Eve Walker, by Jim Routhier

It was Aunt Eve who helped cultivate my love of history. “You can’t know where you are going if you don’t know where you came from,” Eve would always say to me when I was a child. “That’s true for people and for countries.”

She lived in Colorado, with my uncle and two cousins, but visited several times a year. At least once every visit, Eve would find an opportunity to remind me of that basic truth. My father’s eldest sister, she was nearly forty years old and an accomplished woman by the time I was born.

My earliest memories of Eve are of me sitting enraptured while she recounted her adventures in the WAVES during the Second World War. She had enlisted in the summer of 1941. Eighteen and a high school graduate, she was ready to escape the small Upper-Peninsula fishing and logging village of Brimley, Michigan. The peacetime draft was on, and eventually one of her brothers would be drafted and sent to the Pacific in the War. However, as Eve would proudly remind everyone, she was the first to enter military service, and she had volunteered.

In September 1941, after completing her training in Illinois, she found herself assigned to the secretarial staff at the San Francisco Navy Yard. She was still working at that assignment when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor took place. In the days following the attack, she and the other secretaries were pressed into special service and assisted in the processing of the paperwork related to those killed and wounded in the attack.

Decades later, Eve’s eyes would still mist over when she would recall how they worked in a large officespace with twenty-five typists in five rows of five each. These twenty-five women manually typed reports, medical records and notifications to family members. For several weeks, the paperwork came almost non-stop. As soon as one stack of files was completed, another stack was delivered. The typing went on and on, filling the room with the steady clack, clack, clack of manual typewriter keys. Eve always described  the clattering of the typewriter keys as “a cacophony of sound.”. Loud enough to fill the room, but not quite loud enough to cover-up the sobs of those fellow secretaries who occasionally became overcome with exhaustion at the volume of work or from the grief of reading reports of those sailors who had been burned, mangled or drowned in the attack. Sobbing and overcome with grief, these secretaries would be escorted from the area by another WAVE or a sailor. Sometimes they came back, and other times someone new would shortly appear and take their place. The work never stopped.

Following her assignment in San Francisco, she was sent to the Seattle Navy Yard. It was there where she met a young Okie sailor named Bob Walker. “From an early age,” Eve would tell us, “your uncle knew he wanted to be one thing, and only one thing, a cattle rancher. We came up with a plan while we were in the Navy, and after we married and were discharged from the Navy, we put the plan into action.”

Upon their return to civilian life, Eve and Bob took their combined mustering-out pay, a total of $2,500, and invested in a used car dealership. This was the first step in the plan. American car companies were still set up to manufacture military vehicles and aircraft. My aunt and uncle had figured that returning soldiers and sailors would be coming home with their mustering-out pay in their pockets. If they were looking to buy a car, with the car companies needing time to retool and convert back to civilian auto production, used cars would be in demand. The idea paid off.

By the time the auto companies completed their retooling in early 1947, Eve and Bob had already sold their investment for a handsome profit. Their next investment was in Texas oilfields and Hollywood motion picture production. Each investment was made with the same goal in mind, cattle ranching. By the time of their deaths in 2001 and 2010, respectively, their plan of short investments quickly turned over for a profit had paid off. They had built a cattle ranching business that, at its apex, consisted of twelve ranches in three states. A favorite picture of mine is one of Eve at Turkey Creek Ranch, sitting on her favorite horse, “Lil’ Big Enough.” In the picture, she is wearing leather riding chaps over her jeans and a leather vest over a white blouse.  Her black hair is pulled back tightly, and a Stetson sits atop her head. The caption on the back of the picture reads:

 1964 – Eve riding Lil’ Big Enough. Turkey Creek Ranch. 1st Cattle Drive. She said she’d never do it.

The writing is Uncle Bob’s and the picture was proof that, despite her prediction otherwise, here she sat just prior to her first drive.

By the time I was born, Eve Walker was already a wealthy woman. Yet despite her increasing wealth, she never forgot her humble beginning.

“You know we were raised in a home with dirt floors,” she would begin any discussion of family history with that reminder. By “we,” she meant her parents and siblings, including my father. As much as my father avoided discussing his childhood, my aunt embraced every opportunity to discuss hers.

