Community Historians, January 2014
The other day Mike Lemeshko mentioned that his 91-year-old mother enjoys my blogs. He reads them to her every day, he told me, and she especially enjoyed the one I wrote last week about the pig. Me too! She sounds like my kind of woman!
I only ‘know’ Mrs. Lemeshko through Mike and I only know Mike through the Community Historian Project. Mike (and I assume his mother, too) live in the Olympia area and I was always impressed that he made it to our fifteen morning classes without missing a beat. His ‘project’ has to do with Judge Briscoe who lived here in Territorial times. Mike has kindly kept me in his research loop, often giving me snippets of information about my great-grandfather R.H. Espy.
When he shared with me his mom’s interest in my blog, Mike said: She and my father honeymooned at Long Beach in 1941 and it really is due to her that I got infected with the beach…
Sydney at the Beach, 1941
That bit of information got me thinking about the Peninsula in 1941. I’m quite sure that I was here in Oysterville that summer, staying with my grandparents while my folks moved our worldly possessions from an apartment on College Avenue in Portland to a house on Versailles Avenue in Alameda. Montgomery Ward had transferred my father to their Oakland, California headquarters.
It was probably the first of many summers that I spent here in Oysterville without either of my parents along. Shortly after war was declared in December, my mom went to work in the shipyards and I became an ‘Oysterville Summer Kid’ for the duration. I’m thinking that Edna May Sifferman Lemeshko was probably honeymooning in Long Beach at the very time I was playing with the Holway and Heckes kids down at the bay. The new Mrs, Lemeshko was 18; I was 5. I wonder if our paths ever crossed. Not that either of us would have noticed.
I also wonder if Mrs. Lemeshko’s husband would soon go off to war. Or were they even thinking about that eventuality? Dobby Wiegardt who is between Mrs. Lemeshko and me in age has clear memories of the day war was declared. Of course, those who know Dobby will know that it’s more a duck hunting memory than a memory of the war starting:
Beach Patrol, WWII
On December 7, 1941, the day Pearl Harbor was bombed, Dobby was spending the day at Leadbetter Point duck-hunting with his father, They returned home to find that the entire community had been looking for them. Dobby’s father, as Commander of the American Legion, was needed. Within a day or two, his father had organized the Home Guard. Men and boys of all ages, including 10-year-old Dobby, practiced close order drill in the Ocean Park School gym. He still has Winchester .22 rifle he carried at that time.
I have vague memories of the Beach Patrol and of how the ocean beach was off-limits to civilians. But I think all that came later. I hope so for Mrs. Lemeshko’s sake. I want to think of her honeymoon as carefree and filled with happy days and romantic sunsets over the beach. In fact, it must have been that way… How else could her son Mike have become infected?
A lovely job weaving history and memoir together into an interesting blog!