Ruth Wright, Mom's Half SIster

This is a story written by Ruth Wright, mom's half sister who was the last born to the union of her father and his first wife, Alice Bromley. This history tells of the separation. It also talks about the family members living back and forth between families. This must have been hard.

I am Ruth Wright Teichert. I am now seventy-two years old. I was born July 21st, 1918, the sixth child of James Charles Wright and Alice Bromley. I was told I was a large baby and came so fast my mother hurried to get out of the bathtub where she was bathing. My two sisters and brother were at a neighbor’s and told me they rode home in the back of a wagon to greet me. They were singing. “We have a baby sister!” all the way home. My sister Rose was then ten years old and Ann was seven, and my brother Ralph was five years old.

This is the order of birth of my family members. My sister Rose was born on April 11, 1909 and was named Rosena Amelia after her maternal grandmother. Two years later, on May 25,1911, a second daughter was born and named Ann Elizabeth after her paternal grandmother, Ann Elizabeth Harper. A third child was born on January 22,1913, and he was a son named Ralph Bromley after Dr. Ralph Richards, who saved his life, as Mother had to have her appendix out when she was carrying Ralph. Two stillborn sons were born before 1918 and we buried in the cemetery in American Fork, Utah. They have graves side by side that have grave markers with baby lambs on them. These sons were named Charles and Bert Wright. When I was born in 1918, they named me Ruth. My maternal grandmother shortly before she passed away on February 24, 1918 told my mother she was going to have a baby girl and she wanted me to be named Ruth. Rose Amelia and Ann Elizabeth were born in Lehi, Ralph was born in American Fork, and I was born in Spanish Fork.

The first thing that really is clear in my mind is when we had a fire when we lived in Bingham, Utah. Dad Struhs, my stepfather was working in a copper mine there, and the fire came up the hill. We thought it would burn our home, so we were moving all of our furniture out into a wagon to get it out of the way; but the fire stopped, and the house was saved. That was a very frightening thing to happen when I was a little girl.

Ruth with my mother and her twin sister.  My mother is on right

Rose, Ann Elizabeth, Ralph Ruth and my Grandparents Mina Geneva and Carles James Wright

My mother was only nineteen years old when she married my dad, Charles James Wright, who was then twenty-one years old. They were married October 2, 1907 in Provo, Utah. Father had attended Brigham Young Academy for a short time as a young man, and after marriage he found his trade as a machinist, working first for the sugar company in Lehi, Utah and then in Spanish Fork, Utah. After 1918, my father worked in Lincoln, Idaho, a small town several miles from Idaho Falls, as a machinist keeping the sugar beet stokers in the mill in running order at the Lincoln sugar factory. We lived in a small white house which was then owned by the sugar company. It had a large fenced year and an irrigation ditch running in front by the road. Father would raise a fine garden every year by using the water from the irrigation water than ran in front of our house. We also had a milk cow, pigs, and sometimes chickens.

Grade school picture

I remember my parents buying a model T-Ford, and mother would drive it from Idaho to Utah, back and forth to be with her family who still lived in Utah. She was sickly and had had seven pregnancies in eleven years. She missed her mother who had just recently passed away and her married sisters who were living in Salt Lake City and American Fork. Mother decided to stay in Utah, and in this separation Rose and Ralph were to live with our father in Idaho, and Ann and I went with mother.

Ruth Wright

When in Utah, mother worked as a housekeeper and a chambermaid plus she took nurses training at the L.D.S. Hospital. Ann spent much time with mother’s sisters and I was put in a day nursery. In 1920, mother met Henry Ernest Struhs, a widower with four children: Henry Wilfred, who was born in 1910; Harry Herbert, born in 1911; Louise Carol, born on August 10,1913; and a daughter Ruth born in 1919. The youngest girl had been put up for adoption soon after she was born, as her mother died in childbirth, and Henry’s mother Albertine Seiclist Struhs, then up in years, could only take care of the three older children. Mother married Henry on October 1, 1921 in Salt Lake City, Utah. They were sealed in the Salt Lake Temple on August 17, 1931. When they were first married, Henry worked as a boilermaker on the D&RG Railroad until the workers went on strike in 1922. While in Salt Lake, they lived in a house on 8th West and 2nd South, then at 128 Harvard Avenue which they later sold to mother’s sister Louie Ingersoll. They moved from Salt Lake to Bingham, Utah, where Henry worked in the copper mines until a fire closed the mine. The fire caused much distress and changes for our family as well as many others.

When we lived in Bingham, Utah my father came and took me to live this family in Idaho. While there I was given a small white Spitz puppy, which I named Jo-Jo. We had many Jo-Jo’s in the years to come, because when the first dog passed away, we had his son, and then his son’s son, etc. I took my dogs from Idaho to Utah, and back to Idaho. The last dog I owned, I left in Wyoming with my stepsister Louise and her family when I left for Texas to be married in September of 1939. Mother and Dad Struhs moved to Green River, Wyoming where Dad worked as a boilermaker for the Union Pacific Railroad. Mother worked as a midwife; going all hours of the day and night to assist the doctor’s when babies were being born. She was loved and honored by those she nursed and helped in their need. They rented a company house but moved often as better houses became available and also when Dad was out of work during the Great Depression. On August 18, 1925, a son, Henry, was born to Mother and Dad Struhs, but he only lived a short time. He is buried in the Green River Cemetery. Mother was very ill that year, and I went to Lincoln, Idaho to live with my father, Charles, and his family for a few years. I attended the first and second grades in Lincoln, Idaho. I remember that many of my clothes were lost in the mail when they were sent from Wyoming, and so my sister Rose who was then a teenager, made me many beautiful clothes for school. They took many pictures of me all dressed up in my new outfits with ribbons in my hair, and even on my shoes. I was well cared of by my sister Rose.

