They Weave the Spider's Web

By Evedine L. Lane

Deception is a profane power, brilliant and flashing. Like a spider’s web, its power is a shining illusion, gossamer thin,leading the unwary to their ultimate destruction. Deception. It does have appeal! Sometimes for many of us it takes trials and tribulations for the truth to break through, for true knowledge to shine clearly on what is real, wise, important, loving, and truly kind. They Weave the Spider’s Web is not a tale of woe. In spite of hardships, heartbreaks, and seemingly futile battles against injustice, it is a story of adventure, a fight of truth against lies: a triumph! Living it, the author and her husband learned increasingly the power of the Living Truth; that Truth is indeed God, all-powerful, indestructible, eternal. On that they came to rely.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zawn Books
• Release date: Apr 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310223716

Evedine L. Lane

Born in 1922 to a farm family in northeast Montana, Evedine L. Lane grew upassuming that government authorities in America shared and upheld the valuesof honesty and justice that she was taught. Experience proved otherwise.Years later, when she and her husband found themselves in a long andseemingly hopeless fight against government corruption and its attendantpublic opinion, they came to realize something profound: Truth is not just aword. Truth is a power that cannot be destroyed or overruled. With thisknowledge, though helpless herself, the author knew the story of theirsurprising journey had to be written.

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PROLOGUE

I don't remember when I met my husband-to-be. Among my earliest recollections is an occasion years ago when I was working as a secretary for the Farmers Home Administration in Plentywood, Montana. Waldemar and his first wife lived on his farm thirteen miles northeast of town and had come into my office on business. They had been shopping and their two little girls were hot, tired, restless. Cute toddlers, one had her dad's dark good looks; the other was blonde, resembling her attractive mother. I gave each a stick of gum.

I am struck by the unpredictability of life. I look back over the memorable years of my marriage and marvel. That day in the office I had no idea of the things to come.

I feel that many people are of the opinion that if Waldemar and I could have lived our lives over, we'd have done things differently. But we wouldn't have. We often agreed in the latter years that in spite of all we had gone through, we weren't hurt. God had been with us every step of the way. We were blessed.

Had we known what our actions would lead to, however, very likely we would never have dared take the stands we took. Jail. Imprisonment. The loss of farmland, mineral rights, bank accounts, real estate, an automobile. Public humiliation. Misjudgment on the part of friends, neighbors, relatives.

My husband is gone now. He died of a heart attack early on the morning of June 7, 1989. Waldemar went to his grave without getting the justice for all promised by our government. Yet my prayers go on. Through our struggles and stand for truth and right, we learned more and more of God's love and power. He is in control. Scripture tells us there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed. My hope is that I will see justice in my life-time but I know that God's timing and purposes are for the best whatever and whenever they may be.

ONE: BEFORE THE BEGINNING

We started dating in June 1954, a couple of years after Waldemar's divorce. By then his ex-wife had remarried and was living in Arkansas. The girls were with her in the summer; with him through the school year. On our first date he told me he had just returned them to their mother. As soon as they were back in the fall, he brought them to see me. Cute, energetic, with bubbly personalities, Carla was then nine years old and Marbea, not yet eight.

We were married on March 17, 1957, in the Lutheran Church in Comertown where I had grown up. Both Waldemar's parents and mine had come to the rolling plains of northeastern Montana in the early years of this century, raising large families through first the good years of farming and then the dry, dusty years of the Depression.

There had been many coincidences and similarities in our lives. Both sets of parents had started married lives just across the line in Canada and had moved down to Montana with small children. My parents settled in Comertown in 1919, buying land adjacent to the town. Waldemar's grandparents and their three daughters had emigrated from Germany to Canada, where on December 2, 1900, his parents and an uncle and aunt were married in a double wedding ceremony. The husbands were also German immigrants. By 1910 all of that family had moved to Montana and settled on homesteads close together in an area soon to be dubbed, Dutch Valley. Waldemar's mother and my dad had both died at the age of sixty-four.

