When Arthur Frank Vanek and Mona Inez Leeson wed on August 31, 1949 they linked the following family trees, [Maternal ~ Muench and Leeson] [Paternal ~ Vanek and Gremaux].
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| ALBERT EDWARD LEESON (ca. 1929) |
I am the eldest daughter of Al Leeson. What follows i my dad's life, as I know it, and as he related parts of it to me one snowy winter night in early January 1954 when he had been to the funeral of his brother-in-law, Richard Muench, in Spokane, Washington, and was driving through a frightful snowstorm to get back to his Bull River Ranch in Sanders County, northwestern Montana, to care for his cattle and animals.
Albert Edward Leeson was born October 3, 1897, at W. 458 Williams Street, Porchester, New York. At the age of ten, his father died, I guess while they were on the homestead near Stratford, Washington. After that time his mother supported her family of two girls, Ethel and Alice, and son, Albert, by operating a boardinghouse and doing catering services in Spokane, Washington. She was a member of the Lutheran Church and attended St. John's Cathedral on Grand Blvd.
At the age of 14, Albert got into a fracas at school. He said he was in the third grade, and he threw an inkwell at the schoolmaster, and then he and another lad jumped through a window and ran away from home. They lived in railroad hobo camps, learning all manner of survival and morals, and gradually worked their way south. They spent some time on ranches in Mexico. Then Albert worked his way to Spokane. They often rode the rails and frequented dance halls and poolrooms.
He married Gertrude, and had a son, Frank Edward Leeson. He logged and did construction work around St. Maries, Idaho. He also earned money by painting designs and creations on lady's legs, when that was in vogue. He also was a very good swimmer.
For a time, Al worked on road construction on the Denton curves near Hope, Idaho, and often went to the town of Heron, Montana where he played banjo ukulele with the bands there.
He and Gertrude divorced, and he received custody of Frank who he left in the care of his mother until she was killed while she and Frank were crossing a street in Spokane and were struck by a car, when Frank was 8-years old.
Al married Ottillie Muench in 1929. They were both working at a lumber company in Spokane. He had been dating Tillie's sister, Vanda, when Vanda stood him up and Tillie took her place for the date. They were married on Emil and Rosalia Muench's farm south of Spokane, at Chester, Washington.
Al and Tillie moved to Klamath Falls, Oregon, where he worked in logging. After leaving Oregon they moved to Helena, Montana, and then back to Spokane. His hearing was severely damaged in a logging mishap when the truck he was driving was let down the mountain by the "donkey engine" too fast. (Mom always said he'd been in a fistfight in a bar with the donkey engine operator, earlier and the guy was getting even.)
In 1931 they bought a small house and acreage in Morgan Acres, just outside of Spokane city limits on the north side. There they had a cow, chickens, pigs and always grew large gardens. The house had two bedrooms, a living-dining room and a kitchen. There was an outhouse and a barn\garage. A root cellar under the house was entered through an outside cellar door and stairway.
Al and Tillie had three children, Chester (1931), Mona (1932) and Carol (1936.). At sometime while he was a youngster, a man who boarded in his mother's boarding house was learning to be a welder, and Al learned from him. Then, on Morgan Acres, when the depression hit, Al began doing a few welding jobs in his barn\garage. It seemed like a good occupation and he was very good at that, and blacksmithing, which he had also learned on his travels. So Al bought a lot in Spokane, at 1502 E. Trent, and built the Spokane Blacksmith and Welding Shop in 1939.
For many months, he walked ½ mile from his house on Morgan Acres to the nearest bus stop, and rode the bus to the shop and back each day. In the fall of 1939, he sold their home on Smith Street in Morgan Acres and moved to Spokane, renting a house on Lee Street, near the shop. Later he built a small two-room cabin a block from the shop at 1503 E. Front Street.
The shop was burglarized so many times that he finally installed a burglar system and hooked it up through the alley to a large gong he hung on the wall above his bed. When it sounded, he grabbed his rifle and ran through the alley to the shop. After a couple of tries, he finally caught the burglars inside the shop, and got the police to come and arrest them. One robber committed suicide in jail while awaiting trial.
