"We lived on Morgan Acres until we sold our home in 1939, moving
to 6, N. Lee Lee Street, where we rented until February 1940. We moved into our
small house that Al built at 1502 Front Street, one block from our shop that
he'd built, The Spokane Blacksmith and Welding Works, at 1503 Trent Ave. We
lived on Front Street two and a half years, moving to E. 734 Baldwin in the
late fall of 1942, where we'd bought a twelve-room house. We stayed there until
November 1, 1945 when, after contracting to sell our house and business, we
moved to the Bull River valley, fifteen miles from Noxon, Montana onto a 160
acre ranch we bought.
"Our children
found it a drastic change. In town they had a ten-minute walk to school. Now
they had to be on the bus by 7:20 a.m. We often didn't see them in daylight for
five days a week for several months in the wintertime. The house was always
cold in the wintertime as I never really found all the cracks. The upstairs was
hand-hewn shakes over poles for a roof and COLD!"
She failed to record
her love of all children, or to tell how she never failed to give any child
lots of affection and attention. She often raced or wrestled with her own
three, even after they were teenagers. All during her life she loved gardening,
cooking, canning and being outdoors. She was outgoing and always friendly.
Tillie was well known for growing beautiful flowers, and for sharing whatever
she had with others. She was frugal, and when she lived in Spokane she walked
to thrift stores, bought wool garments and took them home. After laundering
them, using a razor blade, she'd carefully take them apart so she could cut
quilt pieces from the best part of the material. Using as many embroidery
stitches as she'd mastered, Tillie made turned out lovely quilts, which she
gave freely to those less fortunate than she.
She shared with her
friends and neighbors the produce from the gardens she grew, milk and
hand-churned butter, pastries from her kitchen, and flowers, and meat when
there was any to spare. Her table was often shared with anyone who stopped in,
either on business or for a visit. She did not like playing cards, abhorred
alcohol, hated smoking, wished she could dance, and loved swimming and hiking.
She enjoyed both ice and roller-skating, sewed, knitted, crocheted and did
embroidery, too. She loved shoes and hats and always had a sizeable wardrobe of
each. Because she'd frozen the tip of one ear and it curled over a tiny bit, and
because a bout with influenza when she was a child had thinned her hair, she
preferred wearing a hat wherever she went.
Tillie became a
naturalized citizen of the United States on March 22, 1954 at Thompson Falls,
Montana. They ranched in Montana for 16 years before retiring in a small house
Al built on Highway 200, about 5 miles west of Noxon.
Tillie attended
churches of several denominations while living in Spokane. After moving to
their Bull River Ranch, she had no opportunities to attend any church and
missed that very much. After their children were grown and had left the ranch
Jehovah's Witness members visited her frequently. They encouraged her to study
with them, and shortly afterwards Tillie joined the Jehovah's Witness Church at
Noxon. She remained faithful to that religion the rest of her life.
Tillie and Al returned
to Spokane in 1962 where Al was working with Chester, who had bought back the
welding business Al had sold in 1945. Al died of a heart attach in April 1964.
Tillie became very active in the Jehovah Witness Church and traveling as much
as she could afford to. She died of a brain-stem level stroke following a gall
bladder surgery, in October 1987. Both are buried in Greenwood Cemetery,
Spokane, WA.
Her
three children each credit both their parents for instilling in them honesty,
love of family, good character, good morals, and a strong work ethic.
Tillie also wrote these memories of her life:
I married ALBERT EDWARD LEESON in an
evening ceremony on November 23, 1929 in my parent's farmhouse near Chester,
Washington. I descended the staircase, dressed in an oyster-white satin wedding
gown. It was calf-length and beaded with tiny pearls and rhinestone scrolls
around the skirt. I wore a floor length veil cascading from a headband of wax
orange blossoms.
Al and I moved to Klamath Falls,
Oregon in July 1930, leaving there in March 1931, coming back to Spokane,
Washington after traveling to Helena, Montana in search of work. We rented a
two-story house on Sixth Street.
Our son, Chester Floyd Leeson, October
19, 1931, wasborn in a rented house on East Sixth Street, Spokane.
We bought a house at N. 1772 Smith
Street on Morgan Acres, a suburb of Spokane and Hillyard, Washington. Mona
Inez, was born there November 26, 1932. Our third child, Carol Elizabeth, was
born there February 11, 1936. (In 2002,
the house number was 7819 N. Smith.)
We lived on Morgan Acres until we sold
our home in 1939, moving to 6, N. Lee Lee Street, where we rented until
February 1940. We moved into our own small house that Al built at 1502 Front
Street, one block from our shop, The Spokane Blacksmith and Welding Works, at
1503 Trent Ave. We lived on Front Street two and a half years, moving to E. 734
Baldwin in the late fall of 1942, where we'd bought a twelve-room house. We
stayed there until November 1, 1945 when, after contracting to sell our house
and business, we moved to the Bull River valley, fifteen miles from Noxon,
Montana onto a 160 acre ranch we bought. [I became a] Naturalized citizen, March
22, 1954, at Sanders County Courthouse, Thompson Falls, Montana.
The years have all run together in my
memory. We'd decided to move out of Spokane, to get back to the country. During
1945, the day we drove to Montana to look at a ranch we had taken no food, so
we had to drive north from the ranch about eight miles to a store on Bull Lake,
to buy some canned food and bread. When we went outside to eat it, the
mosquitoes were so thick we had to get in the car, shoo all the pests out, and
shut the windows or we got a mouth full of mosquitoes.
