Remembering Uncle Ted
14/10/14 05:13
I got my name from my great uncle Ted. His story has never been written up. I doubt if his biography would be interesting to those outside of our family. He didn’t every become rich. He wasn’t famous. Still, his life was remarkable. And our family has a lot of “Uncle Ted” stories. We’ve been telling them for years and, hopefully, will be telling them for generations to come.
Edward Spencer Russell was one of the first generation of settler children to be born in Montana. His father, Roy Russell had come up the Missouri River by steamboat with his wife Hattie Eldora Coon Russell. Roy was a court reporter by training and came up the river to Fort Benton and then traveled overland to Virginia City to serve in the newly-formed territorial government. His brother, Ed, for whom my great uncle Ted was named, was a somewhat rougher character was a mule skinner who drove freight out of Fort Benton to mining camps for years. According to family legend, Roy is the man on a horse leading an ox train up the hill from Fort Benton in a Charlie Russell paining. Charles Russell, who was famous, was of another family according to Hattie, but that is another story entirely.
Roy, in addition to being a court reporter was an avid bicyclist. Among the family archives are photographs of him with his bicycle in what is now Yellowstone National Park and also in Glacier National Park. His sons Edward and Giles picked up his flair for things mechanical and both became part of the automobile industry as it grew and spread. Giles was a car dealer in the state capital, Helena. As the depression tightened its grip on Montana, Ted headed for California, where he worked as a machinist and as a parts man for a Chevrolet dealer.
We got to know Uncle Ted when he and his wife Florence moved to our town. Ted became the parts man at the John Deere dealership that our father had just acquired. For many years, Uncle Ted was the first face customers saw when they entered the place and he was the organizer of the huge inventory of parts that we kept in the days when such things where shipped by motor freight and we had to have what the farmers and ranchers needed to keep their equipment in the field and working.
Of course there are far too many Uncle Ted stories for one blog and it is likely that there will be other blogs.
Uncle Ted lost his wife Florence suddenly. A heart attack took her in the middle of the night. It was my first experience of the death of a family member. My grandfather had died when I was a toddler, and though I have memories of him, I do not have any memories of his death or funeral. Aunt Florence was a different matter. She was just down the street and around the corner. And then she was gone. And I knew how incredibly sad our family was. I cried without really understanding why I was crying.
From that time on, Uncle Ted lived in that little house alone. And he set about inventing ways of making the home work for him. He wore dark green John Deere uniforms to work and he sorted his washing only once: dress clothes went to the cleaners. Everything else was washed in the same load in his clothes washer. It was more efficient that way and it worked for him. We noticed that the small bit of his undershirt that showed in the collar of his work shirt began to take on approximately the same color as the shirt, but it wasn’t a big deal.
Uncle Ted invented his own form of instant coffee. He’d take a can of coffee, dump it into a big pot, fill the pot with water and boil the whole mess down until it was a quart of sludge in the bottom of the pan. The sludge he’d put into a mason jar and stick in the refrigerator. When he wanted a cup of coffee, he’d take a teaspoon of that sludge from the jar, add boiling water and he was set. He served the same to his guests. I wasn’t much of a coffee drinker in those days, but my memory of the stuff was that it was downright difficult to get it down. It didn’t encourage caffeine addiction.
Among the hundreds of “inventions” that our family credits to Uncle Ted, he was known for his winter boots. One day it was quite icy and Uncle Ted took a fall when walking. He came into the shop and headed into the back. Standing in his stocking feet, he set up the drill press to drill exactly 1/2 inch into the heels of his shoes and then proceeded to take the tool for inserting steel studs into tires and install studs in the heels of his boots. he also made himself a walking stick with a wicked steel tip. With his walking stick and studded boots he was ready for the iciest of conditions. The boots were not allowed in the house, however.
A young man during the depression, Uncle Ted learned to keep whatever might have a future use. And that was a lot of stuff. He was an accomplished sheet metal worker and it seemed that no piece of sheet metal was too small to keep. He added a single-stall garage to his house that already had a small garage. The old garage became a shop and the new garage home for the car. The shop soon sported floor to ceiling shelves on all the walls except where there was a window or door. The shelves were lined with boxes, mostly boxes in which parts for the shop had been shipped. The boxes were labeled with grease pencil in Uncle Ted’s neat printing.
The shop also had a small work bench with a vice and a few hand-made tools for bending mental, setting rivets and other jobs. Soon there was need for a shed in the back yard and then another and finally a third. There were simply too many good things that needed to be saved in case they might later be needed.
