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| Evelyn in about 1943 |
On March 12, 1919, my mother was born. At that time in history, fewer people lived to an age where they suffered from Altzheimer's disease. Or perhaps people's diets and exercise levels were such that they were less likely to develop amyloid plaque in their brains.
Her grandfathers died of lung damage and tuberculosis after years of working in mines in Colorado. Her maternal grandmother died in 1929 at age 67, but her maternal grandmother lived to age 89 without any kind of dementia.
Here is a brief summary of Evelyn's life and the social and historical context into which she was born.
In January of 1919, life was
difficult in Telluride. Fighting in
Europe had ended just two months earlier with the signing of an armistice
between the Allies and Germany on November 11.
One in ten people in Telluride had died in the flu
pandemic that killed one-third of the earth’s population. Serena Brown Gustafson was pregnant with her
second child.
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| Evelyn Frances Gustafson in 1920 |
When the US
entered the Great War in spring, 1917, August Gustafson severe rheumatoid arthritis saved him from the draft. He
was crawling to the stove in the morning to light it before taking heavy doses
of aspirin to get through the day. The
young couple with their baby, Reynold, had moved out of August’s parents’ home
on West Pacific to 557 West Colorado Avenue, across from their later home at
548 W. Colorado.
August sold the grocery
store on West Pacific to his partner, Matt Lahti, because he couldn’t work. Then he had surgery to remove both his
tonsils and his teeth, possible sources of the infection causing his arthritis. The arthritis subsided, and he wore false
teeth ever after.
But 1918 was another
bad year. In the spring August’s father
Andru died of miner’s consumption at age 58 after spending many years in the dusty
mines. At about the same time both
August and his former partner were fearing the draft, and Lahti wasn’t
successful in managing the store. He
left town in the spring with all the money in the safe, as well as a large diamond,
telling August to try to collect on the money owed to the store by local
people.
While closing out the store,
August also took a job as bookkeeper at the Black Bear Mining Company, where
his father had owned shares. The mine’s
portal stood about a mile above Ingram Falls in a small basin, and August
commuted up to the mill located at the falls.
He walked east to the Black Bear tram on the mountainside above the mill
and then rode the platform up to Ingram.
In the fall of
1918, however, August came down with the flu and had to stay in a bedroom that
Serena was told not to enter. She passed
his food through the doorway. His uncle
Henry Kangas died in Telluride in the epidemic, only 40 years old. Then in November Serena’s friend Olga Ostrom
died of the flu contracted when she went to the American Legion Hospital in
Telluride to give birth. As a result, the
doctor told Serena that she had to have her baby at home.
The family hired a registered nurse from
Durango to deliver the baby and live in for ten days afterward, caring for
Serena and Evelyn. Serena’s mother,
Martha Neeley Brown, also came to Telluride for a month to take care of Serena
and her babies.
Later Serena’s brother
Byron visited, having returned from the trenches in France. He had been drafted in 1917, and it took
several years for him to heal from the shell shock of the Great War.
The day before
Evelyn was born, Serena and August’s good friends Martin and Ann Wenger had their
first baby, Martin Jr. They had “stood up” with Serena and Gus at their wedding
in 1916; the couple’s parents were only informed of the marriage later.
Thus we have the
cast of characters, beginning with 24-year-old Serena, her mother and the hired
nurse. Did Serena have contractions in the morning and realize her baby would
be born on that day? Did August stay
home from work, or did he walk up to Ingram Falls to keep the books at the
Black Bear? Had he completely recovered
from the flu and from the earlier arthritis, or was he still coughing and feeling
pain in his joints?
Years later remembering
when Evelyn’s little brother Elbert was born, Serena commented that for August,
“His business was always more important than his home. He had to tend to the store; me having a baby
was nothing.” Evelyn’s arrival meant
that at age 26 he was now supporting Serena and two children, and his mother
had recently been widowed. Yet his
grocery store was closed and within two years the Black Bear Mine would go out
of business and be bought by the Smuggler-Union Mining Company, which had its
own bookkeepers. He was given a job in
the mill, but by 1922 he decided to buy back the store on West Pacific and
return to the grocery business.
Was there a
snowstorm that week, or was it sunny and cold with a spectacular view of the
snow-capped mountains surrounding Telluride?
At least the weather permitted Grandma Brown to travel from Mancos over
Lizard Head Pass to Telluride. And was
two-year-old Reynold running around the house as his mother went through labor
and birth? His other grandmother, Minnie
Gustafson, was living near Cedaredge, Colorado, with her brother Jakob Kangas.
We don’t know
the details of what transpired that day, but we do know that both mother and
baby survived. Evelyn cried a lot,
however, and didn’t do well on her mother’s milk, in contrast to little Marty,
the strong healthy baby born to Ann Wenger.
The doctor advised using Eagle Brand condensed milk for the baby, but Evelyn
refused that too. Serena reported, “I
finally worked out my own formula, by studying baby feeding in the one magazine
I took at that time.”
After the birth of
her fourth child in six years, she worked out her own birth control too:
abstinence. The year was 1923, and women
now had the vote. Serena was not going
to have a baby every two years for the next twenty years. August came home later in the evenings, often
after playing card games with friends in the back of the store after
closing.
In the story of
Evelyn’s birth we see a young family that has been battered by illness and
threatened by World War I. It’s a
working-class family perilously close to financial ruin, trying to gain a
foothold in the middle class.
This baby
will earn the first college degree in either her mother or her father’s family,
and she will have a life-long interest in health and nursing. Another world war will dominate the third
decade of her life and postpone her child-bearing years.
She will escape the differing social value
assigned to “tending the store” vs. “having a baby” by somehow doing both
during the 1950s—producing four babies and a career in nursing. She will pass the difficult issues of
work-home balance on to her children.
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Evelyn with her book
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Though epidemics and wars will still threaten their lives, her
high-spirited perseverance will live on in family legend.
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| Evelyn Frances, about six years old |
Note: Historical facts from Adventures of a Telluride Native by Evelyn Gustafson Eggebroten (Boulder: Johnson Printing, 1999), pages 84-88.
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| A. R. Gustafson with Herschel, Elbert, Evelyn and Reynold |
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| Kermit Eggebroten, Evelyn, and their first child, Anne |
