by Paula Becker
About the time Sydney was slipping into arrears on the Laurelhurst house’s mortgage, a gentleman named T. C. MacNamara sold the dairy farm—in Chimacum, Jefferson County—to a man named H. K. Blonde. Back in 1923, MacNamara had mortgaged this property to the Washington Mutual Bank. Blonde was supposed to take over MacNamara’s mortgage payments. Instead, in late 1925, Blonde sold the property to Sydney, who was now supposed to make mortgage payments on the dairy farm to Blonde. A well-respected farmer, Percy Wright, owned the adjoining property and would eventually become directly involved in the Bards’ real estate affairs.
The Chimacum property purchase included a large herd of cows, a flock of chickens, horses, pigs, and goats. The Bards—all but Mary, who had a job and an apartment in Seattle—moved there to take up dairy farming, with Cleve in charge.43 Cleve had never farmed or cared for livestock: a hired boy handled the domestic animals in Laurelhurst, and the family had almost certainly never owned anything more than cats and dogs in Butte. It was, to say the least, a risky decision.
But for the Bards, the new undertaking was an exciting adventure. Like many of their past experiences—in Boulder, Placerville, and even Butte—Chimacum might have become simply another chapter in the family’s story. But for Betty, it would be more. The Sunday drive, the farm for sale, and her mother’s willing acquiescence to Cleve’s whim gave rise to the most significant and enduring experience of her life: the three years she would recount in The Egg and I. Although the process of distilling that experience into narrative would take decades, the move to Chimacum was like a key sliding smoothly into the lock that opened Betty Bard MacDonald’s destiny.
CHAPTER THREE
Child Bride
THE Bards decamped from their Laurelhurst house primed for a fresh start, but from the very beginning, the dairy farm venture was doomed, for several reasons. First, life in Chimacum was far more primitive than the life the Bards had become used to in Seattle. Although they’d sometimes lived rough when Darsie was alive, they were not prepared for the daily dawn-to-dusk hard work of running a commercial dairy farm.
Second, their new home’s location required the vivacious Bards to endure isolation, offering few of the amenities and distractions they had grown fond of in bustling Seattle. Jefferson County is situated on Washington’s lush Olympic Peninsula. Non-Native settlement in the area began in 1850, on Chimacum Creek, about ten miles south of the region’s most important early port of entry, Port Townsend. When the Bards moved there in 1926, the combined population of the neighboring areas called Chimacum and Center hovered around 275.
Third, Chimacum was a difficult place to be a newcomer. The Bards had chosen a community populated by families that had worked their land for decades, whose bloodlines were repeatedly intertwined by marriage. In Chimacum, the Bards knew no one. And finally, although the Bards remained ignorant of this for many months, there was the looming disaster of their property’s broken chain of title.
Far from Jazz Age Seattle, life in Jefferson County moved at a slow pace. Many men worked in logging and lumbering. Hauling, transportation, and heavy farm work were still done with horses. The roads were mostly dirt and often pocked with chuckholes, although the county was working to improve them. Except for those few who owned small generators, Chimacum residents would not have electricity until the late 1940s.
Chimacum featured a garage, a hotel, and a small general store and post office. Major shopping trips required a journey to the mill-owned store in Port Ludlow, a few miles away. Journeys from Chimacum to Port Townsend—where the Rose Theater played silent movies, and confectionery stores and cafes beckoned—were all-day affairs because of the poor roads, and so they were a rare treat.1
Little is known of this period of the Bards’ life. Their friends Margaret Bundy Callahan and Blanche Hamilton left few recollections of the family in Chimacum. Blanche was studying to be a teacher and never visited them there. Margaret was working on the editorial staff at the Seattle Star and saw them rarely. It is especially difficult to know exactly what life during the first year or so in Chimacum was like for Betty. We do not know, for example, if she was sorry to leave college, what her daily life on the farm entailed, or whether she held a job away from the farm.
