My great-grandfather, Louis Martell, emigrated to the United States from French Canada following the American Civil War, searching for fame and fortune. He never found either one. But he did discover a petite and pretty French teenager named Mary. Born near South Bend, Indiana, she was living with her family in Lake County, Michigan, at the time Louis spotted her. They were married in January, 1872. I still own a formal, tintype wedding portrait of the two of them. He was a handsome, swarthy, rakish-looking character.<\/p>\n
Louis and his teen-age bride settled in Berrien County, Michigan, in a Catholic district colonized by French-Canadian \u00e9migr\u00e9s. He felt right at home. Their first of six children was born October 27, 1873.<\/p>\n
The eldest was Josephine, who later became my grandmother. She was followed by Fred, Lillian, Elizabeth, Phoebe and Noah, the youngest. There was a span of almost 20 years between the birth of Josephine and Noah. (The family pronounced the name Noah as NU- WEE\u2014a French-Canadian corruption rhyming with Dewey\u2014which I always found pretty funny.)<\/p>\n
Josephine grew up to be a plain but passionate woman, still unmarried at the mature age of 22. She did much of the cooking for the entire family. Then, she met my future grandfather, James Thad Dewey, a lusty, hard\u00acworking, French-speaking, ranch hand from nearby New Buffalo, Michigan. She’d found her man.<\/p>\n
***<\/span><\/p>\n Born August 2, 1874, Jim Dewey came from French and English stock. His mother was Margrit Gugine, a French-Canadian. His father was Phelix Dewey. He had two brothers, Albert and Sam. Albert eventually married and had three children\u2014all boys. Sam remained an untamed bachelor all of his life.<\/p>\n Jim Dewey and Josephine Martell (he called her Jo) were married in the late summer of 1896\u2014and my mother was born some three months later on November 24. She was an only child. But she was not truly alone. My mother and Aunt Phoebe Martell were both about the same age. They played together as children. And they remained close throughout their lives.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n \u201cHe changed his name to Sam Constantino. And traveled, he did…with a rough crowd,\u201d my grandmother once told me. She let it drop there. It was some 30 years before the family heard from Sam again.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n In Vancouver, Washington, the Martells and the Deweys started over. They were strong, working-class people. My mother entered second grade in the local Catholic schools. However, it was a painful experience for her, At that time, she could speak only French-Canadian, with some smattering of English. And she once told me that she endured teasing and taunting from other kids.<\/p>\n This may be one reason why the family went out of its way in later years to avoid speaking or teaching French to me as a child. They also clung to a mistaken and distorted determination to bury their French-Canadian past and become totally Americanized. During my earliest years, for example, while it was common for my mother and my grandparents to speak in French around the house among themselves, they switched to English whenever I was around. As a result, I did not grow up with bilingual capability. One of my genuine regrets.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n My mother did not attend school beyond the fifth grade. When she was about eleven, my grandparents along with Aunt Phoebe moved to Oregon City, Oregon, where they started a new life on the Diamond A river boats. These were shallow-drafted, double-decked cargo boats with huge rear paddle wheels. Along with the cargo, they herded giant log rafts to the saw mills and the paper mills of the lower Willamette and Columbia rivers.<\/p>\n My grandmother, Josephine, worked on the boats as a cook. My grandfather, Jim Dewey, worked as a deck hand and logging roustabout. Mymother and Aunt Phoebe, not yet in their teens, went along for the fun. They spent much of their time studying from schoolbooks and fishing over the side.<\/p>\n \u201cThe deck hands watched out for us. And we did a lot more fishing than reading,\u201d Mother once admitted. This was probably the beginning of my mother\u2019s lifelong love of fishing\u2014for food and fun. By the time they were in their teens, Phoebe and my mother were also helping out in the galleys, and eventually won cooking jobs of their own. Come the weekends, however, folks could always find them at the popular dances held every Saturday night in Oregon City.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n At one of these loud and lively affairs, Phoebe met a tough, hard-drinking railroad cook named George Litteral. Within weeks, they were married. And from the\u00a0first day out, their marriage was a wild\u00a0one. It seemed to be one, long, on-going battle of words and wit and pots and pans. Aunt Phoebe had the look and caustic tongue of a Thelma Ritter. Uncle George matched her with his tilted derby, dangling cigarette and a Wallace Berry growl. They were a funny couple.