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Note: �Belle, my grandmother, worked as a nurse until she married John McDonald and then no longer. They lived in Walla Walla. In 1914 they took a trip with my mother, aged 4, to Hawaii, perhaps as an effort to improve their troubled marriage. She divorced her husband in 1923 and moved with my mother to Long Beach, California; she lived on Alexander Avenue in Claremont, and at the Wilshire Apartments on Coronado Street in Los Angeles in the late 1920s. In the 1930s she moved to Portland. She traveled to the Orient with her aunt Alice [Hurlburt] Weister in the late 1930s. From her she inherited [1938] a home on NE Stanton and 23rd and lived there until the late 1940s or early 1950s. She developed what was doubtless Alzheimers Disease and ended her life in complete confusion. She died in the Colonial Manor Rest Home, 6821 SE 112th in Portland on 27 October, 1955, and was cremated two days later at Portland Memorial.�
Belle had a reputation for being very tight with money. Her niece Margaret reports an occasion that stuck in her mind for over 70 years: �When I knew Belle, Katherine [Short] and I went up to visit her where she lived, you know, Walla Walla yes, and we visited her there and when it came time to go back to Portland Auntie Belle got our tickets and she got them on the night train not the day train so she could put us on the train herself and put us right into bed you see so they wouldn�t know how old we were. Because Auntie Belle had bought tickets for younger than we really were. She was like that you see, always looking for ways to save a penny here and a penny there.�
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