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| Frank Thomas Ryder |
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| 1948 |
Most of what I remember is from the time they lived in the Rockbrook neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska, on Rockbrook Boulevard, (now a replacement contemporary home at 2306 South 102nd Street). But after a break-in robbery in my parents’ tiny apartment in a house on Lafayette Street, we lived with Frank and Ruth for a time on Mercer Blvd. near St. Cecilia’s Cathedral. By late 1948 my family moved to Davenport Street near Creighton University, close to them.
Even after we moved to Davenport Street, we were back at 1006 Mercer Blvd. often. There were many visits to and from my aunts’ friends. Cars or motor bikes full of young people arrived and departed frequently. Holidays were beyond wonderful and the anticipation for each was tingling. The picture above was taken in 2012.
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| 1006 Mercer Blvd., Omaha NE |
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| Ryder Family Dinner |
We were there many Sundays for dinner, usually a roasted chicken with mashed potatoes and white gravy and green beans or a seasonal vegetable. Later years, on Sunday afternoons at Rockbrook Blvd., there were fierce competitions during College Bowl, a 50’s television game show. Tommy was really great at that game.
It is not an exaggeration that
this family loved each other and loved being together. They were together often, they celebrated,
they helped each other, they sought each other out and they laughed all the
time. And, my aunts Katy and Patty remembered
childhood visits from Frank’s McCarthy uncles.
In years before this time, there must have been visits from Ruth’s
siblings and parents from Sioux City and Chicago, too, as Frank wrote the
lyrics to a song he titled “When Your Wife’s Relations Come to Visit You” with
the refrain “There’s No Place like Home”.
I’m very sorry that I can’t remember all the words but my aunt Katy
Ryder Finnegan reminded me of some of them including references to “grease up
to their elbows” and “pork chop bones” tossed in the corners, and pushing you
out of your good bed.
My father Jim (in the lower right
corner of the picture above, apparently demonstrating a soft drink flavor) remembers
Sunday morning trips with Frank after World War II to the Cudahy Packing plant
in South Omaha where, after a bit of a wait, a box of meat and maybe shell fish
would be brought out to the waiting car.
Bacon, Canadian bacon, beef, pork, and oysters, too.
The stockyards were frenzied in the
50’s, trucks and trains unloading around the clock, and early on Sundays, the
cattle trucks would start to line up on "L" Street from all over Nebraska and
western Iowa, waiting to deliver their livestock to the pens of the buyers for
the packers. This web page is an
excellent source for information about the Omaha Stockyards:
The Rise and Fall of the Omaha Stockyards.
I knew it was the most important part of Omaha’s economy, but the article states that directly and indirectly, the stockyards accounted for half of Omaha’s employment base. The bars lined “L” Street, too, to accommodate the waiting truckers, and they were not today’s Omaha Old Market cafes, bistros and brew pubs! Of course, it smelled like a stockyards, too. That was Frank’s world.
The Rise and Fall of the Omaha Stockyards.
I knew it was the most important part of Omaha’s economy, but the article states that directly and indirectly, the stockyards accounted for half of Omaha’s employment base. The bars lined “L” Street, too, to accommodate the waiting truckers, and they were not today’s Omaha Old Market cafes, bistros and brew pubs! Of course, it smelled like a stockyards, too. That was Frank’s world.
In late 1940’s and early 1950’s
post-war Omaha, veterans married and formed families fast and there was a huge
housing shortage. Contractors were very
busy. Frank helped arrange for a two
bedroom house to be built for my family at 4140 Binney Street in Holy Name
Parish, financed by my father’s VA or GI zero-interest mortgage loan. My father told me that Frank had a contractor
friend, Mr. Minelli, a co-worker at Cudahy, who went into the
house building business and Minelli built our house.
We
called our street “Little Binney” to separate it from ”Big Binney” which ran steeply
uphill from 43rd Street to 45th Street by the Servants of
Mary Convent of Holy Name. My mother and
I would walk up there to catch the streetcar over to Frank’s house on Mercer
Blvd.
Frank was a generous man and may
have helped find jobs for friends. It is
hard to describe what unpleasantness the jobs probably involved at the packing
house (the Muckrakers and Upton Sinclair did a fine enough job with The Jungle
in 1906, years before Frank worked there).
One of my uncles told me a story about showing up for a job there one
day and deciding that was it. One
day. However, a neighborhood and Cathedral High School
friend of my father’s, Maury Howell, returned from the Sea Bees after World War
II and went to work for Frank at Cudahy.
He worked as Frank’s assistant for many years, according to my
father.
