Reflections from 1932 to 1982

by: Hazel Hendrick Helle

My husband, Sheldon, has been at me for months to write my piece for his book. I have kept putting the job off. I told him I did not know what to write about. He said, "Just anything, write about how we met, or our vacation trips, especially the one you kept a log (journal) on." I will see what I can do. The end of my tale will tell.
I was born July 19, 1914, at the home of my parents, Fred V. and Nellie M. (Ault) Hendrick in Wyoming, IL., a small town of about 1,000 population. I had three
brothers. All were younger than me. They were Elmer, Robert and Jim.
Before I started school we moved from Wyoming to Stark. Then when I was about six years of age, we moved to a farm. We were poor folks, but with living on the farm we had three meals a day. We also had our jobs to do to help our folks.
We grew up going to Sunday School and Church every Sunday. I went to a one room country school with all eight grades. There were about twenty two students. I graduated from the Wyoming Community High School.
After graduating, I worked one fall at the canning factory and then I took a job (not what I studied for) working for a grade school teacher in her home - seeing that her four children, three girls and one boy, got off to school and doing the housework. By evening I had supper ready for this family of six. I did this five days a week. Guess what I got for wages? Not as much as you beginners receive for one hour of work: two dollars and fifty cents per week. But I did get room and board.
At this time in my life is when I met Sheldon, but before I get into that phase I'd like to tell of a couple incidents that have stayed with me.
My folks had two very dear friends, Jim and Hattie. Jim was the depot agent. His wife, Hattie sent me to the grocery store (one block) for a gallon of milk. On the way home, the gallon slipped out of my arms and you know what happened. I remember feeling so bad about it that I cried.
Another time I was drying dishes for Hattie and one of her good glasses fell to the floor. That was the first dish that I had ever broken. Back then all plates and glasses were breakable glass. I felt real bad about breaking one of Hattie's favorite pieces.
My Dad and I did a lot of dishes for Mom. I stood on a small stool and washed and he'd sit on a chair and wipe the dishes many a night.
Now, about Sheldon and I. I met Sheldon at Stark, IL, a little one-horse town where I grew up, went to school and church. There were grain elevators, a railroad depot, the dance hall, a pool hall, a grocery store, post office and a Congregational Church.
We were having a "Minstrel Show" at the church and I was selling tickets for it. I tried selling Sheldon and his brother tickets. They were only 25 cents apiece but he did not buy even one. He said he was broke. That was really broke.
In June of 1933, a little later on, Sheldon asked me for a date. We dated for nearly two years. He was a very nice boyfriend, like he would put a corncob in my overshoe or put cardboard in a gum wrapper so I would think it was a stick of gum. I was proud of him, though he was a little "back-woodsy". When we went to the Jr. Sr. Prom, he came without a suit or tie. I was a little embarrassed about it and he was not a dancer, so we sat and watched the rest dance. But I survived it. It makes a good topic of conversation sometimes when bringing up fond memories.
We were married on May 11, 1935, in Palmyra, Missouri at 1:30 p.m. at the
Presbyterian Parsonage. It started raining when we got in the car after the ceremony. It really rained for sometime.
By March 30, 1946, we were the parents of two boys and two girls. They were Lyle Raymond, Thelma Louise, Harley Vincent and Janet Lorraine. We lost Lyle on September 7, 1956 from a bad accident with a load of logs. He had married June Grim of Savanna. They had a darling daughter, Donna Lee, but he never got to see her.
Our life together has been much the same as many others. We have moved many times as my husband is half owner of a sawmill, which meant for many years, moving where the timber was. The mill was portable. Some of the towns were: Hanover, Knoxville, Abington, Dubuque, Iowa and Keosauqua, Iowa, then finally Savanna, where we have stayed.
We moved till our first born was ready for school - then I balked at moving. We were living and working in Dubuque, Iowa. By this time, they started hauling logs to the sawmill.
Our first winter, we lived in a shack with tar-paper on the side and a tin stove to heat with. We had a Kalamazoo cook stove, a bed and dresser, a kitchen table made from three planks and two saw horses and two small nail kegs for our chairs. We will never forget that winter. It got down to 30 degrees below zero. "Wow! ! Was it cold." We were living at Hanover then.
We were married five years before we got a davenport and chair for our living room. We gave $80.00 for it and we appreciated it too.
At the time of this writing we celebrated our 47th wedding anniversary. The majority of these years were pretty happy. We had much enjoyment with our children while they were growing up. Now we are enjoying our eleven grandchildren and two great grandchildren. We lost our first grandson, Lorraine's son, at two and a half months old, in 1963.
I will try to tell you about one of our trips we took. We took several but one in particular I kept a log on. We never had enough money to stop and go through a lot of museums, etc, so the trips consisted of what we could see while driving in the car or free things. We ate a lot of noon lunches of minced ham, bread, fruit, chips and cookies with milk to drink.
We left Savanna on July 5, 1952 about noon in our 1951 Pontiac. It had 15,657 miles on it. We took our four children with us and were gone for twelve days. Lyle was 16, Louise was 10, Harley - 9 and Lorraine was 6.
We're headed for Los Angeles, California to the McCullock Chain Saw Factory. Sheldon and Walt are dealers for McCullock's. We spent a couple hours touring the plant and ate our noon lunch while there. The big LA Airport was across the road from the plant and it was huge.
Back to our starting point, Sheldon, Lyle and I took turns driving. We drove U.S. Rt. 54 and went diagonally through Kansas, Oklahoma and the Panhandle at Gundlyn, Texas. Then we took the famous route 66 on to LA
From Texas we went to Sana Rosa, N. Mexico, then through Grant N. Mexico through Windslow, Arizona to Hackelberry, Arizona by July 8th. When we arrived in LA our mileage was 17,588.
After this we headed for Carl (Bud) and Mary (Adams) Brock at Long Beach,
California. They were friends of ours and Bud was a former employee of Wood Products, but at that time he was a Navy man on the Ship "The Toledo 133"
After our visit with Bud and Mary we drove to Vanturia and got a room at the "Mission-Bell Motel." We ate supper at the "Tom Thumb Drive-in". The weather was hot and a cat tried to get in our motel room that night. We only traveled 150 miles that day. (July 9th)
July  10: We left for San Francisco. This was our third day in California. We got on Rt. 101, which was on the coast up to Trinidad. We drove across "The Golden Gate Bridge" in San Francisco. We stayed all night at the San Rafael after a 390 mile drive with the ocean on one side and the mountains on the other. We noticed the ground on the west side of San Francisco was more useful than the ground on the east side. There was dairy farming out there. We have gone a total of 2,680 miles.
July 11: We left San Rafael - our fourth day in California. It was misting rain this day and chilly. We listened to the Republican Convention out of Chicago. Ike, Taft, Warren. Ike won the nomination.
We saw the "Redwoods" and some sawmills. Passed the "Pacific Lumber Co." at Scotia, California. We visited the "Drive-Through Tree," and drove to the "Tree House". This was the farthest west on the map that we could go. It rained all night. We went across the road and watched and listened to the ocean hitting the rocks for a long time that evening. The kids played outside for awhile then went to bed and had a good night's sleep. Name of Motel: "Hillcrest View."
July  12: Our fifth day in California. We got up, had breakfast and headed for Bend, Oregon. We've driven over 3,000 miles so far. (18,760 on speedometer)
We left Pt. 101 at Klamath Falls, Oregon and saw a sawmill. (Later that same sawmill burned). We went through Crater Lake, Oregon. We followed a snow plow through there. The next day - after we went through Crater Lake, there was a murder committed there. We were glad we had left! It was beautiful at the Lake and there was a lot of timber too. We stayed at Bend, Oregon that night at the Rainbow Motel on Route 97. It was a very nice place.
July 13: We left Bend and drove to Hamilton, Oregon and had our breakfast and lunch combined. It was a little jerk of a town. We then headed for Boise, Idaho and were to have our steering column fixed there. Our second day headed east toward home. We never stopped, (never got our steering fixed.) We drove from Bend, Oregon to N. Platte Nebraska. We drove all night.
On this return trip from Sunday a.m. to Monday night we drove through a corner of Idaho, across one end of Utah, (went through Salt Lake City at night), across Wyoming to N. Platte Nebraska. (1,450 miles) Home was getting to look good to us, but we stayed all night at N. Platte. The motel was higher priced and teasingly my family tried to bribe me into not staying but it didn't work!
The last day of our trip: We left N. Platte. Six hundred miles from home! We lost one of our license plates at Grand Island. A State Police Officer stopped us. It was the first time I'd ever been asked to show my driver's license since I'd gotten them in 1938.
Louise made the remark that she was so glad to get home that she could kiss the ground and Lyle replied that he wouldn't want to kiss it, but he'd sure be glad to walk on it! We had a trip that will never be forgotten. We even had money left over when we got home, though we had brought gifts for my folks, Sheldon's Mom, Walter's, Lynn Ferguson (a friend of Louise's) and a gift for Jim's.
We enjoyed every minute of our time together with our kids and hope they enjoyed their Mom and Dad.
Following is a list of some prices to compare with today's cost. The eating prices are of a family of six, remember.

