Aunt Helen by Grace

Helen Conboy  (Middle name?)

Helen was our mother’s younger sister by about five years.  Her only sister, who Mother had help raise after the death of their mother.  (The David Fleming ‘look,’ and like another man named Conboy we knew in Portland.)   Helen was mentioned in Dad’s diary in a remark “poor Helen”,  evidently disappointed in love.  Aunt Helen was a bit of a legendary figure as we were growing up.  From pictures of her we knew she was about 5’1” and had red hair.  National Geographic subscriptions and books sent at Christmas also added to our knowledge of her.  Later, my daughter Mary and I enjoyed the Eloise books together, which she sent to us.  Crates of fruit were a rare treat at Christmas as well.  The fruit was carefully divided into quarters for all of us to have a taste of sunshine during the cold winters of the North Country.  She was critical of large families and mother felt the hurt of those remarks, I remember.  She would often have needlepoint handwork to work on.  Her furniture was covered with needlepoint and she gave Naomi, Alice and me red pillows with a needlepoint dog design.  Alice had mine while I was overseas and now I have them in my living room.

My understanding is that Mother helped her through her nursing education.  Her nursing career took her to Houston Texas, where she was a Nursing Supervisor, if not more than that.   Her good friend was Helen Corbett of culinary fame at Neiman Marcus and a cook book author.  Many of us benefited by receiving those books and many are treasured in the family. 

Another of her friends was a Superintendent of Nursing at a large hospital in Houston , who hosted our Student Body President and me  for dinner at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco (I think a gift of Aunt Helen),  as we represented Emanuel Hospital School of Nursing at the American Nurses’ Convention in that city in 1950. 

In the early 1950s Aunt Helen came to be Nursing Superintendent at Tillamook General Hospital,  25 miles north of Cloverdale, Oregon where our father was pastor at the Nestucca Community Church.  Anna remembers the runs to pick her up to come for the weekend to visit the family.  She said she came to be near family.  When I came to live with the folks when Dale was overseas, I was not hired there as a nurse.  I think she was not in favor of hiring family members.  The only Emanuel graduate that she had hired was not exemplary in her nursing, she reported.

Aunt Helen was on duty at the hospital when Daddy was brought in with his first heart attack in the spring of 1954. When he went to his heavenly reward later that year, she said that she felt Dad’s passing greater than most of us, because she had known him as a young man.

When Mother moved into Portland in the fall of 1954, Aunt Helen came to Oregon City to be Nursing Administrator at Oregon City Hospital, which was on a bluff overlooking the Willamette River.  She had a lovely apartment nearby.  We would go to see her, or bring her to Portland for special occasions.  At that time I worked  at a  Salvation Army Hospital  and she is in a picture at a Christmas party where we had invited family. 

She enjoyed Mary as a baby, but didn’t like her hard wood floors being scuffed up by Mary’s shoes.  She made it known to us that having Mary was enough of a family.  She also had amber glass dishes, and decorative pieces. 

Esther says she took her shopping for lovely clothes when in high school.  Oddly enough, I remember her giving me emery boards…no doubt a need she saw in my life.

We moved to Eugene in 1960, about the same time Mother  went to Santa Barbara.  Then the Georgioffs were good to include her in family events.  She asked if she could stay on to be a nanny for them.  About the mid 1960s she moved to Mr.Dora, Florida, to be near their brother Gordon (Emerson.)  Mother would visit her there and was deeply concerned about her lack of interest in spiritual matters and later her physical condition as she developed stomach cancer.   She died before our Mother did and was buried there, I believe. 

James' Story

There were nine of us around the dining room table. Nine of us children, that is, between our father and mother who sat at either end. We were nine for approximately five years between the time the youngest was born and the oldest left home. The oldest was a son, Jim, who left to enlist in the u.s. Navy at the beginning of World War II.

We gathered around that dining table three times every day, and the meal did not start until we had all bowed our heads and our father had asked the blessing. After the morning meal there was also a devotional time during which a passage of Scripture was read. Each member of the family old enough to read had a Bible (King James Version) and verses were read in sequence around the family circle. This was frequently followed by prayers, each one kneeling by his or her chair and praying in turn.

