Mystery Monday: The Distance between Two Pictures

Selma (Kangas) Tully (1894 - 1949)

Selma (Kangas) Tully, about 24
years old.  Anaheim, California,
November 24, 1919.

In this day and age, it is common to see hundreds, sometimes thousands, of photographs marking the great and small events of a person's life. In the case of Selma Tully, however, we have a single photograph that leaves us to wonder about her life before and after it was taken.

Born April 22, 1894, in Yliharma, Finland, Selma Justina Kangas lost both her parents, Juho and Susanna (Ruuspakka) Kangas,  by the time she was three years old.  We have no inkling as to what happened to her between that time and the time she came to America. Chances are she probably moved between relatives as she was growing up.  

Her older brother, Matti, had left Finland for America when Selma was only two. In the years since, he became a jeweler in Diamondville, Wyoming, married and started a family, and even ran for public office.  He had paid Selma's passage and was ready to help her settle in the United States, as others had helped him.

The passenger list for the R.M.S. Mauretania notes that Selma was a servant, hinting that even as a teenager she had to work in exchange for room and board.  It describes her as not quite 5'2", with fair skin, and brown hair and eyes.  When my father-in-law, Welner "Bing" Tully, described her, it was not in a physical way but rather a personal, if not wistful recollection of his mother as a sweet and gentle woman who loved him and his sister tenderly.

The Mauretania arrived in New York Harbor on February 26, 1910. Nearly a week later, the 16-year-old stepped off a Union Pacific train in snowy, desolate, Kemmerer, Wyoming, minutes from the mining town that would be her home for the next six years, unsure about what awaited her but ready to dive into her new life anyway. She helped her brother and sister-in-law with the children and learned to speak, read, and write English.  

Sometime after 1917, Matti and his wife, Anna Liisa, sold their home and took the family, including Selma, on a trip to the Pacific Northwest, before moving to their new home in Itasca, Minnesota, site of a large Finnish community. They might have gone there to visit relatives. Many Finns had settled in Portland, Oregon, whose cool, lush climate and forested landscape resembled that of their Nordic homeland.  Among those who lived in the Portland area were several families with the Kangas surname.   

As much as she loved her brother and his family, Selma knew she could not stay with them forever. She needed to make a life of her own, and Portland, bustling and full of opportunity, seemed to be the place to do it. If the Oregon Kangases were indeed relatives, it would be plausible to imagine that she felt comfortable in deciding that now was the time. She found a job as a hotel chambermaid and kissed her family goodbye, promising to write often. As far as we know, they did correspond after that, but the great distance kept them from seeing each other again.

During this time, Selma had a whirlwind romance with Arthur Tully, a newspaper printer from Tucson, Arizona, and they married on January 15, 1919, in Vancouver, Washington, just across the river from Portland.  She was 24; he was 22.

They left Portland for San Bernardino, California, and their daughter, Vivian, was born there later that year. A few months later, Arthur brought his family back to Tucson to live with his father, Charles Tully, for a short time.  Eventually, they returned to Southern California, this time settling in Anaheim, where Bing was born in early 1922.

The Tully family:  clockwise:  Selma,

Arthur, Welner "Bing," and Vivian.

 Anaheim, California.  November 24, 1919.

The family, decked out in their best clothes, posed for a portrait on the day after Thanksgiving of that year. Here we see Selma in a plain dark dress and sweater, resting her hand on three-year-old Vivian, who clutches a doll and looks slightly bored. Arthur, dressed in a three piece suit, sits jovially in a wooden armchair, balancing his bouncy, wide-eyed 10-month old son Bing on his lap. 

Sadly, their happiness was short-lived. With the stock market crash of 1929, the Great Depression began, plunging people's lives into uncertainty and turmoil.  

The struggle to survive hit the Tully family as hard as it did many others. Something happened to Arthur, and the 1930 United States Census shows Selma and her two children living without him on Bonsallo Avenue in Los Angeles.  

Times were desperate. Selma did the best she could to support herself and the children; Bing recalled helping her iron flour sacks to make money. Sadly, she was fighting a losing battle, and there was no one there to help her.

It is hard to imagine the unbearable pain and helplessness Selma endured during that period of her life, especially with her brother Matti living thousands of miles away.  She must have been terrified by the reality that her money had run out and she had no way to care for her children. As if that were not enough, the thought of their having to suffer without her parents, as she had done all those year ago in Finland, was more than she could take. 

Thankfully, Vivian and Bing had what we today would call a safety net. In 1934, their maternal aunt and uncle, Amelia (Tully) and Thomas Binning, who already had a combined total of eight children, took them in and raised Vivian and Bing as their own.  

What happened to Selma after that is hard to say.  There is no documentation on her life until February 15, 1949, when the California Office of Vital Records notes her death of pulmonary tuberculosis in Ventura on February 15, 1949.  She was 54 years old.

