Apparently some sort of family reunion took place at Mary's Cafe on Main Street in Center about 1950 or 1951, judging from the size of Lindsay Craig. As usual, I identify people left to right. Here are the Ellingson siblings, Charley, Ole, Mabel Ellingson Stevenson, Oliver, and Everett. Charley and his wife, Mabel (two in the family was confusing), ran a small tavern with a single gas pump at the south end of town and lived in the house catty-cornered from it, south of the courthouse, where my sister and her family have now lived for decades. Ole and his wife had a large general store on the southeast corner of the main intersection, where the post office is now, and lived in the house directly east of it. Charley Stevenson ran the small abstract office next to the old post office, later run by his son, Charles, from whom I borrowed old National Geographics. (Kay Valverde and her daughter, Laura Hintz, run it now.) I think Oliver and Everett were farmers, but my four cousins, for whom Ole was a grandfather, would have to agree with or correct me, just as they would have to identify Oliver's and Everett's wives.
This was obviously to include their spouses. It's Mabel and Charley Ellingson; Mabel Ellingson Stevenson; Ole separated from his second wife, Loova (far to the right); Oliver and his wife; Everett's wife; Mary Ellingson, whose husband Joe, a onetime barber, was dead by this time; Loova, Ole's second wife; and Everett. Mary's Cafe was the town's main social center (I have an earlier entry on it), and I called her my second mother because she helped Dad care for me when we lived at the station and Mom was at Wayne for summer school. She and Mrs. Ernie Sandoz were the only non-children I ever gave May baskets to. One of those May 1sts Mary chased me across the street around Dad's gas pump, caught me, and kissed me soundly. When I gashed my knee open on a broken 7-Up bottle behind Dad's garage, she was the one who staved the blood with a wet towel and soothed me while Dad got the car to take me to Dr. Kohtz's in Bloomfield.
The three cousins here are two of Mary and Joe Ellingson's three daughters, Gladys Covolik and Mae Bogner, with one of Charley and Mabel Ellingson Stevenson's twins, Charles, who later took over his dad's abstract business. He remained a lifelong bachelor and was good friends with another lifelong Center bachelor, Ora J. Ballard. They drank together down at Charley and Mabel's little tavern, though Ora had other interests like ham radio, the TV line he and Dad rigged up for our first decent reception. Women found Charles charming, albeit an alcoholic, and pursued him, so he had occasional affairs; but the bitter joke was that he already had a family to support, his twin's family, John a brutally vicious alcoholic. Luckily, John was usually in the military miles away. But we always knew when John was in town, when Charles--and sometimes his parents--had a black eye, a split lip, a pained limp. That's Lindsay looking up at the three and, I suspect, a Bogner girl. Dad's single pump and part of the station are in the background, the original wooden garage at the left (north) of that gone. I often value old photos for their backgrounds, as with the last photo, of Lindsay Craig, showing the parts hallway and Dad's garage running to the right of his station in the background directly across from Mary's Cafe.
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