William Sterling Blattman (1914-1989)
From Blattman genealogy
| William Sterling Blattman (1914-1989) | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | May 1, 1914 Ocate (Naranjos),Mora County,New Mexico |
| Died | April 16, 1989 Show Low, Navajo County, Arizona |
| Father | Thomas Blattman |
| Mother | Leila Beatrice Carr |
| Wife | Ethel Lewis |
| Children | Daughter Daughter Daughter Son Daughter Daughter |
William Sterling Blattman was a surveyor who moved often as the job required. Bill was known for his dry wit, vast knowledge and teasing his grandchildren. Bill married Ethel Lewis in 1940 and together they had six children.
Contents |
Early Life
"On May 1, 1914, along with a heavy snowfall, I arrived, somewhat early, to the chagrin of the doctor who had to drive 20 miles in a buggy [only to find that the baby had already been delivered.]"[1]
So wrote William Sterling Blattman about stories he had heard of his own birth. He was the first child born to Leila Beatrice Carr and Thomas Blattman.
Their first born child was named William Sterling after Lelia's father, William Spencer Carr. William Sterling gave his son, James Elliot a green leather bound drafting set that had belonged to William Spencer Carr. William Sterling was always called simply "Sterling" by his mother.
Life on the Ranch
Sterling tells of his grandfather's ranch:
"My grandfather, Charles Elliot Blattman, had built the ranch up from a small herd of sheep to one of the largest in New Mexico. The head quarters ranch where I was born and where I spent the next few years was a wonderful place for a boy; with several barns, corrals, two big apple orchards, ponds, bunkhouses, general store and lots of horses.[1] There were two bunk houses and a ranch house. A ranch house was a very large affair with a long adobe building that had about eight rooms in it and another building, and another building beyond that. One of these had a music room, a cold parlor, and a hitching room over a dug-out. Yet with all of this it was called 'the ranch house.' There were stores and dogs, rifles and horses everywhere.[2]
"About 1917 we moved to the east end of the ranch at Levy, where Dad had built a ranch spread, near the shearing sheds and dipping vats of the main ranch."[1]
Here their third child, Alice was born in 1918.
Mother and Dad were divorced in 1920 and he [Thomas] left the ranch. [Running the ranch at Levy] proved too much for mother and three little kids to handle even with a sharecropper doing the farming. The sheep and cattle had nearly all belonged to Granddad."[1]
William Sterling once told his son, James Elliot that his father or grandfather joined one of the traveling Buffalo Bill Wild West shows that were popular at the time. James also heard that Thomas went to California during this time. It is interesting that although Lelia was from the city, she stayed and tried for a time to make a go at farming. Later, the children lived on the ranch while she taught school in Denver and nearby communities.
Sterling describes his life on the ranch,
"I learned to ride before I learned to walk with all the cow punchers and sheepherders all over the place to care for me as a small child. All and all it was a good place to grow. The first thing I remember as a kid was a pack of greyhounds. That greyhound pack and I were inseparable. We had an old Buick touring car that we didn't use for anything except to haul the greyhounds out after coyotes. When a coyote was sighted they stopped the car and the greyhounds went off in all directions. They we rode on the side boards racing across the prairie, rifles in hand trying to keep up with the coyotes."[2]
Sterling continues,
"I was six and started school at Levy, 4 miles away. It was a one room school with stables in back as only a hand full of kids lived near enough to walk. My horse, Minnie, was the fastest, as proved many times at recess and noon. This was all fun until really cold weather set in when I found I could not open the gates and then get back on the horse. One time I came into the corral and unsaddled old "Minnie", a really good Palomino mare, then looked up at the barn left door just in time to get a half a bale of hay in the face. I saw stars. The first time Mother took me to school in the buggy she put the collar on the old black mare upside down. A neighbor fixed that. Then that night on the way home I dropped my geography book ...overboard in the mud. Of course, the buggy wheel ran right over it. That about finished my first year of education."[1]
"For the next year Mother left Alice and me at grandmother's at the ranch for a while, [and then] with the Keaton family near Wagon Mound, and also for a while we were in Denver with her. I recall that [in Denver] we lived across the street from the Library in the Civic Center. The only bright spots in this year or so were when I was with my grandmother at the ranch. I still think of her as much as my real mother. She was always there when I wanted to talk and she insisted on our conversation being in Spanish."
