Elvera Catherine Wilkins

It is strange that after nine years and dozens of posts on the Northen History, I am just now making a post about the life of my mother, Elvera Catherine Wilkins.  As when writing about the life of her husband, James Edward Northen, this is a point at which the statistics of censuses and birth certificates meets personal experience and anecdote.

Mom in 1922 at 1 year old

Elvera was born in Northville, Spink County, South Dakota on April 27, 1921, the third child of Victor Wilkins and Laverna Ryman.  As everyone who knew who knows, she hated her first name and it caused her to insist that all of her own children were given “regular” names.  She like her middle name Catherine (probably after her maternal grandmother Katie Sitzmann), but was not allowed to. Some time before 1930 when she was 9 years old – and likely much earlier – the family moved to Warner in Brown County, South Dakota.  Mom never mentioned the move but it is likely that they moved there for family support.  Her mother was raised in Warner and most of the maternal relatives were still there.

Throughout the years, Mom would mention things that happened when she was growing up, and it is probable that most of these took place up in Brown County. There is a picture of her at a year old with a mischievous smile on her face which probably presages her personality as an adult. Much of her early life sounds like rural Americana.  She talked about having outhouses where they used corn cobs for toilet paper and about how during the winter when it was cold they would bring the pigs in to keep warm by the stove. She remembered riding in wagons to school and one of the early days in school when another girl took scissors and cut up the new dress her mother made for her.  She tells of the time during the winter when she liked a gatepost and her tongue got stuck to it. 

Grandpa Wilkins’ first six children were all daughters so they had to take over a lot of the work on the farm.  She said that much of the work fell to her oldest sister Lucille and her because her second oldest sister Elaine was frail and only did the work inside the house.  She recalled taking out food at lunch time to men who came in to help with the harvest. 

As mentioned in the previous post, in 1933 they moved from South Dakota to California.  Just what Elvera went through during the rest of the 1930’s is a bit unclear.  It seems that they originally lived in Westminster where they continued to do farming. Mom mentions helping to deliver eggs.  It was also during this time that her older sister Elaine died of pneumonia. And, of course it was during this time that the flood which destroyed their farm took place.

It is hard to pinpoint just when Mom moved to Santa Ana.  Mom (who’d always said that she wanted to be a home economics teacher) tells the story of how she had to quit Santa Ana High School in eleventh grade to go take care of her Uncle Ray and Aunt Irene’s children.  Apparently, her father had to repay his brother Ray for lending him money to move out to California.  Given her age of about 17, this would mean that she was probably living in Santa Ana prior to 1938.

According to the 1940 census, they were living on West Fourth St. in Santa Ana and had been there since at least 1935.  Elvera is listed as the oldest child in the family at that point and the only one other than Armond, the very youngest, who was not attending school.  In fact, the census lists her as working 48 hours a week for a private family, no doubt, Uncle Ray’s.  It is also interesting to note that when it comes to employment, Grandpa is coded as U, meaning unable to work.  Not surprisingly, with nine children to care for and an elderly mother-in-law living next door, Grandma did not have a paying job.  With her oldest sister, Lucille newly married and out of the house, there must have been a lot of pressure on Mom at 18 years old to support the family.

It must have been shortly after that time that Elvera met James Northen.  They were married Nov. 2, 1942 in Carson City, Nevada.

The Flood

One of the advantages of keeping a journal is that the journal itself is a document that allows you to look back into the past and recover events or details about events that  may have been forgotten.  I was recently reading back through my journal and came to an entry from April 29, 2006 in which I recorded information from a conversation with my mother.  The entry mentions two important events in her early life.  I wanted to share those and, for authenticity’s sake, I am going to record it exactly as I wrote it down at the time.

“I just finished talking to my Mom on the telephone. I called to wish her a happy birthday and she was in pretty good spirits and in the mood to talk.  I wanted to record a couple of things that she said before I get them.  My memory is worse than hers in a lot of ways.  One is that she remembers the exact date when she headed out to California from South Dakota. It was October 12, 1933 and she was 12 years old. One thing that I did not know was that her Grandfather Wilkins came with them. I could not get a real sense of whether he actually relocated to California to or if he just accompanied them and stayed for a while. She said they were not there long when there was an earthquake that split the ground open.  Her grandfather couldn’t believe it. She said something about them being in Long Beach, but I did not know they actually ever lived in Long Beach. She did say that her grandfather used to get up in the morning and crow like a rooster, saying that it was 12 in the morning and time to get up. The other piece of family history she mentioned  (which she mentions fairly often lately) was when they had the flood. But there was also a new bit information here. She said that they had to stay up in the attic for two days and were finally rescued by the Red Cross. She was saying that it was hard to get Grandma up into the attic because it was a hole in the ceiling (like ours) so they had to stand on a chair and push her up there.  I can just picture that.  I asked her if the Red Cross came to her in a boat and she said she did not remember, but did not think so.”

Rather like the biblical Genesis, this account records two seminal events in the history of our family in California – the arrival itself and the great flood.  Also like those accounts, it is a kind of patchwork of memories.   Every American has heard of the Great Depression that occurred in the early 1930’s and the way that the lives of farmers were devastated by it, but it is easy to overlook the fact that the Wilkins branch of our family was a part of it. Mom’s pinpointing the date that they moved puts it squarely in the middle of that time period when farm families were moving west to California to try to reset their lives.

The flood that Mom describes was more local than the depression, but it is still a major event in the history of Southern California.   The day after Hurricane Sandy, the Orange County Register reported, “Something very like it happened in 1938. Days of rain dropped more than 9 inches over Orange County, more farther inland, turning much of northern Orange County into a lake as the Santa Ana River overflowed its banks. The flood claimed at least 19 lives, left 2,000 homeless and yielded memorable black-and-white photos of drowning cars and buildings in Anaheim.”

According to Wikipedia, there were floods in that area in both 1934 in 1938, destroying crops and killing 60 people.  Mom never mentioned the exact year of the flood, but just that it was shortly after they came to California. She frequently repeated that they lost everything in the flood.  Throughout the years Mom often talked of the flood with various family members giving each of us bits and pieces of the story.  If anyone has pieces of the story about either the family coming to California or the flood itself, please add what you know in the comments below.