In my world of tradeswomen, unions, building trades, apprenticeship and worker safety, the appointments made by governors and presidents matter. The people who actually do the work of government, the staff that we community-based organizations seek to partner with, influence the success of our missions and the strategies we employ a great deal.
Me and Amy Reynolds posing as Rosies at a Rosie the Riveter event
In the week after the election, comparing Trump to the one-time California governor, my good friend suggested that Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn’t so bad after all. He was pretty bad, I said.
My friend hadn’t had to work with people in the state government during the Schwarzenegger administration but I did and I know what happened in our state. It wasn’t just that our governor was accused of manhandling women and fathered a child out of wedlock with his maid. I would certainly prefer that men who have so little regard for women not be elected to office. But I’m most concerned with the people they appoint to government positions and the policies they promote and enact.
Before our Democrat governor Gray Davis was overthrown by a Republican cabal financed by Daryl Issa, I had been working with people in the Division of Apprenticeship Standards (DAS) and its parent the Department of Industrial Relations (DIR) to help women enter the construction trades through union apprenticeships. We rejoiced when one of our own was appointed to head the DAS, Henry Nunn, a black man who had been the apprenticeship director for the painters union. I had met him when we were interviewed together on a public TV program. By that time, Tradeswomen had been fighting with the DAS to pressure them to enforce state affirmative action regulations for decades. We had even filed a lawsuit against the department in 1981, which got us little. But Henry Nunn understood the necessity of overcoming the sexist racist hiring practices in the building trades and he brought on a staff that really cared about these issues. Our nonprofit, Tradeswomen Inc., built a great working relationship with these folks who took seriously their pledge to make working people’s lives better.
During Davis’ administration, we proposed to the DAS staff that we work together on projects promoting apprenticeship around the state. State regulated union apprenticeships offer the best training and highest paid jobs in construction. Among our joint projects was an apprenticeship fair for high school students that included women and girls that the DAS planned to roll out around the state.
After Governor Davis was recalled, Henry Nunn and his staff lost their jobs. Schwarzenegger, an actor with no government experience, essentially replaced department heads with the previous Republican governor Pete Wilson’s people. Republicans, in the state and nationally, have shown little interest in our issues or in enforcing affirmative action regulations. Under Republican administrations working people and tradeswomen have suffered.
When Jimmy Carter was president, tradeswomen were optimistic that new affirmative action regulations would increase our numbers, and they did. It turns out having the federal government in your corner is a huge advantage. We had reason to hope that women would soon achieve a critical mass in the construction trades.
Sister electricians at the Women Building the Nation conference
And then came Reagan. At a recent exhibit of his photos of striking fruit pickers, journalist David Bacon reminded us that 40 percent of union workers voted for Reagan. Talk about voting against your own interests! Reagan had made his reputation as a union buster, so it was no surprise when the first thing he did was start busting unions. He also immediately began to dismantle and defund job training and affirmative action programs.
Tradeswomen saw that women and minorities were being targeted but still we attempted to work with the administration. At one point in the early 1980s, plumber Amy Reynolds even arranged for us to meet with Reagan’s Department of Labor representative, a guy named John Fox, who sat down with us in our tiny office in the Tenderloin. He seemed proud that he had had no prior experience with labor issues. He had been a basketball star (he said) who had worked on Reagan’s election campaign. Fox, and others in Reagan’s Labor Department we later met with in Washington DC, made it clear that their priority was to disempower unions. Because apprenticeship programs are joint projects of unions and industry, they intended to rid the system of union influence. They referred to construction jobs as “men’s work.”
Now, a month after the election of Trump, I suspect my friend is past hoping that he “won’t be so bad.” His appointments are looking far worse than Reagan’s. It’s fair to say that Trump’s appointments violate every ethical standard and it’s easy to predict that women, minorities, working people and all Americans except the 1% will be the losers.
