Ronald H. Limbaugh

On the Margins of Prosperity

The Mortimore Family in Oregon

Before the 1950s, small farmers and their families in the American West lived on the margins of urban-industrial society. Rural families tended to be large, influential, and wide-ranging, with parents, children, and sometimes grandparents and other relatives living under the same roof. Extended family networks provided emotional support and served various economic and social functions, including employment, protection, education, religion, and recreation.¹ Family size and function changed as the new urban era created the nuclear family, a more pragmatic, less inclusive structure with more limited functions. In its most idealized version, as the popularity of the "Ozzie and Harriet" series on television suggests, the nuclear family was a monocratic, static model of Waspish values, a powerful icon of American popular culture. Since the cultural revolution that began in the 1960s, however, much of this idealistic imagery has fallen away to reveal a much more diverse and dynamic family structure that is still evolving today.²

The Mortimore family story exemplifies many of the characteristics and problems of extended families trying to cope with the changing realities of life in modern America. The Mortimores reached the Pacific Northwest at the beginning of the twentieth century, more than a century after their British or Scots-Irish ancestors had landed on the East Coast. After generations of acculturation, the Mortimores did not have to endure the burdens of racial prejudice or the language differences that stood in the way of the thousands of minority families who were also seeking a better chance in the Far West. Nevertheless, the road to upward mobility contained two formidable obstacles, poverty and ignorance. The lack of both capital and education severely handicapped young families in search of the American Dream, although not everyone recognized their own shortcomings. Farmers, in particular, could see the obvious need for money, but few advocated education as an answer to the Farm Problem, as the late nineteenth-century decline of agricultural prosperity came to be called. For many small farmers at the turn of the twentieth century, better times ahead meant better crops, better markets, higher prices, less expensive transportation, and better equipment. Few thought of changing occupations as the new century dawned.

The Mortimores' first home in Portland, at East Fifty-Eighth and Glisan streets, in 1906

All photographs courtesy of the author

An exception was Edward Merit Fenton Mortimore, who abandoned his Madras, Oregon, homestead in the spring of 1906, failing by two years to meet the residency requirements for title. Though times were relatively good for farmers in the pre-war years leading up to the Sarajevo crisis in 1914, after a three-year struggle Edward saw little future on a remote, dry-land tract covered with sagebrush and far from the nearest railroad terminus. Needing a reliable source of income, he took his family to Portland.

If Edward was slow to accept defeat as a homesteader, his wife, Martha Elizabeth Tucker Mortimore, was not. She hated the primitive life and refused to bear children in a tent. Three years earlier, at her insistence, Edward had rented space in Madras and built a one-room cottage where she could be near a doctor during her second, and last, pregnancy. Doubtless her fears and frustrations as a frontier farmer's wife weighed heavily in the decision to return to the Willamette Valley, where they had started married life eight years before. Portland beckoned to her like a biblical oasis, a glistening City on a Hill.³

Martha's spiritual imagery had secular roots. Portland was an alluring city to middle-class Euro-American families in 1906, as a new generation of progressive businessmen took charge of planning and development. Urban reform was a persistent theme in the Progressive Era, and Portland's leaders mirrored national thinking in promoting beautification, temperance, zoning, election reform, mass transit, and other improvements to make the city look better and function more efficiently. City fathers were also profit-minded, encouraging urban expansion and industrial growth to prevent economic stagnation and offset the threat from upstart Seattle two hundred miles to the north. The result was a decade of reform, prosperity, and dynamic growth, beginning with the Lewis and Clark International Exposition of 1904–1905 that brought a million and a half visitors to Portland. Increasing demand and new capital expenditures spurred growth in export trade, transportation, manufacturing, and retail sales. A booming job market attracted thousands of new families, in turn fostering a residential housing boom. Developers expanded eastward across the Willamette, opening new "streetcar suburbs" a mile or two from the downtown business district and away from older, more rundown neighborhoods. By the time the Mortimores arrived, Portland's eastside residents — the majority of them homeowners — outnumbered those who lived west of the river, where rental units predominated.⁴

For the first few weeks in portland the Mortimores stayed at the home of Eva and Jessie McFeron, Edward's sister and brother-in-law, at the end of the streetcar line in Montavilla. By June 1906, they had purchased a modest new home of their own at East Fifty-eighth and Glisan in the Mount Tabor district. A boxy bungalow typical of the times, it came with a barn for Edward's team of horses and enough pasture for a cow or two and some chickens. Drawing on his experience years earlier as a harness maker in Oregon City, Edward rented a storefront a couple of blocks away and tried shoemaking for a time, but working with horses was more to his liking. When a job grading roads for the city of Portland opened, he grabbed it eagerly. As a skilled horseman, Edward deftly maneuvered cumbersome horse-drawn graders and scrapers through the Portland hills. When Merton, the oldest son, also got a city job, Martha saw Providence at work. She penned an ecstatic note to her father: "Ed & Merton together will make $6.25 per day & no expense comes out of it so that is good. Truly God is blessing and prospering us at the present."⁵

A road-building crew in Portland in about 1909

For additional material support as well as sanctuary from the stresses of urban life, the Mortimores turned to the Free Methodist (FM) network in Oregon. As a lay leader, Martha had been among the pioneers from Kansas who established the first FM congregation in the lower Willamette Valley. Her husband, a convert to the church after his first wife died in 1894, was an ordained FM minister with two children, Merton, nineteen years old in 1906, and his sister Olive, two years younger. Marrying Martha in 1898 had brought stability to the family, which grew to four with the addition of Paul a year later and Evelyn in 1903. Before taking up the homestead near Madras, Edward had served several small congregations in eastern Oregon and Washington. Now he welcomed the change from farm work to regular employment in the city and found time on weekends to serve as a substitute minister. Soon he was preaching regularly at the FM hall in Sunnyside, a few miles south of downtown Portland on the road to Oregon City.

