REMEMBERING FRANK THOMAS RYDER

Frank Thomas Ryder

Frank Thomas Ryder was born Thomas Francis Ryder on October 13th, 1889, in Sioux City, Woodbury County, Iowa, the second child and second son of Fred Ryder and Mary Catherine McCarthy Ryder.  He was baptized on October 24, 1889 at the Catholic Cathedral Church there and Charles Kane and Jane Scott (possibly his maternal aunt?) were his sponsors.   He died October 7, 1957, in Omaha, Nebraska, and was buried at Calvary Cemetery there.  

  

1948 

I spent a very great deal of time with Frank as an infant, toddler and pre-kindergarten, as I did with my grandmother Ruth Harriet Gearen, all of my Ryder aunts and uncles.  Before his forced retirement, Frank traveled often for business reasons, to Cudahy Packing plants around the country and to Mexico, but he was still a presence at home.









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 102^nd 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.

The house at 1006 Mercer Blvd. was a delightful and busy place.  My mother, Mary Ryder Wilmes, was the oldest of five daughters (Frances, Kathleen, Patricia and Bernadette), all of whom were still at home along with oldest son James and youngest Thomas and there was always something happening.  The picture above was taken on the front porch there, probably in spring, 1948.

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.

1006 Mercer Blvd., Omaha NE

Even after our move, we were back at 1006 Mercer Blvd. often and there was either basketball, baseball, tennis or golf in the driveway and out in Mercer Blvd., as well as hiking trips along the stone wall of the Mercer Mansion (home of the family who later developed the Omaha Old Market). Othe times, one of them would take me across Cuming Street to Blackburn’s Pharmacy for fountain Cokes or trips to the donut and lemon roll bakery on North 40th Street and Hamilton Avenue.

Ryder Family Dinner

There were very big family dinners around a giant dining table as in the picture at left.  This picture is from sometime in 1949 in the Mercer Blvd. basement.   Frank was not in this picture, which probably was snapped by the family photographer, Uncle Jim Finnegan, (evidenced by his vacant seat next to Katy in center, left). That’s probably Ruthie Wear Kuehl in Franny’s arms (left, just above Ruth Patty Ryder Quinn and Jack Quinn are next to Katy followed by Jim and Jeanne Ryder, then Bob Wear next to my parents on the lower right).  Note the huge platters of fried chicken. It must have been special as there is floral centerpiece.

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. 

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 43^rd Street to 45^th 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.   

I am not certain of the date or details but Frank had a heart attack and was not able to return to work.  I estimate it was in the early 50’s but, in any event, it was too early for him to retire.  In retirement, he spent a great deal of time with grandchildren.   That’s Bob Wear, Jr. reaching for the caramel apples in the picture above and probably one of Jim and Jeanne Ryder’s children in Frank’s lap in this picture.  Frank and Ruth had young guests all the time.  There are 29 grandchildren and several times that many great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren.

2302 Rockbrook Blvd.

He loved to build things.  One of his retirement projects was building a new house – from a kit.  I clearly remember the construction of the house on Rockbrook Blvd. and peering down the construction ladder to the basement from the kitchen.   My 2013 post at:  Share A Memory - Home Building 1950's speculated about the kit Frank purchased to build the house.  The Option #17 plan shown is very close to the house floor plan as I remember it.


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:

WORKERS, UNIONS, AND HISTORIANS ON THE NORTHERN PLAINS

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 87^th 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 50^th 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

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.   

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.  

LOOK WHAT I FOUND!

My Father's Voice
November 30, 2014
By Sherry Wilmes

A fantastic discovery!  Last Saturday, during a cable outage that made both television football and genealogy impossible (without using up valuable cellular time), it seemed reasonable to attack a little clean-out project - a small bureau full of old electronic equipment (mostly very old cables and power supplies) for recycling.

However, in the bureau, I found an eight or nine year old Olympus DTS 10, a small recorder I used to record some work-related training events!  With fresh batteries, it worked!

And, to my very tearful and grateful surprise, it included a special recording.  Exactly six years to the calendar day and day of the week, it was a nine minute interview with my father James A. Wilmes, who died on St. Patrick's Day this year at 92 years and 9 days old. I had simply forgotten that we created this.