Ruth’s older brother, John
Florence (“Florry” or "Fleury"?) Gearen (Treasurer of Cudahy, a publicly traded company and
part of the S&P Index’s original 500 companies according to Wikipedia) died
in January, 1946. A Cudahy employee magazine obituary stated that his
brother-in-law Frank was the chief master mechanic of Cudahy, probably the
chief electrician and facilities director all in one. He certainly didn’t have an electrical engineer’s
education so his were probably self-taught skills. The 1940 census question about highest grade
completed states that he completed one year of high school. His love of books and reading was legendary in
the family and he valued education very highly.
Each of his children had one or more years of college, and his sons
completed professional schools.
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| 2302 Rockbrook Blvd. |
It quickly became a rose-covered white modern ranch house with green-striped-with-white awnings, a large side yard on the south with a patio and a huge brick or stone barbeque in the back. The lower back yard sloped sharply downhill where Rockbrook Creek ran through the rear of the lot to Happy Hollow Country Club and Pacific Street on the north, creating a scary, tangled woods. When the Rockbrook house construction was not yet finished and they had to move out of Mercer Blvd., he rented a house at Lake Okoboji in north central Iowa for the summer. My mother and I spent quite a lot of time with my grandmother at the lake that summer. I think I was only three then and I cannot recall if any of my mother’s siblings were there but I image that Bernie and Tommy were there for a while at least.
Another project was building a
television, also from a kit or as parts from electronics catalogs, according to
my mother. It had the dark green oval
screen, of course, it was black and white television, and he had it on a table
in the basement but I cannot recall the case.
A few years later, during the McCarthy era, probably around 1953-54, I
remember that he was watching the hearings.
Frank was a Republican, and probably because of his work at the packing
house, he disliked unions. Maybe he
was interested in Senator McCarthy’s pursuit of communists because during his years at
Cudahy, angry and violent labor strikes occurred around the Midwest, some
involving communists. The Great Plains Quarterly article by
University of Nebraska at Omaha professor William C. Pratt in 1996) provides a
scholarly background for labor relations history and part of that history was
the packing house labor issues:
These issues presented difficult
challenges for executives of companies like Cudahy. Part of South Omaha was a wild and violent
place in those days, and management probably had their reasons for disliking
unions, just as the unions and consumers had their issues with the packing
companies.
Frank’s friends visited him at
the Rockbrook house when he retired. They
would visit and drink coffee, but sometimes Frank drank Kool Aid. There were family rumblings about Frank and
that Kool Aid because he was a diabetic and as we know now, that was probably
associated with his heart disease. Of
course, my grandmother was a great and daily baker for all her visitors and he
was probably presented with opportunities to eat the wrong things. He
could be a little demanding of her, and the call “Oh Ruth!” frequently rang
through the house. I assume that his heart disease, forced
retirement and frustration left him somewhat grumpy but I don’t have any
recollection of him in that way. There
were, however, occasions when his children gave it back to him. There were lumps of charcoal or potatoes in
his Christmas stocking on a few occasions!
Before he was sick, together, we spent
a lot of time on the move. At that time,
he drove a maroon Mercury. As I was
researching his father and the Ryder families, it struck me that he was
accustomed to being extraordinarily busy with his Cudahy’s job, but Frank was
also used to seeing large swaths of a city every day from his job as a
streetcar conductor in Chicago in the early 1900’s. The 1910 census states that he was a
conductor on a streetcar; his father and brother Benjamin were motormen so this
was surface streetcar not the elevated. He
never mentioned it that I can recall, but, as I became accustomed to traveling
around with him and asked for a trip somewhere, he would tell me not to have miles
instead of brains in my head.
One frequent stop was a dime store
in mall at Countryside Village at South 87th and Pacific Streets
(Ben Franklin?). He liked that store and
I liked it, too, as it had rows and rows of unwrapped toys, clothes and hardware
counters Usually, I left with something
from one of the toy rows. He did lots of
the grocery shopping because Ruth did not drive. Armed with the weekly grocery ads from
newspapers, we visited markets around town, including Steve’s on the corner of South
50th and Leavenworth Street.
It was a wood-floored grocery then, with a swinging screen front door
and a butcher shop. It wasn’t long
before the chain groceries dominated and the small groceries disappeared. Fifteen years before that, my father Jim had
worked in one of those neighborhood stores (see a Look What I Found post
in November, 2014). In the many decades since the ‘50’s, Steve’s has been an
antiques store but I think of Frank and the grocery every time I pass.
