Many words are needed to describe my mother: small, pert, vivacious, talkative, fun-loving, excitable, easily fatigued, depressed, discouraged, determined. Her best features were her brown eyes; her shining black hair, which grew to a widow’s peak on her forehead; her even white teeth; and her erect carriage. She had a round nose and a sallow complexion, both distressing to her, but she made up for these shortcomings with her sense of style.
Mother was born Mable Atlee in Dowagiac, Michigan, and became a classic figure of the westward emigration movement, the little schoolmarm from the East who stepped off a train in the West to teach school.
Her father, William Slater Atlee, arrived in the United States from England in 1854, at the age of two, with his parents, Thomas and Jane, and a baby sister. The six weeks’ voyage by sailing vessel with two infants was so terrible that Thomas and Jane, homesick for England all their lives, could never face the return trip.
Ancestors are often remembered for some small incident. Great-grandfather Atlee, a miller, is remembered as a man who read every spare moment and who carried a book wherever he went. He is also remembered for admiring the fly front of American trousers at a time when Englishmen wore trousers that buttoned on the sides. One day, equipping himself with buttons, scissors, needle, and thread, he went out into the orchard and clumsily remodeled his trousers, to the horror of his wife.
Great-grandmother Jane Slater Atlee is remembered as a jolly woman, a lively talker, who once was so busy chatting that she absentmindedly knit a sock with a foot two feet long for the small foot of her husband. She bore twelve children, five of whom survived.
Little is known of the family of my grandmother, Mary Frances Jarvis of Dowagiac, Michigan. Her father, Zeduck Jarvis, was well-to-do; she loved him, and all her life took pride in his having given the land for the local school. Her mother died of “the galloping consumption,” and at the age of seventeen Mary Frances married my grandfather to escape her stepmother.
The marriage of William and Mary Frances produced three children: Guy, Henry, and Mable, my mother. In the beginning, the marriage of my grandparents, a poor young miller and the daughter of a prosperous landowner, must have been unhappy. Mother recalled that when she was a little girl, her father drank heavily. “There is nothing more terrible for a child than seeing her father carried home drunk,” she often said. I believe her. However, my grandfather, after observing the deterioration of some of his drinking neighbors, concluded that no good ever came from liquor, and never drank again. Mother had a horror of any sort of alcohol.
Mother graduated from Dowagiac High School in 1903 after spending one unforgettable year living with an aunt and going to school in Chicago. She taught two years in Dowagiac, then emigrated west in 1905 to Quincy, Washington, with two cousins, Verna and Lora Evans, also teachers. They had been hired by mail to teach in what their teaching certificates called the “Common Schools of Washington.”
One letter to her parents, written in round, upright penmanship, exists from this period of Mother’s life. It comes from “School Marm’s Hall.” Mother’s cousins had already begun teaching, and she was about to hire a livery to drive out to her school in Waterville, Washington, a school that she thought had about fifty pupils.
Her description of life in Quincy in 1905 is lively. All the bachelors and widowers had “taken to” the new girls in town. Word went around that the young women liked watermelon, and “the result was rather alarming. There are watermelons upon the floor, table and shelves, behind the doors and in the closet. We never venture upon the street, but what some designing fellow offers us one. We accept them all and do our best….” The young teachers went to dances and took in “all the little one-horse shows going. We always tell everyone we are going, start early, walk slowly and never have to pay our own way in.”
Mother saved from this period of her life a copy of The Biography of a Grizzly, by Ernest Thompson Seton, which had been sent by friends in Michigan. She told me that after she read the book aloud in Waterville, her pupils told their families about it. People began to come from miles around to borrow the book, which was read until its binding was frayed and its pages loosened, but Mother treasured it and in her old age wrote inside the cover in a shaky hand, “This book very soiled because it has been read by many many people, including boys and girls.”
Mother was not the only member of the family to come west. Her older brother, Guy, emigrated to Arizona, where he mined silver and turquoise. Back in Michigan, small-town water-driven mills were being replaced by large roller mills which, my grandfather insisted, milled “all the good” out of the grain, so he and my grandmother moved west and settled in Banks, Oregon, where they bought the general merchandise store and lived in six rooms above it. My grandmother turned one bedroom into a millinery shop, where she trimmed ladies’ hats with style and an understanding of farmwives’ financial problems.
The three young teachers spent their summers trailing through the West in their big hats and long skirts, traveling by train in coach cars, marveling at San Francisco the summer after the earthquake and fire, the sea through a glass-bottomed boat at Catalina Island, the pin that drops silently in the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. Those years were perhaps the happiest in Mother’s life.
Mother took a side trip to visit her parents in Banks. There, sitting on the steps of the store, was a tall, handsome young man wearing a white sweater and eating a pie, a whole pie. This man was Chester Lloyd Bunn. He and my mother were married on December 26, 1907, in Vancouver, Washington.
I have few clues to my parents’ courtship. When I asked about a pair of mandolins no one ever played, Mother laughed and said, “Before your father and I were married, we pictured ourselves sitting in a hammock strumming them together.”
When I was about ten, I found, along with Mother’s old Teacher’s Encyclopedia, a composition book. I opened it and read aloud from her handwriting, “At last Lloyd came today.”
Puzzled, I asked, “Why did you write that?”
Mother snatched the composition book from me and did not answer. It must have been the beginning of a diary kept while she was fulfilling her teaching contract in Washington and longing for the young man she loved. I don’t really know.
The couple moved to Yamhill, where Lloyd, as he preferred to be called, was working the farm for the Bunn Farming Company, an attempt to hold together for the family the land left by their father, who had died, gored by a bull, the previous August.
The life of a farmer’s wife came as a shock to my small, high-strung mother, ill equipped for long hours and heavy work. Three or four years later, Father saw that he was doing more than his share of the work on the farm, and the Bunn Farming Company was disbanded. My father’s share of the farm, eighty-two acres, included the house and outbuildings. He was the only one of the five sons interested in farming.
On April 12, 1916, I was born in the nearest hospital, which was in McMinnville. Mother traveled there by train and lived in the hospital for a week while she awaited my birth. It was wartime, and there was a shortage of nurses, so she busied herself running the dust mop and helping around the hospital until I was born.
McMinnville was my birthplace, but home was Yamhill.