family – Castle Gate

(If you would like to share your family’s Castle Gate story, please fill in the form below.)

Shared with permission by Peggy Lanier

Note from Lisa Bonnice, author of Castle Gate:
Peggy Lanier is Pete Garroch’s only grandchild. His daughter Annie was Peggy’s mother, and Peggy was named after his other daughter. This makes Peggy Lanier my second cousin, once removed.

We’d never met nor communicated until Castle Gate was nearing publication, so I didn’t have her input during the writing of Pete and Jessie’s story. That makes it even more fascinating to read Peggy’s stories about her family’s experience after the disaster.

Peggy was born many years after the explosion, so she never knew Pete. But she knew his widow, Jessie, who was her grandmother:

I heard rumors of Jessie reading tea leaves. Jessie always acted like Pete was a saint who never drank or swore! My dad used to point out that it probably wasn’t true. I went to Jessie’s funeral in 1980 and everyone there was drinking and dancing. What a party!

In this photo of Pete, he looks like he has a quick wit, a touch of sarcasm, perhaps. I only knew him from that picture, now I realize how tough he was. I wonder if it was Jessie who got him to smile? Peter was regarded with reverence in our family as in beloved husband and father.

My mom and I went to West Virginia to visit her and Aunt Peggy every other summer or she came to California to visit us and her sister, Elizabeth, in Santa Monica. She baked without measuring anything and my mom would try to figure out how she did it, but it would never turn out the same when we tried to make it.

I have old home movies of Jessie dancing the Highland Fling. I remember her being very optimistic and laughing a lot. When someone would ask her how she was, she always said “I can’t complain.”

Jessie was “hard of hearing” from having smallpox as a child, so her Scottish brogue stayed intact. My mom and Aunt Peggy lost theirs intentionally, like Willie (Willie Garroch, their cousin). My dad was upset one year, when I was about two years old, because after returning from visiting Jessie, I spoke with a thick brogue, or so the story goes. The neighborhood where I grew up had several Scottish families as well.

_{Circa 1926 — Peggy Garroch, standing,
Annie (Peggy Lanier’s mother) and Jessie Garroch}

This photo of Jessie and her daughters was taken by a photographer for a local magazine in Utah about surviving families of the mining disaster. My mom looks to be about 9 or 10, so 1926 sounds about right.

My mother died in 1982 in a hospital in West Virginia where she had gone to stay with Aunt Peg after my dad died in 1981. I left my children in southern California to be at her bedside. I was 29 years old at the time.

One morning, we got a call from the hospital stating that my mom had taken a turn for the worse. We rushed to the hospital and were surprised to find that my mom was more lucid and energetic than she had been. Mom told us about a visitor she had had the night before.

Aunt Peg and I looked at each other suspiciously because we knew that we had left after visiting hours were over the night before. I didn’t know what she was talking about but then Peg and I went to have a cup of coffee and Aunt Peg told me she had seen someone named “Auntie Mame” (I think).

The story was a wealthy Mormon family wanted to adopt Aunt Peg and my mom after the mining explosion, but Jessie refused. According to Aunt Peggy, Auntie Mame was the woman who wanted to adopt them, who had been dead for years.

Aunt Peg said there was no way my mom could remember her, so we assumed that she was helping her to pass to the other side. A few days later I sat by the bed and watched my mom pass away … she saw her mother (Jessie) who had just died a year and a half before and exclaimed “Mother!” as she looked up through the ceiling.

_{Pete Garroch’s daughters Peggy & Annie}
_{with their mother Jessie Garroch}

I know you like these kind of stories so I wanted to tell you since it pertains to Utah and the mining explosion. I’m glad I’m getting to know more about the other side of the family, thanks to you! I enjoyed your book so much and I look forward to the rest of the trilogy.

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