Ben and Ellen's Children

Children of Ben and Ellen, by age

Ben was working as a clerk in a hotel in Blue Earth, Minnesota when he met Ellen BeaMiller, a young lady from Wisconsin.  She worked as a maid in the same hotel.

A short time later they married and Ben began working for the Post Office.

The family lived in Blue Earth until 1908, when Ben left his job at the post office and moved the family,  Ellen and six children, to North Dakota where he filed a homestead claim a few miles south of Crystal Springs.   His father and brother had moved there earlier and urged him to come. 

At first Ben raised sheep, but as war loomed in Europe he followed his neighbors in raising wheat to feed the armies.  Wheat turned out to be one disaster after another and eventually they lost the homestead and moved to the West Coast.

Ronald, born first, fought in WWI,  where he was gassed.  He came back and he and his father had words.  Ronald would not submit to the old man’s domineering ways and short temper, and swore he would never be whipped again.  When the family moved west Ronald moved to Mt Vernon, in northern Washington.   He had a farm and a great number of children. He came down to visit for his parent’s 50^th wedding anniversary, but was too ill to come down for Ben’s 100^th birthday, and died soon after. After grandma died one of his daughters, Susan, came down to care for granddad.  She left a short time later.

Vera was a schoolteacher in North Dakota.  She married a Mr Thomas, a socialist.  They had five children.   They moved to Springfield, Oregon.   At some point Mr Thomas, according to my dad, crawled out the bedroom window and hightailed it back to North Dakota, and was last seen living on an Indian reservation.

Thelma married a man named Bill Briese.  They moved to Battleground, Washington, where they had a farm, and Bill worked for the aluminum company in Vancouver, Washington during WWII and afterward.  They had one daughter.

Eleanor, or “Nonie,” married Owen Thomas, a brother of Vera’s husband, after they left  North Dakota.  He was also something of a socialist.  They settled in Springfield and raised three children.  The youngest daughter, Jackie, was near enough to my age that we were friends growing up.  Nonie was the oldest of the children who made the car trip from North Dakota.

Cecil drove the old Ford touring car from the homestead in North Dakota to Colfax, in Eastern Washington, where the nine remaining children and Ben and Ellen lived for a few years before moving to Springfield.  He married a woman named Mary, and they raised three children.  Dick was my age and we sometimes played together growing up.  Cecil worked at the Booth Kelly mill in Springfield and drank too much.  There were stories of violent behavior.  When granddad was in his seventies I heard him say he was going up and whip Cecil because he was drunk, but it was only a threat.

Aldyce was a tomboy, leading the younger children in an active lifestyle on the homestead, riding horses and playing sports with the boys.  She was rebellious and wild, and left Springfield High School during her senior year and went to San Francisco.  She never moved back, and eventually married Bill.  She never had any children.  She and Bill lived in Indiana and retired to Sun City, Arizona.  They visited Jane and me in Aspen.

Everett, my dad, was the first child born in North Dakota, August 13, 1909.  He grew up on the plains, moved west with his mother and eight siblings, Cecil driving them all,  packed into a Ford touring car, open topped, with their few belongings tied to the sides and back.  He graduated from Springfield High School  in 1929 with a number of athletic awards.  Like many star athletes before and after, he thought the glory would never end, and neglected his studies.  He struggled for work during the Depression, finally becoming head of maintenance at Chase Gardens Nursery.  Like most of his brothers and sisters he liked to drink and dance; when he was 27  he met Lois Abercrombie at a dance in Vida, a small town outside Eugene and married her a few months later, June 5, 1937.  They had a son, Nick, born April 29, 1938, and 13 years later a daughter, Cynthia.  Everett had joined the Army National Guard in the mid 30’s, and served with the 41^st Infantry Division in WWII in New Guinea,  1^st Sgt with the HQ Company. When he was demobilized in 1944 he worked for Chase Gardens again until the steamy environment of the greenhouses reactivated the malaria he had contacted in the jungle warfare.  He then worked for Georgia Pacific in the plywood mill.  When I was 21 and going into the Navy he sold the house in Eugene and bought a 98 acre spread near Goshen where he raised cattle.

