Galen Richardson
1900 - 1955
"Grandfather"
The Early Years
Galen (Gale), first child of George and Rosa (Tam) Richardson, was born on Monday, May 21, 1900 on his maternal grandfather, Alfred Campbell Tam's farm in Jackson Township, near Idaville, White County, Indiana.
On Saturday, May 7, 1904, Galen's mother passed away leaving his father and him alone and it was during those hard-lonely days that Aunt Addie and her daughter came to take care of the household and responsibilities of being a mother figure to Galen. After his maternal grandfather's death on January 25, 1905, he inherited twenty-eight acres off from his three- hundred-acre farm. Galen was five years of age in that year so his father was appointed guardianship of his estate until he reached adulthood. When they left Indiana in 1910, his acreage was rented out to his mother's brother, Issac Tam. Galen received a percentage of the profits off from the crops that were sold annually. Sometime later Galen decided to rent his property, to his Aunt Mary Effie (Tam) Hunt and her husband Alva Hunt. In 1935, he sold his property for five hundred dollars to them because the country was in the middle of the Great Depression and the Richardsons needed the money to sustain themselves.
In 1910 Galen along with his dad, Aunt Addie and Della moved from his father's farm near Monticello, Indiana to Burlington, North Dakota. When they arrived there, he started in grade school and middle school graduating in 1917. During his youth, he belonged to a Boys Club in Burlington where he learned how to play softball.
Around 1914 Galen's father, George Richardson, decided to earn a little extra money, trapping beavers out in the prairie and selling the skins. He went over and sold his skins to John Underdahl, at Mae's widowed mother's house in Drady. While he was there he met Mae and he was so impressed with what a nice girl she was so he went home and told his son Galen all about her. Afterwards, Galen and Mae road a school bus ,a horse drawn buggy, and they became good friends. I remember grandmother sayings, at that time Galen had such a heavy-black beard at age fourteen.
After two years of advanced education, Mae, who chose teaching as a profession because all of sisters taught before their marriages, earned a teaching certificate at Minot State Teacher's College. Upon graduation, she excepted a teaching position at the Peterson Grade School in Souris, North Dakota near the Canadian Border. As a teacher in that small-rural-agrarian community , she taught grades first through eighth in a one room schoolhouse. During her stay in Souris, Mae, whoes sister Lena Beckman and her family lived there, boarded with Mrs. Brackster.
During the Thanksgiving Holiday in 1919, Galen and his chaperon, Josephine Erickson, went up to spend the Holiday with Mae and the Beckman Family. On December 5, 1919, Mae wrote her sister about how much she loved Galen and I will intimate a portion below:
Dear Hattie,
"…that their is not a better boy in my opinion , than Galen. You know he is good. He surely has the stick-to-ity too. He has been working almost steady every since I've gone with him. We love each other and that counts ever so much. I know marriage is a serious proposition and so is being engaged. I can hardly wait until I get home. Just one more week. The Richardsons are going to Minnesota guess Galen is too. But I hate to think of like of it. Seems like I have been away from him long enough….".
On Sunday, January 1, 1921 at twelve o'clock noon he married Mae Julia Underdahl in the First Presbyterian Manse in Minot, North Dakota . Afterwards they had their wedding reception at Mae brother's John Underdahl's home in Garden Valley. Mae whore a blue dress with black black embroidery , a strand of pearls and she was given a blue sapphire engagement ring. Mae's mother did not attend their marriage because she had the influenza and neither did Galen's parents because they were living in Minnesota. Mae, eleventh child of Johannes and Marti Marie (Holmen) Underdahl, was born on Wednesday, May 4, 1898 in her parents home in Kenyon, Goodhue County, Minnesota. She was Confirmed in the Lutheran Faith on May 31, 1914 in Bethleham Lutheran Church in Minot.
During their first year of their marriage, they made their home in the upstairs apartment in a large home owned by the Beardsy Family at 536 Valley Street Minot, North Dakota. I remember Grandmother saying that she was so used to making large meals for her family, on one such an occasion, she made a huge batch of refried potatoes for only her and Galen. In that apartment, their first child Glen was born on October 24, 1921.
The Farming Years
Glen reflected in 1991 in his Autobiography about his family and growing up during the Great Depression:
Around 1915 my step-grandmother Mabel Vise came from Indiana to marry my Grandfather, George Richardson. It must have been a real treat to have a good cook again after baching it for so many years after his mother died. Dad at fifteen must of had a good appetite because he always enjoyed good food. Grandma probably fried a lot of fried chicken, which she did well. In later years, when we lived in Drady we had a lot of chickens. She could catch kill, pluck, clean and have them in a frying pan so fast that it was really something to watch! She was left handed and always on the run.
Sometime around 1916-1917 my father hurt his back. Guess Granddad was taking a load of hay to the barn and some piece of machinery was in the way. After Dad picket up the tongue to move it, his vertebrae went out of place… he need to have used both hands to move it. He went to the doctor once and should have gone back again . I blame that on Granddad. I'm surprised Dad was able to do the work he did through all those years with a back in that shape. It left him with a pronounced back deformity on one side for the remainder of his life.
When my Father started at the Post Office in Minot, he was wanting a rural route and always did because he had such trouble with his feet which was understandable. Granddad didn't want him to go out on the roads during the blizzards, etc.. In the summer time, it was a good job. They were usually done by noon.
My Uncle, John Underdahl, carried our mail when we lived at Drady. Often it was late at night when he would get to our house and he still had another twelve miles of snow-clogged roads to get through to reach Minot. So I can see Granddad's point, too. Uncle John was a legend in that country as a result there were many write-ups in the newspapers. I think my father carried mail when they married up until early 1929. Many years later during the war, he told Audrey that it was one of the worst mistakes that he made was quitting the Post Office.
Around 1926 we moved from Minot to the house on top of the hill in Burlington. Dean was born there on January 29, 1929.
My first memories of visiting my paternal grandparents at the farm must have been around 1927. Seems like we went on Sundays for dinner and stayed for sandwiches, etc. in the evenings. Dad went from work out to the farm and would not get home until after we were in bed, so we didn't see him from weekend to weekend. He helped Granddad with the haying, etc. and brought milk, eggs, potatoes, and meat home.
That's about the first I remember of visiting out at the farm. Grandma's dad, Scotty Vise, lived there with them. Scotty was Hannah Gulstrand's father-in-law in her first marriage. Grandma Mabel was Ione, Bud and Wibby Vise's aunt. Melvin Vise, who didn't get back from the World War I, was Hannah's first husband.
My grandparents lived on a farm a couple of miles farther up-the river from the Foote Ranch. The Wienrieck Family lived there in the late thirties. It was a real nice place for a small operation like grandpa had going. He didn't think much of going into debt. He had money in the bank and every thing was paid for. He had quite a few head of cattle, several teams of horses and all the farm machinery he needed.
When we lived in that house on top of the hill in Burlington, Dad bought a radio. If it wasn't the first in town, it was the second. I remember when dad went out to the farm and bought them into our house to listen to the radio. Quite a novelty!
At that time Mom had a piano, washing machine, nice rug, etc. We didn't have room for the piano in that little house on the farm and no electricity for the washing machine. That went trying to hang on to the insurance policy.
The Roaring Twenties
I guess everyone was making money in the Roaring Twenties, so Dad's $165.00 a month didn't sound so good. And with the trouble Dad had with his feet, he wanted to go into big-time farming. In 1929, I remember some pretty heated arguments they had over that. Granddad tried to tell Dad the good times wouldn't last. In the end Dad quit the Post Office, drew out his pension and there was no going back.
But he didn't go out to the farm either. I'm sure Granddad was worried about it, because he came to town and to our house… and there was Dad. They about came to blows—I thought. It sure scared me! Granddad had a bad temper much more so than my Father. A short time later, I don't remember why, we moved out to Granddad's for a while. Maybe they looked for something big to farm.
As I remember, it took Grandpa's bank account, what money what Dad may of had left out of his pension and a mortgage on horses, cattle, pigs and Grandpa's farm machinery to make a down payment on all that big-new-equipment.. tractor, 4 bottom plow, combine, drill, etc.
They rented two farms, south and west of Drady, totaling seven-hundred acres. The place that we lived in didn't have a well and was just a shack. It had a kitchen and a living room down, one and a half bedrooms upstairs, and a small cellar whereas the big place where Grandpa lived had a three-bedroom house, large kitchen and a dining room, plus a living room. It had a big barn, chicken coop, machine shop, granary, and a artesian well that was real strong all year around. So all of the operation was done out at that place.
Where we lived was about a half mile west, so I made quite a few trips back and forth. In fact, in the summertime I was there most of the time. I would ride with Dad on the tractor until I got tired, then and go tag along with Granddad. Sometimes he was fixing fence, or some project like that. They milk about twenty head of cows twice-a-day, so it was a lot of work
Sometimes they would make home brew in the summertime. That cold water from the artesian well was great to cool milk, cream, butter, beer, etc. If Granddad stopped for a break in the forenoon, and had a beer, he would pour me a glass. Sometimes I really feel it, but I didn't let on. If Mom would have known she would have grounded me.
Dad put in some long, long hours on that tractor, putting in crops in the spring. (At times, Eunice and Yvonne rode with Dad too.)
Grandma's sister Flora, and her husband Ward Beard, came to visit Drady. I remember her being prim and proper, and a nice lady. Maybe that's why Scotty Vise came out west to live with Grandma and Grandpa. I think that he would like to live it up. Maybe he and Granddad knew each other when they lived in Indiana. I think that Flora raised Grandma after their Mom passed away. I think that she kept Ward in line. I remember Dad and my Grandfather laughing because Ward got chewed out when she smelled cigarette on his breath.
Grandma would tell us stories about when she was a young girl. She talked about Idaville, Indiana and going down to the Wabash and Tippecanoe Rivers for picnics I t was fascinating to some kid on a dry prairie, who hadn't anymore water than the Mouse River.
I think Della and her mother, Aunt Addie, came to Drady to visit also. I don't recall much about but she except she expected Grandpa to have a mustache.
It wasn't an easy life out on the dry, dusty prairie. Mom would have me drag dead limbs from the trees up to the house. If the tractor was there she would put them thought the holes in the wheels to break them short enough for the kitchen range. If not she laid them on the rock and threw another to break them. Primitive huh? In the wintertime, I filled copper boilers with snow, and Mom put them on the stove to milt.
