must have had a baby every two years of her married life.
Of all his brothers and sisters, Dad was probably closest to Uncle Lee, his youngest brother. Uncle Lee moved to Lafayette, Indiana, when he grew up. He and his wife, my Aunt Rebecca, eventually had ten kids. Uncle Lee became well established in Lafayette, and he eventually persuaded Dad to come to Indiana. But I'm getting way ahead of myself. Uncle Lee was two months old when Grandma Harper died with measles , so the younger kids just raised themselves as best they could with help from their father, Silas Harper, and their older sisters. There was nobody else to care for them, so that was what they had to do to survive. They had to take care of themselves.
Their father was working most of the time, I suppose. I don’t know much about my grandfather Harper, other than that they had a sugar-tree (maple) orchard. They made their own sugar and grew their own food. This was up in Rock Castle County, near Mount Vernon.
My grandfather Harper died in 1907 at age 70. My mom said he was a kind, soft-spoken, gentleman. She liked him very much.
Early photos of my father, Simpson Harper, show he was quite a handsome young man with his Derby hat and bow tie. He had been working in Illinois and came home to visit one time when he met Mom. She was 18 and was beautiful in her pictures with her apple-dumpling face, rosy cheeks and turned-up nose.
At 8:30 AM on April 7, 1913, I arrived, delivered by old “Doc” Cress. I was born in a little log house that my great grandfather had built for his bride many years earlier. It was in Pulaski County, Kentucky. The nearest post office was at Conrard, which had been established by my grandfather William Robert “Bud” Burdine. It was the first post office in that area.
The house was made from hand-hewn logs and wooden pegs (no nails), and had a lean-to kitchen, a front porch and an upstairs loft. According to my cousin Tab, the house has been moved to another location. I don’t know who owns it now, or if it even exists. The estate was finally broken up after the second-growth timber was cut. I heard some of it was strip-mined for coal. My grandfather’s house is also gone. Tab used some of its hand-hewn logs to build his house. Tab also used some of the stone from my grandfather’s big fireplace to build his fireplace, although a lot of it was unusable.
The little log house where I was born was over the hill from my grandfather’s place, maybe a quarter or half a mile. My mother inherited the house and land when my grandfather Burdine died. When grandfather died, he left each of his kids an inheritance, either a farm or a homestead or the equivalent in money. He tried to be fair. The ones living out of state got money. Those in Kentucky got land. Aunt Flora, Aunt Alma and her baby Cartelle, and Uncle Ron were all still living at home. They got the homestead. When Uncle Ron got married, he sold his share to the girls. When they died, it went to Cartelle.
My parents didn't live there very long until my Dad decided to move on. My mother was executor of Grandfather Burdine’s estate. My Dad couldn't rest until Mama sold her inheritance. After that, they moved to town—to Somerset. I was probably only a few months old at that time.
My earliest memory—I was about two and a-half years old, and it was wintertime and cold—was of a great big roaring fire in the fireplace of our little house near Somerset. Another early memory was going chestnut hunting with my brother in the woods and getting burrs in my bare feet. He ended up carrying me home. He was nine years older than me and good to take care of me. I guess I was two-and-a-half and he was around eleven years old.
Another early memory I have is of an old cat that we had, and the cat catching a baby chicken. My father threw a stick at it, and the cat ran away and never came home again. I have often wondered if the cat was injured and died.
Later we moved again—to a place called Grundy—which was also near Somerset. My Dad worked for the L. & N. Railroad in the freight office in Somerset.
I remember the train station in Somerset. It was on the South end of town. It must have been close enough for my dad to walk to work. How else could he have gotten there? He never owned a car. At that time, no one did. There was no public transportation, and there were no automobiles in those days. He certainly wouldn't have ridden a horse.
We moved from that house near Somerset to Lafayette, Indiana, on my third birthday. My mother, Clyde and I went on the train. I remember being very sick and throwing up in the toilet on the train.
I remember quite a lot after that. My dad was already in Indiana, working at the B. & D. freight office in Lafayette. He had a job and a house for us to come to. My father was always "on the go." My mother said that every time she got a few sticks of furniture in a house, he would decide to give it all away or sell it for nothing and move somewhere else. Apparently she didn't fight it. In those days, you didn’t fight stuff like that. If your husband wanted to do something, you did it or you got left behind. So that's how we wound up in Lafayette.
2. Mama
My mother’s maiden name was Burdine. They called her Maggie Mae. Or just Maggie. It should have been Margaret, but Maggie was what she was always called and is what is on her tombstone. Mae was from a Colonel Mae my grandfather worked with. I suspect he was a Colonel in the Civil War. She had eight siblings: Martha (Mattie), Ben, Giles, Pauline (Molly), Flora, Walter, Alma and Ronald.
My grandfather, William R. Burdine, was a big frog in a little pond. He always had all kinds of schemes going on. As a surveyor, he surveyed much of the land in Pulaski County. He was a postmaster. He was a schoolteacher. He was a distiller, which was all legal at the time. He had a government license, and his bourbon was bottled-in-bond. He owned sawmills. He had his finger in practically everything. And he worked his kids to death. As soon as they got old enough to go to the fields, they did. But he never worked in the fields himself, my mom said. Always doing other things.
The oldest daughter Mattie, my cousins Flora and Chris’s mother, stayed at the house and helped raise the kids. There were always babies, so she helped her mother baby sitting and cooking. There was another sister: Aunt Molly. Her name was Pauline, but they called her Molly. She eventually ended up in Naperville, Illinois, but when we lived in Indiana we visited her often in Decatur, Illinois. They owned a big farm there. Mama's oldest brother, Ben, was shot accidentally in the leg and died from blood poisoning when he was just a young man. This was particularly tragic for my mother, who considered Ben her "work buddy" on the farm. Ben was also the son Grandfather Burdine was grooming to take over, and his death nearly destroyed my grandfather. His grief was so great that he was never quite the same after that. Within a short time his wife (my grandmother), Elizabeth Ann (Betty), died of breast cancer. He was a broken man by the time Mama was grown.
Another of my mother's sisters-in-law was Aunt Etta, who was married to my mother’s youngest brother, George. Opal and the rest of the Burdines who live in Indiana were the children of this youngest brother.
And there was Uncle Walter, who was Tab, Pete, Williena, Rupert, Jackie and Harold’s Dad. His wife's name was Lola.
Aunt Lola was my dad’s first cousin’s daughter and Aunt Etta was my father’s brother George’s daughter, so there were several Burdines and Harpers that got together. My mother was the first one of her brothers and sisters to get out of the house and out on her own. She and Papa were married Jan. 10, 1901. They had been married 47 years when he died on Good Friday, March 26, 1948.
Moma was 18 years old when she was married. Her first baby, my little sister Grace, died four years before I was born. That happened probably because they didn’t have a doctor who knew much. They didn’t know what was wrong with her. She was born a “preemie.” She was tiny: two-and-a-half pounds at two weeks. They had to keep her on a pillow for about three months. Her cradle was a dresser drawer. Since they were way out in the country, there was no doctor or anything – her grandmother Burdine delivered her. Nobody back then went to the hospital to have babies, not even the rich people. They were all just born at home. Both Helen and I were delivered by the same old “quack.” They found out years later that he didn’t have a license. He had a pharmacy license, but he wasn’t an M.D. He just decided to come out into the country and set up practice.
My mother was always very tidy, and we were always clean at our house. We didn’t have many clothes, but whatever we had was clean. And scrubbed. The first thing we did when we got out of a bed in the morning was make it. The first thing we did when we got up from the table was wash the dishes. And dry them. And put them away. They were never left to drain. I’m sure that’s the way she grew up too. It wasn’t easy, but we were clean. We always had clean clothes to wear. We took baths on Saturday night in the washtub in the kitchen after we moved to the country. To an awful lot of people that isn’t important, but it was to my mom.
Mama used to sing a lot. I never hear "Amazing Grace" without thinking of my mother.
She was a good person. Kind and gentle – a good neighbor – always ready to share or help.
I remember lots of stories about my mom. For instance, I remember an incident that occurred when we were living on Reading Road in Reading, Ohio. Mama always got up first in the morning. She usually had breakfast on the table by the time everyone else was up. We always had hot biscuits for breakfast, and she kept her pan on top of the pantry shelf to make her biscuits in. She reached up one morning to take the pan down off of the shelf, and a mouse jumped out of it and landed on her and went down into her nightgown! Her blood-curdling screams woke everyone up. I was five, and I got up. My dad jumped out of bed, Clyde came in, and one of Dad’s nephews, my cousin who was visiting, grabbed his gun and ran to the kitchen too. And there was Mom, standing in the middle of the kitchen floor, clutching this poor mouse with both hands and screaming. When they finally persuaded her to let go of the mouse, the poor thing dropped to the floor and it was the most smashed thing you’ve ever seen. There was nothing left of it!
Then, after we moved back out into the country, we kept chickens. And the hawks were terrible. They were always after the chickens. They would fly around and nose dive and grab up one of the little ones and carry it off. Well, she heard the old mother hen screaming one day, so she dashed out, grabbing a shotgun or a rifle. My dad always left a loaded shotgun or a rifle in the corner all the time. For hunting. And there was a .45 that stayed on top of the mantle, all the time, loaded. Anyway, she grabbed the gun and dashed out with this gun in her hand. And there was the old hawk circling, just about to make a nose-dive into the chicken coop. But, instead of aiming the gun and shooting the hawk, she dropped it and started clapping her hands to scare him away. She forgot all about her gun. But that was just as well, because she had never fired a gun in her life and would have probably killed someone.
But things were mostly day-to-day. We were just busy trying to keep food on the table and keep warm. There were happy times too. We were poor & deprived but it was never discussed so I didn’t know it.
After we moved back the country the second time, I made up my mind that I was going to leave home as soon as I could. And I did. From the time I was ten years old, I knew I was going to leave when I was sixteen. I started counting days. I’d lived in Indiana and Ohio, and knew what city living was like. Of course, I'd also seen my aunt and uncle’s big farm in Decatur, and I had an idea about farming. But that move to the country was a drastic change for me. I found out not only where the milk and butter came from, but where the bacon came from too, and I didn’t want any part of it. I guess I almost starved to death. I guess I nearly drove my mother up the wall with my picky eating! I was never forced to eat anything I didn’t want. And I have always been thankful for that.
3. Lafayette 1916
I remember the train trip from Somerset to Lafayette when I was three years old because I got so sick. Later, when we lived in Cincinnati, my mother couldn’t even take me on the streetcar without my getting motion sickness. I don’t know how I would have handled a car. My father never owned one, so we often took public transportation, especially when we lived in the city.
I don’t remember getting on the train, but I sure do remember being sick. We arrived in Lafayette on a Sunday morning. It was my third birthday. That would have been 1916. My dad met us at the station, and he had on a new pair of overalls. I guess I’d never seen him in overalls. And I saw him walking across the platform and yelled “Ah papa, you’ve got new britches.” And that embarrassed him to death. He tried to shush me up, but I kept talking about his new britches. It had been a while since I’d seen him. It was just Mom, me and Clyde on that train trip.
Lafayette was a nice, quiet town. One of the things I remember was going downtown to Hook’s Drug Store and getting an ice cream cone. Strawberry was my favorite ice cream back then. Strawberry has always been my favorite. There were only three kinds in those days: strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate. I remember the store had a big long counter.
I also remember the horse-drawn ice cream wagon in Reading, Ohio, where we lived later. I set out on the front steps on Sunday morning to wait for the wagon to come. The horse had a bell, which I could hear way down the street. It was just on Sunday morning. The ice cream man scooped it into a little cardboard box. It must have been half-a-pint. I had to decide whether I wanted vanilla, or strawberry, or chocolate. That was always a big decision for a five-year-old. But I almost always went for strawberry! It cost five cents and I collected the tin spoons that come with it for my doll dishes.
Anyway, back to Lafayette. As far as I knew, Hook’s Drug Store was all there was to downtown Lafayette. All of my cousins, Uncle Lee’s kids, worked there, starting with the oldest: Minnie. This tradition—working at Hook's—continued right down the line for years and years. They worked the soda fountain, I think. These were Uncle Lee’s kids. Several still live around there. My cousin Dell died a few years ago, and I haven’t heard from anyone since. One of Uncle’s Lee’s daughters, Grace Slagle, moved to California, and we went to visit her a few times. She and her children, Brian and Patty, lived in Walnut Creek when we lived in San Mateo. She worked as a hostess in a restaurant in Walnut Creek for years after her divorce.
Almost all of the kids went to Purdue or married someone who went to Purdue. Grace Slagle married a Purdue student and they were very happy until he left her high and dry. She was absolutely devastated. Minnie Ferguson was another sister. They wound up in Phoenix. She married another Purdue student, and he was big shot engineer with some national company in Arizona, and she was a "high-powered" secretary. They had a beautiful big home up in Scottsdale. Minnie was Uncle Lee's oldest girl.
Poor Dell was the one that got left behind. He worked in a foundry and took care of his mother until she died. He had a disability of some kind -- I think maybe he was deaf. He didn't marry until after his mother died. Then the rest of the kids decided to give him the family home, a big old two-story white house. At least I thought it was big. I know the lot was big, with lots of trees. The address was 101 South 27th Street.
The house in Lafayette was standing until a few years ago, when we visited. It had just been torn down. The big old tree was still standing. It was on the corner of Union near a big park, I think . It was a three story white house on the corner. I thought it was huge. There was a kitchen, and a dining room, and a great big walk-in pantry on the lower level. It was built on a slope. I remembered it as a hillside. I used to play on it. But when we went back, I realized it was just a slope. The second was the street level, where you entered the living room and the parlor. Every house had a parlor in those days. There must have been a bedroom on that floor as well. There were two or three bedrooms on the third floor. There was a long flight of stairs from there to the kitchen, and one day I fell down. I fell down all the way to the bottom. I didn’t break any bones, but it scared me to death. Kids are pretty pliable.
We had electric lights. No radio, though. This was before all that. We had running water, but I don’t know that we had hot water. And I think maybe we had indoor plumbing.
Mom had a coal cook stove and a kerosene stove, which was a little easier to use. It’s a big job to build up a fire. You have to have kindling and all kinds of stuff to build a fire in a coal stove. But we had the coal stove for heat too, and also a pot-bellied stove in the living room. That was it. Bedrooms were pretty cold in those days.
One day she poured kerosene on some coal and kindling in the cook stove to get the fire started. Nothing happened and, after a while, she lifted a lid to peek and the whole thing exploded in her face. It burned her eyebrows off and singed her hair. She and I were alone. It was a miracle that she wasn’t badly burned or that the house caught on fire!
Mama had two big round galvanized wash tubs, and a board. You had to have two tubs to wash. You washed in one, and rinsed in the other. Then you dumped the water out of the other one and rinsed them again. Back and forth until the clothes were clean. One time, somewhere along the line, she did have an old-fashioned wringer. You turned it by hand, but at least you didn’t have to ring your clothes out. She did her wash in the kitchen, I guess.
My mother always made my clothes. I had little gingham and percale dresses, and sometimes a sunbonnet to match. The material was very good cotton. It amazes me the shoddy material I see today. I usually had one good outfit that I wore on Sunday. I’d wear it to church when we visited my Aunt Molly and Uncle John in Illinois.
I had a warm coat and two pair of shoes. One pair buttoned up the side over my ankles. They were all leather, black-button shoes. I used a shoe hook to button them. The other pair I thought were just out of this world! They were so fancy! They had patent leather bottoms and a gray, kind of suede cloth top. And with laces, yet!
I had a black coat that looked like karakul fur, and a velvet red bonnet. And with those laced-up shoes I was just in high style.
We would get to ride in a car when we visited my Uncle John in Decatur, Illinois. Not only did they have a car, they also had a surrey with a fringe on top. They used two horses for the surrey. They also had several workhorses. He was a big-time farmer living high on the hog, but later they lost it all.
Only a few people had cars in those days. We got around on electric streetcars. When we wanted to go to downtown Lafayette, we either took the streetcar or we walked.
My dad used to go up to Decatur to help his brother-in-law get the harvest in. It took lots of people. My mother would help her sister cook to feed the farm hands.
One time, when we went on a Sunday – we always went on the train – the family had gone to church and taken the car. I guess my mother called and one of the hired hands was there and hooked the team up to the surrey. He came out to the train station and picked us up. We were at their house when they came home from church. They were very avid church gowers. I don’t know what denomination. Some off brand I think. Something fundamentalist. They called it “The Way.” And they would have big tent meetings out there on the farm, which would go on for two weeks at a time. They gave and gave and gave to that group, and that’s another thing that drained their funds.