Freeman was born within a year of Everett and the two were inseparable for most of their lives.  Everett married Irene Opie (?) and they had three children.  The two oldest, Skip and Patty were my favorite Squires cousins.  Irene was very active in the Springfield parks department, responsible for the WillamaLane swimming pool and activity center.  She then worked at the UofO, history dept office.

Lela was part of the group of children led by Aldyce who spent their summer days in North Dakota keeping track of the small herd of mild cows, riding horses and playing baseball.  After high school she followed Aldyce to San Francisco, where she eventually met Ralph Stelzreid, a merchant seaman.  They married and bought a four story apartment house on Hays Street near Golden Gate Park and had three children, Jack, Judy, and a third son Rick, born late,  about my sisters age.  Jack died in his twenties.

Fay married Jack Williams.  They had three children, Danny, Diane, Jeanie and Rita.

Danny died quite young.

Bruce married, moved to Baker, Oregon, where he had a farm, worked for the post office, and had three children.  The oldest was Peggy, about my age.

Lorraine was last born.  She was a babe in arms during the car trip to Colfax.  She married a log truck driver named Prociw who died in a terrible accident loading his log truck a few years later, leaving her with two boys, Dennis and Billy and a girl, Nancy.  She never remarried.  She was the last to die, in 2013. 

They liked to drink and dance and have fun, and they all lived well into active old age.  Vera was in a bowling league in her nineties.  They were a tough old bunch.

Chase Gardens

Chase Gardens

In the thirties and into the early fifties, it was common for women to wear a corsage when they went out for dinner or dancing on a Friday or Saturday night.  In the southern Willamette Valley, these corsages were provided by Chase Gardens, which was a company  owned by the Chase family with a great number of greenhouses on the north side of the Willamette River, between Eugene and Springfield. They also grew fruit and vegetables for winter sales to the grocery stores.  The Chase family owned many acres of land along the north bank of the Willamette River, where they grew peaches and beans, a vast collection of bean yards where generations of Eugene and Springfield teenagers, from my parent’s generation up to and past my own, spent the summer picking the bean which went to the cannery and were sold all over the West Coast.   In the late sixties the Chase family sold their land for real estate development. The land is now freeways and businesses.

During the depression it was hard for Freeman and Everett to find work.  Ben was laid off from the U of Oregon maintenance department.  The only money that came in that first year was from the two boys finding a job at Chase Gardens pruning trees at ten cents a tree.

Freeman subsequently found work driving a truck delivering finished lumber for the Booth Kelley Lumber Company.  Everett joined his dad contracting, doing odd jobs, painting and roofing and glazing.  They spent one year in Portland as glaziers, putting up green houses on Portland’s east side.

With this experience Everett was able to get a job at Chase Gardens working on the greenhouses.  After a few years Ben was rehired at the U of O and once again the family had money coming in.

After returning from his war service in the South Pacific, Everett was able to regain  his old job at Chase Gardens, as head of maintenance.  Mom and aunt Carldene got jobs there also, making corsages.  This involved sitting a large table covered with boxes of gardenias.  The ladies trimmed the stem, then wrapped the stem in a green paper tape, a gentle downward twirling motion, then poked a pin with a nice looking glass head into the stem and put the gardenia, a lovely smelling white flower with dark green leaves, into a white box.  The boxes were gently packed and taken by truck to flower stores all over the valley for weekend sale.

The two ladies worked at Chase Gardens for several years after the war, until David, Carldene’s husband, took advantage of the GI Bill and moved to Monmouth to attend the Western Oregon College of Education. 

Mom got a job as a school cook, a job she had until retiring at age 65.

