The Olive Project

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Olive feeding baby in highchair
Portrait of Olive

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"I and a girlfriend roomed together. Above the restaurant. There was an apartment-like. Actually, nothing where you could cook or something because you'd get your meals down in the, in the restaurant. But I remember one time..."

standing in front of a car
woman and children in clown costumes

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I've done quite a lot of sewing. My mother sewed, of course, so we had an old treadle sewing machine. And I think the first thing, maybe, I sewed was taking apart some of my dad's old shirts and making shirts for my brother.

Debbie and Jodie on tricycles
Family in 1961 Oldsmobile

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"But I never really drove much because I, I babysat a couple of children that also worked for the Carnation Milk Company. And I didn't like to take kids in the car when I hadn't been driving very much."

Jay and Olive Patton at Snoqualmie Falls
Family portrait of Grandparents

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"My grandfather must have been quite sick with the tuberculosis because he, in the hospital, he didn't come home again. And we couldn't go in the room where he was. We could go to the door."

baby walking in boots
Olive with three of her children

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"Trudy come up with a bear cub foot, plus a leg off, off of the bear. It was good meat. But, oh the bear cub, Doug took it to school for show and tell. The bear paw."

Olive with Curt
Two babies

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"There was another lady in the room with me. Another expectant mother… We saw them making people walk to the delivery room, and I can remember making the remark ...'I'm not walking in there! They're gonna wheel me in.'"

Olive as a bridesmaid
Olive with her father and baby

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"You should have seen my dad driving by the house with the tractor! He was just smiling from one ear to the other. It was a really good turnabout for him."

Olive with brothers at a table
Olive with her mother, grandmother and baby

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"Of course my mom was, well, she didn't have transportation, but she got some of the neighbors to drive her down there. And then he told her. He told her. So I didn't get a chance to do that."

kids in a kiddie pool
Obituary

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"And there was a copper boiler full of rinse water from washing clothes. Because my mother always saved the rinse water to wash the floors with before she—but there's supposed to be a cover on it..."

Olive holding baby
Jay and Olive relaxing on the sofa

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"Jay would come up and we'd sit and do crossword puzzles and stuff like that. Nothing, nothing out of line. But he got wind of that, you know, he didn't like that... But he wasn't there to keep me company or anything."

Jay in a costume dancing
Olive touching up her makeup in a car mirror

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"So my neighbor, actually, actually at the time, she was my friend, as well, and that was Grandpa's former wife… she volunteered—this was before she was real ill—she volunteered to drive, to teach me how to drive."

Olive dressed as catwoman
Cousin Tilden Tivito in a carriage

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"We had cows and pigs and turkeys and chickens… and a weasel that used to come try and get the chickens! Did I say we had horses? And we had cows, yeah. I can remember my dad milking the cows…"

Olive and daughter, Jodie
Olive with Barb and group

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"Dorothy and I… When I'd go stay with her at the farm, maybe for about a week or so—they had a big dog. And we were playing in and out of the granary that was, didn't have the grain in it yet…"

Olive in a wedding dress
Olive with her mother

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"I never felt badly to my mother for that because even then I could kind of realize that she would be blamed—of course she was blamed, but they didn't, they wouldn't… I don't know. I didn't try to understand it."

Olive and her mother at the lake with kids
Olive

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"I remember a time we were supposed to recite a nursery rhyme. This was to the whole group. And my cousins in front of me turned around and whispered to me, "Say the one about the barber, barber, shave the pig..."

Jay and Olive
twins

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"It was at the end of the day, and there was nobody left in the waiting room, except Grandpa. And he took the x-rays, and sure enough, there were two. And, and so I said, 'Well, can my husband come in and look at this?'"

Olive with her back turned at picnic
family at dinner table

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"Every now and then a chicken got to the dinner table. I remember that. That was quite a—kind of an inhumane way of killing a chicken, I think. I know they used to catch 'em, grab 'em by the neck and swing 'em around."

Olive smiling with a thermos
Olive petting a bear

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"We saw this bear on the side of the road, and I thought—probably told you that—I thought it was tame. I was feeding it cake! Eek! Curt was in the backseat just screaming. Barb too."

Jay and Olive
Grandma Longerbone with grandchildren

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"Like I say, it varied from time to time, but the regulars was one, two, three, four. And when my cousins lived in the area, it was five, six or seven of us. Otherwise, there weren't many people, many kids in the school."

