Sensational Seniors – February 2020

My main purpose in writing “Sensational Seniors” articles is to honor the richness of the lives of people of Jacksonville who have been active and productive citizens of our fair town. However, for this, my 33rd article, it was I who was honored with the rare opportunity to spend part of a morning at Pioneer Village with 100-year-old, long-time Jacksonville resident, Helen Hein. And while Mrs. Hein’s body is frail and her memory sometimes escapes her, she is still a vital part of what makes Jacksonville so unique.

Helen Hein was born in Denver, Colorado on October 21, 1919. Her father was a sugar beet farmer, and Helen remembers with angst her experiences on the sugar beet farm. “From as early as I can remember, I helped with the sugar beets. I had five older brothers and one younger brother and four older sisters. My older siblings would work standing up with a hoe to weed and thin the beets, but my younger brother and I would work with a short hoe, crawling on our hands and knees along the rows, thinning out the beets in a square so the biggest beet was the only one left.” Helen further reflects, “My mother would sew extra patches on our pants so we would have a little extra padding as we crawled along. I have to say, I absolutely hated this job and was determined that in my adult life I would never grow sugar beets, and I never did.”

While Helen was still a young girl, her family moved to Montana where her dad gave up sugar beet farming and became a sawyer at a small sawmill near Savage. Since the mill was in a rather remote area and transportation to an in-town school was not possible, the owner of the sawmill, utilizing his own milled lumber, built a one room schoolhouse and hired a variety of teachers. Helen remembers that, while she enjoyed the school, there were several difficult boys in the one-room school. “I remember that one day, while the teacher was out of the room, one of the boys wrote on the chalk board, ‘The teacher is a numbskull.’ When the teacher came back in the room, he threatened whoever had written it with a licking, but, since I was the only girl in the school, he knew I would not have done it, so I was safe.”

Helen’s Montana experience turned her into a cowgirl as she loved being around and riding horses. Her cowgirl experience was enhanced by a friendly neighbor boy, Freddy, who was a rodeo cowboy and her brother, George, who became a rodeo clown. Young Helen’s life took a turn when her family moved from Savage, Montana to nearby Sidney to be closer to a church as they were a strong Christian family. In Sidney, their closest neighbor was the Hein family, a family with eleven children, including Dick Hein, who in November 1935 became her husband. Helen remembers, “Well, Dick was 24 and I was 16. Our mothers were opposed to the marriage. Dick’s mother said I was just too young to get married, but Dick told her that I would learn how to be a wife. My mother was opposed to the marriage because she did not want to lose her main helper in the family home. Fortunately, both our fathers approved of the union.”

While Dick’s parents lived in town, they had a cattle ranch outside Sidney which Dick ran and where the young married couple lived. Helen remembers scrubbing the wood floors on her hands and knees and doing the weekly laundry on a washboard, but this was also the time that she tried her hand at baking. “We always had a Sunday dinner after church, and on one Sunday I made a cake that everyone raved about. From then on, I was expected to bake a cake every Sunday, but I enjoyed it.”

After a couple of years running the ranch, Dick grew weary of doing all the work on the ranch while his father stayed in town and took a good share of the cattle sale profits. Consequently, Dick and Helen decided to strike out on their own and move to the far West. As might be expected, this decision did not sit well with either family. Helen relates, “Dick’s dad did not want to lose his worker, and my dad was furious because he had plans on moving rent-free into a bunk house we had on the ranch. He was so mad he wouldn’t even say goodbye.” Their first stop was in Spokane where a sister of Dick’s lived. Dick had learned butchering skills as a kid as all the family meat was processed at home, so he was able to secure a job in a butcher shop. In addition, he was bought a small ranch on the Spokane River. Life was going well for Dick and Helen until WWII broke out in 1939, prompting Dick to enlist in the Navy where he was stationed on a troop transport ship serving as the head butcher and cook. When Dick was home on leave, his transport ship was sunk with many lives lost.