There were times when Waldemar, in his early teens, had driven cattle to the stockyard in Comertown, seven miles north of Dutch Valley, to be shipped east. He told me that one of those times he'd noticed the bunch of ragtag kids climbing on the stockyard's wooden enclosure. In Comertown all the kids hung out wherever there was any action and I had been among them, one of the ragtags he remembered seeing that long ago day.

When Waldemar was in his late teens he felt that there was a stigma attached to people of German descent so he had his name changed legally from Steinke to Lane. Because of his black hair, friends nicknamed him Blackie, a name that stuck with him all his life even after his hair had turned to grey.

Waldemar remodeled the old farm house the winter before we were married. He had been born in that house on February 6, 1917, the eighth in a family of nine children. His brother Paul, two years older, farmed with him. Waldemar had bought his parents' land and buildings and also additional land till he owned about 1200 acres of crop and pasture land. Paul rented land nearby. The two brothers got along great, with Paul often in the field as Waldemar kept machinery repaired. By necessity farmers must be jacks-of-all-trades. The farm equipment was kept on our farmstead; welding and shop equipment were shared.

Paul lived in town that first summer of our marriage and their dad, a widower, lived with him. In the fall Grandpa took the train to Seattle to live with his daughter Helen and her husband.

By the next summer I was pregnant with our first child. A New Year's baby, my doctor predicted. The fall of 1958 came with a scanty harvest. We'd had hail again. That's six years out of the last seven, Waldemar told me. Farmers, though, learn to accept such set-backs, always hopeful for a better next year.

I was obsessed with impatience, waiting for my baby to be born. Would it be on Marbea's birthday December 15th; my mother's December 22nd? Christmas? But those days went by and New Year’s Day arrived with still no labor pains. A blizzard was raging, an almost whiteout; snow swirling in cold below zero weather. In spite of the weather, or rather because of it, I was determined to get into Plentywood to stay with my brother Larry and his wife Bonita. I dared not wait to risk traveling the country roads after labor pains would start. Waldemar and our neighbor, Oluf Petersen, drove me to town. When we'd reached the highway, a mile from home, we found roads blocked, traffic stopped. We went home and later tried again. This time the snow plow had come and we made it through.

Our baby girl, Vicki Dawn, was born eight minutes after midnight on January 7th, 1959. The doctor wrapped the precious newborn in blankets and took her out to her proud father and Uncle Larry waiting in the lobby. She looks like a Swede, the doctor said with a smile, aware that Waldemar often kidded me about my Swedish heritage. She was indeed a darling little towhead.

As soon as Larry got home and had told Bonita the news, he called Seattle. My widowed mother had moved there by then, as had two of my sisters and a brother. He'd had their instructions to call whenever it happens, day or night. We were a family of four sisters and two brothers. The oldest, twins, Alice and Doris, had been born in Canada in November 1918; Glen was born in Comertown in January 1920. My birth was in January 1922; June's in June 1924; and Larry's in March 1926. My parents had a rough time raising six scrapping kids during the depression but when we were grown we were a close-knit family.

In 1959 the government started a new program for farmers called, Soil Bank. We signed up, planted our cropland to grass, fenced it, and then planned what we would do for the next ten years. We were to get $5,000 per year under the program. Mom and my sister Alice paid us a visit that summer. I had lived in Seattle during World War II and again later, but the climate had not agreed with me. We didn't think we wanted to go there but Alice changed our minds. Besides, Waldemar told me, My Pa and your Ma are there. So Seattle it was.

Seattle was a challenge to Waldemar. A jack-of-all-trades on the farm, he now needed to choose a single trade to support his family. He picked floor covering, almost on a whim, having laid linoleum in the new kitchen of our farmhouse. With his meager experience he found the skill more difficult than he'd expected. The wages were good, however, and he stuck with it.

