Family Stories
Sylvester Barnhart's family

Index:

The People

  • Sylvester "Big George" Barnhart
  • Mariah Barnhart, wife of Sylvester
  • Dee Barnhart, son of Sylvester and Mariah
  • Lloyd Barnhart, another son
  • Ralph Miller, Dee's best friend, and Earl's uncle
  • Earl Miller, Ralph's nephew and also Dee's nephew
  • Howard Schmitt, Dee's nephew
  • Blanche Schmitt Futscher, Howard's sister
  • Dewey and Alice Barnhart Miller, Earl's parents

Places: Washington (State): Davenport (about 40 miles west of Spokane on U.S. 2), Egypt (about 20 miles north of Davenport, just a grain elevator there now, and a church), Marysville, Everett (north of Seattle on I-5)

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The Early Days

[ Threshing crew on a short break ] Right after Grandpa Sylvester was killed, Rilla and Dora went to work cooking for a threshing crew and Dee took on any odd jobs he could find. The family moved to Davenport, and someone went to work in the hotel laundry. Many families used the laundry at the Davenport Hotel.

[ Dee on the railroad ] As soon as Dee neared his sixteenth birthday, he went to work for the railroad. The story is that he lied about his age to get the job, in 1913. However, the 1900 census shows "D. Barnhart" as being two years old. So, although he may have lied about his age at that time, he apparently gave the correct age when he joined the Army in 1917.

In the late fall of 1916, Dee decided to go west. He arrived in Everett, Washington fifteen days after the Everett Massacre. Apparently he moved in with his half-brother, Harry E. Jones and his wife Lottie (Charlotte). Grandma Mariah brought the remaining family to Marysville in the summer of 1917.

Harry was a bridge tender for the railroad, on one of the bridges between Everett and Marysville, a distance of about five miles, crossing the Snohomish River and several sloughs. Harry apparently got his clothing caught in the bridge mechanism and was crushed to death. The engineer of the next train waited a long time for the bridge to close and finally rowed out to the center of the bridge, climbed up to the bridge tender's shack and discovered the gruesome sight.

Dee joined the Army and was assigned to the 31st Engineers. He went to France on board a ship and mostly marched around roads and fields. He never saw any action. The armistice was signed about six months after Dee joined the Army, and he was shipped home.

Apparently, Lottie died shortly after that and their two daughters went to live with relatives in Massachusetts. Grandma rented a house for a while and then moved to the house on Fifth Street in Marysville, which is the one the old-timers remember and where so many interesting things happened. Grandma loved the two girls, Alice and Dorothy, very much, and they corresponded for many years. Finally, the Barnhart family lost track of the two Jones girls, and with that last name it would be like finding a needle in a haystack to try to trace them now.

Howard was born in 1915 to Rilla and Oscar Schmitt, Mickey was born in 1918 to Dora and Floyd Schmitt, and Earl was born in 1920 to Alice and Dewey Miller. Rilla died of influenza in the epidemic of 1918, and Oscar remarried. Their daughter Blanche went to live with Grandma Mariah, and Howard remained with Oscar and his new wife, Alta.
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Army Life

Dee joined the U.S.Army in 1917, partly out of patriotism and partly out of a need to support the family. He was shipped off to Basic Training and really hated it. Gradually, his letters home became more positive.

He went overseas via transport ship with hundreds of other soldiers, arriving in France. This was a real eye-opener to many of them.
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Woodsmanship

Earl Miller, 1924, age 4
Dee would often take Earl out into the woods on the Tulalip Indian Reservation. One day when Earl was about five years old, Dee stopped in the middle of the woods and said, "Which way is north?" Well, young Earl had no idea. That's when Dee taught him that more moss grows on the north sides of trees.

Then one day, Dee told Earl to close his eyes and count to 100. When Earl opened his eyes, Dee was nowhere to be seen. Earl managed to find his way home. We suppose that Dee was simply staying out of sight until Earl found his way to a road, but Dee was already at Grandma's house when Earl got there.

And once when Earl was about seven years old, he hurt himself and his dad, Dewey, was not in the least sympathetic. Earl ran away. When night fell, there was reason for concern.

The search party found Earl in a lean-to he had built out of green branches, with a fire going on the open, leeward, side, sound asleep on a bed of boughs. Nor was he starved, having found edible leaves, roots and berries just as Dee had taught him. Had he not had the fire, they may not have found him at all.
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Engineers

Lloyd and Howard teased Earl relentlessly, until Earl was in tears. Lloyd and Howard thought it was funny. Dee also did some teasing, but not to that extent.

