She wanted us to know about it
"Between fourth and fifth grade, I and my mama were sleeping when the bedroom door opened and my daddy stood there with a gun."
That is indeed our mom and her daddy, Charles Miller, a World War I veteran, on their farm outside of Condon, Oregon, probably in 1926. I’m guessing at the year, but Mom was born in August 1925 so that seems about right, judging from her size.
That’s a portrait of rural Oregon poverty from nearly 100 years ago, and it took me awhile to figure out what to say about it. Or whether to say anything at all.
The photo was taken three years before the stock market crashed in October 1929, which history books use to mark the beginning of the Great Depression. People were poor before that, though, and Mom described her first home as “a shack on a run-down farm.” For her family, things went downhill from there, which is probably why she worked so hard to make our lives better than what she had.
That was America’s post-war story, wasn’t it? It was for our Mom and Dad. He was 10 in 1933 when the Depression chased his family out of Nebraska and sent them packing to rural Oregon, to the Mosier Valley in the Columbia River Gorge.
But Mom and Dad recovered along with most of America. After World War II they settled in, went to work, raised a bunch of boomer kids and reached one of the lower rungs of middle class. And us boomer kids climbed up a bit from there.
So it turned out alright, I guess. And we Americans don’t spend much time looking back. So you could ask what it matters now.
Maybe it matters because the Depression’s children are nearly gone. Mom and Dad and most of their friends are. Using an arbitrary birth year cutoff of 1933, the youngest of their generation would be 90 this year. I would have been a history teacher if I hadn’t found journalism, and it seems we ought to know how those people made their way through a sorrowful economic collapse followed by brutal, worldwide war.
We ought to know what they went through, even if those particular times and circumstances, like most of those people, have long since passed. It’s important, I think, to reach back, touch that history and consider the people who lived it.
Late in life, Mom wrote her memoirs, covering the period of her childhood through high school, to marriage, and to the birth of her first child, our brother Paul, in 1945. It was a time streaked with poverty, family tension and the death of her troubled father when she was 11. She didn’t want to mope or mourn about her early life, necessarily; in fact there is very little in her writing to indicate how she felt. I think Mom simply wanted us to know about the splinters she carried from those bare wood times, and maybe think twice before complaining about life today. “Count your blessings,” she’d say. “God love it.”
Agnes and her daddy, along with her mother, Elizabeth “Lizzie” Palmer Miller, didn’t stay on the farm long. Charles Miller apparently was working it for his father, John Miller, an opportunistic Swedish immigrant who’d gotten himself elected mayor of Fossil, the Wheeler County seat, a couple times. John Miller had quit farming himself and become something of a big shot in the area as he made personal loans and snapped up property when people couldn’t repay him. He didn’t approve of his son’s attempts at farming. He called him a failure and a disgrace, gave him $100 and said he’d get no more. We have a copy of John Miller’s cruel letter telling his son to get off the farm. Mom kept it and handed it down so we’d know about that, too.
“Grandpa Miller forced us off the farm as it wasn’t making a profit. The Depression had hit and it was also time for me to start school, so we moved to Fossil. Grandpa had a rental he let us have for free. I loved it. It was painted white on the outside. Inside was a different story.”
Fossil is in north central Oregon, about 170 miles east by southeast of Portland. It’s spare country, dry, and still largely empty today, compared to the west side of the state. Fossil’s population was down to 440 in 2022, according to the Population Research Center at Portland State University. The whole county, Wheeler, has 1,436 people. It’s the least populated county in Oregon.
Anybody who knows me knows how much I love Wheeler County and especially Fossil, the county seat. Always have since I was a kid, and do to this day.
The free rental house in Fossil had no electricity, only kerosene lamps. The bathroom had an unusable tub; the toilet was outside. The only running water was in the kitchen, and it was cold. Water for bathing and washing had to be heated on a wood range. The house had a wood-burning heater in the living room, the unfinished wood floors were splintery, and the walls were covered in cardboard-type material. The Depression must have felt right at home in such a place.
“My mom raised rabbits and chickens which she killed and dressed to sell for money. My daddy had grand mal epilepsy as a result from being gassed in World War I. There were few jobs to be had and many farmers were afraid to hire him in case he had a spell. He did get a WPA (Works Progress Administration) job working on road building. Most of the work was done by shovel. I’m sure the pay was very low.”
I’ve written previously about Charles Miller’s experience in World War I. So far I haven’t found evidence that he was gassed — both sides used poison gas of various types — but you have to figure the record keeping in those days might have been haphazard. For example, a battalion history says he enlisted in Condon, Idaho, which doesn’t exist. Of course it was in Condon, Oregon, the Gilliam County seat.
At any rate, one of his “spells” caused him to fall off farm equipment and get hurt, apparently.
So Mom’s family scraped by. They ate potatoes — mashed or fried — most days, with milk gravy made from bacon grease. “I hate it to this day,” Mom wrote. They had canned beans and dried prunes, and sometimes they had rice. They had fried chicken or rabbit at times, and on Sundays her daddy gave her a quarter to buy a pound of hamburger.
