Tad Callin has been working on family history and genealogy since the late 1990s. He does most of his research on Ancestry and posts what he learns to WikiTree.
This is part three of a series of posts based on the 60-minute recording of my great-grandmother, Hannah Merle (Huff) Witter. Last time, Merle talked about her family’s life in Glendale, Arizona, between 1907 and 1911, when they moved back to Kansas. Tuberculosis impacted Merle’s family, especially her older half-brother, Perry; but after Perry’s death, Merle decided she liked living in Glendale and returned there.
Merle finally meets my great-grandfather
Daddy – Dick – came out here I would guess, in about …1910 or 11, I’m not sure. And he came out here partly because…well, I guess he’d have been about 19 years old or 20, I’m not sure. Never stopped to figure it out.
But he had an uncle and an aunt living out here. That was Charlie Gilbert and Mrs…. Dick’s mother’s sister. And he stayed at their place for a while, and worked with Uncle Charlie… did work with the beets, that is he managed the ranch and done the buying for them and things like that. Dick got interested in it, and he got some teams and did help with the farming work of the beets, and he had his own bachelor’s tent, then, when he got out in the beet fields.
Dick’s mother was Nancy (Shriver) Witter, and her sister would have been Eunice Alma (Schriver) Gilbert (1868–1951).
Later, after the beet market didn’t do so well, [Dick] had moved and bought a little place a mile south and about a quarter east of Glendale. And there in his camp, he had about, at first he bought five acres, then a little later he bought the other five back of it. And later still he bought another 10 beside it. So he had the 20 acres, there.
Sugar Beet Factory is pictured here in 1915. Smoke belches from the gigantic smokestack as sugar beets are processed into raw sugar near the end of its sugar-producing days. Empty and unused for years, the building still stands near Glendale and 52nd avenues. Photo from AZCentral1, provided by the Glendale Historical Society
I met him, believe it of all things, at Sunday School. I think …That was at the First Christian Church. Not the church, the Sunday school. They didn’t have the church yet, but they had the Sunday school started and were getting ready to organize the church, but they met in the woman’s club house here in Glendale. And of course, the women’s club didn’t rent it to just us, the church; they rented to others and mostly it was a dance on Saturdays.
There is a lot of history behind the First Christian Church in Glendale; they underwent a drastic change in 2018.2 The full name of the denomination is “Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)” if you’d like to dig deeper into Grandma Merle’s faith.
I was living with Iva at that time, and she had, had.. and I, and Phil would walk from their house across through the desert and get the hall cleaned up so we could have our Sunday school and church Sunday morning., and we all of course, with the dances and programs that they’d had Saturday night before, the chairs were all around the wall, and a lot of other things we had to clean up on Sunday morning. The women’s club is right where it is now, the same one, the same building, except they have done a little remodeling and little renovation of it.
And we lived the other side of the tracks across from [Lateral] 18. And I met Daddy, he was coming, he came to Sunday school there, we had a …oh maybe 9, 10, 11, I’m not sure just how many of us there were, and I’d hate to have to name all of them. But we had a good time in Sunday school.
I was already, through Iva and Bertha, we all of us belonged to the Christian church, and they were charter members, and I had already belonged to the Christian church back in Savonburg, so I was a charter member too, although I was working in Phoenix when they were organizing. But they managed for me to get my name put on the list, so I was a charter member too.
But I didn’t meet Daddy until after that, and he was not a charter member, but he was one of the very first ones that did join the church.
The Onset of World War One
The First World War disrupted life early in Dick and Merle’s marriage. I wrote about his service in Twice Honored, but this is all new information to me about his time in the Army.
At that time, I was working in Phoenix for the Valley lumber company, and I was a stenographer and bookkeeper. …but I would imagine that it was …March 15th 1917, and I imagine I met him somewhere along in 13 or 14, but I can’t be sure of that. Then he …he joined and enlisted in the … [this word was garbled on the recording] Depot in California, he went along in the summer after we were married and enlisted, then he came back to Arizona to be waited until they called him.
And they called him in the fall. In the meantime, after we had married, he built us a little house on his acreage and we had a bunch of cows and some horses. His garden horses, he also had a team of work mules, at least one team. Of course all of that had to be sold off before he could… because I couldn’t very well manage it.
