DOROTHY LEONARD MUNCEY

On August 10, 1994, the occasion of Dorothy Rose Leonard’s ninetieth birthday, her daughter Lavere recorded this oral history:


DOROTHY: Mother and Dad, when I was young, but old enough to remember what was going on, would in the spring of the year come out to Farmington in order for Ruth and I to go to school.

LAVERE: What age were you?

DOROTHY: I remember school when I was six but I am not sure... I think they had been doing this long before that because mother mentioned the fact that they took me one time, when I was a baby, and made this trip up to Emida with the cattle and we always took two days. We would have to camp along the way one night. I bawled the whole way. The only time that I didn’t cry was when Dad would carry me. So she said he walked most of the way and carried me. But anyway we would take the cattle up there for the summer but in the meantime, before that time, they had lived up there permanently summer and winter until Ruth was seven because of the fact that it was so far to school. Our property was at the end of the road and it was three miles out of Emida, this little town. It went up into the hill country. We were absolutely at the end of the road but there were two families that lived up beyond where this place was but there was no road up there. They had no transportation other than walking. Anyway, what my Dad did was butcher his own stock. There was a lot of logging going on at that time and so he would sell the meat to the logging camps. When Ruth was seven they decided that they would have to go back to Farmington to put her in school because it would be too difficult. The snow would get really deep up there. It was three miles.

LAVERE: But she hadn’t been to school ‘til she started...

DOROTHY: No, she hadn’t started school. So they went back to Farmington in the wintertime then and from then on. So what I remember about it is that we were going back and forth.

LAVERE: Did they always have the same home up there or do you remember them building that home?

DOROTHY: You mean at Emida?

LAVERE: Yes.

DOROTHY: No. This place that they bought up there had been occupied and it had this big log house and the logs were all hewn so that they were flat on both sides and on the inside they tacked kind of a cheese cloth over it and then they papered that so it looked nice, you know.

LAVERE: Did they treat those walls with plaster?

DOROTHY: Well, yes but they had hewn the logs so that they fit practically perfect on all sides. They had hewn the logs so they were square. They had done this by hand so it was quite obvious that it was a log house.

LAVERE: Was the building square or oblong?

DOROTHY: The building was kind of oblong.

LAVERE: Was the door on the front?

DOROTHY: The door was on the front. There was an upstairs, quite a good size attic. The people that lived there before they had bought it had left some stuff up in there and Ruth and I used to go up and play in the attic. It had a floor in there and there was a real old, old sewing machine up there.

LAVERE: It probably just had a gable roof.

DOROTHY: Yes, just a gabled roof.

LAVERE: Like that?

DOROTHY: Right. The stairs went up out of the kitchen quite steeply but you could stand up, you didn't have to stoop to go into the attic at all. It was quite a good-sized attic and quite high. High enough to really walk around in. It probably had been used for a bed room or something at one time. The folks never used it for that.

LAVERE: Was there glass in the windows?

DOROTHY: Yes, There was glass in the windows.

LAVERE: Sounds pretty good really for that era.

DOROTHY: It was really quite a nice place. Then we would go up there. Then when we would go home in the wintertime we would just lock the door and away we would go. There were no caretakers or anything else. I am not even sure that they locked the door. Because there were not very many people around doing any damage in those days. These two families that lived up above us there lived there year round. They were related. Brother-in-law or something. Anyway it was a family thing. They used to work for my Dad, the men, worked for my Dad during the summer months. What he was doing was trying to eliminate these huge stumps that had been left by the loggers. The people before them had just planted grain, you know with alfalfa around the stumps. So down in the fields there were these huge big stumps. It was a beautiful place. The mountains were high and it was lovely and green and there was this creek that ran right through the place. It ran year round and was beautiful pure water. Dad used to put this, what do you call those things? He had a yoke on his shoulders that he could carry two buckets of water. He would have to hold the buckets of course. This was for our drinking water. Then he had a barrel and kind of a sleigh that he would pull down to the creek and fill the barrel with water for their washing and dishwashing and all of that sort of thing.

LAVERE: Did you have Albert by then? Was he born?

DOROTHY: Not when I first remember going up there but he was only four years younger than I so he came into the picture pretty soon I guess.

LAVERE: Tell about your stump ranch part of it. It was called a stump ranch.

DOROTHY: They always called it the stump ranch because of the fact that it had been logged off and these huge stumps were all through the pasture area. That was what Dad was trying to do was to eliminate a lot of these big stumps so that he could plant more and have more pasture space. Of course Dad was a fanatic about getting everything neat and green you know. I think that is probably where young Bill gets that. He probably inherited it from my Dad.

LAVERE: Too bad I didn’t choose better. Anyway, I remember you saying something about one of those neighbors up there was the powder man that blew up dynamite in the stumps.

DOROTHY: His name was Whitehead. I can remember that as well as can be. He and his wife had no children. The brother-in-law had a good size family of children and their name was Lacey. I remember that. I remember that on my 10th birthday they came down to our place and there was a boy that was a little older than I but I thought he was pretty nice. They used to come down once in a while and play with Ruth and I. He brought me this rabbit. A wild rabbit that he had caught.

LAVERE: Was that the party where Ruth invited him and Grandma didn’t know?

DOROTHY: Yes, Ruth had invited him to come down for my birthday. She hadn’t told Mother that she had done it. So poor Mother was flabbergasted when they all showed up. Ruth had to admit that she had invited them without even asking Mother or telling Mother. So Mother said, "Well it’s up to you young lady, you just get busy and make a bunch of custard pies." So she did but in the meantime I think she felt quite reproved because as she was making these pies, I can remember the tears rolling down her face and she was crying. The pies were excellent. Everybody liked them.

LAVERE: She was 13 by then?

DOROTHY: Yes, she was 13, probably a little more. She knew how to make the pies so she did all right. We always had an abundance of milk and eggs, of course, because the folks had chickens and stuff. So anyway, that was one of my fun, fun birthdays when I was a kid. My birthday came in August and that was just when the harvest would start. There was never any time for any celebration. Anyway way back then we didn’t really do much about birthdays. Mother would usually make a cake because we had so much lovely cream. She would always ice with a thick yummy whipping cream. I can remember those cakes. But that would be the extent of our birthday celebration because we always had men during harvest time. Dad harvested with horses and horse-drawn equipment and we always had a lot of men during harvest time. This is in the farm area. Up in the stump ranch we always had these two men for dinner. Then another interesting thing; the herds of sheep used to come through there in the spring just shortly after we would get up there. We would go early, as soon as it would start to get dusty in Farmington, we would take the cattle and go up there. Of course we would have to wait until school was out after Ruth and I started school. Before that we would go early. Of course school didn’t run as many months as it does nowadays. The sheepherders would bring these bands of sheep up into the mountains for pasture for the summer months. Then they would take them back down in the warmer climate in the wintertime where there was grass. I am sure a lot of them came from probably central Washington because my hubby Bill remembers that these men who had these big herds of sheep would always take them somewhere for the summer pasture. Because down there where it was so hot and warm and dry their pasture would dry up. So these sheepherders would come through and Dad would get mutton, sheep, or a lamb or whatever. I can remember that we would always have fresh meat for these men. Which was a real treat for them I’m sure because their subsistence was pretty primitive and they depended on wild game a lot for their sustenance. They always had a little garden. I can remember this because Ruth and I would go up there once in a while. I remember one time we stayed for dinner up there. They had killed some squirrels. Tree squirrels. They had these fried like you would fry a chicken. Those guys just thought they were the best. She made a cream gravy and she had potatoes. They thought this was just a delicious dinner and you know I could not eat that squirrel no way. I always was squeamish anyway.

LAVERE: Well, we never even liked rabbit very much. I can remember having rabbit once or twice. We didn’t eat rabbit like a lot of people eat rabbit.

DOROTHY: Of course the tree squirrels are really quite good. They aren’t at all like the ground squirrels that are real rodents. The tree squirrels ate nuts and things like that. And the pine nuts. There was always big huge forests up in that area. Knowing where they live there was just a big forest.

LAVERE: That was not a very big community then in Emida. It wasn’t the kind of community where they’d get together for barn dances or any of that stuff. It was too small.

DOROTHY: No. It was a small community at that time. They did have a little school but it didn’t amount to much and maybe wasn’t even running at the time that Mother and Dad had to go out to Farmington. It was a long ways. There was another town there between Emida and Saint Mary’s which was called Santa. That was a quite a bit bigger place. But that would have been a long, long ways you know. We had no transportation except horses. So it would have been too far.

LAVERE: I wonder if there is anything there in Emida at all.

DOROTHY: I think there’s still a little town there. I do think so. I haven’t been up there for a long time.

LAVERE: Do you know for sure that that house is gone?

DOROTHY: I think so.

LAVERE: You think it burned down?

DOROTHY: I do think that that is what happened to it. When Albert and Buelah were married it was still standing.

LAVERE: Well that has only been 65 years.

DOROTHY: Right. That’s quite a while back. But that’s only been 65 years. It was still standing and quite livable actually. They lived up there their first winter after they were married in October. I guess it was pretty rough for them. Like she said she didn’t even know how to cook very good and everything that she cooked she burned. She had this old cook stove that you fired with wood. They weren’t very reliable heat so she would get everything too hot. Get the oven too hot or too cold or whatever. It is hard to regulate the heat.

LAVERE: Well, she is kind of a perfectionist too. Always trying real hard and working hard.

DOROTHY: Then in the summer Mother and Dad used to, this is when we lived in Spokane, and Mother and Dad used to go up there and spend the summer with them to help them out for a few years. Then finally Albert said to Dad, "How about if you let me farm?" Because Dad had leased out his property to a second or third cousin or a nephew or something. This man was not very fair with Dad he didn’t think because he had a farm of his own and when it came to harvest time, you have to get it in before the rains came, and if anything was left out and got rained on and spoiled.

LAVERE: It was always yours.

DOROTHY: It was always Dad’s. So Albert propositioned Dad to take over the home place where Mom and Dad had lived and farm that. So that is what he did and that is why they are living there right now. To get back to the stump ranch. What did you want to say?

LAVERE: No go ahead get back to the stump ranch.

DOROTHY: It was beautiful country. There was this lovely creek that went right down through the middle and Ruth used to love to fish. She was very much more of an adventurous kid than I was. They would say you can’t go down there by yourself because there were quite good sized holes and that is where the good fish were of course in those deeper holes. She would always go right there to fish and they were afraid that she might fall in and there wouldn’t be anybody there to yell for help. It wasn’t too far from the house. Between the house and the creek off to one side was this big huge barn where they kept the cattle. Later on, they used to bail the hay and put it all in there. But when they first started going up there I am sure the barn was there but I don’t know too much about that. There was always men in the fields working, I can remember. These men were there and they were always blasting out these stumps. This one man Mr. Whitehead was what Dad called a potter man and was familiar with how much to load to do what he wanted to do. What they would do, they would dig down and put it under the center of these stumps and then they would set the blast off and get back away far enough that it wouldn’t hurt anybody from the pieces that would come up. They would set that off and it would blow the stump and the center of them would just go all over. Sky-high. Then it would leave these roots. These huge roots would be in kind of a circle and the center was blown out. Mother and Dad would go down then and take the pieces and put them back into the center. They were always full of pitch because of the fact that it was the nourishing part of the tree is the stump. They would set the fires and Mother used to love to do that... to go in the field with Dad and burn the stumps. But of course she didn’t do that too much. They would set the fires and all but it kept her busy cooking when they had the men there so she didn’t go down with him much like that.

LAVERE: How many acres would you say, do you have any idea, that they were working on?

DOROTHY: I would say maybe 25 or 30 or maybe 40 acres.

LAVERE: That’s a lot, really.

DOROTHY: Quite a good-sized piece. Then across the creek there was another big area that had never been planted. That had some stumps and stuff. I can’t remember that Dad ever started too much on that. But I know in later years they did clear much more of that land. The thing was, the system was that the trees on the property did not belong to the owner of the property. The trees belonged to these logging companies.

LAVERE: They had contracted out the trees.

DOROTHY: They used to pay Mom and Dad so much a year to let the ones stand that weren’t big enough to harvest. So that gave him a little bit of cash money. Anyway, they always sold the cream and stuff from the farm in Farmington and they paid these men cash that worked for them. I am sure that is what they bought their staple groceries with for the winter months and for the summer months as well. Flour and shortening and that sort of thing. Salt. They had a little garden and I guess they raised as much as they could. A real primitive existence.

LAVERE: Was there enough rain in there to water the timothy and water the garden?

DOROTHY: Lovely rains. It was all dry land and nothing like it. There was plenty of rain. They were actually in the mountains. Fairly well up into the mountains.

LAVERE: Where did Fayette come in the family? Was he younger?

DOROTHY: Fayette was the first one of their children. They were living in Farmington at that time on the farm. He lived to be six years old.

LAVERE: So he had already died when you were young?

DOROTHY: I don’t remember him at all.

LAVERE: You were real little.

DOROTHY: I don’t even think I was born then yet. Because after Fayette there was another baby a couple of years later. There was another baby who only lived for one day. Mother and Dad had never named him or anything.

LAVERE: Then Ruth.

DOROTHY: Then Ruth came along.

LAVERE: So she might even remember Fayette.

DOROTHY: I don’t think so. I don’t think she would, really. If she would have, she certainly would have been just a small baby.

LAVERE: But he got sick and died.

DOROTHY: What happened was up in the town of Farmington there was an artesian well that ran water constantly like a spring only more so. It bubbled up almost like a geyser except that it wasn’t warm or anything. Good fresh water. They had built a big long watering trough to water the horses. Of course, it would have lots of water in it. This was apparently around the wintertime. He and some of the other kids were playing on this and he fell in and got wet. The folk’s place was a mile from town. So I’m sure he probably got very chilled before he went home. Consequently, he was sick for a while but then he got over that. But later on, I suppose, got another cold and that went into pneumonia and he died in February. I don’t know exactly when this happened that he fell into the water. It was cold.

LAVERE: They think that was contributory.

DOROTHY: They figured that was the reason for it. But my Dad never got over that.

LAVERE: Their first child.

DOROTHY: He was a beautiful child. They had pictures of him. Of course, in those days they had dresses, and they had a big picture of him in his little velvet dress.

LAVERE: I think I remember that. Did they have that on a desk?

DOROTHY: Right, until my Dad died and Mother took those pictures all down when she was going to sell the property and she took them out and took the pictures out and destroyed them and burned those frames. Those beautiful old frames. She said she didn’t want anybody else to have those pictures. She said nobody else would be interested in this and so I am going to destroy them. Those old fashioned frames could be worth a fortune now.