Dad found that working in the steamy greenhouses reactivated his malaria, contracted in the jungles of New Guinea, so he got a job at the Georgia Pacific Plywood Mill, where he worked until he was 62.  Then he told his foreman that he hated his job and he was quitting, and went out drinking.  Mom said he arrived home quite drunk.  He was able to work full time raising cattle on his 98 acre spread until Mom retired and they got a double wide trailer in Queen Valley, Arizona.

Mom said that Dad suggested they drive to New Orleans.  On the way they stopped to visit friends in Queen Valley, a small community east of Phoenix. Mom said she was surprised when Dad bought the trailer house.  She complained that she never did get to New Orleans.

Springfield Days

Springfield Days

At the beginning of 1946 we left Wendling.  The mill worker’s union decided that since the war was over they would go on strike for higher wages.  The Booth-Kelly company decided that they could get along without a sawmill in Wendling and moved everything to their Springfield mill.  The workers housing, A, B, and C Row, were torn down, and most of the other housing as well. 

Dad used the new GI Bill to order a new house built in Eugene, and until that was finished we were to live with his parents, my Squires grandparents.

In Springfield I took a school bus across town to Brattain Elementary School.

On weekends my parents liked to drive up to Wendling to drink beer and visit with Carldene and David.  The two army veterans, and others who showed up,  usually one or more of David’s brothers, enjoyed talking about their war experiences, and delighted in teaching me various ways to defend myself.  Many of these involved breaking arms or backs or trachea, which was far beyond anything that ever occurred to me.  However when I began school in Springfield at lot of the self defense moves came in handy.

Brattain Elementary School was much larger than the Wendling school, and the quality of education was nothing like the North Texas teachers laboratory school in Denton, Texas.  In the classroom I was bored, and would often get up from my seat and wander to one of the displays or bookshelves along the wall to find something interesting.

On the playground, crowded with kids from mill working or logging families, I had a hard time fitting in.  A lot of the boys carried knives in their knee high boots, and mumblty peg was the popular game.  This involved throwing a knife into the dirt in an attempt to make it stick, a skill I still sometimes practice.  I had several cousins at Brattain who gave me some social life but in general I spent a lot of time by myself reading.

The Squires grandparents lived on Kelly Street, at the foot of Kelly Butte.  Grandad Squires who was recently retired from the painting department of the U of O maintenance department, had built the house himself.  The house was el shaped.  At one end was the kitchen, which had a door opening to the back lawn and fruit trees, a door off of the driveway that abutted a covered walkway to the garage, a container in the wall to hold stove wood for the cookstove that had an outer and inner lid, to keep out the cold.  Out of habit, the old people kept a dipper which they filled with water from the tap.  There was a pump in the back yard in case the city water ever gave out.

From the kitchen one entered the dining room, which featured a large oak dining table, a cabinet for dishes and silverware, and at the other end a bookshelf holding adventure and mystery novels left there by the five or six children who had grown up in Springfield.

On the north side of the dining room was the grandparent’s bedroom, separated by a curtain, and a stairway leading to the second floor.

On the south side was a sitting room, creating the el shape, which contained a big wood stove for heating the house in one corner and in the other was a table on which sat a large radio.  In front of the radio was a rocking chair, for Grandad, and in front of the wood stove was a big stuffed chair, for Grandma.  In the southwest corner was a long couch with a small table in front.

The front door was in the northeast corner of the sitting room.  There was a shelf next to the front door holding a picture of Ronald in his WWI uniform and a picture of my dad in his WWII uniform.

Upstairs, which was unfinished, was one large room with several beds where the girls had slept, and around the corner was another room, which was for the boys, Everett, Freeman, and Bruce.  Here there piles of old magazines of a male nature, usually about boxing or mystery magazines.  Bluebook, a magazine for men, was also available.  This was a men’s version of Redbook, a magazine for women.

The lumber Ben had used to build the home was all cedar, still red and slightly fragrant.

Their house was on a double size lot, with a large vegetable garden taking up one half.  Every spring a friend of granddad who owned a team of plow horses would come to plow up the lot.  Ben and Ellen would grow corn and other tasty plants for canning and eating during the winter. On the open land north of the house was a large plot of strawberries, growing big and fat and juicy in the soft loamy soil.

