Whiskey and Smoke: The Life of Peggy Brewer
I have spent most of my life trying to understand my grandmother, Dormillie Frances Brewer—known to nearly everyone as Peggy. She was a woman of contradictions: part Sioux, part White; part mother, part mystery; part fury, part tenderness that she rarely let anyone see. I never really knew her when she was alive, but I have come to know her through the stories, the records, and the wreckage she left behind.
She was born on July 16, 1940, in Yankton, South Dakota, the daughter of Francis Chandler Brewer and Dormillie Garnet Woodward. Her parents had married just two years earlier, full of youthful hope that the country’s promise after the Great Depression would somehow trickle down to them. But the Brewer family was poor—dirt poor. They were farm laborers on borrowed land, people who survived by sweat and hope.
My grandmother was born into two bloodlines that the world refused to reconcile. Through her father, she carried the Yankton Sioux. Through her mother, she carried the White settlers who had displaced them. That mixed heritage made her a target from both sides. Too light-skinned for the reservation, too Native for the White schools, Peggy grew up always on the outside, learning that silence could be safer than truth.
She spent much of her childhood on and near the reservation, surrounded by cousins, elders, and stories that reached back centuries. But there was little stability. The family moved wherever there was work. The adults bent their backs in the fields, and the children followed, picking, hauling, earning pennies. It wasn’t a childhood so much as a long apprenticeship in survival.
By the mid-1940s, the Brewers joined the great post-war migration west. They packed what little they owned and drove toward Oregon, chasing rumors of steady harvests and government housing. The trip was meant to be a new beginning. In reality, it marked the start of years that would scar my grandmother forever.
In 1949, when Peggy was nine, her parents’ marriage fell apart. Poverty has a way of grinding the sweetness out of love. After the divorce, her mother, Dormillie, met a man named Shirley Probst. He had a daughter from a previous marriage and a way of charming the room. For a short while, it must have seemed like things might finally settle. But peace was never something Peggy’s life allowed to last.
What happened next is something that can’t be softened. Peggy’s childhood ended long before it should have. At 11, Peggy began a love affair with her eldest brother Tyrone who was a year older. It’s enough to say that the betrayal came from within the home, and that it left a wound that never healed.
At twelve years old, she became pregnant. When she began to show, her mother tried to hide her from the neighbors and the church. Her mother married Shirley that same year, trying to bury shame beneath legality. And when Peggy gave birth to her son, Chuck, the family rewrote the truth on paper: her mother’s name appeared as the child’s mother.
Peggy was just a child herself, and now she had lost her child. It broke something inside her that never truly mended.
In 1953, overwhelmed by guilt and anger, her mother divorced Shirley. But the damage was irreversible. Shirley wanted a son; Dormillie gave him Chuck. Peggy had to watch as the baby she had carried was taken from her arms and handed to a man she barely knew. It was the kind of grief that reshapes a soul.
Soon after, her mother moved the family to California, seeking anonymity in the sprawl of Los Angeles. For Peggy, the move must have felt like exile. She was thirteen, stripped of her child and her sense of home.
By the time she was fourteen, she met two brothers—Dickie and Ronnie Lake, handsome and wild, sons of New York, transplants trying to make it on the West Coast. The Lake boys were older, charming, and perhaps the first people who made her feel seen instead of judged.
At fifteen, she gave birth to her first daughter, Victoria. She was still a child trying to raise one. Life was cruelly repetitive. She had known the pain of being separated from her baby once, and soon it happened again. When Victoria was two, Peggy and Dickie gave her to a neighbor family who could offer her a better life. There was no paperwork, no court—just a quiet goodbye that lived like a ghost in Peggy’s heart.
Still, she kept moving, as she always did.
ly, and for a short moment, the world must have seemed brighter. Dickie and Peggy were young, poor, and in love, but they were a family. They traveled to New York that same year and married there.
It was the first time Peggy had something official, something real that no one could take from her. They returned to California after the wedding, but the happiness didn’t last.
By 1960, she was pregnant again—this time by Dickie’s brother, Ronnie. The baby, Raymond, was born into a family already unraveling. And yet Peggy kept trying, kept fighting for a version of life that wouldn’t hurt so much.
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The Years of Loss (1960 – 1962)
A year later came another child — her sixth, a son she named Walter. He was tiny, bright-eyed, and sickly from the start. Peggy doted on him with a desperation that came from all the children she’d lost or been forced to surrender. For a few months, he was her redemption.
But one May afternoon in 1962, everything collapsed. Walter caught pneumonia. My grandfather, Dickie, stayed home from work to care for him. He sat in a chair, holding the baby against his chest — and at some point, he drifted to sleep. When he woke, the baby was dead. No cry, no breath. He desperately rushed him to the hospital to save his son. But the doctors couldn’t save him.
