Those of us who are privileged to celebrate a long life eventually reach the time when the body begins to deteriorate. There isn't any amount of exercise or food choices, which will prevent death. Death is guaranteed. Healthy eating and a reasonable amount of exercise may prolong the end only if other life threatening events are avoided such as fatal accidents, terminal diseases, or being the victim of murder. From the beginning to the end, we are ever learning and hopefully, gaining wisdom.
My mother lived many years, passing away 7 weeks after her 90th birthday. My father was 71 when he died. I would consider it a treasure if they had kept diaries or shared their life experiences in a book. I am fortunate to have been able to listen to their words of wisdom, but there is much I have forgotten of our lives together. Had they written of their perspective on life, I believe their words would be beneficial to many today who never personally knew people from my parents' generation. They were born only a few generations away from our country's founding fathers. When you read the constitution of the United States, you can see a glimpse of the character, value systems and wisdom of people who lived when it was written. How nice it would have been had those who fought to keep the freedoms established by the constitution provided future generations with a formula to protect the value systems and integrity shared by the majority of adults living during the 1940's. I was born in the 1940's into a family with an abundance of love and wisdom. My oldest brother was a marine fighting on the front lines at Guadalcanal in WWII. My father's brothers were also on the front lines wherever they were called to duty. My dad would search daily on the radio for news of the war, while he fretted over even the thought of losing his first born son or one of his brothers. I didn't understand the magnitude of the situation then, of course, but now I do. Adults didn't speak as freely before their children, because they felt that adult worries and business should only be shared with other adults. It was their way of protecting them by not inflicting in any way information that could cause a child concern.
It is my generation who failed to carry the message of the wise forward. Integrity and value systems were only sporadically taught after the 1960's. Some parents knew that creating a strong value system in their children was the greatest gift they could give to them, but many placed more of a value on being cool parents. The drug culture blossomed, and it was all too common for parents to even introduce their offspring to drugs.I have two unfinished books and four neglected blogs, but now I need to get serious and take that leap of faith into the biggest writing challenge of all. It is time to cross the finish line. I met with a psychic after my mother passed away, and she said my mother was sending a message urging me to write…write…write. That is exactly the way the psychic said it …write write write as she gestured with her arm the way my mother did the last time I saw her before she died. As I walked out the door on that July Friday afternoon in the year 2000, I turned around to look at her one more time. I was surprised to see her looking back at me. She held her arm all the way up in the air, waved and said, “See you!” I waved, and we both laughed. Knowing the mannerisms of the way the spirits message us, I believe my mother was letting me know that day she was headed for glory land. Mother was a gentle loving woman who always encouraged me and shared her wisdom with me all of my life. However, when the psychic said my mother was advising me to write, I knew it had to be due to something she learned after her death, because the only writing I had done before her passing was some creative writing. I wrote a few songs in the 1960’s, and I had also written papers related to my college requirements and my business needs. Mother probably would have been sending a message to me about writing a book. Maybe she was letting me know she could foresee my writing a weekly article for a local newspaper, but I believe our first interpretation of a heaven sent message is generally correct.
It is not uncommon for people to compliment my writing ability, whether I am writing a business letter for myself or on behalf of others, playing around on the social media networks or writing articles for publication. I am always so grateful, because I think of myself as a being a rather simplistic writer and therefore, feel I fall short when compared to those who write with such eloquence. Had Forrest Gump written a book, it would probably be something like mine. The wind was only a whisper as it flowed through the open window facing westward while the setting sun lit up the blood red sky over the grand Pacific does not often find its way into my material. I will try harder with this book about my life and changing times in America to add some descriptive scenes but most of those will be left up to the reader’s imagination.
I often say I have lived 4 lifetimes. My first lifetime began when I was born in an old farm house and lived there for almost 17 years. The childhood experiences gave me a solid foundation which I needed to go forth with confidence and face the unforeseen challenges of my future. I married my high school sweetheart way too early. I think it shocked everyone that I wasn't pregnant, and instead, we were just in love and wanted to be married. We were still in high school, sneaked away one evening, got married and kept that a secret for 6 months. We knew we were going to be together forever. Forever lasted five years. We had no children, although I had desperately wanted to be a mother. Things were different in the world during those 1960 years. When we both graduated from high school, we moved to Northern Illinois and were able to become self supporting within six weeks. We stayed at my brother Eddie’s home until we found our jobs and then moved out into a little one room apartment. Our life together would be compared to an engagement at best today. We had fun...took vacations ... both worked during the week and played on the weekends. I recall my dad telling me that we should be saving some of the money we were making but saving wasn't in our vocabulary. We soon moved to a nicer apartment and within a couple of years, bought a very nice mobile home. We found an upscale mobile home park across from a city park and on the edge of town where we joined several other young people who were also working and enjoying life. We bought new cars and at least once a month drove south to visit our respective parents who lived in Southern Illinois.
