Elsie May Battaglia

Elsie Battaglia was born on December 12, 1911 as Elsie Maye Stone in Boring, Oregon, and lived to the remarkable age of 104. Her maternal grandmother Katherine Matilda McClung (Granny) (1859- 1942) and father-in-law Robert Nelson Warnock (Dad Warnock) (1868-1941) were Oregon pioneers who crossed the Great Plains in covered wagons. They were both energetic characters, who had a big influence on the course of Elsie’s life. Raised without newspapers, magazines, or radio in Boring, a small lumber town, she first attended a two room school house. She was sorely disappointed that pupils in the lower grades could not use the library, but as soon as allowed read every book that the school owned. Her father, Peyton Kye Stone, a Virginian born in 1882, was a small man but tough enough to be a logger, and in that job was usually away from home. Her mother, Lenora Belle (Nola) (1893-1958), divorced Kye after some bad marital incidents, and moved to Portland with Elsie and Granny, Nola’s mother. Kye had taken no interest in his daughter, and she wanted nothing to do with him in adult life. In Portland Nola worked as a domestic in big houses in the west hills, and knew a lot of good stories about the foibles of Portland’s elite. She was utterly unlike her mother, who had that old time religion and deplored smoking and drinking. Nola was emotional and high strung, smoked cigarettes, and had a salty line of gab. Her second husband was Clyde McMillen, whom Elsie considered to be her real dad. He was lovable to everyone but Granny. Clyde set Granny off by stating that the stories in the Bible never happened, and by always having a batch of home brew in the basement. Elsie attended Franklin High School, and fell for a visiting college student, “cute as could be” she said, when he played in the band at the Fri- day night dance. She married him, Robert Leroy Warnock, when she was 16, before her last year of high school. Bob’s prosperous but frugal father, Dad Warnock, shielded the couple from the worst effects of the Great Depression, and they had a good, fun-filled life for a few years, even having a little vacation house at Lake Oswego. They lived at Dad Warnock’s Rex Arms Apartments, which still exists, at 1236 S.E. Morrison, working as man- agers of the building. Then things took an awful turn when Bob took sick with a heart ailment, endocarditis, and the course of the disease was long and devastating to all concerned. Married at 16, Elsie was a widow at 23. After this sad beginning, Elsie was deeply grateful for any good luck that later came her way, and rarely complained about anything throughout her long life. There were two sons, Robert Lee (Bob) born in 1930 and Gerald Lloyd (Jerry) in 1934. Fortunately, Granny was there to help raise the boys while Elsie worked at modest jobs (for instance at Newberry’s Five and Dime for twenty-nine cents an hour), and tried to have some social life as a single mother. Married friends had largely turned their backs on her. Granny was devoted to the boys above all, but was overly protective and had the ability to make your life miserable through her rigid ideas of good behavior. Nevertheless, she was proud of the boys and quick to praise their efforts. Elsie rightly gave her credit for a good job of child rearing. To live with a woman born in 1869, who had seen so much of a totally different world, was truly extraordinary. Bob remembers her vividly, Jerry less so since he was only 8 when she died. Feeling new responsibilities, Elsie completed her high school diploma through night classes, went to secretarial school with Dad Warnock’s support, and eventually got better jobs, first at Tarola Motors and then as a bookkeeper at Nicolai Neppach, a planning mill. She knew nothing of bookkeeping to start, but quickly picked it up on the job. She helped to start a chapter of Sigma Phi Gamma, a social and philanthropic sorority, which was a great support group for young women like herself who felt so precarious in a man’s world. She was active in the sorority all her life, holding several offices including International President, and never missed the annual convention. While both boys were in grade school at Buck- man School, and later with Bob in high school at Benson Polytechnic School, the family lived at 1024 S. E. 16th Street, a building that still stands. It is a big house dating from 1910 or so, and was divided into six apartments, with five of them rented. This gave Elsie some income and experience in property management, which came in handy in later endeavors. Bob’s job was to stoke the furnace with briquettes after school, so if he was held late for bad behavior there was Hell to pay, because the fire went out. Granny found the tenants very interesting, and was quite nosey about their comings and goings. After a few years in Portland, which did not suit them, Elsie’s parents Nola and Clyde moved to a farm at Rose Lodge in Lincoln County, probably around 1938. It was a place that Clyde’s family had built from a completely forested homestead. Elsie and the boys went to the farm very often in an old Model A Ford, and the boys lived there during three or four summers. It was a great source of groceries when times were hard, especially string beans and potatoes, and an education for city boys. Seeing pigs guzzling slop from a trough, grunting and pushing each other with feet in their food, was something else. At the farm Nola spent end- less hours in knitting and crocheting, through long rainy days. Her beautiful crocheted table cloth is a treasured family heirloom. After the war Elsie