One day when Earl was maybe six years old, Dee told them a rhyme that he learned in the Army Corps of Engineers, and it was uproariously funny. They had no idea that Earl was anywhere around. The others repeated it until they knew it fairly well.

Later, at dinner, Lloyd and Howard started teasing Earl again. Earl stood up by his chair and began to recite:
The mountaineers, they have long ears.
They live in caves and ditches....
At which point Lloyd and Howard panicked and begged him to please shut up. For some reason, the rhyme was never finished in front of Grandma Mariah, and the teasing was greatly reduced after that.
And we younger ones never found out the rest of that rhyme....
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Howard

Howard's mother, Rilla, died when Howard was three years old. His father, Oscar, remarried, and the new stepmother refused to have Blanche in the house and was not very nice to Howard. Hence Blanche went to live with Grandma Mariah and Howard was unhappy.

When Howard was about seven, he ran away for the first time. He would hitchhike from Seattle to Marysville and go to Grandma's house. Grandma, of course, would call Oscar to come and get Howard. About the fourth time Howard ran away, he didn't go to Grandma's house but to Alice and Dewey's house. Dewey had started digging a cellar under the house. Howard was about twelve years old at the time. He hid under Alice and Dewey's house, coming out at night to drink from garden hoses where he also washed off vegetables pulled from nearby gardens and Grandma's root cellar.

After a couple of weeks, Dee found Howard hiding in Grandma's root cellar where they kept potatoes, carrots and many other vegetables. Howard said, "Do I have to go back now?" and Dee said, "I don't think you do." Dewey, bless his alcoholic heart, said, "That boy needs to get out of that house!" Everyone finally agreed with Dee and Dewey, and that is how Howard came to live at Grandma's house in Marysville.

Howard played football in high school. He ran interference, and he would cut under one potential tackler, leaving him in the air, and go after the next one.

Howard always spoke well of his father, Oscar, and that speaks well of Howard also.
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The Boat Race

One year during the Great Depression, the city of Marysville (WA) planned a boat race on July 4, with cash prizes for the winners. Dee Barnhart and Ralph Miller decided to enter.

They made their plans carefully. Lloyd would boil the ribs of the boat in long pieces of pipe, and when Dee and Ralph would come home from work, they would fasten them down on the proper template so that they would dry in the correct shape. They worked for several weeks on this boat, and it was very light and streamlined. They also manufactured their own oars.

On the day before the big race, Dee and Ralph decided to practice. They were both very strong men, and the oars were very strong. After a bit of practice, they got synchronized and then they started to get some speed. They were nearly skimming the water when -- oh, you know what happened!

There was a log just under the surface of the water. When they hit it, the bottom of the boat was ripped out from bow to stern. They swam to shore and sadly looked back at the last pieces of their weeks of work floating toward Puget Sound. So much for the big prize money.
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Howard is Shot!

Going hunting
One day, Howard was cleaning some guns in his room, upstairs in Grandma's house. His friend Stan Rasmussen picked up one of the guns and sat down on the opposite bed. Then Stan pulled the trigger. Unfortunately, you can fill in the story. It was loaded and Howard was shot.

Blanche came running to Alice and Dewey's house all out of breath, crying and totally panicked. They sent Earl somewhere and took Howard to the doctor. It was kind of touch and go for a while, but Howard survived.

One would think that Stan wouldn't be welcome any more, but he and Howard were friends for many years after that.
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The Bear

Sometime during the Great Depression, probably between 1932 and 1934, a group of assorted relatives (probably Dick Miller, Howard Schmitt, Dee and Lloyd Barnhart and a couple of others) went hunting. After they made camp, Dee drew the short straw and had to stay and guard the supplies. The others went up the hill to find some kind of game (elk or deer) to shoot.

After a short time, Dee heard something come crashing through the woods. It was a bear, and all Dee had was a shotgun. All a shotgun would do is enrage a bear, so he beat a hasty retreat. The bear, rather than stopping and rooting through the food (as is the habit of bears), ran straight through the camp. Dee could see that it had been shot.

After a couple of minutes, the rest of the group came crashing through the camp. They had seen the bear earlier, and being good hunters, would never allow a wounded animal to suffer or to be a danger to other people even though they had not shot it. They caught up with the bear and killed it.

Inasmuch as they now had the meat they went after, they took it home. (They certainly would have preferred venison, of course.) Grandma Mariah cooked some of it for dinner. Earl took one bite and it was the awfullest stuff he'd ever tasted. The others couldn't eat it either. It tasted about as close to rotten fish as it could without actually having fins and scales. It was spawning season and the bear had been eating salmon from a nearby stream.

