Steady May

I thought Aunt May was the steady one, but I got to looking at her life today, and oh boy! She went through a lot. Her life was a roller coaster, but it wasn’t her own doing (unlike two of her sisters’ lives).

She was born in rural Newton County, Arkansas on May 11, 1889. Her parents were Mary Jane Whittington and William Lester Munro (he went by the name Lester). May had a half sister, Annie, and a half brother, Sam, from her mother’s first marriage, but within a couple of years of May’s birth, Sam ran away and was never heard from by the Munros again. (Annie did find out where he was eventually.) May had an older brother, John, and an older sister, Agnes. After she was born, next came a brother, Claude, and three sisters, Lillie, Jessie, and Dora.

Death was a fact of life for this family. Not only had May’s mother’s eldest, Emma, died young, but twins Flora and Florence had died before Agnes had been born. Then Claudy died when he was only five. Soon after that their grandfather who had been living with them died. When May was only 9, her mother died.

May’s father took his children within four years to Idaho where he hoped to work on the Bureau of Reclamation’s Boise project. While they were there, May’s older sister Agnes ran away and got married. May’s father moved the rest of the family, John, May, Lillie, Jessie, and Dora, to Oregon.

May was put in charge of the younger sisters quite a lot, and sometimes she resented it. Lillie and Dora recalled many years later that they sometimes gave May such a hard time that she would go to her friend Amanda’s house and not return all night. Since their father and older brother were “riding the rails” (hitching rides on trains) to different jobs in different cities for weeks at a time, the younger girls didn’t like it one bit that they were left all alone. They promised May they would behave. Probably they thought they meant it every time.

Agnes and her husband returned and lived nearby. Agnes’s husband rode the rails with Lester and John, so the young women and girls were always being left alone. Agnes had three babies by 1907 and only the last one lived.

May met the man she wanted to marry about that time. She was 18 years old that spring. She and Paul Rudolph Rieboldt were married in Vancouver, Washington on October 1, 1907 by a Justice of the Peace. Their witnesses were Mr. H.A. and Mrs. A.E. Rice. Paul Rieboldt had been born in February 1877, in the city of Danzig, then part of Prussia, on the Baltic Sea. His father’s name was Henry (Heinrich, probably). The marriage register says his mother’s name was unknown. Paul’s profession was reported to be an electrical and steam engineer, so he apparently ran the trains. He had emigrated to the United States in 1883; I don’t know whom he came with, but probably his father.

May and Paul moved to Clatskanie, Oregon, a town in the far northwest close to the Columbia River, and in 1909 their daughter Pauline May was born there on February 13th. They moved to Yacolt, Washington, a tiny town then of only 435 people, including them, when the census was taken in April 1910. In July a baby was born to a Rieboldt couple and was buried across the river in Portland, in the Multnomah Park Cemetery. This could have been their child, but we have no corroborating evidence except that I can’t find any other Rieboldt family nearby at all. Their son Paul was born in March 1912 in a suburb of Portland called Woodstock, not far from the Multnomah Park Cemetery.

When baby Paul was only three months old, May’s husband Paul died in mid-June 1912. Not having a death record for him, we don’t know whether it was an accident or an illness that took him. He was only 35 years old. He was buried next to the Rieboldt infant in Multnomah Park Cemetery. (This is another circumstantial piece of evidence that the child was probably theirs.)

1917: May holding Ashley; in front
of her at left are her sister Agnes's
children Mary and Eddie; at right
are Pauline and Paul Rieboldt.

May, age 24, went to work, and she kept her children with her somehow. She met another man she wanted to marry, Luther Orando Hallett, whose nickname was Budd. He was born in Pennsylvania in January 1888, so he and May were nearly the same age. Budd worked as a laborer, once working in a sawmill and another record showing him working as a ship builder for a river boat company. Budd and May were married March 17, 1914, and their son, Ashley Sherman Hallett, was born in April 1917.

