It is the day after Christmas, 1993. We sit in the living room at her apartment on S.E. 26th. The tape recorder roles and the story unfolds. Four years later, Lorine Frank fills in a few gaps in the story.  Again, it is just after Christmas, but she's now living on E. Burnside in Southeast Portland. A new supply of salted peanuts in the shell sits on the kitchen table. The jellybean supply has been depleted. No tape recorder this time, just a furiously scribbling pen and note pad.

                              My Story

I was born in Winnepeg in 1913. We moved from Canada to Ft. Collins, Colorado, just after I was born, in 1914 or 1915.

My first memory?  I remember the time when I asked my mother, “Where did we go on the train?”  I remembered going on a train, and my dad was walking to the rest room on the train. I followed him. And Mom was so surprised. This was when we came to the states, Ft. Collins, from Canada. She remembered that, too, because she thought it was so amazing, because I was only a year and a half old, and I was following my dad. And I could barely walk. I didn't even fall from the wiggle of the train or anything. I remember that. I was a year and a half.

I remember following him. But, you know, a person doesn't remember a lot of things when you are young. The movement of the train, the swaying back and forth, that I don't remember, but Mom remembered that it didn't bother me. So then I knew that that was really true, that I followed my dad on the train. I didn't know where he was going or anything, but that was in my mind. She remembered that I had followed him.

I remember this as my first memory because once in a while we would talk about things. I told her, I said, “I remember. Where was that?  That we were on the train and I followed Dad?”

Life in Canada

That was a long time ago when we were on a train, when I was young. It was when we came from Canada to the States. That is after they had homesteaded a lot of land up there, and they were going to live in Canada. They were clearing the place where they were building a cabin. I guess they had the cabin pretty well finished, a log cabin. And when they would go to bed at night the wolves would come up and howl and look in the windows.

My mom didn't want to live there -- it was too wild -- so they dropped everything and came to the States. It was rugged and there were not a lot of neighbors around either. That is way, way, back. There were people there homesteading. But I suppose they were far apart. Then they didn't have a car or anything. She just thought that was awful. She wasn't going to live that way. It probably would have been a good thing because they would have had a lot land there later on.

Ancestors in Russia

Back in Russia they had nice homes. They would go out during planting time, pack up food and they would go out in the fields. It would be far enough away that they wouldn't come home at night. They would stay out all week and come home on weekends. They were far enough away to where they didn't come back. They were just little villages, you know. Their houses were in little towns. People lived close together then, they got to know everybody.

My parents' family had come from Germany to Russia during the time of Catherine the Great. She had promised free land, and so many Germans moved to the Volga. The built little towns and villages there and worked in the fields. My mother's father had a flour mill in Kraft. They were in business to sell flour to flour mills. I am sure they weren't big like they are nowadays. I don't suppose the villages were that big either. There were so many of them and they all had different names.

Mom lived in Kraft (sp?) Russia and Dad was in Dobrinka (sp?) on the Volga River. I'm not sure how they met, though. My dad was drafted for four years with the Russians and he fought against Japan. He couldn't speak much Russian when he went into the army, but when he left he spoke Russian very well. [Originally, Catherine the Great had exempted the German immigrants from military service, but in 1871 the Russian government revoked her edict. Even though the Russians cut the service term from 25 to 16 and finally to five years of service, many Germans began looking for a new country because of this change in policy.]

My parents married when my dad left the army, sometime around 1904. My first sister, Mollie, was born in Russia in 1908 and was two when Dad left and came to the United States in 1910. He entered through the port of Baltimore and took a train to Denver. Someone whom he had known was here and he worked in gold smelting.

In 1911 or 1912, Mom came with Mollie and my second sister Marie. Marie died on the ship coming over here, though. The doctor had given her some medicine, but she threw it up, died and was buried at sea. I think it was about a three-week trip coming over on the boat. Mom was sick most all of the time. They came through Galveston, Texas and then took a trip to Denver. From there, she and Dad went to Winnipeg, Canada to homestead and build a cabin.

Life in the United States

[This section contains a rough transcript of conversations Jan. 19 and 30, 2000, along with some follow-up interviews done on the phone.]