I remember getting lost in the cornfield one time, and the corn stalks felt like trees. They were way over my head. I cried and cried, but finally someone found me.
And they lost it all! They died with absolutely nothing. They owned land in Missouri, and I think they also owned land in Iowa. What happened was that they owned a section or two at their farm in Illinois. But the city of Decatur was expanding and it surrounded him. The developers wanted his land, but he refused to sell. He was stubborn, stubborn, stubborn. He wasn’t about to let them have his beautiful land and chop it up into city lots. No way! So—they just kept raising his taxes, and they bankrupted him. They got his land anyway. If they want it, they’ll get it.
I don’t think our house in Lafayette was too far from the university. It seems to me that we used to cross some woods and a park when we were there.
We were renting that house, and it went up for sale. They wanted $3,000 for it, and my dad said that is ridiculous. It was way too much money, so we moved. There was a neighbor, a Mrs. St. Clair, a few doors up the street, whose husband had died and left her with two small children. One, Johnny, was a little older than me, and there was a baby who wasn’t even walking. She was a young woman, and he must have been much older. They must have been fairly well off, because they had a big farm way out on the Wabash River which was very profitable. At any rate, they had this great big house up the street and she was afraid to stay there by herself. Somehow, she talked my folks into moving in and they made a little apartment in the back of the house. I remember it had a big porch that swept around on two sides. We had our own entrance. We didn’t live there very long until we moved to Reading, Ohio.
I remember very well seeing Mr. Sinclair laid out in their parlor when he died. They had the funeral there at the house. The little kids and a lot of other people were there. I remember that very very well. It was scary.
But she and the two kids lived on one side of the house, and we lived on the other side.
Just about the time we moved to Reading, World War I started. My dad would have been in the next draft, but the war ended in 1918. They exempted the married men with families as long as they could, but his name was coming up fast. I don’t know how we would have lived. My mother wasn't equipped to make a living. I remember when the war ended. I remember him coming home and saying the war was over. That was in November of 1918.
I've only been back to Lafayette twice. The first time was when I took my father up to visit his brother. Uncle Lee never came back to Kentucky. They didn't write, they didn't telephone, and they certainly didn't visit us. Then I stopped by a few years ago when traveling through with Skip and family, just to find our house torn down. We found only an empty lot, and were told the house had been torn down a year or two earlier. We did find my cousin Dell Harper and his wife, Mary, still living in the old house at 101 S. 27th street, where he was born on Aug. 6, 1917. After Uncle Lee died in 1958, Del, who had never married, lived at home and took care of his mother until her death in 1974. As I've already said, his siblings gave him the house out of gratitude. After that, he married Mary.
4. Toys, entertainment, and friends
I didn't have many toys, but the ones I did have were very precious to me. I had my little wagon, which I still have. My father made it for me. It had red wheels, and I think it was made from a cigar box. It was like a little farm wagon. And I had my dolls, and my dishes, and quite a few toys – at least until we moved to the country. After that, I had almost nothing. Things got better in the country for Moma and Papa after I moved away, but it was pretty meager when I was growing up.
I had three dolls when I was little. I had a little celluloid doll. That was my very first one. It was a replica of a baby. A newborn. Celluloid was a very thin synthetic material that was used before plastic. His name was Bucky. I don’t remember when I got that little doll.
When we lived in Lafayette, I got another boy doll for Christmas. There was a big department store in Lafayette named “Lobe & Hines.” That’s where the doll came from, so I called him Lobe.
Then, after we moved to Reading, we went to a carnival one time, and my dad won a doll throwing balls or pitching horseshoes or something. That was a beautiful little girl doll with a pretty little pink dress on and golden hair. And oh, I thought she was the most beautiful thing in the whole wide world! Her name was Dorothy. Those were my three dolls.
Then a long long time after that, I got another one. But that one was a Cupie Doll. After my brother Clyde left home, he sent it to me for Christmas one year.
I had a set of toy dishes, which I never played with because I was afraid I would break them. They were just so fragile, and I was sure they would get broken. I remember one time some kids came to play, and they wanted to play with my dishes, and I didn’t want them to. My mother made me get them out and, sure enough, some of them got broken. And I cried and cried. I didn’t want those kids playing with my dishes. I had to take care of things so nothing got destroyed.
I never had a pair of roller skates, or a bicycle. My brother had a bicycle and would ride me on the handlebars to school. But that was in Reading. I started Kindergarten in Reading.
In Lafayette, I played with Johnny Sinclair, and his little brother Georgie. There was also a set of twins, Mary and Helen, who lived next door to us when we lived in the white house. They went to school with Clyde.
Then there were the cousins, and I’m sure I played with them. But they lived on one end of town and we lived on the other. The parents and cousins would come on Sunday sometimes, and stay all day. They would bring the whole flock of kids, and my mother hated it. They would come early in the morning and spend the day, and have dinner at our house. Mom would have to make the dinner, and they would bring a glass jar of canned blackberries or whatever. There were pints, quarts, and half-gallon canning jars. We ate whatever was canned. Vegetables, fruits, berries, some kind of meat, but not beef. Dad said he didn’t like beef, which was funny because he loved hamburgers. Every time he would go into town, he’d buy a hamburger.
My father and his brother played cards sometimes . . . . .
Have you ever heard of "Setback"? We played that card game when I was much bigger. And another card game, called "Rook," many long Sunday afternoons.
But I often played jump the rope, and there were often kids in the yard. The twins would play with me sometimes, but they played house and I would always be the baby to dress or undress. I didn’t like that.
In Indiana, on Sunday afternoon, there was usually a band concert in the park. Every town had its bandstand. I remember sitting on the grass and listening to the music.
Women got the vote in 1919. But before that, my father always was the one who voted. He was the one who was political. He was an avid Republican, and he hated the pole tax. As a child, I always thought it was a wooden pole he was talking about. He always complained about paying the pole tax. I wonder when that tax was finally repealed?
5. Reading, Ohio
I don’t actually remember leaving Lafayette and moving to Reading, Ohio. But I remember being in the house in Reading. We weren’t there long. My dad was always on the move, and never quite satisfied. It might have been early 1918 when we arrived. I started kindergarten in Reading, and the school I attended is still there.
The house we lived in was a little two-story house, and there’s another one just like it next door. I believe it is still standing. It was on Reading Road south of Benson Street, one house from the corner of Vorhees Street. Like our house in Lafayette, I think our Reading is gone.
The old German who owned the property and his two old-maid daughters lived next door on the corner. They owned their house, the house we lived in, and the house next door. It was a little gray house, and that’s the one that was still standing two doors from the corner a few years ago when we drove by.
The house we lived in had a porch on the side, a sidewalk and a gate. There was a community lawn between the house on the corner and our house. When there was sunshine, the old man would sit out on his porch in his wheel chair. I was forbidden to step on that grass. I could play on the sidewalk, but the little plot of grass between the houses was his, and it wasn’t to be walked on. Once in a great while I was permitted to play on or sit on the grass.
We lived a short distance from a creek. The street went over a culvert, and I used to play with two little girls that lived in the house right by the creek. Sometimes we’d make mud pies and bake them in the sun.
There were no supermarkets in those days, just grocery stores. They had little corner delicatessens where you could go in and buy the necessities. The delicatessens always sold candy. You’d take a penny and you could buy five pieces. They had peppermint stick candy and great big fat sugar candies. It was all loose. None of it was wrapped. They usually kept it in a glass case behind the counter.
There was a delicatessen about a block up the street where we shopped, and I remember going to the store once with a note from my mother. When I got there, I did what I thought I was supposed to do. I walked in and gave the man the note, then turned around and walked home! Mama didn’t tell me that I was supposed to bring something back from the store, so I didn’t. I was always a very obedient child! She thought it was funny, and sent me trudging back for whatever it was she needed.
A lot of the grocery stores had delivery boys. You’d tell them what you wanted, and the delivery boy would bring it out and if you had an account, you’d put it on the account. If you didn’t, you paid them right then and there. We never charged our groceries. My dad refused. He would have starved first.
They also had grocery stores like Kroger's where you went with your list and told the man one by one what you wanted and he’d go and get it and put it on the counter. And when you were done, he’d box it up and you took it home. There was no self-service of any kind. You weren't allowed to handle any of the merchandise. Almost everything had to be weighed. If you were buying meat, they would cut it, put it on the scale, and push their thumb down on it as they weighed it. Self-service is a recent invention.
We lived a short distance from a creek. The street went over a culvert, and I used to play with two little girls that lived in the house right by the creek. Sometimes we’d make mud pies and bake them in the sun.
There were no supermarkets in those days, just grocery stores. They had little corner delicatessens where you could go in and buy the necessities. The delicatessens always sold candy. You’d take a penny and you could buy five pieces of candy. They had A lot of the grocery stores had delivery boys. You’d tell them what you wanted, and the delivery boy would bring it out and if you had an account, you’d put it on the account. If you didn’t, you paid them right then and there. We never charged our groceries. My dad refused. He would have starved first.
They also had grocery stores like Kroger's where you went with your list and told the man one by one what you wanted and he’d go and get it and put it on the counter. And when you were done, he’d box it up and you took it home. There was no self-service of any kind. You weren't allowed to handle any of the merchandise. Almost everything had to be weighed. If you were buying meat, they would cut it, put it on the scale, and push their thumb down on it as they weighed it. Self-service is a recent invention.
A lot of the grocery stores had delivery boys. You’d tell them what you wanted, and the delivery boy would bring it out and if you had an account, you’d put it on the account. If you didn’t, you paid them right then and there. We never charged our groceries. My dad refused. He would have starved first.
They also had grocery stores like Kroger's where you went with your list and told the man one by one what you wanted and he’d go and get it and put it on the counter. And when you were done, he’d box it up and you took it home. There was no self-service of any kind. You weren't allowed to handle any of the merchandise. Almost everything had to be weighed. If you were buying meat, they would cut it, put it on the scale, and push their thumb down on it as they weighed it. Self-service is a recent invention.
A lot of the grocery stores had delivery boys. You’d tell them what you wanted, and the delivery boy would bring it out and if you had an account, you’d put it on the account. If you didn’t, you paid them right then and there. We never charged our groceries. My dad refused. He would have starved first.
They also had grocery stores like Kroger's where you went with your list and told the man one by one what you wanted and he’d go and get it and put it on the counter. And when you were done, he’d box it up and you took it home. There was no self-service of any kind. You weren't allowed to handle any of the merchandise. Almost everything had to be weighed. If you were buying meat, they would cut it, put it on the scale, and push their thumb down on it as they weighed it. Self-service is a recent invention.
I remember one time my mother wanted to go downtown shopping, and she took me up to a neighbor woman who had the two or three little girls. I thought we were just visiting with them, but suddenly Mama was gone. And I was there by myself. I ran away, hid under the culvert and cried. After they found me, I wouldn’t eat any lunch. I wouldn’t have any part of it. Finally, in the late afternoon, Mama came back. She probably would have taken me shopping with her, but she didn’t because I always got so sick on the streetcar, especially when we passed the big Proctor and Gamble soap factory. What a smell!
And I remember once there was a carnival down the street near our house. We were there when the Ferris Wheel broke, either killing or hurting a lady really bad. To this day I have never been on a Ferris Wheel! Papa won my Dorothy doll playing a game tossing balls at the carnival.
Then, one time we went to the zoo. My Uncle Ron, Mama’s youngest brother, had come to visit us and brought his family, including my cousin Opal. At any rate, Opal was with us and we went to the Cincinnati Zoo. She got a little too close to the monkey cage, and the monkey reached out and grabbed her little purse. Back then little girls always carried little purses with a handkerchief. She had her little purse and I had my little purse. Well, the monkey grabbed the purse out of her hand and opened it up and shredded the handkerchief and tossed the purse away! Opal cried and cried.
Then the 1918 flu epidemic hit . People were dying by the dozens around us. It was absolutely raging. Hearse after hearse – many horse drawn– went past our house up Reading road to the cemetery. The flu started in Europe near the end of the war, and I guess some of the soldiers brought it back with them. There was nothing to fight it with. They’d get the flu, then pneumonia, and they were gone. My Aunt Mollie and Uncle John Burdine, in Decatur, Illinois, lost two of their little girls, Helen and Pauline, one day apart. They were buried in the same casket. The whole family was sick and nobody to help.
My dad decided to chuck the whole thing. He gave away almost everything, boxed up a few things, and we ran. He may have sold some of the furniture, but he gave most of it away. He said he figured if he didn’t get away, we’d die. He left a good job with the Fox Paper Company too. But he lost a nephew that had been living with us, and people were dying within days of catching the flu. This was all over the United States. So he high-tailed it back to Kentucky and into the country just as far as he could go.
6. Opal (Burdine) Turner
“I remember that monkey that took my purse,” Opal recalls. “I cried and cried.
“But I don’t remember much about those times, and I don’t remember much about Bea during those times either.
“We lived down the hill from a Catholic Convent (in Reading), and there was a long set of steps up the hill to the convent. A girlfriend and I would play on those steps, and one lady told us not to get too close to the convent because they would take us in and keep us. We thought it was true, you know.
“My dad and mom and two brothers were just moving all the time. We didn’t stay put anyplace very long. We’ve finally stayed in Indiana for over forty years. But my dad was in the geodetic survey, and that kept us on the move.
“I’m Bea’s first AND second cousin! First cousin on the Burdine side, and second on the Harpers . Don't know much about my grandfather Harper because he was killed before I ever saw him. My mother wasn’t even married when he was killed. But I knew my grandmother. She was a McKinney.
“I remember Bea best from being back home with Aunt Mag and Uncle Shed. I remember going over there to her house and staying the night. Aunt Mag always had the best blackberry jelly and hot biscuits.
“There was Aunt Mag and Aunt Mattie. But I remember Aunt Mag’s house very well. It wasn’t too little, but it wasn’t a great big house either. I remember it was not painted at that time and it had a front porch. The best I remember, the kitchen was long. She had a wood stove, and a long table. Most everybody did at that time.
“Our grandmother and grandfather on the Burdine side lived in a house just below Aunt Mag. It was either Helen or Bea, one, that always told me that they always wanted to go in the attic down there at that old house. One of our aunts, Auntie Flora, had died after suffering for a long time with tuberculosis. So Aunt Mag wasn’t letting anyone go up in that attic because they might catch something. But I went up in that attic one day. I just went. Helen recently asked me what I found up there. I said I found a trunk with a bunch of old clothes. Boy, we looked at everything up in that attic. Now I don’t remember who went with me, and I didn’t go by myself. It must have been Helen or Bea one, and Helen said it sure wasn’t her!
“We lived out in the country. It wasn’t too close to Somerset. When you had to travel the way we did, it seemed like it was far away.
“We were very poor, although we were better off than a lot of people. But we never had any luxuries. But you learn from that.
“My dad would hunt squirrel or rabbit. I like rabbit, but squirrel reminds me of a rat. And my mother raised a lot of chickens, so we always had fried chicken. And she always raised a good garden. And they’d butcher a hog, so we wouldn’t starve. But it was still hard work.
“Then, of course, Bea and I went to Somerset High School together.
“When we were in school, and I would go home with her, we would get a ride out as far on the highway as we could go. Of course it wasn’t the highway like it is now. And we would have to cross wire fences and high weeds and all that stuff to get up a hill and down another hill to get to Aunt Mag’s.
“Now, when we went from our house, it was different. We usually went in a wagon. It was on dirt roads, but they were wide enough for a wagon to get through.
“Bea was just as pretty as a doll in high school. And very very smart. And strong willed. Always has been. That’s what’s kept her alive.
“We had a couple of boy friends, and double dated a few times. That was the first time I ever had a glass of iced tea. The boys brought it out to the car. They were older than us.”
7. Back to the country
My life changed very quickly and very abruptly when we moved way out in the country (in Kentucky). I was stuck 18 miles out of town. I didn’t see a sidewalk or make one single trip into town until I left when I was 16. Shortly after I left, they opened up the countryside and put the highway through. A new high school was built, and busses picked up the country kids and drove them to school. By then Greyhound busses also had a regular schedule, making three or four round trips a day between Somerset and London.
There were a few country stores, but I could only go places where I could walk or ride a horse. My dad went into town occasionally, but he was the only one who did. He went away to work on jobs a number of times, but we always stayed home. But we were safe. I was free as a bird. I could go anywhere, do about anything I wanted to. I was free to roam the countryside. No one would harm me.
