Opportunity

Note: While I was visiting Westminster Abbey in London I got the idea of writing about how my relatives were drawn by the Opportunities in the United States.


On my mother's side both her parents though they were both born here in the U.S. , their parents were native to Scotland. And both her parents had a loss of some kind and even though both were born in the U.S. they were forced to return to Scotland to grow up and then meet each other and marry there in Scotland before returning to the U.S. to the land of their birth and leaving their parents alone in Scotland to pass away without them. Such were the prices of opportunity in leaving the old country for a new life in the U.S.A.


My father's side I can trace back to 1580 in Hirzel, Switzerland near Zurich, Switzerland. They came first to Germany on their way through England in, I believe 1725 in a ship likely much like the Mayflower the Pilgrims used and up the Philadelphia River and Harbor to settle first in Pennsylvania there. Eventually my ancestors on my father's side wound up in Kansas, where my father's father(grandfather) was born in Kansas during the 1880s to a Union Army Captain from the Civil War who began a drug store there with medicines gathered by local native American Medicine men and women to be sold to local whites and Indians there in his drug store that he ran from the 1870s until 1925. Then my Grandfather, (sometimes known as "Pinkie" the Baseball Pitcher because he had red hair, became an Electrical Contractor around the early 1900s. My father was born in Morenci, Arizona as my grandfather got Electrical Contracts throughout the western states with his family until he bought a home for the family in Seattle, Washington in the late 1920s when my father was 11 or 12 years of age.


My Mother's side:

As far back as I can trace my mother's family lived in Scotland for many generations. However, then my grandfather's mother worked as a maid in an English Lord's Manor in Edinburgh, Scotland. I guess the Lord of the Manor had his way with her and she became pregnant so she married her boyfriend(someone other than the Lord of the manor) and moved with him to Boston, Massachusetts, in the U.S.A She had another child, my Grandfather there in Boston. And then another son was also born there by her and her husband. However, my grandfather George became very sick one winter and when he father went to get medicine for him in very cold wintry weather, his father became sick with pneumonia and died suddenly at a young age (likely no mare than early 30s). This made George's mother destitute with 3 children and so she went back to her family in Scotland. When George and his siblings grew up, the two younger ones, George and his brother, John moved back to the United States. By this time George had married my grandmother, Margaret. I'm not sure if John was married or not when he came back to the place of his birth, the United States as he was younger than George.

George attended Moody Bible Institute to become a minister there in Chicago and eventually moved with his wife and two daughters to Omaha, Nebraska where many of my Grandmother's brothers and sisters worked on the newspaper there. Eventually, George and Margaret and there three daughters moved by Model T Ford to Seattle, Washington where my mother, her mother and two other sisters all stayed until my mother married my father in 1946 when she was 27 and two years later had me. Then in 1952 my father moved my mother, her mother and me to San Diego. There in Vista, California, all my grandmother's relatives (brothers and sisters) came out from Nebraska to see her once before they all got too old to see each other once again in 1953. I met them all then when I was 5 years of age.

My grandmother, Margaret, was born in 1888 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and grew up there in the families home. However, when my grandmother was about 12 years of age, I believe, the family home burned down and this forced the return to Scotland of her parents and 11 brothers and sisters. She grew up the rest of the way in Clydebank, near Glasgow until she was an adult .

My grandmother's life was difficult in that she was pulled out of grade school at age 8 by her parents never to return. Though I did not hear about this from her directly, my mother told me of this as I grew up. When my own mother was in her 80s she finally admitted to me that she and her mother were dyslexic and that there was so much discrimination about things like this in the past that everyone found it better not to speak about things like this. My mother told me even in her 80s only because my son was also dyslexic even though he has an IQ of over 150. But because of it he lacked the confidence to succeed in school in spelling and English even though in science subjects and computer languages and building computers he always was an A plus student. In his thirties he graduated with many honors with a bachelor of science degree as a nurse. He plans also to get now a Master's degree in Nursing.

My grandmother was pulled out of school at age 8 because there were no useful teaching methods to teach a dyslexic person available then. So rather than have her just be shamed, her parents pulled her out of school in the third grade and brought her home to raise the other 11 children as she was one of the 3 oldest of the 12. She spent the rest of her life raising first all her brothers and sisters and then getting married and raising her 3 daughters and then when I was born she raised me for my mother and father as well. She always spent a lot of time reading her Bible and praying. My mother and grandmother were two of the most intuitive, mystical and spiritual people I have ever known. I wouldn't have become a natural intuitive and mystic without the both of them always there for me in every way, protecting me and guiding me to become a gentleman and a scholar, an intuitive and a mystic. My grandmother always taught me it was better to injure myself than to injure another physically. So, I learned not to cause harm even though I was always very big and strong for my age. So, I spent a lot of time protecting others smaller than myself from harm while growing up. This was probably good as I always had quite a temper like my father. My father and grandfather if they were riled up could be the two scariest people I have ever known. But as long as they were treated fairly they would be fair and just with anyone. They just wouldn't put up with being mistreated by anyone. In this sense they both were very much men of the Western United States.

