Endeavor: Legends of Family and Friends

By Robert L. and Fran Williams Smith

Endeavor:
..to try to do; to set about; to owe; to be under obligation; to try hard; to exert effort; to make an earnest attempt; to strive.
Endeavor begins as a story of five families related by blood, marriage, and a sixth surrogate family by love and friendship. It was the sixth family that raised an important question for the author as to how he defines family. Are they (family) only those who are related by blood, marriage, or are they friendship, legal action, or something broader associated with functions that are similar to what we normally associate with a family?
Endeavor is about people, who spent their entire lives striving to achieve something better for their families, themselves, and others without depreciating the value of their work, contribution, or others with whom they shared many things, not the least of which often was unemployment, and poverty. Only one thing could overwhelm them, fear of losing hope and their belief that things would be better. It was their mantra for living. Often beaten down, they were rarely overwhelmed.
The story begins with the Smiths, peasants living in the Ruhr Valley early in the 19th Century where they labored in the coalmines and on their own small patch of land carved from the dark forest, which was their first step up the ladder of achievement. In those days work was communal, as was most of life's other requirements.
The opening chapter is followed by the story of the Dungans, beginning in the early 1850s. They were dirt poor Irish, who traded a potato famine, starvation, and poverty, for a little land, in a new world, Kentucky. Both stories will take the reader to the Great Depression of the 1930s that shaped an American culture for two generations.
The third chapter will introduces the Williams, Old, and Goss families, a treasure of Cornish cousins who formed tight family units for many generations, and who generously included my wife and myself to their group when I married into the Williams family. The Lows, our adopted family are introduced in the sixth chapter, Families at War. From there on, we leave it to the reader to sort out a remarkable collection of people who became the source of our human fire:

..When we were alone with the wind crying
Offered us the warmth of a human fire.

(Partial quote from Many Winters, by Nancy Wood)

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491866467

Robert L.

Robert L. & Pensacola H. Jefferson are husband and wife and authors of several books. They are the founders and directors of Nazareth Ministries and Nazareth School of Ministry; providing Christian clergy with sabbaticals and restful retreats as well as helping to equipt the Saints for the work of the ministry. The Jefferson’s live in Colton’s Point, Maryland. To contact Robert L. & Pensacola H. Jefferson write: Nazareth Ministries, Inc. P. O. Box 9 Avenue, MD 20609 Or visit their website: www.nazarethministries.com

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© 2014 Robert L. and Fran Williams Smith. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 02/28/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4918-6648-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-6647-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-6646-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014903411

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Contents

Dedication

Endeavor

Smiths and Dungans

Williams, Old, and Goss

The Great Depression for the Smiths

The Great Depression for the Williams, Olds, and Goss

Families at War

The G.I. Bill, Legislation to 10th Power.

Work, Marriage, Family, and Friends

The Fulbright Year, 1961-1962

Opportunity, Challenge, Change

Climb the Highest Mountains

About the Authors

Dedication

E ndeavor began as an idea from my wife Fran. She suggested it might be interesting to write a story about our two families, and how they came together, or might have come together. Her idea launched me into a two year journey discovering that there are all kinds of families, blood, marriage, legal, professional, educational, military, and sometimes just friends and associates who become family because of their importance to our development, and maturity, or lack of same.

I found aunts and uncles I had never known who treated me as one of their own. There were the Williams Clan of Cornwall and Wales, nine in number, amusing, thoughtful, loving, and always sharing. There were the Olds, nine in number having many of the same traits just described and they were all Cornish with their peculiar manner of speech. Then, there was the Goss branch, Tom senior, Alice, and their two sons Jack and Jim. Of those only Dorothy, Jack’s wife survives along with daughter, Catherine, both of whom we still keep in regular contact, Dorothy on a weekly basis by phone.

Then, there were professional associates who helped me learn how to work and think differently, Don Garrity, Milton Chernin, Les and Barbara Wilkins, Eryl Hall Williams and his wife Connie, and the biggest little man I have ever known, Frank Foster. You will also learn about Allen and Virginia Breed, Henry and Jean Low, and others who knowingly or not have made their contribution to all of our books, this one as well. Recognized or not, they are all members of our family in the closest sense.

