Thelma Eileen Ritter

Thelma Eileen Ritter, daughter of Arletta Pearle Bucher and Frank B. Ritter (and not to be confused with six-time Academy Award nominated actress Thelma Ritter), was born 9 June 1907 in Ladysmith, Rusk County, WI. Her parents had only just come to Rusk County, where Frank worked in the lumber industry -- probably in the buying, selling, and distribution of lumber rather than the logging and milling side. Ladysmith was a temporary home, because Frank developed tuberculosis. He succumbed to that disease at the beginning of 1910. Arley, now a single mom responsible not only for Thelma but also a toddler son, Harold L. Ritter, sought the haven of her birth home. That place was Martintown, Green County, WI, a village founded by her maternal grandparents Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader. Within a few years Arley married Charles Henry Ames. A new household was soon established a mile south of Martintown in Winslow, Stephenson County, IL. Thelma would go on to spend the remainder of her childhood in Winslow.

In 1913 the family expanded with the birth of half-brother Glenn Charles Ames. Thelma also had a two step-sisters from Charles’s earlier marriage, Thelma Ames and Margaret Ames, but they lived in Butler, DeKalb County, IN -- the first with a set of adoptive parents and the second with her maternal grandparents. Thanks to the bitterness of the divorce between Charles and first wife Vesta Sewell, Thelma would never really know these step-siblings. Thelma Ritter is not to be confused with Thelma Ames, though they both could claim Charles Ames as a father.

Having no recall of Rusk County, Thelma would forever view the Wisconsin/Illinois border area along the Pecatonica River as her place of origin, yet throughout adulthood her course pulled her steadily away from that vicinity. In the mid-1920s, not long after Thelma had graduated from Winslow High School (the photo at the upper left of this page is the one that was used for her senior yearbook), the family moved to Freeport, IL. This, in a modest way, was the beginning of a more cosmopolitan life, as Freeport, the seat of Stephenson County, was distinctly larger than Martintown and Winslow. About the same time as the move, Thelma entered professional life as a teacher employed by the Superintendent of Stephenson County Schools. Most or all of the classes she taught were at Excelsior School, a one-room country school near Lena, a village located more or less midway between Winslow and Freeport. She kept this job for three academic years, from the autumn of 1926 through the end of the term in June, 1929. During the summers of 1926, 1927, and 1928, she took courses in educational science (pedagogy) at at Northern Illinois State Normal School in DeKalb, DeKalb County, IL, where her aunt Blanche had obtained her teaching credential a generation earlier. (The institution is now known as Northern Illinois University.)

It could be that Thelma spent her interval in Freeport as an occupant of the family home. Arguing against that scenario is 1) she was no longer a minor, 2) she was by nature the sort of person to carve her own path, and 3) it is hard to imagine how living at home would have fit in with her love life. For most or all of the time she was a teacher, Thelma was involved in a romantic affair with a married man -- though whether she knew he was married at the time she became involved with him is not certain. The man was William B. King, an agent for American Express. This was not the charge card company, but a package delivery service that existed in the 1920s that was later absorbed into its larger rival, Railroad Express Agency (REA). Though William lived in Chicago where the Illinois Central Railroad had its “turnaround,” his job brought him to Freeport on a regular basis, and this may have been how he and Thelma met. Alternately, they may have met as she rode the train back and forth from Freeport to DeKalb, a distance of about forty miles one-way.

This photo, taken in approximately 1921, shows some of the Winslow-based members of the Bucher clan. Thelma is the adolescent on the far left, still shy of her fourteenth birthday but looking a bit older. (She was not as tall then as it would appear from this view. The photographer apparently was using a custom lens meant for wide shots, and it caused a distortion. Individuals on the far right and far left appear taller and wider than they were in reality, while those in them middle are comparatively height challenged.) Next to her is her mother, Arley. The two small girls in the center are Arley’s nieces Phyllis Irene Claus (the littlest girl) and Evelyn Lois Claus, children of her deceased sister Blanche. The boy with the dark curly hair -- dark and curly because he was wearing a wig as a joke -- is Harold Ritter, while the smaller blond boy is Glenn Charles Ames. The other adults are, left to right, Tecumseh Edgar Claus (father of the little girls), Ralph Byron Bucher (Thelma’s uncle, looking very much like a young version of Thelma’s grandfather Elwood Bucher -- the latter was probably present, because the house in the background is his -- but he is not shown here), T.E.’s new wife Mabel Zimmerman Claus, an older couple so far unidentified, and on the far right, Charles Henry Ames.

