More Family History from Bill Dale

I found a book written by a cousin and it had some added facts about Peter. He came to the US in the Spring of 1883. That is why I could not find him at Ellis Island register. It started in 1896.
He filed his first homestead in 1885. He married Mary Iverson on Sept. 2, 1895.
Torwald died of diphtheria not scarlet fever as I told you. Bad memory on my part.
There are some interesting pictures in the book if I can figure out how to scan them into the computer and send to you. Several of your granddad and grandmother, along with pictures of your folks.

Bill and Betty's Recollections

The Family Tree in South Dakota

Mary – Okay, so start out and tell me all about Peter Hansen and Mary Iverson.

Bill – Well, our grandparents, Mary Ann’s and my grandparents were Nils Peter Hansen, the sen type, and Mary Iverson Hansen. From the marriage, five children were born – Albert Hansen, his two children are Bill and Jean,

Jean is now deceased and Bill is incapacitated; Agnes Hansen Dale, I’m the only child there; Ralph Hansen, Mary Ann was the only child there; Torville Hansen died at the age of 11 from scarlet fever; and Freeman Hansen was the youngest of the five children. His two daughters were Joyce and Carol Sue. So this is now Mrs. Robert Long. She lives in Riverton, Wyoming and Carol Sue is married to a Scott Rycker, and they live in San Diego, California.

Peter came to the United States from Denmark. He came first and Mary followed him later on. Recently when Betty and I were in New York, we went to Ellis Island and plugged in Nils Peter Hansen to see if we could get him to come up on the computer but found out that they only have information on those people arriving in the United States after 1896, so that’s reasonable because Mom was born in 1897 and Albert was born a couple of years before that so they had to be here before that.

Anyway, we couldn’t work it out, but Peter came and worked on various ranches and farms in the Sturgis area of South Dakota. It’s right on the edge of the Black Hills. As he matured and as he aged, he started buying land and whenever some land would become available, he would buy it. At one time, he owned three ranches of substantial size. One of those ranches he sold himself and then to buy some other things but then the second ranch, a major portion of the land is now under the Bear Butte Reservoir which Bear Butte is a big mountain that comes up out of the ground. You sit there and say, well where did that thing come from? Because there’s not another hill, mountain, anything like it within a hundred miles of the thing but it just rises up just like Devil’s Tower does over in New Castle, Wyoming area. And the third ranch, Freeman took over and he expanded that plus taking possession of the school district land for grazing cattle.

He had about two sections of land when I worked for him in the 1940s. When Mary Ann and Betty and I went to South Dakota in October, 2007, we went to Sturgis. Mary Ann wanted to see the place where her grandparents on her dad’s side grew up and where he grew up. And so we visited the cemetery. We found the graves of Peter Hansen and Mary and Torville plus quite a few other of the Hansen family that subsequently came to the United States, which was good.

Mary – So some of the relatives came over over time.?

Bill – As subsequently, yeah. Because we got all kind of them in that cemetery and you sit there and say, well now, wait a minute. Who is who? Who’s related to so and so? And how are they related? Because they were all intertwined you might say. We toured the area around Bear Butte so that she could get a perspective of what it was, how this thing came about, and then where the land was that Grandpa owned. We then forward to look for Freeman’s and the problem with me is that there’s a lot of the landmarks, the old buildings that I remember being in certain spots were gone.

I remember doing a lot of the stuff in the 1940s and early 50s and wait a minute, that’s 50 years ago. And so they had changed. But we came over this hill and there were these two homes down in the bottom of the valley which I really remembered. The one on the east side of the road looked awful much like Freeman’s place but there were a couple of additions to the house and so as we drove down there, and we got right down flat, I started laughing. And Mary said, what’s so funny? And I said, see right on the edge of the trees. She looked at it and said, well there’s an outhouse there. I said, yeah, that’s our outdoor facilities we had. She said, outdoor facilities? I said, yeah because they didn’t have anything in the farmhouse until in the late 1940s and so it was still there. And that was the mark of distinction. Yes, this was the Freeman Hansen property and we said there and just laughed and laughed about the whole thing.

Betty - What one would think of, the other would counteract. And I let them sit side by side so they would hear each other. And I had a terrible time keeping my laughter at bay.

Bill – So when we went into Sturgis, I remembered that Grandma and Grandpa Hansen lived on Davenport Street but I couldn’t remember what hundred block it was. So we started off, I said well, first recollection was in the 1800s and Mary Ann said, no, no, that’s too big of a number. And so we just started driving down but some of the houses that I remember on Davenport Street were gone so therefore, because right across the street from Grandpa and Grandma, there was this family that had a big barn and also a big high white fence around it because they had some beautiful horses. But that landmark was gone for me so I said, oh man. And she said, Bill just keep driving, keep driving, so I keep going and I get down to about the 1400 block and she says, it’s in this block. And I said, okay, it has to be in the middle of the block and it has to be set back and it has to be a stucco. And we finally came to the decision that’s it! It was painted a different color, looked like it had just been painted. It was a green stucco.

Betty – Real light green like a kitchen paint might be.

