Memorials › Sybil Inez Myers Mills Klomhaus
Sybil Inez Myers Mills Klomhaus
17 Oct 1899 – 14 Jan 1994
| Birth | 17 Oct 1899 |
| Death | 14 Jan 1994 |
| Cemetery | Ajo Cemetery Ajo , Pima County , Arizona , USA |
| Added by | Ruth Jenkins-McIntire on 08 Apr 2007 |
| FaG | https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/18819371 |
Gravesite details
buried next to her first husband, Ed Mills
Bio
ORAL HISTORY - (SYBIL) INEZ MYERS MILLS KLOMHAUS Born - October 17, 1899 in Clarks, Nebraska Tape Recorded July 22, 1979, Sun City, California (transcribed from the audio tape and her notes) I do not intend to give my life's history, but to relate events to let you know how different things were when I was growing up, especially in transportation and communication and regular living. Will tell of the house six miles from Clarks, Nebraska where I was born and where I lived until I was nine years of age. It was a two-story house with four bedrooms. There was no indoor plumbing, no running water, nor electricity, nor gas, not even a telephone. A windmill was near the house with a small water tank (enclosed in a building) where the water ran through to the horse tank and beyond, The water was very cold and Mother kept milk, butter, and so forth in buckets suspended by wires in the small tank. We used coal or wood for cooking and heating and had kerosene lamps. Some of my chores were to fill the lamps, clean the wicks and the chimneys, also to empty ashes and bring in fuel. I'll tell a little about washing and ironing. We had to heat the water. That was about the worst part. When I was big enough, my mother would have me put the wash boiler on the stove as soon as she got through cooking breakfast. She'd take off lids and the boiler would fit right over the hot coals. Then I would slice up a bar of laundry soap and put it in the boiler, and we would use that to wash the first batch of clothes. Then we would put in some more water and soap, and we would always boil the white clothes. We always put all of the clothes through two washes and then rinsed them. The first electric machine I had didn't wrinkle the clothes, the wringer did. Of course, all wearing apparel had to be ironed. The irons were heated on the stove. There was a gadget with a handle that fit over the sad irons, and the irons would be very hot at first. You would probably rub over a sheet or something to get started. When they cooled, you would have to go back and get another iron. Mother planned on baking bread, maybe baked beans or make rice pudding on ironing day. While the stove was heated, Ida liked to iron, and usually she and Mother would both iron all morning. We lived on a farm. Of course this was 80 acres or more. Some was in corn, some in hay, and quite a large pasture for the milk cows and several horses. A creek went through the meadow, which afforded us much pleasure, wading and swimming in the summer, and skating in the winter. We attended a Friends or Quaker church one and one half miles from us, and our Uncle Jeff and Aunt Myra lived about that far on the other side of the church. So often on Sundays, we all went to their place for dinner which would usually be about two o'clock, or they came to our place. Their family was even larger than ours, and each one had at least one cousin near his or her age. When I was 5 years old, my parents and I went with this Uncle Jeff and Aunt Myra and their two youngest girls, Fay and Myrtle, who were near my age. We went to visit an aunt and uncle in South Dakota. Uncle Jeff drove his iron grey team named Daisy and Trim to a two seated carriage. We stopped in Northern Nebraska and visited another uncle and aunt, my mother's brother, Turner Able. He was a minister and they lived in a four room house. It was a Parsonage by the church. They had not been notified of our visit, so the seven of us gave them quite a surprise. Then we went on to Uncle Dock's, Father's brother, and Aunt Edna's on a farm in South Dakota, also giving them a surprise. When I was 9 years old, we moved to Central City near the college so we children could attend without living away from home. The folks had the house built and my father and mother lived in a tent in the neighbors yard (Mrs. Gagle's). They lived there much of the time, my father helping with the building. I was the only one of the family who hadn't been up there before we moved and Nellie Gagle, who became my bosom pal, couldn't see why they treated me so badly. That house had no modern conveniences either, but we thought it quite wonderful, all new, plenty of cupboards, closets, and windows with weights so they would stay up without putting a stick under them. And I'll tell you about the closets. They were quite large; and they had hooks all the way around. We didn't have a coat hanger or dress hanger in those days, just a normal amount of hooks, so I don't know how we kept them decent. There were five bedrooms, one downstairs and four upstairs. We often had a schoolteacher boarding with us sometimes other boarders