Author: Ronald Guenther
Written: February 1st, 2014

I said previously that John Bernard turned out to be a good farmer and he was.  But even on a homestead, it was impossible to make a go of it with no money and so the boys had to have jobs and work.  Beginning very early, while Grandpa Joseph was still in grade school, he had a job with an older fellow delivering milk.  Grandpa said he used to get so cold on these deliveries that he could hardly stand it.  I know what cold is like on the Oregon Coast, too.  I have experienced some mighty cold weather, way below zero, but the coldest that I have ever been is with Bob and pop at a Marshfield football game when the fog would roll in and we would shiver and couldn’t see anything because the Marshfield team always wore their fog suits.  At any rate, it was during such a time that Grandpa learned to smoke.  He usually smoked camel cigarettes and in those days there were no filters, not that they do much good, but that is what he smoked.  When I knew him, he smoked a pipe and to this day, even though I abhor the smell of smoke, I like the smell of a tobacco store, it reminds me of those times.  But the family kept up with their cousins in North Plaines and so there was a constant back and forth between the Sander farm, the Delsman farm in Tillamook and the Delsman farm in North Plaines.  Grandpa John Bernard, however, began to fail, he complained of severe headaches, especially in the last year of his life.  He died in 1904 and was buried in the Catholic Graveyard just West of Portland.  You can get to it by going out Burnside.  He was the last one whose obituary was in German.  The family up until that time had continued to speak Low German, as did the other Delsman family in North Plaines, but Grandma Clara, despite the fact that the obituary was in High German was not one to keep up the German language.  Shortly after the death of John Bernard, she sold everything and moved to Ashland. Mom and I speculated why she did that.  We concluded that she probably wanted to get away from the relatives.  The whole Delsman clan was famous for its drinking.

Those people really knew what to do with alcohol.  They could smell out bottled beer and hard stuff even before it was opened and had a tendency to look a little too deep in the bottle.  But that is just speculation.  Grandma Clara took the two youngest children and moved.   They were Charles (our Uncle Charlie) and Aunt Mamie.  Aunt Mamie had been born in Columbus just before they came West and Uncle Charlie was born in Tillamook.  Grandma Clara seems to have been a good investor.  Later, around 1912, she took her money and went back to Columbus and paid off all the creditors.  At that time, she also visited the relatives back there and had to take a lot of criticism because she had not kept up the German.  She seems to have quit speaking German, that is Low German, after the death of her husband, but Uncle Heini (the husband of Aunt Mamie) still remembered that the older children all spoke Low German.  Aunt Mamie though said that grandpa could not speak High German.  That is probable.

At any rate, the older children stayed in Tillamook and kept up the relationship with the cousins in North Plaines.  Later, Aunt Ag and Uncle Will and Aunt Clara and Uncle Joe moved to Ashland as well, and Uncle Ben, a brother of Grandpa Joe eventually made his way South by a circuitous route through Coos Bay where he built a couple of houses by Mingus Park and then on to Ashland and then on to California.  Uncle Henn stayed in Portland and Married our Aunt Lizzie. Grandpa Joe lived and worked in Tillamook and Hillsboro.  He and his cousin in 1905 took the trip to Portland to see the World’s Fair.  It was a big event and commemorated the hundred year anniversary of the year the Lewis and Clark expedition came to Oregon.   There was a large Chinese population in Portland at the time, there was even a China town.  The Chinese had been brought to the West to build the railroads and they had worked for almost nothing.  After the railroads were built, they were stranded.  To this day, you see the remnants of that.  Everywhere you go, there are Chinese restaurants.  To show allegiance to the emperor and to be able to return to China, though, the men had to have a cue.  There was also the superstition that with the cue, you could be pulled into heaven.  What is more, the Chinese were discriminated against and so they eventually formed a secret society, the Tongs.  The Tongs still exist but is more of a benevolent society now, much like the Elks, but in those days, they were formed to look after the interests of the Chinese and to protect the Chinese.  They also got into the trade of drugs and prostitution and so on.  The white police could not penetrate the organization, but to run afoul of the Tongs was no small matter.  On a dare, Grandpa Joe cut off the cue of a Chinese visitor to the fair and then ran like crazy to get away.  As it turned out, he was not caught and seven years later, Sun Yat-Sen led a revolution against the rulers and ousted them.  All over the world, the Chinese cut off their cues.  Grandpa went back to the cousin’s place in North Plaines and he told the story over and over again how he had cut off the cue of a Chinese fellow at the fair.

It was while he was working in Hillsboro that he met and married Wilda Ruth (baptized Irene) Wiley, who was living with her aunt, Aunt Girtha (we said Gerthy) and uncle Carl Larsen in Hillsboro.  She had finished her schooling in what is now Valley Catholic, which in those days also had a boarding school for girls.  A history of the order, Those Valiant Women, gives an amazingly detailed look at the Oregon of the Willamette Valley in those years.  The only teacher that she ever talked about was Sister Wilhelmine and I had come to think that maybe I had misunderstood grandma about that name, but there in the book is the name of Sister Wilhelmine.