 I'm Amy Blossom from Jackson County Library Services, and I welcome you to Windows in Time. Windows in Time is a series of local history talks, a program that's been developed by the Jackson County Library Services and Southern Oregon Historical Society. It is also part of the Southern Oregon History Show, which airs on Thursday nights at 6 p.m. You can also see us live, though, at the Medford and Ashland Libraries, the first and second Wednesday of each month at noon. So are you ready for some history? Let's go! Hi, I'm Dennis Powers, and my wife and I have lived in Ashland for 20-plus years. I retired about six years ago after teaching at Southern Oregon University, teaching business law for some 15 years. I've written a number of books in around this area, some 20 books in total, 15 basically being nonfiction. And there's been a maritime series that has to do with everything from the Crescent City tsunami that devastated that town and the West Coast in 1964 to treasure ship about sunken gold and a golden ghost ship to St. George Reef Lighthouse, the most dangerous expensive lighthouse built in this country, right off of Crescent City and some other ones. Working up the types of programs that we'd have for the Windows in Time series, Susie Jessel's name came up. I knew a little bit about her, but not a lot, and I decided to look into it. I was astounded by what I found. The first slide is one of Susie Jessel. It also goes into what was talked about in True Magazine in February 1943. Susie came to Ashland in 1931. She was dirt poor. She had six children, a cow, a car, her husband couldn't find work. So they really had to go ahead and start working from the beginning, although she had been a healer and had been doing this that we'll be going into for some years. She was 40 at the time. She was unknown at the time, but in 12 years she was able to build up this practice, and let me read this to you. In a small Oregon village in the foothills of the Siski Mountains lives a country healer who is probably one of the strangest practices in the world. The article went into the fact that she treats almost as many patients in a week as do many of the large hospitals, and she also was one that when she gets down to the business, she rolls up her sleeves and puts the crowd into a line and then tends to them. From the article called, they call her Miracle Woman. Life began for Susie in 1891. She was born in a small log cabin in the hills of Murphy, North Carolina, on Hangen Dog Creek. Now isn't that incredible? I mean thinking about places where you've been or where you're born, Hangen Dog Creek. But no one suspected the fact that she was on the way because her mother at the time was 52 years old, had already eight children, was a grandmother. And she attributed her not feeling as well to the change of life. Her mother though was a midwife and a country doctor, and her grandmother was actually a medical doctor. So there was a real tradition, if you will, that was coming here. Susie was born with a call or a membrane over her face. And in the local lore, that meant that she had a special gift. When her mother was nursing afterwards and she noticed that she was tender, she also noticed that when her little infant went ahead and touched her that the pain and fever seems to disappear from herself. One of the earliest remembrances that Susie has is being carried through the cornfields at all hours of the night to the ailing, and before long they would get some relief from the pain. What's interesting here, and we'll be going more into this, is that there are some rare people who have a way of connecting. But Susie throughout her whole life connected not only spiritually with the people, but she also connected in terms of friends. I was really surprised when I got into this as to the friends that she made throughout the country. And so she had said that her healing career basically started before she was out of the cradle. This was a hard life, hoeing, working in the cornfields, milking cows, working in the lumber camps. However, to pass the time, there is music at get-togethers and fairs. And one of the stories that came up was that Susie played the banjo. And so at one of the county fairs, the band that was supposed to be there didn't show up. So Susie picked up, she was very talented, picked up a banjo and started playing. Well, some people began applauding. And she kept playing and people applauded more. Before you know, they were tossing some coins to her. So she thought this was wonderful. Susie scooped up some of the coins and ran back to her family, told her mother about it, and said, Mama, I think I found what I want to do with my life. What, honey? And that is to be an entertainer. Well, her mom said, none of your life. Those are very, very different people. And the life is not what one would expect of you. So she said in her biography, actually called Healing Hands, which is a very interesting book to get into, that her career as an entertainer stopped right then and there. What was interesting to me was that Susie wanted to be treated like all other, let's say at this time, teenagers. And she didn't want to be treated