In establishing this piety in his home my father was true to his Dutch heritage. He was the third son and the fifth child of eight born to Hendrik and Johanna Holt Brinks*. Jacobus was the name with which my father was baptized, a name which he later Americanized to James. While Hendrik had been born in America, his father Roelof had emigrated from Emmen in the province of Drenthe, Netherlands some twenty-five years earlier.

Roelof was one of thousands of Dutch emigres who came here during the 19th century. While their motivations were both economic and religious, it was their religious faith which kept them together as communities and gave them the courage and stability to establish themselves in the new world.

Their faith was of supreme importance. Frequently it was an entire congregation led by their pastor which left Holland and settled as a colony in America. Churches were erected almost simultaneously with homes, with the life of colony centering around the church. Letters written back to family members in Holland make frequent reference to ways in which the Lord had protected and guided them, or in adversity had disciplined them.

The colony and congregation with which Roelof emigrated settled in western Michigan. There he married, raised a family and worked for thirty-three years. Industrious and hard-working as he was however, he was unable to fulfill his desire to leave his children a legacy of land. Land symbolized wealth and security, and would.provide a livelihood for progeny. But as more and more settlers arrived land became more expensive, and he was unable to acquire enough wealth to purchase it.

When the Dutch settlers heard that less expensive land was available in central Iowa** some of them decided to migrate there. Roelof was one of them. He was 59 when he took his wife Jantje, his son Hendrik, Hendrik's wife Johanna and their two young sons and settled in Iowa. Hendrik and Johanna would repeat this action some four years later, moving from Iowa to South Dakota in a continuing quest for affordable land.

My father was born in Harrison County, South Dakota. Because of drought and grasshopper plagues, the dream of land soon faded there also. The family was forced to move again, this time trekking eastward by covered wagon to a Dutch settlement in Minnesota named Pease. This was in 1895, when James was ten years old. He remembered the trip well.

As they passed through the small towns and settlements in western Minnesota the family would be accosted by boys and young men who would taunt them and want to know who they were, where they were from and where they were going. Luke, the second oldest son and seventeen at the time, was resourceful. He made a sign giving all the necessary information which he would hold up as they entered a settlement, hoping to avert trouble. James, however, being of a more fiery temperment would pick up stones to throw at the tormentors until he was restrained by his parents.

Pease, Minnesota, then became the family home. It was where James would grow to manhood, working side by side with his father and older brothers on the farm. Education was an important family value, so in due time first Ralph, the oldest, then Luke left the farm to attend high school - called then Academy - and on to college. When it came his turn, James followed and graduated from Macalester College in st. Paul, Minn. in 1913 when he was twenty-eight years old.

From that time until he married at the age of thirty-nine he tried his hand at a number of things - although farming was not one of them. He taught school, ran a farm implement business, worked in the fruit orchards in the state of Washington and enlisted in the service during World War I. Finally, together with Luke, he tried to find his fortune in the oil wells of Kansas, but that bubble burst in a market crash in 1920. One could say my father was repeating his grandfather's and father's peripatetic search for that which would provide fortune and financial security.

James, however, did find his heart's treasure in Kansas, a beautiful, dark-eyed young woman named Florence Conboy, whom he would marry in 1924, and who would in the coming fifteen years bear him ten children, three boys and seven girls.

With marriage, the necessity of finding his metier was urgent and unavoidable. Luke had entered a Bible School and seminary in Chicago in preparation for the ministry in the Presbyerian Church. While all the factors which entered into James' decision are unknown, he did decide to follow his brother and become a Presbyerian minister. He and Florence moved to Chicago where he studied to qualify himself for his life's work.

By the time he took his first pastorate in Wisconsin in 1927, there were already two children, a son and a daugher in the family. For the next twenty-seven years until his death in 1954, James would serve churches throughout Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Nebraska and finally in Oregon. The churches were always small, always rural or in small towns; they were always "linked", - two and sometimes three parishes, and the salaries were always minimal.

