Her Story — Susie Parks- Telephone operator Hero of the Pancho Villa Raid on Columbus

Susie Gregg began grew up on Rose Hill in the lush woods of Kirkland, Washington. She was the youngest of seven children born to David Duncan and Eliza Jane Gregg who had traveled by covered wagon from Nebraska to Washington, Washington to Montana, and then back to Washington State, in 1898.

When she was 11 years old, her brother was killed in a log roll accident on the north end of Lake Washington. The family was devastated. Lile Gregg was buried on Rose Hill in the Kirkland Cemetery, then David Gregg put the family on a train to resettle in Columbus, New Mexico. Susie took the move as an opportunity to stop attending school after the eighth grade. In Columbus, she rode her horse, hunted in the Columbus desert, and worked on the family’s desert homestead.

Early days

Right: 1906- Susie about 11 years old on Rose Hill, Kirkland, WA

Above: 1913- Susie on her horse, Sam, at The Gregg Homestead Columbus, NM

Right 1908- Susie at 13 in Columbus, NM

Above: 1913 - Susie with Sam at the Gregg Homestead Columbus, NM

Columbus & G.E. Parks

Susie was 17 when she met Garnet E. Parks, a private in the 12th Infantry at the Post of Columbus. They were smitten and on February 6, 1914, they drove a borrowed car 32 miles north to Deming and were married. Garnet had aspirations of being a news reporter. When the Columbus weekly news publication, the Columbus Courier, became available, G.E. used his meager savings to buy the paper and was named Editor and Publisher.

Together they produced the paper and ran their print shop where they lived in the back room apartment. They also claimed a homestead eight miles east of town and worked it two days of the month to maintain ownership. When their baby girl was born in December of 1914, the pieces were all in place to begin their life together.

Left: Susie at 17 when she met Garnet Parks for the first time at a Columbus Community Dance.

Right: 1910- Garnet “G.E.” Parks in K.C., Missouri

Right: 1913- Garnet Parks, Private 1st Battalion 12th Cavalry and Susie Gregg

Above: 1913- Dressed in her new boyfriend’s cavalry uniform, Susie goofs with a friend

Babies, Villa & a hero’s recognition

On March 8, 1916, Garnet went to spend the night at their homestead while Susie and the baby stayed in town. The Columbus telephone office had burned down in January so Susie kept it in the print shop. In the early morning hours, Villa’s band came into town. It was gunfire and chaos for several hours before the 13th Cavalry and Company 1 of the National Guard chased Villa’s army back over the border.

The story of the attack on Columbus circulated the national news for months to follow. Bullet remnants too close to an artery in Susie’s neck caused her great pain. In July, she gave birth to a baby boy as reporters continued to seek interviews from the young switchboard operator who made the fateful call in the Villa Raid. The stories attracted the attention of a New York socialite and member of the DAR, Mary C. Prince, who was moved to recognize Susan Parks that August in a special ceremony at the Crystal Theater.

Left: About 1915- G.E. and Susie in Columbus, NM

Above: The heaviest fighting happened on East Boundary and Broadway. The Courier Office was three shops west of Jas. T. Dean’s grocery. In the days that followed, citizens served in the town as armed guards. Columbus photos courtesy of “Genealogy Village”

Above: August 25, 1916 Columbus Courier- “Telephone Operator Will be Honored”

Right: Chaplain Vincent, G.E. Parks, Baby Gwen, Susie, and Mary Prince before the special ceremony at the Crystal Theater

Left: The Silver Set, gold watch, and silver cup awarded to Susie Parks and baby Gwen

to Washington

After a fire destroyed their print shop and their newly mortgaged Mergenthaler Linotype machine, Garnet took a factory job and Susie waited tables in Pittsburg, PA hoping to recover their losses. She returned to Columbus eight months later, to recover losses from the mismanagement of the Courier while Garnet continued working in Pittsburg. There, she gave birth to their 3rd child, Billie Jo Parks on June 20, 1918. Billie was sick with dysentery that was made worse by the constant dust and wind in Columbus. For the health of the baby, Susie convinced G.E. to sell the paper and move to Susie’s childhood home in Washington State. They bought a small paper in Napavine, WA, and renamed it the Lewis County Independent.

Above: 1919- Susie Parks writes to Mrs. J.H. Cox about her happiness to be settling in Anacortes, WA.

Right: Summer 1919- trip to Snoqualmie Falls with Baby Billie, Aunt Eva Cathcart, Gwen, Garnet Jr., a friend and Susie

Above: 1920- Susie with Billie who is breathing easier after the family’s move to the Northwest

Right: 1921- Garnet Parks holding baby Margaret Irene

Right: 1920- Napavine, WA- Garnet Parks, Susie, Gwen, Garnet Jr., Billie, Aunt Eva and baby Irene

The Tenino Independent

The Parkses moved the Lewis County Independent to Tenino, WA in 1922 and established a second weekly paper they called the Tenino Independent. In the background of their busy lives, Susie coped with pain in her neck from the bullet remnants that had been too dangerous to remove. They bought a house, enrolled the older kids in school, and prepared to settle in. Stomach pains had G.E. doubled over in pain. Susie rushed him to Centralia’s Seace Hospital where they performed an emergency cholecystectomy. It didn’t help, he got worse and doctors at St. Peter’s Hospital in Olympia diagnosed him with liver cancer.

Susie, ran the print shop and kept the Independent afloat while caring for her dying husband and their five children. A chance discovery of sauerkraut moving through the drain tube out his stomach, revealed that G.E. had been misdiagnosed. He had actually been suffering from a perforated bowel due to a slip-up by the Centralia doctor who had removed his gallbladder. The doctors at St. Peter’s sewed him up and he was on the road to recovery. Unfortunately, though, by that time he had developed a dependency on the morphine they had been giving him for the pain.

