I was born in Waxahachie, Texas, on June 16, 1938, to Edmund Knobel, a 49 year old soil scientist, and Leila Farrar, a 36 year old school teacher in the Indian Service. My parents both waited late to marry, but for different reasons. My father had spent his career traveling around the country, living in boarding houses, making soil surveys, and rationalizing agriculture. His work and personal sacrifice are no longer the norm, but at the time single men were routinely assigned to projects requiring them to constantly move.
During his 33 years of service, my father did field work in 17 states (40 counties), lived in 50 different places, and authored 36 soil surveys. A list of his work appears in the appendix and I am very proud of his contribution to our economy; his invaluable surveys are still used.
My mother, Leila Farrar, had been born into a distinguished family in Waxahachie, Texas. Her father, Bowden Farrar, was a lawyer and member of the Texas Legislature (39th-42nd Sessions). Her maternal grandfather, Franklin Lewis Johnston was also an attorney who served in both the Texas House (14th and 16th sessions) and Senate (18th session). Family roots traced back to 1618 when William Farrar “The Councilor” arrived in Jamestown as a colonist, two years prior to the founding of Plymouth Colony. The Farrars were a well-to-do merchant family who were financial backers and officers of the Virginia Company. Though living in London, their roots were in Yorkshire and DNA indicates Viking blood.
Leila was the sixth child in a family of eight siblings who were all influential in my early life. Her sisters were like second mothers, inviting me for visits and providing beautiful dresses and gifts. I loved my aunts dearly – especially Auntnie (Margaret), Bowdie, and Frankie.
Because her father had forbidden her to marry her first love (whose last name was Edmunds), my mother had remained unmarried until she was 33. She had taught Mojave Indians at Needles, California and Creek Indians at Eufala, Oklahoma. But as she recorded later in a letter, she became fond of her new husband and learned to love him.
My father desperately wanted a son, as evidenced by a letter written to him from his mother soon after my birth. She assured Ed that she would not tell anyone in his home town of Grant City, Missouri, that he had a second daughter and then admonished him that there was no disgrace in siring daughters.
The first daughter, born to Edmund and Leila in 1936, was Mary Margaret, a beautiful and spirited child who had been named after two of mother’s closest sisters. Then I was born in 1938, another pretty and happy child but one who seemed destined for one illness after another.
My mother, with two babies in hand, resumed following my father wherever he was working. She often stayed in hotels with her two babies but occasionally was able to settle in a house for a longer time.
I know of these early travels only through pictures and stories. For a while we were in Uvalde, Texas and I was pictured petting lambs with Mr. Parsons, an old man who had befriended us. In another picture I am holding Chickums, our Rhode Island Red hen, who, caged, traveled with us in the car! Imagine my mother in a Plymouth sedan with two toddlers, luggage, and a pet hen, attempting to keep in sight of my father’s pickup truck. On one occasion she got separated and drove all day in the wrong direction – alternately going slow so he could find her and then fast to try to catch up with him.
Before the war we lived in Grand Junction although I was too young to remember it. But my mother related that soon after she arrived in Grand Junction she put on her good hat and suit and went downtown, only to discover that she was quite out of place. Women wore jeans and shirts and no one bothered to dress up. Grand Junction was strictly a Western culture without class distinctions – very different from the South where people dressed in keeping with their social status.
When WWII started we went back to Waxahachie because my father had been assigned to the job of helping to increase castor oil production and he would be on the road all the time.
My father bought the big Ward mansion on an acre or two of land near the town square which housed the most beautiful courthouse in Texas. The house was an ornate white frame masterpiece with a carriage house, a fishpond and an ornamental garden. I don’t recall exactly how many rooms we had, but in the downstairs there was a large foyer, a front parlor, a back parlor, a dining room, a large drawing room for dances, a large kitchen, and a back porch. Upstairs were bedrooms, bathrooms, and a sleeping porch which extended around the second floor. There were two staircases and the front one featured a fan shaped stained glass window above the foyer. The floors were all hardwood and the bathrooms were all tiled. A large front porch extended around the white columned front of the house.
We had overhead fans in each room which circulated the heavy air in a futile effort to temper the Texas heat. In the low altitude and high humidity it was terribly hot in summer and terribly cold in winter.
Our icebox sat on the back porch (no refrigerators in war time) and the ice man delivered heavy blocks of ice. Chickens had free range in the back yard except when my mother succeeded in catching one and wringing its neck. Then there would be blood everywhere as the neck was chopped off and the chicken flapped around in its death throes. Mama made divine chicken and dumplings! But our pathetic Victory Garden was no match for the invasive native Johnson Grass.
