Early Pictures of Douglas (Grandpa) with His Grandpa

These drawings were done by my father many years ago. These are just a few and I hope you enjoy them.

Douglas Prickett, His Memoirs - 18 December, 1995

Recently I turned 80 years old.  Ever since, I found myself reflecting on the past.  I don't know if that is good or bad but I find it entertaining.  Because all of my memories seem to be good ones.  I am SO lucky to have been born in 1915.  What a great time to grow up.  If I could have picked the time period I could not have made a better choice.  The 20's, 30's and 40's were the best time in history in my opinion and I attribute much, maybe most of it to the music of that era which we were privileged to grow up with.  Those songs are still around today.  At least they can still be found if one is interested.  How many songs being written today will we still be humming in 2045?  ALL of my life has been good though, and I don't think I would ever change any part of it.  I never made much money and I never accomplished much but I could die a happy man any time, whenever they are ready for me up there.  I never set my sights too high.  For me, just not being unhappy is enough to make me happy. 
I am proud of the pioneer stock I come from.  My orphan grandfather came across the prairies in a covered wagon after he grew up and married.  They had seven children, all born in different parts of Nebraska, so it must have taken years to find the spot he was looking for.  When he did, this orphan boy raised pure bred cattle and became well off and well known.  According to the archives, my grandfather on the other side was a bugler with the 8th Illinois Cavalry, and he was chosen to play Taps at Gettysburgh when Lincoln gave his address.  These are my only claims to fame and I had nothing to do with any of it, but I am proud of my heritage and I feel compelled to say so here in my memoirs. 

I am also very proud of my children, my grandchildren, and my great grandchildren.  All of them have been and are good, worthwhile people.  Many people may have similar or better or more exciting memoirs, but these are mine.  I may ramble or jump around a lot as I am jotting these things down but I am just saying them as they come to mind.  For instance, I have a class picture of the 3rd grade room at Sheridan School and I don't know who all the people are.  There is no one I can ask either, because so many of them are dead. 

In the 6th grade I discovered girls.  There was this one in particular who I was attracted to and as it turned out she liked me too.  Now I am getting back to the music of the times as she asked me what my favorite song was.  I liked all the music and didn't have one, but hers was "Little White Lies."  That was 1928.  That song is stull around.  I hear it every day on KABL 960 on the AM dial (San Francisco).  When I married Dorothy Althen in 1937 the most popular song was "Nice Work if You Can Get It."  That song is still here too.  Cybill Shepherd uses it as her theme song on her TV show.  We listened to it on the car radio on our honeymoon.  Yes, we had car radios in 1937 but if you parked and tried to listen to it without the motor running for any length of time the battery went dead and you might have to push the car to get it started.  These radios had tubes which took a lot of juice.  Today's radios have transmittors which take very little.

The name "Prickett" is not common and if most people had a choice it is not the one they would choose.  But, according to records I have seen, the first ones came to America in 1610 from England.  I don't know how far back the name goes in England.  The other side is harder to trace because of the grandfather who was an orphan.  His father was John Howard and mother's name was O'Neal, but we never learned her first name.  Both were Irish immigrants and were not married so the baby was out into an orphan home.  This was in New York City in the 1850's.  There were so many of these orphan kids who nobody wanted that an "Orphan Train" was started in order to try and get rid of some of them.  Grandpa was one of them. 

The train traveled west and stopped at every small town and farming community to try to get somebody to adopt these kids.  Grandpa was "adopted" by a family named "Wood" and he became Charles Wilson Wood.  By the time he was 16 he realized he was not really one of the family, but more of an indentured servant, so he "got the hell out."  My mother, who was the number 3 child was born in 1877 and by the time she was 8 her mother died and grandpa was left with 7 kids to raise by himself.  He shipped 2 of them back to Huntley, IL to relatives who lived on a farm near there.  I don't know how he decided which ones to get rid of. 

My mother was Alice Wood and her sister's name was Flora.  Anyway she grew up there and in 1899 she married my dad, Guy Prickett.  Dad was born in Crystal Lake, IL where they lived for many years.  I was born there on Dec. 13, 1915 and the family moved back to Elgin in 1918, just befire I was 3.  I grew up there, went to Sheridan School and Elgin High School class of 1934.  It was a good place to grow up and as I think back it was a good, safe, clean town where any one could walk around any time of day or night and know they were safe.  I worked at the Elgin Post Office for 22 years, until I got tired of Illinois winters and decided that if I was going to do that kind of work until I retired I had better go someplace warmer, so we came to California in 1969.  It always seemed like it was a good move.

