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Mildred Gunkel of Coyle Oklahoma was not my grandmother, but it was through no fault of her own. She was the right age to have a thirty-something grandson like myself, she came from a rural Oklahoma background like my two honest blood grandmothers, and we were after all kinfolk. Similar to them, physically she had the dumpling plumpness of middle-age and didn’t care. Unlike them, her sharp blue-eyed glance had a quaver in it that seemed to me to reflect a wobble in her mental gyroscope since one of the first things she announced was that all of us with Olson blood were descended from the Queen of Sweden. And that included the actress Ann Margaret, who was born in Sweden and whose father’s name was Olson. For years I thought the old lady was silly. Now, 30 years later, I have begun to think Mrs. Gunkel may have been a prophet.
Later the vital records would tell me that I was mistaken about her age--she was born in 1920, and so would have been two years younger than my dad. Which didn’t make her old. In those days of large families, my dad had an aunt who was born the same day he was. To me, however, a late comer born in 1946, the most important thing was my tape-recorder and the fact that Mildred Gunkel liked to talk about herself and her family.
Nobody in my immediate family knew her, she was never part of my father’s endless tales of Lincoln County, but she knew all of them. Mrs. Gunkel’s mother, Marie Hoskins, who was living with her at the time of my visits, certainly did. The first time she saw me in the house, as she was about to climb the stairs, she took one look at me and said “You’re one of those Poundses, kin to Hank and them.” This would have been about 1990, one year before Mrs. Hoskins’ death at the age of eighty-seven, and her arrow had hit the bull right in the eye. Hank Pounds indeed was next to my granddad in age, as I reconstruct the ladder they made in 1906.
Writing this now, thirty years after the event, I wish I’d shown some affection for Mrs. Gunkel--I think she would have liked that. But the person my heart leaped to was Mrs. Hoskins, her mother, whom I met only the one time on the stairway. I liked her because she recognized me and because, at the same time, it felt like I was meeting a ghost. A smiling and friendly ghost, careful with her footing on the stairs, but still a ghost from a gone, gone time.
She remembered my great uncle Hank Pounds, who was about ten years older than she. As a thirteen-year-old teenager, Hank had stayed with his Olson grandparents after his mother died and his father abandoned the children kids for the dominoes and the pool hall. In 1906 Marie Hoskins would have been only two years old, but Hank stayed with the Olsons for some years, long enough for her to remember him and long enough for a teenager like him to learn to imitate the Olsons’ Swedish language and their English brogue born from it.
The human brain is a curious thing in its memory functions. We belong to the great mammal clan, thus like them we are eminently social creatures, except we are even more so. A grown pig (or cow or dog) doesn’t remember its parents, and the parents don’t remember the piglet either. A human child once grown, however, usually remembers everyone from its childhood that it knew with any intimacy. And that retentiveness of human memory remains, no matter how old we grow. One effect of this brain wiring is that we tend to relate to others whom we meet affectionately along predetermined family lines. A person two generations older than ourselves, we see as our grandmother or granddad. One generation older, as our father or mother, and the same generation as ourselves, they are our brothers and sisters.
All of that is a long-winded way of saying why it was easy for me to see Mrs. Gunkel as my grandmother, and why I was delighted to hear that her mother remembered my great uncle Hank. We were putting together the elements of a family--our family--and I was the prodigal son, the one who’d strayed so far away he was now living in Japan but who nonetheless was welcome home, though he didn’t know a soul who lived there.
An additional word about names, simplifying the Swedish names as an aid to the reader. Mrs. Gunkel’s grandmother was Margreta “Maggie” Andersson, who was the sister of my great grandmother Celia Andersson Pounds. As children the two sisters had had been brought from Sweden along with their brother Hans Andersson to Missouri. Their mother was Bertha Andersson (1851-1923), a widow who had arrived in the United States with her three children in 1882. Bertha married Oliver Olson in Maysville, Missouri, in 1883, about eight years before they moved to Oklahoma.
It was Bertha and her Swedish husband Oliver Olson that Mrs. Gunkel told me the best stories about. She called Bertha “Grandma.”
Grandma Olson was tall. When I was a kid I thought she was real tall, about six foot tall, but I imagine she was about five foot eight, like me. She had green eyes, like me. She had kind of a sallow complexion. Her hair was darker than blonde. They say it darkened after she came to the U.S. and started workin outdoors. She always wore them ole long black dresses, Good Lord! with the sleeves clear down to here and the neck up to here. They thought they was cool in the summertime, and she got out there and plowed. That was the only time you ever saw her with her dress short. She'd take and tie it up cause she'd have to wash the hem of it if she didn't that night.
