More mementos from the past, and the continuation of Wilma's biography...

My mother's toddler set of flatware. They do not match, but in those days, unless one was wealthy, having things match was mostly luck, not design.

The spoon on the left was my mother's baby spoon. The spoon on the right is from China, and was the baby spoon of my Grandma Barrett (Maggie). She was born in 1867.

The item at the top of this page is a project my father made in first grade at the age of 6 years in February of 1903. It depicts a hatchet and some cherries, probably done to commemorate President George Washington's birthday. The item on the bottom left is Wayne's Sunday school pin. The heart-shaped Valentine at the bottom is given to my father by a friend, Rolland Cobb. Little boys shared Valentine cards with their friends, just as little girls did, in those days.

Valentines to my father from Fred Stearns and J.B. The words on the page are from the backs of the cards.

These Valentines were probably given when my father was in 1st or 2nd grade in Sac City, since they didn't move to the Dakotas until 1907, when my father was 11 years old.

The two sepia-toned drawings above are of my parents. I drew them from their photos taken when they were about 18 years old. We do not have photos of them either at their wedding ceremony, or together on their wedding trip to Springfield with the Hughes. But, they were married about 3 years after the above portraits show them, so they would not have looked a lot different. I think my sisters and I inherited our 'good looks' from our parents!

And, now, on with Wilma's biography...Wilma had been introduced to my father after the death of her intended fiance, Harold Brownell, and Wayne, Wilma and Lela Martin (her friend) 'chummed around together...' But, eventually Wayne and Wilma paired off on their own, and Lela found another boyfriend.

 

"We became close friends of Lloyd and Laura Hughes. He was postmaster in Sac City. We went on camping trips and had great times with them after our marriage. 

"Lloyd and Lora had been married less than a year, and were planning a trip in their Model T Ford to Springfield, Missouri, the next June. Wayne and I had planned to marry in the fall, and Hughes wanted us to go to Springfield with them, but my family thought it best that we marry before we went on the trip camping along the way. So, we were married June 10, 1921 at the farm home of Daisy and George Neal. This place was at the edge of Sac City. They had sold their farm in Coon Valley township.

The above 'Wedding Booklet' will be 100 years old in less than six years. The audience can see that the guests at the wedding held at the farm home of Daisy and George Neal were: Rachel Cooper (sister of the groom), Mrs. C. G. Butler (wife of the minister), C. G. Butler (the minister), Mrs. W. W. Cooper (Wilma's mother-in-law and Wayne's mother), Mrs. Lloyd Hughes (friend of Wayne & Wilma, and witness to their marriage), Lloyd R. Hughes (friend of the couple, and witness to their marriage), W. W. Cooper (Wayne's father and Wilma's father-in-law), Daisy Neal (sister to the bride), Helen Barrett (sister to the bride), Mrs. Margaret Barrett (Wilma's mother), Marjorie Neal (daughter of Daisy and George Neal, and cousin to Wilma), and Gerald Neal (son of Daisy and George, cousin to Wilma).

"After the wedding and dinner, George drove us to Carroll where we met the Hughes to join them on the trip to Springfield. This was our wedding trip. The boys had put hinges on the front seat so it would fold back to form a bed with the back seat. Also, we had a lean-to tent which attached to the car, and 2 cots were set up in it.

"We got to Springfield where Lloyd's mother lived, and spent a couple of days there. Then we went to a place on the White River where we set up the tents and camped there along with Lloyd's sister and brother.

"On the way down to Springfield, we stopped at Kansas City and went to a rather classy jewelry store named Jacques to buy me a ring. I had a wedding ring, but this was to be my engagement ring. The salesman asked Wayne what size diamond he was interested in, and he said, "Oh, about a karat," but we found out that size cost more than we had to spend, so we settled for a smaller stone for $100. I'm sure we all looked like 'green horns' dressed in our khaki camping clothes. But we got the ring and went on our way to Springfield. (I mistakenly said the jewelry store was called 'Joseph's' but here Wilma 'corrects' me ~ she had to do that a lot when I was growing up!)

Lora Hughes and Wilma, on my parents' wedding camping trip.

 

Wilma in her hiking gear on their wedding trip to Springfield, MO, in 1921.

"We were friends with the Hughes for a number of years, and had a lot of fun trips to Minnesota with them. Lloyd died of a strep throat infection one summer. That was before drugs sulfa and penicillin were discovered. Lora got me a job as county recorder, and she worked at the courthouse until she retired.

"The first place we lived after we were married was Nemaha where Wayne was manager of one of the grain elevators. While we lived there, Dorothy Ann, Jean and Merry were born. The grain elevator was sold to the man who owned the other elevator so we had to find another job, since he managed it himself.