Olives with her brothers and parents
Olive with hands in pockets

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"I told you about my dresses being so long, and the bloomers underneath, and my mom, she changed that. She shortened my dress and...the length of the bloomer, so I could probably bend over without showing them."

olive and son, Clint, holding up fish
Elsie Anderson

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"I remember Chuck saying when he got there, he looked at what they said that his mom was. And he said, "That's not my mother." He thought, he thought it didn't even look like her anymore from, evidently, the heart attack."

Eileen and Wilmer
Obituary

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"...it weighed heavy on her all this time and that's why she finally—when she was in the TB sanatorium, she'd become a Christian, and she just felt this was something she had to tell. Just to clear her own life, I guess."

Olive cutting Barb's hair
Olive with daughter, Barb

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"I worked part of the time when Barb was little… Oh! I could catch a, a bus if I got out there in time, but I didn't always. So I would walk, and carry her a lot of the time because, because she couldn't walk fast enough!"

Olive dressed as cat woman
Olive with her mother, grandmother, and child

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"You could turn a car around between the houses, I think. But, it was better, actually. They each had their own house, Mom and Grandma. And—but you had to be careful because Grandma had nothing to do in her little house…"

Olive smiling
Olive standing on sidewalk

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"I wasn't always comfortable driving at first because I wasn't used to it, and I hadn't really been allowed to. So, but I felt more—not so trapped, you know, when I could. Because I used to have to walk to the store."

Olive in a swimming pool with children
Grandpa Harris

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"I didn't want to bother the neighbors, so I took a bus downtown to where I worked, and it was in a hotel. So I was in the lobby and I called her from there. That's when she told me that Dad had had the accident."

Olive and Jay with kids sitting on a log
child in snowsuit

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"Oh, we used to go ice-skating in the winter time because the river would freeze over good. In fact, my dad—my dad was a pretty good skater, as a matter of fact… He had skates with the shoes on them."

Barb holding Curt by his crib
Grandma Harris in wheelchair

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"But we weren't allowed to go in with her. She wasn't able to come down and visit in the visiting room. For quite a while. We'd have to go stand out in the middle of the yard and look up to her window, to talk to her."

Olive with children in the grass
Helen Patton

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"Helen used to tell me how Grandpa would, she would, he would sleep on the couch in the same room where her bed was. But, a lot of times she woke up and she could hear him crying. So it was hard for him when she passed away."

Jay embracing Olive
Olive as a teenager

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"One time, coming home from school, she decided she was going to be my, to act like she was my friend. She grabbed me by the arm and wouldn't let me go. Walked me across the street, and across the street was the dentist's office..."

Olive with two boys and a dog
Olive Harris in front of diner in Fargo, ND

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"I was working in Fargo, North Dakota as a waitress... It wasn't a real high class restaurant. It was more like a cafe... Some of the clientele were—especially the younger boys—they'd just do things to irritate you."

Jay and Olive
Jay sleeping in chair with Fritz the dog

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"The dog used to, just to love to come in the house and get behind the door right by the furnace, and my sister—the dog was sleeping and she was crawling and she crawled and happened to grab a hold of his tail..."

Olive fishing with daughter
Olive holding fish

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"The vacation we took most of the time, practically all the time, was to the State Park at Curlew. Tent Camping—I loved tent camping. And fish, of course. That was the main thing there, was the fishing."

Jay and Olive at the beach
Family portrait of Grandma and Grandpa Harris

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"You know, they didn't wear panties; they wore bloomers. And dresses long. And she had this pair that were getting all faded, so she decided she would, you know, dye them a darker pink. Well, they turned out kind of red."

children with their grandparents
family portrait

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"His mom and dad came down to, Grandma and Grandpa Anderson came down to, to Fargo and we met them at a park. And… But he didn't, they didn't know about Barb then..."

Barb standing in a boat fishing
Thanksgiving dinner

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"This sounds horrible, but it isn't really. They would put the pig's head in—after they had taken all the hair and scraped the skin and everything—put it in the copper boiler on the coal and wood stove. Let it boil for an hour."

Curt in a high chair
Jay and son, Mike

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"She came running up to me, and she said, "Come on down!..." So I went down, and, and she had a mirror and she was putting it up in front of—Helen was his first wife's name—her face, and there was nothing, nothing."

