Author: Ronald Guenther
Obtained: 11/30/2013
The Landess family was the first family in that line that I have a clear picture of. As I said, there were five sisters and one brother in the family. Of the brother, I know little. They all married, but very few children came out of the marriages. To my knowledge, Grant had no children and neither did our Aunt Hattie. The sisters were all close. Aunt Etta had one child. Her name was Gloria, but everyone called her Glora and that is the name that I knew her by. In the late 1920-s, Aunt Etta was killed by a hit and run driver and Glora was taken in by Aunt Etta’s sister, our Aunt Gerthy. Aunt Gerthy had married a man named Carl Larsen. They had no children of their own. The youngest sister was our Aunt Mamie. She married a man named Jim. Aunt Mamie worked in a logging camp as the camp cook and there she met and married Jim. After a year or two, she saw that Jim was pretty worthless. Once Aunt Mamie was showing us some pictures of her younger years and said there was Jim, her first husband. Aunt Gerthy piped up and said, “Oh, he was a bad one, that Jim!” Aunt Mamie said, “Oh, Gath, he wasn’t all that bad.” Aunt Gerthy wanted us to call her Aunt Gath, but we never did. It seemed to me that Gath was a worse name than Gerthy, but anyway. Carl Larsen had an ice cream fountain and he and Aunt Gerthy bought a place of about 2 and 1/2 acres on the edge of town. Now that place is in the middle of down town Hillsboro, right next to the County Courthouse. Bob, Louise and I used to like to go to the lawn of the county courthouse and watch the squirrels and sit under the trees. It was beautiful. At any rate, Aunt Mamie then remarried another Jim, this time, Jim Shaw. By the time that I knew them, though, the husbands of Hattie, Etta, Gerthy and Mamie were all dead as were Hattie, Etta, and our great grandmother Rena.
I only met Glora once. She was no longer living with Aunt Gerthy by that time, but had a place of her own in Hillsboro. Mom liked Glora. Mom said she was a pretty girl with a lot of good ideas of games to play. Glora was very patriotic, too, probably the most patriotic member of our family. During World War II, a number of USO clubs sprouted up and the young soldiers would go there, the local girls would, too, and then they would dance and talk. A lot of these soldiers were worried about being shipped overseas, as well they should have been. War is dangerous and they worried that they might not come home, or if they did, whether they would have anybody waiting for them. So, many of them married or became engaged before being shipped out. Glora was not only patriotic, but also had a soft heart and so when one of the boys proposed, she accepted and they married. He then was sent away waiting orders about what would happen next. In the meantime, another boy came along who was also worried about the future and so they became engaged. Then he was sent elsewhere. As bad luck would have it, though, the two men met on the troop ship going overseas and after they talked for a while, they both pulled out pictures of their loved one and they had identical pictures. Well, Glora got two rings in the mail, but she was not one to let bad luck get her down. She married and had children of her own.
When I knew the Aunts, Gerthy and Mamie, they were living together at Aunt Gerthy’s place in Hillsboro. Glora was to be Aunt Gerthy’s heiress. Aunt Gerthy was very robust, strong and healthy. She always referred to a hospital as the “pistol” and claimed she would only go to one in order to die. As it turned out, she was right. The Aunts Gerthy and Mamie ate buckwheat hot cakes every morning for eighty years. I loved them, Bob thought they were OK, pop thought they were the greatest things on earth. The rest of the family were not too taken with them.
Once when Big John was staying with us, I got some buckwheat flour. I loved the hot cakes. Big John had heard about those buckwheats all his life and so he decided one morning to make some. He got out a recipe book and followed the recipe closely. You start out the evening before. The next morning, he carefully fired them and sat down and had a happy look on his face and said, “Look at these, they are just perfect!” After one bite he said, “These are pretty good.” Then after the second bite he said, “But they are a little gritty, aren’t they?” After the third bite he said, “These are gritty and uneatable.” Then he through them out and never ate them again.
The aunts, Gerthy and Mamie, always wanted to inherit some money. Aunt Mamie did not have any. So, out in the middle of the property, Aunt Gerthy had an old shack and they would take in these old fellows and wait for them to die, which they all did, but none of them left any money. With one, though, old Jim, they had an experience, which I will tell about next.
To be continued.