ARRIVING BY TRAIN IN THE GINTHER FAMILY'S
NEW HOMETOWN OF PUYALLUP, WASHINGTON
INTRODUCTION: A SON'S
"RECOLLECTIONS"
Ronald: (laughing) "I was just a baby,
but I can remember everything, how you came out on
the train and I was the baby and you had the
children, and you came to this little depot where I
live right now. I don't live at the depot, I live in
North Puyallup, just across the river, not very far from mother today and
and from where
we first hit town. So
she can start telling you now, about what happened
when she got to the depot. Anything
happen?"
MOTHER'S ACCOUNT
BEGINS:
"I got out of the train, and I thought,
'Oh, we're going to meet our daddy." We hadn't seen
him for seven weeks. And lo and behold there was no
sign of him around. So I went over to the depot, and
it was closed. And then I saw a young fellow coming
out from the house [nearest the station], and I said,
'Would you have any idea where I can find a phone?'
And, 'Well,' he said, 'the lady of the house isn't
home yet.' He worked for her. This Swiss lady had just
lost her husband, and she was out delivering milk,
for she still ran her family dairy called Lakeside.
Here she came driving her pickup, and of course the
children, the four of them and little Ronald the baby
who was in his little buggy--a fold-up buggy which
was handy--and here she came to me and she said, 'Oh,
where do you come from?' 'Oh, we come from South
Dakota. We've been on the train for two and a half
days. And my husband didn't show up. He evidently
didn't get my card because this is a holiday.'
'Well, no problem,' she said, 'I'll be glad to take
you up to where you want to go.' I said, 'Do you
know where Route One, Box 422 is?' 'Oh, ja, I know
where that's at.' And here she had the kids get in
the backend of her pickup, and were they happy! Of
course, I had the baby Ronald in my lap. We drove on
and had such a nice visit, and sure enough the first
lady we met was Bertine Egge, up on the corner. I
got introduced to her by asking her name, and she
said 'Ja, I know where Inga Williams lives!' [Bertine
Egge lives about a mile from where Pearl lives right
now--Editors] I always think of Bertine as the first
lady I met in Washington State, after meeting the one
who took us in her pickup, of course. Sure enough,
we drove down the road and met Inga Williams, and
where we were going to stay. We saw the little house
we were going to live in. We unloaded, and I wanted
to pay this Swiss lady, but she said, 'Oh no, I won't
take any money." 'Well, bless your heart,' I said,
'and I will come and visit you sometime.' She took
off, and I walked out to Inga in the field where she
was cultivating with her hoe in the berryfield. The
berries had already been picked, you see. She walked
with me back to the house, and she looked down and
said, 'Why, your husband never told me that you had a
baby.' 'He didn't?' I replied. "Oh, well, I have a
baby. But he's a good baby.' Then we saw the house,
but we couldn't be there that night since she was
still in it, so we borrowed a bed in the cabin--she
had two cabins close by there. Later, when Bob had
come, and we were in the house and got the kids
settled, I turned to him and said, 'How come you
didn't tell Inga that I had a baby.' 'Oh, I was
embarrassed about so many coming to live in the
house, I didn't know what to do.' Well, Bob was out
fishing when we first arrived, but when he came and
saw us there in the house, he was dumbfounded. It
was a big surprise to find us already there. He
thought he'd have to go and pick us up, because I
told him I'd let him know. He was great to catch
fish and clean them like a whiz, but I'm not sure he
caught any that day when he was fishing while we were
looking for him.
WE MOVED FROM PLACE TO
PLACE
We were there in Inga's house a year, but
we needed to get out, because she let us use the
house while she went to California for the winter.
So when she got back she moved right in. Miss Eaton
was the only one who could maybe let us have a house
to live in, but she would have to live someplace
else. But, you know, she never did leave, for we let
her have a room upstairs since the other place for her
did not work out. Miss Eaton's house was just about
straight west of Inga's. She was elderly. We were renting
her house
while Bob was looking for another place for us. He
had two little pieces of paper with two houses
written on them, and he was coming down a road along
the river from town, and he lost one of those
pieces of paper. All he could do was to go to the
one that was left, and that was the one we were
supposed to have--it was the house at 915 9th Ave. SW
in Puyallup.
A COUPLE YEARS WAS ENOUGH AT OUR NEXT
PLACE
It was just a framework. There was
nothing done inside. No bathroom, just an outdoor toilet. So Bob got busy. There was an acre of
ground, and we had a cow, but no chickens. We had
two cows, two calves, and chickens up at Miss Eaton's
place. I never will forget the time Miss Eaton said,
'The cows are eating off the trees, and we have pears
coming on there.' Bob had put a fence around them,
but they were still reaching over, trying to get
ahold of those pears. And so she had sent her dog
after those cows, and I said, 'What seems to be the
problem?' She said, 'We can't let them destroy the
pear tree.' But I said, 'You know, they should have
never been chased, because one of the cows is going
to have a calf.' It was Mr. Oren's cows that were in
there in that field, and sure enough the calf was
lost. Miss Eaton never had any church affiliation.