attending college. This was a small farm, just 17 acres. There was a grove of trees always on the North to protect from winter winds, quite an orchard, also a large garden and a pasture for milk cows. We children always had to help with the milking, hot or cold, rain or shine, twice a day. I'll tell you one incident when I was twelve years old. My sister, Esther, was teaching on an island on the Platt River, I suppose 8 or 10 miles from home. One time the wagon bridge went out with the spring breakup of the ice, and she walked the railroad bridge. We would take her to the one end and the other people who she boarded with met her at the other. Oh yes, she got $35 per month the first half and twas increased to $40 the second half. Back to the incident. Well, she was having a Christmas Program and box social. In case you don't know what a box social is, the girls and women would decorate a shoebox or similar one and make a lunch for two people. Then it would be auctioned off to the highest bidder, and the bidder would get to eat with the girl whoever belonged to the basket. Esther had a friend make her box. It was like a small car with wheels, ising glass for windows, and it was quite beautiful. Well, she was quite popular with the young blades and two of them started bidding against each other knowing it was the teacher's box. They ran it up to around $25. Harold, Esther, Ida, my friend Nellie, and I went in our carriage. Another group of young people went in a sleigh. On the way home the fellows started racing. The ground was covered with snow. Our rig went too close to the ditch and landed bottom side up in the ditch, we all hitting our heads. Nellie got a nose bleed, the nearest to a casualty. Of course the team got loose and Harold went to catch them. He and one of the fellows rode the horses home, and the rest of us piled into the sleigh. When Father came in the next day after doing chores, he asked, "Where is the carriage?" Well, they got it home without too much damage. We never did tell the folks we were racing. Don't any of you get any ideas. Well, that summer Mother, Leona, and I went up to Mabel's in South Dakota. Father and Esther had gone on a trip East especially to attend a political convention in Atlantic City so Harold stayed at Everetts, and we just closed up the house. First we took a train to Omaha, waited a few hours, then on to Sioux City, Iowa, spent the night there. Mother said she didn't sleep. Our hotel room was very hot and she said she heard some shooting so all and all she just couldn't sleep. Then we got a train to Yankton and had a few hours wait there and finally on to Geddes, and Mabel and Franks' place. They had Wilma who was about a year old, so we had an enjoyable month with them. Frank was working cultivating corn or some such thing and some days I would take a fresh team to him and bring back the other one. I really didn't care for horses so was actually scared of them but tried to help out. A few years later we made that trip to Mabels in a short day by car. When I was nearly eighteen, I went with four others from Central City to a Young Friends' Conference at Cedar Lake, Indiana, going by train, not too bad connections. Of course had meetings every day, but had quite a lot of time for recreation. I bought a bathing suit at a little store there, twas two pieces. One was like a suit of underwear a little above the knees. The other piece like a sailor dress, the same length, and it seemed we had to wear long stockings, twas real cute! Then I started teaching about eight miles from home, had some arrangements to board with the McDermitt family. This was during the first World War and a big celebration for some of the boys leaving from Central City was held on Labor Day. That night I went with the McDermitt family to their house as school was starting the following day. A young man was with them whom they introduced as Ed Mills. He was living with them, having left home at 13 years and lived around with grandparents or uncle until Leo McDermitt took pity on him and had him stay with them and drive to high school with him and his sister. My class had a Round Robin letter that made the rounds from one to the next, so when I wrote mine I told of the family I was boarding with and said last but not least, Ed Mills. Well he was very attentive to me, but we didn't start dating until that summer. About the school - it was just one room with eight grades, but seemed like more, as the beginners were awfully different. Some knew their numbers and letters, others knew none of them, so twas difficult. Oh yes! I made $60 per month that first year, then $70 the second at the same school. I taught the same school the next year and Leo, Irene, and Ed boarded in town and came home over the weekends. Well I didn't see much of them, as I went home for weekends. Anyhow we sometimes had dates and finally were married that summer. I will tell you something I don't have down on here, We left from Central City and went to Omaha on the train. Then we didn't