For her part, Martha took up domestic chores as housewife, mother, and farmhand. Any milk and eggs the family did not need she peddled from door to door. She also continued her Free Methodist missionary work, tending to the sick, preparing the dead for wakes and burials, visiting shut-ins, and offering advice and comfort to those in distress. She toted Paul and Evelyn, the two youngest children, along on trips around town, walking as much as possible to save money but riding the streetcar on longer excursions. The children started grade school nearby but probably gained more language skills at home than at school. Their God-fearing parents, following Calvinist evangelical tradition, insisted that the children read and recite from the Bible as early as possible. Each morning after breakfast they took turns reading a passage of scripture and saying a prayer. Paul became so well versed that he often came home from Sunday school complaining about how little his fellow students knew of the Bible and its meaning.

Martha's two stepchildren, older and experienced beyond their years, were also good students but had little chance to attend school regularly until the family moved to Portland. After their mother died, their distraught father, convinced that his children needed religious instruction and maternal care, had sent them to live with friends and relatives until they were old enough to attend school. As foster children living frugally with pious families, they had learned to endure life's hardships at an early age. Merton, who was twenty-one in 1908, spent his senior year in high school at the Free Methodist seminary in Seattle. After a summer in Portland he returned the next fall to enter Seattle Seminary, later renamed Seattle-Pacific College. Olive completed the equivalent of junior high work at Glencoe, an experimental school for "selected studious kids," as one family member described it, but still had no high school diploma at age eighteen. Her teacher, Miss Butler, persuaded Olive to apply for a teaching job at Redland, five miles from Oregon City. To get the job she needed not a diploma but a teaching certificate from the state superintendent's office. Assured by her teacher that she could qualify, Olive invested twenty-five cents in a streetcar ride to Oregon City; took an exam in reading, writing, arithmetic, spelling, and methodology; waited until the superintendent himself graded it; and happily came home with both a certificate and a job offer in her pocket.⁶

Redland School was similar to dozens of other schools in the days of unconsolidated districts — a one-room building that housed a full range of elementary education in a six-month school year, starting in the fall and ending by Easter. For $38 a month, Olive taught forty-eight students in all eight grades and of all ages, some nearly as old as she. The pay was low even for that era, but her board was only $12 a month — church friends looked after their own. She stayed two years at Redland School, with the pay improving to $48.50 the second year. At Christmas, Olive felt rich enough to arrive home with a goose for the dinner pot.⁷

In 1909, both of the older children went home — Merton from Seattle and Olive from Redland — to be with their mother and the younger children. A smallpox epidemic had swept through Oregon, taking down Edward along with dozens of others. He went to the "pesthouse," the isolation wing of the county hospital, and county officials quarantined the Mortimores and fumigated their home while he recuperated. The health department also vaccinated everyone, leaving all but Olive sick with false pox for a few days. All were well by summer, but the scare provided another lesson in what Martha saw as the tenuous nature of earthly existence. She began to write marginal notes in her Bible at about this time, underscoring passages she took to heart or sermons she had heard. One passage in Hebrews, asserting God's promise of salvation as the "hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast," expressed the core of her feelings during the troubles of 1909.⁸

Martha's somber moods generated seeds of depression that would inflict her throughout life, but her manic moments did not appear to afflict other family members. The children inherited neither Martha's moodiness nor Edward's rosy optimism, which derived from an abiding faith that God Would Provide, whatever the circumstances. Instead, they were realists who focused on earning a living and raising a family.

Changing circumstances had a lot to do with their outlook. America's "age of innocence" ended by 1914; and the social, economic, and political upheavals of the next three decades permanently altered Americans' perceptions of themselves and their future. After World War I, rural life and values, once the dominant components of American culture, fought a losing battle with the forces of urban-industrial growth. Martha and many older Americans who witnessed the changes equated them with epic Biblical struggles between Good and Evil. Edward seemed more reconciled to change, as if it was all part of a Divine Plan, but he was nevertheless active in the moral crusades of the day, preaching against the "wages of sin" and giving freely to church-sponsored campaigns against white slavery, the liquor trade, gambling, and other vices.

Once the family smallpox crisis of 1909 was over and Edward was on the mend, the older children turned east- ward to look for work. Giving up further education at Seattle Seminary, Merton passed the state teacher's exam and took a school at Culver, very near his relatives the Pecks, the Limbaughs, and the Evanses, who were struggling to make ends meet as homesteaders in central Oregon.⁹ After a year or two, he returned to Portland and found a better-paying job clerking with the U.S. Postal Service.

Women had more limited choices. While Merton was still at Culver, Olive found a teaching job at Red Rock school, six miles away. The pay was fifty dollars a month, with only six students to teach, but she was unhappy there. In 1910, her reputation for handling "country kids" landed her a six-weeks job in Prineville, where she replaced an inexperienced teacher from Seattle who was unable to handle a classroom of rowdies. Combining discipline and tact, Olive quickly restored order, put the rowdies in front of the class, and by the end of term had made friends of most of the troublemakers.¹⁰

In the fall of 1910, a sixty-dollar-per-month offer at a school in Clackamas County near Gresham attracted her. She stayed a year but returned to Red Rock in March 1912 during an "awful mixup" between the local school board and a defiant teacher. The nature of the dispute was never made clear, but the board members terminated the teacher's contract before the term ended and hired Olive to finish the last three months. Her hiring may have been influenced by the presence of John Peck, her aunt's husband, on the school board, but probably more influential was her experience and track record. Despite the presence of family and friends, Olive was troubled by lingering social and religious tensions in the community, raised during a spirited revival movement a few years before. She was anxious to leave when the school term ended, as a card to her mother makes clear: "I don't know why you think I enjoy staying here. I am here, but not by choice."¹¹

Tired of school-board squabbles, Olive returned to Portland at the end of the school year. She took a year off from teaching, lived at home, and worked part-time at Meier and Frank's, the city's biggest department store. Nearly twenty-four years old and unattached, she began to think about finding a husband. She brought one pious young man home from church, although he embarrassed her and prompted endless teasing by her little sister Evelyn when he humbly asked for a "dirty towel" so he could wash up.¹² With another church friend, Vernon Damon, romance blossomed, but trouble arose when Vernon's brother Irving began acting strangely. The details were never discussed, but evidently he disrupted FM meetings and had to be restrained. Olive hints at the problem in a letter to her mother: "Poor Irving. I wonder what makes him so bad. It's a good thing they got him away when they did...." Diagnosed as psychotic, he was admitted to the Oregon State Hospital, where Olive found him to be "very intense and strange." She visited only once and never went back, admitting years later that her parents feared the malady might be catching.¹³