When we moved from town to the farm, we had always used bakery bread. Dad told Mom she would have to start baking bread. I don't know what she did with the first batch, but it was so hard you couldn't cut it or break it. Mom told us kids to take'm out to the rock pile out behind the barn before Dad came back home. We had lots of fun bouncing them off from the rocks, and we (probably me) couldn't keep our mouths shut…so Dad got in on the fun. But Mom learned to make real good bread. (She later made some dark brown bread that was super good bread.) When I was going to High School, she must have baked bread twice a week. And she made good chili.
When we lived at Drady, Mom had us kids pick some weeds, and when she cooked it up, it was like spinach. Also, she made cottage cheese, and some other cheese type of thing, that I'm sure was Norse.
Grandma Underdahl came to visit us for a few days along about that time. If there was some home brew over at Grandpa's, Dad would bring it home. Grandma Underdahl liked that. She would get relaxed, and have so much fun laughing at us kids being silly. Dad laughed at her and Mom did not like that… to think that her mother would have some beer and show that she felt it. But it was fun.
I was probably around 1930 that Dad plowed up some sod (I'm sure that it was virgin land), and planted
potatoes. He took us out to hoe them… and it was hot. Anyway, he ended up with a cellar full of a big, perfect, white potatoes…big baker types. It should've been worth a lot of money, but he couldn't even give them away. They froze during the winter and had to be carried back out and hauled away.
" We have nothing to fear but fear itself"
-- Franklin Roosevelt
1933
I think that the crops were good in 1929 and the prices weren't that bad, but the next year, the drought and the Great Depression hit. Things in the United States went to pot. Out in the prairie where we lived, it was so dry that there weren't any crops. If a farmer did get any returns, the prices were so bad he lost money. The ones that survived were the ones that didn't have any overhead and had money to put back. Granddad would of have had it made.
It was the milking cows that bought the groceries. Granddad always milked a lot of cows and sold the cream, buying groceries for both houses. It got a little thin at times. If there was any home freezers in those days, it would have been a snap. But only in the wintertime could a butcher and keep the meat frozen. In the summer time it was eggs and potatoes.
When my father's maternal Aunt Effie (Tam) Hunt, her husband Alva Hunt, their daughter Mabel (Hunt)
Heiny and her husband Merle Heiny came back from Indiana for a visit, they always had a lot of stories about the gangsters coming through their part of the country. They weren't that far from Chicago, so I'm sure they were telling the way that it was. Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and all, probably at some time, hid out in that country, robbing banks as they went. Anyway, it scared me.
In 1929 when three of the Underdahl daughters families, my mother's sisters, the Beckmans, Johnsons, and Treslands came west… the letters that they wrote about this country.. the fruit laying on the ground, etc. I made up my mind I was going west some day, and all I can say is North Dakota is a good place to be from a long way from.
I must have lived a charmed life back there in North Dakota. I was bucked off a horse with my foot caught in the stirrup. The horse didn't go straight, or I would have been had. I would have been stomped into the sod.
Once dad was moving a combine from the farthest field to home, and I was riding behind on the combine. When we had gone down a deep coolly and back up the other side and on the flat ground, the pin on the draw bar broke. If that had happened a few hundred feet back, me and the machine would have ended up in a pile of junk at the bottom of that gulch.
This same combine had a hopper up high that stored the wheat, or what ever that they were threshing, 'til they had about a truckload. Then they'd put a truck under the spout and dump it and haul it to the granary. Anyway, it was over my head when it was full. Once they were combing flax. I was up in my favorite riding spot. Then I got the bright idea of seeing how much I could get around me and still get out. Flax is different, and I just about didn't get out. It was like sand. Then later I heard of people drowned in that grain sometimes.
When we moved to Drady, dad had a Model-T sedan, about a 1923, I think. Anyway we got home from visiting somewhere and Euncie , Yvonne and myself were out, and just about gone for. The car must of had an exhaust leak. Yvonne was the worst off. We were in the back seat. A few more miles and we would have been done for, for us three.
I think I was nine years old when Dad cranked up another old Ford 1915, and told me to start down the road, out to the farthest field. And he would come up behind with the tractor. He wanted to leave the tractor that night, and have away back so he did not have to walk.
On my ninth birthday Granddad had to put his big saddle on a horse and let me ride out to get the cows in for milking. The cattle cross the creek and Bob, the terrier, started nipping at the horse's heels. The horse started bucking and I stayed on long enough to get a cut near my eye, and on my leg, and then went off with my foot caught in the stirrup strap, and my head bouncing off the rocks, the dog still nipping at the horse's heels. Maybe that's why the horse went in circles, which is all that saved me. Finally my foot came loose and I was in the creek up to my waist. Dad, Grandpa and Grandma were up at the barn waiting to milk, so they saw the whole thing and started down there. But I started to move, Granddad went up to the coral behind the barn where the horse ran to, with the dog still raising Cain with the horse. He threw a club or something at the dog and knocked him down. Then he got on the horse and it started to buck again. He knocked the horse down twice before it quit. A few days later, Dad got on it and it threw him, so Granddad got rid of it. Dad took me home and Mom wanted me taken to town to the Doctor and dad thought so ,too. Granddad came to the house after they got the muck and blood cleaned off and said that I would be okay. Guess he was right. The dog and horse survived, too. The dog was old Bob and I think that he was still with the family on Central Ave. in Minot.
Old Dog Pat
In the late twenties, Dad brought old Pat home. The dog had started following Dad on his mail route. Every morning the dog was at the Post Office waiting, so dad started bring him home. Dad liked having Pat with him. He kept the dogs busy and they left him alone so he could deliver the mail. The dog was bull and some kind of terrier. He never bit anyone…but Mom loved the dog. He was there if someone knock at the door. When he put on is act, people backed off.
At Drady, Pat would go out and attack the porcupine. Then he came home whining. Dad would get a pair of pliers, pull the quills out of him. It happen more than once, so Pat didn't learn. He never turn down a fight with anything, I guess.
About 1932, we moved from Drady to a place out in Burlington. It was on the divide, which was between the Souris and the Des Lacs Rivers. It was about five miles out of town. We lived upstairs and Grandma, Grandpa and Ruth lived down stairs. While we were their, the bank foreclosed on the rest of the farm machinery, the cattle, pigs, the last team of horses. The was nothing in the house to eat except potatoes and they had been frozen.
We went to Gulstrand's house where Hannah had food fixed. Everyone was starving. We live in a house next to Lambert's. Grandma and Grandpa lived upstairs at Gulstrand's. They had a big house next to the highway (where we later lived).
"Happy Days Are Here Again"
The next spring, Grandpa moved to a little farm, on the divided too, but closer to the river. He got a few head of cattle to start with an d start to build up a heard again.. And when the project places opened up, granddad got one of those. By 1937, he had a team of horses, cattle, goats, chickens. He was doing okay and then he got sick in 1941. In June of 1942 he passed away. He is buried in Burlington, North Dakota.
Later Grandmother sold everything and came west and lived with the Gulstrand's. Ruth was a big help to Grandma and she was of coarse the apple of Granddad's eye.
When Grandpa and Grandma moved to the farming project and on the small farm, too, he took the old Model-T truck with him. The only thing that was left over from the big time farming. Guess they must have paid cash for it. ( I have the title to the truck yet.) Anyway, one day he was on the way to town with cream and produce, I s' pose. A state patrolman stopped him. The old truck did not have a license, the lights didn't work, and he didn't have a drivers license. So Granddad took the truck home, cut it up and made a cart and used horses on it. He didn't need a license on that.( I think that there was only two state patrolmen in the whole state of North Dakota at that time.)
I remember, when we lived in Drady, going to town with Dad during fair week. He parked close to third street and we walked down to the fairgrounds. We hit a few home-brew houses on the way down there, and also on the way back. Must've been late. Twelve miles in the dark with no lights. I don't remember getting home, but the next morning Mom was so mad it's a wonder she didn't hit him with something! But our Mom was not a violent person. Needless to say that was the last time I went to town with Dad, which was probably what he wanted to start with.
I liked going to town with Granddad. I always got crackerjacks or something like that. Sometimes I had to sit and wait a long time, but with something to chew on, it wasn't so bad.
The end.
--Glen Richardson 1991
Galen worked for the Postal Service in Minot from 1919 until late 1929 before he went into the farming business with his father. Glen reflected back on those early years as aforementioned during the Great Depression and among the financial causalities of that era was the Richardson Family. Those years were an real trying time for the family economically , but as the Depression progressed the New Deal Programs that started in 1933 under FDR came into being . Around that time Galen went to work for the WPA earning forty-eight dollars a month. Although life started to get somewhat better for them, it was still challengeing .
During the Mae's Burlington years, she would often play the piano at First Presbyterian Church on Sundays when the visiting minister would come to preach. Two of her favorite songs that she would often played were "Now is the Hour" and "Jerusalem the Holy City" and probably performed them there.
A New Beginning
After Galen's father passed away on May 4, 1942, he along with his family moved from Minot, North Dakota to Washington. They moved to the greater Everett area on Larimore Road in several small rental houses. In late 1943 they purchased their first home at 4818-2nd Street Lowell, WA. And they made that their home for the next nineteen years until end of May 1962. When Galen first came to the Everett area, he got a job at Simpson Lee Paper Company as a paper dyer and he worked there up until six months before his death
Galen Richardson passed away on June 11, 1955 at 11:00 AM in Everett General Hospital and Mae passed away twenty-seven years later on Friday, September 25, 1981 at 9:40 AM in the same hospital. They are both buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Everett, WA.
Galen passed away on June 11, 1955 in Everett, Washington.
He is survived by his widow Mae J. Richardson. His children
Glen (Audrey) Richardson of Vancover, WA, Eunice Richardson
of Lowell, WA; Yvonne (Daniel) Bunney of Snohomish, WA; Betty (Norm) Turner of Lowell, WA; Dean (Carol Joan)Richardson of Everett; James, David and Carol Richardson of Lowell, WA. A sister Virginia Ruth (Jack) Gale of Seattle, WA. And nine grandchildren.
Mr Richardson was preceeded in death by his parents,a stepmother Mabel L. Richardson. Two children Rita and Paul
Richardson.
