MARRIAGE

Gladys, reasonably enough, asked to postpone their wedding until Roscoe found a position involving less time away from home; it would have been financially impossible for them to travel together on his bank examiner’s salary. Well respected by the bankers he had met while carrying out those duties, he soon learned of a suitable position at the American National Bank in Alamosa, Colorado. He accepted it in the early summer of 1928, went to work, and sent for his bride. In choosing a wedding site, they quickly, and wisely I think, decided against Texas, which had been only a short-term home after all, and then only for one of them. Kansas was an obvious possibility, of course, but Greeley, Colorado was chosen because the Lynn family had relatives there. Gladys returned to Kansas, from where she and Ruth Lynn, accompanied by Mother and Father Lynn, drove to a relative’s ranch near Greeley. The identity of this vehicle is unknown, but I do know that after the Lambert and Patterson the Lynns acquired a seven-passenger Nash. Whatever its make, this car was sufficiently durable to survive rolling over in a ditch, with Ruth at the wheel; nobody was injured, the car remained operable, and a local rancher used his tractor to set them upright on the road again–with Gladys driving? Roscoe left Alamosa the evening of August 10, by train of course, and was met in Denver the next morning by Gladys and two of his relatives. They were married the following day, Sunday, August 12, 1928 in Greeley’s First Presbyterian Church. After a honeymoon at nearby Troutdale in the Pines, the couple took up residence, on August 25, in “a newly furnished apartment at 101 State Street.” They still lived there when their first, and only, child, Janice Ruth, was born on May 23, 1931. I was amused some two decades later by the comment of our UW Professor of Organic Chemistry as he called the roll on the first day of class: “You’re the only girl I’ve met who has three first names.” Her parents greeted her arrival by moving to more spacious quarters and acquiring a car, also their first. On July 30, 1935, Roscoe reported for work in a new career with the Intelligence Unit, Bureau of Internal Revenue, US Department of the Treasury. Much of his work involved detailed study of the financial manipulations of unsavory underworld characters who had paid little or no income tax; they deserved punishment for much worse misdeeds, but this was the only evidence the government could collect that would stand up in court. Many notorious gangsters were investigated successfully by the Unit and put away for at least a few years. Starting in Los Angeles, where the young family was pictured with friends in August, 1937, he was posted, often on an annual basis, to sites throughout the country. His last assignment, in Seattle, began in 1945. During their first year in the area, the family lived in Skyway Park, and Janice attended school in Renton. She and her maternal grandparents are pictured in front of that home on May 29, 1946. Later that year they bought a home just north of Seattle’s Franklin High School, and I think it was about then that Janice insisted they buy the sailboat in which father, daughter, and cousin Tom learned together. The picture of father and daughter–I well remember her outfit–is the latest I have of him; it was taken in late 1948, shortly before his death on January 9, 1949. Most of the unattributed quotations throughout these pages are taken from a story about his life that Roscoe wrote and gave to Janice when she was six and about to begin the first grade. That story and the detailed genealogies he prepared of the Lynn, Clay, and Boring families have been of inestimable interest and value to this son-in-law whom he never met.