LAVERE: They are so valuable. Those were professional photographs of the day.

DOROTHY: Right. Everything was so staged. You had to stand by this chair that they took the picture of. You had your hand on the chair and they stood up there straight. Their shoes were so huge you know. Those old fashioned buttoned shoes.

DOROTHY: He had curls.

LAVERE: I can remember. The clothing had a white top.

DOROTHY: Ringlets. His little dress had a white collar. It was velvet. Beautiful child.

It broke my Dad’s heart of course. My Dad never would mention anything.

I never heard him mentioned by my Mother or Dad, either one.

LAVERE: I didn’t even know he existed until I started asking Grandma a lot of questions about the family.

DOROTHY: Of course, Mom and Dad were never very communicative to each kid. They did not share things with us like a lot of people do with their family.

LAVERE: They were conservative.

DOROTHY: They were very, very conservative. Very, very conservative people. Of course this would have been a hard thing for him to talk about.

LAVERE: I can remember when I was asking her about him. She commented that she had sent him on an errand way off down the way and he was just so little. She just cried.

DOROTHY: It is only human nature to blame yourself.

LAVERE: Yes, because we are talking about Uncle Al. I haven’t heard that before about Dorothy Scharwart. Say that again.

DOROTHY: The reason we got into this history thing was because Dorothy Scharwart, who has been really deeply into the Leonard genealogy, is a granddaughter of Dad’s brother Eugene. She and her folks lived up close to Santa which was not to far from Emida where we used to go in the summer. Actually, her dad was very, very fond of Mom and Dad and they were close. Mom and Dad were never really family people. They didn’t gather the family around for family reunions and that sort of thing. Most of Uncle Eugene’s boys were a little on the wild side and always getting into scrapes. Floyd had married Buelah and she was such a lovely lady.

LAVERE: I can still see her face.

DOROTHY: Right down to earth and worked hard like a dog. We would always go and see them when we would be up to Emida. They would always fix dinner and I can remember eating at their home. Well she said, "How about Uncle Ab when he came out there?" Then I had forgotten that that’s what everybody called my Dad. Ab Leonard. So I thought that was a little interesting side note. Dorothy said, "If you had any family anecdotes or anything." And I said, "Heavens we weren’t that kind of family."

LAVERE: No frivolity?

DOROTHY: No frivolity. Very serious people. I am sure that once in a while Mom and Dad when some of the younger people their age would come around they would joke and laugh a bit. But other than that there was not laughing in our home.

LAVERE: They didn’t play the harmonica and dance around?

DOROTHY: No, nothing like that. They were very reserved. Very reserved people. Very straight-laced. My Dad would walk ten miles to give somebody a penny if they had given him the wrong change. That is the way he was. Honest as the day is long. He was. I do remember that about my dad.

LAVERE: Then you were saying something about your brother, something about him getting wet?

DOROTHY: Yes, he fell into this horse trough. Up in the center of Farmington is an artesian well. Do you know what that is? It is a well that runs water all of the time. Much more water than you get out of a spring. It kind of bubbles up out of there. So they had to put a big long horse trough there in those days because that is what they did. They farmed with horses. You went everywhere with horses before cars. You always watered the horses there. Well he and some of his cousins were playing and this was in the winter time and apparently there was maybe ice on the thing that is what I am kind of thinking. Anyway he fell into the horse trough and it was really, really cold. Where they lived on the farm was a mile from town. So he got really chilled and caught a bad cold. He got over that but that was sometime maybe before Christmas and then he died in February. So later on he contracted pneumonia and there was nothing they could do to save him. He was six years old. I was describing him by the picture that I can remember. Of course I wasn’t even born yet. But the picture that Mom and Dad had of him was one of these huge, huge portraits that they used to stand up by a chair with a regular photographer. In those days they dressed the little boys in dresses. He had on this velvet dress with a white collar and his hair was in ringlets. Kind of blondish. Not red but just kind of light. He was a beautiful child. Of course he just looked like perfection. Mother was so particular with him. First child and all. Then of course he died. But he had a little brother that was born two years later and he lived only one day and was never named. Then the next one that came along was my sister Ruth and this was quite a while later. I do think she was born before Fayette died. I am not positive of those dates. But I think Albert might be able to clear up some of those dates.

LAVERE: I have those dates.

DOROTHY: You have those dates anyway, right? It was a heartbreak for Mother and Dad you know. Never talked about it. I never heard them mention him. Of course he had been named for my Dad’s older brother. There were quite a few boys in the Leonard family. A lot of boys. A big family of boys. There was Fayette who I never met because we never went east after I was born that I can remember. Maybe when I was a baby they did go east once or twice but I never knew any of them. Then there was George Leonard. His brother George and his brother Ralph who became a doctor. It was an interesting situation. His sister, who was my Aunt Floy, was in Farmington. That was the reason I think that Dad came out there when he was a very young man and single. Handsome, real handsome I guess. He was ten years older than my mother. Anyway they were married and I don’t have the dates but I think Lavere has them. Where was I? I lost my track.

LAVERE: We were just talking about why he came out and his sister Lura.

DOROTHY: Yes, his sister Floy.

LAVERE: Floy? Okay Floy.

DOROTHY: Aunt Floy. She had another first name but whatever it was. It was Ida.. Ida Floy.

LAVERE: Just let me ask one question. Were those her children that were the cousins that Fayette was playing with when he fell in the trough? You said that he was playing with his cousins.

DOROTHY: I think they were probably some of Uncle Gene’s kids. I don’t know for sure. I wasn’t clear with Dorothy as to which one it was. She called him something. It is a cousin of hers. So it would probably be some of them...I can find out that from her if you’re interested.

LAVERE: Just trying to keep everything going.

DOROTHY: Get every thing straight, right?

LAVERE: Yes.

DOROTHY: I am sure my dad was disappointed when two girls popped along, you know. No boys. Lost both of his boys. So that when Albert was born. My brother Albert. Mother kept him so clean and immaculate. Wouldn’t hardly let him go outside and play in the dirt that the doctor one time when he came down to the house for something, I mean when they had called him for something. He said, "Mrs. Leonard you are going to have to let this boy go outside and get into the dirt." He said, "You’re just keeping him too clean." Apparently he wasn’t even very healthy from keeping kept in and so close. She was so afraid that something would happen to him. Anyway that is what the doctor said to her. So then she relented a little bit and let him go outside but they were always very careful of him because he was the only boy in the family.

LAVERE: Well, they loved all their children.

DOROTHY: They loved all of us. They were not demonstrative at all and I can’t ever remember my dad putting his arms around me and hugging me. He probably did but I don’t remember him doing that and just telling, you know for no occasion, and just telling me that he loved me or anything like that. I was never at a loss to know that he loved all us dearly.

LAVERE: They really put the children first in their lives. That was their life.

DOROTHY: They did. We never knew whether they were short of funds because we lived from harvest to the next always. Many times I can remember, now that I can think back on it, that when the harvest was ended, Dad would go to the bank and pay off the loan that he had borrowed to put in the harvest and that all they got out harvest was enough to pay off the loan.

LAVERE: I can remember Grandma saying that they had to pay the taxes. That they had to borrow money to pay the taxes.

DOROTHY: Many times. I am sure they did.

LAVERE: But they always paid them.

DOROTHY: Didn’t want it to get into arrears. They never made an issue of it. We never wanted for anything in the way of food or clothing or anything like that. There were lots of luxuries that we did have of course. We always had the necessities. They were never people to go on expensive trips or anything like that.

LAVERE: You had a piano so you could take lessons.

DOROTHY: They had the piano so Ruth and I could take lessons. Neither one of us had a musical bone in our body.

LAVERE: Oh Mom. You played professionally. I will never get over that.

DOROTHY: Well I worked hard for that. I really did practice for some years and got so I played quite well and used to play for an orchestra of fiddlers. Our teacher at that time. Taught violin as well and he would have me play the piano and the others would play the violins. I’m sure it was a sacrifice. Although, of course, our music teachers didn’t charge very much in those days. I think they paid a dollar. But a dollar was a dollar then. A dollar for a lesson. Ruth and I did not go to the same teacher. There were two ladies in Farmington that gave music lessons and I chose to go to one and Ruth went to the other. Which was kind of nice. Of course, we used to fight like a couple of little kittens. Cats, I guess I should say. Like kids will. But anyway, to get back to my dad.

The reason that I think that Dad came out to Farmington was because his only sister of whom he was very fond.

LAVERE: Older?

DOROTHY: Older sister because Dad was the youngest one in the family. I think he had an older sister who died or something. Is that right?

LAVERE: I don’t know.

DOROTHY: I am not sure about that. Anyway someone said, "Oh, he was such a little angel when he was a little kid." One of his brothers says, "A mean little devil was what he was." So I am sure he was spirited because he had red hair and was full of life. I am sure he was a good man for my mother.

LAVERE: Was he taller when he was young? Was he ever taller than grandma?

DOROTHY: No. They were about the same height.

LAVERE: About the same to start with.

DOROTHY: To start with, but in later years Dad’s backbones seem to settle down.

LAVERE: She stayed pretty tall.

DOROTHY: Mother stayed pretty straight so that she was a little bit taller than Dad. No they were the same height. His older brother Ralph went to Chicago to medical school.

LAVERE: Ralph Leonard.

DOROTHY: Ralph Leonard went to Chicago to medical school. One of his other doctors who was studying medicine at the same time. His name was John Grim. One time Aunt Floy went up to Chicago to visit Ralph and that is where she met Uncle John. They fell in love and were married. These two doctors had decided that they were going to come out west and start a practice together, which they did. They came out west and settled in Oregon. They didn’t like it there because it rained so much. So then they came back into Washington. Uncle John and Aunt Floy settled in Farmington. Uncle Ralph and his wife stayed in Colfax. The reason they did, Albert thinks, is that he had married a catholic girl. Uncle Ralph had married a catholic girl. She wanted to raise their children where there was a catholic school. There was a catholic school in Colfax and a Catholic Church. It was really a catholic town at that time. So he settled there and practiced there. When I remember him he was blind and he used to come on a train, if you believe it, without a white cane like they have now. I suppose he could see well enough to walk because he always walked and would come and visit us when we lived in Spokane in later life there. I can remember him as a real portly, lovely, soft spoken gentlemen. I really do. Of course I think the whole family was like that.

LAVERE: Do you have any idea of what their parents did for a living? Were they farmers?

DOROTHY: They were farmers. Right. Uncle George who was Lura Hachen’s dad stayed at home with the old folks and farmed their place and that is why he inherited it. The farm. That was corn. They raised lots and lots of corn because it was in Iowa. Lura Hachen inherited that because she was their only child. So she inherited all that farmland.

LAVERE: Did they farm?

DOROTHY: Yes. They had a lot of acreage. It was good sized.

LAVERE: A good inheritance?

DOROTHY: It was a good inheritance because Uncle Fred stayed back there, too, and farmed. I don’t know what happened to that property. I know that Lura ended up with most of the property back there. There was a little hard feeling in the family, I think, because they really inherited so much and it wasn’t divided up between the other brothers and Aunt Floy who had come west. I remember that Grandma Leonard packed all of things after Grandpa Leonard died. All of the stuff like the old clock, those beautiful antiques and shipped all that stuff out to Aunt Floy. She was the only girl. Oh how Lura used to drool over some of those things. Then Aunt Floy and Uncle John had a Lura too. So that is where we get them mixed up. Their oldest daughter they named Lura. Lura is a Leonard name down through the name, you know. That is where we get mixed up with the two Lura‘s.

LAVERE: You didn’t make clear the medical school stuff.

DOROTHY: You did not have to go to medical school for very many years in those days. I think it was a two-year course or something like that. You were a full-fledged medical doctor. Uncle John did practice medicine until he was injured someway. Aunt Floy and Uncle John moved there to Farmington they bought some farmland and they had a farm that they always kept. Had the income from that as well as his being a doctor. When I knew them, when I was little, he was not really practicing medicine much because he had hurt himself someway. Probably at the farm I don’t know. He was quite crippled. So he didn’t practice medicine any more. He had practiced there in Farmington for years I guess before that. Now any other questions?

LAVERE: No. I just thought that was interesting.

DOROTHY: Aunt Floy was a peppery lady. She had a lot of spunk I tell you.

LAVERE: What was her maiden name? Oh her maiden name was Leonard.

DOROTHY: It was Aunt Floy Grim when I knew her of course.

LAVERE: Tell about their house in Farmington.

DOROTHY: They built this gorgeous old house. Big two story house. High roofed house. It was quite a house for the community.

LAVERE: Wasn’t it kind of on a little rise?

DOROTHY: It was just out on this little hill. Yes, right.

LAVERE: It had a porch on two sides all the way around.

DOROTHY: It went clear around. It was kind of round and I remember their second story had one room that was rounded. We used to go over there and play with Amber, who was younger. Ruth and I used to go over and play with Amber because she was younger and was still at home. Lura as I remember, was married already. She had gone away to school and had graduated from college and she married a fellow that was a schoolteacher. A professor. Actually he was the principal of the school. They were very well educated people. Very austere. Whatever you want to call it. Very reserved. The whole Leonard family was very reserved. All the ones I knew. Except Uncle Gene. He was a completely different type of fella. He had this huge family.

LAVERE: He had an easy going, happy-go-lucky wife.

DOROTHY: And he was an easy going, happy-go-lucky man. Of course they didn’t control those boys. I’m sure they didn’t do anything very great. They would get into little scrapes and then Uncle Gene would bail them out. But Floyd was one of his boys and he was a very, very sober, serious type of fella. He was the one that had the ranch up in Santa. Where mother used to always visit. Their youngest girl was named after me. Dorothy was named after me.

LAVERE: Do you remember Sarah? We used to call her Aunt Sarah. Was she any relation at all?

DOROTHY: No.

LAVERE: I thought she came through those people somehow.

DOROTHY: She came from my mother. My mother had one brother.

LAVERE: He wasn't married was he?

DOROTHY: Oh yes. He married this woman with two children. One of them was Sarah. She had been married before and her husband had died.

LAVERE: She was kind of a step-cousin?

DOROTHY: Actually right. She always called mother Aunt Mary. Well she really was.

LAVERE: That is how she was part of the family.

DOROTHY: That is how she was part of the family. He was a happy go lucky guy. He must have inherited that somewhere back. Well I guess we will get back to the stump ranch.

LAVERE: When did Grandma and Grandpa stop going up to the stump ranch? Oh, you told us the other night about how they were up there when I was born.