1900 - 1955
"Grandfather"
The Early Years
Galen (Gale), first child of George and Rosa (Tam) Richardson, was born on Monday, May 21, 1900 on his maternal grandfather, Alfred Campbell Tam's farm in Jackson Township, near Idaville, White County, Indiana.
On Saturday, May 7, 1904, Galen's mother passed away leaving his father and him alone and it was during those hard-lonely days that Aunt Addie and her daughter came to take care of the household and responsibilities of being a mother figure to Galen. After his maternal grandfather's death on January 25, 1905, he inherited twenty-eight acres off from his three- hundred-acre farm. Galen was five years of age in that year so his father was appointed guardianship of his estate until he reached adulthood. When they left Indiana in 1910, his acreage was rented out to his mother's brother, Issac Tam. Galen received a percentage of the profits off from the crops that were sold annually. Sometime later Galen decided to rent his property, to his Aunt Mary Effie (Tam) Hunt and her husband Alva Hunt. In 1935, he sold his property for five hundred dollars to them because the country was in the middle of the Great Depression and the Richardsons needed the money to sustain themselves.
In 1910 Galen along with his dad, Aunt Addie and Della moved from his father's farm near Monticello, Indiana to Burlington, North Dakota. When they arrived there, he started in grade school and middle school graduating in 1917. During his youth, he belonged to a Boys Club in Burlington where he learned how to play softball.
Around 1914 Galen's father, George Richardson, decided to earn a little extra money, trapping beavers out in the prairie and selling the skins. He went over and sold his skins to John Underdahl, at Mae's widowed mother's house in Drady. While he was there he met Mae and he was so impressed with what a nice girl she was so he went home and told his son Galen all about her. Afterwards, Galen and Mae road a school bus ,a horse drawn buggy, and they became good friends. I remember grandmother sayings, at that time Galen had such a heavy-black beard at age fourteen.
After two years of advanced education, Mae, who chose teaching as a profession because all of sisters taught before their marriages, earned a teaching certificate at Minot State Teacher's College. Upon graduation, she excepted a teaching position at the Peterson Grade School in Souris, North Dakota near the Canadian Border. As a teacher in that small-rural-agrarian community , she taught grades first through eighth in a one room schoolhouse. During her stay in Souris, Mae, whoes sister Lena Beckman and her family lived there, boarded with Mrs. Brackster.
During the Thanksgiving Holiday in 1919, Galen and his chaperon, Josephine Erickson, went up to spend the Holiday with Mae and the Beckman Family. On December 5, 1919, Mae wrote her sister about how much she loved Galen and I will intimate a portion below:
Dear Hattie,
"…that their is not a better boy in my opinion , than Galen. You know he is good. He surely has the stick-to-ity too. He has been working almost steady every since I've gone with him. We love each other and that counts ever so much. I know marriage is a serious proposition and so is being engaged. I can hardly wait until I get home. Just one more week. The Richardsons are going to Minnesota guess Galen is too. But I hate to think of like of it. Seems like I have been away from him long enough….".
On Sunday, January 1, 1921 at twelve o'clock noon he married Mae Julia Underdahl in the First Presbyterian Manse in Minot, North Dakota . Afterwards they had their wedding reception at Mae brother's John Underdahl's home in Garden Valley. Mae whore a blue dress with black black embroidery , a strand of pearls and she was given a blue sapphire engagement ring. Mae's mother did not attend their marriage because she had the influenza and neither did Galen's parents because they were living in Minnesota. Mae, eleventh child of Johannes and Marti Marie (Holmen) Underdahl, was born on Wednesday, May 4, 1898 in her parents home in Kenyon, Goodhue County, Minnesota. She was Confirmed in the Lutheran Faith on May 31, 1914 in Bethleham Lutheran Church in Minot.
During their first year of their marriage, they made their home in the upstairs apartment in a large home owned by the Beardsy Family at 536 Valley Street Minot, North Dakota. I remember Grandmother saying that she was so used to making large meals for her family, on one such an occasion, she made a huge batch of refried potatoes for only her and Galen. In that apartment, their first child Glen was born on October 24, 1921.
The Farming Years
Glen reflected in 1991 in his Autobiography about his family and growing up during the Great Depression:
Around 1915 my step-grandmother Mabel Vise came from Indiana to marry my Grandfather, George Richardson. It must have been a real treat to have a good cook again after baching it for so many years after his mother died. Dad at fifteen must of had a good appetite because he always enjoyed good food. Grandma probably fried a lot of fried chicken, which she did well. In later years, when we lived in Drady we had a lot of chickens. She could catch kill, pluck, clean and have them in a frying pan so fast that it was really something to watch! She was left handed and always on the run.
Sometime around 1916-1917 my father hurt his back. Guess Granddad was taking a load of hay to the barn and some piece of machinery was in the way. After Dad picket up the tongue to move it, his vertebrae went out of place… he need to have used both hands to move it. He went to the doctor once and should have gone back again . I blame that on Granddad. I'm surprised Dad was able to do the work he did through all those years with a back in that shape. It left him with a pronounced back deformity on one side for the remainder of his life.
When my Father started at the Post Office in Minot, he was wanting a rural route and always did because he had such trouble with his feet which was understandable. Granddad didn't want him to go out on the roads during the blizzards, etc.. In the summer time, it was a good job. They were usually done by noon.
My Uncle, John Underdahl, carried our mail when we lived at Drady. Often it was late at night when he would get to our house and he still had another twelve miles of snow-clogged roads to get through to reach Minot. So I can see Granddad's point, too. Uncle John was a legend in that country as a result there were many write-ups in the newspapers. I think my father carried mail when they married up until early 1929. Many years later during the war, he told Audrey that it was one of the worst mistakes that he made was quitting the Post Office.
Around 1926 we moved from Minot to the house on top of the hill in Burlington. Dean was born there on January 29, 1929.
My first memories of visiting my paternal grandparents at the farm must have been around 1927. Seems like we went on Sundays for dinner and stayed for sandwiches, etc. in the evenings. Dad went from work out to the farm and would not get home until after we were in bed, so we didn't see him from weekend to weekend. He helped Granddad with the haying, etc. and brought milk, eggs, potatoes, and meat home.
That's about the first I remember of visiting out at the farm. Grandma's dad, Scotty Vise, lived there with them. Scotty was Hannah Gulstrand's father-in-law in her first marriage. Grandma Mabel was Ione, Bud and Wibby Vise's aunt. Melvin Vise, who didn't get back from the World War I, was Hannah's first husband.
My grandparents lived on a farm a couple of miles farther up-the river from the Foote Ranch. The Wienrieck Family lived there in the late thirties. It was a real nice place for a small operation like grandpa had going. He didn't think much of going into debt. He had money in the bank and every thing was paid for. He had quite a few head of cattle, several teams of horses and all the farm machinery he needed.
When we lived in that house on top of the hill in Burlington, Dad bought a radio. If it wasn't the first in town, it was the second. I remember when dad went out to the farm and bought them into our house to listen to the radio. Quite a novelty!
At that time Mom had a piano, washing machine, nice rug, etc. We didn't have room for the piano in that little house on the farm and no electricity for the washing machine. That went trying to hang on to the insurance policy.
The Roaring Twenties
I guess everyone was making money in the Roaring Twenties, so Dad's $165.00 a month didn't sound so good. And with the trouble Dad had with his feet, he wanted to go into big-time farming. In 1929, I remember some pretty heated arguments they had over that. Granddad tried to tell Dad the good times wouldn't last. In the end Dad quit the Post Office, drew out his pension and there was no going back.
But he didn't go out to the farm either. I'm sure Granddad was worried about it, because he came to town and to our house… and there was Dad. They about came to blows—I thought. It sure scared me! Granddad had a bad temper much more so than my Father. A short time later, I don't remember why, we moved out to Granddad's for a while. Maybe they looked for something big to farm.
As I remember, it took Grandpa's bank account, what money what Dad may of had left out of his pension and a mortgage on horses, cattle, pigs and Grandpa's farm machinery to make a down payment on all that big-new-equipment.. tractor, 4 bottom plow, combine, drill, etc.
They rented two farms, south and west of Drady, totaling seven-hundred acres. The place that we lived in didn't have a well and was just a shack. It had a kitchen and a living room down, one and a half bedrooms upstairs, and a small cellar whereas the big place where Grandpa lived had a three-bedroom house, large kitchen and a dining room, plus a living room. It had a big barn, chicken coop, machine shop, granary, and a artesian well that was real strong all year around. So all of the operation was done out at that place.
Where we lived was about a half mile west, so I made quite a few trips back and forth. In fact, in the summertime I was there most of the time. I would ride with Dad on the tractor until I got tired, then and go tag along with Granddad. Sometimes he was fixing fence, or some project like that. They milk about twenty head of cows twice-a-day, so it was a lot of work
Sometimes they would make home brew in the summertime. That cold water from the artesian well was great to cool milk, cream, butter, beer, etc. If Granddad stopped for a break in the forenoon, and had a beer, he would pour me a glass. Sometimes I really feel it, but I didn't let on. If Mom would have known she would have grounded me.
Dad put in some long, long hours on that tractor, putting in crops in the spring. (At times, Eunice and Yvonne rode with Dad too.)
Grandma's sister Flora, and her husband Ward Beard, came to visit Drady. I remember her being prim and proper, and a nice lady. Maybe that's why Scotty Vise came out west to live with Grandma and Grandpa. I think that he would like to live it up. Maybe he and Granddad knew each other when they lived in Indiana. I think that Flora raised Grandma after their Mom passed away. I think that she kept Ward in line. I remember Dad and my Grandfather laughing because Ward got chewed out when she smelled cigarette on his breath.
Grandma would tell us stories about when she was a young girl. She talked about Idaville, Indiana and going down to the Wabash and Tippecanoe Rivers for picnics I t was fascinating to some kid on a dry prairie, who hadn't anymore water than the Mouse River.
I think Della and her mother, Aunt Addie, came to Drady to visit also. I don't recall much about but she except she expected Grandpa to have a mustache.
It wasn't an easy life out on the dry, dusty prairie. Mom would have me drag dead limbs from the trees up to the house. If the tractor was there she would put them thought the holes in the wheels to break them short enough for the kitchen range. If not she laid them on the rock and threw another to break them. Primitive huh? In the wintertime, I filled copper boilers with snow, and Mom put them on the stove to milt.
