Posts Tagged ‘Helen Richardson Espy’

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Granny’s Gates – Golden and Pearly

Tuesday, May 13th, 2014
Under the Golden Gate Bridge

Sailing Beneath the Golden Gate Bridge

Growing up in the Bay Area as I did, “Golden Gate” was a familiar term. Even now, however, I associate the ‘Gate’ with the bridge linking San Francisco to Marin County. It’s hard for me to think of it as the strait that connects San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean.  In my mind, a gate has substance, like the bridge; it’s a gateway that is an opening. Had John C. Fremont asked my advice back in 1846 when he named the strait, I’d have suggested “Golden Gateway.”

I pondered some of these childish misunderstandings last week as the Norwegian Pearl made her way under the bridge that I’ve known from above for most of my life. It was built the year after I was born and though I’ve walked and ridden across it and have looked down on it from private planes and airliners, gliding beneath it was a new experience.

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The City by the Golden Gate

The seas were calm and we seemed to slip underneath the span – both arriving and leaving twelve hours later – without effort. I managed to look up and to see the bridge from below, but I found it difficult to tear my eyes away for the view of the city. As many times as I see San Francisco, from whatever vantage point and whether or not it is shrouded in fog, I find it a spectacular sight. The view from the Golden Gate was no exception.

My thoughts wandered backward in time – clear back to 1895 when my grandparents were courting. How did they travel from East Oakland where my grandmother lived clear to Muir Woods in Marin where they sat under a “special tree” and declared their love for one another? My grandmother told me the story many times when I was a little girl – of how they crossed the Golden Gate on a family outing and she knew in her heart that, by day’s end, her life would be forever changed.

Helen Richardson (Espy) 1896

Helen Richardson (Espy) 1896

Of course, I always pictured them crossing the bridge. Never mind that it would not be built for another forty-plus years. As it turned out, though my grandmother had crossed the bridge many times when she visited us from Oysterville, she didn’t ever see it for a good many years. By the time it was built, she had lost her sight, and it wasn’t until she flew into San Francisco after her 1948 cataract surgery in New York that she got her first glimpse of the magnificent span.

That was only a few years before she died and, even now, my thoughts of my beloved Granny and the Pearly Gates and the Golden Gate are all a-jumble. A very pleasant jumble, indeed.

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Snowy Thoughts from Oysterville

Sunday, January 15th, 2012
The Oysterville Church, December 2008

     My Grandmother Espy hated snow.  And who could blame her?  Three of her seven children died before she, herself, was much beyond middle age, and all of them in winter: four-and-a-half-year-old Albert in January 1905; seventeen-year-old Medora in January 1916; twenty-nine-year-old Suzita in December 1932.
     Each of the deaths occurred in Portland and, in each case, city and graveyard were blanketed by snow.  As long as I knew her, my grandmother likened snow to a shroud.  Ironically she, too, would die in winter – in January 1954 in Oysterville.  I was unable to attend her funeral and I have no idea if it was snowing, but it would have been fitting.
     I thought about all of that as we drove back from Seattle last night.  Here and there, the world was covered in white and occasionally our windshield wipers could scarcely keep up with the falling flakes.  We were returning from the funeral of an old friend.
    Except for the snow and the occasion for our being out in it, however, there were few similarities between my grandmother’s long-ago experiences and ours of yesterday.  Our friend, Chuck Huggins, was 91 when he died.  He had lived a long and productive life.  At the service, his widow, Dorothy, was surrounded by their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren and at the reception following, the mood was cheerful.  This “Celebration of Life” was far different from the snow-enshrouded funerals of her offspring that forever haunted my grandmother.
     I was glad to get back safely to the snug warmth of home last night.  Unlike my grandmother, I don’t hate snow.  But I can’t say I like to be out in it, either, especially on the roads at night.  I am content to sit near our library fire and watch the outside world morph into a Currier and Ives lithograph as the flakes fall – picture perfect here in Oysterville!

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Counting Blessings

Saturday, November 12th, 2011

The Stevens' fence is falling down, falling down...

