Many avenues led to Silver City

STERLING - They came from near and far, and their humble homes peppered the riverfront like the salt of the Earth.

We've all played telephone, and realize that one errant retelling can skew history. Such was the case with Sterling's story. Somewhere along the line, whether it was a resident or a historian, someone lumped the mini-exodus of the Rio Grande Valley to Wallace Street in with Silver City, a boxcar settlement initially on the west side of Avenue G.

But whereas the Wallace Street neighborhood was predominantly composed of Hispanics, Silver City was occupied by many Hispanic families over time, but was mostly made up of transplants from Minnesota, dairy farms in Wisconsin, tomato fields in Ohio, the cotton patch suburbs of Memphis, the Ozark Mountains, the wheat fields of Colorado, ... the list goes on.

It was a melting pot. But no matter the previous walks of life, they all had one thing in common: They needed jobs. And many of them found one, and made it stick, at Northwestern Steel and Wire Co., as much as tripling the wages they had left behind - if they had a job at all.

Can you tell me how to get to Silver City?

There are myriad correct responses to that question.

For 71-year-old George Ransom, it was a Model A with a tar top that belonged to a friend of the family.

"For some reason, I can remember the ride down," Ransom said, recalling it was 1947, when he was 4 years old. "I don't know why, but it's one of those things I remember, coming down in the back seat with my brothers."

After his aunt and uncle temporarily took him in, his older sister, Margaret, and his brothers Allen "Pat" Patrick and Mike, the Ransoms moved into Silver City.

The boxcars weren't a downgrade - after all, they also had lived in a boxcar at Bane Station in Kenosha, Wisconsin. And those in Silver City had pot-belly stoves where residents could cook on and belly up to when it got bitter cold.

There was no running water, of course, but the cars were wired for electricity, even if most had only a single light bulb. And many dressed up their no-longer-mobile homes quite well, some even turning two boxcars into a multi-room residence, as the Ransoms did.

As for the job at the mill, that was a significant upgrade from George Sr.'s railroad gig.

"We came here, like so many others did, for a better life," Ransom said.

And that light bulb? It was a revelation for one of his childhood friends, Mary Grant.

"The remarkable thing to me and my brother, Mack, was when you would open the door to go into the boxcar, there was a light bulb hanging from the ceiling, no chain or anything," Grant, 73, said. "We'd never had a light bulb. It amazed us."

They'd had only kerosene lamps in Arkansas, where her father, Richard Jones, was a cotton share-cropper. Jones moved to Sterling with his brother and got work at the mill in late 1949, when his youngest child, Roy, was 7 months old, His wife, Virginia, and their three children followed in March 1950. Mary remembers marveling at the amount of snow that greeted them.

The Ransoms lived in the boxcar until later that year, when they moved to Gleason Street, at the foot of the Avenue G bridge.

But before that, Ransom said, he loved life in Silver City.

"The fondest memories for me were the relationships that developed with the people there," he said. "When we moved to Gleason Street, the bond was still there. Joanna Juarez next door, I ran with her boys, and she basically raised me from 1957 to 1961, after my mom died."

Another of Ransom's close childhood friends, Ed Sandoval, 77, who recently visited from Bullhead, Arizona, thought the Ransoms were rich because they lived in a double-boxcar. But even before George's kid sister, Mercedes, was born - on Gleason Street - the six family members needed the extra space. So rather than $25 a month, the Ransoms had $50 taken out of George Sr.'s paycheck.

"I said, 'These guys much be rich,'" Sandoval said, "and years later, I realized they just had a large family."

The Sandovals, like many others, came from Mexico, and like other Spanish-only-speaking youngsters, Ed had to start in low-first grade as an 8-year-old at Wallace Street, where the Silver City children attended school.

His father, Lucas, maintained that they lived in a boxcar for 6 months. But Ed knows it was more like 4 years.

"I don't think he wanted to admit he was there that long," Sandoval said. "It's one of those deals. We didn't want to admit we lived in the boxcars. So we said we lived in Silver City. That's my opinion, but I think it's a pretty good opinion."

His father, a self-made man who taught himself the carpentry trade, was too proud to admit his family lived in a boxcar half a year.

Not Ed.

"When we moved to the boxcars, even though it was kind of bad, we were all the same," Sandoval said. "Nobody distinguished rich or poor.

"We lived like the rich folks - on the river, and we were swinging on vines of the trees."

And he admits he always got to horn in on the Ransom family Christmas.

"Every one of them got at least two or three toys, so on Christmas Day, I'd be at their house all day long, playing with their toys," Sandoval said. "At night time, she's giving her kids a bath, and I'm still there. I guess it's time to go home."

Oh, and let's not forget Jean Ransom's cooking.

"I didn't know what lemon meringue pie was, and she made it about that thick. I was in heaven," Sandoval said. "They welcomed me like I was one of their kids."
The feeling was mutual.

"Ed's folks were just the nicest people," Ransom said. "But everyone down there was. And once they know you, they know you forever."

Ransom can't help but smile as he talks about Floyd and Emma Dee Dickerson, who always listened to country music four boxcars down.

"One of my finest recollections, and I think it's where I got my love of country music, was how they would sit out on their front step and play country music," he said.