DOROTHY: Oh yes. When you were born, Mother and Dad would go up to the ranch for the summer. When Lavere was a baby I had anticipated staying at home and not going back to work in the bakery but I kept all the books. I even did the income tax. I cashiered in the front where the retail part was and then we had men who wholesaled. We wholesaled and they would deliver this stuff out to the grocery stores. At different times we had a different number of trucks. Sometimes we had three or four and then other times, I can remember we had finally whittled down to just one towards the end.

LAVERE: You know that one man that was working for you so long. What was his name? He kept up with my dad his whole life. You know who I mean.

DOROTHY: I know who you mean.

LAVERE: He was a small man and he just thought the world of you. He would come and visit.

DOROTHY: We got down to his one truck towards the end.

LAVERE: I just can’t remember his name. But I really remember him because he kept coming.

DOROTHY: Kept coming to see him. Isn’t that nice.

LAVERE: He thought the world of Wes. Anyway, go ahead.

DOROTHY: Well he worked for us until we closed it down.

LAVERE: What year was that, do you remember?

DOROTHY: Well it was after the depression hit. When the depression hit, I had banked the money from the bakery and from the drivers. We had the bank right on the same block.

LAVERE: You were still making it with the bakery then. Well, maybe it had gone down.

DOROTHY: No, it was going pretty good then I think. We had quite a few drivers. Anyway, when you were born, this was quite a while after that. Let’s get back to that and then we will go to this other. So I was going to stay home and I thought well I better get over there and do some of this. I would put her in this breadbasket and we would have her in the back of bakery and I was trying to do the other things as usual and it didn’t work out very well. She wasn’t getting along very good on her formula. I would feed her and she would throw it right back up and then she would cry and was fussy. This was bad for the business and me trying to take care of her. So one weekend we loaded ourselves into the car and drove up to Emida.

LAVERE: What kind of car was that?

DOROTHY: I think we had a big... I don’t remember. Something maybe like an Oldsmobile or something like that. It was a good-sized car. I took all of your stuff and everything and I just dumped her on my mother. The people just below their place didn’t really have a farm but they had some goats. Of course in those days anybody who couldn’t simulate a formula or cows milk would use goats’ milk.

LAVERE: You didn’t tell about the bank.

DOROTHY: One morning the bank closed with no warning at all. All of the merchants in those two blocks by the bakery, banked at the bank there on the corner. They were all in the same way. They had just enough cash to make change and everything else was in the bank and tied up completely. We never did get it back really. They paid out a percentage. Way, way down the line by that time you know.

LAVERE: By that time you were dead in the water.

DOROTHY: Yes. About that time we were dead in the water. Anyway then that started to put a pretty bad crimp in for a while to get over that. Anyway we all survived.

LAVERE: How old was I then? What year was it?

DOROTHY: You were just a baby. What year was it?

BILL: You were born in 1928 and the banks closed in 1930.

DOROTHY: You were two.

BILL: Roosevelt closed the banks.

DOROTHY: He was elected in what year?

BILL: He was elected in 1931 and took office in 1932.

DOROTHY: But didn’t the bank close earlier than that? There on the business street?

BILL: He closed all the banks all over the country for three days. That is what I am talking about. Your bank went bankrupt two years prior to that.

DOROTHY: Our bank was solid. I mean it was good. But it was connected with the downtown bank that didn’t have it. So when they closed then automatically our bank closed. It was really good. It was in good shape.

BILL: Any bank that was connected went down with it.

DOROTHY: So we lost what money we had in there. I don’t remember now how much it was. Anyway it was all our capital. Our operating capital. We never did really recover very well from that. Then of coursed Wesley started having his problem with his breathing and all that stuff and his dad said, "You can’t breath. You’ve got to get out of that flour."

I remember the year that you came out of the cast and had just one leg out. After you had been in the cast for six months and you were almost two when you first went into that thing, I wondered why you didn’t walk. You were so slow in walking. Then one day Grandpa and I realized you were limping when you trying to walk any distance. So right away I took you to the pediatrician. I said you’ve taken care of her all her life practically. I jumped all over him with both feet. I said, "Something is wrong with this child." So immediately he fluoroscoped you and found out that your hip was dislocated. Nobody really ever knew whether it had happened at birth or if you were born that way or what. The socket was perfectly formed and so was the bone. So it was just a matter of getting the two back together. Then you were in the cast, a complete cast for six months with just your little toes out and it came up clear under your arms. Then they took that off and put on just the one leg in the cast. You were like that all summer long. You went to the lake and Wesley was up there with Mother and Dad and you through that summer. I was left holding the bag at the bakery.

LAVERE: You didn’t have to bake the goods did you?

DOROTHY: No, I had a man there. You can’t make any money that way. So we kept getting a little further behind all the time. So finally the flourmill that supplied my flour, where we bought flour all the time, just shut off my credit absolutely. It just forced us to take bankruptcy. I felt so bad to have to do

LAVERE: And the flourmill was going under.

DOROTHY: Probably. It was in a time, it was in the depression. You couldn’t get any credit. Everybody was going under really. Especially a lot of small businesses. So we went under. We had really done well there over the years.

LAVERE: How many years were you in business there?

DOROTHY: We must have been in business there for 10 years I would say. Pretty close to that. Eight maybe anyway.

LAVERE: That was heartbreaking, huh?

DOROTHY: Yes, that was too bad. I really felt bad about that. But that is part of life I guess.

LAVERE: How old was I when you and Dad separated? I never knew that? I don’t ever remember living with him.

DOROTHY: No. Actually after I took you up and Mother took over with you. Mother took care of you all the time that we had the bakery, she took care of you. Just like she did with Margaret. Actually we were there. We stayed at Mom’s for a long time. Wesley, of course, worked at night. Then he would come home and go to bed W Mom’s and Dad’s. I would work the day shift. I don’t remember exactly how old you were, honey. You must have been maybe four years old. Then there is a period in there that is kind of a blank to me.

LAVERE: You went to work.

DOROTHY: I went right to work. Dad says that social security came in 1934. By that time I was working at the Silver Loaf bakery. I remember that.

LAVERE: I was six then.

DOROTHY: So you would be six.

LAVERE: That’s what I remember is living there with Grandma and Grandpa and you were working in the bakery.

DOROTHY: Of course I worked in the bakery when we had our own, you know. What I had to do to go to work in the other bakeries in Spokane was to join the Union because they were all Union shops, practically. I was working at Silver Loaf at that time. I was working at Silver Loaf when I met Bill. How I come to meet him was on a blind date with one of the girls was going with a fellow and they set up this date for me. I said, "I’m not interested in any men thank you." But I finally agreed to go out on this date. Then we went together for about a year or more I guess. Then they were going to send him overseas. His whole company. At that time an enlisted man could not be married. He said, "If we get married then they will just give me a discharge and I won’t go with the group." But he said, "Otherwise I don’t know if I will ever get back." They did send him over to ________ I think it was. Only about two guys from that company survived that. So he probably never would have survived. But that wasn’t to be I guess. We got way off the Emida thing didn’t we? At that time I think they still went up to Emida, Mom and Dad quite a bit in the summer time. Either that or to Priest Lake. Maybe by this time they were going to Priest Lake every summer. I kind of think they were.

LAVERE: But at that time that was when Al was at Emida.

DOROTHY: Pretty close to that because see he is four years younger than I. He and Buelah were married almost right out of high school and went to live on the farm. Up in their place in Emida. Mother and Dad would go up there in the summer time then. They went up there a couple of summers when Al was up there on the stump ranch. Mother and Dad would go up.

LAVERE: They started out with this property. Did Grandpa and Grandma have property in Farmington?

 

DOROTHY: No.

LAVERE: I know that Grandma’s father....

DOROTHY: Her parents had homesteaded. But by the time Mom and Dad were married I don’t think; maybe they were not homesteading in that area anymore apparently.

LAVERE: Grandmother inherited her father’s homestead and her brother’s homestead, is that correct?

DOROTHY: Right.

LAVERE: There was the piece of property that they lived on. How did they acquire that?

DOROTHY: They had to buy that.

LAVERE: And then they bought Emida as well.

DOROTHY: Yes, later on they bought that as well. But I am sure that it didn’t cost much because as I say it was just stump ranch.

LAVERE: Well, I meant the property that is in Farmington that you talked about. In Farmington, I wondered how they acquired that property. That was quite a few acres.

DOROTHY: It’s 160 acres. Grandpa, Mother’s father homesteaded 160 acres. Actually the address is Farmington but the line, the Idaho line ran right down and their property was in Idaho. It ran just outside of Farmington.

LAVERE: The brother’s property was probably another 160 acres.

DOROTHY: Right. That was over near the ______ area. Grandma and Grandpa had bought that for him and set him up on that. He was a person that never could make it somehow. He went into the bakery business in ______ once.

LAVERE: We’re talking about....

DOROTHY: This is Uncle Horace.

LAVERE: Horace.

DOROTHY: This is Mother’s brother. They financed him in that and that didn’t go. Well then they bought this farm and they moved out on this farm. It was between ______ and _____ which was the Indian reservation. The _____ of them is up towards the place in _______. So that’s really just across the Idaho line. Of course, when I remember going up there was before we had the lake place or anything. When we would go up there for the summer and take the cattle. It took us two days and we camped on the lake. We usually stayed in the Santa area, which was about half way between Farmington and Emida. Also in Santa there was the big school and church. This was on an Indian reservation actually. It was a tribal place but the Catholics went into those places and built their churches and schools for the Indians and that is what that was. We would sometimes camp near their and one time I remember we ate there with a group. Of course I was just a little kid then and I was quite impressed with all of the big buildings and everything. Then we would sometimes go down and visit Floyd and Buelah because they lived in Santa when we were up there at the ranch. We would go down and spend the day with them. I can remember doing that.

LAVERE: Were they doing the same kind of farming?

DOROTHY: Yes, he was on a farm as well. Buelah ‘s brothers, her three brothers, none of them ever married and they lived across the road from Floyd and Buelah. Were very helpful I know and very fond of Buelah. She was a wonderful lady.

LAVERE: She is not living now.

DOROTHY: No, that Dorothy’s mother, Dorothy Scharwart’s mother. They were really, really special people. What else do you want to know about the Emida place?

LAVERE: Lets see. Is there anything else? They don’t have that now. They have sold it.

DOROTHY: They finally did. Dad finally sold it after, well after Albert and Buelah had been up there for several years. I don’t remember exactly how many. He told Dad, he said, "If you will help me get started on the farm, I promise you that I will make it." The properties were just all leased and it wasn’t a very satisfactory arrangement.

LAVERE: You mean you had tenants. You owned the property but they leased them out and took a percentage of the crop as payment.

DOROTHY: As payment. So Albert and Buelah got into the old home place where mother and Dad had lived.

LAVERE: Well, is it right there by where their house is now?

DOROTHY: Exactly.

LAVERE: That old house they used to live in there was that the one that Grandma and Grandpa lived in.

DOROTHY: That was the one.

LAVERE: I can remember it well.

DOROTHY: And the well was there. They may have improved the well. Then after they lived in that for awhile and things started going well for them, they built the house that they have now. During that time while it was being built they just tore the other one down and built right in the same place. They rented an old house across the road.

LAVERE: I can remember that.

DOROTHY: They lived there during that year. It took them about a year I guess to build that.

LAVERE: I am sure they did a lot of things themselves.

DOROTHY: Right. It took about a year. Where do we go from there?

LAVERE: Well, from Emida. Any other things about Farmington? How old were you when you went to Spokane from Farmington?

DOROTHY: The reason we moved to Spokane from Farmington was because of Mother’s goiter.

LAVERE: You needed to go to school.

DOROTHY: Mother had this goiter. The Torences or some other people from Priest Lake that Mother and Dad were acquainted with told her about this chiropractor in Spokane who did wonderful work with goiters and that sort of thing. It got to the place where it was large enough that it was choking Mother.

LAVERE: It was huge. It was way out here.

DOROTHY: Right, way out there. She hated that thing. She couldn’t get any kind of a dress or a blouse or anything you know. When she was a young woman I guess she was a beautiful lady. A beautiful girl because I remember Lura Lizanby, this is Aunt Floy’s oldest daughter saying what a beautiful girl Mother was when she was young. So I am sure she was. She remained a good-looking lady all of her life.

LAVERE: Natural beauty.

DOROTHY: Mother would go up Spokane on the train and she would take a series of treatment from Dr. Bosarth.

LAVERE: He was the one that was the goiter guy?

DOROTHY: He was the goiter guy. Your grandfather.

DOROTHY: She would stay with these nice, I can’t quite recall the name, she would stay with these friends in Spokane. She would stay a whole week at a time because one treatment doesn’t do you any good. You have to take several. Then she would come home. Well it was devastating to Dad to try to cook and take care of everything.

LAVERE: How old were you at that time?

DOROTHY: I was probably in the fourth grade.

LAVERE: Uncle Al would be in the first grade.

DOROTHY: Right. We were there in Farmington. Of course Dad was not farming at this time except the house that we had bought in town was right across the road from Aunt Floy and Uncle John’s place.

LAVERE: That was other than the house on the farm. A mile away.

DOROTHY: Right. We never went back to the farm. I never remember living down there on the farm.

LAVERE: Okay. So who was living there? Tenants?

DOROTHY: I don’t think anybody was living there. They were just farming the land. The house stood empty I guess for quite a good many years. We bought this house up on the hill. It was kind of a light green house. It had a bedroom upstairs and a stairway that went up to the bedroom.

LAVERE: I didn’t even know that existed. It’s not there now.

DOROTHY: No, it’s torn down now. Then Dad had a good-sized barn. We were on the hill. You remember Aunt Floy’s house was up on the hill.

LAVERE: Yes, I remember.

DOROTHY: Well our house was on the hill too just across the road. Then his barn was down over the hill and Uncle John’s barn was down over the hill as well. They used to have horses.

LAVERE: Uncle John Grim?

DORO THY: Uncle John Grim. I can’t ever remember them having cattle. But Dad always had cows that he milked. That’s how my sister happened to get that scar on her face. She was Dad’s shadow. She always went with Dad everywhere that he went. She would go with him into the woods and everything and she learned the names of all the trees and plants. Which was really great. But me, I was such a little chicken I always waited home with Mom. Anyway that is where we lived.

LAVERE: How big was Farmington at that time?

DOROTHY: It wasn’t a very big place at that time.

LAVERE: A dozen houses?