differently. So when she was 16 and the family moved to Eastern Tennessee, she earned a teaching certificate. But the problem with that was that these one-room log cabins, that they didn't pay much. So she then learned tailoring and how to be a seamstress. She wanted to be independent. One of the real big episodes in her life was why walking in the hills, Susie stopped by a spring of water and glanced down. And in there she saw the shimmering hundreds of stars twinkling as if reflected from the sky. She had a vision of Jesus with hands out stretched thing, go and heal the sick. But what was interesting is although her life was really dedicated to healing, to working with those who were ailing, to taking care of people who were ailing, that she still had a teenager's life to live, which really impressed upon me because she didn't just gravitate to it. She knew she was different, and yet she really wanted to have a normal life. So in Eastern Tennessee, in Teleco Plains, which is a company logging town, she started going around with several of the young men in the area. And interesting enough on this slide, you'll see that she was an attractive lady and she entered a beauty contest to help dedicate a new church and she won. Interesting enough was that although she was also earning a living and taking care of ill people, she also was dating and seeing some of the young men in town. She was actually engaged for two years, and this is kind of a cute story because what happened was she was treating the ailing father of a friend of hers. And so rather than going ahead and walking the ten miles all the way back to her home, she decided to stay in a different bed in the bedroom of her friend's house. Well then there were some interesting scratches on the window and the window was brought up. A man stepped in and she couldn't believe it. The voice was of her patrof. The voice was of her fiancée. Well, that took care of that engagement. But she did meet a deputy sheriff when she was 21, a person by the name of Rob Kelby, had two daughters, actually had a son and a daughter and began married life. But it only lasted for three years because her husband was killed in the line of duty. So she found a job with an old Southern family, did tailoring on the side, washed and ironed shirts and was doing things besides her healing. So she was continuing to do this. And the healing again was tending to those who were ill talking compassionately with them and also going ahead and finding out where their ailments were. We'll be going more into that later when we go into Ashland. She met Charlie Gessel and that was the love of her life and the love of his life. They connected immediately. She was 28. Charlie was actually 35, so he was seven years older. More children were born and they moved to Indiana where they rented a farm and then from there they went to South Dakota and that was where their daughter, Alma, was born in 1926. By then they had six children. Now this was hard life because with six children to raise, working the farms in this hard life, soon as they had little time to use her gift. And mind you, this was a time when you didn't have support assistance. There was no unemployment. There was no welfare, no food stamps, no mobile telephones, none of these things, no rent assistance, you had to earn it. And if you didn't earn it, then you were hungry. When they were in South Dakota though, interesting enough, fate intervened because they put in crops that year and it burned out. But as a little girl, Susie always loved the word organ and when an old family friend invited them to come to the eastern Oregon town of Baker, the family moved there. And so this was part of the ambience that was happening because now we're in 1931, in Susie's 40 years old, a neighbor called to ask if she would go ahead and tend to her ailing father who was in Grant's Pass. Susie said, of course I will. I'll see what I can do, what I can help. But different people then told her about a very beautiful little town in the Rogue Valley named Ashton. The main drawback was the fact that there was just no work or money there and to a certain extent we have the same problem in terms of jobs in our town. But Susie liked her first view of the town and the reason was that it had an outstanding educational opportunities where her children could go from first grade all the way through college. And that's where he had Southern Oregon state normal school at the time, which is the predecessor of SOC and then SOU. And that was really a main draw for her. At that time the town had only 4,500 people. They first settled on Iowa Street and their total possessions that I'd mentioned was some furniture, six children, a car and one cow. Charlie couldn't find work in the beginning and he got the run around at the WPA being the Works Progress Administration. So Susie went ahead and tried to find the person and got the same run around. But she was able to find the man who made the decisions who was a prosperous looking man who at that time was smoking a big cigar. So I'll read this to you from this biography. What happened was, his first quest was, do you have a car? Susie said