I had given up finding out any more about my mother’s admirer, Edna L. Then, looking through a box of family photos and letters that my brother Don had taken with him to Vancouver BC, I found another scrapbook made by my mother. This was mostly high school-era, 1920s-1930 (Flo had graduated in the class of 1929½). But Flo had tucked mementos from other decades into it. Among the high school graduation notices I was delighted to find another note from Eddie (as she sometimes signed her name) in her now familiar diminutive handwriting. It was an invitation to a party during the Columbus YWCA conference. It said:
In the Wick and Lauterbach den
On Wednesday night at half past ten
We hope you’ll join us for a spree
To give us one more Council memory
Then there is one of Eddie’s cute stick figure drawings—two skirted figures with F and E written underneath. At the bottom it says, “Just to be sure that my roommate will be here to act as co-hostess with me.” While they were roommates Eddie could never keep Flo at home it seems. It was written on the Neil House stationery and dated April 27, 1938.
I had found Eddie’s last name—Lauterbach—the one thing I’d been searching for in the scrapbooks, the one thing I needed in order to find out more about the woman with a crush on my mother! I was so happy I danced around the house singing her name.
Googling her name got me to the Edna A. Lauterbach scholarship fund for the education of nurses. She was a nurse who championed home care. Then I started making up stories. I imagined Edna was an important historical figure, an organizer. Perhaps she had been a speaker at the conference. I imagined she traveled around the country on speaking tours seducing women in every town. I wondered whether Eddie had had lots of lovers, or no lovers at all. Was she the archetype of the lonely lesbian who never found her mate? Was it hard to seduce women in the 1930s?
I wrote to the scholarship fund to see if they could provide more biographical information. The marketing director got right back to me saying it was a different person, as the age didn’t match up. This Edna Lauterbach was not even born until after the meeting in Columbus took place. Scratch her and all my associated fantasies.
Then Don and I got on the computer and looked at census records. We found an Edna R. Lauterbach, born in 1900 and died in August 1979 who lived her entire life in Brooklyn, NY, after 1930 in a 43-unit apartment house on 88th Street. I found pictures of the building, built in 1926, online. The apartments now sell in the million-dollar range, so I’m guessing the neighborhood was gentrified long ago. But when the Lauterbach family moved in, this would have been a working class neighborhood. Edna had two sisters, one named Gertrude. This was a deciding clue, as her sister Gertrude had been mentioned in one of the other notes found in Flo’s scrapbooks. Don found records for Edna in the 1910, 1920, 1930 and 1940 censuses. In all, she was single and living in the family home. By 1940 their father (a truck maker whose parents had emigrated from Germany) had died, but the three sisters were all still unmarried, in their thirties and living at home with their mother. A household of old maids! Perhaps all the sisters were lesbians.
According to the census, Edna worked in advertising. She was there for the Mad Men era, although she would have been 60 years old in 1960. I imagine her as the staid older secretary who runs interference for her philandering boss while correcting his spelling and grammar and making him look good. She may have worked in the industry until she retired, possibly at the same job. Had she remained a closeted lesbian all her life? Was she part of a lesbian subculture and if so, where was it centered? No doubt the environs of New York City afforded more possibilities than those of smaller towns. But I’m imagining big lesbo parties through the decades at the apartment on 88th Street in Brooklyn on the parents’ bowling nights.
It turns out Edna R. Lauterbach wasn’t anybody famous. I couldn’t even find a funeral notice for her, although we did learn that she is buried in the famous Brooklyn Greenwood cemetery with some 560,000 others. She was a workingwoman, a stenographer, who managed to keep a job through the Great Depression. In 1939 she worked in advertising 44 hours per week and 52 weeks in the year. Her income was $2040 that year.
Her parents were ethnically German and my guess is they were not Jewish. The YW is a Christian women’s organization, but it did work with Jewish groups against anti-Semitism and to prod the government to increase numbers of Jewish refugees allowed into the U.S. during the Nazi era. Jewish women did join the YW, but usually as members of the Biz-Pro groups or associated Jewish organizations.
Edna Lauterbach and my mother were two of the thousands of workingwomen who benefited from their membership in the Business and Professional Women’s organizations under the umbrella of the YWCA. One benefit was being able to make friends with other workingwomen from around the country.
Eddie surely had a giant crush on Flo and my heart aches as I read her letters. My mother never revealed that she’d had a sexual relationship with another woman but when I came out to her in the 1970s she did confess that she had known lesbians. And the name Edna Lauterbach is vaguely familiar to me. Did Flo tell me about her? I can’t remember. But it seems as if they kept up the friendship for some years at least. What was the nature of their relationship? They were certainly close friends, and possibly lovers, although I found no conclusive proof.
