December 1, 2001

Hi Connie

I tried to think about what you want me to gather up and talk about my dad Adolf…as I think back you pretineer have to go back to my childhood and how we were raised. And get into the everyday practice that my Dad, Adolf, had. As I get older and I realize what he did and how he did it was amazing. To me the knowledge that he seemed to have about just about anything that he wanted to do. He knew how to make hominy. He knew how to cure pork. He knew how to butcher. He knew how to farm. He knew how to get the information the he needed to do farming. He used to talk about Professor Bouquet at Oregon State College that he had talked to about his truck gardening out on the Island. And then as I look at him, he was a straight man, he was tall but he carried himself very well. The people around Lebanon…and when he was in Lebanon, even if he had a brand new pair of overalls on and a clean pair of shoes and a hat, they said that he was the best dressed man in Lebanon. He held himself square and he looked dignified. He looked like he was Adolf . . . and mom was always jealous because she wasn’t considered the best dressed woman in Lebanon, and she thought since he was the best dressed man that she should be the best dressed woman in Lebanon, which was difficult to apprehend, but that’s the way it was. And I heard my many Aunts . . . Aunt Winnie and Aunt Dort, all of them came over when us children were small and mom was on her high-horse a quite a bit of the time, why they said Adolf was the most patient man they have ever seen in their whole lives…he would sit there and listen and go on about his business and do the things that he needed to do to keep life and limb together. A lot of times during the depression when things were pretty short, you know why, he was supposed to license the old model T every year the first of January you had a new license come. Well, he would wait until March or April or sometime in the springtime…and finally the old police chief of Lebanon would say " Hey Adolf, better put a license on that old rig of yours or I’ll have to hang a ticket on it". So, he’d dig up enough cream money or something to put a license on the that old Model T, even if it was $5 or $10 or whatever it was but money was hard to come by. During the depression when things were so slow, he left the farm on Kiger’s Island…he had good land and good soil and he was a good farmer. He talked one year when it froze he had potatoes and in the days when money was money, he sold those potatoes for $10 a sack after he kept them in the barn, built a fire to keep them from freezing and in the spring time when he went to sell taters He got $10 a sack which was a lot of money. He knew how to take care of them. Charlie said the first job he ever had was holding the lantern for dad to go out with the team and wagon. And when he knew it was going to freeze he went out brought those taters in the barn and Charlie held the lantern for him. And that must have been…he was pretty young. Dad would take the old wagon out there and he would work all night if he had to save his crop. And he was a solid…he was a solid person. Of course mom she had lots of ideas and she drove him pretty hard…and she made life not miserable for him but made life difficult because the island was out there in the middle of the Willamette River and high water would come up and he built the house . . . he built it himself, and he built it up on piling or stilts or something they said it was up off the ground enough that the river would run under it in the winter when the high water would come and here mom sat in the house with all of us little kids and a kerosene lamp and got to thinking of what the heck would happen if they had a fire. So she got spooked and she didn’t want to stay out there on the island with high water running under the house. And boat getting around the barn it’s just like being out in the middle of that damned old muddy river. And I don’t really blame her for that. He bought a house over on the mainland and he was going to move the family over there during the high water times so mom would be happy. I think it was really the people on the island that were influencing her little darlin’s that made her insist that they sell out and move up to the hill place…Rock Hill that we went to and then he could never farm that rock hill soil…the soil was white. Like he said in the morning you’d go out and it was too wet to plow and then went to lunch…and come out after lunch and it was too dry to plow. It was awful hard. It was an old white gumbo, I guess. And he never really got his heart in farming again after he left the island. And, then of course they went over and bought that place in Lebanon and it was bought in the wintertime. The guy had worked the ground up to where you couldn’t tell that there was a quite a bit of gravel. The land wasn’t really very good. Kind of a sand…oh maybe out of 80 acres there might have been 20 good acres of farming ground he could work but He never really settled into farming. He had the equipment and he had the horses. And he had things to do but he made up his mind he could go to work in the paper mill which was in town and that was a job that paid pretty good money. Crown Zellarback ran that mill in Lebanon for all those years during the depression and a lot of good people worked there. They didn’t need him but he made up his mind and so every morning at 7:30 he was down there ready to go to work and letting them know that he was wanting a job and he was there. And, after about 2 weeks, they put him on. They decided that he was going to insist on being here, and we need a man so they put him on. And thence he went to work in the mill. Then Charlie and mom and all the rest of us