Ransom and his wife, Jean, married in 2003 and had four daughters, and someday there will be two tombstones in Fulton Cemetery that bear the names George E. and Jean Ransom.

Frank Aguilar, who lived in Silver City briefly before his family moved to the west side, said Ransom relentlessly took care of his family, even as a youngster.

"We were kind of wrong-side-of-the-tracks children, and we were young and stupid," Augilar admitted. "A lot of times we'd be driving, and we'd stop to have a few beers. We'd ask George to come with us, and he'd always say, 'I've got responsibilities.'

"But he did. He was busy helping raise his little brother."

"Silver City, ... I'm proud to have come from that era and that area," said Ransom, who lives in Lyndon, where he was highway township commissioner from 2002 to 2013. "To say that we lived in a boxcar, to some people, it might seem a little strange. But to others, it's unique - it's like living in a tree house, or something.

"But the connection with Silver City will never end for those of us who were involved."

Not the sequence you'd expect

Interestingly, Helen Delgado's family lived in multiple Sterling houses before moving into the boxcar settlement when she was 15. She admits it was a strange transition, but has more fond memories than sour ones.

"We used to go out and play with the kids," the 78-year-old Sterling resident said. "We'd play on the streets and talk, and then around the boxcar was a store. The lady who owned it, when she went away, she'd have us take care of the store."

And Helen's parents made the very most of their riverfront property.

"They fixed it up pretty nice," she said.

She loved watching all the guys playing ball in the street, strangely safe and sound. Conversely, she and her husband, Peter, 81, no longer feel comfortable sitting on the front porch simply to enjoy the fresh air.

"Oh, you've gotta be kidding," she said. "We used to sit on the front porch. Now, we don't dare do it, not with so much going on."

Big yellow tablet

Kids in Silver City and the Wallace Street neighborhood found lots of odd jobs. Most turned the loose change in their pocket into ice cream, candy, or a 12-cent feature at the movie theater.

Josie Coronado, 72, turned the dollar she made each week selling tamales into writing utensils and pads of paper. And she turned that into both a career and a conduit to her heritage.

Her parents, Carlos and Consuelo Urrutia, moved from Texas to Savanna, where Josie was born, one of 12 children her mother bore before succumbing to ovarian cancer at age 33 in 1948.

Josie was 6, and she can't imagine how hard it was for her mother to take her children to foster homes, her husband unable to care for them and hold his job.
Consuelo even dropped off three of her boys at a Freeport orphanage.

"You know what? In my young years, I didn't think how hard that would be," Coronado said. "But now, I can imagine how hard that would be to place them in foster homes, knowing that's the last time she'd see her kids.

"She was a beautiful, beautiful mom."

Josie and her 2-year-old brother, Steven, were adopted by Isabel and Feliberto Maldonado in Silver City.

"It was hard for a little girl," Coronado said, unable to hold back tears. "A little girl lost her mother and left eight brothers and three sisters."

And, she said, she was adopted only to serve as a companion for her new stepsister, Rosie, who was 2 years older, blind, and whom the Maldonados had adopted when she was 2 weeks old.

"In fact, they didn't want me; they wanted the baby," Coronado said. "But they thought I could be a companion to their daughter, and that's about all I was. I'd take care of her, keep her company, go outside and play and watch her."

She wasn't allowed contact with her father, or her brothers - who lived nearby on Fifth Street.

"We weren't allowed to communicate," she said. "We never were supposed to ask why or how they're doing. They stayed over there, and I stayed over here with the baby. I was like a mother to that baby.

"That's a guilt that I carry," Coronado added after a long pause. "Maybe I didn't try hard enough. But I was taught to obey, listen and do what I was told. And that's what I did."

She also wasn't used to going outside - and on a lengthy hike - to use the bathroom. Or the other harsh conditions of living in a boxcar. But she overcame. The family moved to Fairview in 1950, and Josie vividly remembers dragging a Christmas tree from Merrill School about a mile and a half to the house - with some help from fellow second-grader Charlie McBroom.

Her stepmother had told her she was too old for a Christmas tree, but her effort was rewarded.

"It looked like a Charlie Brown Christmas tree by the time we got it back," she said. "But we did put it up, and decorated with whatever we could find."

That effort is emblematic of her life. She married Mario Coronado at the age of 17 and was an Army wife to three children born in 3 consecutive years, two of them in Germany. But it was there she reconnected with Frank Aguilar, who had been like a brother to her and was also stationed in Germany.

Mario, a disabled veteran of 23 years, has been in the Whiteside County sheriff's mounted patrol for more than 20 years.

Josie? She was a court interpreter in the county for 25 years, after learning to read and write in Spanish at age 12.

"No one else in the neighborhood could read or write," she said.

So she looked for pencils, markers, whatever she could find at the 5-and-10 store. She'd take that dollar in there every week and turn it into a future.

"That's how I learned to write all this time," she said. "I'd buy crayons and draw. And I'd buy the big yellow tablets for 15 cents with the big Indian chief on the front."

ONLINE EXTRA

In 2008, a study on Silver City was done by Sauk Valley Community College professors Randall Norris and Kris Murray. Click here to read a collection of Silver City findings Murray shared during multiple presentations throughout the Sauk Valley.