     We’re beginning to think of these last few months as “The Autumn of Calamities.”  First the wretched water pump on the car needed to be replaced.  Now our north fence is falling down.  We can only hope that when we had half of the roof replaced last summer it was the correct half.  We don’t need our troubles to come in the usual threes.
     It has helped to stave off gloom and doom that I have been deep into a research project involving correspondence between my grandparents and my Uncle Willard.  Most recently, I’ve been reading the letters to and fro that were written right after World War II.  Things here in Oysterville, and on the Peninsula in general, were in a sad state.  Goods – any kind of goods – were scarce and workmen were even scarcer.
     My grandmother reported that gradually the men were coming home and she was hopeful that things would get better soon.  Meanwhile, on February 11, 1946, she wrote:
     We are feeling pretty much in the depths as the whole place seems to be going to pieces at once.  Because the shingles were not all put on last Fall our north side is leaking badly, especially in the living room.  Even if there were such a thing as a paperhanger, we could not have any hung until the roof is fixed and so it goes all over the place.  The east door will not open and pa has tried everything…
     A few weeks later, on March 6, she wrote:
     We have no idea whether our own house will be standing when you arrive.  It is in a deplorable state of dilapidation – leaks from end to end, windows do not work, doors do not open, the paper is hanging in festoons in the living room.  The plastering in the upstairs hall has fallen down in chunks.  The oil stove is blocked up with timbers and the kitchen is afloat.  I have to put my galoshes on to go in there in the mornings.  Yes, and there is no light in the bathroom.  The fixture, itself, is broken and does not turn on.  The radio has been at the shop for a month and both clocks have stopped short.  There are plenty of other things which I will not try to enumerate.  We have given up hope of ever living like civilized human being again but it is said that more workmen are arriving now… so we hope again.
     Apparently, in spite of all, the house survived.  Just three months later, I arrived for the summer, and I don’t remember any trauma or travail with regard to this dear old place.  Of course, I probably wouldn’t; I was only ten years old and coming to Oysterville for the summer was just about the best thing in the world.  The state of the house mattered not.
     As I read my grandmother’s words of all those long years ago, I couldn’t help but count my blessings, not the least of which is having those letters with her wry humor at my fingertips. 

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Lamenting A Lost Art

Monday, April 26th, 2010

     Most people I know, even those who lament it, are guilty of contributing to the loss of  the “art of letter writing.”  It’s not that we don’t communicate.  We do.  And often we actually communicate through written language, but for the most part there is no physical evidence to prove it.
     It’s hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that my grandmother, Helen Richardson Espy, wrote two or three letters every day throughout her long life.  How did she have time with seven children to raise, a household to run (sans electricity!), and often writing by the light of a coal oil lamp?
     She wrote necessary business letters; she wrote to her children, to the relatives, to her far–away friends.  Corresponding by letter was a life-long habit and as necessary to her and her contemporaries as eating or sleeping. 
     By the time I came along, my grandmother was losing her sight.  Her children bought her the smallest portable typewriter then available – one that could sit comfortably on her lap – and she learned to type by touch so that she could continue to write her daily letters.  Once in awhile, her fingers would stray onto the wrong keys and, for a line or two, her message became mysterious. Deciphering what she meant became a sort of lesson in code-breaking.
     My grandparents, inveterate ‘savers,’ kept every bit of correspondence that came into the house.  Their children also saved correspondence and, over the years, their letters came back to the family house, as well.  In the end, we often had “both sides of the conversation” – an invaluable resource for historical research, especially that dealing with the concerns of everyday life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  This archive is now housed at the Research Center of the Washington State Historical Society in Tacoma. 
     I wonder how many similar collections of correspondence will be left by the current generations…