The landowners had houses for the tenant farmers who worked there. Those houses usually didn't have any running water and the iron in the water on the farm made it unfit to drink. In fact, they had to take a team of horses with a tank on a wagon several miles to go to the well to get drinking water. The water was up in the mountains where there was a spring. My dad was the one who would go haul the water and bring it back to our cistern. Then we'd have to put the water bucket on a rope and drop it into the cistern. We just used it for drinking and cooking. We used the other that we had on the place for washing clothes and for bathing.

Besides water, we also used a lot of coal and wood. We had stove heating and we'd have to chop wood to burn. The kids would have to bring the wood and coal into the house. We had a coal bucket, a coal pail, where we'd put the coal. We'd have to get the coal from 30 miles away where there were coalmines. We used the wood to start the fire and then we'd feed it with coal and burn coal for everything--cooking and heating. Coal would last longer, so that you wouldn't have to stand there and just feed the stove. There were lots of coalmines there in Wyoming, much more coal than wood.

Since there was no running hot water, we had to heat the water to wash the dishes. We had to do that when we were old enough and tall enough to reach the dishpan. We had to sweep the floors, too. My mother scrubbed them every day. Washing clothes also took up time. Mother would have to wash for ten people. She would do all that wash on a board. She'd even iron the socks. And she baked all that bread for the family, too. She'd bake bread a couple times a week. Dad used to buy the flour, a 100-pound sack. And then they had these big bins made of tin that would hold that much flour, and they'd dump the flour in that. It took a lot of time to cook.

We didn't have a refrigerator. In place of a refrigerator, we had a cellar, dug partially under the front of the house, where the soil kept the air below cool. It'd be cold enough to put milk there. Meat we didn't refrigerate. It was always salted and put in crocks with brine to preserve it. We'd also can sausages in jars. Meat was a big part of our diet. Big chunks of meat they'd roast, and then pour lard over them till they were completely covered. We had meat every day. They couldn't cook without meat. We had meat and potatoes and vegetables and bread. On Sundays we'd take time to make a nice roast, and bake pies and cakes. We'd have the same type of food during the week, but we'd cook more quickly.

Until quite late in my childhood, we slept three in a bed. The bed was full size, a regular mattress. And although it was crowded, then we didn't know any different. Until we were grown up, until we moved to Wyoming and there were more of us, there were usually two beds to a room and two or three of us kids to each bed. One time we had three bedrooms. Mostly, though, we lived in very small houses. One time we lived in a place in Wyoming. There we moved into a shack. My mom put up some heavy curtains to make three rooms out of that shack. She made two bedrooms that way. People nowadays might wonder how they managed to get along. It might seem difficult, but we made it. It was okay. It could have been worse really. I think that's where you learned how to share and get along.

Of course you got your privacy when you needed it. When you wanted to change clothes you told the person to stay out, and they'd do that. It was a rough life really. If we had to live that way now it'd be difficult. The other day, for example, the power went out. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't make a cup a coffee, I couldn't get on an elevator to go downstairs, I couldn't hardly do anything that I would normally do.

We had our first electricity just before I got married. I was about 18 years old, and all we had was a drop cord hanging down from the ceiling with a light bulb hanging down. And that was such a treat. We used to have kerosene lamps before we had electricity. We'd crowd around the table to read. You couldn't sit in a chair and read since the light was so dim. People were used to not having a lot of light. We could just sit around and talk, and you wouldn't need a lot of light for that.

Work was hard on the farm. Much of my childhood we farmed beets. We also grew beans, potatoes, corn and alfalfa.  But mostly it was beets. In early April, the men would plant the beet seeds. After they were thinned they'd have to do weeding. We all had a hoe and we'd all hoe the weeds out. Later on, if the weeds got big, we'd just pull the weeds out. They'd have to water, too. They'd have to drive through the fields with equipment and make ditches. They had irrigation canals at first, and later on they had sprinklers.

As children, we had to help with working the sugar beets. We were only six or seven years old. I was lucky; I had to baby sit. But my brothers--they had to start thinning beets when they were six or seven years old. One brother was a skinny little kid, and the ground was so hard, his fingers would get so sore they'd bleed. The beets were planted in a solid row, and the adults would block or space the beets with a hoe, and space them about ten to twelve inches apart. That little bunch spaced every ten or twelve inches--the kids had to crawl behind the adults, and pull out all the beets in those bunches but one. Sometimes when I think about that, I can't imagine how they survived, but they did. When I think back, I didn't think it was bad, but when you see how things are nowadays, it's different. When I see how they had to make a living, it's hard to believe. By the time I got into my teens, things got better. There was more farm equipment.

