Grace Edwards (1904-1993) (52 Ancestors 2020 Week 19) Theme: "Service"

Grace (Edwards) and Floyd McBride in their Service Station Coffee Shop
Moses Lake, Washington, 1940

A service station featured prominently in the life of one family member and her husband. Grace was my Grandma Della's youngest sister, born to Charles F. Edwards and Mary Jane "Mayme" (Wescott) Edwards on 19 November 1904 in Great Falls, Montana.

It is so disappointing that we cannot see additional views of the cafe in the above picture since there was apparently one feature that was at one time the talk of the town in Moses Lake. Here is Grace's nephew John Edwards' description, transcribed from his audio recording (see Resources below to find a link to listen to John tell it in his own voice):

"That little coffee shop and restaurant that my Aunt Grace and Uncle Floyd had in Moses Lake was an interesting place. . . .

When Grace and Floyd built that restaurant there, the state told her they had to have two bathrooms, they couldn’t have one. They had to have a men’s and a women’s. So what she had was two doors a ways apart, one was women’s and one was men’s. They both went into the same bathroom! It was the talk of the town! The state never caught on. They were pioneers in their day. That was true grit, if there ever was. 

I loved my Aunt Grace. She was my favorite aunt." 

Before returning to more of John's memories, we will visit Grace's life story that led to that service station in Moses Lake.

Grace's older sister Marion recalled in her memoirs that the family had quite a comfortable life in Great Falls, Montana, where Grace was born. Father Charles had good employment with the railroad and they had a nice home right across from Longfellow School. The merry-go-round that Charles built them in their back yard was well used by all the school children. Railway passes enabled regular visits to Mayme's family back in Wisconsin. Mayme, an excellent seamstress, ensured that they were always well dressed.

Grace Edwards 1906

Despite this comfort, when Grace was about 4 years old Charles decided to move his family to a  fruit farm 12 miles from Kalispell near Lake Blaine. Charles seemed to be forever on the move, looking for yet another opportunity, but never quite finding that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The 1910 American census finds young Grace, age 5 living with her family at Jocko, Flathead, Montana. Cayuse Prairie School was 3 miles away. By the time Grace started school, it was no longer a matter of simply crossing the street!

When freight rates made the fruit farm uneconomic, Charles went back to work for the Great Northern Railroad. A strike in 1914 left him unemployed, so he went to Canada to work for the CPR and then took out a homestead on some rather poor farmland. The 1921 Canadian census for the family at Miry Creek, Maple Creek, Saskatchewan includes 15 year-old Grace, a student. This was NOT a particularly luxurious life for the family.

Christmas 1921 at the Charles Edwards Saskatchewan Homestead
Grace is on the right, next to her mother Mayme

Within a few months of the above picture, their farm house burned to the ground, including paintings and sketches by Charles Russell, the Montana artist who had been a friend back in Great Falls. Charles gave up on his Saskatchewan homestead and moved back to work on the railroad in the United States.

Grace first married Clark Robbins and settled in Birmingham, Oakland, Michigan, where a 1925 City Directory has them listed at 616 Ann. This marriage was not destined to last; after her divorce from Clark, she married Floyd Marshall McBride on 8 June 1931 in Ferndale, Michigan. Floyd was listed as an insurance agent at the time of the 1930 U.S. census.

Grace was always beautifully turned out!

Grace's mother Mayme had died suddenly in 1926, leaving the family bereft. Her father Charles had received a railroad pension after losing a leg in a switching accident, enabling him to buy property in the area of Castle Rock, Washington. By the early 1930s, hearing of plans to build Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River in Washington, Charles had sold the Castle Rock property and built a service station near the dam site.

Charles and his son Everett operated that service station at the dam site until he sold that in about 1939 to help Grace and Floyd get established in Moses Lake, Washington with their own service station (pictured at the top of this story).

Grace and Floyd raised a family of two; Grace gave up the cafe to stay at home with her children. Their son says that when Floyd first opened his service station, he drove his car to Spokane and sold it to generate enough funds for an air compressor and other equipment for the new service station - and a bus ticket back to Moses Lake!

