EMMA

Emma Potter was born in 1898 to James Potter and Rose, nee Jeanerette in Clayton New York.

Both James and Rose had relatives in Gananoque Ontario which was across the St. Lawrence River. Rose's father and mother had moved to a farm north of Gananoque before her marriage to James Potter as they felt the farming was better in Canada. James's brothers all lived in Gan as it was familiar called and had taken up Canadian citizenship. Fred had a garage there and was also the local firechief. Farming was at best a tenuous affair in that upstate community and Gananoque was a thriving Mill town with the principal industry being the Gananoque Shovel Works, a drop forge steel plant that also forged scythes, rakes, axes and other tools. James obtained employment in a hames and snath factory as he was an adept shaper of hickory.

Emma was the second eldest of their three children. Glen was born in 1900 and Kenneth in 1896. Kenneth was employed at the shovel factory in Gananoque until his death.

It was during the first World War in 1915 when Glen went to kingston 18 miles away and joined the RCA or Royal Canadian Artillery although he was only 15 years old at the time.

He often brought his barracks mates home to meet his sister Emma who was very popular with them.

In 1916 Glen was sent overseas and Emma became pregnant. Her parents were aghast and she was sheltered by an Aunt who adopted the child a girl at birth. Her parents wouldn't let her come home and instead shipped her out west to be with her uncle Joe in Red Deer Alberta.

Life on the poor hard scrabble farm in Alberta soon became unbearable to Emma and she took a job with Mrs Dorseys Hotel and boarding house in Lacombe where she met Mrs Dorsey's son Clyde who was working as a mechanic in Medicine Hat but came home occasionally. She got pregnant with our brother Bob and eloped with Clyde to Bow Island where they were married. Bob was born in March of 1918.

In 1919 Clyde who had never relenquished his American citizenship decided to go back to Spokane Washington where his mother owned the house at 1509 west Fairview. She had purchased it before she had gone to Canada and had leased it to a soldier and his family from Fort George Wright. Both Clyde and Emma were US citizens. Clyde having been born in Yakima Washington in 1896 and Emma of course in Clayton New York in 1898.

Clyde soon landed a job with the SP&S Railroad in Spokane working in their shops as an armature winder. Being of a mechanical bent he soon invented a machine to wind the armatures. The railroad claimed "Shop Rights" to his invention because he had perfected it in their shop on their time and using their materials. In lieu of compensation however they gave him a continental railroad pass good for he and his family in both Canada and the USA.They also gave him an outside job as a lineman.

Emma was pregnant with me at the time and decided to use the pass to go back home to Gananoque and visit her parents for the first time since they had exiled her five years earlier. While on her visit there I was born accidentally in Canada 6 weeks before she returned to the States. She named me after my two grand-fathers James and Lawrence.

In 1925 after two more children were born, Sarah and Ruth both girls , Clyde moved to a farm in Colbert that he rented to be near a forty acres of timber his father had purchased years before for twenty-five cents per acre from the Northern Pacific Railroad. His farming endeavour ended in the fall however as he was successful in his civil service exams and was called to duty as a Spokane fireman.

It was Prohibition time in the states and Clyde who like his father enjoyed gambling often spent many hours off-duty in the card parlors in Spokane. Both he and Emma became friendly with the other couples on the 1500 block of west Fairview. The couples they were the most friendly with were Gail Pitner a city policeman and his wife Ernestine and her twin sister Bernadine and her husband Lee Sprague who was a taxi driver in the winter but had a farm in Valley ford Washington which he was trying to build up during the summer.

Both couples drank and Lee sprague used to tip off his brother-in-law to bootleggers he met in his taxi business. Gail and my father both having badges would raid the bootleggers flashing their badges and confiscating their stock for their own use.

Brother Dick was born in 1926 and Sarah and I were sent out to a neighboring farm couple in Colbert and Ruth was taken to Canada by Grandmother Dorsey during one of her annual visits.

We weren't aware of it but our parents were both drinking heavily and contemplating divorce. By this time they were brewing their own beer and fighting and bickering constantly until it came to the point when my mother took baby Dick with her and got a job in Yakima. When she had settled into a basement apartment she had my father bring the other children to live with her. It wasn't long before he persuaded her to return to Spokane on his promise of reform. He had rented the house out and we had to stay with some friends from Canada while he stayed at the firehouse. When the lease was up we all returned to the Fairview ave house.

