Beginnings

I have always thought my parents made an unlikely couple. They met each other when they were already in their thirties, and had both established an independent life away from their origins. Perhaps that is why they made a rather unconventional choice of partner and were able to make a success of their forty-five years together.

Daddy was a big-city boy. Born in New York City in 1891, to Jewish immigrant parents, he was the oldest of seven children. He had a sixth-grade education, and from that point he earned his living in a variety of jobs until he hopped a freight train, to try life out West.

Mother grew up on a New Mexico sheep ranch until she was seven, and then the family moved to Sedro Wooley, Washington. Her mother’s family had been in the United States since the 1750’s. Her father’s family came around 1853. She graduated from Sedro Wooley High School in 1914 and went on to the Bellingham Normal School. Her course of study there was one full year, and three summer sessions. At that time she received a lifetime teaching certificate from the State of Washington. She was a teacher in the Seattle Public Schools.

Mother owned a summer cottage at Juniper Beach, on Camano Island. During the school summer vacation she spent most of her time there, regularly entertaining groups of friends from Seattle. In 1928, her current boyfriend brought along a friend of his to meet her. Mother thought that Denny, the boy friend, was afraid she was getting to close to marrying him, and brought Nat Krause, my father, along for protection.

Juniper Beach, July 1931.
Susan Steele, standing far left. Nathan Krause, reclining right front

They were married on June 19, 1933 after a five-year courtship. Times were hard during those depression years. My father was a small businessman. He owned a dry-cleaning shop on Magnolia Bluff, in Seattle. He was about to lose another piece of property he owned because he could not pay the taxes on it. Mother had some money, and she offered to loan it to him. He thought, if he was going to use her money to pay the taxes, they had better get married, and so they did. This is mother’s version of the story, but I never hear Daddy dispute it.

The Krauses seemed notoriously difficult to get to the altar. My father was the only one of his siblings to marry up to that point, and he was forty-two years old. His next younger brother, my Uncle Harry, married for the first time when he was sixty-five, and for a remarkably similar reason. He had had a long-term relationship with a woman, and she found a house that she wanted to buy out in the San Fernando Valley, outside of Los Angeles, California. She needed money for the down payment. Harry had the money and he offered it to her, but he thought they really ought to get married first. And so she became my Aunt Anne, the only aunt or uncle I ever had from marriage on that side of the family.

Mother and Daddy both wanted to have a family, but were concerned about being older parents. Would they live long enough to raise the children to adulthood? They decided that since both of their parents were still living, they probably had a good chance of longevity, as well, and if they were going to have a family, they better get started on it as soon as possible. I was born on June 25, 1934.

The family home was located at 6539 3rd Avenue N. W., in West Woodland, a Seattle neighborhood northwest of Ballard and west of Woodland Park. I lived at this address until I got married in 1955. By this time, Daddy’s business was located in Ballard, although he still used the Magnolia Cleaners name, and had a regular pick-up and delivery route to that area. Mother’s doctor at the time of my birth was Martin Norgore. His offices were located across the street from one of my dad’s shops, the Bon Ton Cleaners on 15th Avenue N. W., at 63rd St. Business was slow for both of them during the depression, and they sometimes kept each other company when they went out on their calls. I was born at Ballard General Hospital. It was located on the second and third floors of a business building on Market Street. I believe the Doctor’s bill was $30.00 for my birth. When Mary Lou was born, two-year’s later, they traded the cost of her delivery for dry cleaning services, because they simply did not have enough money to pay in cash. Dr. Norgore was still our family doctor, when I left home.

Mother thought she knew everything there was to know about raising children. After all, she had been teaching young children for eighteen years. She said later, that if Mary Lou had been her first child, she would have thought herself the perfect mother. Whether it was due to my parent’s inexperience, or if I was a particularly difficult baby, I do not know. Her friends referred to me as ‘the sterilized and boiled baby’. One of them commented that she had always thought of Susan as being strong-willed, but listening to her trying to get me to go to bed one night, she wasn’t sure who was going to win out in the battle between mother and baby. Whenever Mother would get up in the night for a feeding or a fussy baby, Daddy would be right at her side. She finally decided it wasn’t necessary for them both to lose sleep, and let him do the nighttime duty. She must have ultimately been successful in subduing my willfulness, as I remember being a compliant child by the time I started to school, but perhaps that is only my memory of the situation. She told me once, when I was an adult, that she never always wondered if I was going to grow up to be a genius or insane, but in the end, I turned out to be just ordinary. I felt that it was a rather mean thing for her to say to me, and that she was, in the end, disappointed in me.

Our home was a house that Daddy had owned before he and Mother were married. He and a business partner had owned two pieces of property. One was the business, and the other was the house. When they broke up their partnership, they flipped a coin to see how they would divide up the property. Daddy lost the call, and got the house. Mother had said she would live there before she ever saw it, and always regretted her decision. It wasn’t much of a house, but she did her best to make it into the kind of home she wanted. Mother said she thought I would tear down the house, and my grandmother said that I would have achieved it, if Mother hadn’t been forever remodeling the place. The house she really wanted was Dr. Norgore’s home on Sunset Hill. It was a beautiful Georgian Colonial and he wanted my dad to buy it when he moved his medical practice downtown to the Medical Dental Building, and his family to Broadmoor. Dad thought it was way too expensive, and in matters of money, he usually got his way. He was always afraid of debt, and was very conservative about spending money, so we stayed in the house on 3rd Avenue, and mother was disappointed. She tried to fill it with beautiful things, but that was later on after World War II started and she was able to go back to work.

I never remember being ashamed of my home. I don’t really think kids notice their surroundings much, if they are basically happy. We always had enough to eat and nice clothes to wear. The homes of my grade school friends didn’t seem much different than my own.

Third Avenue was an arterial, and carried lots of traffic. In those days, it was not so busy that we couldn’t run across the street to play with friends, but I remember my mother was always warning us to be careful about the cars. When I was very young, it was only one lane of traffic in each direction, but later on, the city took our parking strips and widened the road to two lanes. Today, it is a very busy street.

The house itself was a two story affair with five rooms downstairs and two bedrooms and a large central hall upstairs. There was a sink and toilet in the bathroom upstairs, and a full bathroom on the first floor. When my grandparents came to live with us, Mother added another room to the back of the house for them. There was a basement under part of the house and the addition also had a room under it. The lot sloped back from the street, so the basement was partially above ground in the back. In the front of the house, there was a dirt-floored cellar where my parents would store old toys, and all sorts of other neat junk. My sister and I used to love to drag things out of there, much to my mother’s dismay.

My parent’s bedroom was at the back of the house, and when we were little, Mary Lou and I shared the front bedroom. I can remember when the addition was added to the house, but I barely remember my grandparents living with us. They both died in 1938, when I was only four, so I don’t think they lived with us for more than a year. After that, the room was rented. First there was a young married couple. He was in the service, I believe a young doctor, and they weren’t with us very long at all. I do remember that the wife paid a lot of attention to me. Then Mrs. MacKinnon came to live with us. She was an older woman who played a lot of solitaire. She taught me how to play several types of solitaire as well as pinochle. This was a big thrill for me, as my mother never really approved of card games. She also taught me how to knit, a skill that has brought me many hours of pleasure. She also smoked cigarettes, another thing my mother did not approve of. Mrs. Mac worked as a legal secretary, and she told us an interesting story about how she and the woman attorney, who was her boss, had to take some photographs as evidence in a divorce case. I believe I remember something about climbing a tree to get the pictures.

I don’t remember how long Mrs. Mac lived with us, but she remained a family friend for years after she moved away, often joining us for Thanksgiving dinner. Mrs. Mac actually had a husband up in Canada. They were never divorced, but she had not lived with him for many years. I think there may have a drinking problem. She was a Canadian citizen and often visited in Vancouver. I know that I once went to Canada with her on one of those visits, and we had tea at the Empress Hotel in Victoria. I don’t remember much else about the visit, but there had to be a letter from my parents saying it was all right for me to travel into Canada with her.

When Mrs. Mac moved elsewhere, my parents moved into the downstairs bedroom, I got to have the upstairs bedroom in the back, and Mary Lou got the front bedroom all to herself.

My House

Our home was at 6539 Third Avenue N. W. in an area of Seattle called West Woodland. My parents moved into this house at the time of their marriage, and I lived there until I got married myself in 1955. The pictures of the house, when I was a baby, show that the front stairs were directly in front of the porch, facing Third Avenue. From the time I can remember, however, that porch had been enclosed with a short wall on the street side and the stairs moved to the south side and facing the driveway.

6539 3rd Ave NW

When we were small, Mother kept a gate at the top of those stairs to keep us from falling. I think that the style of the house would be a typical bungalow. There were five rooms downstairs and two attic bedrooms. The two rooms at the front of the house were the living room and the hall, but they were of equal size. Directly behind the hall was the dining room, and behind the living room was the kitchen, which you entered from the dining room. Behind the dining room was the playroom. I expect it had originally be a bedroom. In the space next to the playroom and behind the kitchen there was a laundry room, a bathroom and a little hallway where my mother kept her sewing machine. You could enter the laundry room from the kitchen, or the bathroom. You could also enter the bathroom from the little sewing area off the playroom. The laundry room was not a heated space, so the bathroom door and the kitchen door were had weather stripping, as they would if they led directly outdoors. There was a back porch and entrance off the laundry room. The stairs to the basement went down from the kitchen, and the stairs up to the attic bedrooms led off the side of the entry hall.

