1. FAMILY HISTORY

DONALD DICKEY

Interview conducted by Bob Zybach and Neil Vanderburg at the Green Valley Care Center, August 18, 1990, with Donald and Maxine Dickey.

1. FAMILY HISTORY

Bob Zybach: Donald, would you mind just saying hello or something, to just see if this recorder is working? Then I'll check it.

Donald M. Dickey: Yeah. Hi, I'm glad to be part of this.

Bob Zybach: Don, can you tell me what year you were born and where you were born.

Donald M. Dickey: Born, October 20, 1914 at Yamhill.

Bob Zybach: What was your father's name?

Donald M. Dickey: James A. Dickey.

Bob Zybach: What was he doing in Yamhill?

Donald M. Dickey: He was a farmer down there. We had 50 acres.

Bob Zybach: Was he born in Yamhill?

Donald M. Dickey: No, he was born up by Buell.

Bob Zybach: Buell, Oregon?

Donald M. Dickey: Yeah, that's over by Willamina, Sheridan, in that area.

Bob Zybach: Okay. Do you remember his parents?

Donald M. Dickey: No, his parents were dead, they died when he was 15 or 16.

Bob Zybach: Were they farming in that area?

Donald M. Dickey: Yeah, they had . . I think they had 320 acres. They raised livestock mainly. .

Bob Zybach: And they both died at about the same time?

Donald M. Dickey: Yeah, when they was 58, 59 something like that. Within a year or two anyway of each other.

Bob Zybach: So were the deaths related, was it an epidemic, or.

Donald M. Dickey: Well, I think one of them had cancer, but I'm not sure, and I don't know about the other one.

Bob Zybach: Okay. And then your father, did he continue working on the family farm?

Donald M. Dickey: Well, there was three boys and three or four girls, so they divided the family farm up, and my dad had a 40 acre piece of it he and one of his sisters lived on. And I

Donald M. Dickey: don't know for how long, till his sister got married I guess. Then dad married my mother in 1903 and they lived there on the 40 acres for a while then they sold it and moved down to Yamhill. And I don't know whether they rented the 10 acres that they were on for a while or not, I think maybe they did, but then they bought 50 acres out southwest of Yamhill 4-1/2 miles, a little area they called . . . anyway, it was clay, some kind of a gulch out there. And they got a pretty good farm out there. They had to build a house and barn, that stuff. And we had dairy cows. And the soil was kind of hard to work, but if you worked it good and kept at it you raised good crops on it. And in 1928 we moved from Yamhill up to Berry Creek, and one of the reasons for it was they wanted to get closer to Oregon State [University]. My older brother was going to Oregon State, and my youngest brother was a couple of years younger than I was. We were still in grade school when we moved up there. Then we went to Airlie to high school, and I went to Oregon State and I graduated high school in '37, or '33, and didn't get started at Oregon State till '37, on account of there weren't any money trees growing in the back yard in those days.

Bob Zybach: So the reason your folks moved to Berry Creek was to get the family closer to Oregon State?

Donald M. Dickey: Right.

Bob Zybach: Was your father a college graduate?

Donald M. Dickey: No, but he was pretty well educated. So was my mother.

Bob Zybach: Now, going back to your mother's family, do you know where she was born?

Donald M. Dickey: She was born back in Eddyville, Nebraska.

Bob Zybach: Eddyville Nebraska?

Donald M. Dickey: Um hmm. And they moved out in 1893 to Salem. They had a cousin or something over there. They lived there a year or two and then they moved over by Sheridan on Mill Creek, and they, I don't know, they were there for several years I guess, then about 1900 or 1901 or 2 her folks moved over in Tillamook County near Hemlock. And she and Dad got married in 1903 and came back to live on the 40 acres that was part of his dad's old homestead. Then they moved to Yamhill and eventually Berry Creek.

Bob Zybach: What was your mother's family's maiden name?

Donald M. Dickey: Blanchard.

Bob Zybach: Blanchard? Do you know her mother's maiden name?

Donald M. Dickey: Bolton.

Bob Zybach: Do you remember either of her parents?

Donald M. Dickey: My mother's parents?

Bob Zybach: Yeah.

Donald M. Dickey: My grandmother, she was one of the nicest little old ladies that I ever knew. Never said anything bad about anybody. And she lived till she was 66, I think. 1933 or sometime about then. And all of us boys were born down at Yamhill, my brothers, just 3 of us, and then we moved up to Berry Creek, and there, why, my older brother worked in California and different places, and I graduated from Oregon State and went to work for the [Oregon] Game Commission for a while. And World War II was on. So chasing pheasants didn't seem too necessary, since there were a lot of pheasants in the valley anyway. So I took a job with the US Fish and Wildlife Service killing the ground squirrels around Camp White where they'd found them carrying the plague the year before. From there they transferred me to Vanport. I was there at Vanport, let's see, went to Camp White, then they transferred me to Vanport in August and they transferred me to Eugene in February. And I was working on extermination projects, and supposedly I killed 50,000 rats the first 5 months that I was in Eugene. So I, after about 4 years, they decided to pull their money out of the project, they were going to put me someplace else, but I didn't like the payoff, so I stayed and took over the job at Eugene. And worked there, Eugene, Cottage Grove, Junction City, Oakridge, Coburg, and I stayed pretty busy. I worked for a while in Florence, till I got the rats pretty well cleaned up down there.

Bob Zybach: In where?

Donald M. Dickey: Florence.

Bob Zybach: Oh, Florence.

Donald M. Dickey: And I worked 35 years on rodent control. Not completely on rodent control, because I developed a line of rodent bait called Ortho Rodent Bait. And retired in 1980 and sold the bait business to a young fellow by the name of Doug Freeman. And he's operating it out of Coburg now.

