Author: Donald Guenther
Written: February 24th, 2014

We have the Delsmans on the farm in Arago.  They were really cut off from most of the rest of the Delsman and Sander families.  Aunt Mamie and Uncle Heini made a point of going to Ashland once a year and Uncle Heini and his brothers, there were five of them, would get together once a year.  They did that until the brothers started dying off.  But the Sander family was really close.  They did have visitors.  Aunt Gerthy and her husband, Uncle Carl visited them once in those early years.  But Aunt Dora visited them close to once a year with her son, our cousin Edwin.  Edwin loved it on the farm and talked about it until his dying day.  It was a special time for him.  Aunt Dora never brought her current beau with her at the time, whether husband or somebody else, this was a special time when she could get together with her sister.  Grandma’s mother visited just once for a short visit, that was grandma Rena.  I do not believe that she brought with her our step grandfather, Stahl, though.  Edwin had a hard time staying out of trouble.  The snakes down there are a godsend.  They kill all the vermin and small varmints that occur and once Edwin killed a bunch of snakes and was so proud, he put them up on a fence.  Another time when they were getting ready to go back to Hillsboro, he got all dressed up in his traveling clothes, the best he had.

But he did want to see grandpa working and say good by to him.  Grandpa was cleaning out the barn and he had a big manure pile out there.  He would wheel the manure from the barn out onto the pile and dump it at the end and to get there he had some boards that he wheeled out on.  So, there was Edwin, out at the end of the boards seeing what grandpa had done when all of a sudden grandpa came with a huge load of manure.  “Look out!” said grandpa and Edwin stepped back and went up to his neck in manure.  So, they pulled him out of the manure, they cleaned him up and took the train the next day.  Aunt Dora was disgusted, mom laughed.  Once when Edwin visited us at the old place with his whole family, Bob and Louise and I snuck over to mom and asked in a whisper, “Is that the guy who fell into the manure?”  Edwin overheard us and laughed and said he was the one all right and he had told that story to his own children.  Mom and Uncle Dick played a lot together and got very close.  They had an agreement, too.  One day or maybe a half a day, they would play house like mom liked and the next day they would get out and rough house and climb trees or whatever that Uncle Dick liked.  Mom had a pet chicken that was her “baby” and she would dress it all up.  The chicken must have been quick smart, too, but one day as they were walking along, it gave a high pitched cluck, jumped up, and fell down dead, and that was the end of that chicken.  They did not even eat it.  It had to be buried.

But all was not just peaches and cream, either.  After the movie, Birth of a Nation, there was a big revival of the Ku Klux Klan.  It was a big movement and is was very big in Oregon, especially along the coast in Western Oregon.  Crosses were burned on the top of the hill overlooking Marshfield (Coos Bay), the Chinese graveyard was desecrated.  There were no blacks in the state at the time, or at least hardly any, so the objects of the persecution were Catholics and foreigners.  Mom said, they hid all their religious objects and nobody ever said grace at the table.  Suddenly, everything Catholic went into low key.  They got together with the Masons and got a constitutional amendment to the Oregon constitution passed that banned Catholic schools.  People were afraid of them and rightfully so.  People simply disappeared.  My father in law, who was both Catholic and foreign had nightmares about them for  the rest of his life.  A woman tried to write a thesis about them and their growth and activities on the Oregon coast and fifty years later, could find no one who was willing to talk to her.  The nuns stood up to them.   The law was found to be constitutional by the Oregon Supreme Court but was then declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court  They had a recruiting office in North Bend and called themselves the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.  Moreover, they had the tacit support  at least at the beginning by our president at the time.  He was a racist, was from Virginia and loved that move.  That was Woodrow Wilson.

To be continued.