I remember when we first arrived in Kentucky from Ohio, we went to my Aunt Flora’s house, the homestead where my mother grew up. One day my dad came in and told us that the war (World War I) had ended. We couldn’t have been there very long, because I remember riding out from the train station in a wagon pulled by a mule team when we first arrived. We stopped overnight at my Aunt Mattie’s, who was Flora Cornet’s mother. Edna and Elizabeth Whitaker were her daughters as well. They were Flora’s half sisters. It was getting dark, and we climbed a fence and walked through a cornfield. They had just harvested the corn, so it must have been late fall. Flora was about one year old, still in diapers. I still have a vivid mental picture of her, lying in bed, kicking her bare feet in the air and laughing.*
The morning after we arrived, though, I put on my little black coat and my velvet red bonnet, and started to go to the barn. Well, there was a flock of geese and an old gander in the barnyard. The gander saw my red bonnet and he came after me. He got me by his beak and pulled me down, and was just beating the living daylights out of me with his wings. I was yelling and carrying on, and Edna and maybe Elizabeth heard me and came out and beat that old gander off me. After that, I wouldn’t venture out of the house. I was scared to death of that gander for a long time. That was my introduction to country living!
Aunt Flora was Mom’s sister who never married, and had always lived at the old homeplace. She and her younger sister Alma and the younger brother, Opal's father Uncle Ron, inherited the homeplace. All the other kids got the equivalent in farmland or money. But these three younger ones had taken care of their father, and they inherited the house. Aunt Alma died before I was born. She was only 21. Aunt Alma married very young to a local young man named Beecher Cooper. He got into trouble with a neighbor-- and the law-- and he ran away to Montana to avoid being arrested, leaving his pregnant wife behind. The baby boy, Cartelle Cooper, was born soon afterward. She never saw Beecher again. He joined the army and was killed during World War I. She died of a TB and a broken heart.
Aunt Flora had taken Cartelle, who was a couple of years older than me. Uncle Ron had gotten married and moved out so she was left there by herself with the baby. We stayed with her until Spring. Papa and Clyde started working on building a house for us across the hill, and we continued living there at Aunt Flora’s. Then she became ill and died with TB. Mama and I were there when she passed away. Moma had taken care of her through her illness. Cartelle went to live with Uncle Walter, and we went home to the little house over the hill.
I think we should have stayed where we were. It was a big house, and we would have been better off living there. My mother inherited a farm, by the way, but not that one. That went to Cartelle as the only living hear of Alma and Flora. Evidently, the girls had bought their brothers' share at some point.
I said we were safe. Unless you got bitten by a snake. There was a stack of lumber in the front yard. I was playing around there one day, and a bunch of baby chicks were running around, and I saw one had gotten caught in this stack of lumber. It was screaming, the mother hen was clucking and carrying on, and I went over to investigate and see what was wrong. I thought “oh, you poor thing, you’ve got your leg caught in there.” So I found a stick and started prying it out. My brother came running out about that time with a hoe in his hand and told me to get away from the woodpile. My mother came out right after Clyde. He and Mom investigated and found a big old copperhead snake was in that pile of lumber and it had that chick in its mouth. Had that snake turned loose of the chick and bit me, it would have been the end of me probably. Copperheads are so poisonous and we were far from medical care. That sort of stuff happened too often. One just had to be careful. It taught you to be on guard, that’s for sure.
In April of 1921, I was eight years old, and had no idea I was about to become a big sister. I wasn’t home when Helen was born April 21st. My mother sent me with Clyde to a neighbor's house down the road a piece to play with the little girl who was a year older than me, and he also told the mother, Martha Ann Taylor, to come quickly. That seemed a bit odd to me but, of course, I went. Clyde was home for a short time from the snake. Mrs. Taylor went back to our house with Clyde, and I stayed all day and played with dolls and her playhouse. Then her mother and Clyde came back late that afternoon and Clyde took me back home. Was I surprised to see a baby girl! That was my first introduction to Helen, my baby sister.
I was dumbfounded. I didn’t like it at all! I said “send her back, we don’t need her.” They said “why?” I said “she’ll break my dishes and she’ll break the (glass) book case door.” I had been so thoroughly indoctrinated that "things" must be handled with great care and never broken. I never played with my toy dishes because I was so afraid I'd break one. I never did, but I sure was afraid she would!
But she was a beautiful baby with big brown eyes and a mop of blond curls. She quickly became my baby and I loved her dearly.
After she got a little older – before she was old enough to walk – she really did become my responsibility. Mama would work in the field or the garden, and I would stay at the house with her. I was the built in baby sitter. At first this was fun, but as Helen grew older, she learned that as soon as mama was out of site she would always do exactly as she pleased! So she would do all the stuff she wanted to do but knew she would be punished for if Mom found out.
We spent many hours in the swing on the front porch. That usually kept her quiet and happy. She had great fun kicking my shins or screaming if she didn't get her own way. All summer, when mama was away from the house, I had to look after her. I did my best to keep her safe and out of trouble but she had a knack for getting into trouble and was often punished-- severely-- by our dad. Stubbornness-- talking back-- sassing-- temper tantrums-- these things would always bring his wrath down on her. She did it anyway, and she always had the last word. It cost her dearly, though. I often cried when she was being punished but I didn't dare interfere with my father.
8. Helen
“I was born in 1921,” says Helen (Harper) Needham. “Going barefoot was always exciting in the spring, and that’s one of the first things I remember. And I remember Bea took care of me, but I don’t remember much about that.
“I do recall us going to school the first year together. We walked. A mile or something. We went to a one-room country school in Price Valley. I remember later on going with other kids.
“Dad worked around home most of the time, and he did carpentry work. He could do what he needed to do. He built whatever needed to be built. A house. A barn. A shed. Whatever.
“I remember one time up where my cousin Tab lived, Dad built a store building and a post office. They called it Pumpkin Center. Anyone in the neighborhood who needed something built, he built it.
“He could build furniture too. We had some pieces he built. He made what we called a library table – sort of a big elongated table. And he built rocking chairs and other pieces of furniture for us. He really didn't have a special place to do his carpentry work, just wherever it needed to be done.
“But of course he mainly worked on the farm. His most important job I guess was taking care of the crops. We grew mainly corn. Corn for animals, and corn for people too. He always took corn to the mill to get it ground. That’s where we got our meal from. They always grew sweet corn in the garden and corn in the field, but this was just plain field corn that he took to the mill.
“He and Mama would put the garden out, but I guess she finished it off. They both worked wherever they needed to work. They always worked together.
“We plowed the farm by hand with double shovels,turning plows, and what we called old hillside plows. These were all pulled by horses.
“We only grew tobacco one year. Papa didn’t believe in tobacco, but he tried it one year and he never did it again.
“We didn’t grow soybeans or anything like that. We never even grew wheat but oats, yes. I think we farmed about 30 acres. We had woodland too. My dad knew the name of every plant and tree, and my Mom did too. We had all kinds of trees. Papa liked to have many trees on the property.
“We always had orchards with all kinds of fruit. We had any kind of fruit you’d want. Berries and grapes and peaches and pears and apples. Just about anything you wanted. We grew lots of different kinds of apples. Delicious apples. Red and yellow. Jonathens. We always had what we called a sweet apple tree. Kind of a winter apple. We also had June apples. I think we mainly got June apples from grandpa’s old place, though, which was close by. We always had June apples early on, which was a real treat since ours were the only trees in the area.
“We also grew peanuts and cotton. Papa made a cotton gin and I remember us sitting before the fireplace at night and ginning cotton. Mom batted the cotton and she made quilts. She sat before the fire and made beautiful quilts.
“Papa sometimes killed squirrels and rabbits to eat. I’m not really a meat eater, but squirrel is real good. It’s a wild meat, but it’s a good meat. He didn’t allow anyone else to hunt on our farm. He wouldn’t allow people to come in and just kill animals. But if he wanted something for our family, he would hunt it.
“I remember one time after I was married and we lived in London (Kentucky), Papa was coming to see us, and he knew Julius (Helen's husband) loved squirrels, and he killed some squirrels and brought us some squirrels to eat. Mama always made stewed squirrels and dumplings in a big black cast-iron pot.
“We didn’t have a lot of store bought things, but we had all we needed. In fact, we probably had more than a lot of people in town. They worked day to day and went out and bought it, but we grew it. We didn’t have fancy things, but we had all kinds of food.
“We had milk, butter, eggs, chickens, ducks, guineas, although I can’t remember eating either, and anything you’d want in the garden. Fruit, vegetables. Papa was big on growing fruit and berries. Everything you can think of in that line. We grew melons, and watermelons, and several varieties of muskmelons.
“One special thing I remember. Mom grew butternut squash. Little round yellow squashes. She would gather those when they were young and the skins on them were thin and good. And she'd cut them in two and take the seeds out and fill them with butter and sugar and stick em in the oven and heat them and, oh brother, they were delicious!
“We canned everything you could think of. We had great big jars of hominy and then I’d always have the stomachache because I’d always over eat.
“She made cornmeal mush -- milk and mush. Winter nights, for something different, we’d have mush. She boiled water, put some salt and corn meal in it, and you’d have mush. And then you would eat it with milk. I wasn’t too crazy about it, but it was different. I don’t recall her ever frying mush, though. In the South, its called "grits" and served three times a day, even in restaurants.
“We always had ‘country breakfasts.’ We had ham or sausage, eggs, bacon, or whatever meat there was, and hot biscuits and jam. And we always had potatoes for breakfast. Of course, we didn’t have orange juice, but she’d can all other kinds of juices. Apple juice, tomato juice, grape juice. But these really weren’t for breakfast. Papa and mama drank coffee.
“She made delicious bread. I love bread and milk. Corn bread, that is. And she always cooked a lot of green beans, pintos, and navy beans. I think I lived on beans.
“Back then, you knew everybody in the neighborhood. You lived close around, so you just knew the people. You went to school with them, you visited with them, you went to church with them, and you saw them – not daily or anything – but you saw them a lot. Taylors, Whitakesr, Burdinse, Adams, Minx, Kress, Bullocks, Deckerts. We knew them all and were related to a lot of them. My grandmother Harper was a Bullock. They were all nice country people.
“We played lots of games. Hop scotch, jump the rope, marbles. Ante Over, where we threw the ball over the house, was one of my favorites. We did that at school a lot.
“I played a lot at home. I was raised by myself more or less. I played all the time. I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning and start playing. . I had a wild imagination. I always kept house, had stores, had schools. All that stuff. Made doll dresses, cut out dolls.
“I always had a little ‘store.’ Mom always allowed me to have enough corn and beans and flour and meal to display in my store. I’d pretend to sell it, but I’d always take it back and resell it. We had a smokehouse, so I used that as my store. It had shelves and everything, which made it perfect. It was fun!
“I always had pets. Of course, farm animals were pets until someone decided to do something with them. And I always had cats, 17 at one time, which lived at the barn. I didn’t have as many dogs. I had Gypsy. I loved Gypsy. And I had Tippy. Gypsy lived to be 18 years old. Probably a Springer Spaniel mix. White with brown and black patches.
“We always had lots of cats. I loved cats. They couldn’t keep me out of the barn with cats. They tried. I would have lived with them if I could. I loved kittens.
“I was a bird watcher always. I went up to the barn loft and watched the birds feed the babies and build nests. I loved nature and little animals. I spent hours watching ants build – and I’d carry out corn meal and feed the ants and watch them build their colonies. And we always had terrapins and frogs.
“I never hurt anything. The only thing I ever hurt in my life was a little gosling. It was a baby, and I wanted it to drink, and mama said you have to water it. So I did but it wouldn't drink. And I picked up a little pebble and threw it at the gosling. I think I killed it, but I’m not sure. I really felt sorry about that. Maybe what I threw was bigger than a pebble. I was little when mama told that story on me, so I guess it was truth. Seems like I remember it, but maybe I heard it so much that I just think I remember it.
“I was about nine years old when Clyde, Nora and my nephew Bill moved back to Kentucky.
Please enter the date you began answering these questions.
9. Clyde“Clyde, my father was born in a place called Turkey Creek,” said Bill Harper. “I think his father and mother were running one of the sawmills that my great grandfather owned when he was born. Clyde was nine years older than Bea was.
“Grandad and Grandma were living back in there and a-logging. There is a little old place down in there where they got a lot of timber and they called it Turkey Creek. I don’t know what Granddad was doing. I don’t guess he had the sawmill, though. Granddad was a carpenter .
“Then I remember they moved to Lafayette, then to Reading, Ohio. Then that flu epidemic hit that killed so many. People was a-dying so fast the funeral homes couldn’t handle them. They’d have to lay em out on the back porch. It was winter time, so they kept pretty good. Granddad said when you could walk down the street and see dead people lying on the back porch, it was time to leave.
“Granddad was always my favorite. Granddad and Grandma Harper were always my favorites. Everywhere he went I went. To me, he was the best. I rode horses with him, but he never did fish. He didn't like fish. He hunted squirrels. I went with him every time he went. He never missed a shot. You couldn’t afford to miss. You couldn’t afford to buy shotgun shells.
“He was a deputy United States Marshall for a while. He busted up many illegal moonshine stills for a while.
“The road by our house was about a hundred yards down from the main road. I saw em (moonshiners) ride by there and shoot at the house. You’d hear the bullets hit the house. The roof. It was a wood shingle roof, what you’d call a shake roof. Of course, he and my dad wasn’t trying to kill anyone, just shoot over their heads to run em off. My mother was scared to death over there, but Helen and Grandma didn’t pay no attention to ‘em. They were just trying to aggravate Granddad cause he busted up their stills. Some of em I guess was our relations.
“Back then the men, I don’t care where you went, they all carried a gun. If they didn’t have a shotgun or rifle in their hands, they had a pistol. If you didn’t see it they had a pistol.
“Grandma cooked the best green beans you ever ate. A lot of times she had what they called pickled greens. She made homemade bread too. And biscuits or cornbread. About anything she cooked was about the best you ever had. I tell you something else she could make was deviled eggs. And fried chicken.
“The closest store was about a mile or two away. Bill Bullock had a store, and Herb Kress had a store, and there was another little store, but I can’t remember the name of that one. They were just little general stores. They weren’t like supermarkets today. They had barrels of this and that. But most of the stuff was loose. Butter, sugar, all kinds of staples. Coffee -- they’d weigh it up for you.
“My dad was smart. I don’t think he went to high school, though .
“He left home when he was sixteen and joined the Navy. He had a fight with Granddad and I guess he went to the spring to get some water one day, and didn't come back. He just kept on going. At least that’s the way I heard it .
“He didn’t stay too long in the Navy. I think he got an eardrum busted. Maybe he got the mumps. I always thought he could hear good, but he said he lost his hearing in one ear. I don’t know what the fight was over. He and Granddad fought all the time.
“It must have been 1919 or 1920 when he went into the Navy. He was stationed at Gulf Port Mississippi, the only place he was ever stationed. I guess he was still in boot camp when he got sick with the mumps. He wasn't taken care of properly and his inner ear became abscessed-- then ruptured, destroying his hearing in that ear.
“After that, I think he stayed with Uncle Ron in Ohio. He lived here when he met my mother, and they got married. Mom was working at what they called “the cotton mill” then. That’s where they made mattresses. They were married in 1925, two years before I was born. I think they got married in Covington or Newport, Kentucky. She worked for a while after that.
“I was born here in Reading in 1927. Dad had left town around Prohibition time, but he worked at Fox Paper. He worked at Fox Paper, just like granddad did. He lost his job there, and went to work for a contractor. He worked four or six weeks for that contractor and never did get paid. If you didn’t live back in them times, you didn’t know what it was like. Sometimes you couldn’t find work, and sometimes if you did get work, you might not get paid. If you had a job and the boss's nephew needed a job, they fired you and put him on the job.
“So he went to Granddad Harper’s. My grandparents. We all went, we didn’t have anywhere else to go. We were down there two or three years.
“One thing I remember – when I moved back I didn’t talk like they do in Kentucky. I had this northern brogue. I started off the first year of school. Helen would get me out and try to teach me talk like they did down there. She was afraid kids would make fun of me. I got away from it after I left Kentucky, but I came back from the service (WWII) and went to work with these Kentucky people down here (Fox Paper Company) and I went back talking that way and never changed, I guess.
“I went to Price Valley School when we lived in the country. That’s where Helen and Bea went.
“I liked it down there. I wish I’d stayed. I never did like Ohio.
“Bea had left and was working when we arrived, but she never did forget me at Christmas time. She gave me a set of guns, and I don’t know what else. But she always got me something at Christmas time.
