GENE STRACHAN: the family drama

Eugene Strachan, Paul Strachan, Thomas Strachan and Bruce Strachan

1962 at 5103 NE Fifteenth in Portland, OR

Thomas was my father's uncle, Gene was Thomas' son.

Paul was my younger brother.

Some years ago I was contacted by Eugene Strachan, the son of my great-uncle.  To sort this out a bit for you, I’ll use real names.  Archibald Strachan, my great-grandfather, emigrated to America with his three grown children.  Once he was established in South Dakota on a homestead, his wife had a son, Thomas, with beautiful blonde curls, the archetype of a beloved child.  Things did not go well in South Dakota because of drought, and Archibald had to fall back on his master carpenter skills, which was okay.  His oldest son, Sam, had been educated in Scotland and became a teacher and school superintendent in South Dakota, then farmed, sold farm machinery, and moved to Portland, OR, where he became my grandfather.

The little boy named Thomas grew up and married a Norwegian woman.  They too had a rocky economic time until Thomas became an agricultural agent who specialized in grasses and forbs.  He had four children: Marvin, Janet, Marjorie and Eugene. 

Gene's car was a Mercedes.

Three were conventional but Eugene, after a failed marriage, and a WWII tour in New Guinea as airplane mechanic, spent his life keeping books for mining companies as far as I know.  When he called me, he was old and was “keeping books” on the genealogy of his family.  He sent me two handwritten, xeroxed, comb-bound books with all the records he had found.  They are useful.

Janet worked overseas for the Diplomatic Corps, married late and died of cancer.

This is Janet in 1965 with her father, possibly on her wedding day.

Gene wanted to come to Valier because when we broke up my mother’s estate, which included my father’s photos, I took them to protect and possibly use for my own research.  There was a specific photo of a house built by Archibald that Gene wanted to see in order to confirm a distant memory.  I didn’t want him to come.  I live in a necessity-based way that I had learned was far below the standards of my cousins, who are comfortable Pacific Coast people.

The more I argued, the more Gene insisted and then sent me a check for $500 which he described as my inheritance coming early.  Until then he had not mentioned that he would have a companion, a Shoshone full-blood grandmother who had been his “girl-friend” for years.  He was very coy about whether they would share a bed, so I was stumped about whether to put them in my so-called “bunkhouse,” a shed with two single beds that had no bathroom, or my own double bed which has a foam rubber slab for a mattress.  In the end it was clear that they were both unsteady on their feet and otherwise frail.  In fact, Gene was exhausted after lunch, needing a reclining chair which I don't have.  I don’t even have a sofa long enough to lie down on.  He did not want to go back to the bed, so I propped him up on my short sofa with a pile of pillows.

His companion — when I described the tricks of the shower, demanded to know whether I bleached it every day.  I can’t remember EVER bleaching it, but she had been trained to meet hospital standards, a matter of energy and sterilization taught to staff by nurses and administrators who had no intention of doing it themselves.  

She was a “little people,” like all the missionary-trained NA people in the 19th century who cleaned and waited on superiors.  Such folks can internalize the high standards of the people who taught them.  Now she saw I was a very deficient white person when it comes to housekeeping.  Gene never noticed.  But she was very unhappy in Valier and not happy either when I drove them all over the rez.  We’d pass a thriving ranch and she’d ask,  “Who does that belong to?”  They all belonged to Blackfeet which made her bristle with rivalry.  The Shoshone tribe ended up way down the economic scale.  She was a woman with pride which, I suppose, was why she was consorting with a white man. 

I fed them Hamburger Helper and, while I washed the dishes (I don't have a dishwasher), set them up with a funny video that was a takeoff on WWII concentration camps featuring cartoon chickens.  Otherwise, my video collection tends to French angst with sub-titles.  I don’t have television because I don’t want it and because the antenna blew over. 

The Sam Strachans leave for Manitoba

By the third day the grandmother was desperate to go home and Gene was plainly in major pain from a “sprained back.”  At last I found the photo Gene wanted: it was a mansard-roof house with tall windows and the photo was taken when someone left, maybe my grandfather’s family going north to try raising potatoes in Manitoba.  It must have been emotional time that impressed Gene as a child.  I myself was impatient because I wanted to get back to my own projects.

The date of Gene’s visit is easily established.  My neighbor came rushing over to tell us about 9/11, the attack on the World Trade Towers.  She invited us to watch on their TV, but my company was shy.  Gene was desperate to know what was happening and to see the videos.  I set him up with the computer and he watched over and over.  I knew we’d be seeing those images for the rest of our lives.  Gene was trying to figure out some way he could re-enlist, a frail old man with a bad back.  And he was all for reinstating the TV antenna himself, then and there.

