Editor’s note: This is the third and final installment of columnist Julie McDonald’s series on Toledo area resident Frances Grove. See previous installments at chronline.com/opinion.
After giving birth to both a daughter and a son in one fell swoop, Frances Grove figured their family was complete. She and Jerry had purchased her parents’ trailer where she had grown up so they could travel from one job to another. They put two cribs in the bedroom and slept on the couch.
By that time, Fran’s father had persuaded her husband to train as a boilermaker with an East Coast company, CC Moore Co. Jerry later joined the union, which sent him to specific jobs as far north as Marysville and east to Idaho. Toledo remained their home base where they could hook the trailer to her parents’ water, electricity, and septic system when Jerry worked locally.
“It was a better income than logging,” she said. “We still traveled.”
Her father often traveled with them in a separate small trailer, and she cooked dinner for him and her family.
“He’d come for dinner and help with the kids,” Frances recalled. “So Jerry and Dad would babysit while I put dinner on and cleaned up after them.”
Fran’s parents celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary with an open house at the Cowlitz Prairie home of Don Boggs, the former Joe Mathews residence, in March 1956. Frank and Gwen Linwood joined the Cowlitz Prairie Grange in 1958, and Gwen served 21 years as secretary and five years as lecturer. She helped start Grange scholarships for graduating Toledo students, put together Christmas food baskets for needy families, and donated a Living Life Line in 1990 to Providence Hospital.
During Toledo Cheese Days, Gwen made cheese sandwiches to give away, helped cook food for hungry dancers, and served coffee, pop, and hot dogs to spectators during the Grange’s annual Steam Threshing Bee. She also signed in voters who cast election ballots in person at the Toledo Senior Center and drove the ballots to the Lewis County courthouse in Chehalis. She volunteered four years with the Lewis County Literacy Council at Centralia College and tutored adults seeking to obtain a GED. She also volunteered as an aide at Toledo Elementary for a dozen years.
Fran said she and her brother, Raymond Arthur Linwood, weren’t especially close because of the six-year age difference. After graduating from Toledo High School in June 1956, Raymond enlisted in the U.S. Navy and earned high grades, placing at the top of his Navy class. He married Carol Gower in the spring of 1962, and they had four children — Debbie, Danny, Darrel, and Doreen — and lived in Centralia, where he worked as an electronics specialist for WIDCO. He died at 84 on Sept. 4, 2024, in Centralia.
In April 1959, Fran and Jerry, who were living in Pasco at the time, visited her parents — Frank and Gwen — on the Cowlitz Prairie, where they planned to move soon. A week later, Fran traveled to Pasco to spend the week with her husband, who was working there supervising the installation of a boiler system.
Jerry and Fran later obtained a bigger trailer with two bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom from a couple who couldn’t afford its payments. They traded their smaller 25-foot trailer and took over the payments.
“It seemed like a mansion,” she said. “It was only 40 feet long and eight feet wide, because that was the biggest you could haul on the road at that time.”
Having a bathroom inside the trailer was wonderful, she said.
“We had these babies, and by the time they were in the third grade, they’d been to six schools,” she said. Although they were the same age, school officials often put them in separate classrooms.
“We decided we’d had enough of the trailer life,” she said. “So that’s when we started building, and we bought 30 acres from my folks. They had over 100.”
Her father drew up plans for the three-bedroom house and assisted when they started constructing it while living in the trailer. She outlined what she wanted where in the house, which was fun.
“We’d work weekends on it,” she recalled.
In addition to her father and husband, Fran helped with the construction, and so did the twins.
“One time, Jerry and Dad were both in Montana working, and there was nothing but bare studs in here,” she said. “So the kids and I put up a whole bunch of sheetrock while Dad and Jerry were gone, because I could lift it or tip it, and they would hold it while I nailed it. I kind of like doing stuff like that.”
She also put the finishing trim around a window. The corners all matched, and it looked nice, but when she showed her father, eager to hear his praise, he told her the corners matched but she put it on backward. She left it that way.
“I have the wide side next to the window, the narrow side next to the wall, and it looks fine,” she said, adding that she attached the rest of it correctly. She said building the house “took us about two years.”
They parked the trailer in front of the house. Although Fran intended to live there until the house was finished, her husband and children took matters into their own hands.
“One night I went to a PTA meeting, and when I came home, the trailer was empty,” she said. “They got tired of waiting.”
They finished the house while living in it. They also raised cattle, anywhere from two to 20 head, but left most of the property in timber.
“The cows keep the brush down,” she said. They’ve cut timber a couple of times.
The twins attended Toledo schools in the fourth grade, and Fran coached Sherry in sports. She became president of the Parent-Teacher Association and helped coach girls’ basketball and softball.
Then, when her children reached high school, Fran returned to college in her 30s to earn her teaching credentials.
“I just decided that my mothering was pretty much done, and I didn’t want to waitress, and I didn’t particularly want to work in the grocery store,” Fran said. “A friend said, ‘why don’t you go take the Washington precollege test and go back to school?’”