“I had a little dog named Tibby. We had him until we moved to Ohio.
“My dad got crippled when I was eight years old. Betty Jo was born November 4, 1934, and he got crippled January 30.
“I remember the morning my dad got hurt. Mom and Helen and my mother tried to get him to quit working in the mines. He promised he’d work that day and quit. He was only making a dollar or a dollar and quarter a day working in them. He was gone maybe a couple of hours, when the guy that owned the mine’s boy came across the hill, and we knew something was wrong.
“They brought Dad down in a wagon, and he laid on the highway for a couple of hours waiting for an ambulance. There was a big snow on the ground and the highway was frozen over. And they tried to put him the back seat of a car and take him, but he said to put him back on the highway because he said he would die before he got to a hospital.
“The top of the coal mine fell in on him. A friend of his owned that mine. Back then, if anyone had any land and had any coal, they mined it. They took Dad to London hospital. Bea was a nurse up there at that time. They put a cast on him, and never set a bone or nothing. They didn’t put it on him until five or six weeks after he got hurt . He was in misery. He had a fever of almost 105 degrees. Grandaddy cut that cast off him because it made him so miserable. With medicine these days, he could be walking. But he was paralyzed from the waist down.
“One day recently I was trying to find Conrard Cemetery, where Granddad and Grandma and Clyde are buried. I asked directions of a man, and he asked me who I was looking for. I said ‘Clyde Harper. Did you ever hear of him,’ I asked. He said 'I was the one who brought him down off the mountain in the wagon when he got hurt.' I think this was last year or the year before last when I met that man (c.1994).
“Well, we lived in London for about three of four years. When the war (WW II) started, mother worked for the county health department. I was working delivering papers and mowing yards. Then she came up here to Ohio and got a job, and we’ve been here ever since.
10. Clyde joins the Navy
After the crops were laid by at the end of the summer, papa took off for Cincinnati to find a job. He took Clyde with him, but I don’t know why. He was about 17. I think my dad went back to Fox Paper Company because that’s where he worked before. They’d been there a few days and while my dad was at work, Clyde went down to the Navy office and joined! And he was gone when my dad came home. He got shipped down to Mississippi. He got the mumps and got sick. They didn’t take very good care of him. He lost the hearing in one ear because of this mumps deal. I guess they made him work while he was sick.
Then he decided he’s had enough of it and he wanted my dad to get him out. And he did! He contacted our congressman and somehow got him to work on it because Clyde was under age. The Navy sent him home. He was home when Helen was born. I think he stayed around that summer to help my dad with the crops but left soon afterward. I saw very little of him after that until I went to live with them in Reading the summer I was sixteen.
He never stayed around much. He was very smart, and really could have amounted to something if he’d had a chance to get an education. Perhaps running to the Kentucky hills saved all our lives during the flu epidemic, but it certainly played havoc with any chance Clyde or I had for a decent education.
12. Christmas in the Country
“Christmas was pretty scarce, but we didn’t know the difference. We always had a stocking full,” Helen recalls. “Apples, oranges, candy, maybe nuts, and always a toy of some kind. Probably a ten-cent toy, I don’t know, but there was always something.
“We always had a Christmas tree at school and had a play at school. Everybody in the community came. We always drew names, and we looked forward to that. And the teacher was always nice and she always saw that we had treats. So everybody that came always got a big bag of stuff.. She made sure everybody got something.
“We had popcorn on our tree. I remember Mama having us make ropes out of green and red crape paper to go on the tree. We always had a homemade star at the top. I remember having the little tiny candleholders, but I don’t think she would ever let us put them on the tree because she was afraid of fire. They are very dangerous.
“We didn’t have electricity, of course. We had kerosene light. For the better light, we had Aladdin lamps, and for the other we just had lamps. Aladdin lamps were a little special. They aren’t bad to read by.
“Papa used to always keep a lot of pine knots. You know, he’d cut pine. I don’t know what he used the other for. But those pine knots will burn forever and oh, they make the brightest light you’ve ever seen. I’d put them in the fireplace. I remember even getting my lessons at night by those pine knots. I’d get close to the fireplace, and it was just about the best place in the house. It was fun, in a way, and I’ve done it many times since. It wasn’t that I had to, but it just made a good, good light on dark winter nights.
“I don’t remember ever having turkey for Christmas dinner. We just always had baked chicken. There was always somebody there. Back then, you never knew when somebody would drop by to eat.
“Mom always made stack cakes. Out of dried apples. I make them too. I haven’t made them for years. When Julius was living, when Jimmy was living, I always made em. And Clifford loved them. Mom always made them, as long as she was able. We never had Christmas without a stack cake. She always dried apples in the summer time. And you just kind of roll it out like dough, like a biscuit. You roll it thin and make thin little layers and bake it. Then you put the apples between them and let it set and get moist. It’s delicious! They’re at least four layers, and you really should have more than that.
“And Mama always made pie with a little flat pie pan. She made some with the lattice tops, and some without. We loved apple pies. She used dried apples, and she always make custard pies and she always made what she called a marble cake. I loved chocolate, papa loved white – so she made a marble cake to keep us both happy.
“She always left a pitcher of milk and a pie out on the table for Santa Clause. In the morning, there was always a piece gone.
“Another important holiday to us was Decoration Day. Our Decoration Day wasn’t necessarily on Memorial Day because our people had to come in from all over. Memorial Day just comes any day of the week. So, we set a particular weekend that’s closest to Memorial Day, and that’s the fourth Sunday of the month. And that’s when we always met. And we met at the cemetery, and everybody had to drive a long way. Like Uncle Ron, and Uncle Walter, and Aunt Matt. We were the closest, but we couldn’t fit that many people at our house. We had a great big wooded area out at the cemetery, a big place to have a picnic. We always did it until there got to be too few people. Now it’s just Tab, Williena, and myself.
“But they’d have memorial services. A lot of people would bring food, but then a lot wouldn’t. A lot would just go on home. But our family always did bring food, and they’d come in wagons and buggies or whatever they had. Cars when they had them.
13. Out of the Country
I made up my mind when I was ten that I was going to leave the farm when I was sixteen, and I did! I was sixteen in April, and left in May and went to Cincinnati.
Clyde and Nora were living there, and Bill was about a year and a half old, so I went to stay with them. I rode out of there with the postman in his mail wagon, which was pulled by a team of mules, just the same way I came in ten years earlier! The ten most formative and impressionable years of my life were spent growing up in the backwoods of Kentucky.
I caught a train, which was running regularly then. Round trip from Somerset, it cost three dollars. I got a job at the cotton factory and worked there all summer and saved every dollar I could after paying Nora five dollars a week room and board.
Clyde was working at Searns and Foster Cotton Mill, the mattress people, and they were hiring. The factory was huge. I went to apply, they asked how old I was, and I said eighteen. I had to be eighteen to get a job. But I hadn’t learned to put my long hair up, and they laughed and said I should go home and grow up for a little while and come back when I was old enough.
But I really needed the job so, a couple of days later, I borrowed one of my sister-in-law’s dresses, and she showed me how to put my hair up. I guess I put a little rouge on and a little makeup and went back. They didn’t recognize me and hired me! So I spent the summer picking the little black specs out of cotton making samples for the mattress company. My wages were $12.50 a week for 5 1/2 days, Monday through Saturday noon. Soon after, I got a raise to $15.00 a week. When the other girls in the department found out, they were very jealous and not as nice, I recall. I never knew why I got paid more money for the same work, unless it was because the "boss man" was a friend of my brother.
What I wanted more than anything in the world was to go back to school at Somerset High School. But I came down with the measles. I was six weeks late getting started, so it was a hard start. When I finally got back to Somerset, I lived with a family named Marler who had four kids. I baby-sat for room and board. I didn’t have any money to spend for extras. I couldn’t even go to the football games, which cost a quarter, or the movies, which cost twenty-five cents. But I loved high school.
My favorite subject was English, but I muddled through math. My best friend, Zella, who was a year older and ahead of me in school, was very good at math and sometimes helped me with homework. Looking back, I probably learned more from her then I did from the teacher, enough to usually make the Honor Roll.
As a fun or social outlet, as it is for most kids, high school for me was a lost cause. To the city kids who "belonged" there, the country kids were a breed apart. Tolerated but not associated with outside the classroom. I only remember one boy who was even friendly, and that's because he copied my work. He wasn't exactly one of the in crowd, either. The whole experience is sort of a blur in my memory.
What is your name (first, middle, maiden name, last)? Do you like your name? If you could, would you choose another? What name would you choose? Who were you named for?
14. Starting a Nursing Career
I finished high school in 1929, and began my nurses’ training at Pulaski General Hospital. They were looking for nursing students. I hadn’t really considered that, but it sort of fell into my lap. I started from scratch, and learned a lot at that hospital. But I didn’t think much of the doctors there. I worked there about a year and a half.
After that, I worked at the London hospital. They had some pretty smart kids there. It was called Pennington General Hospital. I was there for about three years.
I lived at the hospital with some of the nurses. We had the top floor. It wasn’t a big hospital. It still isn’t. There were other nurses that came in during the day, but their were seven or eight – pretty much the ones that were there all the time – that lived at the hospital. I kept in touch with them for a long time, but have now lost track of them all.
The lab technician that I knew very well was named June Goodwin, and she lived in Lebanon, Indiana. She graduated from a school in Indianapolis and married a doctor who was in the military. That was during the time of the Civilian Conservation Corp. There was a big CCC camp near London. They built Levi Jackson Wilderness State Park with CCC labor. We had a lot of those guys in the hospital. They were always getting hurt. City boys, you know. But he was army and that’s where he met June. I got to know some of the boys as well. They all had access to the army jeeps and stuff, and we thought that was real great!
Of course one of the hard things was having to nurse my own brother after his accident. It was a hard time for my family and for his, but I won’t go into all that.
On Sept 16, 1936, I took ill, and was ill off and on for several years. I caught a bad cold, then pneumonia and some complications, on a train trip from London to Cincinnati in August. I just couldn’t shake it off. I was so weak on one job that I had to hang onto the rail every time I went up and down the stairs. But, with the help of some good doctors, and a very kind uncle, Uncle John, I got through it. I got back on my feet, but really wasn’t going strong again until around 1939.
I traveled around quite a bit during that time, from Cincinnati to Louisville, back down to Kentucky and back to Cincinnati, where I started doing private duty nursing out of the registry. You worked through the registry and they took a certain percentage of your pay. I had more work than I could handle at that time.
Then I got an offer of a job in Florida through a friend of a friend. It was in a hospital in Sebring, Florida. So, in October of 1939, I went to Florida. And I worked there in Sebring General Hospital until February.
Then I got an offer to come to California. A former patient’s mother, who was visiting her, had fallen and broken her hip and had been in the hospital. She was coming out and was going to be having to stay with them. Their names were Stevenson. He was the comptroller for Ohio Oil Company, which is Standard Oil. They lived out in the Wilshire District, two blocks off “The Miracle Mile” in Los Angeles. It was a very lovely area at that time – near Farmer’s Market. She offered me whatever salary I was getting in Florida at the time, plus a round-trip first-class ticket if I would come and take care of her mother for the duration while she was recovering from this broken hip. So, I figured I didn’t have anything to lose. And I went, never intending to stay more than about three months. I was there at that job from St. Valentine’s Day, 1940 until June of the same year.
When I left Stephenson’s, instead of using my ticket back to Florida, I decided I didn’t want to go back at all. So I got a job at Glendale Hospital, which is now Glendale Community Hospital. I worked there all that summer until the holidays, and had an opportunity to go East for Christmas to visit, which I did.
The county had a system at that time whereby they would pay a person’s fare plus expenses for transporting patients. So that gave me a chance to go home for Christmas. I had four people in my charge. I had a state room and a compartment in this train. All the way across the country, I had three little black kids, three four and five years old I think, and a very elderly lady. I took the children to Beaumont, Texas, to their grandparents. They had become stranded in L.A. for some reason. The parents had deserted them, or something. And the elderly lady – they called them indigents – county charges – I took her to the Masonic Home in Philadelphia.
Then I went on back to Somerset for Christmas came down with a very bad case of flu, and I was supposed to be back to work at a certain date. And I was a week late getting back because of this illness. I got back to L.A. to find I had no job! And I also had no money.
I hit that registry the next day. The registries were life savers, you know. I checked into a hotel because I didn’t even have a room to go to. I had baggage with me, so they didn’t ask for money up front. And the next day, I hit the registry and told them “I’ll take whatever you’ve got.”
They sent me out on a job that very night into Westwood. So went all the way from Glendale on public transportation – changed about three or four times getting to Westwood. I had about two or three nights work there. But they paid me right away, and of course, you also got a couple of meals. I continued to work out of the registry for several months. But that gets awfully tiresome, running all over town, not knowing where your next job is going to be. Then one night, they tried to send me to the City of Hope in Duarte for the eleven to seven shift. They said either you take the job, or we won’t carry you any longer. I said O.K.; I’ll find another job. And that’s what I did. That’s when I started working at Doctor’s Hospital.
I held my nurses' license up until a few years ago.
15. Wild Romance
It was sometime in the summer of 1941, I think. Glenn came into Doctor’s Hospital for an emergency appendectomy. Actually, it may not have been an emergency. It was a routine appendectomy. He had an infected appendix that had been bugging him for a long time. That’s where I met him. I was working from 3 p.m. to 11:30 at night and was also going to L.A. City College in the mornings from eight o’clock to twelve noon. I was taking a business class trying to increase my employment options. I didn’t have any time to study, so I wasn’t doing well. I had made it through the semester, but come final exam time, I just didn’t have time to study.
Glenn came along just in time to rescue me in accounting. He had come in for the appendectomy, and they put him in the ward where I was nursing. There was also another young man who was in there who got a bad sunburn at the beach. He was also in accounting—in some office job. I knew I was in trouble in the course, and they were both starting to feel better, and were bored to death after about the first day. I thought, “here’s my chance. I’ll get them to help me with my homework.” I worked on the other guy first, but he wasn’t about to get me off the hook. But Glenn said “I’ll make a deal with you. If you give me all the pineapple juice I want to drink, I’ll help you with your homework.” So I would go to the diet kitchen and get these great big ice-tea glasses of pineapple juice. It’s a thousand wonders he didn’t get an ulcer, but he sure enjoyed that pineapple juice!
I was living with two other nurses; we were crowded into a very small apartment, and we had to move. We needed more room. We lived in one of those old apartment houses on Vermont. It was just one bedroom on the fourth floor, so we were really living on top of each other. There was no place to put our clothes. We decided we had to find a bigger place, and did. We found an upscale apartment—at least we thought it was upscale—on 9th and Catalina in Los Angeles.
I asked Glenn if he would help us move, and he was happy to help. We didn’t have much, just odds and ends. I had moved around so much by then that I'd learned to travel light. Any time I got more than would fit into the three big old suitcases I had, I'd throw it out. I worked in uniforms all the time so I didn’t need very many dress-up clothes. I usually had three or four uniforms – rotating two in the laundry and one I was wearing. There was a Chinese laundry on every block. Cheap, too. In one day, and out the next. We didn't need a lot of extra clothes.
Glenn loaned me his typewriter, which was much better than the one I was renting. Then he loaned me his alarm clock. You couldn’t buy anything back then. It was during the War. You couldn’t even buy an alarm clock. But one of the girls, Jean Nelson, had a car, so we did pretty well, although she drove her car to work and we had to ride a streetcar. We worked different shifts, so passed each other in the night, so to speak. There were two twin beds in the bedroom, and a hide-a-bed in the living room. Jean got the hide-a-bed. She was red-haired and freckle faced—from Omaha or someplace. She had the car. The other one, Virlie Vincent, was from Provo, Utah. Mormon. She was the biggest beer drinker of all, and smoked like a chimney! She ended up marrying John Cook, the x-ray technician from the hospital. Last I heard from them, they were retired, living near Phoenix, Arizona.
This apartment was back of the old Ambassador Hotel on 9th Street. It was new and clean, and the furniture had white leather. At least I thought it was leather. The living room furniture, the chairs, the sofa were all upholstered. And the carpet was real soft and plush. We thought we had really arrived up town when we lived in that place. We thought we had gone to heaven!
The rent was fifty-five dollars a month, which we split between the three of us. With utilities and food, we probably paid twenty-five dollars a month each. But our salaries weren't much either. Hospital meals were free, which was a blessing. Nobody cooked, so we would have starved.
