Ollie Ozias, Midwife in Early Fort Collins

Recently I came across an interview recording I made in 1988 of "The Baxter Girls", the four daughters of Larimer County, Colorado pioneer Frank Eugene Baxter (1852-1937). I reviewed the video in preparation for having it transferred to DVD to share with their relatives and came across a most interesting story, one I had forgotten.

In response to the question "Were any of you ladies born at home," Leone Baxter Thayer seemed a bit surprised by the question and then told me "We were all born at home!" She went on to explain that their mother was attended by a midwife, a woman named Ollie Ozias (she first said Annie Ozias), who, I was told, birthed many babies in the communities of LaPorte and Fort Collins in the early days of those towns. I was intrigued by Leone's description of this spunky little lady whose entire focus was on the baby "and you'd better not get in her way." Leone's memory of Ollie Ozias was so good because Leone was eleven years old when Ollie attended the birth of Leone's youngest sister, Veda in 1916. In fact, Ollie was there when Leone's older sister, Norma Baxter Salisbury, gave birth to her first child, some twenty years after she was born in 1902. When I heard that I commented that Ollie must have seemed like one of the family by then and Leone's thoughtful comment was, no, she was not special to us that way for she birthed all the babies in our area.

Leone described Ollie as a small, intense woman who wore her long, dark hair pile high on her head and moved quickly and with purpose as she attended the mother and newborn baby. About Ollie's personality, she said she knew Ollie had been married for she had a young son but she couldn't imagine a man putting up with Ollie's assertive ways. She thought the very traits that made Ollie a great midwife would make her a difficult wife.

I searched the local Fort Collins and Larimer County historical archives for information about Ollie Ozias and only found her name and Fort Collins address in the old city directories but never any reference to her occupation, midwife. Finally, there was an entry that told me Ollie Ozias was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Veneman. Searching ancestry.com for Veneman I found Ollie, born Mary Olive Veneman in March 1861 in Ohio, the fifth child of Andrew Veneman and Ellen Martin Veneman. She married Joseph W. Ozias about 1879 and gave birth to her only child, Carlton in 1881. She and Joseph Ozias divorced but I don't know what year. By 1900 she was living in Fort Collins with her son, Carlton, and Joseph Ozias lived out his life at the National Military Home in Leavenworth, Kansas.

Thanks to a young woman on ancestry.com whose user name is evenemon I have these family photos of the Veneman family to include here. I still have not found any record of Ollie Veneman Ozias as the venerated midwife in early Fort Collins and LaPorte. There must be many families who owe this woman a thank you and perhaps some will see my post and validate her importance to the history of our area. I would like to make sure she is not forgotten by including details of her career in the historical documents of the local archive.

Ollie Ozias died December 27, 1942 and is buried at Grandview Cemetery in Fort Collins. She was 81. God only knows how many babies first felt Ollie's sure hands on their little bodies.
                                                                                                                

♫ Diggin' Up Bones ♪

On October 31, 1972, Halloween, we moved out here in the country to our little piece of heaven on earth, a small acreage with an old farm house that had most recently been a migrant workers' shack, a barn, silo, granary, and chicken house. My in-laws helped us buy the place from the nearby landowner, F. G. Martinez and his wife, Gertrude, who lived east of us at the Martinez Corner, a ninety-degree-turn on the highway that has been the site of many car accidents over the years. Bob and I were both working full time so we built on our house evenings and weekends. With limited time, energy, and money the construction of our home became a lifestyle, a long, drawn out affair that allowed us to keep the costs down but sometimes drove us a bit crazy.


We've long been interested in the history of our place and thanks to the land abstract we received from Mr. Martinez we can track the change of ownership over the years but have yet to identify the builder of the house and barn or the year they went up. We were fortunate to hear from a couple of people who lived here around 1918-1925, renters who farmed the land for awhile and moved on. The house itself revealed a few of its secrets including an old photograph that Bob found inside a bedroom wall when he was tearing out the plaster and laths upstairs. On the back of the photo someone wrote "Billy and Jack Schwartz". I've included the photo here.

I've been keeping notes about the place since 1973 but made little progress in reconstructing the history of our place until recently with the advent of the internet and the use of ancestry.com. Now I know who Billy and Jack Schwartz were and have learned much more about the August Gross family who lived here in 1920. My hope is to gather enough information to write a history of our place and flesh it out with the names of the various owners and renters. I'd like to know who planted the old apple trees and the seckel pear tree that is about 100 years old now and barely hanging on.


