F03 REFERENCE Kurribcsdt County Library Winnemucca, Nevada
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F03 REFERENCE NOT TO B£ 7AKEK FROM TH!S ROOM KurribcSdt County Library Winnemucca, Nevada Cc-ii. MARIAN ERSKINE GRAUVOGEL F03 REFERENCE NOT TO B£ 7AKEK FROM TH!S ROOM KurribcSdt County Library Winnemucca, Nevada Cc-ii. MARIAN ERSKINE GRAUVOGEL page 9 LD: Did he stay a pipefitter and plumber working for C. B. Brown's? MG: For awhile he went to Reinhart's. He quit C. B. Brown and worked for Mose Reinhart for years and was still a plumber. When my dad got in legal trouble with the bank, it was Mose Reinhart and the Masons that kept him out of jail. Did you know Lucille Erskine? Mona Ellifritz's mother. Lucille is my step mother. My dad married her and then I had Larry and then she had Mona and then I had Lyle. She was wonderful. Lucille was a dear friend for 62 years. LD: Of course. And she was a wonderful waitress. MG: Yes. She was remarkable. She was awful good to me. And the fact that we were having babies at the same time. You know that was a very strong tie. She was 92 when she died. Her name was Kleckner. She was born on a ranch in Elko and then she and her sister were looking for jobs. At one time going to San Francisco and Seattle was a good place to get a job, and it was exciting so they went over there. LD: Was Mona the only child your father and Lucille had? MG: Yes. One was a still-born boy. Before that Lucille didn't have any children until she married my dad. Oh she wanted a baby and they had this little boy. My dad was a lot older than she was. It was heartbreaking for Lucille to lose the baby. She had been married in California. Her folks were all in Elko so she came back here. She worked in the Hotel Humboldt for many years. LD: So she earned the household money from being a waitress? MG: Yes. She was the sharpest lady. I don't know how she did it. She would get these tips and she'd save them. She had a sense of values. She'd pick up a house that nobody else would live in and six months later she would have it ready to rent. My dad worked like that too. LD: Then you and Donald finished school here and went all through these school systems? MG: Yes. What else was there? (laughter) LD: Who were some of your friends that you went to school with? What year would you have graduated? MG: '34. Let's see. Pauline O'Carroll. She and I were buddies. Vera and page 10 Verna Bullis. Emilie Dillon came in from Golconda for high school. Jim Callahan and Leland Pearce. He was a very close friend of my family. Harold Egoscue. Willy Arbonies. Gil Prida. LD: You would walk to grammar school? MG: By that time we lived close to school. It was two blocks. LD: Do you remember some of your favorite teachers? MG: We had the most marvelous school, and it showed. People prospered. My grandmother was on the school board for 25 years. Mary A. Erskine. See they use to have two boards. They had a high school and they had a grade school. She was getting a little senile. My first grade teacher also came to my retirement. Bessie Sanders. She was from here. Second grade, Mrs. Watts, Third grade was Mrs. Pike, and the First grade was Jenny Smith. These people taught for years and years and years. LD: You knew who you were going to have then each grade? MG: Yes. LD: Was there a separate Indian school when you were going to school? MG: Yes. It's still here. The building is here. There was an Indian school in back of us in the old Grammar School. When they built the new grammar school in 1927 they abolished that and brought the Indian kids into regular classes. LD: Did you play with any of them and were friends with them? MG: Sure. They had a different recess, though I did know some of them. Once they came into our big school, yes. During adolescense I didn't have any prejuditions. I didn't know what that was. We had some black people. Robinsons were wonderful. Adelle Robinson, I just loved her. Well, one of the best people I've ever known. Talented family. LD: Did you ever know a lady named Grandma Mims? MG: Yes. Tall. I'd forgotten about her too. LD: In grammar school did you have a talent for music? MG: Oh well, I had a talent for music when we lived in Reno and I was four page II years old and my mother took me to a silent picture. "Little Old New York", I think that was the name of it and I think Marion Davies was in it. The organist played the Blue Danube Waltz and I was just going out of my head, and she said, "Quiet Down". I told her when we got out of the theater, "What was that song?" And she said, "Oh I can sing that." And all the way home she sang that Blue Danube Waltz. I kept at her and I kept at her till I finally got a record of it. All of these people in my family sang and danced. That's the first time I think music really hit me as something ethereal. My mother said, "I got so tired of that darned song." She knew a lot of the words and I couldn't remember the words, (laughter) Then my grandparents were very musical and when we went to live with them they had a piano and they had one of these old crank up record players you know. All kind of music. Good classical music. LD: I wonder how they acquired that taste. MG: I talked to other teachers or musicians and they say that what you hear as a very young child is the music you are going to remember. One time I was with Emmy, she's my daughter-in-law, and this man was a janitor and a black man. He was cleaning up in that part of the building and he sat down at a piano and he started to play jazz. Gee. So I told Emmy, "I just love that." She said, "I'll introduce you. You listen to him. He's good." She said he works nights playing in one of the hotels. So he later was going through all this improvation in jazz and I said, "You know I have tried for years and years to do that and I don't get it." I watched his big, black hands and I thought I can't believe this. He said, "Well what kind of music did you hear when you were very young." I said, "Classics." He said, "Not only that, but you're the wrong color." He said, "I heard jazz from all the time I can remember, so improvisation was already there." LD: How long ago was this? MG: Oh three or four years. Emmy was very active in the Oakland Museum for awhile. She was into a lot of things in the Bay Area. She's an artist, a craftsman, a decorator. That's Larry's wife. LD: Let's go back to your grammar school teachers. MG: O.K. The fourth grade was Mrs. Leach, the fifth grade was Ethel Kibbee. And then we had in the seventh grade a man. Mimi was on the school board so she would invite these people to dinner. Oh she was swanky. This teacher I just loved. He was so handsome and I was in the seventh grade, (laughter) I picked up the nickname of Pete or Peter and I didn't like it. The teachers always called me Marian. The kids called me "Pete" One time he was talking to the seventh grade class and he said, page 12 "Now did you get that Pete?" And the romance was over. That was the last year he taught school. Did you know Wendell Vine? He came from Iowa. This was Stanley's brother. He finally taught in Elko. Ethel Kibbee taught school for 51 years. LD: Was she a good teacher? MG: Oh my gosh. She was out of this world. LD: How about principals? MG: When I entered school here there were two men, a principal and a vice-principal. This was in the old building, and they got in trouble for being too hard on the kids. They got fired and a fellow named Roger Corbett was real young and he came. That was the year they wanted to work on getting a bigger school, which finally was opened in 1927. LD: How about clothes Marian? Were your clothes homemade, or store- bought? MG: Mostly homemade. LD: By your grandmother? MG: Yes. And I learned to sew when I was very young. That's what you did. LD: People told me they didn't have a lot of clothes. MG: No. But of course my mother kept sending me clothes and I had my grandparents getting me clothes. I wanted to learn to sew and my grand mother had an old sewing machine, although for that time it was very good. She helped me. Pauline O'Carroll's mother was very good and I used to hang out there a little bit to watch her sew.