tried to run the farm. Albert was the main stay of the farm. Albert was never a kid. He worked when he was a young man and of course Mom was schooling him to be a priest. Mom had it all scoped out. There were 6 boys and all of us were going to be professionals. She was going to have a doctor, a lawyer, and a priest and nobody was going to carry a lunch pail. Nobody was going to be a "Daygo", which means you go work by the day with a lunch bucket. But of course some of her plans fell through and that was in her diary when she wrote . . . we were all pegged to be important people. And, the Lord had kind of promised her that if she raised those boys that they would be important people. She told me that I was going to be a great thinker. I’ve always been reminded of that, you know, and I did a quite a bit of thinking. I found out later in life that I think she spelled it with a ‘s’ . . . I was really a sinker! When I sunk the company truck out in the ocean, I was a confirmed sinker! But, if you get back to ole’ Adolf, he come over, we had a one room schoolhouse when I was a kid . . . all 8 grades were in there. Of course I was pretty small at the time, so I’d sit up pretty close to the front. The small desks were up front and they got progressively bigger as they went back. They were those old school-type desks. They way they run a one-room school house each grade would come up and sit in the front seats and recite and the teacher would ask them all kinds of questions and everybody else back there was supposed to be studying their own stuff. When the 6^th grade geography class got up there and started talking about all the things in the world and they had brand new books and stuff . . . I didn’t pay much attention to what I was supposed to learn. I was listening to that 6^th grade. I learned more from the older class than I did in my own. I never was too good at my own stuff. The teacher always said that I came to class poorly prepared. But, I think I got most of my education just listening to the older kids getting up there and reciting and showing the teacher what they knew. But Adolf came over one time, my dad, you know, the teacher wanted a curtain put up in the school house so when they put on the Christmas play they would have something that would close off so they could get ready. My ole dad came down there with a brace and bit and a bunch of heavy wire. He had a brand new pair of gum boots . . . white ones, and a pair of brand new overalls, and he went about his work while we were in class. And we were proud of him. He knew what he was doing, He knew how to do it . . . and in about an hour he had that curtain rod up. He bored a hole in the side of the building, he put a big washer on the outside, then he stretched the wire across and tightened it . . . it was tighter than a G string . . . Then he went home and he hung that curtain. And, we were proud of him. But that old 8 grades and us kids that was going to school there was quite an experience when you get down to it . . . and then you went to high school, and of course that was a different ball game altogether, and only lasted a couple of years at that. But, ole Adolf, he always wore those split leather JC Penney shoes. He’d go down and get a new pair once a year. And, unless he was wearing boots he wore those kind of shoes. And, he’d wear a clean pair of overalls. Of course he had a nice suit and stuff, and like I say Mom was a little jealous because no matter what he had on he was pretty well dressed. And, He looked good. He had a big black hat to take up collection at church . . . And, he was just a good steady man. He’s listen and he’d sit there and mom could ding at him for quite a while, you know, and pretty soon he’s say "are you through?" or something like that but they never caused any real ruckus, you know. But, we were proud of him. He was good man, and of course when the war started and mom and dad had a disagreement kind of, but they moved over to Newport. Albert was going to run the farm so they went over and bought a little house in Newport. And he went to work for Grant Abbott, an old contractor. He was Grant’s old right-hand man and he did pretty good. He was over there then when that kind of work ran out, he went over to the fish plant and pulled livers out of the old fish for New England Fish Company for awhile. Mom went back to the farm with Albert. When I went up to the shipyards in 1941 and I was making more money than any of them . . . Adolf, my dad, my brothers, any of them . . . I made more money than they did. My sister Florence & Louie, they were school teachers and they couldn't understand how I could be making more money than they did teaching school and I tried to tell them I didn’t have the education to know what to do with it so I needed more money than they did. ‘Cause they went to school long enough to learn how to manage their money . . . That didn’t sell very good either! Then he went up to the shipyard and worked and he was Adolf . . . and of course during the war Adolf Hitler was a scoundrel and a bum. My brother Adolf changed his name to Joe . . . He couldn’t stand to be called Adolf and they would pick on him. . But my dad was still Adolf . . . and it was A – D – O – L – F . . . there’s no PH in there…nothing, no middle name, but it was Adolf. Mom said that if you went anywhere from Eugene to Salem, and anybody seen that old Model T running around they would say "There’s old Adolf". Everybody knew him. He just fit in. He was a pretty good man and we sure loved him and wish we would have been able to be a little closer. In my younger years I didn’t have much time for anybody. But, now that I think back on it He sure did a fine job. He was 15 years old when he came over from Germany. And he made the