In the fall, starting in September, they'd have a team of horses, with a puller or lifter and pull out all the beets. Then people would plow up and gather those beets and pile them in a row so that they were pointed in the same direction. Then we'd straddle the row and cut the tops off with a knife with a hook on it. Then they'd pull a v-shaped tool to make a smooth place to put all the beets in. In the early days, they had horses and wagons, and they had the big scoop forks and they'd scoop the beets on the wagon and haul them to the sugar beet dump. The tops they'd use for cattle feed.

If it didn't hail too much, the crops would survive. If there was a hard enough hail storm, though, that'd wreck a crop. Between the time when you'd harvest and plant, you'd feed cattle. Maybe they'd haul or spread manure, or maybe they didn't do anything. But they still had work to do.

[This section picks up again with recorded conversations from interviews in 1993 and 1997.]

Russia was a lot different than it was in Colorado or Wyoming or Nebraska. In the states you lived where your farm was instead of living in a village and going out to work. On these little farms the people worked the land. It was right around them. They lived at home at night. Different people owned the land. A lot of these people were just renters, and maybe just tenants, who worked the land. Of course there was a landlord. He had a larger, much nicer house. Then he would hire a family, and they would tend to the sugar beets, and the hired men would do the planting. The boss wouldn't do much of anything; he would just sit at home.

They provided people with the housing. It was okay; it was pretty nice actually. Those things -- those things I remember. I remember, oh, probably five -- from five years on. I remember all of it.

I remember having a real cute little hat one time. People used to buy cute little hats for their little girls. People went visiting a lot. They had neighbors probably a half mile away, and they would take their kids and walk to the neighbors. They probably wouldn't stay all that long. But I remember this one time I fell asleep before my parents came home, so my dad had to carry me home. I was pretty little yet. And I lost my little hat. We never did find that little hat. I felt so bad about it. They were so cute -- hats with little flowers and ribbons on them.

At the neighbors' we'd play games too. We'd just play any game. They didn't have any certain kind of games, like Monopoly. We just played any ol' game. We were just little kids together. We didn't have anything special to play with. We did have dolls, though. These people that we visited that night, I know their little girl had a doll buggy and a doll, and we never did. I had one doll that my brother broke for me. But I thought those buggies were the cutest little things, those little buggies made out of wicker. I would have given anything in the world to have a buggy like that, but I never did have one.

Sometimes on weekends -- or if they had a free night -- we'd go over to someone's house; it wouldn't be every night. Of course they had a horse and buggy. If they didn't want to walk, if they wanted to go farther, they would use the horse and buggy. When they used to have a horse and buggy it would be farther. It could be as much as two or three miles. It didn't take too long.

A Scary Story

My sister and me, Mollie -- my older sister was six years older --  had these friends, three girls. One of them was Mollie's age and one was my age and one in between. Anyway, we used to visit. Those girls would come to our house and we would walk to their house. It was about a mile and a half each way. I remember it was in the fall, and we would stay until it was dark. It didn't matter what time it was because there were different farms on the road on the way going back home. We weren't afraid.

I remember the girl's name, Mary, was the oldest one. She was Mollie's age. The youngest one was Lydia. We started to walk home. We were probably a couple of blocks -- probably a quarter of a mile from their house. There were all these trees along the side of that road. The moon was shining through the trees; the leaves were mostly all gone already. It was the fall.

There was a big harvest moon. There were a lot of leaves on the ground along the sides of road down when we were walking. Neither one of us were talking, and all of a sudden we heard this rustling of leaves. We both heard it. And Mollie said, “What is that?”  So we kept going and we heard it again. About that time, about this far from me -- we were walking along the edge of the road --  there was this tall person standing there. It didn't even seem like a person. But it was a person. He had on real dark clothes. He didn't say anything, he just stood there. Boy, we turned around. And, you know, it wasn't like one of the farmers. It was really strange.

So we went back. We were afraid to go home then. We told our story to this family. Some people said that somebody had hung themselves there in one of those trees. They said somebody really hung themselves there. And, of course, they think this was a ghost. It was really strange. When I think about this, it still makes me have a creepy feeling.

I am sure that isn't true, but it was really strange and scary. I was probably nine or 10, probably about 10. I remember that because we left Colorado when I was 11 years old, probably around 10.

