My Father's Parents

I figure that I should tell what I know about my grandparents before I totally forget the facts. I have already forgotten some details, but this is what is left.

My father's father (Glen Oren Reed) was from the same northeast corner of Iowa where my father grew up. He, too, was from a farming family, but I do not know much more than that about them. He had a brother, named Elmer I think, and a sister named Norma (married Dr. K.R Palmer, Uncle Ray, a dentist). Whether there were more siblings, I do not remember.

I saw this grandfather only three or four times in my life, usually unexpectedly. He had a different "Nana" with him each time and I was led to believe that he was not a suitable person to have around his granddaughters. The time I remember best was when I was six or seven (1956-1957)and he drove up in a big black and white Buick, brand shiny new, on a summer afternoon. I often thought of him when I saw cars like that one, but he never came again. From time to time--not related to holidays or birthdays--he would send gifts from all over the world. Usually it was dolls for us girls, in spite of the fact that I despised them. (The ones from Spain and Japan were very pretty. The one from Iceland was the biggest and was all hand sewn, with chewed-sealskin slippers.) He worked on freighters, getting off and staying a while where it took his fancy. This was often in Iceland.

On one of our family's trips out West when I was a teen, we saw him at his job in the supply room of a hospital in St. Joseph, MO. He died from being hit by a train in Colorado in the mid- 1970s. My father was convinced that he was pushed (not intoxicated), but the police found no evidence either way. I have recently had reason to rethink what I was told about him, but that is for another post.

I did meet my father's paternal grandmother once or twice when she lived in a house across the street from Aunt Norma and Uncle Ray's house. That house across the street had been turned into a nursing home and she was in a bedroom upstairs. We went across to pay our respects a couple of times when we stopped to visit Aunt Norma and Uncle Ray on our way to stay with my mother's family in southeast Minnesota. She was tiny, all pink and white and fragile-looking, but they told me she was tough as they come and 93 years old. When she died soon after, I wanted to go to the funeral with my parents, but they said I was too young. (I was twelve, I think.)

My father's mother (Ella June Underbakke) was born in the same area of Iowa, but her parents immigrated from Stavanger, Norway. They were engaged in Norway before he came over and got established in Iowa and then sent for her. After she arrived, they were married with no one from either family present for the wedding. There were a whole bunch of children, 10 or 12, most of whom I met as a child, but do not remember. The youngest, Agnes, I do remember as an old woman in a nursing home who kept calling me someone else's name. Ella and her husband's sister Norma were great friends, but I do not know whether that started before or after Ella and Glen were married. Ella tried running the family farm with her son and daughter who were teens when their father left them, but had to give it up.

She went to Rochester, MN, home of the famous Mayo Clinic, and worked in the kitchen of the Methodist Worrell Hospital for many years. She was in charge of the kitchen when she retired some time in the 1960s. In Rochester she lived in a tiny apartment in a building owned by a woman who was a dwarf and my grandmother's best friend, next to Aunt Norma. Margie's family owned a circus which was very profitable, so she was able to retire and buy the apartment building and live on the rents. She took me to the circus once when it came to town (some of the family still ran it) and I got to see behind the scenes. Margie had the apartment across the hall from my grandmother, so we often saw her and it was so cool to be friends with an adult who was no taller than I was!

When Ella retired from the hospital kitchen, she bought a general store in the tiny town where my father grew up, Burr Oak, IA. When he was a child, my father and his best friend, Dixon Smith, wondered how many people lived in Burr Oak, so they sat down under a bush and named and counted them. It was something like 106, but they found out later that a baby had been born that day, so their count was not completely accurate. There were still about that many inhabitants when Ella bought the store. There were two churches--Methodist and Lutheran, two bars--one with gas pumps--and another general store where you could buy liquor. My grandmother did not sell alcohol, though she did sometimes drink a little. Now when I say general store, I mean general! In addition to the regular grocery items, there were overalls, hats, shirts, socks, livestock feed, hardware, drugstore goods and a small lending library. She had a walk-in cooler and a walk-in freezer, which were very popular on summer afternoons. (They were not accessible by the general public, but we were family!) Every year the day after Christmas, my family would pack up and drive from Appleton, WI to Burr Oak for Inventory. Before midnight December 31, we had to count every item in that store and it would take all that time. I have vivid memories of climbing a tall ladder twelve feet high to count all the washers, screws, etc. in the bins on the top shelf. (I don't know why they always gave me that job!) There were regular hours posted on a sign on the door, but if someone needed something outside of those hours, he just banged on the door and Ella would walk down the two flights of stairs and open up for him. The apartment above the store was way bigger than the one she had in Rochester and full of antiques and heirlooms. It was cozy and comfy and smelled of baking. There was also a flight of stairs on the outside of the building that we kids could sneak out down.

Ella's baby brother, Melvin, still had a farm just across the highway from the store and he had a daughter just a little older than I. We do not have a lot in common, but we both love animals. We spent a lot of time out in his barn with the dairy cattle. (His Jerseys often won blue and purple ribbons at the state fairs in Iowa and Minnesota.) She also had a cool dog, sort of a corgi cross who was obsessed with fetching sticks.

When my parents moved to Arizona in 1971, Ella went with them and when the duplex was built, she lived in the other half. My mother would brag sometimes that she lived under the same roof with her mother-in-law for ten years without ever a quarrel. That says something about both of them. Underbakkes have many virtues, but they are critical of everything and everyone. If you can get along with an Underbakke, you are diplomatic, for sure.

I meant to cover my mother's parents in this post, as well, but it is so long already that I will save them for next time.