Alice

One of the very first memories I have of Alice is her suffering from headaches as a pre-schooler.  Her head would roll back and forth in pain no matter where she was.   I felt a concern.

She was born in Appleton Wisconsin.  I recall Mother saying theirs was one of the few houses with an indoor bath and people would appear at the door with a towel rolled up under their arms to take a bath.  When they moved to Robinsonville, it was among Armenians (or was it Belgians?)  Mother said the women would stand over her and squeal with delight at the lovely baby.  She felt it might be responsible for her stuttering.

Every time I am in a photo as a baby, Alice is either holding me or holding on to me.  I was surely her first “charge.”  We must have played together constantly.   Mother related how they got up in the middle of the night in Hannibal and we were playing with our dolls on the front porch.   I remember playing on the teeter totters and swings at the school ground nearby.  When some boys came and ran across the top of the equipment, we felt very brash, calling them “crazy- ikes.”  At one time she got in trouble while visiting a home nearby with the kids there.  The parents weren’t home apparently and the kids dropped matches down the furnace grate, trying to light it as the house was cold.  As I recall the fire truck had to come and there were some serious faces and discussion at our house about her possible part in the event.  I don’t remember the outcome.

While living at Wakhon, Mother arranged for us to go on the school bus to a home out along a lake road to  get some lessons in knitting.  Alice must have caught on, but I didn’t.  We dawdled on our way home and were late.  Dad must have been quite concerned about us because we were reprimanded worriedly.  I don’t remember if there was punishment.

Dad would often take a couple of us or so when he had errands.   Once we were left in the car at a garage, or maybe on the street next to a garage.  Time stretched out and we needed to use the facility.

We couldn’t remember if we should ask for a restaurant or a rest room.  Being a bit desperate we went into the big garage doors.  There was a woman sitting on a table with a mechanic type man standing by her “sporting.”   They looked quite surprised when we asked if there was a restaurant there.

When we moved and went to a new school she said her name was Rhoda, and then had trouble remembering to answer to that name.  I think it was when we moved to North Dakota and she would have been about 12.

We sisters were given the task of cleaning the house on Saturdays, and then waited tables at church dinners in the evening.  We were sent to homes to clean on do housekeeping early.  In North Dakota Alice spent more than one summer on a farm where the woman taught her some finer points of housekeeping, like how to iron embroidered works.  Alice was good at ironing and became the official ironer of Dad’s white shirts etc.  They had to be done just so and each part in the proper order, the collar first etc.

And, she loved deeply,  including me, for which I am eternally grateful.

We must have had some sisterly arm wrestling, because I had the disadvantage of wearing glasses and getting them broken in the fray a time or two.  We were generally the best of friends, but when cousin Lois would come around they would pair off.   Another cousin about her age was Don Brinks.  They were the youngest of the Brinks cousins.  We didn’t really know cousins on Mother’s side of the family.

We knew Mother’s sister Helen, who would come visit on occasion.   In later years Alice and George were faithful in bringing her to their home when she lived in Oregon City and mother had moved to California.


Grace

The Sewing Machine

In the year 2012, in San Roque, in Santa Barbara, California, is the cabinet which held my mother’s sewing machine.  It now holds my machine, but mother’s is near by, stored in the cabinet in the garage.

I wonder how many dresses Mother made with that machine—the number would be staggering.  And if the number of dresses she  altered from the “missionary barrel”,  or one she had previously made, to fit the next one down the line, the number  is even more difficult to imagine.  And, that doesn’t even take into consideration the white long sleeved shirts she made for “Jim”—I think she never did call him Daddy—tho’ he often referred to her as Mother. 

My memory does not go back before the time she was doing all this work on her  black electric Singer.  But Naomi recalled when she did these amazing transformations on hand-me-downs and missionary barrel pieces, using a treadle machine.  Naomi remembered that the new machine, which seemed like magic, was a gift from Aunt Helen.  Oh, yes, years prior to the miracles she performed for her growing family, as a young single teacher in Kansas, she financed her own sister’s nurses training and made Helen’s required white uniforms.  

One day in Kimball, Nebraska, she sat at the sewing machine all day, and by the end of the day, she had completed three dresses—one was for me, and I assume the other two were for Anna and Florence.  I wonder what the rush was.