The greatest blessing of all in our time in Seattle happened on the evening of May 28, 1961, when our son, Jack Wade, was born. After three daughters, Waldemar was delighted that his fourth child was a boy.

The winter of 1963 – 1964 I had a long, bad siege of asthma, an illness I have battled all my life. In the spring we reluctantly put the house up for sale and made plans to move back to Montana. We bought a house in Great Falls where Larry and Bonita were then living. By that time they had five children. It was wonderful having our two young families living close together with a chance of getting better acquainted. Waldemar again got work in floor covering. We were there just one year, however, when adventure beckoned us.

In June, Waldemar and a friend made a trip to Alaska, investigating the work situation there. He liked what he found and returned to get the family. Renting out the house, we pulled up stakes and headed north. Thus it was in that snow-covered land at the top of the world that our education was about to begin.

TWO: NORTH TO ALASKA

Going to Alaska had been a dream that my husband had held since his teenage years. He told me that in the Thirties he had heard of people heading for that northland, hoping to homestead and seek their fortune and that's what he wanted to do. We had been married eight years when he decided it was time for him to live his dream.

When we arrived on August 17, 1965, tired, unemployed, I wondered if we had made a mistake. After the first night in a boarding house in a beautiful location at the foot of a mountain near Palmer, Alaska, I awoke with a bout of Asthma. The fog hung heavy, seemingly held in place by the mountain. I cried in despair. Far from home, with two little children, no job and a climate that did not seem to agree with me.

After some discussion we decided that we would go to Anchorage and if it was foggy there, we'd go on to Fairbanks, hopeful that the climate away from the bay would be better. My lungs did improve as we traveled on. Soon, to my relief and delight, we came in sight of Anchorage, a little city positioned in bright sunlight. The climate would be OK! We'd stay there. All would be well.

It did seem that way at first. Waldemar checked with the Floor Coverer's Union and immediately got a job. By mid-morning we also had an apartment. We settled in and that fall Vicki started first grade. For the first six months or so work was plentiful. Anchorage was still rebuilding after the devastating Good Friday earthquake of the previous year.

In December we got a wild idea about investing in property there. We still had three Soil Bank payments coming and were sure we could get an advance on that from our hometown bank for the down payment. Yes, we were foolish! In our forties we thought the world was our oyster, that we could find our pearl. We got in touch with real estate agents and drove around looking at rental properties. Then, answering an ad in the paper, we contacted a Bert F. Kellogg and made an appointment to look at his two new duplexes. We waded through deep snow to reach the buildings, liked what we saw and began to negotiate.

Mr. Kellogg had a loan with the Alaska Mutual Savings Bank and it was there that we went to discuss the matter. Mr. Earl Miller, a vice president of the bank, was also from Montana, a fact that made for conversation. He understood that in Montana our twelve hundred acres was no big deal. There, because of the little rain we got, cropland had to be strip cropped, half of the land put in crop each year, the other half summer fallowed. When I was working for the Farmers Home Administration, two sections was considered to be a family-sized unit.

It was touch and go for us to be able to buy the property but negotiations went ahead. Miller told us that the bank and Kellogg had worked over the loan, dividing the figures in the event that he would be selling the duplexes separately. We wanted both, however, and we eventually took over the existing loan. We were assured that the loan was at eight per cent interest and the length of the term was twenty-five years.

As soon as we'd agreed on the matter and signed the earnest paper, Mr. Kellogg urged us to move right in, even before the deal was finalized. We did that, being anxious to be in our own place before Christmas. The fireplace screens were not yet installed nor were there any drapes. This posed a problem for us in getting tenants. Then another problem arose. We had agreed to take over Kellogg's loan and also pay him on a side note for two years. In March Kellogg insisted that we owed him interest going back to the date of the loan, June 2, 1965, in addition to the amount we had agreed upon in writing.

We hired an attorney, James N. Wanamaker, and Kellogg had