And all i really wanted to say in this blog is that if I have a few extra boxes of bits and pieces in my garage and shed, I come by the tendency to keep such things naturally.
Edward Spencer Russell was one of the first generation of settler children to be born in Montana. His father, Roy Russell had come up the Missouri River by steamboat with his wife Hattie Eldora Coon Russell. Roy was a court reporter by training and came up the river to Fort Benton and then traveled overland to Virginia City to serve in the newly-formed territorial government. His brother, Ed, for whom my great uncle Ted was named, was a somewhat rougher character was a mule skinner who drove freight out of Fort Benton to mining camps for years. According to family legend, Roy is the man on a horse leading an ox train up the hill from Fort Benton in a Charlie Russell paining. Charles Russell, who was famous, was of another family according to Hattie, but that is another story entirely.
Roy, in addition to being a court reporter was an avid bicyclist. Among the family archives are photographs of him with his bicycle in what is now Yellowstone National Park and also in Glacier National Park. His sons Edward and Giles picked up his flair for things mechanical and both became part of the automobile industry as it grew and spread. Giles was a car dealer in the state capital, Helena. As the depression tightened its grip on Montana, Ted headed for California, where he worked as a machinist and as a parts man for a Chevrolet dealer.
We got to know Uncle Ted when he and his wife Florence moved to our town. Ted became the parts man at the John Deere dealership that our father had just acquired. For many years, Uncle Ted was the first face customers saw when they entered the place and he was the organizer of the huge inventory of parts that we kept in the days when such things where shipped by motor freight and we had to have what the farmers and ranchers needed to keep their equipment in the field and working.
Of course there are far too many Uncle Ted stories for one blog and it is likely that there will be other blogs.
Uncle Ted lost his wife Florence suddenly. A heart attack took her in the middle of the night. It was my first experience of the death of a family member. My grandfather had died when I was a toddler, and though I have memories of him, I do not have any memories of his death or funeral. Aunt Florence was a different matter. She was just down the street and around the corner. And then she was gone. And I knew how incredibly sad our family was. I cried without really understanding why I was crying.
From that time on, Uncle Ted lived in that little house alone. And he set about inventing ways of making the home work for him. He wore dark green John Deere uniforms to work and he sorted his washing only once: dress clothes went to the cleaners. Everything else was washed in the same load in his clothes washer. It was more efficient that way and it worked for him. We noticed that the small bit of his undershirt that showed in the collar of his work shirt began to take on approximately the same color as the shirt, but it wasn’t a big deal.
Uncle Ted invented his own form of instant coffee. He’d take a can of coffee, dump it into a big pot, fill the pot with water and boil the whole mess down until it was a quart of sludge in the bottom of the pan. The sludge he’d put into a mason jar and stick in the refrigerator. When he wanted a cup of coffee, he’d take a teaspoon of that sludge from the jar, add boiling water and he was set. He served the same to his guests. I wasn’t much of a coffee drinker in those days, but my memory of the stuff was that it was downright difficult to get it down. It didn’t encourage caffeine addiction.
Among the hundreds of “inventions” that our family credits to Uncle Ted, he was known for his winter boots. One day it was quite icy and Uncle Ted took a fall when walking. He came into the shop and headed into the back. Standing in his stocking feet, he set up the drill press to drill exactly 1/2 inch into the heels of his shoes and then proceeded to take the tool for inserting steel studs into tires and install studs in the heels of his boots. he also made himself a walking stick with a wicked steel tip. With his walking stick and studded boots he was ready for the iciest of conditions. The boots were not allowed in the house, however.
A young man during the depression, Uncle Ted learned to keep whatever might have a future use. And that was a lot of stuff. He was an accomplished sheet metal worker and it seemed that no piece of sheet metal was too small to keep. He added a single-stall garage to his house that already had a small garage. The old garage became a shop and the new garage home for the car. The shop soon sported floor to ceiling shelves on all the walls except where there was a window or door. The shelves were lined with boxes, mostly boxes in which parts for the shop had been shipped. The boxes were labeled with grease pencil in Uncle Ted’s neat printing.
The shop also had a small work bench with a vice and a few hand-made tools for bending mental, setting rivets and other jobs. Soon there was need for a shed in the back yard and then another and finally a third. There were simply too many good things that needed to be saved in case they might later be needed.
And all i really wanted to say in this blog is that if I have a few extra boxes of bits and pieces in my garage and shed, I come by the tendency to keep such things naturally.