After his hospital stay, Glenn seemed to be around a lot. I remember we had a party one night. He came. It wasn’t a big deal. But one of the girls’ boyfriends brought a keg of beer. It wasn’t something we had around normally. I think Glenn tried to drink up the whole case. He embarrassed the heck out of me. The girls kidded me about that for a long time.
He had a car, a little 1936 Ford coupe, which made it a big incentive to get to know him. I had no car of my own. I never owned a car, and had to get around on public transportation. Now we could go to the beach, and he was always willing to take me.
Are you male or female?
16. GlennGlenn’s father, Ulysses Clark Surguine (named for Gen. Ulysses S. Grant) was originally from Ava, Missouri, where his parents and grandparents were Free-Soilers during the Civil War. They were strong opponents of slavery. His mother, Ethel Elvra Hampton was born near Springfield. “Clark” was a barber in Springfield, where he met Miss Hampton, who was then a schoolteacher.
But Glenn's father always “had an itchy foot,” as Glenn often said, and soon had the yearning to move West to homestead 50 acres in Lewis, Colorado, where he raised wheat and alfalfa.
Glenn Hampton Surguine was born in a hospital in nearby Cortez Colorado on February 13, 1918, the only one of three children that was born in a hospital.
(note: so many of the kids, not to mention Ethel, had cancer later in life.
In fact, four died from it. I have often wondered if uranium in Montezuma
County had anything to do with the high cancer rate.)
Then his father moved to Denver when he was only about a year old. That was in about 1920. But he had difficulty finding work in Denver, so about two years later he headed back to western Colorado – to Lewis.
Then, by the time he was five years old, they moved back to Denver again, then Golden. Glenn graduated from Golden High School.
He loved photography, and loved to read. He had rheumatic fever when he was little, so he was restricted in some of his activities.
“He had a bad heart, so he sat and read by the hour,” said Thelma, his oldest sister. “ When I was in Junior High, I was studying "The Odyssey," and he had already read it as a small child. He could comprehend things far beyond his age. He really became a self-educated man.”
Thelma got married and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Glenn followed her, and went to Healds Business College. That was in Oakland, and he lived with her for about a year.
Then, he got a job with Whitehead Metal Products.
“Once, I went out and asked him to put Kenneth, my son, to bed at 7:00 p.m.,” said Thelma. “But then I came home and he had developed pictures of Ken. The clock on the mantel said 9:00 p.m. But he was taking pictures, and that was O.K. We lived on 56th and Walnut in a duplex at the time.”
“My first recollection of Glenn was in about 1939 when he first came out to California,” said Ken Lawson. “He was a young man who came out to go to school and was living with us on Walnut Street in Oakland. I remember he put his feet one at a time on the mantel to tie his shoes! He wasn’t short!
“Glenn was very quiet, so he didn’t really participate in the romping and wrestling that we were used to. After Barbara and I first got married, Glenn became much more of a counselor and a mentor – he had good common sense. We could talk to him and he would listen. He was never critical. He usually wouldn’t make lots of comments, but rather ask questions to cause us to think. Barbara and I used his counsel for a number of things almost until the end of his life.”
The following pages are from an autobiography that Glenn started, but never completed. They are about his earliest memories, particularly of Western Colorado.
Glenn Hampton Surguine
Written May 12, 1971 at Downey, California
To my son, Glenn
It will soon be two years since you gave me this book, in which to write a family chronology and anything else which might occur to me- so here goes, at last!
It was on Feb. 13, 1918 that I was ushered into the world - the first baby in the first hospital in Cortez, Colorado. Cortez is the county seat of Montezuma County, which is in the southwestern corner of Colorado - not far from a Ute Indian reservation.
My dad was farming near Lewis, Colorado, about 17 miles from Cortez. The land is on a high plateau at an altitude of between 6,000 and 7,000 feet. Part was dry-land farming and part irrigated. The time was during World War I and farmers were prospering. When I was about six months old mother & Dad decided that my sisters and I should have the advantages of a “city” education and moved to Denver.
They bought a home on 40th Avenue in North Denver and dad decided to try his luck at selling farm machinery. By this time, war had ended and the demand for farm machinery had decreased. Dad was in Kansas City on a business trip when he caught the influenza and had to return home. Dad always blamed himself for giving it to me, possibly causing a heart murmur, which has been with me all my life.* (see note at end of chapter)
He decided to try farming again, and they moved back to Lewis when I was about two years old.
(These early details may not be totally accurate as my recollection is only as it was told to me.)
My first recollections of life on the farm: I remember Dad carrying me on his shoulders through the stubble fields, so I wouldn’t hurt my feet. Once I was allowed to watch the threshers at a distance. At that time, the grain was cut close to the ground & bound into sheaves with a reaper. The sheaves were stacked in rows and when ready the farmer would arrange for the threshers to bring their threshing machine and steam engine into the field and thresh the wheat. The steam engine was connected by a long leather belt to the threshing machine, far enough away that the straw would not be ignited by sparks from the engine. Of course, I was fascinated, but my fun was cut short by a cinder in my eye. Dad tried to get it the cinder out by rolling the eyelid back on a wooden matchstick. But I cried and carried on so, he couldn’t get it out. The tears must have washed it out. At any rate, I don’t remember the outcome, but I know it was a long time before I got to watch the threshers again.
Once, I remember Dad filling the cistern with water from the irrigation ditch. The cistern was a brick-lined hole in the ground and it was covered over with wooden planks. I could watch at a distance as the sparkling clear water poured into the cavity. The pump consisted of small cup-liked objects fastened to a long chain and when the crank was turned, their contents were emptied into a spigot on which you could hang a bucket.
Before I started to school, my mother and sisters taught me to read, probably to keep me quiet during the long days when they were in school.
Years later, my dad fascinated me with stories of how he and mother started their lived together on the farm in Colorado in about 1912.
My mother’s Aunt Annie and Uncle Charley Harris (my cousin Irving’s parents. Irving later lived on Eagle Street in San Francisco, and we visited quite often) had preceded them by some years to Colorado and wrote glowing reports of the beauty and the climate there - probably not exaggerated as compared to Missouri.
So, they packed up their household goods in a freight car and headed west. The nearest railroad town was Durango, so they hired a man to drive them and their belongings in a freight wagon. As Dad told it, mother was dressed in the height of fashion - hair up in a big pompadour with a big hat on top - and my dad in a suit and Derby hat. They must have made quite a handsome sight. The man who drove them out became (or was) a neighbor, who later told them he expected to drive that city dude and his wife back to town after they saw the place. But he didn’t know my dad. They set up housekeeping in a tent until they could build a “board and batten” house (“straight up and down boards,” as my dad put it.)
Once when they were in church, the cow got into the tent and tore everything up. But they stuck it out.
Thelma was born about a year later and Esther about fifteen months after that - both at home.
The first grade at Lewis school was taught by Mrs. Lewis for whose husband the town was named, I think. It was a two-room schoolhouse which doubled as the Methodist Church and Sunday School on Sundays.
Mrs. Lewis had the first four grades in one room and the principal, a man, taught the fourth through eighth grades. It was there that I learned to write (with my right hand). She would rap my knuckles gently but sharply when I’d pick up a pencil in my left hand. I was only five when I started, which was later to complicate things for me in Denver. Of course, there was no such thing as kindergarten there.
There was a post-war recession going on and prices of farm products dropped drastically. For example, Dad raised alfalfa (hay) and could hardly find a market for it. Then he decided to buy some sheep in hopes he could feed them for less than he had paid originally. That was one thing that helped him to decide (along with mother’s coaxing) to go back to Denver.
In December of 1923, they sold everything and went to Denver again. That was the first time I remember riding on a train. We boarded the Denver and Rio Grande Western in Durango and since it was a narrow gauge track, we had to change trains at Grand Junction .
* I should have thought of this earlier, but it appears that it was the same 1919 flu epidemic that caused my mother to leave Reading when she was very young that Granddaddy caught and passed onto Dad! How ironic that this one outbreak of flu had so much impact, directly or indirectly, on ALL of our live for years to comes! SS December 2010
17. WW II
On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor. President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed Congress immediately, asking it to declare war on Japan, which it did. Since Japan and Germany were allied with each other, Germany declared war on the United States, and America was drawn into the war, which had already engulfed Europe.
After working at Doctors’ Hospital, I got back into the registry, and had a private duty case that must have lasted almost a year: a little old lady that they found wandering the streets in a daze. They picked her up and took her to L.A. County Hospital. She had no identification, so no one knew who she was, and she didn’t seem to have any friends who could identify her. It turned out that someone who knew her at the old apartment she lived in– a Mr. Houston -- was looking for her – but the hospital didn’t know who she was and didn’t know what to do with her. When this Mr. Houston finally connected with the hospital, she was identified as a "Mrs. Dickerson," and she was wealthy! At one time, her husband had been one of the city architects that helped build Bunker Hill. And they’d owned lots of apartment houses on Bunker Hill! He was also the official photographer for the Southern Pacific or Union Pacific railroad. I was hired to stay with her. She must have been about 87. She had been living up on the fourth floor of one of those old apartment houses, right at the top of Angel’s Flight. She didn’t know how to cook. She wasn’t eating right, and was in bad shape.
The bank took over and got her out of the terrible environment she was living in. They had to appoint a conservator for her because she was really out of it. She barely knew who she was. The bank got her out of what had become a cockroach-infested apartment. It hadn’t been cleaned in years. We moved her out to a little cottage court in L.A., got her cleaned up and eating some decent food, and she perked up considerably. I took care of her for over a year.
She died shortly after I left, and I really felt bad about that. I kept thinking maybe if I’d stayed, she wouldn’t have. But her son gave me some beautiful photo albums of hers after she died – photographs taken by her husband.
I was on duty with Mrs. Dickerson when I first heard about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Glenn came over in the middle of the day and told me. He was very worried about his sister Esther. She was working in downtown Honolulu and the bombing was at Hickam Field Air Base and at the Pearl Harbor Naval Facility not far away. They didn't hear from Esther for several weeks after that, and they were all very worried. She was teaching at that time, and all the schools were closed immediately. They never taught another day. She went to work at Hickam Field, and I think that's where she met Arthur Manganello. Art was stationed there working in the army's finance division , and Esther went to work as a secretary. The navy's ships were all huddled in the harbor. They were just sitting ducks. It didn't need to happen.
I think there were a lot of politics behind that attack. That's what got us into the war. I think some people in positions of power in Washington knew it would, and let it happen. The Japanese ambassador was sympathetic toward the Americans and, at his own risk, he tried to warn the Americans, but nobody listened.
Immediately the lights went out all along the West Coast. The city lights weren't on, every block had an air-raid warden, and the streets were patrolled to make sure everyone was keeping their lights inside and that it was dark outside. The ambulances and police had hooded lights, but that was it. All of the windows had to be covered.
Nobody knew when we were going to be attacked. We all thought the Japanese would continue the attacks, but it never happened.
Actually, there was one attack. A sub must have lobbed some shells into Santa Barbara, but nothing was hit. And one night, something flew over L.A., and the air-raid sirens went off. But that was it.
The U.S. government started immediately moving the Japanese inland into camps. And don't let anyone tell you about the poor Japanese. I think that saved their lives. Anyone who looked Japanese was in mortal danger in those days because the anger was running so high. Admittedly, the government did a bad job of it because they didn't let them take anything with them—just uprooted them, but I think they did them a favor by getting them out of the line of fire.
All of my cousins were in the service. Tab was in the army with General Patton in Europe . Pete, who was right out of high school, was in the marines. He was in Iwo Jima on the hill when the flag was raised, but he says he was looking the other way, so he missed it! Soon after that, he was shot in the stomach and lost many of his internal organs. It's amazing he lived. He spent months in military hospitals before they could even move him to the mainland, and then he spent almost a year in San Diego recovering. Harold was in the Coast Guard. He spent his time at Oxnard, just patrolling the coast. Bill Harper was in the Navy in the Pacific. I think it was the U.S.S. New York . And two of Opal's brothers, my cousins Burt ("Buck") and Glenn, went through it. Glenn was in Italy.
Glenn, my future husband Glenn that is, tried very hard to enlist. He wanted very much to enlist in the Army Air Corps, and they wouldn't take him because of his health.
Glenn was an air raid warden during World War II! Males that were left behind, and there weren't too many of them, served doing something like this. As I've already said, Glenn was terribly disappointed that he didn’t get into service, because he wanted very much to go into the Air Corps and go into aerial photography. He thought somehow, if he could get into the Army Air Corps, he could get into the photography division. Well, he didn’t make it.
He volunteered, and they turned him down. Then, after we got married, he was inducted! So he went in and went through the whole physical and everything. Then they took his glasses and said “walk up here and read this chart on the wall.” And he said “what chart?” And they said, “get up there until you can see the chart.” Well, he kept walking and walking until he was practically at the wall before he could find the chart. They gave him back his glasses and said forget it. He was so humiliated. His two friends, Alan Steele and Gordon Paul were both in, but he didn’t get in. They were aircraft mechanics. They served in Asia and in India.
On September 25, 1942, we got married in Las Vegas. Neither one of us was in any great hurry, but gas rationing was coming along. This was the last weekend before gas rationing was supposed to start. We knew we couldn’t go anywhere after that, so we took the plunge and tied the knot.
We both worked all day on the 23rd. After dinner, Glenn came over to the apartment. My landlady invited us over for a drink and we finally got started about 10 p.m. We were planning to arrive in Las Vegas around daybreak because we could only get hotel reservations for Friday night. Since it was wartime, everything was reserved for the military. In L.A., we had been living in blackout conditions for months—maybe a year. When we got over the mountains heading east, a beautiful bright harvest moon was lighting up the countryside and desert all the way. Then Las Vegas came into view just before daylight. We were ecstatic with joy, seeing lights again. So wonderful!
We stopped at a little roadside restaurant out in the desert for a bite to eat and coffee. I needed to wash my hands but the proprietor didn't want me to use the water. He said it was rationed. He finally relented and gave me a cupful in a small pan.
As we pulled into Las Vegas, the town was asleep. Not much to the place then—one main street and a few side streets. Sears Roebuck finally opened and I used their restroom to change my clothes. Then, we went to the courthouse. I guess Glenn changed too. I don't remember. He DID buy me a white gardenia corsage. I tried to back out on the courthouse steps, but he finally talked me into it.
The Justice of the Peace and his two office girls were the witnesses. Big deal. Ten minutes at the most! The day we got there – the 25th of September – I thought it was going to be nice and cool. I didn’t know what to expect. So I bought a new wool suit for the occasion. I was going to be really dressed up. We got there, and it was over 100 degrees. There was no way I could put that wool suit on without suffocating! So, I was married in a made-over navy-blue two-piece dress with a white blouse. I always told Glenn it wasn’t legal because the whole thing was over too fast!
We didn't remember to buy gas before starting home the next evening and the car sputtered to a halt out in the middle of nowhere. Fortunately, we were at the top of a very long hill and coasted down the hill to a tiny gas station at the bottom.
After that, we came back and moved into a little garage apartment in Huntington Park on Sanchez Street. There were five garages on the back of this lot, with three tiny apartments above them, with tiny little kitchens. They were so small, you had to back out to get out of the kitchen. And a tiny little living room and a bedroom that was big enough for a double bed, a chest of drawers, and a bathroom. And that’s where we lived all the time we were in Huntington Park.
The apartment was owned by a friend of Mrs. Dickerson’s stepson and daughter in-law, who lived in South Gate. He was the one who got what little inheritance there was from Mrs. Dickerson, since she had used practically all of it up. So by Christmas of 1942, we were settled into our little apartment.
The following is a letter written by Glenn on Sunday, December 27, 1942 at 2:33 p.m. (Glenn was always precise!):
Dear Mother, Dad, and Grandmother ,
Happy New Year!!
As soon as it is this time of day in Honolulu, Esther will be married. We are glad to see a picture of our new brother-in-law and will send it on to Thelma sometime this week. I should like to make a copy of it with my camera before I send it on to Thelma . We will be thinking of Esther, as I know you will, on her wedding day. Wish we could have all attended the wedding.
We had a very nice Christmas. The Steeles gave a Christmas Eve party on Christmas Eve (naturally). We exchanged gifts and made a record for Mr. Steele's brother in Portland; the usual Christmas record he sends each year. The Steeles gave us a nice picture for our living room (which we shall probably hang in the bedroom since there isn't any wall space in the living room). Allen and June gave me a box of handkerchiefs and Beatrice a set of six sterling silver topped salt and pepper shakers (3 of each). Gordon and Louise gave us a box of candy and Fed and Elda gave us a Pyrex casserole.