Even though the salaries were low, the churches did provide housing important for this rapidly expanding family. During those years James kept a cow to provide milk and butter for the family. Every spring he planted a large garden which put potatoes, tomatoes, green beans, corn and other produce on the table for the summer and much of the fall and winter. And his profession did permit enough flexibility for him to help a good deal with household chores, a necessity with his wife either recovering from childbirth or involved with infant care much of the time.

The growing children had their share of serious illnesses: rheumatic fever, meningitis, measles, chicken pox, etc. before the age of antibiotics and vaccines. One child, a little boy, was lost to pneumonia at the age of nine months. Yet the nine remaining children would grow to be strong healthy adults, who would all marry and raise families of their own.

All either graduated from college or took professional training for a chosen career. Three of them hold Master's Degrees and one has a Doctorate. This despite the fact that each child had to earn his or her own way through their schooling. The Dutch forbearers gave the impetus for higher education, even though they were unsuccessful in establishing a firm financial foundation to provide it. The family's young people received scholarships, took out loans, and worked, often taking a whole year off to earn money for the following year.

Each child had the opportunity to learn to play a musical instrument. As poor as the family was, money would always be found to purchase a piano, violins, trumpets, etc., and to provide music lessons. Since I was the oldest daughter, I was the first to receive piano lessons. By the time I was able to play hymns - about age nine - I was recruited to play for church services, and for several years accompanied my father as he made, his Sunday rounds. The gift of music is one most cherished by the children of James and Florence, and it has born fruit in their grandchildren, among whom are several professional musicians.

As the adult children examine their memories and recall images from childhood, widely divergent views of their father emerge. He was a loving father but his love often took the form of harsh discipline. particularly toward his sons he could be stern and punitive, demanding a standard of behavior inimical to a growing boy's need to explore and experiment. At times he took too literally the proverb "spare the rod and spoil the child" while overlooking another admonition, "fathers provoke not your children to wrath".

His oldest son Jim says "I lived the first seventeen years of my life in constant fear of a beating - beatings which took place quite often ...they diminished somewhat in high school but were replaced with threats of removing me from high school if I didn't behave myself, and placing me on a road crew with my checks being sent home ...somehow I didn't misbehave quite badly enough for that to happen, but I never applied myself to learning very much either, a fact which I've had to live with the balance of my life."

Son David felt such strong pressure to enter the ministry that he had enrolled in seminary and completed one year at the time of James' death. Only after his father had died did David, then age nineteen, feel free to make his own career decisions.

James' physical presence alone could be intimidating to children. He was over 6'2" tall, big-boned, with large, strong hands extremely effective in meting out punishment when he was displeased. with his daughters he was also a firm disciplinarian although he did not, punish them as severely as his sons. Daughter Flo writes "When he gave a command it was not questioned..he did not hesitate to punish...also quite legalistic...he associated things such as wearing makeup, going to movies or dances as unchristian or immoral. Even being given a goodnight kiss by a high school boyfriend, when discovered was forbidden."

James had worked hard all his life and he taught his children to be hard workers. Daughter Anna writes, "I learned to enjoy work by working with him in the gardens, chopping wood, milking cows, washing woodwork, building fires, cleaning chickens, washing the car and drying dishes. The satisfaction he seemed to feel from a job well done gave me reason to believe in hard work." Flo corroborates this, "..he believed in work. I was pushed at an early age to work hard at home, then to seek part time work outside home as a teenager ...many vacations were spent schucking hay, picking beans, etc."

But there was another whole side to James which ameliorates his severity and strictness. Anna says, "He also knew how to stop working and to play..there was the need to go fishing, go on a picnic, go to the beach and watch the sunset or a storm...If the whole family could not go for a break he would ask me to go fishing with him. It seemed a time for him to be alone but yet have companionship." Flo also writes "he liked to fish to relax, and I loved to go with him. In Oregon he liked to drive to the beach in the early evening, especially after a storm while the breakers were still high."