The detached carriage house had a concrete floor and room for several cars. Out buildings including a chicken coop where my sister and I gathered eggs, occasionally finding a rotten one with a horrific odor. A huge pecan tree shaded the house and there were also salt cedars, hackberries, black walnut, and a tree which bore a dwarf fruit (a paw paw tree?).
My Auntnie (Margaret Culbertson) came over to wash sheets in a big iron washing pot which sat above a fire pit. I still have a scar on my leg where I backed into a red hot wire protruding from under the pot. Auntnie and her husband owned several apartment buildings and Auntie washed linen for some of her rentals in those iron pots. They still feared the Depression and hadn’t adjusted to the prosperity created by World War II. They did well with their oil business and funded large trust funds for their granddaughters, Kay and Margaret.
I don’t know if Auntnie’s original frame gingerbread house still exists, but it probably does and is now valuable. But our house no longer exists, having been torn down by the neighboring Baptist church who purchased our property for expansion.
We owned several bizarre animals in Waxahachie. Our cousin Will D kept an alligator in a backyard pen. He reportedly later turned it loose in the country club lake, causing an uproar. We had a large land terrapin and a pet crow whose wings had been clipped. Somehow the crow got out of its cage and the blue jays pecked a hole in its head, leading to an untimely death.
One Easter Uncle Warren brought us a box of little chicks, each of which had been died a different color – red, yellow, blue and green. As the food coloring wore off the little chicks became part of the flock we kept for eggs and meat.
Mama bought us a wind up Victrola record player which we could take on picnics without the need for electricity. I don’t recall taking it on any picnics but I know we spent a lot of energy winding it up and playing 78 RPM records on the front porch.
I recall a big family excursion to Uncle Bill’s pecan ranch on a lake near Waxahachie. All available aunts and cousins attended but I doubt that we gathered many pecans. Instead we had a hearty picnic. The lake was covered with water lilies and floating vegetation, making it difficult to maneuver a row boat.
During the time we lived in our big house, various relatives and renters stayed with us. Uncle Bill Farrar (a widower) and his son Will D, as well as Aunt Sis (a widow) lived with us temporarily. Housing was so scarce during WW II that Mama also felt obligated to rent out a couple of bedrooms to support the war effort as well as to help with upkeep on the enormous house.
Aunt Sis (Mary Yates) had a tragic life, first losing her husband Armand Yates in the great flu epidemic and then losing her son Billy in the war. When a telegraph came to our house notifying her of Billy’s death, time stopped for everyone. The anguish of not only Sis, but of all the family was hardly bearable.
Auntnie was a regular visitor, so she, Mama, and Sis would spend many mornings drinking coffee in our kitchen. Being at a low altitude, heated beverages were intensely hot. My aunts would pour coffee into their saucer, blow to cool it, and then pour it back into their cup. We had a saying about coffee being “all saucered and blowed.”
Other memories of the Ward mansion include a gravestone marking the resting place of our dog Gypsy, of gathering and cracking pecans, of picking bluebonnets from our yard, and cleaning the goldfish pond with the help of aunts and uncles.
In 1947 all our cousins gathered for the Smith Centennial at Getzendainer Park. This celebration marked one hundred years since our ancestors Hans and Nancy Owen Smith had arrived in what is now Ellis County. Smith had been a legislator in Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas and had many descendants in Ellis County (I still belong to the Smith Cemetery Association). My mother was charged with coordinating the food for the event and I still remember the occasion – the long rows of tables laden with food under the tall trees and dozens of relatives.
One of my closest playmates was my cousin Bragg Stockton, also a Smith descendant. He was a freckle faced red head who would come to our house and play “bombing the Japs” until he had exhausted my mother. Then Cousin Fay would come collect him and peace would return. Bragg later became a baseball coach at a Texas college.
I was an ungainly child with my flour sack dresses and bobbed hair. But I had two dimples in my cheeks and pretty blue eyes, so little Johnnie Mac Borders was my boyfriend. His father farmed outside town and I recall going there for a birthday party.
Then, as now, I had an impaired immune system. I spent all of one summer in bed with first the measles and then, when I had barely recovered, I caught whooping cough. The shades were kept closed in the big drawing room where I was kept during my illness. Our house was quarantined because measles was a serious illness and very contagious. How difficult it must have been for my mother! But Dr. Hastings made house calls and I eventually recovered, and learned to walk again after my long confinement.
