Although her history is rich in Lewis County, Frances Grove spent the early years of her life in Oregon and California because her father traveled from one job to another as a carpenter, welder and later a boilermaker.
Her parents, Frank Linwood, the son of Arthur and Margaret Linwood, and Gwendolyn Janice Smith, an Oregon native, were married on March 7, 1931, in Auburn, California, according to The Sunday Oregonian, which attributed the news to her mother, Clara Webb Smith, who was living in Battle Ground at the time.
Frank and Gwendolyn had two children, Frances, who was born in 1932, and Raymond, who arrived six years later.
“It was the beginning of the war,” Fran said, noting that polio had left her father with a 4-F or “unfit to serve” classification. “Dad was working as a welding instructor by that time. I can’t tell you how he learned to weld, but he’d go from one aircraft plant to another, teaching welding.”
The family owned a house in Albany, Oregon, but Frank and Gwen traveled primarily between San Diego and San Francisco so he could teach welding. When his students passed their exams, he moved to the next plant.
“So, they rented their house and bought a trailer,” Fran said. “And trailers in that time didn’t amount to much. We had a kitchen and a bedroom, and that was about it.”
She and her brother had separate beds in the bedroom, while her parents slept on the couch. They parked in trailer courts, where they could use the centralized restrooms, showers and laundry rooms. Living out of a trailer didn’t affect her, she said, because “we didn’t know any better.”
“So we moved quite a few places, and I couldn’t tell you what they were,” Fran said. “I can kind of see them in my mind’s eye.”
When the time arrived for Fran to enter the first grade, the family established a temporary address with Gwen’s mother, Clara Webb Smith, who had grown up on the well-known Webb Farms at Troutdale, Oregon, east of Portland. Her parents lived in a cabin and moved from one job to another, so they thought it better for her to stay in Portland. Her grandmother, who had raised six children by herself and taught seventh and eighth grade boys at a private school, brooked no foolishness.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Fran said, recalling her stern grandmother. “She was a divorced lady. You didn’t do that in those days.”
Clara Louise Webb Smith, who had been born on July 8, 1878, in Oakland, California, was the eldest of three daughters. Her father, Alfred Thomas Webb, a native of Illinois, worked in business, served as a deacon at the First Baptist Church’s White Temple, and owned a large cherry farm a dozen miles east of Portland at Troutdale, according to The Oregon Daily Journal. Her mother, Margaret (Hart) Webb, was a New York native.
In 1911, five years after their father died suddenly at 55 in May 1906, the Webb farm was divided among his three daughters: Clara, who was assistant pastor of the White Temple, a stone building with an arched entryway at the corner of Taylor and Second in Portland; Mary Elizabeth Allen, who had served as an assistant hospital superintendent in Grants Pass, Oregon; and Martha C. Wilson of Seattle, The Sunday Oregonian reported. Mary and Martha each received 80 acres, with the well-known Lambert Cherry Orchard going to Mary, while Clara, who had married Clarence Marion Smith of Milford, Michigan, at the Webb cherry farm in early 1910, kept the middle 72 acres with a home and barns. After their father died, their mother married Richard Zeller but later divorced him due to abandonment.
Within a decade of her marriage, Clara Webb Smith gave birth to six children — Marion V., Alfred W., Gwendolyn J., Isabel C., Myrtle L., and Henry M. Smith. Fran’s mother, Gwendolyn, who was a Big Cheese of Toledo in 1991, was born Sept. 18, 1912, at Gresham, Oregon. In her Big Cheese write-up, she said her father wasn’t home much. She last saw him for about an hour when she was 12.
“It is no wonder that she finally divorced him in 1919,” said Gwen, who died on July 30, 1992, in Olympia. “He skipped the country to avoid child support payments.”
In census records, sometimes Clara Webb Smith described herself as married, other times divorced or widowed. She moved her family to Seaside in 1916 and rented a home at 102 Broadway for four years. That’s where Gwen developed her love for the ocean, saying in later years, “If I had my druthers, I’d rather be at the beach on a stormy day.”
“I don’t have much patience with people who blame their troubles on the lack of two parents in the home,” she said. “I had a wonderful mother, and she brought us up properly.”
In 1920, Clara Webb Smith accepted a job teaching seventh and eighth grades in a private school near Battle Ground, and bought a home valued at $1,500 at 110 Meadow Glade.
Gwen graduated from school in Meadow Glade in 1930 and met Frank Linwood, whom she married in 1931. He worked as a general foreman for a boilermaker company.
Gwen’s mother bought a large $3,000 house at 2535 SE 41st Ave. in Portland in January 1939, which was a good thing because, during the war, three of her daughters listed it as home, including Gwen and Frank and their two children.
