May 6, 1943

May 6, 1943

425 S. Cabrillo

San Pedro, Calif.

Dear father, mother and the folks at home,

It is rather early as I am writing this letter. The sunrise was nice and bright this morning and I guess that that may have had something to do with it — that is with my getting up early on my day off. Usually I like to loaf in bed if I feel that I do not really have to get up. Since it is sunshiny and bright so early in the day it probably will be quite warm this afternoon unless it clouds up around noon. This is a new phase of Calif weather that has occurred a number of times recently.

Your box of cookies arrived, safe and very sound, mama. I don’t think that a single cookie was damaged in the least. And are the scrumptious! Thank you so much for them. One night recently I dreamt that you were making grün (you know what I mean). I guess it was in anticipation of about 3 or 4 months from now. [This recipe for something called “gruetze” is very similar to the recipe for “gryn” that my mom used to make for my dad, from a recipe given her by my dad’s sister-in-law.  —LRS]

My work continues about as usual. However, some new stuff has been going on. 1000 lbs of catalytic-cracking catalyst are being made here. This is sort of interest[ing] since it involves things heretofore not done around here and also a number of new analyses that are fun to do. The work is being done mostly by the operator but the lab does the more involved analyses. As a result, Plant IX is down since it would be difficult to keep both Plants I and IX running and be making the catalyst at the same time.

Today is my day off and I go back to work tomorrow afternoon as operator. The catalyst has been about ½ made now so that by the time after this when I am again operator it should be completed. It really is more fun I think to work in the laboratory that as an operator. Lately some new things have some up in the laboratory and the work there is much less routine than in Plants I and IX. I think that eventually I would rather work in the lab. Zene said that it probably could be arranged sometime in the future.

Last Sunday I went with Pastor & Mrs. Wellington to Los Angeles to a meeting of the Southern District Luther League. We stayed for both the afternoon and evening services. The speaker was Wilton Bergstrand, executive director of the Augustana Synod Luther League and he certainly was a dynamic fellow. I guess he is a very suitable individual for such a position.

I also met some interesting people while I was there. Usually, as you probably realize, I don’t get around to talking to people I don’t know too readily but after lunch after the afternoon session I saw that if I didn’t find somebody to talk to, time would hang rather dull on my hands for awhile. So I started talking to a couple of fellows after some rather diffident hellos. After we got to talking it went fairly easily tho. One of them turned out to be a chemical engineer, who has been working for Shell Chemical Co since last May. The other was a civil engineer working for the U.S. engineer’s office in Los Angeles. It was quite interesting speaking to them.

Afterwards, thru them, I was introduced to several other people, including a geology graduate student at Cal. Tech., a senior in chemistry at the University of Southern Calif and to a number of other people who do I know not exactly what. One of them however was a Liljegren of some sort tho who hails from Arkansas and was a relative of Eleanor Renquist’s. There seemed, all in all, to be quite a number of coincidences coming up during the afternoon. I had a very enjoyable time thru out.

However by the time we got home (10 o’clock) I was pooked out. I had worked graveyards Sunday morning so that by then (at 10 o’clock Sunday night) I had had no sleep for 24 hours and as a result was getting rather sleepy. I slept like the proverbial log that night, altho even when I am not tired I usually do not have too much trouble sleeping.

I am sorry to hear that father has not been getting along so well according to Dr. Borgen. It is a good idea to start taking it easy. Working only in the afternoons should be a good idea I think. Twenty pound of liver seems all right (but an awful lot) and I should think it would perk up the red blood corpuscles considerably.

I received a letter from Vincent which I mean to answer today, but after I have had some breakfast, since when I finish this letter I am going down town and feed my mouth. I guess I will go to the bank too. I haven’t got around to cashing my last paycheck yet. When you are working days it is sometimes rather difficult to do.

I am thinking of trying to buy some sort of a car. I get tired of walking to the P.E. station and I also think I could get a better place to stay farther from the waterfront, and a car would remedy both of these situations. If I feel like it I’ll take a walk down Pacific to the car lots today. If the Ruml tax plan or some pay-as-you-go proposal is enacted I can take the money now being set aside for income tax next year for this purpose. Of course I still must make certain I have plenty to come home on but $100 should be enough for that.

Yesterday morning the P.E. car rain into a car while crossing Anaheim Boulevard. It ripped his back fender off and smashed the glass in his back windows. The jolt was not noticeable at all in the car but I’ll bet he felt it. it was a very silly thing for him to do. There were two trains at the crossing (it is double tracked) one north bound & one south bound. If the south bound had started up as it normally would have in a couple of seconds he would have been hit on both sides and something serious could have occurred.