Jay at table with children
Olive with three youngest children

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"She was 11 months old when the twins were born. Yeah… they were each given a chore in the morning. One would warm the bottle. Barb would start breakfast. And Clint—he hated this—used to get to change the diaper..."

Thanksgiving dinner
Adelia and Una Longerbone

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"They lived there all the time, at Grandma and Grandpa's …which probably wasn't the best thing. Especially since they weren't all that fond of my mom to begin with. And so she, she was more like a hired person there, I guess."

Olive on the beach
child and dog

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"Anyhow, this one side of the road, one side of Aurora Avenue that we lived on. It was a pretty busy street, this one street that ran down. And I didn't have, I didn't have any fenced in yard or anything like that..."

Olive at son's wedding
Mike and Olive

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"He, he and a friend would go down by Tub Lake. And they were walking around and one time Mike, Mike said—it was kind of marshy in there. But Mike started just running, just away, and yelling, 'Bees! Bees!'"

children celebrating birthday in kitchen
newspaper article with children eating ice cream

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"I think Ray for, at first was working as kind of like a traveling salesman? I know he worked in Jamestown and Bismarck... And I remember him driving a—oh! I know. He worked for a milk company. Carnation Milk Company."

Jay and Barb
child in wagon

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"Of course, I was embarrassed. But she, I, I just—when Barb got home, I put her in the little red wagon and we'd go downtown and I'd do what I had to do. And, of course, all the girls my age were always curious…"

Olive with children at Christmas
Jay holding fish

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"We met Dave the pastor when he stopped to see Grandpa when he had heart surgery… So he stopped by and Dad was, Grandpa was talking to him and he asked him, 'Well, Dave, how do you handle opening day of fishing?'"

Olive holding up a fish
twins climbing a ladder

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"I called my mom. My mom is a twin, and my grandmother hand several—well, several? I don't know… Three? I'm not sure how—three or four. Maybe three sets of twins? Maybe more. I don't remember. But anyway, I called my mom..."

Curt as a baby on the toilet
Curt going to prom

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"And then another—they were pickin' on him, it seems like! There was an empty lot across the street, and they came, a couple of boys came across a beehive or something. Bees on the ground, a bees' nest…"

Olive sunbathing
Barb in Stephen, MN

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"Our house used to be part of an old hotel. In fact, when we moved in there, yeah, there was a couple, a mother and her little girl and husband, occasionally, living in the apartment upstairs. Well, my dad put them out…"

Patton family portrait, 1969
Olive as a teenager

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"We'd maybe run up, run up one side of the bank and slide down the other, and we got to school. Finally—I think when I finally decided I was not gonna wear those long underwear anymore, I froze my knees a few times."

Patton family portrait, 1990's
Olive with baby Barbara

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"I can remember when Barb was born. There was one gal from my hometown, she was a nurse there. And, ooh, I was really in a lot of pain with the delivery, and I can remember her saying, 'Oh, it can't be as bad as that!'"

Olive wiping the counter in a restaurant
Olive serving food

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"I know when I, whenever I've missed church, I've always had everybody come up afterwards, especially after I missed two Sundays in a row, and they all know that I have cancer, so..."

Olive walking in the road
children sitting on a dock

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"Her name was Dorothy. Eckman. And I used to go stay at her, with her parents. Just for visiting, you know, in the summertime… She had epilepsy. It seems to me that they called it Saint Vitus' Dance or something. I'm not sure..."

family portrait
wedding portrait

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"We, we rented a house down on Maplewood Drive in Burien, and we were married there, at home. And my—I had a friend that lived in Mountlake Terrace, and she was our bridesmaid."

Jay and Olive cutting cake
cousin Delia

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"I think she was probably seven… No, eight or nine, maybe. Anyway, she came home from school and she was so sick that she just laid down on the bed, and, and she died! Just like that. And it was tuberculosis."

children in a tv station
Olive with drying laundry

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"They came back—they were living in Hawaii and they came back here because he had contracted tuberculosis. So... And they come to our house. Yeah. In Burien. And I was very uncomfortable with that…"

house at Mountlake Terrace
Olive with her mother, daughter, and grandson

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"My Dad, he would—this fellow at the restaurant that worked for the owner, he had told my mom of a place you could go down in Minneapolis and go and have an abortion. Yeah. And my dad thought that would have been ok…"

Barb riding a tricycle