Russell D. Richardson, Reminiscences, Chapter 1, Part 1

by Russell David Richardson, 1971

Our family lived at Northfield,Minnesota, only a few blocks from the high school, and also within walking distance of Carleton College. In fact, all our activities were within walking distance, as very few people had automobiles. 

My father’s business was located about four blocks from our home, and he always walked to and from his work. He and his brother Earl were partners in a furniture business, and this required the use of delivery equipment. Consequently, we had a good-sized barn in back of our home where we kept two coal-black horses, named “Nig” and “Ollie.” By the time my brother, Fay, and I were ten and twelve years old, we had full responsibility for taking care of these two horses. Nig was assigned to Fay, and Ollie to me. So each morning after feeding the horses and cleaning the stable, it was our responsibility to curry and brush the animals and put the harness on so that after breakfast they could be hitched up to the delivery wagon and one or the other of us would drive the wagon down to the store and leave it before school.

Ferguson & Richardson Furniture Store

 

My father had a tendency to gain weight, and as a result of his overweight he had a serious heart attack, and the doctor told him that he must change his mode of living or he wouldn’t live long. He took this advice seriously, and decided to sell his business and to move out West. He had heard about growing apples out in Oregon, so he made a prospective trip to that area and decided to buy a small apple orchard and to sell out the furniture business.

This decision occurred in 1913, just as I was finishing high school. So the family moved to Sutherlin, Oregon, after school was out; but I stayed on in Northfield so that I could attend Carleton College.

The college did not have dormitories for men, and it was the practice for residents of the city to rent rooms to male students. Together with three other boys in similar circumstances, we rented the lower floor of a two-story home and spent our first year in that residence. There were no cooking facilities, and we found a boarding house in the neighborhood where we could have our meals.

Inasmuch as my three older sisters had preceded me in attending Carleton, I found that the professors were continually comparing my scholastic performance with that of my sisters. My oldest sister, Ella, had been an excellent student, made Phi Beta Kappa, and was valedictorian of her 1906 class. I still remember my professor in economics taking me aside and saying, “Russell, you do not seem to have the grasp of this subject that your sister Ella did.”

My college days were not particularly happy ones. I had no definite goal in attending college. I was immature and had had little contact with people in professions such as law, engineering and medicine. My parents offered no advice. However, my sisters had all gone on to college and the whole family took it for granted that I would go to Carleton and eventually reach my own decision as to what profession I would prepare myself for.

I knew I did not want to be a farmer, although that occupation did appeal to my brother Fay, and he went to the Minnesota State Agricultural College in Minneapolis. Ella and Florence had both obtained positions as teachers in high school after graduation from Carleton; but I had no desire to enter the teaching profession as Claude and Bernard Street had done. Moreover, it was doubtful that I would be able to continue for a full four-year course because of limited finances. I received a small scholarship from Carleton in recognition of my high scholastic record at Northfield High School, and had some accumulated savings. In addition, my parents had rented out our former home and gave me some of the income from that source. However, I knew that they had lost their main source of income from the business, and the fruit ranch which he had purchased in Oregon was very young and just starting to bear, so there was little or no income from that source.

There were no fraternities in the college, but there were some Greek letter clubs; and the club that I particularly wanted to join did not invite me. I was informed that the main reason was that I had indicated that I might not attend college for more than one or two years.

At the end of the first years, I had enough money to pay for rail transportation to Sutherlin, and picked the longest route I could develop. I took a train to Fargo, North Dakota, and then almost directly north to Winnepeg, where I connected with a westbound Canadian Pacific train to Vancouver. En route we passed through the beautiful Banff and Lake Louise resorts, and part of the trip was taken in open air cars where they transfer you to cars without any roof. For a person who had been raised in the flat Middle West, the mountains were most impressive.

From Vancouver I had a short boat ride to Victoria, and then on to catch the train to Portland and farther south to Sutherlin.

The small ranch which my father had bought was located about four miles from the town of Sutherlin. The former owner had built a nice two-story house, three bedrooms, with a nice view overlooking the valley. The barn had space for Father’s team of horses and two cows. Later, Father acquired a Model T Ford, but at the time I first visited the place there was no such convenience. My brother Fay was living at home, as well as my sister Ruth. The entire valley had been planted to apples in imitation of the success acquired by the Hood River apple growing region. However, it was actually principally a real estate project and the crop of apples and the marketing of them was never a success.