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About Books and Reading

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

Helen Richardson Espy 1898

April 1898
My Own True Love:
In my reading I have, as you say, rather tended to that which is heart appealing, but it has been pure and elevating anyway.  Which is more than can be said for many of the “mind appealers” who seem to enjoy dragging one through the mire face downward.  Take Lytton for example.  His literary style and ability charm my mind.  On the other hand, the scenes he puts before me degrade all of God’s universe.  Some of the chapters in the book I am reading now, for instance, are no more than unhealthy dime novel scenes – detectives – knives – pistols – blood – harlots – thieves –murderers – knaves.  Igh!  I believe it would do me less  harm to have my heart touched a little bit.  Miss Mullock may bring a tear, or make the breath come a little faster, but one can close the book with purer, sweeter thoughts, a cleaner mind, and a heart full of a broader, tenderer affection for our fellow men, which is more than can be said for many of our “mind appealers.”  So to my mind, that which teaches the heart in a pure way, is of greater and better influence, than that which appeals to the mind only. There is much to think of now, and I want to keep my mind as pure as possible, selecting with great care all reading matter.
I believe I have read some book of every standard author, and it is hard to know what to find of equal merit, and I can not stand trash.  I simply exhausted dear Miss Mullock’s works – read them all, and did likewise with Bronte.  I wish uou would suggest some author.  I have read Dickens, Scott, Thackery, Elliot, Collins, Holland, Black, Broton, Lyall, Lytton, Whitney, Harland, Bret Harte etc. etc. …
Of course, the essayists are elevating and I enjoy them from a literary standpoint immensely, but fear if I had to read them much at a time, the influence I would wish to exert for a taste in that line would be entirely overbalanced, as I would get so tired of it, that our child would be born with a dislike rather than for a taste in this direction.
You must think, dear, that your wife is rather illiterate not to be familiar with the men you mentioned – “Addison, Pope, Drummond, Emerson, Ruskin, Bacon, Milton, Dryden, Burke, Gibbon, Macaulay, Webster, Irving, DeQuincey, Byron, Carlyle, Lowell, Huxley.”
I will take them through: 1) Addison and 2) Pope, I have become familiar with though selective reading and the same with 3) Drummond.  4) Emerson I have read quite extensively – his essays, poems, and portions of his letters, and journal.  5) Ruskin and 6) Bacon I have not become intimate with.  The former I tried to enjoy but could not – will try again.  7)Milton is an old friend, of course I’ve read him.  8)Dryden is a comparative stranger.  9)Burke I do not know.  10)Gibbon is familiar.  I have read a great deal of him and considerable of his own work.  I waded through all of 11)Macaulay’s essays.  Have read 12) Webster’s best orations.  13)Irving is one who has taken a great deal of my attention.  14)DeQuincey is not a friend.  I have not read him.  You say read 15) Byron, just as if I had not!  16)Carlyle have also read quite a good deal.  Poor dear 17) Lowell has been ravenously devoured.  Never have dipped into the science so 18) Huxley is a stranger.  However, dear I shall do some reading along these lines…

These views on reading and books were written by my grandmother, Helen Richardson Espy, to her husband, my grandfather, whose work took him away from home for a time early in their marriage.  She was not yet twenty-two, was newly pregnant, and firmly believed that her thoughts and deeds would directly influence the character of their child.  She held firmly to that belief with each of her six subsequent pregnancies.
My grandparents considered books to be the most necessary of all cultural niceties that might be provided in their home.  In 1913 when a chimney fire destroyed most of the sitting room, it was refurbished with built-in bookcases and ever afterwards was referred to as “the library.”  The books that filled the shelves are there today – over 1,000 titles.  Frayed bindings and well-fingered pages attest to nearly a century of loving attention by five or six generations of Espys and their friends and neighbors.  Indeed, I remember many a rainy summer afternoon or winter evening of my childhood curled up in a rocking chair by the library fire reading “The Girl of the Limberlost” or “The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew” or the poetry of James Whitcomb Riley.
In later years, my grandmother lost her sight from the combined ravages of cataracts and glaucoma.  Still, her passion for reading did not abate.  Each afternoon she would fix herself a cup of tea and have “a little rest,” sitting in the Morris chair close to the woodstove where she would to listen to the “talking books” sent to her by the Library of Congress.  Some of my fondest memories of this gentle woman involve the discussions we had during my high school years about the books I was reading – books by Thomas B. Costaine, Lloyd C. Douglas, Pearl Buck, or Leon Uris.  All of which she had also read, of course.
Recently, I joined a book club — a first-ever experience for me.  The group confines its reading to mysteries — pretty lightweight stuff in comparison to my grandmother’s book list of one hundred years ago.  I wonder what she would think about our selections…

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