They were very poor, but they never got hungry enough to eat the rest of that bear!
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Wood

Lloyd and Dee needed money, just like everyone else in those days. For a while they had a little side business of cutting up wood and selling it. (Chain saw? Who could afford that?) One day, out in the middle of nowhere in the swamp known as Ebey Island, they found a boomstick and were cutting it up when they were arrested for stealing the property of the Stimson Lumber Company. That ended that particular business venture.
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The Well

During the depths of the Great Depression, nearly everyone in the family was unemployed. Dee and Lloyd started a well-digging service. Notice that we say "well digging"; the work was done by hand with shovels, ladders and buckets. Dee still had some of that equipment when he died, including a pump, well point, pipe cutter, pipe threader, and several lengths of large pipe.

When he moved to the "farm" outside Snohomish, Dee used some of the equipment to do a "good job" on the existing well, including new four-foot concrete culvert for a liner and a four-and-a-half-foot concrete lid, sealed with mortar to keep bugs and mice out of the drinking water. Four feet seems quite large for a well, but it's not much room when you dig by hand. It was during one of the first summers on that place that the well went dry and he had to dig down further, which occasioned the improvements. (You might think this was somewhat extreme, but when the neighbors' water was tested and the result was "unfit for human consumption," Dee found all manner of dead mice and frogs and debris in their well.)

But during the Great Depression, he and brother Lloyd dug wells to make a living when the weather permitted. Fortunately, the soil around Marysville, Washington is sandy and easy to dig. Standard procedure was to set four-foot tiles at the bottom to work in, then a reducer and two-foot tiles for access from the top. This avoided the possiblity of the sides caving in (easy to dig, easy to collapse). The whole length of tiles would gradually shift downward as digging progressed, and new two-foot tiles would be added at the top.

Dee and Lloyd had dug a very deep well near Sunnyside (a small area near Marysville named for Sunnyside Hill, not the city near Yakima). Dee came home and said to Earl, "Come along with us; we have something to show you."

So Earl went with them, and they lowered him into this very deep well with the bucket. When he got to the bottom, Dee told him to look straight up. When he did, he could see stars in the sky. We read about this in books, but Earl experienced it firsthand. This was one of his early experiences with science.
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The Cat and the Stove

One cold day Earl came into Grandma's house and there was no one home. He decided to build a fire in the kitchen stove, so he proceeded to gather in the wood. After the fire was going pretty good, Dee came home.

Now Dee always had a cat. At this time, it was an orange tomcat who was getting quite lazy in his old age and had climbed up onto a kitchen chair beside the stove. Earl describes the stove as "red hot" by then.

Dee went into the bedroom where he always kept the window propped open with a piece of wood that filled most of the opening but left enough room for the old tomcat to go in and out. Earl heard Dee say something like, "Well, where did you come from?" and Dee came out of the bedroom holding a large gray cat.

Earl said, "I wonder what old Tom would do if he woke up and saw this cat?"

Dee said, "Let's find out!" and stuck the gray cat right in old Tom's face.

When old Tom opened his eyes and saw the other cat, he leaped straight up in the air and "sprayed" all over the top of the kitchen stove.

Now if you have ever seen what happens to a drop of water on a very hot griddle, you know how the droplets dance around on a layer of steam. Cat pee is no different, except that the smell was terrible. Earl was laughing so hard he could hardly stand up, and Dee had one of the stove lids off and was trying to use the handle to "herd" the dancing droplets into the stove, saying "Now stop laughing and help me!"
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That Cat!

That poor cat. He was really fat and lazy, which almost was his doom.

Grandma Mariah Barnhart and some of the people she fed regularly
Grandma used to tell this story to the grandkids. There was a little Chinese fellow, a recent immigrant, who ran a laundry downtown. Every night he would come walking home -- trotting, really, since he worked very hard and hardly ever sat down.

The fence out front had a board along the top. That lazy old cat would lie out in the sunshine on that board in the afternoons. The Chinese fellow would often stop and pet the cat in spite of being in a hurry. One day Grandma was out on the front porch when this occurred. The Chinese fellow said, "Velly nice kitty. Make velly nice noodle."
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The Cannon

One Fourth of July, Earl was outside of his parents' house three blocks away from the Barnhart house when there was a "boom" from that general direction and in a half a minute or so, a golf ball hit the street in front of him. On the first bounce it went out of sight before coming down again.