Bill – We both agreed immediately, yep, that’s it, that’s it! And so we sat there and we took some pictures. I took some pictures of it and everything else like that. But that was a defining thing. After we came back and we visited Rushmore and Crazy Horse Memorials in the Black Hills and then we traveled to some of my back roads I’d traveled when I was a junior in high school for Paramount Studios and driving the art director around to different places so I…

Mary – What movie was he….?

Bill – It was Charlton Heston’s, it was an off-shoot of Sitting Bull’s, one of Sitting Bull’s sons. And you know when you got Charlton Heston, it was a pretty good size name at the Paramount Studios. But anyway, we traveled these back roads and we saw deer, antelope.

Travels in South Dakota

We saw mountain goats, we saw lots of buffalo, and we saw some elk. But then we came down to the roundup station for buffalo. And I said, good we just got here just in time because they’d brought all of the buffalo herd into this one place. And so they were giving them shots, they were giving them all kinds of testing that they had to go through. They had a fertility test on all of the female things, and they had to take blood samples from them and then they put an ear tag on them so they could identify the things. And Mary Ann really enjoyed that because she could get to watch all this going on and you sit there and they were down below you but you’re only like from here to the door of the garage away from them so you could see what they were doing. And it was something she had never seen before or again, and these tests define whether or not they’re going to keep this buffalo or whether or not they would sell it. So when they came up with the blood test and the fertility test and all that sort of thing, they knew the tag number so and so didn’t make the match that they wanted so they would go out and see this animal and pull it out and then sell it to someone. When we got through going through that and that took us quite a, that ruined that one day pretty much, because we were staying in Custer because it was entertaining for all of us because I hadn’t seen that kind of stuff for a long time but Mary Ann had never seen it and Betty had never seen it. We had lots of questions to talk to these people about, what all are you doing?

Colorado

We then came back and went to Steam Boat, Colorado and we stayed there for four days. Each day we’d go out to a different area. One of the days we went out to an area where they’re mining coal. They ship out 100 cars, 90 tons to a car, every day. That is a lot of coal, I don’t care how you take it. You can just see these trains going out every day and if you get up to a railroad crossing, you might as well shut your motor off because it’s going to be a hundred cars go by before you could get through this place. We came back to Denver and threw everything in the washing machine and the dryer and then took off the next morning to drive to Pagosa Springs because her friend, Betty Sleeter, coming from Albuquerque came up so we got down to Walsenburg and we started up to Levita Pass and we got stopped by the state patrol and said, there’s a fatal accident up on top of the Pass so we couldn’t get through, so you might as well turn around and go back down.

So we went back down and Mary said, this is the first time she’s ever had two breakfasts in one day. So we had breakfast again in Walsenburg. But anyway, we finally got a chance to get over the top so we went down and the next day Betty arrived with her daughter, so from there we went over to Durango. We stayed at Pagosa Springs but one morning, real early, we went over and caught the Durango Silverton Train. Beautiful country. I mean you’re going along on a ledge and you hear way down below here, here’s the river and the mountains are going straight up and this is going straight up and it is sort of chill the railroad track out. Silverton is a town that was an old mining town but now is sort of a tourist attraction type thing for people to come into but in the winter time, they have from three to four hundred inches of snow. A lot of times, from two to four months, they will be totally, 100%, snowed in. You can’t get in or out or around. So people come in there and Mary had a ball of a time. She and her walker went up and down that street.

You’ve probably got three rolls of film from Silverton and she goes up and she was taking a picture of everything. And then I sent her a bunch of Silverton pictures because you know, she just had all these things that she wanted to see and she’d heard about and then after she left, I kept writing her a letter, Silverton has got another 20 inches of snow, now it’s up to 200, kept going up every time. And we had a ball of a time in Silverton. We came back to Durango and we came back over and we would go east. One day we went up to one of the places where I did some fishing and that sort of thing and we came back and so we just meandered around the different areas to see what was going on.

Branson, Missouri

I also remember times when we would have Mary come down to join us in Branson. She really enjoyed, I think, Branson because we did not go to a lot of shows. Some people come down there and in three days, they’ll go to nine shows. And you ask them, what was the first show you went to and they said, I don’t remember. But she enjoyed going to the Lennon Sisters. She enjoyed going to Tabuchi, the Japanese violin player, and then what we’ve always done is take one or two additional, something new, something different, something we haven’t seen before, and one year we went to the Haygoods, which are nine kids of the same family. They all play instruments and they were excellent. They are perpetual motion going all the time playing some instrument. So she really enjoyed that kind of a show. We also saw one time Andy Williams. We saw one time, I think, Dino, the piano player, which is an outstanding piano player but it’s remarkable in this day and age, Mary, where here’s this piano player who’s known all over the world is sitting there playing the piano and all of a sudden, he stops, turns around, looks at the audience, takes his chair up, moves it out to the edge of the stage, and gives a 20-minute dissertation on his personal relationship with God. You don’t see that very often. And to me, the first time I saw him, I said, man that’s something different. And he was in Denver a number of years ago. He came out in a white tux with white grand piano, around him were, I think, five other smaller grand pianos, white, and one by one, youngsters came out and started playing with him. And pretty soon, he had all six of them, I think it was, five kids and him, were all playing and if you don’t think that’s something, I mean he had, Tom’s boy, Peter, I can just him in a white tux playing with that kind of a group, just a real outstanding group of piano players. And then one other time he had just one youngster with him that he did a performance. And he introduces these young kids to working with the thing.

