More Early School Years

Although Garden Valley was a small community, I found it very unusual that I went to school with lots of Lindas - Linda Ho..., Linda Al..., Linda Ed...., Linda La....,  Linda Wa..., Linda Mo..., and Linda Do... (last names hidden because all of them are still living and could possibly be reading this).  After all, when I was in high school there were less than 100 students in all twelve grades.  In fact there are four of them in the school picture I posted last time (third and fourth grade), two in the front row and two in the back.

School was always easy for me.  My elementary teachers were wonderful (my third and fourth grade teacher was sister to the first and second grade teacher, Mrs Harp), strict and thorough.  They taught phonics, drilling us until we could sound the letters in our sleep, and my spelling shows this.  I remember the countless hours of circles, slanted loops, humps and wavy lines as I practiced my long-hand writing (now called cursive by my grandkids).

All those hours of study made me a good writer, and looking at the diary that I kept in my senior year and all the journals I've found from different times in my life that is true, but don't ask me to write (hand write) a diary or even a letter today.  The lack of using a pen or pencil for anything more than a quick note or a grocery list.  And I've read lately that teachers now days are spending fewer and fewer hours per week teaching our children penmanship and failure to write well often results in reduced math and literacy skills.  

Years of office work on computers and emailing friends and families have led to a deterioration of my handwriting skills.  I lack the ability to think free flow and writing it by hand, so used am I to editing as I go by my digital communication these days.  Admit it, typing is fast while handwriting is slow.

So back to my school years, my favorite class was English and as long as I can remember I wanted to be a teacher - preferably an English teacher.  I had three aunts who were teachers (my father's older sisters and his youngest brother's wife) so I thought this would be how I would love to spend my life, molding young minds.  I suppose my school mates would remember me as the bright but shy, heavy-set girl that was always willing to help with homework for anyone who asked.  And because I have six brothers, I've always been able to get along with guys better than the girls, whether in school, in my careers, or in clubs and organizations.  The guys always seemed to think of me as 'one of the boys.'  It could also be because I was kind of a tom-boy.

Back to My Memories

The only time I remember my father spanking me was when I was five or six and I had gone with a young mother (who was probably 18 or 19 years old) to her folks' place up Alter Creek.  My mom and dad had said I couldn't go with her, but I went anyway.  The girl's name was Whitehead and she had a little baby. I guess my folks were worried sick about me and when I got home, I was spanked hard.

I had three brothers older than me and three younger, so I passed my time playing with trucks and bicycles, making trails in the dirt or when the weather was bad, reading books.  Most of our toys were second-hand that were given to us or found in the dump, or were just pretend toys made from cans and wood by the older kids.  I know my folks never bought us new bicycles - we had two or three that were pieced together from parts of old bikes found in the garbage and we had to share.

When we moved from behind the Garden Valley store to Smith Creek (several miles across the valley and up the Middle Fork of the Payette River), we lived close to the river and so from late spring to early fall, we spent all our time playing in the water (from 1955-1962).  We explored that river for miles and when we weren't in the water, we were climbing the hills.

Here's a picture of the bridge we had to cross to get to get to our home.  Our swimming hole was just on the other side of the bridge on the left hand side of the photo.  There was a nice sandy beach there and the middle pylon created an island in the middle when the water was down in late summer.  Trees and branches caught on that left hand side of the bridge would cause the water to push the sandy bottom and create a deeper hole - so deep that the older boys could jump from the bridge into it without fear of harming themselves.

To the right of the picture you can see the sawmill that was operating at that time.  My mother's brother, Walt Crawford, and several of the family were working this sawmill.  My father bought one of the houses that had been brought in for mill workers to live in.  It was a three bedroom house with no indoor bathroom.

I loved going to school because that is the only place I could go to have other girls to play with.  We lived several miles out of town and our closest neighbors were over a mile away, so the only ones I had to play with were my brothers.  My sister was ten years older than me and left home by the time I was seven or eight.  When I started school in 1954 we just walked over the hill passed the high school to the grade school.  When we moved to Smith Creek we were 8-10 miles from school and lived almost a mile from the bus stop.  