You will also meet two sets of remarkable parents, mine, Maurice LeRoy and Maude Lee Smith, and Fran’s, Arthur E. and Addie Williams, both of whom experienced similar lives of deprivation during the Great Depression, but found different routes to success in looking after and protecting their family. They, along with the many others are what I had in mind when I chose the title Endeavor, to strive, and struggle for something important—in their cases, a better life for themselves and their children. I have tried to capture some of that struggle over time and geography, but have been handicapped by having to view history through my eyes and experience. I hope the story is not limited by the viewer, it was an attempt to tell the story of others who I regard as people who have genuinely been endeavors’ in their pursuit of the best in the face of immense hardships. These are the people to whom this book is dedicated. They are the ones who made our lives worthwhile, and to whom we are grateful for their love, friendship, and never ending support.

Many years ago I discovered a small book entitled Many Winters by Nancy Wood. It is a collection of Drawings and Paintings by Frank Howell and the Prose and Poetry of the Indians of the Taos Pueblo living in the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico. It contains only 78 pages, but has never failed me when looking for a thought to share with my reader. The following is her short version of what I have taken many pages to say:

To be yourself is to be

Alone with the wind crying

When all that you ask for is

The warmth of a human fire.

Endeavor is dedicated to all of the men and women who have provided Fran and me with the warmth of their human fire throughout our long lives. We thank you for your love, kindness, and friendships that have lasted a life time.

Endeavor

. . . to try to do; to set about; to owe; to be under obligation; to try hard; to exert effort; to make an earnest attempt; to strive.

E ndeavor begins as a story of five families related by blood, marriage, and a sixth surrogate family by love and friendship. It was the sixth family that raised an important question for the author as to how he defines family. Are they (family) only those who are related by blood, marriage, or are they friendship, legal action, or something broader associated with functions that are similar to what we normally associate with a family?

Family is frequently used to describe relationships we have with blood associates or legal ones through marriage. Here, biology stands large, but there are functions that are not necessarily limited to biology like love, nurturing, caring, teaching, value setting, protection, and belongingness that people other than family frequently provide. Many variations of people offer these things without or without blood ties, and when we are fortunate, encounter them throughout our lives.

Hillary Clinton’s book, It takes a Village illustrates this message very clearly. There are many of us who over a lifetime have people who are close to us as our blood and legal families fade out of our lives. They materially affect how we think and what we become. They include educators, academics, and most certainly the military who shape the nature of the world we interact with and how we think. And heaven help us, there is the inevitable peer group that parents struggle to keep from moderating the totality of their childrens’ lives. Delinquency research has filled many shelves in every library on protecting your child from undue influence. Adults are not immune either. The work place is one of the strongest forces in teaching the ethics of success, and competition, and is sometimes the most enduring in total time spent over a life time, although this may be changing. While the author follows a general tree of genealogy for blood relatives in this story, it is limited for two reasons: their story is simply one part of a family history that was familiar to him, with bits about others, who in both circumstances contribute to the story of how the Smiths arrived at where they are in the order of things.

The story begins with those who came from a much earlier time, different traditions, and over the course of 150 years, became interrelated as two American families. They were strong characters, who believed that hard work, overcoming adversity, and striving to be the best at what they did, they could make the world a better place for themselves and their families. Ultimately, through hard work and determination they would succeed in whatever they undertook. They became citizens of the United States, and their endeavors’ contributed to the rich tapestry of colors, traditions, and character of the country for almost 200 years.

They were living representatives of what we came to know as the Protestant Ethic. They were also examples of how families grow, fade, and decline as their community, friends and associates change through education, and work. In the end, families, who are important to affecting who we are and how we think are not the only ones responsible for who we are and become. Educators or academics will materially change the way in which those who seek education will see and approach others and ultimately the world around. And for those who have long careers in any field, professional or simple labor, they too will suffer effects very similar, if not even more powerful than a blood family from their working peers. The same is true of those influenced by those holding strong religious and political beliefs.