met Sam Battaglia, a bright, sociable, and ambitious man who had worked as a marine electrician and draftsman in the Albina ship yard during the war. Seeing that the boys needed a father, Elsie decided that a second marriage was in the cards, and that happened on December 11, 1942. Sam was a good father and a real pal. He taught the boys everything from electrical work and wood turning to catching catfish in the Columbia Slough. Sam’s parents were Sicilian immigrants. They and their large family had tilled a truck farm near Gresham, bringing their produce to Portland in a shaky Model T truck. Elsie and the kids had good rapport with the family, and got a taste of European culture that was new and wonderful. Their skill in gardening, Grandma Battaglia’s marvelous ravioli and biscotti, Grandpa Battaglia’s wine making in an aromatic cellar, all that is remembered fondly. Sometimes Sam would open a bottle of Grandpa’s Zinfandel wine that was decades old. It was in stubby bottles with sealing wax over the corks, and the taste was incredible. Sam had a gift for salesmanship, and liked to find bargains in war surplus and sell them at a profit. Before long he had a thriving business in automotive supplies, Willamette Sales Company. Elsie was a good helper and advisor. The good income allowed them to buy a new house in the southwest hills, 4486 S. W. Washouga Avenue. It was a single story ranch house with radiant heat in the floors, picture windows, and knotty pine walls, quite the modern thing in those days. It is now much modified with a second story. They were also able to indulge Sam’s love of boating, and acquired a twenty foot steel-hulled cabin cruiser, “Amigo”. They took it up and down the Willamette and Columbia and out to Astoria for salmon fishing at the mouth of the Columbia. Bob built the ship-to-shore radio from war surplus parts. Later they had a splendid custom-built forty footer, “Amigo Too”, that could go in the ocean. They did many cruises up to Puget Sound and an idyllic month long voyage by the coast of Vancouver Island, living on fish and clams from the ocean and filling their water tanks from water falls. After the boys left home, things did not go so well. Sam had demons that pursued him, and thought he would be better off with a divorce,which Elsie granted. They remained slightly distant friends. He did not have much of a business from then on, had too many drinks and cigarettes, and died in 1974 at age 61. Elsie felt the loss severely, but a sunnier period of her life was already underway. She took up buying and selling houses, finding a little fixer-upper, and doing a lot of the work herself to make it saleable. She was good at that and enjoyed it. She loved living by the ocean, and at various times had nice beach houses at Newport, Oregon, and Ocean Park, Washington, as well as houses in Port- land, for instance a duplex with renters. She never missed the clam digging season at the beach, and cooked the big razor clams to perfection. A delight late in life, around her 80’s, was a place at the Sands Mobile Country Club at Desert Hot Springs, California, near Palm Springs. She was there every winter, enjoying the sun and mountain vistas and a golf course right behind the house. Her circle of friends “down at the desert” seemed to get larger and larger. Also, a latent competitive streak came to light on the golf course, which held tournaments for seniors. She was tickled to collect trophies, whipping competitors who were often male and younger. Over the years she also did quite a lot of world travel, and would surprise you every now and then with a new adventure, such as a cruise on a sailing ship in the Caribbean. Rolling around in her bunk at night as the ship tossed was hard on an old lady, but she made it through. Her first trip abroad was a long voyage by freighter through the Panama Canal in 1967, to see Bob and his family in Trieste, Italy. This was done with Sam after they were divorced, and included a delightful visit with Sam’s relatives in Sicily. In Portland her last decade or so was at a very pretty retirement community, King City, where she had a nice townhouse. As usual she made friends with everyone, by now all people much younger. She invited large groups of guests and treated them to her excellent cooking. She went to a CURVES exercise gym on into her 90’s and made good friends in that group too. She was lucky to live with a devoted companion, Claudia Carlson, who helped her deal with failing vision and other trials of old age. Elsie loved flowers and animals, and her pets were always among her best friends. Their names are legend, each with its own story: Lassie, Fuzzy, Pogo, Bill, Schatzi, Tassie, Smokey, and many others. She was always up for a good time, and astiff bourbon and soda at cocktail hour was practically mandatory. She believed that eating nine raisins a day, soaked in gin, would ward off arthritis. In fact, she did not have arthritis. Everyone will remember Elsie for her stories and jokes, often a bit off-color. On her death bed she could hardly talk, but was still trying to tell a good one. If you want to know more, look at Elsie’sexcel- lent writing. She wrote a charming story about her colorful father-in-law, “The Kingfish”, and an autobiography of twenty-six pages, “The Olden Days”. The latter conveys exactly the sound of Elsie telling a story. Elsie has two sons, four grandchildren, and seven great grandchildren, all well-educated and doing interesting things. Both sons went to Reed College and on to advanced degrees. Jerry earned his M.D. at the University of Oregon