In June, 1929, when the school term ended, Thelma packed her bags and moved to Chicago, where she soon succeeded in obtaining a rental apartment, which she shared with a Ruth Von Normann, another young single woman. Thelma supported herself doing general office work at a correspondence school. On a 1954 job application and résumé which survives among her papers, she cited the reason for leaving her Stephenson County teaching position was “to be married.” The comment gives some insight into her mind-set at the time. Clearly, Thelma was ready for William B. King to demonstrate greater commitment to her. She must have been thinking now she would be able to see William on her own terms, rather than at the convenience of his travel schedule. Whether William actually became a greater part of her life at that point is not entirely clear. What is obvious is that matters did not end well. The affair continued through the spring of 1930. However, when Thelma informed William she was carrying his child, he broke off the relationship. He told her he was Catholic -- it is uncertain if he had ever mentioned this detail before and it is unclear if it was the truth -- and could not divorce his wife.

These developments left Thelma in an awkward situation, to say the least. She was not prepared to raise a child on her own. Moreover, a couple of months into Thelma’s pregnancy, Ruth Von Normann and her boyfriend Forrest Lee Carder got married, which had the untimely side effect of leaving Thelma in need of a new roommate in order to meet the rent. Understandably, Thelma dreaded the prospect of returning to Freeport to face her mother’s head-shaking and sighs. She chose in the short term to bide her time in Chicago, perhaps hoping William King would change his mind, and perhaps just unable to think of anything else to do. It was her new roommate, Ruth’s replacement, who came to her rescue. The young woman was Irene Cleo Huffman, born and raised in Casey, IL, who the previous year had found herself in similar circumstances, i.e. pregnant out of wedlock by a man who was not going to stand by her and help raise the child. While exploring the available options, Cleo had consulted I.W. Lee, her family doctor in Casey. Dr. Lee was aware that a local couple, Warner Frederick Boos and his wife, Lydia Marie née Vornholt, wanted to adopt a baby, nature having failed to bless them with biological children despite eleven years of marriage. Thelma followed up on the tip and decided that she had found the solution to her dilemma. Dr. Lee and his wife coordinated the private adoption proceedings. Toward the end of 1930, eight months into the pregnancy, Thelma moved in with Warner and Lydia Boos, and to her relief, found them to be the sort of people she was confident would provide her baby with a fine upbringing -- and certainly an infancy more stable than what Thelma herself was in a position to offer. Warner and Lydia were with Thelma as she gave birth at the tail end of the year 1930. The adoptive parents immediately assumed primary responsibility for the child, a boy whom they named Richard Lee Boos. Thelma did stay on for a few months as a wetnurse, but then said good-by to her son, left Casey, and resumed her life in Chicago.

While this had been going on, Thelma’s former roommate Ruth had been going through a somewhat similar experience. Approximately nine months into her marriage to Forrest Carder -- a railroad man who hailed from McConnellsville, IN -- Ruth had given birth to a daughter, Dorothy Lee Carder. Thelma returned to Chicago to find her friend, baby on hip, struggling to keep her marriage going. Forrest did not appreciate his new role as a parent. All too soon he moved out, taking a room at a Chicago branch of the YMCA. He didn’t leave Ruth utterly in the lurch financially speaking, but he resented the thinning of his wallet, and began advocating that Dorothy be sent to a Catholic orphanage. Ruth did not want that. Moreover, Thelma would have none of it. In December, 1932, Thelma took Dorothy in. It was a stunning turnaround in her life story. Just two years earlier Thelma had given up her own biological child. Now here she was accepting custody of a foster child. She had been transformed from wretch into savior.