These were hard years. Tillie helped in the shop by minding the telephone and doing the books, so Al could be free to take outside or "portable" jobs. He bought a couple of trucks and welders, and had a large forge and bought a good metal-lathe. His blacksmith tools were extensive, and Al crafted some of them.
The large bin of metal shavings under the lathe provided bicycles for Chet and Mona. Each were given a magnet and by picking out the iron shavings to leave only clean brass shavings that could be sold, each enough money to buy their own (used) bicycle.
During the slack periods, Al began making tiny anvils from brass for his friends. They were very popular and could have been sold but he only made them for a few friends. Wintertime brought lots of pipe-thawing jobs, and he was on call 24-hours a day, putting in long, long hours, seven days a week.
During the years of World War II era, business picked up, and Al spent a lot of time welding at Farragut Naval Station near Bayview, Idaho. He tried to get into the navy but was turned down, party because of his age and his poor hearing and partly because of his occupation. Blacksmith and welding were considered too vital. He held an A-1 gas ration card, the best priority you could have.
Around 1942, they bought a large 12-room home on the corner of Baldwin Avenue and Cincinnati Street. The also bought a Packard car, which was the first car they'd owned for many years (since before leaving Morgan Acres.) This made trips to the lakes possible, and during summers every available weekend was spent at a lake.
Al taught his children swimming, ice skating, and roller skating. When beer floats were invented, he thought they were made of beer and ice cream, not root beer and ice cream. He always made his with beer and ice cream. On summer Sundays he often bought three quarts of ice cream, and the family would eat it all. Their dog, Trixie, loved licking the pasteboard cartons!
Al was an avid fisherman and often fished at Sasheen Lake for bass with his 'cronies,' as Mom always called his friends. They brought home tubs full of them. He taught Chet and Mona how to row a boat, and fish.
In 1945, because Al had gotten into such a terrible drinking habit and was ruining his health and his business, he and Mom decided to sell the business and retire to a ranch. The looked at many ranches and farms, with Mom mostly interested in wheat farms, like the one where she'd grown up, on the Canadian prairie. But the ranch that stole Al's heart was in the Bull River valley near Noxon, Montana. Bull River flowed through the heart of it, and dolly varden char could be speared by the washtub full (illegal spearing,) and deer roamed all over the property.
The Bull River valley was a spectacular mountain setting. So Al took an option on the 160-acre ranch, bought a herd of cattle and spent the summer working on the ranch for the lady who had it leased.
On November 1, 1945, the family moved there. The next morning the snow was a foot deep, and kept falling steadily. The winter brought five feet of snow and a whole new way of living. The cattle were sold at a good profit, as there wasn't enough hay to winter them.
Haying and herding cattle to range, cutting wood for the stoves, and ice blocks from Bull Lake for the ice box, logging, fishing, hunting, and battling the elements, was the mode of living for the next several years. There was no electricity or running water on the ranch, so life was rather primitive as Mona, Chester and Carol grew up.
The primitive road through the valley was dirt and rocky ground, so it was alternately foot-deep-dust or axle-deep-mud, from winter to winter. Al bought the first John-Deere Lindeman crawler tractor to the valley, and it replaced the team of horse used for pulling people through the mud holes. Many travelers spent the night and enjoyed wonderful hospitality at the Leeson's home. Many of them became good friends.
Al built a new hay shed on the island in the meadow, plowed and seeded the meadows with help from Chet and a hired hand. He introduced Canary grass in the bogs. He brought the first automated hay bailer to the country, and contracted hay-baling on people's ranches as far away as Trout Creek. His cattle were white-faced polled Herefords.
Lacking electricity, he welded together two 10-gallon Coca Cola cans, and put a copper coil in the kitchen wood range so they had hot running water from a spigot. A wash basin sat on a small cabinet by the back door, next to the kitchen stove. This required filling the 20-gallon Coke-can with water pumped from the well at the back door and carried, pail-by-pail to fill it. Which also meant keeping fire through the night during the long winters, so that the copper coils would not freeze and burst. Al didn't get up to keep fires! Tillie did!
