COUNTRY FOLK

This is the way women my age were supposed to look just after WWII. In fact, the woman on the left is my Grandma Strachan, who is very much like me. I know she made her dress and probably took the collar and cuffs off some previous dress. The woman in the middle is Georgia Coleman, my grandmother’s best friend back in South Dakota homesteading days and the mother of "almost relatives". The woman on the right I don’t recognize, but I think it is clearly her visit that has prompted a clan gathering. She appears to be more urban and maybe a little younger. As a former costumer, I notice the difference in (ahem) foundation garments. I think that Georgia has just dispensed with them. I wonder now whether she had some Indian blood. The photo is at her house in Silverton, about this time of year judging from the blooming bush. Nowadays, these women might be in embroidered sweatpant sets.



This woman is Noma McClure, a beloved daughter of Georgia Coleman, and a one-room schoolhouse teacher. Stewart McClure, her husband, is providing the labor while Noma does stability. Noma was a lively, black-eyed person, interested in everything and everyone. Stewart was much older and quite deaf, but gentle and benevolent. Their marriage was very much a demonstration of what “labor” and “stability” can do for lives and many others benefited from their hard work and constant support. Silverton, where they lived, is a small town with a monastery where the specialty is fine music. It’s also a place famous for its iris farms and the McClure garden stood up to that standard. We loved going there. It was an ideal model of what “country” ought to be and is part of the reason I’m in Valier. Silverton itself is far too commercial and gentrified now.


This is the companion photo for the female old friends at the beginning, probably taken the same day. With the exception of Stewart McClure, these men were from the prairie and never stopped marveling at the Pacific Northwest stumps. This one is not even particularly big as doug fir stumps go! Back row is my Uncle Glenn, Ted Coleman (son of Georgia), my Uncle Seth. Front row is my Uncle Doc (husband of Beulah’s daughter, my aunt May), my Grandfather Strachan and Stewart McClure. The idea of all of them getting on the stump was inspired, but what I love about this photo is the body language: look at the difference between the cocky Doc and the composed Stewart. In the middle Sam Strachan grips his lapels in a characteristic pose. He had employed all these young guys at one time or another, so he knows he’s the head of the company.


This photo always makes me smile. Agnes Wilcox and her baby daughter Norma Jean are on the back porch of their big square farm house in Sutherlin, Oregon, far down the valley from Silverton. At this point (maybe 1937) this house had a handpump for water (like the one behind Stewart and Noma in the ice cream making photo) and an outhouse. Agnes was a home ec major at Oregon State University where she met her husband, George, and she kept house with such zeal and competence that my mother was a little intimidated. I’ve never used an outhouse so totally sanitized and roomy. It was approached along a little board walk. Norma Jean was a couple of years older than me and had red hair like mine. I always treasured her handmedowns, which had mostly been sewed by Agnes. (NJ’s only sib was male.) George was a big, cheerful, quiet man of great competence who grew up on this farm. His father lived out his life with them. George’s son, John, had quite a different life.



This is another of my favorite “country” photos. The man is my Grandfather Pinkerton’s brother, James, but of an entirely different temperament. (John, my mother’s father, was fiery and proud. Jim was gentle and god-fearing.) Jim was one of twins and lost his brother in early adulthood to typhoid fever in the marshy lands of Washington where the family contracted to build the big dairy barns going up at the time. The family moved to Roseburg, a timber town at the southern end of the Willamette Valley, and was never prosperous again but much healthier. Jim’s mother, whom I never knew, mourned endlessly for her lost son until one day in church she plainly saw him walk up the aisle to her and take her hand. “I’m all right, Mother,” he said. “Don’t grieve anymore.” Nadine, Jim’s daughter (here behind him), said she saw the apparition as well. She said the sun coming through the stained glass windows shone on him.

“Aunt Florence,” who was actually my great-aunt, was a bit older than Uncle Jim, which caused trouble when they married. (Few of the Pinkerton weddiings went uncriticized!) Called “Aunt Candy,” because she always brought treats, she was famous for sitting down at the breakfast table with her second cup of coffee and saying with enormous relish, “Now let’s make plans for the day!” Even in old age she could walk the feet off her nieces and she had a lot of flair, a sense of airs and graces.

These are my role models, though they would never have been able to even imagine where my life has taken me. Their small plain houses, their quiet simple lives, are what I try to achieve now. The only person from these photos who is alive would be Norma Jean, the baby, and we’ve been out of contact for many years. Nevertheless, the voices and faces of these people live on in my mind. Their ghosts don’t have to walk up the church aisle to tell me not to grieve because I don’t. Instead I find them a source of joy and strength every time I look at these photos. And there are people here very much like these "country folks."