I have no evidence that they ever saw each other again after 1941 when Flo traveled to New York to visit Eddie. My mother returned to her hometown of Yakima, Washington where (after a stint in Europe with the Red Cross during WWII) she married, raised four kids and lived the rest of her life. Edna L. lived out her life in her family home on 88th Street in Brooklyn.
There is so much more I want to know about my mother’s admirer. Did she frequent the lesbian bars in Manhattan? Was she involved in the blooming lesbian feminist culture in the 1970s? Did she continue to be active in the YWCA? I do know that, even if she and my mother were lovers, the affair would have been long-distance and periodic. And perhaps Eddie’s attentions were not returned at all.
Dearest Eddie, I hope you found love in your lifetime. I hope you found a woman who could love you back.
Among the many questions I wish I could have asked my mother: When did you first have sex? Were you ever attracted to a woman?
We came of age at very different times. My mother turned 20 in 1933, the nadir of the Great Depression. I was 20 in 1969, the zenith of the Countercultural Revolution.
As close as we were, there were things her generation just didn’t talk about—private things. My generation talked about everything, even things that probably should have been kept private.
Whether or not my mother was ever attracted to a woman, I have found evidence that at least one woman was attracted to her. After I discovered the letters from Edna L., my mother’s ardent admirer, I searched in vain for her last name and any identifying information in Mom’s scrapbooks. They had roomed together in the Neil House Hotel in Columbus, Ohio for the national YWCA convention in April 1938. But “Eddie” (as she often signed her name) suggests in one note that they had met the previous year at a YW conference in Chicago.
“It has been fun to continue our friendship begun in Chicago (or even earlier) and I hope we shall be friends far into the future,” wrote Eddie.
I can’t imagine what Eddie means by “even earlier.” I didn’t think Flo had traveled east from Washington State before the Chicago trip, but I have one piece of evidence that suggests otherwise. She gave me a small painting and wrote on the back, “Bought at Dayton’s in Minneapolis in the 1930s. Sent to daughter Molly in San Francisco 2/82. Flo Martin.” So perhaps there had been previous meetings where they connected that Flo had not recorded in the scrapbooks. Had Flo and Eddie schemed for a year to room together in Columbus? They must have planned ahead at least.
So, my new obsession: Edna L. Reading her love notes to Flo warmed my heart and I began to identify with Eddie who slyly references “baths” and late-night “tuckin’ in” (her quotes, not mine). From reading her notes, I conclude she wanted to seduce my mother. Did she?
Some things I know about Eddie: She lived in New York. She was participating in the YWCA conference, so she could have been active in a Business and Professional Women’s Club, as was Flo, or in the YW. Chances are that Eddie was older than Flo, who was only 24 when they roomed together in Columbus. One clue I found in Eddie’s letters: they are literate with perfect spelling and punctuation. This suggests that she worked in an office and not a factory.
What did she look like? My mother’s scrapbooks from the 1930s are filled with pictures, but as far as I can tell there are none of Eddie or the YW conferences. But who knows? Flo didn’t caption anything in these early scrapbooks. In trying to imagine how Eddie looked, I could not even assume that she was white. Even in 1938, the YW strove to include racial minorities.
Participating in these conferences must have felt to my mother and her comrades like early feminist gatherings did to my generation of feminists. The meetings were focused on making institutional changes to give women and minorities more comprehensive rights. These women were leading a movement for social change, just as we did. The artifacts Flo saved in her scrapbooks show that many of these women built loving friendships with each other. The warmth expressed in their greetings illustrates deep feeling. From receipts she saved, I see they sent flowers to each other as thank yous, a practice I wish in retrospect my generation of feminist activists had adopted.
The Columbus conference was a continual round of meetings. In her love notes Eddie grumbles about not getting to see Flo back at the room until late at night.
“Aren’t we having a good time even though I have to sit up nights and wait for a chance to see you?”
“I certainly am enjoying being with you—even if I don’t have that opportunity ‘cept in the wee hours mostly, after I’ve tucked you in. I’ll be tuckin’ you in any minute now when you get back from your meeting on findings…”
Apparently the meetings went long into the night. Another participant noted, “Here’s to more 2am meetings.”