It has been said that grandmother, Desideria never publicly spoke English, and grandfather, Charles, never publicly spoke in Spanish.
"During late summer of 1922, Mom and Dad got back together again. Dad took over the management of the ranch at Halls Peak for my granddad. Here we were in Canada Bonita (Beautiful Canyon) with lots of timber, mountains, huge orchards, and hay meadows but I didn't stay long. When school started I of course decided I was in 2nd grade. Mr. Clark, a very old irascible teacher, decided otherwise. After an argument between he and dad, I was sent to Wagon Mound to live with my great aunt Julia while going to school there. My teacher, Mrs. Keyes, put me through 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grades that year; mostly with a rawhide quirt. There was no coddling or favoritism in that school. My cousins, Francis and Minnie, tried to take the rough edges off me. That spring of 1923, my great grandmother, Margarite, died. I remember her only dimly. Mostly I recall the loom set up in her home and the wonderful wool blankets that she made. They would be called Rio Grande blankets now. [It] seems like they wore forever. She was buried in the old cemetery back of the old stage stop in the Ocate Creek crossing, Calhouaxua."
"The next fall Dad stayed up on the ranch and Mom and us kids moved to Ocate near a school. We lived in an adobe "Tee" sloped house with about a dozen rooms. In fact Mom even had a cafe' in one of the front rooms. Ocate then was a small, mostly Spanish town that look like it hadn't ever changed. Come spring we went back up to Hall's Peak. The home there had been built of adobe and was huge. It had six rooms, just one huge bedroom. The next two winters my teacher was my own mother. But in the fall of 1926 I went to Menual School in Albuquerque for the 7th grade. Boarding school was a totally new experience."
William Sterling's Son James recounts:
"Once in a while, as we would be driving along a road together, Dad would launch off into stanzas of a poetry. One of his poems was favorites was The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I was surprised and asked him where he had learned it. He replied, "Why in school, of course. Don't they teach you anything in school?" I always thought his education at boarding school must have been exceptional compared to my public school education. Or perhaps he just had a terrific memory. 'I got out of school in 1932 and all this time I was raised in a dormitory, and even after when I was grown up.'"
The dormitory he is referring to after school was probably the Civilian Conservation Corps, CCC.
"I went out in a CCC camp and spent a couple of years there. By that time I was really struggling. I was holding my own but I really didn't know how because I never lived in a home. I'm saying this because I feel I missed something."[1]
William Sterling told his son that he rode freight trains, once going up north and once to California. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Jobs we not readily found. He wanted to go to on to university but there was no money for that.
On Religion
Sterling told about his religious feelings.
"When we start religion-wise; my grandmother used to take me to mass. My grandfather said, 'I'm a Mason.' My mother was a Baptist, my father nothing. It wasn't until I was 13 or 14 that I went to a '4 Square' gospel tent. It was almost a show, in California when we were living out there. Well, I don't know if it ever did any good or did me any harm. Later on I went to another Baptist church when I was a freshman in Gallup. From there I went to a Congregationalist school. In the last two years I went to a Presbyterian school, in fact I could have gone to Dubuque with a scholarship to be a preacher. I couldn't really see myself as a preacher, I still don't, it's impossible for me to visualize such a thing. But I do think I do have a religious thread. A lot of people can absolutely reject religion; I can't do that. The first contact I ever had with the Mormon Church was over here close to Rama, New Mexico. It's a small town south of Gallup. It seemed like I went to a dance with some girl and she said she was a Mormon. Well, it never occurred to me what a Mormon was, but I inquired around a little bit and I kind of let it drop. That was about 1932 I guess. It wasn't until later I was working out here at Keams Canyon, oh, about 1940, where I got acquainted with Ethel. She was working there at the same place on the reservation, 20 miles from town."
