This is another article for the series "52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks", a challenge by Amy Johnson Crow on
No Story Too Small.
Please welcome Guest Blogger and my husband, Scott Richmond with a remembrance of his father.
Around noon on Sunday, February 16, 1913 in Orleans, Harlan County, Nebraska,
Joseph Otho Richmond, the sixth of nine children was born to John K. Richmond and Jane Irene Phelps Richmond.
He was “Joe” to most who knew him.
I called him “Dad".
 |
Joseph O. Richmond
Wedding Day 12 Jun 1937
From Author's Personal Collection |
By all accounts, he was a very pleasant child. My dad told me someone once said to his
mother, “You’ll never raise that one, he’s too good”.
Much of his boyhood was spent on the family farm, located just outside
of Alma, Harlan County, Nebraska
. There he performed a wide variety of farm
chores, went to school, and did the kinds of things that boys do in a rural
environment. In these years, he likely
developed his life-long passions for hunting, fishing and the great outdoors. Family conversations left me with the impression
that my dad was always quite close to his mother but not so much to his
father. Perhaps this was due to the fact
that his father was often engaged in local politics, having served two terms as
Clerk and two terms as Treasurer of Harlan County, Nebraska.
Little information is available regarding his school years except that
he left school in the middle of the 10th grade, most likely in late
1928 or early 1929, and just prior to the beginning of the great
depression. From that point my father began
a period of cross-country travel, primarily on freight trains that took him cross-country,
notably Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and eventually California.
My father lived in California when he received word of his father’s
unexpected death in 1932. He returned
home to the farm in Nebraska to help run it and then later, assisted his mother
in its sale. During this period, he had
to shoulder a good deal of responsibility since his two younger brothers were still
in high school and a younger sister only seven years old at the time. Upon the sale of the farm, the family moved
west to Oakland, Alameda County, California.
They joined a number of other Richmond family members, mostly his older
brothers and sisters who had already relocated to Oakland and the San Francisco
Bay area.
After moving to Oakland, he took up the watch-making and repair trade
and became a certified horologist
. For a time, he plied this trade while working
in a jewelry store owned by his brother-in-law Vern.
Marriage and Family
In May 1937 my dad met his future wife,
Cecilia Caballero. They met while in the company of his
brother-in-law, Floyd, whose brother, Paul, was married to Cecilia’s older
sister Connie. Just five weeks later,
they were married in a civil ceremony at City Hall in San Francisco, California. This marriage would last just three months
short of 40 years and produce three children: Donald, Ronald and me.
Early in their marriage, my dad studied refrigeration through correspondence
courses and was ultimately able to obtain his certification as a journeyman
refrigeration mechanic. Unfortunately,
WW II intervened. He attempted to enlist
in the Navy the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Since he had a wife and child, he was told
that his service could wait until additional manpower was absolutely
required. As a result, his war-time
service was limited to acting as an air raid warden in San Francisco during the
early years of the war.
After moving back and forth across San Francisco Bay several times, the
family moved to Alameda in 1943. They lived there comfortably, renting an
upstairs flat on Alameda Avenue for over ten years. During this period, both their second and
third sons were born and an effort to establish and operate a refrigeration
sales and service business was unsuccessful.
The business lasted less than a year, and probably failed, in part, due
to the instability of the immediate post-war economy.
My dad’s mother died of heart disease in 1946. Prior to her death, she had lived and worked as
a seamstress in the flat just below my parents.
The flat had been configured to serve as a shop in the front, with
living quarters in the rear. Following
her death, my father and several of his brothers took her back to Nebraska and
buried her next to her husband.
In 1953, the family moved again, this time to an apartment building on
Central Avenue in Alameda. Joe and
Cecilia had agreed to manage the apartment house for Joe’s brother Don. This proved to be a difficult time for a couple
of reasons. My dad was on the road in
the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys as a traveling salesman for the Hinshaw
Supply Company. He had also badly broken
his leg after being thrown from a horse while deer hunting in the autumn of
1953. As a result, the apartment
management experiment lasted all of about six months.
