He was more like an uncle to me than a cousin. Twenty one years older than me, my father married very late, he lived on an adjoining farm until I was an early teen. Leslie would take my two brothers and me fishing. I remember catching my first fish with him, a bluegill at Lake Goldsmith. Sometimes we would go ice fishing and in the summer he'd use his small fiberglass boat powered with a two and half horse Johnson motor. It was the same motor he used to take Ed and me fishing for salmon in the Straits of Juan de Fuca in 1962.
Leslie, son of Sam, my father's younger brother, also persuaded his father to lend me his shotgun for duck season one year before I got my fist shotgun. It was a 16ga. Winchester model 12. It was the gun with which I shot my first duck, aiming at the first one in a line of 6 or 8, and killing the last one in line.
Leslie died Monday in Salem, OR., far from the SD farms where I knew him best. I believe the last of my Negstad cousins. In the early '50s he and another man from the community, Earl, sold their machinery, invested in a new pulpwood plant in the state of Washington and moved their families west and settled in new houses. They were not only investors in the plant they were also to be employees. After moving to Washington they showed up for work on the first day and found the plant shuttered. The plant's financial officer had embezzled the money and Leslie and Earl lost all of their investment and their houses.
Years later Earl's son told me that with that loss they moved into a garage and Earl spent his weeks selling Bibles door to door. The son said he didn't know how poor they were until he asked his dad for a penny for a piece of candy and Earl started to cry because he didn't have one.
Leslie moved to Anecortes, and then Port Angeles, where they ran a motel and were living when he took me salmon fishing. In Port Angeles they ran a motel. Later they moved to Soap Lake in eastern Washington. His wife, Esther, had rheumatoid arthritis so the climate there was better for her. Sometime after Esther died Leslie moved to Salem, OR to be near his son, Paul, which is where he was when he died.
As I grieve for Leslie and Esther I also grieve for what was lost when they moved to far away. How different might have been some of my early experiences had they still been across the road? I've had so little time with Leslie's children who are only a little younger than me. That would have been much different had they remained in the community. God bless the memory of Leslie Negstad.
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