Although automobiles were still rare in Chimacum in the 1920s, Cleve always had a car, and this would have increased the Bards’ chances to take part in social life and recreation, if they wanted to. Whether they mixed with them socially or not, the Bards took the measure of their neighbors. The culture shock Betty described in The Egg and I probably reflects her first months in Chimacum: in this insular rural community on the Olympic Peninsula, the Bards were a poor fit.
After Darsie’s death, the Bards had increasingly defined themselves as an exclusive society. They ruthlessly criticized but also enjoyed other people’s foibles, blurring the line between appreciation and mockery. The less money they had, the more comfort they may have drawn from feeling intellectually and socially superior to their neighbors. To Jefferson County old-timers, the Bards’ attitude would have been obvious, and off-putting.
Not all the Bards were snobbish. At Chimacum High School, Dede edited the paper and was remembered warmly decades later by classmates who rode the school bus with her. Stories that circulated later had Cleve cutting a wide swath through the population of young women in the area. He went to dances and sometimes strong-armed Betty into going along so she that would not be considered snooty. But Cleve seems always to have stood alone, coming and going when and where he wanted to, only loosely connected to the female household, an independent agent.
Mary visited frequently from Seattle, often bringing friends who helped sustain the old open-house tradition, if in a more rural style. Betty acted as hostess. Mary sometimes stayed with her family for longer stretches during this period: one story has her teaching tap dancing classes in Port Townsend, and she once performed a dance at a Chimacum High School evening gathering, as documented in the Port Townsend Leader.2 Mary’s experience of living independently and starting to build a work history would be important to the Bards during the next decade.
Meanwhile Betty, in Chimacum, tumbled into romance. Blanche Hamilton describes how Betty encountered the dashing Robert Heskett, the older man who swept her off her feet:
One time when Cleve was in Seattle he bumped into an old friend, Bob Heskett, and brought him home to the farm. Both Mary and Betty thought Bob was a beautiful man. He was tall and well-built, with uniform white teeth, dark hair, and blue eyes. In his late twenties, he appeared very smooth indeed to a girl of eighteen. He began to notice Betty rather than Mary, which was most unusual as most of the guys who came to the house were more attracted to Mary. Before the summer was over, the romance had gathered great momentum and Betty confided in me that Bob had finally seduced her in the strawberry patch.3
Betty later described how thrilled she was to best Mary, and the strawberry-patch seduction (presumably in June) might be the reason that Betty subsequently wed in haste.
Mary thought Robert Heskett looked almost exactly like the film heartthrob Gary Cooper.4 Heskett was born in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and raised mainly in Fargo, North Dakota. When Bob was a young man, he and his father worked homestead claims in Montana. During World War I, Bob fought in France as a private in the U.S. Marines. In 1920, Bob’s sister Katherine, who was nearest him in age, died, and the Hesketts left Montana soon afterward. By 1923, Bob was living in Seattle with his parents, Otis and Florence, and two younger sisters. After Bob’s mother died in 1925, his father quickly remarried. By the time Bob and Betty met, both he and his father worked for Mutual Life Insurance.
Betty MacDonald was not a romantic writer, but her description of her whirlwind courtship with Bob takes her as close to that label as she would get: “He liked me. I still cannot understand why unless it was that he was overcome by so much untrammeled girlishness. He took me to dinner, dancing and the movies and I fell head over heels in love, to his evident delight.”5
Family lore holds that despite his good looks, Mary Bard loathed Robert Heskett. Whether this was because he failed to favor her over Betty or for other reasons is hard to know. In marrying Bob, Betty made a stand against her sister, perhaps the first time she had done so in any significant way.
Sydney announced her daughter’s marriage in the Seattle Times the following week. After a short stay in Victoria, British Columbia, the notice stated, “they will return to Chimacum, Wash., where they will be at home.”8 Home at the time would have meant living with Sydney on the dairy farm. After Betty wed, her maternal grandmother—she who preferred to be addressed as “Deargrandmother”—commenced her letters to Betty, then twenty, with “Dear Child Bride.”9
Bob was gentle, Betty wrote, and smitten by her girlish naïveté. Sydney had taught Betty housewifely skills: how to make up a bed with mitered corners, how to cook and arrange flowers and set a sparkling table. She had learned to control small details whether or not she could control the large ones. Betty had also been raised by Gammy, who was (at least in the retelling) a droll, fatalistic skeptic. Betty brought her mother’s and grandmother’s somewhat disparate views to her married life. Having observed her parents’ strong union, Betty also came to her marriage with that ideal in mind.
