By Imagene Fidler
Our mother, Martha Helen WRIGHT met Claude E DAVIS when I was around 4 years old. We
were living near Marysville, California at the time, in a trailer camp of some kind. Claude was on
the police force. What his position was, I don't know. (He still has his pistol, badge, ect; he likes
to show his close friends.) But he first met our mother while she was sitting on a curb of a
sidewalk. She was real worried over something that had to do with her car I believe it was.
Anyway, there she sat, her head in her hands, tears running down her cheeks, and ants crawling all
over her arms and legs. Claude didn't know whether to arrest her, or buy her a cup of coffee.
Claude must have been in the Police reserve or some such organization, because he did other
work as well. Besides running a ranch he owned at Live Oak, he was also helping out on a friend's
walnut orchard. This was the first time I remember seeing him. One of our relatives pointed him
out to me while we took our walnuts up to the scales to be weighed. He was working up near the
scales and was one of the bosses who wrote down our names, the amount we brought in to be
weighed, etc; I remember feeling very uncomfortable while he kept glancing at me between sacks
of nuts being weighed!
Then the next time I saw Claude, was when we were living with Grandma WRIGHT in
Phoenix, Arizona, (out by the roundhouse). We were doing some yard work, when this man
walked up to the gate. Mom let out a scream that liked to scare the daylights out of me, she ran
up to this man, threw her arms around his neck, and kissed him. The "man" turned out to be the
only father I ever remember having! (Mom caused my own father, Jim ROSS, to leave when I was
6 months old, so naturally I don't remember at all). Anyway, Mom and Claude were married soon
after, and our first home was a real nice adobe house out in Glendale, Arizona. I remember a lot
of incidents here.
Claude was gourd by a steer. It wasn't real bad, but it sure scared me! And I remember admiring
him for getting right back into the corral again. We had a large swimming pool. Actually it was a
wooden tank that held water for irrigation, but we called it our "swimming pool," and it was years
and years later before I knew what a real swimming pool even looked like! This was the first time
I knew Mom could swim. She and Claude let Bobby and I float around a ladder while they swam
close-by.
Also, there was a garden off to the left of the house, and one day while gathering some radishes
for dinner, I found a little baby cotton-tail rabbit. I got to keep it for awhile, but one day I caught
Claude bashing the rabbit's head against the stump. Ha, there was quite a sceme over that let me
tell you, but Claude managed to convince me that the rabbot was about to die anyway, was on it's
death-bed as a matter of fact, and I cheered up (but refused to eat any of it for dinner!!)
Our next house was one built up on stilts, along the San Juaquine River. Claude was a foreman
on some ranch then, and during round-up time, he rode along side of the town's sheriff, Clyde
McDonald. ( I remember feeling very proud of this fact!)
And, once I remember after Mom shot a rattle-snake, missing several times before she finally
got it in the neck, the snake crawled under the house and died. But it smelled so bad, we just had
to move out of that house. Claude homesteaded 140 acres just 3 or 4 hills over from where we
were, and that was the last home I remember living in. Eddie, it was the home you came to when
you made your entrance into the world. It was at one time, a stop-over for sheep herders! It had a
cement floor, and some old weather worn boards for walls, but it was still a lot nicer than the
other old houses! I remember the room we children slept in, had a whole wall of old-time
refrigerator doors. And you could even open each and every one of them to serve as a window. (I
guess ice- boxes would have been the better word to use rather than refrigerator, because they
were made out of dark-brown wood.
Claude really worked on this place of his tho. After he repaired all the leaks in the house, he
busied himself building a barn, and corral. Then he bought a milk cow, taught me how to milk,
and that became more or less my job. Then he put in a small orchard, and a garden. He even dug a well by himself using dynamite too! Then Claude began gathering up wild stallions, and he broke a couple of them. Somehow, he was thrown off, and the horse came back and trampled on him. He was laid up in the hospital for about 6 months over this.
Besidess being a foreman on that ranch, Claude also did government trapping on the side! He
taught me how to skin mountain lions, coyotes, etc (I'm not the type for all of this knowledge
either, but he taught me how to do these things, and I've never forgotten). He used to bring fresh
game home every day for our meals. We ate cotton-tails, quails, tree squirrels, venison, wild
turkey, and even a porky-pine. These are the happiest days I can remember in my childhood. I'll
always remember the years we lived in Arizona. Now that I'm older, I realize that it must not have
been a very good time for Mom. Because she had no electricity, no plumbing facilities or any of
the other modern conveniences as did the distant neighbors. But then, I don't recall her having
much more of these things before she married Claude.
Mom finally became restless, and her sister and children came out to visit us, this more or less
"triggered" her, and when you were 3 weeks old, we left Claude, and came back to California. A
few months later mom went back to Arizona, and talked Claude into giving everything up and
come out here. Things were never the same tho. We lived for awhile in Magalia, then in Sutter
County, then over on the coast somewhere above Eureka. Mostly Mom stayed in and around
Oroville. I guess it was because her mother and sister lived in Palermo, and she didn't want to
venture too far away from home again...By this time Claude and mom were fighting quite a bit
and had split up several times.
I sort of think he just gave up. He finally just walked away and we never heard from him again
until I looked him up some 6 or 7 years ago. He might have felt like a failure or something, I don't
know. After all, he did give up his first group of children, when he married mom. He always
spoke of these children tho, and I became so familiar with them, that when I met some of them, it
was like I had always known them. He was very proud of these other kids of his, (and I'm sure he
would have felt the same towards you, Deena and Dotty if Mom had given him the chance.)
=================================================================
-1HUSBAND - CLAUDE ELZA DAVIS-4-0
Other marriages:
MRIN: 2
MABLE CLAIRE DOCKERTY-302 MRIN: 47
-1WIFE - SERENA NICHOLS HANCOCK-281-0
-1CHILD 1 - WILLIAM CLAUDE DAVIS-282-0
-1CHILD 2 - MARTHA JEAN DAVIS-283-0
-1CHILD 3 - ROBERT ALVIN DAVIS-284-0
-1CHILD 4 - JACQULINE RUTH DAVIS-285-0
-1CHILD 5 - RICHARD PAUL DAVIS-286-0
-1CHILD 6 - JAMES LEONARD DAVIS-287-0
-1CHILD 7 - HARRIET LOUISE DAVIS-288-0
-1CHILD 8 - CLARENCE MANUEL DAVIS-289-0
-1CHILD 9 - CHARLES NORMAN DAVIS-290-0
-1CHILD 10 - EARLEEN ROSE DAVIS-291-0
=================================================================
WIFE - MARTHA HELEN WRIGHT-5
Other marriages/relationships:
1935 JAMES ROSS
Abt 1937 FRITZ SCHROEDER-294 MRIN: 44
1946 CLAUDE ELZA DAVIS-4 MRIN: 2
1953 MAXWELL EVANS-298 MRIN: 45
1954 SANTANA MEJIA-300 MRIN: 46
=================================================================
Still under construction