He was a simple man and there is nothing elegant here.  But it was a sweetly emotional gift to hear his voice again.  This picture is my father Jim at a fish restaurant north of Omaha riverside on the Missouri about three years ago. 

The only document we have to prove his birth is a poor copy of a baptismal record from a Council Bluffs, Iowa, Catholic parish with a date of birth in Mercy Hospital there could be an 8 but also might be a 3(rd) day of March, 1922 and somehow Social Security decided to use the latter instead of the 8th.  

There ensued a long series of encounters with Social Security which finally led to my repeating "He uses March 8, 1922, but Social Security uses March 3, 1922" to all the pharmacists, doctors, insurers, Medicare Part D providers, and others who inquired about that date.  There are military forms which use the "correct" date.  Someone believed him in 1941 when he enlisted!

That Sunday, we sat in his house on North 533rd Street in Omaha, Nebraska, his home of 48 years at the time.  It was Thanksgiving weekend, and on the recording there are sounds of cooking in the background, pots clinking and muted conversations.  But Dad and I sat at the kitchen table and he answered my questions about what it was like for him during the Depression.  He had an amazing memory and enjoyed telling us about his life.  Some things he repeated often, but some of these things were really facts I could not remember having heard.  So, this was a belated but excellent second chance.

It would be terrific to insert an audio file here, but the media in this little recorder, the kind that reporters used pre-smart phones to catch impromptu questions and answers, is a 64MB SmartMedia or MMCwafer and although I have in the last few days found Switch Sound File Converter and Audacity software (an audio editor and recorder), both free and used them to successfully transfer the recording to a computer, there hasn't been time to master clipping some unrelated discussion.  When I do, I will definitely upload my first audio file to Family Tree Maker, Ancestry and perhaps Fold3.com.  I transcribed it and have inserted some of it here:

Sunday, November 23, 2008, Partial Interview with James A. "Jim" Wilmes

NOTE:  I label this partial because there is a little story of an unfortunate neighbor lady who was murdered and I did not have time to document her story!

Sherry:  Tell us what you remember of the hard times around the Depression.  You were living on North 35th Street?

Jim:  35th and Chicago.  when Dad (Henry J. "Hank" Wilmes) had his garage (Farnam Ford), he could do an overhaul ofr $15 for a transmission.  This was at 29th and Farnam which is npow the Interstate (I-480).

Sherry:  Fords?

All cars.  Fords and idifferent ones.  We had a grocery store called Nelson and Nanufsen (sp?) at 43rd and California Streets and when you walked in there they had things along the walls (bins?) and you could get a pound of coffee and sugar in a glass and they had trucks for deliveries.  When Dad (Hank) would do work on his cars, he (the owner) traded for groceries instead of money.  On Sunday, there was a place (a Chinese or Japanese restaurant?) between 29th and 30th (on Farnam) and he did work on their cars, so about every two weeks we had chicken chowmein (chuckle).  You could get a pound of round steak at Wohlner's Grocery for 39 cents if you had 39 cents (and according to Aunt Joanne, Jim's sister), heart, kidneys and liver were thrown in for free)!

Sherry:  Were you working then?  Did you work s a teenager?

Jim:  In high school.  Well, on Saturday morning I worked at a grocery store at 33rd and Cass for $2 from 6 am to 6 pm.  At 6 pm, I would go to the Boagards' drugstore (across the street) and work until 11 pm for 20 cents an hour  On Sunday, I would go to work from 3 pm to 11 pm on Tuesday and Thursday.

Sherry:  Did you get paid cash?

Jim:  I got a check for it, money (cash) once a week.

Sherry:  Was there anything withheld then, payroll taxes or anything?

Jim:  No.  I quit and I played baseball for one year in high school.

Sherry:  When you got out of high school, you had a hard time finding a job?

Jim:  When I got out of high school (St. Cecelia's Cathedral), I had a hard time finding a job for a couple months so I coached baseball at Cathedral.  There was a fella named Mack McCormack who was the manager of the National Cash Register (later NCR) office here and so I got a job there on September 22, 1941, because I had graduated (he then worked for NCR for 42 years).  After that, on a December Sunday, we were playing football on the grounds at Cathedral School and somebody had an old car there with a radio and they said that Pearl Harbor had been bombed.