circuit of logging up in Minneapolis, Wisconsin, then he went out to Washington. He invented some skids and stuff up in Aberdeen Chehalis Company. He made some skids to get some logs out a little easier and he got pretty good patents on it. Then he came down and was farming around Corvallis when he met mom. And, when he was farming, he made some equipment. He made a pulverizer that we tried to use when I got a little older. It was a good idea. If he had lived long enough to see a rototiller I believe he’d be in heaven. Because he was always trying to figure out how to work that ground a little better, and make a little better seed bed for his gardening. He made this pulverizer and it was about 4 or 5 rows of little discs about 6 inches in diameter and about 2 inches apart and they overlapped each other. They’d get clods in them and they’d plug up and make a mess. I never could use it. Then they had a harrow in front of it and a drag in the back to level the ground out. And he had a patent on it. It never sold very good. And he had a patent on a bunch of gopher traps. He made some traps out of a piece of 2x6 with a strong spring with a spear on it with a hook that was supposed to go thru the hide of a gopher and hook him and he couldn’t get loose. He had about 50 of those made. He thought they were going to revolutionize the gopher business. They just sat around out in the garage. We used a few of them once in a while . . . never had much luck with them. But he always had ideas. He made a rig to pick gooseberries. It was a finger clamp. Gooseberries, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen them or not, but they are stickery as all heck, and when you’d pick them they’d make a mess. But he had this thing you could rake those gooseberries right off into a pan. It’s like Walter. Walter does some inventing and he got it from ole dad. Dad was an inventor. He was always trying to figure out a better way to do it. And, he knew how to do . . . how he knew so much, and he was a head logger.

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Yeah, and ole Adolf worked in the shipyard as a laborer. He went into 296 and then he went to school to be a burner. But he realized that his name and reputation was such that if he advanced himself he knew more that most of the people that he was working for and with. He was content to be a sweeper, a janitor in the shipyard and stayed right there during the war and never made any waves. And, he just fit in . . . He was a good man. Of course he got the stigma of being Adolf. But then after the war he went down and helped Albert on the farm a little bit. He had an accident policy that he knew about. He was driving the tractor. . . and it was that old John Deere that had a clutch that you pull with the big arm that came down. Albert had tightened it up because it was slipping. Dad was driving it and he wasn’t used to it. He didn’t realize that Albert had tightened it up, and he was driving, and he run into the side of the barn because he couldn’t pull that thing hard enough to stop. And so he got bunged up a little bit. And of course he had this accident policy. And it paid off pretty good. He milked it for quite awhile. He even had to learn to limp when the inspector came around. I’ve always had a lot of respect for these accident policies. They used to tell the story out on the job about the salesman that went to sell this accident to this old farmer. And he said "Farmers don’t have no accidents. I don’t need no policy like that". Well, I did my homework…a couple of years ago you were in the hospital for 3 or 4 days because the bull got you out in the corral. The Farmer said "That was no accident that bull did that on purpose." So that’s the same way with dad and his old accident policy. Then he went back over to Florence’s and spent the rest of his days up there helping Florence and Louie, and they provided pretty good for him. I wish I had taken more time to be with him. And, I was with him probably more than any of the boys because I went over to Newport with him when I got sick and tired of the old Lebanon High School . I went to High School a little bit over in Newport. Lebanon was the Warriors. That was our nickname…and Newport called me Geronimo because I came from Lebanon. I fit in pretty good. Newport was a pretty good school. I learned quite a bit over there but I got fascinated with the business that said I could go up and work in the shipyard so I baled out and I hate to admit it to my family, but I was a high-school drop out. When I got out of the Navy I was going to go back to the high school in Lebanon and I went up to the school house and Gladys Essig was one of our neighbor girls, and a pretty nice girl. Boyd was her brother and we were buddies. She was the Secretary for the principal over at the high school. I told her I intended to maybe go back to school. I was out in the Navy for 3 years. She said, "You must have went to some schools in the Navy", and I replied, "Yeah, I did Radar School in the Navy". She said, why don’t you go over to Corvallis and take the entrance examination and if you can pass it you can go to college." So I went over, I took it and I passed it. And so I went to College. I didn’t have to tell anybody that I didn’t have a high school diploma. I went a year to College. That sold pretty good. I never had any trouble after that. But dad went over to Florence and Louis and Florence said that he was always busy doing stuff. He lived to 1950 . . . He died in 1950. It’s quite a tribute. And, mom said that she blamed the fact that he made good and went back to his religion and kept his religion up. He died a good Christian man from the prayers of his mother. If you think about it, his mother stayed over in Germany