Chapter 16
My Support Team
Many people gave me help and support, some of whom I shall cherish forever as loving and caring friends.
My sister-in-law, Grace Jones, was one of them. She was a newspaper woman from whom no one could escape if she got wind of a good story for her Mother’s Diary column. She often wrote stories about her family, and the trials and tribulations of raising six children. Our family came under scrutiny frequently in her column, along with many other families in the area. Her column was a source of entertainment for mothers raising young families because they could easily relate to it. If it happened in the Jones household, you could bet it happened in another home, too. Kids will be kids! They were always a great source of material.
Many times when I felt like talking to someone, I would put one child in the pram and one on the front seat and head for the Jones’s house. I thought of Grace as being not just my sister-in-law, but also a caring advisor. I believed I had much more to learn about raising a family, and Grace seemed to have done it all. She set me straight on that point however, when she declared that we were never through learning about raising children. They were so unpredictable! Although you thought you knew it all, each child added something new to the learning curve.
As I settled back to being a mother and housewife instead of a globetrotter, I needed to find a job that would yield the best returns to repay my father-in-law and Edna Garrels the money they loaned me for the trip. Going back to nursing on nightshift at the Elderly Folks’ Home meant low pay and emotionally draining for me. I adored all my patients, and spent time visiting them during the daytime, when I should have been sleeping. One day it was going to be my turn to be old, but I hoped I would never finish up in a nursing home, forgotten by family and friends.
I looked at the only two job options, and chose Globe Union, an electronics plant in Fort Dodge. I had to rely on transport from a few townsfolk on the same graveyard shift. That shift allowed me to get the children off to school. My reliable friend and neighbour, Marion, was always willing to take care of them for an hour in the afternoon, till Bill got home from work.
We spent more years without a car than with one. Our first car, a used jalopy Bill bought for $50 in 1951, was a 1938 Hudson coupe. I found out later that he borrowed the money from his sister, Ethel. He had plans to drive 600 miles to visit his folks for Thanksgiving but an ice storm, and the Hudson’s engine, didn’t get us out of our driveway!
Any plan I had to learn to drive the Hudson was thwarted because I was pregnant for much longer than that car lasted. I never could get my stomach under the wheel. After selling the 1939 Studebaker that Bill’s dad gave us, we bought a Chevrolet, which Bill later sold for $50. I wrote and told my brother Peter in Australia how easy it was to buy a car just as long as one had $50. Australian cars cost so much more!
Lorraine offered to give me driving lessons. As much as I wanted to learn to drive, my days were too busy to take the time. Lorraine found a solution: after first taking care of her family, she rode her bicycle to our house at 11.30pm, drove our car seventeen miles to meet me when I came off my shift at 12.30am, and taught me to drive on the graveled back-roads on the way home.
When Lorraine picked me up at the factory in our Chevrolet, my hands were often sore and bleeding from the machine I operated making switches for outer-space vehicles. I could hardly grip the steering wheel, but Lorraine would bandage both hands and the pain was soon forgotten. (Some good-natured kidding occurred on the job at Globe Union, when my friends blamed me for the faulty switches on any spacecraft in Florida that failed to make it off the launching pad.)
It was miraculous that I ever learned to drive our car at all as we spent most of the journey home joking and laughing. Sometimes the convulsive laughter would force us to pull over to the side of the road to regain our composure. Earlier, Bill had tried to teach me to drive at the football field, accompanied by Billy and Janis (for lack of a babysitter). They screamed from the back seat: “We want to go home, Daddy! Don’t let Mom drive!” That was the last time he ever attempted to teach me.
“I see you still have the red Christmas lights burning,” Lorraine said, as she drove the car into our driveway. “You’re going to get a reputation as a Madam, and you have the effrontery to advertise, too!” The red lights on the porch had been there for six months. My intentions were always good but, after I entered the front door and turned off the outside lights, all was forgotten about changing the light bulbs during the daylight hours. The same thing had happened the year before, when my brother-in-law, Lloyd dropped me home late each night after rehearsals for the stage play, ‘Heaven Can Wait’. He got some ribbing from fellow citizens about the hours he kept in the red light district. I never understood why the yellow and green Christmas lights always burnt out and the red ones never did!