The children went wading in the lake
and we had our first encounter with leeches! We were to find the waters in the
area were not only a breeding place for mosquitoes, but full of leeches too.
The livers of deer and cattle would be full of leeches. They didn't seem to
affect the cattle, they grew fat and seemingly otherwise healthy.
World War II had been raging and then
they finally signed the Armistice. We'd bought the ranch and while I stayed in
Spokane during that summer, Al was up on Bull River haying [June 1945] with
horse drawn mower and a one horse rake, which Chet drove raking the hay into
mounds that Al then loaded onto a horse-drawn hay rack with three slings in it.
When it was full, they hauled it to the
barn, attached a long rope to the sling. The rope went over pulleys and out the
back of the barn, where they hitched the horses to it and pulled the slings
into the haymow. Then by means of a trip rope attached to the bottom of the
sling, dumped the load of hay into the haymow.
[Al and Chester returned to Spokane in
July, 1945.] We had finally sold our house n Spokane, and on the first day of
November 1945, the children and I moved up to the ranch on Bull River [in
Sanders County, Montana], which we had previously bought.
The ranch house was made of logs with
chinking, which I was to learn needed constant repair and unless the chinking
was of cement the rats and mice used it for nests. One could look out of the
cracks and see the meadowland!
Our first night there was sure an eye
opener, for lo, when I got up the next morning to make the fire, on going out
onto the porch where I'd left the house plants sitting on the floor, all had
been neatly topped and in their place were carrots, bulbs, grain and various
other things.
On returning to the bedroom to report
to Al this awful calamity, he just laughed and said, "Just go out there
again and look up toward the ceiling and you'll see the culprit."
Sure enough, two beady black eyes were
staring at me There sat a rat called a pack rat. For everything they take they
leave something in its place. This was my first encounter with these smelly
creatures.
There were to be many more in the
fourteen years we were to spend there, and not only did he top my plants but he
also got into the kitchen and chewed a large hole in the hem of Carol's coat
and I had a time persuading her to go to school with it as I had nothing to
mend it with, and needless to say, no other coat. Town was 28 miles away!
About two weeks later we had about
eleven inches of snow, but Hurrah! it all melted off in two weeks and we had no
more until in December, and then we were to get four feet and more! This was to
be much of the yearly pattern after that.
The first day we took our children to
school. I dressed me in my fur coat and nice hat. After we got the children
enrolled in school, we found out that the blue gills [kokanee salmon] were
running. Nothing would do, but Al bought fishhooks and lines and we went
fishing, fur coat, hat and all, and we came home with a gunny sack full.
Smoked, they were a rare treat. The river was full of black patches and if you
got your hooks in the middle of that patch, you could always catch two to three
fish on the three-pronged snag hooks.
That first winter we bought some of
Mrs. Hayes' cattle, as we had plenty of hay. The cattle watered from the north
fork of Bull River as it flowed through our property. We pumped the water from
a well at the back door for house use, and carried water from the river for
drinking. The river was at least twenty feet deep just down the hill from the
house. Our heat was wood, and there would often be ice on the water bucket in
the morning, as we never could keep a fire all night.
The children found it a drastic
change. In town they had a ten-minute walk to school. Now they had to be on the
bus by 7:20 a.m. We often didn't see them in daylight for five days a week for
several months in the wintertime. The house was always cold in the wintertime
as I never really found all the cracks. The upstairs was hand-hewn shakes over
poles for a roof and COLD!
One winter, for a couple of months we
had a man staying with us. And, his head being bald, he tried to wrap the
blanket around it. As the only light we had were kerosene lamps, the corner of
the blanket caught over the chimney of the lamp. It finally went out but not
before it guilt up a small stack of soot. Lucky yes, that it didn't start a
fire!
We went back to town two weeks after
moving up onto the ranch, to sign the papers on the house sale. On the way back
to Montana when we hit the hill, it was icy and the truck started to slide.
Since we had a load of building material, Al had tied two of the older children
on the back of the truck and we had one in the front. I was tired and dozing
when Al suddenly said, "You'd better start praying. We're sliding."
And a bad curve was coming up. If we couldn't get around that, we would have
all perished. My thoughts, of course, flew to the children tied on the back.
Fortunately the bank caught and we made it. Whew!
The first year we were on the ranch we
bought a tractor, a John-Deere Linderman cletrack crawler and Al decided to
plow up some of the meadow. The Bull River flowed between the house and part of
the meadow to the south of the house. He put Kenny Hayes to plowing. Kenny was
watching the plow and forgot about the ditch at one end of the piece of meadow
and drove off into the ditch and the tractor turned completely over. It was a
miracle that Kenny wasn't killed.
Later Al decided to plow a stretch
along a stretch of Bull River, to the north, across our bridge, when suddenly
the back of the tractor went down and even the seat was under water. He came
back to the house to get the truck, to help get the tractor out, but got the
truck stuck, too. Finally, the next day he decided to chain a log over each
track and with this he was able to drive the tractor out on its own power. It
was found the tractor had dropped into a beaver hole!
Al planted Canary grass, which grew
well in water, and our meadows were flooded every spring, into late July.
Haying usually started then on the higher parts. One year Al decided to clear
some more land at the far end of the meadow behind the Island (a raised portion
of ground situated in the center of the meadow land that was timbered) where
there was buck brush. He rented a breaker plow, which has an extra wide deep
plow share. Al tied the anvil and some heavy rocks on the back of the plow and
finally, for added weight, I stood on it too and he plowed under not only buck
brush, but young trees went under it too. Thus he made considerably more land
suitable to grow hay.
*****