DOROTHY: More than that. Probably a couple dozen. There was a bank there. There were several churches actually. The Methodist church was kind of up next to Uncle John’s and Aunt Floy’s place. At the end of the block there was quite a bit of area in between. Then there was a Lutheran church there, I remember. I don’t know. Adventist’s church. Of course, there were quite a few Adventists in that area. There were several churches there. It was a pretty good-sized little community. I wouldn’t venture to guess how many people. Probably maybe a couple hundred. But it was smaller then that it had been. At one time it had been quite a busy place. Actually when they were going to build Washington State College, they were deciding between building it in the Farmington or in Pullman. But Pullman won out. That’s the reason that Pullman is the home of the University of Washington. Washington State University. It used to be called Washington State College because it was started as an agricultural college. Being in a farming community and everything. Dad got pretty sick of Mom being gone a week at a time. She would maybe go once a month.

LAVERE: What was it doing for it? Just making her able swallow?

DOROTHY: Well, it might have made it a little smaller. It gave her a lot of relief from it. Of course, they kept thinking he would finally get it to go away. Dad said, "If you are going to have to be going up there for treatment we might as well just move to Spokane." At that time all of his property was leased out and was being farmed by someone else. So we moved to Spokane and we rented a place. Ruth was in the sixth grade, I think, and I was in the fifth, I believe. Then we stayed there during that school year and then we moved farther down. I believe Ruth graduated from Emerson. I am sure she did. So apparently she was in eighth grade. Right because there is three years difference in us and she was just one year behind because of the fact that she didn’t start until she was seven. She graduated from the Emerson School, which is just at the bottom of the Monroe Hill. Then we moved down farther. Well anyway, I started going to the Bancroft School, and that is where I graduated, and we lived there for a while. We rented that place. By this time Grandma and Grandpa Davis had come to live with us. They were there, I remember, when I went to the Bancroft School.

LAVERE: When they were in Farmington did they live right in Farmington? The Davises?

DOROTHY: They always lived on their place, which was just across the Idaho line. The address was Farmington. By this time Grandma had cancer and wasn’t very well at all. In fact, I think Grandma died when we lived there. The Torrences that had this big place at the lake. A big log house at the lake and were good friends of Mom and Dad’s. Their brother-in-law had this place that he wanted to sell that he had built. He wanted to sell. It was not nearly as nice as the home that the Torrences had built.

LAVERE: The Torrences lived right next door though? They had the house on the corner.

DOROTHY: They lived right next door. He wanted to sell this place so they talked to Dad about it and we bought that place. That is the place where you were born. That’s where we lived when I went to high school. I went to North Central and we walked, believe you me.

LAVERE: I remember walking. It was either walk or go downtown on the doggoned bus and transfer.

DOROTHY: Right, it was ridiculous. It took forever.

LAVERE: There was one bus that went along Indiana, I think. But it only ran at strange times.

DOROTHY: Not very frequently. So we always walked.

LAVERE: When I was going to North Central High School and staying out there on Wall with my dad I had this boyfriend. So we decided to walk home from North Central. I can’t believe I walked up that hill and all the way out there. I remember him saying to me, "Your face is as red as your hair," by the time we got home. I never did that again.

DOROTHY: It must have been four miles. Five miles maybe. Even from the house on Augusta, it was a good walk to school.

LAVERE: I don’t remember riding a bike.

DOROTHY: No. Kids didn’t ride bikes too much in those days. In fact, I never did learn to ride a bike. You had a bike, I know. You had a bicycle. Not very many kids took them to school.

LAVERE: Nobody drove you. You just got there.

DOROTHY: You just got there the best way you could.

LAVERE: I can remember taking the bus. Different ways.

DOROTHY: You could go downtown and transfer. You had a special rate. They had a student rate. It took forever.

LAVERE: We just used to bus it.

DOROTHY: Exactly. So we bought this house there on Augusta. That is where Mom and Dad lived. Grandpa had that bedroom downstairs.

LAVERE: Grandpa Davis?

DOROTHY: Grandpa Davis had that bedroom downstairs. He lived to be 93.

LAVERE: How long were you there before he passed away? How old were you when he died?

DOROTHY: I was in high school, I know, when he died. They had put in that little half bathroom because of him. That is the bedroom you were born in. Dad never adjusted to moving t~ Spokane because he was not a mixer. They would visit with the Torrences and these people that he knew. But he never really got acquainted with any of the other neighbors. It was pretty much a Catholic community anyway. Dad was really rabid about Catholics. The old school. Then of course Ruth married a Catholic. Yes. Jack.

LAVERE: I know Jack, but I meant the first husband.

DOROTHY: Her first husband was not a Catholic. He wasn’t anything as far as religion was concerned. Then when she married Jack, he was a Catholic. His family didn’t really accept Ruth that well because she had been married before and had Margaret. She joined the Catholic Church and finally won them all over and they thought she was great. Actually she took care of Jack’s mother for quite a few years after Jack’s father died. She lived with them out in Deer Park. Finally I think she did maybe have to go to a nursing home at the very last. But she lived there with Ruth and Jack for quite a few years. Then we found out that Dad had his heart problem. Dad had never been to a doctor or had stayed in bed a full day in his life. We had this lady chiropractor who lived just a little ways from our place there on Augusta. Dr. Kinert. I used to go to her for adjustments and she was an excellent doctor. So Mother started going to her then, too. She had an office in her home.

LAVERE: She had one leg removed.

DOROTHY: Well, that had happened when she was girl. Growing up she had run across the street in front of the streetcar and she had fallen and the streetcar ran over her leg. She had that from the time she was in high school. She was that age when it happened. A group of them had been to a youth meeting at the church. It was right there where the church was. The streetcar made a bend around the corner. It came off of Indiana Street and turned right there on Dakota Street. They were yelling like kids will when they came out and she ran across and fell and the streetcar hit her. She was good doctor and we were going to her for adjustments and things. I remember one time that Bill got pneumonia in the wintertime. It was really on his chest. He went over there to her and she always put us under these lights to relax us before she would do the adjustments. She put him under this light and she forgot him. He stayed under that light for a whole hour, almost, and it just really cooked that out of him and he got over it immediately. It was hilarious. He was immediately well. It just took all of that inflammation and everything out of his chest. Mom had gone to her for some treatments occasionally. We all liked her real well. She was a real nice lady. As I say, she had her office right in her home and it was a just a couple of blocks from the house. So Dad got to the place when he would mow the lawn, he would just really get such a pain in his chest. Well he said it is just gas.

LAVERE: Well he must have been in his 70’s by then.

DOROTHY: Yes, he was for sure. Pushing 80 pretty close because he was in his 80’s when he died. Anyway, he finally gave in to go to see Dr. Kinert and Mother went with him, of course. So then she examined him and I suppose gave him a treatment and so forth. After she had examined him then she called Mother into the other room and she said, "I don’t want to frighten you, Mrs. Leonard, but your husband has a bad heart... a very bad heart. He has got to go to a medical doctor and get some medication." Then finally Dad went to Dr. Baker who had his office in his home, as well, and it was just up on Indiana. Just a couple of blocks the other way. So he started going to Dr. Baker. He was such a kindly man. Just a real dear. He had just moved in there just a short time before that, I think. He had come from Montana. He had been practicing in Montana. He practiced in Montana,

I remember he said during the depression years when the only pay he would get would be the produce that the farmers would bring him and this sort of thing. Anyway he was just a real dear, down to earth man. Dad liked him real well. So he treated my father then as long as he was alive and gave him his medication. When Dad was finally bedridden at the last there, he would come down every other day or so to the house and see how he was doing and everything. So then from then on he was our family doctor for sure. When you were born, it was not ethical for Dr. Bozarth to do the delivery. So Dr. Stevens, who was his brother-in-law, did it.

LAVERE: Were they in business together?

DOROTHY: No, they weren’t in business together. Each one had their own office. They had gone to school together and he was chiropractor as well. His wife was your grandfather’s sister. Bertha. Aunt Bertha. She was the one that did the job. Your grandfather says that he let me labor longer than was necessary, he thought. But what could he do.

LAVERE: They probably didn’t know about things like they do now.

DOROTHY: Your grandmother also took care of me.

LAVERE: You mean Grandma Bozarth?

DOROTHY: Yes. They were still married at that time. She took care of me. I could have died. I didn’t seem to get better very fast. Did you ever hear this story?

LAVERE: Yes, but go ahead.

DOROTHY: The neighbors used to come over to see me. One of the neighbors said to Mother, "There is something wrong with that girl because there is a funny odor." She said, "It smells to me like all the afterbirth didn’t come away.

LAVERE: These days they get you out of bed. But those days you probably laid there.

DOROTHY: Laid there in bed. Hardly got up only to go to the bathroom. Fortunately as it would happen shortly after that I got up to go to the bathroom and the rest of the afterbirth came of it’s own accord, which was a blessing. Otherwise, I would have probably died. Blood poisoning. People did die quite a bit at childbirth that way. Of course, Dr. Bozarth said that they should have examined me. But the three of them, you know, your grandmother, your grandfather and Dr. Stevens. There was such a flurry going on there that none of them had really carefully examined the afterbirth apparently to see if it all came. He was pretty irate about that. He could get irate, too.

LAVERE: I remember him pretty well. He was always nice to me.

DOROTHY: He was always nice to me. I was very fond of him, really. And of your grandmother as well.

LAVERE: You can imagine that she kind of became a little morose. She always seemed kind of morose to me. She was always nice to me. I stayed with her sometimes. She was always real nice. I’ll never forget the time I was there as a child. It must have been when I had the nervous thing because I had to be in bed and I was laying on her couch. I remember day in and day out. She came in to scrub the ceiling or something. She had this ladder and this bucket of soapy water. She stepped off that ladder into that bucket. She said, "Oh.... Well you know, Lavere, sometimes we say things that we shouldn’t say." She had apologized for that. It was typical of her to do that. I can’t blame her for being so disgusted. Put her shoe right down in that bucket of water.

DOROTHY: So then right away I started getting better. So then I was able to go back to work.

Those were the years. There was a lot of happiness along the way.

LAVERE: My dad sure thought a lot of Grandma and Grandpa.

DOROTHY: He came to their service.

LAVERE: I know.

DOROTHY: He and Ruth and Peggy.

LAVERE: I was really surprised. I went out there and there they were.

DOROTHY: I really appreciated that. I am sure it was kind of traumatic for them to do that.

LAVERE: He said that Grandpa was "a prince of a man." That was the expression. They were wonderful people. They were just loving, generous.

DOROTHY: That summer that he spent up there with them, I think, probably was one of the happiest summers of his life. He spent it at the lake with you and Mom. He used to make bread for everybody.

LAVERE: I’ll bet for everybody.

DOROTHY: Mother always baked bread up at the lake because there was no place really to get bread.

LAVERE: He was a hard working guy, my dad. He went on nervous energy.

DOROTHY: I am sure they had a pretty nice summer up there together. They thought a lot of him. He had a lot of good qualities, Lavere.

LAVERE: I know. One of the things that I think about him is that he was fun-loving.

DOROTHY: He and Peggy. When those two would get together it was like a couple of kids. He and Peggy were always close and they always had their little private jokes and all of that. Peggy stayed with us too at Mom and Dad’s one summer, I remember.

LAVERE: Ruby told me that she did that. That she stayed at the house there with you.

DOROTHY: I am sure she did.

LAVERE: Divorcing or something about that time, was that it? Grandpa and Grandma Bozarth were divorcing about that time.

DOROTHY: I think so. Right.

LAVERE: She stayed there because she wasn’t out of school yet or something and so she stayed and went to school.

DOROTHY: Peggy stayed there when she was in her divorce. With her little boy, one summer.

LAVERE: At Grandpa and Grandma’s house?

DOROTHY: Yes.

LAVERE: But they were at the lake.

DOROTHY: They were at the lake. She spent the summer there and she did the cooking and everything. I was working in the bakery. Your dad was working in the bakery. She stayed there with... I have forgotten the little guy’s name. What is her son’s name? Do you remember?

LAVERE: Howard.

DOROTHY: Howard.

LAVERE: Tell me about. This is aside but we don’t care because this is all going to
be edited anyway. I tried to find out about Peggy’s husband. Howard’s....

DOROTHY: The boy’s father?

LAVERE: Their name was Grasser. Is that correct?

DOROTHY: Yes. Right.

LAVERE: Was he a Spokane person? How did she meet him?

DOROTHY: I don’t know how she met him, honey. It didn’t work out for them, anyway.

I think he was not very much good. Quite a drinker. Of course, that’s

Peggy’s downfall too, you know.

LAVERE: Yes, alcohol.

DOROTHY: So they didn’t live together very long after Howard was born. He was about two or three, I think, the summer.. I think they must have lived together until he was about two.

LAVERE: So it was just a few years there.

DOROTHY: Just a few years. That summer she would stay there at Mom’s and Dad’s while they were at the lake and cook for us. She lived there. Then one year, if you can believe it, the Butler girls stayed there. So they were more than generous. Dena and, which other girl was it? I still remember it anyway. Uncle Al and Aunt Mary. Of course, their mother was the only girl that Uncle Gene had. Then she got tuberculosis and their oldest daughter died with tuberculosis. Her husband died with tuberculosis. It just kind of went through the family, you know.

LAVERE: It got them all.

DOROTHY: They knew that it was very contagious and you had to boil the dishes they ate off of. In a big family, you know, it’s hard to isolate it. I don’t know there might have been one of the other girls. There was a Butler girl that was about Ruth’s age, she died with it. Then Doris was my age. After their mother died, she went to live with an aunt. They were quite wealthy. So Doris was very well educated. She went to college, she got a degree and she taught school. The other girls more or less just lived from one family to the other. Those girls were always close. Lots of affection. Doris was the only one that was kind of separate from them because they lived quite a ways away and they didn’t get together much. What else?

DOROTHY: I will have to get the date when Dad came to the Farmington area. Also some of the dates about the marriage and all of that. I will have to get that from Albert. When Mother and Dad were married. The date they were married and so forth.

LAVERE: I may have that.

DOROTHY: I am sure I have it here some place. I don’t know exactly where. So anyway before Mother and Dad were married she used to always cook in the summer time for the harvest crews. They would go out in this cook wagon and move from one place to another and cook for each farm. That is the way they did it. They would do one farm and then they would move to the next farm. The cook shack as they called it was kind of a portable thing where they cooked for the men. She did that sort of thing every summer before they were married, I know that. I don’t know too much about their early-married life except that she used to make butter and things like this when they lived on the farm there in Farmington. She would take their buggy and go to town with it and trade it for staple stuff or sell the eggs and the butter. Everybody wanted Mother’s butter because it was so good. It makes a lot of difference Th the way you take care of your cream how your butter tastes. She made such good butter. Whenever Mrs. Leonard’s butter was there that went right out first. They were eager to get it from her. I guess she was quite an independent lady. Took the buggy with the horse.

