Ansel Greenley, WWI Vet, part 2

In a post from July, I wrote about my grandfather's service during World War I.  You can read it here: Ansel Greenley, WW I Veteran.  It looks like my grandfather was quite the ladies man in his day.  He kept a collection of letters from that time, most of them from women who wrote to him while he was in the service.

 One of the letters, dated Oct. 18, 1917, is written by Ansel to his mother.  (The link will take you to a copy of this letter.)  The other letters are to Ansel, from various women.  One of the women, Grace, is his girlfriend.  Another woman, Ella, also writes to him regularly.  From the letters I can tell that Grace, Ella and Ansel were all friends from Wagon Mound, New Mexcio.

In the letter he wrote to his mother, he is in San Franscico, waiting to hear what he will be doing next. In the letter, he fully expects to serve in the Navy four years.  His actual service was less than two years. (Enlisted June 1917 - discharge January 1919).  The war ended Nov. 1918. I wondered why he didn't have to serve his full four years, and found that the war department didn't want to keep such large military after the war ended - so they released men from their service early. His father's death in Sept. 1918 may have been a factor in his early release also.

One passage from his letter to his mother I found particularly interesting:

"I have not wrote to Grace for about a month guess she thinks it is time to get a new man. Well I hope she has good luck. I am getting along fine. I have found out which one of the girls thinks enough of me to write anyway. But then I never met a girl that would wait four years for me so I sould worry. Four years is a long time for the most of them. If it was not for getting a little mail once in a while I would quit them all except the one that writes the most and it might be best do do that anyway." (sic- I did some minor editing to assist readers.  Editing included adding punctuation and capitalization)

Grace Seely, Ansel's girl friend during war

From that quote you get the sense he is not completely committed to his girl friend, Grace.  Grace's letters are beautifully written. She is a teacher/principal in Wagon Mound.

Letter from Grace

In her letters it interesting to read about life was like in 1918. She writes of her father's purchase of their first car and visiting Ansel's family. In one letter, she is visiting her grandparents in Des Moines, Iowa.  Her grandfather, obviously wealthy, has a chauffeur that drives them around the countryside. She also talks of the noise from all the cars in the city. This romance lasted throughout the war and for awhile after Ansel returned home.  From other letters, I know they were no longer a couple in April of 1920 when Ansel meets Mary Maddux.

One other woman, Ella Kronig, writes regularly also. Her letters are harder to read (not as nice penmanship - and like my grandfather, has difficulty with spelling!) But her big personality comes through.  From her letters, Grace is quite jealous of Ella and the friendship she has with Ansel.  

There are also cards from other women included in this set of letters.  Two different women from New York send cards to Ansel.  And then there is this picture:

Ansel Greenley and unknown woman

There are about four pictures like this in my grandfather's stuff.  Different men are all photographed with this woman on their lap.  From other letters (from shipmates) it looks like they had these pictures taken after the war was over, and before they went home.

Memories of Grandma Greenley

The following memoir was written by my brother Dale Greenley, of his memories of our Grandmother Mary (Maddux) Greenley.  She was born near Montrose, Colorado in 1896, and died in Roseburg, Oregon in 1967.  He asked me to fact check his info.  And, because of the information in the trunks and other reserarch, I realize there is some incorrect information in his narrative. 

Dale talks of my grandmother's move to New Mexico from her childhood home in Colorado in 1920.  We now know that the Greenley's sold their home in New Mexico to Mary's brother, Edwin, and her father, Isreal Oliver Maddux.  She took with her, Eugene (age 8) and Lois (age 4), her half-siblings. 

I included pictures from the family photo album that connect with Dale's narrative.  One other thing that I noticed is in Dale's description of their trip to Oregon from Colorodo that it took several months.  Well, the dates on the photos indicate the trip only took a couple of weeks.  I am sure it felt like months to the travelers.

With the tragic events in Roseburg this week, I am feeling much love for my hometown. And much pride in our family's connection to this beautiful town.  I just emailed Dale, and he confirmed that one of the victims was a close friend.  Larry Levine was the writing instructor killed at Umpqua.  He and Dale were fellow fly fisherman.  Dale has been interviewed by several news sources the last two days.  He wrote that he was interviewed by AP, Yahoo, and the Washington Post.  I went to Yahoo and found the following:

Yahoo News - Larry Levine

Grandma Mary Greenley

Dale Greenley

     I can see her now, standing at the kitchen stove with a white dish towel draped over her head, hunched over a simmering pot of water containing menthol extract.  The pleasant, pungent aroma masked the normal faint skunk odor that permeated the house, but I could never understand how she could inhale those hot, humid fumes.  Grandma was a devout Adventist and a great one for “taking cures.”  She was very health conscious and adhered to the strict vegetarian regimen preached by Ellen White decades before being a vegetarian was popular. 

