Author: Ronald Guenther
Written: March 21, 2014
I think Ed is probably right about those two stories that Don and I told. I believed them myself until Ed came up with the idea that they were just too pat to be true and I really think that is the case. Oh well, they were good stories. Don’s story was always suspect, but I still believed it. By the way, Grandpa Joseph was only called Joe by one man that I knew and that was by Mr. Brelage. Everybody else called him JB. His name after all was Joseph Bernard. I never called him grandpa, myself, except after I got older. To me, grandpa meant Grandpa Sam. I called him Pappo, where the a is pronounced as the a in cat and the o at the end as oh. So, he was pappo. I had a pappo hat, pappo pants and so on. Grandma Wilda was always called Grandma as for that matter was Grandma Rena. I never knew Grandma Alice but she was also referred to as Grandma.
Grandpa Joseph was very successful out in Arago. Every little area in those days had a cheese factory and he furnished most of the milk for the cheese factory for the area around Myrtle Point and Coquille which happened to be located in Arago and close to the Arago school. Mom used to like to walk over to the cheese factory during the noon hour and get some curds. For some reason she never liked cheese, but she loved curds and because grandpa furnished so much milk, she got them free. Pretty soon, other students realized what was going on and they went for curds as well and so the people put a stop to it, but she still ate curds whenever she could find them. As I said, grandpa was very successful and eventually had the most productive dairy farm in the area, but he wanted to branch out and saw a great opportunity to get a farm right there at the junction of Coos River and Ketching Inlet in the Coos Bay area. In 1932 he moved his whole operation there. He took an option to buy the place and settled in. Eventually, he was milking roughly a hundred cows and at one point had a crew of five hired men. I hasten to add, this was the depression, those fellows were working for food. Pay was little and often there was none but they did eat. One Christmas, he gave each of the men $10 for their Christmas bonus and they took the money and bought him a nice Christmas present with it. They were just grateful to have a job. Mom had to leave her friends in Arago and she was really homesick. Her mother then did a stupid thing. She pressured mom into calling herself Geraldine rather than Clara. All her life she had gone by the name Clara. To her dying day, all the relatives called her Clara and when pop first started coaching Saint Monica’s School, we played all those little schools out there like Arago and Riverton and so on and all the people out there still remembered her, after all, that was only sixteen years later, and they all still called her Clara. She and Uncle Dick were terribly homesick, too, for their friends and finally toward the end of summer, they convinced Freddy and Joanne Milani to come and stay with them.
The school year started with four transfers from Arago. Mom had always been a good student, had been the top student at Arago, but the principal had his own bee in the bonnet and did not like transfers. Mom was never a member of the honor society even though she was eventually the salutatorian for her class, something that always bugged her. She ran for a student body office, too, I believe it was for secretary, and the principal campaigned against her and she lost. In those days the school principal was called the professor and I was always confused growing up what the meaning of the word professor was. Until I went to college, I thought it meant school principal in some outlying school, but that usage seems to have died out. But mom and Uncle Dick made friends quickly. Mom became Geraldine. Despite grandma’s pressure to go by the name Geraldine, she never called her that, she called mom Ted or Teddy. Pop never called that either, he called Gerdeen, so poor mom never really had a name that was universal.
People used to talk about the Delsman ears, they were especially big and Uncle Dick had the Delsman ears. It turned out that those ears came from GGGGGreat Grandma Bernhardine Eimers, but since all Delsmans were related, they were the Delsman ears. Uncle Dick even wrote a poem about that. He said in the poem that if he were ever lost at sea, he would use those ears to paddle him home. Ironic, isn’t it. In those years, too, both at Arago and Coos River, the girls had an inter school athletic program and mom played basketball. Girls rules were different in those years. The court was divided into three parts. In the middle were the center and running center, at one end were two forwards and at the other end were two guards. Mom played running center. After each basket, the ball came back to the center and you had a jump ball. So, the running center had quite a bit to do. I think mom liked it in both high schools, especially after the Milani kids came. Grandpa was very successful, too. He had come from Arago with a nest egg and he immediately started reinvesting it. He bought some property that the Messerles now own and also a place out Haines Inlet. He planned to exercise his option to buy the place he was on. He started up a construction company and bought a cat. Later, he had the first contract to build the North Bend airport. It was prohibition while he was in Arago and initially in Coos River and everyone made their own beer and wine. He made a plum wine that he was proud of and Uncle Heini made a beer that he said later was better than the Budweiser that you can now buy. Things were on the upswing.
To be continued.