Following that marriage and my work in administrative offices in various manufacturing firms and one stint as private secretary to the county superintendent of schools in the 2nd largest county in the state of Illinois, I decided to find a job that was less demanding. I soon got a job as a waitress in a truck stop. That is where I met my second husband. Henceforth, my 3rd lifetime was about to begin. The first was my childhood and the 2nd was my life after high school with my first husband. Of course, when you meet a new person, you really don't know you are meeting another future, but I was and we were married for 10 years. I was no longer the 9 to 5 administrative assistant. I became Mommy. I loved it. We had a son, moved to California and less than two years later, we had our baby girl. We also officially became foster parents. It was all about baking cookies, sewing, which included making many of our clothes, fixing husband bacon and eggs for breakfast, and taking half the neighborhood kids to Sunday school on Sunday mornings in our station wagon. We would sing songs all the way, and the more kids I had in the car, the more I loved it. There were no seatbelts. You just stacked them into the back seats. During those years, one of my musician friends tagged me as the Santee Housewife.
My four lifetimes were quite different. My fourth lifetime would definitely be noted as career development years. I was an entrepreneur and at the same time always a college student. The spirit of entrepreneurship still lives within my heart. Some people enjoy a variety of hobbies and display many talents. I always enjoyed the challenge of developing a new business while creating new approaches to serving clients in a way that had not previously been done. For doing that, I was called innovative and avant garde. Once I accepted an assignment of converting a restaurant to a sports bar to prepare it for sale. Much to my surprise, I enjoyed doing that. It allowed me to see the commonalities of business operations whether a human care agency or a restaurant.
I am an avid reader of non fiction and in one of those many books I have on my book shelves or in storage, someone said “follow your hand in life. If there is something that you just can’t seem to put down, and it keeps coming forward in your thoughts, you need to address it.” I probably read it in a book entitled “How I Found Freedom In an Unfree World” by Harry Browne. I loved the book and kept it close by during some challenging business years referring to it as one might do with a Bible. Documenting our life experience and our perspective of it seems important to me even if only for our future children and grandchildren.
Often I have wished I could have shared my childhood with all of the troubled souls I have met in my lifetime. Perhaps this is my way.
Life began for me when I was born on Thanksgiving Day inside an old farmhouse. My dad’s wealthy boss actually owned the house where we lived. According to my brother’s writings, the house did not even have drywall in it when my dad moved in there with his wife and little step daughter. My dad worked hard to make it livable when he wasn’t working sun up to sun down on the farm. I know that Daddy would have loaded plenty of coal into the old coal stove that Thanksgiving Day before I arrived. The coal stove stood in the middle of the living room and had a vent above it, so heat could flow up to the second story. During the winter months, my dad always kept the fires going throughout the long cold nights. That was just another thing I took for granted. When you are a kid, you assume all dads are getting up in the middle of the night to keep the house warm. Just as you could depend on my dad to take care of his family, you could always depend on freezing temperatures in the Midwestern winter months. Our home was in located in Southern Illinois about ninety miles east of St. Louis. We lived in what was referred to as the bottoms by the local people.
As soon as my mother’s labor pains began that day, she would have sent my dad to pick up a neighbor lady who would serve as the midwife. Once he delivered the midwife, he would have left again with my older sister and brother so he could drop them off at our grandparents’ home on his way to the nearest neighbor who had a telephone. He needed to make a call to the old country doctor who was in a town about 20 miles away. We could see Grandma and Grandpa’s house. In fact, we could see for miles. The only thing obstructing our view were trees, but there were not a lot of those in the open areas since we were surrounding by farm land. Most of the trees grew along the Little Wabash River’s edge.Years later when I would take a trip back to Southern Illinois with my San Francisco born husband, he would express a disbelief that you could look as far as the eyes could see and beyond without seeing a mountain or city in the distance. That is when he decided that I was born and raised in the middle of nowhere.
