RE: FAMILY GENEALOGY
DATE: OCTOBER 27, 1989
INTERVIEW WITH MAYME FLAHAVEN
I interviewed Mayme Flahaven on Thursday, October 27, 1989, in the company of her husband Leo in their home at 1310 Grand Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota. Mayme and Leo have lived at this address since leaving St. Cloud shortly after the second World War, I would say somewhere around 1945.
Mayme is the daughter of Arthur Graham, the oldest brother of my grandmother, Maryann Graham Donohue. The following are my notes of our conversation and the interview:
We first went through the whereabouts of all of the Grahams she knew:
Pearl Graham is still living in Chicago. Mayme says she receives Christmas cards from her.
Mayme repeated a second time the story about my grandfather being a traveling man, that he, as a traveling man, had occasion to be in Melrose. My grandmother worked at the hotel in Melrose. Mayme believed that is where she came in contact with my grandfather. They wanted to get married. Maryann's parents, Tom and Mary, did not believe Will Donohue was good enough to marry Maryann. It was for this reason he went to law school, to show them. According to Mayme, he completed law school in one year and came back to Melrose to practice. To do it in one year was apparently a remarkable feat. I have inquired of other family members about this story and find no verification of it from the William Donohue descendants.
Mayme remembers her grandmother Mary McClean. She describes her as a lady who always had candy in her pocket. She pointed out candy was a real big thing to them at that time. She was from somewhere near Chicago before coming to Minnesota. She would come out to the farm and visit.
She also remembers her father talking about his folks, that they were from northern Tipperary County, way up in the northern part of the county.
I reviewed the pictures I had from one of the Graham families. The first picture on page one, the man with the beard, she described as very likely being her great-uncle, Mike Graham. He was a bachelor who farmed very close to the Arthur Graham farm. He was a well-regarded man. Mayme has a large antique frame picture of him in her home and she showed it to me. He is a very handsome man. Mayme described him as "liking his liquor." In fact, as he became older, for a period of time he was living at the Ellen Graham farm. He and Ellen got into a fight, he left, went into Freeport, got tipsy, came home to his farm, and died of a heart attack during the night. Another story is told of him as coming to attend my grandfather's funeral, was drunk, and they put him in the bathroom at the funeral to keep him from making noise. I think this story was told to me by Ethel Lerohl.
Mayme related Patrick Graham from the Patrick Graham, Jr., family, who would be Patrick III, got into a fight with his father, Patrick Jr., and left home, married, went to Havre, Montana, to work for the railroad. According to his father's biography, he married Mary Donohue of Melrose.
Mayme also remembered Artie Graham of that family who married and went to Sauk Centre.
Mayme remembered Edward and James Graham who lived in Freeport, had farms close together, and neither were married. She believed one of the sisters in that family, possibly Alice, these are children of Patrick Graham, Sr., lived together. Mayme remembers the house they lived in. It was an eight-room house and very old. Each room had a fireplace, which was its only source of heat.
I asked Mayme about her family. The oldest child in the family was Tom. Tom lived in North Dakota, married, and had no children. He worked for a lumber company. His wife was a cook. She had children. They were both older when they married. The next child in the family was Rose. Rose married a Mike McCarthy. Their children are still on the farm of the McCarthys in the Mendota, Minnesota, area. The children, as best Leo and Mayme could recall, are Mike, who is dead, Tim, Jim, and Owen. The next child in the family was Mayme. Mayme was born June 22, 1896. She married Leo Flahaven who was born May 13, 1893. They were married August 3, 1915. They will celebrate their 75th wedding anniversary this next August 3. They were married at St. Cloud; Cathedral. They ran away to get married. They ran away because Mayme's family did not approve of her relationship with Leo. They lived about four miles apart. Leo's family lived up toward Belgrade in Brooten, four miles away from their farm which was three miles from Sauk Centre, seven miles from Melrose. Leo had a nice horse and buggy. His dad was Bartholomew T. Flahaven. Mayme believed the family was a little jealous of Leo because he had a pretty good horse and buggy. In fact, Arthur, Mayme's father, rented out horses and buggies for use of people that did not have them. This matches with Ethel Lerohl telling me that when her family needed transportation more than walking or the railroad, Uncle Arthur would send in a horse and buggy.