Flo had saved the banquet book from the YW convention and its inside covers were filled with inscriptions from attendees. Altogether there are 27 signatures. Nicknames were popular and they seem to have nicknamed Flo “Cricket.”
They all signed their full names, except Eddie who signed “Love—Eddie.” It’s an indication that their relationship was special, but disappointing for me because Eddie never signed her last name.
In the banquet book Eddie wrote: “Dearest Florence—You are one grand girl and a swell pal! These interludes of Council and Convention will always be happy memories because you shared them with me. I hope you’ll “bother” me “for years to come” and some day I’m coming to see you in the Northwest! Love—Eddie L.”
Did Eddie ever visit the Northwest? There is nothing in my mother’s scrapbook to suggest that she did. But items she saved show that Flo visited Eddie in New York in 1941. There are menus from the Swiss Village Inn and Struppler’s (next to the Cordova 917 Grand Ave.) I found a cocktail napkin from Jack Dempsey’s Broadway Bar and Cocktail Lounge, “Meeting Place of the World.” She kept a newspaper article citing record heat in NYC, a humid 91 degrees on the hottest Sept. 10 in a decade. There’s also a receipt from Sweden House Inc. (Swedish decorative arts) at Rockefeller Center for $1.53 dated 9/10/41, and a receipt for a single person at the Taft Hotel, 7th Ave at 50th St. NYC, and a menu from the Taft Grill.
The Taft Hotel, a 22-story high-rise built in 1926, was one of New York’s premiere tourist hotels with 2000 rooms right on Times Square at Radio City in Midtown. My mother, a small-town gal from Yakima, Washington, must have been thrilled to stay in such a glamorous big city accommodations. I bet she had a great view from room 1045.
How could my mother afford this trip? Had she been saving pennies for three years while working full time and helping to support her family? I could never afford to stay in hotels as a young working person, nor could my family afford hotels when I was growing up. On vacations we drove to the Cascade Mountains and pitched a tent. When I traveled I always arranged to stay in the homes of friends or comrades. It made me wonder if Eddie had chipped in to pay for the room at the Taft Hotel. Or maybe Eddie sprang for the hotel while Flo paid for the train trip. Perhaps she and Eddie had been corresponding furiously for three years, planning this tryst.
Flo also saved a Christmas gift card in its envelope from Macy’s New York. It is signed “With much love to you, Wickie dear—Edna L.”
There’s another note on a card with a monogramed L with no date: “My best love to a very good pal—Edna L.”
Then there’s a note that reads “Florence dear—Just got tickets for Watch on the Rhine—only chance it seems—Gertrude (my sister) will be joining us—will call you about meeting for dinner & theater tomorrow night. Edie L. (The play, by Lillian Hellman, won the New York Drama Critics prize in 1941).
Did Flo travel to New York just to visit Eddie? I can’t find any evidence of meetings of the YWCA or Biz-Pro in NYC in September 1941. Did she stay in a hotel and not with Eddie because she and Eddie wanted a place to be alone?
Painting bought in Minneapolis
From the evidence, it looks like Flo travelled to New York by herself. In those days you could take the North Coast Limited on the Northern Pacific Railway all the way from Yakima to Chicago. Then you transferred to the Pennsylvania Railroad for the final leg to New York. Of course, by this time Flo was a veteran train traveler, having already been to Chicago, Columbus and Minneapolis.
As much as I’ve fantasized about my mother’s lesbian affair, I think the evidence is mixed. It wasn’t just that Flo had had lots of boyfriends, or that she married a man. That’s a story many lesbians tell. While I never married a man, I spent a decade experimenting with heterosexual sex before I came out.
Flo’s inscription on the back of the painting
My mother definitely struggled with homophobia. As liberal as she was politically, Flo had difficulty accepting that my brother and I are gay. He came out first and she felt justifiably burdened by the widely accepted Freudian theory that mothers are responsible for sons’ homosexuality. Then, when I came out a few years later, she at first chalked it up to a phase I was going though. Could that be because she went through a lesbian “phase” herself?
I made up all sorts of sensational stories about Eddie and Flo from the information I found in the scrapbooks. But since Eddie’s last name remained unrecorded, I gave up learning any more about her. Whatever happened between Flo and Eddie, I’m sure my mother had to wrestle with her own internalized homophobia and that of the dominant culture. At that time, in the 1930s, homosexuality was highly stigmatized and even in the big city of New York, lesbians stayed closeted to protect their jobs and reputations, meeting mostly at private house parties.
