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An Oregon Life By Bill Varble Elvine Gienger didn�t get around to writing a book about her life until she was in her 90s. The result, "My Oregon Life: the Memories of a 20th Century Pioneer," is a story that cuts across Oregon history, the American West, women�s studies, American Indian affairs and popular culture. Gienger lived a hardscrabble childhood in and around Medford, taught school, raised three children, hunted big game when women didn�t do such things, amassed a valuable collection of American Indian artifacts, traveled the back country of this and other nations and stayed married to the same man for more than 70 years. Gienger and Idaho writer David Proctor, who is married to a granddaughter of the Giengers, taped 90 hours of interviews for the book, pored over 75 steno books of notes and reviewed photos spanning the decades. The book has been published by a Gienger family company and is being marketed by Proctor. "There aren�t many people left who have seen the century like this," says Proctor, of Boise. "She was sharp. She could recall all the detail." Gienger saw horses give way to cars in the streets of Medford. She saw World War I and the flu epidemic that followed, Prohibition and bathtub gin, silent movies, early telephones and crystal-set radios, the Depression, World War II, Sputnik, the first RVs, Vietnam, the Gemini missions. Gienger and her husband, Roy, were known in tiny Chiloquin, where they lived most of their lives, as "Bangor" and "Popo" � nicknames bestowed on them by Gienger�s first granddaughter as a tyke. She was born in 1902 as Elvine Flury, one of 12 children of Henry and Leonora Flury, who lived in the Talent area when it was known as Stringtown. Her father farmed and worked in the woods. He became abusive and violent when drunk, once dragging his pregnant wife down the stairs by the hair. Gienger�s mother left him, moving from the family�s ranch on Anderson Creek to Medford. The young Elvine wore flour-sack dresses and went to a one-room school. Many children went from elementary school straight to farm work. Living in a series of rented houses with mud yards in northwest Medford, Gienger decided she would escape poverty by finishing school and becoming a teacher. After graduating from Medford High School in 1920 in a class of 20, she taught eight grades at Poe Valley near Klamath Falls for $25 a month and sent money home to her mother. She got out of a teaching contract at Butte Falls to marry Roy Gienger in 1926. He ran a grocery store and a pool hall and belonged briefly to the Ku Klux Klan, a membership he later said he was ashamed of. Roy was an ambitious and energetic man who liked to run things. The couple raised a family in a small town carved out of the Klamath Indian Reservation, ranching and raising grain and cattle and running a store, all the while crisscrossing Oregon and the West to hunt deer, elk, antelope and Indian artifacts. Carrol Howe, who later became a school superintendent and a state legislator, met Elvine Gienger at the University of Oregon through Luther Cressman, founder of the Oregon Museum of Natural History, when Gienger was working to catalog her collection of artifacts. "She taught everyone who came in contact with her the value of work, attention to detail, loyalty and strength," Howe says. The Giengers had three children, Normie, Bonnie and Bud. Daughter Normie Hill, 72, of the Chiloquin area, says the children didn�t usually go with the couple on their hunting trips or collecting expeditions. "We were usually left home with somebody," she says. Those trips eventually branched out to the deserts of Arizona and Mexico. Ilene Gienger-Stanfield, 44, of Medford, a daughter of Bud Gienger, thinks Bangor and Popo were a good match. "My grandpa ran the show, and she let him," Gienger-Stanfield says. "But I think he adored her. I remember him looking at her like, �Isn�t she beautiful?� "They were very healthy. They always raised a garden." It was in the hunting camps that Elvine started writing in pencil in steno notebooks about people, hunting, roads, food and adventures. "After that I kept notebooks everywhere I went," she wrote. "My only regret is that I didn�t write more about our day-to-day lives." "She recorded everything," Gienger-Stanfield says. "She didn�t pick up a chip without writing about it. I always thought it was neat that after he was so domineering, she was the one who got to tell the story." As the Depression and the war years gave way to the 1950s, �60s and �70s, Gienger�s notebooks recorded more hunters, less wildlife, more logging. "By the 1970s, it had turned into a real crowd," she wrote. By the time the Giengers last hunted deer � they were in their 90s � Roy was disgusted. There seemed to be "a man behind every tree." The Giengers in 1935 constructed "Arrowhead House," a building behind their home to house their collection of 12,000 Indian artifacts: arrowheads, bowls, beads, bone awls, knives, spears, scrapers, trading coins and other items. A 1979 law made it illegal to dig sites or remove artifacts. By the late 1980s, the Giengers wanted to build a museum to house the collection. They approached the Klamath Tribe about cooperating in a museum, Gienger wrote, but tribal members didn�t want to have anything to do with their collection. Dino Herrera, director of culture and heritage at the tribal office in Chiloquin, says many of the artifacts are burial goods. "Our people are not in the habit of buying back things that came from sacred grounds," he says. Herrera remembers being taken to Arrowhead House on a field trip as a boy. There he saw finely made burial objects such as ceremonial obsidian blades and henwas, cq small religious figures made of stone. "Those things were passed down in families," he says. "And these people sold them." The Giengers sold off the collection, raising $600,000. They used the money to set up the Leroy and Elvine Memorial Scholarship Fund to award college scholarships to Chiloquin students. The fund generates $20,000 or more each year for students. Many of the arrowheads were bought by Gene Favell of the Favell Museum in Klamath Falls. Normie Hill acknowledges that some of the artifacts had been buried with the dead. "It was being done," she says of the collecting. "I know that�s a bad excuse. I guess they thought things were going to waste when they were in the ground. They felt they should be seen." "It was tough on them when the regulations (protecting sites and artifacts) came in," Gienger-Stanfield says. Herrera acknowledges that there is still animosity toward the family over the collection. "They made a profit on our burial items," he says. The story of a long life comes inevitably to the subject of loss. The day came when the Giengers� friends were no longer in their hunting camps. Bangor battled uterine cancer. Popo had painful arthritis, a heart attack, a pacemaker. Nearly blind and deaf, he gave up making jewelry and turned to hook rugs and pillows. He died in 1996 of lung cancer at 94, refusing chemotherapy and radiation. Bangor found herself questioning life. "What have I done with my life?" she asked. "I see nothing spectacular or famous." "After Popo died in 1996, she was despondent," Normie Hill says. "But when she started working on the book with David, it kept her interested until the day she died. She even started playing pinochle again." At the end, Bangor Gienger said she wanted to pass on three beliefs. She didn�t want to preach, she added. "It�s just that I think those three things � moderation, self-responsibility and population control � are very important to our future." Some of the Giengers� trophy heads hang today on the walls of the former Coast to Coast store in Chiloquin, their blank eyes mute testimony to two lives that spanned one corner of a century already fading from view. Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or e-mail [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2000 Mail Tribune, Inc.