Bill begged me to quit the job at the electronics plant the first time he saw my bleeding hands, but there was no way I was going to give up my early morning driving-lesson-and-laugh sessions. Besides, the salary on piecework was excellent.
Lorraine lived her Christian life ‘as God intended’ by helping her fellowman and never standing in judgement on another human being. Her philosophy was simple: “As long as I have my family, garden tools and a bicycle, the rest of my needs will take care of themselves.” She would become animated as she stated emphatically: “There is so much more to life than all those mundane things like cleaning house over and over again - especially when no one’s coming to visit! I’d rather spend time with my one close friend, my children, working in the garden, painting, sketching and working at the church.”
She accomplished many things and worked long hours, always very active in the Methodist Church, teaching Sunday school and bible school, busy with the overseas missions as well as collecting and packing boxes for the less privileged. Most times, when Lorraine was called on for help or asked to use her artistic talents, she never gave the excuse that she was too busy. She would stay up all night to finish designing a float for the Homecoming Parade; or inscribe with her skilful calligraphy, the inside cover of a presentation book.
She often told me that she would love to have been born during the 17th or 18th century, so she could have been a part of settling the West. The more I thought about that, the more I was sure she was there in another time, heading a wagon train and caring for her five children! The vision of Lorraine rounding up the wagons to protect her flock was very clear in my mind.
When we first arrived in Manson, Bill and I were warned to ‘beware of Lorraine Hansen’. According to rumour, she was a woman of ill repute. My instinct told me I had to meet that woman! Those who chose to speak unkindly of Lorraine may never have taken the time to get to get to know her; but then, those same people may not have thought twice about asking for her help. I was convinced Lorraine was a Romany Gypsy. She had a different agenda to most people in the community. I learned much from that amazing woman - an artistic gypsy, born out of her time, or maybe, in the wrong location to be truly appreciated.
Lorraine needed very little to function in her daily life. She owned two straight-cut, no frills black dresses, which gave her a ‘motherly Italian’ look. Her going-to-church, navy blue dress with white collar and cuffs was also her party dress. She mostly went barefoot at home, and always had difficulty finding her comfortable black work shoes to wear when she rode her bicycle up town to work in the family bakery at 4.00 am.
Her husband, Ray, had the ovens hot for the first run of fresh bread and sticky rolls when she arrived; the deep-fat fryer was ready by 5.00 am for the doughnuts and long johns, in time for the early breakfast clientele at the restaurants. By 7.00 am Lorraine cycled home to get her five children ready for school.
The last time I saw Lorraine was 1978, eighteen years after we left Manson when we went back for an extended visit. Except for a few grey hairs she hadn’t changed at all. Her children had grown up and gone off to college, continuing their education and their own lives.
A new firm, a trucking cab-assembly plant for interstate transports, had started up on the main interstate highway, not far from the Hansons’ house, and Lorraine became the firm’s delivery driver. I didn’t ask, but I bet she convinced them that they needed her on their payroll. She got herself a heavy-duty-trucking licence and delivered the tractor-cabs all over the United States, loving every minute of her job. It was a modern version of settling the West in her latter-day Wagon Train. Often, a staff member would call across the fields to Lorraine from the back of the factory, where she was working in her vegetable garden and notify her of another tractor-cab ready for delivery. In fifteen minutes, with a bag of apples, celery and carrots, she was ‘ready to roll’.
After we returned to Australia, we heard from Marian that on Lorraine’s last trip south she was driving one of the firm’s pickups with a trailer and it jack-knifed on a bend on the highway, overturned, and rolled down an embankment during the early hours of the morning. The ambulance men were quoted as saying: “She was a lady with a very positive outlook, and kept joking the whole time on the way to the hospital. We did everything possible to stop the bleeding, but she had severed the main artery in her groin.”
Within a year of
During the same tornado, The Manson Journal newspaper office was completely demolished. Touching on the lighter side of such a tragic storm: my brother-in-law, Lloyd Jones, editor of the newspaper, was single-minded about the safety of his readers’ mailing list - the most important list for any editor. “It’s no use printing newspapers if I don’t know where to send them!” Lloyd said angrily, as he and members of his staff and the community sifted through the ruins of his beloved newspaper building.
Mangled Press and Linotype |
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