Al did logging around the country, and when Cabinet Gorge Dam was being built just over the Idaho\Montana state line, he worked there as a welder. After that job was finished, he and his son, Chet, contracted several miles of land-clearing for construction of Noxon Rapids Dam.
When he was doing this, Al became interested in the pulling of railroad spikes necessary for relocation of the railroad. While he paid his evening visit to the outdoor john (which he called 'the crapping can',) Al dreamed up the idea of a pneumatic-air powered spike puller. He whittled parts from wood, and then built the spike-puller he invented.
In 1958, Al began construction of a house on the Highway 10A, in Montana, 5 miles west of Noxon, and decided to sell the ranch. About then, or 1960, he ran for county commissioner of Sanders County, Montana, but was defeated in the election.
The ranch sold in the fall of 1959, and he and Tillie moved to the new house, although it wasn't completed.
About 1962 or 1963, Chet decided he wanted to buy back the Spokane Blacksmith and Welding Shop that Al had built in 1939. So Al financed him, and moved into Spokane to help Chet learn the trade and get started.
Before long they went into automatic welding, which was a new field just getting started. Chet excelled at it, and this meant having trucks and men on the road as all the jobs were on location, mainly building up caterpillar track pads and rails. IT was a fast growing business, and Al became the salesman for the shop, spending much of his time on the road between Spokane and Portland, Oregon.
He lived in an apartment close to the shop while Tillie preferred to stay in Montana. On night while he was walking home from the shop three toughs jumped him and beat him unconscious and robbed him. They didn't get much money but Al got a badly broken nose and jaw and had to have it wired, and returned to Montana while he healed.
He bought a small house in Spokane near the shop. He figured the house would have a good commercial resale value in a few years as the area was changing from residential to commercial. He and Tillie moved there and closed their house in Montana.
Al gave up drinking hard liquor, but bought a gallon of beer every day and drank that. He began gaining weight, which he'd never been able to do before. He also applied for a patent for his spike puller. After the patent was granted, he and Chet refined the machine and made it push-button automatic.
In March 1964, after returning from a business trip in Oregon, Al entertained friends that evening by playing his beloved "bones" to the Lawrence Welk program on TV. Upon retiring for the night he suffered a heart attack. He spent four days in the hospital, and then got mad and walked out and called an ambulance to take him home. Even before he got home, he lit up a cigarette. The doctor called Chet to say Al could not survive until he got home. However, Al had a drink of whiskey on arriving home, and he lived and spent the next month in bed at home. But since he'd walked out against the doctor's orders, they dropped his case and on April 4, 1964 he died when his heart went out of sinus rhythm.
Al died before he could complete a deal to have his spike puller manufactured. Chet dismantled the machine and put the parts to other good use.
Al lived a very unconventional life. His morals were not those approved by the culture of his time, and he felt no remorse at cheating on Tillie by having sex with other women. His religious beliefs were strong, but he despised all churches and called all preachers leeches, and yet he had an abiding faith in God.
He loved all things new, and tried many new inventions. He loved all outdoor sports, and anything that offered excitement and a good time. He loved picnics and parties, indoors or out. He was charming, contrary and hard to live with, loving, demonstrative, and extremely kind to any underprivileged, wrongly accused or underdog.
However, Al harbored strong prejudices. He hated all "spiks" (as he called Italians) and Mexicans. He distrusted "roundheads" (as he termed all Swedes and Norwegians) and never trusted a man with small feet, and declared men that wore small shoes were no good.
Al was warm hearted and outgoing, and yet he mistrusted most people. He could be very hard and unbending, and yet he taught his children to be tolerant and kind. He wasn't above breaking the law where drinking and driving was concerned. He passionately hated a thief or a liar, and yet he could lie like a trooper when it suited his needs.
Life was never dull when Al was around, and we loved him dearly, though we often argued and fought vocally with him. Those of us who knew and loved him were blessed. (Written by Mona Leeson Vanek in 1976.)
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