They went home the next morning.  Already packed and waiting in the car, the grandmother realized she had forgotten to take her pills and demanded a glass of water.  I got it, but I had run the tap to get cold water and she said it should have been lukewarm.  They got home safely, though later the grandmother was going between houses on the rez and was knocked down by dogs, which hurt her seriously.  As I write, 2016, they have both been dead for a while.  Gene’s bad back turned out to be stomach cancer and within the year he died in hospice.  His sibs were all gone except Marjorie and he had no children.   I wondered if I'd have felt differently when he visited if I'd known he had terminal cancer.

The genealogy is often useful, though I use it quite differently than he did.  I look for patterns.  The most interesting story was not about Strachans but about a branch named Gillis, which had a Masterpiece Theatre plot I told on the post dated Monday, January 12, 2015, entitled “Gene Strachan’s Quest for the Gillis Branch.”  Interesting photos there.

http://prairiemary.blogspot.com/2015/01/gene-strachans-quest-for-gillis-branch.html 

I’m not sure what I think about Gene and his visit.  I admire his sudden burst of what was surely "Kinko Publishing".  He made several copies of the two books he sent me and also sent the information to cousins.

His idea about Uncle Thomas, who was idolized by the rest of the family, was quite different.  At one point Thomas had managed to get a job as the town’s water-master which meant maintaining pumps and so on.  When Gene was a small boy he went with the father and they found the electrical pump was in a pool of standing water.  Thomas wanted the boy to turn off the pump — he would have to stand in the water to do it.  Somehow Gene knew it was dangerous and interpreted it as his father being careless with his son’s life.  

As a boy Gene was sent to work for a neighboring farmer and that man was shocked that he brought no lunch with him, so provided a lunch, and Gene interpreted this as his father’s neglect again.  He told these stories as an old man with high resentment as intense as if they happened last month.
  

This was not Gene's mother.  This Ida Strachan lived in Africa. 

But she seems to match his idealization of his mother.

His family research began with his beloved mother, named Ida.  In his mind her resourcefulness and love was all that saved the family from the fecklessness of Thomas.  He himself married late to an older woman and they soon divorced.  I suspect he was looking for Ida and didn’t find her.  He attached her virtues to being Norwegian and Thomas' flaws to being Scots.  

It’s all an old familiar story -- do you remember that John Murie's father nearly killed him by making him dig a well so deep that it filled with gas?  But Gene's bitter tale reveals how ideas we develop in youth can control our lives forever after and close doors — maybe protective ones.  

But I love yanking doors open to check out skeletons.  So it’s clear that early on I must have been rewarded by finding out things, but I think that came from my mother's side -- she was a Pinkerton.  It does not make friends.  But pretty good detectives.

A FOOTNOTE TO HISTORY

On September 11, 2001, World Trade Center buildings 1, 2 and 7 in New York City, collapsed as a result of terrorist attacks and the subsequent fires that followed. After a 3-year investigation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, it was concluded that fire weakened the steel structure until the long bridge-like floor sections (called trusses) began to progressively sag. This sagging converted the downwards pull of the trusses into an inwards pull. This intensifying inwards pull on the walls eventually caused the outer columns of Tower 2, and later the inner columns of Tower 1, to buckle and fold, thus initiating the collapses.  2,752 people died in the buildings, including 157 passengers and crew members who were aboard two hijacked airplanes that struck buildings 1 and 2, initiating fires in both, with debris initiating fires in building 7 upon the collapse of buildings 1 and 2. The buildings were a steel-frame design. This structural failure should not to be confused with a progressive failure of the floor systems, or so-called "pancake theory" which was ruled out as a cause.  (Wiki)

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/09/the-third-building-which-collapsed-on-911-was-not-hit-by-a-plane.html

Some want this report re-opened.

Early in September, 2001, my father’s cousin, a man past retirement age, called to ask whether he could come to look through my father’s photo albums.  Gene Strachan was trying to complete a family genealogy and sent me copies of what he had so far, hand-written, photocopied and comb-bound into a book.  He remembered a house my great-grandfather had built and wanted a photo.  It had a mansard roof with tall second-story windows set into it as gables.

This is the house Gene was remembering.

I tried to discourage him.  I told him my house was a shack, underfurnished, no television; that I’m a terrible cook; that I had cats who were very spoiled, and so on.  All true, but I couldn’t talk him out of coming.  It just happened that he showed up the day before the attack on the World Trade Center.  

Gene had served in WWII as an airplane mechanic in New Guinea, one of those indelible life passages that shapes people.  When a neighbor came over breathless with the news, Gene was ready to re-enlist.  He was also desperate to see what had happened but too shy to go over to the neighbors’ at such a powerful time.  So I set him up at the computer and showed him how to repeat and search.  He was there for an hour. 

An unwelcome bedmate.