Sometimes these Barnharts and Millers were totally nuts. They had designed a "cannon." They drove a length of pipe into the ground. Ralph was an avid golfer and had lots of old balls with scars and slices in them. The pipe was just a bit too small for a golf ball.

They had this down to a science. One would hold a cherry bomb, another would light the fuse. They would drop the cherry bomb into the pipe, someone would put a golf ball on top and another would hit it into the pipe with a hammer. Then, when the cherry bomb went off, the explosion could be heard for blocks and the golf ball went out of sight. (Sure, it could have killed somebody, but wasn't it fun? Noisy, too! You can bet the next generation was never allowed to do that when we came along!)
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The Shooting Match

During the days of Prohibition, Dee used to make home brew -- perhaps not as good as brother-in-law Dewey's, but passable. One day some of them, probably Dee, Lloyd, Ralph and Dewey, got a bit sozzled and got their guns.

Someone had the idea of putting a match into a crack at the far end of the barn and shooting at it with their rifles. Tipsy as they were, they managed to light several matches without breaking them. (Small wonder that they didn't burn the barn down!)
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G-Men!

One day, Earl was on his way home from school when he saw a big black car in front of a neighbor's house a few doors down. He came in and said to his mother Alice, "There's this big black car and a bunch of men in suits and they have guns!"

Alice immediately ran to tell the next-door neighbor who was bottling up a batch of homebrew. The neighbor panicked and threw all of the bottles out back in the creek.

Later, when the excitement died down, there was the neighbor with a net, trying to get all of his bottles back out of the water!
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Green Pancakes

There was a party one night at Grandma's house and Dee had made plenty of homebrew. The next morning, there were people sleeping all over the house.

Earl and Lloyd were the first ones up, and they were hungry. Lloyd wanted to make pancakes, but he feared that the others would smell them and he would end up cooking, if indeed he would get any for himself. Earl suggested coloring them green.

Indeed, the smell woke everyone up, but when they saw the bright green pancakes, they let Earl and Lloyd have all of them.
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Guns and Eggs

On another occasion, a large group went on a picnic on Puget Sound. They played games and ate, then ate some more. Finally, when everyone was stuffed, they had five hard-boiled eggs left over. Dee and Ralph came up with a new game.

One would throw an egg and the other would shoot it. (We can only suppose that the fish enjoyed the splattered remnants of the eggs.) Finally there was one egg left. Dee said, "Ralph, you shoot under it to pop it up into the air and I'll shoot it." So he tossed the egg in the water and they did exactly that. (Note: hard-boiled eggs float well in salt water.)
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The Salesman

This crowd spent a lot of time cleaning guns. One day, a salesman came to the door when Dee and Ralph were cleaning their guns.

The salesman was a very persistent type and just wouldn't shut up. Dee finally tried to shut the door in the salesman's face. But the salesman had been well trained and put his foot in the door.

About this time, Ralph came over and said, "Dee, are you having trouble with this guy?" Ralph had been cleaning his .38 and had it in his hand. The salesman took one look at the gun and disappeared.
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The Shotgun

One day, somebody had a shotgun to sell, cheap. Howard had enough money to buy it, so he brought it home, a 10-gauge, double-barrelled shotgun with several shells. He was proud of that gun. Dee and Ralph were both there at the time, and he showed it off.

So Howard changed clothes and went out on the Ebey trestle to hunt ducks. Within the hour he came in looking somewhat dejected and dirty, like he had been rolling in the dirt. "What happened?"

He had walked down the track, almost to the trestle. He got down there and a duck came up out of the water. He raised the gun and fired a shot. The recoil knocked him down the railroad embankment. When he got up off the ground and ran back up the embankment, the duck was gone so he came home.
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The Bike

Howard got a bike with all of the accessories, even a speedometer. One day he noticed that the mileage was different in the morning than it had been the previous night. Suspicious, Howard set a trap. He put a bucket of rocks up on the peak of the roof and tied a rope from it down to his bike.

Sure enough, after dark there was the clatter of the bucket and all the rocks rolling down the roof. It was his friend Stan, who had no bike of his own, taking it out after dark.
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Chocolate Pancakes

Earl lived at Grandma's house, often for weeks at a time. Howard drove the school bus for several years to pick up kids from the Tulalip Reservation. Earl would ride along and that's how they became good friends. They also learned a lot of the Tulalip words for things, to the extent that they could figure out what the kids were saying.