There remains the possibility that Flo was deeply in denial about her attraction/affair. I have some evidence to support this theory. My mother’s sister, Ruth, also had gay children and, while much more politically conservative, Ruth took a stand when her Presbyterian church excluded gays. She was proud of her gay kids and publicly quit the church in support of them. But she complained to me that she could never get my mother to talk about the issue. She couldn’t understand why Flo, her closest sister, had shut her out, especially with regard to a subject they both shared. I never understood this. I just assumed it had to do with Flo’s avoidance of the personal like so many in her generation, but perhaps my mother feared that her own sexual past would be revealed.
Did Flo have an affair with Eddie? I’ll never know for sure. If she were still alive, I think I could ask her now. When she died in 1983 at the age of 70, I still felt restrained from asking personal questions that I knew she would refuse to answer. Then again, maybe she never would have revealed the truth. She believed some things are best kept private.
The 2016 presidential election disturbed me deeply as it did my friends and family, but it was only when we began driving away from San Francisco on Friday that I got in touch with just how deeply.
Holly and I were making our annual trek to the San Francisco Mycological Society’s mushroom foray at a rustic camp near the town of Mendocino, a trip we always enjoy even if we don’t find edible fungi. We look forward to the peaceful quiet of the redwood forest and quirky company of the fungi crowd at the old WPA-built retreat.
But as we drove further and further into the country I felt my anxiety rising. I began to feel vulnerable in a way that reminded me of how it felt to be gay in the 1970s. Even in San Francisco gay men and lesbians were being attacked and murdered on the streets. We warred with the cops, who invaded our bars and gathering places. We certainly couldn’t count on them for protection. Just holding your lover’s hand in public required courage, but we were young and (I speak for myself) confrontational.
This sudden unsafe feeling made me ask myself how long I had been feeling safe. It had happened so gradually I hadn’t even noticed but the past 40 years have brought changes in San Francisco, and I venture to guess around the country, that have combined to make us feel safer. Gay people, as a result of our own activism, now hold public office, run influential organizations and businesses. We no longer feel the need to be closeted in order to keep our jobs. We are such a part of our city’s civic life that we no longer can claim to be outsiders.
But we live in a blue bubble in the dense coastal cities. Already friends in rural areas and red states (how did the Republicons steal the color red too?) are posting stories of anti-gay attacks.
I’m not a crier, but by the time we got to Booneville I was weepy on my way to hysterical. Standing in line at a cafe I struck up a conversation with the woman in front of me who was black. I told her I was glad she was there. I was feeling that somehow the presence of this black woman would create a safe space. I was just thankful that I was not surrounded by white men, Trump’s people. I know. Completely irrational. The woman I spoke to was with her husband, a white man. She assured me that he is with her. She told me she is a counselor for kids and that many of the kids are terrified that they or their parents will be deported. Tears streamed down my face as I babbled incoherently about how we need to protect the undocumented. We need to re establish the networks we built during the Reagan wars in central America. We need to immediately develop institutions to keep people safe.
I weep for all people in my country who are vulnerable to attack in the new era of Trump. I will do whatever I can to protect you. We must do the best we can to keep each other safe.
My friend and sister writer, Pam Peirce, is doing deep research for a book about her Indiana family and came across an article in the 1903 Indianapolis News titled “What Hoosier Women are Doing.” It’s a list of occupations with numbers of women for each: “There are thirty-four women dentists in Indiana.” My guess is that it was compiled from the 1900 census. Pam passed it along to me, noting that in that year “Seven women carpenters belong to the building trades of Indiana.”
Unfortunately, the clipping is out of focus, but it is still readable. I can see that “Four women in Indiana are cabinet makers, and eight work in saw and planing mills. Indiana has two women blacksmiths and ten women machinists. Nine women work in the coal mines of Indiana. Two women are marble and stone cutters.” I wonder if any of these female crafts workers were allowed to join unions.
“Seven women carpenters belong to the building trades of Indiana. Four women in Indiana are cabinet makers, and eight work in saw and planing mills. Indiana has two women blacksmiths and ten women machinists. Nine women work in the coal mines of Indiana. Two women are marble and stone cutters.”
