A Family Saga

By B.B. Ellis

Although the seven of us have dispersed across the country in our adult lives, we still get together occasionally for family reunions. When we do, the conversation often turns to stories beginning with, Do you remember when. One day we decided that some of these stories should be written down, especially since some of the most cherished stories dealt with our grandparents. We were afraid that these older stories would become lost in the mists of time, and we were aware that our more recent stories would someday be old stories to our children and grandchildren. Thus was born the idea of this book. We have all contributed remembrances to this little volume and we hope that our children will be able to know more about where their parents came from. Compiling this book has been one more enjoyable and unifying activity for a family that continues to cherish each other.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Apr 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481742122

B.B. Ellis

B. B. Ellis, the author of this book, is actually the penname of seven people who have worked cooperatively in producing this book. B. B. stands for the demographic designation of Baby Boomer, and all seven of the authors are members of the Baby Boomer generation of the Ellis family.

Book preview

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

The Farm

Learning To Farm

The Family

Food And Entertainment During The Early Years.

Favorite Recipes

The Family Tree

The Ellis Family

The Sturgeon, Lawrence And Burns Families

The Whitney Family

The Thomas, Steell, And Lame Bull Families

PREFACE

The seven children of Tom and Helene Ellis pooled our recollections and our talents to produce this memoire of our family. The author is given as B. B. Ellis, which stands for Baby Boomer Ellis. This was chosen as representative of all of us since we are all members of the baby boom generation of the Ellis family, with the oldest, Laura, born in 1946, and the youngest, Pat, born in 1964. Actual names of the seven authors are:

Laura Helene

Thomas Harry

Elizabeth Rachel

Lawrence Charles

Kathleen Louise

Peter Christopher

Patrick Francis

Special authorship recognition must be awarded Betty (Elizabeth) for her extensive expertise and labor compiling the section on our ancestors. Stories were collected and edited by Laura.

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December 1945, Tom and Helene Ellis Wedding Photo

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Tom and Helene Ellis, about 1998.

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1967. L to R Back: Kathleen, Laura, Tom;

L to R Front: Chris, Pat, Betty, Lawrence

INTRODUCTION

This is the story of the family of Tom and Helene Ellis. Tom and Helene were married December 29, 1945 when both were 18 years old. The Second World War had just ended and Dad was soon to be drafted into the army. This wouldn’t seem to be an auspicious beginning to a marriage, yet they created a successful, loving family and a large, economically fruitful farm. They contributed to the growth of their community, Conrad, Montana.

After his discharge from the army, Dad attended Carroll College on the GI Bill, where they lived in married student housing in Helena during the school year. Laura was born in August, 1946, and Tom in January, 1949. Dad worked at Eddy’s bakery to support the family while Mom was home parenting the two babies. When Granny died, Dad ended his student days before graduation and the family moved back to Conrad; the farm needed his fulltime attention.

By the time Dad retired, the family had grown to seven children, the farm to many more acres, and their activities widened to include politics, banking, real estate, and community development. We all feel a great deal of admiration for the integrity, perseverance, hard work, and intelligent risk-taking that they showed through their lives.

Of course, the family story would not be complete without the stories of both of their parents’ families, as far as we know them. We would not like to see the histories of these people be lost, and so some of these are included in this family story.

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The homeplace, 1992

THE FARM

Learning to Farm

Around the age of seven, Laura began her apprenticeship in agribusiness. Dad bought a hundred baby chicks and Laura raised them. We kept careful records so that she could see you only had income if you had more revenue than expenses. Of course, the kids didn’t call it by those names at the time, but we certainly got the idea. This turned into a family tradition: as one child grew out of the chicken business and into the truck driving business, the next child would take over the chickens.

Some years the chicks came in to the post office; it was always fun to hear the cheeping of someone’s chicks from the back while waiting to buy stamps. Other years, we picked them up at the Farmers’ Co-op. That store was redolent with the aroma of feed. No matter where we picked them up, we brought them home in large flat boxes with lines of little holes cut in the sides. We had a heat lamp hanging from a cord inside the chicken coop to keep them warm, a feeder full of feed and automatic waterers. The waterers were round metal cylinders that held probably a gallon of water, into which we’d drop a yellow tablet that was supposed to keep them healthy. Then we’d attach the base, upside down of course, since the cylinder was upside down to be filled, and then quickly turn it all right-side up, holding it all together as it went through the turn, and getting only a generous splash of water on ourselves.

When the chicks were older they could spend their days outside. Each evening, though, they went inside the coop and their door would have to be shut to keep the predators out. One summer evening when Laura was the ‘fowl master,’ the family decided at the last minute to go to the drive-in movie. After the movie, as the family drove up the lane toward home, she suddenly remembered the chickens. She ran down in the dark to shut them in and discovered there were no chickens to be found. Dad looked until his flashlight found them lined up beneath the chicken coop, dead as a doornail. A varmint, probably a skunk or weasel, had killed every last one of them and stashed them beneath the chicken coop. She still remembers how relieved she was that Dad didn’t make her pay him for the feed, since she had no revenue from that year’s chickens (or course, they both knew that there was no blood in that turnip).

When the chickens were old enough, we would kill all the roosters and put them in the freezer—this is where the revenue came in, for Mom credited us with $1 for each bird. After that, the fowl master would collect the eggs from the hens as long as they continued to lay. Each morning, the egg collector took the pail down to the coop, praying that the hens were in the yard, and not in their nests. It was no great feat to gather eggs from an empty nest. The real trepidation came from sliding one’s hand beneath the warm feathers of a hen sitting on eggs and then snatching them out from under her. Some hens packed a mighty wallop in their beaks.

