Reeder & Koesters-narrative from Chuck McClenon

Reeders and Koesters

From Chuck McClenon

Lillie Pearl Reeder was born February 20, 1870, to an Ohio teenager, Olive Sophia Reeder, who had, they said, fallen for the charms of a Frenchman. His name is recorded as Leopold Thompson, which sounds at most half French, but that half was enough. What follows is a disorganized story, made up of anecdotes, told out of chronological order.  I've heard the stories, and have tried to attach them to the right persons and places, but if any of my readers suspect that I've  attached them to the wrong parties, I invite them to correct me. 

The mother became an outcast, a disgrace to the family, and Lillie, referred to as "Olive's little mistake," was raised with little love mostly by her grandparents, Joseph Zenas Reeder and his wife Louise, in Piqua (pronounced pick-way), Ohio, about fifty miles north of Dayton.  Joseph Zenas Reeder was employed as a United States gaugeman, that is, a "revenuer" who traveled to distilleries to measure the proof of the whiskey, and tax it accordingly.

Joseph Zenas Reeder was born in 1823, the oldest son of the Rev. Joseph Adams Reeder, and his wife, the former Olive Langston. Joseph Adams Reeder, born in 1792,  was one of the early settlers of  the Miami River valley area of southwestern Ohio.  The Reeders appear before then to have been a restless bunch, moving west from generation to generation, from New Jersey across Western Virginia and what's now West Virginia, and across Kentucky into Ohio. Among his other great-grandchildren in the Dayton area were a couple of young bicycle mechanics named Wright, who aspired to greater heights.

Rev. Joseph lived to the great age of 88, and died in 1880; his wife Olive died in 1878 at the age of 84. In fact, almost everybody seems to have live to quite an old age. Joseph Z. Reeder died in 1905 at the age of 82; his wife Louise died in 1904 at the age of 80.

Louise's father, John Stump, was probably a half-blood Indian, though we don't know from what tribe. He was born in 1790, and died in 1875. Lillie, his great- granddaughter, remembered visiting the mill he owned, and the story has it that the employees loafed around in his absence, but that when he showed up and raged at their laziness, they would get to work, and produce enough revenue for him to go off on a drunken binge.  An unfortunate stereotype, and only hearsay when I repeat it. Louise's mother, Catherine Sophia Elizabeth Emrick Stump, lived to see Lillie's children born, her own great-great-grandchildren, and died in 1893 at the age of 102.

At the age of seventeen, Lillie left her grandparents' home and married a footloose young man of dreams and visions,  John William Koester. John's grandfather, Gerhard Evert Koester, had been born in Germany about 1800. Probably Gerhard and his wife, the former Anna Gesina Aldekamp, immigrated together and settled in the Dayton area.  She bore seven children, of whom five survived infancy. John Harm Koester, born in 1826, was the second son. Gerhard died in 1846, but Anna lived to the age of 80, and died in 1884.

John Harm Koester married Anna Elizabeth Schowve, and John William, born August 21, 1866, was the sixth of ten children.  John Harm Koester operated a grocery store, and it's noted that he would not sell the last one of any item in stock, because if he sold it, he would be out of it.  John William must have learned to sell at an early age, and a traveling salesman he became. For much of his career he was a freight agent, working for railroads to sell shipping. He traveled, he relocated, the family followed him. Herman was born in 1888, Ivan in 1891, and Ruth on March 19, 1893.

They moved, and Lillie Koester landed on her feet. She was the practical one who had to serve as the anchor. Salesmen's commissions are uncertain; she found herself a job, of some kind, anything which required common sense and a little mechanical skill.  Even before her marriage, at the age of fifteen, she had worked as a telephone operator, within the first decade after its invention. The idea of telephone numbers was not well-established. One businessman who spoke more German than English would pick up the phone and say "Get me mine offiss", or "Get me mine home."

One time, on arriving in a new town, she took a job as a seamstress in a garment factory.  Seeing that her thread was about to run out, and realizing that she didn't know how to re-thread the sewing machine, she tied a new spool onto the tail end of the old, and let the machine pull it through. For that act of foresight, she was promoted to forelady on her first day.

Foresight and practicality at home, too. She always had her Christmas shopping done long beforehand, and to those running around at the last minute she would ask, with little sympathy, "What's the matter, dear?  Didn't you know it was coming?" She wouldn't so much as cross the kitchen without thinking of everything she should carry from one side to the other, and she advised those around her to do likewise.  Nobody in her family cared for pepper, so she never filled the pepper shaker. Instead, it sat on the table and gathered dust, and when a user shook it, they would get enough dust to believe it was pepper.