Olive as a young teacher in 1909

Still unsettled after a year in the city, Olive returned to teaching in the fall of 1913. She took a position at Mud Springs, three miles from Madras, in the hardscrabble country of her kinfolk. It was familiar turf, with wonderful views of the Cascade Mountains but barely tamed from frontier days. The railroad had arrived in Madras in 1911, but other services were still in short supply. Farmers, merchants, townsfolk, and firefighters all competed for the limited water available until a pipeline was constructed from Opal Springs to the township during the winter of 1913–1914. The countryside was overflowing with rabbits, fair game for farmers and the poor. Rabbit drives were a popular sport, as young Paul learned in a letter from his cousin Bernice, John Peck's oldest daughter. "Come out and help hunt rabbits," she invited, "they sent 555 to Portland to the Salvation Army for the poor people...."¹⁴

Indians from the Warm Springs Reservation were occasionally spotted on the dusty streets of Madras. Although they had little respect for Native culture, white settlers and their families visited Warm Springs on hot summer days to enjoy the mineral water. Sometimes it seemed hard to tell the difference between people, as Pearl exclaimed in a note to her sister Martha while on vacation at the Springs: "We look like Indians that hadn't had anything to eat for a mo. John learned to swim since coming here."¹⁵

Around the time this photograph was taken, in about 1910, Madras was booming in anticipation of the arrival of the railroad. Its population was around thirty-five hundred people.

For two terms Olive taught a small group of students in the one-room schoolhouse at Mud Springs. The following year she took a position in Madras at her biggest school to date — a two-story brick building, constructed in 1908 that served students from first grade through high school.¹⁶ She taught there a year and might have remained longer had her family stayed in Portland. But in the fall of 1914 her father decided to move to Washington state, and Olive's plans abruptly changed.

Though he had lived in Portland since 1906, Edward never adjusted well to urban life. By experience and inclination he was a farmer and ranch hand who preached on the side. The transition to shoemaker and road-grader helped put food on the table, but good city jobs were hard to find without having at least a high school diploma. A two-year economic recession in the Pacific Northwest after 1913 also may have played a role in Edward's decision to move to Washington, for urban work dried up when prices collapsed for lumber and farm products.¹⁷ Edward may have been motivated, however, more by lifestyle choices than economics.

Olive and her class at Madras, in about 1913

Portland's rapid growth made it hard to be an urban farmer on the outskirts of the city. Though citywide zoning ordinances were still a few years away, progressive neighborhoods were already imposing limits on animal husbandry and other "dirty" industries. New technology on the eve of World War I swept away the vestiges of a horse culture that still lingered on the city streets, as tractor-driven road graders replaced draft animals and automobiles crowded the horse and buggy off the main roads. Urban living was too fast-paced for a faithful Free Methodist farm family such as the Mortimores. Merton, the oldest son, had already fallen away from the family circle. He took a city job with the post office and was courting a city girl. Olive remained in close touch though living apart, and the younger children were still in school. Paul had just started the sophomore year at high school, and Evelyn was entering the fifth grade. The timing for a move was not ideal, but the opportunity beckoned to return to ranching and Edward jumped at the chance.

Edward's older sister "Ella" — the family Bible records her as Elma Craig — sparked his sudden enthusiasm for Washington. After the death of her first husband, she had married Philip Bowerman, who owned a 160-acre ranch and orchard in the hills near Methow on a tributary of the Columbia River forty miles above Wenatchee. The Bowermans were eager to leave — or at least Ella was — as Edward found out when he visited them in early 1914. A trade was quickly arranged, and Edward agreed to exchange the family's home in Portland for the Bowerman place. The decision was made too quickly for Martha, who spoke her mind when her husband returned with the news. Her memories of Washington during the Chewelah pastorate a dozen years before were none too pleasant, and Methow was fewer than twenty miles from the western boundary of the Colville Reservation, whose inhabitants had both frightened and repulsed her. Besides, Paul was in high school, and Methow had only an elementary program. Ultimately, the protagonists compromised: Edward would wait until school let out in the spring and then take Martha and Evelyn north with him to Methow. Olive agreed to take Paul with her to Madras, where he could continue his sophomore year and join the family after the spring term. Merton, despite his father's wishes, refused to give up the postal job in Portland — and his nearly betrothed, Genevieve — for a return to ranch life, but he did agree to look for a homestead prospect near the family ranch and to help his father make the move. Edward was content with half a loaf. In mid-March 1915, the five travelers hitched the team to a loaded wagon, tossed in a puppy and a few young chicks, and struck out for Methow, leaving the cows and the rest of their possessions for the Bowermans.¹⁸

After three weeks of travel over poor roads in brisk weather, camping out along the way, the Mortimore family arrived at their new ranch. Mostly pastureland and scrub, except for a few acres of apples, the place had plenty of water for irrigation, but the hills precluded row crops. Edward certainly learned something about the realities of farm life from the years spent struggling with the Madras homestead. Now, a decade later on a Washington ranch that needed solid financial resources and the raw energy of a homesteader to make it pay, he must have sensed at age fifty that his task was hopeless even if his will was strong. Edward was sorely disappointed that Merton would not stay, though he did promise to come back for a few weeks that summer. Paul showed little inclination for pastoral pursuits other than a love of horses and hunting. He was a popular student at Madras, singing in the choir and becoming business manager of the yearbook, but he saw his talents for music and business as the attributes of what he saw as a higher calling. He had already made up his mind to enter the ministry. "I always knew I had to preach," he told Olive.¹⁹

Edward (front) and Merton preparing to spray apples on the Methow farm, April 1, 1915

Without strong help or much money and with too little credit to buy essential equipment and supplies, Edward could do little to improve the Methow ranch. The apples were a potential cash crop, but the harvest was far away and the trees needed a lot of care. The board-and-batten farmhouse was badly run down, without running water or electricity. Edward spent the first week or two patching the roof, using Evelyn as "gopher" to fetch shingles. Martha – who "didn't think much of that country," according to Paul — set out a vegetable garden and tended to her chickens.²⁰ When Paul and Olive arrived from Madras a few weeks after their parents, the family settled into a long season of hard work. Merton, as promised, returned for a few months to help, taking leave from his postal job in Portland.

