Author: Ronald Guenther
Written: February 6th, 2014

We left the Delsman family in Portland at the time of the great flu epidemic.  It was after WWI, work was now hard to find, Grandpa Joseph was not interested in working in the woods or the sawmill or as a longshoreman, as I mentioned at that time, there were labor problems, the IWW was actually fairly strong and the leaders like Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn exerted a big influence.  Grandpa had a wife and three children to support.  He moved the family back to Tillamook.   Grandma would have been glad to stay in Portland, but the whole family moved.  A little bit of looking for a place in Tillamook and Hillsboro had only led to dead ends.  But grandpa had a sister and her husband who had recently moved to Coos County, to the Coos River area and he thought that maybe there was a chance to find something there.

Let us digress for a moment.  Uncle Heini Sander had married Aunt Mamie Delsman and they had a farm in Ashland.  It was a profitable farm.  Why they ever moved is beyond me.  Uncle Heini had even won a blue ribbon for his prize bull, a black Angus, at the state fair.  I did ask him once why he moved and he said they were young and adventuresome, they knew how life would be if they stayed in Ashland, and they had read that a new territory had opened up in Coos County and they decided to sell out and move there.  So, they did.  They got an excellent price for their farm in Ashland and so went to Coos County with quite a nice financial cushion and there they fell into the hands of a real swindler.  This was a smooth talker.  He told them that he had a great farm for them, the road was not yet in, but would be within the next year or two.  The place looked great, they bought it.  As it turned out, the road did not go in for over fifty years.  They had to take their milk and other things that they raised by boat, in fact they had to go everywhere by boat.  It was expensive.  But they had the money to stay afloat for a few years.  It was really a nice looking place, too, good dairy country.

So, grandpa went down there in, I believe, 1919 and left the children in the care of grandma.  Grandma was so sure they would find paradise down there, that after a couple of days, she took all their savings, paid for the train ticket to get them to Coos Bay and off they went.  So, when she and the children arrived, there was no way to get back home.  Grandpa was a little taken aback by this turn of events, so he looked for a place to work until he could find something permanent.  He was a hired man at a dairy farm in the little community of Norway for about a year and then found the place in Arago where they located and stayed the next twelve years.  In the end, he became one of the biggest farmers in the Arago/Myrtle Point area.  He had found his niche.  But the family continued to visit Aunt Mamie and Uncle Heini, they would spend days there on that farm.

Aunt Mamie and Uncle Heini had to bring their goods by boat and also to import what they needed by boat so they had a large dock and it was there that my mother learned to swim.  Aunt Mamie taught her.  That Coos River was frightfully cold, but that did not matter.  Aunt Mamie tied a rope around mom, at the time she was six or seven, and threw her into the river.  Mom sank like a stone, Aunt Mamie pulled her up with the rope, mom screamed and thrashed in the water, Aunt Mamie without saying a word, walked back and forth the length of the dock, mom swallowed water, mom went under, every time she went under, Aunt Mamie pulled her up.  After a while, mom learned to stay on top of the water, she swam.  When I was little, mom always went swimming with us.  She was never a competitive swimmer, but she developed a nice form.  I never saw her swim in a cold river, though, even when we could go up Millicoma or Allegheny, she would not swim, pop would, but she would not, she would swim in a pool, though, and as I said, became quite a good swimmer.  Aunt Mamie’s technique, though effective, was never used on us.

Mom loved Arago, she loved the farm.  Her sister, our Aunt Louise, took to the farm and was instantly helpful, more so than mom or Uncle Dick.  The two of them liked to play.  Grandpa liked to sing and grandma while at what was to become Valley Catholic had learned to be quite a good pianist, so evenings they would sing, mainly the popular songs of the time.  When I was little grandma still had some of the song sheets, I remember Smoke gets in your eyes was one and you can hear that on YouTube, and then there was The wreck of the ol’ 97, where the engineers is killed and in the end of the song, it says to the women, be good to your kind and loving husband, he may go and never return and grandpa would look over at her, smile and wink.  So, things were off to a nice start.

To be continued.