Budd was called up in the draft of 1917 for World War I, so he joined the U.S. Merchant Marines and was sent to Japan. He died there in Yokohama in April 1918, and May was left a widow for a second time. Even though that was the year of the great flu pandemic, the first cases in Japan were not reported until November 1918, so it is probable that Budd died of something else, but I don’t know what happened to him.

May and her three children were living in Portland, and when she got a job in Bremerton, Washington, she moved them all there. Pauline was old enough to babysit the others, so that is probably what May had her do at first. May’s job was as a “general helper” in the United States Navy Yard there in Bremerton. The children weren’t doing well though. May put Pauline and Paul into the Seattle Children’s Home for a time. When the 1920 census was taken in mid-January 1920, the census taker noted that May and her children were visiting in another state (probably Oregon), but she (the census taker) still managed to get almost all of the information about them correct, with the exception of assigning the surname “Hallett” to the two Rieboldt children. However, two days later the census taker at the Seattle Children’s Home listed Pauline and Paul there. Who was taking care of Ashley is unknown.

The next year May married for the third time, to Owen Alderson Cade, on December 6, 1921. They met the officiating minister and their witnesses, Fay Cobb and Agnes Hodges, at a small hotel in Seattle for the ceremony. Owen was originally from West Virginia and was about five years older than May. He had never been married before and was a worker at the shipyard where May had been working.

The Cades moved within two years to the California Bay Area and found a house in Vallejo; Owen worked at the shipyard at nearby Mare Island. In Vallejo their daughter, Minnie Lee, was born in early July 1924, and their son, Owen Lester (who went by Les), was born in March 1926.

May’s life may have seemed steady from this time on, but she had her share of heartaches on behalf of her children. Yet she saw them all through with a characteristic calm and quiet cheer.

Sadly her eldest daughter, Pauline, died in Napa, California near the end of 1926. Pauline was 17 years old. No death certificate or record has turned up yet, so I don’t know why she died.

In November 1928 Paul swore he was a year older than he really was so that he could join the military. He went first to San Diego and a few years later to Florida with the U.S. Navy. From this time on, his birth is often recorded as being in 1911, but we know that it was actually 1912.

The 1930 Census taker found the Cade family living in Vallejo. The two youngest children were not in school yet, but Ashley, who was 12, was attending school.

By 1935 they had transferred to San Diego, where Owen still pursued the same occupation. May invited her father, Lester Munro, to come down from Oregon and live with them. The cold and wet climate had been getting to Lester. He lived with them until his 80th birthday, and then he died.

In 1937 May became a grandmother when Paul’s daughter Pauline was born in Florida. Paul had married Hilda Fletcher just a month before he turned 20, in 1932. The marriage didn’t last, nor did Paul’s next four marriages. Paul died two years before his mother, May.

Ashley joined the Navy when he was eighteen and got married a few years later. He and Thelma lived with the Cades during 1939 and 1940, before the Navy shipped him out to fight during the War. Ashley and Thelma divorced in 1963 and married again in 1966. In the meantime, Ashley was married briefly to another woman. Ashley had children whose descendants continue to branch out. Ashley died in San Diego in November 1972, three years before his mother.

The Cade children also grew up with bumps along the way. Les had to serve in the military the final year of World War II, which was unnerving to all his family. He came home and married. Minnie Lee was married several times; she divorced the same man twice when she was in her 40s. Their families continue to branch out.

May at right with her sister Lillie and Lillie’s husband, Lloyd

May’s husband Owen A. Cade died in the spring of 1961 in San Diego, California. She stayed there in her home for the next fourteen years, but she often took trips to see her sisters, and they all came to see her. She and her sisters took several trips together; once they went to Arkansas to see their nieces and nephews, the children of their half sister, Annie. May was an innately cheerful person. I met her when I was a young child, and I remember her laughing a lot. I remember how much fun she had being with her sisters.

May died in December 1975, steady to the last.