In about 1974 we disassembled and discarded the chicken house whose construction was much inferior to the other buildings here. We had the silo torn down for it was crumbling at its base and presented a hazard to our horses. The old barn is on its last legs too, temporarily propped up by wood poles wedged in place along the east side. The combination of strong west winds and cribbing horses took it's toll.  In 2011 we had a new roof put on the granary and braced the building on the east as it was starting to lean that way, just like the barn.

In addition to the dome we built a new pole barn on the place and an enclosed garden surrounded by cedar fencing. Aside from that the most obvious improvement to the place is the addition of trees, lots of trees. It's been almost 100 years since Billy and Jack Schwartz lived here and we've been here for forty-three. We love our home and would like to think we gave new life to this hard luck farm and made it a place of good memories for many, the Russell Place.

I'm a Ham!

With the encouragement and support of my husband whose amateur radio call sign is W0UDT, I passed my tests for the Technician and General licenses on January 17, 2015, and on the 22nd of that month my name and call sign appeared in the FCC database giving me the right to talk on the radio! I studied for about six weeks using the booklets published by the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) and took the test at the hamfest held at The Ranch near Loveland, Colorado. The hamfest is similar to a gunshow or flea market in that vendors set up tables to display their wares and interested buyers and  lookee loos walk along the rows of radios, antennas, and various related items shopping for bargains. I bought a small quilt from a woman who sat on a folding chair knitting and scowling. Traditionally, the hamfest offers the opportunity for non-hams to take the FCC tests in a room set aside for that purpose and on January 17 there was a good turnout of 27 test takers.


With the onset of the internet and cell phone ham radio operators were dying out until the FCC relaxed the rules in 2003 and declared it no longer necessary to pass a five-word-per-minute Morse Code (continuous wave or CW to hams) examination to get an amateur radio license. That part of the test was difficult for many and after the rule change the numbers of hams increased. Now the popularity of the "prepper movement" has increased the interest in ham radio even more. I decided to become a ham after a conversation with my husband, one of those conversations that couples who've been married almost fifty years sometimes have..."What will I do if I outlive you?" conversations. I told him that if I outlive him I'll want to stay right here and live alone but I might be scared and have to get a dog or a gun. He stared a me a long minute, then nodded, but didn't say a word. The next day he asked, "How about ham radio?" That sounded practical to me since he has erected several large antennas in the yard and has a hamshack with multiple radios, and I'm not good with dogs or guns.

My first call sign was given to me by the FCC...they assign them in alphabetical order with a number in the middle that denotes the calling area in which the new ham lives. I got KE0CSY, or Kilo Echo Zero Charlie Sierra Yankee, in phonetic alphabet lingo. I decided right away that I would apply for a vanity license and chose W0UKE, partly because of its similarity to Bob's W0UDT and our friend Bill's W0WST, and partly because the UKE was my dad's nickname, and that of his brother too, as in Joe Uke and Bill Uke. I know they would be proud of me being a ham and I shared their difficult Lithuanian last name that was shortened to Uke.


So here I am, almost a month since I got my license, and I've only talked on the handheld Baofeng radio, on the 70 cm band, to my husband and to a fellow who is a regular on that band here locally. His call is KF0CB, nicknamed Charlie Brown. He is a WWII veteran who encourages us all, is always willing to talk, and serves as our base station of sorts.


There are many ways to enjoy ham radio and I'm just getting started. The basic use for amateur radio is emergency communication during times of disaster. It is also used for communication at events like bicycle races in the mountains. Some people are into contesting, such as contacting another ham in every state (WAS for Worked All States), or the highly competitive contacting as many radio stations as possible in a given time period. Others like to communicate with the Space Station and use satellites to get their signals around the world. I hope to learn Morse Code and use that format to communicate other CW users in foreign countries. That will take some study and practice. The thing I like the most about being a ham is sharing a hobby with my husband, a semi-technical hobby that allows each of us some individuality in our hobby.

American Gothic Ad Nauseum

About thirty years ago I noticed that parodies of Grant Wood's 1930 painting American Gothic are everywhere! I started to collect newspaper clippings and magazine photos mostly but with the dawn of the internet more and more spoofs appeared. Most people in this country recognize Wood's painting and that must be the reason it is used so often to make a point about today's society.

I must have fifty or sixty different takeoffs of this painting and they are delightful. I even had a potholder with an American Gothic image. I chose a few of my favorites to include in this blog.





