CHAPTER 8

Back to Washington

Hunter Ferguson was manager of a gas station in San Bernardino and offered Burr a bit more money to work for him but soon put him on a twelve-hour night shift which did not make us too happy. After the folks came back to California, we packed our personal things in the little Ford and headed back to Washington and settled down in the 1111 Pioneer house that my folks had vacated to move into an apartment closer to town where Dad had moved his shoe repair business.

Jobs were difficult to find and when Clifford Wilcox found an opening in the North Coast Garage in Seattle, where he worked, we moved to 3615 Bagley Avenue in the northern part of the city. Burr worked servicing buses for the company for six years.

Barbara was born March 9, 1929, at home with Dr. R. N. Dillon, with Ada and Burr in attendance. In May, we moved to a smaller and cheaper house (we had been paying $30.00 a month which was plenty with wages then sixty cents an hour). Later we moved into a basement apartment in a big house where Ada and Cliff Wilcox lived, at 130 W. 50th Street, near Woodland Park.

In late July we attended our reunion at Silver lake, living in a tent. After reunion, my Oriole Girls came up from Seattle for a few days of camping there. Ada kept Barbara, then four months old, while I had the girls.

Late that fall we bought a three acre plot of ground just off highway 99, about half way between Seattle and Tacoma. Lester helped us build a little 16x24 foot house and we moved in. Lester Lynn Goldsmith came from Montana to go to school in Kent, our nearest town. It was Ada's idea and we kept him for that school year but he was a bit troublesome and returned to Montana in the spring.

We had been attending church in Seattle but now we were closer to the old home branch so moved our membership to Puyallup. The group had brought a small church building on the east edge of town. During this year (1930),Burr was ordained a priest in the church.

In the spring of 1931, Dad and Mother Bronson came from Independence, Missouri where they had been living, Dad stayed with us and Mother went to keep house for Ada who was working until school was out. Then Mother came to stay with us and look after Dad, Burr, and Barbara while I was in Seattle at Cliff and Ada's awaiting the birth of Jack on June 16. It was an anxious time as I had fallen down a long flight of rustic steps at a picnic area at Green River Gorge six weeks earlier.

That summer, we took the children to reunion but instead of a tent, we rented a small cabin so Dad and Mother Clarke could attend with us.

Dad Bronson and Burr moved the shop building from West Pioneer, now that Daddy John no longer used it, to our place for a house for Dad and Mother Bronson. They lived there for over two years. During that time a small barn for a cow and pig, and a large chicken house were built and we sold eggs to the Washington co-op in Tacoma where I had once worked.

We continued our church attendance at Puyallup and reunions at Silver Lake. Mother and Dad Bronson moved to Puyallup and in the spring of 1934, we sold our place and moved to a rented house near Ada's so I could finish my citizenship classes and in June received my citizenship papers in the Federal Court house in Seattle. Burr was still working for North Coast Transportation and we had arranged to rent a larger house in Seattle so that Dad and Mother Clarke could come to live with us. Mother's health, never good, had gotten much worse and she could not care for her home or herself. She had been hiring help for some time but that proved unsatisfactory. Just before we moved, Burr was laid off from his job at the bus company. We moved in with the folks in the 1111 W. Pioneer house where I could care for Mother who soon became bed-fast. Daddy continued with his shop and Burr looked for work but the great depression was in full force and no job could be found. Idle men roamed the streets and soup kitchens were opened in the cities Daddy John kept the house going with proceeds from his shoe shop and we were getting $15.00 a month from the sale of our place. I remember it was a bleak Christmas that year, Mother too sick to care, my dad never thought much about such things and our only gifts to the children were a 25-cent doll for Barbara and a 25-cent little truck for Jack, then five and three years old.

1935 proved no better. A long shoremen's strike shut down lumber mills and many factories. Machine guns were placed on the streets of Tacoma and Seattle to preserve order.