January 1947 - Family Gathering with Floyd and Grace standing center 

Grace's nephew John Edwards (smiling in the center of the above photo, seated at the table on his father's knee) recounts the events that occurred at the service station restaurant one very memorable December during his childhood. The following is a transcription from an audio recording made by John in  2019:

"I think it was the winter of ‘45, I’m not sure. All the winters - that area was extreme in its climate at that time. It was triple digits in the summer and it was below zero in the winter and blizzards and it was just a miserable place to live. It’s amazing that a jackrabbit could survive out there. But Grace and Floyd ran that little café. He had a little bulk plant back in behind there. . . .

It was winter and they were all gathered there celebrating, I guess, the upcoming Christmas and singing songs. My uncle Everett there, my Dad’s brother, he was D.O.A. That doesn’t mean dead on arrival; it means drunk on arrival. Which was not unusual for Everett or anybody else in those days, I guess. Every deal was done on a handshake and a drink. It was kind of interesting. As a little kid I didn’t realize that that was inappropriate. I would have been 5 years old.

I think it was the winter of ‘45. This blizzard had been blowing all night. There was hardly anybody coming through town at all. The snow was so deep everybody had chains on and then this one car had come over from Seattle all the way through the Snoqualmie Pass, in those days nothing like it is today, a little two-lane road that was paved in places only. Most of it was gravel. It was a horrible time getting through. We had this car that came through and stopped there at Grace’s café. It was a 1940 Plymouth business coupe. And a very polite young man got out of that and he was just beat and bedraggled. It had been a heck of a trip! His fenders were all beat up in the back from those chains. He came in just frozen. He had run out of money - and everything else. . . .

They were all gathered around in there. Everett had a collection of harmonicas; I think he probably had those the day he died, all colors, all different kinds of harmonicas. He was a genius on a harmonica. Oh, he could play good! Dad had his guitar. They were in there singing Christmas songs.

This gentleman came in all bedraggled and broke and didn’t know what he was going to do. They invited him in and Grace made him a sandwich of some kind and they all kept singing and Dad was playing his guitar and Everett the harmonica.

This little fellow said “I have a little tenor guitar out in my car. Let me go get it.” Dad said sure we’ll wait and he went out and came in with this little tenor guitar. . . . They struck up again and started singing.

And this gentleman started singing with them and, all of a sudden, they just all stopped singing. And it was Bing Crosby! They’d all heard him on the radio but they had never seen him before. They were just thrilled to death!

He was the guest of the evening. He was fed and I think they sang songs all night down there. I fell asleep over in a corner there somewhere, as a kid. . . .

In the morning Bing wanted to know if there was anyplace in town where he could maybe hawk his little 4 string guitar to get enough money to get on into Spokane - that’s where he lived. Chris the barber had a place down there on East Broadway. . . . He was the one who had the pawn business. And so Bing got on down there; they gave him a couple of bucks to get down there. They’d had a road grader come through and knocked some of the worst snow back where you could get going again.

Chris was so excited when he found out who he was! He wrote him a pawn ticket for it but he had one of the - Parker had just come out with the roller pens  to write with instead of  the regular fountain pen and it went down a lot nicer - and he had Bing sign his guitar and put the date on it and everything and he said this will always be here. He said, "If you can’t pick up your pawn ticket that’s fine. But I will have this guitar until the day I die. I’m not going to sell your guitar." . . .

I think he loaned Bing $20 which in those days was one heck of a lot of money, and that’s what he paid for the little 4 string guitar.

 Bing made it, I guess, on in to Spokane.  . . . But I think Chris had that guitar still when he died."

Grace (Edwards) McBride c1964

Grace's son recalls that the family lived for awhile at the service station in the part that had been the cafe. The McBrides built a new service station on the same location in the mid-1950s and eventually sold out to retire in 1973.

Grace and Floyd at the time of their 50th wedding anniversary party

Floyd died in Moses Lake, Washington in 1992 and Grace joined him the following year.

End note: 

In fairness, but not wanting to ruin the hilarious story of the deceptive bathroom doors recalled above by John Edwards, it should be reported that Grace's son recalls there actually being two bathrooms at one point but with the dividing wall not providing much privacy! Perhaps the authorities did catch Grace out in the end?

Resources:

• Edwards, John; Audio recording made in 2019 detailing some of his memories of his Aunt Grace's service station cafe, can be listened to in its entirety in the Memories section for Grace Edwards on the Familysearch.org website at: https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/memories/LCRN-S58
• Miller, Marion Frances Edwards; My Memories, personal memoir written for her family in January 1978 from her home at 5405 Union Street, Lexington, Michigan