Why not? She passed easily and enrolled at Centralia College, where she excelled for two years. Then, in 1969, her father suffered a horrendous accident. While working underneath a bulldozer, his pants caught fire and burned his legs so severely that they eventually needed to be amputated above the knee.
He was hospitalized with severe burns at a Seattle hospital, and Fran spent weekends with him and her mother. He was later transferred to Good Samaritan in Portland. The community held a benefit dance for the Linwoods at the Cowlitz Prairie Grange with live music and dancing.
“That was really, really hard to stay in school,” she said. “I was going to drop out.”
In fact, she told a friend over lunch that she planned to do just that, but then two of her instructors called her to their offices to encourage her to stay in school and help her father on weekends.
Her father, who had always led an active life, left the hospital in a wheelchair.
“It was awful,” she said. “It’s like anything, you learn to deal with it. He did as much as he could do around the place.”
His employers at CC Moore offered him a desk job, saying young guys could do the running up and down the stairs, but he had the boiler-making brain. He didn’t want to do it.
“It would have been hard for him, but it would have been good for him,” she said. “You can’t put yourself in his place.”
In November 1972, the Grange purchased new chairs for the hall, which were scheduled to be assembled by a work party, and Frank Linwood made the armrests.
On Nov. 11, 1974, at the age of 67, Frank E. Linwood died and was buried at Claquato Cemetery.
“In 1974, my beloved husband, Frank, passed away,” Gwen said. “Since then I have filled my time with family and community involvement.”
Gwendolyn Janice (Smith) Linwood died nearly two decades later, on July 30, 1992, at the age of 79, and was buried beside him.
Despite the challenges she faced, Fran graduated from Centralia College and earned a biology degree from St. Martin’s University in Olympia. She had to take physics, which proved challenging. She put organic chemistry notes on index cards, attached them to the dash, and studied while driving. She also earned her teaching credentials.
“I could have gone just a straight teaching degree, which would have been easier, but I guess I’ve never done anything the easy way,” she said.
She graduated a year after her twins finished high school. Her son, Larry, enlisted in the Navy and served during the Vietnam War. After his discharge, he enrolled in Washington State University, using the GI Bill, and graduated in biology. He later returned to school to become a certified public accountant. He was elected Lewis County auditor in 2014. Sherry also attended WSU, studied education, and taught four decades at Toledo Elementary School before retiring.
“Teaching seems to run in our family,” Gwen Linwood said, referring to her daughter, Fran, and granddaughter, Sherry.
Fran’s first job was teaching girls at the Catholic private school, St. Mary’s Academy, on Cowlitz Prairie next to St. Francis Xavier Mission. She wasn’t Catholic but taught the girls algebra, biology, and physical education alongside business teacher Alice Aboen, who died last September just days shy of her 98th birthday.
“Classes were small, and it wasn’t bad,” she said. “They were kind of winding down.”
The nuns often sought her out when needing help. One time, a sister rushed to her classroom, saying since she was the science teacher, perhaps she could remove the snake they’d found.
That year, 1972, the federal government passed Title IX, which required schools to provide sports activities for girls as well as boys. When Toledo refused to field a girls’ basketball team, St. Mary’s did.
“I didn’t know much about basketball, but I was able to read and do enough,” she said. It helped to have a short girl from Nicaragua who was “just a speedster out on the floor.”
St. Mary’s won the Lewis County title, defeating Winlock for the win.
“The principal at Winlock was very upset that St. Mary’s won the trophy because they weren’t a public school, and they shouldn’t have been able to even participate, let alone win,” she said. “So the story is that he bought a first place trophy for Winlock.”
When Fran needed to teach advanced algebra, she panicked, but the principal, a nun, assured her she’d be fine.
“She said, ‘Well, you just try it, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll give the girls a study hall.’” Rather than wasting the students’ time, she sought help from the Toledo math teacher who tutored her every Friday. The following year, a student attending Portland State University sent her a note, assuring her that her math education at St. Mary’s was fine.
“My main concern was that I wasn’t giving them enough math to go from high school to college,” Fran said. The note calmed those fears.
St. Mary’s closed in June 1972 because of declining enrollment and rising operational costs. A private school and Toledo public schools leased the classrooms for a time. The Cowlitz Tribe purchased the building from the Sisters of St. Francis in 2001 for $1 million and then invested $5 million remodeling it into senior housing for the tribe.
After St. Mary’s closed, Fran applied for a job at Toledo, where she taught girls’ freshman English and creative writing for a year until the biology teacher, Denny Clark, accepted a promotion to principal, leaving an opening for a science teacher.
“I talked Mr. Clark into letting us (girls) join the sports program,” she said, noting that because she usually taught PE, she became the girls’ coach. “We had volleyball and basketball and track.”
Fran coached all three, and when her daughter started teaching at Toledo, she worked with her as assistant coach.