and she had two girls, Adolf’s sisters who lived in Leavenworth, Kansas. He had a brother Andrew who lived in Okanagan, Washington. And then Adolf. She stayed home and let those kids go over to the new world. It must have been an awful strain on her to see her family gone and never see them again. And, like mom said, she prayed for them and probably saved them. And now I’m thinking about when they were married they lived up at Alsea, when they were first married. He had a homestead up on the Alsea River. He was logging. Alpine was the name of the town on the Alsea River. They traded it for a farm in Kansas. Mom used to tell about going back to Kansas. She had Josephine . . . Josephine was born . . . and this guy was supposed to be kind of a scoundrel trading them the farm sight unseen. He must have traded it for that Alsea property. They went back there and got dusted out in a year. Adolf got chill blanes and I guess the wind blew. He said the wind didn’t blow hard, but it was steady…it would hold a bull up against the side of the barn for 3 days. Of course, mom didn’t have any green trees to look at so they got homesick. They lasted a year back there in Kansas and came back. And then after doing that, now, he came home in a few years he had money enough . . . he must have had some money rat holed away somewhere, and he must have been a hell of a manager because Mary says he loaned money to Henry Gerding to start his Grocery business. And he had money enough to go out and buy that place out there in Kiger’s Island and build a house. And, it was a dandy house too! It had running water and plumbing. Big water tank up on top and big force pump down below that you pumped by hand, it had all the facilities of the modern house. He built it, or had it built. He knew how to get people to do stuff. He’d get people to work on the farm. He’d put Florence out there. Florence was a raw boned girl that could take a dog gone hoe. When she was 12 years old she could out hoe 20 men, you know. So he’d get some fellas out there to hoe strawberries and he’d set her out there kind of like a pacemaker and they’d be so darned ashamed of themselves seeing that little girl out there doing so much work, they worked pretty hard for him. But, he knew how to do that kind of stuff. When they came back from Kansas and they were able in a few years to have that ranch out there on the island and had all kinds of money I guess. Cause they loaned money to Henry. And then they sold out when high water come up and mom’s little darlin’s was getting influenced by some pretty tough people on the island, I guess. But, how he managed to have money enough to do that after going back there to Kansas on that expedition. I’ve tried to manage some of my own stuff, and boy, you run out pretty quick. He seemed to always have it . . . He had a rat hole somewhere. And there must have been from his logging days, maybe he had a little sock here and a little sock there. How he managed at the time . . . at the time I wasn’t able to ask those questions because I wasn’t interested. I want to know where they were in Kansas and I can’t find out. Nobody knows. Charlie seemed to think it was in Western Kansas. I always thought it was back around Leavenworth where his sisters were. But it must not have been. But you get to thinking about those things and you think how dumb you were not to ask those questions that you wonder about now because it must have been quite an experience for them to do that. I don’t think he had but a 3^rd grade education. He knew more accidentally than most people know on purpose. And, We loved him. He was a great father I think he did a heck of a job. He kept things together until we were big enough to go out and make our own messes. I am sorry that I didn’t really know him a little better and treat him a little better. But that’s the way it was . . . and we’re here today . . . We have to thank God that Adolf and Lucy got together . . . and they did a good job. I would really rather talk about mom that I would Adolf. I will tell you that he was a fine man and everybody respected him. And, he worked hard. And I’ll tell you another thing. When they were over at Corvallis and running the farm out on the island, Father Lapsik was the priest in Corvallis. Adolf had a pretty good reputation of being a hard worker. Father was giving a pretty good sermon one Sunday and Father was a big Dutchman, and Father said "I can work just as hard as Adolf too". Mom spoke out later and said "When you two get through, I’ll cook the dinner". She knew that Father wasn’t toughened up enough to out work her Adolf. She made the statement that she’d cook dinner when they got thru working for a day. I think it was pretty good. She was pretty sharp. And all these things they come back to roost. And, I might magnify some of them like my Navy stories. But basically, he was a swell person. He had that old Model T. He didn’t have money enough to buy antifreeze I guess, or he didn’t know about it or something. It would freeze up and break the radiator. He didn’t get it fixed, so he’d put horse manure in the radiator. And that would stop the leaks. If it got hot again and boiled and he took the lid off, My God it made a mess. And Florence was always trying to get Annie Blacklaw to come over…she had an old 30 Model A coupe. She was Catholic. She lived down the road. Florence conned her into coming by and picking her up and taking her to church so she wouldn’t have to go to church with us folks in that old Model T. She did a pretty good job. We all got in there and we had a good time. That’s the way we were raised up and we’re proud of it. I hope I gave you enough information to put something down about a good man that came over and must have had a lot of obstacles.