Upstairs there was a large central hall between the two bedrooms and a half bath. There was no heat upstairs. Instead there was an opening in the floor with a register that could be opened and closed, to let in the heat from the entry hall below. In the morning, my mother would lay out our clothes on that register, and Mary Lou and I would get dressed standing right on top of it to keep warm. I remember how very cold it was on winter mornings when we huddled around that welcome source of heat.

The house was full of little cupboard and closets, and I loved to play and hide in them. In the upstairs hallway there was a cupboard under the sloping eves where my mother kept all kinds of wonderful things. I especially remember her unfinished quilt. It was a Grandmother’s Flower Garden, the most popular quilt of her day. It seemed to me that there were hundred of the little hexagon flowers in a green border, just waiting to be put all together into a quilt. I learned later that she had never finished the quilt because she had run out of the green fabric, and could never find a match for it. The flowers themselves were of scrap fabric, but the green was essential to tying the quilt together. Mary Lou and I have both wondered whatever happened to those quilt squares. When we were still small enough, we would climb into that cupboard and hide.

There were two closets in Mother and Daddy’s bedroom. Both of these were also under the eves, so they were deep and had ceilings that sloped toward the back. They were another great place to hide. My mother’s wedding suit and shoes were in that closet. Usually Mother wore tie up oxfords with two inch, broad heels; but the wedding shoes were a beautiful pale gray, with slender high heels and a pleated leather bow at the front. I loved to put on those shoes and walk around in them. I never saw Mother wear those shoes.

There was another closet under the stairs in the entry hall. Here were kept our coats and hats, and also Mother’s handbag. We were never allowed to take anything out of that bag. Mother would ask us to bring the handbag to her, and she would be the one to take out the money, or whatever else was needed.

The best closet was in the playroom. We often used it for a store, with a counter in the doorway. Our toys were kept on shelves in the closet, or on a rather large bookcase, storage shelf that was in the playroom, itself. I can remember hiding in that closet sometimes when I was in trouble.

We also used to play elevator on the stairs going upstairs. They were enclosed by a door at the bottom, and made a wonderful place to play. Mother would put things inside the door that needed to be taken upstairs. Anyone who went upstairs was supposed to pick up the objects placed there, and to return them to their proper place upstairs.

The stairway down to the basement was also used as a sort of closet. Here hung the broom and dustpan, Mother’s aprons, the ragbag, and other assorted cleaning supplies. I think Mother had made shelves between the fire stops, and put hooks on the studding. The basement always smelled musty to me. The ceiling was quite low in this area, and tall people had to be very careful coming down the stairs, or else they might crack their heads on the ceiling at the bottom. This was never a problem for my short parents, but during my teen years, quite a few of my boyfriends ran into that beam. There was a daybed in the basement, and on hot summer days and nights it was always cool there. When the upstairs bedrooms were sweltering, Mary Lou and I were allowed to sleep down in the basement.

On one side of the stairway in the basement was the panty, and later that was where we had the freezer. Mother also had stored there her collection of National Geographic magazine. They went back to the early 1920’s, and were an unending source of pleasure for me as a child. The magazines were really quite dusty, but everything about them was a wonder, even the advertising. We were allowed to cut them up for school reports, and we were never limited access to them. They finally ended up in a school paper drive, probably when we needed to make room for the new freezer. We continued to get the new National Geographic, and while I enjoyed reading it, I don’t think it ever quite measured up to playing around in the old ones.

There was also a wooden chest down there where Mother put all her sewing scraps. Whenever I needed a piece of fabric for some project, I was allowed to go down to find something out of that chest.

On the larger side of the basement was where the clotheslines were strung for use during rainy weather. Mother would often be down in the basement, taking down the laundry, when I got home from school. I would run down the stairs, curl up on the daybed and tell her all about what had happened at school that day.

One Halloween, Mother gave us a wonderful party. I don’t know what inspired it, but the party may have been for my Brownie or Girl Scout troop. I know she had the help of some other adults.. Mother and all of her helpers were dressed up as witches.

Each of the guests was turned into a goblin at the start of the party.

My dad was a drycleaner, and in those days brown paper bags protected the finished cleaning instead of the plastic bags in use today. Those bags were just the size to make a covering for a child. Mother had used colored crayons to draw a goblin on the front of each bag. She had made holes for the eyes and nose, and there were openings in the sides for our arms. It was pretty scary inside those bags. After all the guests were transformed, the lights were turned out. She must have had candles or dim lights, but it was pretty dark. We were led into the bathroom first. There, our hands were put into something squishy, probably a gelatin mix of some sort, but I don’t remember that it was sticky. Since we were in the bathroom, they might have washed our hands afterwards.

Then we were led through the laundry room, into the kitchen and down the basement stairs, and all through the basement. I remember walking through hanging things, and lots of scary noises. That is all I really remember about the party, but I think we played games for a while down the basement. I do remember the refreshments. My Uncle George worked for a dairy, at that time. He brought us ice cream made in Halloween shapes. There were witches and pumpkins and black cats. I had never seen such wonderful ice cream before, and haven’t since.

This was the best party I have ever attended in all my life. It must have been a lot of work, but I have never forgotten that mixture of fear and fun that I experienced that night.

Our Neighborhood

When I was a little girl, there were many small neighborhood grocery stores. There were actually three within a block of our house. I’m not sure if they were all in business at the same time. One was across the street at the corner of Third and 65th, and there was one kitty corner to it. I remember these as being good-sized store, but they were tiny compared to today’s supermarkets. Next door to the store across the street there was also a butcher shop for a time. I think my mother shopped pretty regularly at those stores. You stood at the counter and asked for the groceries you wanted. The grocer would go get them for you. Sometimes things were high up on the shelves that went clear to the ceiling. The grocer had a sliding ladder that he would climb to get those items.

It was very common for a family to charge their groceries during the week, and then pay their bill on payday. My mother always paid for her groceries when she bought them, but I can remember going with friends, when their mother would send them down to the corner store for something, and they would ask to have it put on their bill. Once, I heard the grocer say that the mother needed to pay her bill before she could charge anything more.

Mother always bought flour and sugar in 100 pound sacks. She had lined drawers in the kitchen base cabinets that would hold the entire 100 pounds. We often had biscuits for dinner and she regularly baked cakes and cookies, and sometimes bread. During the war, when food was hard to get and hoarding was discouraged, mother was still able to buy flour and sugar 100 pounds at a time. One of his customers asked the grocer why Mrs. Krause could get 100 pound of sugar, and she couldn’t. He told her that Mrs. Krause had always bought that much sugar and the other customer hadn’t.

There was also a small store on our side of Third, at the corner of 67th. Two Greeks, who lived in the back of the store, ran it. Before we were old enough to cross busy Third Avenue, Mother would send us to Sammy’s for things that she needed in an emergency. It was also the place where we could spend our allowance, usually on candy. Even as a child, I thought the place rather dark and dreary, and not very clean. I don’t know how they made a living there, as the stock was meager, but the store remained in business for years.

West Woodland had a fairly extensive business district. It ran along both sides of 65th from about Fifth Avenue to Eighth. Sometime, during the forties, the good grocery stores in our neighborhood must of gone out of business, as Mother started doing her shopping at Nicks, down in West Woodland. They had both a grocery store and a butcher shop in the building. This was a new and much larger store than I remember from when I was younger. At one time, it had been a very small shop, almost a stand. There was a wooden front that was raised each morning to show the counter and the goods behind. We did not shop there then, but walked past on our way to the bus stop on Eighth Avenue.

Other stores along that street were an ice cream parlor, a dress shop, a candy store, a variety store, a movie theater, a photographer and a drug store. My parents patronized all these places. There was also a beer parlor. I think it was the first place we passed on our way to West Woodland. I learned early on that my mother did not think this was a very respectable place. There was a distinctive smell and sound to the tavern and a sign out front that said, “booths for ladies”. I remember wondering about that, and my mother explained that ladies would not be allowed (or might not want) to stand at the bar. If indeed any lady would patronize such a place, was unspoken.

I learned to love the movies. We were allowed to go on Saturday afternoon, if we had money left from our allowance. It cost eleven cents for children. We saw a newsreel, a cartoon, that week’s serial and a double feature, plus the preview for coming attractions. You would think that would be enough for anyone, but sometimes I would stay and see the whole thing twice. When I didn’t come home, Mother would come down to the theater and drag me out. Then, I would not be allowed to go to the movies the next week. I don’t think I ever learned, as I remember she had to come and get me many times, and she certainly was angry about it.

Early Memories

I have one early and very persistent memory. It would flash into my mind unexpectedly and I could never quite place what it meant. I could see a light; way up high and just below it would be a large shape with criss-crossed legs. I was visiting my mother, one day, when her next-door neighbor Mrs. Shoemaker came over. I was in the final months of my first pregnancy. “Betty Jo, there is something I want you to have” she said. “It is the changing table your mother used for you and Mary Lou. She loaned it to us when Sonja was a baby, and you might like to have it for your baby, too.” She went home and brought back a folding table with a canvas top. Instantly, my memory came flashing back, only this time I could place exactly what it was. It was the changing table, of course, with its crossed legs. High above my two-year-old head was the light coming through the window in our playroom. In front of the window stood the changing table. I could even hear my baby sister crying. I know that Mary Lou had a serious ear infection when she was very small. The Dr. had to come and lance the eardrum, and before that operation she had cried incessantly, according to my mother. I wonder if this is the time I remember. A photograph of me sitting on that table is in my baby-book, and I had certainly looked at it many times in my childhood, but I had never made the connection that came to me so vividly that day.