When we moved from town to the farm, we had always used bakery bread. Dad told Mom she would have to start baking bread. I don't know what she did with the first batch, but it was so hard you couldn't cut it or break it. Mom told us kids to take'm out to the rock pile out behind the barn before Dad came back home. We had lots of fun bouncing them off from the rocks, and we (probably me) couldn't keep our mouths shut…so Dad got in on the fun. But Mom learned to make real good bread. (She later made some dark brown bread that was super good bread.) When I was going to High School, she must have baked bread twice a week. And she made good chili.
When we lived at Drady, Mom had us kids pick some weeds, and when she cooked it up, it was like spinach. Also, she made cottage cheese, and some other cheese type of thing, that I'm sure was Norse.
Grandma Underdahl came to visit us for a few days along about that time. If there was some home brew over at Grandpa's, Dad would bring it home. Grandma Underdahl liked that. She would get relaxed, and have so much fun laughing at us kids being silly. Dad laughed at her and Mom did not like that… to think that her mother would have some beer and show that she felt it. But it was fun.
I was probably around 1930 that Dad plowed up some sod (I'm sure that it was virgin land), and planted
potatoes. He took us out to hoe them… and it was hot. Anyway, he ended up with a cellar full of a big, perfect, white potatoes…big baker types. It should've been worth a lot of money, but he couldn't even give them away. They froze during the winter and had to be carried back out and hauled away.
" We have nothing to fear but fear itself"
-- Franklin Roosevelt
1933
I think that the crops were good in 1929 and the prices weren't that bad, but the next year, the drought and the Great Depression hit. Things in the United States went to pot. Out in the prairie where we lived, it was so dry that there weren't any crops. If a farmer did get any returns, the prices were so bad he lost money. The ones that survived were the ones that didn't have any overhead and had money to put back. Granddad would of have had it made.
It was the milking cows that bought the groceries. Granddad always milked a lot of cows and sold the cream, buying groceries for both houses. It got a little thin at times. If there was any home freezers in those days, it would have been a snap. But only in the wintertime could a butcher and keep the meat frozen. In the summer time it was eggs and potatoes.
When my father's maternal Aunt Effie (Tam) Hunt, her husband Alva Hunt, their daughter Mabel (Hunt)
Heiny and her husband Merle Heiny came back from Indiana for a visit, they always had a lot of stories about the gangsters coming through their part of the country. They weren't that far from Chicago, so I'm sure they were telling the way that it was. Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and all, probably at some time, hid out in that country, robbing banks as they went. Anyway, it scared me.
In 1929 when three of the Underdahl daughters families, my mother's sisters, the Beckmans, Johnsons, and Treslands came west… the letters that they wrote about this country.. the fruit laying on the ground, etc. I made up my mind I was going west some day, and all I can say is North Dakota is a good place to be from a long way from.
I must have lived a charmed life back there in North Dakota. I was bucked off a horse with my foot caught in the stirrup. The horse didn't go straight, or I would have been had. I would have been stomped into the sod.
Once dad was moving a combine from the farthest field to home, and I was riding behind on the combine. When we had gone down a deep coolly and back up the other side and on the flat ground, the pin on the draw bar broke. If that had happened a few hundred feet back, me and the machine would have ended up in a pile of junk at the bottom of that gulch.
This same combine had a hopper up high that stored the wheat, or what ever that they were threshing, 'til they had about a truckload. Then they'd put a truck under the spout and dump it and haul it to the granary. Anyway, it was over my head when it was full. Once they were combing flax. I was up in my favorite riding spot. Then I got the bright idea of seeing how much I could get around me and still get out. Flax is different, and I just about didn't get out. It was like sand. Then later I heard of people drowned in that grain sometimes.
When we moved to Drady, dad had a Model-T sedan, about a 1923, I think. Anyway we got home from visiting somewhere and Euncie , Yvonne and myself were out, and just about gone for. The car must of had an exhaust leak. Yvonne was the worst off. We were in the back seat. A few more miles and we would have been done for, for us three.
I think I was nine years old when Dad cranked up another old Ford 1915, and told me to start down the road, out to the farthest field. And he would come up behind with the tractor. He wanted to leave the tractor that night, and have away back so he did not have to walk.
On my ninth birthday Granddad had to put his big saddle on a horse and let me ride out to get the cows in for milking. The cattle cross the creek and Bob, the terrier, started nipping at the horse's heels. The horse started bucking and I stayed on long enough to get a cut near my eye, and on my leg, and then went off with my foot caught in the stirrup strap, and my head bouncing off the rocks, the dog still nipping at the horse's heels. Maybe that's why the horse went in circles, which is all that saved me. Finally my foot came loose and I was in the creek up to my waist. Dad, Grandpa and Grandma were up at the barn waiting to milk, so they saw the whole thing and started down there. But I started to move, Granddad went up to the coral behind the barn where the horse ran to, with the dog still raising Cain with the horse. He threw a club or something at the dog and knocked him down. Then he got on the horse and it started to buck again. He knocked the horse down twice before it quit. A few days later, Dad got on it and it threw him, so Granddad got rid of it. Dad took me home and Mom wanted me taken to town to the Doctor and dad thought so ,too. Granddad came to the house after they got the muck and blood cleaned off and said that I would be okay. Guess he was right. The dog and horse survived, too. The dog was old Bob and I think that he was still with the family on Central Ave. in Minot.
Old Dog Pat
In the late twenties, Dad brought old Pat home. The dog had started following Dad on his mail route. Every morning the dog was at the Post Office waiting, so dad started bring him home. Dad liked having Pat with him. He kept the dogs busy and they left him alone so he could deliver the mail. The dog was bull and some kind of terrier. He never bit anyone…but Mom loved the dog. He was there if someone knock at the door. When he put on is act, people backed off.
At Drady, Pat would go out and attack the porcupine. Then he came home whining. Dad would get a pair of pliers, pull the quills out of him. It happen more than once, so Pat didn't learn. He never turn down a fight with anything, I guess.
About 1932, we moved from Drady to a place out in Burlington. It was on the divide, which was between the Souris and the Des Lacs Rivers. It was about five miles out of town. We lived upstairs and Grandma, Grandpa and Ruth lived down stairs. While we were their, the bank foreclosed on the rest of the farm machinery, the cattle, pigs, the last team of horses. The was nothing in the house to eat except potatoes and they had been frozen.
We went to Gulstrand's house where Hannah had food fixed. Everyone was starving. We live in a house next to Lambert's. Grandma and Grandpa lived upstairs at Gulstrand's. They had a big house next to the highway (where we later lived).
"Happy Days Are Here Again"
The next spring, Grandpa moved to a little farm, on the divided too, but closer to the river. He got a few head of cattle to start with an d start to build up a heard again.. And when the project places opened up, granddad got one of those. By 1937, he had a team of horses, cattle, goats, chickens. He was doing okay and then he got sick in 1941. In June of 1942 he passed away. He is buried in Burlington, North Dakota.
Later Grandmother sold everything and came west and lived with the Gulstrand's. Ruth was a big help to Grandma and she was of coarse the apple of Granddad's eye.
When Grandpa and Grandma moved to the farming project and on the small farm, too, he took the old Model-T truck with him. The only thing that was left over from the big time farming. Guess they must have paid cash for it. ( I have the title to the truck yet.) Anyway, one day he was on the way to town with cream and produce, I s' pose. A state patrolman stopped him. The old truck did not have a license, the lights didn't work, and he didn't have a drivers license. So Granddad took the truck home, cut it up and made a cart and used horses on it. He didn't need a license on that.( I think that there was only two state patrolmen in the whole state of North Dakota at that time.)
I remember, when we lived in Drady, going to town with Dad during fair week. He parked close to third street and we walked down to the fairgrounds. We hit a few home-brew houses on the way down there, and also on the way back. Must've been late. Twelve miles in the dark with no lights. I don't remember getting home, but the next morning Mom was so mad it's a wonder she didn't hit him with something! But our Mom was not a violent person. Needless to say that was the last time I went to town with Dad, which was probably what he wanted to start with.
I liked going to town with Granddad. I always got crackerjacks or something like that. Sometimes I had to sit and wait a long time, but with something to chew on, it wasn't so bad.
The end.
--Glen Richardson 1991
Galen worked for the Postal Service in Minot from 1919 until late 1929 before he went into the farming business with his father. Glen reflected back on those early years as aforementioned during the Great Depression and among the financial causalities of that era was the Richardson Family. Those years were an real trying time for the family economically , but as the Depression progressed the New Deal Programs that started in 1933 under FDR came into being . Around that time Galen went to work for the WPA earning forty-eight dollars a month. Although life started to get somewhat better for them, it was still challengeing .
During the Mae's Burlington years, she would often play the piano at First Presbyterian Church on Sundays when the visiting minister would come to preach. Two of her favorite songs that she would often played were "Now is the Hour" and "Jerusalem the Holy City" and probably performed them there.
A New Beginning
After Galen's father passed away on May 4, 1942, he along with his family moved from Minot, North Dakota to Washington. They moved to the greater Everett area on Larimore Road in several small rental houses. In late 1943 they purchased their first home at 4818-2nd Street Lowell, WA. And they made that their home for the next nineteen years until end of May 1962. When Galen first came to the Everett area, he got a job at Simpson Lee Paper Company as a paper dyer and he worked there up until six months before his death
Galen Richardson passed away on June 11, 1955 at 11:00 AM in Everett General Hospital and Mae passed away twenty-seven years later on Friday, September 25, 1981 at 9:40 AM in the same hospital. They are both buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Everett, WA.
Galen passed away on June 11, 1955 in Everett, Washington.
He is survived by his widow Mae J. Richardson. His children
Glen (Audrey) Richardson of Vancover, WA, Eunice Richardson
of Lowell, WA; Yvonne (Daniel) Bunney of Snohomish, WA; Betty (Norm) Turner of Lowell, WA; Dean (Carol Joan)Richardson of Everett; James, David and Carol Richardson of Lowell, WA. A sister Virginia Ruth (Jack) Gale of Seattle, WA. And nine grandchildren.
Mr Richardson was preceeded in death by his parents,a stepmother Mabel L. Richardson. Two children Rita and Paul
Richardson.
Galen Richardson
1900 - 1955
"Grandfather"
The Early Years
Galen (Gale), first child of George and Rosa (Tam) Richardson, was born on Monday, May 21, 1900 on his maternal grandfather, Alfred Campbell Tam's farm in Jackson Township, near Idaville, White County, Indiana.