The big change that made the development possible was that Thelma was now a wife. Her new husband was James Harold Welch, Jr., better known as Harold J. Welch. (Shown at right.) Like her, he was from the northern reaches of Illinois. His parents, James Sr. and Jennie S. Nyberg, had settled as a young couple in Rockford, Winnebago County, IL, a town not far to the east of Winslow and Freeport, and had raised their family there. Harold was the third of their five children, born 8 January 1895. Despite their geographically-close points of origin, Harold and Thelma surely met in Chicago, and Chicago is where they resided over the course of their marriage.

Ruth got back together with Forrest Carder after giving up Dorothy. Apparently he liked her when he could lay claim to her full attention. Alas, shortly after he and Ruth became parents of a son, Von Lloyd Carder -- the birth taking place at the end of 1934 -- he grew resentful and once again abandoned his family. Poor Ruth had to get by as a single mother again. She kept little Von, though, and soon found a new husband, David Patton. He understood from the beginning that Ruth came as a package deal with Von, and he became Von’s adoptive father, the boy’s surname changing from Carder to Patton. Ruth and David added a daughter to the household in the late 1930s.

But Ruth never asked to take Dorothy back. She consistently avoided the mention of her, and did not involve her in her existence as Mrs. David Patton, nor even see her. This was true even though Ruth did stay in touch with Thelma. It was as if Ruth were pretending she had never given birth to a baby in 1931. This was to go on lifelong. In the late 1980s, Ruth died, and it was only in the wake of that development that Dorothy -- now going by her middle name of Lee -- connected with her biological brother. He welcomed that, and the two had the chance to get to know each other a bit, albeit as middle-aged adults.

By contrast, as the 1930s wore on, Thelma came to think of her foster daughter as her daughter, period. When it became clear Ruth would never take back custody, Thelma and Harold initiated adoption proceedings. Ruth and David raised no objection, nor did Forrest Carder. In November, 1938, the adoption was completed. By then, Dorothy knew of her biological origin, but because Thelma and Harold were the only parents she could remember, she was entirely content to have the arrangement formalized.

Through these years, Thelma worked. In fact, she never was a stay-at-home mom, uncommon as that was among women of her generation. In August, 1931, shortly after she had become reestablished in Chicago after the Casey sojourn, she obtained a job as a PBX (Private Branch Exchange, aka “switchboard”) operator at Englewood Hospital at 6001 S. Green Street. These were the days when all phone calls had to be routed through one or more branch exchanges, where the operator(s) would move cable plugs from one outlet to another to establish the connections. Nothing was automatic. At hospitals such as Evergreen, timely communication between parties calling over the phone could literally be a matter of life and death. Thelma was the sole operator during most of her shifts, responsible for a PBX of 180 lines. She also operated the paging system. She was good at her job, and the hospital administrators knew it. They were not about to lose such a valuable employee. For her part, she was aware of the value of steady employment as the Great Depression dipped toward its bleakest point and then ever-so-slowly eased up. She kept the position for a total of twelve years, the remainder of her time in Chicago.

Meanwhile, Thelma’s little brother Glenn Ames finished growing up and left Illinois for law school in 1935, going all the way to Los Angeles, CA. After he had been there a few years it became clear southern California would remain his “home port.” Arley and Charles Ames came out for the wedding of Glenn to June Marie Jones in early November, 1940. The older couple lingered over the winter after the ceremony in order to get to know their new daughter-in-law, and all it took was one break from the frigid climes of the upper Midwest to convince them to stay permanently. They soon settled on a parcel in Reseda, in what was still at that time a rural area. These family relocations set the stage for Thelma to leave Illinois as well. The lure became even stronger as her marriage to Harold Welch hit the rocks. By no later than 1941, the pair separated. They would go on to divorce some time during the interval between then and Harold’s death of cancer, which occurred in Chicago 7 November 1945.