Cape Canaveral, Florida

So we had another time, we went to Florida to a place where we could see from our hotel room, Cape Canaveral, and this big bird was sitting on the pad. It was scheduled to blast off while we were there, prior planning, but it didn’t go. But every morning we could out there and see it sitting there and we’d go down to the beach and run around and do things. The sad thing about it, that was the Challenger. And after we got back, it blasted off but coming back it exploded and lost all the crew.

Betty – Mary Ann and I just for days were talking about how committed everyone in program was, what a neat job they were doing, and just being so proud of them and then, I caught it real early on t.v. the day that it happened and called her right away. We just couldn’t believe it.

Myrtle Beach

Bill – Another time she joined us at Myrtle Beach for a week. She just enjoyed going down to the beach with one of those low chairs and just sitting there with her book or magazine. Then we’d go down every once in a while and we’d all just walk along the beach and take off our shoes and walk on the sand but then we would drive up to some places towards North Carolina. We stopped off to see a number of those places that were very prominent in the Civil War. Another day we’d go south to far south of Savannah. And she really enjoyed walking along the ocean there.

Betty – She likes historical things the same as we did.

Bill – Because I think those houses along that road were all very prominent in the Civil War and they had had placards or posters or whatever you want to call them and Betty and Mary Ann would sit there and read every word on every one of them. It took us a while. I was ready to go in a much shorter time so I’d go up and sit on the wall and just listen to the water come in and bounce against the waves. It was really good because they could, they got a history lesson renewed, and it was fun and game time.

Betty – Yeah, we really wanted to go back. We had plans to go back and seeing some of those things that we didn’t have time for.

San Diego, California

Bill – Another time Mary Ann joined us for a week in California. We were north of San Diego at Lawrence Welk’s Escondido, California. But while we were there, we drove down to see Carol Sue, which is now Rycker, which is Freeman’s youngest daughter. She’s an audiologist. Her husband is an optometrist. They have no children but two dogs, I think it was. And so we just played around, went down to the Catalina Island, and just puttered around. Here again, we’d just take off our shoes and just walk along in the shoreline and watch the waves come in and feel the waves come in. I always give her a bad time about, you’re not going to collect those shells again, are you, and take them home to the grandkids? And I said, I often wonder if any of those shells ever got home and if the grandkids ever got them. She would collect a bunch of them as we’d walk along and so it…….

Mary – I bet she did cause she made many things with shells from different vacations we were on.

Boston

Bill – Well, Betty, why don’t you talk about the Boston trip?

Betty – Bill and I were coming back from a trip to China and we had Mary Ann meet us in Boston and that was the period of time when they were rebuilding the underground tunnel. So we took a bus tour and they kept telling us that it wasn’t going to be done for ten more years. Well, it was done long before that. And as we took a bus tour around just Boston to see all the historical things, we both really enjoyed that, going out on some of the ships and all the historical things.

Bill – Paul Revere’s North Tower and all that kind of stuff that if one of us couldn’t remember the whole story, the other could and so it was sort of a history lesson for all of us.

Betty – And then from there, we drove to a timeshare that we had planned for in Massachusetts and each day we could leave that timeshare and go to a different state capitol. So each day we could say well we’ve been to that state cause we would see all the sites in the capital city and then the capitol itself. And so we all found that real interesting. Well, we kept seeing all these signs, almost in every state as we would drive around, watch out for the moose, watch out for the moose, see the moose here, and so forth. Well, comes toward the end of the week when we were going to be there, we said, hey we haven’t seen a moose yet. So someone in one of the gift shops or something said, well what you need to do, it’s full moon, you go out on one of the back roads during the middle of the night and just be quiet and stand around there, and they’ll come around. So we all were excited cause we all wanted to see a real moose. So we did that and I can remember that big full moon still shining down on us but we never saw a moose. But then at Christmas time, our gift from her was a moose made out of a piece of bark and he had ears, eyes, different things and there was some fur on it. Someday I will pass it on to one of you kids. I laughed and laughed when we got that. That’s her Christmas memory for us.

Arizona

Bill – Well, you also have the Arizona trip where she was supposed to, we were supposed to pick her up in Phoenix, Arizona……..

Betty – No, Tucson, honey.

Bill – Well, that’s where we did pick her up. She got out to the airport out here and got on the plane but then they pulled it back in and said they’re not going to fly so they put her in a cab and whisked her up to O’Hare and put her on a plane….

Betty – What are you talking about? You’re not talking about Arizona when you say O’Hare.

Bill – Yes, then they flew to Tucson and that’s where we had to pick her up.

Mary – That’s a long drive from up in the Phoenix area, isn’t it?

Bill – Yeah, and luckily it was Mike or Steve called us and said, Mom’s not going to be at Phoenix; she’s going to be in Tucson. And I said, huh? I mean that’s a ways away from here. What time is she supposed to arrive? And they gave us a time and I said, well I better get on the road because it’s a ways down there. And we got down there just in time to pick her up.

Betty – And I saw her from the back. She hadn’t seen us yet. She was worried because it was someplace strange to her. But we just got there at the right time.

