Chapter 2 - Beginnings
Judith Lorraine Mawson (Ridgway) was born on August 15, 1944. Her eighteen-year-old mother, Helen Downing, quietly delivered her at only seven months into the pregnancy, alone, at the St. Helens Hospital in Chehalis, Washington.
During the years flanking Judith’s birth, it seemed the world had gone mad. In 1939 the U.K. and France had declared war on Germany, pressing the start button for World War II. Canada followed suit in September of the same year. 1941 brought a shocking and deadly attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, December 7th. The United States officially declared war on the Empire of Japan December 8, 1941. Just two months prior to Judith’s birth, United States soldiers waded onto the beaches of Normandy, France, under devastating enemy fire. And, like the soldiers in Normandy, Judith’s father was far away from home, a nineteen-year-old soldier himself, battling for America in World War II. American soldiers and their anguished families had no means of predicting that World War II would end in 1945 after the U.S. bomber, Enola Gay, would drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. And they, in their wildest dreams, hadn’t foreseen that the United States would be back at war just five years later in Korea.
Helen did not know the location of Judith’s father when she gave birth to their baby. In fact, as she lay in the hospital bed with no smiling, well-wishing visitors, no flowers, and no gifts, she did not know if Wesley Mawson was living or dead and whether he would ever come home and meet his new daughter. Her chest ached with worry for her new baby and for the life of her lover. Of course she would write him a letter… tell him the good news…it would take weeks to reach him.
What the new, young mother acutely knew as fact was that she had just become the mother of a premature baby girl, that she was not married, and that she had only one living soul to help her survive and to care for the new baby: “Uncle Si.”
Uncle Silas was a man who had executed multiple roles in his life. Had he volunteered for the challenging roles in a benevolent spirit? Or, had he accepted the roles with resentment when they were rudely thrust upon him? The answer is not known. But Uncle Silas, a carpenter and widower with no children of his own, took custody of Judith’s mother, Helen, when she was sent to him at approximately three years of age. Helen’s biological mother had become erotically active by the age of thirteen and was drinking alcohol excessively. She married six times and gave birth to several children. She abandoned Helen to pursue men, and later, committed suicide after four failed attempts. The identity of Helen’s father was unknown, and her maternal grandparents had been killed in a car accident. Uncle Silas was the brother of Helen’s grandfather who had died in the car accident.
Great Uncle Silas became both mother and father to Helen while he worked in his trade as a carpenter. Young Helen and aging Uncle Si lived together near the tiny town of Vader, Washington, in a small, modest home that he had built with his own hands on five and one-half acres of fertile land—land that he had made claim to when he came to the area as one of the early settlers. The simple, square home had no indoor plumbing and no running water, but it was a cozy home and the occupants were mighty thankful to have it.
Vader, Washington, at the time of this writing, has a population of approximately 600; however, the town is considered to be a semi-ghost town. Incorporated in 1906, the town covers a total area of approximately one square mile and is located twenty miles southwest of Chehalis, Washington, along the Interstate-5 corridor that runs north and south in western Washington, on state route 506.
Vader experienced its paramount energy in the early days with a steady, dramatic, decline until present day. The community rose up from nothing in the early 1800’s when settlers arrived from the east. A post office, general store, hotel, and a one-room school gave the town a fresh, new face— a face that would later be blemished by brothels and saloons.
Helen and Uncle Si worked together as a competent team during the years that Helen grew through childhood, adolescence, and then as a young mother. Si’s modest income from his sporadic carpenter jobs and his skills as a handyman supported the basic financial and maintenance needs around the home. A well on the property supplied all of their water. They fed themselves with locally butchered meat and plentiful vegetables that they nurtured each year in their expansive garden. Potatoes served as a major staple for the household as they were easy to grow, easy to dig up in the rich, dark, loamy soil, and they did not require much for preservation—simply a dark, cool, area for storage. It seemed they ate potatoes as a part of every meal. They even ate raw potato wedges for snacks. Fruit trees on the property yielded abundant crops each summer. Helen treasured the once-a-year pleasure of tasting fresh, sun-ripened fruit. Most of the fruit was preserved to last the remainder of the year. It was endless, backbreaking labor for the duo, but somehow they made it work. They had all the basics for survival: water, food, shelter. But most importantly, they had each other.
When Helen was sixteen years old, Uncle Si sent her to work as a riveter at a Boeing airplane factory in nearby Chehalis. It was wartime and the United States needed more airplane riveters just as much as Uncle Si needed more cash. Helen went to work at her first paying job without question, and quietly slipped out of school, never to return.
At seventeen, Helen discovered who her biological father was and that he was living in California—a universe away from Helen’s small world in Vader. Uncle Si encouraged Helen to go meet her father. So, Helen left Uncle Si and the mini-farm in western Washington and courageously went to live with her newly found father who was, in fact, a total stranger to her. During her one-year stay in California, she worked at a purse factory and began a relationship her father. Then, at the end of the year, Helen felt a powerful yearning to go home to Uncle Si. Uncle Si welcomed her back, and the duo picked up where they had left off: working in the yard, tending the garden, hauling water up to the house, chopping wood, and preparing and preserving food.
At eighteen, when Helen realized she was pregnant after getting involved with Wesley Mawson, a handsome, restless, and charismatic young man she had met while hanging out at the local train station (one of the few sources of entertainment in the tiny town). Neither Uncle Si nor Helen had any experience with pregnancies or babies to reference. However, they did not panic. They simply continued moving forward, calmly accepting that they would just figure it out, like everything else they had faced in life. In the meantime, Wesley had already been drafted into service for World War II.
Helen’s pregnancy developed normally while she performed her usual chores with Uncle Si. With no woman available to offer advice and experience about pregnancies and birthing, Helen observed, with fascination and a child-like delight, her belly growing tight and round, and she felt movement from strong kicks by the baby. Once, she exclaimed to Uncle Si, “You know, it’s just like when a calf kicks inside the mother cow…my gosh, it feels like there’s a baby cow inside of me!”
Labor began unexpectedly and early at seven months when Helen slipped and fell over a large rock while crossing a creek near their home. The jolt to her swollen abdomen initiated labor, and the very worried Helen and Uncle Si walked quietly together down their long driveway and then down the first dirt road to neighbors who owned a car. The neighbors drove Helen to the St. Helens Hospital (named for Mt. St. Helens, an active volcano that would violently erupt in 1980) in Chehalis and dropped her off. Uncle Si walked back home to wait for news from the hospital.
Premature baby Judith was born and placed into an incubator. She was tiny but thriving. After sixteen days, Helen and her baby were discharged from the hospital. A staff person at the hospital kindly offered Helen and the baby a ride home. But they were gruffly dropped off at the mouth of Uncle Si’s driveway as the driver did not want to attempt to maneuver the car up the perfidious terrain. Helen, weakened from inactivity for sixteen days, thanked the driver for the ride home and then slowly carried her tiny bundle up the long, nappy driveway and introduced the sleeping baby Judith to Uncle Si.
