! HELEN NICKUM INTERVIEW ! !Tape 1, Side 1 GK: My name is Greg Karnes, and today’s date is January 28th, 2011. I am interviewing Helen Nickum. I guess we’ll get started. If you could state your full ! name and where and when you were born. Helen My full name is Helen Nickum, no middle name. I was born on February 4th, ! 1928, in Portland, Oregon. !GK: I guess a good place to start out is to sort of get a sense of your family history. Helen Yes, it goes back to about 1756, a far piece, when a father and three sons immigrated from Erzweiler, Germany down the Rhine River to a port in the Netherlands to board a ship to America in answer to an ad put in the paper by William Penn. And they landed in Philadelphia or near Philadelphia through several different clerks, and the name was spelled differently by the clerks because none of the group knew how to write and the genealogy came out with ! several spellings. So, that’s where my father’s family started. Both my mother and father’s folks lived in--were raised in Pennsylvania. My father’s folks came across the prairie from Baltimore to Corinne, Utah, where is-- near the place where the Golden Spike was planted when the railroads met. They ran a hotel there, which was the only brick building in town and a haven for when the Indians were uprising. Some of the chairs from that hotel are still in the ! town library. !GK: What were their names? Helen Nickum, John Nickum, that was my father’s father, and his mother, Cornelia Allen, had come by railroad from Baltimore, she leaving her husband because he was an alcoholic. He was a barrel maker in Baltimore. She came there to join a sister who had come earlier, and that’s all I know about that. John did go on to Montana and later became a station agent for the railroad in Butte, I think it was, Montana, and then lived in Spokane. He had met and married Luella, no, ! Ella, in Corinne. My father was born in Dillon, Montana. !GK: Did they have any siblings? Helen John, oh, my father, Walter, had several siblings. He was the youngest. The oldest was Chester, who lived in Pasadena, California; an older sister, Lou, who ! lived in Morro Bay, California; and Elmer, who lived in Berkeley, California. !GK: So, did they run the hotel? Helen No, that was my father’s father, John, and his mother, Cornelia, who ran the ! hotel. !GK: Okay. Continue. Helen Ella came from Ohio and wrote poetry, there she is, I have to say there’s a family resemblance. There’s the hotel, the Central Hotel in Corinne. This picture was ! taken in 1910. !GK: Do you know when it was built? !Helen No, I don’t, probably before 1910. [Laughter] !GK: And you compiled this book? Helen Yes. Some poems that she had left. I didn’t collect them, my Aunt Lou collected them, and we exchanged correspondence cross country in compiling the different categories, and the copyright is in both of our names. And then, I filed a ! copyright to the book, which I did. !GK: Is there any particular poem that you really enjoy? !Helen Yes, there’s one. !GK: Do you want to read it or talk about it? Helen Well, this was written in 1870, age 16, she wrote “Angels of Temperance,” before prohibition. There’s one–she wrote about holidays and events. Some of the ! poems were published in newspapers of the time, but I haven’t followed through. !GK: She started writing poems at an early age. Helen Yes, she did. I’m looking for one with a footnote. Here it is. There’s George ! Washington. No, there aren’t any favorites. !GK: Is writing poems something that got passed down? Helen Yes, it did. My dad enjoyed reading poems, and his favorite author was Robert ! Service, who wrote about Alaska and early Portland. GK: Is there anything else, that your dad’s parents maybe, that they passed on to ! your dad and his siblings? Helen Yes, my dad was hard of hearing, and he inherited that from his mother. And my sister, my only sister, and I always wondered which of us was going to inherit that deficit, and neither of us did, so we were very grateful for that. It was a handicap to him. ! !GK: Um-mm. Any personality traits? !Helen He liked to laugh. He was always in a good mood. !GK: A good trait. Helen Yes, it was. And he was a steelworker by trade. He worked, well, from Spokane he spent some time working for his uncle on a sheep ranch in Montana, and then he rode the rails, in fact, that was the way people got around in those days was hitching a ride on a boxcar to come to Portland. I don’t know where my mother was at that point. They met and married in Spokane, and my sister was born in Missoula, Montana. He worked in a copper mine in Anaconda, not in the mine itself, on the tower, on the chimney to the mine. He climbed, which led him into the steelworker career. And I guess they came to Portland, to join Mother’s family who had landed here, in search of work and lived several blocks apart ! during the Depression. I lost my train of thought regarding my dad. GK: Well, we could probably step back a little bit. Do you know anything about your ! mom’s parents on the other side of your family? Yes: Yes, she was born and raised in either Lewistown or Yeagertown, Pennsylvania, this is central Pennsylvania, up the Susquehanna River. Her mother, Harriet McDonald, was married twice. Her father, last name McClenahen, worked in the axe factory there. He had been a soldier in the Civil War, and died shortly thereafter but not until they had another son, Earl Bell. Her mother married again, a painter named Guy Hale, and had another child who was a half-sister to them, whose name was Isobel. My mother’s name was Charlotte, my father’s ! name was Walter and middle name John. !GK: Okay. Helen The family came to Washington by way of Canada looking for work, and my grandmother worked as a cook for a fraternity in Pullman, Washington. So, she raised or supported the children from then on as a seamstress, she was a men’s ! tailor and worked for Lipman Wolfe here in Portland– !GK: So, she had moved down to Portland. Helen Yes, prior to Mother and Father’s joining them. She died at age 75 while she was ! still actively employed. !GK: And this is your grandmother. Helen Yes, she was sort of short. Both my father and mother’s mother came to Portland, and when I was about four there’s a picture of me with both grandmothers and Mother. ! !GK: Do you still have that photo? !Helen Yes, I do. !GK: That’s nice. Do you remember any specific qualities about your grandmother? Helen Yes, she had very dark, almost black eyes that sparkled when she talked. She was a good cook, she taught my mother how to cook. She also taught my mother how to sew. I didn’t learn from my mother how to sew, but I did take sewing lessons, both in college and after I graduated. I don’t know how I missed that, probably because my mother made all my clothes during the time I was in college. I worked my way through college with the exception of clothes, which ! my father paid for and my mother made. !GK: Well, how did your parents meet? Did they meet– Helen No, they met in a dance hall outside of Spokane. And Mother–I don’t know why she got there because she never really danced, but Dad loved to dance and he taught me how to dance. He actively pursued Mother, and they married shortly ! after they met, as far as I know. !GK: What time was this? !Helen Oh-h, I’ve got to get more information. !GK: Okay, that’s fine. Would you say probably early 20's or–? Helen I was born in ‘28, my sister was born in ‘20, so it was before 1920, and she had a boy born dead before my sister was born and three failed pregnancies between ! my sister and myself. !GK: Okay. And so, at this point was your dad still working in the steel industry? Helen No, he worked on bridges and buildings and dams. He worked on more than one of the coast bridges that were built during the Depression but before the WPA went into effect, and he was employed on the Bonneville Dam, which was the first of the Columbia River dams. That was when he stopped smoking. I was known as what would have been known as a construction baby, where the family usually followed the wage earner, but Mom didn’t like to travel. So, they rented a house here in Portland, and Dad traveled during the week, either commuting daily if it was close enough, and coming home on weekends. So, I was really ! lucky as a construction baby living in one place. !GK: Not having to live down by Bonneville Dam, probably wasn’t much there. Helen But that’s when he stopped smoking. He decided in the car that he would stop smoking, and he threw a half a pack of cigarettes out the window to celebrate the fact, and all the guys were upset to think he wouldn’t give them the cigarettes.