Memoirs Part 4

1954, the year I started first grade, was a difficult time for my mother.  In April of that year her mother (Christina Ellen Tuttle Crawford) passed away while she was 8 months into her 9th pregnancy.  She was 40 years old and gave birth to a son less than a month later.  She brought this baby home to a rented houseful of kids and luckily a 17-year-old daughter to help out.

Then in October she had to be a support for her husband as he lost his father, Thomas Elbridge Logue.  My dad's parents had celebrated their 50th anniversary in March of this same year.

So, as I am growing and going to school, the Logue family was growing and changing, too.

Memoirs Part 3

Well I came across some photos of myself and brothers taken in front of that house in Garden Valley, and it was not a LOG cabin.  But cabin it was and when I posted about it on "You Know You're From Garden Valley If:" FaceBook page, many people remembered that cabin.  Here are the photos:

You can see the bandage on Adrian's left thumb, but it is harder to tell that he is missing two fingers on his right hand.  These were chopped off by an axe when he was just over 2 years old.  He thought he was being helpful when our older brother was chopping wood by putting a piece of wood on the chopping block - his timing was just not that good.  We were living in High Valley at the time and my folks had to make a mad dash to Emmett to have his hand stitched up (the length of time it took to get to medical help and the technology of the times did not allow him to have his fingers reattached).  This was the summer of 1948 and I'm not sure what kind of vehicle they had, but it had to have been an older model and the roads were long (about 65 miles), narrow, unpaved and crooked.  I can't imagine the panic my parents experienced in that trip.

Okay, back to the time behind the Garden Valley Store.  My brother Adrian was born in March and went to school in the fall after he turned 6 - 1952.  (In Garden Valley there was no Kindergarten.) I was born in November and my parents want to get me into school the next year while I was still 5, but the school said there were too many children going into the first grade so I would have to wait until the next year, when I was 6 (almost 7).  In August of 1954 I started first grade in a class of twelve (there had only been 7 or 8 the year before and I was more than ready, having studied and learned with Adrian.

One of my posts on "You Know You're From Garden Valley If:" FaceBook page: 

When elementary classes were held in a one-room building with outhouses and a wood-stove for heat, water being packed by bucket from the well across the highway.

Yes, it is hard to believe that someone born after World War II went to a one-room classroom like something out of the 1800s.  I just wish I had pictures of the school at that time.  I only have pictures of the first and second grade classes sitting beside it (below) and of the building that was being built at that time to house first to sixth grades with a lunchroom at the back (and indoor bathrooms).

These schools were geographically located just a short distance from the GV Store, so we easily walked to school each day.  And as you can see by the above pictures (the bottom picture is grades one through three: 1955-56), I had the same teacher for first through third grade, Mrs Gladys Harp - a wonderful woman who was a little scary because she had a breathing apparatus in her throat and she had to put her finger over it in order to talk to us.  She couldn't yell at us, but she could sure wield a mean ruler on the knuckles.

My Memoir Part 2

I believe we only spent one winter in the log cabin on Warm Springs Creek.  We next moved down the Middle Fork of the Payette River and across Garden Valley to a house behind the general store on the main Banks to Lowman road, where there were several rentals located and renters came and went frequently.  I was still quite young, so I don't have a lot of memories of the first year we lived there.  One of the first was getting the measles and having to stay inside while the other kids played outside.  I remember sitting on the chest freezer, wrapped in a blanket, gazing out the window and watching my brothers playing.

The ownership or management (not sure which they were) changed a couple times while we lived in this rental.  One of them had a couple of kids that my brothers and I played with all the time.  I can remember being teased by my brothers about liking the son and my younger brother was caught kissing a daughter and was teased terribly.  We were not yet in school, so this was a lot of innocent childplay. 

 Not Garden Valley store, but similar to what I remember

We also hung out around the porch of this general store - a typical rural store of the 1950s with the post office in the store sectioned off from the grocery section, a 'pot belly' wood stove in the back where the local men gathered to hear local news, discuss politics and socialize,  wooden counters worn shiny with use, and pumps out front offering gas for $.27 a gallon. I, to this day, cannot eat licorice because patrons of the store would buy this inexpensive candy and treat we 'raggamuffins' loitering on that porch to the point that I would get sick.  My father also told the story of a couple that pulled up in a new model car and 'fawned' over me, marveling at what a darling little girl I was and even offering to pay him a million dollars for me.  He always said they looked like they could have had that much money.  Of course, he didn't sell his little 'princess.'

We played all around the area and another memory was getting into trouble for going out into a hayfield and rolling around in the hay, causing it to lay down which must have made it hard for the baling machine to cut and bale.  Anyway, Jim Mills, son of the store proprietor was not happy with us (those three innocent angels pictures on the left of and seated in the following picture).

That's me on the left a couple years before that time, older brother Adrian behind me,

and younger brother sitting on the ground. The other two are cousins.

The Cecil Logue family was continuing to grow:  the first child, a girl had been born in January 1934 and passed away in June of the same year; next, a son (Tommy) was born in May of 1935 and a daughter (Christina) in March of 1937; another son was born in May of 1941 and a gap of 5 years before another son (Adrian) born in 1946 (my father had not gone into the service during WWII, but did work in Mountain Home, Idaho and Walla Walla, Washington in sheet metal works).  We learned many years later that while my parents were separated for a time during this five years span, my father had met another woman and fathered yet another son out of wedlock.  This is when I entered the family in November of 1947 and another brother was born in June of 1949.  After this was when we moved to Garden Valley.

Pictures taken when we lived behind the Garden Valley Store. Above is a picture of 

me with older brother Cyril and below are brothers Adrian and Roger.

Visiting our grandparents in Cascade, Idaho around the time of their 50th wedding anniversary, 1954.

It is starting the Labor Day weekend and my husband and I are going out of town for the weekend.  So I'll continue with more when I return.  Hope you all have a wonderful holiday weekend.