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. 

The Impossible Dream

71 years of marriage and adventure

by Liv Stecker 

When Frank Johnson, Jr. got a flat tire in front of the little house in Renton, Washington, he had no idea about the lifelong adventure that was about to begin. He and his buddy, Jimmy Wendell, a “lady killer” by Frank’s standards, were more than a little delighted to be stranded near a house full of pretty high school girls, as he recalls, but one in particular caught his eye when he asked to use their phone. Kathleen Kells was fresh out of high school, and the way she tells the story it was love at first sight. Franks and “Teenie” (Kathleen) were an item right off. “Jimmy Wendell showed up with Frank at our house, and after that, we were dating!” She laughs, as if it were the most natural thing ever. 

Kathleen was one of six children born to the only doctor in Kirkland at the time, who was killed in a car accident before she turned 3. The large family went from the comfortable lifestyle to borderline poverty almost overnight. “When I look back over it, I wouldn’t change a thing, which is amazing to me.” Teenie muses. Though they were poor, she said her family was happy and loved each other, and they didn’t seem to notice what they had to do without. Her upbringing prepared her for the series of adventures that she would follow Frank through. 

The attack at Pearl Harbor happened that year, and  Frank enlisted in the US Navy as World War II began to escalate. Teenie joined the war effort at Boeing and went to work as a real life Rosie the Riveter, building airplanes in a largely female workforce. “I thought it was a fun thing to do, because most of the men were gone, so it was a lot of women.” She reminisces. For three and a half years, Frank was deployed as a sonar technician on the USS Halford, DD-480, a destroyer that was launched in 1942 and spent a large part of war time in the Pacific Theater. 

On Valentine’s Day, 1945, the Halford was patrolling Saipan Harbor in a smoke screen laid down for protection from a kamikaze attack,“There were airplanes coming from all directions,” Frank recalls, and in the confusion the Halford lost contact with a freighter and accidentally rammed the large ship, collapsing the bow of the destroyer like an accordion. The Halford was dry docked nearby for emergency repairs to the bow, and then sent back to the naval base at Vallejo, in California. Frank made the most of his shore leave at the end of March, 1945, by making his way up to Seattle to find Teenie and marry her. 

The couple was married at a church in the University District in Seattle where Kathleen was living at the time, and then went to Vancouver, BC for a brief honeymoon. “I had made about six thousand dollars playing poker on board the ship,” Frank tells the story of their return to California, “That was a lot of money back then.” He took Teenie, her three sisters and an aunt to the San Francisco area where they stayed for six weeks in quonset hut housing while they waited for his ship repairs to finish. Nearly every night, the group went to San Francisco where they danced and went to clubs and enjoyed the nightlife of the big city. Both Frank and Teenie smile at the memory of what they call their “real honeymoon”, with a bevy of female family members in tow. In May of that year, the Halford set out to sea again with Frank on board, and Teenie went back to Boeing, where she worked until December, when their first daughter was born. 

Frank completed his naval service at the end of 1945 and went to work in Seattle for the 13th Naval District doing clerical work. Before long, he grew restless in his job, and took a new position with the Seattle Police Department in the booking office. A curious fellow, always looking for adventure, Frank liked this job a little better than the Naval District: “I met all the interesting people who decided to make problems for society.” He chuckles. The Johnsons bought a little white house in the Fremont district, but Frank was working nights for the Police Department, and Teenie didn’t like having him gone all night. He left that job and went to work for Texaco, where he remained for 15 years, during which time they had two more children. 

Their youngest son, Justin, was born 11 years after the second - a surprise that Teenie says was the highlight of her life. “I thought we were all done! But he was a special gift that came along.” She calls the unexpected baby her favorite gift from God. When Justin was very young, Frank and Teenie realized that the potential for moving up with Texaco was limited, so they sold everything they owned in the Seattle area and bought a hunting guide company that provided horse packing for trips into the mountains west of Yakima. “We inherited a truck, put everything into it and headed to the mountains.” Frank says.They moved into a primitive house in the woods and left the city to pursue one of Frank’s passions. 