One reason I threw in a little family history along with memories of my youth and childhood is so that if my grandchildren ever want to know anything about who they are or where we all came from this is what I know about it.  Most young people don't concern themselves with such mundane things as family trees but sometimes they do when they get older.  As far as I know there were no black sheep and we can all be proud of who we are. 

Doug Prickett (Grandpa) 1978

Doug and Dorothy Prickett

3 January, 1996 Part II

Octogenarian....

At least that’s what I think I am, although the name sounds something like a cross between a creature with eight arms and one which doesn’t eat meat.  Some of these stories are my own memories from my youth and childhood and some must have been told to me by some of my siblings, of which I had four.  I have one left.  All of them were older than I.  All of them were evenly spaced, two years apart, beginning with my sister Ruth, born in 1900.  Until my arrival in 1915, almost nine years behind Warren, the next youngest, who may have been the last on they (my folks) intended to have.  All of which led me to believe, after I grew older and was old enough to think, that my being here was maybe not 100% intentional on their part (my folks).  Also, since they only had the one girl, I think they might have wished for a girl when I arrived by mistake.  The reason I think this is because my mother always arranged my hair in Shirley Temple curls.  Of course Shirley had not yet made the scene but that’s the kind of curls I had.  My dad was a pretty good photographer and he used me as his subject a lot.  I still have some of these pictures and I must admit I was quite adorable.  I was ashamed of those pictures when I was young but now I am not and I show them freely.  My grandsons look at them in awe, not really believing it’s their grandpa.  The curls only lasted till we moved to Elgin in 1918 a month before I was 3.  I guess I had a regular cut by that time as I can’t remember anyone pulling my curls or making fun of me.

We were the 5 children of Guy Prickett and Alice Wood.  They were married March 29, 1899 on the farm near Huntley, IL where my mother lived with the Andrus family after she and her sister Flora were sent after the death of their mother when Mom was 8.  Their children were Ruth, born in 1900, Kenneth, two years later, Gordon, two more years later, Warren, another two years, and then Douglas, yours truly, almost 9 years after Warren.  By the time I was a teenager I was the only one left at home and I felt like I was growing up as an only child.  This was not all that bad as I had things pretty much my own way.  But none of them moved away and I saw them all the time. 

My dad never liked working for someone else.  He tried all kinds of things on his own and not all of them were successful.  He started as a carpenter when we lived in Crystal Lake, IL and he built many houses there, most of them by himself.  Most of them are still standing.  He built them to last.  One he built in the winter time and he built it on blocks.  When the ground thawed in the spring he dug the basement.  One man, one shovel, he dug the entire basement under a house that took all winter to build.  Life must have been hard in the olden days.  This is the kind of stock I am descended from but none of it seems to have rubbed off onto me.  Later he had the brainstorm of opening the first movie house in Crystal Lake.  He built the movie right downtown and a large apartment over it.  That apartment is where I was born on Dec. 13, 1915. 

The “Crystal Theatre.”

Last time I saw it, it was a Walgreen Drug Store.  But then World War I came along and the crowds who frequented the only movie in the area left and went over to Woodstock to work in the Underwood typewriter plant and Dad lost his shirt.  He raised the floor level and converted the building into a grocery store.  The people traded with him a little bit but had established credit at the other grocery store in town and Dad was in no position to offer credit.  So he lost his shirt again.  He went back to carpentry and got a job with Rinehimer woodworking shop on Kimball St. in Elgin.

By this time he had accrued so many bills that his wages were being garnished by his creditors and he quit.  His older brother helped him get started in the bakery business he knew nothing about.  This was at 600 E. Chicago St at the corner of Liberty.  This was 1920 and I was five years old.  We lived in a rented house at 484 Addison St.  We lived there till I was 17. In the meantime Dad had bought the lot next door and built a building on it which he then moved the bakery into.  Business was great for a few years and then the “Great Depression” of 1929 when the bottom fell out of the stock market and people lost everything.  Many committed suicide.  Dad’s customers came from all over town and beyond, but now they could no longer afford to drive their cars to an outlying bakery, so they shopped downtown where they could get to on the streetcar.  So Dad lost his shirt again and still he was able to find an empty building downtown at 169 Milwaukee St., now known as E. Highland Ave.  Some of us brothers worked at the bakery, including myself. 

World War II came and they tried to draft me but I was too skinny and they wouldn’t take me.  I didn’t think I was that skinny but they thought I was probably sickly.  I wasn’t sick and I never have been.  By then I had been married for several years and our son John was on the way so I stayed home and took care of them.  When Dad was 71 he had a stroke.  He died at 73.  He had sold the bakery and I got a job at Illinois Tool Works.  I had to work nights and didn’t like it, so I quit and went to work at the watch factory where I could work days.  This was close, fine work and I didn’t really like it and when I got a chance to get into the post office I took it.  This became my career.  Between Elgin and Redwood City, California, I racked up 33 years in the postal service; 28 as a carrier, five as a clerk. 

