Author: Ronald Guenther
Written: December 6th, 2013

So, I left the two sisters, Wilda and Dora in the boarding school which is now Valley Catholic but is no longer a boarding school.  My grandmother Wilda was always proud that she had gone there to school.  Years later, she made a special effort to drive Bob and me by there and show me the main building, which is quite impressive.  She did not tell us then and we did not think to ask, but that building was built in the thirties and was not there when she was there.  At any rate, the school at that time and still has a reputation of excellence.

She finished her high school in 1909, but did not go home to her mother and Grandpa Stahl, but instead went to live with Aunt Gerthy,  Aunt Gerthy, Aunt Mamie and she had been raised practically as sisters.  I think that it shows that she was not comfortable with her mother.  After all, she had only been with her mother a couple of years before being sent off to boarding school and her mother had to work as a seamstress in the tailor shop.  At any rate, that is where she went.  Her father had died in 1907, as I said in Pasco, but she died believing he had been hit by a train walking out to visit her and Dora.  Aunt Gerthy lived in the house where we knew her in Hillsboro.

Aunt Dora stayed one more year at the boarding school and left it in 1910.  She married shortly afterwards a man named Doyle.  They had a son who was the same age as mom’s older sister, Louise.  His name was Edwin.  I knew Aunt Dora only briefly.  I thought she was a saint.  We went to the Grotto with her.  She was dying of breast cancer at the time and was very religious.  Afterwards, we went to an ice cream store and I still remember, she had a strawberry milkshake and to this day, I associate strawberry milkshakes with older women.  Aunt Dora had a hard time making relationships and marriages work.  She divorced Edwin’s father and took up with somebody else and each time she visited mom’s family in Coos County, she had somebody else.  I remember hearing about a fellow named, Gus.  According to Edwin, Gus was a good one and he hoped she would keep him, but she sent him on down the road as well.  She was about fifty five or six when she died.  Later Edwin had his own problems with marriages and relationships, too.  That probably all stemmed from the funny upbringing they had had with their mother.

I was asked when our grandmother Wilda died.  She was born in 1891 and died in 1960 in March of a stroke.  Mom was there at her bedside just shortly before she died.  She could no longer talk.  Mom told her to squeeze her hand if she understood and she did squeeze mom’s hand, so mom felt that she had taken leave of her.  If anyone wants to visit her grave, it is in the veteran’s graveyard just of highway I-205, the Portland by pass on the way to the airport.  Grandma went by three different names, Wilda until she left Coos County, then Ruth for awhile, and finally, Irene.  It was as Irene that her second husband knew her and she was buried there.  She did not want to be brought back to Coos County and buried next to our grandfather which was mom’s wish, but instead, she was buried in the veteran’s graveyard next to her second husband.  The name under which she is buried is Irene Meier.  Mom only visited her grave once and I brought her there and as it turns out, we were shocked.  A day or two after her death, her second husband, Fred, met a woman while he was drinking, roughly a month later, they were married.  Well, he outlived grandma by five years and died and then was buried next to grandma as she had wished, but when Fred’s new wife died, which happened just a year or two later, she had herself buried in his grave.  Our grandmother would have been just furious over that.  Ed’s middle name is Frederick.  Grandma wanted us all to call Fred, grandpa, but we never did.  I could not bring myself to do so.  I knew grandpa and he was not my grandpa.  Anyway, none of us knew him that well.  Grandma also wanted Ed to be named after Fred and mom could not bring herself to do that, either.  After all, we had no Joseph-s in the family.  So, she gave Ed as his middle name, the name of grandma’s second husband.  Fred had served thirty years in the navy as a non commissioned officer, he said he was a boatswain, pronounced, boats’n.  Anyway, he turned out not to be the man we thought he was.

But the question now is, what happened in between those years after grandma left high school and moved back to Portland.  Grandma was and remained a Catholic all her life.  She was also very pretty and so caught the eye of a young man who was singing in the choir in the Hillsboro Catholic Church.  He had cousins living in North Plaines, a place just outside of Hillsboro and West of Portland.  He had moved out from Nebraska with his own family and by this time they had had a place in Tillamook, but his father had died and his mother had sold their place in Tillamook and moved to Ashland.  This man’s name was Joseph Bernard Delsman and at the time, he was a contractor. 

To be continued.