Although Clyde never struck Emma to my knowledge, he did administer some severe beatings to brother Bob. Clyde was one of those types who were always sure that they could overcome any adversity through sheer physical and intellectual force and he couldn't understand Bob's chronic bed-wetting which persisted in spite of or perhaps because of the physical abuse.

Clyde was an intelligent man who never attended Highschool but was well read and knowledgable.

In 1929 I was severely burned. After my recovery in 1930 Emma could stand no more of the constant verbal abuse of her and the physical abuse of Bob and they decided to split up. She would take Bob and the youngest Dick with her and Sarah and I would be left in Clydes care. Ruth having been already adopted by Grandma Dorsey in Canada.

She went to Williston North Dakota to work as a housekeeper for a man that she evidently had met in Spokane. She was plagued with vericose veins from being over weight and from bearing 6 children in nine years and she was only a short time in Williston until she was crippled with inflammatory rheumatism to the point where she could no longer work. She was in correspondence with Clyde and with Sarah and me.

Clyde had put Sarah and me out on the farm with his friends the Zeiments who had taken care of us when Dick was born but when school started he brought us back to Spokane and boarded Sarah with some friends named Flathers and me with a Spokane streetcar conductor and his wife the Aronsons.

She wrote to Clyde to see if she could come to a reconcilliation. He went to Williston but evidently the reconcilliation didn't go the way she expected even though that had a brief conjugal relationship which resulted in yet another pregnancy and a birth which would not be discovered by any family members until twenty-one years later. She was now pregnant and unable to work and she was faced with the decision that all single women were faced with in the depression era when relief for families which at best was pitifully small and that was to take any kind of a housekeeping job without salary and the expectation of sexual favors in exchange for a roof over her head and food for her children.

After the birth of her child Denise, she gave the baby to a caring neighbour along with a letter to the baby telling her that her biological father was Clyde Dorsey and that he was a fireman in Spokane Washington.

Bob had run away while she was in Williston and had ended up in the Montana State Training School for Boys in Miles City. Before Denise was born she phoned Clyde collect and asked him to take Dick. He agreed and she put Dick on a bus for Spokane. Clyde had taken up with a woman by the name of Hilda Skeels who was the wife of George Skeels a prominent baseball player in the triple A league and she had moved into the house at 1509 West Fairview with her son George and two daughters Lois and Tina. She had agreed to take care of me and in fact I had been living at her house for two weeks before she moved over to Fairview and I was with Clyde when he met the bus that Dick came home on.

Hilda didn't last too long but she did become noted in the coterie that came over to the fairview house to drink beer as the woman that put her bathwater in the brew. At least that is what they accused her of doing when the first batch she brewed had curly hairs and toe-nails in it.

What broke them up was her eldest daughter Tina who was streetwalking. Clyde became enamored of her and one day Hilda caught them having sex together. After Hilda left Clyde had a succession of housekeepers for Dick and I and all of them occupied his bed. In those early depression days there were no jobs available to women and no such thing as Aid to Dependent Children and women were forced into a sexual liaison with any man that had a job and offered a roof over their head.

Clyde at the same time was pursuing Emma's and his old friend Bernie and persuaded her to leave her husband Lee Sprague and come with her two children Elmer and Bobby to live in the Fairview house. She did and was very motherly to Dick and I and we were quite glad when they both received their divorce decrees and decided to go to Idaho to be married.

They were newly married when Bob wrote a plaintive letter to Clyde asking him to please take him out of the Boys School as they would parole him to his father, otherwise he would have to serve out his sentence which was until he was twenty-one years old. Bernie persuaded him to write the Montana authorities and soon Bob was a part of the house-hold.

Bob started in to Highschool at John Rogers High a newly opened school in Spokane and had a chemical laboratory in the attic where he slept. He was a whiz in school but he still had the same old fault of wetting the bed. Bernie's son Bob whom we called "Little Bob" to distinguish the two, was also a copious bed-wetter. Bernie could cope with both of them but Clyde reverted to his old ways and was abusive to both boys, but more so to his own son and he would beat him unmercifully.

He took to drinking heavily on his days off. He worked 48hrs on and 48hrs off, and He became almost paranoid. He got enamored with the Watchtower Society which are now the Jehova's Witnesses and soon he was giving us all bizarre punishments like putting me into a dark closet to read the Bible. Bob could take no more of this and ran away from home again. He was fifteen but a big boy for his age and he went to Seattle where he got a few shipping berths and when ashore stayed at the "Seaman's Institute".