Another, clearer, memory must be from when I was about three, as we were at my grandparent’s home in Sedro Wooley, and they came to live with us in Seattle when I was three or four. I am in grandma’s yard. She grabs a chicken by the head and swings it around to wring its neck. I can still see that chicken running around all over that yard. We probably had chicken for dinner that night.

I remember very little about my maternal grandparents, as they both died in 1938 when I was four years old. My grandpa Steele was blind. He had lost the sight in one eye when a sliver of wood flew up and hit his eye when he was splitting firewood. Then, when he was older, he suddenly lost the sight in his other eye. He used a cane when he walked. When my grandparents came to live with us, Grandpa liked to take walks down Third Avenue, and I went with him, holding his hand. I was not allowed to go as far as the corner, but when I walked with Grandpa, we could go clear down to 65th and even across the street. There was a grocery store on that corner, and that may have been our destination. Beyond the grocery store there was a hedge bordering the sidewalk. It was way over my head, a solid wall of green, as we walked past. When I grew older, I sometimes walked that way to school. I was always surprised to find that the hedge was not very tall at all, certainly not much higher than my waist when I was in the sixth grade.

Chasing Mary Lou

Mary Lou and I were having a grand time chasing each other around and around. Through the kitchen we went. Through the dining room, the playroom, the bathroom and out the door to the laundry room and back through the kitchen again. Doors opened and closed. This was great fun. Mother didn’t think so. She was trying to take a bath. The bathroom had two doors. One was at the playroom end and the other opened out into the laundry room. The laundry room was unheated and looked out onto the back porch. She must have asked us to stop, but we paid no attention. Finally her patience was exhausted. She jumped out of the tub and slammed the door to the laundry room shut.

Unfortunately, my hand was in still in that doorway. The door caught my left thumb and I started to scream. The door to the laundry room was weather stripped, or the damage would probably have been much worse. She called Mrs. Shoemaker, and Mr. Shoemaker drove us to the nearest doctor, only a few blocks away. The injury must have been painful. I really don’t remember. I know that I lost the thumbnail and had a fairly large bandage. I remember how upset and guilty my mother felt. I had to stop at the doctor’s on my way home from school a few times for the aftercare. His office was in his home, and I walked past it everyday on my way to and from school. When the nail started to grow back, it was all very lumpy and ugly. I remember chewing away at that nail until it finally it grew back straight. I still have a scar on that thumb to remind me of that day.

Growing Up

My mother was very anxious that her daughters should have all the ‘advantages”. These advantages consisted of having lessons. Over the years I had all sorts of lessons. The earliest that I remember were speech lessons. I don’t know if I had some sort of speech difficulty that needed to be corrected, or if the lessons were chosen for some other reason. I was either in kindergarten or first grade at the time, for I know that I had not yet learned to read. My only real memory of these lessons is of standing on a stage and reciting a poem entitled Buttons, Buttons. The memory is not so much of the poem, but of the costume that I wore. Mother made the costume for me. It consisted of a white, peasant type blouse and a green jumper. The blouse had embroidery on the sleeves and the bodice of the jumper laced together in the front around two rows of buttons. On the skirt there were rows of buttons and the same lacing was used to make a zigzag design all around the lower edge above the hem. The outfit hung in my mother’s closet for years after my performance, and I often wore it to play dress-up until, I suppose, I grew too big to be able to fit into it any more. I loved wearing that costume, which is probably the reason I can so well remember the reason for its existence.

Twenty years later, when I was teaching first grade at Esperance Elementary school in Edmonds, I was flabbergasted when one of my students came to class wearing that costume. It was at Halloween, when the children came to school wearing their holiday costumes. It had to be the same dress, as I’m sure it was one of it’s kind. The child did not know where her mother had got the costume for her, but she liked it just as much as I had. When I got home from school that evening, a telephone call to my mother was my first priority. She could not remember the specifics of giving away the garment, but said that when she was teaching at Warren Avenue School, she gave many of our old costumes to the PTA there. The mothers would hold a sale of such items each year to benefit the school. I hope that many little girls had the fun of wearing that wonderful dress.

Following next were dance lessons. Verla Flowers had a studio in the basement of her parent’s home, only a few blocks away from us, and I was duly enrolled to study with her. Verla had danced professionally in New York, but either age or hard times had brought her back to Seattle. She seemed very young and glamorous to me, with her hair all piled up on top of her head. I studied both tap and ballet with her, and mother again made the costumes for our recitals. I remember seeing posters for one of her later recitals at a theater in the University district, but I had long since stopped being her student. I think she became quite well known as a teacher of dance, as I once saw a lengthy article written about her in the Seattle Times. Then, just a few years ago, a friend told me that she was well known as the teacher of Mark Morris, the well-known dancer and choreographer.

Mother enrolled Mary Lou and me at the Cornish School up in the Broadway district to take music lessons. I took rhythm lessons, which consisted of moving around to music, and semi-private piano lessons, where I shared the teacher’s time with a little boy. He was a much better student than I. Mary Lou must have been taking other lessons at the same time. We went to classes on the bus, and the trip required a transfer in the Fremont area. We took the streetcar, which ran down the middle of Third Avenue in front of our house, and at Fremont, we caught the bus up to Broadway. The streetcar ran on tracks laid into the street. It had wooden seats, and I loved to ride on it. The tracks remained in the street long after the streetcar stopped running. On the way home we reversed the trip. The bus stop on Broadway was in front of a shop that had fascinating things for sale from other countries. I loved to stand there while we waited, and look in the windows. The Cornish School building is still standing, albeit with many renovations and additions, very close to where my sister, Mary Lou lives today. I don’t think we took classes there for very long. I remember Mother saying we had to quit because it was too expensive.

She soon arranged for us to have piano lessons from Mr. Greener. Mr. Greener was the organist for a large church in the University district. We went there at least once to hear him give a concert. He taught children to play the piano during the week, walking from house to house to give his lessons. I was his student first, and when Mary Lou got old enough, she took lessons, too. We had to practice an hour every day, half and hour in the morning and half and hour after school. At first Mother made me practice for the whole hour at one time, but she had learned better by the time Mary Lou started lessons. The piano stood in the playroom, and I spent many hours sitting at the piano stool and practicing. Mother was tone deaf, so she only knew that the piano was being played, but not if we were doing a good job. Once, I remember memorizing a piece from Cavalleria Rusticana. Once I could play it by heart, I put a book in front of the music and read. I read most of the Anne of Green Gables series while playing that song. Every time I hear it, even now, I associate it with those books. I don’t think Mother ever knew.

I think I studied with Mr. Greener for six years. He may have told her that she was wasting her money after that, or perhaps, he quit teaching, or I may have been unwilling to continue. When I got married, Mr. Greener played the organ at our church for the ceremony. I think there might have been a problem about it with the regular church organist, but Mother prevailed, as she usually did. Mr. Greener liked to play at the weddings of his former students. I remember hearing him talk about it when I was his student.

While I was still taking piano lessons, I also started taking cello lessons. Mary Lou had better pitch than I had, so she got to take the violin instead. My first lessons may have been at school, as I certainly remember playing in the grade school orchestra. I also took private lessons. Our next-door neighbor played the cello for the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra, and she was my teacher for quite a long time. I must have been a teenager at the time, as I remember baby-sitting for her sometimes, as well.

I hated carrying that big, awkward cello around. Mary Lou and I both played in a summer youth orchestra that rehearsed at the Greenlake Fieldhouse. We had to take two busses to get there, and I had to lug the cello every time. It also had to go back and forth to school with me. Once, I forgot to put the bottom post back in after school, and broke it off on the sidewalk, carrying the instrument home. I think I was trying to ride my bicycle and carry the cello at the same time. I continued to play the cello through my Jr. year in high school. My mother bribed me with a cashmere sweater if I would stick with it through the Spring Concert that year. There were only two cellists in the high school orchestra, and I believe I was quite a bit better than the other girl. I think the music teacher enlisted Mother’s help to keep me playing until after the concert.

Mother let me sell the cello the summer before I started college, I got $35.00 for it at Sherman and Clay in downtown Seattle. They insisted that I bring a letter with my parent’s permission to sell, before they would give me the money. I remember going that same day to buy myself a cashmere sweater set at Littler. Even then, $35.00 would not have paid for the complete set, so I must have had other money to pay the balance. The sweaters were avocado green, and I enjoyed wearing them for many years.

I don’t believe I ever showed much talent for any of these lessons. I’m certainly not sorry that I learned to read music and to play. But it is not something I ever continued into my adult years. The cost of giving us all those advantages must have been considerable, and we were not a family with a lot of extra money to spend. I think it must have been very important to my mother that we had the chance to learn these skills.