Left: 1922- Garnet and Susie, pregnant with Jimmie

Below: 1922- Tenino, WA Gwen, Billie, Jimmy, Susie, Irene, G.E., Garnet Jr and Mrs. Chansky

Right: 1922- Tenino, WA Just after Garnet’s cholecystectomy and before his liver cancer diagnosis. Irene, Garnet Jr., G. E., Gwen, Susie, Jimmy, and Billie

Above: Margaret Irene Parks winner of the Better Baby Contest, 1923 Tenino Fair

Above: 1922- Tenino, WA Baby Jim in the wicker buggy with his Papa, Garnet E. Parks

It was inside of a year, when G.E. decided he was ready to try another newspaper in Estacada, OR. They moved again.

Brother Rex showed up at their Estacada doorstep and this tie his corrupt influence was more than Susie could take. They were falling apart.

On a weekend morning in June, the family piled into their Oakland sedan and drove to Portland. They pulled over on a street by a bridge and G.E. said goodbye to his family. They remembered a promise that he would get help and, when he did, he would come back. It was the last time they saw him.

Despite Garnet and Susie’s efforts to fight through his addiction, he was compromised and the influence of his bootlegger brother didn’t help his sobriety. Whether they hoped to put the ordeal behind them or sought to escape too many temptations that lurked in Tenino, they pulled up roots and moved the family south. The kids remembered their farm in Orchards, WA as the happiest time of their lives.

Centralia, Orchards Farm, and bye-bye papa

Left: about 1926- Susie somewhere in Washington

Above: 1926- Susie happily goofing with a farm hand in Orchards. WA

Garnet E. Parks in the driver’s seat of the Dodge Okland

Right: 1928- Garnet E. Parks in the driver’s seat of his Dodge Oakland. The last time the Parks children would see their father was from the back seat of that Dodge Sedan in June of 1929.

Left: 1922- Tenino G.E. Parks, Gwen, Susie, Garnet Jr., Irene, Jim, Bill.

seven mouths to feed & The great depression

Left: 1930- Kirkland, WA Susie works the cafe counter on the ferry that ran daily from Kirkland to Seattle

Susie was six months pregnant as she packed her kids, some furniture, and the milking cow onto her brother-in-law’s flatbed truck. They drove to Kirkland and moved into her sister Eva’s carriage house. She took the only job she could find, hoeing strawberries at Mr. Patchel’s farm. She saved enough to rent a house on Rose Hill where she had lived as a child. Now she would to take her best shot at starting her life over. The baby was born in October 1929, 4 weeks before the market crashed. Susie feared she’d have to put her two youngest children up for adoption, but the older kids pitched in.

Above: 1936- Kirkland Ferry Dock Susie and son Lyle

Gwen took a job as a housekeeper in town for the well-off Marsh family and looked after 2-year-old Lyle. Garnet Jr. and Billie picked and sold berries and cascara bark and helped Susie sell baked goods and other used items out of the back of the Dodge while Irene and Jimmie attended school. A kind neighbor, Elva Adams, put in a good word for Susie at the Kirkland ferry dock where she landed a waitressing job at the Lincoln Ferry boat cafe. Mrs. Adams agreed to take baby Barbara while she worked and Susie gave her the milking cow in order to keep the baby fed.

She wrote several letters to G.E. all returned with: “address unknown”. For the next 17 years, Susie worked one to two jobs at a time and she raised their kids without him.

Left: 1938 Lyle and Bill camping in the Olympic National Forest

Below: The Lincoln Ferry boat from Kirkland to Seattle from 1919 to 1950

Above: 1939 Kirkland, WA Barb, Gwen, and Gwen’s daughter, Danna at Lake Washington

the war & a new life with Del kendrick

Below: 1944- Kirkland, WA On leave from WWII- Bill Parks, Grace and Garnet Parks, Susie, Barbara, Gwen, Tommy and Danna Gonyea

Americans were going off to war in 1943. All four of Susie’s boys and Irene served in various branches of the military. Susie bought and ran a boarding house and worked at the Sandpoint Shipyards as a metal worker. She supported the war effort by hosting Red Cross events and performing with her orchestra at bond rallies. She found a doctor who was able to remove some of the bullet fragments still embedded in her neck. She was adamant that she would never bring a man into the house of her children while they were growing up and she stuck by it. When she met Del Kendrick, at the Sand Point Navel Air Station, baby Barbara was 17 and a senior ready to graduate high school. Susie and Del were married in 1947 then moved to California to start a new life.

Above: 1950- Kirkland, WA - Garnet Jr., Barb, Lyle, Susie, Bill, Gwen, Jim, and Irene

Left: 1950- Kirkland, WA Susie, Irene, Gwen and Barb

Left: 1943- Deming, NM Irene and Jim

Above: 1947- Seattle, WA, Del and Susie Kendrick

Above: 1943- Kirkland, WA Gwen, Susie, Garnet at the house on 2nd Street in Kirkland where she took in boarders during the war.

Yoga, Square dancing and on the road with Del

Susie and Del spend their last years traveling the country to visit their kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids. They had square dance groups up and down the West Coast. Susie discovered yoga, vegetarian eating and Far East spirituality. She picked up an electric guitar and amp at a secondhand shop and taught herself to jam at family visits. The two traveled seeking adventure and unusual sights. From soaking in the mineral baths of eternal youth at Desert Hot Springs to waiting at the rocks in Arizona on the off chance of an alien sighting. Everything was fun to them. It was a joyful time and, she earned it.

Below: 1960- Inglewood, CA Barb. Lory, Shannon, Susie