Author: Ronald Guenther
Written: December 1st, 2013
I just wanted to say a couple more things about the Aunts Gerthy and Mamie. Their husbands were long since dead when I grew up. They were older by a few years than our grandmother Wilda. When we visited, mom would take them out to the graveyard and their favorite thing was to point out all the foibles of the folks buried there. They would point to one grave and say something like, that fellow was having an affair with the woman over there. Her husband was a traveling salesman and that couple had a real drinking problem and so on it went. They brought up more hanky panky than this generation ever thought of. Marriages seemed to hold in those days, but there was a lot of unhappiness, too. Those good old days certainly had their drawbacks and these two aunts were delighted to talk about them and point to the graves of those who had them.
After their husbands died, Aunt Mamie moved in with Aunt Gerthy. I told you that they had a little shack out in the garden where they took in old men hoping for an inheritance. They never got one, but it was not for lack of trying. One of the fellows, his name was Jim, did say that he would come back and let them know how things were on the other side. He told them exactly how to prepare for him. So, he came back and communicated with them through a system of knocks. I know that is hard to believe, but it has to be true. I got this from Grandma Wilda herself. Once she stopped by to visit them and they were in the midst of a session. Grandma said her hair stood on end and she said loudly, In the name of Jesus Christ, declare thyself. The knocking stopped and they never heard it again. The Aunts Gerthy and Mamie were furious. Mom thought it was rats and she was probably right. But you know, in the good old days, unusual things happened that no longer do.
The Landess sister that we are really interested in is Grandma Rena. Actually, her name was Irena but everybody called her Rena. She was a poet and whenever something happened, especially if it was sad, she would write a poem about it. Only one of her poems has survived. She married rather young. The name of her husband was Wilbur Richard Wiley who went by the name Richard, said my grandmother. Our own Uncle Dick was named after him. He died before mom was born so she never knew him. He eventually went deaf and it was his deafness that he passed on to my mother, me, Sister Louise, and whoever else is hard of hearing. At any rate, she immediately had a baby who was still born. She wrote a poem immediately after his death and that is the poem that has come down to us. About a year later she had our grandmother, Wilda Ruth, and a year later, her second daughter, Dora. A couple years later, she had her third child, a son, our Uncle George from mom’s side of the family. His birth was a difficult one and she was never able to have children after that. She also felt that she was unable to take care of the three and so she gave our grandmother to her own mother to raise. So, our grandmother grew up thinking that her own grandmother was her mother.
Incidentally, you know that picture of the old woman smoking a pipe? That is the grandmother of Rena. She claimed that the only reason she smoked was because it was good for her katarrh. It certainly must have helped because she did like that pipe. At any rate, back to Rena.
Rena left Wilbur and moved in with her parents. After 4 years she divorced her husband, Wilbur Richard and married Grandpa Stahl. Grandpa Stahl was a German, a tailor, quite a dapper man, said my mother. When we visited Portland, which we only did twice while Grandpa Stahl was alive, she always made a point to visit him. So, that was pretty much the end of Wilbur Richard. He continued to look after the children and pay child support. Grandma Rena seemed to be happy with Grandpa Stahl. They had a tailor shop for a while in Corvallis, and then moved to Hoquiam, Washington, where they set up a successful tailor shop and employed a number of seamstresses to keep up with the work. After a few years, though, Grandma Rena decided she wanted her daughter, Wilda, back and so she asked her mother to send Wilda up for a visit. Wilda was fourteen at the time and had no idea who the lady was she was going to visit, but she went.
After she got there, Rena sent word to her mother that she was now keeping her daughter. Rena’s mother promptly died of a broken heart and it caused a rift among the sisters. The Aunts Hattie and Etta would have nothing more to do with her. Eventually, they all got back together shortly before Rena died but the relationship was different after that. After a couple of years, though, Rena decided that three children were too much and so she enrolled Wilda and Dora in a boarding school for girls. My recollection was that grandma Wilda was a sophomre and Aunt Dora was a freshman at the time. They were roommates. The year was 1906 and the school is the school that is now called Valley Catholic. It was there that both Wilda and Dora became Catholics. Wilda took for her baptismal name, the name Irene. Years later, after our grandfather, Joseph Delsman had died and she had moved to Portland, she went by the name Irene.
If you visit her grave, you will find it listed under the name, Irene Meier, Meier was the name of her second husband. She is buried in the veterans graveyard just off highway I-205. They were happy there at the boarding school. When she was a junior, she was told that her father had been hit by a train and killed on his way out to visit her. Grandma believed that all her life. It was not true. He was hit and killed by a train in Pasco, Washington, where he was taking care of business.
To be continued.