On that early Thanksgiving morning, every neighbor who saw my dad racing up and down the country road in whatever old car or truck he owned then would have known a baby was on its way. No one knew then that my mother would give birth to a baby girl. There were no sonograms. There also were no epidurals. Mother would have no choice but to have a completely natural childbirth. I cannot imagine the experience. Franklin D. Roosevelt was president of the United States then. My father probably did not vote for him, and my mother surely did. Daddy was a Republican, and Mother was a Democrat.
Soon Dr. Allison would be rushing through the country roads too on his way to our house. He had delivered my brother in the same place 6 years earlier, so he knew the way. He also knew my mother and her helper would have everything set up and that he only needed to bring his medical bag, a stethoscope, a thermometer, a syringe, his scissors, a blood pressure cuff and antibiotics. The antibiotics would have been penicillin.
On another occasion, when Dr. Alison came for a home visit, the backwaters were surrounding our house. My father had to bring him in with a boat. The floods did often come in the winter months, so we were all fortunate there was no flood when I was born. I don’t know why Dr. Allison was making a home visit the time he tagged a name on our house. Doctors often made home visits during those years. I was told when the doctor stood on the edge of the water that particular day waiting for my dad to row a boat over to pick him up, he said the house sitting in the middle of the water looked like Noah’s Ark. Thereafter, he called our home Noah’s Ark. At least our house had a name. Normally naming property is reserved for the wealthy and their very large estates. Low income people’s homes are only named in a group fashion such as Tobacco Row or other unflattering names. We had a very respectable name, in spite of our low income, thanks to Dr. Allison. Noah’s Ark was a safe haven for the animals, and I believe today that our home served as a safe haven for many people throughout the years due to the abundance of love and respect my parents had for God and humanity.
The house was actually shaped a bit like the Ark, and it sat up on blocks. After the backwater got inside the house one year, my dad and his boss had placed bricks 5 feet high under the floor. When the water was at a certain level, you could no longer see the bricks, so it did look like an ark floating in the midst of flood waters. There was only one time after it was placed on the blocks that the water got inside the house again. I never questioned why my dad liked Johnny Cash’s song, “How High’s the Water, Mama?”
With flood waters surrounding it, it looked as if it was floating on water, since you couldn’t see the brick posts holding it up off the ground. The entire house was covered with brown fireproof shingles with the exception of the roof. The roof shingles were red. The roof had a slope from the peak and then it dropped downward about a foot making a slight overhang. My dad lined up three lightning rods on its peak placing one on each end and one in the middle. Since it was taller than anything in a wide open space area, it was vulnerable to lightning strikes.
Going to our aunt and uncle’s home in a city when the floods came and getting to see movies and walk to stores nearby was a real treat for me and my brother. My aunt and uncle also had electricity. I would be 6 years old before we got electricity at our house, and my brother would have been 12. Imagine coloring, reading and later studying by the light of a coal oil lamp. My brother was doing that throughout most of his elementary school years. The 6-year age gap between us made his life and mine so different. An even bigger gap existed between my older 4 siblings, and they all lived through and remember the Great Depression of the late 1930’s and early 1940’s. I have no memories of the depression, although I was born on the tail end of it. My mother saved some sugar rationing stamps with my name on them, which I have always kept.
Simple steps that we take today to do laundry and most of our household chores were very different when I was a child. Mother’s preparations for my arrival that Thanksgiving Day when she gave birth to me would have included boiling a huge pan full of water on an old fashioned cook stove, and gathering together clean towels, scissors for cutting the cord, and a clean nightgown for herself. Mother probably only owned a couple of gowns whereas I have a closet rack just for my night clothes today. She would have sewn cloth diapers, baby nightgowns, crocheted booties and made soft flannel baby blankets for the infant before the month I was supposed to arrive. She also would have sewn little belly bands, so she could use them to hold the baby’s cord close to its tummy for the purpose of preventing a hernia. When my first two babies were born in the 1960’s, baby bands were no longer used. I think they served a good purpose, and believe there are more hernias today which may be caused by a failure to bind the tummy during the early infant months.