Clyde was glad to see Big Bob gone and to keep the peace Bernie persuaded Lee her ex-husband to take the two boys with him. He agreed to take Elmer but he didn't think his new wife would take to Bobby. Bobby was now the bone of contention between Clyde and Bernie.

Meanwhile Emma had taken a number of housekeeping jobs in Minot ND and in Glendon Montana all with men who wanted more than housekeepers and all with the implied promise of marriage if the liaison worked out. It of course never worked out and she moved on to a new opportunity. She finally arrived in Great Falls Montana and met Jack Gross who promised to marry her and to take her new baby Dallas.

At the same time Sarah had written to her and asked to be with her as she was being sexually abused by old Mr, Flathers.

About this time I too was running away from the Clyde-Bernie house- hold, as the tension and the erratic behavior of Clyde frightened me. I went to Seattle where I met Bob as I was selling newspapers and staying in a flophouse down on Yesler Way. Bob told me he would get us both train fare to Great Falls to be with Mama and like a sucker I fell for it. I gave him my total savings which was about fifteen dollars and he rehearsed me on what I was to say to the Travelers Aid Lady when he reported to her that I was broke and wanted to be with my Mother. He said he would hold the money and when I had told her that my big brother wanted to go too he would give it back when we got to Montana.

He went over to the Travelers Aid while I set in the RR Depot and talked to the woman. Looking over and pointing to me. She nodded her head and seemed to be agreeing with him, then he walked out the door. After a long wait a man came in and talked to the lady then both came over to me and asked me if my name was Jimmy. I told them it was and they said my Father was looking for me and had instructed the juvenile authorities to pick me up. When I told them I was with my brother Bob and that he was going with me to Montana they informed me that it was he that had turned me in.

They put me in the Mercer Island juvenile Detention Home for the night and the next day a case worker was taking an epeleptic retarded boy to the home for the retarded in Medical Lake and agreed to take me on to Spokane. In Spokane I was put in the Juvenile Detention Home for about a week when they had a hearing for my case at which both Bernie and Clyde attended. The judge looked at my record of running away and asked me if I would prefer going home or to go to the Parental School. I told him I would prefer the parental School so he sent me there for an indefinite term but ordered Clyde to pay 20 dollars per month board.

The Parental school was run by a couple named McCall. Both were school teachers by profession and they had a one room shool with grades up to grade eight for 24 boys. 4 older boys worked in the dairy barn and on the farm which helped support the school. The farm was run by a young man named Earl. All 28 boys slept upstairs in the main dormitory and the dormitory was run by a cook-housekeeper. I was in the 6th grade but Mr McCall terminated my schooling when I goofed off in school. He gave me the task of running the laundry room and firing the wood-burning furnace in the dormitory. I ran away from the school in February and bummed my way to Montana.

Mama had taken Sarah in with her and Jack Gross and baby Dallas and as they didn't have room for me she got me a job in the Rainbow Hotel in Great Falls where she worked part time. It paid me room and board and 2 dollars per week for washing pots and pans and glasses and silver-ware.

I thought the CCC's sounded pretty good from Bob's description so I went in and was sent to GNP 15 in Glacier National Park at Belton Montana. Sarah was going to Highschool and Jack and Dallas and Mom and Sarah had moved into a warehouse adjacent to the old Brewery. Jack had gotten some WPA work but it only amounted to 8 days per month at fifty cents per hour.

Jack wasn't really such a bad guy. He had been in a prisoner of war camp in Kalispel after being captured by the Americans in a machine gun nest he was manning for the German Army. He was a conscript and happy to be captured and he liked the prisoner of war camp so much that after the war he emigrated to Montana. He was a good natured though stolid German.

A Beer distributor by the name of Dolly (A knick-name and I've forgotten what his real name was.) was using the old Brewery for a warehouse and he gave Jack occaisional work. Seeing that Jack was reliable he soon had him driving and distributing Grain Belt and Great Falls Beer.

Sarah had grown into a huge girl with a manly figure. Broad shoulders and she wore her blonde hair cut short like a boy. At that time she had to walk past the "Cribs" on her way to school and the girls in the windows and on the steps used to try to flirt with her thinking she was a young boy.

They prospered and mom got a hotel on a lease purchase plan that was on the other side of Wood street from the Cribs. Jack was doing well at the distributing and often got Sarah to help him load the truck. She was an incredibly strong girl and whether he persuaded her to leave school and help him on the route I don't know, but she did and all his customers used to tell stories about how she carried full kegs of beer in and set them up for the draft taps.