These stories describe my grandfather perfectly. Though I was always a little afraid of Grandad, since I was his favorite grandson and the most like him, I always knew if I did right by him he would die for me if it came to that.

When I was 12 we went to visit grand Dad on his 2 1/2 acres. He lived there then with my grandmother and my aunt and her husband and their two kids in a separate house.  He wanted me to rototill the 2 1/2 acres of land to plant some more stuff to grow there. Since I already had a scar in the top of one of my feet from a push lawnmower that I had mowed our lawn back in Glendale, California with, I took a look at this rototiller out of the 1940s with no safety devices at all to protect my feet and just didn't say anything. I knew arguing with my Grand Dad would be a very bad idea. So, I just listened to him and decided I wasn't going to harm myself on this dangerous rototiller and after he left I just walked away.

Later, I guess he had talked to my Dad and my Dad came and said, "Why didn't you rototill the land like your Grandad asked you to?" I said, "That old thing is dangerous! I already have one scar on the top of my foot from the push lawnmower back in Glendale!" Dad said, " I'll loan you my work boots that have metal in them so it won't be able to cut up your feet if you get in its way." So I said, "Okay. That will be enough protection." So I started up the old rototiller and tilled the land. At age 12 I was already as big as a man at about five foot 8 or five foot 10 so I could work like a man at my size.

The next two stories are true. However, I wasn't there personally to witness them. But I know enough about my Grandad to know that these stories are true about him.

The first story is that it was during World War II and I think my Grandad had retired in the early 1940s when World War II began and let his older son (Dad's oldest brother) take over the family electrical contracting business). So Grandad raised I believe either strawberries or tomatoes east of the cascades on rented land to be sold as a part of the Victory Garden War effort to feed everyone during the war. However, when his crop got ripe he went to get his gas coupons to haul his crop to market. But the gas coupon rationing people said, "Oh. That season was over two weeks ago there won't be coupons." So my grandfather simply went and got his shotgun and walked in and set it on the desk of the person who promptly gave grandad the gas coupons for hauling his crop to market. This was the cowboy way. He didn't verbally threaten anyone. He just wasn't going to leave without his gas coupons. He knew his rights.

The next story has several parts to it to get just who my Grandad was. The first story was when he was approached in Idaho on his 2000 acre gold mining claim by a forest ranger. The ranger came up to Grandad there and said, "Sir. You have to move off your mining claim now. The laws have changed and you can't have a mining claim this large without making more money mining gold than you do." My Grandad simply got out his 30 odd 6 World War I army rifle (that he hunted deer, elk and bear with until 1925) and shot the ranger's hat off his head. The Rangers left Grandad alone to live there 6 months a year until he died. (He lived spring summer 6 months in Idaho' and then wintered 6 months with his wife in their home in Seattle, Washington.)

The next story also took place in Idaho. One day Grandad  wanted to pull out a tree stump on his mining claim for some reason so he started up his D-9 Caterpillar Tractor which had a strong winch with a thick wire as big around as a person's thumb in width. Then he tied off the tractor to a large boulder in one direction and then tied the drag line onto the stump and started up the tractor's winch and kept tightening it until the tractor had so much tension on the thing it lifted the whole tractor off of the ground and it spun upside down on the line on top of Grandpa and he was pinned underneath there for several days alone with hot water and hot diesel burning him. Eventually, a neighbor found him and called the rescue crew and fire department and took him to the hospital in Grangeville which was the nearest Hospital for the Elk City area where his mining claim was in. But since Grandpa had a sort of Kansas Cowboy attitude he didn't want to die without his boots on. So even though he had a collapsed lung he made the nurses put his cowboy boots on because he had to die with his boots on. Somehow, someone smuggled into the hospital his Camel, or Marlborough cigarettes and so with a carton of these he smoked and reinflated his collapsed lung. He also got a pistol into the hospital somehow and decided one day just to walk out of there because, "People only die in hospitals!" So, he walked out and never went back.


The last time I saw grandpa I was about 21 years old. I had bought myself a brand new 1968 Camaro when I was 20 then in 1968 but since then I had been excommunicated from my childhood church. I was sort of suicidal at the time (anyone could see this by my despondency). It was September 1970 and I saw the way he looked at me that he couldn't bear to see his favorite Grandson so close to suicide. The girl I had intended to marry stayed with the church so my plans for the next 20 plus years of my life were over then too. Grandpa was dead about one month later when a wheel bearing froze on a dirt road on the way to his mining claim from Seattle and his panel truck (Van) fell into the river. Luckily, or (unluckily) (you decide) there were men vacuuming the river for gold dust at the time and since they already had wet suits on they pulled him out and drove him home as he wouldn't let them take him to the hospital because he didn't want to die there. Three days later his son Bob from Seattle found him with old chair staves poked into his back from an old chair that broke when he fell over in his mountain cabin. He died in the hospital (knowing him) likely from embarrassment of just being in a hospital. Grandad was a fighter until the end. They just don't make them like that anymore. Both he and my Dad will be missed. There was just no one like them, sort of like John Wayne, the actor.