Author: Ronald Guenther
Written: February 1st, 2014
Noma Elisabeth Guenther Davidson was born in Iowa, I believe on the farm just outside of LaPorte City. She died in a nursing home in, I believe, Beaverton, at any rate just outside Portland and is buried next to her husband, Lester, in the Sunset Graveyard just South of Coos Bay. Aunt Noma was a lovely woman and we all loved her. The name, Noma, is unusual. When she was pregnant, Grandma Alice went to visit a friend just before Christmas and saw that the name of the Christmas lights was NOMA. You still buy NOMA Christmas lights, just look at the package. When Grandma Alice saw that, she said, now I know what I will name my baby if it is a little girl. It turned out to be a little girl and she named it Noma and the second name came from Aunt Elisabeth, I believe. At any rate, I am a little more tentative now with my assertions. Lester Davidson was of Swedish descent. He was an excellent contractor and builder, had a hard growing up. At any rate, she was the sister of pop, the middle sister. The last Christmas in pop’s life (old Lester was dead by then) we celebrated at Annie’s place and she was there. She said it was the best Christmas that she ever celebrated and the food was the best ever. She said, “Don’t tell me the old Christmas dinners were better than this. Those old gals couldn’t cook. They couldn’t follow a recipe so they always flugged up.” That Christmas she and another old fellow at the nursing home in North Bend were practicing a couple of Christmas songs and one of them was ‘Home on the Range’. I was surprised at that and asked and she said, “Yes, it is a Christmas song, you might say, it is about home and all that sort of thing.” Well, I did not contradict that but I did think it was funny and so I told pop that she was practicing this song, ‘Home on the Range’ for Christmas and he said in her exact same words, “Yes, you might say it is a Christmas song, it is about home and all that sort of thing.” Those three, Berchion, Noma and pop all had so many funny ways of putting things and they were all alike.
Noma and Lester lived when I first knew them in a home on Bay Park Hill (up the hill from the Bunker Hill School) that he had built and that is where they were living when Grandpa Sam and pop came to say good by before heading off to South America. They moved several times after that. Lester was a contractor, a builder, and a carpenter. Like all builders, though, he had no qualms about selling the house that he had built and moving on. Eventually, he retired because he said he hurt his back and they had a trailer in Lake Side. They then moved to another trailer in Empire and when they could not take care of that, Pauline, their daughter and our cousin, moved them to a nursing home in North Bend. That is where he died. Aunt Noma was 82 when she died, almost 83. She died a couple years after pop died.