BILL AND EFFIE ENGER, CONTINUED

In my last blog “Happy Days Were Here Again” in Worthington, Minnesota.  World War II was finally over and our boys were coming home! At least some of them did, and thank God the Enger boys were among them.  In a telegram to Bill and Effie from son Billie, dated Sept. 26, 1945: “Dear Folks, Expect to dock in New York about the first of the month. Am working in the Orderly Room again and am busier than a cat with fourteen kittens. Don’t write any more.  Love, Billie.”  As usual, a man of few words, but that was all he needed to say—he was coming home!

Gale, on the other hand, sent a more wordy missal, in the form of a letter postmarked January 3, 1946 at Camp McCoy, Wisconsin.  He had come back from overseas after VE Day and VJ Day and was biding his time at Camp McCoy, Wisconsin to serve out the remainder of his term.  He wrote: 
“This morning I sent out a duffel bag crammed full of stuff that I’ve picked up around here.--Things look pretty good for an early discharge now. Maybe even by the 15^th of the month. That’s a pretty optimistic point of view, but it could really happen.”  (In actuality Gale’s official separation date was January 26, 1946.)

(Note to the younger generation:  V-E Day stands for Victory in Europe Day, and V-J Day stands for Victory over Japan Day. After the German surrender a treaty was signed in Reims, France on May 7, 1945 and President Harry S Truman declared May 8 as V-E Day, the end of World War II in Europe.  However the war did not officially end until the surrender of Japan on August 14, 1945.  Japan signed the terms of surrender September 2, 1945 on the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, and that date was designated as VJ Day.)

While the Enger sons were away Bill Enger the father had taken the plunge to start his own lumber yard.  The younger Albinson brothers had taken over Albinson Lumber Co. from their half brother Clarence Albinson so Bill’s services were no longer needed.   Bill, Effie, Hope and Nonie had spent the winter of 1943 in Crookston, MN where Bill was operating saw mills in the area but that was not a good life for the family.  By 1945 Bill’s innate entrepreneurial spirit kicked in and he decided to take the gutsy plunge to open his own lumber yard in competition with Albinson—Enger Lumber Co. was born at Oxford Street and Smith Avenue. Somehow Bill was able to finagle a load of lumber on credit, and he started selling the boards right off the vacant lot.

It was an opportune time for this kind of venture.  Thousands of young service men were streaming back from overseas, getting married, and starting families, and the Number One need would be for housing!  Bill was there to get in on the ground floor of this post war boom and he jumped in with both feet.  He sold the house on Smith Avenue and bought an old dilapidated house right across the highway from the lumber yard where Oxford. and Smith Avenue met. 

The first lumber pile and the first office of Enger Lumber Company, Worthington, Minnesota.

The  new lumber shed was under construction in the background.

The first lumber yard office was a small square shed surrounded by piles of lumber. Soon a larger lumber shed was added to keep the boards under cover, and Enger Lumber Co. was off and running.  Now that Billie and Gale were home Bill wanted to bring them into the business, but Billie still had unfinished business in Redwood Falls. He went back to his pre-war job at the auto parts store, and back to his former church, the North Redwood Evangelical where Oscar Monson had been the Pastor when he left for the service and had recently moved to Rochester, Minnesota.

Rev. Monson had kept in touch with Billie during the war years, and Billie faithfully tithed to the church all the time he was in the Army.  His letters home would often contain instructions such as: “Today we got paid for Feb. and March; I received $103.00 and bought an application for a Money Order blank for $100.00 which I will send to you as soon as I get it.  If I have any money at home now, I would appreciate it if you would give $10.30 to Monson (at Redwood) or Heitke (at Worthington church) for my tithe.”

But one thing had changed while Billie was away.  During the three and a half years he was overseas the preacher’s daughter Ruthie Monson—just a kid of 16 when he left—had grown into a lovely young woman and romance soon blossomed!  Ruth had attended Western Union College in LeMars, Iowa to become a teacher and was teaching in a country school.  William J. Enger and Ruth Naomi Monson were married on August 22, 1946 at the North  Redwood church where they had met, with her father, Rev. Oscar Monson, presiding.

August 22. 1946 in North Redwood, Minnesota

Ruth Naomi Monson married William John Enger.