want to get married in Omaha, because his folks lived there. He wasn't so very old, just almost nineteen; and we didn't want the folks to know about it. We thought we'ld go over to Council Bluffs, Iowa; and they wouldn't find out about it. So we went on the streetcar over there. We went to get the marriage license, and they said we had to have a witness. We looked around outside a little bit and found somebody that would be a witness. We called Reverend Mills (no relation) who had been a minister out at Central City. He lived in Council Bluffs. He came and got us and took us out to his house. His wife was canning and had quite a mess but cleared off a little bit of the living room, and he married us there. We had her for a witness and the three children. One of them was named John. He was three years old. He signed the book, John. Well then the next day we were at Ed's brothers. He lived in Omaha, too; and while we were there his father called and said the neighbor girl had seen the marriage license in the paper. She asked if that was the other Ed Mills. Well, they didn't have it annuled, otherwise none of you would be here now. Oh, this was during the depression. Work was scarce and we lived with Ed's sister Ada and Oscar Neilson on a farm. Later we moved on a ranch at $75 per month. We got the house and an old Tin Lizzie, Model T Ford, with no top, and some of the floorboards were gone. One cold night coming home from town I had an old coat around my legs and it caught on fire, not really blazing, but scortched good. We had all of the milk and eggs we could use. I also had a small churn and made butter. Once they butchered and I canned some beef. I'll tell you some of the perils of moving. It was said there was nothing worse to make a person cuss then putting up a stove. The stove pipe was hard to put together never quite fitting from one place to the next. We always had two stoves, one for cooking and one for heating. In cold weather, we needed to get the stove up as soon as possible. Of course we needed to clean the floor and get a rug or linoleum down first, just too many first things. When I was a child I thought it would be fun to move and my folks moved just once while I was home, but we moved so many times after I was married, I always said I never got to clean my own dirt. I would have to thoroughly clean when I moved in, then would move before house cleaning time. Finally, we bought a house in Omaha and stayed put for several years. My father couldn't stand to see us paying rent so looked around and found this four room one for sale. He loaned us money for the down payment. Then we paid the rest to the loan company at $20 per month. The total cost was $1600. Ed was always very mechanically inclined. As he had only gone to the eleventh grade in school, he took several correspondence courses, then started building radio sets. Neither of us had seen or heard a radio until he made one called the Crystal set. A certain amount of small wire was wound around an Oatmeal box. Then the fine wire touched a galina, sort of a crystal and of course was plugged in for electricity. We could hear the stockmarket every hour on WOW and after midnight when the Omaha station shut down, could get Kansas City. When he told some of the fellows that he worked with at the American Smelting and Refining Company, they wouldn't believe it. One said, "If you can get Kansas City, I'll eat the set." Well one night several of them came to the house and got ready for the Omaha station to sign off, but instead they announced there would be a special program. What a disappointment for Ed and the others. Later he built sets with five tubes and many other parts. Twas an ordeal to try ones patience to turn each knob a little til all were synchronized and you had a station. Our first means of transportation (of our own) was a motorcycle with a sidecar. I had planned to go out to my folks for Easter this one year, so Ed was to take 2 1/2 year old Christina, 8 month old Evelyn, and me on Saturday. Well it rained hard the night before, but we just went on anyway as we had planned. I had our clothing in a box that Christina sat on and of course I held Evelyn. The roads were not paved in those days so kept getting stuck in the mud. Finally had to take the guard off the sidecar wheel, then the mud was flying all over us. Twas hard on my new Easter outfit but after the mud was dry, it brushed off easily. That took us all day to go 120 miles. We returned in a few hours the following day. The sandy soil dried quickly. We had some wonderful neighbors, the Halls, next door. They loved children so much that we never had to hire a babysitter. They kept the girls whenever we wanted them to, and they had the girls some time every day regardless. In 1926, we moved to Copperhill, Tennessee, had a new Model T Ford Sedan, and thought we were really in style. Christina started in the first grade there and since there was no kindergarten, I conducted one in our home for Evelyn and some neighbor children. Natives