Bill – But we got down there and so we checked into the motel and started looking, well what all are we going to do? Cause we hadn’t had a chance to really plot out too many things other than this is our home base for a week and what are we going to do? Well, she wanted to go down to O.K. Carrol in Yuma, Arizona and so we go down there and, of course, we had to get in on the shooting and all that kind of stuff that they had the dramatization. But then we’re both trying to think of, today, that after we saw that we went to this little town, saw this little sign in this little town so we drove down there and all of a sudden, we got into a whole bunch of wild burros. And they were all over the road and they weren’t about to get out of the way. And you almost drive up to them and try to boost them a little bit and it was a zoo trying to get through those things. And I told Mary, don’t roll down your window cause they’ll give you a nip. And she started rolling it down and she was going to take their picture. I said you better take the picture through the window cause they’ll nip you on the arm or cheek or face or anything. And she said, you think they will? I said, don’t give them a chance because they will. And so it was so funny because she must have taken quite a number of pictures of the different burros and they had little burros and big ones and so she had all kinds of pictures taken and we finally got through there. And went on down below to this other town that she wanted to go to and it was another tourist area where they had some museums and all that kind of stuff so we toured those things.

Then came back to our motel again. And that was a method that we’ve used in all of our places, we sort of go out from certain places and have a central, have a home...., and plot it out and keep going to different places. It was a time that we really got to know each other better because, as I said to you or to the gals at different times, there was a period of time in there when we were not very close because I was in the service away from her, she was having family, I was out in Denver, Colorado and she was in different places and finally ended up here in South Bend and I came home once or twice and did see Kathleen but that’s about all the time we ever had. And then we got started again and these things that we’ve just enumerated, we started doing, and having a fun time together and remembering things about the family.

Memories of Sturgis

Mary – Tell me about what your childhood memories of my mom and being like in the summers going and visiting back in Sturgis.

Bill – Well, they would come out, Uncle Ralph and Aunt Kathleen and Mary Ann, to South Dakota and they always wanted to go out, well her dad always wanted to go out to the Badlands, because Dad was born and raised out there, wasn’t born but was raised out there, and he really knew, because they lived out there so many years, places where you’d get Indian artifacts and everything else because, and he was a real travelogue.

That’s why I wish I had one of those little systems that could be able to take him because he would show us, let’s say, well here’s where in 1840 or 50 where the Indians drove a whole bunch of buffalo off the side of this cliff because they had a bunch of bluffs and then they butchered out all the animals down below because that’s where they found a whole bunch of Indian heads, had big rocks that were flat rocks, but yet where they used them for scraping hides and they found all these things when he was a kid and he said, this is where they did all that sort of thing and then he said, here’s where we went up to get our firewood for the winter and where we had to live, the sod house that they lived in. I mean it was an old sod house. It wasn’t..

Mary – Had to be some cold winters to kind of live in a sod house.

Bill – Yes, and so they lived on this, what they called, a Cord Morris Ranch, and Dad was a cowboy, running cattle and working for Mr. Morris and Grandma was cooking.

Mary – It would be your grandma.

Bill – Yeah, my grandma. She was my dad’s mother. They lived there, they’d come out from Iowa.

Betty – I think your mother came and her father came out probably just about every year to see his grandson.

Mary – And you’d pretty much come at the same time?

Bill – Yeah. I lived there. I didn’t go away until, when I was 18, I went into the University of South Dakota. Here’s Rapid City and clear across the state at the lower end of the state is Vermillion, South Dakota, the university. So the summers I normally came back, except between our junior and senior year, I had to go to Fort Benning as an ROTC officer and then when I came back from overseas, I was at Fort Sheridan, Illinois. So I didn’t have anything to do so I could get weekend passes to go down because they were waiting to discharge me out of the service. Well, I would go down to Springfield and Mary Ann was not there at the time because she and Ed were, but I at least had time with Ralph and Kathleen and then once in a while, Ed and Mary Ann would come over.

Young Mary Ann

Mary – How old would they have been at that time? Were they already married at that point?

Bill – Yeah.

Betty – They were really close to Bill’s age. I just can’t remember from the cemetery the other day. Mary Ann was born in 32.

Bill – December of 32 and I was born in August of 31.

Mary – Okay, so you really were just one year apart.

Bill – Yeah, very close.

Mary – Was she kind of a city kid when she would come up to visit in South Dakota when you were young?

Bill – A little bit but not, you know we sort of looked over that kind of a thing and just went to do the things. We would go up to the dinosaur looking over Rapid City, they’ve got three big dinosaurs, replica, because they’ve got in the museum at the South Dakota School of Mines where Uncle Ralph went to school, they’ve got a big thing about dinosaurs and all that kind of stuff. But they’ve got these cement dinosaurs that we would go up there and play on and just sit on the tail of the dinosaur and ride it, all kind of dumb things that kids do, just to be doing something. And we would go down to the stream and go fishing, just monkeying around for the most part just like any kids.

I wouldn’t say that she was a city kid but I was not a real farm kid either because even though I work in the summertimes because at that day and age kids, unless they could drive, I could drive but not legally because I’d been driving tractors and everything else out in the farm, out at my Uncle Freeman’s, I’d go out there all the time to work, until I was 16 I couldn’t legally drive. So she and I just would bum around, so to speak, and do different things and just have a big time together.

