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Note: (All details of Harry Reeve's life are thanks to Ray Reeves) As a young man, Harry was delivering 6 different papers in Arcata to earn money. He delivered them on foot, because he had no horse or bicycle. Then he and a friend started a dairy. They would milk 16 cows by hand, pasteurize the milk and bottle it. Then Harry would take a horse and wagon and deliver the milk to the homes in Arcata. Harry said that horse, once he started the route, would go through the entire route without him having to touch the reins. He said that at one of the stops he would take the milk for about three houses and the horse would go down the alley to the street, turn around, and come back to pick him up and finish the route. Harry even had a slide that was made to show at the Arcata movie theatre advertising the dairy.
When Harry was about 24 years old, he quit the dairy business and went to work as a laborer on the Korbel railroad. When a train would derail that was carrying lumber, as they did every once in awhile, they had a huge steam donkey that was mounted on a flat car. He would pick up the cars from the track and spin around and set them down on the track so it could work its way down to the derailed car with the spilled lumber.
Since he worked for the Korbel railroad, he would eat at the Korbel Cookhouse, where a young girl named Eleanor Brogan worked. One day she was pouring boiling water into a big coffee maker urn, and the boiling water splashed back and scalded her. Harry was the first one on the scene and immediately started rubbing her down with butter (In those days butter was the standard treatment for burns). They became an item, and even though Eleanor was only 15, they got married on March 19, 1919.
Harry quit the railroad shortly after his daughter Peggy was born, in 1920. He went to work for Pete Phillipsen, who was the manager of the Arcata Creamery. Harry and Eleanor bought a house on 10th Street in Arcata, close to where Eleanor's Grandmother Clara Anna Doe lived (on the corner of 10th and O street).
Pete Phillipsen and Harry became good friends, and Pete one day approached Harry about coming with him to a place called Fernbridge. Pete had been asked by the Dairyman's Association in Ferndale to start a new co-operative dairy there. They would take in the milk and separate the cream and then make butter from the cream. They would make 2700 pounds of butter per day, and it would be put into a mold and the mold would then be run through a wire cutter and made into 900 lbs of 1/4lb. cubes. Each cube would be wrapped by hand and then put into a 1 pound carton and then into a box, 20 cartons per box. Harry had gone from Fireman (tending the steam boilers) in the Humboldt Challenge Dairy, to driving the butter truck, delivering Challenge butter and cheese to every store and restaurant from Scotia to Arcata. Monday and Friday was Eureka, Tuesday was Rio Dell, Scotia, Alton, Hydesville, Rohnerville and Fortuna. Wednesday was Arcata and Thursday he was Fireman in the boiler room. During WWII, tobacco products were rationed and everybody wanted him to help them out. (Black Market), he knew all the store owners. He would buy snoose for Soren Peterson, cigarettes for his sister in-law Ethel, and chewing tobacco for Orin Duer.
Harry Reeves is a half-brother to Annie Mae Stayton (they had the same mother). Annie Mae's husband Charley died in 1942, and she was left alone when her son Kenneth (Tut) was drafted into WWII. In 1948, she told Harry that she had to sell the place and move to a smaller house closer to Eureka. Harry agreed to purchase the it, and immediately set about to update the property.
With Herman Brogan's help, Harry turned the two-storey barn into a duplex, updated the main house and rented it out until he was ready to retire in 1957.
There was an old gentleman who lived across the street from Harry's house on Pine Hill by the name of Rudy Barsch. He had a younger American Indian woman and her daughter living with him. Harry eventually bought Rudys house and then updated that and rented it to Jesse and Louie Sundquist in 1957, when Louie retired as a Train Engineer on the Korbel Railroad, where he had worked for 55 years.
To be continued......
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