It was during the period in which I worked at IL Tool Works that our daughter Pat was born, just about 34 months after John.  He was born during WWII and she just after the war ended.  Even with a secure civil service job at Elgin post office it was necessary to work part time somewhere else to make ends meet as none of my jobs paid outstanding wages.  Dorothy stayed home and took care of the kids and I was always somewhere working.  But with two small kids in the house, Pat the baby and John almost three, working nights and sleeping days was just an impossible situation.  That’s when I quit ITW and went to work in the watch factory.  And that is the only time in my life that I was out of work. 

I applied at the watch factory but they wouldn’t hire anyone who was already employed.  So I quit one job and went over to the next one, a matter of just hours.  And that was my brief stint at unemployment.  I am not taking credit for anything except just being lucky.  When I took the exam to get into the post office I had one more hurdle.  I was so underweight they didn’t want to hire me. 

That old bugaboo again. 

I ate bananas and drank chocolate malts till I felt sick and managed to tip the scales at 125, the minimum weight requirement, which they don’t even have any more.  But this was 1949 and a carrier had to be sturdy enough to carry a 50 pound sack of mail on his shoulder and walk a 7 mile route every day no matter what the weather.  We had big green storage boxes strategically placed so that when the 50 pounds we started with was gone, there was a box with another 50 pounds waiting for us.  Sometimes in winter the locks would be frozen and we had to blow our hot breath into the lock to thaw the ice.  Either that or use a match or cigarette lighter.  This went on until the last relay was delivered and then we went back to the P.O.  Some guys went back in by bus and if you missed it you waited for the next one no matter if it was 20 below zero.  That was worse than carrying the heavy loads all day.  When I finally got my own route, which you could only get if someone retired or died, it was starting at the P.O. and the first stop was Waite Allanson Funeral Parlor.  One of the employees fancied himself a comedian and took my measurements with a tape measure every day.  I told him I wasn’t ready yet and he said they could wait.  I think he was older than I was and I’ll bet he didn’t wait after all. 

My route went up Center St. to River Bluff Rd. and then back to Prospect to Cherry St., covering all the side streets between Center and St. John Street.  From Cherry I had to “dead head” all the way back to the P.O. and do it all over again the next day.  This was just the route time.  We had to go to work every morning at 6 A.M. and route the mail into sequence to be delivered.  This usually took about 3 hours.  I had the same route for 15 years.  When I transferred to Redwood City, CA, I had another route which I kept all the while that I carried.  So in 33 years, I had a total of 2 routes.     

3 January, 1996

My Memoirs by Douglas Prickett, Recent Octogenarian, A Sequel

I say a sequel instead of The Sequel because there might be more.  There are those who think I could be making too big a deal out of it.  Big deal, they say.  People become 80 years old every day.  Well, not I.  This is my first time so indulge me a little.  Oh, I’ve come close a couple of time, like 78, then one time I made 79, but the big EIGHT-OH is something very new to me and there have been a couple of times when it didn’t seem like it was an attainable goal.  If I don’t write my memoirs now, when will I?  Maybe this is not all that important that I even do it, but what else do I have to do?

Some of this stuff is what I remember and some is a little family history, as much as I have been able to gather from various sources. 

On Christmas Day I talked to both of my grandsons and both indicated that they did, in fact, have an interest in their family history and also their ethnic backgrounds.  I can help them a little as far as my side and their grandmother’s side.  My mother was strictly of Irish extraction, my father’s family came from England.  But all of this was many generations ago and the blood has been through many mixtures but I think it didn’t stray far from the English-Irish mix.  These were my grandson’s great-grandparents on my side.  Their grandmother, whom I married on Nov. 28, 1937, is of German and French extraction; German on her mother’s side (Dettman), and French on her father’s (Althen).  The name doesn’t sound too French but they claim French blood.  Now the grandsons have to go to their mother’s side.  Stewart is a Scottish name and Holtz sounds German to me.  So I’ll bet they have more Anglo-Saxon blood then any other one strain. 

Now the boys are married -one to a girl of Polish-German heritage, and one to a girl of Italian-Swedish extraction.  This should add a little spice to the mix.  I think we are ALL real Americanos.  Mix ‘em up, that’s what this country is all about.  Actually, I think Althen, Grandma Prickett’s maiden name, is more rare than Prickett.  Any Althens I know are Grandma’s own brothers.  There are Pricketts in almost every state and every foreign country, but mostly in English speaking countries, including Australia and New Zealand.  I already touched on some family history but I only hit the high spots.  There is more and I’ll go into that at a later time if anyone is still listening. 

Grandma Dorothy