Author: Ronald Guenther
Written: November 17th, 2013

So, we left things where pop and grandpa were heading out for South America.  The year  was 1934.  The political party that grandpa had gotten involved with in Peru was being gradually taken over by the Nazis who had come to power in Germany.  Grandpa thought that maybe the Nazis were the right thing for Germany and at the time, the widespread persecution had not begun.  The first thing that had happened was Hitler took care of the rivals within the National Socialist Party itself, people like Roehm were simply murdered.  Then they took out after the communists and that party went underground and essentially disappeared as a political party.  The true socialists suddenly kept quiet themselves.  This all occurred very quickly.  Then it was time for the Jews and other minority groups such as the Gypsies, the mentally deficient, and so on.  Murder meant nothing to those people.  Americans did not realize what was going on and could not believe people such as the Nobel Prize Winner, Thomas Mann, and his family as well as a number of Jewish scientists and anti Nazis who had flooded into this country.  Later, after Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, occurred, grandpa became very quiet, he never joined the German-American-Bund, which had been quite active.  Later when I was in the ROTC I had to swear that I had never been a member of the German-American-Bund nor a member of the communist party nor any other subversive organization.  But grandpa did know, or at least claimed to know, the members of the Nazi party who had taken over the organization in Peru.

Grandpa and pop arrived in Coos Bay.  Aunt Berchion did not want them to stay with her and so they stayed with Aunt Noma.  Pauline at the time was about three and they were delighted with her.

Aunt Noma’s husband was a man named Lester Davidson, a man of Swedish descent, an excellent carpenter and a heavy drinker.  But there was little work for a carpenter at the time and so he like so many others picked up money where he could.  His own father had left the family when he was in the fourth grade and so his mother pulled him out of school and made him go to work supporting the family.  It was tough for a ten year old to be the sole support of the family, which consisted of a younger brother and a mother but he did it.  When pop and grandpa arrived, though, he augmented his income by digging clams.  He would trade the clams for whatever he could and also sold them to old Mr. Perry, the man with whom pop and Aunt Noma had lived for two years.  Mr. Perry had a little fish market down on front street in Marshfield (now Coos Bay).  Mr. Perry would also dig clams and bought fish from the local fishermen.  Clams were very plentiful in those days.  According to Mr. Perry, you just dug one hole and kept expanding it and picking up the clams.  I personally never saw clam digging like that until I went to Alaska to visit Brother Bob.  There we got into an area where we made one hole and just kept picking up the razor clams.  The clams in Coos Bay were those big Empire clams which I found even better than razor clams, but anyway.  I once was in that little store and had to go to the bathroom, just to pee.  They had a toilet there that was essentially just a hole over the water in the bay, you looked down and the water just swished around.  In those days, sewers were just put directly into the bay and of course, the bay was totally polluted.  When you went to Empire you could really smell the mud flats in the summer at low tide.  It was terrible.  But that is the way things were.  Originally, people swam in the Bay, but by the time I was young, nobody did that any more.

At any rate, one day, mom and her mother came to the Davidson house to trade beef for clams.  Grandpa Delsman had about 100 cows that he was milking and so each spring, when the cows came fresh, there were plenty of calfs and among the calfs there were plenty of little bulls.  He would raise the little bulls for about three months and then sell the meat as veal.  A number of other farmers did that as well.  A lot of the little bulls were “stored” on an island in the Coos River and to this day it is still called Bull Island (at least it was when I was growing up, maybe now it is not, who knows).  So at any rate, mom and her mother brought over some beef to trade for clams.  Pop happened to be there and he and mom got to talking and enjoying each other, mom was eighteen and had graduated from high school the previous June, pop was 22 and setting out on his big adventure.  He helped unload the beef and load the clams into the car.  Pop was really smitten.  Mom liked him as well, but to her he was just another boy that she had gotten to know and liked and that was pretty much the end of it.  Grandma, her mother, said that she was really taken with him, but all agreed that that meeting would probably be  the end of things.  Anyway, another point that turned mom off was that he was in the same family with Uncle Lester.  Everybody knew and loved Aunt Noma, but Uncle Lester was a different story.  Mom did not want to get to close to somebody who was a brother in law with Uncle Lester, so pop had a number of defects and anyway, there was another boy that mom had her eye on.  There was nothing definite between her and somebody else, but she was not quite ready to settle down with anyone just yet.  So that was that.  Mom and her mom drove away with the clams, mom never gave the situation another thought and that would probably have been the end of it all.  But then pop called a day or two later.

But before we get too involved with that part of the story, it is necessary to hear about mom’s family.  So we will have to take that up and in the meantime, the story will be continued.