Mother would have had clean sheets folded neatly on a nearby couch and a clean pee pot tucked under the bed. A crib was located nearby too, although the baby would spend a lot of time the first couple of weeks in bed with the new mommy. When her grand babies were expected, she would prepare in the same manner, making sure everything was ready at least two weeks ahead of the expected date of delivery. Things were, indeed, different when I arrived in this world. I would arrive in a room lit by a coal oil lamp. I wonder if that is why even today I don’t like bright lights in a room.
I was not the first baby to be born in my home nor was I the last. However, I was the last baby to be born to my mother and father. My brother, Charles, had also been birthed in the same house in the same bed in the corner of the living room near the old coal stove. He had been born in December three days after Christmas. At least two of my parents’ grandchildren were born in that same house.
I would always be the baby of the family of six children, and my parents would introduce me accordingly even when I was 30 years old. My father had three kids from a previous marriage, and my mother was a widow with one baby when they got married. The age span was quite unusual, since my oldest brother was at least 20 years older than me. One sister was about 16 years older than me, and the other older brother and sister were 14 years older than me. My dad’s children were supposed to live with their mother and visit us. Brother Eddie often would run away from his mother’s home and come to our house. In fact, he did that so often that my dad finally bought a bicycle for him to make the trip across the old country roads easier. When he was a little over sixteen years old, he lied about his age and joined the Navy. At that time my oldest brother was already in the Marines and fighting on the front lines in WWII while I was still a toddler. Sister married at 17, and her husband was in the Army. As soon as he returned and was discharged from service, she moved out. I really do not remember any of my older siblings living at home, except my brother who was six when I was born.
Although they did not live at home, our big loving family was very close, so I saw my older siblings often when they came home for visits. A friend of the family once noted that when we were all together, you could never tell which parent was the natural parent, because all of us were treated the same by both parents. As the years passed by, the family grew larger and larger because my nieces and nephews started arriving one by one.
The closest little town from our home was 5 miles away, and it only had a couple of stores, a school, gas station and a mill. My mother and grandmother would make dresses for the little girls in the family out of the flour sacks after they were emptied of the flour purchased at the old mill. Whoever thought of the idea of making colorful sacks certainly made a contribution to the community. I remember coming home from school one day with a new dress made from one of the mill sacks. It was red and had strawberries on it. My mother had sewn strawberry buttons on it. I loved it. It wasn’t easy to get me into a dress, because I liked wearing jeans all of the time. Once when we were staying with my grandfather in a city in the next county during backwater season, Grandfather Flynn (my mother’s father) bought some fancy dresses for me. They were colorful and had ruffles on them. I hated them. I cried if my mother insisted on my wearing them to school. That same grandfather insisted on walking to meet me after school one day when there was ice gathering on the sidewalks. He had recently fractured one of his legs, and it was in a cast. My mother told him he should not worry about me. She said “if she falls down, she will get back up. If you fall down, you will end up with another fracture.”
It must have been disappointing for both my mother and my grandfather to have a little girl who was a tomboy. My mother loved dolls, and I always got a new doll from Santa each year. Although I played cowboys, climbed into the barn rafters and played in the soy bean storage bin, climbed trees and played farming with the neighbor boy’s latest toy farm equipment, I also did love playing with my dolls. It was not uncommon to find me playing school with my dolls lined up as students and my playing the role of the teacher. The neighbor boy was my dad’s boss’s son. We were the same age. Most of the time, the neighbor kid and I played outside. With a brother six years older and only one playmate who was a boy, I guess I was like a little boy in a girl’s body to observers. I’m sure today overzealous adults might have tried to influence me to embrace my boyish ways. That would have been a huge mistake, because I was happy being a girl. I was just very competitive and was pleased if I could run faster or win at anything when competing against a boy. My brother was an excellent basketball player, so he taught me to play basketball. I was really good at that. Our teacher arranged for me to be a starting player on the boys basketball team. When I was in junior high school and my brother had a job, he told me if I scored 15 points in a game, he would buy a hot fudge sundae for me. I scored 35 points that night. Basketball was a very popular competitive sport. One evening when our school was competing against another, the coach called me in to play. We didn’t have a girl’s team, so as usual, I was playing on our school's boy’s team. Suddenly, the game stopped, because the other school filed a protest over my playing. After the officials met and discussed it, and I have not a clue what they talked about. The outcome resulted in my being allowed to play. After I graduated 8th grade, I played basketball with the girls team my freshman year of high school. I didn’t like the rules for girls, which were different than the boys’ rules. For example, certain players on the girls team at that time could not play the whole floor. On the boys team, regardless of your position on the team, you could run the floor. I transferred to another high school after my first year, and never played anymore high school basketball. A few years ago, my husband and I joined a gym, and I chose one that offered its clients a place to play basketball. I talked him into playing a game with me, while not knowing if I still had the skill. I beat him so badly that he refused to play anymore. He said, “I don’t like this game.”