Medical School, and specialized in Radiology. He founded and developed a major center for medical imaging, Epic Imaging, which does a large part of the X-ray and MRI work in the Portland area. Epic has been a leader in installing advanced equipment, and Jerry has held top offices in professional societies. His biggest enthusiasm, however, is in hunting and fishing. This has taken him, with his wife Margaret, to every place on earth where hunting is done: all over Africa, Alaska, Central Asia, Manchuria, Mexico, New Zealand, the list never ends. He assembled a remarkable trophy room in his house on Old Scholls Ferry Road, and has a beautiful garden. He was also a winning long distance runner, a pilot of his own airplane, and lately has been a world traveler apart from hunting trips, for instance going to the South Pole. He climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with his daughters and sons-in-law at age 81, which may come close to setting a record for that ascent. Bob was a Fulbright Scholar in Amsterdam after College, and earned his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics at Harvard, with Nobel Laureate Julian Schwinger. He was Professor Of Physics at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago for seventeen years, concentrating on the basic physics of elementary particles. He moved to San Francisco in 1978, after his wife Martha was offered a professorship at the medical school, University of California at San Francisco. He worked at Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory and gradually changed his field to particle accelerators. From 1987 to the present he has done research in that field at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University. He has also worked at several other institutes and universities in Europe and this country, for instance at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste. He and Martha did a lot of travel to international conferences with tourism on the side, going many times to Europe, especially Italy, twice to Russia, and to Japan and Korea. Bob reads novels and poetry in German, Dutch, and Italian and loves photography and metal working in a home machine shop. Jerry’s children are Susan Kirkpatrick of Carmel, Indiana, and Cynthia Christensen of McMinnville, Oregon. Susan is a graduate of Stanford with a B.A. in economics, and has an M.B.A from Oregon State University. She held management positions with companies in the paper and publishing industries in Portland, Norwalk, CT, and Indianapolis, and settled in Indianapolis with her husband Rob. They own Kirkpatrick Management Company, a property management firm. Susan was an enthusiastic soccer and track mom, as her kids pursued those sports at a high level. Cynthia has a B.S. in Animal Science from Oregon State University and an M.S. in Biology from Portland State University. Cynthia has worked in primate research, and as a high school science teacher, and volunteers as education coordinator at the Yamhill Historical Society. She follows her love of animal husbandry on a farm that has been in husband Lyle’s family for more than a hundred years. She and Lyle have recently acquired a Christmas tree plantation as well. Bob’s children are Kevin Warnock of San Fran- cisco and Andrew Warnock of Fort Collins, Colorado. Kevin is a photographer with a B.A. from Brooks Institute of Photography. He founded Hot- Paper.com, an early Internet company for document preparation, based on his own software. After selling the company he worked on an improved document system and acquired a house with a splendid view in the hills near Sutro Tower. He now enjoys meeting guests from all over the world as an Air B & B host. Andrew is a geologist, with a B.S. from Whitman College, an M.S. from Western Washington University and a Ph.D. from Lehigh University. He is devoted to improving science education as director of the College of Sciences Education and Outreach Center at Colorado State University. He does educational projects for the National Park Service in Hawaii and Alaska, and he and his family enjoy music and many camping trips in beautiful Colorado and beyond. Susan’s children are Kaitlin Kirkpatrick, Kelsey Kirkpatrick, and Nicholas Kirkpatrick. Kaitlin has a B.A. in English and Biology from Colorado College, Phi Beta Kappa, and is now in the fourth year of medical school at Medical College of Wisconsin. Kelsey recently earned her B.A. in Chemistry and Political Science at Miami University in Ohio. Nick has a B.A.in Computer Science from Stonehill College, and is now in his last year of a program in Computer Engineering at the University Of Notre Dame. Furthermore, he is a two time All American track athlete. Cynthia’s children are Celene Christensen Blair of Edmonds, Washington, and Emily Christensen of Portland. Celene received her B.S. from Oregon State University and her M.S. from the University of Colorado, Boulder, both in Geology. She works as a geologist for an environmental consulting firm. Emily has a B.S. in Recreation Resource Management and Anthropology from Oregon State University, and an M.A. in Teaching from the University of Portland. She is headed toward a career in teaching, currently in elementary schools in the Portland Metro Area. Andrew’s children in Fort Collins are Julia Warnock and Maxwell Warnock. They have thrived in home schooling and piano instruction from their mother Krista, and are accomplished musicians, bud- ding composers, and Science Fair winners. In the fall they begin classes at the Poudre Global Academy, Julia in the 7th grade and Max in the 9th.