Recollections of Life with Bert and Neva Lowry
as told by
(their 2nd son, the 3rd child)
|
Bert and Neva Lowry Were My Parents I am an Oregonian from the Rogue River Valley’s pear country. I was born here in 1914, grew up here, married and raised a family here, and I’ve grown pears here for more than six decades. Growing pears is my occupation. It is the wellspring of my happiness, my life’s grand passion, and I’m good at it. For some people, the orchard business is a way to make a living. For me it is a way of life. I attribute the disciplines necessary to being successful in this industry to my parents’ tutelage and the examples they set for me as I grew up in their household.
My parents were from the Joplin-Webb City area of southwestern Missouri. My father was an experienced orchardist. Dad migrated to Hood River, Oregon where he managed an orchard and where he was later joined by Neva. They were married there in January 1911, and brought their first child, Burton, into the world in November 1911. Later they moved to Pocatello, Idaho where dad worked for the government at an agricultural experiment station. During this time, his reputation for skill and hard work brought him to the attention of Samuel Rosenberg, who operated the Bear Creek Orchards in Medford, Oregon. This was the business that would later be operated by Samuel’s sons Harry and David. Bert took the job of orchard superintendent, and remained in that position until his retirement in 1957. During the job negotiation stage, my father had wanted to become a partner in Bear Creek Orchards, but Mr. Rosenberg demurred in favor of offering a share of the profits if dad should prove successful as a superintendent. He did prove successful, but alas, he never shared in the profits.
The house Bert and Neva bought was on twenty acres of land across South Pacific Highway from Bear Creek Orchards. The house was a sturdy two story structure with about 12 rooms including 5 bedrooms. It served Bert and Neva’s family well as five more children arrived over the years. Their family included a boy, a girl, and four more boys. I was their third born, on July 24, 1914.
Our Home Life My father, a business school graduate, was very strong on honesty and hard work. He believed in the McGuffy Reader, a widely utilized school book of his day that espoused Judeo-Christian values. There was a different McGuffy Reader for each school grade and each of its stories had a moral. His was a far different culture than succeeding generations. Integrity was his guide. My father’s credo was: “If you are taking the pay, you must do the job.” I remember trying to avoid him on many occasions in my childhood because he always seemed to have a job for me to do. I guess I was as work-averse as any other kid.
Dad was a kindly and fair man, but my mother ruled the roost. She was trained as a school teacher and I attribute my love for poetry and classics to her interest in them. Mother handled the family money matters, and was regarded as a very capable person. She made the major child-rearing decisions, and demanded obedience of her children, though she wasn’t a tyrant. Her intellectual side included personal interests in music, poetry, classic literature, and other cultural events such as ballet. Naturally, mother and dad had disagreements from time to time, mostly about money or raising their kids, but they settled them in what came to be known among my siblings as “discussions behind closed doors.” So, we lived a pleasant middle-class life in a rather bucolic existence here in Southern Oregon.
Sunday Drives Did you do that as a kid? Go for a family drive on Sunday? We did, and it was wonderful. Mom would dress all of us up in our church clothes, and off we’d go in my Dad’s touring car …. Mom and Dad and their six kids. We’d see barn signs that advertised Lydia Pinkham’s Potion For Pale People, and feed store signs everywhere. The Burma Shave serial signs were always a favorite with their pithy advice. Since most of the agricultural work involved animal power back then, grain fields for animal food were everywhere. It was pleasing for me to see a grain field waving in the wind. I remember stopping at friends’ homes and seeing my mother’s obvious pride when they would comment about her brood, “My, Mrs. Lowry. You have such a lovely family.” Sunday drives are practically extinct now, and that’s a pity.
The Jackson County Fair
The auto races at the fair grounds were another exciting event for me as a boy. I remember marveling at how fast those little one-seaters could go, and how angry their snarling engines sounded. Why, one time my Dad timed the car in the lead at no less than sixty miles per hour! Boggles the mind, right?
Medford International We do have an international airport in Medford now, even though the immigration service is housed in a humble mobile home structure somewhere on the tarmac. In the 1920s, however, all we had was a smooth pasture west of town and no foreign air transportation service. This was good enough for the Army Air Corp at the time. In an attempt to display world wide capability, they were engaged in a high profile project of flying Curtis-Wright biplanes around the entire world. AND Medford was on their itinerary even though we had no formal airport. It’s hard to know why they stopped in Medford, but it probably had to do with their having started in San Francisco and the probability that they would run out of fuel if they went further. They made it all the way around the world by the way.
So, as local yokels, the Lowry family was titillated enough to go out to the airport/pasture to see this display of airmanship. After they landed, the pilots seemed uncommonly heroic to those of us who were earth-bound, and we displayed proper reverence for their aviation capabilities. As we watched one of them trying to wipe an oil smear from his windshield with a rag that itself was oil-soaked, my mother, who was ever prepared for messy situations, solved the problem by handing him a diaper. And once again it was proven that a mother with a clean diaper, or handkerchief, and a little spit can tidy up almost anything in the whole world.
The Fate of Our Family Home After all the rest of us had left home and after my mother’s death in 1948, my father remarried and he too moved out of the house. My brother Phillip and his wife Shirley then occupied the house and raised a family there. When Phillip died, my father willed the house and its 20 acres to Shirley. She too eventually lived elsewhere and allowed the house to become occupied by people who abused it terribly. So badly in fact, that it became an uninhabitable derelict and an eyesore. One Halloween night it was used as a ghost house to scare folks. Shirley’s interest became focused on selling the property, but the rundown condition of the house was a detriment to marketing it. The final solution was to allow local fire departments to use the house in practicing their firefighting techniques. This, of course, provided the means for the final demise and the inglorious end of a structure that had been dear to me as a boy. The barren property was finally purchased by the Grange Co-op where their garden supply store now stands. Our road was renamed “Lowry Lane.”
Summing up It was wonderful growing up in small town America.
|
email to: webmaster@lowrys.info
|