Growing up in the bottoms was quite interesting when the floods arrived. My dad’s father was a fisherman, so my father was very comfortable in and on the water. He grew up helping his father on the river. He was a great swimmer and didn’t mind using the boat to go in and out during high water times. Mother, on the other hand, was terrified of water. She hated the backwater and always dreaded having to use the boat to get out and go to higher land. That is why my dad would normally take us to a nearby city where we would stay with my mother’s sister and her family when the water would rise. Of course, my brother and I loved that, because we were fascinated with city life. I also loved the boat ride from our house to the water’s edge. My dad would often stand up in the boat the whole way, and no man was ever more of a hero in my life than my father through my eyes when he would paddle us to safety. If I close my eyes today, I can still hear the water slapping against the boat, and it is a comforting relaxing feeling.
Going to our aunt and uncle’s home in a city when the floods came and getting to go to movies and walk to stores nearby was a real treat for me and my brother. They also had electricity. I would be 6 years old before we got electricity at our house, and my brother would have been 12. Imagine coloring, reading and later studying by the light of a coal oil lamp. My brother was doing that throughout most of his elementary school years. The 6-year age gap between us made his life and mine so different. An even bigger gap existed between my older 4 siblings, and they all lived through and remember the Great Depression of the late 1930’s and early 1940’s. I have no memories of the depression, although I was born on the tail end of it. My mother saved some sugar rationing stamps with my name on them, which I have today.
Household chores could be quite a challenge in the 1940’s. Mother’s preparations for my arrival that Thanksgiving Day would have included boiling a huge pan full of water on an old fashioned cook stove, and gathering together clean towels, scissors for cutting the cord, and a clean nightgown for the delivery and herself. There would have been cloth diapers, nightgowns, crocheted booties and soft flannel baby blankets for the infant. She also would have sewn little belly bands, so she could use them to hold the baby’s cord close to its tummy for the purpose of preventing a hernia. When my first two babies were born in the 1960’s, baby bands were no longer used. I think they served a good purpose, and believe there are more hernias today which may be caused by a failure to tightly bound the tummy during the early infant months.
Mother would have had clean sheets folded neatly on a nearby couch and a clean pee pot tucked under the bed. A crib was located nearby too, although the baby would spend a lot of time the first couple of weeks in bed with the new mommy. When her grand babies were expected, she would prepare in the same manner, making sure everything was ready at least two weeks ahead of the expected date of delivery. Things were, indeed, different when I arrived in this world. Mommies normally stayed in bed for 10 to 14 days following the birth of a child. I would arrive in a room lit by a coal oil lamp. I wonder if that is why even today I don’t like bright lights in a room.
I was not the first baby to be born in my home. My brother, Charles, had also been birthed in the same place in the same bed in the corner of the living room near the old coal stove. He had been born in December three days after Christmas 6 years before I arrived. In fact, there would be even more babies born there after my birth. At least two of my parents’ grandchildren were born in the same house.
I would always be the baby of the family of six children, and my parents would introduce me accordingly even when I was 30 years old. My father had three kids from a previous marriage, and my mother was a widow with one baby when they got married. The age span was quite unusual, since my oldest brother was at least 20 years older than me. One sister was about 16 years older than me, and the other older brother and sister were 14 years older than me. My dad’s children were supposed to live with their mother and visit us. Brother Eddie often would run away from his mother’s home and come to our house. In fact, he did that so often that my dad finally bought a bicycle for him to make the trip across the old country roads easier. When he was a little over sixteen years old, he lied about his age and joined the Navy. At that time my oldest brother was already in the Marines and fighting on the front lines in WWII while I was still a toddler. Sister married at 17, and her husband was in the Army. As soon as he returned and was discharged from service, she moved out. I really do not remember any of my older siblings living at home.
Although they did not live at home, our big loving family was very close, so I saw my older siblings often when they came home for visits. A friend of the family once noted that when we were all together, you could never tell which parent was the natural parent, because all of us were treated the same by both parents. As the years passed by, the family grew larger and larger because my nieces and nephews started arriving one by one.