I also managed to get a ringworm infection on my head, perhaps from holding a stray cat. Whatever the source, I had to have my head shaved and go to a specialist in Dallas who painted my skin with a purple substance (probably potassium permanganate). My aunts crocheted caps for me to wear until my hair grew out again.
Mama used to make pecan candy and send it to her nephews in the service. Once cousin Warren’s wife, Dale, came to get the recipe and felt slighted that Mama couldn’t give it to her. Mama cooked “by gosh and by golly” – a pinch of this and a pinch of that – never measuring too precisely. Dale hadn’t been slighted but because she had Cherokee blood, she was quite sensitive although everyone was most fond of her.
My best friend, Annette Ackley, lived up the street and I would pass by her house to collect her on the way to Marvin Elementary, where I attended first and second grades. One of my teachers was Miss Douglas and the other was Miss Jennie Ruth Chapman, who married my widowed Uncle Bill Farrar. My classmates organized a handkerchief shower in Jennie’s honor and it was a big occasion during that school year.
Later, Uncle Bill predeceased Jennie Ruth and then there was a fuss over his will as he had one son, Will D., by his first wife, Acie Wall. The fuss was finally settled in a lawyer’s office with all parties present. But that didn’t prevent a family feud years later when Will D’s wife had Jennie Ruth exhumed from her burial plot next to Uncle Bill and moved a few spaces away. Everyone took sides on whether it was right to move Jennie Ruth.
Will D. was a nickname for William Dysart Farrar Jr. In other places I’ve written about our Dysart family of whom 13 are designated DAR patriots, either for fighting or for contributing money and goods to the Continental Army.
As to segregation, I remember the black and white drinking fountains at Kress dime store, the streetcars with blacks seated in the rear, the black schools, black churches and black neighborhoods.
My mother would drive out to black town to take her ironing, to pick up a maid, or to get a man to scythe down our Johnson grass. There the ramshackle gray houses overflowed with black young’uns, while old folks sat watching from the porches. The yards were littered with junk and flapping clothes lines.
My family used to talk about “Poor White Trash” which is a concept unknown to a non-Southerner. But we all knew who they were and my mother would never have hired them to work for us. We always had a Negro servant, as did our friends. I recall one black servant, Hazel, who had the biggest feet I’d ever seen. She slouched along in bedroom slippers because nothing else would fit over her feet. Although uneducated, she was great at putting together jigsaw puzzles.
Annette’s father was John Ackley, a tall, dark, handsome man whose mother lived in one of the town’s biggest mansions. Annette’s mother was Louise Dunaway, also from a wealthy family. But I don’t believe Annette fared well in later years. She married without going to college and stayed in Waxahachie all her life, divorced and with one adopted child. I believe she also owned a gift shop. She had always been extremely protected and just hadn’t developed any independence.
One summer after we had moved to Grand Junction and I was about 16, Annette flew up to visit me. We had already grown apart but I did my best to entertain her, hunting for dates (no success) and driving her over the Colorado National Monument in our green Plymouth. I worried all the way that the brakes might fail as it is a steep and harrowing drive. After the visit, I flew back to Waxahachie with Annette and spent the rest of the summer with Auntnie. Annette drove me several time in the family Cadillac to their country club in Dallas.
Years later, in 1986 I attended a library conference in Dallas and saw my cousin, Warren Culbertson. But as I was only in town briefly, I couldn’t look up Annette. My life seems much richer than hers as I was blessed with a happy marriage, an excellent education, and extensive traveling, — but staying in Waxahachie undoubtedly made Annette feel secure with an established place in the local society.
Before attending Marvin Elementary I was enrolled in Miss Chapman’s kindergarten. I have a photograph of myself graduating in academic dress, with Annette in the same picture.
I recall my cousin Billy Yates going off to war, riding in the back of our brown Plymouth sedan with his duffel bag, heading for the railroad station. His plane was shot down over North Africa, leaving his already widowed mother totally alone until she remarried. Her new husband was a man named Osce Turner but no one took to him because he kept hound dogs and was below her social status. Again, the old Southern prejudices.
Two other cousins who went off to war fared better. Warren Culbertson was a meteorologist who had served in WWII and helped forecast the weather prior to the Normandy invasion. Mama had paid Warren’s tuition to Trinity University when his parents couldn’t afford it. He later graduated from the California Institute of Technology and was a noted weather forecaster on Dallas television.
Cousin Lewis Johnston was also sent by the Army to Europe where he met his future bride in Ireland. She came home and helped put him through medical school. They were the Catholic branch of the family mentioned in my discussion of the parents, Uncle Lewis and Aunt Teresa Johnston. Uncle Lewis was 19 years younger than my grandmother Nettie, who was his sister.
