Elizabeth and Lawrence visiting John and Grace in the 1950s with the Ducommun children (left to right) Joanne, Duane, Ron and Alan.

Elizabeth (“Bessie”)

By Alan Ducommun, son

My earliest memories of my mother are of picking the flowers off of her bleeding heart bush to impress the little girl from next door when we lived in Country Homes, a suburb of Spokane, Washington. She had married my father, Lawrence, at the end of World War II, and moved from Anoka, Minnesota, where she grew up, to St. Maries, Idaho, in the wild, wild west. I am not sure she knew what she was getting into. St. Maries was a town in the mountains where the principal industries were logging and subsistence farming— and it was a lot different from Minnesota.

When I was born, my parents lived in town where the neighbor across the street had a cow and chickens, so milk and eggs were not hard to come by. They had lived on a farm called Omega at first, which was outside of town on the St. Joe River and close to the Jacot family farm Le Chant de L’Oiseaux, which was on a nearby hill. The main Ducommun farm was around a bend in the river and across the Milwaukee Railroad tracks. This was a little too isolated, as going to town involved rowing a boat across the river to get to the road into town. Another problem was that she did not get along well with her mother-in-law. Grandma Ducommun was a woman with a habit of criticizing, and her daughters-in-law did not come up to her standards. Additionally, the meeting in St. Maries was mostly composed of people who were bilingual and the people who did not speak French may have suspected that they were being discussed unfavorably behind their linguistic backs.

Jobs in the automotive field were not too secure in St. Maries, so my dad found a job with Babcock Motors, the Packard garage in Spokane. The family moved from St. Maries to a house in Country Homes, where my mother planted her bleeding heart bush and other flowers, and she had access to a little corner grocery store down the street. Her mother also came to visit her, which I am sure made her happy. Duane was born around this time, and Mom and Dad bought four acres on Moran Prairie, which was on a corner at 4027 South Regal Street. Two of the other corners were occupied by the radio station KREM and the radio and television station KHQ. The neighbors next to us had cows which roamed at will and led to Dad and his brother Vernon putting up a barb wire fence to preserve the alfalfa and wheat that had been planted on the acreage. The first step in building a house there was to install a basement where we lived while the rest of the house was gradually built. I am sure Mom liked having the extra acreage so that she could have a chicken coop for eggs and the occasional chicken for Sunday dinner.

The division between the Ames Grant Brethren and the Booth Grant Brethren had taken place between 1948 and 1949 and had the effect of isolating my parents — they had gone with the Ames Brethren while the St. Maries assembly had stayed with the Booth Brethren, so they fellowshipped alone in our basement with occasional visits from laboring brethren such as Joe Butler and Lee Ames. We also used to go to the local NHH (aka Tunbridge Wells) meeting for Sunday School, and we still occasionally went to St. Maries and attended the meetings there. I think my mother really missed her family and the Anoka assembly and she appreciated the visits from her mother and Uncle John and Uncle Lawrence (with his whole family!) and Aunt Jo and Aunt Eleanor and her family. She really loved her nieces and nephews and being so far away from them had to be hard on her. She had a good relationship with the Jacot girls — Mary Jane, Elizabeth and Joyce — and they often baby sat us children, so she wasn’t entirely without friends. She also was friends with some of the women neighbors on Regal Street, but they were not really close friends, so I think she really wanted to be back in Minnesota if she could.

I mentioned her raising chickens and her chicken coop. It was a nice structure built by Dad, complete with a fenced-in chicken yard so the chickens could be free range. The chickens frequently escaped from their pen and mother would have to round them up. She couldn’t figure out why the gate to the pen was open so often — chickens aren’t smart enough to figure out to open gates. Finally, one of us confessed that we opened the gate because we liked to watch her chase the chickens, so then she locked us in the house so we couldn’t watch the roundup.

This and various instances of combat with my brothers led her to quote scripture to us such as, “Let brotherly love continue,” and “Children, obey your parents,” and “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.” She also told us stories from her childhood that usually had morals.

One of my favorites involved a melon patch that her father had planted by the brook. He instructed the children that they were not to pick the melons — he would let them know when they were ripe enough to pick. One day Uncle Lawrence came to mother and Aunt Eleanor and said, “I found a melon in the melon patch that is ready to be picked- let’s go pick it and eat it!” The girls, being obedient little children, said, “But Father told us not to pick them yet!” Uncle Lawrence said, “No one will miss one melon; this one will really taste good!”

So they went to the melon patch and picked the melon, and Uncle Lawrence took it over to a stump next to the melon patch to break it open. When he hit the stump with the melon a bunch of yellow jackets came pouring out of it and he yelled “Bees! Run for the brook!” which he did and jumped in. The girls panicked and ran for the house, pursued by the yellow jackets. They all had to explain what had happened to their parents and learned the truth of the verse “Be sure your sin will find you out.”