<\/p>\n Initially, they worked the railroads, cooking for the surveying crews. Then, for a good many years after World War I, Phoebe and George worked for the timber companies, cooking in various Oregon logging camps. He played the blustering head chef role to the hilt\u2014in full command of the cook shack. She always played a strong- supporting role as pastry chef. The loggers loved her. And I loved them both.<\/p>\n The marriage lasted about twenty-five years. Uncle George was a constant smoker. He died of lung cancer in his fifties.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Sadly, I know little about my dad’s family. Another regret. What little I do know is this: Willard Mayo, my great-grandfather, served in the Union Army during the American Civil War. For years, one of my most valued mementos was his full-dress sword, presented to me by my dad when I was about twelve years old. I passed it on to Byron Robert some years ago. The blade is straight and heavy. Reminds me of Excalibur<\/em>.<\/p>\n At the end of the civil war, Willard Mayo drifted from somewhere in the east on out to Kansas, where he met and married a woman named Joan, my great-grandmother. She gave birth to a son, which they ***<\/p>\n Throughout most of his life, my dad worked as a machinist; or in the building trades as a carpenter, roofer, bricklayer, timekeeper or construction foreman. At the time he met my mother, he was a young carpenter working in the paper mills.<\/p>\n They came together Dad was a small, tough, wiry man with gray eyes and dark, unruly hair. With the outbreak of World War I, he enlisted in the US Army and served in France as a corporal in the 309th Trench Mortar Battery Division. They called it \u201cthe war to end all wars.\u201d It ended on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, 1918. My dad returned home to my mother in January 1919, unscathed.<\/p>\n He always remembered his homecoming for another reason, too. January 1919 was the month in which the 18th amendment to the US Constitution was ratified, blanketing the nation with prohibition\u2014outlawing all alcoholic beverages. This was something my dad and George Littreal and thousands of other returning soldiers found hard to take.<\/p>\n Welcome home, <\/em>\u00a0Yanks.<\/em><\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Prohibition in this country marked the beginning of \u201cThe Roaring Twenties.\u201d It ushered in an era of bootleggers. Speakeasies. The rise of the mob. Bath tub gin. Flapper fashions. The Charleston. Chicago jazz. And a wild decade in which \u201ceverybody\u201d speculated in a booming stock market. My great-grandfather, Louis Martell, emigrated to the United States from French Canada following the American Civil War, searching for fame and fortune. He never found either one. But he did discover a petite and pretty French teenager named Mary. Born near South Bend, Indiana, she was living with her family in Lake County, Michigan, at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family-connections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140"}],"version-history":[{"count":66,"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":414,"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140\/revisions\/414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nTimes were hard in Michigan at the turn of the century. My\u00a0great-grandmother, Mary Martell, had died not long after the birth of Uncle Noah. Jobs were scarce. Unemployment was high. The future did not look promising. Meanwhile, the railroads were promoting the good life in the Pacific Northwest. After much family soul-searching, they succumbed. The entire family\u2014 Martells and Dews\u2014headed West. They settled in Vancouver, Washington, across the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon. All except Sam.\u00a0For reasons I still do not know, Sam broke away from the family and moved to Chicago.<\/p>\n
\nnamed Adam, my future grandfather. Unfortunately, Joan died shortly after childbirth.
\n
\nAdam grew up in Kansas. In his late twenties, he married a young Frenchwoman named Mary. During the earliest years of their marriage, they lived in the rural village of Somerville, Kansas, where they had five children\u2014two boys and three girls\u2014Byron Albert, Burt, Alice, Myrtle and Gertrude. Around the turn of the century, Adam and Mary Mayo and all five children joined the flow heading further West, looking for greater opportunity. They, too, settled in the Oregon City area, on the Willamette river some twelve miles south of Portland.
\nGrandfather Adam Mayo died before I was born. Grandmother Mary Mayo died when I was an infant. While I have a photograph of a stern-looking Mary Mayo holding me as a baby in her arms, plus a picture of Aunts Myrtle and Gertrude, I really don’t remember them.<\/p>\n
\non a rainy night in October, 1912, at another one of those popular Oregon City dances. She always said he was a good dancer. And she was a party girl. She loved to dance. Six months later, Della Martell Dewey and Byron Albert Mayo were formally married. It was April 1913. I still have a small wedding photo in which they both look very serious, very proud, and perhaps a little scared. He was 23. She was 17.<\/p>\n
\nIt was during these frenzied times that I was born \u2014 January 14, 1922.<\/p>\n