The Year We Were Famous (22 page)

Back in Mica Creek, they were greeted with the news that both Bertha and Johnny had died of diphtheria. Helga went into another of her dismal spells—the worst yet—and the family agreed never to talk about the trip again. Helga and Clara's journals and the letter with the signatures of all the famous people they met along the way were apparently destroyed.

Four years later they lost the farm, but moving to Spokane was not the disaster Helga had predicted. Her husband, Ole, later joined by Arthur (my father's father), started a construction business, which did well enough for the remaining family to have a comfortable home in Spokane. No one starved. Helga continued to demonstrate for women's suffrage and had her first chance to vote in a national election in 1920. She died in 1942.

And what of Clara? A year after the trip, Spokane businesswomen raised money for her to go to business school. After that she disappeared until 1924, when she returned to the family for her brother Arthur's funeral. Although Clara and her surviving brothers and sisters were estranged for many years, they had reconciled by the time I knew them. Clara and her sister Ida lived on the main floor of a large Tudor house in Spokane, and her youngest brother, William, and his wife lived on the top floor. My cousins, sisters, and I looked forward to visits when we could explore the attic and shout important messages into the speaking tube that connected the floors.

In 1950, Aunt Thelma (my father's sister) took me to Sacred Heart Hospital to see Great-Aunt Clara for the last time. Children weren't usually allowed on patient floors in those days,so Aunt Thelma must have convinced the nuns that I was an exceptionally quiet child who absolutely had to see her Great-Aunt Clara again before she died. It's as if my aunt knew that many years later I would want to tell Clara's story and would need a clear memory of her.

Clara is described by other family members as an intelligent, detached observer and a competent businesswoman. She kept her vow never to write about her trip across the country, and as far as I know, she did not publish any writing. She enjoyed writing for her own amusement, though. Several letters she wrote to a niece eighty years ago survive to this day. They are written in verse, sprinkled with fairies and magic.

Helga and Clara inspired me to persevere in my attempts to tell their story even after twenty-nine rejections. I just kept taking classes, writing, and rewriting one word at a time for nearly fifteen years before seeing this book in print. I hope Helga and Clara inspire you, too, to keep on walking in the direction you want to go, one step at a time.

If you picture me writing at a battered desk with nothing but a napping cat for company, you'd be right for ninety-five percent of the time. But it's the other five percent of the time in the real or digital company of editors, teachers, librarians, relatives with stories to tell, other writers, and forthright early readers that is the most important. Here, then, are my five percent people. I'm sorry if I left anyone out—it's been fifteen years since I started the project and my memory is, alas, fallible.

Jennifer Wingertzahn, my acquiring editor at Clarion, who helped me pare 150 pages and find the real story. Dinah Stevenson, publisher at Clarion, who let Jennifer take a chance on me. Daniel Nayeri, who coaxed me into writing a new beginning and fixing the middle and the end. Everyone else at Clarion, including Christine Kettner, Amy Carlisle, and Alison Kerr Miller.

My critique group: Deb Lund, Pamela Greenwood, Penny Holland, and Ruby Tanaka. My favorite teachers: Brenda Guiberson, Janet Lee Carey, Darcy Pattison, and Patricia Lee Gauch. Early readers: my sisters, Rollanda O'Connor and Helen Barr, my daughter, Emily Dagg, and Kaitlin Senter, Bev Katz Rosenbaum, Teresa Gemmer, Kate Snow, and Meg Lippert.

Everyone in the Seattle chapter of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. Candy Moonshower, who nominated me for the Sue Alexander Award, and Sue Alexander, who chose an early version of this book to receive the award. Librarians across the country who scrolled through microfilm of local papers to make copies of articles about Clara and Helga.

Preservers of the family legend: Dorothy and Darryl Bahr, Mary K. Irwin, Aunt Thelma and Uncle Harold, Great-Aunt Margaret, and my parents, Wanda and Rolland Estby.

And, of course, Great-Aunt Clara and Great-Grandmother Helga, who lived the story.