 Infant Dorothy Ann...

Wilma with her two oldest daughters, Dorothy Ann (standing) and Jean (in Wilma's lap)

Merry holding a ball and sitting on a 'twig' chair

 "Wayne found a job as tank wagon salesman for the Standard Oil Company at Humboldt. He called on the farmers in the Humboldt area to sell them oil and other products for their farming operations. So, we moved to Humboldt, about 60 miles away. (Wilma doesn't mention the time period when Wayne worked on the train and they took lunch to him as it passed through Dakota City, next to Humboldt, but I know it took place while they lived in Humboldt. That story appears in an earlier post. She also does not tell about the horrible accident my father had when driving the oil truck. I do not know whose fault the accident was, but his truck ran head-on into a car with a 4-year-old little girl sitting next to the driver in the front seat. When the two vehicles hit, she was thrown into the glass window - and back then, there was no such thing as 'shatter-proof' glass - and her throat was cut and she died. My father never spoke about this incident until I had a slight fender bender with a pick-up truck in 1957 riding with a high school boyfriend on icy roads between Tama and Toledo, Iowa, when my head hit the windshield and I got a couple of cuts..but by then the windshields had been designed to not shatter into pieces, but my head left a very large 'spider-web' of cracked glass on the passenger side of my boyfriend's 1955 blue and white Pontiac. My dad gave me some good advice about how one should react when you have time to do so in an automobile accident. He said, "Don't push yourself away from the dashboard of the car or the window; put your head on your folded arms on the top of the dashboard, and even if your head hits the window, it won't be like a 'hammer' and smash the glass." I doubt if most people traveling at the speeds we drive these days have time to think about how to react before the accident happens...unfortunately. But, now we do have seat belts, which would be a big help in keeping you from flying forward into the window.)

"Margaret was born in late 1929. We didn't know at the time that Merry had whooping cough. We thought she just had a cold, but she soon developed the characteristic 'whoop' when she coughed. At about three weeks of age, Margaret also began to cough with the disease. We had her sleep between Wayne and I, and when she would get one of the awful coughing spells, we would put a finger down her throat to pull out the thick string of mucus that would nearly suffocate her. But she came through that illness, and we were thankful. Then, when she was six months old, she had pneumonia, probably because she was still weak from enduring whooping cough. But she recovered again, though she was very sick. (I do not have a portrait of Margaret when she was an infant. I don't know if one exists, but with all the illness she endured during her first year, and with four little girls to care for, perhaps getting a photograph of her taken was not a top priority.)

"We lived in Humboldt seven or eight years. This was during 'the Great Depression' and times were hard. But everyone was 'in the same boat.' Banks were closing and farmers and other lost their farms and their money. I think we never had much money so we didn't lose any.

"Wayne was still in the oil business, and running a service station in partnership with another fellow. We were barely making ends meet most of the time. So, when Wayne found out that exams were coming up for railway mail clerk, he took the exam, and with a little pull from Senator Gilchrist, he got the job.

Wayne's photo for his postal exam.

"That meant that we had to move to Chicago, where all mail clerks had to work in the mail terminal for two years before they could bid on a run on the railroad. To start, our salary was $150.00 per month. We were very happy with that! It was a good salary in those depression days. When we were first married, our pay was $115.00 per month at the elevator in Nemaha."

This photo was taken in the winter of 1936 in Humboldt, before Wayne and Wilma moved to Chicago. That winter was a terrible one, with a lot of heavy snow. The summer in 1936 was also unusually hot.

 My mother was a member of the American Legion Auxiliary, and when that group served food at a lunch stand at the fair during the summer of 1936, she remembered cooking hamburgers in the auxiliary tent and the temperature was 110 degrees. My Phoenix daughter did not think that was an accurate figure, but I looked it up online, and indeed, Iowa had temperatures that high in 1936! And, no air-conditioning...people slept on screen porches in the summer back then, and carrying a hand-held fan was fashionable! Hooray for progress!

Some time before the family moved to Chicago, they went to visit my mother's brother, Herbert, and his family on their farm near Rolfe, Iowa. Below is a photograph from that visit.

In the photo above, from left to right, are Herbert (my mother's brother), his daughter Marilyn, his youngest daughter Dorothea (this child was severely mentally retarded and eventually had to live at Woodward where she could get the constant care she needed). Next to Dorothea is Herbert's wife, Crystel, then my Grandma Barrett, my sister Dorothy Ann, and Herbert's son, Herbie. On the horse in the back, from left to right, are Jean, Margaret and Merry. My mother must be taking the photograph. This was taken in about 1941 or so, and I would have been a baby. 
 

More to come...keep coming back, and please do leave comments on my blog. I love to know someone is reading it!