I can’t recall how long he was
sick before his death in 1957, but it was clearly a chronic condition. I was 10 years old when he died and I remember
returning home from school on an October afternoon and finding my mother crying
with her head in her arms on the dining room table. I dimly remember his wake at the Brewer-Korisko
funeral home in South Omaha. In my mother’s
family history collection, I found the visitation book which brought many
memories of family friends, his coworkers and relatives. Frank’s funeral at Christ the King Church was
my first experience with death and I attended the funeral Mass with my Wilmes
grandparents. It was one of my saddest days.
My mother and her sisters Franny,
Katy and Patty, really wanted family information (Bernie Ryder Strasheim died
in 1966). They even took a trip to
Virginia once in the early 80’s to look for their maternal grandmother Dora
Virginia Curtis Gearen’s records. His daughters
pressed Frank, but there was only the story about his brother Benjamin.
Arthur Benjamin was Frank’s older
and only brother, born and baptized in Sioux City in 1884 according to the
Sioux City Archdiocese Archives (his sister Anna was born in 1894 and Margaret
was born in 1898, both in Illinois). The
story was simple and without dates – Benjamin was killed in a train
robbery. I found the newspaper story of
his death in a “harvest holdup” in a train boxcar in 1915 in Kansas – in an
Oklahoma Territory newspaper at:
BOY MURDERED IN 'HARVEST HOLDUP', SOUGHT WORK HERE, Tulsa Daily World, June 20, 1915
BOY MURDERED IN 'HARVEST HOLDUP', SOUGHT WORK HERE, Tulsa Daily World, June 20, 1915
Information about
Frank’s father Fred will be in a separate blog post, but this story confirms
that there were some issues with Fred’s absences prior to Benjamin’s death in
1915. In Frank’s World War I
draft registration in 1917, he states that he is the sole support of his
mother. The census and City Directories
listings may actually provide the moves back-and-forth between Sioux City and
Chicago, but the names are sometimes interchangeable or perhaps misreported by
the enumerator so I can’t follow it with confidence. Fred may have been out of the home before
1915. He died in St. Louis, Missouri in
1923, from cancer, having lived there for seven years according to his death
certificate.
Fred’s father was Azariah Ryder,
a pensioned Civil War veteran of an Illinois infantry unit who was born in Bath
County, Virginia. Fred was born in
Illinois in 1861, before Azariah enlisted or was drafted into the Union Army in
1863. Thanks to the now deceased family
historian Gordon J. Ryder (distant cousin), author of The Rider-Ryder Family of
Virginia (The Gateway Press, Baltimore, MD 1993), there is actually a narrative
history of Azariah’s extended family. The
self-published book (book and publisher now out-of-print and business) is the
result of his multi-year exhaustive search for family information. This compilation includes extensive
documentation, correspondence and personal visit narratives with relatives and
individuals with knowledge of this enormous family.
There is a single copy of it at the Milstein Division of American History and Genealogy in the Schwartzman Building of the New York Public Library. I cannot find a digitized version online. Because the book is copyrighted, I have written to his family hoping to obtain permission to include several of the stories as he wrote about them.
There is a single copy of it at the Milstein Division of American History and Genealogy in the Schwartzman Building of the New York Public Library. I cannot find a digitized version online. Because the book is copyrighted, I have written to his family hoping to obtain permission to include several of the stories as he wrote about them.
Azariah’s father along with
brothers and cousins (one of them ours) crossed the Allegheny Mountains from
Bath County, Virginia several times on horseback to search for land in the
Midwest. Fred’s grandfather Thomas J. and
Azariah settled in McHenry County in northeastern Illinois in the 1840’s. Thomases’ father James and his father William
had probably moved to mountainous Bath County farms from Maryland or Virginia
in the late 1770’s, according to Gordon
Ryder.
Maybe Frank knew more of family
history, or maybe he didn’t know much of it, or was disappointed with
dysfunction. With his daughters, at
least, he did not discuss it. Christine
Quinn Hudson told me that her mother Patty Ryder Quinn had discussed his father
with Frank and she remembered that Fred Ryder was very sad at a child’s (Benjamin’s?)
death. However, Frank had to have known
his relatives. Both Frank’s father’s
Ryders and his mother’s McCarthys families lived as next door neighbors in
Sioux City for decades as the censuses and City Directories document and Frank
lived there during some times.
I wish there had been more time
to know Frank as an older girl. It would
be great to quiz him about all this as I suspect he had many stories. I will continue to post the stories that can
be discovered here in Long Since Dispersed. Please send me stories and recollections at
wilmessh@yahoo.com.
There are so many details to
these stories and the individual pieces of information are stored on public family
trees on Ancestry.com where you can search by name.
All of the photos used here were
in the collection of my mother Mary Ryder Wilmes and with the exception of the
one I believe was taken by Jim Finnegan of the family dinner and the one I took in 2012 of 1006
Mercer Blvd, I do not know who created them.
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