We bought a lot, about half a block from Iva’s. That was over in northern addition. It was just a one little room square building on it. So he put, built all around it the back part of it then was enclose for the kitchen, and the south side of it was enclosed for the bedroom. And the rest of it then, well part of it was screened in. I guess maybe all of it eventually was screened in the porch around it. And I was supposed to have lived there while he was gone.
He did move me up there, and when his call came, he left. But I was kind of blue, I expect. So I had quit working sooner and put in full time for Sample More meat market. Before that for about six or eight months, anyway, no, it was longer than that, it was before we were married anyway. I had stared doing the bookkeeping for Sample and More just on an evening basis, after I finished working for the lumber company, I’d come out and do their book work and the posting, anyway and everything. I’d usually work about three evenings a week in there.
And after I quit in phoenix, the lumber company, I worked full time at their place. Then… after I’d decided to go to follow Dick over to California, he seemed to be establish there. I quit all of the jobs, I quit that one, too. And I’m not sure… I think it ws the first of January in… that I wnt over to California where he was. I was in San Diego in a little apartment, and he was at … Depot base.
He could come in twice a week, he could come in Wednesday and he could stay just so he got back out to camp in time for breakfast to begin the day the nxt day. And on Saturdy, he could come in an noon and didn’t have to be back until Monday morning early.
Most of the boys didn’t have it that nice; just the married ones was the only ones could stay in town overnight. The rest of em had to be back the same night, SAturday night, and Wednesday night, when they went in.
In the summer, when Dick got a couple of weeks off, in the meantime to go back and forth from camp and to San Diego we had bought an old Ford. And the fact of the matter is I had to buy it. Because when we went in and he found the one he wanted, and he was getting started was gonna start it was gonna be a charge account and they wouldn’t sell it to him. I had to be the buyer; because they couldn’t collect it from the soldier, but I was a civilian so they insisted on selling it to me. But they had the surprise of their lives when we agreed to that, and I just wrote em a check for the thing, because our cattle and stuff had been sold off and he had put it all in my name anyway. So I just wrote em a check, but then they explained afterwards why they couldn’t sell it to him.
But anyway, in the summer we got a furlough, we came back to Airzona in that old ford, and on the way back… of course we had to ferry across the Colorado River. There was no crossing at Parker, only the ferry. And it was uneventful except that it was a long, tiresome ride in that old Ford.
Dick and Merle’s “Uneventful” Journey
But we drove that first day to get …not on the first day, but the day we was gonna get to the ferry… because they ferry didn’t open until 9 o’clock the next morning, and Dick wanted to be across the ferry the night before because he didn’t want to fool around until 9 o clock, to cross and get started on our way again.
So I was pretty tired, but we did, we crossed the ferry. We camped just a mile or two beyond. And uh.. I was too tired, I didn’t want anything to eat at all, but Dick was hungry and he figured if he got supper, I would eat too, so he started a little camp fire. I think he was frying himself if I remember some potatoes or maybe some bacon, I don’t know what, but he started a little fire. And he finished his supper and crawled into bed, and the fire had kinda burned down a little bit.
He hadn’t gotten to sleep yet, and he couldn’t tell for sure where it was, but it sounded like it was right at my head. And I had gotten to sleep. And he was afraid, he didn’t want to startle me, but he didn’t know which way I’d jump or which direction the snake was. But when he said “Snake” I did jump anyway, I come right awake and jumped. I went hand over hand, I don’t know how far, just rolling. I was clear out of reach of the snake, and it happened that I went in the direction the snake had been right at the foot of our bed!
We didn’t have very much better luck sleeping the next night. We came to a nice little lake – I can’t remember the name of that lake – it was some shade trees along there, and people had camped along there, and a little road went along beside it. It looked nice because we didn’t get too much rest the night before with the rattlesnakes.
So we made camp and got settled and was just ready to put down our beds and crawl in, when we happened to look down the road, it was just a dirt road by the lake, and here comes three big tarantulas. They looked like they was as big as your hand with your fingers down, just walking in file, one two three, right down the road in front of where we’d planned to camp. So we didn’t feel like getting up and going on. We didn’t much feel like sleeping there on the ground, either. So we slept in the car that night.
And we got up early enough and made it on back to our little old apartment the next day, and we was very glad to get to a place where it was safe to sleep.
Next time…
We’ll get a taste of married life as Merle and Dick start a family in Glendale.
Say hello, cousin!