Lynnfield Moody, My Uncle part 2: Another Collection of Pictures From the Past

Lynn and Ruth, 1944

Lynnfield Moody's wife was Ruth. He married her in 1938, so when World War II started he was already married and not a young man. She made the scrap books,  and saved all the pictures and everything I have received came through her. She saved it all, especially during the war. He enlisted in Sacramento, California August 18, 1942 when he was 37 years old. He had been working at a service station. 

Lynn had registered for the draft, October 16, 1940, a year before the United States got into the war, but didn't get called before he enlisted. The way it looked in 1942 he would be better off enlisting instead of waiting until he was drafted. He had no children, so he wouldn't be deferred. When he began to see the headlines and the devastation of war, he decided to enlist.

By enlisting rather than waiting, Lynn was able to enlist in the Warrant Officers branch as a Private. Eventually he became a Sargent First Class. 

Ruth, as many family record keepers do, failed to keep the dates of the articles she archived, so I misunderstood her notes at first, thinking that by September first, 1942 Lynn was a Sargent at Monterey, California. He wasn't. It took longer, but I wanted you to see this picture early in these articles. Lynn is on the right here. He is the Sargent.  

Sargent Lynnfield Moody, on the right inspecting his cooks' work.

Lynnfield Moody's Albums and Scrapbooks

My uncle Lynnfield Moody was a World War II veteran, but he never left the United States. He and his second wife Ruth lived a long and happy life together in Sacramento and Eureka, California.

Lynnfield Moody

When you are a child in a big family gathering like a family reunion the adults often ignore you, because they are so happy to see their brothers and sisters. I often fell asleep as they were talking, but the one voice that came through as I was dozing off was Lynnfield's. My cousin Kenny says that Lynnfield would give him a nickel or a quarter to "get lost," so the adults could talk. Kenny is six years younger than me. I guess Kenny didn't fall asleep so easily when Lynnfield was talking and was probably trying to interrupt and get attention.

Lynnfield had all kinds of stories, but I don't remember any of them. I just remember him talking and talking and me falling asleep.

One year, when I was very, very young,  he showed movies of his and Ruth's travels. They traveled all over and took many, many pictures. The movies were silent and Lynnfield droned on and on and on, so I fell asleep. Even though I fell asleep, I liked it.

But a few years later at another family reunion I heard him make a kind of snide remark while talking about their travels, saying something like, "I have pictures of that..... if anyone's interested."

I don't know if I was the only one who fell asleep when Lynn was telling about his travels, but he talked about them less and less as the family reunions continued over the years, and I missed it. I missed his stories, his movies, and his photographs, and his excitement and enthusiasm.

When my sister Jacque gave me a box of Lynn's albums and scrapbooks and photos a few years ago, after  he died (1994... whoah... that's a long time ago) I wanted to somehow share all those photos.

Lynnfield with his mobile home on one of his trips

There are lots of pictures of people I do not know in them and probably lots of stories I didn't hear, or slept through, but I decided I will give it a try. It worked with Edna's pictures (his sister).... I got a box of hers also, and in the column on the right of this page you can see the stories about those pictures that I wrote. (Scroll down, it keeps going and going.) Some people even contacted me about those pictures, and somewhere around 25,000 people have seen them.

Like Edna, Lynnfield and Ruth didn't have any children..... Well ... Lynn had a daughter from a previous marriage, but no one knows anything about her, even if she grew up or died as a child.

Maybe this blog about Lynnfield and Ruth's pictures can have some kind of similar results ........... Maybe even Lynnfield's daughter or grand children may find it.

Grandma and Grampa Moody exerpt

           Grandma and Grampa Moody left Maine and rode the railroad to San Francisco.

            The City of San Francisco had placed a bounty on rats, so Howard Moody hunted rats, shooting them and turning in the tails for the bounty while they waited a few days for their steamship to Eureka.

    I got the idea of paying for gophers at San Lucas School when I   was superintendent of the district after talking to Grandma Moody on one of our earlier trips from Sacramento back to Eureka.  So when we had a gopher problem I remembered Grandpa Moody hunting rats, and  I put a bounty on the gophers. Gooby (Stan) was one of the best hunters. I bought traps, and he and a few other boys placed and checked the traps. I asked the school board if we could pay the boys. I believe one of the checks to Gooby, who trapped gophers in the 7th and 8th grades, was around $60. I think the bounty was 50 cents for each gopher tail. I kept the tails because often the governing board looked carefully over the payments and questioned me on some of them, especially payments to any family members. I was ready when the question came and showed them the envelope with hundreds of gopher tails. They didn’t ask me about gopher payments again, though I always had the envelope of last month’s tails on the table at    the board meeting.

