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| Aunt Elsie |
If you have been following my Amanuensis Monday series
transcribing the manuscript my great-aunt Elsie wrote, you know that it stopped
before her family moved from Idaho to Oregon. However, I can continue
(admittedly, in less detail) from there. Each time I visited her she told me
other stories, which, thankfully, I recorded as soon as I got home.
I have before me the notes from two conversations with
Elsie, one on 18 Apr 1999 and one that I unfortunately neglected to note the
date, but it would have been in late 1998 or in 1999. Some of what she said
repeats what is already written in her manuscript, so I will omit those parts.
The rest I will sort more or less chronologically and present in the following
paragraphs.
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| The day of one of our conversations. My “nephew’s” mom was also there, but apparently she was taking the picture. |
Going back to the times that Elsie wrote about in her
manuscript, she told me a couple things that she had not written about. She
told me that when she was a little girl she used to sit on her dad’s lap and
curl his moustache. She said he had some kind of special wax or cream that he
would put on it.
She also remembered that her dad always said that tea should
be the color of whiskey. Elsie told me that she was so young she didn’t know
what whiskey was, but she always remembered that tea ought to be the color of
it.
And now we arrive where the manuscript left off. The first world war has ended, and Walter Sr.
(Elsie’s dad) has fallen in love with Oregon because berries and nuts grow on
the sides of the road. He had been working in the shipyards in Portland during
the war, while his family remained in Idaho. But now the war is over, and he
has decided that the whole Underwood family will move to Oregon.
When they came, they took a train from Idaho to the Oregon
town of Canby. That seems a remarkable stopping point to me, as Canby is a fair
distance south of Portland, and a pretty small town. I wonder how they even
heard of it. However, perhaps it was more prosperous at that time, or perhaps
they knew someone there. Elsie said that they stayed with friends for a while,
though she didn’t say whether those friends lived in Canby or Portland. And
unfortunately, if she mentioned their names, I did not write them down. But
after staying with those friends, whoever they were, the Underwood family got a
house in the area of Portland known as Errol Heights.
Elsie left home at age 15; she didn’t get to finish high
school. At that time she moved in with a prominent Portland family, the
Banfields. There is now a freeway named after them. She looked after their
little girl, Harriet. She also cooked for them. On Thanksgiving, she would
prepare their Thanksgiving dinner before going home to her own family for the
holiday.
The little Banfield girl picked out a set of dishes for
Elsie. They were a buttercup pattern because she said that Elsie was just like
a buttercup. Mrs. Banfield told Elsie to go to a particular store and look at
this particular set of dishes. She knew that Elsie loved to set the table. So
Elsie went to the store and looked. She liked them, but, she protested to Mrs.
Banfield, they were so expensive, and she had such a large family. (Her
“family” at this time is, naturally, referring to her parents and siblings. She
had not yet married.) But Mrs. Banfield wanted her to have these dishes. So she
had the store do a table setting display with them for Elsie and told her to go
look at them again on her day off. Elsie felt very awkward about it, but Mrs.
Banfield’s word was law, so she went. She nervously entered the store. The
salesgirl asked if she could help her.
“I’m supposed to look at a table setting,” said Elsie.
“Oh! You must be Elsie,” said the salesgirl, and showed her
to the table setting.
It was beautiful, but once again Elsie protested the price
to Mrs. Banfield. It was no use: Mrs. Banfield wanted her to have the dishes,
so she bought them for her. She also insisted to Elsie that they be used for
everyday, not saved for special occasions.
At the time of my visit, Elsie proudly showed me the dishes,
and told me that she still had the entire set. She was just shy of her 92nd
birthday.
She said that one time they had duck for dinner, and it
tasted like fish.
Sometime after all the Underwood girls were out of grammar
school, Walter and Flora Underwood (the parents) moved to Netarts, on the
Oregon coast. Walter’s sister and her husband, known as Aunt Sadie and Uncle
Alvy, lived next door. Walter built both houses. He preferred living at the
beach to living in Portland. He sold flower bulbs there.
Here I must interject a story of my own. The houses in
Netarts are no longer in the family, but when my Dad was a child he used to
visit his grandparents there. When I go with him for a drive in that area it is
like a guided tour: he points out the house that belonged to his grandparents
and comments on the changes that have been made in the neighborhood, he shows
me where the dump was where his cousins used to shoot rats, he tells about the
dune that was behind the Schooner Restaurant and how the kids used to run down
it until one day a boy was covered by sand and died. I have accompanied him on
enough of these excursions that I can almost tell some of the stories
myself, although Dad tells them best. He is an excellent storyteller. Like a
little child, I beg him to tell them again and again.
One day, my parents and I were on such a drive, and we saw a
garage sale sign. Not one of us can resist a garage sale. And then we realized
that the sale was at Walter Underwood’s old house! We definitely had to stop.
Among the other items displayed in the front yard were a large number of
gladiolas. “The man who used to live here ran a nursery,” explained the woman
running the sale. “That was my granddad,” my dad said. These were flowers
descended from those originally planted by my great-grandfather. So naturally
we bought as many gladiolas as we could carry—not only were they lovely to look
at, but they were family heirlooms!