I guess I will stop now. I shall include Vincent’s letter altho it may contain news you have already heard about.

With love

C.P.

The Knock Family

I should mention before I proceed further that there were two families with whom I had continuing though not frequent contact after I came to the Bay Area. One family was that of Mabel and Fritz Udden. Mabel had been one of the girls in the Knock family whom my mother had known in childhood. The Knock farmstead was located a milewest and perhaps ¼ mile south of the Peterson farmstead, on the usual route to Gowrie. My mother had often related how her early interest in flowers and gardening was fostered by Mabel who apparently at an early age was involved in this pastime.

There were perhaps half a dozen Knock children when the father of the family died suddenly. The family continued for awhile on the farm but eventually to facilitate the education of the children, Mrs. Knock sold the farm and bought a house in St. Peter, Minnesota, the site of Gustavus Adolphus College and Academy. Here her brood of children ended their way through high school and college.

At least a couple of her sons became Lutheran ministers, one of them being Gust Knock. He became the head pastor at one of the largest bellwether congregationss sof the Augustana Synod. He retired from that post in the late 1940s or early 1950s. A several of his childen were living in California he moved in retirement to the San Francisco area with his wife and for a time was the manager at a home fo the aged in Oakland. Later he left the job for complete retirement and they purchased a house in Oakland. While at the home for the aged, housing had been provided for them.

He and his wife were delightful people and I had occasional visits and meals with them, both when he was manager at the home for the aged and later on after he left there. I recall hearing him preach as a “fill-in” pastor at Bethany in Berkeley where I was then a member. His sermons were not intellectual but simply inspiring homilies.

After Jean and I were married (he was basically the pastor who married us, though the pastor of the church where the ceremony was held participated), we continued to see him and his wife occasionally, typically for some sort of supper meal.

Mabel and Fritz Udden also had moved to the Bay Area, probably after WWII and when I knew them they were living in the Hayward area. I recall being at their home for a supper meal not long after I had transferred north from Wilmington. As with the Gust Knocks I would see them occasionally and this contact continued after Jean and I were married. They also were congenial people though not perhaps as likable as the Gust Knocks.

Both families were dyed-in-the-wool adherents of the Christian faith as represented by the Lutherans. Though my beliefs were in transition and waning, I consequently had some twinges of conscience on the impresion I left with them that I was still of the same opinions and beliefs that they had. I still however found their simplistic view of life appealing. They were certainly untroubled by any deep-seated inspection of Christian dogma.

The Gust Knocks had four children, one of whom lived in the Bay Area. We got to know her also and still keep up a Christmas card contact with her; she now lives in Fresno. I haven’t seen her I believe since before we moved to Houston. A late insertion as I retype my original account of my life, she died a couple of years ago. She was close to ninety years of age and had been in poor health.

Road Trips

I overlooked discussing one aspect of my life in the late 1940s and that is the various car trips I was fortunate to be asked on, by Shell friends who had cars. The principal benefactors in this were Hugh Guthrie (whom I had known slightly at the university but who had become a good friend starting in Wilmington days and more so in San Francisco and Emeryville) and Bob Overcashier.

One trip I took with High there were just the two of us. He asked my to go along with him on a Christmas trip to visit his parents, who were living on a farm near Chehalis, Washington. Christmas Eve at Shell those days was only nominally a half day of work and even the morning was largely characterized by people roaming around, extending holiday greetings, etc. So Hugh and I left well before noon for the drive north.

We stopped briefly in Dunsmuir for something to eat at the home of a college friend of Hugh’s (then a dentist in this small northern California town). We then proceeded to drive all night, arriving at the home of Hugh’s parents early on Christmas day. Needless to say we went right to bed for some rest. I guess we took the road through Klamath Falls but I have no specific recollection that we did — I suspect that Hugh would not have attempted the route over Siskiyou Pass. [This was well before the interstate highway system existed.—LS] The trip was not without incident — somewhere near Klamath Falls we slipped off the road but fortunately someone came along and aided us to get back on the road.

I had completely forgotten about this until Hugh mentioned it when Jean and I had supper one evening with Hugh and Betty, his wife, during one of our visits to Palma’s. My recollection of the trip was one of snowy roads and lowering skies throughout the few days we stayed in Chehalis. One day Hugh, I and at least one other person nominally went duck-hunting (Hugh and I without hunting licenses). I guess I held a shotgun — I know I did not shoot it. In fact I don’t think any shots were fired at all. I was relieved when the excursion was over.

On another trip there were several cars and we visited the redwood parks south of Eureka. On this trip we had sleeping bags along and though we were not supposed to, slept on the ground beneath the towering trees. The cars were just driven off the road into positions where they were hidden from the road.