GAS
10.3GAL.$2.90
11.6GAL.3.39
7.4GAL.2.10
6.8GAL.1.90
13.0GAL.4.03

MOTELS:

Motels ran from about $7.00 to $9.00. The Motel in N. Platte was the highest. It was $12.00

MEALS:

Breakfast:$4.55, $4.50 $3.00, and $6.80
Groceries:$1.90, $2.80
Lunches:$4.75 $5.40
Supper:$8.50
Film and Stamps: $3.00

Twelve days Total:$228.00, Balance:  $22.00

P.S.
I'd like to add a little more on Sheldon, me and the kids. Sheldon would also put paper wads in my gloves or tie the fingers together or maybe tie my coat sleeves together or put one sleeve wrong side out. He would do some of this to his kids too.
Sheldon would poke Lorraine on the shoulder and she hated that. (Still does)
One night during Lyle's early teens, a guy came to the door for help to get pulled out of the ditch. Sheldon grabbled Lyle's coat and wore it. He put his hands in the pockets and found a pipe and tobacco. When he got home he went in, woke Lyle up, and talked to him about smoking. A couple days later Lyle came to us and said, "Do you know what happened to the pipe and tobacco? We said "No". He said, "Well, Bill, Ken and I dropped them into a railroad box car on its way out of town." He never did smoke or drink.
When we were in California - the first night at Delmar, a suburb of LA, we got our motel and then went out to eat. We got mixed up in our directions getting back to the motel. Pretty soon, Louise says, "There's the strawberry stand - there's the barber shop." We found the motel. She became a good map reader on that trip.
Lorraine liked to comb hair. She especially loved to comb and brush (style) my Dad's hair. He would tolerate it for so long then he'd tell her that was enough for today and she'd get off her step stool. She liked to style her Dad's hair before he got his crew cut.
Harley was all boy. He was so cute as a baby people thought he was a girl. As he grew older he acquired his Dad's talent for tormenting his sister's and he could even shoot a hole with a gun (by mistake) through the ceiling. We came home that night and Louise said, "Don't punish him. He feels bad enough already."
That kind of sums up how we all felt about one another and our home. We've had our share of burdens and sad times with our family and friends, but we've had our share of the good times too. That's what keeps us going. Family and friends.

Hazel N. Helle

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