The first days and weeks that followed Mom’s death in the summer of ’60 have faded away to just a few wispy tendrils. I can’t remember who made us breakfast or tucked us in at night, or the hundreds of other tasks involved in managing five boys from 9 to 2. There were groups and groups of visitors for a while. 
The Unterrieners, close friends who lived in town (Susanville), were frequent visitors. I believe the parents, Josephine and Cletus, probably became acquainted with Mom and Dad through the Catholic church. For years it seemed as though there was a competition between the two families to see who could raise the most kids. David was a little older than me. Paul Unterriener and my brother Dale were about the same age. Mary Francis and Hal arrived in the same year. Alan and Bill, and Marrette and Ted also matched up, I think. Dad, at that point, put a stop to it by having a vasectomy. The Unterrieners continued in the Catholic tradition and ended up with 11.
Years later I heard that there were discussions in the weeks after the accident about splitting the family up. There were suggestions and offers of new homes for each of us boys. It was thought to be too much to ask of a single father to work and take care of us too. Dad chose the hard road and kept us all together. I for one, am glad he did. It would have been much more devastating to lose both parents, though in a way, I did. Dad came to depend on me as a sounding board, I think because I was the oldest. It was a source of friction for many of the adults who came to take care of us later. Dad usually wanted my opinion before making a decision and that could irritate the hell out of them, especially when I did not agree with their side of an argument. I miss him so much. But that will come later.
Gramma DeVeau stayed with us for awhile. I remember one morning making toast for breakfast and asking if she wanted some. She did but wanted to make it herself in order to get it just right. I thought she was pretty fussy about it. Dentures, the existence of which she was very careful not to reveal, were the reason for it – too little time in the toaster or too much butter made it soggy and harder to chew, while too long meant scraping away a lot of carbon. Couldn’t afford to throw it away. In any event she felt the desired outcome was more likely in her hands than mine.
Aunt Curly (real name Caroline, Dad’s sister) took over for a few months after Gramma. I wish I’d had a chance to know her better after I was an adult. She had kind of a tough and interesting life. She had three husbands that I know of and two daughters, Marion and Karen. Marion arrived when Curly was 15, whispered to be the result of abuse by an uncle. I never got the whole story. Adults don’t talk about those things around kids. Karen was a rather rebellious teenager in the early ’60s. She did not live with us, but did come around to stir things up once in a while. There were a few mature black locust trees on the property and one in the backyard that we climbed on a regular basis just because we could. On Karen’s first visit, I was about half way up when she came out the back door and saw me. She said, “I bet I can climb higher than you.” Well I knew there was just no way she could, so up I went thinking I’d go up first and then wait and watch as she tried to go higher. When I was at the point where I usually stopped, Karen egged me one some more: “I can go higher than that.” I should have suspected something besides me was up, but I didn’t. So I climbed until the branches were just large enough to support my weight. I knew she could not possibly go that high due to the simple fact that she was 6 or 7 years older than I and consequently heavier as well. At that point she turned around to face the screen door at the back of the house and hollered as loud as she could, “Mother, Jerry’s climbing trees!” I’m sitting there thinking, “Yeah, so?” In seconds, Aunt Curly came running and demanded, “Jerry! Get down from there!” Karen burst out laughing. I was stunned! That devious redhead had had no intention of climbing herself. She merely wanted to get me in trouble. She had purposely gotten me to climb too far to get down quickly, though at the time it never even occurred to me that I should. There had never been an issue with climbing nor had I ever before encountered such behavior.
Aunt Curly had her own life to live and neither she or Dad expected it to be a long term arrangement. But consider the alternatives. Was it possible to convince a total stranger to come live out in the country 14 miles from the nearest town in an old 3 bedroom, 1 bath, ranch house to cook and clean for a 36 year old man and his five, count ‘em, five boys, six days a week (Sundays off) for room and board and $100 dollars a month? Turns out, it was, and part of the attraction for some was that 30 something man.
Eventually Dad hired the first of several live-in housekeepers: Juanita. Sweet and cheerful are the first two words that come to mind to describe her. She was a little taller than Dad (about 5′ 6″) with short curly black hair and brown eyes, a bit on the heavy side, though that may only be in comparison to Mom who was a tiny little thing just shy of 5′. I don’t remember her soft voice ever being raised with any of us, though she could be stern with her own teenage daughter, Susan. Juanita introduced us to tacos. It seems inconceivable now that anyone living in California could reach the age of ten and not know about tacos. But this was Lassen County in the sparsely populated northeast corner of the state many years before the High Desert State Prison turned Susanville into a prison town. Tacos became a Saturday night tradition. When she left about two years later, we tried to continue, but they just were not the same without Juanita. Looking back, I think she was not only the first, in many ways she was the best. We were primed for disappoint with those who came after.
Alice Westfield was a cranky old widow of a railroad man. She smoked and drank at least as much, if not more than the other denizens of the Wayside Inn in Standish, which I think is where Dad found her and offered her the job after Juanita’s departure. Good help has always been hard to find, I guess. She had a voice like gravel and from a distance the only clue she wasn’t a he was the hair that was only a little longer than a man would have worn it in those times. But putting aside her personality, she was a decent housekeeper and cook. She made the best “chili beans” bar none. They were so good in fact that for the next 20 years or so I thought they were the only kind of beans worth eating. Made it kind of tough for my most excellent spouse, Patricia, when we were first married and hers didn’t measure up.