LAVERE: You were saying that they had joined the lodge there.

DOROTHY: This is when I remember my dad being more or less fun loving was when they would go down to the Masonic Temple for their meetings. This was the Eastern Star meetings when the women were there, as well. I don’t know about when the men had their meeting because I never went down for any of those occasions. They would set up these long tables in the hail below the lodge hall. Aunt Floy’s daughter, Amber, because they were very active in the Masonic Lodge as well as Mother and Dad, she would go too and she and Ruth and I would run around like a bunch of Indians. I remember Amber used to snatch the olives off the table. They would put things like that, the pickles and olives and things like that, on the table. Then, of course, the other food was not brought out until they were through.

LAVERE: They were canned olives?

DOROTHY: Oh yes. They bought them at the store, I guess. Quite a treat for anybody that liked them, but I thought they were the awfulest tasting things I ever had.

LAVERE: You still don’t like olives?

DOROTHY: I love olives now. It is a vegetable fat so I can eat those.

LAVERE: I suppose the lodge, the Eastern Star, the Masonic and the church that was the social...

DOROTHY: That was the social life of the community.

LAVERE: There were moving pictures yet?

DOROTHY: This was before movies.

LAVERE: Were there saloons there?

DOROTHY: I suppose so.

LAVERE: But that wasn’t part of your...

DOROTHY: That wasn’t part of our life because Dad didn’t drink or anything. He was dead against it. Anybody taking a drink at all. I do remember that occasionally there would be a spelling bee up in a little school that was out in Idaho. It was Pigeon Hollow. That was what they called it. They would go to the Pigeon Hollow School for this spelling bee where they would spell down. I don’t remember, I think they would sing. Sometimes it would be a singing thing. I do remember when I was real small Mother and Dad going to that occasionally. Ruth would remember more about that then I would because she used to love to go to that. She thought that was great when she could go to Pigeon Hollow for the sing or for the spelling bee or whatever. It would be a social time. The social times were few and far between because it was just mostly farm and work. All the farmers had cattle and horses. It was something they had to be home to take care of. When we would go up there to Pigeon Hollow that thing would go on until two or three o’clock in the morning. I guess when Mother and Dad were going together they used to go to these things. They would drive miles. Then it would just be an all night thing before they would get home. That was their social life and it didn’t happen too often I guess because the work had to come first. This is when I would remember my Dad would joke with the women and the men. They would all come down from up at the lodge meeting and they would all pitch in to get the things on the table and ready to eat. They had this great big boiler boiling with water. They would put that on the fire before they went up to the meeting. Then when they came down, I guess there was always someone that sat outside and guarded the door. What do they call it? Order I guess. Anyway, this is supposed to be a secret organization. A very secret organization.

LAVERE: Everybody belonged, didn’t they?

DOROTHY: Just about everybody in the town belonged. There were other groups that had a different lodge. I forgot what it was called. Anyway, they were all friends. My Dad used to joke and laugh and it was a happy time. Most of the time he was a very serious person as I remember him around the home and everything. Mom and Dad never joked. They never had any little private jokes but I can remember that my girlfriend, Genevieve, her parents... that’s the way they were. They had their little private jokes that they shared and they’d laugh about them and all this.

LAVERE: They’re dead I suppose.

DOROTHY: Oh yeah they are... both of them.

LAVERE: How about Genevieve... is she dead too?

DOROTHY: Yes, she’s dead too. The last I knew, her husband was still living though. But Madeline, her sister, is dead and I imagine that her husband is dead now too. But the other girls didn’t stay in really very close touch with him because they felt that he had not been a very good husband to Genevieve - That he imposed on her and everything. She was one of those slow, patient people and I was the impatient type. Ha Ha. We used to get along really well though and the folks used to let her come up to the lake with us for the whole summer. I can remember when we were kids in high school and my folks were wonderful that way.

LAVERE: What kind of social life did you and Ruth have when you were going to high school? She went to North Central too, I assume.

DOROTHY: She went to North Central too, as well.

LAVERE: Did she graduate from North Central or did she get married?

DOROTHY: I can’t remember... I think she did graduate and then she married Lee--and of course that was a disaster--but they had Margaret and Mother raised her, practically, until Ruth married Jack in later years. Then they took Margaret. Of course, that was a disaster, too, because Margaret was such a rebellious kid. She didn’t want to go to live with them, really.

LAVERE: It’s too bad she did. She should’ve stayed where she was.

DOROTHY: Mother said she would have been a different girl if she would’ve stayed with them. She gave them no problems, even though she was redheaded. She never had any temper tantrums or anything like that but when she met with Ruth and Jack, she was rebellious. If she didn’t want to wear her boots when the snow was going, she didn’t wear her boots. Jack would get on her for that. So, it wasn’t a very happy situation ever. Then, of course, young Jack was born and that made it all the worse.

LAVERE: Yeah, cause they just doted on him.

DOROTHY: They doted on him and he was a boy and was always the favorite one in the family. Then poor Margaret’s life was a disaster when she got married, too, because her husband, Clifton, was killed. She got married real young.

LAVERE: Before she even finished high school? I don’t know...

DOROTHY: I don’t remember either, for sure, but she got married real young. Clifton was a nice kid but he was not very well educated. He just did common labor work. Big hearted; he was very much like Dwight in that respect. How he come to be electrocuted was that he was just trying to help these people. He went to this farmhouse and there had been an electrical storm; a real storm of thunder and all that sort of stuff. This light pole had fallen down and the wires were lying there on the ground. Crazy kid, he picked up a stick and was trying to put them somewhere out of the way. Of course, the wires were hot and it electrocuted him. Here was Margaret with three little kids--three little boys--no means of support or anything.

LAVERE: Where were they living then?

DOROTHY: They were living in the Lewiston area.

LAVERE: Oh, that’s right, they weren’t living in Spokane...

DOROTHY: No, they weren’t living in Spokane. So it was pretty rough going for Margaret after that.

LAVERE: By then, Ruth and Jack were living in Spokane, though, weren’t they?

DOROTHY: Oh, yes. They came up during the war-times because Jack was a welder and there was such a demand for welders. He had been working for this one welding company in Lewiston for years and years. But during the war-time, everything went to war. That was the big thing. So he got a job out at what is now Fairchild Airport and was at that time called Galena. They repaired and did all these things and he got a really good job there. Ruth stayed in Lewiston, then, until Jack’s term of school was through. Then she moved to Spokane and they sold their place in Lewiston. Margaret, of course, was married by that time. So then after they came to Spokane, they rented an apartment for awhile. Then they bought a home in the northwest area of Spokane.

LAVERE: She got sick while they were there. I remember, That’s when she got sick and she was down and I remember going over there and staying with her, with Ruth.

DOROTHY: Is that when they were in the apartment yet?

LAVERE: No, I remember them being in the apartment because I went over and I vacuumed for her once a week.

DOROTHY: Uh-huh. Yeah...

LAVERE: But then they bought that house. I remember going over there because she was down. She was working then, when they were in the apartment.

DOROTHY: Right.

LAVERE: I guess in an office or something.

DOROTHY: Well, she had done secretarial work before, right out of high school. She got this job as a bookkeeper-type, you know, office work. She had taken bookkeeping and typing--a commercial course--in high school. How she met Lee was through his sister. She worked in the same insurance office, I think, as his sister. So they became friends and she used to go home with her occasionally and spend the night. That’s where she met Lee. This girl was a nice girl. The family were a nice family but Lee was just kind of a...

LAVERE: Oh, just a kid probably.

DOROTHY: Yeah, just young and ne’er do well type, you know. Happy-go-lucky...redhead.

LAVERE: In fact, Uncle Al--when we were down there--was saying that he used to go out with them when...l don’t know what Lee did...some type of delivery...

DOROTHY: Yeah, he delivered something; I can’t remember what.

LAVERE: And he said [Uncle Al], he’d go with him just as a sidekick, and he was always really good to him. He liked him.

DOROTHY: Yeah, right. He was a nice guy.

LAVERE: After he (had his time?) with some other woman, grandpa wouldn’t have him on the place, I guess.

DOROTHY: No, no. Well, what he did.... He just went off with a bunch of other people. He went out to the lake and left Ruth in this little house they were living in up on the North side--and Margaret was a baby. Finally, the people went out to Lune Lake and rented a cottage--a bunch of them--and they were just having a high old time. How this woman ever found out who he was, I don’t know. Anyway, she called Mom and Dad. She told them that he was out there with this other bunch of people and with this woman, so she said, and she knew he had a wife and a baby. So, Mother and Dad went up there and there was practically nothing to eat in the house. They just packed her up and brought her home with Margaret. Then, Dad said, "That’s it." And one time, even after they took her up to the lake later on, Lee came up there to the lake. I can’t remember this because I was not there, but Dad got the shotgun and went down and met him at the dock and he wouldn’t even let him come on the dock. Just "Get out and get going," and he did. That was the end of that!

LAVERE: I never remembered my grandfather and guns at all!

DOROTHY: No, right, right.

LAVERE: I guess he had one that time.

DOROTHY: Yeah, well, they used to hunt when they were up on Emida. There were lots and lots of deer up in there and he would go hunting with the men. He had guns and he had a gun rack in the living room, I remember, and his hunting guns were up on the rack. Other than that, he didn’t. When they first went up there, to the stump ranch, they lived there year-round for several years, apparently. At that time, there was much logging going on. They were still cutting trees in a lot of places in these mills, these logging companies. When Mother and Dad first started going up there, they had this large herd of cattle and stuff that they took with them from the Farmington farm. So, he would butcher the young stock and sell it to these places. He did really well doing that because they were just eager to get the fresh meat.

DOROTHY: I was talking about Dad butchering the young beeves and delivering them to the logging companies and he did that for quite a few years. I can remember that house so well because it was really a large place for..

LAVERE: Why don’t you describe it. What did it look like from the front?

DOROTHY: Well, it was just plain in the front and sides but the logs were all smoothed off, you know. It still looked a bit rough on the outside, but the rooms were large. I remember the kitchen was a good size and this stairway went up out of the kitchen and the dining room was large because we always had men there, you know, and apparently they had..

LAVERE: Were there partitions inside?

DOROTHY: Oh, yeah. It was partitioned into four rooms. It was divided almost equally, I think, into four rooms and we never really used the living room too much because.

LAVERE: Fireplace in the living room?

DOROTHY: No fireplace in this.

LAVERE: No fireplace at all?

DOROTHY: No fireplace at all. There was a big cookstove that was right in front of the back door where Mother.. and it was a large range.. where she did the cooking and the baking and. all of that. And then the bedrooms.. I remember the bedrooms. There were these two double beds and Ruth and I slept in one.. Mom and Dad in the other. This must have been before Albert came along because I can remember that the beds were homemade and they were made with poles, I suppose and had the bark on it yet.

LAVERE: And I bet they had straw mattresses.

DOROTHY: I don’t remember but all I remember about the beds was the fact that Ruth and I used to fight like a couple of little cats. We’d roll together in this dumb bed and we’d "You’re on my side." "No, you’re on my side. Get over." Dad got really sick of it and what he did, he went out into the woods and got a pole and cut this pole and put it right down through the middle of the bed so that we... and one side was hers and one side was mine and we..

LAVERE: If you put your finger over it you were going to get it chopped off!

DOROTHY: (laughter) Exactly. So there was no more fighting and he hated us to fight more than anything else in the world and Mother did, too. In fact,..

LAVERE: That was the days when they didn’t have single beds.

DOROTHY: No. All beds were big, right. In fact, I suppose, it was big enough you could put three in there if you divided them off with poles.

LAVERE: Wan would tell a story about sleeping with his brother, Charley, and he said, "Here’s the line!" and he’d clack his arm up and down.. "If you cross this line.."

DOROTHY: "If you cross this line, you’re dead!" (laughter)

LAVERE: As long as he didn’t treat me that when we were married. "Don’t cross this line LaVere! (laughter)

DOROTHY: Oh, shoot. Well, anyway. I can remember that just so well and see it just so well and they hated to have us quarrel more than anything. And you know kids. They will quarrel no matter what. And that’s the only thing that I can ever remember Mother whipping us, but Ruth and I would get into a scrap and Mother would go out and cut a twig off of the willow tree and it was good and snappy and she’d just more than give it to us around..across the back of our legs is where she always whipped us because.. it stung good and we just bawled really loud, so she’d quit. But anyway, why Dad quit doing this was because he got to dreaming about it at night..

LAVERE: Dreaming about what?

DOROTHY: Dreaming about butcher.. killing these animals. See, Dad was such a tenderhearted man when it came to his stock, you know. He loved his stock and he just was always kind.

He didn’t make pets out of them but he just was considerate.. very considerate of his stock.. his cows, his young stock, his horses. He would never., the horses just had to die of old age.

LAVERE: It must have been quite a trip to move that stock from Farmington to Emida.

DOROTHY: Oh, it was.

LAVERE: It took several days, didn’t it?

DOROTHY: Right. Because, you see, the cattle walked slow. It would take us at least two days and maybe part of three to move them. But anyway, it got to bothering him. He would dream at night and he got to worrying for fear that he might get up at night and injure some of the family. And so he quit it. He quit doing it. Now that I got from my mother. She told me that, you know, that that was the reason that Dad quit butchering because it just got to him some way and he got to dreaming about it at night. And I suppose his dreams were not very pleasant, you know. Maybe he was doing something that he shouldn’t be doing or killing something that he shouldn’t kill or whatever. Anyway, it got to worrying him so he quit doing the butchering and selling meat. But we were very isolated up there. There were only a couple of farms where people lived between Emida and our place. It was absolutely the end of the road and then, of course, the two families lived way on up in the boonies and they were at least three miles farther up in the woods, but oh those woods were beautiful. And I remember their place. It was kind of a meadow. They’d cleared it away and it was kind of a meadow but they had never cultivated anything because they had no animals.

LAVERE: The people that lived up the road?

DOROTHY: The people that lived up the road and the two men that used to work for Dad in the summer time. They just lived off of wild life really, pretty much, except in the summer, the men would work for Dad. And when they didn’t work for him, I’m sure they would work some place else because they had to have money to buy the staples that they used.

LAVERE: Let’s go back to Spokane. No. No. We were talking about the house there in Emida. What did it look like from the front? Where was the door, on the front of it?

