The Continuing Saga of Bill and Effie Enger, aka--My Parents

               When I left off with William D. Enger and Effie J. Mestad in the previous blog they had met, dated and eloped to Minot, North Dakota to get married on March 29, 1920.  After that they lived a happy and romantic life for the next 56 years, right?  Well, not exactly.  If that were the case there wouldn’t be much of a story to tell.  They were married for 56 years all right but, as with most people, there were many tragedies and triumphs in between.

Bill, who had been working with his father on Rice Lake Ranch in Ryder, ND branched out on his own in the fall of 1920 and took a job with a lumber yard in Bottineau, ND near the Canadian border.  By this time Effie was already blossoming out in pregnancy with their first child who turned out to be William John Enger, born January 16, 1921, in Bottineau.  My ever-joking father always said, much to my modest mother’s chagrin, that Billy waited just long enough, as he came along a respectable nine months and two weeks after the marriage!

At the time Bill and Effie were living in an upstairs apartment in a Bottineau boarding house.  As the story goes, the day Billy was born was one of the coldest days of that cold winter and since they didn’t have a car Bill froze his ears walking Effie the six blocks to the hospital. 

In later years when I saw a copy of Billy’s birth certificate I was surprised to see that the baby’s name was Everett William Enger.  My Mom told me the story:  She and Bill had a little trouble deciding on a name, since they wanted him to be named after his father but they didn’t want him to be stuck with “Junior.”  Bill was at work the day the hospital nurse came in and said they had to pick a name that day in order to register the birth, so Effie wrote down the name “Everett William.”  When Bill arrived that evening he was not at all happy about Everett, so instead they changed it to “William John” after Effie’s father John Mestad.  However, Everett William was the name that was registered with the State of North Dakota.  This turned out to be a problem for brother Billy later in life when it came to applying for a Social Security card and enlisting in the Army. When I asked Mom why my father didn’t like the name Everett she said, “I guess because he knew I had a boyfriend in Kenmare named Everett before I met him.”  The green-eyed monster strikes again!

Bill and Effie were quite homesick in Bottineau as they didn’t know many people and there was no family close by.  The next year the lumber company where Bill worked wanted to transfer him to Cole Harbor, ND which was even farther away and more remote than Bottineau, so they decided to bag the north country and go back home.  By this time Bills parents, Ed and Hannah Enger, had moved to Valley Spring, SD east of Sioux Falls, and Ed told Bill that he could come there and work on the railroad with him until he found another job.  That summer Bill and Effie packed up their baby and their few belongings, headed south, and moved in with Ed and Hannah Enger in Valley Springs.

 

Second baby Robert Edward Enger--Bobby--died in his third day of  life

By the fall of 1921 Effie was pregnant with their second child which was to be born in July of 1922.  In June Ed and Bill were away  working in a nearby town, and when they boarded the train to come home for the weekend Bill noticed that a crewman was loading a tiny casket on one of the boxcars. Bill thought to himself, “Some poor family must have lost their baby.”  When he arrived back in Valley Springs he was met with the sad news that the baby was his;--Robert Edward Enger had been born one month early on June 26, had lived only three days, and had died on June 28 despite the valiant efforts of Effie and Grandma Hannah to keep him alive.  My mother told me that the baby was perfect and beautiful, but he was too weak to eat.  He wouldn’t suck at all and Grandma tried heating milk and feeding him from an eyedropper, but to no avail. 

My aunt Vivian was just a little girl at the time, and she remembered that for the rest of the time that Bill and Effie lived with them Effie would put Billy in th baby buggy every day and walk to the little cemetery on the hill where her baby boy was buried.  She never forgot him, and until the day she died a picture of “Bobby” in his casket was displayed on her bedroom dresser.  Even in the 1960’s when Effie got her mother’s ring there was a stone for Bobby right along with rest of us.  My kids learned about their aunt and uncles by counting the stones in Grandma’s ring: “Billy, Bobby that died, Gale, Hope and Dianne.”  He was then and always will be a part of our family.

            I remember visiting the Valley Springs cemetery several times with my parents when I was a little girl, and although my parents hadn’t been able to afford a stone marker at the time of the burial, my father had built a wooden frame with a glass in it to put over the grave with a little metal plaque inscribed, “Our Darling.”      When I stopped at the cemetery in the early 1990’s the grave site was nowhere to be found.  Obviously the wooden structure had deteriorated over the years and was removed.  My parents apparently salvaged the metal plaque at some time as it was found with my Mom’s keepsakes after her death.  I now have the plaque and the photograph of Bobby that sat on her dresser all those years. 

Entrance to Pleasant View cemetery, Valley Springs, SD 2009

I was able to locate a death record for the baby in the South Dakota state archives, but the burial records and location of the grave have been lost to time and the elements.  I still stop at that peaceful little cemetery whenever I go by Valley Springs while traveling I-90 between Sioux Falls, SD and Worthington, MN.

            Epilogue:  After the death of their baby Bill and Effie decided to leave Valley Springs, and Bill received a job offer as office manager for the Adams Lumber Company in Kindred, ND.  There they built their first home and as my Mom always said, they had some of the happiest years of their married life in Kindred.  Their third son, Gale Edward, was born there on March 3, 1925, followed by their first daughter, Hope Carol, on July 18, 1926.

The Enger kids, Gale, Billy and Hope, in  Kindred, ND circa 1930

            In 1991, sixty-plus years later,  my sister Hope and I attended an Enger family reunion in Kindred.  We went to the old house where she and brother Gale were born and the current owners welcomed us in.  The house looked the same on the outside as the pictures I had seen, it had been remodeled inside and was in new condition.  We were happy to see that our parents’ first home was still receiving tender, loving care after all those years.

The Enger home in Kindred, circa 1930

            That’s all for now!  Stay tuned for the continuing story of Bill and Effie’s life journey.  After all I can’t stop now, as there is still one more child to be born.  That happens to be ME!