 John Koester must have been an enigma, an effective salesman and student of human nature but also given to occasional hare-brained schemes. When he had a job to fill and interviewed a potential employee, he would ask the subject to turn around and walk away from him. That way, he could see if the man had polished the backs of his shoes, a sign of thoroughness. One time, he designed a new-fangled milk container, made from waxed cardboard, cheaper and less fragile than glass bottles. When he tried to market it, the unanimous conclusion was that nobody would buy milk they couldn't see.

As the children grew older, the family seems to have moved steadily farther from their native Ohio.  John Koester dreamed of a return to the land, of settling on a farm and getting out of the rat-race.  They bought a farm outside Nampa, Idaho, got the crop planted, and worked them for several months into the summer, but as the dry season arrived, farming became difficult. One time a horse became ill, and the veterinarian said it needed to be given plenty of water, fed through a long-necked bottle.  Water and long-necked bottles were both in short supply, but the family had some champagne in appropriate bottles, and it had the prescribed effect.  Stories differ as to whether the horse drank the champagne, or whether there was a quick party, and the bottle refilled with the horse none the wiser. Midway into the summer, John was informed that his rights to irrigation water had run out with the end of the spring run-off, and that his purchase hadn't included any water rights for the rest of the year, the farming adventure was abandoned. In his later years, he had a brief and equally fruitful experience with a fruit farm in Southern California.

Sometime in his teens, young Ivan ran away from home, and it may have been the rare case of running away not to seek adventure, but to escape it.  He found work in the railroad yard, not five miles from the homestead in Ohio; it was several years before he revealed his whereabouts.  He eventually married and raised a family in Cincinnati, and died there in 1956. He loved baseball. He became an umpire in semi-pro leagues, because that way he was paid to go to the game, instead of paying the price of admission.  At one time, the going rate for umpires was five dollars a game, unless (as usually happened) either team included "colored" players. In that case, the umpire was paid ten dollars on account of the greater risk of fights.

Ruth, on the other hand, through her teens and into her twenties, always moved with the family, and like her mother, found various jobs. She attended college for a year, perhaps studying to be a kindergarten teacher, but when the instructor proclaimed that the velocipede, that is, the tricycle, was "the ideal toy", she concluded such education was impractical nonsense, and she took up typing and shorthand instead.

Ruth remembered working around 1910 in a tire store, where two different models of tires were sold, one with a 2000 mile warrantee, the other, for twice the price, carrying a 5000 mile warrantee. In fact, both tires were of identical construction, and lasted an average of 1500 miles, and the warrantee would be pro-rated toward the price of a new tire. The lifespan of tires may have increased thirty-fold in eighty years, but the tire business hasn't changed much. The warrantee is always prorated.

The family eventually found their way to California, and Ruth must have  worked for a time as a stenographer for the state government in Sacramento. Every shorthand stenographer has her own abbreviations and idiosyncrasies which only the writer can interpret, but Ruth was the exception. One afternoon, she was the recorder for an important hearing, which went late into the evening. After a brief sleep, she came to work early the next morning to transcribe her notes to typescript, only to be told that this had already been done, because her shorthand was so standard.

Then, at the politically active age of twenty-one, she worked in the 1914 campaign of the Progressive Party.  She, a night-owl by preference, worked evenings at a desk used during the day by a young lawyer, Walter McClenon. She complained to him about leaving his galoshes under the desk, and the rest is

history. On one of their first dates, they visited the state capitol, and he told her how many steps it had.

The Koester parents settled in Southern California, and gradually acquired rental property, and were more successful as landlords than as farmers. John died in 1937, from complications of diabetes. At some point (the chronology is unclear) Herman and his wife Kathryn, who had lived in Cincinnati, evidently moved to California and became neighbors of his mother and Herman began "helping" with the property management, but may have helped himself more than anybody else. When her daughter-in-law Kathryn died in 1948 and Lillie was left with Herman, Ruth went west to retrieve her mother, saying there was nobody else who cared.

Lillie , living in Takoma Park with Ruth and Walter, was still feisty at the age of eighty-something.  From Takoma Park, the best way to get to downtown Washington was an Express bus. It would fill within its first few stops, and travel some five miles with no passenger stops. Once downtown, there would be a half-dozen stops close together before the end of the line. One time Lillie got on the bus with standing room only, and all the young men were busy reading their newspapers or sitting in "thinker" poses, and Lillie stood for the "express" part of the trip, through many jerks and bumps for traffic stops.  When the bus arrived at its first "discharge" point, a gallant young man folded his newspaper as he got up, swept it over the seat he was about to vacate, and said to her, "Won't you take this seat?"  Although she was very tired from standing the whole trip, she had enough spirit to respond, "No, why don't you take it with you?  You may want it on the way home."