Everett Williard Williams by Hazel

EVERETT WILLARD WILLIAMS

Some Brief Remembrances by His sister, Hazel Alice Williams-Robbins-Gravel

(Dictated to her daughter, Tina Robbins-Coonce)

Marion, Illinois 2001

  Everett was the first child of Harvey Jackson “Jack” Williams and Mary Edwards-Williams, born in Vale, Oregon, near the Idaho border in 1916. Our mother was just a little teenager when she was virtually sold into marriage to a man twelve years older.  Nine months after the marriage, Everett Willard was born, and eighteen months later, I came into the world -- Hazel Alice.  It was six years later before their third child, Bucky Dale, was born.

My young mother now had a toddler and new baby in an impoverished and difficult life. Day to day survival took precedence over such frivolities as mother-child bonding.

Moving often to find work, we were usually in desperate circumstances.   In one home -- an abandoned shack by the river, my mother kept an illegal trout line for food.  Even as an adult, I still shudder as I recall the day my mother shot a snake that had slithered in through the floorboards of the shack.

As many eldest children of poverty-stricken parents, my brother Everett had to make his own way very early in life.  When he was just a young boy, he sadly observed the reality of his life, "Mother loves Bucky, Dad loves Hazel, but nobody loves me."

I remember how Everett was mean kid who killed animals when he was little.  Today I think he would probably be called a sociopath - with no conscience.

And he was mean to me.  One of the lesser traumatic things I remember was a prank rather typical of young boys.  Conspiring with our Uncle Bob, who was the same age as he, they put my shoes in water, and then placed them up on the roof, laughing at me as I cried.  It was my only pair of shoes!

As many other children of impoverishment, we slept on hay.  When Everett was ten years old we moved to Elk City, Idaho and had real beds for the first time.  Actually, they were like boxes built on the wall, a type commonly used at that time.  I remember the young Everett soon found a use other than sleeping.  While in the bed next to him, I heard him having sex with his girlfriend.

Life was hard for our family, and we children worked at whatever we could, and sometimes it was gruesome.  In those days, prairie dogs were a hated pest because of the holes they made in the pastures.  So for a time, we kids were able to earn one-cent for each one we killed with a bat.  When he was grown, Everett said he never got over that, and could still see it in his mind.

However, it didn't bother him to beat-up his little sister regularly.  I still remember an especially bad beating one day for the crime of letting a rabbit out of a trap.  I don’t blame my parents for the harsh life we had, I know they were doing their best, but one thing I do blame them for is letting Everett beat up on me all the time.  It felt like at times I was virtually fighting for my life!  They never taught him to treat a girl with respect.  After he was grown and married, he was ashamed of it and asked me not to tell his wife about what he had done.  I guess people can change.

Everett had a naturally high intelligence, and was actually considered a genius in the first grade.  But opportunities for education and refinement were nonexistent in the Idaho Mountains in the 1920's.  

Everett was only thirteen when our mother died, but he was able to get a job working in the construction of a water flume around Elk City.  He tried to hide the little money he made, but Dad always found it and drank with it.  However, Dad also started taking Everett drinking and carousing with him.  He introduced him to things no young boy should know.  By the time he was a teenager, he was running with a wild bunch of men.  One of them was a boxer who started bar room fights, and let Everett have the pleasure of finishing them.

For a brief time, our aunt, Flora Cline Howard came from Grangeville and tried to care for us kids, but my Dad didn't give her any money, so she couldn't stay.  We ran wild like animals until our grandparents, Will and Annie Edwards, came and took us to Klamath Falls, Oregon.  But life there wouldn’t be a great improvement.  Money was scarce, and hunger was frequent.  Grandmother Annie tried to help, but there I witnessed thievery, bootlegging, fortune-telling, and prostitution.

In those days, public school students had to buy their own schoolbooks.  Everett and Uncle Bob worked and saved to buy their books and go to school.  They buried their money in a field, trying to hide it, but our grandparents always found it and took it.

Later, our grandparents separated.  Grandmother Annie had a lover named Jim Watters, who had a reputation of being “a little crazy.” Everett claimed he saw Annie and Jim shoot her husband, Will Edwards.  The 54-year old man was found in a chair in his house, slumped over a table with a gun.  With somewhat circular logic, the police didn’t see any reason he couldn’t have shot himself!  The murder was never solved, and the local, less than expert, authorities declared it a suicide!

