Roberta McKern
Roy Elliott’s 1971 book, “Profiles of Progress,” ranks high on the favorite book list at the East Linn Museum.
The best history of Sweet Home in the museum’s research room, it includes sketches of prominent families who settled here and shaped the town and general vicinity. Among those profiled are the Ameses, the Barrs, Russells, Pickens, Weddles and Whitcombs – 22 in all. Quotes from this book enliven numerous articles on Sweet Home history.
Having grown up here, Elliott knew many of those about whom he wrote, or their descendants. He served 34 years in the Forest Service, and from hunting and trapping when young, he knew much of the general area. The book became a project of his retirement years, but here we will look at its beginning, when he was a boy collecting the memories he would later write about, his introductory autobiographical sketches.
The title, “Profiles of Progress,” implies optimism. True, it is possible to progress backwards, a retrograde action, but we usually think of progress as moving forward, upward and continuously onward. This positive attitude carries on throughout the book.
For example, in recalling his boyhood, Elliott leaves out the negative aspect. Focusing on those who most positively influenced his development, he leaves some surprising omissions, and only by running across other information do we become aware that his grandmother’s second husband was part of the family scene until 1912, when he died. For obvious reasons, Elliott makes scant mention of his own mother and father.
His focus is upon those who meant the most to him, particularly Nancy Emma Harrington, Minniece Donaca and his Uncle John Minniece. When Roy arrived in Sweet Home as a lonely, frightened 5-year-old, his grandmother welcomed him with open arms and a reassuring loving heart. She reared him and the son by her second marriage, to John P. Donaca, as brothers. Young Frank was but a year and three months older than Roy, and Emma Donaca loved and punished them equally as need be, especially when boyish rivalries led to fisticuffs.
In the earlier years of her second marriage, Emma had helped John P. Donaca run the St. John’s Hotel here in Sweet Home. John P. founded the hotel in 1864 and named it for himself.
But by the time Roy joined his grandmother’s family the hotel had different owners and Emma had become the main breadwinner. As Roy recalled she worked at many tasks, took in washing and ironing, did carpet weaving, cleaned houses, picked hops, earning an income however she could yet she retained her compassion and charity for those in need.
Along with Roy’s mother, his Uncle John was from Emma’s first marriage to John Minniece. Of four children, one died at 10 and another daughter married and lived elsewhere. Reading Elliott’s narrative, we come to feel his Uncle John was perpetually middle-aged, but he was actually only 12 years older than his half brother Frank and around thirteen years older than Roy, if the data in the 1905 census is correct.
For young Roy, Uncle John was the head of the family and also a mentor when it came to ingenuity and self-sufficiency. It was he who introduced Roy to the woods.
Too, John Minniece was a bridge builder who gained renown despite having no more than an eighth-grade education. Among his other skills, he could do intricate rigging for a logging outfit, lay out a water-grade road through the forest and fight a forest fire with a keen ability to suppress it.
He was a man of remarkable abilities and Roy Elliott came to wonder how much further his uncle could have risen had he had a broader education.
His Uncle John owned the house and 30 acres where the family lived and the need to clear the land of brush and scrub allowed him to pass some of the skills along to Roy and Frank.
Once, John Minniece made the boys partners with him to clear acreage for a neighbor, perhaps $100 for the entire job. It proved to be a good way to educate the boys in the joys of arduous work at limited pay.
And there was always firewood to cut for the fireplace and stove in the house, especially when Roy’s grandmother took in washing and ironing. Roy Elliott recalled sawing wood with a 7-foot crosscut saw to keep the house supplied with wood throughout the years.
Once, he and Frank got into an argument over who was or was not doing his share of pulling hard enough on his end of the saw. Roy admitted some of his resentment came from Frank’s abilities as an actor, which sometimes called for his taking time off from sawing wood to rehearse for a school play.
At any rate, each found the other less lively at keeping the saw moving. Accusations arose. Fisticuffs appeared in order.
Worse, one teen-aged boy picked up a sledge hammer, the other an axe, although neither meant to actually use his tool. At this point, Uncle John intervened, “Tut, tut, tut,” he is quoted as saying. “If you fellows want to fight, lay down them tools, and I’ll take you on one at a time, or both at once. I’m tired of hearing your jawing. Now put up or shut up and get back to work.”
The boys wanted no part of such a battle with their blue-eyed, reddish sandy-haired, redder-mustached relative, whose wiry muscular body had been hardened by years of working in the woods. They went back to work!
