Erla Adella Inks Smith

Erla Adella Inks Smith was the child of two centuries and lived long enough to see the arrival of a third. She was born 85 years ago in a two-room plank cabin on a farm homestead on the Coeur d'Alene Indian reservation outside Worley, Idaho. In 1912 her family had moved there from North Dakota to start a new life. Erla was born three years later, on November 16, 1915.

There was no doctor to bring Erla into the world. Her father, who had learned the appropriate skills from his mother, served as midwife while the doctor was still in the row boat, crossing two miles of Lake Coeur d'Alene to perform the delivery. The doctor was greeted with a team of horses, which took him to Erla. By this time she was already washed and dressed. The Inks family didn't bother to summon the doctor for the final two of eight daughters raised by George and Laura Inks.

Erla spent her childhood in Worley in a home that never had electricity or running water. The house was clearly modest, but at times it was warmed with the music of an organ the family bought from the local school for $2. Erla attended a one-room grade school and lived at times in primitive economic conditions. The girls churned butter, which was taken into Worley along with radishes and onions to sell or barter for staples—flour, sugar, and the occasional five-pound tin of peanut butter.

The people who reared Erla came from an era we can only imagine. She was named, in part, for Adella Bender Smith, her mother's sister. Her father's mother bore 11 surviving children, the last of them in 1893, and lived to witness the Roaring Twenties. Her grandfather was a teenager in the civil war and was only 20 years old when Lincoln was shot. He lived to see the beginning of the Great Depression. Erla's mother didn't enjoy the same longevity. She died in 1930, when Erla was still in high school.

Erla's father was a stubborn and hard working laborer who worked on the railroad, logged, and farmed. From time to time he visited relatives in Wenatchee during the apple harvest. His work could be dangerous. One time he cut his foot with an axe and the family had to stop the bleeding by pouring flour into the wound. And his farm work was demanding. While he cleared land of trees and stumps, the older daughters had to grub out the underbrush by hand, to be piled and burned. In time they had a sizeable farm, and Erla recalled seeing her father disappear in the waving alfalfa as he walked across their land.

They had six cattle, and used a separator to skim milk from the cream, which was stored in cans in the cool root cellar until they took it to the railroad station for shipment to a creamery in Spokane.

When it came time to put meat on the table, George was a good provider. He was a crack shot who trained his eye by using a rosebud for a target. His 22 Special Winchester pump-action rifle brought down deer and birds on the wing.

We can obtain a sense of how primitive life was by understanding that Erla didn't have her own birth certificate until after she was married and had two children, in 1943. Documents she left behind revealed that one way she clarified her true age was to request a record from the 1920 census. Erla may have had a sense of modern times from stories she heard about the outside world, but Worley was a long way from the action in the Roaring Twenties, and by the time she was a teenager, the promise of modern times was over. At the age of 15 Erla had lost her mother and was faced with a future dominated by the Great Depression.

Photos of her teenage years at Worley High School occasionally reveal a young woman ill at east with life. But Erla's high school classmates were fond of her. She was class secretary, and the autograph book she kept for the rest of her life carried the comments and ditties that young people like to scribble off to their friends at graduation. One of them penned a line that seems to show up with every generation:

"If all the girls were across the sea, what a good swimmer I would be."

One of Erla's childhood recollections was seeing her first airplane, a biplane. The pilot had landed at Worley and was offering flights for a fee. Even in the last few years of her life she still recalled how sad she felt that she didn't have the five dollars to take that flight. Some folks will note that Erla had been pretty much a stay-at-home in her later years, but she clearly wasn't always that way. There is good reason to wonder what other choices she might have had in a friendlier world.

But Erla passed through hard times. Following the death of her mother came the depression and the great uncertainty of those years. Later she would recall the shame she felt around other girls because her clothing wasn't always in good repair. She moved to Spokane, where she worked in the homes of people who could afford domestic help, and later in a hospital, where she met a friend she kept for life: Florence Hamaker.

Erla and Florence worked the same shift, and Florence recalled just a few weeks ago how Erla would be waiting around for her boyfriend, Ralph Smith, as Florence was leaving with her beau, Dan Hamaker. This turned out to be a friendship that would last more than 65 years.

Ralph was a college-educated man who earned an engineering degree with honors and who found work when others were out of work. He turned down opportunities his education offered him in order to attend to his family. For 27 years he served as a Spokane police officer. They began their marriage in a very small house but after a few years and the birth of their first child, Judy, they moved into a new house on North Adams Street.

Over the remaining years of her life Erla raised three children in that home and experienced the loss in childbirth of a son. She returned to and remained at the home after the untimely death of Ralph shortly after his retirement, while he worked as a schoolteacher in Wilson Creek, Washington.

During the time from her marriage on she lived to see the splitting of the atom, the introduction of television, the assassination of a president, the landing of men on the moon, and an increasingly shrinking world in which her children and grandchildren would travel the globe and be able to retrieve information from all corners of the earth and view it from their desktops.

During most of her 60 years on North Adams Street, Erla was a member of Fowler Methodist Church and she made regular contributions until her death. As youngsters, her children were baptized at Fowler a half century ago, and attended until they left home and life took them in new directions. Erla's insistence that they attend was one of the most important influences in their lives, and Erla's first grandchild, Delrene Elaine McCauley, also was baptized at Fowler. Although Erla did not attend regularly, the church was always in her thoughts, and she developed many friendships through the church that enriched her life.

Erla also is remembered for being a mother who could cook well for her family. She set a standard for what should be on the table at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and the foods she served at those occasions are still served on the tables of her children. Her after-Christmas turkey soup, was especially favored, and provided for the family for days afterward.

Except for the famous story of the "bean and pea" room where Robert would be taken as a child for his adamant refusal to eat his vegetables, no one every turned up their noses at her meals—or her lemon meringue pie. Ken and Robert in particular remember the famous "Christmas lemon meringue pie incident" in which two young boys just couldn't keep their fingers out of the meringue as the pie cooled in the refrigerator. Afterward, they laughed through their tears, as they realized that, with that meringue smeared all over their little faces, they both looked like Santa Claus.

When her sons went off to college, Erla stayed in touch by writing long letters. As the years passed and her eyesight failed, she still enjoyed staying in touch with her remaining sisters and children through long phone conversations. Whenever possible she attended Inks reunions. Those could be large affairs, because the Inks kin lived long lives, many of them well into their 90s.

Erla's growing blindness and other ailments were made more bearable by the support of her relatives who remained in Spokane, and her regular contacts with her two sons and other relatives who lived out of town. Her daughter, Judy, and two granddaughters Delrene and Patricia, and their families lived nearby. She was especially helped by Patricia, who took time out of her busy schedule and the raising of her two sons and support for her husband to visit Erla each week to help her write checks, read mail, bathe and accomplish other daily tasks. As the end of Erla's life approached, she had the satisfaction of seeing her family pull together and express their care for her. It was especially clear to everyone how helpful it was for Erla to have her daughter, Judy, care for her. Judy extended a better quality of care than Erla could possibly have had through any other choices.

In her final few months, Erla endured great discomfort, but her death came gently and without pain. Shortly before she died she was alert and able to hear her sons speak to her by phone. She had the peaceful knowledge that her children had been allowed the opportunity to bid her goodbye and express their love, and that Judy and Patricia were by her bedside to the very end of her life on earth and the start of her new beginning.