The marriage likely began with several romantic weeks or months. The couple had something to look forward to: just before their marriage, or perhaps immediately after exchanging vows, Betty had become pregnant. On February 23, 1928, she gave birth to Anne Elizabeth Heskett at Seattle General Hospital.10 By the time Anne was born in Seattle, Betty and Bob were no longer living with Sydney in Chimacum. Whether or not Sydney had been making her payments to H. K. Blonde for the property, Blonde was certainly not making his required payments on MacNamara’s mortgage to Washington Mutual. In August 1927, shortly after Betty’s marriage, Washington Mutual began foreclosure proceedings on the Chimacum farm. In late 1927, Jefferson County Superior Court handed down a judgment against MacNamara, ruling that neither Blonde nor Sydney had any legal interest in the property and ordering that it be auctioned off to pay the debt. In January 1928, the dairy farm was sold on the Jefferson County Courthouse steps.
In later years, the Bards obscured the details of the farm’s demise, blaming the loss on a larger-than-expected bill for drainage from the county and the discovery of tuberculosis in their dairy herd, which could have been the case. In order to market milk from the region as guaranteed free of bovine tuberculosis (which can infect humans through consumption of contaminated milk), Jefferson County instituted rigorous testing. The only way to eradicate tuberculosis in a dairy herd is to destroy the herd.
Sydney still had one hope for getting her hands on money: the Bards had learned from old friends that the Montana gypsum mine being worked by Darsie’s former partner, Raymond Calkins, was much more profitable than he had suggested. Sydney started corresponding with Calkins, who repeatedly promised her royalties but did not pay them. In September 1927, Sydney initiated a suit against him.11
While this case moved through the courts, however, Sydney lost her desperate struggle to keep the Laurelhurst property. The State Savings and Loan Association started foreclosure proceedings on lots 3 and 4, which included the house.12 One week after she lost the Chimacum dairy farm, Sydney sold lots 1 and 2 of the Laurelhurst property to Percy Wright, her former Chimacum neighbor, who had been living with his family in the Bards’ Laurelhurst home for over a year.13
In March 1928, a few weeks after Anne’s birth, the gypsum mine case was settled, with Calkins agreeing to pay each Bard sibling $1,860 (equivalent to about $24,675 today). Sydney safeguarded at least some of Alison’s and Dede’s portions. Mary, who recognized frugality as one method for controlling destiny, probably put her money in the bank. What Cleve did with his money is impossible to tell. For Betty and Bob, new parents, Betty’s money was a godsend, enabling them to purchase the property about which—in a plot twist the young mother would likely have found completely implausible, had some palm reader or Ouija board predicted it—she would later tell the world in The Egg and I.
The proceeds from the land sale and the Calkins settlement proved insufficient to save the Laurelhurst house. The King County Superior Court ordered that the property be sold to satisfy Sydney’s debt to the State Savings and Loan Association. In December 1928, the large, gracious home into which Darsie and Sydney had confidently moved their family almost exactly ten years before was auctioned on the King County Courthouse steps.
For Sydney, these two losses—her properties sold on the steps of two county courthouses—bracketed the year 1928. At fifty-one, Sydney was now a grandmother. Dede and Alison were youthful aunts. Gathering her younger children and Gammy, Sydney found a place to rent somewhere in Jefferson County.14 The Bards opted to remain near Betty, Bob, and baby Anne.