Grandma Bertha Olson, 1851-1923
They had those warmin ovens, put heated bricks and rocks in 'em. She'd cook on Saturday all day. She wouldn't cook a thing on Sunday. On Sunday boy we didn't do nothin like that. I can still hear her--she ran her words together--she'd say, "Have to take care of the shattle. They's an impatient lot." You had to milk 'em mornin and night. But she wouldn't gather an egg out of the chicken house on Sunday. But boy about 4 o'clock Monday morning she was out there gettin them eggs!
Once my daddy and mother was over there, maybe when they first got married, for Sunday dinner, and Mother jumped up to do the dishes. Grandma Olson got so mad at her! You didn't do a dish in that house on Sunday. She had all this stuff in the warmin oven and the table already set on Saturday night--and the plates turned upside down. That's what always amazed me. The silverware and the napkins were put on the table the night before, and the plates were turned upside down. They was ready for breakfast the next morning.
Grandma Olson went to church on Sunday. They went over there to Olivet. Grandpa'd go with her but not all the time. When they was feudin he wouldn't go. And smoke a pipe! Grandma had a big ole corncob pipe about that big, had this great long stem on it. It fascinated me cause I was just a kid. She didn't smoke all day long, but she'd light that thing up at night, sit there by the fireplace--I don't care if it was summer--and rock in that rockin chair. The air'd be blue in that front room. She wouldn't let it go out until it was time to go to bed. She was makin up for what she'd missed out all day out there workin in the fields.
She was strong too. Once they were drivin in the wagon and the wheel fell off, one of those iron wheels. She held the wagon up while Grandpa put it back on. She was an amazing woman. That skirt got in her way and she tied it up under her knees, and boy she could run faster than I could.
I never will forget one thing. I liked to go barefoot. Mama went and stopped there one time when we was goin over at Merrick. I was barefooted, dressed up in a white dress and barefooted. Grandma gave Mama the money and said, "Put shoes on that child before you let her step out on the streets of that town!" So she got me a pair of shoes and put on me. Grandma said, "Don't you ever let her go to town without shoes on!" And we lived within a block of Main Street of Tryon. First house we lived in. So help me, I carried my shoes around in the hip pocket of my overalls, and when I got on Main Street I sat down and put my shoes on. I never went to town without my shoes on, cause Grandma Olson said not to. I remembered that all my life. There I was, 9, 10 years old, and I'd sit down there at the church--we lived a block away, then Main Street was right there, and the church was on the corner of the same block we lived on--sat down on the curb and put my shoes on and go on down town. Then I'd take them off when I got back to the church and put 'em in the hip pocket of my overalls [laughs].
When Grandma died, she said she wanted to be placed in the casket with her hands in position so she'd be holding a book. Then I was supposed to put in the New Testament. So I put it into her hands. I was only about five years old, and what I remember is how cold her hands were.
The force of Grandma Olson’s character was such that there were people living, seventy years after her death, who still remembered her vividly. One was Rosa Cicle, who married one of Bertha's grandsons, Arley Jenkins. In 1992 Mrs. Cicle wrote:
Everybody loved Grandma Olson. She was a dear lady. She lived in Sweden. She and her husband always talked of coming to America to educate their children. Then he died in Sweden, so she brought the three children on to America and they located in Missouri. She met Oliver Olson and they married. He had wanted to live in Oklahoma, so they settled a few miles south of Perkins. He had a stroke so was handicapped, but he still got around.
Later she adds,
Grandma Olson was a wonderful woman. She didn't have a phone but when she would take her cream and eggs to Merrick she would use their phone to call Arley's mother. They [would talk] in their old-time language. People would love to hear Grandma Olson talk. Everybody loved her, but they couldn't talk Sweed like she and her daughter.
Mrs. Gunkel had an additional tale to tell about Grandma Olson, this time involving a physical family heirloom that I suspect had something to do with Mrs. Gunkel’s belief that Grandma was related to the Queen of Sweden and to Ann Margaret. This is the story, part fairy tale, surely,of the little red chest. Here we must first backpedal to remember that one of Grandma’s three children was a girl called Maggie. This girl married John Beecher Jenkins, and they had a boy named Andrew Jenkins but always known by his friends as “Dutch.” The red chest was supposed to be handed down from generation to generation to a boy named Andrew, so Dutch inherited it.