The story is simple enough; it is primarily about five families, who became two over the better part of two centuries. Their stories will interweave different themes and experiences. It is a personal story of the Smiths/Dungans (German /Irish heritage), and Williams/Old and Goss families (English heritage). They are American stories in the purest sense and imbue the meaning of those who worked and struggled to make their lives, and others, better. They are the backbone of every great generation, particularly theirs. Their stories will be intermixed with others who served the role of family, in one form or another for the central characters.

+++

The space shuttle Endeavor, carried by its jumbo 747-carrier plane passed our house above the San Francisco Bay at 10 A.M., September 21, 2012. It was a spectacular sight; the two aircraft were at eye level, about 1200-foot elevation, and 1,000 feet west of our deck. People in the neighborhood were clapping their hands, shouting, and obviously thrilled at what they were seeing. It was inspirational, and warranted the pride we gave the spacecraft and crews that took us into space, and part way to the stars.

The great ship moved slowly north with its fighter aircraft protection, passed over Richmond, California, and then turned southwest to go out directly over the Golden Gate Bridge to the west before disappearing south into the fog and its final place of honor, an air museum in Los Angeles, California.

I could not help but remember its short but industrious life, only twenty years or so, and having travelled so far between earth and the international space station, making even more grand dreams possible. It had endeavored, as had the people who made a conscientious and concerted effort to reach for the stars, a worthwhile, industrious activity. It occurred to me that this was the theme of my new book, one that now had a title, Endeavor. I would try to remind myself, and others, that life is full of challenges, opportunities, and disappointment. Yet, each new event presents opportunity for something different, and often change. Change is neither good nor bad, it is simply the opportunity for us to experiment with something different, and then evaluate our choices and their consequences if we are willing to take time for reflection.

Rarely did the people of the Twentieth Century face change passively. They were flexible, and sought new experiences and, in doing so changed the world through their collective choices about which they were not always aware. The people of the nineteenth and twentieth Centuries’’, more than most, confronted and overcame their fear of change by simply engaging it. That, of itself, is no easy task, and by itself is neither good nor bad.

Endeavor is about people, who spent their entire lives striving to achieve something better for their families, themselves, and others without depreciating the value of their work, contribution, or others with whom they shared many things, not the least of which often was unemployment, and poverty. Only one thing could overwhelm them, fear of losing hope and their belief that things would be better. It was their mantra for living. Often beaten down, they were rarely overwhelmed.

It is the story of men and women who had little, but who, in the end improved their world, while laying the seeds of massive change for today. They aspired to a world that would be better than the one they inherited, for their children, and children’s children. They wanted to live in peace with their neighbors and friends; they wanted acceptance as equal members of the human community, and regardless of the trials and adversity, they wanted the opportunity to strive to use their own resources and strengths to achieve their goals for family, community, and self. Endeavor is a study of why every American generation is The Greatest (with appropriate deference to Tom Brokaw’s use of the title).

On the journey, you will meet the Smiths, immigrants from central Germany early in the nineteenth century. You also will meet the Dungan’s who came to the United States during the great potato famine in Ireland during the mid-1840s. Neither, as they frequently said, Had a pot to pee in. The mix of these two families, three or four generations later, is responsible for the author’s presence in a peculiar form of memoir.

A second line of decent explains my wife’s presence. Her family came from very old lines in England, specifically Cornwall, Devon, and Wales. Her father immigrated to the United States at the very beginning of the 20th century. Two years later Addie followed and married him in Long Beach, California. Trained as a shipwright, Arthur, always known as Gunner, had a long and fulfilling career as a ship builder, and a technical expert for the construction of ships and special effects man in the movie industry, mostly MGM (Metro Goldwyn Mayer). Addie struggled to raise and supervise her two family members, Arthur and Ruth Frances, with commendable success.

While complicated, the plan is to describe the early experiences of one family at a time, as completely as possible bringing them each up into the 20th century. Once we have some level of historical parity, the stories will follow a single line for a time, but then be interwoven with the lives of others as they were lived. In the interim, you will learn as much as the author did about these five families, and those who survive into the twenty-first century. You will also learn about the Lows, a special part of Addie and Arthur branch of the Williams family and Fran and mine. And you will see, just as the writer did, families of yesteryear survived as units that functioned together, something becoming rare in today’s world. Beginning in the 1950s they began to become atomistic, functioning independent particles that travelled different paths, frequently as individuals and not members of familial groups. The (I) or the self, emerged as the dominant characteristic of human behavior; while the (you), me in relation to others, faded; and the (us), the collective we became out of fashion. George Mead would have been saddened by the concepts he had so carefully defined in Mind Self and Society, but he would have understood how relationships are changed by culture.

