Let's Eat.........

It is 1965 and it is summer.  My parents belonged to a social group that played cards in the evening on Saturday nights every two weeks.  They took turns meeting at one of the four couples' house and usually had a dessert before playing cards.

In the summer the group started having a cookout in the evening to give them time to enjoy the summer weather and a chance to eat with each other.  From what I remember each couple brought a covered dish and the host couple supplied meat, bread and potatoes or whatever that made the meal a substantial feast.   On rare occasions I attended some of these cookouts as I was the only young one still around among the group's families. I was a novelty because I was still in school and none of the others had their offspring in the state. They liked having the kid around once in a while.

The photo is taken in the back yard of Ted and Janice Nannens.  You can see the farm lot in the back and it is early summer. The farm was north of the town of Murray, Iowa.  Ted the host took the photo as he is not in the picture.  It is an original black and white photo that was taken even though color film was available.  I am sure the black and white was affordable at the time.

Most of them are my relatives.  Dad is on the front left side sitting next to his first cousin Galen Burgus.  Uncle Bill Farr sits at the end.  Janice Nannen, not a relative, sits at the head of the table. She is the only person still living from this photo.

June Burgus, Galen's wife, sits on the front right side.  She is one of the people who made me take an interest in anti;ques.  Her house was furnished with early farm furniture.  Most of her pieces were purchased at farm auctions for a quarter or sometimes a dollar. She collected Hummel figurines, glassware and other antique dishes.  She also prided herself in being a great cook and did make some great food.  I remember sitting at her grand old table filled with lots of food and having roasted duck.  Sitting next to her is my mom and next to her is my Aunt Mary Farr.

I realize that I have many photos of family of the last 20 years sitting around the table for birthdays but this photo tends to fit the old days in the best way. Maybe another time I can get them organized and share the growth of our boys as the parties continued each year.

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Granger, Iowa Late 1800's

Granger, Iowa celebrated it's centennial back in 1984.  That means the town is now 128 years old.  It isn't a large town but it's early history included Italian coal miners living in the area. The agricultural influence on the area helped to feed the country.

While reviewing the Granger Centennial Book of 1984 I notice a theme of horse power being critical for the development of the area.  A horse and buggy would get you to wherever you needed to go on the dirt roads of the area.  Des Moines is thirty or more miles to the south so local grocery stores, doctors, and lumber yards kept the locals buying locally.

It really would be worth you while to click on the photos to see them in the larger format. There is a lot more to see of the history of Iowa when you do so.

Downtown Granger with it's dirt streets has electric wires down the streets.  I don't know it they are power lines also. This had to have been in the early 1900's. I like how the horse and buggies are pulled up in front of the businesses just like model T's would eventually have done.

Horses were essential to bring in the harvest from the fields.  Work back then was just as hard but its pace had to be different as the work was more extensive and slow.  Pitching bales of straw were slow when you were not using machinery to bring in the crop.

Covered carriages were a welcomed luxury with snow on the ground.  This looks like a scene at a country homestead as the grove of trees reminds me of a country area. I am sure a country doctor would have to depend on his horse and buggy to take him to the sick.

Riding behind the mower or binder was hot work and I am sure a rough ride with metal wheels.  A straw hat was mandatory in the summer heat of Iowa.
town consolidated it's school with Granger in 1976 so as I was hired to work for the two schools, I felt I was just as much a part of Granger as I was with the town of Woodward in which I lived.  The family histories of the people are all the grandparents of the parents of the children that I taught in Granger so as I go through the Granger Centennial Book I do know most of the names.
I have more to blog about with this town as it had a circus that wintered near the town and the very first government housing program happened in the Granger area.  I also have some school building history to share.  They were a part of our inter urban train line that connected to Des Moines.

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Hats and shoes.............

Following the theme of the past I will share the different members of my family covering their heads or maybe their feet.  My grandmother Mabel Wheeler Brown Brooks is posing for her picture in her wedding dress and hat. It is the year 1913. I actually have both items stored in a box in my upstairs room.