Kathleen and Ralph

Mary – What were your memories of Kathleen and Ralph?

Bill – Uncle Ralph was more, I would say, a professional guy. We got along great but he was big and I was so small. I think that impressed me more than… My dad was pretty good size too but I was with him all the time. So, therefore, the difference in size because, Mary, until I was in high school, until I was almost out of high school, I was only 4 foot 11, in the senior year, I still made the hundred pound basketball team and I’m sitting, I was a little guy. I sometimes look at my grandson right now and say, uh oh, he looks awful small like he may have gotten some of my genes somewhere along the line, he’s going to be a little guy. And then after high school, I then grew and added some weight and started sprouting up a little bit, not very much.

Kathleen was harder to get acquainted with. I think after I got acquainted with her, it was a little bit easier to communicate to her, but at first, I was always, who is this person?, how do we relate?, and all that kind of stuff. I could talk very easily to Mary Ann, but yet her dad was such a big guy and Kathleen was not that big but yet, was very soft spoken and it was just more difficult to communicate and I think a lot of it is I really didn’t understand all of the…, because we didn’t have a lot of family. So it was tough to understand what’s our relationship here?

Betty – But then we brought his mother to see Ralph a couple of times after he had the strokes. And one time when they were all living down in that big old house…

Mary – On Radisson Street?

Betty – Yeah. And Ralph was always trying to reach out but really didn’t know how, I think you’d say. And Kathleen was always very quiet but very attentive of him. And then Mary Ann brought her mother out to see Agnes, Bill’s mother, in 1986 and, to this day, I am upset that I didn’t stay there. They didn’t stay very long; they flew out for several days to be with her. And my thought at that time was that it was time for me to leave, that they needed that time together but it would have been a good time to get her better. I presume she probably was in the early stages of what we call Alzheimer’s today. She didn’t communicate that well. Mary Ann did most of the talking and then it wasn’t too long after that, she was gone and then I took Bill’s mother to Denver after that too.

Rapid City Flood

Bill – Well, I think one of the things about our family, Betty would, after Mom, see she was in the big flood in Rapid City…..

Mary – I remember hearing stories of that, climbing on the roof…..

Bill – She lost everything. The dam is a mile and a half upstream but a mile and a half further up, they had got something like a four to five inch rain that River Falls or stream or creek or whatever you want to call it, that body of water, falls 1800 feet in that mile and a half coming down. That amount of water hit, started hitting houses, bridges, cars, people, trees, and just started wiping them out. And so, therefore, as the stuff gains momentum, it comes down and it hit the WPA Canyon Lake with a bang. It just wiped out the while spillway and so, therefore, it dumped all the water into the flood plain below Rapid City, towards Rapid City.

Well, we were right in the, where Mom and Dad had moved from the original house which is on a little bit higher ground, it dropped down about ten feet and they were down closer to the river but they had a rented house that they had rented after they sold our house that was back up on the higher ground. And Dad had already passed away and Mom was in there, and as you may or may not recall, Mom is totally deaf when she takes off her hearing aids, totally, nothing. She had gone to bed and then the storm came and all of a sudden, she was awakened by the fact that her mattress was floating and she was coming up in the room…

Betty – To the ceiling.

Bill – And so her next door, here’s the main street and here’s the street that they were on, and she’s the second house, this gal here got out and told the National Guardsmen that Mrs. Dale is down there but she can’t hear; she’s totally deaf. So the National Guardsmen tied ropes around themselves and to the bumper of their vehicle and then walked down through the water to the house and kicked the door in.

Luckily, Mom, by that time, was out trying to figure out what she’s going to do, couldn’t find her glasses, couldn’t find her hearing aids, couldn’t find nothing, but anyway, and all she had on was a nightgown and that was pretty shot by then, but they took her out and brought her back up to the truck. Well, by that time, our former next-door neighbor that lives up this way where we were living next to them, said bring her up to my place. And they brought Mom in and put her in the bathtub and then drained all of the hot water that they had in there, because the water system was out by that time, but they drained all the water and they wrapped her up in blankets because the hypothermia had set in. And just covered her up the blankets and the hot water to try to get her blood back going again, then wrapped her up after they got the temperature back up, put her in bed, and doctored her up and kept her there overnight at Mrs. Range’s place.

Well, in the meantime, down in Denver, I’m off on a fishing trip with Bill and Wayne. And so I come rolling in and when Betty sees me come in, well she says, Mom’s been in the flood in Rapid City is hit and they can’t find Mom. And so I said, well I can’t drive up there because I can’t get there that quick but it’s almost night now. So I got a reservation on the flight from Denver to Rapid City. So I flew up the next morning. Well, everybody says well you can’t get out to where you’re going. And I said, look, I’ve waded that creek so many times, went swimming in it, did various things in it, I know every bit where I can get across that stream carrying my suitcase and I’ll just go up to Range’s place first and find out what they know about it. So I went up there and there she was.

