The Guilty Conscience

(Yet Another Connection Between the Vern Ducklow and Gideon Arneson Families)

[Published January 9, 2011]

This weekend I told my mother about the old postcard I purchased on eBay showing the spoke, stave and heading factory that was located in the “flats” between St. John’s Cemetery and the Eau Galle River in Spring Valley.  We discussed how funny / odd it was that the 1909 postcard was addressed to Mrs. Gideon Arneson—the wife of the man who was in a race of sorts to be married before my Grandfather Vern Ducklow.  To learn the full story of that check my prior posts here and here.

I asked my mother if she recalled what Gideon Arenson did for a living.  At first she couldn’t recall, but then an old memory surfaced that he was once in the mercantile business.  The reason mom remembered was due to a conscience-clearing letter sent from Vern’s daughter Audrey in the 1960s.  

Victor "Vic" Neil Ducklow

Smiling over the  counter of the "new" post office
Son of Vern and  Mina Bowen Ducklow

Circa 1969, age 47

Around 1964 Gideon stopped in the Spring Valley post office to pick-up his mail.  My father, Vic Ducklow, was a mail clerk there.  Dad retrieved his mail as Gideon purchased some stamps. As Vic handed Gideon his mail, he noticed one of Gideon’s letters had a return address of A. Thompson, Phoenix Arizona. He recognized the handwriting as that of his sister Audrey Thompson Ducklow – but had no idea why she would be writing to him.  He kept his professional poise making no note of the letter from his sister.

Audrey Ducklow Thompson
Daughter of Vern and Mina Bowen Ducklow

Circa 1960, age 56

Gideon looked through his mail and was immediately confounded by this letter from “A. Thompson Phoenix.”  He had no idea who this was and why anyone from Phoenix would be writing – so he opened the letter right in front of my father to discover its contents. After reading the letter to himself, he shared it aloud.

The writer said that when she was a girl she had stolen a 3-cent pack of gum from Gideon’s store (likely sometime in the 1920s). As she looked back over her life she had developed guilty conscience about swiping the gum and wanted to make restitution.  Enclosed was a dollar bill.  She did not sign the letter or offer her maiden name.  The only name was on the return address – A. Thompson.  To my mother’s knowledge, Gideon never did discover that A. Thompson was Audrey Ducklow.  My father too kept her identity hidden from Gideon – figuring that if she had wanted to share her complete identity she would have. Hearing this story gave me a better appreciation of the character of my Aunt Audrey.  If stealing a pack of gum was one of the worse sins she committed, and then writing a letter of apology some forty years later, she certainly ranks among the saints in the family!

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Footnotes:

Like Great Grandfather George Ducklow, Audrey suffered with asthma.  She and her husband Hank Thompson moved to Phoenix in the 1950s for the clear air and dry weather.  She died of complications of asthma in 1967.

So the answer to my original question to my mother was implicitly answered by this story – Gideon was, at least for a few years, a mercantile man in Spring Valley.

Upon receiving the dollar, it appears that Gideon received about 8% return on his 3-cent pack of gum over the 40-some years. 

Dad never brought up the story with anyone in the family, except my my mother.  I had never heard the story before she shared it with me on Jan. 9, 2011.

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