My father had paid $4,000 in cash for the Ward mansion on a trip back to Waxahachie from his field work. In depression days no one had money except government workers like my father. Much later, after we had moved to Grand Junction, the big house sold for $13,000 and was then torn down by the corner Baptist Church who wanted the land for expansion. Other changes which I recall from my 1986 visit included seeing that an impressive house of my youth, built by Uncle Warren for Auntnie, was now unkempt with the lawn washed out by heavy rainfall.
As my father was away during the Waxahachie years I have few memories of him. On the one occasion when Daddy came home, it was not pleasant. We had all gone to the Smith Cemetery Association picnic. Mama had baked a white cake with pineapple filling and vanilla frosting for the occasion. Beer was served and I recall Daddy, a little tipsy, angrily driving us home from the picnic. He did not fit in with the Waxahachie relatives, but that was to their discredit as he was a fine, upstanding man.
He tried to teach me how to tell time while he was at home, but I couldn’t grasp the concept of the minute and second hands and he ridiculed me, a most hurtful memory. When Daddy came home that summer he was in terrible shape. He had been bouncing around dirt roads for months in a pickup truck and Mama said he was all swollen up and totally exhausted. He parked his pickup in our large garage with its concrete floor where we children got in the habit of playing. One day I either fell or was pushed over the side of the pickup, landing on my head. I still remember the serious concussion and have wondered if any lasting damage occurred.
I sometimes visited the two story stone farmhouse built by Irish masons and owned by my Uncle Lewis and Aunt Tessie Johnston. Aunt Tessie, was a most impressive woman. True, she was Catholic, but she had a master’s degree in astronomy from Columbia University and was widely traveled. One of her Coates relatives brought back a Madonna cameo from Italy and gave it to my mother, who had it mounted in a gold frame.
Aunt Tessie’s front parlor held a stiff horsehair sofa and the upstairs bedrooms had feather beds where we slept on our visits. Tessie also had a covered well house on the back porch from which she drew cold spring water. There was a big outside barn surrounded by a fence crossed by a wooden stile. And one of the Johnston cows was lacking a tail, supposedly having lost it in a barbed wire fence when a train went by. We held Brownie Scout meetings in a one room stone playhouse in the front yard.
My grandfather Bowden had been elected to various offices including District Attorney and Representative to the 39th through the 42nd Sessions of the Texas state legislature. His photograph still hangs in the state capitol at Austin.
Grandfather Bowden suffered terribly from rheumatoid arthritis, gout, and a deformed foot which required specially made shoes. He walked with a cane. Some times his arthritis became so painful that he was taken by ambulance to a clinic for a treatment lasting several weeks. In his old age he kept his bed near a downstairs fireplace and it was Aunt Frankie’s job to sleep nearby so that she could warm bricks at the fireplace, wrap them in a towel, and place them on his legs and knees. His accomplishments are all the more amazing considering his poor health.
Neither of my grandparents learned to drive, although they owned a car. The grown children had to chauffeur them around and Frankie, being the last child to leave home, did most of the driving. Frankie also worked in her father’s office and tells funny stories about the silly old men who would make passes at her. She was a very attractive blonde who later married a Jewish psychiatrist and lived in Los Angeles. Having no children, she bequeathed her estate to my sister and me.
Frankie and all my other aunts and uncles attended Trinity University, some for two years and others for a full degree. All the girls became school teachers, as that was the only career open to them.
My watercolor print of the Ellis County court house by James Riely Gordon is a beloved memory of Waxahachie. Built at the turn of the century in red sandstone and cream colored marble, it resembles a big wedding cake and is considered the most beautiful courthouse in Texas. It is there that both my grandfather and my great uncle Lewis practiced law.
Texas was not settled until the mid 1800’s. Waxahachie was located in the heart of the black lands, the richest farming land imaginable with enough rainfall to make big cotton crops. Waxahachie was thirty miles south of Dallas and had great promise, but my ancestors laid their bets on Waxahachie to become an important city.
My great grandfather, Captain Simon Bowden Farrar Sr., was one of a small party of soldiers sent to locate a fort for protection against the marauding Comanche Indians. His party selected the site for Fort Worth, but it was in Waxahachie that the Farrars settled.
Waxahachie was built on a square, with businesses facing the court house. On Saturday nights the farmers would come to town, park their cars and then walk around the square and socialize. Ellis County was “dry”so there were no bars and the court house square served as a wholesome gathering place.