The Great Depression

We left Colorado on account of the crops didn't come up because of drought. That whole time reminds me of The Grapes of Wrath. We had a Ford Touring car and ten people piled into that. Can you imagine?  Ten people. My brother, Ed, his leg was in a cast. (When he was seven he fell off a slide and did something to his hip and back. Then they didn't know how to fix it. Later on they replaced his hip.)   Somehow we all piled in there. We took some food along, summer sausage, boiled eggs, some fruit. I don't know how long it took. We stop every now and then and eat.           

And then we went to Huntley, Wyoming. Then we moved to Melbeta, Nebraska and lived there three years. We did our own farming there, sugar beets mostly. We had to work the field then. The school I went to was Creighton Valley. I probably went to about ten schools altogether. I started at seven years of age and spoke no English then.          

I remember the Dust Bowl. We were in Mitchell then. The sky was red. We used to have to dig the dust out of our homes with shovels. The Depression affected us, but we didn't hurt as much as the poor people living in town. On a farm we always had our livestock, our hogs. We always had meat, potatoes and eggs. People would use corn cobs to keep their homes warm. It was a difficult time for many.

Our whole family had the flu around then -- Sam, Ed and Bud. Bud, especially. Bud was born and was very sick. I had to take care of them. I remember having to take water to them. Doctors or nurses would come to the house to vaccinate us for small pox and diphtheria. These days when they vaccinate it's no big deal, but then it was awful. It'd leave a big mark on your arm, this big around.

More Adventures in the Midwest

And then there was the time when we got stranded on top of an elevator, a grain elevator, you know, those old fashion types. I remember how we hung on to the back of a truck that was hauling grain to the elevator. The elevator was about mile, probably. And when we were got there -- messing around like kids will do -- there was this person on this elevator.

When this one machine stopped, this one person said, “Would you like to go up to the top and see what it looks like up there?”  He took us up there to the top of the elevator. About the time we got up there all the machinery started up again. We couldn't get down. We had to stay up there until the machinery stopped.

It got nighttime. We were all missing from our homes. I was missing from my home. So my parents get in the car, go to their friend's place. I think about when they found us we had gotten back down, and it was nighttime. The elevator had stopped. About that time they drove up. Oh, brother, did we get it.

You know, that person shouldn't have taken these two little kids up in the elevator. We could have fallen down. We didn't think about the danger, though. We did lot of silly things. We'd play in snake-filled irrigation ditches, you know -- not snake-filled, but everyone saw a few snakes in there. We would swim in that ugly dirty water. When our parents used to go out to work in the beet fields -- there were several times -- I remember two places -- where there was this one place with a huge canal that went past our shack.

We lived in the shack, and our parents would lock us in the house. I guess they had no other way. There wasn't any way. They didn't have any baby-sitters. They did the best they could. So they'd just lock the door, and they would go out for a half day at a time -- go out in the morning and didn't come home until noon. We would be locked up in the house. We could have gotten hurt in there, too. But that is the way it was. That is how people did things. That is how they did it. They didn't have any other way. They had to make a living. We all survived, though.

School

We went to school. They did allow people to keep their kids home for a short time, but when they weren't home, excused for this or that, why there would be an officer at the door. If you weren't in school -- school started at 9 o'clock -- and you were missing, there would be an officer at the door checking up. So we went to school. We had school buses. Most of time we went to school we had school buses. I will tell you the first crush I had was on my school bus driver. Oh, I just loved him. I thought he was the nicest guy. I was probably about eight, nine years old. I kept all of it secret, to myself. I didn't tell anybody about it. You are probably the only one that knows. I even remember his name. His name was Paul Milner.

The very first school I went to was a red schoolhouse. Then the other school was a pretty nice school; it is still there. That was in Colorado. That was about seven or eight miles, maybe ten miles, out of Ft. Collins, just a little town, called Timnath. It was a nice big beautiful school. They had this built-in gymnasium; it was deeper than the basement. There is a basement on the first floor, then the second floor. Then below the basement there was this gymnasium. On each end of the gymnasium there were the bleachers. It was very nice.

They had a nice large auditorium, special auditorium, nice seats, that would fold up and they were staggered so the people in the back end could see as well as the front ones. And the schoolroom that was behind it had doors that could open up, so if the auditorium was crowded they could open that up and people could sit in the back. It was really a very nice school. It is still being used.

