Grandma Lucille

It all started when this small town girl, Lucille Mack from Falls City, took up with the youngest of the rowdy Wheeler boys. Her folks owned the local bar and grill and the smoke shop which had the only local pool tables. She was the baby of her family of brothers by fourteen years, allowing her to enjoy the successes of her elder parents after her older brothers had grown and left to work in the woods.

Her eye was caught by Elmer Wheeler a year her junior during their high school years. He came from a family of all boys who for generations had logged and worked in the sawmills in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. His lot was many times rambunctious then her family but she was smitten with him. His family was cut from material that was hard working and even harder playing. Her family owned the local tavern his kept it in business.

When high school was over she enrolled in a local tech school where she learned the the skills to work in an office and being a bookkeeper. Being from rural Oregon where timber was the way of life, office skills were only required by a few.

The two eventually married and moved up the mountain to a local logging camp, Valsetz. The trek home in the valley was many more miles then the twenty that showed on the map. The roads into the mountains in those days were rarely traveled during the rainy months which equated to eight months a year in the coast range. The alternative means of traveling out to the valley was by rail. The local train was best equipped for running logs and lumber to the valley markets and not necessarily passengers. The accommadations for train travel was primative at best.

After ten years of marriage the couple had their first child, a boy, my father. He was named Franklin after her Irish father. Then seven years later they had twins, a boy and a girl. Raising small children in a remote logging camp wasn't the easiest task and having a hard working and harder playing husband didn't make it any easier. Two years after the twins prematurily came into the world Elmer Wheeler was killed in an industrial accident, leaving Lucille a widower with three little children to raise.

She moved back to the valley to her parents farm where she was helped by her mother in raising the children. Lucille was able to find work fairly quick as a mill cafe cook on the evening shift in a neighboring town, Dallas. After a couple years working as a cook at the sawmill a local bachelor, a tall unmarried Indian man from the local Siletz tribe started wooing her. He was known for his roustabout manner and his good looks. He took to courting her and then he eventually convinced her and her parents he was worthy of her hand and the responsibility of raising the three children. They always claimed they were married in local Indian ceremony with drums pounding and braves dancing they went to the top of a cliff and annouced to the indian gods they were one. I have no idea if that was true but it played well for an imaginative boy like myself.

They bought a home in Falls City where her new husband, Clair was hired as the local police chief. She took a job at the high school she had attended as a student as the school secretary. They were married well over twenty years before Clair contracted lung cancer and died in 1977. Lucille continued as the school secretary until her retirement in 1979.

Since her retirement she has traveled a bit. Her most memoriable trip was to Las Vegas with several of her widowed sisters-in-law to see their heart-throb Lawerence Welk. after being retired nearly ten years she went back to work as a live-in aid for several elderly women and eventually as an aid for one of her sister-in-law. In her ealry 80s she took several computer classes in order to figure out how to work with these new gadgets. As she neared her 90s her sight and hearing left her sparingly but her mind to this day is sharp. She can pull memory nuggets out and share with the rest as if all was played out only yesterday. She can discuss the upcoming baseball season better then any avid diamond fan, she can discuss the ups and downs of the last thiry years of the Blazers better then any team historian and dammit don't ever get her started on politics.

As her rural Irish style upbringing would dictate, she is as Democrat as FDR. I don't care is a yellow dog was the Democrat nominee she would vote for him over any damn republican. Another known secret is you never want to sit near her when you are nursing a cold beer. Because when you sit it down and turn to your head its as good as gone. Grandma loved a cold beer with a strong head on it. She gave up her Salem menthols severl years ago when the tax on them got too high for her to buy with her pension money. She blames it on those Republicans in Washington DC.

This last weekend Lucille Lillian Goodell celebrated her 92nd birthday with two of her children and most of her many grandchildren and great-grandchildren and her great-great grandchildren. She celebrated with dignity and grace. She celebrated with the love she has always provided all of us.



This last picture is of my two brothers, my sister, my father and my Pirate grandma who has stolen my hat to look cool and myself.