We know that women have worked in the trades since before this country was founded. Still, I’m surprised that Hoosier women had such a good representation in the trades in 1903. In contrast, there were about 6,000 washerwomen and 2,000 stenographers.
Pam also turned me on to a book, The Fair Women: The Story of the Women’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893. The World’s Columbian Exposition included amazing exhibits of the results of women’s activities–in the arts, industry, science, politics and philanthropy. Most of these were housed in the Woman’s Building, which was designed, decorated and administered entirely by women.
Handbill for the Women’s Building
In the book there is quite a bit of information about two women who were hired to do sculptures for the outside of the women’s building. One was Enid Yandell, who designed the caryatids, 24 identical female figures that held up the roof garden. It is said that the male workers with whom she shared a studio accepted her “without question.” One of the women managing the project said “Perhaps owing to the fact that almost all the workers were foreigners, and abroad it is not so unusual for women to do industrial work.”
At a party, Enid later had a wonderfully funny discussion about the propriety of women working with the widow of President Grant, who was prejudiced against Enid as soon as she heard that she was a “stonecutter.” Apparently the widow was still angry that her husband had spent too much time with a 15-year-old sculptor (Vinnie Ream Hoxie) who was doing a sculpture of Lincoln. Enid went on to have a career as a sculptor and in 1898 became the first woman to join the National Sculpture Society.
The Women’s Building
More sculptural work on the Women’s Building was awarded to 19-year-old Alice Ridout, who lived in San Francisco where she worked in the studio of Rupert Schmid. It took the fair managers months to convince her to come to Chicago to do her work on the sculptures they required, but she did it.
Remembering female first responders who died on 9-11. Words and photos by Susan Eisenberg. I’m republishing her blog, On Equal Terms, from September 11, 2016.
Kathy Mazza, Port Authority Officer, NYC The first female Port Authority Officer to be killed in the line of duty, Captain Kathy Mazza died while evacuating people from Tower One of the World Trade Center on September 11. Her clear-headed decision to shoot out the glass in the lobby, enabled hundreds to exit more swiftly. Three percent of the Port Authority Police Department perished that day. Having earned a nursing degree before joining the PAPD, Kathy rose through the ranks and became the first female commandant of the Training Academy, leading its emergency medical programs. The regional Emergency Medical Services Council of New York City named her the 1999 Basic Life Support Provider of the Year. Kathy Mazza
Yamel Merino, Emergency Medical Technician, NYC. Born to Dominican immigrant parents, Yamel Merino earned her EMT certification at Westchester Community College where she received the Chancellor’s Award for scholastic excellence. She…
You could say that she died at the hands of the white man too
The posse didn’t wait to start shooting as they drove their horses down into the wash where the Indians slept in their camp. The reward had been promised whether they were brought in dead or alive. It was easier to kill them all.
On a cold February day in the Nevada hinterlands, a battle raged for three hours, pitting 13 Indians with few guns and little ammunition against 19 well-armed vigilantes. The women defended themselves and their children with spears and arrows. The little children threw rocks at the invaders.
One of the whites was killed as he advanced when a girl held up her skirts and flashed her genitals, smiling and moving forward in a weaving dance. As the white man stared in astonishment, she dropped down and her brother shot him with the one bullet left in his gun.
The youngest baby was in a cradleboard on her mother’s back when her 19-year-old mother was shot and killed. Her head fell back into the snowy mud. The marauders heard the baby crying and retrieved her along with three other children who had run into the sagebrush.
The four children were put in jail after capture. Mary Jo is a baby held by her aunt here.
That baby grew up to be Mary Jo Estep, the last surviving Indian of the last Indian massacre in 1911, a woman I would meet many years later.
She was one of four children who survived the massacre, but the other three died the following year of tuberculosis. Mary Jo was about 18 months old when the posse ambushed the remnants of her tribe. Her grandfather, “Shoshone Mike,” had led the band across 300 miles of western desert in northern Nevada and California after refusing to go to a reservation.
Mary Jo knew little of this and did not remember it. When, in 1973, the Oregon writer Dayton O. Hyde wrote a book about her grandfather and the massacre, he speculated that the children might still be living. He learned of Mary Jo and then agonized about how to approach her and tell her the story of the massacre.