Out at my great grandpa Wheeler's farm stands four women with great fashion.  My mom has the fur coat and hat with fashionable shoes. Her younger first cousin Eva Wheeler White is not so dressed up with her stockings and everyday shoes. The woman hiding in back is Leila Wheeler Witt. A friend of my mom's on the right wears a stylish hat and sensible shoes.  I don't think that is a feather in her hat but some part of a background post or tree. I am guess the time period is the late 1930's.

My mom steps out in her fashions of the past with the stripes on her dress and also on her socks. The shoes are partially hidden but her hat is clearly in sight.  My uncle Marvin with his wife stand behind her with his straw hat. The two children are half cousins to my mom. I also believe this was taken in the 1930's.

Practical shoes for a teacher of a country school are shown with the children of the school.  It is out on the prairie with parents in the background looking on at the camera. My mom taught school from 1938 to 1940's.

Hats and coats are great to wear in the winter in Iowa.  The Charles Burgus clan are visiting an in law family of one of their daughters Ruby Burgus Henderson.  My grandmother Grace Burgus is the one with the gray hair and no hat. Her daughter Amy stands to her front left and my Grandfather Burgus stands the next one over in  the lineup with his dark hat and tie. The rest of the people would be a guess for me as to who they are. The hats do vary as well as the styles of coats. The picture was taken in area on a farm south of Murray, Iowa.

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Cards of heartlfelt love......

VALENTINES OF OLD

It is a small collection from my parent's home.  I really never asked anything about their history and yet most of them have my mom's name written on them.  The history part is seeing who sent them and when.  I can glean facts and dates by seeing how many children were born at the time it was sent. 

The back side of the folded card Valentine is below.

To Zella from Marvin, Leila and Eva Marie Wheeler.  The history of family here shown by the name of Marvin.  Marvin in my mom's, Zella, brother.  He went to live with Uncle Lee to help out on the farm.  Times were tough and Marvin lived with them for a length of time to be farm help and work as the young hired hand.  Uncle Lee had four kid's but only two have them have been born.  The two girls Leila and Eva Marie were born and a boy and girl have yet to be born.  Lee Junior and Freda will complete their family. I do have a photo of a baby that they had lost, laying in its casket out at the cemetery near Macksburg, Iowa. I have chosen to never post that and find it strange that they even took the photo.

 Rural language that evolved from no education.  It certainly is not the King's English.

Old photos or old Valentine's, either way it is history.  Illustrations from the pass tell a lot of what is going on in the country of the time.  The dancing hearts at the bottom of this last card reminds me of the precartoon era.  The early black and white cartoon movies and even Disney showed the flavor of dancing characters with stick legs.

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Man and Beast

My brother is showing off his new band uniform for the Murray High School band.  Our dog Tippy is checking out the smell of his shoes.  The shoes had to be painted with a white polish to keep them white.  It was opaque enough that it was like whitewashing a picket fence to get it to be clean and white again. Tippy was the first dog that I remember in the family. They had a border collie which they lost the year before I was born.  Tippy was get outdoor dog that fathered many of puppies in the farm neighbor hood.  I remember his smells as he loved rolling around in about everything. He reminds of a part border collie but he was a mixed breed.

I had a photo of my dad with the twin calves.  Couldn't find the photo so I give you just the calves.  It was rare and profitable to have cows give birth to two calves.  Hereford is the breed in case you couldn't tell.  They survived the winter births in March down in low valley areas of our pasture out of the wind. These two were brought to the barn as they were small and dad wanted to be sure they survived.

Larry and Dwight holding their killer beasts.  The cats were a major way for us to learn how to relate to animals.  It was also a bad way to learn about life and death as cats tended to get them selves in trouble and skip the nine lives situation. 

My dad's assigned regiment in Washington DC had a mascot German Shepard.  The man is covering the dogs eyes so the flash of the camera won't scare him. 