There were no cell phones in my home. There was not even a telephone. No television. We had a radio. I was arriving in a home with few assets. My family had a double bed in the living room where my mother would birth me. They also had the coal stove in the middle of the room always with a couple of coal buckets next to it. There was a table, which we called a library table, a couch and a crib for the new baby. There was not a sink in the kitchen. No indoor bathrooms. On laundry days, the ironing board would be set up in the living room over by the back door. The iron was heated on the wood stove. My mother probably had a rocker, because people rocked babies a lot then, but I don’t remember a rocker if she did. I know my grandmother who lived a quarter of a mile away had a rocking chair, because it was known as Grandma’s chair. She had really long hair, and my brother told me he use to love brushing her hair when he was a small boy. She died when I was only 4 years old, so I have few memories of my grandmother on my father’s side of the family. My brother, however, wrote extensively of her wisdom and his love for her. She was a woman of deep faith. The nurturing I received from my dad’s brother’s and their wives was comparable to having a half dozen grandparents. I was surrounded by and perhaps most importantly, by people who respected children and treated them accordingly. I only have fond memories of how I was treated by my older brothers and sisters.
I was a bottle baby. My dad loved to tell me that the reason I had to take a bottle was because my brother drank up all of my mommy’s milk and left none for me. It was common for families to hang items that needed to be kept cool deep into the wells on property if they didn’t own an icebox. My bottles were heated up before serving them to me in a pan of water on the wood cook stove. My mother would boil the bottles in a big pan of water to keep them sterilized before putting milk into them. I faintly remember having a bottle. The family story is that one day I was on my way into my grandparents’ home with my Uncle Joe following close behind me. I was dodging their big dog, Sambo, and my Uncle reached down and grabbed my bottle and made it disappear. He told me that Sambo got my bottle. I guess I made sure everyone in the family knew that Sambo could not be trusted, because he got my bottle, and no doubt, I never trusted him after that.
The family carried water into the house from the well. It was across the gravel road in front of our house and located by a couple of barns. We would keep buckets of water in the kitchen. One of my brother’s chores was to bring buckets of water from the well. I was usually walking beside of him. I liked looking into the well when he would drop a bucket down to bring up some water. I could never see the bottom of the well. Later my dad had a cistern installed behind our back porch which made it a lot easier to bring water into the house. Shortly after that, they actually installed a sink and a pump which they connected up to the cistern. They put a big heavy steel door on top of the well, which was too heavy to be lifted by a child. My dad would be called a proactive farm manager today. He was always thinking ahead and solving potential problems before they arrived. Once he knew the property would flood, he built buildings on runners, including our outhouse. When the floods could be seen down the road, he would hook up a tractor and pull our outhouse and the chicken house to higher land.
Although they could pump water into the house after the pump was installed, it still had to be heated. They had to heat it on a wood stove and later on a gas stove when Mother finally got a new cooking range, so they could wash dishes and carry the dirty water out of the house after they were finished with it. Mother would fill big tubs with water on wash day and heat them on a gas stove in the washroom. It looked something like a propane camp stove today only it had two burners. They also had to heat a big rectangle tub full of water for my dad’s Saturday night bath. The rest of the family kept clean by using a wash pan, cloth rags, a bar of soap and water heated in the teakettle, which could always be found on top of the stove. Only occasionally would we use the tub. We washed our hair in the wash pan too by using shampoo and then dumping water on our head outside the house several times until we got the soap out. When my dad would come in from the field everyday for lunch, which we called dinner, he would thoroughly wash his hands and face before sitting down at the table. I often watched him wash up for his meal. He seem to have it down to a science while being what would appear to be as thorough as a surgeon preparing for an operation.
The wash pan would become my enemy when I went on my first date 15 years later. My dad reluctantly decided to let me have a date before the planned age of 16, because he knew the family and trusted the kid who had asked me to go to the movies with him. He was the brother of one of my best friends. However, he was older than me, was attending college and was a member of the ROTC. I was so excited to be going on my very first date with a guy picking me up and driving away in a car. That was big stuff. My courting up until that point had been limited to holding hands and stealing kisses while sitting on an outside bench with a bunch of kids watching a Saturday night cowboy flick being shown up on the side of the old country store building in Burnt Prairie, Illinois, a town with a population of maybe 100 people.