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A gladiola resembling those we got from Walter Underwood,
Sr.’s former garden.
By 3268zauber (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons |
But we must go back in time again, and return to the stories
that Elsie told me. There is little left; the rest is more like snippets of
information than stories, but they are still worth telling.
During WWII, there was a scare at Netarts Bay. Walter Sr.
and two other men watched on the ground all night, but fortunately nothing
happened.
When V-J Day came along, people swarmed into Safeway, the
grocery store where Elsie worked.
Elsie’s sisters Aileen (my grandma) and Inez worked for
Jantzen Knitting Mills. Aileen was the floor manager, and Inez was a spinner.
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| My grandma, Aileen, is the last woman from the right in the second row. Her sister Inez is directly behind her. |
Elsie also said that she remembered going back to Idaho and
visiting her sister Vida’s grave with her mom. If you recall, Vida was the baby who died of typhoid
fever, apparently when the Underwoods were living in Burley, Idaho. “Mom
allways thought she could have saved Vida,” Elsie wrote in her manuscript. She
told me that Vida had been the only one of the children who had brown eyes.
That is the end of the notes I took on the two visits I
mentioned. There were many more visits and many more notes, but I was just
beginning to become serious about genealogy and still had a lot to learn about
organization. The other notes are scattered amongst my papers, yet to be sorted
into any sort of identifiable structure. I often, when going through old
paperwork, run across a stray piece of scratch paper or even an envelope
covered in genealogical notes from those early days.
However, since you have already spent so much time getting
to know Aunt Elsie, I suspect you may be interested to learn about the rest of
her life.
She married a man named Ferris Jones on 21 July 1928 in
Portland, Oregon. I don’t know much about their marriage, as Elsie seldom
talked about it except when saying something like, “That was when I was with my
first husband, Ferris.” I once asked her about Ferris, but all she would say
was, “He wasn’t good to me.” They divorced sometime before 1960, but I have not
yet been able to find the record.
Despite how well I thought I knew Elsie, I learned only last
year that she was married on 9 July 1960 to a man named Donald Peterson. They
probably met at work, since I know that Elsie worked at Safeway, and he was a
meat cutter at Safeway. There are, of course, a number of different Safeway
locations, and I don’t know at this time whether they were both at the same
location, but it does seem the likeliest scenario. Their marriage, however, was
very short-lived. Even my dad, who was a child at the time, was surprised to
hear of this marriage, having no recollection of it, and I could not find a
single picture of Donald in the family album.
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| Marriage record for Elsie and her second husband Donald. Two of the witnesses are Elsie’s sister and brother-in-law. |
She married a third time on 20 April 1963 to Lee Crocker.
This was the uncle that I knew, and the marriage that lasted. Elsie once told
me how they met, and I know that I recently saw those notes, but evidently I
did not put them where they belonged, because I don’t see them now. However, I
do remember that the story involved square dancing and seeing
Lee walking around with his three children.
Lee, as I knew him, was a quiet, but very kind man. Elsie,
in contrasting him to her first husband, said, “He’s good to me.” Elsie never
had any biological children, but she took in Lee’s as her own. Their mother had
passed away in 1960. I know that Elsie loved those children very much. Every
time I visited she was sure to show me the latest pictures of her kids and
grandkids and to tell me what each one was up to. Unfortunately, I never got to
know them personally very well, though we did meet a few times, but Elsie
always made sure to tell me the latest news. (I suspect she kept them apprised
of the latest news about me, as well.)
When my own grandmother, Aileen, passed away in 1989, Elsie
and Lee took over as sort of my surrogate grandparents. It is difficult to put
into words what they meant to me. It was shortly after my grandma died—memory
makes me want to say the day after, but I’m not sure that is correct—that I
spent a very special day with Lee and Elsie. I think it was the first time that
I had stayed with them without my parents, and it might even have been a
sleepover. But after that day, although I still missed my grandma, I didn’t
feel quite so much like she was gone. And I knew that whenever I needed Grandma
Aileen, I could always call on Elsie.
Lee passed away on 11 April 1992. After that, Elsie moved
into a smaller apartment. I remember “helping” her move. (I doubt if I was much
help!) We explored many treasures hidden in her huge closet. She did not have
to move far; they had lived at an upscale retirement home called Willamette
View Manor, and she stayed within the manor, just in a different hallway.
Elsie remained lively and spry into her 90s. She kept some
rosebushes in the manor’s garden and made a habit of leaving roses at her
neighbors’ doors in the morning so they would have fresh flowers for their
rooms.
And then one day she fell. I have never understood how a
broken bone can completely destroy a person’s health, and I probably never
will. But Elsie spent the rest of her days in the hospital. She passed away on
20 June 2001.
I think her life was well summed up by one of her friends at
the funeral. I don’t know who it was, only that she lived at the manor. She
told my mom and me that, having no family of her own, she had never quite
understood why Elsie was always talking about hers. Sometimes it would rather
annoy her that Elsie was always talking about others. But, seeing how many
people were at the funeral and how much love there was, “Now I understand.”
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