Howard's sister Blanche was still living with Grandma Mariah and would cook for "the boys" each morning. Often the fare was chocolate pancakes, which they dearly loved. (Years later these had evolved into chocolate waffles, which were dearly loved by a later generation.)
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Friends for Life

Art Duborko was the same age as Howard and lived right across the alley. Art and Howard were "fighting pals" for many years. They were always bickering about something. On the other hand, neither one would go very far without the other. When one got into trouble, the other was there to help.

Howard married Nana Maik and moved to a house near Art. Then, when Howard built a new house, Art bought the property next door and built a house there. They were neighbors for 65 years, still "fighting pals."
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Mashed Potatoes

Speaking of Earl, this is a story that is often repeated in the Barnhart family, with varying degrees of accuracy.
Herman and Clara Barnhard


Herman Barnhard (spelled thus) was a cousin of Dee and Lloyd and their sisters. He and his wife Clara lived at Nooksak, a little town near the Canadian border northeast of Bellingham. They were fine Christian folks, very proper. Before arriving for a visit, children were admonished, "Now don't just start in eating, because Herman and Clara always say grace before meals." I recall being thus admonished, and, not knowing what "grace" was, learned this meaning of the word by observation. (It's amazing what adults think a kid knows by osmosis or something.)

Anyhow, Earl, age maybe 7 or 8, rode with his parents and some other relatives to see Herman and Clara. At dinner, he piled on the mashed potatoes which he relished greatly. He patted down the pile so that the gravy wouldn't run off and said, "These potatoes look good as the devil!"

Cousin Blanche immediately said, "What did you say, Earl?" (In 1928, the word "devil" was not used in polite society.)

Clara, who was very proper, rescued the situation by saying, "Yes that's right, Earl; you pat them down nice and level."

(To this day, most of the family thinks that Clara didn't know what Earl said. My opinion is that (a) she knew what he said, (b) knew it was a compliment to her cooking, and (c) that she saved Earl from punishment.)
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Herman

Another story is often repeated in the family. There was an exchange of letters in December of 1946, and Dee and Marie took young "Ricky" (almost 3 years old) to see Herman and Clara. Little Ricky sized up Herman, who stood about 6 feet 4 inches tall, and said, "I don't like you!"

Herman never learned to drive, or at least never owned a car. He took the bus into Bellingham whenever he had to do "official" business or shop for something he couldn't find in Nooksak. He and Clara lived in that same little house for many years.
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Virgil

Virgil Barnhard
Virgil Barnhard, Herman's father and Sylvester's brother, according to family legend, changed the spelling of the surname when it appeared that way on his discharge papers from the Civil War. He married, raised a family of eight. His wife died and he remarried and then left Nebraska to go to California.

He is reputed to be one of the "founders" of Long Beach, but this was around 1920 and he seems to have only been there for four years. When he died in 1923, his body was shipped back to Nebraska for burial. (Military records say "Cedar Rapids, Iowa" but he lived in Cedar Rapids, Nebraska for many years.)
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The Beans

Sometime around 1926 or so, Earl went to his Grandmother Miller's house. His mother, Alice, would go shopping in Everett and leave him there. Grandma Miller would make bread and Earl would stuff himself with hot bread and fresh butter. She was from Denmark and immigrated to the U.S. in about 1885.

Earl was "helping" his grandmother by sorting through her button box, as six-year-olds are happy to do. He had sorted the buttons into various colors and types when he came to three beans in the bottom of the button box. He said, "Grandma, what are you going to sew these onto?"

Grandma Miller told him that they were beans from Denmark where she was born, and that he could have them. "Those beans got in there when I was a little girl. They're real old. If you want them, you can take them home and plant them." So Earl took them home, planted them and cared for them.

(No, they did not grow up to the sky and there are no giants in this story!)

The beans grew and had several pods of beans, which Earl carefully harvested and dried. There were now thirteen beans. The family had a garden where they raised vegetables, so Earl planted his thirteen beans.

This time, Earl got quite a little harvest. He counted up to about two hundred before he lost track. The next summer, he harvested a lot of beans. He measured them by the bucket full. Dee came along and asked him if they were good. Earl didn't know because no one had eaten any yet. They cooked some of them and they were really good.

Earl gave away many of them as seeds. That year, there were enough beans that people could eat part of the harvest and still have some for seed.

Those beans, claim the old-timers, were some of the best beans anyone had ever tasted. After a couple of more years, they were grown in nearly every garden in Marysville.

But all good things have to end sometime, and one year some kind of bugs arrived in town and killed every one of those bean plants. No one had a harvest, and no one had kept back any seeds. And that was the end of those beans.

And that's really too bad, you know, because the Great Depression was just getting under way and those beans would have fed a lot of people. Sadly, Grandma Miller died before there were enough of those beans to cook.