Fran was seven and attending first grade while her father, Frank, worked as an erector in San Francisco. He had finished eighth grade and worked full time, earning about $2,000 a year (about $45,552 in today’s dollars). Her grandmother, Clara Webb Smith, sold “fine large chestnuts” from the Webb Farm.
The next couple of years, while the United States fought in World War II, Fran attended school in Orange County in California.
“We were just right off the ocean, and we spent a lot of time on the beach,” she said. After all, her mother gained a love for the Pacific Ocean after living at Seaside. Fran knew how to swim but not well, especially in a bay with deep water and an undertow.
“One day I was out with a bunch of kids and almost drowned,” she recalled. “I was probably in the seventh grade. I still think about it sometimes because it did scare me.”
And, she added, “I learned to swim better after that.”
The war ended during her eighth-grade year, so the family moved north to Albany, but the renters had trashed their house. They sold it in 1946 and decided to build on 40 acres they owned on the Cowlitz Prairie north of Toledo.
“Frank and I loved the prairie, but we also enjoyed the ocean,” Gwen said. “We dug clams but mostly watched the water.”
Frank’s mother lived nearby on the prairie with her second husband, Joe Mathews.
“We moved up here and lived in the trailer, and Dad cleared enough to start building a house,” Fran said. He cut the trees from the property and milled the lumber there.
“Mom and I got to be off-bearers,” she said. “He’d run it, and then we’d be on the other end, and when the boards would come through, we’d have to take them off. He ran it all with a Fordson tractor.”
The big wheels from the tractor left ruts that enabled her father to dig out stumps left behind.
They lived in the small trailer while building the house. Fran, who milked three cows twice a day, started as a freshman at the old Toledo High School, which is used as a middle school today. They also had a donkey who brayed whenever Fran failed to tackle her chores immediately after school.
She remembered Albert Kletsch, who taught math and later served as principal, “but I think he was a better teacher than principal.” He later taught at Onalaska.
“I loved math,” she said. “None of the kids liked it really. He just had a way of saying things to make you hopefully want to learn your math.”
She recalled Kletsch telling a football player that all he had to do is “grab the math” — and he picked up the wastebasket — “get a good hold on it, and then you run with it. You can learn this.”
Chuckling, she added, “He’d come up with stuff, but that one just kind of stuck.”
She preferred math over English, probably because of her father’s encouragement.
“We used to sit at the table after dinner, and he’d give me math problems,” she recalled. “So I learned my math pretty young.”
When she attended high school, girls didn’t play sports, except perhaps on Sports Day once a year, like the time the Toledo girls rode a bus to play a softball game against their counterparts in Toutle Lake. She did participate in Future Homemakers of America but didn’t date much during high school. At the time, she thought of becoming a veterinarian.
“I think when you’re a teenager, all you want to do is get out of the house,” she said. Or in her case, the trailer.
Fran worked summers waiting tables and doing dishes at a small restaurant and gas station — the Dude Ranch — north of Toledo and south of Sareault Road on Jackson Highway, also known as Highway 99. It was the major north-south route in Western Washington before construction of Interstate 5, which is why nearby was another restaurant called the Blue Tree, across from where the Toledo softball fields are today. Waiting tables, Fran said she earned 75 cents an hour plus tips “and didn’t even have to declare them in those days.”
“The couple that owned it did the cooking,” she said. “We had a fair amount of traffic because Jackson Highway was the main highway.”
After graduating in 1950, she waited tables and did dishes at the Toledo Café downtown at the corner of what today is Cowlitz and Ramsey Way. The Greyhound bus passed through Toledo and stopped occasionally during bad weather at a terminal at the Olson Brothers across from the cafe.
“So when the weather was bad … whoever was on the bus came to the restaurant,” she said. “We sold more dinners, and I got more tips.”
One of her regular customers, Gerald “Jerry” Grove, asked her for a date. He was eight years older than her, having graduated from Toledo High School in 1942. He had been drafted into the Army during World War II and served in the Philippines.
They drove to the ocean, rode the ferry in the Puget Sound, watched movies in Chehalis, and enjoyed time together when they weren’t working — Jerry as a logger for Weyerhaeuser Co. and Fran at Thayer Grocery.
Then, on June 9, 1951, when she was 18, Frances Clara Linwood married Gerald “Jerry” Edward Grove in Toledo in a lawn ceremony at the Cowlitz Prairie home of her grandmother, Margaret Mathews, and her husband, Joseph. They exchanged vows in front of an arbor covered with snow balls and pink peonies while her uncle Vance Brewer accompanied Marlyce Mackey as she sang “I Love You Truly” and “Because.” The reception took place at John Hinkley’s home where her aunts poured beverages and served the cake.
They had been married 53 years when Jerry died in 2004.
But that’s a story for next week.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