Apples from the Richardson orchard

During the summer months, I helped out with the orchard work; and then in the fall returned to Carleton for a second year. After that summer in Oregon, I could see plainly that my folks would be unable to help me very much, and that I would not be able to finish college. I did get some income from odd jobs, and one of my regular sources of income was at the college gymnasium.

The modern gymnasium had a large basketball court with an oval-shaped balcony above the playing field, on the edges, and this mezzanine oval area was the indoor running track. Whenever there was to be a basketball game, temporary seats had to be erected, covering the running track. I was able to get the assignment to put up these temporary seats and to remove them after the game.

Incidentally, this gymnasium was the nearest thing to a clubhouse for the male students. It had a huge Olympic-sized swimming pool, which was available for our use at almost any time. The gymnasium was well equipped with all kind of gymnastic equipment, as well as several basketball courts.

During the Christmas vacation, I practically lived there because it afforded something to do. I remember one particular time another classmate and I challenged a group of Northfield High School athletes to have a tournament, staged like a track meet. We’d do the high jump, and broad jump, the hop, skip, and jump, run races, heave the shot, and do as many events as could be performed indoors. While this classmate and I were not top athletes, nevertheless we were able to completely outclass the high school athletes, merely because of our better development as a result of our age.

When the school year ended in June, 1915, the Panama Pacific Exposition was in progress in San Francisco, so I returned to Oregon by way of San Francisco so as to be able to visit the fair. Fred Watson and his wife Sydney were very hospitable and invited me to stay a few days in their home at 375 Elwood Avenue, Oakland.

Next: Chapter 1, Part 2 Coming soon! | Back to Table of Contents

Stars and flowers

As the daughter of the family historian, one of the hardest things to contend with is the physical and emotional weight of the records and artifacts passed down through the generations. My family was blessed by having prolific writers: we count easily a half-dozen journals, from the sweet recounting of a teenage girl's wardrobe and school crushes to the hefty and pensive journal of a Civil War chaplain (and that of his wife and son). These all have a physical presence as well as capturing not only our family's history, but the history of our country at a key moment.

After my mother died of Alzheimer's, I had the arduous task of combing through disorganized piles of family and historical research (she was a published historian), interspersed with decades-old bank statements and direct mailers for things she would never buy. Deciding what to keep and what to discard, what to take to my home and what to let go, was a difficult decision, complicated by my difficult relationship with my mother. As I can now take time to comb through her work and read her journals (yes, she kept journals as well), I have come to better understand and admire her accomplishments. 

But by far and away, the most difficult piece has been what to do with her unfinished projects. I admit to the same overachieving tendency that she had: to start projects. It's a little like knitting a sock, and wondering if you will have enough yarn to complete it; will I have enough days to complete them? Adding my mother's projects to the pile adds a new level of stress--I have my own projects! Is my time to be used finishing hers? 

As I dig through the piles of family artifacts, I find a box  labeled "Civil War blanket" which I always assumed was the blanket that my GGG Grandfather had used many a night on the cold, hard ground. Instead, I find what looks to be odd scraps, but turns out to be a partially pieced Ohio Star quilt top with a label pinned to it. It was begun by a great aunt in 1867, the year she turned 19, the year she graduated from Hamline, and the year she was married. In less than two years, she died of consumption, leaving behind a bereaved husband and an unfinished quilt. 

Underneath that box is another dress box with stacks of hexagonal "flowers" destined for a grandmother's garden quilt. Some of the fabrics I can identify from my mother's scrap pile as being from garments she sewed for us; others appear to be of her mother's and grandmother's vintage. 

Turning the work to the wrong side, I can see that all the stars and flowers are hand-stitched. These two incomplete quilts are a physical reminder of how our time is borrowed. Stiches in time.

I keep chipping away at my own projects, but I have also found a local quilter who is enthusiastic about helping finish both quilts. Hers will add a third generation of hands and stiches to the mix. I find comfort in being able to honor these women, and to wrap myself in their handwork, and I hope they will share that same sense of accomplishment when you can fold up a beautiful thing, and say to yourself, "done." 