In 1911 Indians had no rights and were not considered human. White men could get away with killing Indians with impunity. It was easy to blame crimes on Indians, and that is what happened to Shoshone Mike. A cattle rustling gang whose leader was the son of a prominent judge blamed their crimes on Mike. A vigilante group formed with eyes on the reward money. Federal marshals also were after Mike and posses began roaming the desert in northern Nevada looking for him.
Mike and his extended family evaded the posses for a year. But the winter of 1911 was the worst in a long time and, starving and tired, they were forced to camp in an unprotected spot where they were discovered.
The surviving children were taken to the jail in the nearest town and eventually moved to an Indian school. The murdered Indians’ bodies were never properly buried.
Until Hyde wrote the book it was still said that Shoshone Mike had committed crimes and the killing of his family was justified. Mike’s crime was that he wanted to live the nomadic life he had grown up with, camping every winter for 30 years on Rock Creek in southern Idaho and then moving to higher country for the summer season. The white man’s fences, sheep and cattle, mining waste, and development made his family’s lifestyle more and more difficult.
Hyde had been obsessed with the story of Shoshone Mike and his research included interviews with people who still remembered the massacre 60 years later. He traveled the route taken by Mike and his family, even collecting remaining bones of the Indians and reburying them.
Writing the book, he set the story straight. Mike and his family were innocent of the crimes whites accused them of. The murderers were never brought to justice; they were hailed as heroes by people in the surrounding towns. Hyde also uncovered evidence that Mike was Bannock, not Shoshone. His wife, Jennie, was Ute.
When she learned the story, Mary Jo’s first reaction was to discount it. “Most of my friends are non-Indians. I was raised in the white world,” she said.
Later she became a local celebrity of sorts in my hometown of Yakima, Washington, giving interviews and speaking to groups who wanted to hear her unique story.
Mary Jo Estep was raised by the family of the Fort Hall Indian reservation superintendent. She graduated from Central Washington College with a degree in music and spent 40 years teaching school before retiring in 1974. At the age of 82 in 1992, Mary Jo died in a nursing home because a nurse had given her the wrong medication and hospital staff determined that her non-resuscitate directive meant that they could not help her. The effects of the overdose could have been easily reversed. She took several hours to die and in that time her friends, who had come to pick her up for a party, surrounded and comforted her, but could not move the doctors to save her life.
“You look at what happened to her, and you could say that she died at the hands of the white man too,” said Louis Jarnecke, one of her friends.
I still have the newspaper article telling of Mary Jo’s death, and the book written about her grandfather, The Last Free Man. What they don’t say is that Mary Jo Estep was a lesbian. She lived with her “long-time companion” Ruth Sweany for more than 50 years on Summitview Avenue in Yakima.
My mother, Florence Martin, with the chapbook
I met Mary Jo and Ruth through my mother who had organized a seniors’ writing group in Yakima. My mom was interested in the history of our part of the world and she encouraged old people to tell and write their stories. She worked for the senior center there and for a time she produced a local TV program in which she interviewed old-timers and recorded their histories. The women told me they were part of a group called “Living Historians,” and laughed saying, “At least we’re still living!”
In 1980, my brother Don and his press, Hard Rain Printing Collective, printed a chapbook that includes the writing of all three: Mary Jo, Ruth, and my mother Florence Martin. Mary Jo’s only piece in the chapbook chronicles an incident from her childhood of an old man who is lost and then found the next day by neighbors. Two of the published entries are by my mother. Ruth Sweany has four; three are poems, but the fourth is a prose piece that describes her life with Mary Jo, particularly when their friend Mabel comes to visit on Fridays. I think the friend must be Mabel George, another writer published in the chapbook.
A photo in the archive Yakima Memory from the Yakima Herald-Republic newspaper shows Mabel George (born January 8, 1899) at the piano, and another entry is titled Mabel George Children’s Songs from 78 records, 1947. So Mabel was a musician and songwriter.
Ruth’s story never mentions Mary Jo, but clearly the “we” in the piece refers to Ruth and Mary Jo as a couple. It’s about the fun they have when their friend Mabel visits. They listen to music (a critique of modern loud disco music follows), they read poetry and plays to each other. They also write and produce plays, calling themselves “The Carload Players.” Ruth writes that they even produced a couple of plays before an audience. This makes me wish their papers had been archived but I can find no evidence that they were saved.