I’ve been told my grandmother screamed for hours when she learned what happened. The grief broke her body, her mind, her faith — everything. She had lost her baby, and the man she loved could not look her in the eye without seeing death reflected back. They separated soon after. Peggy took most of the children north to Oregon, while my father, Richard, stayed behind with his father’s family. The Lakes kept him close, calling him their golden grandchild. He would never see his mother again as the person she once was.
Oregon, Grant, and the Disappearing Years (1962 – 1974)
In December 1962, Peggy married Grant Eichler in Oregon. He was steady enough at first — a man who could work with his hands and keep the lights on. But alcohol filled the spaces that love couldn’t reach. They both drank, and the drinking turned the house into a place of shouting, then fists, then silence.
My father was only a toddler when Peggy and Grant came back to California in 1963 to retrieve him. He’d been living with his father, grandparents, and his disabled great-grandmother, Jennie, who couldn’t move easily. When Peggy arrived, the house turned to panic. My father’s aunt — a small woman named Sandy — tried to hide him under the bed. But Peggy found him, pulled him out, and left with him.
That moment became legend in the family — the day my father was taken back by a mother who had already lost too much to ever let go again, even if she couldn’t give what he needed most.
Back in Oregon, she gave birth to her last child, Adele, in 1963. The house was now full again — full of noise, pain, and the smell of whiskey.
Throughout the 1970s, Peggy and Grant’s drinking worsened. My father grew up in that storm. He took beatings meant for no one. Words that should never be spoken to a child were shouted at him daily. He learned to run, to hide, to endure. And yet, somehow, he survived.
When he was sixteen, a night of teenage recklessness ended in tragedy. He and a friend had been drinking; there was a crash. My father’s neck snapped, and he fell into a coma. Most parents would have sat by their child’s bedside, but Peggy and Grant saw an opportunity. They accepted money from the friend’s family to claim that my father had been the driver.
He woke weeks later, unable to walk or speak clearly, forced to relearn the simplest parts of being alive. When asked his name, his first words weren’t “Eichler,” the name he’d been forced to carry, but “Lake.” Even broken and half-conscious, he remembered who he was.
That small act — saying his true name — was defiance, blood reclaiming blood.
By 1979, the marriage between Peggy and Grant was over. She filed for divorce in October, ending a union that had nearly consumed them both.
A Late Peace (1979 – 2000)
Two months later, in December 1979, she met Harold Earl. He wasn’t perfect — nobody in her story ever was — but he was kind to her in ways she didn’t know how to receive. They married soon after, quietly.
For the first time, Peggy seemed safe. She tended bar for a living — a fitting stage for a woman who had learned to live among strangers and confessions. She laughed loudly, smoked constantly, and poured drinks for other broken souls who recognized something of themselves in her.
With Harold, she stayed married for more than twenty years — longer than all the other chapters combined. They lived near Fern Ridge Lake, west of Eugene, Oregon. Their home was small, the kind that smelled of tobacco and coffee and worn linoleum.
In 1999, the doctors found cancer between her shoulder blades — the kind that spreads silently until it owns the lungs. She had smoked since girlhood; it felt like fate finally coming to collect. Even then, she faced it the only way she knew how — with defiance. She kept the cigarettes, kept the whiskey, and kept the walls around her heart.
She died on May 1, 2000, at sixty years old. My last memory of her is hazy now — me in a winter jacket beside her hospital bed in the living room. She had her arm around me, a glass of whiskey in one hand, a cigarette in the other. The smoke curled up into the lamplight like a prayer that never learned how to end.
Afterword: The Weight of Inheritance
I used to think of my grandmother as a villain — mean, angry, impossible to love. But the more I’ve learned, the more I see that she was the sum of a thousand injuries that began long before she was born. Poverty, racism, violence, silence — all of it carved into her until she became stone just to survive.
She hurt people, yes. But she also carried a pain that no one ever helped her put down. In the few pictures that survive, her eyes look tired but alive, like she’s daring the world to challenge her right to exist.
When she married Harold, she found something close to peace. Maybe not forgiveness, maybe not redemption — but rest. After a lifetime of running, she could finally stop.
Sometimes I imagine her sitting outside that house by Fern Ridge, watching the wildlife under an Oregon sunset, smoke in her hand, drink in the other, the air still for once. Maybe she thought of all she’d lost. Maybe she thought of the children she couldn’t save, the ones she couldn’t keep, and the ones who still remembered.
I think, in her own way, she knew she was loved. And that might have been enough.
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