A Story worth telling…

Meet Mary Gifford

by Liv Stecker

In late August, 1924, Mary Anderson was born in Craig, Colorado. The fourth out of ten children to Carl and Ione Anderson. She was one of only two girls and a whole herd of strapping boys who helped their father work the family farm. As a small girl, Mary remembers going to school in the wintertime in Colorado in temperatures as low as forty below zero. They would ride horses to school, but when it was the coldest, she tells stories of her older brother using extreme measures to keep the kids warm: “he pulled us off the horse and used the reins to keep us moving” she laughs, to avoid freezing from lack of movement.

 After years in this extreme environment, her father Carl longed for a more temperate climate for farming, “Dad wanted a place he could grow vegetable and fruit”, Mary recollects. Carl was an ingenuitive self-starter, once building a splint for a cow with a broken leg. He built a large camper on the back of a truck, and when her youngest brother was six months old, the family piled and headed west. It took seven days in 1935 to make the trek across four states to get to Washington, where her father had been born. Along the way, Mary remembers that they had several flats. At the time, the solid rubber tires cost $7 to replace. When they camped at night, the oldest boys would sleep outside under the truck while the girls and their parents were stacked inside with all of their belongings. 

After they arrived in Washington, they camped in what is now the Chewelah city park for a month while her parents looked for property to buy. “We went floating down that little creek for our baths,” Mary reminisces. The Depression had dropped real estate values significantly, and the Andersons bought some land with an old house in the town of Gifford, where the family moved in after an infestation of bed bugs was routed. Soon Mr. Anderson had a large farm flourishing, with cows and pigs and the fruit orchard he had been longing for in cold Colorado. 

Mary and her siblings attended the Maude School, a few miles up the road from Gifford, where students from the surrounding area gathered for education. When she reached high school age, she transferred to Hunter’s High School, where she graduated on May 24th, 1943. 

Shortly after her graduation, Mary followed a friend from school to Spokane, where she got a job at Geiger Airfield, building airplanes for the war effort. Mary’s girlfriend was married to a boy in the army, and as he shipped out for service in World War II, the girls were put to work welding and riveting war planes. Mary remembers working high on top of the wings of large planes, scaling ladders with her assigned tool box that she was responsible for. “Before then, I always wore a dress, but we had to wear coveralls. That was the first time I wore slacks.” She says. Mary and her girlfriend shared an apartment on third street in Spokane, taking a segregated bus to the airfield for work. The work force on base was segregated, as well as the military personnel, “the white boys would march by, and after them, the black soldiers.” 

The wartime world was a contrast even to the struggles of the depression. Ration books were issued to citizens in the United States, granting them allotments of grocery staples like flour and sugar. Even if you had the ration stamps to allow you to purchase groceries, you still had to be able to afford the food, and for some families, even the most basic supplies weren’t in the budget. Mary’s family would glean bulk flour and sugar from the grocers when bags were damaged in transit. She tells a story of cookies that were delivered to the local grocery store, and the broken packages were shared with her and her siblings. Most of the food they ate was what they grew as a family. Carl and Ione grew delicious apples, Mary remembers her youngest brother sharing apples, a bite at a time, with a pet pig on the farm. 

During her employment at Geiger Field, Mary went back to Gifford where she married Roland Gifford on May 5th, 1944, the grandson of the town’s founder. Roland had enlisted in the army but was discharged for medical reasons before he was deployed. He drove a grocery truck from Gifford to Spokane, hauling 8 gallon milk cans and other foods from the farms in all kinds of weather. 

Mary and Roland moved to Colville where they lived when their daughter Marlene was born. Mary worked at Pinewood Terrace for a brief time. Shortly after her birth they built a house in Gifford and moved back to the their hometown, where two years later, Mary succeeded her mother-in-law as the local post mistress for the town of Gifford. The Giffords ran the post office out of their small house where Mary also raised their two children, while Roland continued the grocery and mail delivery, before he began logging. 

In addition to her own children, Mary took in her husband’s youngest brother for many years, raising him as her own. She was well equipped for her job as a mother, since most of her younger brothers considered her their “second mother.” Their home was not only the local post office, it also served as a grocery store and service station for a time, and Mary managed the whole thing, with children in tow. When her son Ron was little, he once went missing. Mary and her daughter searched for him and finally found him asleep on a pile of mail sacks under the counter of the post office. 

The Gifford’s house and post office was located on a busy intersection in Gifford, where Mary witnessed 22 accidents in the 60 years she lived there. She would frequently be the first one to the scene of the wreck, helping injured passengers. Often, drivers would cut the corner across her yard, leaving her to run a string along the far side of her lawn that her children and grandchildren were strictly forbidden to cross. One young grandson crossed the taboo line and Mary says that she “warmed his seat up” quite a bit. The trespass was never repeated. 

Mary also served as the first official bus driver for the Maude school. When her son was a youngster, she remembers slip-sliding backwards down a hill in the auto. Her son was making loud proclamations from the backseat, so Mary made him get out and wait by the side of the road for her to go up the hill and collect the students at the top. 

Mary served as postmaster in Gifford until her retirement in 1986. She was also a member of the Stranger Creek Grange and the Daisy-Gifford Homemakers Club for over 60 years. Active in the Church of God, Mary never missed a step in maximizing her role as a mother, a postmaster, a wife and a neighbor. She lost her husband Roland in 1997 after 53 years of marriage, but she remained in Gifford until 2010, when she moved to Colville to be closer to her children and grandchildren. Still a pert and sassy 91 year old, she uses her scooter to get around and walks her dog Dukey almost every day. 

A laid back and humble lady, Mary was insistent that her story wasn’t that interesting. In spite of her cross country move with a large family in the midst of the depression, her stint as a real-life Rosie The Riveter during the Great War, and six decades of community service, raising three generations of children, Mary was still unconvinced that there would be an audience for her experiences, but she dutifully saved photographs and souvenirs, documenting family history and events over the course of almost a hundred years. But Mary doesn’t know that she is a hero hailing from the Greatest Generation, characterized by service and sacrifice and the selfless mission of community building. For nearly a century, Mary has quietly been laying down the stepping stones of history, from Colorado to the little town of Gifford, and now in Colville, where she is a delight to everyone who knows her, and her life is definitely a story worth telling.