Martha's spirits rose with the family united and the summer sun brightening the green hills and pastures. The neighbors were friendly, and a community of Scottish immigrants welcomed them as kinfolk with a common heritage. She joined in summer work and play alike, picnicking with the neighbors, plowing and hoeing the garden, taking short trips to Lake Chelan, gathering the eggs, and milking the few cows Edward managed to acquire. Still, her disposition darkened as fall approached and the family again separated. Merton stayed long enough to pick the apples and pack them on a boxcar for the eastern auction market, but then he returned to his job and sweetheart in Portland. The three younger children stayed in Methow. With no high school to attend, Paul stayed on the ranch that winter with little to do but enjoy the snow. Olive found ready employment in the local elementary school, with a higher salary as added incentive to stay.

Plowing a garden at Methow. Martha stands in front of the horses, with Edward and Olive at the plow.

During the fall, Olive and Evelyn, now in sixth grade, rode horseback five miles from the ranch to school — at least for the first day. Years later the two sisters reminisced about those Methow days, perhaps embellishing the story of Olive's first ride wearing long skirts. To protect her dignity she borrowed a sidesaddle and rode off in the dust in proper schoolmarm fashion. But dignity soon gave way to comfort. She came home astraddle, skirts flying. The next day Edward took her to school in the buggy.

For twelve-year-old Evelyn, Methow was a happy place that years later recalled childhood memories. She enjoyed riding in the soft green hills, racing bareback down dusty trails, learning to shoot the family shotgun, exploring the hills with her dog, and cozying up to the fire in winter. She had been a sickly child, but her childhood illnesses did not stop her from having fun. She was an endless tease, full of mischief and a handful to her mother, the disciplinarian in the family. Red-haired and freckled, boisterous and saucy as a pet chimp, she later remembered that she could always "find things to do to aggravate people." At Methow, she spurted upward and grew strong with daily farm work and riding. She even raced to school on Redwing, an old saddle horse her father had acquired, chancing the displeasure of Olive, her teacher, for kicking up the dust. Winter snow soon put an end to dusty roads as well as riding, but not to the fun. The powdery hills were ideal for downhill races on sleds or dishpans. Evelyn reveled in the outdoors, unlike her more sedate older sister who rented a small apartment in town to avoid having to travel in the cold. With her parents' blessing, Olive took temporary charge of Evelyn, who lived with her until spring weather allowed horseback riding again.

Evelyn with her dog at Methow, 1915

With all the children but Paul away that winter, Martha and Edward spent days at a time on the ranch, deep in snow and pondering the future. Most farmers during World War I made money, but the Mortimores were dogged with bad luck and poor planning. They had hoped for a good return from their apple crop, but shipping apples eastward was a risky business even if the crop arrived in good shape. Independent growers were at the mercy of cash buyers and consignment shippers to eastern auction houses, and instead of a check in the mail the Mortimores received a bill for the cost of shipment. After the apple disaster, Edward was ready to move again, and Olive advised him to "sell the place and get whatever you can."²¹ Their chance came in 1916 when W. Joseph Stockman invited Edward to work on their ranch near Pendleton. Eighteen years earlier, as newlyweds, Edward and Martha had worked for the Stockmans; now they decided to return, forsaking fee-simple ownership for the more secure status of hired hands. It took time to work out the details and sell the ranch and livestock, but by early summer the Mortimores were ready to move again.²²

The Stockmans held three sections of wheat and grazing land in Umatilla County. To get there in one move, the Mortimores rigged up a "covered wagon," as Evelyn remembered it — really a freight wagon with a canvas top — for the heavy things, with Paul and his father taking turns as teamster. The rest of the family rode in a farm hack, hardly more comfortable. The trip took nearly two weeks, camping out at night and resting on Sundays near a church, for regular attendance was compulsory to the Mortimore family even on the road. One night, a group of Indians showed up, begging sugar from Martha. For her, it was Chewelah all over again, where Indians from the Colville Reservation had entered the Mortimore home seeking food. At that time she had told them to go see the priest at the nearby Catholic mission, but this time she had no priest to send them to.²³ She shared what she had. Olive rode with the family as far as Umatilla and then took the train with Evelyn to Portland for a visit, leaving her parents and Paul to cross on the ferry and ride to the Stockman ranch, where the wheat harvest was about to begin.

As soon as they could, the Mortimores rented a small house in Pendleton and settled in. Edward was busy all summer driving team for the huge combines that lumbered across the golden hills from daylight to dusk. He also tended the horses and repaired harness for the ranch. The work was hard and the hours were long, but the Stockmans were more than just employers. Martha and Mrs. Stockman had become close friends over the years, and Paul found a young friend in their son Lowell. Evelyn, tall and strong at age thirteen, found a summer job helping a neighboring farmwife cook for the harvest crew; but after a few days away from home, she was so homesick that Martha had to rescue her. After finding no teaching positions near Pendleton that paid more than the ninety dollars a month she was offered in Washington, Olive decided to return to Methow. After a year alone, however, she took a job at Pilot Rock, fifteen miles south of Pendleton. By 1917, all the Mortimores except Merton were in or near Pendleton.

After the harvest that year, Edward looked for work in town and readily found a job with the Oregon State Highway Department as a road grader. His experience in Portland served him well, for he swiftly rose to the senior position of finisher, the grader who stood over a long blade for hours, giving the final touch to macadamized county roads. The work was hard on his legs, which he began to wrap in ace bandages after varicose veins developed, but the pay was good and the work was steady. When Martha told her Uncle Royal in Kansas about Edward's work in a 1917 Christmas letter, his reply contrasted Edward's good fortune with Tucker bad luck, starting with his failing kidneys, his wife's rheumatism, the high price of fuel, and a relative's hard work in a laundry. He ended with "Oh this terible terible war."²⁴

Crossing the Columbia on the Umatilla ferry on the road home from Methow, 1916

The war was also on paul's mind as he graduated from Pendleton High School in 1918. Though he wanted to continue his education, he rejected a forty-dollar scholarship from Willamette University and entered Oregon Agricultural College in Corvallis. A notice from the Umatilla County draft board to report for a physical doubtless influenced his decision to enroll in the Reserve Officer's Training Corps, the fastest route to a military commission. That September he became a full-time student soldier. The series of letters he wrote his parents during the next three months provide a window on both ROTC training programs during World War I and on Paul's hopes and expectations as a young recruit.