of Tennessee talked with that southern drawl. When our girls first started picking it up, I criticized them, but on visiting the school and hearing the teachers use that drawl, I could not blame them. She would get up and say, "The dawg says Baw Waw Waw. The neighbor next door one day (he was a college graduate and the head chemist at the plant) hollered at one of the boys, "Go in the house and get the plars. I got to fix the tar." That's the way they talked. When that depression of 1929 and 30 came along, operations of that copper mine were curtailed; and we moved back to Nebraska. Work was scarce and Ed's brother, Lew, insisted on us going to Los Angeles where he was an electrical contractor and hired several men, so made that trip. But soon business was falling off, so that Lew didn't have enough work to keep Ed busy. Then in 1934 we heard through our friends, Pat and Bessie Carlson, that a mine (which had been shut down), was opening in Ajo, Arizona. By that time Larry was 6 months old; and Evelyn, he, and I went by train, following Ed who had gone a few weeks before and rented a house and had received a paycheck. Christina stayed with Lew and Irene to finish the school term. Then she came with the Carlsons later. As there wasn't a vacant house in town, the Carlsons lived with us for a couple of weeks. They had been neighbors of ours in Copperhill, in Los Angeles, and then in Ajo. This was the last of May and twas very hot. Had no refrigeration, not even an electric refrigerator. Ice was high and really didn't last long, couldn't keep it over the weekend. So those were tough times. Ed was always interested in flying so when there was a flying instructor in Ajo, he took it up. When he got his license, he purchased a small plane. As you all know he died in a plane crash during a storm at night. There were several reasons he shouldn't have been flying. That happened 25 years ago today. Well, that seemed to be the end of the world for me, but I found I had to keep going. There was a certain Paul Klomhaus who lost his wife in a car accident about that same time. So since we had been friends and he knew my children, we decided to get married, making two lonely people, one happy couple. At his vacation times, we took many trips by car, one long one to Chicago by way of Texas without air conditioning. Twas very hot most of the way, too! Will just mention a couple of incidents during trips after Paul retired. After we had spent six weeks in New Zealand and Australia, we boarded a plane at Sydney on Thursday afternoon and arrived in Honolulu Thursday morning, had picked up that day that we lost crossing the dateline on the way over, having two Thursdays that week. Then on a flight from Boston after having visited my brother, Harold and wife in Providence, we took a plane about 6 o'clock in the evening, during a heavy rainstorm. We landed in Los Angeles and drove our plymouth (car) home to Sun City by midnight. Some advancement from the horse and buggy and also train days. While wages were much lower in our younger days, expenses pretty well corresponded. Having babies for instance: The doctor's charge when Christina was born was $35, then when Evelyn came along had a country doctor and a nurse that came to the house every morning for a week or more with no charge. Of course Larry came several years later and that doctor charged $42. But that was during another depression and we could only pay him $2 per month - were still sending him money after we moved to Ajo. So you see, during my lifetime there have been great strides in living conditions. Questions: Q. How many dresses did you have? A. We had just as many as I have now. Q. Did you say what year you were born? A. 1899, October 17, 1899. With all of my grandchildren and great grandchildren, I can't hide my age. If I live to be 100, I will have lived in three centuries. Q. How many brothers and sisters did you have? A. The family besides by parents consisted of Ida, Mable, and Everett, who were away attending college quite a bit of the time, but were home often during vacations. Everett was married when I was six years of age, but he had been very attentive and he was always bringing me some little something when he came, and I just cried when I heard he was going to get married because I thought "Oh My, I'm just going to lose a brother!" and I visited them. I stayed with them several times after they were married. I thought Everett was just about IT! And lets see, there was Esther, Harold, and I, and later Leona when I was nearly 7. My parents had 10 children and then Ida. Ida was really my cousin and the folks took her when she was about a year old. Her parents had both died and she was older than any of us and then they lost four as babies and they were all before me except one that was when I was about 2 ½. She just lived a month. This one brother died of diphtheria, and sister of scarlet fever. The oldest sister was run over by a wagon and one died in a spasm.
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