Which brings us to another story.
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Dee's Gardens

Dee was always a gardener as long as we who are still alive can remember. At one time during the depression, he had maybe ten to fifteen gardens on various vacant lots in Marysville, some of which occupied entire lots.

Marysville has a much drier climate than the notorious clouds and rain in Seattle and Everett to the south, so the gardens had to be watered throughout the summer. The City of Marysville furnished the water free, which seems rather odd at first glance.

But Dee used the produce from the gardens to feed the poorest of the poor all over town. Whenever a particular vegetable would come to maturity, he and others would distribute them to poor people, starting with the poorest and finally taking some for themselves. In his typical way, Dee never mentioned this to anyone in the younger generation. He was just doing what had to be done.
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The Count

One day Earl asked someone why they called his father "Duke" when his name was Dewey. The answer was, "Because his father was a count in Denmark. Why do you suppose your name is Earl?"
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Step Grandma

Some time after Grandma Miller died, Grandpa Miller came to Alice and Dewey's house for dinner with an old lady whom he probably intended to marry. Grandpa, the count from Denmark, was pretty ancient by this time and so was the old lady. (For all we know, she was some kind of royalty also, which just adds to the humor.)

During dinner, this old lady was eating potatoes and gravy and had gravy running from both corners of her mouth. Earl was about to burst out laughing when Dewey ("Duke") leaned over and quietly said to Earl and Phil, "Not a peep out of either of you!"
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The Harmonica

During the depression, the government (in the guise of FDR) adopted the Roman philosophy of bread and circuses, which is still working. (Give them food and entertainment and they won't notice their misery. Witness the fast food and entertainment industries, and now the Web.)

Since Marysville didn't already have a civic center, it got one. This was a metal building referred to as a "tin can." It was built from recycled materials, including used "tin" siding. Every weekend they had community dances. Marysville needed a band, so Dee brought his harmonica, someone brought a guitar, and so on. It has a different meaning nowadays, but people in Marysville would say, "Are you going to the 'can' tonight?"
Dee, his banjo, Marie, and an unnamed friend


One by one the other musicians dropped out and several times the "band" consisted of Dee and his harmonica. This was annoying to say the least, so Dee taught Earl to play a few songs on the harmonica and the "band" now had two members. (Dee also played the banjo, but apparently not at these dances.)

Sometimes Dee would leave young Earl to play while he went out and danced. Earl didn't like this, but it was good training. In later years, Earl played the accordion and organ professionally.

We younger ones know that Dee met his wife Marie Herd at a dance. We suspect it was one of these. At the time, Dee was about 36 and Marie was 16. They fell in love, but Grandma Mariah wouldn't hear of it. It was only after she passed away that they could even consider getting married.

And, sadly, his son never heard Dee play either the banjo or the harmonica. We suppose that those things belonged to the past, hard times and the Great Depression, so he put them aside and became a husband, father and breadwinner for his "new" family. He kept his sense of humor, though, and never became a drudge. (N.B. There is more to this than meets the eye. Someday the story may be told, if we ever find out.)
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Marriage

It was after Grandma Mariah died in 1934 that Dee and Marie could consider getting married. After a "decent" time of mourning, they made plans.

They had no money for a marriage license, so Dee went up into the woods and trapped beaver as he had done several times before. The money from the pelts was enough to buy a marriage license, the cheapest ring at the cheapest jeweler in Everett, and pay the Justice of the Peace. (Just forget churches, flowers and ministers!) He was 38, she, 19.

There were a couple of old ladies sitting outside the courthouse, so Dee asked them if they would be witnesses. They were most pleased to do so. And thus they were married.

Everyone knew it wouldn't last very long. Only 34 years until Dee died.
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Skating

One winter, the dykes around Ebey Island broke, as they are still in the habit of doing once or twice a year. Ebey Island is rich farmland when it isn't under water. It became extremely cold, to the extent that the water over the island froze. Many people from Marysville went skating on the ice. They could literally skate for miles. Some recall looking down under the ice and seeing cabbages that had been left in the fields on the island.
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Dee Skating

When they still lived in Eastern Washington, all of the kids learned to skate during the winters. One day, Dee was skating down a creek with the wind pushing him when one skate dropped into a hole in the ice. Dee went flying end over end and broke his collarbone. One arm could reach higher than the other after that.