Ella's quilt: begun in 1867, finished in 2023

Very social media

When they were little, our kids had a well-loved book called Post für den Tiger ("Post for the Tiger"). In it, Little Tiger misses his friend Little Bear, who goes off to go fishing. He eventually hits on the idea of asking Rabbit if he could carry a letter home to Little Bear (he even remembers a stamp!). Rabbit happily obliges, and as word gets out that Rabbit delivers letters, he is given a uniform cap and they put up a few mailboxes to make Rabbit's life easier. 

Without doing a great deal of research on the world history of postal services, I can imagine it's not too far from reality. Messengers have existed since time immemorial, starting with people carrying individual messages, and eventually becoming available to the masses of Tigers and Bears who miss each other. 

Technical advances were adopted in their own time: rail transport, commercial ships at sea, air mail, and even a flirtation with rocket mail (sometimes called Missile Mail). Several countries theorized would be feasible as early as 1810. Practical experiments were conducted by many countries, and were abandoned as accuracy for the landing was difficult, especially in the context of getting mail from one large city to another. 

In a time before Zip codes, I remember the mail came twice a day. And even though my mother lived only a mile away from her mother, the letters went back and forth daily. The letter from Grandmother would arrive one morning, and my mother would pen or type her response in time for the afternoon pickup; Grandmother would receive it the next morning, and her response would go out in the evening post. After a year or so, they would return the letters to each other to serve as a quasi-journal. There were many dozens boxes of letters when we cleaned out her house, and we were simply not able to keep them all. 

Their correspondence continued throughout their lives, even as time and technologies inevitably marched forward: first to fall was the twice-daily post. Then came Mr. Zip®, the USPS character who introduced us to five-digit codes (instead of the combination of city and a two-digit code). We moved to a smaller town, and the morning mail came around midday; a move to a more remote place meant another day's delay and afternoon delivery. The price of stamps went up. And up. And yet, the two kept writing. I'm not sure what my Grandmother would have thought of nine-digit codes being scanned and sorted by machines.

But somewhere along the way, a pattern emerged: as I read through reams of chatty communications between them, there were holes, and they usually corresponded to major events like births, sudden illnesses, and deaths. The explanation was obvious: we started to pick up the telephone to make calls when the news couldn't wait a few days. 

The other casualty to time was a round-robin letter between the large family of cousins sharing the same grandfather. Every few months, a fat, worn envelope with layers of address stickers and a couple dozen letters would arrive at our home. We would read them all, then take out our last letter and insert a new one about the happenings of our family since then--sort of like an interim Christmas letter. There was always one cousin who had to be reminded that they needed to keep the packet moving, but it worked for decades.

Alas, two things spelled its demise. The first was the advent of email, which was not adopted by all at the same time. The second was that as the cousins aged and passed away, those names and letters dropped from circulation. The big manila envelope got thinner and thinner, until it was eventually replaced by group emails from and to those who used such things. 

The good news is that my mother, as the family historian, kept many years' worth of family round-robin letters; as I work my way through the relatively manageable stack, I hope to uncover more stories and pieces of information that help paint a more complete picture of who we come from. 

One of many letters from mother to daughter

In the linen closet

When I was a young girl, I loved to sit next to my grandmother and listen to her stories. It was on her lap that I learned to read, and first heard of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Lawrence Welk. She was a thoroughly modern Millie, and had a remote control--with a mute button!--in the 1970s. She had a disability that made walking difficult, so spent much of her time in bed or in a custom-made chair that made it easier for her to be comfortable. 

One of those mornings, she told me the story of how she was invited to christen a ship in Japan. She recounted how the Japanese didn't just have a bottle of champagne broken across the bow; they had developed a mechanism that included a silk cord that had to be cut across a block with a silver hatchet in one stroke. They provided her with a hatchet to practice, since it was purportedly bad if she failed to cut it in a single blow--sort of like birthday candles. She told of the day of the christening dawning very cold, how she was very nervous, and how it rained when she cut the cord--successfully.

Then she called to my grandfather Russell, asking him to bring her the hatchet to show me. He stepped over to the linen closet, of all places, and reached in and pulled out a beautiful presentation box, painstakingly inscribed with the date by a hand not used to the roman alphabet. Inside were nestled the hatchet, along with a section of the red and white silk cord and a cedar chopping block that showed a clean cut. 

