The Brownes, The Curtises and The Hollands
Written by Hazel Florence Curtis. Submitted to wurm-hastings.com by Shirley Ann Worthen.
NOTE 5:
The Radtke family, who owned the house, had built a new home across the road nearer the Russian River. Their three children were Ruby, Reva and Ray.
There was a country school nearby in a little community called Icaria, which had been started years before by a group of French people. They had school in the summer and a long vacation in the winter time. We went to that school for a few weeks.
Father had a forty-acre piece of land near Marietta, Minnesota that he had owned for several years. It was called a "Tree Claim". He was able to buy it cheap, if he would plant ten acres of trees on it.
He sold it and with the money he bought four acres at the north end of West Street, Cloverdale, California's main street. It was one of the oldest houses in town, but well made of redwood. There was a barn and a meadow, a chicken house and all kinds of fruit trees, oranges, lemons, cherries, apricots, peaches, plums, pears, almonds and English and Black walnuts. A creek ran through the middle of the place and in the winter sometimes salmon came up from the Russian River. There was a good well from which we pulled the water in buckets. This was the first home we had ever owned and it seemed wonderful to us.
At first father didn't find any office job, so he did any kind of work he could find. Cloverdale was just putting in its first sewer system and for a while he dug sewer ditches.
Then the grapes got ripe and the whole family walked over the hill to a vineyard about a mile from town and we all worked.
When school started, Grandma Baker came to California and stayed with us a few months while father and mother went and camped at Hopland and picked Hops.
About that time, Father got a job as Assistant Postmaster. He had that job for several years. Finally a Democrat was elected President and a Democrat was appointed Postmaster. His daughter took over the job as Assistant.
Father passed Civil Service examinations and secured a job as gauger. It was a seasonal job during the winemaking time of the year.
When I was in the Eighth Grade, my sister Ella May, became very ill with tuberculosis. The doctors treated this ailment differently in those days. They had her exercise, ride bicycle and horseback and take elecution lessons. She was growing very fast and was very tall and thin. Soon she was tired out and they told the folks to take her farther from the ocean to a drier climate.
Father got a job as relief agent on the Union Pacific Railroad and we moved to Payette, Idaho and then to Caldwell, Idaho. I finished the Eighth Grade in Payette.
Ella May did not improve and she and mother wanted to go back to Minnesota. The doctor said she could not get well. We went to Redwood Falls, Minnesota, eight miles from Delhi, where we had lived before.
Dawson, MinnesotaGrandpa and Grandma had moved from Marietta to Dawson, Minnesota and then to Redwood Falls. They had lived there several years before we moved from Delhi. They gave their farm in Marietta, Minnesota to their son, George.
Ella May died August 29, 1905, at the age of fifteen, and was buried in the cemetery in Marietta, Minnesota, where the first baby sister had been buried. Grandpa and Grandma are both buried there now.
Father had been a relief agent for the M. and St. L. R.R. but now he was given a job at North Redwood, two and a half miles from Redwood Falls.
The depot where we then lived is known as "The Birthplace of Sears Roebuck". Mr. Sears had been Agent there a short time before this. A jewelry firm had sent a shipment of watches to the druggist in North Redwood and asked him to sell them on consignment. The druggist refused them, so Mr. Sears decided to try his luck. He did so well, he tried selling other things and had such success he decided to quit his railroad job. He rented a building and started a store which finally became Sears Roebuck.
I did not go to school that year, as I could not have walked two and a half miles in the Minnesota cold and blizzards to the High School in Redwood Falls. I worked with father in the depot, selling tickets and making express and ticket reports.
I made some friends and learned to skate on the ice. The young folks had a long sled that would hold about eight people. We would pull it up a hill on the edge of town and go sliding down. The year after we left, it upset going around a curve and one of the boys broke his leg.
We had not sold our home back in Cloverdale, California; so after a year in North Redwood, Minnesota, we decided to return to California. Father got a job as agent at Hauser Junction, Idaho, twenty miles from Spokane, Washington. We were only there a short time. It was beautiful country. There was a small lake in the midst of pine trees about a mile away and many bushes of syringa, Idaho's State flower and wild strawberries growing in the woods. People from Spokane had summer homes around the lake. Wild deer roamed in the woods.
A little narrow gauge train went our from Hauser Junction to Coeur de Lane, a larger lake and summer resort about fifty miles away.
We returned to Cloverdale, California, passing by beautiful scenery through Washington and Oregon. I especially loved the scenery along the Columbia River. In a few weeks school started and some of the happiest days of my life followed during my four years in High School and two years at San Jose State Normal School.
A baby sister, Mary Louise, joined our family June 23, 1911. She was fifteen years younger than my brother Cyril.
We sold our Cloverdale home in 1914 and the family moved again; first to Berkeley, California and then to a forty acre piece of timber land in Chicago Park, Nevada County, California. Father, mother and my brother Lloyd, cleared the land and planted a pear orchard and other fruit trees for the family's use.
I taught school in Mendocino, Sonoma, Nevada and Yolo Counties, California and retired to marry Vera D. Curtis on December 1, 1923. We lived on the Curtis Ranch in Brooks, Yolo County, California until 1952 when we retired and moved to our new home at 703 Buena Tierra Drive, Woodland, California. Vera passed away December 22, 1971 and I now live alone in our Woodland home.
Our only child, our daughter, Martha LaVerne Curtis (Holland) and her husband Thomas Holland, and their three children now live on the Yolo County Curtis Ranch. The children are [...]. They own the place and raise almonds, alfalfa, grain and cattle and a few walnuts.
The Nevada County, California property which my parents owned was sold. All of my family (the Browne family) have passed away; my brother Cyril in April of this year, 1973.
I am eighty-one and hope to hold out for a few more years. LaVerne and family live twenty-five miles away and come often and take good care of me.
At present my youngest grandchild, Shirley, is spending two weeks with me while she is taking swimming lessons at the Woodland Municipal Pool.
1973
P.S. July 7, 1977--still here; now 85...