Author: Ronald Guenther
Written: March 8th, 2014

Here is another little bit of poesie.  This one is from Aunt Dora.  When she was a senior in high school at what is now Valley Catholic but in those years also included a boarding school for girls, she wrote into one of the girls’ poesie albums:

Fruit decays as soon as ripened,
Love and kisses soon grow old.
Young men’s vows are soon forgotten.
Take care old girl and don’t get sold.

Here is an ad from the Ku Klux Klan.  In the good old days, bigotry was out in the open, nobody thought anything about it.  There was also no problem in harassing people.  So, here goes.

Look Sharp, Americans!

To ignore the problems of your Race and Country is to wilfully (sic) defraud posterity.  The greatest danger facing the American Republic today is the gradual replacement of our religious, social and political foundations by those of alien origin.

To fight for the conservation of our Race and for its betterment is not a matter of racial prejudice.  It is a true sentiment based upon knowledge and the lessons of history rather than a silly sentimentalism bred in ignorance.The remarkable growth of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in the face of wholesale calumny has driven the anti-social and anti-American forces to desperate measures.  With their lying propaganda they are trying to discredit this noble organization in the eyes of Americans.

Our enemies are your enemies!

The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan shall ever safe guard the integrity and welfare of our native institutions.  They are anti-nothing except that which is avoidably destructive of constitutional privilege.  They are intolerant of nothing except that which represents the forces of evil.

For further information address
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan

This sounds a lot like the Nazi propaganda.  I will later tell you about eugenics which was taught in the schools clear up  until I was in high school.  I learned about that in our health classes.  We are lucky to have modern genetics.  The forces of evil in Oregon were foreigners and Catholics.  The Klan tried to close Catholic schools, they also tried to close the churches.  In Coos Bay, Father Sheridan marched right into a Klan demonstration in front of the church.  It was lucky that he wasn’t killed, but those people did nothing in the open.  In the outlying areas where mom and her family lived in Arago, they were lucky to have a priest, a young man, one of the last to visit people on horse back.  His name was Father Kericko.  (I do not know how to spell it.  It was pronounced:  Care – ee – koh).  One time while he was visiting and staying over night with Grandpa Joseph, he wanted to say mass for the family and had no hosts so grandpa decided that he could make the hosts.  It had to be unleavened bread.  So, he whipped up a bunch of it and to make it though, he took one of those old irons.  There was no electricity out there at the time, it came shortly afterwards,  so you heated the iron on the wood stove, or in his case, he had a kerosene heater and he heated the iron on the kerosene heater.  Well, then came communion.  The hosts tasted like kerosene.  Father Kericko remarked, “Oh, Joe, I know you had to use the kerosene heater, but did you really have to make the hosts so large?”  Poor grandpa, the whole family chomped down the hosts and never let him forget it.

But the clan went down hill after a high point in about 1925 or 1926.  The polio epidemic came to Coos County and our Aunt Louise died.  Aunt Gerthy came to help dispose of Aunt Louise’s belongings.  She would ask, did this belong to Louise and if the answer was yes, it went into her bag and was thrown out.  Grandma never willingly talked about Aunt Louise again.  Even the last time that I say her, thirty two years later, she could not talk about her.  Mom and Uncle Dick would go out to the barn and talk about her.  Grandma Wilda hung in there for about a month and then had a nervous breakdown.  Ostensibly, she went to her mother in Portland and she probably went there for awhile.  I suspect, though, that she spent a lot of time with Aunt Gerthy.  At any rate she was gone.  The day she left, one of the hired men came in and wanted to do something nice for the children.  They were in the process of emptying the ashes in the stove and had made a real mess, but mom and Uncle Dick dropped everything and went off with the hired man.  Grandpa came home that evening after milking, cleaned up the mess and made supper.  He never said a thing.  Later he said he just wished he could have talked about Louise, but Grandma would have none of it.  After about five months, grandma came home.

To be continued.