I particularly cherish memories of treasure hunts he would prepare for us on a Sunday afternoon, often after at least two and sometimes three morning services. And Flo recalls "he would entertain us by preparing a scavenger hunt, joining in candy-making, playing board games, etc." One strong memory for daughter Alice is a reply he made to a man who commented that the children's play was hard on the manse lawn. He said, "I am raising a family, not a lawn."

And just as he enjoyed recreation with his own family, so he thought it important for the young people in his churches. Alice remembers him "organizing early morning tennis matches, long hikes in the country. His ever young outlook made for...discovering places of interest, drives around Lake Mille Lac in Minnesota, exploring the mountains in Wyoming."

One of the most telling elements of memories of James are his children recalling their joy in being with him, in spending time with him. Flo writes that she recalls his warmth, "as a teenager coming up and putting his arm around my shoulder". And Anna writes, "1 often went with Dad as he called on the people in the church ...and learned how much he meant to the people he visited." She also remembers him teaching her ..."in Oregon the joy of eating fruit right from the tree, warm and ripe from the summer sun. Often we could get the late picking, free after the harvest was over. It always reminded me of the story of Ruth."

Another reminiscence from Anna is particularly poignant. "I seem to have such good memories of Dad and I never remember not loving him very, very much. One of my most common and vivid nightmares as a child was that he had died and I would often wake up from these nightmares, crying, and would sneak into their bedroom to make sure he was there. I think these sad dreams helped me prepare for his death when I was eighteen. Even so, I was stricken with grief at his death. Somehow I was able to grieve and did for months by reading and rereading the letters he had written to me the weeks before he died. I read them every day for three or four months and wept because I missed him so much. I still miss him (after over forty years) and would love to go fishing."

Several family members recollect the very special pride he took in his family. Anna again is most eloquent. Since she was one of the younger children, she would observe that there would be tears in his eyes as he saw one of the older ones off on the train or bus after a visit. She would note how he treasured letters from them and would hear his prayers for each one. And Alice remembers "I can visualize the look of pride and happiness when he had opportunity to talk of his family."

Daughter Grace's memories of our father are particularly tender, underscoring other siblings' statements of his hard work, his love for his family, and his commitment to the spiritual life and the ministry. Her memories are included as an addendum to this chapter. James' life came to a close in 1954 when he was sixty-nine. He was still active in the ministry at the time, indeed had preached and held Bible studies just a few days before his death. His widow, Florence, would live on for an entire generation, dying in 1986 at the age of eighty-eight. They are buried side by side in a veteran's cemetery in Portland, Oregon.

His grandson, Robb Reed, born the year James died, sums up James' life well, writing in 1996: " ...an interesting and complex man, very human. Perhaps the best understanding we can have of him is by looking at his children and their children .. Considering we're all his progeny ...his stamp is indelibly upon us. Look how complex, spirited and multifaceted we've turned out to be."

The heritage of land and livelihood which Roelof wanted to leave his children, and which Hendrik also sought throughout his life was. not realized. But they did leave a heritage much more valuable, passed on by James and his siblings to their children and to the following generations. This heritage includes a high value on education, an appreciation for the arts, particularly for music and literature, an emphasis on living a life of service to others, and most valuable of all a capacity for faith and a strong commitment to the spiritual dimension in one's life.

Written by Naomi Reed, oldest daughter

* Donald Brinks, son of James Brinks' brother Luke, noted that the wife of Hendrik Brinks should be Johanna Hultgeerts, not Holt, as recorded in Naomi's story.

** Donald Brinks also noted that the family went to northwest Iowa, Sioux County, and not to central Iowa before going to South Dakota and homesteading in Douglas County, SD.

Donald Brinks provided this photo of James and Luke Brinks with the Brinks Bros. Oil Exploration,  Independence, KS.  Jim is on the left and Luke is on the right.

This photo of the 1910-1911 Macalester College (St. Paul, MN) basketball team shows James Brinks as team manager on the right next to the coach. Photo is from the Macalester College photo archive. 

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