Grandma Moody told me that Howard got paid 5 cents for each rat tail he took in. I don't  know what San Francisco did with their rat tails, but I kept the gopher tails in my office until after the board meeting and then took them to the garbage secretly, sealed in an envelope so the boys wouldn’t find them and try to turn them in again.  

Grandma Moody didn’t say how long they had to wait for the steamer, but I got the impression that it was more than a few days. While waiting they also helped clean up rubble.

Fluhrer's Bakery in Eureka, California Part 2

      Before I got the job with the Examiner, when I was as young as ten  years old, around 1951, I would often go with my father to work. We got up early, before 5 a.m. He would drive his old 1939 Plymouth to the bakery and park on “A” street. He had to load his truck. For a few  years I went with my father every Saturday and more in the summer.

Dad's truck was like this one.

      When I went with him, my father had a route that covered the Arcata Mad River Bottoms, Korbel, Blue Lake and Trinidad. He had three markets and three restaurants  in the town of Blue Lake. It took about about two or  more hours to deliver the bread, pies and rolls. I usually put the bread on the shelves. It was always packed in wooden boxes then. Sometimes we would get way ahead of time because of my help, and my dad let me go down to the creek that ran under the town. Sometimes I took advantage of him and played around down there too long, but he was always kind to me and was patient.

My father Tom Stark

     We delivered pies to restaurants and the next day Dad picked up the pie tins. Dad's truck was like the one in the picture. One summer day it was hot. We had both front doors of the truck open. The pie tins were stacked high next to where I sat on the side of the engine cover. We went around a corner going up a hill toward Trinidad. The wind blew in from the ocean and out through those open folding doors. It caught those tin  pie pans and blew them right passed me out the door, and they rolled down the highway. It sounded like a tinny explosion. Dad stopped the truck, and we both ran after them. He called that place "Pie Pan Turn" from then on. It was fun.

From the Portsmith Herald
 Dec 21, 1954

      Before loading his truck, Dad usually stopped for coffee at  The Blue Ox restaurant across “A” street from the bakery, the same restaurant Dick Koenig took me to years later. There were a few drivers in there one morning talking about some person who predicted the end of the world that day. Dad's route supervisor was there too. It spooked me a little, but I soon forgot about it.    

      It was December 21, 1954. We went on the route. We got to E & O Market on Highway 299. I was stacking Big Loaf on the shelves and Dad's route supervisor showed up. 

       He was talking to Dad, and WHAM!!!! CRASH!!! BLAMMM!!! It sounded like a freight train had hit the north end of the building. Bottles flew off the walls. Glass milk bottles crashed on to the floor. The smell of wine spread throughout the store, and that supervisor sprinted out the nearest door. Through my mind went that prediction that the world was ending today, but it was an earthquake! Dad told the story over and over the next few days and enjoyed emphasizing and comparing how that tall long legged supervisor galloped out of the building while I finished stacking the Big Loaf then wandered around the building looking at the mess. Dad never said how he felt.

 Back to 1958 on my first days working, I only worked dumping hamburger buns for three or four hours per day, then I would help the same two women take the pastry out of the pans they were baked in and put them in the cardboard trays so they could be wrapped. Then I did other odd jobs. 

This is the sifter. I did the job that this guy is doing for a while.

One of those odd jobs was dumping flour from the 100 pound bags into the sifter like the guy in the  picture. 

At first the sifter would get ahead of me, but soon I got so I could dump it fast enough so that I would have to stop dumping so the sifter could catch up.

Flour would fly in the air and after a few minutes of working hard I would sweat and the flour would be caked on my arms.

I took it as a challenge to keep the sifter full when I worked there. Alan Koenig told me that later, they had flour delivered in bulk, and no one needed to dump it.

I worked dumping the buns and doing the odd jobs for a few months, and then Mr. Koenig told me I was going to wrap bread at Butternut Bakery which was at 4th and Commercial streets a couple of blocks away.

You can get this 8 1/2 X 11 full color book at lulu.com. Click on the button at the top right of this page.