Dutch Jenkins had a sister named Agnes, who was a school teacher in New York City, never married, and who developed an interest in family history. She changed her name to Jaqueline and was called Jack. She did some research on the Olson side of the family, though what became of her findings, reported to have linked poor Oklahoma farmers with the Swedish crown, is not known. She also corresponded with her cousin Hank Pounds, who knew the Olsons better than any of the Poundses, because of the years he stayed with them after the 1906 death of his mother.
One matter that Hank and Jack corresponded about was the little red chest brought from Sweden by Grandma Bertha. She gave the chest to Margaret, so it is now owned by the Jenkins side of the family. It was the tradition that it be given to the male in each generation who bore the name Andrew. Grandma Olson didn’t have a boy named Andrew, so her grandson Andrew “Dutch” Jenkins inherited the chest.
Hank Pounds had a son named Andrew, and that may have been one reason why he was inquiring about the chest. After Dutch Jenkins died in 1964, the chest went to his daughter Mrs. Gunkel, who had the chest when I met her in 1990. She said it was very small, maybe half the size of a cigar box. "It's a red box, little thing, the red chippin off and everything. It's really not very pretty. One leg comes off. But there's not a nail in it." And inside the lid is written "1686 Sweden." Mrs. Gunkel has a son named Andrew, who in turn has a son named Andrew, to whom the chest will in due turn pass.
Returning now from the Queen of Sweden to the Oklahoma farmstead, the Olsons, like other successful homesteaders, worked hard, and Bertha performed a man's labor in the fields. Oliver at some time in his life had had a stroke, which hindered him from working as strenuously as he might have, and perhaps caused Bertha to have to spend more time in the fields.
Many years later in Lincoln County OK, Rosa Jenkins, who had married a nephew of Bertha Olson, remembered Bertha telling how when she and her husband were in Sweden they would talk of coming to America to educate their children. This man's name was Andersson, according to Rosa, and he died in Sweden, leaving Bertha to carry out the dream on her own. One other point of interest regarding Bertha is a tradition which says she came to Maysville Missouri because she had a sister living there. I have found no trace of the sister, but some such family connection must have existed. Why else would a widow with three small children have crossed the Atlantic Ocean and half a great continent to come to a place hardly even on the map?
Oliver and Bertha must have worked hard, for their Homestead Proof shows that by June 1900 the family had seventy acres under cultivation. Located in the dry upland plain of Iowa Township, their land would not have been easy to work. Oliver listed the farm's improvements in detail: "4 rooms & porch, frame [house], Barn 14 x 16, corn crib 8 x 18, hen house 10 x 14, 2 wells, farm all fenced [with] 3 wire fence, 100 fruit trees, [valued at] $800." The document was testified to by two neighbors, Augustus Beliel and John T. Dilley. (An earlier "declaration of intent to make final proof" from May of the same year carries the signatures of four neighbors, Augustus Beliel, John T. Dilley, F. H. Wright, and T. E. Hively. Like Oliver Olson, all these men gave their home as Partridge, a stop between Lowe and Merrick on the railway. (The Chicago and Rock Island Railroad built a small spur line from Guthrie to Chandler in 1902. During its short existence it went by the nicknames: Doodle Bug, Peavine, and Old Huldie.)
Railroads are important enough to warrant a paragraph. This is my dad Archie Pounds (1918-2004) speaking, about 1990 on a visit to Oak Grove:
There's something up there you ought to know. I got it from Daddy--too old for me. But that corner there, what a lot of people call the Goble corner, just south of the Gobles' place there, was called Lowe in the early days. Daddy always called it Lowe. There was a saw mill there and some kind of little store there. The old Katy railroad that run to Carney--you could flag a train down right there with a red handkerchief or a blue handkerchief like they wore around their necks in them days. It came right down through Chandler Park, and crossed 66 Highway right there at Sherman's ol' salvage yard. That's the old Katy railroad that went on into Carney, and I believe it went on to Guthrie. It ran so slow, Daddy said, they'd even stop and get a farmer's cow or horse off the track. They wouldn't run over it. But you could flag it down and ride to Chandler for a dime, or you could be there in Chandler and catch it and ride out to Lowe. (Pounds 207)
This is the railroad that ran through Merrick and Partridge, shown on the 1907 Atlas of Payne County. But to return to the Olson homestead.