My oldest brother Ron is showing off his heifer that he showed in the 4-H county fair.  She was a gentle cow and we had her for many years giving us a calf each spring.  I suffer emotionally when I think of the day my Dad called up a man to sell off his herd of 27 Herefords. He was selling the farm and they had to go. I was in college at the time, 1970.  I know my dad cried and I didn't have to be there to know it.  That is the part of raising animals that makes it difficult and they do become like family members and our emotions are so intertwined with them.

My youngest son Aaron and his two dogs.  The one is a puppy that he got so the other dog would have company.  Aaron was terrified of dogs when young and now carries his babies around the house in his arms.  The are great dogs who get to enjoy their home in Maine. We always have to ask how Penny and Hannah are doing as they are the closet thing we have to grandchildren.

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Mama don't take my Kodachrome away.....

With Kodak filing bankruptcy and my discovering a new photo, I thought I would make up my own theme.  The photo I found is pretty gaudy in color and I did tone it down a little with my photoshop program.  The thing that amazed me about the photo is the change one can see from photos with life's physical changing process, the change in housing and the change in clothing styles, even if it is only 70 or more years.

The house has been moved to Lorimor, but my Grandfather Charles Burgus and Grace Turner Burgus built and lived in this house north of Murray on a farm.  He was a farmer and they raised 10 children in the house. They did move away from the four square house so that the children could attend high school in Murray by buying a farm near there.









The ten Burgus children are at left.  My dad is the silly one on the right.  They look like they were just back from church.  The two on the left front are twins and my dad is on the far right. Dad was born in 1918 and he looks about ten here so 1928 is my guess for the time period.

Here is an informal shot of the ten at the city park with their mom and dad in the middle.  Mama and Papa I should have said.  They were a close bunch even though eventually three of them moved away from the Murray area.  One brother ended up living in Creston, Iowa, another brother was in the Indianola area and a sister lived in the Chariton, Iowa area.  The rest lived on farms in the Murray and Osceola, Iowa area. One sister went off to Oregon and another sister followed for a couple of years but eventually all were back living close to each other.

I have a first cousin that could probably date this photo for me.  I know that the one brother Carl in the back row had earlier lost his only son in a drowning accident and you can see the effects on him in the photo.  Ruby in the front row, next to my grandmother Grace was the one who moved out to Oregon and worked for the war effort, welding in a plane factory.  She did return to the Murray area after the war with her husband. I don't know if this is before the war but my dad looks young, left front row and he doesn't look like he has gone to war at that time.


Back row: Eva Burgus Dovenspike, Carl Burgus, Doris Burgus Forbes, Donald Burgus, Amye Burgus Ramsey, Cecil Burgus, Mary Burgus Farr
Front row: Jesse Burgus, Charles Thomas Burgus, Grace Elizabeth Turner Burgus, Ruby Burgus Henderson, Ralph Burgus

Kodachrome photo appears from the past and it is such a typical home photo.  I like the way that the one guy is cut off and my Uncle Donald can't be seen at all except you know he is standing behind Aunt Amye with her beehive hair.  If she had not worn her hair that way, we would have seen Donald.

It almost seems like time traveling ahead a hundred years, but it probably isn't any more than 30 years or less from the photo above.  The above photo had to be in the 40's and the photo at left had to be in the late 60's.
The house was built in 1959 by my dad.
Ralph died in 1957 so they are down to nine.
It is the summer and the style of dresses must be late 60's.  We lost Aunt Ruby in the early 70's.