After the first week on campus, Paul was still in civilian clothes and without army blankets. He thought he would have to "sleep in the brush" until a college professor offered him a bed in his home, fifteen blocks from campus. To report for duty at six AM required a very early bed call, but the reward was breakfast of mush, fruit, bread, and potatoes in the campus mess hall. Drill began at eight and lasted until noon, when they broke for lunch, followed by afternoon drill, retreat, and supper. After eleven hours of marching, with occasional breaks and meals, the 2,700 men who made up the Corvallis unit were dismissed, required to report again at six o'clock the next morning. Sundays were free, and Paul went to church. A youthful activist influenced by the social gospel movement, he thought young people needed religious guidance and was disappointed to find most Corvallis congregations seemingly indifferent to the needs of students. "It is a shame for the churches to treat a place like this with so little concern," he wrote his parents. "The boys have no place to go Sundays but church and are willing to go there." Paul tried the Methodists first but did not like the preacher — "this was his first Sunday," he wrote. For evening service he went to the Christian Church. It had a more active program for young people. For dinner he returned to his temporary home, offering telling commentary on the state of ethnic relations in that era.²⁵

The weeks wore on without uniforms or a change of procedure for Paul and his fellow soldiers, though there were rumors that the unit would be shipped to Kentucky. Uniforms finally arrived just before November 11, when the armistice ended the rumors but not the monotonous routine. Paul thought he would be "kept here till June," not a bad alternative to a young man without money. He wrote his mother: "It means a wonderful opportunity for an education.... The plans have not yet been worked out but it is certain the government is planning an education for every young man regardless of his financial abilities." His was a forlorn hope, not to be realized until World War II when Paul, as the national chaplain of the American Legion, helped bring the GI Bill to fruition. War's end in 1918 at least lifted the local restrictions on campus activities, as Paul playfully noted to his mother: "I have busted in to a whole house full of girls and it cheers a fellow up on rainy Saturday and Sunday afternoons to sit around a fireplace and talk to some girls."²⁶ By December, Paul's soldiering was finished and so was his brief tenure at the Oregon Agricultural College. He could not afford to stay on as a regular student, and when the unit disbanded just before Christmas he headed for Portland to look for a job and soon returned to Pendleton.²⁷

The "mess hall" for cadets on the Oregon State campus, 1918

While Paul was away, his parents moved to the Umatilla County Hospital as staff members. Edward's varicose veins made it unlikely he could continue working much longer on a grader, and with Stockman's encouragement the county commissioners had offered Edward the job of managing the poor farm, a branch of the hospital that cared for indigent older men. Living in the big, two-story manager's house was a considerable step up from their small rental in Pendleton, but either the salary was too low or the responsibilities too many for Edward. He left most of the paperwork to Martha and kept his eye out for a county job more suitable to his peripatetic inclinations.

The couple's move to the county hospital grounds brought them closer to Louisa Tucker, Martha's widowed mother. "Grandma" Tucker's mental health had deteriorated after her husband died in 1910, and the family had committed her to the state asylum in Salem. Two years later, Pearl and John Peck built a one-room cottage behind their farmhouse in Culver, and the state released her to their custody, hoping she would improve. Instead, she grew worse, showing classic symptoms of dementia and, increasingly, paranoia. One postcard she sent Martha in 1912 provides some indication of her mental condition:

[Pearl is] washing on her new washer John has gone ... in the oto [auto] of corse, and I have a grafaphon to he ha he gave 10 drs [dollars] with 30 reccords ha ye got ye eye on me has ye.²⁸

After running away several times, accusing the Pecks of taking her money, and growing ever more detached from reality, Louisa was institutionalized again, this time at the branch asylum in Pendleton, not far from the county hospital. Evelyn visited her often, bantering back and forth with her like schoolchildren, making doilies, and listening fascinated while Grandma played tunes on her teeth. Louisa died in 1920. Her obituary, written by her daughter Martha, described the cause of death as "nayocarditis," probably a misspelling of myocarditis, a heart disease.²⁹

Edward's search for work paid off when Umatilla County offered him a job inspecting and labeling county property. The work required a vehicle — he had purchased his first horseless carriage a couple of years before — and he was reimbursed for expenses as he drove all over the county stamping tanks, trucks, and other machinery with an official stencil. Evelyn accompanied him on many occasions, learning how to drive and not minding the open top with the wind in her hair and the dust in her face. By her late teens she was an avid car enthusiast, volunteering whenever a driver was needed and impatient for a car of her own.

Pendleton was a growing community during World War I, with a reputable high school and an annual rodeo, but it lacked a "holiness" church. Doctrinally, the Nazarenes were close to the Free Methodists in their teachings, both devoted to living a simple but demonstrable Christian life. The two denominations differed on some details. FMs frowned on musical instruments in church, for instance, unlike the Nazarenes, who sang both a cappella and with accompaniment. Both groups approved of music in the home, however, and the Mortimores loved to sing. Edward had obtained a minister's license and an evangelical commission from the regional Nazarene Assembly in 1918, and when his cousin, a Nazarene preacher from Walla Walla, came to town and helped organize the first Nazarene congregation in Pendleton, Edward stepped forward as interim pastor.³⁰

The Umatilla County "poor farm," from the family album. The Mortimores lived in the house on the left, next to the home for indigent men.

