Conversation Between Dwight and Russell M. Blood August 1992 (Continued)

I got my Social Security number on 12/12/36, so it must have been the winter of 1936-37 when I stayed at Brasher's wash house.  Drove into Cody. (Not sure what this comment means).  The mice and bedbugs were bad, I set 12 traps and listened to them snap.

Fall 1937: Louise started school.  I made cutouts (western silhouette scenes cut on scroll saw from walnut or other plywood), and made small inlays.  The year Louise was born (1931) I worked at the ranch (Dewey Riddle Ranch in Sunlight above Cody).

After I worked at the ranch, Dewey gave me an old team of horses and a light rig to go back to Penrose.  I stopped at John Nielson's (don't know who or where) and stayed overnight, cut across Sand Coulee, stayed at Oscar's (Uncle Oscar House) in Ralston, then to Penrose.  Took the horses to Grandpa's (Grandpa Wasden who lived nearby in Penrose).  The horses had sore shoulders.  In the spring, I traded the roadster (Mom's prize Model A roadster she had bought with her teaching money before marriage), team, light rig for a payment on the Penrose place (bought from Maude Moody).

We got married on December 24 1930 and went to Denver; we came back to Penrose and Louise was born in Billings.  Mother (Minnie) stayed at the folks (her parents, the Wasdens); went to Billings when Louise was born.  I went back to the ranch (Sunlight) for the summer); I was just doing chores.  I remodeled an old school house at Mary Riddle's; I took the roof off, raised it two logs high, put in new windows and a new roof, chinked the cracks with plaster.  Mother came and stayed with Mary Riddle until I was through. (To be continued).  (Someone: figure out how far it was to drive a team of old horses from Sunlight to Penrose and sketch out a rough map, showing Sand Coulee).

Listening to Past Good Times

Thank you, Ann.  When Ann sent us the CDs of so many family treasures, including recordings of past family get-togethers at Mother and Daddy's home on 93rd, I decided to put the recordings of family conversations on my ipod.  I had forgotten about them, but had the play-back on random this morning, and came across the riotous conversation that took place after we had our family pictures taken on August 1, 1980.  We were evidently doing dishes, because the constant clink of the tableware is in the background.  What a joy to listen to the banter and laughter that took place at such a serious time.  What a wonderful memory to re-live.  If you haven't listened to yours for a while, find it and enjoy!  Onward and upward.

Memorial Day 2013

Memorial Day 2013.  I always remember that when we were still home, Mother cut a bouquet of lilacs and iris, if either were blooming and took them to the cemetery.  I don't ever remember going with them.  One of the difficulties for us in honoring our parents on Memorial Day is that we all live so far away and some of us aren't quite as mobile as we used to be.  So, much as we would like to go to the cemetery and have a moment of solitude and thankfulness for their lives, the best we can do is to offer these photos so we can all remember.  

We also honor all who have served and those who have lost their lives in the service of our country on this Memorial Day.  We give special thanks to those in our extended families who have served or who are now serving in the military.  We all welcome Ross back to civilian life, we thank Cliff (Kim's husband) for his various tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we pray for Aaron's (Kim and Cliff's son) safety (Afghanistan) while he is gone.  Please add others in your comments I have omitted.

And so we pause these brief moments and look to the distant clouds and the tiny sliver of Heart Mountain in the distance and we remember the good life and the good years we had in Penrose with our parents.  We forever remain grateful to them for learning how to work, how to survive, and how to persevere just by following their example.  We were, and are, truly blessed.

We remember the Wasdens: Cindy, Minnie (Mother) Grandpa Wasden, Grandma Wasden, Orvil, and Elna (who became our stepmother in Dad's last years).

To Mom and Dad, we say thank you once again for your hard work, exemplary lives, and for the love that still binds those of us who are left together.  We may not all have too long left in mortality, but not a day goes by that I don't think of home, of Dad, of Mom, of my Wasden grandparents.  We honor all of you on this Memorial Day of 2013.  

Siblings of Russell Blood

Kathryn Blood - a half sister

Paul Blood - a half brother.

Views of Heart Mountain

These grain storage elevators were built a few years ago just a short distance from where the Blood family lived just west of Ralston about a mile during the years 1941-1944.  Heart mountain was the ever-present icon of the landscape.

Elizabeth and Judy 1981 Olympia

Ladies and baby: Diana, Louise, Liz 1981 Olympia

Uncle Brooks and Elizabeth, Olympia 1981

Aunts and an Uncle: Olympia 1981

Lucinda and Norman Sorensen, Elna House, Sofe Johnson

Have 30 years gone by since I took these pictures?