But our aunt offered another explanation.  A few days before the murder, he had been involved in an altercation with some ruffians from a prominent family in the area.  She and her mother were convinced it was revenge, and the social standing of the perpetrators’ family prevented a thorough investigation.

Annie and Jim eventually married.  However, it appears Jim knew her well, and was wise enough to not eat anything she cooked until after she took a bite of it first!

We children were eventually sent to live with our mother's sister, Aunt Violet and Uncle Monte “Skeeter” Hays, seasonal crop pickers with four hungry children of their own.     As other men of the time, Skeeter and Everett both worked “in the woods” when they could; and Annie operated a logging camp kitchen for a time.  Though only fifteen, Everett had become rough and mean.  One day while working alongside Skeeter, he started thinking about perceived abuses, and began to beat him almost senseless, knocking his tooth out.

Then he up and left.  He dug a patch of green potatoes, put them in a sack, and we didn't see him for nearly ten years.  He worked as a logger in the woods for a while, but by the age of twenty-one he had become a professional gambler, traveling around the country.  I have frequently said, "He had such an awful life, its no wonder he became a dishonest man."

A few years later, there was a brief period when he was out of work and wasn't gambling.  So my first husband, Jack Robbins, and I went to Klamath Falls to find him.  We brought him back to Greenville, California, where he spent the winter with Dad and his new wife, Marie.  My husband, Jack, was a hard-drinking, carousing man, and Everett was delighted to have a like-minded companion.  The two men took off on a spree, living it up with prostitutes in Oroville, Sacramento and Reno.  But for some reason, Jack left him penniless in Reno.  He walked and hitchhiked back to Greenville, hungry, in the dead of winter with his toes nearly frozen.

When Everett told me about it, Jack wouldn't let me see him.  Everett wanted to go back to Klamath Falls, and needed to catch a freight train in Susanville, half-an-hour away.  The stubborn Jack wouldn't let me take him there, so Everett borrowed a car to get there.

Everett's first wife, Margie, was an Indian girl he had married in Tule Lake, California, just over the border from Oregon.  Unfortunately, Margie was promiscuous, and drank heavily.  Everett left her, and she later died of tuberculosis.  They had a son, also called Everett, who probably had a worse life than his father.  Violet and Skeeter kept the boy for a time, but finally made Margie take him back.  Violet and Skeeter’s daughter, Peggy Hays-Peterson recalls that after Everett remarried, he went to see the boy, but after that no one ever knew what happened to him.

In the early 1950's Everett married his second wife, Greta, in Seattle.  He told them she was from Holland and didn't speak English very well.  She was actually from Idaho, and madly in love with him.  After he broke his leg in a gambling fight, she dutifully brought him a fifth of liquor every day during his recuperation!    

Several years later, Everett got a job in Las Vegas as a legitimate dealer.  He had the opportunity to move his family there, and have a decent life.  But from years of practice, dishonesty was deeply ingrained in him, and he was caught trying to "skim off the top."  Security is tight in Las Vegas, so from that time on, he was not allowed to even enter the gambling halls there.

He fell in with a group of outlaws in Montana who involved him in underworld connections.   I was deeply distressed to learn some of the details of their "work."  I was particularly grieved that arson had been one of his assignments.  It was some small comfort when he told me that when a murderous "hit" was discussed by his cohorts, he tried to talk them out of it.

Tragically, in 1967 Everett was killed in an automobile accident when he was only 51 years old.  He was working a gambling job in Glacier National Park, Montana, when a head-on collision ended his life.  Two women were also killed in the other car, and a little girl was seriously injured.  Everett may have had a heart attack or stroke, which resulted in the accident.  Any eye witness claims he saw Everett slumped over the steering wheel as the car veered, and then raising himself up just as the other car came over the hill.   

My daughter, Tina Robbins, knew her Uncle Everett and his family for only a brief time, when she was a teenager in Great Falls, Montana.  Tina baby-sat with the children one summer while Everett was working in Glacier Park.  She remembers him being very kind to her.  But Tina was a troubled teen herself during that time, and Greta didn’t like her.

Eventually Greta remarried.  Keith Vestman, a retired policeman, who was very good to her and the children, before he too died.  But to this day, she remains obsessively devoted to Everett's memory to this day.  She won't even let her children see his photographs, for fear they might take one. 

Though-out his lifetime, there was little, if any, spiritual input for Everett, but he did go to the Catholic Church at times with Greta.

June 7, 2000

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