Early years of James D. Haffner and Barbara Bennion - told by daughter Rosemary

Early years of James D. Haffner and Barbara Bennion - told by daughter Rosemary

Email from Rosemary Haffner to Lisa Edler, January 2017 - Lisa had asked about how our grandparents (James D. Haffner and Barbara Bennion) met and married:

As I understand the story, my mom and dad (your grandma and grandpa Haffner) met at a dance in Seattle after WWII. Dad came back home to Seattle after the war; his family had gone there from Iowa by train when dad was 5 (he was born in 1920, so that would have been 1925 or 26, before the Depression). An uncle (might have been Uncle Ben who with his wife Evelyn were cook and caretaker at the UW oceanography lab on San Juan Island for 40 years) had gone to Seattle and found work, and the rest of the clan followed. I remember dad talking about a train ride with grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins.

Mom, Barbara Bennion, had moved to Seattle from Utah during the war. As I recall, she had gone to the University of Utah, maybe for three years, but didn’t graduate. My sense is that she chafed under the restrictions of life in Utah for a single woman in the 1940s. She had a cousin in the area when we were kids; he lived on Lake Sammamish and I remember going there and swimming in that lake. Mark might recall his name. He was a Bennion. It could be that she headed to Seattle because he was already there, but I have no particular recollection of being told that. Mom worked as a bookkeeper/accountant. She wasn’t a CPA but I think things were less regimented then than now, and I imagine she was highly capable; her firm gave her lots of responsibility (which you will see below). She told us that she was in the Northern Life Tower downtown on the 42d floor when the 1948 earthquake hit Seattle, and that she crouched under her desk and watched the chandelier on the ceiling swing back and forth. When the shaking stopped, she said, she and her colleagues walked down 48 flights of stairs to get out; the elevators were stopped. She lived in a boarding house run by “Mrs. P” - P for Peterson (or Petersen). One time I brought home a zucchini from a farm I was working (I would have been about 12) and she told me she hated zucchinis, and that Mrs. P had tried everything short of putting chocolate chips on them to get her to eat them but nothing worked. [On food, mom also told me that her mother, Grandma Bennion, had confronted her with the same bowl of oatmeal for breakfast for an entire week, which my mom - your grandma - refused to eat. I never found out who won that one.]

Some time after they met, mom was sent to Portland to open a new branch of the accounting firm she worked for. (This would have been exceptional - to send a woman to do this job in those days, so she must have been very good at her work and highly regarded and trusted by her employers.) Dad stayed in Seattle; he may have been painting with his dad, my Grampa Louie. He also drove cab for a while, but I think Mark knows more about that. Dad told me a story once about how he was driving to a painting job with an old painter in the passenger seat. It was raining. The older gentleman was complaining nonstop about young drivers, and dad took a left turn across railroad tracks with wooden timbers at the at-grade crossing - it might have been under the viaduct. The wet wood had no traction, so dad’s car spun a complete 360 and ended up pointed in the same direction he had been going. He said he put the car in first gear to continue on his way, but the older guy said “wait a minute,” and got out of dad’s car to walk.

Anyway, mom would fly from Portland to Seattle on weekends to see dad, landing at Boeing Field in south Seattle (which was where I took off from to go to college in the late 60s-early 70s). Often it would be socked in and mom’s plane would circle in the air looking for a hole in the clouds so it could land. Dad, who had been a navigator in WWII, knew about fuel loads and how long the plane could stay in the air before running out of gas, would circle on the ground looking at his watch and calculating remaining fuel. According to what he told me, he finally couldn’t stand the worry any longer and so asked her to marry him so she would move back to Seattle and stop flying back and forth.

My understanding is that mom was able to keep her job even after becoming married (another exception to the rules of that time), but once she was pregnant with me she had to quit. Meantime dad, who had wanted to be an interior decorator, and was working at JC Penney’s doing that (he had gone to Cornish School in Seattle for 3 years on the GI Bill), couldn’t make enough to support us in that job and so went back to painting with his dad. I think he never really liked painting, but he was so good at it that his customers wouldn’t let him quit.

See? Push a button and all kinds of stuff gushes out.