Butchering the roosters was an all-day undertaking. We had a large block of wood with two nails sticking up just wide enough apart to lay a chicken’s neck between, but not wide enough for it to pull its head back out. The executioner would hold the axe with one hand and pull the feet back with the other, until the neck was stretched out, then, Chop! The head came right off. Suddenly there was a wild flurry of wings and feathers and that chicken would fly and flop all over the yard, spewing blood as it went. When it was finally still, it was time for the next step. We laid a broad board over the top of the 50 gallon garbage pails, drew the entrails out and let them plop right into the garbage. Then, it was time for Mom’s job. She would have pots of water boiling on the stove; she would hold those chickens’ legs and dunk them a few times into that bucket of hot water, then strip all their feathers off. Finally, a match singed their pinfeathers off. That chicken was then wrapped and tossed in the freezer.

Various children worked out different divisions of labor according to their negotiating abilities. Laura couldn’t stand the thought of cutting the chickens’ heads off, so she and Tom agreed that he would chop their heads off while she drew the entrails out and disposed of them. Even though the drawing part of the process was much longer and was incredibly messy, she didn’t begrudge the shorter job of being executioner to whoever would relieve her of it.

When Betty reached the age of about five, she broke into the business by being the leg-holder while Tom continued to wield his axe. She says that she remembers being petrified when the chicken would squawk and flail without a head; it was very difficult to hang on to those legs knowing that in a moment they’d be flapping all over the place. Around the age of seven, she took over the entire operation. She still has her savings passbook from the bank showing she earned $17 one year. Both Betty and Laura recall that Dad showed them how he calculated their profit, then the numbers showing up in the little brown savings passbook, and that passbook going into his safe. Laura, for one, never realized those numbers represented Purchasing Power.

For a few years we raised pigs and at one time had a big sow named Bessie. One spring Bessie had a litter of piglets inside a shed that Dad had pulled into her pen. To get inside, the pigs had to walk up a gang-plank. We were told that we could each pick out a piglet, and Laura chose the one that seemed to have the most individual personality: he was always off rooting around in the straw on his own. Well, it turned out that this piglet was alone because he was blind. When they were all older and able to be outside, he was the one who could be found running in a tight little circle, unable to find his way into the shed to get out of the rain or to find his mother for a meal. Laura knew that rain meant she needed to get down to the pig pen to help that little guy get up the gang-plank and inside. It turned out he wasn’t the most intrepid of the litter; he was the runt of the litter.

Eventually Betty was promoted from chickens to pigs. Her job was to feed them every morning before breakfast, sometimes having to crawl inside the feeder to break up the feed to get it to come out the bottom part. This was in the days when girls wore dresses every day no matter what the weather.

The day Dad was to take the pigs to the market, Betty was home with the flu. He tried and tried to get them to go into the pickup but they weren’t cooperating. He came in the house and had her get dressed to come out and help. Those pigs quite readily followed her up the plank and into the back of the one-ton Dodge. Then Dad lifted her up and out over the stocks on the side of the pickup bed. They rode to the Great Falls market along with a load of scrap metal destined for Carl Weisman’s. She doesn’t remember feeling sad that they were going to market, but she doesn’t think she really understood where they were going until Dad showed her the $35 in her little bank book.

Betty certainly had a history with the pigs. She was born during a wickedly cold spell, 51 degrees below zero according to Dad. He had to leave a pick up or truck running all night for fear it would not start in the morning when he might have to go to the hospital. He had to drive through the stubble fields as there had been a blizzard and the road was drifted shut. That also happened to be the time the sow decided to farrow. We were living in the basement of the farm house at that time (the ground floor had not yet been built), and Dad collected all those baby piglets in a bushel basket and brought them down to the basement so they wouldn’t freeze to death. Tom and Laura had a great time playing with those little pigs and the little pigs had a great time running all over inside the home. Periodically, Dad would gather them up, searching beneath the couch and in all the corners, and take them down to the sow to nurse. We never heard what Mom said about it when she got home from the hospital with a brand new baby.

Looking back from many years’ distance, it occurred to at least Laura that the girls had a somewhat schizoid upbringing. They learned that they could hold their own when it came to work and accomplishment. They just didn’t get the chance to learn that they could spend their earnings, too. Betty and Laura remember those little savings pass books, and are sure that the boys remember them, too. The difference is illustrated by this little memory of Laura’s: one year Tom decided he wanted to own a Honda scooter. He took his earnings and bought himself one. She was astonished. It was the first time it ever occurred to her that those numbers in the bank book could translate into Real Things. It still never occurred to her that she could do the same thing (although maybe she couldn’t. She can’t imagine Dad letting her). Of course, parents learn new ways over time, too. For example, Laura did not receive a check for farm wages after a summer of driving tractor or truck, but her college tuition, room and board were paid directly to the school without passing through Laura’s purview first. She first saw the amounts when reported on her tax return as wages. By the time Betty went to college, she had enough control over her earnings to exhibit a certain amount of control over where she would spend the tuition dollars.

Betty has a story from one of her harvest seasons as a truck driver. In her words:

One September day when I was not yet back at college in Missoula, the forecast was for a freak snowstorm to hit by midnight. Since it was in the 80s, it was quite hard to believe but as they say in Montana, If you don’t like the weather wait five minutes. Dad and I worked hard all day cutting at the Erickson place during the heat and into the afternoon. We had less than a hundred acres to get off and harvest would be finished. Mom brought us dinner and then stayed to drive in the field while I hauled to town since the granaries were now full. The temperature had dropped considerably and it looked like the forecast might have some truth to it. One of my trips to town about 9:00 that evening found the elevator had plugged—no more trucks that night. I knew