We waited until Christmas morning to open our gifts from you and Thelma. Grandmother, we certainly have enjoyed the candy. We've been hoarding it and even so it's almost half gone. The Pine Tar Soap will be a good thing to wash hair with. It's a commodity which is becoming more and more scarce, too, and probably will be rationed soon . How did you guess that we needed a shoe bag? Beatrice can put her shoes in the one you gave us, Mother, and I can use her old one for my shoes. We both got a tremendous kick out of the stamps, coins, compass, and the other things which I saved when I was home. Did you notice that by strange coincidence the letter which came by Clipper from Esther (on the Clipper's first flight) was received in Denver on Dec. 7, 1935, just six years to the day before "Pearl Harbor"? Dad, the celery arrived in good shape about 9:30 Christmas morning. It is certainly delicious; we had some for Christmas breakfast. We took a couple of bunches to Anaheim with us for Christmas and gave some to the Steeles. The rest we are hoarding carefully in order to make it last as long as possible. We had some of it with out roast chicken yesterday.
Beatrice gave me a wedding ring for Christmas. It is something I have wanted very much and about which I dropped several heavy hints. She had it wrapped in a rather large box and I had given up hope that she was buying a ring for me. Imagine my surprise when I opened the big box and found a smaller one inside with the ring in it. It matches her ring except that it is a man's style. I haven't been in the habit of wearing rings or jewelry of any kind for that matter and I haven't quite become accustomed to it yet .
Beatrice also gave me some new house slippers. I think she hopes I'll throw away the old sheepskins now. I'll fool her and make shoe polishers out of them.
Thelma and Winston sent us a pair of fancy pillowcases. One is marked "His" and one is marked "Hers." Lawrence and Olive (Stotts) gave us a towel and wash cloth and Aunt Bertha and Uncle Ed gave us a dollar. Beatrice's Mother and Dad sent us five dollars and her sister sent a two-dollar bill .
Christmas Day we had dinner Uncle John's folks. Aunt Ella's nephew and niece Lowell and Mildren Merriman were there too. We had a good dinner and enjoyed visiting with them. They are still about as usual. Uncle John's eyes don't seem to improve at all. They had a great many attractive Christmas cards lined up on the mantle. It was a clear sunny day but the wind was rather cold. We took a couple of Kodachrome pictures of the palm and orange trees with show-capped mountains in the background. It rained here Christmas Eve and there was quite a bit of snow on the mountains. We left Anaheim about five o'clock and drove to Glendale to see Virlie and John Cook. Beatrice roomed with Virlie before she married John. You probably remember about our telling you of attending their wedding last Valentine's day. We got back home about ten-thirty pretty well tired out after a busy day and long drive.
We received a great many nice cards from relatives and friends.
Yesterday we had our Christmas dinner at home. Beatrice roasted a small chicken and we had cranberry jelly, potatoes and gravy, Colorado celery and mince meat pie. We walked over to Huntington Park to the show yesterday afternoon: saw "Bambi" and "One of Our Aircraft is Missing." Bambi is Walt Disney's latest full-length picture—it was very good. The other was about the usual run of war pictures. After the show we walked over to the Steele's. There was no one home except Eugene (their grandson) so we didn't stay long. We had quite a long walk before we got home—it's about a mile and a half over to the Steele's. We used up all the gas we had been saving for Christmas , so will have to walk most of the places we go until after January 21. I still have enough coupons to get me to work and back but little more. I ride with John Richards in the company car part of the time.
Mother, we certainly enjoyed the grape jelly. We have been having it for breakfast.
How are you making out with the gasoline rationing, Dad? Were you able to get a "B book"?
Thank you for sending us the New Testament, Mother. It has good clear print and we enjoyed the pictures and poems you inserted.
We thought of you at Christmas time and wished we could have been with you. Hope you enjoyed the Holiday. I must close for now. There are several more letters which I must write.
Love,
Glenn and Beatrice
P.S. I wonder when Kenny is going to have his tonsils out? We haven't heard from Thelma since she said he would have them out last week. We thought it would be all over with by now.
WW II (continued):
I didn’t do anything through the Holidays, and I got tired of doing nothing, so I went to work for Axelson’s as an industrial nurse – and stayed with them all through The War. I was the one who helped set up their First Aid Department. They were expanding very rapidly. They had been a machine-tool and oil equipment manufacturer, and they expanded during the war into an airplane equipment maker. Axelson was located right behind Bethlehem Steel in the City of Vernon. They had over a thousand employees at that time.
They already had a First Aid Department, but it was run by a little old man who had been there forever. He really couldn’t do much other than take out splinters. I was the first real nurse that they hired. I was in charge, and it was a good job.
Most of what we got were eye injuries from flying sparks in the foundry. But everyone had to wear goggles, and women couldn’t wear their hair down. They wore what were called “snoods.” That was a cap with a kind of a net on the back. And of course pants. No dresses. Closed toe, flat healed shoes. All the safety precautions that could be written in.
We were right in the middle of the activity. We had a little office – a little building – about the size of a Quonset hut. It had a couple of cots to lie down on. I had a first-aid driver, a guy that did practically nothing but drive the first-aid car. He made regular runs to an industrial hospital that worked in conjunction with our office. I had about four nurses in there at one time.
Towards the end of the war, they needed somebody to supervise the women in the plant. There were only about a hundred women in there at the peak. They prevailed upon me to take over that job, and let somebody else do what I was doing. It was lots of paper work, visiting, keeping track of the insurance.
Glenn continued working for Whitehead Metal Products, which was a subsidiary of International Nickel, which was in New York and Canada.
They made kitchen sinks, cabinets, and that sort of thing. They were known for their products made out of Monel, which International Nickel had a patent on. I still have two Monel cabinets. They really don’t build them like that any more.
Whitehead was a wholly-owned subsidiary of International Nickel Company and Glenn went to work for them right out of business college because the president’s son, Judd Whitehead, was running the office and his wife was jealous and wouldn’t let him have a female secretary. So that’s how Glenn got his first job: the job as the private secretary of the vice president! But, of course, by the time I knew him they had closed the office in Oakland and gone into war production in L.A. Glenn had moved to Los Angeles with Whitehead.
At the time the war ended, things were changing rapidly at Axelson. They were closing down large segments of their aircraft building facilities, and the defense orders were no longer coming in, and the whole atmosphere was changing and – I don’t know – I was just very tired, and I decided to quit. There was no problem getting a job at that time. It’s hard for me to realize people in Los Angeles have trouble getting jobs now.
On May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered, ending World War II in Europe. But the war continued with Japan in the Pacific and came to end only with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9. Japan’s emperor Hirohito formerly surrendered on board the U.S. Battleship Missouri on September 2, 1945.
In what country, state, and city were you born? What hospital?
18. San Francisco 1946At the end of the war, Whitehead closed their manufacturing plant in Vernon, and sent all the equipment and employees back East. Glenn was the last one in that office. He was the office manager. That was the one time in his life he wrote a check for a million dollars. He was actually quite proud of that. That was to transfer the funds when they closed the office. He had to send the money to New York.
We could have gone east, but I didn’t want to go! He could have gone to the main office in New York, or to Kalamazoo or some place, but I didn’t want to move back East or up north so he decided he’d stay in California with me rather than go.
By then, Glenn’s mother and father had come out to California. Thelma was in San Francisco at that time with her husband Winston. But Glenn’s mother and father decided to settle in Los Angeles. They bought a little house and were staying with us and were going to be close to their son and Dad Surguine's blind brother, Uncle John, who lived in Anaheim.
But Winston picked up one morning and moved out. He had had a job in the shipyard, and they bought this little house on 98th Avenue over in Oakland. He got them settled, but then he got involved with this Amy woman, who also had two kids and a husband. They decided to chuck their mates, and that’s what they did. Thelma woke up one morning to see him taking the kids' pictures off the mantel and she said “what are you doing?” He said, “I’m leaving.” He had his suitcase packed and ready to go. She said, “You’re not taking those. Put them right back where they were.” She made him put them back. And he left her high and dry with three little kids. This was probably 1945, and the war was still going on.
I was getting ready to go work one morning, and a call came in and it was Thelma. She was sobbing her heart out, crying so hard she couldn’t talk. She wanted to talk to her mother. She told her Winston had left.
We got Grandma Surguine on the train that day and sent her up to stay with Thelma. Dad Surguine put the little house he had just bought in South Gate on the market to sell it. He had torn all the paper off the walls and was getting ready to sand the floor and paint it. And that was that.
We were in Southern California for about a year after Glenn's parents left. That’s when Whitehead closed up shop.
That’s when was offered a job with General Water Heater where several of the other Whitehead employees had gone. His friend Sterling Simpson had gone up to the Bay Area already. They were opening up an office in San Francisco, and Glenn was offered the office manager’s job. So he and three of the salesmen and one of the secretaries went to San Francisco and opened an office for General Water Heater. This was in April of 1946.
We lived in our friends’, George and Helen Grace’s, apartment up on Sanchez Street, way up on the hill in the Mission District while they went on a three-month’s trip to Canada and back East. George had worked for Whitehead in San Francisco and Glenn had been working for Whitehead in Oakland before the war. That’s where they met. Anyway, George Grace had his business in his house, and I answered his phone for him and took orders while Glenn was at work.
They owned a triplex – it was three levels. This was on top of a hill overlooking the Mission District, at 21st and Sanchez. It was very, very steep hill. I enjoyed it. It was a wonderful view. We had a lot of fun in San Francisco. Glenn knew San Francisco like the back of his hand. Glenn’s parents and sister were close by, and we enjoyed being able to see them.
We had saved quite a bit of money during the war, with the idea that when it was over we would buy a house. But we spent it all! We just didn’t realize things were so expensive and what happened was that all the people we knew from Southern California loved to come to San Francisco. They would come to visit us, and we would very generously put them up and take them out, and we were spending our money and they were keeping theirs in their pockets. Of course, we bought some furniture too, and that set us back a bit. But we had nothing left for a house.
Fortunately, we had a good car. Glenn had his black Ford when we were married, but it was getting old. His cousin Dolores Surguine who lived in Anaheim and her husband Jeff Harrison got stuck in Oklahoma. He was trying to keep from getting drafted because they had three little babies. But their car was still in L.A. and they wanted to sell it so they could buy a car in Oklahoma. It was a better car than we had, so we bought it.
Parking that car was tough, though. We had a garage across the street from our apartment, and you had to turn around twice to get into it. It was straight up a steep incline. You had to make a sharp right hand turn off of a narrow street, and hope nothing was coming the other direction.
Later we got a yellow Studebaker in San Francisco. It was a Godsend. It had what was called a “hill holder.” Of course, there was nothing like automatic transmission, so you had to shift and hold the brake. I said I would never drive, but I lugged a sack of groceries up that steep hill from Market Street one time. After that— I drove.
There were no buses or streetcars up our hill, so you either walked or you drove, one or the other. And the stores were all down the street on Market Street. Well, we lived up there for about three months, and then we moved to our little house on Byxbee Street. We were glad to get out of that apartment!
Going downtown was exciting. You always wore a hat, gloves, and heals; and put on your good outfit; when you went downtown. You might not buy three cents worth of anything, but you'd go somewhere and have lunch, even if it was just a lunch counter at a dime store. Everyone had to go into the City every now and then. That’s just what you did.
San Francisco was a beautiful city. Now it’s trashy, trashy, trashy. Back then it was clean. The wind blew all the time, so nothing ever accumulated. But things were always clean and tidy and the stores were elegant.
I got a Christmas job at O'conner Moffit and during the time I was there Macy's bought them out and took them over. So I helped open the Macy’s store in San Francisco. I was hired for the toy department up on the eighth floor. The whole floor was toys and I was in charge of the games. I’d never sold anything before! Then they wanted me to stay on afterward.
These were kids games, of course. But they were beautifully packaged. We only carried a couple of dozen, but they were nice games. This was Christmas, the trains were running, and they had a Santa Clause. So the mommies would get the kids all dressed up, bring them down to see Santa Clause and the trains, and to get candy canes. It was a very good time in our society.
Now San Francisco seems dirty. The stores are crowded and dirty. It isn’t a place you’d want to live anymore. And Los Angeles was nice too. I came here in 1940, you know. The air was crisp and clean. It would rain and everything would sparkle afterwards. I’d go out and see women walking around with fur coats on along Wilshire Boulevard! It was just a couple of blocks up from there from where I lived: right off The Miracle Mile. It was just a couple of blocks to walk up to Farmers Market. May Company was up there. There was Phelps Terchel, a very nice shop. And Silverwoods and Desmonds and all those nice shops. Beverly Hills was not very much at that time. But the Miracle Mile was where the stores were, and I lived right in the middle of all that.
San Francisco was much more formal. L.A. was casual. Frumpy, by comparison. Like somebody with a fur coat and pants on. San Francisco was like New York, I guess, but I’ve only been to New York one time and it rained all the time I was there, so I don’t have much of an impression.
Of course, San Francisco has always been unique. Back then, San Francisco had an unusual pedestrian street corner crossing system called "the scramble system." All the lights would go red, and everybody ran for it. They moved fast. If you didn’t move, you got ran over.
Cable cars were all they had for a long time, because they were the only thing that would pull those hills. They didn’t have buses, and a regular streetcar wouldn’t handle it. The streetcars were on Market Street. They ran all the way out to where we lived on Byxbee Street, right to the foot of the hill. You’d ride the streetcar out there through the tunnel. But you’d use the cable cars from Market Street to get over the hills. They weren't just for decoration back then. They were very practical.
We often went to a Chinese Restaurant up on Grant Avenue. The food was excellent and it was nice and clean. But the last time I was there, I don’t think they’d cleaned the place since we'd left. Even the walls were a dark, dirty brown. Like smoke brown. Everything was dirty.
We liked Fisherman’s Wharf. Fisherman’s Grotto was our favorite place there. When I was carrying Skip, I was working downtown and so was Glenn, and I was just miserable. I was nauseous all the time. Glenn would pick me up at work and we would "high tail it" to Fisherman’s Wharf. They had those crab and lobster pots out front which would stink like all get out. He would pull up front and let me out. I would put something over my nose to get past those lobster pots and go inside. It didn’t smell inside. Then he would go park the car and come in.
I could hold fish and especially those French fried shrimp down until around about bedtime. We would come home and I’d hit the couch and stay there as long as I could, and then I’d lose everything. But I couldn’t force anything else down. Except for cheese sandwiches. I always had a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch. It stayed down long enough that knew I was getting a little bit of nourishment. And on the way to work in the morning I’d stop at the doctor’s office and get a shot . That would last me until about one o’clock, long enough for me to have my grilled cheese sandwich for lunch.
I also worked at the Emporium and the White House at different times when we lived in San Francisco. I worked in lingerie at the Emporium, and I worked the games at the White House. I was actually working for the game company that time. It was like Bradley. It was Cadico Ellis. They tried to hire me full-time, but I didn’t want to.
The White House was on Grant Avenue, pretty close to Market Street. That was an elegant store, just a shade below I Magnin’s. Macy’s I believe is over on O’Farrel – or Mason. I don’t remember. And the Emporium was on Market. I quit the Emporium after I got pregnant. You didn’t see pregnant women working in the stores. You had to really dress up in suits and heals and that sort of thing. I was working in the fur department. I wasn’t in sales there. I was in customer relations or something greeting customers and checked them in and if they brought their furs in for repair, you took care of that for them.
Department stores tried to keep customers happy in those days. The Emporium even had podiatrist. I used to get my toenails done and my feet all taken care of. It cost three dollars! And this was a regular licensed podiatrist. It felt good after you were on your feet all day.
They didn’t have restaurants, but they did have an employee’s cafeteria.
It was a fun job. I liked sales. You’d have customers come back and ask for you. I was Mrs. Surguine. When I was nursing, I was Miss Harper. Nobody ever called me by first name. And now that I’m old and gray, what do these service people do? They call me Bea! They never call me Mrs. Surguine. Sometimes we just get too casual in life. They try to put you on their level.
Actually, I guess you might say we pulled a bit of a “fast one” to get that house on Byxbee Street. We snuck into that house when somebody we knew was moving out, before the landlord knew about it! It turned out to be a good move, and we became close friends with the owners, Harry and Paula Schumacher, but it didn't start out that way.