Bill and Ethel
Ethel and 'Bill,'as she and all of us came to know him, dated for a time at Keams Canyon. Ethel had a job as a cook for the hospital and government offices there.
Speaking of dating Ethel, Bill said,
"So you didn't just run into town to go to the show every Saturday night, especially when the roads were bad, if you remember how the reservation road out here used to be. Well, I got acquainted with her, and she started talking to me and I started talking to other people."
If the story be known, she told him that she wouldn't marry outside her faith. He left for a while, thought it over and decided to be baptized into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
"Eventually I wound up being baptized here in Snowflake in 1940 by Arch Whiting. I remember that Ralph Whiting came along and said to make sure it was done right."
Bill came back to see Ethel and showed her his new baptisimal certificate. They were married December 14, 1940.
Working
Bill said,
"I started out in 1940 at Keams Canyon and I went with the Bureau of Reclamation on the CAP project. From there I worked out here (Taylor, Arizona). I mapped out Chelly Canyon; in fact we used to throw rocks at the wildcats and elk there. The Parowan Canal went from there to Holbrook."
This was the first of a several canal projects he worked on as a surveyor or draftsman.
In the late 1970's Bill told a group of men in his ward of the church in Taylor,
"I started out in 1940 at Keams Canyon and I went with the Bureau of Reclamation on the CAP project. From there I worked out here (Taylor, Arizona). I mapped out Chelly Canyon; in fact we used to throw rocks at the wildcats and elk there. The Parowan Canal went from there to Holbrook. We were going to irrigate that rock flat out there I guess. I don't know how it ever got started, but we got the job. From there we went out to Sanders and I mapped out the reservoir sites in Black Canyon. Inside Sanders, I mapped the proposed irrigation area clear out to Chambers. Along about that time the war had started and I quit the Bureau and went to work for Goodyear aircraft, figuring I wouldn't have to go into the army so soon that way. As a matter of fact, I was called in July but in August after they had dropped the bomb in Japan they decided they didn't need me anymore. If I ever did anything right, I time that one right."
During the War
Bill had always been good at mathematics and had received early training in surveying with the CCC. That depression era New Deal program provided the experience and skills to launch him into his life's profession as a draftsman and surveyor. While war was raging he and Ethel began their young family. Gail and Edie were born during this time. Then, with the German surrender in Europe, the need for airplanes was less. He told his son, James, that the commanders brought all the planes back from the European theater and that there was no need for his services anymore. In July of 1945, at the age of 31 and a father of two children, Bill was called up. He told me he presumed he would be sent into the Pacific theater in September. He told me that he believed it would be a very bloody war with the tenacious Japanese and that he likely would have been killed. I'm sure that the knowledge that his brother, Bob, had been captured early in the war by the Japanese in the Philippines and was one of the soldiers of the infamous Batan Death March colored his fear of war with the Japanese. He felt that dropping the atomic bombs on Japan ended a bloody war and probably saved his life.