In 1990 the four-room frame house with its porch was still standing on the farm, though a little changed in appearance by added rooms and gray shingle siding. But there was
another house on the homestead, for Oliver and Bertha appear to have had a stormy marriage. When they were getting along well, they lived together in the four-room frame house, which stood on the western half of the farm. When they were not getting along, which seems to have been the case periodically, Oliver lived to himself in another house (since disappeared) which stood on the east eighty.
Mrs. Gunkel remembers this arrangement:
Yes, Grandma and Grandpa Olson had separate houses. She had the west and he had the east. They set quite a ways apart, about two city blocks. The pump sat up on that other hill. Grandpa's house was a green house, painted green. Oh I hated the color--Daddy painted that a real dark green.
Every time Dad would go down there and come back--he'd ride his horse down there to see about them--when I was just a little bitty thing, I can remember that--and he'd come back home and say, "Well, the Olsons is at it again. Grandma's livin in her house, and Grandpa's livin in his." So we knew they was feudin or fightin. Then Grandpa Olson'd go take her flowers, go take her a bouquet and make her some candy and take it over and go court her. Then he'd be over and livin with her again [laughs].
Then Dad'd be back over there maybe in a week or two, and he'd say, "Well Grandpa's back over with Grandma." He took her some flowers or candy, made her some chocolate candy and stuff. He'd make a box of candy and take her.
Since Mrs. Gunkel was born in 1920 and the the Olsons died in 1923 and 1924, her memories must have been acquired at an early age, and the Olsons’ courtship been a very late flowering of their romance.
The Olson's living arrangement was formalized in a legal contract drawn up August 17, 1903, but, as if after ripe deliberation, not filed at the courthouse until December 28, 1906. The contract, which divided the property down to the last chicken, reads in part:
First: The party of the first part [Oliver] is to have as his own exclusive separate property the east half....And the party of the second part [Bertha] is to have as her own separate property the west half....
Second: The contracting parties divide their horses as follows: The first party is to have Dolly, Prince and Betty and the second party is to have Frank, Rock and the colt.
Third: Each of the contracting parties here is to have one half of the crops and the rent due on all of the above described land for the year of 1903 and each is to pay one half of the following indebtedness to it:
$25.00 and interest to Morlin at Perkins
$67.00 and interest to Hicks at Chandler
The present store bill at Rankins in Perkins
The present store bill at St...[illegible] in Perkins
Two notes at the Perkins state bank given by first party... $10.00 and interest to the Payne county bank at Perkins $20.00 and interest to Mrs. Crater, at Perkins
$15.00 and interest to G. Z. Page
$20.00 for grape vines
Fourth: The parties hereto agree to divide their farming implements as follows: second party is to have the spring wagon and the riding plow and first party is to have the new farm wagon and the rest of the farming implements except the harrow. The harrow to be used in common on the premises.
Fifth: The parties hereto agree to divide their remaining live stock as follows: First party takes the first pick of one half the cattle and second party takes the first pick of one half the hogs.
Sixth: Parties hereto divide their harnesses as follows: First party takes the new harness and second party takes the old harness.
Seventh: The parties hereto agree to divide their household goods and other property not herein before mentioned as follows: The said household goods to be divided equally, it being agree that second party shall have the stove in such division and if the parties hereto cannot agree upon the division of the household goods each may select an arbitrator and if said two arbitrators cannot agree they may select a third arbitrator and the third so selected shall divide the household goods between these two parties, endeavoring to divide the same equally according to their value.
It is further agreed that neither party shall interfere with the property and possessions of the other and that neither party shall keep or permit anyone objectionable to the other to interfere with such possessions, and that if the parties hereto live together as husband and wife at any time each shall bear their half of the living expenses while so living together out of their own separate property.
It is further agreed that the first party may live with the second party on the premises of the second party so long as the second party may desire at least until July 1st 1904 but that the second party shall have the right at any time after July 1st 1904 to order the first party with his share of personal property from her said 80 acres of land and premises herein given her and the second party shall not thereby by entitled to any further property, support, alimony, or any damages or further compensation or support from the first party.
It being the intention of the contracting parties hereto to hold their property separate and distinct, each to support themselves, each to waive any claim or demand against the other for support, maintenance, or alimony upon any contingency whatever, each to waive and relinquish their right to inheritance in and to the property which is hereby conveyed or which may be hereafter acquired by the other.