There was one movie house on the square that I recall attending. Rogers Street led off the square, crossed the railroad tracks and shortly arrived at our big house. A small store was near the railroad and my mother occasionally sent me there to buy some item she needed. People didn’t worry about children being picked up or molested in those days and I ran those errands when I was only eight or nine years old.
A movie, “Places of the Heart” filmed in Waxahachie and starring Sally Field, caught the character of the Depression era. The men all wore hats and suits, carried their illegal booze in paper bags, and gathered at community halls for dances. Meanwhile, the widowed heroine of the film desperately tried to get her cotton crop in with only one Negro helper. She succeeded and saved the farm. It’s a great movie with a closing scene filmed at the local church with her deceased husband and the black youth who had accidentally killed him seated in the front row – reconciled and at peace.
My grandmother Nettie was said to have regularly tippled in the cupboard. Each old timer had their own way of dealing with pain, and whiskey strikes me as being an acceptable choice. I hope that not too many were blinded by bathtub gin during prohibition. I know that at least one funny story was told by Aunt Frankie about street cars, gin, and my grandfather’s confusion in finding his way back from Dallas with the necessary brew.
Grandmother raised eight children to adulthood and had six miscarriages including twin boys. She had servants, including a cook, a cleaning woman, and Cousin Emma, but she still fed the hogs and did other chores, once slipping on a wet path and breaking her arm. Frankie says that all the grown children regularly arrived for Sunday dinner and grandmother fed all those people without complaint! I didn’t know my Farrar grandparents, both of whom were born the year after the Civil War ended and both of whom died at age 66.
Cousin Emma, mentioned above, was quite a character. Her full name was Emma Harris Forston and she was a shirt tail relative who lacked any refinement. Born in 1864, she was a contemporary of Bowden and Nettie but had been widowed and fallen on bad times. She was then taken into the Farrar house as an unpaid servant. I vaguely remember an early trip to a nursing home to see Cousin Emma, who was loved despite her rough ways and lack of refinement.
Waxahachie remained part of a “dry” county and people were driving up to Dallas as late as I can remember to buy liquor or go to a country club. Of course liquor has its dangers and at least one of my cousins was a heavy drinker. My genealogical research also disclosed an early Bowden relative whose promising political career was ruined by drink.
My mother told Mac on home leave from Bolivia that she would never forgive him if he made me an alcoholic and it’s true that Mac and I drank on a daily basis. My solution to having three wisdom teeth pulled during one home leave was to drink several martinis and go to bed. Others were hospitalized for such an ordeal.
Prohibition was not the answer to the drinking problem nor is it a solution to todays drug use. In 2006 I rejoined the Libertarian Party to protest the criminalization of narcotics in our country. We have made enemies abroad with our war on drugs and in no way has it diminished the usage of cocaine, heroin, nor marijuana. As long as there is big money to be made in narcotics, we will have criminals making fortunes and pushers getting people hooked.
Aunt Tessie Johnston was a trained astronomer and we enjoyed going out and watching the stars with her. She had hopes of converting us by giving us Guardian Angel book marks and driving us around the area visiting small Catholic churches, but to no avail.
As I eventually became Eastern Orthodox I could have benefitted from all those intervening years of spiritual formation, but it was not to be. My family kept me firmly in the First Christian Church where I attended Vacation Bible School, was baptized by immersion, and took soda crackers and grape juice for communion.
It was not rigorous religious discipline, as we were not even required to walk up the aisle for communion which was instead passed around like the collection plates. Communion was open to anyone who chose to take it and most members were undoubtedly baptized and therefore entitled to the sacraments. We sang favorite old hymns such as “Church in the Wildwood” and “In the Garden.”
Perhaps I should clearly enumerate my mother’s Farrar family. My grandfather was Bowden Farrar, a lawyer, and my grandmother was Nettie Johnston, whose father Franklin L. Johnston was also a lawyer and legislator. Mama’s siblings included another Nettie who was a teacher studying for her master’s degree in Colorado. She died of flu, perhaps during the great epidemic. Mama’s other sisters were Mary Yates (Aunt Sis), Bowdie Elliot, Margaret Culbertson (Auntnie), and Frankie Holden (married to Dr. Isidore Holden). Her brothers were Bill (William Dysart Farrar), and Bowden Farrar (died in middle age, leaving Barto as his only son.)
Aunt Frankie says that the marriage between Bowden Farrar and Nettie Johnston was arranged, and I think it likely. Although they were first cousins they did not live near enough to become acquainted, Bowden being in central Texas and Nettie in southeast Texas. Nettie’s father, Franklin Lewis Johnston, was a role model for Bowden.
