Growing up Grandma-less

Mom had lost her own mother when she was 6 years old, but because she was so young, she really didn't remember her. Sure, she had heard the stories of the hit and run accident that had taken her mother's life in 1929, but much of the rest of what she knew of her mother came from her oldest sister Jeane.

My Dad's mother was named Minnie Caroline, and I was named after her. I have always been honored to know that they thought I was special enough to name me after my paternal grandmother as well as mom's oldest sister Jeane. Minnie was born in Howell County, Missouri in 1894. Most of her childhood and young adult life was spent in Howell county, in and around Brandsville, Fruitville and West Plains.

Minnie's own father had died at the age of forty-four in 1899 after he contracted spinal meningitis while helping care for a friend who had come down with this horrible disease. No one else would care for this friend but Harvey Smith, and his ministering to this nameless friend cost him his life. The friend survived. Minnie was just a few months shy of being three years old at the time her daddy died. She was the youngest of seven children born to Harvey Lawson and Mary Elizabeth Pentecost Smith.

Harvey Lawson Smith

My Great Grandmother Mary E., as she liked to be called, had come through her own physical and emotional hardships when she lost one of her babies sometime between the years of 1876 and 1881. She almost lost another baby, my Great Aunt Mirtha, in 1889. Mirtha's daughter Allene related the story of her mother's birth and how Mary E. had kept her alive for the first few months by keeping her warm in a small box in the woodstove that was always kept at the ready. Mirtha was the fifth live birth of Mary and Harvey's children. I credit my Great Grandmother Elizabeth Jane Hunter, Mary E.'s mother, for that. Grandma Hunter was a mid-wife-by-necessity in her time, and there is no doubt that she passed along her birthing skills to her own three daughters, Mary E., Miriam and Ruth.

 The Harvey Lawson Smith Family, West Plains, MO

Attending church was something most of my dad's family did on a regular basis, so it wasn't surprising to find out from my Missouri cousins that Mary E. and her second husband Jim Yates, met at church. No doubt, there was probably some match-making going on in both families to get these two together after they had both lost their spouses. In those days, and in this particular part of America, most everyone walked or rode a horse wherever they needed to go. A long walk home after church probably provided many opportunities for them to get to know each other.

In February of 1907 Jim Yates and Mary E. Smith were united in marriage in Howell County, Missouri, and so the Yates and Smith clans were combined. Jim's son Will was fifteen when his father remarried, and no doubt he was quite taken with his new younger step-sister Minnie who was thirteen at the time. Most all of Jim Yates' children were married and away from home when he remarried, but family stories have it that the Yates kids didn't have an easy time with their new step-mother whether they lived at home or not. Family legend has it that she was a force to be reckoned with. I have read some of her letters, and she was definitely single-minded.

Will most likely quit school when he was young so that he could help out on the family farm, so although he could read and write, it was never with much alacrity. Minnie had gone to teacher's college in Springfield and had obtained her teaching certificate to qualify her to teach third grade. I don't know that she ever taught school in Missouri, but I know that she was a student of the Bible and could quote it chapter and verse, so my dad told us with no little amount of pride and chagrin.

World War I had been raging in Europe for a few years when my grandfather Will Yates received his draft notice in 1917. It was only a matter of time before he was pressed into serving his nation in "The War to End All Wars". His draft registration is dated June 5, 1917.  Minnie was twenty-three and Will was twenty-five when they were married on June 29th of 1917. Witnesses were the mother of the bride and the wife of the minister who married them, Rev. O. N. Barnett.

Will K. and Minnie C. Yates

 As a WW I soldier, Will served as a Pvt. in Battery D, of the 339th Field Artillery in France. Some years before, he had traveled back and forth to Bordeaux, Washington where some of his sisters and one brother had settled, and when he was in France he was stationed near Bordeaux which he found to be an amusing coincidence. One night he found some French wine in a cellar and proceeded to drink it all. The next morning he woke up near a river. He went down the bank, probably to get a drink and wash his face, but he fell in instead. He used to tell that story with a little embarrassed chuckle. While he was serving in France, his wife and family were at home worrying that he would be one of the men who brought home the Spanish Flu that was already a pandemic world-wide. His unit was scheduled to be sent up to the front when the war ended.

Grandpa was one of the lucky ones who did not get the flu or pass it along to his family, and so when he came home in 1918 he went back to farming with his dad on his dad's 80 acres. In March of 1920 he and Minnie became the parents of their first son, William Gale Yates, my dad.

Missouri had been drained of its young men, and southern parts of the state had been turned to dust with the beginning of the drought affecting the region from 1917 to 1920. Once a prime stone fruit growing area, Howell county found the Will Yates family yearning for the lush green forests of the Pacific Northwest where there would be work for Grandpa in one of the mills. As Will's cousins the Holmes family had done in 1842, eighty-four years later Will, Minnie and their now two sons Gale and Guy, followed a similar reasoning and path as they migrated from Missouri to Washington on a path not too dissimilar to the Oregon Trail where they hoped to find a better life.  

Gale and Guy Yates

And so, in 1926 they all began a new life in a little mill town called Bordeaux. The house they lived in was owned by the company, and the food they bought was purchased at the company store. Their mail was collected at the post office in that store and given to them by the postmistress Bessie McKay. The boys attended a two room schoolhouse in town, and the family increased by one more when the youngest boy Waldo was born in 1927. Grandma loved her boys and probably tolerated her somewhat austere life as the wife of a mill worker. They always had a garden, and canned much of their crop as generations of families had done before them. "Store bought" clothes were probably a luxury, and grandma was also a seamstress who could supplement the wardrobe of her rough and tumble boys.

My dad said he remembered the day that he saw his mom preparing that evening's meal, and he had watched as she opened the home canned jar of corn and took a bite of it. No doubt, that scene was burned into his memory for the rest of his life. It was the spring of 1932.

In the days to follow, Minnie became sick with what she thought was a cold. Family members have told me she had asthma, so maybe she thought she was having a flare-up of that condition. It was much worse than that though. Grandma had botulism poisoning from eating corn from the jar before heating it so that it would kill off any of the toxins. In food-borne botulism, symptoms generally begin 18 to 36 hours after eating a contaminated food, but they can occur as early as 6 hours or as late as 10 days. Dad told me that his mother was asking for some Vick's for her throat and neck, never suspecting that her symptoms were more serious.

Eventually, Grandma was taken to the hospital when she continued to get worse. People in those days didn't have the resources or medical knowledge that we have today. They were used to taking care of themselves, whether it was surviving childbirth or battling the flu. It puzzles me to this day just why the doctors could not save my grandmother's life. I don't know the whole story though. Maybe she didn't go to the hospital in time. I will never know. It just makes me sad that I never got to know Minnie, or my maternal grandmother Helen.