On Saturday, May 7, 1904, Galen's mother passed away leaving his father and him alone and it was during those hard-lonely days that Aunt Addie and her daughter came to take care of the household and responsibilities of being a mother figure to Galen. After his maternal grandfather's death on January 25, 1905, he inherited twenty-eight acres off from his three- hundred-acre farm. Galen was five years of age in that year so his father was appointed guardianship of his estate until he reached adulthood. When they left Indiana in 1910, his acreage was rented out to his mother's brother, Issac Tam. Galen received a percentage of the profits off from the crops that were sold annually. Sometime later Galen decided to rent his property, to his Aunt Mary Effie (Tam) Hunt and her husband Alva Hunt. In 1935, he sold his property for five hundred dollars to them because the country was in the middle of the Great Depression and the Richardsons needed the money to sustain themselves.
In 1910 Galen along with his dad, Aunt Addie and Della moved from his father's farm near Monticello, Indiana to Burlington, North Dakota. When they arrived there, he started in grade school and middle school graduating in 1917. During his youth, he belonged to a Boys Club in Burlington where he learned how to play softball.
Around 1914 Galen's father, George Richardson, decided to earn a little extra money, trapping beavers out in the prairie and selling the skins. He went over and sold his skins to John Underdahl, at Mae's widowed mother's house in Drady. While he was there he met Mae and he was so impressed with what a nice girl she was so he went home and told his son Galen all about her. Afterwards, Galen and Mae road a school bus ,a horse drawn buggy, and they became good friends. I remember grandmother sayings, at that time Galen had such a heavy-black beard at age fourteen.
After two years of advanced education, Mae, who chose teaching as a profession because all of sisters taught before their marriages, earned a teaching certificate at Minot State Teacher's College. Upon graduation, she excepted a teaching position at the Peterson Grade School in Souris, North Dakota near the Canadian Border. As a teacher in that small-rural-agrarian community , she taught grades first through eighth in a one room schoolhouse. During her stay in Souris, Mae, whoes sister Lena Beckman and her family lived there, boarded with Mrs. Brackster.
During the Thanksgiving Holiday in 1919, Galen and his chaperon, Josephine Erickson, went up to spend the Holiday with Mae and the Beckman Family. On December 5, 1919, Mae wrote her sister about how much she loved Galen and I will intimate a portion below:
Dear Hattie,
"…that their is not a better boy in my opinion , than Galen. You know he is good. He surely has the stick-to-ity too. He has been working almost steady every since I've gone with him. We love each other and that counts ever so much. I know marriage is a serious proposition and so is being engaged. I can hardly wait until I get home. Just one more week. The Richardsons are going to Minnesota guess Galen is too. But I hate to think of like of it. Seems like I have been away from him long enough….".
On Sunday, January 1, 1921 at twelve o'clock noon he married Mae Julia Underdahl in the First Presbyterian Manse in Minot, North Dakota . Afterwards they had their wedding reception at Mae brother's John Underdahl's home in Garden Valley. Mae whore a blue dress with black black embroidery , a strand of pearls and she was given a blue sapphire engagement ring. Mae's mother did not attend their marriage because she had the influenza and neither did Galen's parents because they were living in Minnesota. Mae, eleventh child of Johannes and Marti Marie (Holmen) Underdahl, was born on Wednesday, May 4, 1898 in her parents home in Kenyon, Goodhue County, Minnesota. She was Confirmed in the Lutheran Faith on May 31, 1914 in Bethleham Lutheran Church in Minot.
During their first year of their marriage, they made their home in the upstairs apartment in a large home owned by the Beardsy Family at 536 Valley Street Minot, North Dakota. I remember Grandmother saying that she was so used to making large meals for her family, on one such an occasion, she made a huge batch of refried potatoes for only her and Galen. In that apartment, their first child Glen was born on October 24, 1921.
The Farming Years
Glen reflected in 1991 in his Autobiography about his family and growing up during the Great Depression:
Around 1915 my step-grandmother Mabel Vise came from Indiana to marry my Grandfather, George Richardson. It must have been a real treat to have a good cook again after baching it for so many years after his mother died. Dad at fifteen must of had a good appetite because he always enjoyed good food. Grandma probably fried a lot of fried chicken, which she did well. In later years, when we lived in Drady we had a lot of chickens. She could catch kill, pluck, clean and have them in a frying pan so fast that it was really something to watch! She was left handed and always on the run.
Sometime around 1916-1917 my father hurt his back. Guess Granddad was taking a load of hay to the barn and some piece of machinery was in the way. After Dad picket up the tongue to move it, his vertebrae went out of place… he need to have used both hands to move it. He went to the doctor once and should have gone back again . I blame that on Granddad. I'm surprised Dad was able to do the work he did through all those years with a back in that shape. It left him with a pronounced back deformity on one side for the remainder of his life.
When my Father started at the Post Office in Minot, he was wanting a rural route and always did because he had such trouble with his feet which was understandable. Granddad didn't want him to go out on the roads during the blizzards, etc.. In the summer time, it was a good job. They were usually done by noon.
My Uncle, John Underdahl, carried our mail when we lived at Drady. Often it was late at night when he would get to our house and he still had another twelve miles of snow-clogged roads to get through to reach Minot. So I can see Granddad's point, too. Uncle John was a legend in that country as a result there were many write-ups in the newspapers. I think my father carried mail when they married up until early 1929. Many years later during the war, he told Audrey that it was one of the worst mistakes that he made was quitting the Post Office.
Around 1926 we moved from Minot to the house on top of the hill in Burlington. Dean was born there on January 29, 1929.
My first memories of visiting my paternal grandparents at the farm must have been around 1927. Seems like we went on Sundays for dinner and stayed for sandwiches, etc. in the evenings. Dad went from work out to the farm and would not get home until after we were in bed, so we didn't see him from weekend to weekend. He helped Granddad with the haying, etc. and brought milk, eggs, potatoes, and meat home.
That's about the first I remember of visiting out at the farm. Grandma's dad, Scotty Vise, lived there with them. Scotty was Hannah Gulstrand's father-in-law in her first marriage. Grandma Mabel was Ione, Bud and Wibby Vise's aunt. Melvin Vise, who didn't get back from the World War I, was Hannah's first husband.
My grandparents lived on a farm a couple of miles farther up-the river from the Foote Ranch. The Wienrieck Family lived there in the late thirties. It was a real nice place for a small operation like grandpa had going. He didn't think much of going into debt. He had money in the bank and every thing was paid for. He had quite a few head of cattle, several teams of horses and all the farm machinery he needed.
When we lived in that house on top of the hill in Burlington, Dad bought a radio. If it wasn't the first in town, it was the second. I remember when dad went out to the farm and bought them into our house to listen to the radio. Quite a novelty!
At that time Mom had a piano, washing machine, nice rug, etc. We didn't have room for the piano in that little house on the farm and no electricity for the washing machine. That went trying to hang on to the insurance policy.
The Roaring Twenties
I guess everyone was making money in the Roaring Twenties, so Dad's $165.00 a month didn't sound so good. And with the trouble Dad had with his feet, he wanted to go into big-time farming. In 1929, I remember some pretty heated arguments they had over that. Granddad tried to tell Dad the good times wouldn't last. In the end Dad quit the Post Office, drew out his pension and there was no going back.
But he didn't go out to the farm either. I'm sure Granddad was worried about it, because he came to town and to our house… and there was Dad. They about came to blows—I thought. It sure scared me! Granddad had a bad temper much more so than my Father. A short time later, I don't remember why, we moved out to Granddad's for a while. Maybe they looked for something big to farm.
As I remember, it took Grandpa's bank account, what money what Dad may of had left out of his pension and a mortgage on horses, cattle, pigs and Grandpa's farm machinery to make a down payment on all that big-new-equipment.. tractor, 4 bottom plow, combine, drill, etc.
They rented two farms, south and west of Drady, totaling seven-hundred acres. The place that we lived in didn't have a well and was just a shack. It had a kitchen and a living room down, one and a half bedrooms upstairs, and a small cellar whereas the big place where Grandpa lived had a three-bedroom house, large kitchen and a dining room, plus a living room. It had a big barn, chicken coop, machine shop, granary, and a artesian well that was real strong all year around. So all of the operation was done out at that place.
Where we lived was about a half mile west, so I made quite a few trips back and forth. In fact, in the summertime I was there most of the time. I would ride with Dad on the tractor until I got tired, then and go tag along with Granddad. Sometimes he was fixing fence, or some project like that. They milk about twenty head of cows twice-a-day, so it was a lot of work
Sometimes they would make home brew in the summertime. That cold water from the artesian well was great to cool milk, cream, butter, beer, etc. If Granddad stopped for a break in the forenoon, and had a beer, he would pour me a glass. Sometimes I really feel it, but I didn't let on. If Mom would have known she would have grounded me.
Dad put in some long, long hours on that tractor, putting in crops in the spring. (At times, Eunice and Yvonne rode with Dad too.)
Grandma's sister Flora, and her husband Ward Beard, came to visit Drady. I remember her being prim and proper, and a nice lady. Maybe that's why Scotty Vise came out west to live with Grandma and Grandpa. I think that he would like to live it up. Maybe he and Granddad knew each other when they lived in Indiana. I think that Flora raised Grandma after their Mom passed away. I think that she kept Ward in line. I remember Dad and my Grandfather laughing because Ward got chewed out when she smelled cigarette on his breath.
Grandma would tell us stories about when she was a young girl. She talked about Idaville, Indiana and going down to the Wabash and Tippecanoe Rivers for picnics I t was fascinating to some kid on a dry prairie, who hadn't anymore water than the Mouse River.
I think Della and her mother, Aunt Addie, came to Drady to visit also. I don't recall much about but she except she expected Grandpa to have a mustache.
It wasn't an easy life out on the dry, dusty prairie. Mom would have me drag dead limbs from the trees up to the house. If the tractor was there she would put them thought the holes in the wheels to break them short enough for the kitchen range. If not she laid them on the rock and threw another to break them. Primitive huh? In the wintertime, I filled copper boilers with snow, and Mom put them on the stove to milt.
