Leave it to my friend Maggie to remind me about my Great Aunt Dora's story of the Christmas roast. I mentioned it in my blog about holiday dinners "In The Best of Regulated Families" the other day and promised to tell about it later. Then, of...
Third cousins two times removed, Cheryl Kocher and her brother Ralph Jeffords, arrived yesterday with Cheryl's husband, Virg. It was SO great to see them! It had been four-and-a-half years since we'd seen Ralph (who lives in Virginia) and a bit...
I remember that it was in the 1980s that Nancy Reagan kicked off her "Just Say No" campaign as part of the U.S. "War On Drugs." Those three words quickly became a catch phrase for just about everything whether it was illegal substances, an...
It really is nuts-making. Now that I am actually gathering together some final bits and pieces of things to take up to Ed Nolan at the Washington State Research Center, I cannot find Papa's diary -- the one written when he was sixteen in 1892/93. ...
There are several things that drive us collectors of bits-and-pieces-of-history to distraction -- old photographs with no identifying names or dates and yellowing news clippings without any indicators of when or whence. I think the following...
What I'll be the first to say about my grandfather and his brothers and sisters is that there were the taciturn Espys and the loquacious Espys -- about an even division among the ones I knew well. Uncle Cecil and Uncle Will were the quiet ones;...
On May 17, 1914, my fifteen-year-old aunt Medora Espy wrote to her parents in Oysterville from her boarding school in Portland, Oregon: Thursday the girls and I went to see "Tess O' the Storm Country" at the Peoples. It was very good – a five...
According to family lore as recorded in Willard Espy's Oysterville, Roads to Grandpa's Village, once Espy and Clark realized that they had fathered a village, Mr. Clark said, "We'll call it Espyville." "We'll do nothing of the sort," snorted...
I just received a note from my three-two cousin (third cousin, twice removed) -- is that right, Ralph? -- Donna Gwinn who lives in Garfield, Washington, not far from Pullman. Donna, a generation or so younger than I and with more energy than all...
We felt badly when we wrote to Cuzzin Ralph and uninvited him to come to Oysterville (or "Oyster Patch" as he calls it) for a visit. He was coming out from his home in Virginia to a family reunion of first cousins in Eastern Washington. The plan...
Yesterday I gave a Book Talk about Historic Haunts of the Long Beach Peninsula at the Senior Center in Klipsan. It was the third event in as many weekends and I didn't have high expectations for attendance or sales. However, what I didn't factor...
In the "olden days" of my childhood, summer in Oysterville meant visitors. Lots and lots of visitors. The relatives came from Portland and Puyallup and California and they usually came for two weeks or more. Often, they "overlapped" and we were...