Sherry:  So when you worked at the grocery store, were you bagging groceries and at the drug store, were you making sodas and delivering?

Jim:  At the drug store, I was delivering prescriptions and I was a soda jerk.  I could make the best sodas! Vanilla, raspberry, strawberry.  We made small cokes for 5 cents.  Cherry,  Whatever you wanted.  I delivered on a bicycle.  The longest trip I ever had to make was 50th and Underwood (two large hills in that trip).

Sherry:  Who were the customers for the drug store?

Jim:  Oh all kinds of people who would come in for ice cream sodas, malts and sundaes, strawberry, chocolate.

Sherry:  Did the streetcars stop there from downtown Omaha?

Jim:  Yes, then it would turn north and go to North 33rd and Parker.

Sherry:  Did you listen to the radio and the Roosevelt Fireside speeches?

Jim:  Yes the speeches.  When I would come home from school, I would turn on KFAB and they would have the best music you ever heard (Big Band Era hits).  And I used to listen to that.

Jim:  When I enlisted (August 27, 1942), I went to Ft. Crook (Bellevue, NE) and then the same day took a train to Ft. Leavenworth (Kansas) that night, getting in at 2 am.  Some guys had to stay up and do fire patrol.  We got up at 6 am and had breakfast and then got all our new outfits (uniforms), the outfits that we would have for three and a half years.  You could send your civilian clothes home if you wanted to.  Before we left Ft. Crook, they called our folks and told them to come out and bring your necessities.

(interview end)

So, imagine high school freshmen, sophomores and juniors working 19 hours a day Saturdays and then five hours a day on Sunday and twice weeknights from 6 pm to 11 pm!  And, he did it cheerfully and without complaint 75 years later.  Today, of course, most grocery stores don't feature wooden bins for produce; except in major cities, grocery deliveries are not made by bicycle, if at all; and there are probably not many pharmacies that include soda fountains.

I have no photos here in Brooklyn of my father at that age, but in his Omaha house there are several photo albums of many later events as he was a good collector.  Using these "copies of copies" photos of  his sisters, Marjorie and Joanne, I can share my handsome father's world with you.

The first is a picture of his sisters (left to right) Joanne and Marjorie with a neighborhood friend ice skating in Gifford Park in 1939 behind their home.  There is an image in the distance of a car my grandfather Hank might have repaired (perhaps a 1939 Model A Ford like the one he maintained for years, so long that I rode in it as late as approximately 1950-1953). 

Here is an early photo of Dad in his Army Air Corps uniform, probably early 1943.

This photo is from the flightline checking fighter training plane radios at Minter Field, Bakersfield, CA.

A later picture of Dad and Aunt Joanne polishing Hank's car on No. 35th St. while on leave.

At a Los Angeles area military base with his brother John Henry "Jack" Wilmes late in WWII.

So, what is next for my genealogy searches?  First, finish learning the new software to add audio and video files.  And beyond that, Nebraska and Iowa genealogy makes searching for extended family tough. Their documents are rarely digitized, though I understand there are very limited records at the Nebraska Historical Society in Lincoln, NE.  Even the Ancestry.com state records wiki page acknowledges that courthouse by courthouse searches are necessary but records are good quality. District Court clerks are busy and there are no online ordering systems.  Newspaper archives have not been digitized.  Future searches will require library, courthouse and newspaper company office trips.

This brief recording was a discovery to be treasured and preserved.  It generated a busy week searching for strategies for conversion software for audio and photos; retrieving scattered photos; consulting non-traditional sources (such as Omaha's Cathedral High School Alumni Directory 1991, published by Bernard C. Harris Publishing Copany, Inc. White Plains, NY 1990,one of Dad's prized possessions); visiting by phone with Aunt Joanne in Omaha to confirm some details; and, sharing it all with my two sisters.

I could add many more documents, photos and stories and use an updated digital format but the Share A Memory deadline looms today and I would like to share this memory of Dad.  I appreciate the opportunity to do that.  And I appreciate my reliable little Olympus DTS 10, ancient though it may be.