The two trips that Bob Overcashier invited me on were to Mt. Lassen park and up the Feather River Canyon. My vivid recollection of Lassen park was the high snow cuts (well above the car-top level) along the road; this was the case though it was the Fourth of July weekend. My other recollections of Lassen park and the Feather River Canyon are quite vague except for the scenic qualities of the areas. On both of these trip with Bob we were accompanied by a summertime employee at the Berkeley lab, whose name I no longer remember.

Jim Cosgrave

One of my first contacts outside of Shell on my arrival was my acquaintance Jim Cosgrave, who by then had left Shell and was working as a reporter or staff writer for the McGraw-Hill magazine Chemical Engineering. I remember him including me, along with some relatives from Fresno and I believe his parents, in attending a rodeo, or maybe some sort of stock show at the Cow Palace south of San Francisco. All during my years in the Bay area, both before and after I was married I kept in touch with him and it was only after the move to Houston that I lost touch.

Now that I think of it I believe that I visited him even after our move to Ashland. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that a Christmas card to him came back unclaimed. I kept thinking that I should try to reestablish contact with him since he had certainly played a significant role in my life. I also had the vague feeling that he may not have been all that interested in keeping up the contact. He had remained a bachelor as long as I still had contact with him and I recall him remarking on occasion that as his acquaintances were married and had children he tended to pass out of their lives.

I may have mentioned earlier that he was a spastic — although his affliction was at a rather low level and did not keep him from living an almost normal life. Later on he became a lawyer (I think by means of night classes, etc.) but I don’t know in what capacity he used his legal training.

I met his parents on several occasions (he was an only child). They were congenial enough though rather orthodox Presbyterians (particularly his father I think). When I knew them, they lived in one of the western areas of San Francisco and I recall visiting them there — even after we had one or more of our daughters. Jim’s father worked in YMCA management. He preceded his wife in death and Jim had the responsibility of arranging for his mother’s affairs in her later years. She had been a teacher in the public schools I believe.

I continued to think about him occasionally and one time when we were at Muriel’s I brought the subject up and that he had been a member of the California bar. Muriel immediately called up the bar to find out about him and found out that he had died several months previously. I regret that I did not look into his whereabouts sooner and try to get in touch with him.

Jim was a cigarette smoker. He once told me that he would have liked to smoke cigars but they were too strong for him. His idea of a very pleasurable experience was to sit across the table from a cigar-smoker and have him blow smoke in his direction. This comment on his part may have been the seed for my contention that tobacco users smoke because the like the smell of the smoke and that nicotine addiction is perhaps a minor contributing factor.

The Johnsons and the Wellingtons

I had some contact with the Johnsons after I left San Pedro. I think there was an exchange of Christmas cards for a few years, which eventually dwindled and then stopped. Once, a few years after I had left, I was in the Los Angeles area for some reason, maybe a technical meeting, I went down to San Pedro and visited them briefly. They had moved out of their home and were living in an apartment. Mr. Johnson was still alive but I believe he was more or less bed-ridden. Later on I found out in some way that their son-in-law had returned as pastor for the congregation. Whether he remained, or for how long, I don’t know but I seem to have heard that he died not long after. He was a large, rather overweight man, so he was a candidate for an early demise.

Mrs. Johnson in a way lives on in my life since we named our second daughter Palma. That she was given that name was only partly due to Mrs. Johnson having that name but when I hear Palma’s name it often generates thoughts of Mrs. Johnson in me.

The Wellingtons dropped out of my life after they transferred back to Manhattan, Kansas. They surfaced briefly several years ago when my brother Verner chanced to encounter Maynard at some church meeting and for some reason the conversation between them turned up the acquaintance between me and Wellington. There were a few letters between us, and perhaps a few Christmas cards, but these presently ceased.

I have tried to recall what Mrs. Wellington’s first name was but with my poor memory for names I haven’t succeeded. I remember them with a feeling of appreciation for the company they gave me in that period of my life when I was in a new and strange place with no persons that I had known before to provide social contact.

They were [two] of the few people I’ve run into in my life who gave names to their family cars. When I first knew them they had a coupe, dubbed Eloise — I think it was a Chrysler product. Later they traded for a secondhand Ford sedan, a pre-war car but in good condition. This they named Henrietta and indeed it was a comparatively lively sort of car. After the war was over he bought one of the new-styled Studebakers. It was green in color and it became the Green Hornet. When he traded it in for a new blue Studebaker, that one became the Blue-Tail Fly. I wonder if that name didn’t originate with Betty Guthrie, Hugh’s wife, who was from the south.