I grew up in this family in Bremerton Washington. Bremerton is west of Seattle, a ferry ride across Puget Sound. There's a naval shipyard in downtown Bremerton and the Bangor naval submarine base just to the north.
My parents still live in the same house we grew up in (except when I was a very small child). That house, which used to be in "the country," is now surrounded by tract houses and near major shopping areas.
To differentiate between the family a person grows up in and that persons own family, professionals refer to the family a person grew up in as "family of origin."
The surname Kollars is fairly unusual. It turns out that folks with that surname in the USA are probably all related. The name --originally Kolash ("wheel maker")-- came from somewhere near what used to be Czechoslovakia, and the spelling was mangled at Ellis Island. The original immigrant came to the town of Crofton in northeast Nebraska, and many of the Kollars diaspora trace back to that town. A distant relative put a lot of effort into capturing the Kollars family tree. The results of that effort seem to not be available online any more, but fortunately I got a copy before it disappeared. Here's my copy of the Kollars family tree.
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Dad grew up on a farm in Nebraska, then left it in hopes of becoming a CPA. He was drafted into WWII, and served in the Pacific Ocean. After the war he went to college in Washington state on the GI bill. Educated as an electrical engineer, he got a job at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton. He lived in that town all his adult life, getting married, raising a family, retiring to part time work, then retiring from that too. He's always been a gardener --he used to unwind from the office by "watering the garden"-- and is still very fond of his large (40'x100') vegetable garden. |
Mom grew up on the edge of Spokane Washington, in a small close-knit community centered on truck gardening, in what would have been desert landscape if not for some springs. Water was important there. A motel a little down the road from her homestead never opened because they couldn't get an adequate water supply. Her house got its water from a well that tasted funny because of a high iron content. What water there was travelled in strange ways through the old rock that surfaced in hexagonal columns, for example blasting for a new road caused one swimming pool to constantly have extra water flow into it so the only way to keep it from overflowing and making a mess was to run a pump all the time. She went to college for a couple years, then got married and settled in Bremerton and stayed there all her adult life. Even though Mom is having more and more trouble getting around, Dad still drives her to her church once a week where she helps with secretarial things. |
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| My sister Ruthie is only about a year and a half younger than I. After high school and college she went on to graduate school to get a Masters in speech pathology. That was a lonely time for her, going suddenly from her undergraduate existence that was full of people and events to being all by herself. She's lived in a lot of different places, outside Portland Oregon, north of Oakland California, Mesa (Phoenix) Arizona, in Snohomish (Seattle) Washington elsewhere in Oregon, and now back near Seattle. Almost every place she's worked in the local schools. Her twin daughters, who I remember crawling around, are now near college graduation. For the past many years Ruthie has suffered from an unusual disease that makes her physical movements slow and awkward and makes her very tired. It's progressed very slowly but inexorably until she can no longer work even part time. Different specialist doctors have all scratched their heads. One gave the name "primary lateral sclerosis" (not quite the same as Lou Gherig's Disease/amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), another suggested some kind of genetic connection with the name "spastic paraparesis", and so on. Perhaps the specific names "Familial Spastic Paraparesis (FSP)" or "Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HPS)" or "Primary Lateral Sclerosis (PLS)" suggest the condition is better understood --and more cleanly linked to genetics-- than it actually is. | My brother Bob is a dozen years younger. He was like a second family, with Ruthie and me being the first. We were teenagers when he was a real little kid. He's quite athletic. He played intramural basketball at the University of Washington (a very large school with about 30000 students). Later he coached the basketball team at a local private religious school. Even though he'd lived all his life in Bremerton on the Olympic Peninsula, he was priced out of the market for waterfront real estate by a glut of expatriate Californians. Instead, several years ago he bought a corner of the old homestead (just over an acre) from Mom and Dad, and had a house built with a great view of the Olympic mountains. Now his family is looking to move to a house in a better public school district (his kids are getting too old for the easily available option of private schools that go up through eighth grade). As he's moved up through the ranks at his job, it seems each step has required more travel rather than less. He commented "you know you travel a lot when you get a Christmas card from the CEO of an airline." |
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Location: N42 40.86' W070 50.35'
(North America> USA> Massachusetts> Boston> North Shore> Ipswich) Time: UTC-5 (USA Eastern Time Zone) (UTC-4 summertime --"daylight savings time") Email comments to Chuck Kollars |
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