Dale Espy (Little) 1927 – “Sweet Sixteen”

Now that Jailhouse Stories is in production (publication date, June 13^th) I am beginning to think about another book project.  Again, it would be based on a series I did for the Chinook Observer some years back.  Actually, it was a decade ago – 2006!  “North Beach Girls of the Teens and Twenties” told about the growing up years of seventeen remarkable women, all of whom were then in their eighties and nineties.  The idea began with a discussion I had had with my mother:

“How old am I?” she asks.
“Ninety-four,” I tell her.
“Nooo!” comes the astonished reply.
“Yes!  You’ll be ninety-five in November.”
Helen-Dale Espy Little, known to her friends as “Dale” (and to me as “Mom”), was born November 13, 1911.  She was the seventh and last child of Harry and Helen Espy of Oysterville — a tousled-haired tow-headed “imp” according to descriptions written by her mother during her toddler years.  These days, her memory is fogged with dementia and conversation has become difficult, but her lovely blue-gray eyes still light up at the mention of her girlhood growing-up place and nothing pleases her more than spending a bit of time at “home” in Oysterville.

Catherine “Kay” McGowan (Garvin) with her grandfather, P.J. McGowan, c. 1911

My article continued with her marvelous descriptions of life here on the “North Beach” during her girlhood – before there were “automobile-machines,” or electricity and when the family banking and doctoring were done across the bay in South Bend which was far easier (and faster) to reach than Ilwaco.  And the photographs!  Fabulous snapshots of a time almost-but-not-quite within my memory.

The Herrold Twins – Charlotte (Davis) and Catherine (Troeh) 1931 Graduation from St. Vincent’s School of Nursing

The other women featured in my series were Virginia Williams Jones, Verna Smith Oller, the Hoare Sisters (JoAnne Risley and Marilyn Nielsen), the Chellis Sisters (Frances Church and Lorna Holeman), Martha Turner Murfin,  Emma Louise Sather Krager, Catherine “Kay” McGowan Garvin, the Herrold Twins (Charlotte Davis and Catherine Troeh),  Ellen Loomis McMurry, Edith Martin Bales, Dorothy Trondsen Williams, Donna Gabriel Oman, and Adelle Redfern Beechey.  I loved interviewing each and every one of them.  Some were friends of my mother’s and I had known them since my childhood; others I knew because they were parents of my own friends; others I had met “in the community.”  Every single one of them was remarkable!

So… I’m noodling about another book.  I don’t know if I’m up to the process ‘yet again.’  But those women are all calling to me, most of them from ‘the great beyond.’  And, if I’m hearing them correctly, it’s not so much that they, personally, want to be remembered (although that may be a part of it).  It’s more that they don’t want those precious years to be forgotten – those coming-of-age years of the early twentieth century in our little corner of the world.