When my sister and I drove to Denver about 15 years ago -- that is where Arnie lived -- on the way back to Worland we drove around to that little school. As we went through this little town, there was this old store called Lund's. The people's name was Lund. They owned this mercantile; they had a little bit of everything there. We used to go there and buy candy, those little wax things with that liquid stuff in it where you bite off the top of it. If we had a penny or two, we would go there and spend it. Those things used to cost a penny.

When she and I, about 15 years ago, went by there, that old store was still there and it was still open. Probably the same family on down. But it still had the same name on it. It is really amazing to see that there. I was about 10 when I used to shop there. And then 25 years ago, that is a lot of long years, a lot of years.

Living Arrangements

I still remember every place we lived. And we must have lived in about -- I would have to count them -- at least seven different houses in that area, in the radius around Ft. Collins. Where we lived -- probably two miles long that way and maybe two miles long that way, probably -- in that area we must have lived in about seven or eight different places. I remember how every one of them looked, just like it was yesterday.

There was this one house that was pretty nice. This one house, before we moved away from Ft. Collins, it had three bedrooms. I remember they had one bed out in what you would call the dining room and living room. It was a real big room and then on the side, on one corner it had another bed there. So kids had to sleep together; they didn't mind. There was no other way.

Now everyone has got to have a bed all by themselves from the time they are born. They have got to have their space. So I think people got along better in those days, when they had to learn to share when they were little like that. If you have to share everything like that, that makes you more able to talk to people, too, and relate. I think people talked more then and spent more time together too. No matter where we lived, even after we left Ft. Collins and moved to Wyoming and western Nebraska -- I was growing up, 13, thereabouts -- no matter where people lived, we always had friends. The next house, the next farmhouse, or all of the next houses, they got acquainted just like that, and they were friends. They would visit each other. People don't do that nowadays.

They always seemed to have a good time. They talked about, I suppose, everything. They gossiped. I know sometimes they talked about other people. It is amazing how these people always had a lot of friends. Nowadays people can live on top of each other in a town and they don't even know what the next door person looks like.

I remember this one year -- gosh, I must have been about 16 years old already when my parents and the neighbors went to a New Year's Eve party, celebrating. They would just prepare. I remember my mother wrapping big hams, pork hams, in this dough she made, just flour and water. She would wrap that meat in there and bake it. Oh, that was good. Then she would peel the crust off. I think it was better than wrapping it in foil. But of course they didn't have any foil -- anyway, we didn't. Then here would come different neighbors, maybe from three or four houses. They would stop there; they would have a drink and a bite to eat.

My mom would always bake these good breads and good pork. They would eat and then get out by their cars. Some of these people had guns. When they would go to the next house, why they would blast off the shotgun to wish them "Happy New Year!"  Then those people would have food and everything. They would stay there and visit and celebrate. That is the way they went from house to house, celebrating that way, wishing people a happy new year. I bet they had a lot fun that way.

Having Fun

They found their entertainment. No radio, though. We didn't have radio. I think about that time, probably about that time, when I was about 16, I think my sister, Mollie, and her husband bought their first radio. We didn't have one, though. We did have like a gramophone or phonograph. Before we left Ft. Collins, our landlord, the boss, the landowner, they must have gotten something better. They had one of these Edisons. The records were about that [gesturing an inch] thick. I still remember one record, the name of the one record was “The Japanese Sandman.”  I still hear that music, “Japanese Sandman.”  When we moved away from ft. Collins we did take it with us. My parents -- even when they moved to Nebraska, then when they moved up to Wyoming after I was married -- they had taken it up there, too. So I don't know whatever happened to it. Fritz -- Helen and Fritz -- he is a collector so he still has some of those thick records. But I don't know whatever happened to the machine.

They had dances too. I don't know about the old people. I don't know whether they did. But when I was a teenager, they used to have barn dances or shack dances. Somebody would probably bring an accordion they would be good on. They would play this polka music. We had a good time, probably better times than people have nowadays. They weren't involved with drugs. And someone had alcohol. I know some of these guys couldn't dance unless they had a couple of drinks. They'd carry around a little flask with them. They would bring their own and go out a take a drink.

It wasn't like a place to meet boys or for boys to meet girls, though. People would just go there. I suppose girls had dates and they would go to those shack dances with somebody. They weren't just hangouts. They would sort of be paired off and coupled up before they even went there.

--Interview by Chris Davis