+++

A young friend, a psychiatrist, and probably genius taught me in 1950 that creative or scientific change of any sort with a magnitude greater than ten, ten to its tenth power, would change the world and the behavior of the people who lived through it. At the time, he was predicting the next such change; he was describing the computer, a large and not particularly efficient machine that was in its early stage of development. It occupied an entire room. He suggested that I invest anything I could in it and become wealthy. Information was to be our next expansion of our wealth as a nation. Since I had neither money nor wisdom, his prediction was not useful to me. More important, he made the point that once unleashed we could not control the consequence of our advance. He liked to illustrate his idea with examples from anthropology where man learned to stand erect, developed speech, and weapons like clubs, spears, bow and arrow, etc. These steps changed humankind, some at much faster rates than others, but few with a magnitude of ten.

In those days, our numbers were fewer, our imprint on the world small, and carbon emissions limited to flatulence shared by varying animals. We learned to domesticate animals, some for transportation, and others for warfare. Horses speeded up travel, and facilitated the killing of more people, but it took the automobile, and its aberration, the tank for warfare to begin to change our landscape. Gunpowder did little to make things better. We even learned to navigate oceans and rivers. We came closer to a value of ten, but, it took the steam engine to lead us to large-scale farming, the increased production of goods, and influenced where and why we built cities, and subsequently the same knowledge to destroy them.

He loved to point out that one of the grand inventions was the printing press that permitted us to communicate over longer distances, but not as long as the wireless and telephone permitted. Change speeded up, and we replaced trains with airplanes. A five-day train trip became only hours by air, and even fewer hours by jet plane when the first commercial jet came into service in 1959. He regarded this, and the rocket, as the two big winners of the ten contests for achievement at midcentury. Both became possibilities to extinguish the human race.

Television, computers, wireless phones, pads for books, etc. changed the nature of recreational choices. Some linked us closer to the home and others freed us from the containment and control of the home. The nuclear family took its last feeble steps toward extinction. We have not even covered medical miracles, ability to rebuild bodies, prolong life and life styles that increased our health risks. Nor have we covered our gluttony for individual transportation by car, the ability to control birth by mechanical and chemical methods while inventing new chemicals to assist the aging population to maintain their failing libidos, and help others beyond childbirth age to have children engineered by scientific, chemical, and alternative programs. Many proclaimed we were approaching immortality as people lived longer and advances in medicine made it a possibility or at least fantasy for some. We had not learned yet that our immediate world would be crowded by communication devices that we, in absentia, could participate in revolutions while fiddling with the latest in recreational use, our hand held computers. More important, we had not even learned to question our cornucopia of toys for our amusement.

+++

The story begins with the Smiths, peasants living in the Ruhr Valley early in the 19th Century where they labored in the coalmines and on their own small patch of land carved from the dark forest, which was their first step up the ladder of achievement. In those days work was communal, as was most of life’s other requirements.

The opening chapter will be followed by the story of the Dungans, beginning in the early 1850s, poor They were dirt poor Irish, who traded a potato famine, starvation, and poverty, for a little land, in a new world, Kentucky. They may well have been your family as well. Both started with large families that with time dwindled away to the few. Both stories will take the reader to the Great Depression of the 1930’s that shaped an American culture for two generations.

The third chapter will introduce the reader to the Williams, Old, and Goss families, a treasure of Cornish cousins who formed tight family units for many generations, and who generously included my wife and myself to their group when I married into the Williams family. The Lows, our first adopted family are introduced in the sixth chapter, Families at War. From there on, we leave it to the reader to sort out a remarkable collection of people who became our family over time, people who:

". . . When we were alone with the wind crying

Offered us the warmth of a human fire."