She used to cook for people years back who were doing
work along the roads. I told her, 'You know, we have
to make an account someday for ourselves,' and she
listened. After a while she had to go to the nursing
home, and when I later got work at the home whom did
she ask for when she was dying, she asked for me. I
had prayer with her. So God worked in those
situations [and others we had sharing the same house with
her, so that at the end she was open to for me and
also to allow me to pray with her just before she slipped into the next life.] [We
had one strange time with her after another, it seems.]
I'll never forget when we came home once, and we saw
her sitting up in the stairway. She said, 'What in
the world, what made him do what he did?' "What did
he do?' I asked. 'Well,' she said, 'when I came
home, I went to get my gloves, and there was a little
duck laying there.' She put her hand on those
feathers, and it just scared the life out of her, she
told me. I said, 'I can find out what happened, if you
want me to.' Bob said he found the little duck
limping around, it was sick or something, so he just
laid it on Miss Eaton's work gloves, [thinking that
might help it], the ones she used to take wood in.
She always carried it in, and kept us in wood. And
here the duck had died, laying there. And she was so
upset. It was dark, and she couldn't see it was
there. She never did have a good feeling toward Bob,
[for being unmarried her whole life] she wasn't used to
having a man around. And we
had a garden there, but we never had a chance to get
any of it, for when fall came we still didn't have
everything out, but we had to leave, and I just
couldn't go back to get what we had in the garden. I
was so tickled to be in my own place.
OUR NEXT HOME WAS ALL
OURS
Our new place had a cook stove, but we
had
to get beds, second hand, at the store. We had just
that one cow there, and she got sick and died. We were
there on 9th Avenue not more than two years, then Bob
wanted to move again. He found a property for
sale on the side of the Valley up from 9th Avenue,
and in 1946 he moved two cabins down to the property
and nailed them together into one house. I was
expecting Joyce at that time. We had a blackberry
field below the hillside, and I had a young fellow
hired to help me train the vines while I worked on
the other side of the blackberry row. Time came when
we had to harvest, and a man came and offered to take
all our berries and transport them to the cannery
without any charge. I was able to witness to him,
too, for he was taking instruction at the Lutheran
church, and so he listened to me a bit. He marveled
at what I was able to do in the field, and the crop
was abundant. I
took some pictures. Oren sold us a horse to
cultivate the berries. Bob worked cultivating for
people for extra money. Shipyard work was over, and
we made okay with the work he found. He had the
house papered inside and everything, he fixed it up
nice and clean. There was even a cookstove in the
cabin he moved down. We moved our beds up there of
course. There was a toilet outside. We had a little
lean-to with a washing machine. We had a hot water
tank. We had water into the house and went to the
sink, but no bathtub. I washed the kids in the
washtub. We had a bedroom at both ends of the house,
the stove was in the kitchen and eating area. Yes,
we had a lot of good times there. The kids loved it
up there on that hill. I can see them yet, sliding
on boards, especially when it was frosty they could
slide that much faster. It was really fun, really
cute.
A DREAM HOUSE, TWO NEAR MISSES, AND
GOD'S PREPARING OF PEARL FOR HIS TAKING BOB AND AND ALSO
ART
Bob had bought all the lumber for a new
house, and he had figured how he was going to
build the house. He had the lumber stacked over in the
garage
of the Mattsons who lived next-door, and it was good
lumber. He used a horse and scoop to dig the basement. He
worked hard. One day he said, 'I have a huge
rock to remove. I can't take time to dig it up, so
I have to buy a couple dynamite sticks to shoot that thing
out, because I can't possibly move it away
otherwise. Then when he started getting ready for leaving
for South
Dakota, he said to make it safe [he had to do something
about the still unused dynamite], so he took the remaining
two
sticks of dynamite and removing the caps, lit and
and threw the first and as he threw it, it was okay. [It
exploded, and nothing else happened.]
But the second, he threw and a pebble came back and
hit him right in the forehead [and some blood trickled down
his face from the cut]. And I was standing in
the doorway, and I said, 'Did it hit your eye?' 'No,
it didn't.' 'Now what does that verse mean to you,
that you read before we went up to see the Brendes in
Des Moines?' He used to fly with
Carl Brende. They bought a plane in Sioux Falls
together, you see, [and so he wanted to visit him before
this trip]. Now daddy was going to go back [to the Midwest]
and
find another plane, and sell it to the Orens, and Mr.