Sister Hope had been married eight months earlier, January 1946, to Durward “Dude” Reyman of Valley Center, Kansas.  He was a first cousin of Aunt Vivian’s husband Clarence Erbes, and Hope saw a picture of him in uniform when she visited Clarence’s parents, Carl and Lizzie Erbes, in Round Lake, Minnesota.  There was a big campaign on during the war urging people on the home front to “write to our service men overseas,” so Lizzie suggested to Hope that she should write to Dude.  Hope did, Dude answered, and before long the letters turned from “How are you” to “I love you!”  Much to Effie’s consternation Hope and Dude decided they were engaged to be married without ever meeting in person.  A mother’s nightmare!

January 19, 1946, Evangelical Church, Worthington, Minnesota

Hope Carol Enger married Durward Lee Reyman

After the letters had gone back and forth for a while Swede was on leave and wanted to come and see Hope.  Even though I was just five years old, I still remember the scene, it went something like this:  The phone rang and my Mom answered:  “Mrs. Enger, this is Durward Reyman and I would like to come and visit your daughter.”  Effie:  “I just don’t think that would be a good idea, please don’t come!”  Hope:  (Lying on the bed sobbing as though her heart were broken): “But I love him!”  Effie: “How can you love a man you’ve never met?  You don’t have any idea what he is like!”  After being rejected by Effie, Dude talked to his Mom in Valley Center, Kansas and she gave him some sage advice:  “If you love her you’d better go after her!”  He did, and the rest is history. When Dude (by then known as Swede) passed away from cancer in 2009 he and Hope Enger Reyman had celebrated 64 years of marriage, had raised four boys together, and were blessed with a big, wonderful family of grandchildren and great-grandchildren!

Gale Edward Enger and Cecelia Marian Roberts were October 31, 1947

in Worthington with brother Bill and  Ruth as attendants

Gale was the last holdout in the marriage department, but after coming home from the Army, he met a Worthington girl, Cecelia “Cece” Roberts.  On October 31, 1947—also known as Halloween—they were married at the Emmanuel Evangelical Church in Worthington.  As of this writing and after many adventures they are now living in retirement in Poteau, Oklahoma.  Last October they celebrated their 64^th wedding anniversary.  They have two sons, four grandchildren, and several greats.

Enger Lumber Company in Worthington,Minnesota, Circa 1950

As the three older Enger kids were being married off one by one, Bill Enger was prospering in the lumber business.  Gale had joined the firm and was drawing the blueprints for houses and in 1950 Billy and Ruth moved from North Redwood to Worthington with one-year-old Timothy and a second baby on the way, who turned out to be Thomas Richard.  Billy went to work at the Enger Lumber Co. and both the boys built houses in the new Sunset Addition to Worthington just off  Diagonal Road.  . Aunt Vivian’s husband, Clarence Erbes, also came to work in the lumber yard and built a home on MacMillan Street where they lived with son Steve, born January 21, 1947, and Grandma Hannah Enger.

Bill and Effie eventually remodeled the old house on Oxford Street and made it into quite a showplace.  The old front porch was torn off and a large living room was added across the entire front.  The former living room became a large dining room, and a room next to the dining room became my bedroom 

A variety of wood paneling, apropos to the lumber business, were featured throughout the home— birds-eye maple in the living room, red cedar above the fireplace. etched-wood paneling in the dining room which was painted and then wiped so the etched grooves were accented with color.  My bedroom was knotty pine with built in wardrobe, desk and dressing table and a private ½ bath with blue fixtures. Quite a novelty for that time!  The kitchen was wainscoted in tile with leatherette paneling above. The master bedroom was paneled in mahogany.  Bill and Effie made several trips to Daytons in Minneapolis to choose the furnishings which included wall to wall carpeting, custom made sectional couch and matching draperies in “dusty rose”.  A huge enclosed porch with concrete floor was added across the back at ground level along with an attached double garage.  Only the old attic with small guest bedroom and the basement were left pretty much as is.

Emmanuel Evangelical United Brethren Church in Worthington, now United Methodist

Times were good— Effie was in seventh heaven and Worthington was her Eden.  She loved her newly remodeled home, and her involvement in the Evangelical United Brethren Church where Grandma Hannah, Vivian and Clarence and the Doedens also attended.  Effie was a Sunday School teacher and an active member of the Ladies’ Aid..  I can remember wonderful Sunday dinners after church with Aunt Hazel and Uncle Herman at the Doeden farm, where the women visited, Aunt Hazel cooked on the wood stove, the men argued about politics and I played with my cousin Janet who was just a year older.