I left the CCC's and stopped at the Hotel to pick up my cheques which though assigned to Mom she had agreed to keep for me. Every thing seemed happy and serene in the Gross household and they were prospering.

A year later I stopped in again and when I inquired at the Hotel they told me that Jack was in the prison at Deerlodge and that mom was on the dole and was living in the gulch. When I got there she was living with a young girl and she had a baby naamed Jack. She said that Sarah had gotten pregnant from Jack while at the same time she was pregnant. Sarah had had written to Clyde about her plight and he had come over from Spokane,

Clyde had Jack arrested on a statutory rape charge and he got 1 to 15 years in the Pen. Clyde took Sarah back to Spokane and shortly after her baby was born (She named it Norma Jean) she died.

Mama suspected that she may have suffered physical abuse at Clydes hand but there is no way of knowing this.

Bernie left Clyde and years later when I questioned her about it when I was visiting she and her husband in Idaho she said she would rather not talk about it as it was in the past.

The young girl living with Mama had picked up a couple of National Guardsmen who were camped outside Helena and they came often to the house. Mama got occaisional work at the Japanese gardeners and got some for me too. I persuaded her to sell her furniture and buy a car. A 1928 Plymouth for 90 dollars as I said I knew where we could both get work at a Hop farm in Yakima. She did and I got the two National Guardsmen to teach me how to drive it.

We started out from Helena with Dallas and the baby Jack and the car made it to Yakima. The Hops weren't ready for picking as yet but the owner gave us a tent with a stove in it. I scrounged for vegetables and captured some chickens that came to the tent door. I went out at night and stole a few rabbits from backyard pens so we ate.

Then the owner moved us into one of the little row houses he had and gave us free potatoes. We sold the Plymouth for junk.

A couple of kids my own age and older moved into the next cabin and I made friends with the youngest. They had a 1929 model a roadster and had gotten a few gigs playing in taverns. It was on one of these gigs that the youngest fell in with a Woman who had lost her son. He had built a cottage on her place while he was an architectual student and she offered it rent free to him. His friend wouldn't share it with him so he asked me if I would. I said sure so I left Mama and Dallas and baby Jack at the Hop farm and moved in.

I saw Mama one more time after this. She said she had a job housekeeping in the valley for an old couple who would take them in. She got my friend to take them there in the Model A. She said too that she had met a man named Ed Blackburn who wanted to take her and the kids and that she was thinking it over as an alternative if the job with the couple didn't pan out.

Meanwhile Clyde had retired from the Fire Department in 1950 and moved to Mentone California to be with his mother Grandma Sarah Dorsey. He wasn't there long when he died unexpectedly at the age of 54.

Meanwhile the girl that Mama had given to the couple in North Dakotah had turned 21 and her foster father had died leaving her a small insurance cheque. The foster mother had moved to Washington and knowing that she had brothers in the State and fearful that she might accidentaly meet one of them and fall in love she disclosed the letter to her and told her about her real father.

Denice decided to go to Spokane and meet him but when she got there she was told that he had retired and moved to Mentone. By the time she got to Mentone he had died and was buried so she never did get to meet him. She then went to Gananoque and stayed awhile with her maternal grandmother Rose Potter and met her cousins then back to Seattle where she met Bob and me.

Denice lived with us for awhile in Seattle in between marriages and Theresa kept Cindy and Tony. She looked in vain for her mother but all I could tell her was that I heard she married Blackburn. I traveled with her to Farmer Washington and to Yakima but neither gave us a lead to her whereabouts.

Then in 1966 Emma had evidently seen a Robert Dorsey and decided to look him up to see if he were her son. He was and of course the rest of us got to see her again. If she was surprised when Denice turned up too she didn't show it and they became good friends, Mother and daughter.

Emma had borne nine children. One in Gananoque, five by Clyde and a sixth Denice which she said was Clyde's, one by an unknown father, Dallas and one by Jack Gross. She had taken care of all of them the best way she could given the times. The Great Depression. She was a strong resolute woman who was always good-matured and forebearing no matter how dire her circumstances and I for one am proud to call her Mother

Emma had nine children by her first two husbands. They were Robert Dorsey (Deceased at), Jim Dorsey (79) Sarah Dorsey (1922-1938), Ruth Dorsey (76),Dick Dorsey (74), Denise Dorsey (1929-1978),Dallas Blackburn (66),and Jack Gross (62)

Dallas (Blackburn)