(Partial quote from Many Winters, by Nancy Wood)

Smiths and Dungans

T he Smiths lived as small groups in a communal clan during the middle 1800’s in the Hurtgen Forest above the Ruhr Valley of Germany. The family had resided there, in their minds, from the beginning of time. They could not remember when a Smith did not live in the Hurtgen Forest. They survived at a subsistence level on small farming plots cut out of dense cultivated pinewoods. Located below Aachen, their closest large towns were in the industrial Ruhr Valley where coal mining, steel, shipping, and railroads were major enterprises that were soiling a pristine area of Germany. The Smiths were similar to American mountain people, who farmed small plots of ground cut out of their planted forests for food, and engaged in a number of enterprises for money and extra resources as a matter of pride and necessity.

They were fiercely independent. Men forested and forged metals; women wove fabrics, and produced Schnapps from small potato crops for pleasure and profit. The terrain was rugged, dark, and damp much of the year because of the pine trees, clouds, and intense fogs. Local people used their woods for cooking, heat, and cash earned from foresting the land. Life was difficult, and it was short. It was also family focused, clannish in regards to others, and frequently assumed responsibility for distant members of the extended family.

By the mid-1850, it was becoming difficult to maintain the old ways. The family was beginning to break down its traditions and customs, and Industrialization, transportation, coal, and steel brought the younger members down from the hills to seek their fortunes in more remunerative work. An area, once pristine and self-sustaining, was no longer viable. The older family members could no longer provide for themselves, and there were too few youth to look after the elderly left behind. Hunger, illness, and disease became more prevalent among the older clan who increased in numbers as younger members decreased and went down out of the mountains. The younger mountain people abandoned their traditional homes and elders, and settled in large communities that offered less than what they had left, but promised more than they had for those strong enough to endure. In either case, a pattern was broken, and the strong family units began to disintegrate, through emigration, new work patterns, and the need to move to survive.

The mountain folks of Germany were a dying breed, figuratively and literally from family breakdown, famine, crop failure, disease, pestilence that offered a killing misery of body and soul. Local wars had not helped. Their fortunes were in the Valley (Ruhr), with its cities and increased work opportunities. That dream also faded quickly, and small bands, including the Smiths, chose to move on and migrate to America. Worsening opportunities for farm ownership made it difficult for them to remain on their traditional lands, and there was persecution of some religious groups, and military conscription. America offered better economic opportunities, the chance to own their own land, and religious freedom. Many paid for their passage by selling their labor for years as indentured servants. Others discovered that the development of the American Railroad system during the 1800 required skilled labor, particularly men who understood iron. The railroads, in turn had acquired vast expanses of land along their right a ways that needed settlers to build towns and cities as well as railroads, so they sent brokers to Germany to hire German men who, in return for wages, also could acquire large expanses of farming lands. It was win-win for everyone, who wanted to become a rich American. Many believed that the streets really were paved with gold. It was the land of opportunity. They pooled their labor, resources, and hopes, sold everything they still owned and began their migration to the United States. They headed for the Promised Land toward the last quarter of the 1800s.

The largest flow of German immigration to America occurred between 1820—and 1916 during which more than six million immigrated to the United States. The largest group came from 1840-1880, particularly after the German revolutions of 1848. Favorite city destinations for the new emigrants included Milwaukee, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, New York, Baltimore, and Northern Kentucky. After 1900, other favored destinations became Cleveland, Milwaukee, Hoboken, Cincinnati, Dubuque Davenport, Omaha, Fort Wayne, and Columbus. Many concentrations of Germans acquired distinctive names such as the Over the Rhine district of Cincinnati, German Village in Columbus, or, the German Athens, of Milwaukee with skilled politicians, craftsmen an entrepreneur of the brewing industry of Pabst, Schlitz, Miller, and Blatz. Roughly, all German immigrants settled in cities, but over half established farms in the Midwest, from Ohio to the Plains states. Based on limited records, but many photos, my branch of the Smith clan ended up in Ohio, the Plains states, and West. In 2010 there were over 50,000,000 German American citizens living in the United States. We knew a good thing when we found it.