Ann, 1981

Two Russells Visiting Fort Collins Cemetery Where Dad's Father Roscoe is Buried 1981

The New and Improved Penrose Blood Family Blog

Liz called me this morning to titter, teehee, giggle and make fun of me when she could see I was struggling to fine tune the blog a bit.  Reminded me of when Dad was trying to milk Old Red, the meanest cow I remember.  I got rid of the books for Ann, and I didn't like them either.  I adjusted the column widths so stuff doesn't slop over in the two main columns.  Now we have a poppy or is it a pansy, it has whiskers.  I do not want any comments, complaints, bloviations, or other verbiage, thoughts, or expressions for at least six weeks.  I hate blogger.  Too many limitations on what you can do.  I've thought about moving the blog over either to Typepad or Wordpress, but we seem to have adjusted to blogger so I'd better let well enough alone.

We do have some work to do.  I would suggest we focus a bit on telling short stories and anecdotes and reproducing documents and such in addition to just commenting on the blog posts, though the latter comments are important.  We need to encourage family members who are members of the extended Blood family to feel at home on this blog.  I also encourage readers who visit our blog who are not members of our family to share their experiences in developing family blogs and the benefits their families have received from their blogs.  Finally, we need a major streamlining of the categories to make it easier to archive similar material.  I hope that in the next year or two, heaven willing, that we can compile one or a series of family printed books from archived material.  I hereby resign from fiddling with the blog.  If I could learn HTML I could likely post our own photo on the side backgrounds and maybe in the next life I will be shown by some kindly young person how to do that.

Thank you all for your patience with me and for your continued interest and participation in this blog.  I think we have all found a home here and that we have been blessed with closer contact than we would ever have experienced without Penrose Mornings.  The future of this blog is limited only by the ingenuity of our participants and readers.  I would like to think we would be smart enough to take family blogging and family history blogging to a new and higher level that would not only benefit us, but also be of help to countless others who are considering starting such a blog, or who have started one and then seen it languish.  The benefits are simply too great, the family ties too important, and the heritage to be passed on too valuable and fleeting, to not take this project seriously.  Cheers, dmb

Something of interest: Our humble blog is going to be listed on GeneaBloggers!

From: Thomas MacEntee

Date: November 7, 2010 4:58:34 AM MST
To: dmblood@mac.com

Subject: Your blog has been added to the list at GeneaBloggers
Hello there!

You’ve got a great genealogy blog – Penrose Mornings: Blood Family Blog - and we’ve added it to the list of over 1,300 genealogy blogs at GeneaBloggers (http://www.geneabloggers.com/).

We will announce your blog in our weekly New Genealogy Blogs on Saturday, November 13, 1010. In the meantime, please visit the About (http://www.geneabloggers.com/about/) section at GeneaBloggers to learn how you can display your GeneaBloggers badge on your blog and also how you can participate in activities such as the Daily Blogging Themes.

If you need technical assistance, please check out Bootcamp for GeneaBloggers (http://fbbootcamp.blogspot.com).

Cheers

Thomas MacEntee
Founder, GeneaBloggers
http://www.geneabloggers.com/
+1 (773) 661-3080

Digitizing and Preserving Our Family Archives

Watching the flow of information and photos this past year on Penrose Mornings, and looking through the boxes of stuff I have, have prompted me to have an inspiration which would involve putting everyone else to work except me.  We each have photos, papers, documents, journals, bits and pieces, keepsake dishes and pieces of furniture, inlaid pictures, and other memorabilia.  When we pass on, so to speak, no guarantee exists that much or any of this material will be preserved in a way that will mean anything to anyone.  With the opportunity to digitize and make a digital museum and library of what we have, we can give future generations an opportunity to connect with their past.  I've only talked to Liz and Ann about this project thus far. My phone went dead so haven't yet talked to everyone.  Apologies.

What we have come up with is that we need to categorize the stuff we have: letters, journals, writings, artifacts like dishes and pieces of furniture, pictures, and whatever else.  Ann suggest we have several categories: the first category would be the materials of most immediate interest to family.  The second category would be historical material like the writings of Uncle David about the Penrose Canal, Garland, and other such memorabilia.  These writings will vanish when the current generation goes, likely, and yet so much information of historical value is contained in them that we need to save it.  Third category would be other materials such as Grandpa Wasden's journals.

We would need to establish minimal quality control requirements for scanning in terms of dpi resolution and similar standards.  Ann suggests that the minimal output should be CDs of the material each of us has and that these be made available to others.  From there, people could print whatever they wanted to print.  Some material, like Uncle David's writings, should be made available to the Park County Historical Society and the Wyoming State Historical Library.  Liz has volunteered under my direction to contact the Wasden family and see what the proper thing to do is about these valuable writings.