But then they were finding people all over. They had lost 240 some people, as I recall the number, and right behind where Mom lived, they had a cinder block housing unit for seniors and when that water hit, it exploded and I think some of them were not there, luckily, but the ones that were there were lost. One block down, we had a very good friend who had the local freezer place and Jim and Betty and young Jim came out of their house when they were told to get out of the place and get to higher ground. Betty and little Jim got in one vehicle and took off. Big Jim went back into his house to get something, I don’t remember what it was, came back out and got hit by the flood. The problem is that they found his body two and a half miles downstream. Every bone in his body was broken. He had on laced boots, a leather coat zipped up, a belt and jean-like pants. He didn’t have a strip of clothing on him but his wedding ring. It just ripped everything apart. Luckily, the body was still in one piece but, as I said, every bone in his body was broken.

Mary – You must have been so surprised to be able to find your Mom in such good shape.

Bill – Oh yeah, because when I went by and I saw the gal that lived in the first house and she said, it was terrible, Bill, it was terrible. But go up and see how your mother is doing up in Beulah’s place and I didn’t know if she was alive or gone by that time. As I said, coming out, I could get us across the stream. That wasn’t that big of a problem because I had fished and went swimming and everything else in that stream my whole life.

Mary – So could you save any of her stuff? Probably not, probably all …..

Betty – We went back. It happened, I want to say June 7^th maybe, we went back up there on Labor Day. I don’t remember at what point we were able to bring her to Denver to live with us. But on Labor Day we went up there and they hadn’t torn the house down yet. Anyway, we had to literally push our way through the door. Just like he said they had done before because it was all, the basement we had, it had been a finished basement and a room with a door on it. So we had put everything that Bill wanted or that his parents wanted him to have in there when they moved into this little house. And we said, well we would get it in the summertime, that was at Christmastime, cause his father was still alive. Anything that was downstairs in that room was…

Bill – Gone. I’ll take over. But the furniture that Grandpa Hansen had brought over from Denmark, the beautiful tall dresser, the beds, anything where the tongue and groove fittings and everything like that, everything that had that in them, weeds were growing out of.

Betty – And we’d get a drawer open and there’d just be weeds growing through everything. But we cleaned all the dirt out and brought it back down and, oh shortly before that, we had had a man, our kids were in Denver Christian School at that time, and we knew a man there who had….

Bill – Well, did the wood-working type stuff, renovation. And so he took all the tongue and groove apart and re-sanded them completely, then refinished them, then put it all back together again.

Mary – Oh nice, so you did save some of the furniture.

Bill – So we saved a chest of drawers, a bed, rocking chair and I think there was one other thing but he did all that work of taking the stuff apart. You wouldn’t know that it looked like total destruction when we brought it down but he really did an excellent job of taking that stuff apart. So we got all that stuff and Wayne took all that stuff but then lost part of it when he went through a divorce so he still has the chest of drawers.

Starting the Travel
Bill – Your mom has been a big part of the last 20 years where we’ve gotten back together again….

Mary – When did you first traveling together? After my dad died?

Bill – Yeah, shortly after.

Betty – And I can’t figure out how your mom and I got together. It was the summer, I think, after your father had died and Bill was going to Canada fishing, was it you and Billy and somebody, I don’t remember….

Bill – Bill wanted to take me up to way back in to go fishing and….

Betty – And I got to come up here and that’s when your mother and I went to Chicago on the train and I think that was the first time, on the Fourth of July, a couple of your brothers had something to do with a concert. And what else did we do that summer together? But that kind of was the start of our relationship and so we were always talking together on the telephone and it was always such a joyful time.

We’d get excited when we’d pick up the phone and it was Mary Ann because immediately we were both laughing. I miss that laughter so much. She was just great. And she was always eager to go someplace and she knew that, like she asked if she could invite Betty to come that time when we were over at Pagosa. You just naturally said yes cause we all liked to do the same things. I don’t know how I’m going to react when I get home cause I can’t believe that she isn’t here. I haven’t wanted to go out to the house, just like I’ve never gone back to the home that we left 15 years ago. That fact that we just can’t pick up the phone and plan.

Mary – I think that’s one of the things she really loved about traveling was the planning in advance, you know the thinking of the different places and she was so game to, at least when I was with her on trips, to try and do new experiences, to go to whatever the choices might be, she would find some interesting things to see that wouldn’t be, she wouldn’t be sitting around for day after day. She’d find places to go, things to think about, to look in advance and try to find ideas.

Bill – Well, she just enjoyed doing everything…

Card Games

Betty – And then we were too tired to do anything, we’d sit and play cards.

Bill – Till the wee hours of the morning. Those two, you could never get them to go to bed. Well, we gotta do one more hand, one more hand, Bill. And I’m sitting there saying, yeah you two ought to, two of a kind to draw to. I have to play cards here.

Mary – What games would you play?

Bill – Mass confusion and then we also had…

Betty – That was the last one and I felt like when we, that was the last one that we taught her when we came to stay that five weeks and she wanted to keep playing that every day because she realized it made her use her mind and that she could still use her mind so we really did play that till just about her last days.

Bill – That’s why she wanted Meg, always, to play with her and Pat would play with her once in a while. And it would just keep going. But before that, we used to play Skipbo a lot and Kings in the Corner and…

Betty – You know simple things, but things that do keep your mind active which is so important at our age.

Bill – I think in our very early games, we used to play Cribbage once in a while too because apparently she and Ed had played Cribbage and so I said, yeah you want to take us on because you’re the expert in this Cribbage game. She was pretty much game for any game you wanted to play but you know once in a while we remembered to bring along like the last time we were here, the Mass Confusion because you play with seven decks of cards…

Mary – And you play with any number of people.