yes. Rent paid, yes. Any livestock, one cow. He looked up and said, well you don't sound poor to me. Well Susie went ahead and said, quote, this made me mad. And I told him that if we didn't get work we couldn't run the car, pay the rent or feed the cow and the children go hungry. So he could do one of two things. Feed us or shoot us. And she walked out. Two days later, Charlie got the job digging ditches in Lithia Park for the WPA program. They finally settled on a dirt road that was then known as Holley. And you can see Holley Street today of course in Idaho that's up above the university. And her healing practice started working and started growing. Now here's an important thing. She didn't advertise. She didn't ask money for her services and she told her patients that she was not a healer. This is really important. She said she was only a vehicle for God's work and that her ability was given to her by her creator. But one of the key things was that if a person said, can you cure me? And she said, no, I can't make that promise but I can make you more comfortable. I was doubting when I first was getting into about Susie Gessel but I can tell you I'm a believer she really is the real thing because more and more people came to her clinic as the word spread and her overriding goal was to treat suffering humanity. She was as close to Mother Teresa when we look at that as anyone I've seen in this valley and in this region and more than like this state. With the slide that you see in terms of inside the private room you can see Susie asked the patients not to tell about their particular ailment. She talked to them as a friend about where they came from and tell her about her family as her hands went over their torso and what would happen is that those that were there said later that her hands felt warm and then at times the veins and the back of her arms and her hands would actually rise over the afflicted area and the treatment would be anywhere from one to three minutes and a treatment would be where she would be going ahead and working over the area and then what you do is she would just tell them not making a diagnosis about how many more times if they wanted to that they could probably come and have some help. No forcing, poking or manipulation was done. I mean I've been in the Philippines and I saw the faith healers there where they're actually they seem to be operating they're pulling out part of a muscle or things like that and the sleight of hand is something that is really incredible. She didn't do this. The treatment was over when she walked over to a stand wiped her hands in a towel and her veins returned back to normal. With the Holly home that they then eventually bought it was soon evident they needed a separate place because how do you have where you're raising a family and having a family life trying to be normal but on the other hand what you're doing is you have people coming now from all over Oregon and even other states. So they bought the adjoining lot in Idaho which had an old house on it and Charlie went ahead and remodeled it into two basely units where people could stay who are non-amulatory in a treatment facility. Every single afternoon Susie would come to the treatment center and she would stay until the last patient was seen there would be 16-hour days. Her daughter Alma had said later that she seemed to get her energy from her work and it had to be that way. Then we had when True Magazine profiled her nationally in 1943 she was soon seeing upwards of 600 persons a week and on the 600 persons a week they would travel thousands of miles this year. They came by plane, by train, by bus, by taxi, by car all these different ways and the plates in their cars were nearly all the types of states of the Union. It was national and they were coming to get help or relief from their pain from Susie and the ailments were many. I mean it could be severe colds, it could be the flu, it could be arthritis, severe rheumatoid arthritis, even cancer of broken bones but you see what happened though is that even doctors would refer their tough patients to Susie and Susie referred back to them so this is really a different type of deal that is very heartwarming when I look into it. Another national one was Time Magazine in 1953 and Time Magazine in 1953 went ahead and wrote an article on her and on this one what I have on this slide is that you can get kind of an idea of what it's like that many were bandages or held to canes and crutches sunbore the grimace of chronic pain. These were people who were sick and something that she did all in all for 35 years. She would come in and sometimes she had a white nurse's uniform and fancy print apron and she would raise her arms to the picture of Christ and say, I dedicate my hands to the Lord. That was it. She did not care what a person's religion was. She didn't care if they're aesthetic or agnostic because she was there to do the healing. If they didn't pay her, that was fine. She actually returned large donations of money as you could imagine would be coming in there because she didn't want to change the way that she was relating and not only relating to the individuals