photograph taken Christmas 1928. I was almost six months old. WCP
This photograph taken Easter 1929. I was almost ten months old. WCP
My Grandmother Peters only visited us once, December 1928, when the above picture was taken, so of course I do not remember her visit. She and my grandfather were still on the Peters family farm when we visited them in July 1933. I remember her from that visit. She was so glad to see us and with such joy showed her only grandaughter around the family home and farm she and my grandfather bought in 1892. The furniture in the house and the farm equipment was much the same as it had been when my father was a boy on that farm.
We did not know then it would be our last visit with my Grandmother Peters.
In 1934 my Grandmother Croxen purchased a home at 1024 North Euclid from Dr. and Mrs. Andrew Ellicott Douglass. Since this home was adjacent to ours, we saw her every day for the almost twenty years she lived there. From her I learned a lot about history as it happened. She often recalled her earliest memory of how upset her mother was when she heard President Lincoln had been shot; how styles changed and her mother stopped wearing the hooped skirt; family travels in a covered wagon, the first time she saw an electric light and other inventions.
She had frequent visits from her son Fred and his family. He had come to Arizona in 1909.
My own two grandmother's birth dates were within two years of Louise Marshall's birth date, so she easily seemed like a third grandmother. These dates, about one hundred and twenty five years before the writing of this book, happen to be during or at the close of the Civil War. What great changes they saw! They could remember the first telephone, electric light, motor car, aeroplane, radio and many other things.
This photograph was taken in May 1931.
To me, as far back as I can remember, going to see Mrs. Marshall seemed like a combination of a visit with a benevolent and concerned "third grandmother" and having a very formal and socially correct audience with someone who bore a striking resemblance to pictures I had seen of Queen Victoria. "Noblesse oblige."
When I was quite young I felt how tense my parents were during these visits. As the years passed this would change and I would go there by myself. Always these visit were pre-arranged and usually involved a special reason such as the presentation of a holiday card I had drawn, some flowers we had grown in our garden or perhaps to receive a small gift from her.
In my younger years I usually would go with my father in the panel truck he used for business. We would park in back near the barn then walk around the front of the house to the east addition front door. Through the sheer window curtains I could see her moving to come to the door as she knew what time to be expecting us. "Come in, come in" she would say. So pleased we had come. During the coversation she would nod her head and say softly, "Yes, yes." A small woman with quick motions, she would give the visitor her full attention for the brief visit. When the visit was over she would accompany us to the door. I can still see her, smiling, standing at the door and waving good bye to my father and me.