In the fall of 1918, the congregation hired a preacher from Texas, E.V. Buzbee. He was young and just out of seminary, but he was popular with the church elders and started a drive that resulted in the construction of the first Nazarene church in Pendleton. A tall, dark, and skinny bachelor, Brother Buzbee was eager to find a friendly family home away from home, and he was soon a regular visitor at the Mortimore house. When he fell victim to the last vestiges of the great influenza epidemic that swept the country in 1919 and 1920, Martha led prayer vigils while he lay dying and escorted his coffin to Texas.³¹

Not all family members joined the Nazarene church in Pendleton, since the Nazarenes did not accept children or teenagers into full membership. Evelyn attended church as an acolyte, sang with the choir, and chorded the piano when the regular pianist was gone; but Paul had other ideas. He had been influenced by William Boddy, a Free Methodist evangelist and orator who emphasized the importance of youth organizations in church.³² The Disciples of Christ had a vigorous young people's group in Pendleton that had attracted Paul while he was still in high school. When he returned from Corvallis after the war, he joined the Christian Church and came under the influence of Dr. Thomas A. Mangum, a Nazarene physician and medical missionary on the faculty at Northwest Nazarene College (NNC) in Nampa, Idaho. "He was a wonderful person," Evelyn said later, and he took Paul under his wing and promised him a job in Nampa if he would study medicine and religion at NNC. It sounded good, but Paul grew disillusioned after a few months at the college. Though formal school policy required tolerance of other faiths, Paul felt like an outcast and the Nazarene girls spurned him as a nonbeliever. "My, the study of medicine is fascinating to the extreme," he wrote sarcastically in a letter home. When he learned about Buzbee's building campaign, he wrote a letter home that was indicative of both his sour mood and his financial worries:

So you are trying to build a church. Well, I hope and pray for your success, even if it is a Nazarene Church. Hope you folks dont have to go into it too heavy. It seems as if this family just wasn't meant to prosper.³³

Seeking prosperity — and adventure — on his own, Paul left NNC in the spring of 1920. At about this time, Olive and Evelyn later remembered, he heard or perhaps met the great Canadian explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who was trying to organize an expedition to the "friendly Arctic," following his return in 1918 from the tragic adventure that had cost the lives of eleven team members after their ship had been beset in the Beaufort Sea. Stefansson, so the family story goes, invited the youthful Mortimore to join the party, but Paul declined. It apparently was not the kind of adventure he had in mind.³⁴

Instead, Paul took a summer job in 1920 working for Ellison White, an organizer with the national Chautauqua movement. Though prosperity remained elusive, adventure came fast and furiously for a young man who had never been far from home. The Chautauqua was highbrow vaudeville for the culturally deprived, with heavy doses of religion and patriotism mixed in. The traveling road show had its roots in Lake Chautauqua, New York, where in the 1870s a Chicago Methodist minister had organized a summer conference to improve the training of Sunday-school teachers.³⁵ From there, the movement had spread rapidly in both geographic scope and substance. By World War I, its greatest appeal was in small-town America, whistle stops where advance men made local arrangements and erected huge tents for several days of performances and lectures.

Sent to join White's advance crew in Texas, Paul left Portland on about May 1, giving himself ten days to reach his destination. It was his first extended trip. Along the way, he took time to see the sights and wrote letters that were full of exuberance. California was a "wonderful country," San Francisco "simply grand." In the Central Valley, he marveled at the rich farmland: "I wish I had a hundred acre ranch in this country.... Just think, they are cutting 1st crop of hay here! The weather is absolutely ideal." Traveling through the borderlands just a few years after Pancho Villa's raid into New Mexico, Paul's patriotism took on a militant tone. "My first town I find is almost on the Mex. border. Hope I get to scrap some Mexicans," he wrote. But his uniform, which he still carried from Corvallis, had to go. It was too heavy for the hot Southwest. "I'll have to get some lighter clothes as soon as I can afford it," he explained, and asked that his favorite black hat be sent to him to replace his army one.³⁶

Evelyn and Brother Buzbee at the Mortimore home in Pendleton, 1919

Militancy changed to disgust once he reached the heart of the borderlands. With a "group of singers," part of the Chautauqua troupe, he crossed the border at Douglas, Arizona, into Agua Prieta, "a border town of course and wretchedly dirty and vile. We went into where they were gambling with all kinds of gambling apperatus [sic], and the money was sure piled high. Mostly Chinese and half breeds run those places. Booze is pleantiful [sic] and of a rotten variety." There were a few soldiers about, "poorly dressed and dirty, the only uniform they wear is a huge cartrige [sic] belt, or rather, several of them with cartriges as big as young cannon balls." He described the American soldiers in Douglas as well dressed and armed, ready for action if any trouble developed. But he need "hardly look for trouble now tho as the new rebel army seems to be friendly to the U.S. I hope the whole thing ends peacably."³⁷

Paul came home when the summer tour ended and worked with his father on road crews that fall and winter. In the spring of 1921, he returned to Texas for the new Chautauqua season, now an experienced hand who could work faster and carry more responsibilities. In Orange, he was busier "than a bunch of drowned out hornets. We have been having a regular southern Texas drencher and it has almost washed us away completely. I worked for several hours with the crew in a bathing suit the other night to save the tent."³⁸ After the rain came the oppressive heat. "I have burned my arms and shoulders to a beautiful crisp," he wrote from Corpus Christi. "It is sure hot work putting up tents. Thank goodness it only comes once a week."³⁹

Despite the weather, he still found the time to explore the countryside. "I have the tent up and nothing much to do now untill [sic] the show starts," he wrote from Orange, noting the high prices for everything except cotton. The post-war depression in agriculture had already begun. "Cotton isn't worth picking and they tell me they are burning it in the field lots of places."⁴⁰ From the Gulf coast, he reported: "People here are all wishing they were up in the North. Wages are practically nothing and there is little or no work. I guess every one is in the same boat." Home seemed a lot more interesting. "But of all the country I have seen so far," he wrote his relatives, "that around Pendleton offers the best living. I am sure I don't know what you folks could do any where else for every job is taken, and wages are very low." The cause, he believed, was somehow part of a corporate conspiracy, a common theme in rural America since the Civil War: "The oil fields have most all closed down. That seems queer with gasoline and oil so high, but it only shows the graft in the oil business. The small companies can't find a market for their oil, and yet the Standard Oil Co. says there is a shortage. It is pure and simply a scheme to keep up the price."⁴¹

Paul gained maturity and organizational experience during his two years on the Chautauqua circuit. He also learned some handy vaudeville lessons: how to warm up an audience with laughter and magic, how to project feeling and personality into a sermon, how music could be used to attract young people. But he still lacked ministerial training and experience. He would later earn some credits at Northwest Christian College in Eugene and ultimately gain an honorary doctorate of divinity degree, but that was after nearly thirty years in the ministry.