During the early years of their marriage, Bowden sued the railroad and won about $36,000, a very substantial sum which allowed him to buy farms and build a large house for his family. Seven of his eight children went to college at Trinity University.
The Farrars are dying out. Bowd and Nettie Farrar had eight children, but only seven grandchildren (Billy Yates, Jack Elliot, Warren Culbertson, Will D Farrar, Barto Farrar, Mary Margaret and me.)
My male relatives, including my grandfather, were Masons, ignoring the incompatibility between Free Masonry and the Christian Church. Even my father was a Mason, although raised in the most rigorous Methodist circumstances imaginable (three of his Hicks uncles were ministers). I do admit to being glad that I had Masonic connections as a teenager because it made me eligible for Job’s Daughters. How my attitude has changed! Now I hope that none of my descendants ever belong to such an organization with its secret rites and beliefs.
After we moved to Grand Junction in 1947 my parents helped get meet the right circle of friends. Besides Job’s Daughters my mother bought me a clarinet and enrolled me in the Junior High Band so that my home room was with all the other students in band or orchestra. I had very nice friends whose parents were either physicians or business leaders.
One of my first memories in Grand Junction was a trip to the railroad station to hear Harry Truman on his whistle stop campaign for the 1948 presidential election. I was attending Lincoln Elementary School on North Seventh Street and we were all walked to the railroad station to hear Truman’s speech.
At the time I was wearing my shoulder length hair in braids. Unfortunately, a rubber band holding one braid gave way and half my hair came down, falling loose around my shoulders. This humiliation stayed with me and enabled me to recall the whistle stop visit which otherwise I might have forgotten.
My father had bought a two story white frame house on the corner of Seventh Street and Gunnison Avenue. It had bay windows and a shed in back which my father soon tore down to replace with a proper white frame garage. We had a vegetable garden where my father raised potatoes, vegetables, and flowers. There was an alley in back with a concrete incinerator. The property was large and required a lot of upkeep.
In the early days we had a coal burning furnace which always dirtied the wallpaper. Every Spring my mother bought cans of a pink doughy substance which we kneaded into balls and used to wipe the coal dust off the wallpaper. As soon as possible my mother had the furnace converted to oil. But before the oil conversion my father went nightly down into the basement to remove the clinkers and stoke the furnace. The old coal burning cook stove in the kitchen lasted only a week or two after we moved in as my mother quickly replaced it with an electric stove.
Colorado attitudes were totally democratic: no class distinctions, no clothing distinctions, and no speech distinctions — except for my mother’s life long Texas drawl. Little boys used to knock on our front door and ask for directions so that my mother would come out and explain in her heavy drawl how to find some place in our obvious, numerically numbered street grids.
Another pleasant memory was old “No Name,” a homeless mongrel dog who had a regular begging route. My mother daily had scraps for No Name at his regular calling hour.
Strangely enough I was ashamed of our big house because it wasn’t located near Lincoln Park, the most desirable neighborhood at that time. Many of my friends lived in smaller houses near Lincoln Park until they moved to the previously undeveloped outskirts now known as Pill Hill for the number of doctors who were building expensive homes there.
My early friends were Joyce Tupper and Barbara Jaros, both physicians’ daughters, Dora Lynn Kellogg, whose grandparents owned Manuals department store, and Marjorie Mistler, who lived a block away and whose father was a policeman. Inge Wire, of German descent, was close in my later high school years, as was Mary Kaye Corey, whose parents owned the Royal Motel. Several boyfriends come to mind and although I never lacked a date for anything, I refused to “go steady.” After I refused Ed Mashburn, Ed asked Barbara Jaros to be his steady and she accepted, but I didn’t mind. I was an independent soul, then as now.
I have regrettably not kept up with my friends. My nine years in South America, led to a disruption of my relationships and I didn’t reestablish contact except with Mary Kaye Corey Vaughn who regularly sends me emails.
I’ve attended only one High School reunion, my 25th. As I have been shy all my life, I did not enjoy the reunion at all. Our class had over 300 graduates, which when doubled by marriage, meant potentially close to 600 attendees. All the classmates who had remained in Grand Junction grouped together, so I had little opportunity to talk to those who had remained in Grand Junction.
My shyness was no joke. When I was little it had an endearing quality, but by the time I reached South America it was a liability. I was too shy to even stand up and introduce myself in public to a group of women. If no one else spoke up, my presence as a new member went unnoticed. I was terrified to serve as a delegate to a women’s meeting. On one occasion, when I was scheduled to represent the Episcopal Churchwomen in Medellin, Colombia, I was mercifully relieved of the unwanted obligation when Michael was injured and I had to stay home to care for him.