Aside from chores for Roy and Frank, there was school.
As Elliott notes, Sweet Home may have been settled around 1850, but there was no actual school house built until 1874 and it burned in 1882. A new one-room building then was constructed about one mile east of Sweet Home (at that time.)
He and Frank walked that mile to and from school and sometimes, in snow and ice, they walked barefoot when there was no money for shoes, just as some of the other students did. His grandmother had a remedy for sore. chapped and cracked feet, a salve made from the buds of black balm trees (cottonwoods) gathered in spring.
A favorite game of Roy’s was playing dogs and deer. School children acting as dogs chased the deer. If a deer were caught, that child became the dog ready to run after the former dog, now a deer. When the deer ran away from the school yard into the woods too far to get back to class after the sound of the bell, limitations had to be set on the game.
At the age of 6, Roy started school at the one-room building in 1899. Two years later a new school came under construction, a two-roomed building and the old school was used for storage. The larger school received greater distinction in 1910 when one of the rooms was partitioned by a curtain so high school classes could be held, the beginning of high school in Sweet Home.
Initially, Roy Elliott did not finish the eighth grade. He dropped out to work in the woods.
Perhaps it was then that he and his Uncle John stayed at a logging camp and worked for John Weddle near Chandler Mountain. Ten hours a day for six-day work week at a dollar a day plus board. Weekends they walked to and from camp.
Altogether, Roy spent two years working in the woods, one in harvesting, and one trapping and hunting in the forests around Sweet Home.
High school started looking good. First, at 18, he had to finish the eighth grade. He survived the humiliation.
But when he applied for high school, a problem intervened. Because high school was a new social experience and expenditure, a rule declared anyone over 18 had to pay a fee in order to attend. Consternation, for Roy Elliott there was no money.
Then a hero intervened and won his place in the book, “Profiles in Progress.” Cy Barr of Fern Ridge served on the school board. He also led many of Sweet Home’s parades, riding a big white horse and carrying the American flag, a fitting image of him in Roy Elliott’s eyes.
Cy Barr concluded that if the fee requirement had no legal penalties, then the question of who should pay could be argued case by case. And in Roy Elliott’s case, the fee could be, and was, waived.
When Roy started high school, classes were held in the Upper Church, but improvements were under way. In 1912 eight school districts consolidated to form the Sweet Home Union High School and money was raised to build the new school. More districts joined over time.
Sweet Home’s first high school class graduated in 1915, three students: one girl, two boys. Following his graduation, Roy Elliott would marry the lone girl, Georgia Opal Russel.
He enjoyed his high school years. He played the trombone in the high school band. His cohort at home played the bass horn and when Roy and Frank practiced, the duo became overwhelming, so cacophonous it seemed Uncle John may have tricked Frank into giving up the bass horn.
Because it was the school’s first band, students purchased their own instruments.
Roy also played on a winning baseball team coached by Clayborn Bigbee, a former Sweet Home School principal. Bigbee knew how to pitch a curve ball, then new to this area, and he taught it to Roy Elliott and his own son, Carson Bigbee.
Three Bigbee sons played on “The Sweet Home School” team as their uniforms announced. Two Bigbee sons would become professionals with the Pacific Coast League, going on to the big time, Lyle with the Philadelphia Athletics and Carson with the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Elliott graduated in 1917 from high school at the age of 23. He went on to become a ranger with the United States Forest Service and to secure additional technical training.
All we are looking at here are the days of his boyhood up to the end of his school years. With his autobiographical reminiscences at the beginning of “Profiles of Progress,” he paid tribute to those who had the greatest influences on his earlier years, his grandmother Emma Donaca and his Uncle John Minniece.
They set him off in the proper directions, but more than anything else, they gave an insecure 5-year-old a home in a house filled with love, compassion and respect.
We can admire this tribute, and also be very glad Roy Elliott sat down and wrote Profiles of Progress for the unmatched history it’s given is of Sweet Home and what is now the East Linn Museum vicinity.
Looking ahead, there is uncertainty about the museum’s schedule for the first two weekends of December.
In past years it has been open with special decorations, music and treats for Christmas but the COVID-19 virus has impacted these plans as it has many others. As in the past, however, the museum will be closed for the months of January and February, except by special request, to open again in March on our regular schedule.
We do wish everyone happy holidays and good health. Don’t we just.