Third and fourth grade classes in the new school building - Mrs Search is teacher

Garden Valley was a very small community with no movie theater, a community hall where dances were held, the community church (non-denominational) and a Catholic Church.  It really was divided in Crouch and Garden Valley with each having a store and gas station.  Crouch also had a garage and a cafe/bar.  Because we were such a large family, we never ate out.  My father planted a garden (which the boys took care of), had a cow to milk and have calves each year for meat, raised chickens, and sometimes turkeys, and pigs.  My mother made butter, cottage cheese, and bread.  She canned fruits and tomatoes which were stored in the fruit cellar (in the hillside at Smith Creek and under the end of the house when we moved back across the valley up the South Fork and near the Ranger Station).

Garden Valley Ranger Station

My folks loved to dance and listen to music.  They went out to the bar every Friday and Saturday night that my father was home, especially when there was live music.  They never drank much - my father would drink a beer or peppermint schnapps and my mother would drink a "ditch", whiskey and water. When I got older, 13 or 14, they used to let me go with them and sometimes they would buy me a coke.  But generally I just listened to the music and once in a while my dad would dance with me.  My folks were great dancing together, whether it was the waltz, a polka, or the schottische.  (My dad was out on the dance floor the weekend before he died in December, 1983.  They had been married 50 years and still loved to go out and dance together.)

I Regress Momentarily

I thought I probably should do a timeline of my family's short history prior to my memories.  I had worked on this with my sister a few years ago and I think it is pretty accurate (my sister, Christina, was ten years older than me - the second surviving child). 

Cecil Elbridge Logue (b. 11/27/07 in Crawford, Valley, ID) married Rachel Helen Crawford (b. 12/06/13 in Alpha, Valley, ID) on April 16, 1933 in Cascade, ID.

1) They rented a cabin in Cascade in 1933.

2) Cecil worked on a bridge in Round Valley the summer of 1933 – (the famous Rainbow Bridge on the North Fork of the Payette River pictured below)

3) Marian Doris was born January 20, 1934 in Cascade, Valley, ID.  She died June 27, 1934 of pneumonia and whooping cough,

4) The couple lived in an old house of Herrick’s on Clear Creek.

5) Cecil then worked for Boise Cascade in Horse Thief and bought a house in Cabarton, but the company wouldn’t move it so dad quit.

6) Back to Cascade where they rented a house in the northeast part of town.

7) They then lived in a house owned by a lumber company that dad worked for on Piersol Creek (probably Percy Rutledge's logging company).

8) Back to Cascade to a little red house by the school, where Thomas Elisha was born May 4, 1935.

9) Dad worked that summer in south Donnelly and lived in a collapsible house (I think this is those tent homes - wood sides up about three feet then sides and top of canvas).

10) Back to Cascade for the winter in a house on a hill by a shop.  They bought the house and moved it to under the water tower.  Christina Winnie was born there March 18, 1937.

11) Moved to an abandoned house in Werley (unsure where this was).

12) Went to Tonasket, Washington to visit Aunt Alice (Belle Crawford Marshall).

13) Back to Cascade in a collapsible house; it burned down, so the family moved to MacGregor, living in a tent and piling brush for Boise Cascade.

14) They then moved to Emmett and bought a trailer house.  Cyril Ellis was born in May of 1941.  (Cyril’s doctor  was CE Carver and when mother named him the nurse who was the doctor’s wife came in and asked if she wanted to give him the rest of the doctor’s name C.E. – Cyril Ellis.  Mother had found the name Cyril in a book and liked it and Ellis is the only name she could find to go with it, so he wasn’t really named after his doctor even if it might have looked that way.)

15) They lived on Trail Creek in the trailer house (on the Salmon River) for three years, wintering in Cascade.  (There are pictures of the trailer with Cyril, Dixie, Tommy, and Christina – some with a tricycle, some with a trailer.  Uncle Cash must have worked there one year as Dixie is his daughter and she was in a lot of the picture.)