Thelma’s big move west took place in the summer of 1943. The final precipitating development was that all of a sudden, she had another child to care for. Her son’s situation, once so elegantly resolved by his adoption, had changed. The rosy picture had been dimming for a number of years. Warner Boos had not experienced the sort of job dependability in Casey that Thelma had enjoyed in Chicago. To be a responsible breadwinner, Warner was forced in 1935 to seek employment in Hammond, IN, where his sister and other relatives were based. He succeeded in obtaining a position as a master machinist, whereupon the whole household shifted to Hammond. However, Casey was the preferred home, so in 1938 Lydia and young Richard returned there. The resultant split-household dynamic was far from ideal but it was manageable until a morning in the autumn of 1941 when the not-quite-eleven-year-old boy found his mother dead in her bed. Needing to keep his job, Warner remained in Hammond. Needing to continue at his familiar school and in his familiar environment, Richard stayed in Casey, where he was taken into the household of I.W. Lee, the physician who had arranged the adoption. That living arrangement was intended as a temporary measure, but a year passed and then most of another year. Finally, again with the help of Thelma’s old roommate Cleo, who knew all parties concerned, a plan was hatched whereby Thelma would become the custodial parent -- restoring to her day-to-day existence a child she had given up essentially the instant he had left her womb.

Thelma was, of course, a single parent herself at this point. To cope with her new responsibility, she wanted to have her own mother within easy reach. Less than a week after her brood had unexpectedly doubled in size, Thelma and her pre-teens were on their way to southern California aboard the El Capitan Santa Fe streamliner. (The seats, a scarce commodity, were obtained through Cleo, whose husband Glenn Evans was at that point a Santa Fe ticket agent.) The trio took refuge at Arley and Charles’s “chick’n ranch” in Reseda until they could get settled. The transition period was brief. Thelma had $3000 toward a house courtesy of Warner Boos’s contribution, an amount that in the World War II years was more than sufficient for a reasonable down payment. With that assistance, she soon obtained a mortgage on a suitable house in Reseda. She knew she could handle the monthly payments because she was highly employable. She found interim work with Pacific Telephone Company, and then toward the end of the year scored a position as Chief Telephone Operator at Birmingham General Hospital in Van Nuys, Los Angeles County, CA, a facility belonging to the U.S. Army. She began that job 1 December 1943, supervising a four-position switchboard and its staff of eight operators. At that point, the logistics of the household seemed to have been resolved, but in fact one more hiccup occurred. The newly acquired property was near the Los Angeles River. When a rare flood in December, 1944 made the water rise to within an inch or so of coming inside, Thelma was unnerved. In early 1945, she bought a house on Whitsett Avenue in North Hollywood. She was willing to put up with a slightly longer commute to her job at Birmingham General if it meant she could live on higher ground. She would keep the Whitsett Avenue place for ten years, until well after she had completed the raising of her children.

In the late 1970s all but one of the surviving grandchildren of Elwood Bucher and Mary Lincoln “Tinty” Martin got together one day and this photo was taken of the generational group. The one missing surviving grandchild was Glenn Charles Ames, who declined to make the trip all the way from California. Shown left to right are Dwight Cecil Buss, Phyllis Irene Claus Scott, Mary Alice Bucher Maynard, Thelma Eileen Ritter Welch, Evelyn Lois Claus Stoner, Estel Maynard Buss, and Helen Claudia Bucher Brobst.

Throughout the span from the initial hiring by the military in 1943 to retirement in 1973, Thelma’s career was a steady aspect of her existence. The particulars of her employment circumstances did undergo modifications, but they were positive developments, most of them coming as part of alterations in the way medical care of military men evolved in the region over those decades. At the beginning of April, 1946 the Army, as part of downsizing after World War II, handed over Birmingham General to the Veterans Adminstration. Thelma was given a promotion, receiving the title of Chief of the Telephone, Teletype, and Information Section. Her responsibilities now included not only her eight switchboard operators, but the supervision and coordination of six more employees on the teletype/information desk. The number of lines serviced by the switchboard doubled. In June, 1950, Birmingham was closed and all operations moved to the former U.S. Navy Hospital at Long Beach, which was re-named Long Beach Veterans Hospital. As a result of the relocation, Thelma’s staff increasing by another six PBX operators. In the mid-1950s the VA built is neuropsychiatric hospital in Sepulveda. Thelma applied for the position of founding chief of the telephone/information department there and succeeded in being chosen. (Her July, 1954 job application was among the papers she left upon her death and became a prime source of information for this biography.) The new hospital opened 17 April 1955 with Thelma as part of the team. She would keep this employer, place of employment, and position until retirement more than eighteen years later, a thirty-year hitch altogether. That meant she was on hand to witness the end of an era as PBX equipment evolved to the point where switching was automatic, no longer requiring that human workers move cables from one slot to another to complete a connection. Thelma’s successor would never oversee a department quite like the one she had known.