Bill and Ethel's third daughter, Judith, was born in Phoenix in September of 1946. In 1947 they moved to Helena, Montana, where Bill began work on a large dam there. It was in Helena where James Elliot was born in July of 1950. William Sterling describes his experience,
"I lived all around and lots of times I lived in places where there wasn't any church. I really wasn't very active, in fact, we were never in any place where we could be active until about 1947 when we were in Helena, Montana, where I was put in the Sunday School Superintendency. There weren't too many people in Helena that were Mormons, so you had to be active if you came out. Eventually, it became pretty good sized. But it was a good experience and it was a good job. From there we wound up in Kennewick, Washington, and I had the same sort of job as I was in the Sunday School there."[1]
Life with the Bureau of Reclamation
Bill tells of his life with the Bureau of Reclamation,
"What you want to remember when you think, 'well how did they move around so much,' was that I was working for the Bureau of Reclamation. You worked in an area until you finished the job, or until they needed you in some other place, and they shipped you off. You could go clear across country or maybe just across the state line or across the river. We really moved. I think Ethel and I moved five times in one year when we were working on power lines. But we always tried to go to church when we were together that way. Sometimes I was off by myself in places where there wasn't any church. For one year during 1946, I was in Okinawa. I think I tried to find the church there one time, I finally did find it. I think there were about five or six G.I.'s there but it didn't last very long because they were all discharged a couple weeks later. I spent another year (1955) on the North bank of the Amazon in South America. There were no Mormons there of course."[1]
"I went back with the Bureau of Reclamation and we began moving around. I worked in Southern California, Helena, Montana, Washington, and eventually wound up out here at Glen Canyon Dam in 1956. I was one of the first people hire on the job. It's kind of interesting to me now to go up there and look at that place. I used to drive out in my Jeep from Kanab, go down Wah Weep Canyon, get in a boat, and go on down to the work site. I look at it now and it is hard for me to visualize. I did the mapping on the town site, I laid out all the streets, all the lots, and the houses. I went out there about July of this year and looked for the house that we had lived in. We were the first people to move into the Bureau housing. The Bureau had built 200 houses and I couldn't even find it after doing all the surveying. I finally asked and couldn't find anyone I knew, but I really didn't spend much time at it though. So many of the jobs I've worked at are that way. I've gone back a few years later and don't even recognize it because when I was working on it it was raw land. It was just a bare valley and we were going to make a reservoir site out of it."[1]
"About 1960-61, I had gotten tired of that line of work and someone offered me a lot of money if I would go into power lines. Well, they worked in the 17 Western states that the Bureau of Reclamation worked in, and it sounded interesting. The only trouble was that it was a travel job. I could be, and this sort of thing happened several times, that I would be in some where I was running power lines from Glen Canyon to Pinnacle Peak and then get a phone call saying to be in Laramie, Wyoming Monday morning with thirty men and be ready to run the lines from Craig, Colorado, all the way to Cheyenne. We thought nothing of it to load, get all the equipment, (we had a lot of 4wd Jeeps and specialized equipment), and go."[1]
Move to Reno
"We finally wound up in 1963 in Salida, Colorado, finishing up a line there. Ethel had given up. She was tired of being left alone and she decided to move around with us. That's the year I think we moved five times. About January of 1964 we moved to Reno to take one of the biggest jobs, a 7500 KV line from Boulder City to Oregon. It was to have been the largest direct current line ever built. We worked on that five years, had it all ready for construction and Nixon pulled the money out of it and we were given was called a reduction in force. I was just over 55 so they said I was eligible to retire and wouldn't even consider me for a transfer. That happened to about ten or twelve men who had been lifetime employees of the job. All of the other people, my surveyors, I managed to get transfers."[1]
"I finally did manage to get a transfer into the BLM and went out to Battle Mountain. Two months later, I wrecked one of their crew cab 4wd pickups. The front end locked up and I wound up in the ditch by Austin, 175 miles from the hospital. I lay there with a broken back for several hours until someone found me. The got it set that night at the hospital in Elko. This happened early in the morning and they got it set that night. After a few months later, they retire me on disability. Then I spent a year just laying around feeling sorry for myself."[1]
"Finally, I managed to work myself back into shape and I went back to work up at Tahoe as an inspector on sewer lines, underground lines, engineering and designing. That job finished and we just sort of playfully one day were sitting around the house then in Reno, just sort of wondering what I was going to do, and Ethel answered what we really ought to do is just move back to Taylor. This is her home town. Well she picked it up from there and I didn't have a chance from then on. We sold out in the next couple of weeks and here we are. And that's about the size of it."[1]
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References
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