Years later, we would find a folder of the official photographs, along with a VHS tape my uncle had made of the 5mm film that had been gifted to Jessie and Russell. It was a remarkable experience to see the event she had described that day (and many times later on as she slipped into the fog of dementia), and especially moving to see her alive and hear her voice. 

My eldest cousin James also enjoyed listening to the grandparent's stories, except he followed my grandfather around. Russell was a wiry, vital man who always seemed to be in motion--except when he sat down to watch golf. James was a budding journalist at the time, and in 1977, he sat down with our 82 year old grandfather and interviewed him about his extraordinary life, using the latest technology--audio cassette tapes. 

Shortly after my mother's death, I asked him if knew what had become of the tapes. He was in the midst of moving and preparing a book for publication (The Abolitionist's Journal) and told me he would keep an eye out for them. After the California storms of last month dropped a rather large tree on his home, he made a concerted effort to find them. Of course, it was his wife who located them--in the linen closet, of all places.

They are currently in the hands of my favorite digitizer. I'm hoping the result will contribute to these family history musings. 

The fabled hatchet in its presentation box

All the rights and privileges pertaining thereto

I have in my possession some extraordinary documents. Most of our efforts as genealogists center around locating records of birth, marriage and, death. But these are personal milestones: university diplomas.

But what makes diplomas extraordinary is not just the date--though it places them in a societal context--but also the names: my grandaunt Ella Richardson, and my mother, Madge. Both women, at a time when women did not typically earn degrees.

Ella and her sister Florence both attended Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, which was just a few blocks from the family home. Ella earned a BA and graduated in 1906. Seated one person away in the front row of the class picture is her sister Florence; behind them are Ella's future husband Bernard Street and his brother Claude; the four were the subjects of a double wedding the following year. In the Carletonian's senior number (edited by none other than Florence and Claude), the class picture is flanked by portraits of the valedictorian and salutatorian; Ella is the valedictorian. 

Ella went on to become a schoolteacher of German and History--until of course, she had their first child. In 1918, when she was six months pregnant with their fifth, her world fell apart when her husband was killed in a hunting accident. The family rallied around her, and she spent the next couple of years regrouping in her parent's new home in Sutherlin, Oregon. She eventually returned to Minnesota, where she lived out her days and is now buried near her dear family.

At a time when women might begin college, only to drop out once they had earned an "M.R.S." degree (witnessed by the number of wedding invitations from sorority sisters pasted in her junior year scrapbook), Madge bucked the trend. After having finished her Bachelor's in Dramatic literature from the University of California Berkeley in the early 1950s, she asked her father for support to pursue a graduate degree. He agreed, on one condition: that she prove she could support herself for a year. I recall her dexterous fingers on the typewriter (later the computer keyboard), and she told me she had had a lot of practice. She had met her father's requirement by working for a year as a secretary for Del Monte (the canned tomato folks). Satisfied, he paid for her graduate degree, this time in anthropology with a focus on ancient Egypt. Her thesis sat on a shelf next to a fat book on Hieroglyph Grammar in my childhood home. 

I keep family documents on the shelf in my office. On the wall near them hang three diplomas with my own name on them. The roots in my tree are thick with extraordinary women, and I have the documents to prove it.

Mystery dinner invitations

It's one of those interview or cocktail hour questions: If you could invite [insert number here] people, past or present, to dinner, who would you invite? Common responses are people like Albert Einstein, Johnny Cash, and even Anakin Skywalker. 

But to the family researcher, this would be an amazing opportunity. I would love to hear from my great-grandmother Julia about the love affair that brought her daughter into the world--and how she felt about that daughter finding her birth father as a grown woman. I would also ask if she actually married my great-grandfather, and what on earth they were doing having a baby in a mining town in Nevada when their lives were in San Francisco. 

I would also invite my great-grandfather, who accepted Julia, a woman with a past (and a young daughter), and gave them his name and heart. I would want to talk to him about why he split from his family in New York, how he got across the country (was he aiming for San Francisco, or is it just where he ended up?). I'd also love to know how, if he wasn't speaking to (or about) his family, did he end up with his older brother's trophy. I actually would love sitting down with the entirety of the New York Walshes, even if they might well empty my stores of whiskey. 