Rose was the first in the family to get married. After she was married in 1927, I went back to Green River to live with my mother and dad Struhs and this is where I completed school and graduated from Green River High School in 1937. (In 1987, I went back for my fifty year reunion.) When Rose married, my brother, Ralph, also moved from Idaho to Green River, Wyoming to live with us.

When the family first moved to Green River, Wyoming, there were three boys and three girls living with mother and dad Struhs. Rose stayed in Idaho. She married Ruel Norton. Rose and Ruel first lived in Pocatello, Idaho, and then were sent to Bakersfield, California. Ruel was a telegraph operator, and it was interesting to watch him at the Telephone Company sending messages with dots and dashes. In 1931 while they were vacationing in Idaho, Ruel was helping his brother stack hay, and one of the chains on the lift broke, and it fell and hit Ruel in the head. He died soon after in the hospital. They had been married only a few years and had been sealed in the temple on October 16, 1930. We had a happy life, and Dad Struhs was a wonderful stepfather. He was very thoughtful and kind to his family. We loved him very much. While working as a boilermaker for the Union Pacific Railroad, he was struck in the eye with a piece of welding steel which caused him to lose the sight in that eye. After the accident, he was retired by the railroad. After dad retired, they sold the fine home they had built in Green River and moved to Salt Lake City where they found work as the custodians of several different apartment buildings. One building was on 1st South and 3rd East, another was on 5th South and 3rd East. One was called the Progress Apartments. Mother loved to be back near her family in Utah. She had four remaining siblings in the Salt Lake area; her brother, Will, who was ill with hardening of the arteries; her sister, Lou, was confined at home with arthritis, her sister Jenny who lived in Murray, and her sister Cora who also lived in Salt Lake. Mother’s health was not very good, but she was able to drive her small Dodge Valiant to visit her family for a number of years before she was confined to home with diabetes. While they were custodians of the apartment buildings in Salt Lake City, Mother and Dad Struhs had great joy in caring for their great-grandchildren. Their grandson Alfred Sellers was away serving in the Air Force, and his was Stella was working during the day so Al’s two children, Alfred, Jr. nicknamed Ted, and Alice Ann, were often with the folks.

We were a railroad family. Henry’s sons Wilford, and Harry, as well as my brother Ralph all worked for the railroad. Harry was a brakeman, Wilford worked in the ticket office, and Ralph worked in the ticket office depot for many years and as a ticket agent in their office in Park City, Utah. He later was transferred to Pocatello, Idaho. Ann and Rose worked in the storehouse on the railroad, and even I worked there for awhile doing typing and then time keeping. The railroad paid the best salaries, so whenever we could get a job with the railroad, we took it. Louise, my stepsister worked in the local grocery store. Ralph worked for awhile as a plumber and also in a butcher’s shop before going to work for the railroad. My stepbrother Wilford’s first car was a Whippet. We have quite some memories about that Whippet. It would often stop and stall on top of hills and start rolling backwards, so we would carry bricks in the car and would jump out and put them under the wheels whenever the car stalled. Green River was filled of hills and it also had a high bridge over the many railroad tracks near the depot. We’d swim in the Green River. It was a couple of miles from the main part of town, which was separated from town by an island. We would walk up the riverbank on the island and swim down in the current. Later, we had a swimming pool not far from the river and the island bridge. On the island there was a large building where we went to roller skate, and in the summer we would have dances there. On holidays like the Fourth of July, we had special bands that came to town – some well-known bands like Glen Miller, and Artie Shaw came to Green River to perform. Wilford, my stepbrother, was the second of the children to be married. He married Mary Cummings and they moved to Omaha, Nebraska. Louise, my stepsister, married Harold Krause and had four children; she was a wonderful housekeeper and kept her children just spotless. She was also a good cook, and I loved to go and stay with her and her family. Ann married Claire Sellers on April 23, 1928 in Green River, and they had three children. Claire was working in the courthouse as an assistant county clerk, and he was an excellent typist. They have the most grandchildren and great grandchildren in our family.

Ralph, my brother, married Laura Bernhardt on February 6, 1937 in Green River, and they had four children, all of whom worked hard and earned college degrees. I married Louis Page Teichert on September 23, 1939 in College Station, Texas and we had one daughter, Patricia Ruth who was born April 12, 1941. Patricia earned her college degree June 1977 from University of California in Long Beach. Like my mother used to say. “I could write a book about my life; so many things have happened.” I feel the same way. Happy and sad days make one’s life interesting.