When we moved from town to the farm, we had always used bakery bread. Dad told Mom she would have to start baking bread. I don't know what she did with the first batch, but it was so hard you couldn't cut it or break it. Mom told us kids to take'm out to the rock pile out behind the barn before Dad came back home. We had lots of fun bouncing them off from the rocks, and we (probably me) couldn't keep our mouths shut…so Dad got in on the fun. But Mom learned to make real good bread. (She later made some dark brown bread that was super good bread.) When I was going to High School, she must have baked bread twice a week. And she made good chili.
When we lived at Drady, Mom had us kids pick some weeds, and when she cooked it up, it was like spinach. Also, she made cottage cheese, and some other cheese type of thing, that I'm sure was Norse.
Grandma Underdahl came to visit us for a few days along about that time. If there was some home brew over at Grandpa's, Dad would bring it home. Grandma Underdahl liked that. She would get relaxed, and have so much fun laughing at us kids being silly. Dad laughed at her and Mom did not like that… to think that her mother would have some beer and show that she felt it. But it was fun.
I was probably around 1930 that Dad plowed up some sod (I'm sure that it was virgin land), and planted
potatoes. He took us out to hoe them… and it was hot. Anyway, he ended up with a cellar full of a big, perfect, white potatoes…big baker types. It should've been worth a lot of money, but he couldn't even give them away. They froze during the winter and had to be carried back out and hauled away.
" We have nothing to fear but fear itself"
-- Franklin Roosevelt
1933
I think that the crops were good in 1929 and the prices weren't that bad, but the next year, the drought and the Great Depression hit. Things in the United States went to pot. Out in the prairie where we lived, it was so dry that there weren't any crops. If a farmer did get any returns, the prices were so bad he lost money. The ones that survived were the ones that didn't have any overhead and had money to put back. Granddad would of have had it made.
It was the milking cows that bought the groceries. Granddad always milked a lot of cows and sold the cream, buying groceries for both houses. It got a little thin at times. If there was any home freezers in those days, it would have been a snap. But only in the wintertime could a butcher and keep the meat frozen. In the summer time it was eggs and potatoes.
When my father's maternal Aunt Effie (Tam) Hunt, her husband Alva Hunt, their daughter Mabel (Hunt)
Heiny and her husband Merle Heiny came back from Indiana for a visit, they always had a lot of stories about the gangsters coming through their part of the country. They weren't that far from Chicago, so I'm sure they were telling the way that it was. Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and all, probably at some time, hid out in that country, robbing banks as they went. Anyway, it scared me.
In 1929 when three of the Underdahl daughters families, my mother's sisters, the Beckmans, Johnsons, and Treslands came west… the letters that they wrote about this country.. the fruit laying on the ground, etc. I made up my mind I was going west some day, and all I can say is North Dakota is a good place to be from a long way from.
I must have lived a charmed life back there in North Dakota. I was bucked off a horse with my foot caught in the stirrup. The horse didn't go straight, or I would have been had. I would have been stomped into the sod.
Once dad was moving a combine from the farthest field to home, and I was riding behind on the combine. When we had gone down a deep coolly and back up the other side and on the flat ground, the pin on the draw bar broke. If that had happened a few hundred feet back, me and the machine would have ended up in a pile of junk at the bottom of that gulch.
This same combine had a hopper up high that stored the wheat, or what ever that they were threshing, 'til they had about a truckload. Then they'd put a truck under the spout and dump it and haul it to the granary. Anyway, it was over my head when it was full. Once they were combing flax. I was up in my favorite riding spot. Then I got the bright idea of seeing how much I could get around me and still get out. Flax is different, and I just about didn't get out. It was like sand. Then later I heard of people drowned in that grain sometimes.
When we moved to Drady, dad had a Model-T sedan, about a 1923, I think. Anyway we got home from visiting somewhere and Euncie , Yvonne and myself were out, and just about gone for. The car must of had an exhaust leak. Yvonne was the worst off. We were in the back seat. A few more miles and we would have been done for, for us three.
I think I was nine years old when Dad cranked up another old Ford 1915, and told me to start down the road, out to the farthest field. And he would come up behind with the tractor. He wanted to leave the tractor that night, and have away back so he did not have to walk.
On my ninth birthday Granddad had to put his big saddle on a horse and let me ride out to get the cows in for milking. The cattle cross the creek and Bob, the terrier, started nipping at the horse's heels. The horse started bucking and I stayed on long enough to get a cut near my eye, and on my leg, and then went off with my foot caught in the stirrup strap, and my head bouncing off the rocks, the dog still nipping at the horse's heels. Maybe that's why the horse went in circles, which is all that saved me. Finally my foot came loose and I was in the creek up to my waist. Dad, Grandpa and Grandma were up at the barn waiting to milk, so they saw the whole thing and started down there. But I started to move, Granddad went up to the coral behind the barn where the horse ran to, with the dog still raising Cain with the horse. He threw a club or something at the dog and knocked him down. Then he got on the horse and it started to buck again. He knocked the horse down twice before it quit. A few days later, Dad got on it and it threw him, so Granddad got rid of it. Dad took me home and Mom wanted me taken to town to the Doctor and dad thought so ,too. Granddad came to the house after they got the muck and blood cleaned off and said that I would be okay. Guess he was right. The dog and horse survived, too. The dog was old Bob and I think that he was still with the family on Central Ave. in Minot.
Old Dog Pat
In the late twenties, Dad brought old Pat home. The dog had started following Dad on his mail route. Every morning the dog was at the Post Office waiting, so dad started bring him home. Dad liked having Pat with him. He kept the dogs busy and they left him alone so he could deliver the mail. The dog was bull and some kind of terrier. He never bit anyone…but Mom loved the dog. He was there if someone knock at the door. When he put on is act, people backed off.
At Drady, Pat would go out and attack the porcupine. Then he came home whining. Dad would get a pair of pliers, pull the quills out of him. It happen more than once, so Pat didn't learn. He never turn down a fight with anything, I guess.
About 1932, we moved from Drady to a place out in Burlington. It was on the divide, which was between the Souris and the Des Lacs Rivers. It was about five miles out of town. We lived upstairs and Grandma, Grandpa and Ruth lived down stairs. While we were their, the bank foreclosed on the rest of the farm machinery, the cattle, pigs, the last team of horses. The was nothing in the house to eat except potatoes and they had been frozen.
We went to Gulstrand's house where Hannah had food fixed. Everyone was starving. We live in a house next to Lambert's. Grandma and Grandpa lived upstairs at Gulstrand's. They had a big house next to the highway (where we later lived).
"Happy Days Are Here Again"
The next spring, Grandpa moved to a little farm, on the divided too, but closer to the river. He got a few head of cattle to start with an d start to build up a heard again.. And when the project places opened up, granddad got one of those. By 1937, he had a team of horses, cattle, goats, chickens. He was doing okay and then he got sick in 1941. In June of 1942 he passed away. He is buried in Burlington, North Dakota.
Later Grandmother sold everything and came west and lived with the Gulstrand's. Ruth was a big help to Grandma and she was of coarse the apple of Granddad's eye.
When Grandpa and Grandma moved to the farming project and on the small farm, too, he took the old Model-T truck with him. The only thing that was left over from the big time farming. Guess they must have paid cash for it. ( I have the title to the truck yet.) Anyway, one day he was on the way to town with cream and produce, I s' pose. A state patrolman stopped him. The old truck did not have a license, the lights didn't work, and he didn't have a drivers license. So Granddad took the truck home, cut it up and made a cart and used horses on it. He didn't need a license on that.( I think that there was only two state patrolmen in the whole state of North Dakota at that time.)
I remember, when we lived in Drady, going to town with Dad during fair week. He parked close to third street and we walked down to the fairgrounds. We hit a few home-brew houses on the way down there, and also on the way back. Must've been late. Twelve miles in the dark with no lights. I don't remember getting home, but the next morning Mom was so mad it's a wonder she didn't hit him with something! But our Mom was not a violent person. Needless to say that was the last time I went to town with Dad, which was probably what he wanted to start with.
I liked going to town with Granddad. I always got crackerjacks or something like that. Sometimes I had to sit and wait a long time, but with something to chew on, it wasn't so bad.
The end.
--Glen Richardson 1991
Galen worked for the Postal Service in Minot from 1919 until late 1929 before he went into the farming business with his father. Glen reflected back on those early years as aforementioned during the Great Depression and among the financial causalities of that era was the Richardson Family. Those years were an real trying time for the family economically , but as the Depression progressed the New Deal Programs that started in 1933 under FDR came into being . Around that time Galen went to work for the WPA earning forty-eight dollars a month. Although life started to get somewhat better for them, it was still challengeing .
During the Mae's Burlington years, she would often play the piano at First Presbyterian Church on Sundays when the visiting minister would come to preach. Two of her favorite songs that she would often played were "Now is the Hour" and "Jerusalem the Holy City" and probably performed them there.
A New Beginning
After Galen's father passed away on May 4, 1942, he along with his family moved from Minot, North Dakota to Washington. They moved to the greater Everett area on Larimore Road in several small rental houses. In late 1943 they purchased their first home at 4818-2nd Street Lowell, WA. And they made that their home for the next nineteen years until end of May 1962. When Galen first came to the Everett area, he got a job at Simpson Lee Paper Company as a paper dyer and he worked there up until six months before his death
Galen Richardson passed away on June 11, 1955 at 11:00 AM in Everett General Hospital and Mae passed away twenty-seven years later on Friday, September 25, 1981 at 9:40 AM in the same hospital. They are both buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Everett, WA.
Galen passed away on June 11, 1955 in Everett, Washington.
He is survived by his widow Mae J. Richardson. His children
Glen (Audrey) Richardson of Vancover, WA, Eunice Richardson
of Lowell, WA; Yvonne (Daniel) Bunney of Snohomish, WA; Betty (Norm) Turner of Lowell, WA; Dean (Carol Joan)Richardson of Everett; James, David and Carol Richardson of Lowell, WA. A sister Virginia Ruth (Jack) Gale of Seattle, WA. And nine grandchildren.
Mr Richardson was preceeded in death by his parents,a stepmother Mabel L. Richardson. Two children Rita and Paul
Richardson.
1900 - 1955
"Grandfather"
The Early Years
Galen (Gale), first child of George and Rosa (Tam) Richardson, was born on Monday, May 21, 1900 on his maternal grandfather, Alfred Campbell Tam's farm in Jackson Township, near Idaville, White County, Indiana.
