Author: Ronald Guenther
Written: March 25, 2014

We left mom and Uncle Dick at Coos River High School together with their friends, Freddy and Joanne Milani, and grandma and grandpa on the farm on the Ketching Inlet.  Uncle Dick and mom got along fine.  They had one teacher that was very popular with all the students.  She was just out of college, actually only a couple years older than the seniors in high school.  She was unmarried, her name was Miss Ennegrin and although she had a beau in Gold Beach or somewhere over there, she did a lot with one of the local high school graduates and the kids all hoped she would marry him.  Her favorite was Uncle Dick.  Her first name was Sari-Ann. Uncle Dick was a lot taller than she was and he would rest his elbow on her shoulder and say, “Well, Sari-Ann, how are things going?”  And should would reply, “Now, Dick, you know that I am Miss Ennegrin.”  And he would say, “Oh, yes, I forgot, I will remember next time, Sari-Ann, you can count on that.”  But he never did call her Miss Ennegrin.  Miss Ennegrin did tell the other girls who always gathered around her that if she ever had a son and she hoped that she would have, she was going to call him  Richard.  After one year, she married and she did have a son and she did call him Richard.  Mom actually fit right in at Coos River High School and attended their reunions up until the time she died.  At the end of the school year, they had what was called the senior skip day.  We called it the senior picnic.  They had it a Lake Cleawox , which is now part of Honeyman State park.  They had no way to get there, so finally, grandpa said that they could use his truck.  Uncle Dick, a junior in high school would rive it.  So, the entire senior class loaded onto the truck and Uncle Dick drove and they headed up north.  The class had a grand time.  But graduation was near and all good things eventually end and so the school days for mom did as well.  She graduated.  Then Joanne Milani went back home.  Freddy did stay on for an additional year, though.  About that time, the youngest sister of old Mr. Milani moved to North Bend and got a job.  She ended up staying there the rest of her life.  Mom would talk to her every Sunday at church.  She had been living with the Milanis.  She never married.  She had had polio and it had settled in her hip so she was crippled and never thought she could marry.  Mom and we always called her Aunt Catherine.  She was mom’s link to the past.  She also called mom, Clara.

Mom graduated from high school in 1934.  As so many girls did, she had to get a job and jobs were hard to come by.  She got a job working as a maid for a woman named, Mrs. Main.  The Mains were well to do people in Marshfield (Coos Bay) at the time.  The town was growing up by then and getting city water and city sewer.  The only source of water that was close was a lake at the head of Pony creek, which flowed into Pony Slough, right where Pony Village is today. 

So, he was in charge of the water supply.  Later the people decided that he was charging too much for the water and so the city took it over.  After a year, they had to raise the rates substantially.  But when mom worked for them, they still had the franchise on providing water for the city.  The city sewer meant only that the city built pipes emptying directly into Coos Bay, which was an improvement over the idea of having your cess pool just ten feet away from your well.  It was Mrs. Main who impressed on mom the necessity of using good grammar in her speech.  After about six months she got a job working as the care giver or baby sitter for the O’Neill family.  They had two boys, Jim the older boy and Bill the younger.  Mrs. O’Neill was originally Lois Perry and she was married to Joe O’Neill and we grew up with them.  The O’Neill boys were little scamps at the time.  The first day that mom baby sat them, little Bill was making a nuisance out of himself and when the O’Neills got home, they asked how the boys had done and mom said things went well for Jim but Bill had been hard to handle.  Well, Joe got plenty mad at that and he told Bill to go fetch him a switch, he was going to switch him good and proper.  Little Bill climbed up a tree and got the best switch he could find, crying all the time.  Then old Joe used it.  Mom was appalled and never said anything again.  Later in life, both Bill and Jim said the best time of their early lives was when mom baby sat them.  She took them to a movie once.  It was one of those Shirley Temple movies that were so popular at the time and in it, Shirley Temple had a special relationship with the truth, but if she were told to say something was Honor Bright, well, then it had to be true.  Mom used that to good effect.  If she were suspicious of something  Bill had said, she would say, Well, Bill, is it Honor Bright?  And he would respond, well, maybe not quite honor bright, but pretty close and then she would get the truth out of him.

Mom loved those boys and they thought highly of her all their lives.  Joe was a carpenter and Lois was working in the separator factory run by Evans Products.  Lois was funny.  Once she said that she had gotten married at fifteen and the biggest mistake of her life was that she had not married a year sooner.  Joe had been in the navy in WWI and had an impressive tattoo on his arm.  All the navy people who had gone below the equator or to one of the exotic points in the far East, had neat tattoos.  We always liked Joe, but his boys thought he was a tough task master.  Mom worked for the O’Neills for about six months and then Lois left her job, Joe, despite the depression was doing well and her salary was no longer needed.  Mom was out of a job and moved home.  She was considering her next move when Aunt Noma decided that they needed some beef.  Her father and brother were staying with them and were eating them out of house and home.  So, they were going to trade beef for clams.  Mom and grandma headed over to the Davidson (Noma and Lester Davidson) house with several packages of beef and it was there that grandma met the young brother of Aunt Noma, our pop/father/grandpa John.

To be continued