+++

A distant branch of the Smith family named Miller joined the immigration of the late 1800s. They had recently had a daughter named Lidda Ann, a girl destined to become my Grandmother Smith, but that comes later in the story. Resources were limited, so the men had to work for everyone’s passage. They served as cooks, cargo handlers, carpenters, and common seamen on an ancient sailing cargo schooner between Hamburg, Germany and New York. They travelled in steerage class, since there were no others they could afford. Below decks, they lived in open areas between sections for livestock, ship hands, and cargo. They were heated by the masses that surrounded them and the metal cans (stoves) used for cooking. Letter fragments report unbelievable misery and suffering aboard the schooner, but also reflected hope and expectations of a new life they believed would begin.

New York and the East Coast were a major cultural shock for the new arrivals. Size, scale, the speed of life, the overpowering energy, and unrestrained motion over whelmed them. They were awe struck and many frightened by a world far beyond their expectations, or comprehension. As strangers in a strange land, they did what others did before them; they turned to friends for advice and suggestions. In the process, they learned what others had before them, looked outward to the center of the States with its different geographies, customs, and size of various communities. Friends assured them that there were places for them in the states where they would feel at home, comfortable, and at ease with the speed of living. They could find a place where they would be happy, and comfortable. The Smiths and two other families moved to the Midwest, Ohio, where they settled for several years before moving on to California.

The Millers stayed behind in New York to seek their fortune. Lidda Ann Miller and her family would later move to Ohio, where she and the Smith branch of the clan reunited in a farming community in the southern part of the state. Their exact date of arrival in Ohio is unknown, but the date and place of the birth of Maurice LeRoy Smith, first and only son of C.K. Smith and Lidda Ann Miller, was April 7, 1887 in Thayer, Kansas. They also would have two daughters, Bess S. Colbert, Hutchinson, Kansas, who bore Jacob A. Hutchinson of Little Rock, Arkansas, and William C. Hutchinson of Champagne, Illinois. A second daughter, Marry married Grover Cable, an employee the Hammond lumber company, and later, one of its administrators. They too would have two children, a boy, King, and girl, Jane, believed to have been born in Kansas. The family moved on to California around 1900 and settled, for the most part, in and around Long Beach, California, with C.K. and Lidda Ann still being pivotal to family survival.

The Mid West, with its farming, smaller towns, and working people similar to themselves became home with a comfortable environment. Farming, labor, construction, railroading, mining, and even small business opportunities were all things they understood, and had skills to offer their new community. It was a world apart from Germany, yet there were things everywhere that were familiar to them, even customs from the old country that had arrived with previous emigrants, and were growing up around the lower edges of the Great Lakes.

Something else was becoming familiar; the Smith clan was becoming transient, less rooted to a single geography. Cards, letter, pictures cover a wide variety of places, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, and Illinois were noted frequently in terms of work. Later, New Mexico, Colorado, became a part of their personal itinerary. Missouri also was mentioned. Based on their notes, and pictures, they were collectively following work opportunities in mining, lumbering, railroading, and construction, and they often found themselves in the same communities. They went where employment opportunities were available and consistent with their own interests and skills.

One part of the family Smith was clearly in Waverly, Iowa on March 23, 1913 when Maurice George Smith was born first son to Maurice LeRoy and Maude Dungan Smith, married on January 26, 1912 in Tucumcari, New Mexico. This was the beginning of a new branch of the Smiths. Eight years later, their second son, La Von Grover Smith, was born on January 18, 1916 in Manly, Iowa. I did not join the family until November 14, 1924, in San Diego, California, eleven years after the birth of their first son. I was almost end of the line of this branch of Smiths, but that is a story for later.

+++

I know little about my grandparents during this early period, but old pictures and scrapbooks reveal that C.K. Smith (grandpa) and Lidda Ann Miller Smith (grandma) were living in Long Beach, California before 1920. Somewhere before then they had acquired enough resources to buy a small California Bungalow in a working section of town. They had also invested in an old-fashioned popcorn wagon, two large wagon wheels, a large glass enclosed popping machine where you could watch the popper pop, the buttercup empty, into large banks of pure white popped corn. It was permanently located in a small 20’ X 20’ rental area on the Long Beach Pike, a serious amusement area in those days’ restaurants, movies, dance halls, warm water swimming plunge, games of chance, and challenge, salt water toffee pulls, penny arcades, hot dog stands, and other places of family amusement on weekdays and weekends. During the summer, they served many, winter, fair crowds, and fall and spring very large crowds. The traffic along the Pike was usually good, particularly when the City Band was in concert on a warm evening or holidays. What can I say; it was family entertainment in the 1920-1940s.