While the collarbone was healing, Dee's mother fashioned a sling out of a dishtowel. One day she was pinning it together when she got overly enthusiastic. Dee hollered, "Hey! You're pinning that to the skin!"
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The Packard

At some point, Dee acquired a yellow 1923 Packard. It had a cast aluminum body, very light. He and Ralph went to Tacoma for some reason, and on the way back, Dee got sleepy. Ralph took over the driving and Dee went to sleep. When he awoke, they were tumbling down an embankment. Ralph had gone to sleep at the wheel.

They picked themselves up and Ralph said, "Dee, are you OK?" Dee replied, "I guess so, how about you?" Ralph replied "Yeah, I'm OK." And then, as he was removing a glove, "No, I'm not OK." Ralph had a broken collarbone.

That beautiful car was a total loss.
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Food

A lot of these stories center around food. These were the years of the Great Depression, and it was hard to acquire even the necessities of life. In fact, the Great Depression started in the 1920's with the farmers, many of whom had to sell out because of poor crops. The banks ended up owning large numbers of farms with no one to buy them, which only contributed to the huge number of bank failures after the stock market crash in 1929, which is what most people know about. The market crash is what caught the attention of the middle and upper classes, but the working class majority had bad times long before 1929. But the working class doesn't write the history books. And, of course, the middle class places the blame squarely on Herbert Hoover, who had the misfortune of being in the Oval Office when the economic ship, already sinking, hit the iceberg.

Grandma served salt pork at most meals, especially breakfast and lunch. The diet was very rich in fats. Then the Depression came along and food was not as plentiful any more; but food was fairly cheap, such as it was.

There were salesmen who came around in trucks with all kinds of food. One was the Meat Man, who would pull out a board and slice off whatever hunk the customer wanted. His truck had an exhaust whistle that would go "Toot toot toot" as he slowed down approaching their house.

Then there was the guy with the squeaky little voice who would come by the back door crying "Chee! Hominy! Chee! Hominy!" So they would buy cheese and hominy from him. The last of this breed was probably the Bread Man, who would come to rural houses on into the 1950's.

Grandma Mariah always had food in the house. Eggs were about ten cents a dozen, and every Friday the milkman would come around and sell her a ten-gallon can of skim milk for fifty cents. Earl always tried to come around on Fridays because there was always something good to be made with the milk. He says he must have had chocolate pudding coming out of his ears. Many of the grandchildren like Mickey Schmitt (Fishel) fondly recall the custards and cream pies Grandma made. "Eat up, kids," she would say, "It's just good milk and eggs!"
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Eggs

Alice and Dewey decided to go to the Promised Land (California) to look for work. They packed up the car, an old sedan with side curtains, and stuck Earl in the back seat among all of the bedding and boxes. Phil was smaller and rode in the front seat.

Alice had just bought a dozen eggs for about a dime, and tried to figure out how to pack them so they wouldn't break. Finally she settled on spacing them out on the blankets and then putting more blankets over them for protection. Earl snuggled down beside this arrangement for the duration of the trip.

As you probably know, California has had border guards for many years. The Millers arrived at the border in the middle of the night, and this particular guard was rather belligerent. "You have fruit in there someplace!" (Note: nobody knew or cared about drugs in those days.)

Alice said, "Don't touch that!" But the guard proceeded to yank out the pile of blankets, flipping all of the eggs out all over the pavement. Alice came around the car, hands on her hips, and yelled, "All right, buster, five cents apiece! Start counting!" The guard was embarrassed and very meek at this point, and paid sixty cents for the dozen eggs. We can only suppose he also cleaned up the mess.
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Recipes

Dee had two recipes for seagull.

Baked: Cut a 2x12 pine board to fit the seagull. Nail the seagull to the board. Bake in a hot oven for 7 to 10 days. Remove seagull. Eat board.

Boiled: Place seagull in pot with a red brick. Boil. When you can stick a fork through the brick, the seagull is ready.

(For those readers who live inland, the same recipes work for magpie. Perhaps these would be good recipes for bear as well.)

Of course, Dee's recipe for coffee was almost as bad:

Boil coffee over campfire. Place spoon in coffee. If it stands up straight, get cups ready. When the spoon dissolves, serve the coffee.
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The Wheelchair

Grandma Mariah had a stroke and could no longer stand up. Dee cut the rockers off her favorite rocking chair and put casters on it. This "poor man's" version of a wheelchair served her well until she died. She would look over her shoulder and kick her way backwards to where she was going. She still did her cooking and cleaning as always, just from a sitting position.

Grandma was a very large person, which is one reason that she couldn't walk. One day she was taking a bath and could not get out of the bathtub. She let the water out of the tub and dried herself with a towel she had put nearby. She managed to get a towel under herself and put on her dress. When Dee came home, he got her out of the tub.