What I really liked to do was to read and to do needlework. We always had books at home, but mostly we went to the Public Library. The Greenwood branch of the Seattle Public library was on Greenwood Avenue, about ten blocks from our home. It was on the other side of Greenwood, so I had to cross a very busy street to get there. I went at least once a week; first with Mother, and later, with Mary Lou or by myself. I always had a stack of books to carry. We were only allowed to check out books appropriate to our age, so when I grew older, Mother had to write a note to the librarian giving me permission to check out books from the adult section. I always felt that the librarians were very stern and formidable, but I certainly felt very much at home in the library. Mother always walked up 67th St. to Phinney, and then up to the library, but I liked to vary my route by walking up Third Avenue for several blocks and then up to Greenwood. The hill wasn’t quite so steep that way, and for some reason it seemed like more of an adventure to go the less familiar way.

Mother taught me to sew when I was quite young. My cousin Margaret lived with us for about a year, right after her mother’s death. She was about twelve then, so I would have been eight. That summer we made matching sundresses. Margaret and I both remember making those dresses. Mary Lou had one too, but Mother made hers. The fabric was a multicolored stripe, and the collar of the dress was square with mitered corners. The stripes had to be matched at the miter, and we both remember having to rip out that seam and sew it over, until we got the match perfect.

I’m sure that my mother made all of our clothes when we were young, and as soon as I could sew well enough, I made my own. I loved to sew. I’m sure that some of my initial efforts must have been iffy at best, but I never noticed, and never minded making my clothing. By the time I got to high school, I was a proficient seamstress. I think I had beautiful things, and was certainly better dressed than many of my friends. Mother taught my friend Laura to sew, too. She and I both put in a hem in exactly the same way; one that was considered upside down by my college clothing instructors.

Mother taught me to embroider and to crochet, but it was Mrs. Mac who taught me how to knit. She knit German style, or pick knitting. All my friends seemed to knit the English way, where you throw the thread. Pick knitting is faster, but probably does not make such an even stitch. I became an expert at knitting argyle socks, which were all the rage when I was in high school. My boy friend, Jerry, was the recipient of most of these efforts. I’m not sure if he really liked all those socks, but he did wear them.

Mary Lou and I also had to learn how to darn. Our socks were always getting holes in the toes and heels. Those darned socks always seemed lumpy to me, and never very comfortable to wear. Mother wore lisle hose for everyday, and those had to be darned, too. She had an Indian woven basket that was her darning basket. We would often sit in the evening, listening to the radio shows, and darning our hose. Nylon stockings were available before the start of the War, but I don’t remember that we had any at our house until it was over. Nylon did not wear out as quickly as lisle or silk, and women thought they were wonderful. Finally, socks began to be reinforced that the heels with nylon or some other, stronger fiber, and after that we didn’t have to darn stockings anymore.

Riding My Tricycle

I was given a tricycle for my second birthday. When I grew a little older I was allowed to ride the tricycle on the sidewalk in front of our house. I was allowed to go down to the corner to 67th Street, but only about half way down the street to 65th. I remember very clearly that there was a place in the sidewalk where it was cracked, and the sidewalk was not quite even on one side. That is where I had to stop and turn around. I think that Mother made this rule because the street began to slope downhill at that point, or perhaps she did not want me to go farther as there was a gas station on the corner.

One day, I disobeyed my mother and went clear to the corner. I turned the corner; started down 65th, and there, disaster struck. Now the street became very steep and my tricycle “ran away”. I ended up at the bottom of the hill with an overturned tricycle and badly skinned-up knees. I climbed back up that long hill and went crying home to Mother with my sad story. I remember going back with her to fetch the tricycle. She must have been horrified at the thought of her little girl going down that hill on an out of control tricycle, especially since 65th was a very busy street. I don’t remember that I got into a lot of trouble over this, but I don’t think I ever went past that place in the sidewalk again. Even when I was old enough to go to school, and passed that spot every day, I remember feeling uneasy about going past that place.

Mother wrote down this story about my adventure. It was handwritten on notebook paper, folded and kept in the middle drawer of the desk. I used to love to take out that story and to read it when I was growing up. I suppose that is why it is so vivid in my mind today.

Remembering My Father

I never had a really close relationship with my father. I don’t think he knew what to make of his growing daughters. I know that with his grandsons, he adored them as infants and small children. Once they got big enough to talk back to him, he began to lose interest.

I have two very special memories of things we used to do together. The first is going out to Lippman’s Jewish bakery on Sunday mornings to get our rye bread. Daddy loved rye bread with caraway seeds, and he taught me to love it too. I don’t think my sister came with us on these trips, or maybe she got to go by herself. Daddy and I would get into the car, and our route would take us up 15th Avenue N. E. and I suppose the bakery was actually located on Beacon Hill. Every time I drive up that street today, I am reminded of our special trip to the bakery.

What I remember most, is how wonderful it smelled there. The fragrance of the freshly baked bread was wonderful, and I could hardly wait to get home with it, so I could spread a slice with butter and gobble it down. It was wonderful as toast or for sandwiches, and remains my very favorite kind of bread today. Sometimes one of the ladies would give me something to sample. I had my first taste of bagels there. I still remember how moist and chewy they were. The woman told me that bagels were boiled first before they were baked.

Daddy loved baseball, and Mother never really enjoyed the game. He started taking me as his companion to the games. Our team was the Seattle Rainiers, and they played in the old Pacific Coast League. Their home ball park was Sick’s Seattle Stadium in Rainier Valley. My Dad owned a piece of business property out there. It had been his original dry cleaning shop, and now housed a tavern as well as a small cleaning shop. He always went out to collect the rent in person, and then we would go to the baseball game.

Oh, how I loved to go with him to the ball game! He always got us good seats, and he was very patient about explaining the game to me. When I got a little older, he showed me how to keep score. I knew the names of all the players, but my favorite was Jo Jo White. One day, I came back from the game and informed my mother that Jo Jo slid into base and skinned his knee, but he didn’t cry at all. My Dad thought that was the best story, and he used to tell it to everyone. I couldn’t understand why it was so funny.

Daddy would explain strategy to me. I wanted to know why they bunted the ball, when they almost always got put out, so he explained about moving the runner along. This was long before designated hitters, so we saw the pitchers bunting quite a bit. I asked why they sometimes used a pinch hitter, and he explained about a left-handed batter having a better chance against a right-handed pitcher. Once, when the opposing manager then made a pitching change, I complained that it wasn’t fair, and Daddy said, “No, Betty Jo, that’s just good baseball.”

When we couldn’t go out to the game, we would listen on the radio. Leo Lassen was the radio broadcaster, and he could really make the game interesting. Present day sportscasters can’t hold a candle to him, in my opinion.

Daddy grew up in Brooklyn, so as a boy he was a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers. He loved to talk about old time baseball. A few year’s ago, I ran across a series of mysteries that revolved around the old time baseball teams. All the while I was reading them, I wished my Dad were still here to talk to me about them. I’m sure he would have loved to read them, as they took place during the time he was growing up and learning to love baseball himself.

All my sons loved to talk baseball with Grandpa. Even when his near memory began to fail him, he could still remember all about baseball. I will always be grateful to him for teaching me to love the game.

Going to Aunt Barbara's House

When I was about ten or eleven, Mother’s sister, my Aunt Barbara, came back to the United States. She and Uncle Jess had been agricultural missionaries in Brazil, but had returned to live in Grandview, in the Yakima Valley. Mother always said that they returned because my cousin Jack was turning sixteen, and would be subject to military service in Brazil at that age. They came home for regular home leave, and just never returned. I think that Uncle Jess’s parents were probably getting old enough that they wanted him to take over the running of their family fruit ranch. At any rate, that is what happened. We often went over to Grandview to visit them during our summer vacation.

I had always been a city child, so staying on a farm was a new and exciting experience. The first time we visited, the older Wyants were still living on the ranch, so our family stayed in an old house that had once been for the hired man and his family. It had no electricity or running water, so I learned all about lamps that had to be lit with matches and out houses. There was a pump at the kitchen sink, so that was a new experience as well. I can remember that we used the bathroom at the farmhouse, whenever we got the chance, and always took our bath up there. My mother took this primitive living in stride, but my father was from New York City, and I think it was an interesting experience for him, too.

The farmhouse was quite large, and very comfortable. In later years, Mary Lou and I had a bedroom upstairs. The only problem with this room was the bees. Uncle Jess kept a beehive outside the bedroom window, and during the hot summer we needed to keep that window open, or swelter. Sometimes a bee or two would get inside, and I remember that once, Mary Lou stepped on one and got stung on her foot.

That farm had lots of attractions, however. We often went swimming in the irrigation ditches. They were delightfully cool, and not so deep that I ever felt nervous swimming in them. We had the run of the farmyard, and loved to climb around in the barn and over the tractors and other equipment when it wasn’t in use. We also could play in the haystack. I remember it as being pretty sticky and scratchy, probably more straw than hay. There was also an old wood and coal stove out by the barn, and we could use it to play house. I had never before seen such a stove, and my mother and Auntie Barbara explained to us how it worked. I suppose it had been in the farmhouse kitchen at one time.

There was a vineyard in the front of the house, and some cows were kept confined by an electric fence in another pasture. Uncle Jess only kept the electricity on the fence for short periods, to save money, but the cows could recognize the buzzing sound made when the juice was on, and only stayed away from the fence during that time. The rest of the time they seemed to know that it was just a plain old fence, and leaned against it whenever they felt like it. I think my uncle wished his cows weren’t quite so smart.