Her mom, Lizzie, made angel food cakes and sold them for money, too. “We had plenty of eggs,” due to the chickens they kept, but Lizzie had to beat the egg whites by hand with a wire whip because they had no electricity to run a mixer. It took a long time to get the egg whites stiff, and the wood-fired range had to be kept at just the right temperature or the cakes would fall. “I don’t recall any failures,” Mom wrote.
Lizzie also exchanged fryers to buy Mom piano lessons for a year. She kept a small vegetable garden that she irrigated with dishwater. Mom’s clothes were mostly hand-me-downs.
“We had no refrigeration — not even an ice box. My mom dug a hole in the ground and put a big crock in it. She would put perishables in it, cover it with a wet cloth and put a plate on top.”
But living in town meant there were other children to play with, finally, starting with Ruth Nicholson, who lived at 130 Washington Street, right across the street from Mom. The Nicholsons had electricity and an indoor bathroom, Mom wrote. The girls played dress up over at Ruth’s house and sometimes, in the parlor, looked at slides through one of those old-fashioned viewers. In her memoirs, Mom left a ? on the page because couldn’t think of the name of the device. I can’t either.
“First grade opened up a whole new world to me. My teacher was Flo Gilliland and I loved her dearly. I loved reading and borrowed many books from the library. It was a quiet activity to do at home as my daddy didn’t much care for noise. He was afraid I’d fall down if I ran so he tried to discourage that.”
I want to stop for a minute because this was something else Mom wanted us to know about: The door-opening power, and in her case the comfort, of education. You can live in economic poverty but you don’t have to be poor in spirit. Education, including books, is among the things that can lift you out of where you are.
“My daddy would sit me on his lap in our car and he would let me steer while he backed up and went forward. Eventually, he wrecked the car due to a spell and we rode no more.”
The house in Fossil had two bedrooms. Agnes and Lizzie shared one and her daddy used the other. Mom said her parents were only together because of her, at that point. They communicated to each other through her. Lizzie would tell Agnes to tell her father that dinner was ready. Charles would say to tell her he wasn’t ready.
Mom was torn between the two of them. When she set the table, her mama was the fork, which she’d place on one side of the plate, and her tall daddy was the knife, on the other. The spoon was her, and she didn’t know which side to put it on. So she laid it horizontally above the plate. Mom told us that story when we were kids, and included it in her memoirs. Imagine being that little girl, and feeling like you had to choose.
Sometimes other people do the choosing for you. Like on that night, between fourth and fifth grades, when her daddy opened the bedroom door and stood there with a gun.
“No one said anything, we just stared at each other. Then my daddy just shut the door and returned to his room. My mama thought he meant to kill us and himself. He was depressed over not having a job, epilepsy and the Depression.”
She and Lizzie left to live with relatives who had a farm near a creek at a wide spot in the road called Olex, about 20 miles due north of Condon and about 40 miles north of where Charles was, in Fossil.
Charles Miller didn’t last much longer. He had more falls, one time hitting his head on a cupboard corner and bleeding profusely.
“He then developed a horrible infected sore on his thigh. We had little money for doctoring and Dr. Robbins didn’t know how to care for him. After the sore burst, my mom took care of him.”
Charles and Lizzie began talking to each other again. Charles tried to joke with his daughter. In her memoirs, Agnes wrote that she didn’t know what to think of it.
Charles got worse, so relatives drove him to the Veterans Hospital in Portland. The doctors there said his right femur was diseased and was poisoning him.
“They wanted to put maggots in to clear it up but he refused to let them, and he died in April.”
It was 1937. Agnes, our mom, was 11. Decades later she told me, “Children need their daddy.” And I was slow to know about it.
That’s Charles Miller’s headstone, next to his mother and father under the concrete slab at the Odd Fellows Cemetery at the edge of Fossil, Oregon. The stone notes that he served as a Wagoner in the 347th Machine Gun Battalion, 91st Infantry Division, during World War I.
So those are some of the things Mom wanted us to know.
God bless Lizzie Palmer Miller, don’t you think? She made sure Agnes survived and thrived, taking her with her to live with a series of relatives and settling in The Dalles in time to start high school. Class of 1943. Married in 1944. Paul was born in 1945, and brother Neil was born in 1949. Lizzie died that year, and the rest of us seven kids never knew her.
Lizzie Miller’s grave at the Igo Cemetery, up out of Condon, Oregon. Worn to a frazzle and dead within 60 years.
Lizzie Miller saved our mom, I think you’d have to say. And despite everything, despite poverty and violence, loss, dread and sorrow, she delivered us a woman who was loving, kind, intelligent and hard-working.
So it’s true that children need their daddies, as Agnes said. She wanted us to know about it. And I think she wanted us to know children need their mamas, too.
You can see where your mother got a lot of her strengths. She was extraordinary, in those times, and she would be now. I hope everyone is able to get such stories from their mothers and fathers.
You always have loved that area. I remember you talking and writing about it when we were both reporters at The R-G. Deep fascination. I'm writing a second novel now that is based in southern Indiana, which is where my family's from (my great grandfather was a sharecropper in Brown County), and I feel the same pull.