To make life even better the grandchildren began arriving for Bill and Effie!  Gale and Cece produced the first grandson, Alan William, in 1948, and three months later Hope and Dude’s first son, Durward Lee Reyman, Jr. was born.  The next year, 1949, Gale and Cece had Larry John in February, followed soon after by Billie and Ruth’s first son, Timothy John.  One year later in 1950 Thomas Richard was born in February to Billie and Ruth, and Hope and Dude followed in May with William Craig Reyman and on Valentine’s Day in 1952 there was James Mark Reyman, born shortly after Hope and Dude had moved to Linch, Wyoming.  After seven boys in a row and no girls, Bill offered a $100 prize for the first girl (which didn’t happen until several years later).

Bill’s entrepreneurial spirit was in full force during those years as it had been throughout his life.  He joined Frank LaPachek in a partnership to build the Shady Lane Cabin Court on property which was an old apple orchard next to the lumber yard.  It featured an office building and a dozen or so individual log-sided cabins and later six motel-style units were added.  The Enger and LaPachek partnership also purchased a small acreage with large trees outside of town for future development, called Whispering Pines, but that project never happened.  Bill even started a branch lumber yard down the road in Jackson.

Shady Lane Log Cabin Court

, Worthington, Minnesota

Bill was into horses, too.  He had a big, beautiful riding horse named Blaze and joined the Saddle Club. I got a little black Shetland pony named Black Beauty, complete with red saddle, bridle and martingale.  I can also remember a horse named Betty and finally, a spirited half-Arab called Stormy Weather. The horses were kept at the horse barns at the fairground which was a short distance from our house.

Bill on Blaze

Bill, always a farmer at heart, in 1950 invested in a farm 250 miles north of Worthington at Mora, Minnesota which started out to be a “gentleman farmer” project.  He sent one of his lumber yard employees up there to live year around as the hired man in the “big house” and oversee the farm and the animals.  The plan, as I knew it, was that we would go there for vacation times in the summer and stay in the “little house.”  That was a lot of fun for me because I usually got to take a friend with me, and since it was summer we could spend our days catching frogs in the pond, playing with the kittens in the barn and experiencing farm life without having to do the work!

But little did I know that this idyllic life of ours was about to take a sinister turn!  In October of 1952 Bill was on a quick trip to Mora checking on the farm and Effie and the daughters-in-law had spent that Sunday afternoon cleaning the lumber yard office from top to bottom.  All at once in the early evening the sound of a fire alarm pierced the air and soon the sirens became louder and louder.  I quickly learned that the Enger Lumber Co. office and main lumber shed were on fire, and what a conflagration that turned out to be! 

I ran to the corner where a crowd was already gathering across the street from the fire, and I was horrified to see people standing around watching, casually talking and laughing as the flames grew more and more spectacular.  Why wasn’t everyone else as upset as I was?  I stood there sobbing and then finally ran away to hide and cry my eyes out.  Paint cans exploding inside the building sounded like bombs going off and the wood in the lumber shed crackled like a huge bonfire!  Billie and Clarence heard the news and rushed over to try to get inside to save what they could, including a brand new lumber truck in the shed, but they were stopped by the firemen.  All they could do was stand there and watch along with everyone else.

When the fire was finally out the office and the lumber shed were virtually destroyed.  When my Dad arrived home I thought that he would start making plans to rebuild as soon as possible.  But I was dead wrong!  After the dust settled my father announced to me, and I assume he had already told my mother, that he had decided to sell the lumber yard property and move all of us to the farm in Mora. 

“NO!!!  I’M NOT GOING!!” was my immediate reaction.  How could my father even think about taking me away from Worthington where I had been born and lived all my life, where all my friends were, my beloved Grandma, aunts, uncles and cousins and our beautiful home!  The old farmhouse in Mora didn’t even have an indoor bathroom!  In my mind my father—William D. Enger—instantly became the meanest man on Earth!

It took a while after that to clean up the lumber yard details and make all the arrangements for the move but true to his word, one year later in October of 1953, Dad, Mom and devastated Me were headed for Mora, Minnesota with all of our worldly belongings.  Looking back I am sure that my Mother was as unhappy as I was, but she went about the process as her usual stoic self.  Whatever Bill wanted to do, that’s what they did and that’s the way it was—always!

Aerial view of the Mora farm in it’s heyday, circa 1960

The farm that I had loved in the summer time now looked old, and dark, and dreary.  I won’t even go into the indignities I suffered by having to use the outhouse that first winter after I was used to my own private bathroom;--and how do you think I felt at age 13 to walk into a brand-new eighth grade class that had already been together for two months and not know even one soul.  Of course everybody stared!

