My Great Aunt Calla Lily Tucker died in 1981 when she was 82 1/2 years old. I inherited a few of her things - one of which was her Botany note book which she did between Fall 1916 and June of 1917. Calla turned 18 on March 11th that year. It contains Botany exercises, drawings and plant samples from Silver Creek, Lewis County, Washington. Amazingly almost all of the plant samples are still in one piece after 97 years (only the strawberry plant had totally disintegrated by 2014.) I finished scanning it the first week of January 2014, in case someone else wanted a copy of it (since there are dozens of Tucker cousins) and to "preserve it" forever. I also created an index to it which includes current day pictures of the samples. The note book sits on my antique desk, and I put Calla's grandmother's (my great great grandmother Mary Hardesty Tucker's) reading glasses on top of the book as if she was reading it. I am sure Calla showed it to her as Mary did not die until 1918.
My Great Aunt Calla Lily Tucker was born March 11, 1899. She was William John Tucker's (eldest son of John and Mary Tucker) fifth and youngest child and his only daughter. Calla's mother was Will's second wife May Mabel Wight.
Calla left Silver Creek 1 April 1922 to attend the Seattle School of Nursing with Eva Henderson. In December she came home for a few days visit on December 23rd. The Kalama River in neighboring Cowlitz County had frozen over due to the severe cold snap and two barns had collapsed from the weight of the snow in the Winlock area. The following year Calla and Eva had the month of July off from nurses training and spent it in Silver Creek.
After graduation, Calla stayed in Seattle to work as a nurse, but returned home often for visits. Calla was my maternal grandfather Alva Ashbury Tucker's youngest sibling
of four and only sister. Alva had forgotten to mail his life insurance
check for his premium in May 1927 and he asked her to mail it for him
before he went to work (he was an engineer on a tugboat) and to look
after his family if anything happened to him. The tugboat went down in
stormy seas a few days later and the life insurance money helped keep his widow and four
children (ages 10, 7, 4 and 2 months) going during the depression. Calla
did what she could for his children in the years that followed.
She worked in Seattle until sometime in 1929 when she started working as one of two nurses for a 38 year old physician, Dr. James R Barton, who also employed a cook for the household at Port Gamble, Washington. Calla was still there on April 5, 1930. Later in 1930 Calla moved back to Seattle to work as a nurse at the Florence Crittenton Home for unwed mothers for six years.
Cally Lily Tucker July 28, 1932
Calla must have needed a birth certificate for something because on 29 August 1934 her maternal grandmother swore in an affidavit in lieu of a birth certificate that Calla Lilly Tucker had been born on 11 March 1899 at Silver Creek, Lewis County, Washington. Calla’s father William had died the year before and her mother May had died in 1920 at the age of forty-nine.
During the spring of 1936, Calla had a couple of Seattle doctors that she had worked with write her letters of recommendation. This is what they had to say about her:
“This is to certify that I recommend Miss Calla Tucker, a registered nurse, to the fullest degree. I have been closely associated with her in a professional status for the past seven years and have found her to be most capable and competent. Her character is beyond reproach and it is with great pleasure that I recommend her for whatever position in the field of nursing she may desire. Carl M. Helwig, M.D.”
“During my service a pediatrician on the staff of the Florence Crittenton Home, I have worked with Miss Calla L. Tucker.
I know her to be an exceptionally well prepared and efficient obstetric and pediatric nurse. I can most whole-heartedly recommend her to any position requiring institution pediatric type nursing.
She possesses an unusual acumen for detecting when things are not going well with babies. She is dependable, trustworthy and energetic. Arthur E. Wade, M.D.”
Calla returned to Lewis County sometime after 1940 to work at St. Helen's Hospital where in 1948 she was a head nurse. At some point Calla bought a home in Chehalis at 1434 Second Street which was across the street from the block that R.E. Bennett School occupied. R.E. Bennett faced Market Boulevard which was the main street through Chehalis.
Calla belonged to a number of community and fraternal organizations. On 2 October 1950, Calla and her fellow members of the Pythian Sisters Drill Team journeyed to Seattle to compete at the Grand Temple Convention. Their team took first place and was now the best team in Washington. The Pythian Sisters is a fraternal order with members in both the United States and Canada. It was founded in October 1888 in Indiana, and it is associated with the Order of the Knights of Pythias which was established in 1864 in Washington, D.C. (The organization is much smaller now with one temple in Italy, twenty in Canada, and one hundred fifty-one in the United States in twenty-eight states. Oregon has five and Washington has four temples – Tacoma, Longview, Black Diamond, and Port Orchard.)
In the fall of 1950, Calla was also a member of the World Hobby Guild No. 1. It was a fairly large group with twenty-four members attending even during icy weather when most could not make it. Members had a variety of hobbies from writing to rock collecting to jewelry making to painting. At the meetings members would show examples of their hobbies and various clubs would exchange items to review at guild meetings. For example, a World Hobby Guild in California sent the Lewis County guild samples of a rock collection from an old mine. A man in New York sent samples of his jewelry to be sold or exchanged. Various competitions were held around the country and you could enter something from your hobby.
Calla had a busy active life with a number of friends. In June of 1951 she had a birthday dinner party at her house for two friends, Mrs. Marie Jubb and Mrs. Elmira Filan, with birthdays that week. She had a pink and white decorated birthday cake and the assistance of Donna Filan, the small daughter of Mrs. Elmira Filan. In April of 1952 Calla was elected to the Executive Board of the Hobby Guild. She held offices in every organization in which she was a member. She also was active in the Southside Garden Circle.
Calla
spent the weekend before Thanksgiving 1953 having dinner with her first cousin
Adeline Larson Swanson, her husband Arthur, and daughter Marjorie who had come
down from Port Angeles to celebrate with some of Arthur’s family. Also
attending from Tacoma was Hilda Usher, the widow of Adeline’s older
half-brother Walter who had died in 1952. Since they were living on neighboring
farms, the first cousins - Calla born March of 1899, Walter born February 1896,
and Adeline born in 1901 would have all grown up together.
Calla worked as a nurse at St. Helen’s Hospital until she retired. She was also a member of the Chehalis Seventh-Day Adventist Church. Calla died at St. Helen’s Hospital on Monday, November 30, 1981. Her funeral was held on Thursday, December 3rd at Fissel Chapel of the Brown Mortuary Service in Chehalis. She was buried at Alpha Cemetery (noted in one cemetery index as Callie Lilly Tucker instead of Calla Lily.)
Calla left her estate to her church. The church members were very kind to me at her service and said that I could go into her house and take whatever personal belongings I might want because I was Calla's closest living relative. She had a few snapshots of herself and her half-brother Edwin Monroe Tucker, Sr. and his wife Marie. Under the glass on her bedroom dresser, she had something that made me cry. Calla had the obituary for her grandfather John Tucker, her grandmother Mary G. Tucker, her father William John Tucker, and an article "5 Men and Boat Believed Lost in Straits - Missing Tug and her Scow Thought to Have Been Run Down and Sunk" about the death of her older brother Alva to whom she had been very close. Alva did not have an obituary.
Great grandparents: Isaac Tucker/ Agnes Tucker
Grandparents: John Tucker/Mary Graves Hardesty
Parents: William John Tucker/May Mabel Wight
Updated May 25, 2023
Copyright ©2023 Maevè Mitchell