When Saturday arrived, I was filled with anticipation. I felt like Cinderella. I pretty much spent the day preparing for my date. I washed my hair in the morning, so it could dry in the sunshine and be looking perfect by the time my date arrived. I waited to take my wash pan “bath” shortly before the final steps of getting ready.
Afterwards, I put on my favorite full skirt with a couple of petticoats underneath to make the skirt stand out, added a pretty sleeveless summer blouse to match the skirt, dabbed some of Mother’s cologne behind my ears and promptly backed up and sat down in a wash pan full of water on the edge of my bed. I was horrified and when I let out a screech, my mother came running. As important as that was to me at the time, I don’t even recall how we solved the problem. I think my skinny little fanny was in and out of that wash pan so fast that I didn’t get my clothes that wet. I can imagine my mother ironed my skirt dry and brought it back to me to slip over my petticoats, because I did wear at least a couple of them on my first date. I didn’t have a lot of choices on what to wear. Makeup for me that evening was a dab of powder on my nose and cheeks from Mother’s compact and a little bit of her lipstick. I was a little late in getting dressed due to the sitting in the wash pan incident, so he was in the living room talking to my dad when I finally was ready to go.
As I look back at the evening now, I think he would have been better suited as a date for my dad than for me. He was 18. I was 15. They seemed to enjoy talking with each other. He was attending a state university, and I had only read about what was going on in the world outside of my circle of friends and family. I had been to St. Louis once with my family and to Chicago once. Otherwise, the only time I was in a sizable city was when we stayed with our aunt and uncle in Mt. Vernon when the floods came.
My date’s car had no muffler on it, so the roar of the engine prevented any discussions anyway without shouting. When we arrived at the drive-in, I was just wishing to be home. He bought us some popcorn and a soda. When the movie started, he put his arm around my shoulders and soon one hand dropped slightly down but just enough to make me feel uncomfortable so without saying a word, I just pushed his hand back up on my shoulder. He then removed his arm. We watched the movie in silence. After the movie, we listened to the outrageous roar of the engine all the way to my house. He did get out of the car and walk me to my door, said good night and turned around and walked out of my life forever never to be seen again by me. The experience shot a big hole in my imagination about how fun it would be to date.
However, I am getting ahead of myself now. There were many preceding years that led up to my first date. I treasure my memories of the long summer days on the farm and even the long winters, which seemed to arrive no later than the earliest weeks of November and last through March or April of the following year. The first 16 rather uncomplicated years of my life seemed to be never ending, but now I know they did end and could not have lasted forever.
The first thing I remember about my early life was that I was very ill. I couldn’t have fully understood the danger, but it was obvious my mother did. My parents’ living room also served as their bedroom. They had a double bed in the living room of our home. I slept in a crib in the same room only a couple of feet away from their bed when I was a toddler. It was during that time in my life that I can remember it being late at night and my mother hovering over my crib. In the shadows of my mind and those midnight hours, I can see her placing soft heated cloths covered in camphor oil on my chest, while holding me in a sitting position helping me cough and cough and cough. She would literally reach into my mouth and throat to help bring up the phlegm that seemed to be raiding my body, choking me and taking my breath away. She would murmur words of comfort. I believe some of that was probably a mother saying prayers for her very sick child. Much later, I would learn I “almost died” from the whooping cough. Since that time, I have never been near death or even seriously ill, so I believe it must have been then that I had an out of body experience. I can’t be sure. I could have had a very realistic dream. I just know that I experienced going through the dark tunnel towards the light, which has since been described by others who claim to know they had out of body experiences. When it happened to me regardless of the cause, I have never forgotten that it offered greetings from known souls and at the end of the tunnel had I gone forward I would have stepped into or floated into a wonderful engulfing warm light of ever lasting powerful love with people who were reaching out for me right at the entrance inside the lighted area. It ended right there for me. I was never fully inside the light. I was close enough to feel the heat of it and the joy that it offered, and then it was gone. I have always wondered if being there on the edge of the light of the hereafter contributed to my having such a great understanding of people. It seems even as a child, I was able to see beyond the words they were speaking and feel their emotions. It allowed me to love and fully understand the positions that my peers took.