Front row of Aunts: Doris Forbes, Amye Ramsey, Mary Farr, Eva Dovenspike and Ruby Henderson.
Second Row:  Cecil Burgus, Jesse Burgus, Donald Burgus and Carl Burgus

I was so surprised to find this photo of color in a pile of pictures in one of my dad's old cigar boxes. It really jumped out at me as they entire group and their spouses are now all gone.  My mom was the last to pass away in 2008.  The photo brings back all the memories of the family dinners that happened every year. It was either Thanksgiving or at Christmas time.  All the uncle and aunts would be there with spouses and my cousins of the younger family members were there. Cecil, the oldest, and his wife Bertha attended but their two children had move away out of state. We sometimes saw the son Roger and his wife, but rarely did we have a visit from their daughter Cecilia. Those two being the oldest cousins are gone also.

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In the past..........

Thanks to the Penny Postcard site for sharing their photos of old.  The above building was in Murray, Iowa and was one of their first school buildings. The very first one was a wooden building this one looks like it is brick. I never saw this building and I am sure that it caught fire and was torn down. The history of these buildings usually met their final fate in that way.  I am not even certain of it's location in the town, but I figure a relative or two will help me to update that info.  I graduated from a different building in Murray that was built in the 1900's that sat on a hill that reminds me of this
location.

Edited on December 24th,

My cousin Joan Henderson Callison wrote me the following information:

The lst and 2nd schools in Murray were in the block kitty cornered northeast across the street from the present school.  Plans were being made for the present school when the brick one, pictured above, burned a month before school was out. It was thought that it was arson. They finished going to school in churches and business buildings.  Mom, Ruby Burgus Henderson and Mary Burgus Farr would have been Juniors.  Mom said that they had to ask the kids what their grades were because all the records were burned and the boys remembered them being much higher than they actually were. Mom and Mary were in the first graduating class of the current school in 1926.Grandma & Grandpa Burgus made Mom wait a year to go to high school so she and Mary were in the same class. 

Structures like the newer one are of flat roof construction. The illustration of the Woodward building a few pictures down is typical of the early 1900's style of school building. The 1926 building that Aunt Ruby and Aunt Mary graduated from is the very same building that I graduated from in 1968, 42 years later.

Another school structure that stood in Osceola, Iowa in the past shows the tower for the school bell, a carryover from the country schools who most had a tower structure built as the entry for the school and to hold the bell. As the country grew the families grew and I am sure this building became too small to handle the number of children in the town.

A structure that still stands today is the Osceola Depot.  It is still in use and the Amtrak train stops here frequently each day. When people are ready to board the train, they line up on the concrete slab and wait as a group for the train to slowly pull up to allow them to board. I don't know how fun that would be in a rain storm or snow storm as there is not covered area for them to stand.

When I was first starting out as a teacher, I taught in Sidney, Iowa.  The county seat of Fremont County was Sidney and this is the courthouse that still stands there today.  The trees have all grown in since this was taken.  This is actually the second courthouse built here as the last one was destroyed by dynamite.   The border of Iowa is more than twenty miles away but during the Civil War, the southern soldiers didn't have maps.  They were sure that they were in Missouri so they placed explosive material inside the court house and lighted a match.

 The Underground Railroad actually did go through Sidney in the 1860's. I do know that Iowa was against slavery but I don't think Iowa ever actually was attacked by the South except for this one time.

This is the Woodward, Iowa school building that was built in the early 1900's  Originally it was a Kindergarten through Senior building and the stories were told that the bottom floor was left with a dirt floor for it's early years. The school children went down there to play during rainy days for recess.  I am assuming that the money was tight.

I do know that they later finished the floor as I taught my first four years in this building. I was in the basement room with a concrete floor.  It is the one with the right back basement windows. I started teaching there in 1976.

The cupola was said to have blown off in the 1920's.  Do you notice all the Roman influence on this structure with the pediment over the doorway and the water line base that reminds one of Venice, France?

As with all older structures in this country we tear them down after 100 years.  It was taken down in 1993 to be replaced with a single story building.

I am off theme most every time but maybe I can dig out my Grandmothers old cookbooks and create a food theme for next week.   I seem to be behind on themes or never conforming at all.  I enjoy all the themed blogs and you can see more blogs who share in Sepia Saturday by clicking here.