Mightier Acorns

Last time, in Great-Grandma Merle’s Travelogue, we looked at the first 15 minutes of Great-Grandma Merle’s hour-long recording of her memories of moving from Kansas to Arizona. In the next 15 minutes, Grandma Merle talks about her family settling into life in Glendale: starting businesses, finding homes, and (for some) returning to Kansas.

Some of the people mentioned in this recording appear in this photo, which was probably taken around 1932 or 1933. Albert C Huff (with his two pipes) died in 1936:

Upon Arriving in Arizona…

Our first night here, we stayed in a hotel in Phoenix, and the next morning, we got up to catch a train over to Glendale. Perry had been in Glendale and liked that location the best, so we came over here to look for a location. 19-and-7, and it was some time in November when we got here.

And we found a place to stay, to rent, and it was what was then known as the old Eire place. They were the people, I don’t know if they homesteaded, but they had built it. And it then was later, as most people remembered as the Pullens place. But there was another man…

When we rented the place, it was owned by a man by the name of Doctor Tuttle, and that it was about a quarter of a mile, I guess, north on Lateral 18. And we lived there for, oh, at least a year, I imagine, because we were still living there when Bertha and Roy came out.

“Lateral 18” was later named 59th Avenue, and you can see some historical photos of the area on AZCentral’s site in their article from May 2025: “This is what Glendale used to look like: See the historical photos.”

Bertha Huff’s first husband was Roy Sample. Bertha was Merle’s older sister. I wrote about Bertha and her family’s butcher shop in “Sample-More Meats – a Businesswoman’s Story” a while back. There are some photos there showing the butcher shop and early Glendale.

Then, they got, when the boys started up – Perry and Roy started a butcher shop, and Bertha and Roy got a place, and they lived in town. But Dr. Tuttle gave Grandpa a job as foreman on his ranch. That was a mile north of town, and about a quarter east, then up into the field, where that was. And, Dr. Tuttle’s wife was …those guys’ names… The Tuttle house, where we lived, was on the north side of the road, and just a little ways from the Sands ranch. Mrs. Tuttle was related to the Sands. I don’t know if it was Mrs. Sands or the boys, but she was related to them.

We were there, oh, probably a year and a half. But in the meantime, while we were still living at that place, my sister Iva and her husband Harry and they, at that time, had baby Phil. He was only a few weeks old, about three weeks old when they came out. Of course, in the meantime, …[Thelma] Sample was a little older than he was about six weeks. And she later married and was Thelma Akin.

Bertha and Roy’s children were Thelma (born 1909) and J.L. (for John Leroy, born 1913). Iva (Huff) and Harry More had one son, Phil, born in 1909. They can all be seen here in photos from the collection Merle handed down to my Grandma Nancy. (I owe all of them some attention on WikiTree.)

Grandma Merle never gives us Roy Sample’s full story, but he died on 21 December 1918 from typhoid-pneumonia. Considering all of the illness that struck the family during this decade, I’m not surprised she left some details out.

The Family and Tuberculosis

Merle alluded to Perry’s illness before as a reason for the family’s move, but here she goes into more detail about how many of them were affected by tuberculosis.

But Iva and them, and Perry hadn’t been feeling too good. The work was too heavy for him or something. So when Harry [More] came out, he sold his interest in the butchers’ shop to Harry. And that is where the Sample and More Meat Market came in. And Perry didn’t seem to get over that; that was too much, and he kept going down.

So, the doctors advised him to go to a sanitarium in Colorado, and I can’t name that place. But he was there a while and tried it, and we stayed on in Glendale. When the doctors told him there that he wouldn’t really get better, that wherever he would prefer to live was the place for him to be. 

Well, he knew everybody back in Kansas, Savonburg, so he decided he wanted to go back there. So Grandpa gave up his job, and we caught the train, and went and met him over there, then, together we all went back to Kansas. 

He lived there with us, we had to stay in town, in a place in town, because our old home was rented out. When we got possession of that, then we moved out there.

It isn’t clear from what Merle said about “Iva and them…hadn’t been feeling too good,” but if Iva (Merle’s sister, and the wife of Harry More, both seen in the photo above) was ill, that might have factored into the More family’s decision to move to Glendale. Next, Merle tells us how they think the family first contracted the disease, starting with Perry’s wife, Pearl Lucy (Enos) Huff:

When Bertha and Roy first came out here [to Glendale, AZ], Bertha wasn’t very well, and she had come for her health, too. But before that, Perry’s wife had passed away with tuberculosis. Her name was Pearl, and Perry had contracted it from her, and of course, they was watching the baby to see that she didn’t come down with it, and she never did, to my knowledge.

And …It helped Bertha right away, she began to get better. But Bertha then developed it too, because she had been living with them, and she and Pearl had had a milliner’s shop in Savonburg, Kansas, and they contracted it from their cow. 

They had a really nice, and you never saw a prettier cow, but one day when we went out to the barn to milk the cow, she was laying there dead, and when they had an autopsy, they found that the cow had TB. And that’s where Pearl had gotten it, and Bertha living there, and Perry, they had all gotten it. But it just developed with Pearl, first.

But Bertha got better right away when she came out. And, when we went back with Perry, we stayed there… I did… I stayed there, but in the meantime, Bertha and Iva had come out, and they were running the butcher shop, and they used to butcher their beeves out in the open, back of our… where we lived there on fifty… on Lateral 18. They done their butchering out there on a Sunday, and then they sold a lot of it to the beet camps. They had beet fields out, and the camps would buy sometimes a quarter of a beef at a time. And that was Perry’s job, and it was too heavy for him to unload that. That was one reason he didn’t get any better.

But after we went back, then we got our own place and we lived there, and… back in Kansas, and … we, I stayed there then until Perry passed away, and then I think it was, I know it was on my birthday, December 11, about in 19 and 12, because I didn’t come back out here to Arizona again then, until I came out here in June the 13th – 1913. It was on a Friday, besides.

Perry Huff did die on 11 December, but in 1911. Next time, Merle will tell us about moving back to Arizona and how she met Howard Ray “Dick” Witter, my great-grandfather!