Fluhrer's Bakery in Eureka, California

   

 The Fluhrer’s Big Loaf Bakery on Fourth and A streets in Eureka, California put me (Stanley Stark) through college and helped me take care of my family. My father Thomas Stark worked at the bakery as a salesman and truck driver for many years before me.

My father, Tom Stark

       I learned a lot about work from Dick Koenig and Tony Farlan, Arnold Janke, Don Lorensen, and Chris Tamanovich, my bosses over the years. I was only seventeen when I started to work there, but I already had a family and knew I had to work. 

 It was a day in early May, 1958, when I went down to the bakery and climbed the steps up to the office. They were expecting me. I talked to Mr. Koenig, filled out the paperwork, and he took me over to the little restaurant  across “A” street called “The Blue Ox” for something to eat, which he paid for. 

Dick Koenig

Tony Farlan was there and Mr. Koenig introduced him to me. Tony ordered soup which he pronounced “souwoop.” 

One day a few weeks after I started, I took my card from the rack and was about to push it into the time clock, dreading the start of the work day, when I heard a voice in my mind say clearly to me,  “Stan, you can like this job as well as hate it!” It was a clear, firm voice, and I knew I should listen to it. 

From that moment on I began to like working at the bakery. I left (quit) many, many times and worked other places, but I always loved to go back. In the twenty-four years from when I started until the last day I worked there, I must have left at least 12 times. I never really quit. I was laid off, or I got another job, but I always went back until August of 1982. After that,  I became a school district administrator.

Back at the beginning, I had two jobs in April of 1958. I was seventeen, working for Lynn Paxman who was the distributor of the San Francisco Examiner and also for the Humboldt Times. I delivered the Examiner in the morning and rolled papers for the Times at night.

My father, Tom Stark, who I sometimes went to work with when I was a boy, said he talked to Dick Koenig about me working at the bakery. He said to go to the office and fill out the paperwork, and I would be able to work there.  

But…. My Father said, “You have to write on the paperwork that you were born in 1940 instead of 1941, because you have to be 18!”

I did what he said.

Dorothy and I were married December 27, 1957 only four

Dorothy and Me

and one half months earlier. I was sixteen and she was fifteen. I had been working for the Examiner since I was twelve, and after our marriage I also worked at odd jobs, and finally was hired by the Humboldt times. It hadn’t crossed my mind that my age was a problem getting a job until my father told me.

Dorothy and I both quit high school in December. My mother, Eunice, had signed me up for a correspondence  high school course with the American School which was advertised in many magazines.

   I began working  immediately on the schoolwork and was actually almost done with the rest of high school by  May of 1958, the same year. 

           Tony  became my mentor and my financial benefactor. He never gave me money, but he was my contact. Through the next twenty-four years, on and off, I worked at the bakery, and it was Tony I called. If the times were getting financially tight for me and my family, about May, I called Tony. 

         “Do you need me this summer,” I said, and Tony would always say, “I’ll ask Dick.” A few days later he would call and I, by myself, or with my family would go back from Sacramento to Eureka as soon as school was out. 

But back in 1958 at the beginning, the next day after I completed the paperwork,  I went to work at eight o’clock in the morning.     Since both of my other  jobs did not conflict, I kept them. I delivered Examiner papers from about 5:30 a.m. until 7 a.m., and worked at the Humboldt Times from 12 midnight until two or three a.m., and now I worked at the bakery from 8 a.m. until 3:30.

     My first duty at the bakery was dumping hamburger buns into the slicer.  As soon as the buns went through the slicer they were packed by Eva Minshall and  Eunice  Purcell into cardboard frames and put into the wrapper. It was a mechanical wrapper that clicked and clacked and made a lot of racket. One of the women put the wrapped buns into wooden bread  boxes.

            

  There was a conveyor belt not far from us that was carrying bread wrapped in wax paper out of that room into a room to the east of us. The same as it had been for years, even when I came with my father when I was ten. There were trucks in that room. The conveyor belt went around the corner and down next to the wall  where a shipping clerk would load the bread into wooden boxes, and then he stacked the boxes onto the floor next to the trucks. 

   Though this was my first day of actually working at the bakery for pay, I had been there before, many times with my father.

............These are excerpts from my newest book: FLURHER'S BIG LOAF BAKERY.  Order at Lulu.com.