Maxine Dickey: Harrisburg.

Donald M. Dickey: Yeah, Harrisburg. Where else do you want me to go from there?

Bob Zybach: Okay, we'll just keep going back and then bringing it forward and then we'll concentrate on Berry Creek in a bit. When you graduated from Oregon State, what was your degree in?

Donald M. Dickey: Fish and Game Management.

Bob Zybach: So you were able to capitalize on that pretty much. How about your older brother?

Donald M. Dickey: He was taking mining engineering, and they closed the mining school before he got out. And besides, he started in '26 and by '29 things was getting a little rough. Anyway, he got a job in a mine down in California, and instead of finishing up why he worked down there.

Bob Zybach: How about your younger brother, did he go to Oregon State?

Donald M. Dickey: No, he. . . well, my father died in 1942. He died on my birthday, and was buried on my younger brother's birthday. And then my younger brother, we were married by that time, Maxine and I, so my younger brother stayed around the farm for a long time. And my mother remarried after a while, and then my brother got so that he had trouble with his lungs or something because of the cold wind that blew down they lived over by, what's the name of that place where they lived, Maxine? Where was it they lived over there? Wren. And the wind blew down through that gap there from Kings Valley in the wintertime, and my brother was working hard and he had trouble with his lungs or something, so he decided he had better get out of there so he moved to Arizona, and well, they had given him in 1952 ten years to live because he'd had

Maxine Dickey: Holocystic kidneys.

Donald M. Dickey: Holocystic kidneys. He lived 30 years.

Bob Zybach: Let's go back real briefly to 1893 when your grandparents came with your mother out to Oregon. Did they come by train?

Donald M. Dickey: Yeah, they came by train.

Bob Zybach: From Nebraska.

Donald M. Dickey: From Nebraska.

Bob Zybach: Do you know why they came to Oregon?

Donald M. Dickey: Well, he had a store, her dad had a store with some other fellow, and I'm not sure that they were getting along too well. They had some relatives out here at Salem. And Oregon was kind of a popular place to come, so they came out here.

Bob Zybach: They just heard it was a nice place.

Donald M. Dickey: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: How about your father's folks? Do you know why they came to Oregon?

Donald M. Dickey: My father's family? Well they came in 1853. From Lone Jack, Missouri, and I

Donald M. Dickey: think it was just part of the western migration, probably.

Bob Zybach: Just free land? Do you know if there were any stories in your family about coming across on the [Oregon] trail?

Maxine Dickey: No, we haven't.

Donald M. Dickey: Not, really.

Bob Zybach: Okay, so do you know how your father and mother met?

Donald M. Dickey: Well, they lived in the same area down there by Buell. And I might tell you a little interesting side story on that. My dad and mother got married and they'd go out on a Sunday for a buggy ride. And of course she come in later than dad, why she didn't know who was related to who, she'd heard these stories about various people. So one Sunday they were out and met somebody on the road and exchanged greetings with them and drove on, and my mother said, "Did you hear that story about . . " I don't know what the story was about. And dad says, "Oh, you can't tell stories about her, she's my cousin." Mother said she was beginning to think he was related to everybody in the area.

Bob Zybach: Is any of that land still in the family? The donation land claim?

Donald M. Dickey: I don't think so. It wasn't what I'd call real hot farm land. It was more cattle than anything, so . . . Incidently, we have been back to Lone Jack, where my great grandfather homesteaded.

Maxine Dickey: I think that was 1835, wasn't it.

Donald M. Dickey: And that country looks a good deal like where they settled out here.

Bob Zybach: So he picked land out here in Oregon that was real similar to what they left in Missouri?

Donald M. Dickey: Yeah.

Maxine Dickey: We have become good friends with those people, and they have been out to visit us, and he sent me a picture to hang on my wall, you know, because he knows I do genealogy, and with a picture of the old homestead, he's got an "X" on it where the old well was, which is still there, and where the barn was.

Bob Zybach: In Lone Jack?

Maxine Dickey: Yes. And they have sent us a lot of horseshoes. Because he has a metal detector he picks out all the horseshoes. And made all of our kids clocks out of the wood from this old barn.

Bob Zybach: From the Dickey homestead in Lone Jack.

Donald M. Dickey: It's interesting, the old barn was made out of walnut and oak. And he saved some pieces. I think the four clocks we have are made from oak. Imagine making a barn from oak and walnut? You asked about stories on the trail. I only remember one that they told, they come up just looking over a ridge and here was a bunch of stuff waving on ahead, and they were ready to group up and then discovered it was

Donald M. Dickey: willows instead of a bunch of Indians.

Bob Zybach: Do you know where that occurred, about?

Donald M. Dickey: No, I have no idea.

Bob Zybach: But that's the one story that.

Donald M. Dickey: That's the one story that I remember him telling. That was my dad's story.

Bob Zybach: Do you remember any stories about when they first set up the donation land claim, or the homestead?

Donald M. Dickey: No, I asked my dad how come they settled back there, and he said, "well, I think

Donald M. Dickey: they wanted wood and water." There was still good land out here in the valley, I'm sure, in 1853. But then the other part of the family had come earlier, and they had settled over there, too.

Bob Zybach: So there were two groups of Dickeys, that .

Donald M. Dickey: Well, there was Dickey, and Bolyjacks, my grandfather married a Bolyjack girl. And Newbergs, one of the Newbergs married another Bolyjack girl, and Lackeys has married another Bolyjack girl. There were three Bolyjack girls. They were all in the same general area down there. And then there was some brothers of my dad that settled down there too.