Years later, as a University of Denver Reference librarian I gave numerous presentations, often with no time for preparation and only rough notes. I overcame my shyness with Valium, a tranquilizer which I took before presentations. Though drastic, the treatment worked and I grew comfortable before the often very bored attitude of captive audiences. One of my proudest moments was when I drew applause for my talk before a Freshman English class. At the time, none of the reference librarians had ever heard of applause for a Freshmen library skills presentation. I had ended my presentation with a definite finale, eliciting some response other than bored relief. And some of the women from the Weekend Program selected me as their favorite presenter because I tried so hard to make them comfortable with our overwhelming collection.
My “bête noire” in those days was Phoenix College which offered a masters degree without the benefit of a library and gave academic credit for work experience. Whenever I caught a Phoenix student using our collection, I quickly clammed up about our reference section and gave them minimal help. After all, our students were paying top dollar for their D.U. degrees and the Phoenix programs had no right to mooch. My behavior went against everything I had learned working at the Villa Library in Jefferson County, but I was now in a private rather than a public library.
My posture was poor, with my neck drooping forward. I recall a friend at Stanford being horrified that when I married I might walk down the aisle with my usual poor posture. But it never improved. Mac called it scoliosis, but whatever, it was with me for life. My parents had even sent me for two months to Perry Mansfield, an expensive summer camp in Steamboat Springs, in hope they would train me to stand erect, but it didn’t work.
While on the subject of Stanford, I must mention my two freshmen room mates, Helen Hawthorne Overton and Mimi Lassiter. Helen was the daughter of an Army colonel who has been blessed with good fortune, marrying well and donating a million dollars to Stanford for the 45th reunion of our entering class of 1956.
Mimi, on the other hand, divorced her first husband who had been chosen by her parents. Her second husband was killed in a freak accident, and then Mimi herself died of cancer while her two children were still in elementary school. There is certainly an element of luck in all our lives, and Mimi definitely had bad luck.
Also while at Stanford I enjoyed visiting my father’s first cousin, Professor John D. Hicks, a noted historian at the University of California at Berkeley. An early picture shows Mac, my father, John Hicks and me holding Tor in front of our Sunnyvale house. I had used a history text by John Hicks when I was in high school and I’m sure he had become wealthy on royalties from his many publications.
The wedding was a small afternoon ceremony attended by my best high school friends and a few of my mother’s friends. We were married by the minister at the First Christian Church and my sister, Mary Margaret, came from Tucson to be my bridesmaid. Mac’s brother Boyd came from Arizona to be best man and Mac’s parents traveled from Mackay, Idaho. A soloist sang several selections and we ate cake and drank punch. I wore a street length white lace wedding dress with a tight waist and full skirt.
We honeymooned by driving to Aspen, then north to Wyoming, Idaho, Washington and Oregon before returning to California. Along the way we stopped at Jackson Hole in the Grand Tetons before continuing on to various stops where we met Mac’s family including Marge and Otto Jr in Pocatello, Ralph and Patricia Thompson in Selah, and Helene and Rol Lindburg in Prosser, Washington. We then drove down the Pacific coast to our home in Menlo Park, California.
A highlight of our trip was time spent near Jackson Hole in the Tetons. Mac fished, we climbed mountains, and enjoyed feeding the chipmunks. Shortly after arriving back in California we started looking for a house, as Mac’s bachelor apartment was not large enough for the two of us. Mac had carefully saved money all his working life and had the funds to purchase a dramatic California style house in Sunnyvale. It was a three bedroom, two bath ranch with a Swedish fireplace and a large family room with a wall of glass windows looking into the back yard. My parents had given us $500 as a wedding gift, which was sufficient to furnish the house, albeit with inexpensive furniture.
We moved in and had a housewarming party with Mac’s Survey friends and a few of my Stanford chums in attendance.
In 1960 Mac accepted a position as advisor to the Department of Geology in La Paz Bolivia. Our South American adventures were published in our 2010 book, “Under the Condor’s Wing : Fifty Years in the South American Andes.”
I was a stay at home wife for nine years in South America and then for another few years in Lakewood before Mac urged me to learn a profession. I complied by earning an MA in Librarianship and becoming an Assistant Professor/ Reference Librarian at the University of Denver.