The Laniers lived in that house before us. He was with General Water Heater, and he was shifty from the get go. He’d look you right in the eye and lie and try to make you believe it. Anyway, they were moving to a house down the Peninsula. They had lived in this house about four years. And they knew that we needed a place to move to. So he told the Schumachers that they were just going to be gone a few months. They were taking over somebody else’s house while they were out of town. He concocted some kind of far-out story, and there wasn’t a grain of truth in it. And he wanted us to come and stay in the house while they were gone. Schumacher agreed. They had been pretty good tenants. The Schumachers had wanted the house for income and the Laniers always paid their rent on time.
The Laniers had two dogs that they were extremely fond of. They both worked for General Water Heater and he was sales manager. When they went to work in the morning, well, they put the dogs in the basement and those dogs had the run of the basement. And they wet all over the wall and concrete all day long . From then on, any time it would rain, that place would just reek. I never could get that odor out of the basement . But the Schumachers didn’t know about that when the Laniers lived there.
We had very little to move. The Graces were coming home, so the Laniers just kind of slid out and we slid in. So Harry Schumacher kept waiting for things to change, and nothing happened. So he figured out after a couple of months that he’d been had. He said it was O.K., he would have rented the house anyway, but he would have appreciated it if he hadn’t lied to him. He told Glenn he could stay if he would do his book work. That was the deal. And Glenn did his book work faithfully. He handled his books for as long as we were there. We were there for six years. And we really did become pretty good friends with Harry and Paula.
They came to visit us in San Mateo a couple of times later. We visited them at their home on the Russian River a few times. We stayed all night there one year, slept in their rental next door. We didn’t intend to stay. But that was after we moved to Downey many years later. Paula always spent the summer up at the river and rented out some property they had there. It was nice up there.
Glenn made himself an office down in the basement of the Byxbee Street house, and did people’s income taxes to bring in extra income. That’s also where he kept books for Harry, who lived behind us. And we had an old Maytag ringer washer in the basement, where I did my laundry.
And there was a clothesline that went out of Skip’s window up that hill and a pole at the top of the hill and that’s how I dried my clothes. I didn’t have a drier. The wind would whip the sheets and diapers around that pulley line – there were two lines – and if I didn’t get the wash out early and get it in before one o’clock, I couldn’t hardly get it in at all. The wind would pick up and twist those clothes around and around those lines. They were so black from the lines that, by the time you got them in, you’d have to put them in the wash again. But boy those diapers sure dried fast .
Byxbee Street was also where we got our Danish Modern furniture. A customer of General Water Heater’s lived over on Market Street and owned a furniture store and let us have them wholesale.
The Byxbee Street house had a living room in the front, a kitchen and dining area which was also in front, but on the north side of the house. It had two bedrooms and a bathroom in the back. And there was a square hallway right in the center of the house. Every room in the house opened off the square hallway, including the basement stairs that Harold fell down and nearly killed himself. He fell from the top to the bottom, and if there hadn’t been one of those heavy grass mats at the bottom, he wouldn’t have survived. He wouldn’t stay in the cradle when he was little. He was climbing out by the time he was six or seven months old.
I think the worst thing about living there was that my kids didn’t have any place to play. There was just a little patio in the back outside the basement door. The hill went straight up. The Schumachers lived right behind us. Their backyard went straight down, and ours went straight up and there was a fence between us and them. The lot was only 25 feet wide! There was a little concrete paved area on the lowest level, then a retaining wall, and three or four steps up the retaining wall was a little grassy area, and then there was another retaining wall which was higher and there were no steps up to that third level. It was all covered with ice plant to keep the hill from slipping.
My first son, Skip, was born at St. Mary’s hospital in San Francisco at 9:30 p.m., on a Monday night, April 19, 1948. I stayed in the hospital ten days with him. And the hospital bill was $100! Of course the doctor charged $50 or something.
Schumacher made what we called a “kitty kat” chair for Skip when he was born. He brought the pattern with him from Germany. And he made his kids one and made one for us. I still have that, but it needs repainting . It was built to last forever. He also gave us a cradle which both of my boys slept in.
Skip’s favorite doll was “Steve,” which I made for him while I was expecting my second child. He was made from a pattern I cut from material—canvas or something. And I made Steve a suit of clothes. And Grandma Harper made him several new sets of clothes. Steve had red hair made out of yarn, his face was embroidered on, and he was stuffed with cotton.
Skip also liked to sneak out of bed and watch the adults through the heater vent at night. At least, that's what he tells me . I don't remember that myself.
One incident I do remember was when Skip got lost in the Emporium. We had gone down to buy him a bed. I turned my back, and he got lost. It was at Christmas time, and I was at the card counter, and I thought he was right next to me and he was nowhere to be found. It was a mob scene. A floorwalker found him and took him to the office. He wasn’t too concerned when I found him .
Then, another time, there was a mall we went to and his brother Harold was in the stroller and Skip was running around. They always had a drawing to get people in to shop, and the drawing was about to start. We were frantic because we couldn’t find Skip, and the next thing we knew he was up on stage pulling the numbers out!
Skip got very sick at one point with scarlet fever. I was quarantined when I was pregnant with Harold. They let Glenn go to work, but nobody else could come in or go out, and we were quarantined for six weeks. Glenn had to go out of town once, and we were stuck. They made us put a big sign up in the front window, and I couldn’t leave except to go out into the backyard. We ran out of milk, and I stuck my head out the window and called to the neighbors two doors down in the backyard and asked if he would go down to the foot of the hill and get a bottle of milk. He said why can’t you or your husband go? After he realized our predicament, he was happy to go.
Our neighbors were the first to have a television. The kids were neglected and dirty. The mother was an alcoholic, but I didn’t realize it at the time .
Harold was born on December 13, 1950, at 8:30 in the morning on a Tuesday. We still lived in the little house when Harold was one-and-a-half years old.
Harold walked at eight months, and by nine months he knocked out a tooth playing around the coffee table. Then there was the time he tumbled all the way down the back steps. He landed on his head, and I thought he was dead. There wasn’t a sound – it must have knocked the breath out of him. Fortunately there was that cork mat at the foot of those stairs that saved him from the concrete. I was never so scared in my whole life!
Mama came out from Kentucky twice when we were in San Francisco. Harold was a year old when she came out and stayed with us six months. She couldn’t stay any longer than six months because she would lose her Kentucky pension. It was like social security, which she really needed.
She just liked being with her family and taking care of the babies when she visited.
I didn’t have a car when Glenn went to work. If I had to have the car, I’d have to take him up to Twin Peaks Station and he’d take the trolley in. I was able to walk to the grocery store at the corner, but they didn’t have much. Of course I had the milk delivered. Pushing that baby buggy up that hill was a chore.
But it was O.K. I was able to keep my house clean. Every Friday that house was clean from stem to stern and polished and waxed. One time, it was a Friday, and I had waxed the hallway floor and I was expecting Glenn to call me from the station. He’d call me when got there – it took about ten minutes for me to get there. But I went through the hallway and my feet slipped out from under me and I fell on my elbow. I had to go get Glenn. There was no way I could get in touch with him. I had to get that car out of the garage and drive it. I was in shock – the real pain hadn’t started yet. I took Glenn home and gave him dinner, but by that time it got to hurting so bad he had to take me to emergency and there was no doctor at that little hospital. But they called a doctor, and he said take an x-ray. They did and told him it was broken. So he said send her on home and I’ll see her at the house. They put my arm in a sling, and I went home. That doctor never did show up that Friday night. He didn’t show up until Saturday afternoon. All I had was some aspirin, and I walked the floor all night long with that arm hurting. He came finally, and said we can do one of two things. I can either put that arm in a cast, and its going to be stiff and you won’t be able to bend it for the rest of your life. Or you can keep it in a sling and take the pain, and it will heal on its own. So I carried it in a sling for six weeks. Fortunately Mama was there. You can’t diaper a baby with one arm.
Speaking of diapers, men didn’t take care of the babies in those days. That wasn’t their job. I think he would have run like a turkey if he had to change a dirty diaper. He’d change a wet one once in a while, if there was no way out of it. And he’d hold a bottle, which was better than most men would do. But he was a good father. He was gentle and kind and loved his kids dearly.
I remember leaving Glenn with Skip when I went to the store and he took his shoes off and went to sleep on the couch. And he woke up and one of his shoes was missing. He looked and looked for that shoe, and couldn’t imagine what had happened. An hour or so later, he started to go to the bathroom, and lifted up the lid, and there was the shoe set neatly in the toilet .
Soon, we outgrew that little house. We needed more room for both children. And it was very, very cold on that wind-swept ocean side of the city. They were sick a lot and didn’t grow much. Most days, we never saw sunshine until at least noon, and there were days we never saw sunshine. And the wind off the ocean battered the front of that house incessantly. You could set your clock by the wind. It would start in a 1:00 in the afternoon, and wouldn’t die down until 1:00 in the morning. You could hardly get in and out the front door. My kids wore snowsuits in July!!
19. Sunny San Mateo
We used to go out on Sunday afternoon to see if we could find some sunshine. It was a big game, I guess. Well, this one Sunday afternoon, we drove down the Peninsula. And we kept on driving until we hit Hillsdale, in San Mateo, where the sun came out. We took off down a side street, just kind of wandering around. We’d never been down in that area. And we spotted this little house for sale. It had pansies in window boxes. It was all freshly painted, and I thought it was the cutest house I ever saw! So I said “let’s go in and take a look.” “Down here?” Glenn said. “It’s so far from everything. Why bother to look?” “Oh, let’s look anyway,” I said.
So we walked into the house, saw that big covered patio and a nice, big level fenced back yard, and I was sold. 100%. That was my house! I wanted that house. I could see my babies playing out in the sunshine. So, that afternoon, we made an offer and left a deposit, and bought that house for $12,500! The house payment was $75 a month.
We moved to San Mateo on the 30th of May, 1952. Skip had just turned four, and Harold was 18 months and just walking good. Glenn borrowed the company trucks to move, and got some of the warehousemen to help. Skip thought it was a big deal to ride down in the truck with Johnny Pucinelli, who had worked in the Warehouse and had recently become a fireman in San Francisco. I remember he was disappointed because Johnny didn’t move us in a fire truck!
But that move was one of the highlights of my life! The day we moved off the gloomy, cold San Francisco hill down into the sunshine. It was a perfect house. And Glenn decided that, rather than drive into the city, he would ride the train . And he did! The office was down close to the Embarcadero, not far from the Ferry Building on Market or Howard Street. But the City started giving them trouble about bringing their trucks in and unloading them, and so they moved back up to Bryant Street in the Mission District. They were there for quite a while, and Glenn drove during that period. Once again, I was often left without a car.
I think we met most of our new neighbors that very day. There was a neighbor boy named Claude Chamberlain, who I thought Skip could play with. But he was a bit of bully. Skip was kind of afraid of him. Bob, his father, was rough on Claude. He would take him out in the garage and beat the living daylights out of him. He had two sisters, Kim and Vicky. They were afraid of their dad, but they got into mischief all the time. Their mother was screaming at them all the time, and that didn’t help either.
Then there were the DalColletos who lived next door. Alice DalColleto was born Alice Allenspach, and she was a Swiss citizen who grew up in Shanghai, China. Her parents were quite wealthy – I think he owned a big machine shop or something. But the Communists came along and took everything they had and they were practically under house arrest. Alice got out because she came over to Marry Carl DalColleto. The father died there, and Mrs. Allenspach brought the ashes back and kept them on the mantel. Harold played with Carl Jr., and they had a younger daughter named Yvonne.
Then there were the Carlsons, Bernie and Fred Race, and the Harkenses who had the pool. He was an electrician who worked for the city. The Chamberlain kids often snuck into their swimming pool when they weren’t home.
Unlike in San Francisco, where we couldn’t grow a thing, we were now able to have a vegetable garden. Half of the yard had been used as a garden, but I couldn’t grow any root vegetables at all. Onions and carrots would just get eaten up. But we had a strawberry patch that was wonderful. Tomatoes, cabbage, zucchini, anything that would grow above ground did fine. We also grew corn. And we also grew artichokes, which grew well in that climate.
We had a pear tree and a huge fig tree. They were white Kadota figs. They were white, and the seeds were red. They would cost about $1 a piece in the market, if you could find them. That tree was producing fruit all the time. Thelma had the black Mission figs you see in the store, but they weren’t as unique as these figs. We had that tree until it finally had to come down when we extended the house.
Just about everything I needed on a day-to-day basis was within walking distance. The Village Market always had good quality meat and Pike’s hardware store was just around the corner.
As far as a place to live was concerned, I thought San Mateo was nearly ideal. But Glenn had a rough go of it from the beginning.
His mother was dying of cancer. His father and mother had just moved to Felton, down near Santa Cruz. She wasn’t there long when she discovered a lump in her breast. She returned to Oakland and had radical surgery, and she did well for a few months. She had returned to Felton, but the cancer spread and soon reached her lungs. On May 2 of 1953, she had gone into a coma. I stayed with her and Thelma all night and she died the next morning at 5:30 a.m.
Then Glenn got sick in November of 1954. We had been in San Mateo two years. It was Armistice Day when he went into the hospital with pneumonia. I thought he wouldn’t make it through the night. He was fighting this thing that he thought was a cold, but it turned out to be a heart infection known as sub acute bacterial endocarditis, which at that time was thought to be 100% fatal. But a new miracle drug had just come onto the market, and it saved his life. According to the American Heart Association, he was the first on record to ever survive this kind of infection. He was in San Mateo County Hospital up on the hill from November 11 to the end of January.
With his illness, we had very little money. And I was five months pregnant and couldn’t get a job. There were times when I didn’t know where a bottle of milk was coming from. I remember Audrey Oling would bring up a pot of beans and the neighbors would bring over food now and then, and granddad would come up on the weekends and bring us stuff
It was a relief when Glenn finally came home, but he was terribly incapacitated and wasn’t ready to go back to work. He had to put his hands on the side of the wall just to walk. A walker would have helped him, but there was no such thing as a walker at that time. I didn’t even know how I was going to get him out of the car and up the steps to our house when he came home. For months he was in bed a lot, and was very weak. The drugs that had saved his life had destroyed his inner ear and he was always dizzy from that day on. He was never as good a driver after that. It always worried me, but he got better as time went on. But he always walked with a rolling gate after that. Kind of like a sailor on a ship. He said he always felt like he was sailing against the wind. Things didn’t quite stand still for him.
The company paid Glenn up through Christmas. After that, there was no money coming in and Art Drucker kept wanting to fire him. Help came in a very unusual way, though. The president of the company, the widow of actor Lon Chaney, had heard that we were having a hard time of it and she had a great deal of respect for Glenn. Suddenly, we got a check for $500 in the mail. Then we got another one for $250. With $75 a month house payments and $50 a-month car payments, that really helped. Still, it took a while to pay back the medical bills.
My little daughter Beverly was born in February. Mama came out, crippled with arthritis, to help. She rode with Tab in his back seat all the way to California so she could be there to help. Tab had been out west, and he almost always went home for Christmas.
Beverly was a beautiful baby, popular with everyone from the start. The boys actually fought over who would get to hold her, and she was the apple of both her grandfather and father’s eye. Managing a newborn at the time was tough, but she brought new hope to all of us. I was very glad to have that baby.
Glenn went back to work way before anyone ever thought he could do it. With mama there, she could kind of take over with the baby. I was able to get up and take Glenn to a warehouseman’s home who lived in San Mateo to get a ride. Glenn was unable to drive himself for quite a while.
Mama stayed with us until Easter. We joined the church on Palm Sunday, and Beverly and Harold were baptized on Easter Sunday. She was six year’s old. She was a happy baby. We almost lost her. She was jaundiced and had to spend three days in the hospital. But she made it through o.k. I really loved that baby!
What is your birth order?
19. Sunny San MateoWe used to go out on Sunday afternoon to see if we could find some sunshine. It was a big game, I guess. Well, this one Sunday afternoon, we drove down the Peninsula. And we kept on driving until we hit Hillsdale, in San Mateo, where the sun came out. We took off down a side street, just kind of wandering around. We’d never been down in that area. And we spotted this little house for sale. It had pansies in window boxes. It was all freshly painted, and I thought it was the cutest house I ever saw! So I said “let’s go in and take a look.” “Down here?” Glenn said. “It’s so far from everything. Why bother to look?” “Oh, let’s look anyway,” I said.
So we walked into the house, saw that big covered patio and a nice, big level fenced back yard, and I was sold. 100%. That was my house! I wanted that house. I could see my babies playing out in the sunshine. So, that afternoon, we made an offer and left a deposit, and bought that house for $12,500! The house payment was $75 a month.
