Family Secrets - Oregon or Bust

Family Secrets – Oregon or Bust

My grandmother on my father’s side was born to a tenant farmer in the back woods of Tennessee.  She was the seventh child out of what would become nine children in all.  For reasons not known to me her father decided to uproot the family and head for Oregon where I guess he assumed that life would be better.  They must have looked like the Beverly Hillbillies when they all loaded into a pickup truck and headed west.

They got as far as Platt County Missouri when the truck broke down and his wife decided to have their ninth child in the back of the pickup.  Out of money and vehicle and with another mouth to feed, plus a sickly wife he got a job on a farm for less than the going wage but a house was thrown in to the mix.  He thought according to what my grandmother could remember that he would only be there just long enough to scratch some money together to fix his truck and continue their westward migration.  However his wife was bitten by a brown spider and given the medical treatment available at the time and an already sickly condition due to her last child being born under less than desired circumstance she died.  He was left with nine children ranging from ages 10 years old to three months.  His dream of Oregon had busted.

It soon became obvious that he was not going to be able to take care of them all and with the help and guidance from the local child welfare agency of Platt County the children were placed in foster homes, no two children being placed with any one family.

Except for the youngest three, my grandmother included, all the brothers and sisters lost track of each other for several years there after.  My grandmother and her two youngest sisters some how managed to keep in contact and given their very young ages it is remarkable to me that they were able to do so.  I guess they had the same case worker and he or she stayed on top of things.

While the two youngest children seemed to have been placed in stable homes, my grandmother bounced from one foster home to the next for the next several years.  By the time she was entering the sixth grade at Mt Washington Elementary School,( the same school I went to years later,) she had moved in with one of her older sisters who had left the foster care system and married.

Times were tough and when grandmother was in the seventh grade her brother-in-law told her that she was going to have to drop out of school, get a job and help pay her own way if she wanted to continue to live with them.

The next day the school principal, Mr. Ritter, noticed that Tennessee, my grandmother’s name then and the cause of much teasing by classmates, was up set.  She told him about her having to drop out of school.  With the help of the principal at Sugar Creek, Mr. Stone, and the county welfare agency they placed her in another foster home.  Her new foster parents were pretty well-to-do and it just so happened that the foster family was also named Stone, the lady of which was always referred to as Mother Stone when I would be told a story or two growing up.  Others in the family called her Nono, a name apparently given her by my dad.

Her new home came with a new foster sister, a foster cousin, her own bedroom, and a new name, Marie.

Given the fact that she was now in an upper middle class well-to-do family that thought education important, her future looked bright.  She continued her schooling for a few more years but then my grandfather showed up.  He had just returned to Independence from his time in the army and he was a dashing blade.  He jauntily wore a round straw hat, a blue blazer, and white trousers and had a job.  He was considered to be quite the catch among the local females looking for husbands at the time.  He zeroed in on Marie against the wishes of Mother Stone but like in most cases the wisdom of adults was no match for the passions of youth.  They were married two years later.