The small home they lived in is still standing in Brimley, although it now has floors and indoor plumbing. Even now it’s difficult to imagine a family of seven living in the small dwelling. Based on pictures taken during the era, the home resembled a tarpaper shack straight from the Depression-era South. Despite being in northern Michigan, the structure was only marginally insulated against the cold and was not livable year-round. There was no indoor plumbing. Water was provided by a well on the property and stored in a rain barrel just outside the back door. The outhouse, behind their home, served as the toilet facilities. Eve’s eyes would sparkle with delight whenever she would tell the story of the time she and her sister were tasked to give their brother, my then eight-year-old father, a bath. Not being particularly motivated to complete the chore, they thought to save time by simply bathing their little brother in the cold water of the rain barrel. The result was a half-drowned, half-frozen eight-year-old boy, a barrel of well water that was now sudsy and had to be emptied, and one angry mother.

Grandpa was a commercial fisherman in the non-winter months, and during the winter worked at one of the area logging camps. Once winter started to set in, the house would be closed up for the winter and the family relocated to the logging camp where Grandpa worked. During this time, Grandma worked as the cook for the same logging camp, while continuing to raise the children. Often this meant that Eve, my father, and their siblings would assist with the cooking and cleaning chores at the camp. Once you were old enough, everybody worked.

Overcoming this difficult beginning, Eve was immensely proud of our family history, particularly the history of Judge Sir Adolphe-Basile Routhier. Judge Routhier was a Quebecois jurist who rose to the position of chief justice of the Quebec Supreme Court. In 1880, he wrote the original French lyrics to the Canadian national anthem, “O’Canada.” Eve would describe Judge Routhier as “the Francis Scott Key of Canada.” It is because of her and her love of family history that I would eventually trace my family line back to France in the late 1500s.

As much as Eve was a positive impact on my childhood and helped nurture within me a love of history, she was not without her prejudices and foibles. I was in my early teens when I first realized that Eve had issues with race. Like other aspects of her life, even her prejudices were complicated. She would at times declare her support for Civil Rights legislation, but openly supported keeping the armed services segregated. In Eve’s mind, separate but equal was perfectly acceptable, provided both sides were truly equal.

“What’s wrong with everyone staying with their own kind?” she would ask whenever the topic of segregation came up. Her politics were no less complicated. She was a registered Republican but considered Frankin Delano Roosevelt to be one of the greatest presidents in US history. “Only FDR could have gotten us through the Depression and the War,” she would often say.

While a lifelong supporter of FDR, Eve was just as rabid an anti-Communist. She was a long-time member of the John Birch Society and was convinced that just about every one of America’s problems was the result of Communist infiltration. She would endorse Civil Rights legislation one time, and the next would declare it government overreach. In her world, it made perfect sense that while Civil Rights legislation was overreach on the part of the government, Senator McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities was not.

Eve’s sense of history was no less complicated. As much as she would mock those who believed the moon landing to be a hoax,  she would openly scoff at the Warren Commission’s finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating John F. Kennedy. She refused to believe that Oswald was capable of carrying out the shooting, and was convinced that a conspiracy had existed between the CIA and the Soviet government. She claimed that this conspiracy was responsible for Kennedy’s death. In 1975, Appointment in Dallas by Hugh McDonald was published. In this book, McDonald raised those same allegations. In Eve’s mind, this confirmed what she had been saying, and she would live the remainder of her life, convinced that Oswald had been a patsy and Kennedy the victim of an international conspiracy.

Both Eve and her husband were avid hunters, and they owned a large number of hunting weapons. At Eve’s insistence, an air- and water-proof case was constructed for each weapon. Eve was convinced the government would be confiscating weapons, and she was determined to hide their weapons away rather than permit them to be taken from them.

Eve died in 2010, but it had been several years prior to that when I last saw her. She had become too ill to take the flight from Colorado to Michigan, and my being in the Army made it difficult to visit Colorado. After her death, Gary, her oldest son, explained that as her body began to fail her, her mental faculties remained. She remained involved in the day-to-day operations of the cattle company until her failing health forced to her retire. Even in retirement, she continued a reduced workload from home, becoming proficient in telecommuting.

Whether fighting in the war, creating a successful business or raising her family, Eve served as a role model for those who knew her. Someone who demonstrates what hard work, inspiration, and luck can accomplish. She continues to influence my life to the present. The dichotomy that was her life illustrates for me that people are never as simple as all good or bad. Each of us possesses the ability for both. It’s what we do with the opportunities we are given, the challenges that we encounter, and the limitiations we impose on ourtselves that matter.