This Spuds MacKenzie picture was printed with Spuds was in his heydey as an Anheuser Busch mascot, before he was banished for influencing children to like beer.

Time Magazine has featured this parody at least once...this issue came out in August of 1994.

In December of 2008 a 25 foot tall sculpture of Wood's American Gothic was displayed in Chicago's Pioneer Court on Michigan Avenue and was very popular with camera-wielding tourists but by 2010 was dismantled and sent packing.

 Oh, there are plenty of political uses for this image. In my collection I have Jimmy and Rosalie Carter from the cover of a Punch magazine, and the entire line up of candidates from the 1988 election. I chose this one of Bill and Hillary Clinton clipped from a Colorado newspaper "back when."

I love this one of the 80's couple.

And since it is Thanksgiving I will post one of many images I've found where Thanksgiving is featured in an American Gothic parody.

I even have a photograph of my dear brother-in-law, Ken Russell, and his wife, Charlotte, wearing coveralls and posing in front of one of his dad's farm buildings with the necessary pitchfork in his hand. But my favorite of all is this little drawing by a local first grade school boy..just love it.

Next time you see one of these drawings or photographs you'll realize just how common they are.

Harbingers of Fall

On the far southeast corner of our property are two old Cottonwood trees that are the first to show fall colors each year. As I return home from shopping in Wellington on Colorado State Highway 1, I see these trees from a long way off and sometimes as early as late August will notice a yellowing of the leaves, a sure sign that the season is morphing from summer to autumn. These two cottonwoods probably sprang up from the ground beside the irrigation ditch many years ago, much to the annoyance of the ditch riders and those water users downstream. When we bought our place back in 1972 the ditch was lined with stately cottonwoods all along its banks, continuing north as far as I could see, but our neighbor to the south, Dallas Horton, came by one day to tell me that he was going to have all but one of them removed as they impeded the operation of his walking sprinkler system. He apologized but said it was necessary. So these two old cottonwoods, and one north of our place, but not on our property, are the only survivors. I'm thankful for them for they provide refuge for crows, squirrels, and owls. I've never named these trees but think of them as the harbingers of fall.

Jack Pierson Tree

About forty years ago we bought several ponderosa pine seedlings from a local Boy Scout troop, specifically from our friend Jack Pierson who was a Boy Scout leader at that time. We planted them along our south property line and then ignored them for years. You see, planting and caring for trees was way down on our list of priorities for we had a house to build, a huge project that occupied our every moment when we weren't working for Union Manufacturing. To be honest, building our house occupied more than a few moments while we were working for Union Manufacturing! But we bought and planted the trees to support the Scouts and because we had just purchased three acres of land that cried out for trees.

Over the years we planted more trees and even remembered to water them from time to time for you can't depend on our piddly 12 inches of annual rainfall to keep trees alive. Of those pine seedlings only one survived; it not only survived but grew to be the tallest tree on our place. The roots must have tapped into the irrigation ditch a few feet from the fence even though the ditch is lined with concrete near the tree. A few years ago our electric utility company pointed out that branches of the tree were scraping against the power line and needed trimming so we watched as the men in the bucket cut the offending branches. They didn't cut the top out of the tree, thank goodness, and it has continued to grow. I call it our Jack Pierson Tree not only because we bought it from Jack but because it's tall and stately, just like Jack. We water it regularly now, finally recognizing the treasure that it is. This fall many of the needles turned brown and gave us a scare as to its health for we've read about the pine bark beetle and the destruction it is causing to the pines in the mountains to the west of us and to many of the trees in our immediate area. I photographed the Jack Pierson Tree today knowing that those brown needles are an indication it is struggling but hoping the tree is strong enough to shrug off the threat and continue to thrive for decades to come.

Childhood Revisited

The summer I was eight years old Dad moved us way out west from Tuscola, Illinois, to the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington, where he had a job mining uranium at the now infamous Midnite Mine, today the site of a Superfund ecological cleanup. We were a family of six, mom and dad, me at eight, my brother six, a sister four, and a baby sister six months old. About eight miles from the little village of Wellpinit was an old Civilian Conservation Corp campground beside the pristine waters of Blue Creek and very close to the mine site. That is where Dad parked the little eight foot trailer house that would be our home for the next six months. There were three or four other families camped at that site, with seven kids our ages, and a couple of bachelor geologists too. At first we had no electricity or running water but soon a makeshift generator supplied enough power to run lights to the trailers. We never did have indoor water. Mom carried water from the creek for drinking and to wash our clothes in a kettle over a campfire. With only a dozen cloth diapers this was a daily ritual. An outhouse down by the creek served the needs of all those in our camp.