In 1993 I resigned my position as Reference Librarian. The staff couldn’t believe that I would leave after enduring seven years of the arbitrary rule of Director Maurice Shertz. What the librarians, and even I, did not realize was that I was a self starter, an independent worker, who preferred working alone. The incoming director, Nancy Allen, clearly wanted a collegial work order. She was an accomplished, diplomatic and likable person, but our work styles were at odds, and I knew that I would not be happy as part of her team, with endless meetings to find consensus on policy.
When hired in 1986 I had brought my Macintosh to the library in opposition to the preferences of the library staff, who all used the MS-DOS operating system with its unwieldy line commands. Microsoft Windows, which mimicked the Mac, was not introduced until 1995, so the graphic interface of my Mac was truly revolutionary.
One night, after closing hours, my Mac was vandalized. Only an insider could have opened the locked Reference Room so I suspected that the director of Technical Services might have so strongly wanted MS-DOS uniformity that he had stooped to sabotage. I made no accusations and had my Mac repaired without further incidents, but the sabotage showed the fervor with which users supported their preferred operating systems.
When Tor and Dawn became engaged I recall telling the library staff that Tor wan an Apple II owner and Dawn was a DOS user — but I hoped they would overcome their differences! In the end, Dawn prevailed with her Microsoft preference when they bought a home computer. It was hard to fight the Microsoft standard, but I never regretted my original decision to go with Apple
In 1986 automation was taking over libraries just as it had taken over factories and businesses. The first online catalog was due to be installed at Penrose in a matter of months. Productivity gains and cost savings were enormous. Card catalogs were as much a relic of the past as had been quill pens when typewriters were invented.
One inflexible faculty member could not adjust to the online system. He always came to the Reference desk and had us look up his citations, complaining all the while that the faculty had not been consulted before the enormous card catalog was removed forever. Of course it would not have mattered what the faculty advised on automation — it was a de facto change affecting all academic and large public libraries.
One of my accomplishments had been to write a hypertext guide to our business collection and to mount it on my personal Macintosh next to the Reference Desk. Though well written, the guide was seldom used because it was much easier to ask a librarian for help than to figure out how to use the guide.
Several of the librarians disparaged my efforts, feeling that no machine could replace a good reference librarian. This was of course true, but then neither did a hypertext guide require a salary or benefits. Despite the lack of local support, my hypertext program and accompanying article generated interest and secured me an invitation to present my paper at a library conference in Puerto Rico.
In addition to my hypertext program, I had used my Macintosh to write illustrated booklets about databases, indexes, and services offered at the library. These guides were extremely popular because they provided a simplified way for students to grasp the basics of library research.
At staff meetings everyone was silenced by the arbitrary rule of Maurice Shertz, but I always spoke up and stated my mind. Shertz really liked my nerve and was my advocate. My immediate supervisor, Pat Fisher, could barely type and hadn’t mastered any computer skills, but she bowed to the Director’s wishes in order to retain her powerful position. She was literally the only professional who had access to Mr. Schertz outside of the formal staff meetings.
I had wisely cultivated the Business school users where there was a void in service. Almost all librarians came from a Humanities background of either English or History and had to learn the basics of Science or Business to become useful. Sallye Smith was already highly competent in Science, but no one adequately served the Business school.
I gladly learned the needed skills, having taken evening classes at CU Denver in Accounting, Business Law, Marketing and Business Information while obtaining my MA in Librarianship at DU. Because of my background and interest in Business, I was then given preference for instruction to students in the College of Business Administration. As Pat Fisher pointed out, I had been hired as a temporary substitute but had quickly become a full time, indispensable librarian. Pat Fisher also assigned me as liaison to the Weekend College, giving me more opportunities for specialized instruction.
For most of my time at DU, there was no process for promotion for professional librarians. Mr. Schertz informally submitted names for promotion with no peer review or consultation. In about 1991 this changed, and librarians were given an opportunity to present their qualifications for peer review. As soon as possible I applied for promotion and was appointed Assistant Professor/Reference Librarian. At the time, having worked four years, I had more than sufficient publications, presentations, and professional experience for promotion.
When, after seven years of service at DU, I resigned my position, my friend Peggy Keeran arranged a farewell luncheon attended by all the professional staff. I knew that my resignation meant the end of my professional life and that I would never again work full time. I had focused all my energies on professional advancement and had enjoyed my work enormously, but work took all my energy and on my days off I just laid around trying to recharge my energy. Also, Mac had retired in 1982 and I wanted to spend more time traveling with him.
Mac and I soon started traveling in earnest, visiting 35 countries on seven trips abroad via Elderhostel and Renaissance Cruises. We also made long trips across the continent in our Winnebago.
Our various trips are described in “From Shore to Summit : The Tschanz Travel Journal from 1958 through 2016.”