Early in my residence there I discovered a chicken house up the hill on the northwest corner, with fat hens and a couple of roosters pecking the soil.  To my six year old delight, the chickens ran when I approached them.  I was happily chasing the chickens when I heard heavy breathing and the sound of pounding feet behind me.  My granddad was chasing me!  And he was angry!  I veered away from the chickens and led the chase into the house, where I escaped into my mom’s lap.  After a few minutes of heavy breathing granddad calmed down.  He urged me to never chase the chickens, which request I honored.  He taught me to find eggs the chickens had laid, piling them carefully in a basket for breakfast.

Behind the house was a steep hillside, the east side of Kelly Butte.  This was a scene of exploration.  I found a section of mud which cousin Skip and I slid down one spring day, sliding over and over in the gooey mud, till we were both barely visible beneath our layer of silt.

I tried the same thing one summer day, but the mud had dried and I bounced rather than slid, and ripped the sleeves off my shirt, and tore my forearms as well.

At the top of the butte was a section of exposed rock, where I had my first rock climbing experience. 

I also climbed the trees on the hillside.  I was just then reading Tarzan, and found places where I could leap from tree to tree.

We lived there for almost two years, then in the spring of the third grade we moved 

The Big Flood

In the fall of 1945 Mom and Dad and I lived in the little red house in Wendling, and

I began the second grade in the Wendling grade school, quite a change from the North Texas State Teacher’s College laboratory grade school I had attended in Denton.  Dad got back the job he had prior to the war, as head of Maintenance at Chase Gardens in Eugene.   He found jobs for Mom and Carldene there as well.  My aunt Carldene’s husband, David, had returned from the European Theater of Operation and was now working in the woods, bucking and trimming fallen logs, and the company offered housing for him and the other loggers.

One day in late December the rain began pouring down.  Walking home from school GD, who was now in kindergarten, and I looked at Mill Creek as we crossed the covered bridge.  The water was rising fast.  We hurried through the rain, our heads down, holding hands in the murky dusk.  There were no lights in my house so we continued on up the hill to where Grandma stood on the porch, holding an umbrella.  When she saw us she came running out.  “I’ve been looking for you boys.  I was worried you had washed away.  Come on in.  The radio says Springfield is flooding.”

As it got darker we began to worry that my folks would not make it home.  David called from his parents.  His sister in Marcola had told them that the Mohawk River was flooding Marcola and the bridge to Wendling was under water. 

What was I to do?   Granddad came home and said that Mill Creek was over the covered bridge to town.  We listened to the radio news from Eugene describe the rising Willamette River overflowing its banks.  Grandma said that I would have to bed down in GD’s room.

Then we hear the sound of a big truck.  Grandma peered out the window.  Lights from the truck were coming up the plank road.  It stopped at the bottom of the hill.

Grandma said, “My stars, if that isn’t the Downing cattle truck.”  The Downing family owned a lot of logged off land between Wendling and Marcola and ran a substantial cattle ranch.  Soon we saw three people hiking up the hill and the cattle truck turned around and headed downhill. 

It was Mom and Dad and Carldene walking up to us.  I was so relieved.  GD and I jumped around till Grandma told us to hush.  Grandad went to the door and we watched them take off their wet coats and shoes on the porch.  Grandma gave them towels. We were all laughing and asking questions.

They had made it as far as Marcola, but the water was too high to cross the bridge to Wendling.  The three of them were huddled in the rain trying to decide what to do when up drove Johhny Downing in his empty cattle truck.  He said he was sure the truck was high enough to make it across the bridge, and if the Abercrombie girls wanted to chance it they could hop in.  There was only room for three in the cab, so Dad had to climb in back and stand in the ankle deep manure.  We all laughed at that. 

Mom and Dad took me home and put me in bed while they ran water for the tub.

The next day the water had receded and life was back to normal.