I do feel compelled to introduce the reader to one special character at this point, strange Earl. Strange Earl always dressed in a suit, shirt, tie, etc. as a poor businessperson. Someway, he was related to the family through a Dungan connection. My aunt Jewel, on my mother’s side married a man named Jess Gerard. Jess had a brother, strange Earl. The Gerard’s lived in Bellflower, out in the country. It was mostly a community of dairies and farms.

Earl always seemed to be around my grandparent Smiths and their popcorn stand. He did odd jobs for them, loved the Pike and its excitement, and finally convinced them to let him do caramel corn, which became a very successful moneymaker for them. He also tried, unsuccessfully to get them to invest in chicken ranches on Signal Hill, a desolate mound overlooking the entire Long Beach, Los Angeles basin. You could buy land for a $1 per acre since no one really wanted it. Strange Earl bought many acres, and in 1921, when oil was discovered under Signal Hill and the basin, he became a rich man, and turned his attention to low cost land acquisition in Bellflower, California.

Within ten years, he owned half the city and surrounding area. He acquired a large farm with orchards, livestock, tennis courts, swimming pool, and other services to establish that he was a man of property. He also constructed a Party Barn for dances and other social get together. In later years, he cared for my grandfather Dungan, providing him with a home for minor chores performed around the farm. He was generous, and every Christmas saw that every grandchild, Smith, Dungan, Gerard, etc. received a five gallon golden can of his homemade caramel corn, with or without peanuts. Even after his success, he was frequently found around my grandparents and, while they had it, the popcorn stand. For whatever reason, they had become family for him. The same was true for my Grandfather Dungan. Earl cared for him in old age as if he was his grandfather.

My strongest memories of my grandfather and mother as a child are photos of them at the popcorn stand. C.K. standing along the great machine with his white cap with black bill, white businessman’s working jacket, black vest with brass buttons, and black pants. Lidda Ann was always in her place, a comfortable wooden rocking chair to the right of the entrance to the business. She handled finances. She also knitted constantly, what, I never knew. C.K. always had a great curved meerschaum pipe hanging from his lips, and his upper lip covered with a pure white bushy white mustache. Lidda Ann simply smiled, knitted, made change, and always dressed in her ankle length flowered cloth dress, and or black skirt, high buttoned black work shoes, and a large shawl, probably one she knitted for herself. She always had a smile for people, but little conversation. One of the remarkable things was her hair, mostly grey, but some brown, long, and carefully and tightly quaffed huge bundle carefully rolled high on her head. She was a big woman, large boned, and physically large, not fat who, correctly or not, always seemed to tower over C.K.

Their popcorn stand was financially successful. They owned their small two-bedroom wood framed bungalow on the edge of downtown Long Beach. Until 1930, and Granddad’s death, various members of the Smith family came to Long Beach to visit C.K. and Lidda Ann. Clan rules governed their stay. Family visitors rarely had money for expenses, so C.K. had worked out alternative methods of payment. Contributions to the family cause included cleaning the chicken coop, rabbit hutches, turning soil for the vegetable garden, or other household tasks, including painting both the inside and outside of the house.

Much of their furniture was hand crafted from dark heavily weathered woods, from either old buildings or old furniture. C.K. was not above asking a family member sharing their hospitality to leave something in return, like a piece of handmade furniture, made on site, some of which were works of art. Where my grandfather found the time for work, play the piano, and host family, I never knew. He worked seven days a week, and when home spent his time reading or playing the piano with contemporary works. Grandma kept trying to explain classic music and other music without much success.

Grandpa Smith died in 1930, which made it difficult for Lidda Ann, Grandma. She had to sell the house and move into a small one-room apartment closer to town, specifically at 735 American Avenue. It was an area near my Aunt Bess, the YMCA, and Amos and Andy’s Hamburger restaurant, an area with which I would become familiar in late 1930s, particularly the great open market with many small independent shops selling many good things like cookies.