“The two of us did it for many years,” she said. “We had a good time.”
For the girls’ basketball team’s first year, with no money for uniforms, they sewed numbers onto their gym clothes. Fran had to create the program herself.
“Some of the girls that I run into still remember that,” she said.
Allocated only a specific amount of money, she tried to find enough to buy knee pads for the volleyball team, but the boys’ baseball team needed something, so she bought them herself.
Fran enjoyed teaching science students to work with electricity and learn the inner workings of a car engine using a four-cylinder motor mock-up with spark plugs she found stashed away in a cupboard.
“Teaching is interesting, because if you’re at a place a long time, you tend to find things that have been stuck away that nobody wants to work with,” she said.
When Chuck Caley arrived as a math and science teacher, he created a science team that competed regionally and even nationally.
“We had really good years with the science team, and we had good kids,” she recalled. “State was at Seattle, and nationals was in Georgia or wherever. We did a lot of travel. It was fun. It was a lot of work, but we just had a good time.”
She coached the students in biology and tree identification. That’s also when she learned to identify birds.
“Jerry set me up a platform just outside the window, and we put different kinds of seeds and stuff on,” she said. “We’d draw different birds, trying to identify them.”
After retiring, which was difficult because she liked what she did, Fran Grove helped special ed teacher Shirley Watson for a year.
“All I did was paperwork,” she said. “That was not me, so one year was enough of that.”
Losing Jerry, her husband of 53 years, in 2004 was difficult, especially after his painful bout with shingles, which affected his inner ear. He told her, “I just need to flip a switch and get out.”
He liked working on cars and the tree farm and spoiled his dog, Heidi. When the weather kept him inside, he enjoyed reading. He loved their five grandchildren. Jerry died at St. Peter’s Hospital in Olympia on July 27, 2004, at the age of 80. He was survived by Fran, son Larry and Cindy Grove of Centralia and their children, Brittany, Jessica, and Marcus Grove, and daughter Sherry and Sam Bakotich of Chehalis and their sons, Nic and Bryan.
In 2014, Fran was nominated for Washington State Tree Farmer of the Year, although the award went to Sam and Joy Comstock of the Comstock Tree Farm in Mason County. A write-up in the March/April 2014 Washington Farm Forestry Association’s Landowner News described Frances Grove’s 85-acre Grove Family Tree Farm outside Toledo, where the family had farmed for more than 50 years and received American Tree Farm System certification 11 years earlier. The family focused on maintaining a healthy forest for wildlife habitat, family recreation, periodic income and ownership by future generations.
She looked at the tree farm as a big backyard to manage and a place to raise a small herd of beef cattle, which provide meat for the family. She received the Lewis County Farm Forestry chapter’s 2008 award for forest management, providing an excellent example of a working farm and forest. In 2013, the Grove Family Tree Farm was honored as Lewis County Tree Farmer of the Year.
She does selective harvests and uses wood salvaged from downed trees for firewood to heat her home. In 2013, the farm hosted the Lewis Chapter Twilight Tour and annual picnic. She said she hopes her son, daughter, and five grandchildren continue to manage the tree farm.
Fran likes to work outside with her seven cows and three calves, including a big brown and white cow called Beauty, who nestled her wide chin into her owner’s shoulder as we stood talking, eager for an apple.
Fran feeds her livestock every morning and evening, fixes fences, weeds, and mows. She also enjoys her five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. One described loving to visit her and her “ginormous cows.”
In recent years, she’s suffered a few physical setbacks after falling. The week after Thanksgiving, she was heading outside when a barn cat and two kittens that adopted her ran into the utility room. She tried to shoo the trio outside when the mama cat turned around under Fran’s feet, causing her to tumble onto the concrete floor.
“I landed on my elbow and shattered it,” she said. “I had to have surgery to get it repaired, and it’s got a bunch of metal in it.”
That’s not the only fall she’s taken.
“I think I’ve had four in the last 10 years,” she said. She suffers from osteopenia, reduced bone density that doesn’t quite rise to the level of osteoporosis.
After a bone scan, a doctor recommended she take medicine, but she read it could cause cancer. She opted instead to adapt her diet to strengthen her bones and “see if I can’t fix it that way.”
As for her secret to longevity, she said, “You just keep going. Orneriness, I guess.”
Sometimes she’s upset that her body doesn’t work as well as it used to, and she misses pushing a gas-powered mower that did better with edging. She purchased it at Stihl in Chehalis, where the woman showed her how to start it and watched while she did it. “If you couldn’t start it, I wouldn’t sell it to you,” she told her.
“I was impressed,” she said. “That’s caring for your customers to do that.”
As for the younger generation, if she had any advice, it would be this: “Well, get out and do things. Don’t spend so much time on the TV and your computer and your phones.”
“If you’re going to live to be old, you need to get your body so that it will keep going for you. And if all you do is sit down, it’s not going to keep going.”
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