Always looking for new opportunities, when the war ended, Dick and Helen packed up and left Spokane, seeking good ranch land in southern Oregon. Dick believed strongly that to have a successful cattle ranch you had to have a ready source of water, so he was initially drawn to southern Oregon by the Rogue River and all its tributaries. Their first Rogue Valley ranch was out of Ashland, but they were not there long when they traded the Ashland ranch for a butcher shop in Jacksonville, which began a long commitment to Jacksonville. While Dick had a full-time job running Hein Butcher Shop, he could not go long without cows and horses, so Helen was not surprised when one day he announced the purchase of ranch property just outside the city limits and this was to become Pair-A-Dice Ranch and eventually the well-known Pair-A-Dice housing development where two of the streets, Mary Ann Drive and Richard Way, are named after Dick and the couple’s daughter. Eventually, running the butcher shop and the ranch became too much for Dick, so he sold the butcher shop and concentrated on ranching.

Remembering Jacksonville in the 1950’s, Helen relates, “At that time it was a dead town. It was not considered a very nice place to live, there were many boarded-up buildings and the Chamber of Commerce didn’t have funding to do much of anything. Really what kept the town alive were the fireman because, besides protecting our property, they were always promoting some event or activity like dances, parades, Pioneer Days and dinners.” Having grown up with a strong work ethic, Helen was a dedicated mother and housewife but, once in Jacksonville, Helen revived her passion for baking and for more than just her family. She baked pies for the Mustard Seed Café; for years baked the Communion bread for the Jacksonville Presbyterian Church and then moved on to making wedding cakes. “Of all my baking, I loved making the wedding cakes and especially the bells and slippers I made from sugar. My other specialty was making a German peach coffee cake for our Pastor Larry Jung. He always requested it, and I always baked it.” In addition to her baking, Helen, an accomplished seamstress, started creating period costumes, especially Victorian-style dresses, for period dances that were held in the U.S. Hotel on California Street.

While Dick was busy working on their ranch, his entrepreneurial spirit led him to begin purchasing land and developing it. For example, Dick built Jacksonville’s only gas station as well as the veterinary hospital behind it. A skilled heavy equipment operator, he did some logging as well as doing all the excavation and site work for his building projects. Eventually, as Dick and Helen grew older, they had to take a break from the rigors of hard physical work. They sold their Pair-A-Dice ranch property and built a home on Wells Fargo where they had a large garden. Helen remembers, “People said you won’t be able to have a garden because of the deer, but Dick put in two cattle guards back to back. You see deer might jump one cattle guard, but they won’t two.” Their relaxing time on Wells Fargo came to an end when Dick, who suffered from vertigo, could no longer do the work on the property, so they sold their lovely home and moved to Pioneer Village. Helen is very proud of the fact that, when they sold their Wells Fargo home, they took $100,000 of the proceeds to help purchase the Middle Street property where the new Jacksonville Presbyterian Church was built.

Dick passed away on August 9, 2010 at the age of 99. He and Helen celebrated 74-years of marriage. This past September Helen’s beloved son, Raymond, died, leaving a hole in her life, but she was thrilled when her church gave her a 100th birthday party on October 20, 2019. Her daughter, Mary Ann, lives in Portland, and she has frequent contact with a granddaughter and grandson. On her actual birthday on October 21, Helen’s granddaughter, Michelle, provided flowers and cake at Pioneer Village along with the Pioneer Village staff blessing Helen with 100 balloons to celebrate her milestone. While it is no longer physically possible for her normally to attend the Jacksonville Presbyterian Church where she and Dick were mainstays, she enjoys frequent visits from church friends and is proud of the fact that her Pioneer Village apartment is never cold. She sums up her experience of living so many years in Jacksonville with these simple words, “Jacksonville is a wonderful place. The people of Jacksonville care about their town and Jacksonville cares about them.”

Featured image: Helen at her 100th birthday party.