but also to the community. I have to say also that it wasn't all life at Wine and Roses because actually during that time period you had an Ashen minister that actually called her and declared her as a heretic and drummed her out of the church that she had been in for 20 years. What she did is she found another church and the other ministers and religious leaders in the area totally supported her. She got poison pen letters that were very, very tough from people that not only doubted but basically didn't like what she was doing. They even, a couple of them turned in them, the jessals into the IRS because of the fact that she was having cash, but this wasn't a lot of cash. These were dollar bills for $5 bills and $10 bills. So what did Susie do? She hired a tax attorney, actually an attorney who was dealing with that and just the case was settled for small amounts and then dismissed. The healing really was taking its toll and you think about it because she kept on treating humanity. She died in 1966 and the mourners thronged to Ashen Cemetery. There were many testimonials given and I can say that when I gave this presentation in Medford I was struck by some of the testimonials, if you will, that came there and even when we gave it in Ashland and one of the ones that really struck with me was a man that said that his father actually went to see Susie and was ill and went for about six or seven times but was having relief from his pain and on that last visit Susie just said you can go home now. I can't help you anymore. He died a month later. I mean this is really moving material. One of the things that really stood out to me also was that and it was very true was that a patient's faith, age, color or denomination had no effect whatsoever on God's healing and so therefore it had no effect on Susie's healing and her mother taught her about love, charity and humility and I'll read this is that somehow she managed to keep me from feeling too different from other children and adults as I grew up because we were taught that God gives each one of us a gift and we all use them together for a common purpose. Now that really strikes me because isn't it true? I mean think about it. Every person, even those who are watching this or if you hear about this we all have a special gift. There's something we do a little better than others and to use it to help another person is really what it's about. Her son Joe carried on with her work until he passed away in 1975. It's true that Joe didn't have the close connection with patients that Susie did but then again who could and her daughter Alma then took over at age 49 in that year and then again they believed that it came from God but we'll talk about that really at the end and Alma then moved to Phoenix in 1991. The three acres of the surrounding property originally owned by the Jaisal family became the Jaisal subdivision in 1955. A trailer park now you can see it now occupies the treatment room and the land and that has been remodeled into a two room unit. The actual Jaisal house with the name on it is on Holly near Idaho with its sign. It was purchased by a very wonderful person from the family in 1987 and it's being run as a VRBO or vacation rental by the owner. I took this picture, this last slide in winter and it just seemed to shine with the golden rays of the setting sun but I think in conclusion that we have the power of positive thinking and working together with a patient. She was bright, rural, her mom was a healer and also think about this, there are electrical impulses that comprise our bodies and there are those rare people who will be able to come into that, can sense it, to come into that. Edgar Cayce had past life regressions and think about the special sensitivities that animals have, you know, they can hear. Dogs can hear things we can't hear. Smell things that we can't smell and they can pick up these vibrations. She was not fervently religious. She wasn't saying heal or doing an Elmer Gantry approach. She didn't claim to cure all ills. She said no in terms of can you cure me. She referred to doctors. She would suggest herbs and the patient did not have to have faith to be treated by her. And think about now, for example, it's throughout our area, let's say in Ashland specifically, you have psychic healers, you have rectilogists, rectilogists, crystals, energy fields, past life therapists. I've seen working up close. I've seen acupuncturists, massage therapists, nutritionists, deep tissue massages. I've seen all this. And I really need to tell you that she is the real deal and she stands out because of not only her compassion but also the way that she just treated everyone the same as if they were her friend. I have to say it's been my real pleasure to be able to give this presentation and I really want to thank you very much, you know, for watching all of the windows and time series that are being done in 2014 that we continue on in other years, of course. 2015, 2016 are being typed live. So I just want to say thank you and Susie Gessel is the real deal. So thank you for coming and joining us this evening. And open your eyes. Remember, history is everywhere.