Rose and Claude Bates: "Simply" Extraordinary

It's January 31st for a few more hours, and before this day turns into February I need to say Happy Birthday to my grandma Rose Bates who would be 119 years old today. Though Rose died in 1960 when I was only 12, she was a big influence on who I became as a person. It seems that I talk a lot about those who have gone before me, but as I get older and hopefully wiser, I feel the need to say "thank you" to them and to what they taught me about being a member of the human family.

Rose's mother, Mary, died at the age of 24 of "consumption" when Rose was only 4 years old, leaving her husband, Edmond, and three small children. Though Edmond remarried a young widow three years later, and soon after loaded the family into a covered wagon and moved to northern Wyoming from Indiana, it was as if Rose and her older brother Leo and younger sister Annie became a burden to their father and his new wife. In the 1900 census records of Sheridan County, Wyoming, Rose is listed as a "servant" as the ripe age of 10 for a family living in the area. Her father and his second wife, Melissa, had two daughters, the second born in the cold wintry month of February, 1901. Melissa died in childbirth, but the new little daughter survived, and Rose returned home to care for the family at age 11.

Mom told me that Grandma was only able to attend school through the fourth grade because in order to go at all she had to take her baby half-sisters along too, which wasn't the easiest thing to do. Rose cooked and cleaned and ran the household for three years until January 1904 when an itinerant priest urged her father Edmond to send all the children to the South Dakota Children's Home Society in Sioux Falls for adoption. Of course by this time Rose was considered too old to be adopted out, but again she was sent to various households to be a servant or live-in nanny, as was her sister Annie. Her two half-sisters, being much younger were adopted almost immediately, and she lost touch with them for many, many years. Her older brother, Leo, just ran away from the orphanage and made his way back to Sheridan to again live with his father.

Though I don't know all the circumstances, I do know that Rose was diagnosed with tubucular glands in her neck, and probably through the orphanage, she was sent to the Mayo Clinic in the fall of 1905 for surgery. Dr. Charles Mayo was the surgeon, and she was allowed to stay at the convent of the sisters who ran St. Mary's Hospital there until she was totally recovered. She helped the sisters with cleaning or any other jobs she was able to do to help out.

In the 1910 Census Rose was listed as once again living in Sheridan, Wyoming, but in May of the same year she was back at the Mayo Clinic having more tubucular glands on the other side of her neck removed. My Mom said Grandma had a scar that almost encircled her neck from the two operations, and tried to always wear clothing that covered it.

Rose met my Grandpa, Claude Bates, in Sheridan in 1912, and they married at Holy Name Catholic Church there in March, 1913, a mere two weeks after Claude was baptized into the Church. Claude was born on the boundary line of Missouri and Arkansas and his mother was very against him marrying a Catholic. She promised him a trip around the world if he would give up Rose, but instead he and Rose married and stayed married for 47 years until her death.

They homesteaded on a piece of land in Clearmont, Wyoming, where they made a barn into a house where they raised three boys and three girls. Grandpa was a blacksmith who fed his family through the Depression by sharpening plowshares and shoeing horses for farmers in return for beans or flour or beef. Shoes and clothes were hard to come by, but as my Mom got older toward the end of her life, she would talk about those days as being the happiest of her life.

When all the kids were married except the youngest, Aunt Thelma, World War II started and Grandpa and Grandma packed everything up in their old car and moved first to Boston to work in the shipyards there, and then later to Oakland, California. Grandpa's welding skills were put to work on Navy ships for several years. Some time later when he was visiting some of his children who settled in California, his blacksmithing expertise came in handy when Knottsberry Farm was being built in southern California. He was one of the technical advisors in building the true-to-life blacksmith shop there.

Grandma Rose and Grandpa Claude Bates. What a legacy of hard work and quiet determination and love of family they left us. Happy 119th Birthday, Grandma Rose!