Author: Ronald Guenther
Written: February 12, 2014

We left the Delsmans looking for a permanent place and they found one in Arago.  There the children all went to the Arago grade school, mom started in 1922 in the first grade, Louise was already in the third grade, and the next year Uncle Dick entered school.  For Louise, it was the third school in three years.  They left quite a ways out of town, actually about a mile and a half and so they took the “school bus”, which at that time was a horse drawn wagon.  Mom loved it.  It was the last year they had the horse drawn wagon, after that a real school bus came along.  It must have been a ricketedy old thing, but at least it got them to the school.  It was at that school that mom met a life long friend.  That was Joanne Milani.  They hit it off beautifully.  She said that her family was from Italy and mom like any good Oregonian at the time said, Oh, so you are an Eye-talian.  Joanne looked at her rather sternly and said, It is not Eye’talian, it is Italian (a short i) just as it is not Eye-taly, it is Italy.  Mom said she was so embarrassed, she felt like sinking into the ground and never made that mistake again.  She also made sure that we never made that mistake either.  Joanne had a younger brother, Freddy, and Freddy and Uncle Dick became very close friends.  The Milanis had a farm about three or four miles from the Delsman farm, on the other side of Arago, actually.

When I think about it, true Oregonians always had a different way of pronouncing words, for example, you never said:  wash, you pronounced it warsh.  An old family friend was happy to tell us a story about when he was a boy.  He was the same age as my grandfather.  In those days, one of the big events was to have a spell down.  All the kids lined up and a word was given.  The first person tried to spell it.  If he/she got it write, the next person got a new word, but if wrong, that word passed on to the next person.  Jack was so proud of the fact that he was the only one in his school that knew there was no r in squash so even though you called it squarsh, you did not have an r there.  The people were also rather cut off.  One time a little girl from the South was visiting some family out there and mom started to talk to her and finally said, You talk so slow that by the time you are finished, I have forgotten what you started out to say, and the little girl answered, You talk so fast that I cannot understand you.  Another time a little girl from England was visiting and mom thought it was so funny that rather than saying, for example, two o’clock, this little girl said, two of the clock.

After she was married and had several children, Joanne and her husband, Sherman, and their children visited us a few times.  We really liked the children.  They were about our age and so nice.  They ended up living in, I believe, Klamath Falls, or it may have been Yrica, California.  One of the relatives was that old lady that mom always talked to after church.  She called her Aunt Catherine and so did we.  Aunt Catherine was the sister of Joanne’s father and she lived with the family when mom was growing up.  Because Joanne called her Aunt Catherine, mom did, too, and all her life called her Aunt Catherine.  Aunt Catherine was really a nice and independent lady.  She lived to be just over a hundred and would probably still be alive, but she was living alone, fell, and was unable to call for help.

The life was a simple one.  They had a large herd of dairy cows, not as large as they were later to have in Coos River, but still large.  Grandpa Joe was one of the biggest farmers in the Coquille Valley and a big supplier of milk to the cheese factory that was located in Arago.  Later mom was to go during the noon hour and get curds from that factory.  Mom was a picky eater, too.  For a whole year when she was in the third grade, she lived on milk and graham crackers.  What was worse, she felt that the milk from her own father’s cows did not taste right and so grandpa Joe bought a quart of milk everyday so that she would have something to eat.  Mom always was a rather picky eater, though.  Evenings, they would gather around the piano and sing popular and folk songs.

At one point, Grandpa Joe decided that milking cows was really hard work and it tied you down, so he sold his whole herd and went into truck gardening.  In those days, every county was pretty much self supporting.  That was the case right up until just after World War II when the railroads brought in refrigeration cars and the trucking industry got big after the building of the Interstate system.  That was actually Eisenhower’s big contribution.  He had seen the Autobahnen in Germany that Hitler had built.  Of course, Hitler did it so he could move tanks quickly from one part of the country to the other, but it was soon the principal routes that the cars and trucks took, too, and Eisenhower thought we could also have such a system.  So, what you did, was buy up fruits and vegetables when they came on the market, ate them while they were available, and canned, you did a lot of canning.  Grandpa did that for two years.  The trouble with that kind of farming, though, is, you have to go from store to store and market the stuff.  Grandma Wilda, though, liked it very much, because they had a fruit and vegetable stand and she and other farm women would sell their produce.  That was a happy time for her.  Basically, though, she did not like it on the farm.  She wanted to get back to Portland.  But that was not to be.  Grandpa on the other hand, did not like to go from store to store peddling his produce and so after two years, gave it up and went back to dairying.  Mom liked to remember that time, though.  It was up to her and Uncle Dick to take care of the carrots and they took that job very seriously, as well they should have.  They also had guests and visitors and next time I will tell about some of them.  One of Edwin’s visits was famous.

To be continued.