Author: Ronald Guenther
Written: December 14th, 2013

I thought that I should flesh out Grandma Wilda a bit so that no one gets the wrong idea about her.  Remember that I do not really understand her, nor for that matter did mom, pop, either of her husbands, nobody really did.

Grandma Wilda had an unusual growing up.  I have already gone over what she went through and how that must have affected her psychologically.  My mother brought us up with the idea that we were to love all our grandparents.  On the other hand, at the time, that was not always easy to do.  Grandma Wilda also suffered some real set backs that she was not able psychologically to handle.  Having three children close together like she did was hard.  She of course got no sleep, no mother ever does, the birth of Uncle Dick had been hard and she obviously did not feel like she was getting the support from her husband that she deserved.  From his standpoint, though, he had to make a living.  They had lived and worked in Portland for a short time where he worked in the shipyards.  He earned $2/day and was amazed with a salary like that that they could not make it.  Times were tough for people out here on the West coast at that time.  There was consequently a lot of labor unrest, the Wobblies, the IWW, were strong and simply pushed for higher wages and better working conditions.  A few made it big, namely the timber barons, but most of the people found it hard to make a living.  Later during the roaring twenties, the twenties did not roar out here.  So grandpa really had to struggle.  He had gone back to Tillamook to try to get his construction business going again, but that was also not working.  His mother had sold the family place and moved to Ashland, so it was a hard time for him with a young family.

After they patched things up personally and the family was back in Tillamook, grandpa wrote to Aunt Mamie and Uncle Heini to see what the possibilities were in Coos County.  They invited grandpa to come down and check things out, they had bought a farm in the Coos River area.  Uncle Heini had been very successful in Ashland, had made a lot of money there, won a blue ribbon at the state fair for his bull, I believe it was an Angus, but had heard that a new territory was opening up in the Coos County area, so he sold out and came up to Coos Bay to buy another place.  So, grandpa went down there.  He did not like what he saw where Uncle Heini and Aunt Mamie were, but started checking out other places in the county, the year was 1919, when who should appear on the scene but grandma and her three children.  She had taken all the money they had in the bank, gave up the house they were renting, and spent all the money coming down to Marshfield (now Coos Bay) on the train.  She arrived penniless.  So, there was grandpa.  He took a job as a hired man on a farm just outside of Myrtle Point, and then after a year rented a place in Arago where mom grew up.  In the meantime, grandma pined the whole time for Portland.  What a stupid place Arago was and what she had gotten herself into.  But grandpa was able to make a good living there.  He had a option to buy the place.  Grandma found that during haying season, she was cooking three meals a day for quite a large crew and during the rest of the time, was a farm wife at the time.  She did like getting together with some of the other farm wives and selling fresh fruits and vegetables at a little stand.  As nearly as I could tell, that was about the only thing she did like to do, not enough to ever want to repeat it, but did talk about it nostalgically.  Then her oldest daughter died.  She knew her daughter was going to die.  Every time there was a death that was close to her, she dreamed of muddy water.  She had another nervous breakdown.  This time, her husband sent her to Portland to be with her mother.  While in Portland, her doctor said that it would be could to calm her nerves if she smoked and drank a little.  So, grandma tried both.  She really gave cigarettes a try, but it did not take.  She simply did not like to smoke.  Alcohol was another story,  She discovered that that really was nice and a good way to calm her nerves.  That turned out to be a problem.

Her mother must have been a rather strange woman herself.  She was tough, though, as were all the Landess sisters.  Our Grandma Rena had had three children.  Grandma Wilda was never really happy and contented.  Her sister, Dora, apparently also was not.  She had had many relationships with men, never was able to make any of the stick.  She had only one son, our cousin, Edwin, who ended up with a special relationship to alcohol and also had trouble finding a real life’s partner.  He told his mother on her death bed that he was divorcing his first wife, Honey, whom everyone loved and who was really very beautiful.  Aunt Dora was heart broken.  The third member of that family was our Uncle George.  He never married, spent his life in logging camps and lumber mills, enjoyed relaxing with the bottle, and died at the shack in the yard of Aunt Gerthy.  It was an unlucky family to be born into.  At any rate, Grandma Wilda was with her mother for seven months and then came back, begging to head back to Portland.  Shortly after she returned to Arago, though, her own mother died.  She knew her mother was going to die.  She dreamt of muddy water that time, too.  Her husband, Grandpa Stahl, lived another twenty years but never remarried.

So, grandma was mentally unstable.  On the other hand, she could be generous and loving.  Mom always felt responsible for her.  Strange that a daughter should feel that way.  When we were very young, we (= Bob, Louise and I) really loved grandma.  Later, a lot of children made her nervous.  She only visited Coos Bay about three times that I can remember after she went back to Portland.  The first time was to tell us that she was marrying Fred Meier.  Then she and Fred visited us about twice.  Dory remembers the Hershey bars, but that was really Fred’s idea.  The last time we visited up there as a family, the boys all slept in the basement of the house and had brought our own sleeping bags.  Later, Bob and I visited her alone a couple of times when we played tennis.  She spoiled us rotten during that time.  We also discovered that she had a special relationship with the truth as well.  She would tell an out and out lie and then sit down and figure out why it was God’s own truth and if somebody else misinterpreted things, well that was their problem, not hers.

The first house that I remember was a little small house on Date Street overlooking Mingus Park in Coos Bay.  Grandpa had always thought that it would be nice if the folks found a place like the Selvors in Glasgow.  A place like that did come on the market and the folks went out to look at it.  It was owned by the Barnes’ family.  That year was 1941, just three months after Louise was born.  They looked at it and put earnest money on it on the spot.  That was the place where I grew up.  It was wonderful.  It was just outside of Glasgow where the boundary of Kentuck began.  Of course, the folks had no money at all.  Their own bank account was empty and it looked like the banks were going to be reluctant to lend them money.  So grandma gave them the money to buy the place, not quite all the money but almost all the money.  So, grandma could be generous.  The Selvors turned out to be our neighbors.  He was a Norwegian immigrant who spoke English in a way that I never understood, his wife was American, they had one son, Hansi, who according to my math teacher was the smartest boy ever to attend North Bend High School.  The place for us was a paradise and grandma made that possible.