On a personal side, Thelma’s life was not as rose-tinted. Though she had inherited a capacity for charm and liveliness from her mother that served her in good stead at her workplace and in formal situations -- like Arley, Thelma was described in cousins’ reminiscences as “quite a character” -- she could not maintain this pleasantness twenty-four hours a day. Her darker side was surely a factor in her split from Harold Welch, and helps explain why she never remarried despite six decades of further lifespan. It was more than just moodiness or lack of patience. Thelma is likely to have been afflicted with Bipolar Disorder. Her condition was never diagnosed by a professional nor did she engage in treatment to alleviate it, but when Dorothy was interviewed in 2008 about her mother’s life, she plainly stated that she believed her mother was bipolar. Thelma did not suffer from the condition to the degree her brother Harold Ritter had. Harold’s troubled nature was surely a factor behind his death in 1926 at barely eighteen years of age. Thelma obviously was steady enough that she was functional, or she never would have had the career success she enjoyed. But she would “lose it” often enough that her kids lived in a state of dread about when the next episode would occur, and whether there would ever be a point when Thelma might become a direct danger to them or to herself.

By the spring of 1948, Richard had had enough. The man living next door, who had overheard all the yelling that went on at Thelma’s house, offered the youth his enclosed porch to live in. Richard took him up on it. Then after high school wrapped up in June, Richard high-tailed it back to Hammond, IN and stayed with his adoptive aunt Susan Boos Blackman until he turned eighteen. On the positive side, the rift was not permanent. In fact, it must be emphasized that over the decades to come, Thelma managed to keep the bonds tied with most of the significant others in her life, including the bonds between herself and both of her children. Even the rift with Harold Welch might not have been absolute had he not died so soon after their parting. In the 1980s, when Harold’s sister Mable, then based in southern California, was in a rest home, Thelma would visit the woman, honoring the link to her former spouse. It wasn’t that others in her life didn’t want Thelma in their lives. They just preferred to interact with her in small doses.

As the 1940s ended and the 1950s began, things changed quite a bit for Thelma vis-à-vis family. Her stepfather passed away in 1948. It was in the immediate aftermath of that event that Richard departed, as described above. Dorothy married within a few years, and though she remained local at first, had her own family to deal with. Arley lived nearby and checked on her often -- even lived with her for a year or two shortly after Dorothy had established herself elsewhere, until she got tired of being treated like a housekeeper rather than a mother -- but Thelma had now entered a long phase she would essentially spend solo. With her financial situation secure, she could afford to be a world traveller, and so she was. She was also free to change her living arrangements as it suited her, and made a number of moves -- to Van Nuys in 1955, back to North Hollywood in 1960, to Van Nuys again in the mid-1960s to a place on Hazeltine Avenue, and then in 1973, she settled into an apartment in Van Nuys on Woodman Avenue.

Thelma had come to a watershed point in her life. All within the calendar year of 1973, she retired, she settled into her Woodman Avenue apartment, and her mother passed away. (She inherited her mother’s home on Hatteras Avenue, Van Nuys, but she preferred to rent out that property. As a bachelorette, an apartment was more than big enough to serve as her dwelling place.) She went on to decades spent living the life of a solo retiree, able to travel, collect knick-knacks from around the world, meet interesting people, and more. By all reports, she enjoyed this interval a great deal, though naturally there were downsides, such as loneliness and the inevitable limitations of being elderly.

Thelma was one of those great-grandchildren of Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader to demonstrate the characteristic longevity of the clan, and did so in full measure. Like almost anyone who lives to an extremely advanced age, she did eventually require nursing care. She was able to hold on past her ninety-third birthday, but on 1 February 2001 she was admitted to an assisted care facility in Sherman Oaks. Unfortunately, “assisted care” was a level soon inadequate to cope with her decline in health. After several hospitalizations over the next six months, she was admitted in mid-August, 2001 to Country Villa Convalescent Home in Van Nuys. She passed away there 4 February 2002, age ninety-four. Her remains were interred at Valhalla Memorial in North Hollywood.

Descendants of Thelma Eileen Ritter

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