I have given this contract at length because it gives us insight into the circumstances, the everyday lives, and above all the characters of the old couple. First, it suggests someone in the family had a taste for law, for husband-wife feuds do not usually end in a formal contract. In fact, Oliver owned law books and had frequent recourse to the county court house for various transactions, including finally his will. Two of his books were owned by Mrs. Gunkel: Gustave G. Fenneberg's Simplified Law, published in Oklahoma City in 1912; and Samuel D. Hirsch's Business Law, published in Chicago in the same year. The first book appears to have been the more useful to him, for it's opening chapter is called "Husband and Wife" and Chapter 24 is "Wills." Neither of the books had a mark in it when I saw them in 1993, but the chapter on wills in Simplified Law was dog-eared. Perhaps Oliver studied it when he wrote his own will in 1923.
A second and perhaps stronger impression the contract makes concerns the independence and force of Bertha's character, for not only does she relinquish any economic claims which she might make on Oliver, she seems equally determined to avoid any claims he might make on her. In the penultimate paragraph, the document also gives her the right--any time after July 1, 1904, which would probably be the completion date for the house on the east eighty--to send him packing. The contract reinforces the tradition that Oliver was a quiet man and no match for Bertha in either temper or staying power.
Mrs. Gunkel had this comment to make:
I don't remember as much about him as I do about Grandma. Course I was in the house with her more, and he was outside. To me, I was just a kid, he was just a real mild mannered man. And I couldn't figure whenever they come home and said they was feudin just what the fuss was all about, cause he didn't have much to say. . . . He was kinda meek, and she was so big. He wasn't as tall as she was. It was just about like Ma and Pa Kettle. Of course I wasn't around him as a lot--he was out in the fields--but he just seemed to me like a mild mannered henpecked man. She'd run right over him, and that's where the trouble came in.
Perhaps this is the place to emphasize what is already apparent, that the Olsons were both literate. In Bertha's case, we know that all of her life she received and read a Swedish newspaper. When her granddaughter Amanda and her husband Arley Smith would come for a visit, she would tease Arley by saying, "You want to read the newspaper?” and toss it to him. He would look at it, turning it every which way, but could not make any sense out of it, and she would laugh. In Oliver's case, we know he read law books, and his signature in the court house documents is the firm and regular signature of a practiced hand. In Sweden in the nineteenth century literacy was wider spread than in the United States, as it remains to this day. Early figures are hard to come by, but wide-spread literacy did not become a public concern in the United States until World War I, when it was found that 30 percent of the recruits were unable to take the written intelligence test.
Oliver Olson's ease with the written language was one reason for his many trips to Chandler to have legal documents drawn up. To learn more I had to leave Mrs. Gunkel and go do my own research. Old legal records were my first resource, and from these I learned that like most southwestern farmers of the era Oliver was in debt. I list the principal transactions in Lincoln County, though the meaning of some of them is unclear:
Apr. 1901, the homestead patent.
Aug. 1903, Oliver sold Bertha the east eighty for $1000 and
Bertha sold Oliver the west eighty for $1000.
Oct. 7, 1903, Oliver gave a quit claim deed to Richard Barnes for
$1 on his eighty.
Oct. 19, 1903, Oliver and Bertha gave quit claim deeds to Richard
Barnes on both eighties.
Dec. 1903, Oliver and Bertha deeded the east eighty to Carrie Olson
of Chicago for "love and affection and sum of 5 dollars," and Oliver deeded the west eighty to Bertha and entailed it to Bertha’s three children, Celia Pounds, Maggie Jenkins, and Hans Olson.
1904-1912: several mortgages with the Union National Bank taken out on the west eighty, paid off, and taken out again.
Feb. 1912, Union National Bank foreclosed on the west eighty. Mar. 1921, Oliver gave a 5 year oil lease for $400.
Jun. 1921, Oliver had the 1903 deed to Carrie Olson set aside. Mar. 1923, Oliver deeded the east eighty to Arley Jenkins in return for board, clothing, and medical attention.
What do these transactions say? Times were hard, the Olsons more often than not owed a four to five hundred dollar mortgage to the Union National Bank (which was always ready to lend money to farmers whose land they would hope to grab), and in 1912 the bank foreclosed. But the mortgage was on the west eighty only. The east eighty was kept out of hock by the deed to Carrie Olson (“For one dollar and affection”). After the death of Bertha in February 1923, Oliver revoked the deed to Carrie Olson and gave the property to his wife's nephew in return for board and care. In January 1924, less than a year later, he would follow his wife to the grave.
In August of 1923, six months after Bertha's death, Oliver went to Tryon and made out a will:
I Oliver Olson of Lincoln County, Oklahoma, being about 71 years of age and of sound and disposing mind and memory, do make publish and declare this my last will and testament, hereby revoking and annulling any and all will or wills by me made heretofore.
