My Family, My Life

Throughout my lifetime, my family has reminded me that I resembled my mother. The photographs taken when I was a baby showed that I had almost no hair when I was born. Eventually my hair did grow out, but I was destined to grow up with fine, sparse, white blonde hair. I also had my mother’s bright blue eyes.

Both my brother Arlan and I had our mother’s features, fair skin and dimples. I was told by my Grandma Wiese that I also have my mother’s temperament.

I was the fourth child born of Alice and Irvin Wiese. I was a round, healthy, happy baby. My mother breast-fed me for the first four months of my life. After my mother died, I was given goat’s milk to drink, because I didn’t take too well to cow’s milk.

Although I was born in my parents’ house on Duane Street in Oregon City, after my mother died, my Grandma Wiese became my second mother and assumed the care and responsibility of me and her other three grandchildren. By this time, Grandma Wiese’s own children were either grown up young adults or were in their older teens. Grandma Wiese must have been answering a moral call or a promise to God because she assumed full responsibility of taking care of all four of Irvin’s children, even though she had already reared six children of her own.