Those 70ish Girls

It feels strange to me that my Uncle Wayne’s house, which was at the end of Main Street in Murdo is no longer there.

I remember the dark gray color and the big front porch. Uncle Wayne and Aunt Emily lived there for years and raised their son, Terry there.

I remember their dog, Smokey. He was all black and I think he was mostly cocker spaniel. One time Grandma Sanderson who lived next door fed Smokey some of Uncle Sandy’s homemade caramels. She gave him one a day out the back door of her house until Smokey got sick. It was  a while before they figured out that Grandma was the culprit.

Aunt Emily was a great cook. She made the best oatmeal cookies. “Do you know who the best cook is?” Grandpa Sanderson asked my mom once when he was eating noon dinner at our house. Mom smiled all big until Grandpa said, “Emily.”

I remember Uncle Wayne parked his big dirt mover between his house and the little park to the south of it. He built many a road in his day.

Yes, it feels strange to me that that house is now gone and in its place is a new house. Someone else will make new fond memories there.

Delicious cookie recipe by our Aunt Emily Sanderson. Aunt Emily was a hard worker, my Mother, Ella Sanderson (Leckey) used to say.

Part 2- Corny But True by Valerie Halla

I remember getting to go inside Uncle Wayne’s house when my family visited Murdo from Pennsylvania almost every summer as a kid. It felt like a sanctuary to me being allowed to go inside their cool, dark, mysterious old house. Uncle Wayne adored my Mom since she was the next oldest of six Sanderson kids, with him being the oldest. I often thought it was interesting that the two oldest kids each only had one child. Was it because of the tough times they knew living on the prairie being raised in poor, almost poverty level circumstances on the farm on Horse Creek during the Dirty 30’s ? WWI was raging across the Atlantic when Wayne and my Mother were born and farm goods were in demand for the troops. The two oldest Sanderson kids knew life was a battle and not like the battles of WWI but at home with little cash and less food a different kind of battle. Some nights my Mom related to me that dinner would be boiled beets. That’s all. That was dinner. They knew the meaning of “dirt poor”. Wayne must have felt good to start his own family as a young man, and buy such a solid comfortable house when he finally broke free from hard farm life to start out on his own.

The brick trimmed house at the end of Main Street in Murdo must’ve seemed like a mansion to Uncle Wayne and Aunt Emily. So much nicer than the log cabin at Horse Creek. It seemed sadly nostalgic and tragic when I heard it was being torn down to make way for a new specially constructed home by the state of South Dakota to accommodate low income families. It is a refreshing new chapter though in Murdo life and changes in life move us all forward. Progress can be positive.

On the other hand, I’m having deep, dark, dusty spiderweb like thoughts between the house I remember and the new one just recently built. Can I please just believe that the old comfy, cozy, warm home that we thought of as Uncle Wayne’s House is still standing? Too many fuzzy, foggy memories there for me to give up and sling aside like an old lint filled hokey, hole infested sock.

Also some people in my wonderful Sanderson side of the family might not feel the same way about the feelings I have regarding the past with Uncle Wayne and Aunt Emily. Plus their old house isn’t equivalent to them. It’s just a shelter for humans. To me it was a part of my Aunt, Uncle and cousin all rolled into one with the house as the symbol to my childhood.

As a young kid visiting in the 1950’s and 1960’s then living there in Murdo for two years in junior high, I was naive about who this uncle was. To me he was loved by my mother and her four siblings. Aunt Elna said Wayne literally kept the family alive during tough times growing up down on Horse Creek as a young boy and one who felt responsible for seven other family members, a young boy being a man before his time.

When a relative to my Uncle Bill Francis visited from Southern California in the early 1960’s, we cousins looked at her like she had two heads. She wore her hair styled and ironed her Bermuda shorts and lightweight blouses every day when she stayed at Aunt Loretta and Uncle Bill’s house. She had big expressive eyes. She was petite. Nadine was like a magnet to young girls like us. She talked kind of loud and told entertaining stories. She seemed carefree. No job, no working in her world was crazy yet seemed normal. We were mesmerized. She also started riding around town with Wayne’s son, Terry Sanderson, in his new VW bug- a car which we had never seen before. It clearly was not a Ford nor a Chevy. We were astounded by it all. To us she was like a TV celebrity, new and different. Murdo seemed too small and confining for Nadine. We thought it so romantic that she was hanging out with our oldest cousin.

Now the house we knew is gone but it’s around somewhere yet. It’s in old photographs of Christmases spent there, in pictures of the family visiting there, with Grandma and Grandpa living right next door to Uncle Wayne and Aunt Irma and Uncle Jeff two doors away. It will stay with the folks who are now the “Old Folks”- namely all of my family, with my dear cousins. It will stay in our memories, no matter if the house is gone or just a ghost from the past. It held a lot which will never be replaced.