More important than formal credentials was experience. Paul found his gospel voice in the early 1920s as a soloist and assistant to "Teddy Leavitt's Soul-Winning Team" of evangelists, based in Newberg, Oregon. Financed by the "freewill gifts of the people," Leavitt promised to "take the gospel ... to the needy fields, i.e. rural communities, small towns, camps and remote places ..." to "lead sinners to Christ by ... methods of the apostles and New Testament evangelists." Leavitt and his crew spent the summer months organizing Bible schools and churches in small towns throughout the Pacific Northwest. During the winter, they held revival meetings in established churches. For two years Paul accompanied Leavitt and a fellow evangelist, Cecil Warner, singing solos, leading the audience in song, playing guitar, and offering homilies to warm up the crowd before the main event.⁴² By the spring of 1923, he was ready for a church of his own.

Paul about the time of his Chautauqua trip, 1922

While Paul was traveling and learning the ropes as a soldier, organizer, and evangelist, the rest of the Mortimore family remained in eastern Oregon. After a year or two teaching at Pilot Rock, Olive took a school at Adams, thirteen miles northeast of Pendleton. Evelyn was still in school when her older siblings left home. While the family had been living at the Poor Farm, she had suffered from rheumatic fever and had lost a semester of high school, but she was determined to graduate with her class. Despite an officious principal who tried to discourage her, she took enough correspondence courses to obtain the necessary credits and finished on schedule — even making her own graduation clothes and singing a solo at Pendleton High ceremonies in 1921. In later years, she reminisced about her precocious youth, her exuberance for life, and her physical strength. "I was a big, strong girl, and could do just about anything," she said of her late teen years. But what to do with her life after high school was still in question.

In the summer after graduation, Evelyn visited her cousin Ouida Limbaugh in Fruitland, in the heart of southwestern Idaho apple country. She worked for a time in a packinghouse; but when the fall semester started she enrolled in Northwest Nazarene College at Nampa, the same school Paul had tried for a semester. Within weeks after the semester started, an epidemic of "itch" broke out in the NNC dormitory, and she was called on to nurse several students who were put in isolation. After a few days, she returned to classes, but in November the Nazarene Church in Pendleton needed a pianist for a revival meeting and Evelyn went home. During Thanksgiving vacation, she played through the revival and then decided she did not want to go back to Nampa. With two months of classes and several nurses' uniforms she had made while at NNC, she went to work as a practical nurse in Hermiston, where her parents had rented a farm. She lived at home and found steady work helping a country doctor deliver babies and handling other nursing chores while he made house calls. Despite his poor legs, Edward was once more working for the Oregon State Highway Department, grading roads in northeastern Umatilla County.

Farm families who lived on the margins faced difficult choices during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Many who stayed on the land during the boom years of World War I suffered from the falling prices and severe agricultural recession that followed the war and that only got worse as recession gave way to depression after 1929. Moving to an urban area had its own set of perils. For more than a century, cities had served as an economic safety valve for agrarian discontent, but for farm families the social costs weighed heavily against the material benefits as they saw traditional family structures breaking down under the pace and complexities of urban life.

The Mortimore family story can tell us something about how rural people tried to cope with the economic and social consequences of the First World War and its aftermath. The family began the century with limited means and inadequate education. Edward's desultory efforts to earn a living from the soil ended in failure twice, once in Madras and again in Methow. The alternative was to move to a city, but for a man his age it was a Hobbesian choice. He lacked the training and experience necessary to qualify for an office job, and physical limitations forced him to move frequently in search of easier, if not better, blue-collar work. He was more fortunate than many other farm migrants, however, because he had skills that could be adapted to certain types of urban employment and he also had influential friends who helped him find suitable positions. By the second decade of the century he was earning a respectable wage as a road grader, but the work was hard and his earnings were inadequate to help his children. They had to make it on their own.

The campus hospital at Northwest Nazarene College, 1921. Evelyn took nurse's training under Dr. Magnum in the hospital for two months.

Like many former farmers, the elder Mortimores clung to rural traditions and ways of life. Coming face-to-face with an urban culture they regarded as both materialistic and decadent, they added their voices to the progressive campaign for moral reform. Their podium was the evangelical church, an emotional haven for the rural poor cast adrift in what they saw as a dark and turbulent urban sea. Through good times and bad, Edward and Martha were comforted by the proscriptive dogmas of "old-time religion."

The transition from rural to urban culture was easier on children than adults. Some youthful migrants were quick to join the "revolution in manners and morals" that characterized the social history of the 1920s.⁴³ Other scions of agrarian America — among them the Mortimore offspring — took the middle ground, making room for secular changes without abandoning the spiritual lessons of their youth. They accepted city jobs out of economic necessity but rejected lifestyle choices they considered to be immoral or unchristian. Ultimately, to both generations of Mortimores, personal opportunity was not as important as faith and family values. Though perhaps more comfortable in small towns far away from the secular and more worldly cities, they maintained close ties to church and family wherever they lived and worked.

The Pendleton Nazarene Church

Notes

^1. Sociologists generally accept the "standard model" of pre-industrial families but differ in many details. See Sheva Medjuck, "The Social Consequences of Economic Cycles on Nineteenth-Century Households and Family Life: The Case of Moucton, New Brunswick, 1851–1871," Social Indicators Research 18 (August 1986): 233–61. For more on family history, see Journal of Family History (1976–present), published for the National Council on Family Relations by JAI Press; and Jane Turner Censer, "Whatever Happened to Family History? A Review Article," Comparative Studies in Society and History 33 (1991): 528–38. For popular guides, see "Your Family, Our History," Parade Magazine, November 21, 1999. Growth of interest in family studies has been aided substantially by the long-standing program of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to copy and preserve archival resources around the world. A list of LDS Family History Centers can be found at www.genhomepage.com/FHC/fhc.html.