Selma (Kangas) Tully is buried at
Ivy Lawn Memorial Park,
Ventura, California. May
she rest in peace.

I think she would have been happy to know that Vivian and Bing made successful lives for themselves, married and had children and grandchildren, and never forgot their humble yet loving origins. Bing treasured the family photograph all his life and hung it in a prominent place in his living room. It was a tangible reminder of a mother who had made the ultimate sacrifice for her children. 

In 1971, he received a letter from his cousin John Kangas, one of Matti's sons. In it, John wrote of having traveled to Finland, "a long postponed trip that every good Finn should make, at least once." 

Bing's own chance to go to his mother's homeland came in 1991, when he made a personal pilgrimage to Helsinki and took a bus from there to Yliharma, in what was then called Vaasa province.  Unable to speak Finnish, he had no luck in finding his mother's home, but it gave him some comfort to think he was walking down the same streets she had so very long ago.

There is another photo, but it is not of Selma herself. Rather, it is a picture of her gravestone at Ivy Lawn Memorial Park, in Ventura, California. Its simplicity belies a life that began and ended with tragedy, punctuated by dreams of a better future, days of playfulness and deep motherly love, and untold moments we can only hope were filled with joy.

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Copyright ©  2017  Linda Huesca Tully

Motivation Monday: Look Up, Look Forward, and Lend a Hand

Matt Oskar Kangas (1876 - 1971)

Look up and not down; look forward and not back;

look out and not in; and lend a hand.

                      - E. E. Hale


Matt Oskar Kangas was born to overcome obstacles.

"That's Life for You," by Madjag.
Creative Commons; in the public domain.

Matti, as he was known to all, was my father-in-law, Welner Tully's maternal uncle. In a short memoir he wrote in his later years, Matt recalled growing up in western Finland during an era of poverty, pestilence, and famine.

By 1876, when he was born, Finland had recovered from the 1866-68 crop failure and famine that claimed some 270,000 lives, or 15% of the population.  However, it seems some areas of the country were still struggling. Matt's home province of Vaasa was among those wanton areas.

Dire conditions forced many men in the area, including Juho Kangas, Matti father, to migrate to America in hopes of making enough money to send home to their families.  Most of the men eventually returned or sent for their loved ones.  Some were never heard from again.

With the men of Kauhava gone, the wives, including Matti's mother, Susanna (Ruuspakka) Kangas, became the new heads of their households. The children of the town did their part to help their mothers, and their days became a mix of school, play, and hard work; Matti, like many boys his age, tried to fill in for his father as best he could. Juho’s absence weighed heavily on him, but watching his mother suffer without him was even harder to bear.  He dreamed of helping his father in America.

Susanna Kangas did her best to look out for her family, but daily life had become a struggle for survival. Epidemics swept mercilessly through the town. Death became a daily occurrence, and it hit the Kangas family hard. Matti wrote matter-of-factly about watching helplessly as neighbors, relatives, and even his own brothers and sisters succumbed to disease almost as swiftly as it overtook them.  

Lacking access to proper medical care and education on sanitary measures, some of the women turned to old folk remedies to save their families. One of these unorthodox ideas held that drinking one’s urine would boost the immune system and keep disease at bay.  Susanna tried getting her surviving children to do this, desperate to keep them alive, but Matti recoiled in disgust.

The first time I read this in Matti’s memoir, I, too, felt revulsed.  But as I re-read it, I could not help reflecting on how I would feel  as a mother if I watched my own children die one by one, with little to no medical treatment available.  It would be agonizing. So yes, I can only imagine that the horror, fear, and helplessness Susanna probably felt in that circumstance left her no choice but to try anything that might help, no matter how extreme the measure might have seemed.

It was a happy day when Juho Kangas finally returned home, and his stories of life and opportunity in America were all Matti needed to begin planning his own trip to see it for himself.

Juho died in 1895, a year before Matti's chance finally came.  Barely a man at 20, he must have had mixed feelings the day he bade goodbye to his widowed mother and his sole surviving sister, Selma, who was by then two years old.

It was the last time he saw his mother, as Susanna died the following year.  He would reunite with Selma, but not for another 14 years.

Handbook issued to passengers
traveling on the Cunard Steamship
R.M.S. Lucania, 1894. 

Matti loved all things modern.  He must have felt exuberant the day he boarded the R.M.S. Lucania, a three year old Cunard ship that at the time held the record for being the fastest passenger liner in the world.

Despite the luxury the Lucania afforded passengers in first and second class, its steerage class was little more than a cattle car for up to 1,000 people, Matti being one of them. He probably took it in stride, having seen much worse in his young life.

He arrived at Ellis Island in New York City on July 25, 1896 and went from there to either Michigan or Minnesota to live with relatives while he got settled.  

