Grimm, Richter

Photo by Barb Aue, South Beach Bulletin

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George J Grimm

A picture taken at Christmastime in 1925, before the were married June 8 in 1926.

1. Anna Louise (Anne) (1927)
2. George Frederick(1930) Married divorced Lela Ann Glover Gerwig
3. Rose Marie(1932) Married Alvin Lynn Weathers and divorced

Nine grandchildren. Anne with three children, Geroge with two, Rose with four. These nine were first cousins only to each other as the Grimm-born parents married into families where the spouses had either no siblings or no issue by full siblings.

Working 12 hour days for six days each week, the two older boys left for the Pacific Northwest when they could, and went to work as loggers. George, not threatened by conscription, enlisted with his older brother John, at Pioneer Square in Seattle in 1917.

There were two battalions at Fort McKinley and one at Corregidor in the Philippines where they took their Basic Training. George spent eight months at Ft William McKinley in H Company, the 31st Infantry ... called the American Foreign Legion. (John was assigned to G Company. The brothers were separated because each was fluent in German ... to do translation when needed.)

Brothers George (seated) and John Grimm, in the Philippines.

After a quarantine for mumps in the Philippines, in the summer of 1918 George (and John) was sent to Vladivostok -- via a stop in Tokyo, Japan -- with the A.E.F.-Asia. They were of the American Expeditionary Forces-Asia group called The Siberians and the others who served in Archangel were The Polar Bears. While in the Philippines George became ill with malaria, which recurred for some years after he returned to the state of Washington.

At the age of 20 while serving in Siberia George had a serious heart attack, being administered the Last Rites, and after a long period of recovery in San Francisco at Letterman General Hospital, received an Honorable Discharge, having refused to accept one for disability as offered. Returned to the Northwest, he went back to work as a Gyppo Logger, as a partner with Lawrence Panfilio. He owned a Model T Ford.

Marie Anna Richter (later Anna Marie with change at immigration) after finishing her formal education worked as a maid for a well-to-do family in Berlin, Germany. She, along with her older sister Lina Marie who had trained as a seamstress and tailor, had a ticket and departure date of August to cross the ocean via Hamburg and London to New York, with travel by train to the Pacific Northwest where their oldest brother lived. An assassination in Sarajevo, and England was at war with Germany, so the two young women remained in Germany for the duration, the younger doing war work in an open pit coal mine.

Anna Marie Richter, having completed school at age 14.

On 4 August 1921 the entire family remaining in Germany left via Hamburg, to spend two weeks in London before embarking on the S.S. Aquatania for the United States. The elderly parents, older sister now with husband and two small children, Marie Anna and her younger sister Anna Marie (they traded given names because they understood the US fashion was to be called by the first and not second name) booked passage steerage.

Anna Marie then, being called Anna and living with her parents at the home of her brother Oswin near Menlo, went to work at a box factory in Raymond, Washington where they made small wooden boxes with metal trim in which grocery stores sold fruit and berries. (Much later replaced with plastic boxes.) Her borrowed passage repaid, she bought a Model T Ford and had a substantial bank account when on 8 June 1926 she married George J Grimm.

In April her niece Clara -- daughter of her oldest brother, Otto, -- had married the other partner of the small logging company and the following March both couples became parents of their first children, both girls.