Gloria: My grandmother Essert was my mother's mother. She was born January 1st, 1896, in St. Paul, Nebraska. As a child, her parents moved and they ended up in Grand Island, Nebraska, and my great-grandfather had a mercantile. My grandmother had older siblings, and her mother died when she was 10 years old. By the time she was in junior high or high school, she had to go farther away to school. And her dad got her a horse and they thought, well, a Bucky Wagon would be better because then she would be more contained, more safe than riding a horse.

And so anyway, she had a little horse and his name was Jessie. And she could tell you that to her dying days: her horse was named Jessie. She was just a really warm, generous person. I think her parents were, too, but I never met my great-grandparents. She took Jessie and rode him to school with her little buggy. When she finished high school, her mother was gone, her older siblings were gone, and her dad was busy, so she went to college in Kearney, Nebraska. My grandfather also went to school in Kearney, and he was two years older. My grandfather was very active. He was a five-sport letterman. My grandmother might have seen him around school, but he was very active in sports. They started dating when she was a sophomore. When he graduated, he came to Wyoming and bought land.

When my grandmother graduated, my grandfather came and they got married in just a small little ceremony and then they went to Wyoming together. My grandfather was a farmer, and my grandmother had really never been exposed to cooking. At her home, I imagine it was just simple things. When it came time for harvest, my grandfather had a crew coming to help harvest, and so my grandmother, she got educated real well, real fast in how to cook in Wyoming.

My grandmother and grandfather were educated, and the superintendent of schools in Torrington knew that my grandparents were out in Yoder. That's about 15 miles south of Torrington. And so he came and proposed to my grandfather about a school in Yoder, and my grandfather would be the principal. Of course, my grandmother said yes, she would be a teacher also. In Yoder, my grandfather was the principal, the janitor, the coach…he shoveled snow and did anything and everything, all the maintenance needed to be done to the school.  My grandmother taught English, home economics, and music.

Yoder now is a ghost town, but I think it was a pretty good size because it was on the railroad. After things got settled down and everybody knew what their positions were, my grandmother was musical and she said, “we don't have a piano in our school.” She proposed to my grandfather that they have a school holiday for two days and they go out and hoe a farmer's crops. So everybody in the school went out and worked, and they made enough money that they could buy a piano for the school.

I cannot imagine kids now saying, “okay, tomorrow we're gonna go out and hoe a beet field,” you know? But anyway, when it came time for the first class to graduate, my grandmother had been really busy with school and kids and everything, so she had her wedding china packed away and had never unpacked it. For the graduation, she made a dinner. They had a ceremony and student awards and all of that. So they ate on my grandmother's wedding china.

Then they lived in Wyoming full time, and my grandparents had three kids: two boys and a girl. And my mom was the daughter. She was very catering to my grandfather. In Wyoming, my grandfather was really into baseball. The baseball teams had to travel from the east coast to the west coast. And the trains did stop. They would go along and little towns that they stopped in, they would get off, stretch their legs, and play baseball with the local teams. So this is a picture of the Yoder baseball team. And so they got to play the Dodgers, the Yankees, and the teams that went back and forth.

After their children grew up, their two sons lived in Yoder and farmed. I grew up in Buffalo. They would come to our house to spend two weeks. My mother always brought out the mending, and my grandmother would sit there and visit and mend everything. She was quite the lady.

She was a wonderful wife to my grandfather. My grandfather, he grew up going to the horse races in California, and I went with him one time to the horse races. He went to place his bet. I wasn't old enough to bet, so I was just walking down the grandstand and they were building this little kind of corral there. So I stopped, and here comes this jockey. It was Willie Shoemaker. So I got to meet Willie Shoemaker! I did have my program with me, and I said, “hi, Willie, would you give me your autograph?” And he did. He was the nicest guy.

My grandmother usually went, too. If she went with him to the horse races, my grandfather would go get a program the night before and study it. You know, where the horse had run and all the, how many times it had won its race, and all of that kind of stuff. And my grandmother, if she bet on a horse…if the horse had a name that was somebody in our family, that's a horse she always bet on.

They were just lovely people.

Note: The transcript above has been condensed from its original audio recording to improve the flow and readability of the story.