For now, these suggestions are only the beginning.  We need to discuss all of the possibilities open to us.  We earnestly solicit ideas from any of our readers who have undertaken or thought about undertaking compilation of a family historical archive that goes beyond photos and family tree documents.  Now, I am going to rest because it gives me a headache thinking about all of the work that everyone else is going to do.  But I think we could make a contribution to our descendants and to ourselves by systematically preserving our heritage and our legacy.  I think this is what we are supposed to do.

When We Graduated in 1953

Velna and I were married December 22 1953 in the Salt Lake Temple.  Velna had a job and therefore could make payments on her engagement ring.  Plus she saved up enough to pay for the baby she was carrying here to be born in Bozeman MT that November while I took it easy studying for a master's degree in agricultural economics 18 hours a day.  How could we have known on this rare summer day in Laramie Wyoming?

Velna Graduates from the University of Wyoming in 1968

Nineteen Sixty Eight. Fifteen years after I graduated from the University of Wyoming. Velna receives her bachelor's degree in elementary education with honors from the University of Wyoming after taking courses at Penn State, Colorado State, U of Wyoming, and working while I piled up two Master's degrees and a Ph.D. and she accumulated four of her five children.  Talk about perseverance.  Mother received her bachelor's degree in 1957, I think, after years of correspondence courses, summer school, late night study and course completion after the milking was done and while she existed by herself in a lonely teacherage at Valley in South Fork above Cody for a long winter.  We do persevere, don't we?

U of Wyo Graduation 1953

May 1953.  Four years of struggle. I was 20 years old, acquired a wife and a college degree.  I cleaned every building on the UW campus during my four years, some times holding down three or four part-time jobs.  Went to work at the Half-Acre gym at 11:00 p.m. after intramurals, then 12 blocks down town to the phone company and then back to my room on 12th st. by 2:00 a.m., then up for class.  I was chewed out many times for nodding off in class.  Notwithstanding, it didn't seem like a big deal.  I received no help, but always felt I could survive another week, another month.  I loved school.  Mother wrote to me every week for four years. Sometimes her pen drifted off the page when she fell asleep when writing.  She earned the degree every bit as much as I did. It was always sad that Dad had to stay home with the cows. Velna made my accomplishment possible in many ways.  She was 16 when I went to Laramie, 19 when we married.  She was the bright light that saved me. Along with her mother's cooking.  We never really worried whether we could make it.  We left for the University of Michigan three years later with a three year old, a two-week old, no job, no money, no place to stay.  And we were bold enough to think we could make it.  So we finished nearly eight years of college without borrowing a cent.  I just think it was the Wasden and Blood family mettle, absorbed in the genes and never mentioned openly.  You just did what you had to do and then figured out the next step.  And then you did it.  Now I am just simply lazy.  But I really find it hard to believe that Velna and I were so naive that we thought we could do what we did. We had many guardian angels along the way.  I don't know how I got so distracted posting this photo, taken by the west door of the LDS Institute, our home away from home for dozens of poor Mormon kids just like me who figured out how to get through college and went on to become physicians, dentists, professors, teachers, scientists, ranchers, and mothers.  We were a mutual support group, finding each other jobs, bolstering each other up when needed, and we became a tightly knit family. We all survived.  I never intended to be so wordy, but I might as well go ahead and post it. 

Graduation from the University of Wyoming Janitor Crew 1953

It Wasn't Penrose

The thing about going out to Olympia to see Mom and Dad was . . .it wasn't Penrose.

Memorial Day Memories

Dear Mom and Dad and Grandma and Grandpa, We're all sorry we can't be there on this Memorial Day with armloads of purple iris and lilacs to pay tribute to your resting place in person, but we all live too far away and we each are getting closer to the end of our own earthly existence.  But we can each tell you that not a day goes by that we don't think about you, and miss you, and have questions to ask you, because, especially you, Mom, were so darn stingy with information that we wanted to know and still want to know.  We are all continually amazed as we gain new insights each year about the magnitude of the sacrifices you made and the perseverance you unwaveringly pursued to bless each of us and make our lives possible and to endow us with the qualities that we each possess.  We owe you more than we can ever repay.  Though we can't be there today, we are all sentimental cry babies and cherish all of the sights and sounds and voices and winter snows and summer flowers and hayfields and admonishments to go to bed at 8:30 even when we were 30 years old.  We thank Burchell and Ruby for bringing flowers to your graves each Memorial Day, as close as we can get to being there ourselves.  But we can tell you that we six Blood kids that you left behind have stuck together and loved and supported one another through all of these years, united in our devotion to each other and to our parents and grandparents.  See you next year.  Love, Louise, Dwight, Elizabeth, Judy, Ann, and Steve