Eight years later, he was working as a coal miner in Diamondville, Wyoming, a wild, hardscrabble community of mostly immigrant Scotsmen, Finns, Slovenians, Italians, and Austrians, among others.

Diamondville was a true frontier town. Housing consisted mostly of shacks and dugouts built into the hill near the mine, aptly giving it the name "Shack Town."  With two churches, one school, a jail, a hotel, and a handful of stores, opportunities abounded for new business. Matti was among those who took advantage of this and eventually left the mining life to become a jeweler.

He turned 30 in 1906.  Still an idealist who wanted to change his world, he entered politics, running for State Treasurer on the Socialist ticket.  It was common for Finnish-Americans to belong to the Socialist party with its "old country" origins and friendliness toward them and the language and culture they had left behind. The party advocated for safe labor conditions and fair rights. It also helped various ethnic groups establish meeting and cultural centers where they could gather with others who came from the same places and spoke the same language. 

For these reasons, Socialist advocacy resonated with the Finnish and other mine workers in places such as Diamondville, where 53 miners were killed in two horrific accidents between 1901 and 1905. It did not fare as well, however, with other Americans, who viewed Socialism as a threat.  This was especially true in Wyoming, even then a heavily Republican state. 

During the election campaign, several newspapers set aside the objectivity that was the hallmark of American journalism, instead instructing readers to vote for the Republican candidate alongside the long slate of candidates for state office from the Republican, Democratic, and Socialist parties. 

One of these newspapers, the Crook County Monitor of Sundance, Wyoming, printed a sample ballot on the front page of the November 2, 1906, edition, an "X" featured prominently in the box over the Republican slate.  On top of the box read the headline, "Ballot to be used in the Election next Tuesday.  Vote it Republican by a Cross as Indicated." Below the graphic, a breezy wrap-up of local and state news wove in at least seven references to the achievements of Republicans and the merits of voting the party.

Front page of The Crook County Monitor, Sundance,
Wyoming, November 2, 1906.

Though it should be no surprise that Matti lost the election, he seemed to be no worse for the wear, and he moved on with his life.

In 1908, Matti married a fellow Finnish-American, Anna Liisa Heiska, and nine months later they had a son, Pellervo.  Two other children would follow: a son, John, in 1911, and a daughter, Aune, in 1922.

He never forgot the sister he had left behind in Finland, and he paid her passage to America so she, too, could start her life anew.  16-year-old Selma Kangas arrived in New York from Yliharma, Finland, on February 26, 1910, and promptly made her way to Wyoming.

In the fall of 1914, Matti threw his hat in the political ring again, this time running for the state congressional seat.  It is admirable that he chose to do this a second time, given the odds against him. 

Two years later, an area newspaper, the Kemmerer Republican, reported that he sold his house for $300 and planned to visit the Eastern states before relocating again to either Oregon or Washington State.

There is no evidence that the Kangases reolcated to Oregon or Washington.  There was a sizable Finnish community and several Kangas families living in the Pacific Northwest at the time, so it is possible the Kangases went there to visit relatives, or maybe they went just to see the sights.  Either way, when they left, it was without Selma.  Records show she found a job as a hotel maid in Portland, Oregon. She would go on marry a young Arizona pressman, Arthur Tully, and have two children, Welner and Vivian.

As for Matti and Liisa, they moved their young family east, first to Itasca, Minnesota, and then to Owen, Wisconsin, both sites of large Finnish communities.

It was a happy time.  Aune was born in Owen.  Pellervo, known as "Pell," and John were members of the school band, playing the saxophone and trumpet, respectively.  During 1927, 18-year-old Pell went on tour in Finland with a Finnish-American band, called the Humina, or "Murmur" band, to Finland.  The band played for such notable listeners as the President of Finland and Finnish composer Jean Sibelius and his wife.

1940 found the family once again on the move, this time to Arlington, Virginia, where Matti set up shop as a watch repairman.  The Pell, John, and Aune married and had children of their own.  They stayed in touch with their cousins, Vivian and Welner Tully, exchanging letters and Christmas cards over the years.

Matti Kangas was 95 years old when he died of a stroke in 1971.  Anna Liisa outlived him by eight years. Her death certificate notes that in late January, 1979, she was being helped from her bed in an Arlington nursing home one day when there was an accident and she suffered a broken right femur. Two weeks later, she died of cardiac arrest.

Life is not without its obstacles.  Matti had more than his share at an early age, but maybe that prepared him to face the challenges of looking up and making a new life, looking forward and running for public office not once but twice, looking out and raising a family, and lending a hand by bringing his sister to America and helping her adjust. His story is our story, and his dream lives on in the face of every person seeking a better life.

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Copyright ©  2017  Linda Huesca Tully