Bill – Yeah, and you can just have a ball of a time. It was good just to keep going in the game to have her keep using her mind to what’s going on around her.

Bill in the Army and Early Mary Ann and Ed

Mary – When you were in the Army, basically down at Springfield when my mom and dad were newly married, what was your impression of my dad? Do you remember what you thought of him at that time?

Bill – I should probably do some recalling because I don’t really remember having a lot of time with your dad.

Mary – Sure because at that time period, he had such little kids. You probably hadn’t seen them for a long time.

Bill – Well, yeah, when I came back from the service after being in Germany for two years, I was a little bit excess weight. I was pudgy because over there, you don’t drink the water, you drink beer, or beer and wine and the wiener schnitzels and all the other heavy duty stuff that you eat, well, and I didn’t pass up very many meals along the way. So when I got to see, I remember Uncle Ralph give me a bit, man you’ve put on a little bit of weight there, boy. And I said, yeah, a little bit. But I was able to get down to see them in Springfield, I think twice while I was stationed at Fort Sheridan. But until they got me out of the service and that sort of thing but it was a time to just relax and get away from military life.

Mary Ann and Grandma Murphy

Betty – So I think your mom, too, didn’t get to really be herself until Ed’s mother went home cause she had made a commitment that she would take care of her and she did and the three of us had fun that summer playing cards and games together. Every night she wanted to do that. So I think when the time came in Mary Ann’s life where she was free to plan whatever she wanted to do or go wherever she might have the opportunity, she made the most of it. And I think she knew for some time that something was going on before she actually went and started letting the doctors determine because I think she just wasn’t ready to give everything up and she wasn’t ready to give up anything when we there that five weeks with her but towards the end of that five weeks, I had to help her go to the bathroom and stuff and remember, I told you to be sure and get her someone to help her now. She tried so hard but each step of the way certain things could be impossible….

Bill – But I always remember the other side of the coin that when she was always very dedicated to Ed’s mother but she always wanted to get Ed’s mother into the games and stuff that we played and we were playing dominoes. We played this one game where we were looking for a certain domino to be the starting one and so we all wind up with all dominoes and so Mary says, well do you have it, Bill? No. Betty, do you have it? No. Mom, do you have it? Nope. Well, I don’t have it so we started drawing. So we get through and we said, wait a minute now, are you sure you don’t have it? No, no. We went clear around, we took every tile in the bunch and wait a minute, somebody’s got to have it. And Ed’s mother said, what are you looking for? Okay. Then she said, oh I made a mistake, can we just throw all these back? And I said, no you gotta play them all. You all drew them fair and square so now we gotta play them all. She says, well I forgot what number we were looking for.

Betty – She was a good sport. And then the second year when we came back and she was so alive in that way, she couldn’t wait for us to….

Bill – She was ready to play now, cause apparently they had played a little bit more so she was onto it and ready and willing to do the thing.

Betty – Your mother was a very care-giving person, a very loving person, very committed, and developed in her faith.

Finding Churches

Bill – That was very true. Whenever we would go to any of the places, I think when Saturday came, first thing that she’d do, she’d get ahold of a telephone book and find out where the church was and said, okay how do we get there? And I said, well what’s the address? So we’d both get out the map in the front of the telephone book and okay, we gotta go from here to here and so I said okay, you call and find out what time we have to be there, and sometimes they were easy to get, the one at Branson, the one big Catholic church was in the weirdest place to try to get to, at least in my opinion as a novice. Maybe the regular people knew how to get there easy because Branson roads are terrible. They got one right down the middle and then everything is off of it. So I tried to go that main drag and then branch off and go to the church and so I told her when I delivered her that morning, I said, I’m parking right over there and I’m not leaving because I don’t know how to get out of here nor get back, so I’m not going anyplace. I’ll just park and sit over here and read.

Betty – I know where every pit stop is between our house and church. I know where an awful lot of Catholic churches are that I knew you would have known.

Photo Albums

Mary – Thank you for all these wonderful memories.

Bill – But that’s some of our recall of…..

Betty – And I can’t do it right away because I have a church project I have to get done first, but then I’ll get our travel books out and send you more input and see if Bill can……

Mary – She has some nice albums that you know, of your memories here, when you see the albums that she put together from the church. For most of them, she took the pictures from you guys, that you took and she took and she put them together in that book.

Bill – Well, did she put below them where they were and all that kind of stuff?

Mary – For many of them she did. I’d have to look to see the particular trip to see. It seems like certainly up until the last couple of years, she certainly did.

Everglades

Bill – Well, Mike gave us seven or eight pictures last night that he got from some of her pictures that were not mounted or something like that. Now I’m still looking. I remember going, it’s a boat that we, wind boat, or whatever you call them, turbo-boat.

Mary – Down in the Everglades?

Bill – Yeah, I think that’s where it is. But I’m…

Mary – She told me about it, I thought for your Florida trip you went on a windboat like that cause I remember her telling me about it.

Bill – Because when we went, I was sure that we went down to the Everglades or someplace down there on the river….

Betty – Could it have been that Lake…..? There was a lane coming from the west going east, which would have been the second lane and then the first lane, we were down to just one lane, and that’s where all these great big monster trucks were and we were squished between them and going off the bank on this side. I tell you I never prayed so hard in all my life.