We moved to San Mateo on the 30th of May, 1952. Skip had just turned four, and Harold was 18 months and just walking good. Glenn borrowed the company trucks to move, and got some of the warehousemen to help. Skip thought it was a big deal to ride down in the truck with Johnny Pucinelli, who had worked in the Warehouse and had recently become a fireman in San Francisco. I remember he was disappointed because Johnny didn’t move us in a fire truck!
But that move was one of the highlights of my life! The day we moved off the gloomy, cold San Francisco hill down into the sunshine. It was a perfect house. And Glenn decided that, rather than drive into the city, he would ride the train . And he did! The office was down close to the Embarcadero, not far from the Ferry Building on Market or Howard Street. But the City started giving them trouble about bringing their trucks in and unloading them, and so they moved back up to Bryant Street in the Mission District. They were there for quite a while, and Glenn drove during that period. Once again, I was often left without a car.
I think we met most of our new neighbors that very day. There was a neighbor boy named Claude Chamberlain, who I thought Skip could play with. But he was a bit of bully. Skip was kind of afraid of him. Bob, his father, was rough on Claude. He would take him out in the garage and beat the living daylights out of him. He had two sisters, Kim and Vicky. They were afraid of their dad, but they got into mischief all the time. Their mother was screaming at them all the time, and that didn’t help either.
Then there were the DalColletos who lived next door. Alice DalColleto was born Alice Allenspach, and she was a Swiss citizen who grew up in Shanghai, China. Her parents were quite wealthy – I think he owned a big machine shop or something. But the Communists came along and took everything they had and they were practically under house arrest. Alice got out because she came over to Marry Carl DalColleto. The father died there, and Mrs. Allenspach brought the ashes back and kept them on the mantel. Harold played with Carl Jr., and they had a younger daughter named Yvonne.
Then there were the Carlsons, Bernie and Fred Race, and the Harkenses who had the pool. He was an electrician who worked for the city. The Chamberlain kids often snuck into their swimming pool when they weren’t home.
Unlike in San Francisco, where we couldn’t grow a thing, we were now able to have a vegetable garden. Half of the yard had been used as a garden, but I couldn’t grow any root vegetables at all. Onions and carrots would just get eaten up. But we had a strawberry patch that was wonderful. Tomatoes, cabbage, zucchini, anything that would grow above ground did fine. We also grew corn. And we also grew artichokes, which grew well in that climate.
We had a pear tree and a huge fig tree. They were white Kadota figs. They were white, and the seeds were red. They would cost about $1 a piece in the market, if you could find them. That tree was producing fruit all the time. Thelma had the black Mission figs you see in the store, but they weren’t as unique as these figs. We had that tree until it finally had to come down when we extended the house.
Just about everything I needed on a day-to-day basis was within walking distance. The Village Market always had good quality meat and Pike’s hardware store was just around the corner.
As far as a place to live was concerned, I thought San Mateo was nearly ideal. But Glenn had a rough go of it from the beginning.
His mother was dying of cancer. His father and mother had just moved to Felton, down near Santa Cruz. She wasn’t there long when she discovered a lump in her breast. She returned to Oakland and had radical surgery, and she did well for a few months. She had returned to Felton, but the cancer spread and soon reached her lungs. On May 2 of 1953, she had gone into a coma. I stayed with her and Thelma all night and she died the next morning at 5:30 a.m.
Then Glenn got sick in November of 1954. We had been in San Mateo two years. It was Armistice Day when he went into the hospital with pneumonia. I thought he wouldn’t make it through the night. He was fighting this thing that he thought was a cold, but it turned out to be a heart infection known as sub acute bacterial endocarditis, which at that time was thought to be 100% fatal. But a new miracle drug had just come onto the market, and it saved his life. According to the American Heart Association, he was the first on record to ever survive this kind of infection. He was in San Mateo County Hospital up on the hill from November 11 to the end of January.
With his illness, we had very little money. And I was five months pregnant and couldn’t get a job. There were times when I didn’t know where a bottle of milk was coming from. I remember Audrey Oling would bring up a pot of beans and the neighbors would bring over food now and then, and granddad would come up on the weekends and bring us stuff
It was a relief when Glenn finally came home, but he was terribly incapacitated and wasn’t ready to go back to work. He had to put his hands on the side of the wall just to walk. A walker would have helped him, but there was no such thing as a walker at that time. I didn’t even know how I was going to get him out of the car and up the steps to our house when he came home. For months he was in bed a lot, and was very weak. The drugs that had saved his life had destroyed his inner ear and he was always dizzy from that day on. He was never as good a driver after that. It always worried me, but he got better as time went on. But he always walked with a rolling gate after that. Kind of like a sailor on a ship. He said he always felt like he was sailing against the wind. Things didn’t quite stand still for him.
The company paid Glenn up through Christmas. After that, there was no money coming in and Art Drucker kept wanting to fire him. Help came in a very unusual way, though. The president of the company, the widow of actor Lon Chaney, had heard that we were having a hard time of it and she had a great deal of respect for Glenn. Suddenly, we got a check for $500 in the mail. Then we got another one for $250. With $75 a month house payments and $50 a-month car payments, that really helped. Still, it took a while to pay back the medical bills.
My little daughter Beverly was born in February. Mama came out, crippled with arthritis, to help. She rode with Tab in his back seat all the way to California so she could be there to help. Tab had been out west, and he almost always went home for Christmas.
Beverly was a beautiful baby, popular with everyone from the start. The boys actually fought over who would get to hold her, and she was the apple of both her grandfather and father’s eye. Managing a newborn at the time was tough, but she brought new hope to all of us. I was very glad to have that baby.
Glenn went back to work way before anyone ever thought he could do it. With mama there, she could kind of take over with the baby. I was able to get up and take Glenn to a warehouseman’s home who lived in San Mateo to get a ride. Glenn was unable to drive himself for quite a while.
Mama stayed with us until Easter. We joined the church on Palm Sunday, and Beverly and Harold were baptized on Easter Sunday. She was six year’s old. She was a happy baby. We almost lost her. She was jaundiced and had to spend three days in the hospital. But she made it through o.k. I really loved that baby!
20. Downey
Finally, General Water Heater moved to Colma so they could have more warehouse space. That’s when General Water Heater consolidated with Holly Heating and Air Conditioning. It became Holly General. That office stayed there until July of 1962. Glenn closed that office, and we moved back to Southern California.
Glenn came home one afternoon and said "how would you like to move to L.A?" I said “fine, how soon are we going,” thinking he was kidding. “Tomorrow,” he answered, and he wasn't kidding! With that, he left – considerably before Christmas – around the first of December. I wasn’t too keen about that, but he said either we move or he would have to look for another job. He decided we should go, but I thought Holly General was in bad financial shape. I thought he should look for another job. But he said I have eighteen years invested in this company, and I don’t want to lose it now. He was concerned most about losing his pension. So we moved! I was left behind to sell the house, and the kids didn’t want to move at all. But I stayed behind and let them finish school, and then we moved to Downey on June 17, 1963. That’s the same day Glenn’s nephew’s daughter, Kim Lawson, was born.
Six months after we arrived in Downey, Glenn was looking for another job anyway. The owner of the company – it was a family-owned business – died. A daughter was trying to run it, but turned it over to some sort of financial administrator, who proceeded to run it into the ground. She was Lon Chaney’s ex-wife.
So then, he went to work for Haldemann Pipe and Supply. He worked for them for six months, and they went bankrupt! Then he worked for S.E. Rykoff, a grocery wholesaler, for next to nothing! Those were really starvation wages. But he had to have a job because I wasn’t working.
We survived, though, and got the kids through high school and into college. I eventually got a job working for the L.A. County Schools, and managed to put away enough in the retirement fund so I could have a small income. Glenn, after a long and protracted struggle with thyroid cancer, died July 5, 1977.
I now have five wonderful grandchildren, something I thought I'd never live to see. Skip, who married Joan Kilpatrick of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, has two boys, Chris and Nick. Hal, who married a French girl, Danielle Dupre (sp?), has three children: Sophie, Adrian, and Emily. And Bev, who married Richard Feller, has two: Megan and Cory, the youngest child in the family. It's wonderful that I get to see Megan and Cory so much! I wish I could see the others more, but Skip lives in Indiana now, and Hal in France. And I'm still here -- in Downey. For all of its problems, you still can't beat the weather in L.A., and I own the house, so I guess I'm not moving soon.
THIS is where this narrative ends. I only write the following because I am required to do so…Skip
Mom lived for a number of years after we wrote this, and passed away after the turn of the millennium, still living in Downey. Had she lived until now (2013) she would be over 100 and would have the joy of knowing she also has 3 great grandchildren! She and Glenn are buried at Rose Hills Cemetery in Whittier California.
How old are you today? How old do you feel?
Index1
1913 1
1916 9
1918 14, 18, 20, 26, 57, 59
1918 flue epidemic 20, 36, 41
1919 17, 38
1920 38, 57
1929 50
1936 51, 56
1936 Ford coupe 56
1939 51, 58
1940 5 75
1941 54, 6 68
1942 65, 67
1944 64
1945 71, 72
1948 6, 81
1950 6, 82
1953 87
1962 91
1963 91
9
9th and Catalina, Los Angeles 54
A
air-raid warden 63
Ante Over (game) 34
apples 3 46
Ava, Missouri 57
B
bandstand, Lafayette 17
Bullocks 34, 37
Bunker Hill, Los Angeles 62
Burdine, Alma 5, 26, 27
Burdine, Aunt Etta 6
Burdine, Aunt Lola 6
Burdine, Ben 5
Burdine, Dell 10, 14
Burdine, Elizabeth Ann (Betty) 6
Burdine, Flora 25, 26, 27
Burdine, Gilbert ( 6, 31, 4 43, 47, 64, 89
Burdine, Giles 5
Burdine, Grace 10
Burdine, Martha 5, 2 25
Burdine, Minnie 10
Burdine, Opal 6, 20, 2 26, 64
Burdine, Pauline 5, 12
Burdine, Ron 20, 26, 27, 38, 4 46
Burdine, Ronald 5
Burdine, Walter 5, 6, 27, 4 46
Burdine, William Robert 5
Burdine, Williena 6, 4 43, 47
bus, Greyhound 25
butternut squash 33
Byxbee Street, San Francisco 75, 76, 78, 79, 80
C
cable cars 76
Chamberlains 86, 87
Christmas 15, 39, 45, 46, 5 67, 68, 69, 75, 81, 88, 89, 91
Cincinnati Zoo 20
Cincinnati, Ohio 6, 9, 20, 37, 41, 48, 51
Civilian Conservation Corp 50
Colma, California 91
Colorado 57, 59, 60, 67, 69
Conrard, Kentucky 40, 43
Cook, John 55, 68
Cooper, Cartelle 27
Cortez, Colorado 57, 59, 60
cotton factory 48
Covington, Kentucky 38
D
DalColletos 86
dating 24
Decatur, Illinois 5, 8, 1 13, 20
Decoration Day 43, 46
delicatessens 18
Denver, Colorado 57, 60, 61, 68
diapers, changing 26, 80, 84
Dickerson, Mrs. 6 63, 67
dolls 15, 28, 34
Downey, California 59, 79, 91, 92
E
Embarcadero, San Francisco 86
Emporium, San Francisco 77, 78, 81
F
Feller, Cory 92
Feller, Megan 92
Feller, Rich 92
Felton, California 87
Ferris Wheel 20
figs, Kadota 87
Fox Paper Company 21, 35, 38, 39, 41
G
gas rationing 65
geese 26
General Water Heater 73, 78, 79, 80, 91
Glendale Hospital 52
Glendale, California 5 53, 68
Golden High School 57, 64
Goodwin, June 50
Grundy, Kentucky 3
Gypsy 35
H
Haldemann Pipe and Supply 91
Hampton, Ethel Elvra 57, 59
Harper, Betty Jo 39
Harper, Bill 36, 64
Harper, Clyde 3, 7, 9, 15, 16, 27, 28, 35, 36, 37, 40, 41, 48
Harper, Grace 6, 7, 10, 73
Harper, Lee 1, 10, 14
Harper, Maggie Mae 5, 6, 7, 11, 19, 20, 2 23, 27, 29, 3 33, 4 45, 46, 83, 84, 89
Harper, Nora 35, 48
Harper, Silas 1
Harper, Simpson 1, 14, 17, 2 30, 36, 43
Healds Business College, Oakland 58
Holly General 91
Huguenots (Burdines) 42
hunting 23, 33
Huntington Park, California 66, 67, 69
I
ice cream, strawberry 9
K
karakul fur coat, Bea's 12
Kilpatrick, Joan (Surguine) 92
L
L.A. City College 54
Lafayette, Indiana 1, 3, 4, 9, 10, 1 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 36
Laniers 78, 79
Las Vegas, Nevada 65, 66
Lawson, Ken 58
Lawson, Kim 86, 91
Levi Jackson Wilderness State Park 50
Lewis, Colorado 57, 60, 61
Lobe & Hines Department Store, Lafayette 15
London, Kentucky 25, 33, 39, 40, 50, 51
Los Angeles, California 51, 5 54, 6 64, 66, 71, 7 74, 75, 76, 92
M
Market Street, San Francisco 74, 75, 76, 77, 80
Marlers 49
marriage 38, 58, 59, 65
melons 33
Miracle Mile, Los Angeles 51, 76
Mission District, San Francisco 73, 86
moonshiners 36
N
Naperville, Illinois 5
Navy, United States 37, 38, 41, 64
Needham, Helen 7, 16, 20, 23, 28, 29, 31, 33, 37, 38, 39, 41, 4 43, 45, 73
Needham, Julius 33, 46
Nelson, Jean 55
nicknames 42
nurses registry 51, 5 53, 62
nursing 40, 50, 69, 70
O
Oakland, California 58, 71, 7 73, 87
Oling, Hal and Audrey 88
P
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii 6 63, 64, 68
Pennington General Hospital, London 50
pine knots 45
pineapple juice 54
pole tax 17
Price Valley School 31, 39
Proctor and Gamble 19
Prohibition 38
Pucinelli, Johnny 85
Pulaski County, Kentucky 1, 5, 4 50
Pulaski General Hospital 50
Pumpkin Center, Kentucky 31, 43, 44
Purdue University 10
Q
quilts 32
R
railroad, B. & D. 4
railroad, L. & N. 3
Reading, Ohio 7, 9, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 20, 2 36, 38, 41
Rock Castle County, Kentucky 1
Rook cardgame 16
S
S.E. Rykoff 91
San Francisco Chinatown 76, 77
San Francisco, California 58, 60, 64, 7 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 81, 83, 85, 87
San Mateo, California 10, 79, 85, 87, 88, 89
Sanchez Street, San Francisco 66, 73
sawmills 5, 36
Schumacher, Harry and Paula 78, 79, 81
scramble system 76
Sebring General Hospital 51
Sebring, Florida 51
Setback card game 16
shoe in the toilet 3, 84
Shopville, Kentucky 43, 44
Simpson, Sterling 73
Sinclair, Georgie 16
Sinclair, Johnny 16
snake 27, 28
Somerset, Kentucky 3, 9, 23, 25, 4 43, 44, 48, 49, 52
Springfield, Missouri 57
St. Clair, Mrs. 13
St. Mary’s Hospital, San Francisco 81
Steeles 65, 67, 69
Stevenson, Mrs. 51
Studebaker 74
Surguine, Adrian 92
Surguine, Bev 76, 89
Surguine, Chris 5, 6, 92
Surguine, Danielle 92
Surguine, Dolores 74
Surguine, Emily 92
Surguine, Esther (Manganello) 61, 63, 67, 68
Surguine, Glenn 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 61, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 7 73, 74, 77, 79, 8 83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92
Surguine, Hal 80, 92
Surguine, Harold 6, 4 64, 80, 8 83, 85, 86, 89
Surguine, Nick 92
Surguine, Skip 1, 14, 26, 77, 79, 80, 81, 8 84, 85, 86, 92
Surguine, Sophie 92
Surguine, Thelma (Lawson, Ringsmith, ) 58, 61, 67, 68, 69, 7 73, 87, 88
Surguine, Ulysses Clark 57
surrey with a fringe on top, Decatur 12
T
Taylor, Martha Ann 28
toys 15, 75
Turkey Creek 36
V
Vincent, Virlie 55
Vorhees Street, Reading, Ohio 18
W
Wabash River 13
Whitaker, Edna & Elizabeth 25
Whitehead Metal Products 58, 70, 71, 7 73
Wilshire Blvd,, Los Angeles 51, 76
World War I 14, 25, 26, 27, 60, 65, 68, 71
World War II 40, 6 65, 68, 69, 71