Looking back to those years I try to see them through the eyes of my parents and believe it was a time of high adventure for my father. He came from a coal mining background in central Illinois, joined the CCC when he was fourteen or fifteen and travelled out west building roads and planting trees. In 1941 he enlisted in the Navy, was a Boatswain's Mate on The USS Saratoga in the Pacific during WWII, spent shore time in Seattle, Washington, and came to love the West. In 1954 he ventured out to Colorado to do some uranium exploration, leaving his much-pregnant wife and three young children in Tuscola for the winter. His mine boss, Pete Loncar, beckoned him to Wellpinit the following spring and that's how we found ourselves in this primitive little camp of miners in the summer of '55.

For my mother these months were probably not so romantic. Our cramped quarters, lack of amenities, limited social life, no relatives within 2,000 miles (Mom missed her Smith family so much), and young baby kept her from finding much to like about life on the reservation. Not far from our camp were some lakes with recreational areas and at least once we went swimming at Deer Lake or Jump Off Joe's Lake, maybe both (my memory and my brother's differ on this subject). We also made a trip to Seattle and Bremerton in our '53 Kaiser, rode the ferry, ate restaurant food and fresh fruit along the way. Those outings provided a much needed respite from life in Wellpinit for all of us, especially Mom.

From my point of view, an eight year old girl with a good imagination, life on an Indian Reservation surrounded by pine-covered mountains and a nearby creek to play in was heaven on earth. We were free to spend as much time outdoors as we wanted. In fact, we were strongly encouraged to get out of that little trailer early each morning so my mother had room to cook and care for the baby. We climbed the mountains and found wild strawberries beneath the pines, elderberries hanging low on bushes, and tasty trout at the nearby beaver dam. Wildlife surrounded us including a porcupine that swatted one of the dogs in camp, a bobcat that someone shot and brought down for us to see, and beavers in the dam. That summer provided me with a lifetime of idyllic childhood memories on which to draw as life became more complex and inhibited. As summer waned and the temperatures dropped my dad decided to move us out of central Washington and accepted a job as a cobalt miner in a little company town high up in the rugged mountains above Salmon, Idaho, appropriately named Cobalt. That move brought two and a half more years of adventure in the wild west to my life but closed the chapter on Wellpinit, Washington...at least I thought so.

Twenty-one years later my husband and I with our eight-year-old son travelled from our home in Colorado back to that camp on the Spokane Reservation in the hope of finding our old camp. From the time we left Cobalt, Idaho, in 1958 I lived in Illinois but the pull of the West was strong and Fort Collins, Colorado has been my home since 1970. The summer of 1976 we crossed the Little Falls bridge and pulled in to Wellpinit where we stopped at a grocery store, the same one where my parents shopped so many years ago. I told them of my quest and was directed to an older native woman stocking shelves. She gave us exact directions out of town, past Turtle Lake, into the old camp site which was now a picnic grounds. The three of us tromped around, took photographs, found the road that led to the now missing beaver dam, and checked out the creek. Little had changed in the area and I believe the Midnite Mine was still in operation in 1976 but we didn't try to find the mine. My memories didn't include the mine site.

Just last week, September of 2014, my sister made her first trip back to Wellpinit to rediscover the place her four-year-old self vaguely remembers, and she found it despite faulty instructions received from a Reservation cop. There was a fallen log blocking the narrow dirt road leading to the camp so she parked her car and walked down into the bowl-shaped camp ground, her dog at her side. Using her iPhone she photographed the creek, the open-sided picnic cover, and the warning signs at the mine entrance then sent them to me so I could share her excitement. After 49 years the place has changed very little aside from the big "elephant in the room", the contaminated Midnite Mine, which leaks uranium tailings and radioactive waste into the ground and creeks, including our beloved Blue Creek. I do believe our camp ground was above the mine so the flow of waste water into Blue Creek and then into Roosevelt Lake is away from the Blue Creek Camp. However, I wouldn't advise eating the berries, the fish, or even breathing the air for any length of time.

Maybe this will close the chapter on Wellpinit for us, my sister, brother, and I, and our memories will fade and be lost to history. But like so many of my aging friends I like to revisit in my mind those wonderful childhood memories when I was free to roam, pretend to be a "wild Indian", float notes in bottles down the creek, be an innocent, naive eight-year-old girl in the 1950s.