On Saturday, May 7, 1904, Galen's mother passed away leaving his father and him alone and it was during those hard-lonely days that Aunt Addie and her daughter came to take care of the household and responsibilities of being a mother figure to Galen. After his maternal grandfather's death on January 25, 1905, he inherited twenty-eight acres off from his three- hundred-acre farm. Galen was five years of age in that year so his father was appointed guardianship of his estate until he reached adulthood. When they left Indiana in 1910, his acreage was rented out to his mother's brother, Issac Tam. Galen received a percentage of the profits off from the crops that were sold annually. Sometime later Galen decided to rent his property, to his Aunt Mary Effie (Tam) Hunt and her husband Alva Hunt. In 1935, he sold his property for five hundred dollars to them because the country was in the middle of the Great Depression and the Richardsons needed the money to sustain themselves.
In 1910 Galen along with his dad, Aunt Addie and Della moved from his father's farm near Monticello, Indiana to Burlington, North Dakota. When they arrived there, he started in grade school and middle school graduating in 1917. During his youth, he belonged to a Boys Club in Burlington where he learned how to play softball.
Around 1914 Galen's father, George Richardson, decided to earn a little extra money, trapping beavers out in the prairie and selling the skins. He went over and sold his skins to John Underdahl, at Mae's widowed mother's house in Drady. While he was there he met Mae and he was so impressed with what a nice girl she was so he went home and told his son Galen all about her. Afterwards, Galen and Mae road a school bus ,a horse drawn buggy, and they became good friends. I remember grandmother sayings, at that time Galen had such a heavy-black beard at age fourteen.
After two years of advanced education, Mae, who chose teaching as a profession because all of sisters taught before their marriages, earned a teaching certificate at Minot State Teacher's College. Upon graduation, she excepted a teaching position at the Peterson Grade School in Souris, North Dakota near the Canadian Border. As a teacher in that small-rural-agrarian community , she taught grades first through eighth in a one room schoolhouse. During her stay in Souris, Mae, whoes sister Lena Beckman and her family lived there, boarded with Mrs. Brackster.
During the Thanksgiving Holiday in 1919, Galen and his chaperon, Josephine Erickson, went up to spend the Holiday with Mae and the Beckman Family. On December 5, 1919, Mae wrote her sister about how much she loved Galen and I will intimate a portion below:
Dear Hattie,
"…that their is not a better boy in my opinion , than Galen. You know he is good. He surely has the stick-to-ity too. He has been working almost steady every since I've gone with him. We love each other and that counts ever so much. I know marriage is a serious proposition and so is being engaged. I can hardly wait until I get home. Just one more week. The Richardsons are going to Minnesota guess Galen is too. But I hate to think of like of it. Seems like I have been away from him long enough….".
On Sunday, January 1, 1921 at twelve o'clock noon he married Mae Julia Underdahl in the First Presbyterian Manse in Minot, North Dakota . Afterwards they had their wedding reception at Mae brother's John Underdahl's home in Garden Valley. Mae whore a blue dress with black black embroidery , a strand of pearls and she was given a blue sapphire engagement ring. Mae's mother did not attend their marriage because she had the influenza and neither did Galen's parents because they were living in Minnesota. Mae, eleventh child of Johannes and Marti Marie (Holmen) Underdahl, was born on Wednesday, May 4, 1898 in her parents home in Kenyon, Goodhue County, Minnesota. She was Confirmed in the Lutheran Faith on May 31, 1914 in Bethleham Lutheran Church in Minot.
During their first year of their marriage, they made their home in the upstairs apartment in a large home owned by the Beardsy Family at 536 Valley Street Minot, North Dakota. I remember Grandmother saying that she was so used to making large meals for her family, on one such an occasion, she made a huge batch of refried potatoes for only her and Galen. In that apartment, their first child Glen was born on October 24, 1921.
The Farming Years
Glen reflected in 1991 in his Autobiography about his family and growing up during the Great Depression:
Around 1915 my step-grandmother Mabel Vise came from Indiana to marry my Grandfather, George Richardson. It must have been a real treat to have a good cook again after baching it for so many years after his mother died. Dad at fifteen must of had a good appetite because he always enjoyed good food. Grandma probably fried a lot of fried chicken, which she did well. In later years, when we lived in Drady we had a lot of chickens. She could catch kill, pluck, clean and have them in a frying pan so fast that it was really something to watch! She was left handed and always on the run.
Sometime around 1916-1917 my father hurt his back. Guess Granddad was taking a load of hay to the barn and some piece of machinery was in the way. After Dad picket up the tongue to move it, his vertebrae went out of place… he need to have used both hands to move it. He went to the doctor once and should have gone back again . I blame that on Granddad. I'm surprised Dad was able to do the work he did through all those years with a back in that shape. It left him with a pronounced back deformity on one side for the remainder of his life.
When my Father started at the Post Office in Minot, he was wanting a rural route and always did because he had such trouble with his feet which was understandable. Granddad didn't want him to go out on the roads during the blizzards, etc.. In the summer time, it was a good job. They were usually done by noon.
My Uncle, John Underdahl, carried our mail when we lived at Drady. Often it was late at night when he would get to our house and he still had another twelve miles of snow-clogged roads to get through to reach Minot. So I can see Granddad's point, too. Uncle John was a legend in that country as a result there were many write-ups in the newspapers. I think my father carried mail when they married up until early 1929. Many years later during the war, he told Audrey that it was one of the worst mistakes that he made was quitting the Post Office.
Around 1926 we moved from Minot to the house on top of the hill in Burlington. Dean was born there on January 29, 1929.
My first memories of visiting my paternal grandparents at the farm must have been around 1927. Seems like we went on Sundays for dinner and stayed for sandwiches, etc. in the evenings. Dad went from work out to the farm and would not get home until after we were in bed, so we didn't see him from weekend to weekend. He helped Granddad with the haying, etc. and brought milk, eggs, potatoes, and meat home.
That's about the first I remember of visiting out at the farm. Grandma's dad, Scotty Vise, lived there with them. Scotty was Hannah Gulstrand's father-in-law in her first marriage. Grandma Mabel was Ione, Bud and Wibby Vise's aunt. Melvin Vise, who didn't get back from the World War I, was Hannah's first husband.
My grandparents lived on a farm a couple of miles farther up-the river from the Foote Ranch. The Wienrieck Family lived there in the late thirties. It was a real nice place for a small operation like grandpa had going. He didn't think much of going into debt. He had money in the bank and every thing was paid for. He had quite a few head of cattle, several teams of horses and all the farm machinery he needed.
When we lived in that house on top of the hill in Burlington, Dad bought a radio. If it wasn't the first in town, it was the second. I remember when dad went out to the farm and bought them into our house to listen to the radio. Quite a novelty!
At that time Mom had a piano, washing machine, nice rug, etc. We didn't have room for the piano in that little house on the farm and no electricity for the washing machine. That went trying to hang on to the insurance policy.
The Roaring Twenties
I guess everyone was making money in the Roaring Twenties, so Dad's $165.00 a month didn't sound so good. And with the trouble Dad had with his feet, he wanted to go into big-time farming. In 1929, I remember some pretty heated arguments they had over that. Granddad tried to tell Dad the good times wouldn't last. In the end Dad quit the Post Office, drew out his pension and there was no going back.
But he didn't go out to the farm either. I'm sure Granddad was worried about it, because he came to town and to our house… and there was Dad. They about came to blows—I thought. It sure scared me! Granddad had a bad temper much more so than my Father. A short time later, I don't remember why, we moved out to Granddad's for a while. Maybe they looked for something big to farm.
As I remember, it took Grandpa's bank account, what money what Dad may of had left out of his pension and a mortgage on horses, cattle, pigs and Grandpa's farm machinery to make a down payment on all that big-new-equipment.. tractor, 4 bottom plow, combine, drill, etc.
They rented two farms, south and west of Drady, totaling seven-hundred acres. The place that we lived in didn't have a well and was just a shack. It had a kitchen and a living room down, one and a half bedrooms upstairs, and a small cellar whereas the big place where Grandpa lived had a three-bedroom house, large kitchen and a dining room, plus a living room. It had a big barn, chicken coop, machine shop, granary, and a artesian well that was real strong all year around. So all of the operation was done out at that place.
Where we lived was about a half mile west, so I made quite a few trips back and forth. In fact, in the summertime I was there most of the time. I would ride with Dad on the tractor until I got tired, then and go tag along with Granddad. Sometimes he was fixing fence, or some project like that. They milk about twenty head of cows twice-a-day, so it was a lot of work
Sometimes they would make home brew in the summertime. That cold water from the artesian well was great to cool milk, cream, butter, beer, etc. If Granddad stopped for a break in the forenoon, and had a beer, he would pour me a glass. Sometimes I really feel it, but I didn't let on. If Mom would have known she would have grounded me.
Dad put in some long, long hours on that tractor, putting in crops in the spring. (At times, Eunice and Yvonne rode with Dad too.)
Grandma's sister Flora, and her husband Ward Beard, came to visit Drady. I remember her being prim and proper, and a nice lady. Maybe that's why Scotty Vise came out west to live with Grandma and Grandpa. I think that he would like to live it up. Maybe he and Granddad knew each other when they lived in Indiana. I think that Flora raised Grandma after their Mom passed away. I think that she kept Ward in line. I remember Dad and my Grandfather laughing because Ward got chewed out when she smelled cigarette on his breath.
Grandma would tell us stories about when she was a young girl. She talked about Idaville, Indiana and going down to the Wabash and Tippecanoe Rivers for picnics I t was fascinating to some kid on a dry prairie, who hadn't anymore water than the Mouse River.
I think Della and her mother, Aunt Addie, came to Drady to visit also. I don't recall much about but she except she expected Grandpa to have a mustache.
It wasn't an easy life out on the dry, dusty prairie. Mom would have me drag dead limbs from the trees up to the house. If the tractor was there she would put them thought the holes in the wheels to break them short enough for the kitchen range. If not she laid them on the rock and threw another to break them. Primitive huh? In the wintertime, I filled copper boilers with snow, and Mom put them on the stove to milt.
When we moved from town to the farm, we had always used bakery bread. Dad told Mom she would have to start baking bread. I don't know what she did with the first batch, but it was so hard you couldn't cut it or break it. Mom told us kids to take'm out to the rock pile out behind the barn before Dad came back home. We had lots of fun bouncing them off from the rocks, and we (probably me) couldn't keep our mouths shut…so Dad got in on the fun. But Mom learned to make real good bread. (She later made some dark brown bread that was super good bread.) When I was going to High School, she must have baked bread twice a week. And she made good chili.