Every spare minute, Frank had spent hunting or fishing, often with the kids in tow, and taking on the outfitting company was a chance to do what he loved for a living. The hosted eight day pack trips along the Wonderland Trail at Mt. Rainier, one of which Teenie joined him for. “I had never even been on a horse!” she says, “I got to go on the trip and some of those women were so good - they helped me learn how to start a fire and cook food!” She got a taste of the rugged life that her husband and children loved. The Johnsons built a new house and shortly afterward, the makeshift cabin they had been living in burnt to the ground. 

The company offered different types of guiding and packing for outdoor sportsmen, and during one trip, Frank had to take over guiding a mountaineering group on Mt. Adams without time to take the large multi-purpose truck and horse trailer back to the ranch. Teenie was stuck driving the cumbersome outfit down the winding switchbacks of Mt. Adams with a 2 speed rear end and complicated gear shifting system in the truck that the family had inherited. “She was a good sport,” Frank laughs, “to go along with it.” Teenie says there was no choice, and even though she had no experience operating the truck or negotiating the trailer around the hairpin turns, it had to be done. 

The Johnsons operated the packing company,  Indian Creek Corral, for 8 years, while Frank worked at White Pass ski resort as a lift operator in the winter season. One night coming down the ski hill, Frank said he was in too much of a hurry and broke both of the bones in his lower leg, ending his career in the packing business after several months in a cast. When he tried to return to the trail with his horses in a walking cast, he injured his knee severely clearing brush for a pack train. He was helicoptered out of the wilderness and his teenage daughter and son had to guide the train of pack “dudes” back out. Frank says the injury ultimately made a court reporter out of him, as he and Teenie realized that it was time for a career change. 

They moved to California, and after a brief try working at a thoroughbred horse ranch, Kathleen saw an ad in the newspaper for court reporter training. Frank enrolled for a year of training in Los Angeles and went straight to work in that area as a reporter until he found an open position in John Day, Oregon, working with a Judge who served six counties. For eight years he worked in rural eastern Oregon, traveling with the judge to small towns around the country. In the meantime, Frank invested in a Mooney Mark 21 airplane and learned how to fly it. 

As their youngest son Justin became involved in high school sports, Frank realized he was gone so much that he was missing most of his kids major milestones while he traveled around the state. He took a new job in the Miami area, but they weren’t in Florida long before the whole family missed the western states, so they moved back, first to Boise, then back to John Day, the Monterey area of California, and eventually, back to Seattle. “I love Seattle the most, it was always home to me.” Says Teenie, who was happy to back in her childhood home. Frank acquired a sailboat during their time in Seattle, and learned to sail. Frank laughs about how good natured Kathleen was about his many hobbies and career changes. “She went along with everything!” and Kathleen says she wouldn’t change a thing. “I have never not wanted to do what he wanted to do - it just felt natural.” 

Frank retired in 1986 and for twenty years, the couple spent every winter together in Mexico, loading a boat on top of a truck canopy and pulling a 31 foot trailer down to the beaches of Mexico. For the first ten years they stayed near Guadalajara, and then they began spending winters on the Barra De Navidad, where Frank could deep sea fish to his heart’s content. 

In 2000, the couple moved to Kettle Falls to be near their youngest son and grandchildren. Still riding horses until last year when he suffered a fall that set him back, Frank and Teenie have remained as active as life would allow. Teenie often asks her son Justin, a talented musician, to perform her favorite song for her at his shows. “The Impossible Dream”, from the play Man of La Mancha, is a fitting theme for a couple who have spent more than 70 years chasing down their dreams together. Frank and Teenie will celebrate their 71st wedding anniversary in March - a landmark that seems as much like the impossible dream as anything these days. Through war times and peace, rich and poor, highs and lows, Frank and Teenie tell the story of more than seven decades of commitment, devotion and adventure together.