Another time, when I was junior high age and we lived in Cloverdale, Oregon, she had been able to go to the Pendleton Woolen Mills fabric store—I assume it was roll ends or flawed fabric store, we call them outlets now—because there could not have been enough money to buy that quality fabric at normal retail price.  She was thrilled to be working on such fine fabric.  In fact, ‘fine fabric’  was a part of the fabric of her life.  Most of my sisters have memories of following her around stores as she felt bolt after bolt of material between her thumb and pointer finger, commenting, mostly to herself, on the quality of the piece in hand. She would stand concentrating and visualizing in her mind the possibilities.  If it were sewn in an appropriate way it would be perfect for one of her girls or herself.  I suspect she could actually “see” it completed on the one she had in mind.  And, she would have made it in the way she imagined it, using a pattern she had in the “pattern box”, and altering it to make it in the style which was then current.  After all the mulling over fabric design and quality there would be a peak at how much per yard.  Then perhaps a sad shake of the head and quiet sort of ‘tsk-tsk’ to herself before she moved on thru the bolts.  But one of her girls needed a new dress, so she turned to fabric she deemed less desirable or maybe sale fabric, but found something which would work, and finally we would be released from what seemed like a fabric store prison.

Getting back to the fine Pendleton fabric.  The rage then was to have a Pendleton jacket with a matching skirt, and for men, a Pendleton shirt. I am not sure how many pieces she produced from the wool she bought at that time.  However, there was a shirt for Daddy, and I think one for David, and for me, the chubby hand-me-down queen, a brand new navy jacket with a matching skirt. 

The sewing projects took on epic proportions upon occasion.  The summer between my sophomore and junior year at Westmont was one such time.  It was always assumed that Anna and I, who both attended Westmont for four years, would return to Portland and find summer jobs.  However, by that time, Anna was an elementary school teacher in Santa Barbara.   Because of that,  I suspect Mother did not feel the need to “dress” her.  What does stand out in my memory, tho’ is that summer she made  me a new dress each week.  I loved all of them.   But, these many years later, I wonder if they looked obviously different than the clothes the other girls in college were wearing—the frumpy homemade look.  I don’t know.

And then there was knitting.  Right before my senior year at Westmont, Mother was recruited to be a housemother at Westmont—in the dorm where I was to live.  That arrangement brought to the surface all sorts of “issues”.  Those obviously have nothing to do with her ability express in creative and amazing ways with fabric and increasingly with yarn. (We eventually worked things out and enjoyed many years in a companionable mother/daughter relationship.)  So let’s keep to the topic.  Now she was becoming an accomplished knitter.  All of the sister’s were wearing her knitted creations.  However, being the one closest at hand, the sweaters were piling up for me almost faster than I could wear them.  One stands out—a short sleeved cardigan, soft, pink, lightweight yarn, with a gentle oval trim of white angora wool across the shoulders.  It was lovely and the talk of the campus.  In fact, my friends liked it so much that one or the other of them was often “borrowing” it.     So much so, that in a community that small, all were enjoying the joke, and I’m sure Mother was receiving lots of good “strokes”. 

So it seems as tho’ the question which should be asked regarding the prodigious numbers of clothing items which came from her over the years, is how did she do it?  And, amazingly enough, she seemed to loose herself, or should we say, find herself in the creativity of the tasks.  When she died close to the age of 88, we found two garments in process in her apartment and the sewing machine was open. 

Welcome to the Brinks Blog

Welcome one and all to the Brinks Family Blog!

As we discussed during 2012 Family Reunion, this blog is intended to share and preserve the memories of the Brinks family.  More specifically, this blog has been created to share memories of Grandma and Grandpa (Florence and Jim) Brinks and the family's memories of growing up in their household.

As some of our beloved family members have already passed, we would like to encourage their children to share stories or memories that their parents may have shared with them about growing up in the Brinks household.

It is to be expected that everyone will have different perspectives on the memories of the family, and we would like to encourage everyone to share their thoughts and for all of us to accept and honor their stories. 

We will start this blog with a story from Esther, and next week will follow up with a posting submitted by Grace.  Please join the blog to receive updates as they occur, and comment with any additional thoughts and memories that come to mind about the post.  For those of you inclined to share a story of your own about Grandma and Grandpa and the family, please do so and submit to Esther via email at estherbb@cox.net so that we may post it for you.

We are excited to finally get this going and hope that everyone will enjoy and participate in preserving the legacy of the Brinks family.

Esther and Brad