When we lived at Drady, Mom had us kids pick some weeds, and when she cooked it up, it was like spinach. Also, she made cottage cheese, and some other cheese type of thing, that I'm sure was Norse.
Grandma Underdahl came to visit us for a few days along about that time. If there was some home brew over at Grandpa's, Dad would bring it home. Grandma Underdahl liked that. She would get relaxed, and have so much fun laughing at us kids being silly. Dad laughed at her and Mom did not like that… to think that her mother would have some beer and show that she felt it. But it was fun.
I was probably around 1930 that Dad plowed up some sod (I'm sure that it was virgin land), and planted
potatoes. He took us out to hoe them… and it was hot. Anyway, he ended up with a cellar full of a big, perfect, white potatoes…big baker types. It should've been worth a lot of money, but he couldn't even give them away. They froze during the winter and had to be carried back out and hauled away.
" We have nothing to fear but fear itself"
-- Franklin Roosevelt
1933
I think that the crops were good in 1929 and the prices weren't that bad, but the next year, the drought and the Great Depression hit. Things in the United States went to pot. Out in the prairie where we lived, it was so dry that there weren't any crops. If a farmer did get any returns, the prices were so bad he lost money. The ones that survived were the ones that didn't have any overhead and had money to put back. Granddad would of have had it made.
It was the milking cows that bought the groceries. Granddad always milked a lot of cows and sold the cream, buying groceries for both houses. It got a little thin at times. If there was any home freezers in those days, it would have been a snap. But only in the wintertime could a butcher and keep the meat frozen. In the summer time it was eggs and potatoes.
When my father's maternal Aunt Effie (Tam) Hunt, her husband Alva Hunt, their daughter Mabel (Hunt)
Heiny and her husband Merle Heiny came back from Indiana for a visit, they always had a lot of stories about the gangsters coming through their part of the country. They weren't that far from Chicago, so I'm sure they were telling the way that it was. Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and all, probably at some time, hid out in that country, robbing banks as they went. Anyway, it scared me.
In 1929 when three of the Underdahl daughters families, my mother's sisters, the Beckmans, Johnsons, and Treslands came west… the letters that they wrote about this country.. the fruit laying on the ground, etc. I made up my mind I was going west some day, and all I can say is North Dakota is a good place to be from a long way from.
I must have lived a charmed life back there in North Dakota. I was bucked off a horse with my foot caught in the stirrup. The horse didn't go straight, or I would have been had. I would have been stomped into the sod.
Once dad was moving a combine from the farthest field to home, and I was riding behind on the combine. When we had gone down a deep coolly and back up the other side and on the flat ground, the pin on the draw bar broke. If that had happened a few hundred feet back, me and the machine would have ended up in a pile of junk at the bottom of that gulch.
This same combine had a hopper up high that stored the wheat, or what ever that they were threshing, 'til they had about a truckload. Then they'd put a truck under the spout and dump it and haul it to the granary. Anyway, it was over my head when it was full. Once they were combing flax. I was up in my favorite riding spot. Then I got the bright idea of seeing how much I could get around me and still get out. Flax is different, and I just about didn't get out. It was like sand. Then later I heard of people drowned in that grain sometimes.
When we moved to Drady, dad had a Model-T sedan, about a 1923, I think. Anyway we got home from visiting somewhere and Euncie , Yvonne and myself were out, and just about gone for. The car must of had an exhaust leak. Yvonne was the worst off. We were in the back seat. A few more miles and we would have been done for, for us three.
I think I was nine years old when Dad cranked up another old Ford 1915, and told me to start down the road, out to the farthest field. And he would come up behind with the tractor. He wanted to leave the tractor that night, and have away back so he did not have to walk.
On my ninth birthday Granddad had to put his big saddle on a horse and let me ride out to get the cows in for milking. The cattle cross the creek and Bob, the terrier, started nipping at the horse's heels. The horse started bucking and I stayed on long enough to get a cut near my eye, and on my leg, and then went off with my foot caught in the stirrup strap, and my head bouncing off the rocks, the dog still nipping at the horse's heels. Maybe that's why the horse went in circles, which is all that saved me. Finally my foot came loose and I was in the creek up to my waist. Dad, Grandpa and Grandma were up at the barn waiting to milk, so they saw the whole thing and started down there. But I started to move, Granddad went up to the coral behind the barn where the horse ran to, with the dog still raising Cain with the horse. He threw a club or something at the dog and knocked him down. Then he got on the horse and it started to buck again. He knocked the horse down twice before it quit. A few days later, Dad got on it and it threw him, so Granddad got rid of it. Dad took me home and Mom wanted me taken to town to the Doctor and dad thought so ,too. Granddad came to the house after they got the muck and blood cleaned off and said that I would be okay. Guess he was right. The dog and horse survived, too. The dog was old Bob and I think that he was still with the family on Central Ave. in Minot.
Old Dog Pat
In the late twenties, Dad brought old Pat home. The dog had started following Dad on his mail route. Every morning the dog was at the Post Office waiting, so dad started bring him home. Dad liked having Pat with him. He kept the dogs busy and they left him alone so he could deliver the mail. The dog was bull and some kind of terrier. He never bit anyone…but Mom loved the dog. He was there if someone knock at the door. When he put on is act, people backed off.
At Drady, Pat would go out and attack the porcupine. Then he came home whining. Dad would get a pair of pliers, pull the quills out of him. It happen more than once, so Pat didn't learn. He never turn down a fight with anything, I guess.
About 1932, we moved from Drady to a place out in Burlington. It was on the divide, which was between the Souris and the Des Lacs Rivers. It was about five miles out of town. We lived upstairs and Grandma, Grandpa and Ruth lived down stairs. While we were their, the bank foreclosed on the rest of the farm machinery, the cattle, pigs, the last team of horses. The was nothing in the house to eat except potatoes and they had been frozen.
We went to Gulstrand's house where Hannah had food fixed. Everyone was starving. We live in a house next to Lambert's. Grandma and Grandpa lived upstairs at Gulstrand's. They had a big house next to the highway (where we later lived).
"Happy Days Are Here Again"
The next spring, Grandpa moved to a little farm, on the divided too, but closer to the river. He got a few head of cattle to start with an d start to build up a heard again.. And when the project places opened up, granddad got one of those. By 1937, he had a team of horses, cattle, goats, chickens. He was doing okay and then he got sick in 1941. In June of 1942 he passed away. He is buried in Burlington, North Dakota.
Later Grandmother sold everything and came west and lived with the Gulstrand's. Ruth was a big help to Grandma and she was of coarse the apple of Granddad's eye.
When Grandpa and Grandma moved to the farming project and on the small farm, too, he took the old Model-T truck with him. The only thing that was left over from the big time farming. Guess they must have paid cash for it. ( I have the title to the truck yet.) Anyway, one day he was on the way to town with cream and produce, I s' pose. A state patrolman stopped him. The old truck did not have a license, the lights didn't work, and he didn't have a drivers license. So Granddad took the truck home, cut it up and made a cart and used horses on it. He didn't need a license on that.( I think that there was only two state patrolmen in the whole state of North Dakota at that time.)
I remember, when we lived in Drady, going to town with Dad during fair week. He parked close to third street and we walked down to the fairgrounds. We hit a few home-brew houses on the way down there, and also on the way back. Must've been late. Twelve miles in the dark with no lights. I don't remember getting home, but the next morning Mom was so mad it's a wonder she didn't hit him with something! But our Mom was not a violent person. Needless to say that was the last time I went to town with Dad, which was probably what he wanted to start with.
I liked going to town with Granddad. I always got crackerjacks or something like that. Sometimes I had to sit and wait a long time, but with something to chew on, it wasn't so bad.
The end.
--Glen Richardson 1991
Galen worked for the Postal Service in Minot from 1919 until late 1929 before he went into the farming business with his father. Glen reflected back on those early years as aforementioned during the Great Depression and among the financial causalities of that era was the Richardson Family. Those years were an real trying time for the family economically , but as the Depression progressed the New Deal Programs that started in 1933 under FDR came into being . Around that time Galen went to work for the WPA earning forty-eight dollars a month. Although life started to get somewhat better for them, it was still challengeing .
During the Mae's Burlington years, she would often play the piano at First Presbyterian Church on Sundays when the visiting minister would come to preach. Two of her favorite songs that she would often played were "Now is the Hour" and "Jerusalem the Holy City" and probably performed them there.
A New Beginning
After Galen's father passed away on May 4, 1942, he along with his family moved from Minot, North Dakota to Washington. They moved to the greater Everett area on Larimore Road in several small rental houses. In late 1943 they purchased their first home at 4818-2nd Street Lowell, WA. And they made that their home for the next nineteen years until end of May 1962. When Galen first came to the Everett area, he got a job at Simpson Lee Paper Company as a paper dyer and he worked there up until six months before his death
Galen Richardson passed away on June 11, 1955 at 11:00 AM in Everett General Hospital and Mae passed away twenty-seven years later on Friday, September 25, 1981 at 9:40 AM in the same hospital. They are both buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Everett, WA.
Galen passed away on June 11, 1955 in Everett, Washington.
He is survived by his widow Mae J. Richardson. His children
Glen (Audrey) Richardson of Vancover, WA, Eunice Richardson
of Lowell, WA; Yvonne (Daniel) Bunney of Snohomish, WA; Betty (Norm) Turner of Lowell, WA; Dean (Carol Joan)Richardson of Everett; James, David and Carol Richardson of Lowell, WA. A sister Virginia Ruth (Jack) Gale of Seattle, WA. And nine grandchildren.
Mr Richardson was preceeded in death by his parents,a stepmother Mabel L. Richardson. Two children Rita and Paul
Richardson.
Family Members
Siblings
Half Siblings
Children
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Glen Elbert Richardson
1921–1994
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Eunice Lewine Richardson Blankenburg
1923–2003
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Yvonne Mae Richardson Bunney
1924–1990
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Betty Lee Richardson Turner
1926–2015
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Dean Alden Richardson
1929–2019
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Rita Rose Richardson
1930–1931
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James Ellis "Jim" Richardson
1932–1980
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David John Richardson
1934–2007
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Paul Sherman Richardson
1944–1946
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