DOROTHY: It was just kind of in the middle.

LAVERE: A window on each side or something?

DOROTHY: No. No. Just the door.

LAVERE: That was all there was on the front of the house?

DOROTHY: I don’t think there were any windows on that side that I remember. There was one at the end of the dining room and one at the end of the kitchen where the stairway went up.

LAVERE: But that was on the ends of the house.

DOROTHY: Now there may have been a window on the side. I wouldn’t know. Buelah would remember because they lived there, too.

LAVERE: Call them up and see if they have a picture of that place.

DOROTHY: I’ll talk to them about that. I’m going to get with Al and get those dates and stuff straightened out in my head and then I’ll send it to you.

LAVERE: OK.

DOROTHY: There was one window in the bedroom between the two beds. I can remember Mom’s bed was on this corner and we were on this other corner and out behind the house was some brush growing and stuff. Some wild bushes. One night a skunk came and got into the.. and Mother had a setting hen and she had sneaked out her nest and she was in those bushes and so here comes the skunk and got after Mom’s hen. And I can remember this so well. They were out there chasing that skunk away from that hen and I don’t know if she ever got the hen or not. I don’t remember that, but I remember them getting up and dashing out of the bedroom after that dumb skunk. She was after Mama’s hen that was setting in these bushes behind the house.

And then in the living room there was a window..a couple of windows, too, I think. But I don’t recall exactly where they were, my dear.

But the upstairs must have had a window because it was light up there and we would go up there and play and it had a floor in it. Probably, the windows were at the ends.. the gable ends. It was light up there and we would go up and play and there was old magazines up there and it was quite a treat for us to go up in the attic.

LAVERE: Were there just steps going up to the door? Was there a cover over the door.. no kind of a porch?

DOROTHY: Well, it had a few steps.. at the front door. No. You just came in. It was just on the ground level, practically. There wasn’t anything out there. I remember there was something there, probably some boards or something.. a porch, maybe. A stoop type thing. There was no cover over it as I remember. But going up to the attic, you went up three..

LAVERE: There was a stairway..

DOROTHY: There was a stairway that went up there and it went up three steps and then there was a landing there and there’s where the window was and then it turned and went up the side of the house.. the back edge of the house to the top. And there was a door at the top that closed and..

LAVERE: But they just used that for an attic.

DOROTHY: Yes. Really, they didn’t even store anything up there that I remember. And then, just out behind where the men.. they had a bench where they would wash up and where the barrels were that Dad would bring from the creek to bring the water for washing their hands and faces and that. And they always had a towel hanging out there behind, I remember. And then, just a few feet back from there was Dad’s shop. It was a blacksmith’s shop where he had a forge and his wheel where he sharpened his instruments and he used to shoe the horses even. And he had this forge and he would.. I would like to go out and watch him. But like I say, I was kind of chicken then. Ruth was always the one that was hovering with Dad. She followed him like a shadow. He was patient with her and taught her all the names of all the plants and everything.

So, anyway, that’s what I remember about the house. And it was big. It wasn’t just a little log cabin. It was a good-sized thing.

LAVERE: That’s why I keep thinking, why weren’t there windows on the one side.

DOROTHY: There probably were, in the dining area, but I don’t recall in the kitchen. I don’t remember too much about the windows but I know there was always plenty of light in there. We didn’t have anything for light but just lamps, you know, coal oil lamps. And so, of course, there were windows. .good size windows. But they were tall and narrow, rather than being wide like people build them nowadays.

LAVERE: Well, go back now, Mom, because I think we’ve covered Emida pretty well.

DOROTHY: Go back to Farmington?

LAVERE: Go back to Farmington. Grandma was going to.. well, no, we left Farmington.

DOROTHY: We got to Spokane. All right.

LAVERE: I wanted to know about your school years in Spokane.

DOROTHY: Well, like I said Ruth graduated from Emerson and then she went to North Central. By that time, we had moved down from the Emerson area into the Garfield area because that was closer to the high school as well. It was just across Monroe Street, you know, from the high school and we were down there about four blocks off of Monroe. But they didn’t buy that house. Then they bought this one over by the Torrence house and it was about the same latitude but it was the other side of town. It was east and before that we had been west, in the western part of town. And I graduated from the Bancroft School and then started to North Central.

LAVERE: And you guys are taking piano lessons all this time. Did Ruth continue with the piano?

DOROTHY: No. She never continued with it either. But she can play a little bit, too, and so in later years, she got a.. I think, the last I knew, she had one of those keyboards, you know..playing with it. She took lessons long enough that she could play a little bit, always..always. But she didn’t really continue with it. We, neither one of us, were born musicians, which you’d really need to be if you’re gonna make something out of it, you know..a livelihood or anything.

LAVERE: Well, you have to be pretty good, Mom, to play for the orchestra.

DOROTHY: Well, yes. I was pretty good.

LAVERE: How old were you then? Were you out of high school?

DOROTHY: Oh, no. I was in high school. It was during my high school years. I can remember, my teacher just as well as can be. He was a big, tall skinny man. He was in his music up to his ears.

LAVERE: So he got you started with the fiddlers.

DOROTHY: Yes, right. He played.. he had a lot of violin students and he taught piano as well. But he had many more violin students than he did piano students.

LAVERE: Tell about your musical. Who did you play for? Where did they play?

DOROTHY: We used to go out and play for organizations or something.

LAVERE: Did you get paid or was it free?

DOROTHY: Free, probably. Just for the experience. I don’t think he got any money for it either. I don’t know, but it was just a way to expose his pupils and get more students and stuff like that. I sort of remember his wife, too. She was a real nice lady, but didn’t participate in the music in any way.

LAVERE: So did you have any other interesting high school experience besides your music, Mom?

DOROTHY: Oh, yes. Yes. I had a friend in high school that wanted to take elocution lessons, they called them in those days. So, I said to Mom, "Can I take this?" She wanted someone to take it with her. She would teach two at once. So she said, "Will you go take these?" Oh, I always wanted to do everything like that. So we took these speech lessons was what they amounted to, you know.

LAVERE: That’s really a good thing.

DOROTHY: And so, well, yes, it was. It gave me.. it did a lot for me. It really did.

LAVERE: It would give you confidence.

DOROTHY: And I really liked it and when it came to..

LAVERE: I remember you used to do some kind of little readings..

DOROTHY: Oh, yeah. I did readings and all that sort of thing. I guess I must have been pretty good at it.

LAVERE: I think that’s a lost thing, now. I never hear of anybody taking..

DOROTHY: ..taking speech lessons.

LAVERE: I mean, they have drama and maybe it would be part of drama or something.

DOROTHY: In high school we had the drama class, too, but I never took that one particularly and I remember in my senior year that I was.. they.. I guess I must have been a pretty good student because they had.. there was a draw between two of us as to whether we would give the baccalaureate. For the program for our graduation, they were going to have the school play.. the senior class put on this play. You were either going to have the lead in the school play or else you were going to give a speech.. say a recitation of some sort. So, anyway, it simmered down to the fact that this other girl took a lead in the school play and I did the recitation at our graduation, which was quite an honor because we had over a thousand graduates, I think, that year, or close to it and like I say, when my dad moved to Spokane, he kind of went into a shell. And he would never go out to any of those things and Mother wouldn’t go without him, so they didn’t go to my graduation, I remember.

LAVERE: Oh, my goodness.

DOROTHY: But, they were there in spirit, I know, and they were really proud of us kids whenever we accomplished anything, but he was just so proud.

LAVERE: OK, high school.. elocution.

DOROTHY: And so I remember giving this reading. It was quite a dramatic reading, at the graduation, and I can remember Genevieve, my girlfriend, you know, and.. she and I were just like sisters.. and either I would sleep over at her place or else she would sleep over at my place and school was always easy for me. I don’t brag, but I always got good grades and it was always easy for me and I loved it. The only subject that I had that I had really difficulty with was my physics class. And that was electricity. And that just kind of boggled my mind. I just.. well, chemistry or any of that was duck soup for me but physics, I could not comprehend the electricity and at that time, they were just.. radio was just coming in and my teacher, my physics teacher, was starting a little ham radio station at North Central. These dumb boys in that class would get him talking about radio and he would spend the whole period, so actually I didn’t learn very much about electricity. And that was my poorest subject in high school, otherwise.

LAVERE: Where did you meet my dad?

DOROTHY: I was going to come to that. I never really went with any boys in high school. I went out occasionally with one or two but I never really had a boyfriend in high school. But when I was a senior in high school, you know, your dad was, of course, out of school, because he was a bit older than me and mother was still taking treatments from Dr. Bozarth. And so he said to Wesley, I want you to meet Mrs. Leonard’s daughter. And he wasn’t too interested, I don’t think. But, you know, his dad was quite insistent and so, some way or another, they arranged for us to meet. So I started going out with him and I went with him then, pretty steady, all of the time that I was a senior. And he had this old Cadillac which I thought was really super-duper, duper, you know, for a high school kid and he would pick me up sometimes after school. Because, of course, being a baker, he would have his afternoons off and he’d be off early and he’d come to school and pick me up sometimes, you know. But, yes, that’s when I met your dad.

Wesley had been going quite steadily with a girl and Dr. Bozarth didn’t think she was the right one for him, so he wanted him to get with a girl that was more stable than this gal was. It was probably a good idea. I think he was sowing a few wild oats, probably. And so his dad was kind of concerned about him. But he used to always.. when they went to dances, and they loved to go to dances and they would go sometimes even out to the barn dances in the surrounding areas. We always took Peggy with him because they were so close of an age and she loved to go, too. So, he always took Peggy with him. But he had been going quite steady with this other girl and she was pretty mad at me when I stepped in. When I came on the scene, she didn’t have any use for me at all. But, anyway, that’s when I met your dad.

LAVERE: So then you got married shortly after you were out of high school..

DOROTHY: Right. I was just right out of high school. His dad was the bottom of that. He kept saying, "Why don’t you get married? She’s a nice girl. Why don’t you get married?" He said, "Just go off to Coeur d’Alene and get married." which is what we did, eventually, you know and practically broke my dad’s heart to think that we would sneak off and get married and, of course, he, I’m sure that everybody thought that I was probably pregnant but I wasn’t and I didn’t have you until we’d been married a couple of years. But, you know, they thought it was one of those instances where you had to do it if you sneaked off, you know. So it was an embarrassing situation for my dad. . . very embarrassing. And heartbreaking. .He just said, I don’t want you to come back in this house again. .yes, he was really burned up.. but, of course, he got over it and I apologized no end. I said "Well, Dad I hope you’ll forgive us for doing this. I’m really sorry that I did it this way." And, of course, Mother thought why didn’t she tell us, so they could have given me a nice wedding and a nice dress and all of this. They would have loved to do that, but actually it was a good thing because they weren’t that flush.

LAVERE: Yes, and everybody else just got married. Ruth got married.

DOROTHY: Ruth got married, too.

LAVERE: Albert and Beulah sound like they just got married.

DOROTHY: They just got married, too. I mean, no big splash. Actually, things were.. they were pretty hard times. The crops hadn’t been all that good and it was really a blessing. But they had signed me up to go to college, you know. I was registered at school and, of course, I thought I could have my cake and eat it, too. And I thought, well, I’ll go to school anyway. Ha ha.

LAVERE: Ruth was already married by then?

DOROTHY: She was married by then.

LAVERE: But was she back at the house with Margaret by then?

DOROTHY: I think she was back at the house by the time I graduated. I think she was back at the house with Margaret, living with the folks. But, anyway, I took these elocution lessons and I enjoyed it. I really liked it. And I learned a lot of readings and that sort of thing and I used to go places and give these readings for free and never got paid. And one time, at that time, we had vaudeville. We had this vaudeville theater down in Spokane and the lady that I took lessons from had been quite an important actress in one time before she had married., her name was Albert.. before she had married her husband and come east.. came from the east to Spokane. She was still in connection with these.. she still was familiar with the people that were on vaudeville and into movies and all this sort of thing. Well one time, this was right after Wesley and I got married. This group came through... this troupe.. and they put on this little playlet.. a one-act playlet.. vaudeville circuits.. and one of the younger actresses just took off and left them high and dry without anybody to do it. So Mrs. Albert said, "Well, I’ve got a student that’s very good. She could fill right in there." And so she recommended me.

LAVERE: Your career! (laughter)

DOROTHY: My career. I went down and interviewed and they would have taken me but then they found out I was married and that was the end of that, you know. This was the year that we sneaked off. This was in the fall of the year after we had sneaked off in August and gotten married.

LAVERE: And he was working where?

DOROTHY: He was working at the bakery.

LAVERE: Which one?

DOROTHY: I can’t remember. I think he was working for Bode Brothers. I’m not positive. No, maybe not. Well, there were quite a few bakeries in town at that time and I don’t remember which one he was working at. But, of course, the bakery business always fell off in the wintertime so immediately, that very first winter, he was laid off. And so, here we were. He belonged to the union and he couldn’t go out free lance, you know. He had to wait..

LAVERE: Were you living at the house with the folks or were you living somewhere by yourself?

DOROTHY: We were living in this apartment in the Bozarth ‘s house.. that downstairs apartment, do you remember?

LAVERE: I remember Beatrice living there.

DOROTHY: Yes, right. That’s where we lived the first few years we were married. That is where we were living and he lost his job for the winter. But we got along all right because the union paid him so much, so we had living wage and we never paid any rent, as I remember, there, when we lived in that apartment. It was a daylight apartment. It kind of went down the hill, you know. But it was in the Bozarth ‘s house there on Main. Then, finally, he got this job in Davenport, Washington and we moved out there and we were.. he was there for pretty near a year. He lived in the hotel part and I was there with him in the room and I ate at the restaurant. They had a restaurant in this bakery, as well. And we were there for at least six months, maybe longer. I can’t remember how long.

LAVERE: Was that the place that was upstairs and you had to have your piano up there?

DOROTHY: Yes. And I had to have my piano.

LAVERE: Dad told me that story. Something about moving this piano up those stairs.

DOROTHY: Up those stairs.. little narrow, rickety stairs in this hotel down in Davenport. Oh, great Gus. We had had it down in the basement, you know, there at Bozarth’s. Oh, I had to have my piano.

LAVERE: And that was probably a big piano, too.