But Mora was a small farming community, and the school was small compared to Worthington.  Most of the kids lived on farms too, and it didn’t take long to make friends, both girls and boys!  Before that first school year was over I had to admit to my parents that I actually liked it there.  It helped that after the spring thaw we were able to install a septic system and a former nursery room on the upper level was converted into a large INDOOR bathroom!

The Enger farm house in Mora, Minnesota

The farmhouse was huge and had been built before 1900, but it had been constructed in the old hand-crafted style, and with a little sprucing up it was actually a beautiful house.  It had dark woodwork and hardwood flooring throughout which was restored to its original beauty   Mom painted all the rooms, which included a big eat-in kitchen, dining room with sitting area (which later became our TV room), a parlor which was hardly ever used, and an office/bedroom on the main floor. Upstairs there were four large bedrooms, the nursery/bathroom, and another steep stairway up to an unfinished attic for the keeping of treasures.  A full cellar underneath housed a huge coal and wood furnace. There was an open porch with columns outside the parlor door, a screened porch facing the road, and a closed-in porch which opened into the kitchen.

My Dad, as usual, jumped into farming with a vengeance.  Before long a brand new milk and hay barn with siloes  was under construction, an old log barn had been torn down and replaced with a new hog house, and since Gale and Billy were moving their families up to join the farming operation, the “little house” was remodeled and two bedrooms added for Gale, Cece and boys. Another farm with a very old house was acquired just down the road where Billie, Ruth and kids would live.  The farming operation was incorporated into “Engco Farms” and was truly diversified, with an award winning dairy herd, sheep, hogs, some beef cows, chickens, and crops such as oats, alfalfa and corn.  Of course all of this activity required lots of labor and my Dad, being a workaholic, was in his glory.  He could sit all day on a tractor and watch the soil turning over behind the plow,which he always said was the most beautiful sight on earth.

Effie, on the other hand, went into kind of a “retreat mode” on the farm.  She didn’t drive so she quit going to church; she and Cece joined the Leisure Hour club in the neighborhood, but she mostly worked at home.  In addition to taking care of the big house, she and Cece were given the added chore of washing milking machines every day, and at harvest time literally “cooking for threshers.”  My belief is that Effie always yearned for her Worthington life but she never complained.

Billy and Gale were not as enamored with farming as was their father.  If you ask Gale even today about his years on the farm he will tell you, “I never want to see a black and white cow again as long as I live!”  When you have a dairy herd, they have to be milked twice a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, and there is no such thing as a day off!  Billy had a herd of milk cows at his farm, and he was expected to do his own work and also work at the “big” farm.  Bill bought another small farm with a lake he called the Cook Farm, and they leased more farming land from the airport, where Gale also started a flying school in his “spare” time. 

I was oblivious to the problems and conflicts that were going on behind the scenes as I was too busy being a teenager, but I later learned that my Mom often took the role of “peacemaker” between Dad and the boys.  Dad didn’t understand Billy’s quiet and easy-going ways, and he and Gale were too much alike in temperament.  Still, at its peak, the Enger farm was a real showplace in Mora and always on the list for one of the top dairy producers.

Dianne Enger at age 15 and a Junior at Mora High

By the time I was 15 years old I believe my middle-aged parents (age 55) were overwhelmed by dealing with a teenager and I pretty much was allowed to do my own thing. I started dating at age 14 and had several boyfriends but nothing serious, until around Christmas time of my sophomore year, I fell head over heels in “love” with a boy two years older and a grade ahead. His name was LeRoy “Roy” Gries, the “tough-guy-leather-jacket” type, a football player, and as handsome as all get out!  He came from a family of six boys and two girls, and he and his brothers had the nickname all through school as “the fighting Gries’s.”  My biology teacher. Miss Rasmussen, warned me several times to stay away from “his type” as it would only lead to trouble, but of course that is exactly the type I wanted!  To make it brief, a year after we started “going steady” we eloped during Christmas vacation in 1955—me just barely 16 and he 18—but that is another story for another time.  The next summer in June of 1956 Roy and I moved to Linch, Wyoming where Hope and Dude were living, and Roy was hired on by Conoco Oil Company, so my parents were finally empty nesters at 56 years of age!

That’s all for now, but this is far from the end of the story.  Stay tuned for the hardest and final chapter in the Bill and Effie Saga, coming soon!