My older brother, Dale Greenley, has written about our grandparents. Born in 1946, he is one of the oldest grandchildren, and grew up in Roseburg, with grandparents nearby. The following memoir is about our Grandfather, Ansel R. Greenley. Dale gave me permission to post this on the blog with the warning that not everything was fact checked. This is a memoir, not a work of journalism, but provides valuable insight into our family's oral history.
Grandpa Greenley was a large man. Standing 6 feet 6 inches tall with a full
head of upright snow white hair and crystal blue eyes, he was an imposing
figure. On top of that, he was an ornery
old cuss. When he was sitting in his
easy chair in the corner of the living room beside his big wood-laminated
Philco console radio, his grandkids quickly learned that climbing into his lap
would not result in a loving hug. That
was what Grandma was for. Grandpa was born
in Independence, Iowa in 1892. The family later moved to take over a large
cattle ranch near Wagon Mound in Northeast New Mexico. Grandpa and his younger brothers were raised
as cowboys.
As kids in the early ‘50s, cowboy and Indian games and movies
were our favorite pastimes. Grandpa,
however, always took the shine off of them by telling us that no real cowboy
would dress the way they did in the movies or abuse his horse by galloping all
over the place. Much to our chagrin, he
relentlessly found fault with every facet of our beloved cowboy and Indian
heroes.
With the onset of WWI, Grandpa enlisted in the Navy and with
typical Greenley communication habits, he didn’t learn about his father’s death
until he returned to the ranch after the war.
What he found was the ranch in disarray and his younger brothers
fighting about it. The good thing he
found there was Mary Maddux, the ranch cook whose brothers were cow hands on
the ranch. He married her and in
February of 1921, my dad, Robert, was born.
After years of struggle, the family lost the ranch and Grandpa moved his
family North to Rocky Ford in Southeast Colorado.
The struggle continued as the Depression hit and his family
grew to include three more sons and two daughters. All I know about this period is what little
my dad, not a story teller, mentioned on occasion. Grandpa had a Raleigh route, selling
household items door to door, similar to the Avon of today. Dad told about the flat, dry, dust-blown
landscape and the abject poverty they lived in.
The only good part of life he recalled was the great Rocky Ford watermelons
in the summertime. In 1936, Grandpa got
a job as a cook at the Roseburg Veteran’s Administration. How he managed that from Colorado, I have no
idea. He loaded all the family and
possessions on an open wooden-wheeled flatbed trailer pulled by a 1929 Ford
pickup and headed for Oregon. It took
them 5 months, working along the way for gas and food and enduring the death of
one of the twin brothers. It was not an easy trip. When I complained about the work dad had me do
as a child, he would say that compared to harvesting sugar beets, what I had to
do was a snap. One of the things they
had done along the way was to work in the sugar beet fields in Idaho. Dad said it had to be the worst work in the
world. Also, I remember using the
derisive term “Okie” to describe some undesirable person and Dad gently
reminded me that the only difference between him and an “Okie” was just a few
miles of flat, brown prairie. Unfortunately,
I didn’t read the “Grapes of Wrath” until after Dad died. There are many questions I wish I’d have
asked had I realized what they went through to get here.
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| 1953 - Ansel Greenley on the job at the VA Hospital |
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| Grandpa with his sons in 1967 Bob, Ansel, Everett, Bill |
When the Greenley family finally arrived in Roseburg in
August of 1936, Dad was 15 and thought he’d died and gone to heaven. They found a beautiful blue-green river full
of fish flowing through a town surrounded by green forested hills and inhabited
by numerous deer and other small game.
At that time, Harvard Avenue was bounded by big truck farms that were
open for post-harvest gleaning so all the fruits and vegetables you needed were
free for the picking. Dad said that after
coming here, it was the first time in his life he hadn’t felt constantly
hungry. After some time, Grandpa settled
his family in a two story white house on the corner lot of Harvard where Long
John Silver’s now sits. When I was a
babe-in-arms, Grandpa and Grandma bought what we would now call a shack,
perched on the side of the hill at the end of Broad Street overlooking the
airport. It had a small kitchen and bath,
a living room and a bedroom. An attic was
accessed by steps from a hall way that connected the garage, all heated with a
wood stove in the corner of the living room.
The house was perched on posts, making the area under the house a good
place for skunks to live. My memories of
Grandpa and Grandma Greenley’s house include the faint skunk odor that always
permeated it. A significant part of
their life on the hill included maintaining a large garden and gathering fire
wood. Using a buck saw, Grandpa fell
Madrone trees on the hill, drug them down to the house, then bucked the logs
into firewood and stacked it inside the garage.
I find it ironic that 60 years later, I am doing the same thing to
gather my firewood.
Grandma and Grandpa were long-time Adventists. Ancestors had been involved with the
formation of the church in 1863 so their roots went deep into the church. They followed Ellen White’s prescription for
a long and healthy life by being vegetarians.
Grandma was much more fervent about it that Grandpa. At Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners, Grandpa
could be caught snitching pieces of turkey when he thought no one was
looking. Also, when the house on the
hill was torn down, the spaces between the studs in the garage were filled with
20 years’ worth of empty Copenhagen cans, remnants of Grandpa’s days as a
cowboy.
After Grandma passed away in 1967, Grandpa sold the hillside
property and we moved him into the little house I had been raised in on
Bradford Street. In 1969, while I was in
Korea, he passed away in his big easy chair beside his beloved Philco
radio. A radio that now resides beside
the easy chair in my house.
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| circa1965 from left to right: Grandpa (Ansel Greenley), Ross, Susan, Grandma (Mary Maddux Greenley), Dale in front: Marianne and Lance |
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