I think I would enjoy talking with my great uncle Vincent, who drove a flashy car, married a new-age German woman (who sang opera and penned poetry), and who left his house to his secretary, a spinster who kept the business running while he was living it up with his wife. He's also the younger brother who stepped up for his nephew when my grandfather died prematurely. As an aside, I would let him know that we share a birthday, and ask if he knew the circumstances of his birth. We'd probably share some laughs, too. Of course, I'd set the table with his wife's silver, which was passed on to me. 

I might also include my Grammie, with whom we shared meals every Sunday, and for all her commitment to family research left us precious little about her own life and family. I know she was social, and I would love to sit with her, and have her tell me who the smiling people in the group pictures were. I'd really like to ask about George, who is clearly her beau, but did not become her husband. We would use her silver, monogramed with her maiden initials on the table.

I would be beyond ecstatic to fill my weekend calendars with dinner parties for each and every one of my brick walls, but alas, that is not part of the question, and those amazing conversations will never take place. 

They say that dead men don't speak, but the fact that part of them literally forms part of us in the form of inherited DNA, does give voice to them, confirming the family lore, or exposing secrets buried over the generations. Those of us with stamped letters and envelopes sealed with a kiss and Victorian hair art will hold on to them, as they may allow our ancestors to speak once more, even if we can’t invite them to dinner.

A message from the past that may speak to us

Waste not, want not

In the 1920's, my Great Aunt Ruth Richardson came to Sutherlin, Oregon as a bride. One of her letters written back home to family in Northfield, Minnesota talks about when she went out to the springhouse to get some butter for her mother-in-law:

"And this is what I saw - shelves all the way around filled with jars and jars of canned fruit! I am going to offer to get the butter and cream every meal and count them.

"...Tonight I went after butter again, and I asked Mother Morgan if she would think me dreadfully snoopy if I counted the fruit jars. Now, darling, you simply have to believe me - there were six hundred quarts, and jars and jars of jam, preserves and chow chows, and a big immense jar of wonderful pickles. There were the most wonderful assortments of fruit, meat, fish and vegetables, and she had done it all herself. She is just so nice and modest about it; I'd think anyone who had done that ought to broadcast over the radio. And then she said in that nice quiet voice of hers that I am learning to love and respect, "But I canned a few more this year than usual." And what do you think she said? That two hundred of them were for us. Jim had bought the jars and sugar and she canned them."

The first time I met my husband’s aunt, she was in the kitchen of her farm in Southern Germany, cutting brown bits off a head of cauliflower, her fingernails blackened by soil and paring. My father-in-law did much the same with shriveled apples, taking them one by one from a cardboard box next to his chair. I recall being repulsed by the condition of the produce; indeed, it was the kind of stuff you would see in dumpsters in this country, never in the stores. But these people had been through a war on their own soil, and knew what being hungry was like. For my generation, who has lived in a world at war for nearly their entire life, there is no shortage, no hardship.

As I child I remember my mother parking close to the fence at the bank so my brother and I could stand on the hood of the car and pick blackberries while she did her banking. We had purple tongues when she returned, but there were enough for some on ice cream later, and even more that she turned into jam. She enlisted our help in stirring jam and canning peaches. In fact, on the day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, we put up peaches: as the person with the smallest hands, my job was to neatly layer the cut and peeled peach halves in the mason jar so my mother could pour the hot syrup over them. When we cleaned out my parent's home, there was still one lone jar of "Moon Peaches" on a shelf in the pantry. They're past their prime, discolored with time, but I still packed them up (along with boxes of jars), and they sit on my pantry shelf with the other canned goods. 

And there are more than a few, as my family and friends have learned that if they bring home fruit (or pick it from the trees on our suburban lot), jam will be made. As I take my first jam of the season down to the shelves in the garage where they reside, I check seals and rotate the jars (older jam near the door, newer jars on the left). I also took the opportunity to channel my ancestor and count the jars, and did you know, there were 126 jars of jam, and 36 of applesauce! I will share some with friends who have been trained to return jars, but my family will enjoy the lion's share of the bounty and I admit to a great deal of satisfaction from seeing them, rows of soldiers ready for toast.

Yes, there is jam available to us on the supermarket shelves and farmer's market, but we all prefer following in the footsteps of our predecessors and sweating through the hot days of summer so we can spread a little sunshine on our toast on a wintry morning. 

Summer in a jar