Bill – I think I had two white-knuckle people.

Betty – And he was doing the best that he could do but just about the time I would life my head just far enough to see out, here would come another turkey from over here coming way over to our lane, I don’t know what in the heck he thought he was going to do or where he was going because he was initially going east.

Traveling to Sturgis

Mary – Where is Levita Pass?

Bill – It’s down in the southern part of the state between Walsenburg and Alamosa. Alamosa has normally one of the coldest spots in the nation because it’s down in a gully and, therefore, and mountains around it, and, therefore, the sun doesn’t get in there until high noon but then the mountain blocks it out after two o’clock. So, therefore, it doesn’t have a chance to warm up. Walsenburg is a coal mining area and potato growing in some of the farms.

Mary – What’s the driving distance from Rapid City to Denver?

Bill – Four hundred and five miles.

Mary – So you made a big move? For the size of the trip, it’s eight hours.

Bill – Yeah, when we used to go up there, we could do it in…

Betty – That was the worst drive of my life.

Bill – Most boring drive between Wyoming………..

Betty – We knew where every windmill was, we knew every license plate in the United States, we’d play War.

Bill – The kids and Betty, Betty would always have to come up with some new game to keep everybody entertained because they were always saying, well are we there yet? So she came up with all the states listed on a piece of paper and so, therefore, when you saw the license plate from that state, you could call out that thing and then you get to check that you had that license plate. Well, it was a long ways up there and so the kids, that would keep them entertained for a while but then you had to have alternative two and three.

Betty – It was just like having a two-lane street all the way from the interstate. But then once the interstate came in, then eventually we got rid of some of the curvy roads and then when you left the interstate, it was just nothing but a snake all the way. And usually, we were doing it at night in the dark.

Bill – When you go through the Black Hills at night, it’s dangerous because you have a lot of wild animals on the road and people are always hitting them. Deer, elk, once in a while a goat.

Mary – When’s the prettiest season in the Black Hills?

Bill – May and June, I think. Because normally that’s when all the wild flowers are blooming and if you’ve got any rain, it’s enough moisture for them to really grow, if you had enough snow during the winter season, they’ve got a good start. Where you get into June, it’s starting to get warm. July and August are plain, flat-out hot. October you can get a lot of wind and you can get snow.

Betty – I would say August and September but…….

Bill – Well, it depends on which year you’re talking about. I’ve seen them both ways but I just think May and June. But if you go up there, if you and Mike and Andy and the rest of the clan want to go up there, let me know and I’ll outline some other places for you to see.

Mary – That would be nice.

Sturgis Travel Advice

Bill – Because if you follow the Triple A plan or the Mobil plan or any of the other places, you go to the big tourist traps. Yeah, you want to see Rushmore, Crazy Horse, but it would be also pretty nice to see some of the other things, to see the Needles as an example. The Needles are beautiful. Normally, rocks are this way. In the Needles, the rocks are this way. They’re standing on end. You get down into the Sylvan Lake area and it’s beautiful down there. And Mom had a picture. She was in the Rise Photo Studio, and that’s where she worked all the time, and she had some pictures of the original Sylvan Lake Lodge.

Well, in 30 something, it burned down to the ground. Well, they built it up on top of the hill now in the current motif which is a bummer because I think they should have rebuilt it in the same motif that the old lodge. But then, at the same time, go through that whole area. And your grandfather, I remember going with him down in that particular area and we have what we call the pigtails. When you come up to some of the valleys, they didn’t have enough room to build roads so what they did, they built bridges and he was a bridge designer but what they did, they curlicued them and they had just like a pigtail. You know, a pigtail is curly and so that’s the way you got up the hill. And he was just dumbfounded. He had to get out and look at the construction and how they did it and what was going on and sometimes it went this way, sometimes it went this way, depending on where they had to come out at. And he enjoyed that, just looking at all those roads they had back in there. Most of them at that time, when he was going around with them, they were just gravel roads. No tar and no asphalt and they never have put concrete in them because it was too far out of the way to have a concrete plant to get all that.

Mary – Is the ranch still in Freeman’s family or is that since…?

Bill – No, he sold out. He’d been gone for 20 some years. I haven’t seen or heard of Joyce for years. Carol Sue and us email each other on a regular basis. When we go out there, she is so eager and she was really eager to learn about your mom and when we went out there, well you guys gotta stop by. You can’t leave here without stopping out to see us. And so we spent some time with her.

Mary – Seems like that ranching would have been a hard way of life. I remember my grandpa saying he thought of doing the ranching and it was like a drought year and everything was lost and he just said, I can’t live with that uncertainty, I want a steady job. That was how he felt.

Bill – Well, then you come through, after you go through the Sylvan Lake area and the Needles area, go over toward Hill City and see some of the back country there, then you go down and see Crazy Horse, which is another big thing, well then go east of Crazy Horse and go down to the Game Lodge area and see where all the animals they’ve got down there and you might luck out like we did and get in the buffalo lineup. I mean it was, I’ve been in it two or three times so I knew what they were doing when I saw them so that’s why I pulled in there. Because I knew Mary Ann would really enjoy and see what all they had to do with these animals.