Grandma’s new home was similar to many other large beach apartment houses of the time, generally three stories high, and running from the main avenue back to the alley way. They were always wood-lap construction, painted a soft yellow or off-white outside, and had a fire escape dividing the building in half in front and back, and connecting hall ways with six or seven apartments on each side.

I stayed briefly with her in 1930 for two weeks when the rest of my family was moving from Herington, Kansas, by Studebaker-six touring car to somewhere else, yet to be determined. They picked me up in Long Beach and I joined the family in a multi-state tour lasting a month or so before settling down in Long Beach, California.

During my short stay, Grandma Smith talked little to me, but she did take me to the great market with a bakery that made icebox cookies. I always had a bag to take home, but it never quite made the journey its full measure intact. Neither of us felt an obligation to comment.

Before, when I visited her in their home, Grandma Smith arranged for me to sleep on the piano bench, but the apartment presented other problems. It was one very large room with a bath at one end and a kitchen at the other. The bed was a pull out bed from the wall. There was no piano, nor bench, so Grandma Smith improvised. My bed was four straight chairs with backs on two ends, and backs reversed in the middle to keep me from falling off. It was a hard bed for a six year old, but it worked. Besides, when we went to the store, she still bought me some icebox cookies to eat on the way home. With that note of food fondly remembered, it is time to move on to the Irish part of my family.

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There is one big mystery in the family that I was never able to solve. In 1924, in San Diego, California, my mother drove a Studebaker Big Six Touring Car, which sold for $2,350 at the factory in South Bend, Indiana. She won the car in some form of contest or drawing a few years earlier. She was the only one who drove it, and it served as the primary source of transportation for some very unlikely excursions. I know the family owned it when I was born, because I have photos of my mother and car, she, all decked out in a leather driving costume, boots, and goggles. The only references or pictures suggests she won it in 1920 in Bisbee, Arizona, and she, along with the rest of the family, began a tour through New Mexico, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio where the family visited Elmer Dungan, my mother’s father and her extended family.

By 1924, the family briefly returned to California and purchased or rented a Barbeque Restaurant six miles from the Tijuana, Mexico Border. It was their first and only business venture. It failed, and six months after I was born in November 1924, the family returned to visit my father’s parents in Long Beach in 1925. Following that, we relocated to Douglas, Arizona in 1925 for my father to work as a railroad controller in the mines. We then moved to Valley Junction, Iowa, where my father accepted a job as railroad freight conductor in 1927 before returning to Long Beach, California and then, turning around and accepting a better offer in Herington, Kansas in 1927. My mother also found employment with the Security Benefit Association Insurance Company as a salesperson. We remained there until the stock market crash when we returned to Long Beach in 1930-31 to stay with my father’s parents while he looked for employment during the beginning of the Great Depression. Somewhere during this period, the Studebaker ceased to be, and it was several years before we would rediscover private transportation again.

The Irish side of the Smith-Dungan clan did not permanently settle in California until after 1930, a stock market crash, the early beginnings of the great dust bowl storms in the Plains states, and the beginning of the Great Depression. Their history begins during the mid-1800 in Ireland during the Great Potato famine, but they too made it to California, but not until the late 1920s, or early 30s.

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Beginning in 1845 and lasting through 1851 the great Irish potato famine killed over a million people, and contributed to another million leaving the country. Being poor tenant farmers, my mother’s ancestors decided it was time to get out of the old country, an easier decision than action. The Irish were an agricultural nation populated by 8 million people. Life expectancy was short at 40 years, and the young married early and had large families for hands to do the farm work. The rural families tended to live in communal clusters, called clachans, spread out among the countryside. The homes were small, single-room, windowless mud and/or rock huts without chimneys for their fire circles. They slept on straw on the bare ground, sharing their shelter with livestock.

The average tenant farmer lived at a subsistence level on less than ten acres. They rented or leased their ground, but any improvement they made belonged to the landlord. Potatoes are not native to Ireland and probably originated in Peru. In the 1500, Spanish conquerors found the Indians growing vegetables they called patata, which came to Ireland sometime in the 1590s. They thrived in the country’s cool soil with little labor, and with an acre of fertilized potatoes yielding up to 12 tons of potatoes, enough to feed a family of six for a year. By the 1800, the potato had become the staple crop in the poorest regions and over three million people