First: My will is that my just debts and funeral expenses by paid as soon after my decease as shall be found convenient.
Second: My will is that the monument that I have selected be placed at my grave and paid for out of my estate.
As I have already made arrangements for the disposal of my real property, my will is that the rest of my personal property of whatsoever kind of nature be divided equally between my nephews Andrew Olson and Carl Olson of Maysville, Missouri.
I appoint M. C. Sloan to be executor of this my last will and testament.
In testimony whereof, I have set my hand to this my last will and testament at Tryon, Oklahoma, this 28th day of August 1923.
The just debts mentioned in the first clause were $147 to S. Barclay for funeral expenses; to Chandler Marble Works $40 for a stone; to Ed B. Ambler, $2.69 for medicine; to L. G. Houston, $40 for personal care; to the Court Clerk, $40 for court costs; to Robert Creager, $5.50 for cemetery lots; to M. C. Sloan, $35 for administrator's fee; and to M. A. Cox, $35 for attorney's fee. In addition, 84 cents was charged against the estate for the telegram to the heirs, Andrew and Carl Olson.
In Maysville, Missouri, I found a copy of the letter sent to the heirs from M. A. Cox. It was among the papers given to me by Gene Newkirk, himself related to some of the Olson families around Maysville. Dated April 14, 1926, it is addressed to Mr. Carl Olson and reads:
Dear Sir:
Oliver Olson died in Lincoln County, Oklahoma, and I had charge of the probating of his will. Under this will you would be entitled to a cash balance, the exact amount of which will be determined by the Court records. We have made many attempts to locate you but have been unsuccessful. If this letter reaches you communicate with me at once.
Yours very truly, [signed] M. A. Cox
The cash balance which the two nephews divided between them after the subtraction of $356.03 in debts was about $400.
The gravestone that Oliver bought still stands in the Olivet Cemetery, on the west side of the section line that divides Lincoln County from Payne. A handsome three-foot marble slab mounted with a square cross and sitting on a one-foot pedestal, it is the twin of his wife's in the lot immediately to the north, except that from hers the cross has been broken off. Both give the full name, birth and death date, and the place of origin.
For Oliver: Werland Gunnarskog, Sweden. For Bertha: Hansingland, Sweden. Her inscription alone includes a final benediction: "at rest." But the visitor to Olivet Cemetery who views these twin stones that sit on the east side of the lot along the road cannot help but wonder what rest is provided by the space between them. They occupy separate lots. It is as though the neighboring but separate residences Bertha and Oliver had kept in life had worked so well that even in death they wanted to maintain this careful distance.
As for Mrs. Gunkel, in 1990 she had seven years’ life left to her and would be buried in Tryon, the town where her Grandma Olson made her put on her shoes. Before Mrs. Gunkel’s death, life had a hard blow to deal her, but posthumously fate was kinder. The hard blow was the loss of her grandson Christopher Andrew Conley in 1994, when our over-militarized and over-zealous police in Glencoe shot and killed him for trespassing in a museum library after hours.
The little red chest, one would think, would now have to go to a different Andrew, but in fact it remained in the Conley family. Vicky Conley, Mrs. Gunkel’s daughter-in-law (wife of Clarence Andrew Conley) wrote my sister in September 2012, “You won’t believe this but we do have the Andrew box. Clarence, we call him Andy, did not get any of his personal things but for some reason we got that little box. I think no one wanted it or Leroy [Gunkel] could not sell it.”
What made this information surprising is that the last my sister and I had heard Leroy Gunkel was selling his diseased wife’s heirlooms and throwing away what he couldn’t sell. Among the treasures he trashed were Oliver Olson’s law books, mentioned above, a vandal’s act that made me feel a little sick, and I understood why Mrs. Gunkel had dropped hints to me that Leroy was not a likable person. In my book, a man who has no feeling for family heirlooms is a man without a soul.
Nonetheless, it should rejoice the posthumous heart of Mildred Gunkel, the grandmotherly teller of Olson tales, to know that the little red chest still has a home. Another in the long line of Andrews has claimed his heritage. It should have given Mrs. Gunkel a smile--maybe even one brilliant as Ann Margaret’s.
Sources
Pounds, Wayne. North of Deep Fork, South of the Cimarron: The Story of a Farm Family, 1891-1941. 2nd Edition. CreateSpace eStore, 2011.
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