Cain and the two Oren brothers were going to learn
how to fly, so he was working to get everything in order at
home before he left--so
when that rock hit his forehead he had to recall how
something else had happened on our way home from the
Brendes. A horse came galloping fast down the road right
toward where I was sitting in the front
seat with Joyce. She was two years old, and the rest
of the children were in the backseat. Bob swung the
car into the ditch, tore out of there and drove right
up into the Williams's driveway. 'What are you going
to do now?' I asked. 'Well, I'm going to get that
horse off the road, make it safe for others,' he said
and [after he did that we continued home.] I turned to him
and said, 'What
does that verse mean now, 'The Lord campeth round
about you,' that you read this morning?' And he said,
'If it wasn't for the grace of God, we'd all been
killed.' So when this [incident of the pebble nearly
striking his eye and blinding him] happened with the dynamite, I
said, 'Now what does that verse mean to you that you
read yesterday.' 'Well, it wasn't my time.' [Myself, I
had to think],
'What is this all about?' [In his final preparations for
leaving for South Dakota], Bob had even taken the
little milk separator from the cupboard and put it
away, for the cow had gone dry, and we didn't have to
concern ourselves with the milk. Here the next morning he got
his suitcase ready for going back to South Dakota.
He said good-bye to all the children, kissed them
good-bye, and he said, 'Pearl, I don't want to get
after you, but I hope you don't leave the children at night very
often.' I said, 'No, I won't do that.'And as we
drove on and got down to the railroad, just as we
were crossing, since there were no signs in those
days, he said, 'Pearl, whenever you are going over
the railroad tracks, look twice both ways.' I
remember that to this day, it always comes to my
mind. When we got down to the depot where now Ronald
lives nearby, the train would be coming from Tacoma.
He had all his stuff out, camera, suitcase, two
coffee thermos jugs, you name it. I said, 'I'll carry this,
and you carry that,' and here came the train, so we
hugged each other and kissed. The train
was coming real slow. The conductor jumped off, and
I said I would help my husband get his things on the
train, but he said, 'Oh no, lady, this train isn't
stopping.'
"I was hoping to see him once more, see
his face. But when he got on the [still moving] train had
already
passed and I didn't get to see him again, and it
hit me like this: I thought, 'Is this the last time I
will ever see him alive?' That is the first question
that came to my mind. It wasn't natural. When that
happened, I [had an uneasy feeling] and said, 'Lord, I
can't go home right away."
"I stopped by the Evangers our friends, and I told
Mrs. Evanger just what had happened. That eased it
off a bit for me, and I went home to the family. In a
couple days, I went down to feed the cow and the
pigs, and when I went to feed the pigs in the shed,
it was really slippery on the boards, with the pigs
piled up over in the corner. Well, I fell, and when
I got up off those boards I said, 'Thank you, Lord,
that I didn't break anything,' and thought how
wonderful God is. Then I went up to the house. I
went to get something up in the cupboard, reaching
through the curtains in front, and of the pictures
laying up there what do you suppose fell down? It
was a picture of our daddy with an airplane. I said,
'What is this all about, Lord?' All along the way,
God gave me leading like this.
THE BURDEN OF PRAYER FOR PAPA, A DAUGHTER
AND MOTHER'S SACRIFICE
"Even on that day, when Bob was digging
the basement down there, I thought of my Papa, and I
said, 'Lord, that hit me so hard when I saw how my
mother was suffering from what Papa used to be so
upset with our Pastor [Peterson] in Bryant, South
Dakota.'
"I thought, What is it going to take? So I
said, 'Lord,
I'd be willing to give up my baby if my Papa would
turn his heart around and be the way we want him to
be.' And, you know, as I prayed, 'But give me grace
when it comes,' I got up off my knees, and the burden
was lifted, it was gone. Then I knew that God would
do something, but what it was I couldn't tell. But I left
the matter with God, and the burden [of prayer] was
gone.
"Here, after I had come up
to the house and the photo fell out with the picture
of Bob and the airplane, and I went to lay down and
rest a while so the children would sleep easier, I
thought, 'I wonder who is going to rap at my door
today?' Just then there came a rap! I had my
glasses off, and when I went to the door there was
Pastor Gudmanson, and he said, 'I have sad news for
you.' The first thing I could think of was something
to do [with my oldest son] Darrell, that was the first
thought I had. But
he said, 'Your husband and your brother were killed.'
'Instantly?' I said. He said, 'Yes.' I said, 'I
have the answer.'"
PLEASE GO TO NEXT SECTION TO FIND OUT WHAT WAS
PEARL'S "ANSWER"--Editors