Grandma Mariah at least appeared to have some faith, but she never went to church. It is thought by some that her size made it difficult to walk even before her strokes, so that might be the reason. She made her own clothes since she was so hard to fit "off the rack." One lady would always bring her the church bulletin each week, which she read diligently.

Grandma could do a lot of things from her chair. The kitchen cupboards were all low so that she could reach most of them. Blanche was always there to do the things that Grandma couldn't do herself. Blanche often did the cooking and the heavier housework, while Dee brought home a paycheck most of the time. Grandma allowed Dee to be the head of the house, and Dee's word was law even to Lloyd, the "baby" of the family. The living arrangement probably seemed rather odd to outsiders.
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Chores

Mariah's grandchildren often got little jobs to do around the kitchen. In those days, margarine was white, with a little capsule of yellow food coloring. (Politics -- the farmers didn't want it to look like butter.) So one of Earl's jobs was to squish this yellow food coloring into the margarine to make it look like butter. That was kind of fun.

Another job was cherry pitting. Grandma had a machine for this job. It had a sort of hopper, and the cherries would drop down into a little tray. A crank activated a little fork that would push out the pit, then lift the cherry and flip it into another little bin. This also became Earl's job.
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The Hollises

Lee Hollis grew up on a farm not far from the Barnhart homestead in Eastern Washington. Lee and Elsie were good friends of Alice and Dewey. In fact, they all traveled to California together. When they returned to Marysville after not finding work in California, the Hollises moved in with the Millers for a year or two while Lee built a house. We would suppose that Earl got tired of sleeping on the floor and went over to Grandma's house where he shared a room with Howard.

Lee and Elsie's daughter Leah used to beat up on Earl Miller regularly. Fighting pals, you might say.
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Friends

Dee knew a fellow he called "Swede". One day they met on the street and Dee asked him how he was coming with learning English. Swede replied, "It took me ten years to learn to say 'yug' and now they call it a 'yimmy-yohn'!" (The actual word was "demijohn", and the story varies between "demi-yohn" (Earl) and "yimmy-yohn" (Dee) but you get the idea.)

One evening, Dee was walking home when someone let out a war whoop that nearly caused him to climb a pole. Then a cheery, if somewhat alcoholic, voice hollered, "Hi, Dee!" It was Cashmere Sam, a good friend from the Tulalip Reservation, who had had a bit too much to drink. He proceeded on down the street, letting out a whoop every time he went under a street light.
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The Hammer

One day after he was married and moved to the little house on Cedar Street, Dee was out in the garage nailing up something. He put down his hammer and then reached for it, and it was gone. He looked high and low all around where he had been working. No hammer. Hammers weren't expensive, but they weren't cheap, either, and this was a real vexation to him.

Over ten years later, probably when they were packing to move to the "farm" outside Snohomish, he found that hammer. It was in a box under some other stuff. How it got under that stuff is a mystery, but the box had been near where he was working that day.
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Epilogue

Mariah Barnhart, widowed when Sylvester was killed in 1911, died in 1934 after a series of strokes.

Art Duborko, Howard's lifetime friend, became postmaster of Marysville and was a very prominent citizen. Everyone knew him. He is still an active citizen in Marysville.

Howard passed away in 1985 after an illness. His last words were, "Time to go to sleep now."

Blanche married Al Futscher but never had any children. After Al died, she often showed up at family functions with Lloyd, who was single by that time.

Lloyd had several more jobs such as working at a laundry, milking cows and being a janitor. He married Eva Stewart and they had one son, George "Barney" Barnhart, who lives with his wife Kathy in California.

Dee got a job at Weyerhaeuser Mill "B" in Everett, WA, in late 1935 or early 1936 and retired from there. They moved to a five-acre place ("the farm") near Snohomish, where he mostly raised a boy, Richard. Dee died suddenly in 1969 on his 34th wedding anniversary. Richard lives with his wife Kathy and two cats in Indiana.

Earl got a job with the government and used much of his spare time playing the accordion or organ everywhere from churches to campgrounds to night clubs. His "day job" included meeting Dave Hewlett and Bill Packard (as in HP Color Inkjet), working with the developers of the Sidewinder missile and at least two fighter jets. He has written his autobiography which we are all waiting for, especially the part about the FBI.... He currently resides in California with his wife Kathy, a dog and a cockatiel.

(No, you're not seeing double. That's three Kathys in a row. It's a good name. And yes, there are two Kathy Barnharts. They even like each other.)


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