Author: Ronald Guenther
Written: February 4th, 2014
To begin with, I just wanted to say that heavy drinking was much more prevalent in the good old days than it is now. Drinking was a real scourge in some of the Delsman families. Grandpa Sam hated drinking of any kind. However, Aunt Berchion married into the Perry family and those folks really knew how to drink. I remember one of the husbands, Lee Sundbaum, talked about how he blacked out for a whole weekend after a heavy bout of drinking and his wife, Leta Perry Sundbaum, did not think anything of it, she thought it was normal. Our own grandfather Joseph drank moderately and so he did not have a problem, but apparently that was not always true in the other families so it is not surprising that mom and I thought that maybe one of the reasons that Grandma Clara went to Ashland was to get away from some of that.
However, not all of them went. Later, Aunt Ag and Aunt Clara went and of course their husbands came, too. But Grandpa Joseph stayed and went between Tillamook and Hillsboro. While he was living and working in Hillsboro, he sang in the church choir there and that is where he met our grandmother, Wilda, who was living with Aunt Gerthy. They married and had quite a gala wedding. She had been told and it may have even been true, that her wedding gown was from Paris. During the party, her uncle came to her and gave her a ten dollar gold piece and said, that was the last of her inheritance. All her inheritance had been spent on keeping her at the boarding school and then putting on the wedding. She was stunned, she thought that she was going to get quite an inheritance, enough to give them a grub stake but it was not to be. They moved into a small place in Hillsboro and every night when grandpa came home from work, she met him at the door and said, let’s go out to eat, I am tired of staying at home. So, they did, but after a week, grandpa said, we cannot afford to eat out every night and we have all these nice cooking things, let us eat in, and then grandma had to confess that she did not know how to cook. Her mother had never taught her, nor had her grandmother, and during most of her high school years, she had been in boarding school. That did not bother grandpa, although he was surprised. So he just said, I will teach you to cook. And he did. Grandma became quite a good cook. Later during haying season when she had quite a large group to cook for, her food became famous, there was a lot of it and it was good. The hired men also praised her cooking. One thing she made sure of, her own daughters were going to learn to cook.
Grandpa and Grandma moved back to Tillamook, grandpa and his brother, Ben (actually, Bernard) went together with another group of three brothers to form the Delsman and Dolan Construction Company and initially all went well with it. In 1913, the first baby was born. They named her Louise. For a while she was destined to be the star of that family. She learned to drive the tractor at ten during the haying season after they had moved to Arago, she helped in the kitchen, she got fantastic grades and was loved by her classmates. She must have been something. Three years later, in 1916, our mother was born. They named her Geraldine Clara. There was a mix up there and Grandma Clara thought that she was named after her so much to grandma’s chagrin, she went by the name Clara. Then in 1917, our Uncle Dick, Richard Joseph Delsman, was born. Grandpa had hoped to name the baby after him but grandma said, no the baby had to be named after her own father. He was Wilbur Richard, but apparently within the family went by the name Richard while outside of the family, he seems to have gone by the name, “Cap”. I do not know where the Cap came from or whether he was the captain of something, but that is what he was called. Unfortunately, the birth was a hard one and after that grandma was unable to have any more children. Grandpa was always sad about that, he used to say, the big families are the happy families. I think he was wrong about that. I think a family of every size an be happy or said, but he had been happy in his own family with eight children and his own family was not always as happy as he would have liked.
After WWI started, the construction business was no longer able to support the five families involved and so the company was dissolved and grandpa moved his family to Portland where he worked in the shipyard. He was amazed, too, that on $2/day, he was barely able to make it. Toward the end of the war, labor problems erupted throughout the Pacific Northwest. The mill owners and timber barons were making a fortune and they were definitely not passing those profits on to the workers. The Pacific Northwest became a hotbed for the new union, the IWW = Indusrial Workers of the World that was founded and run by Big Bill Haywood. An effort was made to frame him in Idaho for murder, but Clarence Darrow, the foremost defence attorney of the time got him off. Before Mao’s little red book, the original little red book was a book of union songs and a real firebrand, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, one of the founders of the ACLU, arrived on the scene waving her little red book and rousing the men to rise up against the bosses. She later died while attending a communist party congress in Moscow. The roaring twenties were about to begin, but the twenties did not roar for the common people in the Pacific Northwest, life in Portland was hard, the world wide flu epidemic hit and grandma said the carriages of the undertakers constantly rolled by her window. Joseph and Wilda and family moved back to Tillamook.
To be continued