Much to the relief of his girlfriend, a Cheyenne grandmother who was a CNA and had envisioned all white people as having color TV, recliners, and a shower that was scrubbed with bleach daily -- that’s motel standard but not mine.   Crackers thought she was wonderful and decided to sleep with her, which caused her to scream for Gene to get the monster off her.  I just didn’t live up to her standards at all.  She had a tough few days.

But Gene  didn’t care.  His life had been solitary and restless and the albums comforted him.  I was surprised -- Uncle Thomas, his father, had always been the fair-haired child when the past was discussed.  But now Gene told us about poverty, having no shoes or lunch, and his father’s temper outbursts.  Only later when his father finally found a role as a county agent,  becoming an expert on grasses and forbes, did the family stabilize.  But the resentment in Gene never went away.  His attempt at marriage had failed, no children.  I had met him long ago but that was all.

I didn’t think about 9-11 much until they had left.  Then I was the one who sat at the computer and watched the event over and over.  I never did get hysterical about it.  I was just curious.  Plenty of catastrophic disasters happen all the time around the world -- this one was simply vertical and in the city.  I did NOT understand some of the claims, and I couldn’t figure out Building 7, which was not hit by airplanes but collapsed anyway.  Many claimed there were demolition explosives planted there.  A minister friend of mine lost his pulpit because he claimed that and his congregation thought it was unpatriotic of him.

Portlandia Building

Before I moved back to Montana, I had been working at the Bureau of Buildings in Portland.  The office was in the Portlandia Building, a notorious Michael Graves structure which is basically a big square warehouse with tiny windows that was decorated with fancy painting and a big statue on the front.  It was miserable to work in -- never enough light or air -- and the building inspectors had so many criticisms and complaints and made so many threats to sue that they were finally moved to another building.  Our motto:  "Don't get rid of the complaint -- get rid of the complainants."

At one point the geologists were worrying about earthquakes  (Portland is in the “ring of fire” that is volcanically active) and gave us all some education on what to do.  They warned us about buildings that “pancake,” meaning that if they are weakened somehow, they will drop each story onto the one beneath until the whole thing had gone straight down into rubble.

Crane collapse at Mecca's Grand Mosque

They say that Osama bin Laden, who was an engineer, had expected/hoped the World Trade Towers would tip over sideways and smash adjacent buildings -- something like the big construction crane that just now tipped over when hit by lightning and wind, smashing into the Grand Mosque of the Kaaba.  The crane belonged to bin Laden’s father’s business.  What a gift to conspiracy theorists!  There is video of it happening, lightning and all.

During the Nineties time period when I was in Portland a crane had tipped over and smashed into the City Hall.  The building inspectors said that people had no idea how much risk there was in the many projects of expansion and that inspection had little “impact” on the problem.  Very small problems could cause catastrophic consequences.  We don’t know enough and supervisors didn’t have enough power.  The architects were in experimental mode.  The engineers were influenced by money.  And since my group was soils engineers, they knew how shifty land can be.

We were told that if a bad earthquake hit, the Portlandia building was likely to “pancake” (the pop term for progressive collapse), so if we felt trembling we should immediately get under our steel desks.  And we probably ought to keep some bottles of water there in case we were trapped for a few days.  Then management took away our steel desks and gave us composite cubicles.

There were boxes in the clerical storeroom marked for earthquake response.  The rumor went around that they were full of candy bars for emergency rations and someone couldn’t resist breaking open a box to see.  The contents were paper forms for recording damage for insurance claims.  Somewhere in there I formed the intention of coming back to Montana.

Building 7

By now I’ve watched Building 7 fall a dozen times.  There’s plainly fire in one whole floor.  It clearly pancakes, though the narrative calls it “progressive collapse.”  The distinction is lost on me.  Putting that alongside the newly released photos of the stricken Cheney and his watchdog wife, and suddenly it becomes clear that bin Laden was one lucky poker player. This coming election is going to be very "interesting".   The stakes keep going up.   I’m thinking about houses built on sand, how image overwhelms the words of experts, and how dangerous the implanting of fear can be.  How easy it is. What a great way to claim power.  But it can boomerang.

Gene and his friend weren’t really expecting to visit the rez, but I guided them out to Heart Butte and back, because I thought they ought to see scenery and hear a little history.  Every time we passed a ranch, the Cheyenne grandmother wanted to know whether whites owned it.  Mostly they were Indian owned,  which surprised her.  When we got back to town, we drove along adjacent Lake Francis.  The road was unpaved, just a trail, pretty rough.  Gene almost groaned in pain from the jolts.  He said his back was giving him a lot of trouble but he wouldn’t take even aspirin.

Within months he was in hospice, dying of stomach cancer.  Knowing death was coming must have been the reason for him being so anxious to understand the family web.  He'd been a bookkeeper for a uranium company for much of his life and this was his own bookkeeping.  I don’t know whether the girl friend knew or whether she would have told me anything anyway.   Knowledge is power.  Esp, when it's secret.

Cheney on 9-11