DOROTHY: It was a regular.. one of those high. .you know.. regular upright pianos. Right. Exactly. Oh, dear. That was.. I was a pain in the neck when I was a kid, that’s for sure. So we were there for a while. Well, where we went from there, I don’t remember. Anyway, we came back to Spokane and I think Dad loaned us some money to buy this little bakery about then.. about that time and he loaned us some money. He borrowed the money for us from the bank because they didn’t have it either. He borrowed the money and signed a note, of course. We did real good. We paid that back really fast, all but the last $500. We hadn’t paid off I think it was only $1,500 we paid for this little., this business, to start with. Of course, that was a lot of money in those days. And then when the bank closed, then there we were. It was a long, long time before we ever paid off the other five. But to begin with, we did really well because I worked in the front and we just had one girl, I think, and then business got better and he hired a baker. Well, then you had to pay good money for bakers, you know. So that kind of cut down on our profit, but we still did well. (The "Delicious Bakery")

LAVERE: Let’s see. You got married at eighteen.

DOROTHY: Right.

LAVERE: You were born in 1904.

DOROTHY: Right.

LAVERE: I was born in 1928. You must have been married several years before I was born. Six years, is that right?

DOROTHY: No, I don’t think so. You were born in ‘28. We were married in ‘22. I graduated in ‘22.

LAVERE: Six years. You must have been married six years before I was born.

DOROTHY: Right, right. Because I worked in the bakery and everything else, you know.

LAVERE: So you had that bakery probably four or five years before I was born.

DOROTHY: Right. Exactly. And we had it pretty well established and everything. We were married a long time before that. Finally, I decided that I wanted to have a family. And I thought if I’m ever going to do it, it’s going to be now, you know. And he’ll just have to learn to get along without me.

LAVERE: Well, he was not a businessman.

DOROTHY: He was not a businessman type.

LAVERE: It was the same with Merle. He said I always marry the executive type women. He really didn’t have the business sense.

DOROTHY: He had a high school graduation. He had a high school diploma but he did not, the mathematics.. he hadn’t gone into any mathematics in depth and, apparently, that wasn’t his cup of tea at all. The time when I was pregnant, I took this trip with Mother and Dad and we went over to Seattle, I remember, and took the boat to Victoria. It was a beautiful trip on the sound there and we went up to Victoria, Canada.

And we were gone for about a week, and Wes had.. like I say.. he had to check the drivers in at night and he had to check the till. He didn’t do any of the retail end of it. We had a girl in there and he had to balance the till.

Ruth and Jack were living just about two blocks from the bakery and Jack laughed about this years later. He said "Well, I would always go over when it was time to check in the drivers to give Wes a hand." And he said "Well, if we didn’t balance, if we were $10 short, we took it out of our pocket and put it in. If we were long, we took it out and put it in our pocket." And that’s the way they balanced the books that week I was gone, you know. (laughter)

So, when I got back, of course, I went right to work again.

LAVERE: Sounds like Jack wasn’t much better.

DOROTHY: No, Jack wasn’t any better than Wes. Ruth would have done great but she had the baby then. Jack was a little guy.. the little tiny baby, then, you know. That was the story about that. And they laughed about it in later years how they and Jack would laugh about that how one night we were $10 long so we just took it out and the next night, they were $10 short, so they put it back in.. or whatever amount it was. That’s the way it went for the whole week.

LAVERE: So you had that bakery for about two years.

DOROTHY: Yes, we did. We did, I’m sure.

BILL: He was a good baker.

DOROTHY: He was an excellent baker. He was an excellent baker. He always got along well with his men.

LAVERE: He was a nice guy.

DOROTHY: At one time, we had several men bakers working for us, you know.

LAVERE: It’s kind of interesting that you worked up a wholesale business.

DOROTHY: We worked up a wholesale business and delivered to the grocery stores. Two trucks, I think, at least. And maybe, part of the time, and then there was another man who had his own truck who used to pick up things. And he delivered out in the valley. Clarr.

LAVERE: Clarr. . That’s who I was trying to think of.

DOROTHY: That was his own truck and he had this route out in the Spokane valley. Actually, he had two routes. Every other day, you see, he’d take one. He delivered all kinds of pastries and stuff house to house and that was his little business that he’d worked up but he always bought all the pastries and stuff from us. He had that going, though, and came to us after we’d gotten started in there and signed up with us to do this. He was a German fellow, a real character and his wife, too.

LAVERE: I don’t think that they had any children.

DOROTHY: They had no children. That’s right.

LAVERE: I remember it. I remember, you know, when I was a teenager. . that he’d come and visit Merle.. because he always kept up on them.. they were older by then. I don’t think he was working.

DOROTHY: Yes, right. And they were the same way with me. We were friends. Actually, when he died, we were friends. And I would visit the. They had a little home on the north side and I would visit them and then..

LAVERE: And then there was that Hans Olsen that was a friend of Dad’s. Remember, do you know him? Or was that after you were divorced?

DOROTHY: I don’t remember, dear.

LAVERE: He was the redheaded baker.

DOROTHY: Well, he probably worked for us. I don’t remember the names of the bakers, a lot of them.

LAVERE: I don’t know whether he worked for you or whether he just worked in the.. well, after.. in the bakery that Dad worked in after. .you know, he was a union baker, maybe. Lucille and Hans.. do you know them?

DOROTHY: No. It must have been afterwards. Right. Because it was quite a few years after we were divorced before he married Merle.. several years anyway.. and he worked all during that time. And, actually, I don’t think he ever had tuberculosis, but he might have had a touch of it. But, in later years we found out that if you’ve had pneumonia and it will leave a scar on your lung, and many times, when they used to.. when tuberculosis was so prevalent, they would x-ray your lungs. Well, these scars would show and it was hard to tell the scars from the tuberculosis.. lesions.

LAVERE: There were scars.. there was something on his lungs?

DOROTHY: Oh, yes. Very much so. He used to get sick every winter.

LAVERE: He had allergies.. that flour.

DOROTHY: He had such terrible allergies. And he would just cough and cough and cough and even when we were married and he was sleeping upstairs in the daytime, you know, Mother and Dad said "I’ve just never heard anybody cough like that man." Dad was concerned about him. And he had a terrible cough and so he might have had TB. It’s very likely, because it was very prevalent in those days and very contagious.

LAVERE: He went in to the doctor for a chest x-ray because he was having problems when he was in his 60’s.

DOROTHY: Right.

LAVERE: And he saw that old..

DOROTHY: Scar tissue.. a lot of scar tissue on the lungs.

LAVERE: He had cancer of the lung.

DOROTHY: Oh, I see. Well, in fact, Bill has a scar from pneumonia on his lungs. And when he was working at the post office, they had to take a physical regularly, you know, and this thing would come back "Go get a TB test" and it was just the scar tissue. So he could very well have had that, but at least, it cured it for that year.. that summer that he was up at the lake. Apparently, that cured it pretty well.

LAVERE: That’s all they did for TB.

DOROTHY: That’s all they did. They just isolated them and kept..

LAVERE: Kept them as quiet as they could..

DOROTHY: Right, and fed them nourishing food and kept them out where they breathed fresh air and they had no.. really no medication or cure for it. And now, it’s coming back again, they say.

LAVERE: Antibiotics works on TB, doesn’t it, Dad?

DOROTHY: I think so, I think so.

BILL: They have pneumonia shots now.

DOROTHY: And some people will argue and say, "Well, it only lasts five years!"

LAVERE: Well, I’ll only last five years anyway. (laughter)

DOROTHY: Right. (laughter) So, anyway, what more do we want to know about the bakery?

LAVERE: Well, that’s probably it. I remembered him telling me.. or maybe, you telling me, about how they baked in that bakery.. that you had big brick ovens.

DOROTHY: When we bought that place, it had just what they called a Dutch oven. And what you had to do, you got your big long, long cardboard, you know, four foot, and you built your fire in the oven and it had to heat that oven hot enough for baking and then you pulled the coals out and then they went in there with a kind of a swab on a long stick and cleaned out the ashes and then you baked on the hearth and all your French bread and that type of bread was baked right on the hearth. .right on the brick., on the bottom of the. .but of course, the pan went in. Well, then, after we got started we put in an electric oven. We put in a big electric oven as well, but he still used the Dutch oven because it was just so great for the French bread and for the rye bread and I can remember he always made several different kinds of rye bread, which I loved, you know.

LAVERE: He made really good bread and his pastries were..

DOROTHY: ..outstanding.

LAVERE: I never cared much for bakery pies.

DOROTHY: Well, we made pies and would put them right in on the hearth to bake them.

LAVERE: I made a pie once when he was visiting me and he said "Well, if I tried to make a crust like this in a bakery, you couldn’t do it because it has to be handled." You have to be able to have a heavy .. a stiffer crust. There’s no way you’re going to be able to do that kind of a short crust..

DOROTHY: But we made good pies and we had a good pie business and we had a tremendous pastry business in our retail store, too. And then I was going to say, we had this big pot of grease where they fried the donuts and the donuts and crullers. They made donuts and crullers and cake donuts, but they, the ones that I really liked the best was a raised.. you know, from the raised dough.

LAVERE: I like the raised and sugared.

DOROTHY: Yes, raised and sugared. That’s what I like.

LAVERE: If you remember, in Coeur d’Alene, his bakery there, he had these two big vats.. we had big Oscar do the donuts.. fry the donuts.. those were good! That was when I was there in the summer..

DOROTHY: In the summer time, right, right. Oh, I loved those. And after.. when I went to work at the Silver Loaf, they put me on the donut machine one time.. On the donut machine. Oh, how I loved those donuts coming out of that machine., those hot donuts. They were good. No wonder I have cholesterol.. oops.

LAVERE: You probably never ate a one.

DOROTHY: I did, too. Once in a while, I’d eat one. I never got to the point where I didn’t like the donuts. Never.

LAVERE: Butterhorns..

DOROTHY: But, I think the donuts were my favorite. And then when we first got the bakery, we made maple bars, you know.. which were the fried dough.. and then with the maple icing on it. Oh, I used to love those maple bars, but I ate so many that I finally got sick on them, so they can go by the board anymore.

LAVERE: Yes, I don’t care much about maple.

DOROTHY: Too much icing on them, you know. I just like the plain ones. .plain pastries coming out of the hot grease.. that’s when they’re really good.

LAVERE: Did you use butter?

DOROTHY: Oh, yes, yes. Absolutely. We used butter. The Danish pastries absolutely had butter between the rolls, you know.. layers.. layer after layer. When we bought the place for $1,500, it had just a single small mixer. A bread mixer. And then we bought a larger bread mixer and some more cake mixers and stuff like that. So we had quite an establishment for a while.. until things went up the creek.

LAVERE: You weren’t able to sell that stuff, huh?

DOROTHY: No.

LAVERE: Nothing? Dead in the water economy..

DOROTHY: I’m sure that they eventually sold that stuff but we were in depression. Nobody had any money to buy anything, you know.

LAVERE: Well, it seems like there was a bakery that went in there after that in that same building.

DOROTHY: In that same building, somebody did start a bakery later, but I don’t think it ever went too well.

LAVERE: Probably didn’t do any good baking is the trouble.

DOROTHY: Probably.

LAVERE: There’s plenty of bakery stuff that’s not any good.

DOROTHY: Oh. A lot of bakery..

LAVERE: Generally, it’s hard to find one that is good.

DOROTHY: It is hard to find one that makes really good pastries and bread. We had quite a retail bread business right there, you know. After we got to going quite good, we put a little., radio was very, very popular then, you know.. came in really with a splash. Everybody had a radio, so we advertised. We put a little advertising on the radio and we had a real draw from that. People used to come from the south side of Spokane to buy stuff at the Delicious Bakery. That’s what we called it.. Delicious Bakery. That wasn’t what it was named when we bought it but I can’t remember...that’s what we called it, anyway.. Delicious Bakery. Yes.

Mother had a half sister that came across the plains with them. And it’s my understanding. I’m not positive about this, but I think she was Grandpa Davis’s from a previous marriage and she had died and he had this girl and grandma was quite a bit younger than grandpa and so when they came across in a covered wagon, Mother was.. Uncle Horace was born, apparently.. and Mother, as well.. but when they came across and settled there in Farmington. . because I think Horace was a bit older than Mother.. because he was such a mean little kid.. Mother always said.. and he had a jackknife. And when they would go to school, he would pitch this jackknife at the other kids’ heels.

LAVERE: He never married, did he?

DOROTHY: Oh, yes. He’s the one that married Sarah’s mother. And she had two children when he married her, but he never had any family of his own full blood, I mean. He and.. what was her name. .but I’m sure you have the record.. Horace’s wife. Anyway, she had these two girls. . .Sarah and (what was the other one’s name.. it left me)..Anyway, he had the two girls and they had no children of there own.. the two together.. where he was the father.

LAVERE: So it was Horace and Grandma and an older sister. But what happened to the older half-sister?

DOROTHY: She died of scarlet fever.

LAVERE: So she never married.

DOROTHY: No, she never grew up completely. I think she was about fifteen or so and it was not too long after they came out. She is buried in the Farmington cemetery in the Davis plot up there.

LAVERE: But we don’t know anything about their parents?

DOROTHY: No, the only one of Grandpa Davis’s family that Mother knew anything about was this Uncle Holland that used to come.. he was Grandpa’s brother and he used to come and visit them once in a white. He came to visit them a couple of times that Mother remembers him. And this was when they were growing up and, of course,..

LAVERE: They were coming out of Iowa, too, weren’t they?

DOROTHY: They were way in the east somewhere, I don’t know. And so none of Grandpa’s folks ever came west so far as I know. They always remained in the east and this one uncle was the only one.. he came out a couple of times. .made that long trip out to Farmington to see them. And I don’t know a thing about Grandma Davis’s folks.

LAVERE: Well, you know, I asked Grandmother all that so I probably have maybe the names.

DOROTHY: All that she would remember.

LAVERE: Mm-hmm. But it didn’t seem like it was much.

DOROTHY: You’re right. Well, you know, people in those days did not keep in touch. When people went west, they were gone, you know, and the communication was difficult.

BILL: When people went west, honey, they were never heard from again.

DOROTHY: Yes, they established their own home and they didn’t live in the past. My folks didn’t live in the past. They lived for the immediate day and in the future, you know.

BILL: Tomorrow’s, yesterday is gone.

DOROTHY: Right.

LAVERE: Well, it is kind of interesting to see these old westerns in the movies, where the son gets up to be about fourteen.. "Good-bye Mom and Dad. I’m off to seek my fortune," and you never hear from him again.

DOROTHY: No. Many times they..

LAVERE: It seems incredible now.

DOROTHY: Yes, right.

BILL: Some of them would never live to get west.

LAVERE: Probably true.

BILL: If you get bitten by a snake in the wilds there, your horse can throw you and then leave.. you were as good as dead then.