Bob’s decision to quit selling insurance and take up chicken ranching coincided with Betty’s receiving her portion of the Calkins settlement. Bob later claimed that Cleve and Sydney urged him to make the change.15 The notion that Bob should try his hand with chickens was not completely bizarre: egg ranching was a popular occupation in Washington during the 1920s. Alderwood Manor, a planned community about twenty miles north of Seattle, included a huge demonstration farm designed to show potential homeowners how to make egg ranching pay. By the time Betty and Bob went into the egg business, Alderwood Manor was one of the largest egg-producing operations in the nation.16 In Jefferson County, egg ranches were all the rage. The Port Townsend Weekly Leader carried frequent stories about home egg-laying contests, and participants received advice on the care and feeding of their flocks. County residents held what the paper called “poultry meetings,” inviting visiting experts to lecture. The paper’s classified section advertised chicks, priced as low as $130 per thousand.
The property Betty and Bob bought to begin this venture was in Center, which bordered Chimacum and over time would eventually come to be considered part of Chimacum.17 Two valleys—Beaver and Center—undulate gently along this finger of the Olympic Peninsula, the ridge between them more like a long, narrow hill than the fierce mountains Betty described in The Egg and I. Her forty-acre ranch was known to neighbors as the old Hammargren place, after the pioneer who received the property from the federal government in an 1891 land grant. The road running past the property was designated Road No. 16. In Betty’s time, this road—also called Swansonville Road and Winding Road—ran all the way from Discovery Bay to Port Ludlow. Thanks to Betty it would become—first colloquially, then by habit, and finally by county decree—Egg and I Road.18
The property’s chain of title is a mystery: no record survives of a deed or mortgage confirming the precise day when the Hesketts purchased the property. A Seattle firm held a mortgage and paid the property taxes when Betty and Bob lived there. There were two houses on the land: their farmhouse and a smaller, older dwelling that subsequent owners nicknamed the Pioneer House and which likely stood empty during Betty and Bob’s tenancy.
The Hesketts’ farmhouse was a cedar-shaked cottage with a rickety porch. The ten acres closest to the house had been logged long before the Hesketts purchased the property, but second-growth forest and mature fruit trees endured scrappily nearby. The cottage’s main floor featured tall, narrow windows that seemed to beg the often-murky Northwest sun to find them. An attic tucked under the steeply pitched roof was accessed through an exterior door high up on the outside of the cottage. Using a long ladder, trunks and boxes could be carried up for storage. With the ladder remo
ved, the doorway looked eerily wrong, as if the attic harbored incorporeal beings capable of walking out into midair.
The Hesketts’ neighbors to the east were Albert and Susanna Bishop, who lived in their farmhouse with those of their thirteen children who had not started families of their own. To Bob and Betty’s west lived Edward and Ilah Bishop and their teenage son, Bud. Edward was Albert and Susanna’s eldest son.19
Eight months after Anne’s birth, Betty was pregnant again. On July 14, 1929, she gave birth to Joan Dorothy Heskett at St. John’s Hospital in Port Townsend.20 Betty did not mention her second daughter’s birth in The Egg and I. Given her vivid descriptions of her difficulties caring for one baby, a farm, and hundreds of chicks, perhaps she decided that two babies would strain credulity. And yet, two babies were what she had.
By this time, the romance of her marriage to Bob had dissipated. Betty never knew when or why she ceased to charm Bob, or what about her might have irked him. That Bob had been a soldier and endured the horrors of the battlefield may have played into his impatience, but she could do nothing about that except stay out of his way.
Jefferson County lore holds that Bob Heskett, like many of his neighbors, distilled moonshine. Betty’s unpublished draft of The Egg and I contained a good deal of discussion of this Prohibition-era activity.21 It seems possible that chicken raising supplemented moonshine manufacturing, or vice versa. Grain for hen feed might have disguised grain for mash.
Betty’s marriage to Robert Heskett and her experiences as a young wife and mother in late 1920s rural Jefferson County differed greatly from the version of that marriage that Betty presented in The Egg and I in 1945. Years before writing it, almost immediately after living it, Betty started recounting a version of her experiences to entertain her friends. Betty’s repeated tellings honed her version of events. Betty selectively reshaped her past, cutting the most disturbing incidents. Her highly curated history eventually—and unexpectedly—won her fame.