Mostly, the farm was an orchard, raising apricots, cherries, prunes, peaches and apples. We were sometimes allowed to pick the fruit for money. My oldest cousin, Jack, wasn’t too happy about that. He was given the job of picking after us, to make sure that the trees were picked clean. Since we took all the easy fruit, it meant that he wasn’t making as much money as he could have. He was a teenager, five years older than I was, and he was earning serious money in the orchards. Most of the other pickers were Mexican itinerant farm workers. They seemed to be able to communicate quite well with my uncle, although he spoke Portuguese and they spoke Spanish. I remember once when the Mexicans were making some comments about us picking in the orchards. They didn’t think it was a proper job for little girls to do. At least, that is what Uncle Jess told us.

We could easily walk into Grandview to go to the store, or to visit my cousin’s grandparents. Ann and David were four and five years younger that I was, so they had more free time to play with us. Once, Jack took me driving in his car. We went up to the Rattlesnake Hills, and at one point he was speeding down a stretch of road at 100 miles an hour. I know that he was showing off for me. I had never before been out riding in a car that wasn’t driven by an adult. I probably got him into trouble, because I remember telling my parents about it when we got home.

Aunt Barbara had a vegetable garden, and I remember thinking it was wonderful to be able to go out to the garden to pick something to eat for dinner. They also raised chickens for the table. One summer Uncle Jess had a new batch of chicks. He let each of us children have a chick. We played and played with them. They were so soft and fuzzy. I still remember how awful I felt when my chick died from being handled too much.

When my own children were small, my mother took them over to visit Aunt Barbara. They went over on the Greyhound bus. Uncle Jess took some home movies while they were there, and gave them to us. They show the boys having the same kinds of fun that Mary Lou and I had had. My cousin David was college age then, and he let the older boys drive the tractor around the farmyard while sitting on his lap. Watching those movies brings back wonderful memories.

Meeting My Grandparents

My father’s parents lived on the East Coast. When I was born, during the depression, there was no money for travel, and when the war started, no one was able to travel much either. As a result, the first time I was able to meet my grandparents was when I was a teenager. My Uncle Harry lived in Los Angeles, and both my Aunt Pearl and my Uncle Fritz had visited us occasionally when I was a child, but my grandparents were elderly, and did not venture far from home. For some reason, my parents never made the trip east to visit them there. Uncle Fritz was my father’s youngest brother, and he was within draft age for the Second World War, although probably at the upper limit. He did serve, and sometime in the late forties he bought a house for his parents in the San Fernando Valley on the G I Bill. My Aunt Pearl and my grandparents moved to California, and for the first time they lived in our part of the world.

As a teenager, I was very active in the Y-Teens, and during my Jr. year in high school, I was elected to the All-City Y-Teen Council. For my Sr. year, I was elected president. The summer before I was to take office, the YWCA was sending me to a leadership conference to be held at Asilomar, a conference center outside of San Francisco. It was decided that this was an opportunity for me to continue down to Los Angeles to meet my grandparents.

Another girl from Seattle, Joyce Ishii, also had relatives in the area, so after the conference, we were to stay one night in San Francisco, and then take the train together to L.A. My mother had written to the YWCA in San Francisco to make reservations for us to stay there. Our adult chaperones from the conference took us to San Francisco and Joyce and I made our way to the Y. I remember that we learned the hard way that the downtown streets in San Franciso followed the shoreline, and did not run parallel. We had walked quite a ways out of our way before we figured this out. We were tired when we got to the Y, only to find out that because Mother had not sent a deposit with our reservation request, a room had not been held for us. The Y was full, and could not take us.

They did suggest another hotel where we might stay, and we were able to find a room there. I do remember that the hotel clerk was a bit hesitant about renting a room to us. We were only sixteen, after all. I think that one of us was Caucasian and the other Asian might have had something to do with it. It was 1951, but there was still plenty of discrimination going on. The room was on the inside, and the only window overlooked an airshaft, but was clean and comfortable enough. We got a good night’s sleep, and continued on our way the next morning. We were smarter about getting to the train station, and looked at a map for the shortest way before we left the hotel. Both of us were met in Los Angeles by relatives, and my visit with my grandparents began.

I stayed at my grandparent’s home, which was a fairly new rambler, typical of the type of housing development that was springing up everywhere after the War. It was sparsely furnished, as I don’t think they were able to bring much furniture with them when they moved from New Jersey. I thought it was a very nice house, much newer than my family home in Seattle. My uncles were afraid that I would be bored, staying way out there in the Valley, and they took turns taking me sightseeing around Los Angeles.

I now regret that I didn’t have more time with my grandparents. There are many questions I wish I had asked them. I really would like to know more about their life in Russia before they immigrated to America. Why did they come? What was the trip in steerage like? What was it like to be a young bride and mother in teeming New York City in 1891, when you didn’t speak the language and couldn’t read or write? I didn’t even know the questions then, and at sixteen I didn’t think to ask much. Grandmother would have been happy to tell me, and I treasure the things that I did learn.

She said that they were married twice. First, in a religious ceremony in their village, and then by the State in Odessa. I believe they took a ship from Odessa to Holland, where they stayed for a short while until they could get passage to America. Grandpa told me that he had registered for universal military training in Russia when he was eighteen year’s old, and that he was five feet tall at that time. Time had eroded that stature by quite a few inches by the time I met him when he was in his late eighty’s or early ninety’s.

Grandma told me that her good children died young. These were my Uncle Lou and my Aunt Frances. I personally thought that they were her good children because they were no longer around to make her angry. She had seven children over a period of twenty-one years. “And thirteen times I blooded the bed”, she told me, so I suppose those were miscarriages. My father was the firstborn. She told me he was the first of many children who were named Nathan in honor of her father, Noah (Nathan) Garbut. She was mistaken in this. My father’s first cousin Nate Garbut, the son of her brother Hershel, was several months older than he. He also had another cousin, Nathan Glotzer, the son of Grandma’s sister Goldie, but I do not have a birth date for him.

She wanted to know if I had a boyfriend. “You go home and marry that nice boy, and make quick with a baby.” She wanted to be a great-grandmother, as all of her friends were. I think she really felt shortchanged in the grandchild department, as Mary Lou and I were the only ones she had. I did, eventually, marry that nice boy, but she had to wait for five years, and another year after that for the great-grandchild. When Aunt Pearl told her that Tim had been born, she said that she was great lady indeed.

I think that her granddaughters were important to my grandmother. She would have preferred a Jewish daughter-in-law, but I think she came to accept that any granddaughters were better than no grandchildren at all. She told me several times, “It is the same God darlink, the same God”. She had pictures of my sister and me that she carried around in an envelope, protected by feathers to ward off the evil eye. She was certain that a neighbor had put the evil eye on my Aunt Pearl, and that is why she was sick again, and had to be in the hospital. Uncle Fritz could not understand where she got the idea, as the neighbor was a very nice woman who had been good to the family. She made beef tea to send to the hospital to help Pearl get well again, and my aunt was convinced that it helped her.

My grandparents had been married about sixty years when I visited them. I’m afraid that their marriage may have been a battleground. The whole time I was there, they were yelling and screaming at each other. Since my own parents never quarreled, this was a new experience for me. He accused her of drinking his rubbing alcohol. She screamed back, “Moses says liars get the electric chair.” One day, Grandpa and I took a walk. He told me that Grandma was much older than he was. They were actually the same age, but she did look much older. He was very vain about his appearance, and had a huge collection of ties. He hadn’t seen my father for so many years, that he was sure he wouldn’t recognize him “if someone told me, that is your son”. I said that I thought he would, as they looked so very much alike.

Grandma kept a kosher kitchen. There were separate dishes for meat and for dairy; each kept in their own cupboards. She was so short, that she had to stand on a stool to get anything out of the upper cupboards. It took me a while to understand why she kept giving me glasses of milk to drink between meals, but I couldn’t have any with dinner, when I really wanted some, but, of course, I couldn’t mix meat and dairy at a meal. We had chicken for dinner one night. She soaked the chicken in a bucket of water until she was sure all the blood was gone. Then she put the water on her tree. She told me she had the best tree in the neighborhood. I wondered if her children might have grown taller, if all the good nutrition hadn’t gone to her tree.

She was cooking something else, and I thought she was using a lot of salt. She told me that “after sixty years, I should know what he likes to eat”, so I kept my mouth shut after that. My grandmother had a reputation for being a very good cook, and certainly all the meals I had at her house were delicious.

My Aunt Pearl was quite ill with tuberculosis, and was at the City of Hope Hospital. When they lived in New Jersey, she had a very good friend, whose name was Ann Shevelow. She was now living in Los Angeles to be near her son, Jeff Chandler, who was a well-known actor. He had a very distinctive voice, and had played the role of Mr. Boynton on the radio show Our Miss Brooks. He was now doing mostly movies. He had been instrumental in getting my aunt a place at the City of Hope, through his membership in the Screen Actors Guild.

Every week, my Uncle Harry would give my grandfather the money to take the bus out to Duarte, and then to take a taxi out to the hospital, so he could visit Pearl. Harry found out that Grandpa was walking out to the hospital from the bus, because he wanted to have the money. Harry just about had a fit when he found out, but he let Grandpa keep the money. Uncle Harry could be very tight with money. Grandpa needed some dental work done; (it may have been false teeth that he needed). Instead of giving him the money, Harry arranged for grandpa to get a short-term job as a cutter, so he would have the money to pay for it himself. I think grandpa must have been a very good cutter for someone to hire him when he was in his eighty’s.