These women rejoiced in each other’s company. Ruth writes: “So our Fridays are always cheerful. Why not? We are doing things we enjoy, in a congenial group. After one of Mabel’s visits the world stops going to the dogs and the sunshine comes out a little brighter.”
Mary Jo died November 19, 1992. Ruth died November 28, nine days later. They were both buried in the Terrace Heights cemetery in Yakima. They chose identical gravestones.
Ruth and Mary Jo carved out their own woman-centered culture in the hostile environment of Eastern Washington before the advent of the modern women’s movement and lesbian pride. Living lightly on the cultural landscape served them well.
My hiking buddy Marg suffers from Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS) and so she tries to find places to hike where chemical herbicides and pesticides are not used. This is not as easy as one might imagine. Land managers spray tons of herbicides in our public parks and don’t always alert the public.
At the trailhead
On the trail, Mt. Diablo in the distance
No permit necessary for this section
Marg is actively involved in community groups fighting the cutting of trees in the East Bay hills, financed by FEMA, but even with much vocal opposition from the community the project continues. Contractors are now in the process of cutting hundreds of trees and then treating the stumps with herbicides to keep them from sprouting. The herbicides will be applied multiple times and the project will go on for years, but the public continues to protest. http://milliontrees.me/2015/11/27/public-opposition-to-pesticide-use-in-our-public-parks/. Marg was threatened with arrest recently when, on a walk, she came upon a tree-cutting crew and, um, got in their way.
East Bay Parks clearcut
Milkmaids and watershed
Marg at the spot where she was nearly arrested
On our hikes I’m always stopping to identify birds and native plants and flowers. It seems like on every hike, Marg and I revert to the same argument: what is native? Does native mean before humans lived here, like 10,000 years ago? Or does it mean before whites settled here? Or does it include plants that have adapted to this environment and thrive here? And why do I care? My answer is that I just appreciate plants that have adapted to this place over centuries, like the California Buckeye, Aesculus californica, endemic to our coastal hills and foothills. The buckeye blooms spectacularly in spring, loses its leaves in the dry summer and looks dead with only its fruit hanging on bare branches by fall. Or the perennial wild cucumber, Marah macrocarpa, which dies back during the dry season and stores water in a huge tuberous root (it’s also called man root). Of course eucalyptus is one of the “invasives” that have adapted well and are now being felled. This argument can go on forever and I won’t repeat it here. Suffice to say that Marg has convinced me that the eucs should not be cut down. I did not need to be convinced that spraying toxic chemicals is bad policy.
Trillium chloropetalum
Poppies and Lupine were blooming
Wild Cucumber
Shooting Stars
In her search for toxic-free places to hike, Marg was assured by a higher up at the East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) that no chemicals are applied to the watershed lands in their purview. So last week we chose to hike on EBMUD land. For most trails, hikers are required to buy a permit and it’s easy to do on the EBMUD website: https://www.ebmud.com/recreation/buy-trail-permit/#. This watershed has miles and miles of developed, well-maintained trails and we will be sampling more in the future.
My friend Jano just published a beautiful children’s book that she wrote and illustrated. Yetta & the Fantastic Mom Suits, a picture book, is a modern version of a Jewish folktale featuring a mischievous spirit, a Dybbuk.
At her Mama Susan’s job, the carpenters were adding a new room onto a house.
Here’s the story: Yetta is tired of her Moms telling her what to do. She wants to be the boss! She runs to the back yard on her stilts and spies a Dybbuk sitting high in the tall pine tree. The Dybbuk, hearing Yetta’s complaints, concocts a way for her to become her Moms: she sews costumes that look exactly like Yetta’s two Moms. Yetta hops onto her stilts, slips inside a Mom suit and takes off for her Moms’ jobs. Trouble follows.
Here’s the tradeswoman angle: one of the moms is a carpenter. When daughter Yetta trades places with her moms, she has to cover for them at work wearing a mom suit and on stilts! She manages to fool, if not to please, the bosses. Looks like Yetta will make a great career in the trades.
tradeswomn musings 