DOROTHY: The transportation was hard in those days, you know. Only the most healthy people survived, I think.

LAVERE: True. Well, Grandma was a real healthy lady. She really was a strong person.

DOROTHY: Well. Her father lived to be 93, you know. Grandma Davis died because she got cancer of the stomach, but she must have been in her 80’s then at that time when they came to live with us in Spokane. And she died there in a Spokane hospital. Grandpa lived a good many years after that because I was in grade school and I think I was practically out of high school by the time Grandpa died.

LAVERE: Tell us about Uncle Horace.

DOROTHY: Uncle Horace was Mother’s brother. He was a bit older than she and was kind of a little problem in the days when they were kids going to school. Grandpa used to go every fall down to Walla Walla to buy supplies. He would take down something.. I can’t remember.. maybe fence posts, it seems like. Sacks of wheat? Anyway, he would take part of his produce from the ranch down there and he would get supplies for the family. So he would buy a pair of shoes for Mother and for Horace. They had to last the whole year out. And so Mother said, many times in the spring of the year, they went barefooted to school because of the fact that their shoes were worn out. Well, he used to come along behind the girls.. Mother.. she said girls, so it must have been the sister that died eventually. And he would throw his jackknife. .he’d learn to flip it so it would flip. . .he had it open. .he would flip it and it would go into the ground, you know. Well, he would flip it right behind them and it was so close to their heels that sometimes, I guess, it would hit them instead of the ground, but she said he was kind of a mean little kid.

LAVERE: A menace!

DOROTHY: He was a menace. LaVere says he was a menace. Yes, I guess he was a menace. Well, I remember him in older life, after he was married, and he married this lady whose husband had died and she had two girls. But they never had any mutual children. That was all the family they had. . .and I don’t know too much about it but I know he just never could make a go of anything he tried to do. It was one of those things where Grandpa and Grandma just subsidized him from the word "go." They set him up in business in Tekoa in a bakery business and that failed. They bought a farm for him and he was just so.. he never could do any good on the farm, but he was pretty heavy set and I don’t think too ambitious, maybe.

LAVERE: Where was the farm, right there in Farmington?

DOROTHY: No, the farm was.. when they lived out of Tekoa, between Tekoa and Tens, they had this farm. And I don’t really remember how big it was or anything. But they never., he never seemed to be able to make a go, really. . support the family.. he was never quite adequate and Grandma and Grandpa always had to subsidize him, more or less. But then, he died fairly young, you know, and left her again a widow with the two girls, but they were grown by that time, pretty much. But, I remember, the younger one, Sarah, was always very, very fond of Mother and she thought Aunt Mary was just right. And she always kept in touch with Mother and she would come and visit. When we lived out on a ranch, she came one time, and this was when Mother was living with us out on the ranch and Sarah came and spent a few days with us. She always was very, very fond of Mother and I liked Sarah very much, too. She was a very nice lady. But that’s all I remember about Mother’s brother. Of course, he was the only son. Mother was the only daughter. So, by the time that Grandpa died, she was the only one left in the family except Sarah and her sister. Her sister married and moved east and never did come west again. That I remember, so I didn’t really know her too well. So that’s all that I really remember about Mother’s brother.

* * * * * *

LAVERE: What kind of a car was that?

DOROTHY: That was the Rickenbacker. It was a nice car and ran well and we had it for years and years and we.. Dad would drive it to the lake and, of course, drive it home. Well, we were coming back from the lake and his eyes were getting quite bad by this time, but he hadn’t gotten anything done for them. I think he did wear glasses. Anyway, this particular time, he was too close. This man was walking along the side of the road going in the same direction that we were going and Dad was just too close to him and he hit him a little bit with the.. there was.. what would you call those windows out at the side? Wings. Out of sight. They were not part of the windows as such, but there was a wing that was out there, right, to cut the wind when you had the window open and he brushed his shoulder with that and caused him to fall down, of course, into the gravel that was along side of the road there. And we were so concerned, all of us, and especially Dad, you know, because this man could have sued him for his shirt. So, I think we picked him up and took him to where he was going. He lived not very far form there and so Dad said that he should go to the doctor and be checked and they would pay the bill and all of that. They did. They took care of ail of his medical expense and then he.. they made a small settlement.

He took him home and then he and his mother came to the house and they decided. .after he had been to the doctor and everything., and they decided on this little settlement, but it was very reasonable. I don’t remember what it was. The folks never thought that he held them up that much, you know. But of course, they were really poor. .poor-type people.. so it was a little nest egg for them, I guess. But after that, then Dad., he never did like to drive, actually. He never adjusted to driving cars. He had driven horses all his life and I remember when we first got a car, was a Model T Ford, when they first came out.. shortly after they came out. This is when we were still living in Farmington. . and oh, we girls just thought this was the absolute end, and of course, Albert did, too, you know. This is great. We had a car. So we would get into this car and go for a drive like people did. .just for a little drive in the afternoon on Sunday or whatever. Well, coming into the place.. there was a gate that you had to open.. and this fenced in the property between the house and the barn, you know. And that’s where the chickens used to run.

LAVERE: Now, are you talking about Spokane?

DOROTHY: We’re talking about Farmington.

LAVERE: He had a car in Farmington?

DOROTHY: Oh, yes. He got this.. when he got the Model T Ford we were still living in Farmington. One time.. he had built a garage.. a single garage.. across the other side of this area.. this barnyard, we called it, but it wasn’t really connected to the barn but it went down to the barn, came up close to the house and was fenced in. Beyond this fenced-in part was his garden, so nothing could get into his garden. .none of the animals or anything could get into the garden. Well, he had built this single garage across the other side, so some of us jumped out and opened the gate. And Dad drove in and he started to drive towards the garage. Well, he forgot how to stop the darn car and he said.. "Whoa., whoa.." and he kept right on going in it. .saying "Whoa." We were practically beside ourselves with mirth and just laughing our heads off and poor Dad was trying to get that dumb thing stopped. He finally made it before he crashed into the garage but it was a miracle. Actually, he was never very comfortable driving a car.

LAVERE: Well, Uncle Albert, the other night said he learned to drive as soon as he could see over the steering wheel because Grandpa didn’t want to drive himself.

DOROTHY: Oh, that’s right. And then Albert used to drive the Rickenbacker all the time, but, in a pinch, Dad would take it to the lake if there was nobody else to do it and that’s what he was driving when we were coming home from the lake that time. But that was quite a car. There weren’t very many of them made, you know and they were really quite a nice automobile.

LAVERE: He got a car right off the bat, it sounds like., when they were available.

DOROTHY: I don’t recall him having anything.. we might have had a Model A.. later on.. I can’t remember, but he used to load those things until they would look like they were taking off for outer space and, of course, the Model T had this running board along the side on each side and he had things rigged up so that he could fasten things onto that and the running boards would be full and everywhere he could stick anything, we’d have stuff for when we would go to the lake. And when we used to go up to Coolen on the west side when we first started going in there before they completed the road on the west side of the lake, you know, some of those hills were rather steep and the car would go chugachugachug.. slower and slower, and so we’d all pile out of the back to relieve the weight in the back and run behind and push.

We always thought we pushed it up the hill, but of course, we didn’t. Anyway, when we first went to the lake, we went in on the Coolen side and pitched a tent there in Coolen, actually, and he started fishing there.. But at that time, Aunt Sarah and Uncle Mose‘s Fish were up at Twins. They had their place up at Twin Islands and Uncle Mose had a steamboat that he drove up and down the lake, you know. And, of course, they were no relation to us at all, but just friends of Mother and Dad. And they lived there in Farmington. Actually, just beyond the green house. .right behind the Methodist Church that was there on the corner.

LAVERE: What was on the point there when Grandpa and Grandma were there?

DOROTHY: The Torrence’s built their big cabin.

LAVERE: Easter used the Torrence cabin. Is she related to the Torrence’s?

DOROTHY: No, no. I think she finally bought that from them or something. .And then, later on some other people built a cabin., what was their name? ..beyond the Torrence cabin.

LAVERE: That judge with the redheaded wife?

DOROTHY: Oh, no. That was farther down.. That wasn’t actually on the point. That was a ways up towards Distillery Bay.. the bay up above the point..

LAVERE: I’m thinking of Goodsells.

DOROTHY: Judge Goodsell, a Spokane judge, and his wife built a cabin on the point between where we had our cabin at Twin Island Point and the next bay up above. They were quite exclusive people but we still used to go up there and visit fairly often. As Lavere says, she was a wild looking lady, but she was quite talented and wrote poetry. Some of her poems were published in the Spokesman Review. They were quite important Spokane people. Then beyond the Torrence cabin, there was a family who moved in there and built a small cabin and then later on Aunt Sade and Uncle Mose built another cabin between their cabin and our cabin, because they had a lot of company. Uncle Mose had a brother with a large family and it was just too much to stay in one place since their cabin was only really one large room.

They built this and they called that Tumble Inn and they kept that exclusively for their quests. Then, between their cabin and the Tumble Inn, they made a large eating area. I believe there was a range out there and it was all screened in with curtains and so forth. So they used to eat outside, even when there was only the two of them. I can remember that she was very set in her ways, Aunt Sade was, and that they would have certain days for different foods. This day would be the day they would have baked beans, another day something else. It was a very regimented way to live, but she was a really nice lady. She was from New England and spoke very New Englandish but she thought she spoke exactly like the rest of us. And she would say "buttah". That’s what you say, "buttah". Of course, we really said butter, but she couldn’t see that she spoke any different than the rest of us.

LAVERE: You’re talking about Mrs. Goodsell?

DOROTHY: No, I’m talking about Aunt Sade Fish. I don’t remember anything more about the Point.

LAVERE: Well, when did the Morleys come in there?

DOROTHY: They bought the Fish place. They were friends, too. They, later on, when Aunt Sade and Uncle Mose couldn’t go to the lake anymore, they sold their property to the Morleys. I remember when they were still there, that sometimes we would get together and build a big bonfire and heat the sand pit that they’d dug and then when it got really hot, they would brush all the coals away and she had this big bean pot they would put down in the ground and bake the beans all day long and by the evening meal, they were just super-duper and so we’d all get together and have these baked bean dinners. Of course, we all brought other things as well, but that was the main highlight--baked beans. To this day, I love baked beans, so I can remember that real well when we were kids. We always looked forward to Aunt Sade coming over. She would come over periodically to see Mother and we kids would gather around and listen to what she had to say. She was an interesting person. She and Uncle Mose had lived there on the lake for a long time because he had asthma so very bad that as soon as they could get in, they would go to the lake and spend the whole summer there. They lived in Farmington, too, and there was this dust problem that had forced Dad to give up his place. In those days everybody on the lake knew Mose Fish because there weren’t that many people. He had a steamboat that they had to fire with wood and he would go up and down the lake with that. He called it the Papoose, I remember. And he used to take us all, sometimes, and that was a big trip when we could go with Uncle Mose in the Papoose. We were like a little community because we were really isolated, you know, and there was a boat that went up and down the lake from Coolen and brought the mail and stuff but it only came about once a week so Mother and Dad became really good friends with those people and, of course, it was from the Torrences that we bought the house there on Augusta in Spokane; actually, from Mr. Torrence’s brother, I think, that built it.

LAVERE: Have we talked about Grandpa and Grandma’s cabin at the lake that had the screened-in porch across the front and the big double decker beds? Big beds that had the straw mattresses?

DOROTHY: I don’t know if we’ve talked about that or not, Lavere, but anyway, the cabin, Dad had built this screened-in porch across the front. It was a big wide porch and large enough for two large beds. And one side had bunk beds, if I remember.

LAVERE: Double-size, but bunk beds. He had built that himself, and there was another bed out there for Mother and Dad. I can remember when the sun would come up in the morning over the lake and you could just see that so beautiful and you could see the moon shining on the water at night, also. Just beautiful. A wonderful view, and I was always on the top bunk. I remember Grandmother would get out a little table, sometimes, and put it by the fireplace and we’d toast our bread on forked sticks that Grandpa had made, in the fireplace... and have smoked fish and cheese. This is where I learned to love good cheese. CHEESE TOAST.

DOROTHY: We always had great cheese. They’d buy 5# blocks.

LAVERE: That was a treat. It was fun. But best of all was that fresh fried trout and huckleberry shortcake on baking powder biscuits.

DOROTHY: I know, and Dad always fried the fish, do you remember that?

LAVERE: I don’t remember that, but I remember all that bedding. She had this big tub that she’d heat on the wood range and wash all the sheets and clothing on a washboard and then we’d take them down to the dock and throw them in the water and jump off the dock on top of them to rinse out the soap. How she ever did all that work is beyond me. I don’t even remember ringing them out again. She probably came down and did that herself.

DOROTHY: I do think we tried to ring them out but I don’t think we probably did a very good job of it. And then she had some lines out behind the cabin that we could hang them on. Then we always ran out of line, so we’d drape the stuff over the bushes and they would just dry beautifully.

LAVERE: Beyond that, she had those stupid flatirons that she heated on the stove and ironed stuff. Ohhh.

DOROTHY: I know, and we had those flatirons up in Emida as well.

LAVERE: I bet you had those in Washington as well, didn’t you.

DOROTHY: We probably did. There was no electricity to start with. That was really a banner day in our life when we got electricity. We had this thing hanging from the ceiling with just one little bulb in it, you know. That’s how we started out. Boy, that was terrific,

LAVERE: Dad is getting anxious to go but we still have a couple of minutes so just tell about the Leonards being upper class.

DOROTHY: Well now, Lavere wants me to talk about the Leonards being upper class. I can remember that they were all very refined people, that type of thing, and I can remember Aunt Floy having sterling silver and that really impressed me. Of course, Uncle John had quite a lot of money when they moved in and she had lovely china, bone china, and silver and all of that and just for the family would use her bone china and silver. She was quite a lady for that. She wanted to maintain a high life style. Uncle John was always good to her and able to buy those things. When Grandma and Grandpa Leonard died, all of their lovely things were sent out to Aunt Floy. It was that kind of a family. Like Lavere says, we were well born, not with a lot of money, but with a good background. A good strict, moral upbringing.

LAVERE: They had money Mother. They had money for the time they were in.

DOROTHY: Right. We were never poverty stricken, and my Dad would certainly never admit that we were short of funds or anything to we children. Never constrain us if we wanted something. It was either you can have it or you can’t, you know. He never said "We can’t afford it."

LAVERE: Thank you, Mother, for sharing all of this family history with me. The date is August 10, 1994, Dorothy Rose Leonard’s ninetieth birthday.

 


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