I also went to visit my aunt in the hospital. She looked very thin and ill at the time. I remember that someone told a joke, and Pearl repeated it for her father in Yiddish, so he could understand it better. That was the first time a realized that the family spoke Yiddish at home and that English was really their second language. My grandfather could read and write some in English, but my grandmother was illiterate. She never even learned to write her own name, and always made her mark, an X, on legal documents. Aunt Pearl told my mother once, that she thought Grandma would have learned to read and write, if her daughters had been born first. They would have insisted that she learn when they did, but instead, she had four sons, who never seemed to notice. I think that Frances may have tried to teach her, but by the time she started school, Grandma would have been in her forties, and busy with her six children, one an infant. Aunt Pearl was born another six years after that.

While I was in Los Angeles, my aunt’s friend Ann Shevelow invited me to have lunch at her home. My Uncle Harry’s friend, Anne Moore, took me. I expect the house was very expensive. It was small, but built on several levels, and had beautiful exposed beam ceilings. We had a lovely lunch, probably a stuffed chicken breast, and I remember eating dressing for the first time, and really enjoying it. My mother’s dressing was always too heavily seasoned; quite dense and heavy, and I never cared for it. I have really like dressing ever since. She had posters of her son’s movies decorating one wall. I expect they would be real collector’s items today. My hostess was a charming woman, and I enjoyed having lunch with her.

Jeff Chandler predeceased his mother. He died while having back surgery. The surgeon nicked his aorta, and they were unable to get the bleeding stopped in time to save his life. I happened to be in Los Angeles at the time, but I don’t remember why we were there. It was after Jerry and I were married, and he may have been attending a business conference for the Upjohn Company. At any rate, I attended the funeral with my Uncle Harry and (now) Aunt Anne. Aunt Pearl had already died of her tuberculosis by that time. The streets outside the funeral home were lined with people who wanted to see all the movie stars. I guess this is typical of any event in Hollywood, but it was a new and uncomfortable experience for me. There were many actors and actresses in attendance, but I only recognized them as such because most of them were wearing so much stage makeup. They had probably come directly from work, and would return after the service. We did not go to the cemetery for the internment, but my uncle felt that he needed to go to the funeral, as Mrs. Shevelow had been so kind to my aunt.

Both Anne Moore and my Uncle Harry worked for the same garment maker. He was a cutter, just as his father had been, and she was a machine operator. Uncle Fritz took me there so I could see where they worked. I think that Fritz sometimes worked there, too, as a presser. I was fascinated to see how the garments were cut from huge stacks of fabric with an electric knife. Harry put spikes down through the entire stack to keep the fabric in place. He felt that this particular company was cutting too many garments at once, but that is how they kept the cost down. High quality garments are cut a few at a time, and lower quality in greater volume. Harry should know, as he cut for some very fine companies, including Hart Schafner and Marks, and Lantz. When Mary Lou and I were little girls, he often sent us beautiful Lantz dresses, always identical.

That day, they were making wool knit sport shirts. I got one to take home for Jerry, and Harry gave me a length of fabric so I could make a dress for myself. The fabric was beautiful, and I loved the dress when it was finished. My grandmother fingered the fabric when I brought it her house. “Very nice, very nice”, she said. I guess, that when everyone in your family works in the garment industry, you learn to appreciate good fabric. Her daughter Frances worked as a designer. My mother said that she was so good, that even during the depression she could walk in and get a job anywhere. My aunt Pearl said she always had beautiful dresses and coats that Frances designed and made for her. Jerry was in a car accident in Georgia, when he was in the army. He was riding in a convertible that flipped over, and her was thrown from the car. He ended up sitting in a field without his shirt. It was the one I had given him. All the buttons were torn off, and the shirt as well, as he flew out of the car.

When it was time for me to return home, I went with Uncle Fritz to the grocery store to get something for me to take for lunch on the train. I chose ham and cheese to make a sandwich. When my grandmother saw it she was very upset and screaming in Yiddish. Fritz said he had to take a minute to pacify his mother. “She’ll die, she’ll die.” It was the ham, of course. I had thoughtlessly forgotten that pork products are forbidden in Jewish dietary laws.

It was very hot on the train going north from Los Angeles. By the time I got around to eating my sandwich, it really didn’t look all that good to me. I thought that my grandmother was probably right about the ham.

I never saw my grandmother again, although she lived for five or six more years. My grandfather came to Seattle to visit with us the following summer. I don’t think he was terribly impressed with our house, but my parents took him over to Grandview on a visit to my mother’s sister, my Aunt Barbara. The lived in a large old farmhouse surrounded by apple orchards. My grandfather thought that was more like it.

My future husband said that when he first met my grandfather he didn’t know whether to shake his hand or to pick him up. He was diminutive. The entire Krause family was both short and small. I think my Uncle Fritz was the tallest, and he was several inches shorter than I am. The daughters were both petite. My mother’s neighbor, Mrs. Shoemaker told me once that my Aunt Frances reminded her of a beautiful little bird. The certainly is very pretty in the photographs I have seen. Pearl looked a lot like the film actress Betty Davis. She never had very good health, however, and was always very thin.

Grandfather died shortly after this trip in 1952. I had already started college, and I remember my mother’s phone call to tell me of his death.

Breaking a Rule

My grandmother kept a kosher kitchen. This was my first experience in a Jewish home, and I had always thought it must be a very complicated way to cook. It actually was very easy. There were separate dishes and cooking utensils for meat and for dairy; each kept in separate cupboards. She had blue striped dishtowels and red striped dishtowels; the red used for the meat dishes and the blue for the dairy. She would urge me to drink milk during the afternoon, but there was never any on the table in the evening if she served red meat at dinner. It was just the routine of the household, and nothing was ever said about it.

When it was time for me to return home, My uncle thought I should pack a lunch to take with me on the train. He and I went to the grocery store to get something for the lunch. I chose some fruit and ham and cheese to make a sandwich. We went back home, and started to fix the lunch. When my grandmother saw what we were doing she was very upset and started yelling at Uncle Fritz in Yiddish. I couldn’t understand what was going on, but Grandma was clearly unhappy. “Just a minute”, Uncle Fritz said, “I need to pacify your grandmother.” Now she switched to English, “She’ll die, she’ll die.” It was the ham, of course. I had thoughtlessly forgotten that pork products are forbidden in Jewish dietary laws.

It was very hot on the train going north from Los Angeles. By the time I got around to eating my sandwich, it really didn’t look or smell all that good to me. I thought that my grandmother was probably right about the ham.

My Life as a Blonde

I was born blonde, but by the late grade school years, my hair was slowly getting darker and darker. My Aunt Pearl urged my mother to put a rinse in it, to try and keep it light, but Mother would not consider it. At any rate, she would have been fighting a losing battle, and by the time I was a teenager, I was definitely a brunette.

Within weeks of our marriage, my husband decided he would really like to have a blonde wife. His Aunt Alice owned a beauty shop, and we went over to see what she thought about it. She took a look at me, and decided that she thought blonde might look all right, but she didn’t have time to do the job. She gave us a bottle of peroxide and some booster, gave Jerry some instructions, and off we went to my parent’s home. I can’t remember why we went over there, but I do remember spending most of the evening in their bathroom while Jerry bleached my hair.

At the end of the allotted time, we rinsed out the bleaching mixture, but the hair was still pretty dark. The time, however, was getting late. We packed up our supplies and returned to our own apartment, and there we gave my hair a second treatment. This time, at the end of the allotted period, my hair was blonde, but not exactly as we had pictured. I learned where the term, ‘brassy blonde’ came from. My hair was a bright yellow, the condition was very dry and my scalp was burned and red. I spent a very painful, uncomfortable night, and then had to go to work the next morning.

A coworker took one look at me, and said that what I needed was a toning rinse. She called a friend at the shop where she had her hair done and got me an emergency appointment for that afternoon.

“Oh dear” said the beauty operator when I walked in her door. “Don’t worry about your scalp”, she said. “ A virgin scalp always burns the first time you bleach. It will heal, and then you won’t have trouble with it burning again.” The color rinse she chose for me was an ash blonde, and I must say, the results were a huge improvement. I took the bus home, and when I got off at my stop, my husband was waiting for me in the car. I walked over and got into the front seat beside him. “Boy”, he said. “I was just thinking that that was a great looking blonde getting off the bus, and then she walked over and got into my car.”

I never quite got used to being blonde. I was working at Frederick and Nelson that summer. I would walk down the aisles of the store and catch a glimpse of myself in the full-length mirrors. I always was startled by my image, and often took a second glance. I had worked at the department store for several years, by this time, and I had never before had a customer comment on my appearance. That summer, lots of people noticed me. No one ever said anything about my hair. They would say, “You know, you have beautiful eyes”, or “My dear, you have really lovely skin.” I began to love being blonde.

Jerry’s best friend, Chuck Hazen, got married in September. Jerry was his best man. After the wedding ceremony, I was standing on the steps to go down to the church basement, where the reception was being held. Jerry came down the stairs to get into the receiving line, and he stopped and gave me a hug. At the bottom of the steps, a family friend stopped him, and wanted to know just whom he was hugging. “That’s my wife”, he said. “I thought she was a brunette”, she said. Then she found my mother. “I thought your daughter was a brunette”, she said. Mother wouldn’t admit to a daughter who bleached her hair. “My other daughter has much darker hair”, she said. Finally, the woman found me. “I thought your hair was brown” “It is” I said, and told her the truth.