^2. For studies of rural American families in transition, see Kenyon L Butterfield, "Rural Life and the Family," in The Family, Papers and Proceedings, 3d Annual Meeting, American Sociological Society, December 28–30, 1908 (reprint, Arno Press, 1972), 106–14; Hal S. Barron, "Rediscovering the Majority: The New Rural History of the Nineteenth-Century North," Historical Methods 19 (Fall 1986): 141–52. For modern family relationships and problems, consult David A. Hamburg, "The American Family Transformed," Society 30 (January–February 1993): 60–9; Patricia K. Kerig, "Triangles in the Family Circle: Effects of Family Structure on Marriage, Parenting, and Child Adjustment," Journal of Family Psychology 9 (March 1995): 28–43; Betty G. Farrel, Family: The Making of an Idea, an Institution, and a Controversy in American Culture (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1999); Brian P. Ackerman et al., "Family Structure and the Externalizing Behavior of Children from Economically Disadvantaged Families," Journal of Family Psychology 15 (June 2001):, 288–300.

^3. Augustinian eschatology filled her mind and materialized in a song lyric she copied from a Free Methodist friend on April 10, 1906, just before leaving Madras: "I see the new Jerusalem descending from above / With its pearly gates and golden streets so fair / I hear the invitation, 'tis a message of His love / Inviting me the city's joys to share. / ... I've shaken hands with all my friends, / I've bid them all adieu. / The last mile-stone I've just passed by, / The land appears in view. Hallelujah, to the Lamb of God...." Another copy in unknown hand notes at bottom: "Brother Smalley's Song, for Mrs. L.C. Tucker [Martha's mother]."

^4. Carl Abbott, Portland: Planning, Politics, and Growth in a Twentieth-Century City (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 27–57.

^5. Martha Mortimore to J.C. Tucker, postcard, Portland, June 26, 1906, family archives.

^6. Olive Mortimore Rodman Peck (hereafter Olive Mortimore), interview with author, Salem, Oregon, June 11, 1968; Doris Rodman Jewett, note to author, March 3, 1993.

^7. Olive Mortimore interview, June 11, 1968.

^8. Jefferson County Reminiscences (Portland: Binfords & Mort, 1957), 160; Martha Mortimore Bible, holographic marginal note, 1911, at Hebrews 6:17–19, family archives.

^9. For the homesteading efforts of the Limbaugh, Peck, and Evans families in central Oregon, see R.H. Limbaugh, "From Missouri to the Pacific Northwest: Pioneer Families in the 20th Century," Oregon Historical Quarterly 91 (Fall 1990): 228–57.

^10. Olive Mortimore interview, June 11, 1968.

^11. Olive Mortimore to Martha Mortimore, postcard, Culver, May 24, 1912, family archives. The pietist religious rivalries are discussed briefly in R.H. Limbaugh, "From Missouri to the Pacific Northwest," 249.

^12. Evelyn Limbaugh, interview with author, Caldwell, Idaho, October 27, 1980.

^13. Olive Mortimore to Martha Mortimore, postcard, October 20, 1913, family archives; Jewett note.

^14. Inez Peck to Paul Mortimore, postcard, November 23, 1912, family archives; Jefferson County Reminiscences, 142, 165.

^15. Pearl Peck to Martha Mortimore, June 11, 1913, family archives.

^16. Ibid., 133.

^17. Abbott, Portland, 57–70.

^18. Evelyn Limbaugh, interview with author, Stockton, California, August 21, 1967; Olive Mortimore interview, June 11, 1968.

^19. Olive Mortimore, interview with author, Salem, Oregon, June 23, 1970.

^20. Paul Mortimore, notes in photo album, March 1915, family archives.

^21. Olive Mortimore interview, June 23, 1970.

^22. Evelyn Limbaugh interview, August 21, 1967.

^23. For the Mortimores in Colville, see Limbaugh, "From Missouri to the Pacific Northwest," 232–3.

^24. R.H. Tucker, Hutchinson, Kans., December 26, 1917, to Martha Mortimore, family archives.

^25. Paul Mortimore, Corvallis, September 30, October 3, 6, 1918, to Martha Mortimore, family archives.

^26. Paul Mortimore, November 12, 1918, to Martha Mortimore, family archives.

^27. Paul Mortimore, December 12, 1918, to Martha Mortimore, family archives.

^28. Louisa Tucker, postcard, August 14, 1912, to Martha Mortimore, family archives.

^29. Louise C. Tucker obituary, June 10, 1920, newspaper scrap, family archives; Evelyn Limbaugh interview, October 27, 1980.

^30. Minister's license, June 8, 1918, certifying E.M. Mortimore is licensed minister with Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene, by order of Northwest Dist. Assembly, Portland; Evangelist's Commission, June 8, 1918, certifying E.M. Mortimore is commissioned evangelist in Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene, field to be Northwest States, by J.W. Goodwin, General Superintendent; both in family archives.

^31. Martha Mortimore, holograph Bible note, February 16, 1920, at Hosea 6:1–3, family archives.

^32. Olive Mortimore interview, June 23, 1970.

^33. Paul Mortimore, Nampa, Idaho, December 6, 1919, to Martha Mortimore, family archives.

^34. Evelyn Limbaugh interview, August 21, 1967; Olive Mortimore interview, June 23, 1970; Jeannette Mirsky, To the Arctic! The Story of Northern Exploration from Earliest Times to the Present (1934; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 288–92.

^35. Luther A. Weigle, American Idealism, vol. 10 of The Pageant of America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1928), 200–201.

^36. Paul Mortimore, [ca. May 1], May 6, 1920, to Mortimore family, family archives.

^37. Paul Mortimore, May 11, 1920, to Mortimore family, family archives.

^38. Paul Mortimore, April 8, 1921, to Mortimore family, family archives.

^39. Paul Mortimore, April 14, 1921, to Mortimore family, family archives.

^40. Paul Mortimore, April 4, 1921, to Mortimore family, family archives.

^41. Paul Mortimore, April 19, 1921, to Mortimore family, family archives.

^42. Huldah Mortimore, notes, ca. 1970; "Leavitt's Soul-Winning Team," printed flyer, 1923.

^43. Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday (New York: Harper, 1931), chap. 5.

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