Mayme and Leo's children are as follows: Buford, born October 9, 1916. Eileen (Babe) born October 18, 1918. She married Max Stark, who is now dead. She lives in the State of Washington. Pat, who was born in July is 62 years old now, that would mean she was born in 1927. Pat was married to Eugene Hawes. Mike was born October 7, 1931, died May 13, 1959. He died in an airplane crash while flying a Capital Airlines plane. He was the youngest flight captain in Capital Airlines. Mayme gives this account having to do with his death: The day before he died he picked out his grave, he transferred all of his property into his wife's name, and he tried to get someone else to take the trip he had with Capital Airlines, which was, as I recall, somewhere on the East Coast flying into Washington, D.C. He told his mother the day before in a telephone conversation that if something happened to him he would simply say, "Well, God, here I am." He married Mary Smizzie, a flight attendant, from Dearborn, Michigan. Mary's parents were Rachelle and Dominic Smizzie. Mike and Mary have a daughter, Katherine, who married Russ Rumles. Mary Smizzie Flahaven married Bill Ryan following the death of Mike. Pat's children are Jean Hawes, who is unmarried and lives in St. Paul, and Mike Hawes who married Shelly something, they have one child, Hunter Hawes, who is one year old. Buford has three children, Dellas, Mike, and Mary. Mike lives in the State of Washington, Dellas and Mary live in Idaho, as does Buford (Buff) and his wife. Babe has the following children and lives in the State of Washington: Mike, Diane, Douglas, Mary, and Virginia.
Next, in the Arthur Graham family is Bill Graham, who never married and died in North Dakota.
Next is Mabel Graham, who married Joe Janike. They have one son, Jerry, for Jerome. Jerry went to West Point. He is a retired military officer living in New Mexico.
The next child in the Arthur Graham family is Irene Graham, who married George Janike. They lived in Grand Rapids. Irene is dead, George survives. For that matter, Mabel and Joe Janike are dead. Irene and George have children. I failed to get their names from Mayme.
The youngest person in the family was Tim Graham, who died in South St. Paul, for whose estate I handled the probate in Hastings, in Dakota County. He died in 1962.
Mayme said Leo's family came from Waterford Ireland. She didn't know whether Leo's father or grandfather came over.
Arthur paid $2,000 for his farm in 1890. He borrowed the money from a bank in New York. He did this because there was not a bank in Sauk Centre. Mayme believes she has some papers showing the payoff on the farm.
Mayme's mother was Ann Haley. She was raised on a farm near New Munich. She never knew her mother's parents. At best she knew her mother had a sister living in the New Munich area for which reason she assumes she grew up in the New Munich area and was probably from there.
On my last visit to Mayme, she told me the story of having taught eight years in a country school house. After graduating from eighth grade she was sent to St. Cloud in some special capacity to attend normal school. She attended normal school for a year and became a teacher, qualified to teach in country schools. She was, however, too young to teach in general school, so somehow obtained a job on an Indian reservation. This was in South Dakota. She taught on that reservation, had a home some distance from the reservation, and was given a horse to ride to and from school.
She started sleeping during the week at the school and then riding to and from where she lived on weekends. Leo came out to the area and managed a saloon and pool hall. Leo could remember having the cowboys who came into the pool hall check their guns before they were allowed to come in to avoid any shooting in the pool hall.
Mayme also tells a story of sharing a birthday with my Aunt Madeline, the oldest member of the Will and Maryann Donohue family. She said she was brought in each birthday to a birthday party had for Madeline Donohue. She stated she was always jealous and resentful because Madeline had a room filled with gifts, in turn, her family was poor and she had no gifts.
She tells a story of how she had a dog who was taken into the Army during WWII who wrote her two letters while in the service. I failed to get around to asking the content of the letters. We were covering a lot of ground. I remembered the dog going into the Army from my own childhood. We were all quite excited about this. Mayme said the dog went into the Army because she couldn't afford to feed him. She said she had to cook him meat for his food and she didn't have enough ration stamps to feed him. Therefore, she thought it was good idea to put him into the military when they were calling up dogs for service. As I remember, this dog was a police dog. Her son Buford, known as Buff, was a pilot, as was her son Mike. Pat also tried flying, was up twenty minutes and has never set foot again in a plane. She suspects that Pat, an asthmatic, must have gotten into a higher altitude and lost breath or consciousness. She has never mentioned why, simply refuses to fly. Buff was a Flying Fortress bomber pilot. We were quite impressed by stories of him when we were kids. Mike Flahaven was also one of my heroes growing up as was his sister Pat. She was our babysitter. As I remember Pat, she was very tiny, had red hair, and freckles. As our babysitter she would take us to the movie and would sneak in with a child's admission. That was back when children were admitted to a theatre for a charge of 10 which went up to 12 during this time period. I can personally recollect going to the Eastman Theatre in St. Cloud for a Sunday matinee the first time the price was up to 12. Pat had us there my cousin Yvonne, my two brothers, and myself. She got in for 12 along with the rest of us. At the time, she was nine years older than me. I suspect I was seven or eight years old.
Mayme tells that after Aunt Jo married Jessop, she and Jessop homesteaded in Colorado. This didn't work out and they ended up in San Diego.