In October, it was time to go back to Pullman, and finish up my last year at Washington State. My hair was beginning to show dark roots by this time, and I really did not want to go through bleaching it again. Reluctantly, I had it dyed back to its original color. I was doing my student teaching the second half of that semester, and by Christmas time, the color had begun to fade rather badly. When we went home for Christmas break, I had my hair cut, and the color retouched. The first day back at school, one of my students saw me and exclaimed “Oh, Mrs. Jensen, you got your hair……cut.” I laughed, and told her the truth, too.

I have never been a blonde again, but I have been tempted. I think the hair color was really flattering to my complexion, and I felt really pretty that summer. I guess the memory of that painful, weeping scalp was one thing that stopped me.

A Man Walks on the Moon

July 20, 1969, and America is waiting for the Apollo 11 crew to land on the moon. I’ll always remember that day. The astronauts had departed on this space mission on July 16th, but it took them four days to reach the moon.

It was a hot and sunny Saturday in Mountain View, California, and we were off to spend the day at a Cub Scout family picnic. Little boys were running all over the Mountain View Recreational Center Park, and having the wonderful time that little boys have at a picnic. The adults were all gathered around the picnic tables listening to a portable radio as the lunar module landed and Neil Armstrong prepared to become the first man to step on the moon. There was no other topic of conversation that I can remember, and it certainly took most of the day for them to accomplish the landing. We listened to all the conversations between their control station on earth and the astronauts, and found it endlessly fascinating. We ate, we watched the children at their play, but mostly we listened to the radio.

Later in the afternoon, we drove our children home, and Jerry and I went over to our friends, the Magyars, to watch, with them, the actual moon walk on television. We spent the early evening there, but decided it would be best not to leave the boys to their own devices for too long, so returned home. What I so vividly remember, is the empty roads we encountered at about 7 o’clock in the evening. We drove the usually very busy expressway from Sunnyvale to Mountain View with almost no other traffic. I had driven that road numerous times, at almost all hours of the day and night, and I never saw it without heavy traffic. It was an eerie feeling. We felt as if the whole community must have been glued to their television sets that night.

Becoming a Medical Librarian

an Old Librarian and her firstborn male child (c. 1988)

We were still living in California, and Jerry was working for the Upjohn Company, when we were invited to a retirement dinner for one of his salesmen. That evening, I was seated next to the branch manager’s wife. She had recently returned to college, and was working on a library degree at San Jose State, and she was full of enthusiasm about her work. It came to me, in a flash, that being a librarian was a job I would love. It was something I had never even considered as a career, when I was in college.

After we returned to Seattle, I called the office of the University of Washington School of Librarianship. I was returning to graduate school, and wanted to inquire about the requirements for entering the school. The woman I talked with was so discouraging about job possibilities in the field that I called the school of Home Economics to see what they would say. They immediately offered me a graduate assistantship and assured me that they were finding wonderful jobs for their graduates. In the end, I did resume my work for my Master’s degree as a Home Economist.

Jerry took a transfer to the Bellingham territory that next summer, and I started looking for a Home Economics or elementary school teaching job. None were to be found. Some school districts did not even answer my letter of application. It was 1974. We started building our house in Bellingham, and moved into the house on Camano Island for the mean time. I kept looking for work, and did sign up as a substitute in the Bellingham district. The assistant superintendent for hiring teachers told me that there were really no openings in either Home Economics or the primary grades, but he was looking for a school librarian.

Our house was finally completed in the spring of 1975 and we were able to move in. I substituted twice, once at Sehome High School and once at the middle school. I rather enjoyed the high school, but the middle school was awful. I was really glad to finish the day, and sincerely hoped that I was never called back to teach there again. Summer came, and I still didn’t have a job.

One day Jerry came home from work and told me, “I was at the hospital today to deliver some books that Dr. Barnhart had asked me to donate to the new medical Library. I looked all over St. Luke’s and couldn’t find it, so I went down to the personnel office to see if they could direct me. The manager laughed, and told him they were trying to find a medical librarian, but no one qualified had applied. This is the perfect job for you. I was dubious. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a medical librarian. When I thought about being a librarian, I pictured myself in a public school. After all, I was a teacher. “Go and apply for it”, Jerry urged me. Hospital librarians do reference work for physicians. You would love the work, and anyone who had spent as much time in graduate school as you have won’t have a bit of trouble doing medical reference.” I was sure they wouldn’t consider me, but I did go and apply for the job.

I was hired to start work in mid-September. The library was a joint project of the two hospitals, and the Whatcom County Medical Society. I would work half time at each hospital, and the Medical Society would buy the books and journals. I would be in complete charge of the library. They had never had library service at either hospital, so I would be establishing the service in Bellingham.

I spent several days at the University of Washington Health Sciences Library, acquainting myself with Index Medicus and their cataloging system. I bought a couple of books on medical libraries, and read what I could. I started the job completely unprepared.

I did have one lucky break. My first day on the job, I was told that there was a library meeting being held in Victoria at the end of that week, and I should attend. The consultant from the University had urged them to send me, and the hospitals had agreed. It was the annual meeting of the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the Medical Library Association, and it started me on a twenty-five year active membership in the group. I took a CE course on planning hospital libraries. I met wonderful, supportive librarians, who welcomed me and gave me much needed encouragement. I became acquainted with the services of the Regional Medical Library, and went back to work feeling much surer of myself.

The physicians had a collection of books at each hospital, and a few donated journals. I started in at St. Luke’s only to find that the library had been moved to a new location because Medical Records needed that space it had formerly occupied. The new room for the library was next to the two, locked mental health units on the second floor. A prisoner from the county jail occupied one room, with an armed guard outside his door. There were no electrical outlets in the library, so they also gave me the use of a former bathroom across the hall. A board was placed over the tub, so I could have a place for my electric typewriter. All the books were in boxes. The next day, I went over to St. Joseph. The library there was being remodeled. I was given an office in what had been the men’s restroom on the first floor. The medical staff secretary was in an adjoining room. We shared a phone. When the phone rang, the switchboard operator, who was located just outside our offices, would point at the one who should answer. We learned to keep the door open all the time, as several startled men came walking in, expecting to find the restroom. Here again, all the books were in boxes.

After this inauspicious beginning, I began to get things organized. The consultant from the Regional Medical Library came to advise me. He set me to writing a grant proposal from the National Library of Medicine. He suggested a good book on hospital Librarianship. The medical staff was delighted to have a librarian on board. My first question was on the Heimlich maneuver. The doctor had been asked to give an interview on the subject for the local paper. I was able to find just what he wanted. He was pleased. Other fairly routine questions followed. Business was slow, and I was learning how to do my job.

In 1975 all medical literature searches were done manually. This meant that the researcher went to a print index of medical or scientific literature and looked up the relevant information, writing out the bibliography. Index Medicus was the preferred index, but we sometimes used Science Citations Index. The National Library of Medicine was just introducing an online system called Medline. It had been in trial on a limited basis, and was just being offered to universities with medical schools. The tapes used to produce Index Medicus were put into NLM’s mainframe computer, and academic librarians were learning how to search the database from remote locations with terminals attached to telephone lines. These “dumb terminals” were merely keyboards, with no memory. The computer was in Bethesda, MD.

At library meetings, everyone was talking about this wonderful new technology. Hospital librarians hungered for a chance to try it. We all wanted to learn. Terminals cost several thousand dollars. Mainframe capacity was too limited to allow more users. Finally, more users could be accommodated. The hospital librarians in Seattle got together and shared a single code. They divided up the day, and each hospital had a designated hour in which to search. You paid by the minute for your online time, and prime time hours were twice as costly as non-prime. Prime time was 8am to 4pm EST. Those of us in the outlying areas were left out. Telecommunication nodes with local telephone numbers were unavailable in areas with a population of less than one hundred thousand. Long distance charges added to online charges made the cost prohibitive. Finally, Whatcom County’s population reached the magic number. I begged for a terminal, and online training. The terminals now were a little lower in cost. We bought one that cost $1800, and I carried it back and forth between the two hospitals. I went off to UCLA for a week to learn how to become an online searcher.

You cannot imagine how this changed my life. We no longer needed to purchase the costly and space consuming print indexes. The computer magically put together our search terms, and found only the most relevant articles. They were printed out for us on paper. Okay, so it was a continuous strip of thermal paper, and the printing faded over time. It was still a miracle. Everyone said that with a computer terminal, a librarian could do three times as much work. I believe it was true. Of course, there were limitations. The database was only a few years deep at first, only indexing material back to 1974. Not all journals were included in the beginning. Costs could still be high. The United States government subsidized Medline, but some private indexes cost several hundred dollars an hour to search. You were always aware of the minutes ticking away.

The first personal computers were marketed in 1975, but few people owned them until quite a bit later. Hospitals are notoriously tight with money. I requested a PC in every budget from the early 1980’s until I left Bellingham in 1988, but my request was always denied. I kept searching on my terminal. I was able to have email, and it was a wonderful tool for librarians. We were able to request materials on interlibrary loan with email, saving at least two days time in the mail. Articles had to come back by mail, but the request got there in minutes. We all agreed to read our email several times each day. Then NLM introduced Docline, an automated ILL system. I could also access this system with my terminal, and it was even more efficient. If the first library could not fill your request, it was automatically sent on to another library that owned the material. You didn't even have to look up which library held the journal, as the system had all that information imbedded in the program. More and more magic for librarians. I stopped buying interlibrary loan forms.