     Born near Montrose, Colorado in 1896, Grandma Greenley’s ancestors on both sides had been among the earliest American colonists, spreading from Jamestown in the 1630s and involved in the Revolutionary War.  Her later ancestors were among the earliest Adventists, dating from its formation in 1863.  In spite of this distinguished ancestry, she had led a rough life.  Her mother died when Grandma was 14 with the cause of death listed as “mania.”  From letters Grandma’s father later wrote to her, he didn’t seem to be any saner than her mom.  Her father quickly remarried and Grandma inherited the task of tending to her step mother’s two children.  Sometime during World War I, Grandma’s older brother spirited her away from the madness and took her to the Greenley ranch in Northeast New Mexico where he was a ranch hand and she became the ranch cook.  There she met and married Ansel Greenley.  My dad, their first child was born there in 1921.  Some years later they lost the ranch, and moved to Rocky Ford in the arid, wind-blown plains of Southeast Colorado. 


 There, amid the dust, the depression, and poverty, she raised five children, after losing one of the twin boys when he was eight months old. In 1936, they loaded their possessions on a wooden-wheeled flatbed trailer, hitched it behind a 1929 Model A Ford pickup and spent several months traveling with their possessions and children to Roseburg where Grandpa had secured a job as a cook at the Veteran’s Domiciliary.

On their way to Oregon - left Rocky Ford, Colorado June 30, 1936.  In the picture Bob, Ansel (Bette in front of Ansel), Mary (with Everett in front of her), Lela (with Bill in front of her)

Camping on the trip to Roseburg

From the pictures grandma religiously took, you could tell the trip west was a sad-sack operation and I’m sure the care and feeding five children and a demanding husband was no easy task.

First home in Roseburg on Harvard

     As a very young child, I remember them living in a white, two story house on Harvard where Long John Silver’s now sets.  Sometime in the late 1940s, they settled into a house perched on the hill above the end of Broad Street, looking down on the airport.  When I was in high school, they sold the bottom corner of their property the people who started Nottingham Nursery. Their home there is the house of my memories. 

     A petite, frail lady, she didn’t say much and never said a bad word about anybody, but she had resolve, developed over many years of enduring a humorless, domineering husband.  Short brown hair, only lightly flecked with grey, wrapped a kindly, compassionate face with a small nose that sported her dainty wire-rimmed glasses.  On this hill, she tended a large garden, her grandchildren, her daily diary and her photo albums.  The diary and photo albums are now valuable family treasures.  Not only does her diary offer a wonderful window into the past, every photo in the albums have the names, the location and a brief account of what is in the photo.  They are priceless for the information they carry.

     When we came to visit, the kids made a bee-line to Grandma’s chair next to an old Singer treadle sewing machine. The top left hand drawer contained a box of Luden’s menthol cough drops.  We lined up when Grandma opened the little drawer and then handed each of us a cough drop.  I still love those cough drops and without fail, the sight the distinctive orange Luden box or the smell of menthol flashes fond memories of Grandma Greenley.  After the cough drops, we went to the closet under the stairs to the attic and got out a big cardboard box full of old toys.  There were red, green, blue, yellow and orange wood blocks in many different dimensions that we fought over, an old Pluto-like jointed dog figure on a spring loaded disk in a wood cylinder that did funny dances when you pushed on the bottom of the cylinder.  There were numerous other toys that I have long forgotten, but also in the box was a dried Flicker wing.  The bright orange feathers on the underside of the wing always captivated me and made that wing my favorite item in the box.

     On a local grandchild’s birthday or on a visit from the out-of-town grandchildren, she stood each up against the door frame of the kitchen.  Once properly positioned, she told us to stand straight and tall, and with a book placed on the top of our head, drew a pencil line on the frame.  She then printed the child’s name, age and date above the line. I wish that when the house was torn down, someone would have had the presence of mind to salvage that door frame.  If our visit turned out to be an extended one, I loved to go up in the attic and either play with the large collection of old marbles that Uncle Everett had won in school, or read some of the old “National Geographic” magazines stored by date in long shelves against the wall.  

    In her later years, she began a trend of increasing restrictions on her diet and the last year or so of her life, she was eating nothing but a gruel made of mashed peas and carrots.  She was a thin, frail lady to begin with but in the end, she had withered to skin and bones.  I was in college when she passed away and I found it difficult to deal with.  It seemed that such a kind, gentle and loving person as Grandma Greenley deserved a better life.  Fortunately for me, there are flickers on the hill behind my house.  Every time I see one, grandma’s flicker wing comes to mind and I am taken back to that big box of toys and my wonderful Grandma Greenley.