More Moves
This time - to Modesto in Stanislaus County, California, then a small
town in California’s Central Valley. The
move occurred in May 1954 and was intended to put the family in the middle of Joe’s
sales territory. It was during this
period that their oldest son, Donald, graduated high school and joined the
Marine Corps. Eighteen months later, the
family of four now moved again, this time to Sacramento in Sacramento County,
California, approximately 80 miles to the north.
It was November of 1955 and Joe had accepted a promotion to manage the
Hinshaw Supply Company store in Sacramento.
Another upstairs flat at 30th and C Streets became the family
residence but was rented for only a little over four months because a
significant milestone had been reached. Joe and Cecilia purchased their one and only
home located in the Tahoe Park neighborhood in what was then the east end of
the city. Both would reside there until
their deaths in 1977 and 2012 respectively.
Joe’s time as a store manager lasted only about a year and a half. He did not enjoy either office politics or
inside work. He returned to “working
with the tools” as he said in the summer of 1957. He would continue working as either a
refrigeration mechanic or industrial pipe fitter until his retirement in 1973.
Joe’s life was defined in some respects by three health episodes. He suffered heart attacks in both 1953 and
1962. The second of these forced him to
give up refrigeration work but he was able to continue working at the pipe
fitting trade. As a result, he was
involved in the construction of two major oil refineries, a nuclear power
plant, at least one nuclear missile site, and several test stands for the
testing of rocket engines for the American space program. Perhaps one of his less notable projects was
the building of the Gemco store (now a Target) at Riverside and Broadway in
Sacramento which happened to be constructed on the former site of Edmund’s
Field, the home of the city’s first of three minor league, professional
baseball teams.
 |
Christmas 1963, Scott, Joe and Cecilia
From Author's Personal Collection |
Joe’s other major health issue revolved around stomach ulcers that he
developed while organizing a union of General Electric employees in San
Francisco in the 1930s. While living in
Modesto, he began experiencing internal bleeding and it looked like surgery was
his only option. As a last resort, he
consulted a Chinese herb specialist.
Miraculously, the ulcers were healed in approximately six weeks, and he
never experienced any further difficulty with them for the remainder of his
life.
Joe was virtually a life-long union member and believer in the labor
movement. He belonged to the Plumbers
and Pipe Fitters Union and served for many years as a classroom instructor in
the union’s apprenticeship program.
His experiences with the medical community also left him with certain skepticism
of conventional medicine and some physicians.
Although respectful of medicine in general and certain physicians in
particular, he was never willing to give doctors the god-like status that many
in his generation gave to them, often without question. This attitude probably both helped and hurt him
in the later years of his life but it was based on real life experiences
leading up to these final years.
A Fine Man
Those who knew him appreciated his many fine qualities. He was a mechanic’s mechanic. He could find a way to build or fix most
anything. He freely offered his
mechanical skills to friends and neighbors, always without charge. He loved helping people and always seemed to
find time or ways to do so.
He made friends easily and these relationships seemed to last. He was quietly proud of his kids and their
accomplishments and equally reserved in his disappointment over their
failures. He was an extremely
responsible husband and family man and although never aspiring to wealth or
material possessions, always provided more than an adequate living for his wife
and children. He obeyed the laws, at
least for the most part, willingly paid his taxes, treated others the way he
wanted to be treated, and displayed a generous spirit often to strangers or
people he barely knew.
Like so many in his generation, my father preferred to build things
that were solid and lasting and of benefit to everyone. Even though he never achieved fame or fortune
in the broader sense, he definitely made significant contributions to the world
in which he lived and more importantly, to those who had the good fortune to
know him as a neighbor, friend or relative.
My dad passed from the earth on Sunday, March 6, 1977. As he wished, his ashes were scattered a few
days later on land where he loved to go deer hunting - a friend’s ranch located
near Coloma in the California Gold Country of El Dorado County.