16) Then in 1944 they moved to Emmett, in a house across from a storage building.  Dad helped grandpa Crawford build a house under the bench where the graveyard is.

17) The family lived in Boise while dad went to sheet metal school, (Christina had measles and then pneumonia and was in the hospital in Emmett.  A lot of her stuffed toys were lost while they lived there)  then off to Walla Walla, WA where they rented a cabin while dad worked on the air base.  (Christina fell of a sign board and tore a large triangle gash in her arm.  She remembers going to a carnival, but not with dad.)

18) Rented a cabin in Lewiston.  (mother left father.  Christina started school in first grade at a church school.  It was about six weeks after school had started but because of the war and so many people moving in to work on the air bases they weren’t letting six year olds start school.)

19) Rented a cabin in Payette.  (Cyril had measles, mumps, and whooping cough, all at the same time.  It enlarged his tonsils.  Pictures of Christina’s birthday with Tommy, Cyril, and a boy friend – Christina did have boy friends.  We lived in Emmett a while in a small house on the river street right next to the canal.  There was and still is a pipe across the canal there and a very small shallow spot where we played in the water a lot.   Tommy, Cyril, and Christina stayed alone a lot and went to sleep listening to western music on the radio.  A kid who was allergic to poison oak had Christina and Tommy rub leaves all over them, but they never broke out.  The boy who told them what leaves to pick really got a bad rash.  Mom went back to Dad because she couldn’t get any help from her family to help support us.  Her parents wouldn’t even take care of us so mother could work.  Dad fathered a son to a woman in Boise, must have happened while he was there going to school because from leaving Walla Walla to going to Mountain Home was all one school year.)

20) Rented a house in Mountain Home while dad worked on the air base.  (It was really just a tent in a place like an unkept trailer park with what ever kind of temporary housing they could put up.  It was across the road from a service station and motel just south of the underpass.  Dad had friends named Bennett.  Christina learned about people of color.  We had a red-headed friend who’s parents whipped him until his legs were a mass of sores.  Then would baby him and doctor them until they healed.  We put coins on the railroad tracks so the train would run over it and flatten it.  An older lady lived in a very small trailer house with a Boston bulldog.  She was very upset and cried a lot when FDR died.  Christina had a spell where she couldn’t see and had to sit on the curb until she could see before going on home after school.  Her eyes were checked and they weren’t bad (I know now it was sinus problems)  Mom was the one who needed her eyes checked.  Our cousins lived in the same park for a while and their son killed our gold fish with a fork.  Cyril disliked eggs and if Tommy told him that cake had eggs in it he wouldn’t eat the cake.  Cyril didn’t talk much.)

21) Back to Cascade where they rented a house across from the school.  Adrian Dexter was born there March 23, 1946.

22) Worked summers in High Valley and living in a tent and wintering in Cascade or Emmett.  I was born in November 1947 in Emmett.  Adrian’s finger was cut off accidentally by Cyril while he was chopping wood, summer of 1948.  Lived in an abandoned house in Emmett where our younger brother was born in June of 1949.

 Adrian in High Valley, before the fingers of his right hand were chopped off.

23) Then worked at Dry Buck in a tent and wintered in Emmett.

24) And finally they moved to Garden Valley in 1950 living in a log house on Warm Springs Creek (now Terrace Lakes) for the first summer, then to a rented house behind the Garden Valley Store where George Alexander was born in 1952 (born in Emmett Mary Secor Hospital) and died after three days, possibly from pneumonia.  Then in May of 1954 the next brother was born (next to last).

Dad bought a house from Uncle Walter Crawford up the Middle Fork of the Payette, near his saw mill at Smith Creek, in 1955 or 56.  My youngest brother was born in Emmett Mary Secor Hospital on in November of 1956.

Thomas had married Charlene Smith the year before and had a son in February of 1956.  They had their second son in March of 1957.

So here I am all caught up - about 22 years in just a few paragraphs and pictures.

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.