Childhood

Evelyn was born Evelyn Agnes Galonzowfski in 1918 in Outlook, Saskatchewan, Canada. Her grandparents had moved there in 1904 from southern Russia. They were wheat farmers of German origin and moved to Canada to farm wheat. At that time, Evelyn’s mother, Emma (nee Brown), was 9 years old. She grew up, married Herman Galonzowfski and gave birth to Evelyn in Canada.

Evelyn, about her childhood:
“My dad worked for the Canadian Pacific Railroad. So we never lived on a farm. ‘Til we came to California; we had a farm there, but it was a peach orchard farm. And we had chickens, freshly sold eggs. Then we sold that and went to Oregon, and he worked in the lumber mills, depression came along … lots of things changed. So he worked in the lumber mills there, and then we came to New Mexico. We were very young when all that took place."

After living in California and Oregon, the family moved to New Mexico in 1928 to Santa Rita, a mining town near Silver City. The depression hit, and Evelyn’s father left her mother – left her with three children, no house, no car, no job and no formal education.

“So we spent our life, our next 7 or 8 years, struggling to exist over there and trying to get enough money together to eat, you know. My mother worked taking care of a sick lady, and then she did housework for people, for teachers and for the mine bosses. There were several little mines around, and so there were different little areas around there. So we moved around and scratched out a living. Then later years we moved; she got a job at Rosedale."

Evelyn’s mother ran the boarding house at Rosedale:
“And my sister and I were like 14, 15, 16, along those years. Nineteen-thirty-three, thirty-four, something like that. And we worked in the dining room and we got paid! We got a paycheck! So we had board, we had a little house to live in, and we had our board and room there. So from there, things started getting a little bit better."

Ervin, Evelyn’s brother, worked in the assay office for two years, making $2 a day. He was the assistant to assayer Johnny Kinds, and when he left, Ervin got his job. Ervin said:

“But you had to weigh all those samples, you know, and all little tiny balances, and just had little wires and counterbalances, very delicate stuff to weigh, and keep track of the gold and silver. Thirty-four, yeah, she first heard about it, asked ‘im if they needed a cook up there. He said, “We sure do,” so she jumped in the car with him and went to Rosedale and left us kids. And Lewis and I were still going to elementary school, and Evelyn stayed with us, kept us together, and summer of ’35 we all went to Rosedale and all went to work. Boy, that was like … Christmas. ‘Cause before that we were living on a dollar a day, sometimes. My mother made a dollar a day, if she had a job.

"Well she (Evelyn’s mother) cooked in the cookhouse for a couple a years, and then they decided that her grocery bill was too high, so they let her go, so we went to Magdalena and opened a little restaurant, and then two months later they came and said, ‘You’ve gotta come back. All the miners are leaving – we can’t find a cook …’ If you don’t feed men, they don’t work. In mining camps and in cow camps, it was important to FEED well. So she went back. And I had dropped out of high school, and I went back to school in Magdalena, and took two years of school in one year and graduated from high school, walked out the door and married Dean (Fite) and moved to the ranch.”