Front Porch: Stories an extended gift to generations of family

My friend Isabelle is putting the finishing touches on a most wonderful legacy for her family. I can’t imagine a better gift.

She is 85 now and, for the past 20 years or so, has been writing stories about the daily lives and adventures of her extended family, going back several generations. She’s compiled them in four bound journals, the final one almost complete. Various family members – aunts, grandparents, siblings, cousins, herself and others – are the stars of the tales, and they reveal as much about the times they lived in as they do about the people who lived the stories.

I know this because I’ve read them, and I’m doing a little proofing/editing on this last one (she wanted a final set of eyes to catch any glaring errors). What a privilege this has been for me.

Though she worked in higher education for most of her career, in her early adulthood, she was a reporter for the Wenatchee Daily World newspaper, so she knows her way around the telling of a story. She said that was a long time ago, but I can attest that she still has it.

Some of the individual stories have been pulled out and published here and there, too – such as in a fall 2020 issue of Nostalgia magazine, running her account of how voting took place in private homes in Spokane. Her story focuses on the 1948 Truman-Dewey presidential election and tells how her grandmother, known as Othermama, prepared her house on Everett Avenue for the delivery of voting machines to be set up as a precinct voting locale. Othermama always baked something tasty beforehand so the house would smell good. If the voting line got too long, young Isabelle would go outside and offer a homemade treat to the waiting voters.

This fourth volume – some 150-plus pages long and with photos – is kind of the potpourri edition, including stories that either weren’t written when she put the first collections together or just somehow didn’t fit in them, and includes more family recollections from generations above Isabelle’s.

It also includes what I call the begat section – you know, who was born when, who married whom, listing the names and information about their children – and then the same for those children – concluding with her generation. That part isn’t such snappy reading, but it will be valuable for any of her grandchildren or great-grandchildren (and those who come after) who might wish to know just who exactly is who and how they are all connected.

In this latest compilation, there are a couple of accounts that stand out about her Aunt Margarite (Aunt Marky), whose mother Myrtle became pregnant by her beau prior to marriage, and the birth father beating it out of town when he learned of the pregnancy. Despite the mores of the time (around 1902), the family rallied around her, and a family friend named Paul stepped forward to marry Myrtle. They had a happy marriage, it is told, during which time they raised several children, of whom Paul always considered Marky his precious eldest.

The first volume of the four focuses on the summers between 1964 and 1970, when Isabelle’s husband, Rondy, who was a teacher, took a job with the U.S. Forest Service, monitoring camping areas and delivering supplies to back-country work crews in the Wenatchee National Forest, up along the Entiat River. Isabelle had a lot of improvising to do keeping a household operating in a cabin way up in the mountains in what were mighty primitive – but joyful – conditions, where their children had endless outdoors adventures.

The second volume – which, I confess, is my favorite – recalls her days living in Seattle with extended family for a few years during World War II. It was in Isabelle’s Great-Aunt Zou’s house near Garfield High School where she and her brother Lee and their parents Gretchen and Lee, and her Aunt Isabelle (for whom she is named) and her husband, Jack, all threw in together during the war.

There were many deprivations then, of course, but she was 5 years old when her Seattle days began. Stories of those times are told as they were seen through the eyes of a child, when the world can be full of wonder, even when things going on all about you aren’t all that wonderful in reality.

The third volume is a series of life sketches focusing on her more direct family line – parents, brother, herself, and their life experiences.

Throughout all of the stories in all the volumes is one constant – family. And family making do.

Consider one of the stories about Isabelle’s great-aunt Goldie, who ran off with a traveling dance troupe at age 15 in the early 1900s. She returned a year later with a baby and a husband, borrowed money from her sister Myrtle, then left her child behind “for a few days” (which turned out to be year) so she could go off and get her life together. Goldie spent most of her life “borrowing” and dropping her child off, eventually settling down with an impoverished Danish nobleman, a count (considered a no-account by Isabelle’s family), in his home country.

It’s a great story to read, but the takeaway is that Myrtle knew just exactly who Goldie was and what she was doing, but she loved her anyhow and stood by her. Because she was family.

Although Isabelle will be providing copies to her descendants and those of her late brother – or, frankly, any of her relatives who want copies – she understands that not everyone will read the stories. But they will have them.

Isabelle wanted to pass them along. Stories that go with the box of photos in the attics of the older family members. History. Their history.

She wanted to tell the stories while she could, while her mind is still sharp – and it is, believe me! And to keep alive for herself all these people whose everyday lives she knew about and were important to her.

Not to get too grand here, but this kind of writing is part of the patchwork quilt that is America. What a gift it is that Isabelle Sadie (Wright) Green is stitching her family into it.