I got my first PC when I went to work For Evergreen Hospital in 1988. There was never any question about it. The medical staff told the hospital that I couldn’t possibly do the job without a computer, and one was waiting for me when I started to work. What heaven! I could now do things I had never even dreamed of doing. Our journal holdings could be stored in the computer, and systems were available for ordering and checking in and out. I could keep the libraries statistics on a spreadsheet, and write my reports on a word processing system. Everything was so much easier. I had finally caught up with the rest of the library world.

At library meetings we started hearing about the Internet. They had it at the University of Washington. Other academic libraries started to get access. It was expensive. An institutional Internet account cost several thousand dollars. I began to think it would be better if I could retire, so I didn’t have to fight this particular battle, but as usual, the technology came on too fast.

In 1994, I was elected Chair-Elect of the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the Medical Library Association. The Board wanted to keep in touch by Internet. I was the only board member without access. All of a sudden, it became vitally important for me to have this tool. As soon as I got home, I began to investigate possible methods. The Regional Library had put together a list of providers. Most of them wanted to hook up the entire institution, but in Bellevue, I was able to find a new business that would provide individual access at a cost of $300.00 a year, as a group rate. I called to ask for a definition of a group. They told me that they would consider the Seattle Area Hospital Library Consortium a group, if I could get ten members to sign up with them. We would have to pay annually. The company was Northwest Nexus, and their Internet service was halcyon.com.

At the next meeting of the consortium, I suggested that we sign up as a group. Those hospitals that actually had Internet service were paying thousands of dollars a year and this sounded like a real deal. We agreed to join as a group. The owner himself came to my office to show me how to sign up and use the service. His wife came with him. She had been a nurse lactation specialist at Evergreen, and was excited that we were going to be a customer. I learned to love the Internet.

As always, technology improved, and the Internet became a windows-based program. My old computer no longer had the memory to do the job. Another budget request was made. The old computer was ten years old, after all, and my friends, the medical staff went to bat for me. This time, I got my new computer without a hassle.

With the Internet, library programs started coming by leaps and bounds. We got an Internet Medline in PubMed. Now online searching became free. In 2000, Docline also became Internet based. Who knows what the future will bring?

Television

I have never been much of a television watcher. When my boys were little, the television ran non-stop in our house, but what I know about it was mostly heard from another room. The boys and their dad favored sports programs on the weekends, and the kids would watch just about anything in the evenings. I much preferred to read a good book or listen to my stereo in another room altogether.

There were two times, however, that I would retreat to my bedroom to watch television. On Sunday nights and Thursday nights, I would get out the ironing board, put it in front of the TV, and turn to PBS. My shows were Masterpiece Theater and Mystery. Watching these really classy productions while doing my least favorite household task, made the work a lot more bearable. Probably my favorite Mystery series was Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppance. The costumes were gorgeous. Other favorites were The Woman in White and Rebecca. I must like the period dramas best, because I also loved Upstairs, Downstairs and Pride and Prejudice, as well. I don’t think I ever saw a single program in either Mystery or Masterpiece Theater that I didn’t enjoy.

I guess I am out of the habit of watching TV these days, as I forget to turn on the set, and it stays silent unless my children or grandchildren are visiting. Sometimes, I’ll hear someone talk about a program that I think I would really enjoy, but in the end I forget about it, and end up doing something else instead.

How the Personal Computer Changed My Life

In 1975, when I first became a medical librarian, all medical literature searches were done manually. This meant that the researcher went to a print index of medical or scientific literature and looked up the relevant information, writing out the bibliography. Index Medicus was the preferred index, but we sometimes used Science Citations Index. The National Library of Medicine was just introducing an online system called Medline. It had been in trial on a limited basis, and was just being offered to universities with medical schools. The tapes used to produce Index Medicus were put into NLM’s mainframe computer, and academic librarians were learning how to search the database from remote locations with terminals attached to telephone lines. These “dumb terminals” were merely keyboards, with no memory. The computer was in Bethesda, MD.

At library meetings, everyone was talking about this wonderful new technology. Hospital librarians hungered for a chance to try it. We all wanted to learn. Terminals cost several thousand dollars. Mainframe capacity was too limited to allow more users. Finally, more users could be accommodated. The hospital librarians in Seattle got together and shared a single code. They divided up the day, and each hospital had a designated hour in which to search. You paid by the minute for your online time, and prime time hours were twice as costly as non-prime. Prime time was 10am to 2pm EST.

Those of us in the outlying areas were left out. Telecommunication nodes with local telephone numbers were unavailable in areas with a population of less than one hundred thousand. Long distance charges added to online charges made the cost prohibitive. Finally, Whatcom County’s population reached the magic number. I begged for a terminal, and online training. The terminals now were a little lower in cost. We bought one that cost $1800, and I carried it back and forth between the two hospitals. I went off to UCLA for a week to learn how to become an online searcher.

You cannot imagine how this changed my life. We no longer needed to purchase the costly and space consuming print indexes. The computer magically put together our search terms, and found only the most relevant articles. They were printed out for us on paper. Okay, so it was a continuous strip of thermal paper, and the printing faded over time. It was still a miracle. Everyone said that with a computer terminal, a librarian could do three times as much work. I believe it was true. Of course, there were limitations. The database was only a few years deep at first, only indexing material back to 1974. Not all journals were included in the beginning. Costs could still be high. The United States government subsidized Medline, but some private indexes cost several hundred dollars an hour to search. You were always aware of the minutes ticking away.

The first personal computers were marketed in 1975, but few people owned them until quite a bit later. Hospitals are notoriously tight with money. I requested a PC in every budget from the early 1980’s until I left Bellingham in 1988, but my request was always denied. I kept searching on my terminal. I was able to have email, and it was a wonderful tool for librarians. We were able to request materials on interlibrary loan with email, saving at least two days time in the mail. Articles had to come back by mail, but the request got there in minutes. We all agreed to read our email several times each day. Then NLM introduced Docline, an automated ILL system. I could also access this system with my terminal, and it was even more efficient. If the first library could not fill your request, it was automatically sent on to another library that owned the material. You didn't even have to look up which library held the journal, as the system had all that information imbedded in the program. More and more magic for librarians. I stopped buying interlibrary loan forms.

I got my first PC when I went to work for Evergreen Hospital in 1988. There was never any question about it. The medical staff told the hospital that I couldn’t possibly do the job without a computer, and one was waiting for me when I started to work. What heaven! I could now do things I had never even dreamed of doing. Our journal holdings could be stored in the computer, and systems were available for ordering and checking in and out. I could keep the libraries statistics on a spreadsheet, and write my reports on a word processing system. Everything was so much easier. I had finally caught up with the rest of the library world.

At library meetings we started hearing about the Internet. They had it at the University of Washington. Other academic libraries started to get access. It was expensive. An institutional Internet account cost several thousand dollars. It all sounded so complicated. You had to know a special computer language to give the commands. I began to think it would be better if I could retire, so I didn’t have to fight this particular battle, but as usual, the technology came on too fast.

In 1994, I was elected Chair-Elect of the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the Medical Library Association. The Board wanted to keep in touch by Internet. I was the only board member without access. All of a sudden, it became vitally important for me to have this tool. As soon as I got home, I began to investigate possible methods. The Regional Library had put together a list of providers. Most of them wanted to hook up the entire institution, but in Bellevue, I was able to find a new business that would provide individual access at a cost of $300.00 a year, as a group rate. I called to ask for a definition of a group. They told me that they would consider the Seattle Area Hospital Library Consortium a group, if I could get ten members to sign up with them. We would have to pay annually. The company was Northwest Nexus, and their Internet service was halcyon.com.

At the next meeting of the consortium, I suggested that we sign up as a group. Those hospitals that actually had Internet service were paying between $6,000 and twenty thousand dollars a year and this sounded like a real deal. We agreed to join as a group. The owner himself came to my office to show me how to sign up and use the service. His wife came with him. She had been a nurse lactation specialist at Evergreen, and was excited that we were going to be a customer. I learned to love the Internet. I also became the area specialist in the Internet. Other librarians called me every day or so to ask questions. Nobody knew very much. We were all learning together.

As always, technology improved, and the Internet became a windows-based program. My old computer no longer had the memory to do the job. Another budget request was made. The old computer was ten years old, after all, and my friends on the medical staff went to bat for me. This time, I got my new computer without a hassle.

With the Internet, library programs started coming by leaps and bounds. Medical Librarians formed a listserve, where we could ask each other for help. All of a sudden, problems became much easier to solve. Post a question to the list, and you almost always found someone who could give you the answer, or at least point you in the right direction. Sometimes, I would go online to ask a question of the list, only to find the question had already been asked, and the answer was there.

We got an Internet Medline in PubMed. Now online searching became free. In 2000, Docline also became Internet based. Who knows what the future will bring?

I bought my first PC when I retired in 1999. I don’t know how I ever lived without one. I do almost all my public library business online, as well as my banking. I do a fair amount of shopping online, as well, and now I have discovered ebay. I can remember going to the Seattle World’s Fair, and seeing the House of Tomorrow. They told us that by the year 2000, every household would have its own computer, and that it would cost about as much as the family car. Well. Cars were a lot cheaper then.