My ability to predict the behavior of others would serve me well at a later time in my life. An extra ordinary capacity for loving others may have come from my out of body experience whether it really happened or was a very realistic dream. The first time I heard someone talking about a similar experience, it certainly reaffirmed that I had not imagined what happened to me. I was shocked at the similarities of their detailed description. I don’t even recall being introduced to the concept of out of body situations. I may have read about it or perhaps I saw someone discussing it on television. I do know for a fact that if I was a toddler, I could not have been influenced by someone’s story. I couldn’t read yet, and I was at least 11 years old before we had a television in our house. Yet, the first time I heard someone describing an out of body experience, they could have been describing mine.
Several years later, I got a call from an x husband who said his girlfriend was distraught, and he was concerned that she had suffered a breakdown. That meant he thought she was displaying symptoms of some type of mental disorder. I requested that he let me talk to her on the phone. I knew her very well. She started talking to me and explaining that she had an amazing dream wherein she saw the light. She described the light as love. She went on to say that it was powerful and overwhelmingly intense. She cried while explaining it. She told me that life is all about love and that the solution to all problems lies within the embodiment of love. I chose to not counter or even disagree with her opinion of what she was feeling. My approach to the problem was promoted by two facts. I believe in God, and she said the light was coming from God so why should I question and also I knew that the only way to connect with someone having a mental heath episode was to accept the reality of the patient and build from there. It would not be worthwhile to challenge a person within his or her own reality. In fact, your efforts to help could be destroyed by presenting an oppositional position. There is time to do that later when the patient has calmed down and developed a trust in you. Because I believed I had gone through the tunnel, I knew about the overwhelming love coming from the light. People who had tried to help this woman had attempted to get her to realize that what she thought happened did not happen. I chose to go forward with the belief that it did happen, and we must figure out how to handle the information. The approach calmed her enough for her to go forward without a hospitalization. In a matter of a couple of weeks, she seemed to be fine again. She just needed someone to validate her experience. Whether it was just perceived or really happened, it was her reality. Perhaps it was drug induced. Regardless of the cause, I was happy with the result.
My very best friend when a child was Mother Nature. Nature is wrapped around and blended in with all of my childhood memories. Most of our activities on the farm were dictated by the weather. Just as my mother would allow me to go barefoot when the earth felt warm, my dad began to prepare the garden’s soil when we knew the earth was going to stay warm. The fields that surrounded our home were also prepared in the springtime. My dad would plow the fields, and then disc them. Next he would pull a big rake behind the tractor until the dirt was exactly the right texture for planting. Once the soil was loose and smooth, the fields were ready. Before I was born, my father had to use horses to tend the land. He would drive a team of horses back and forth across the fields. Today I can appreciate how excited he must have been when the owner of the farmland bought tractors. Tractors did not have a mind of their own and did not require as much additional work when you came in from the fields in the evening. During the busiest times, my mother would help in the fields. I recall her talking about riding in a wagon when she was 7 or 8 months pregnant with my brother picking corn while my dad pulled the wagon through the corn fields. She never complained about that. Instead, she and her neighbor were talking about their earlier respective pregnancies and that is what I overheard her sharing with the neighbor. A wife helping her husband farm in high season was and is a way of life for farmers. Instead of protesting the hard work and long hours, the farmers just thank God for a productive crop. Farmers and their wives work together as partners day after day.
I loved it when I got to help my dad with his farming duties. He would ask me to ride on the back of the combine when he harvested the soy beans on his sharecropper small piece of land about a half mile from our house. My job was to let him know if the equipment was getting plugged. I would perch up there on the back of the combine while riding back and forth across the field all afternoon. I didn’t know at the time that my dad could tell by the sound if he needed to stop and clean out the blades and didn’t connect the fact that he could combine just as easily without my assistance. It just felt great to be a helper and to be praised for doing a great job when we would come in from the field. I never got bored when doing that. Boredom was never really an issue with me during those childhood years in spite of living in the country with seldom an opportunity to play with other kids. My imagination could always take me around the world whether I was sitting under a shade tree having a glass of ice tea or riding on the back of a combine basking in the hot sun and keeping an eye out for any bugs that might decide to fly along with us.
We had an outdoor toilet, which was located about 50 giant steps away from the house. My dad built one with two seats, so Mother and I could go at the same time. I was always afraid to go alone during the dark nighttime hours. You haven’t really seen dark until you are in a remote area without electricity. We did not have street lights. If the moon didn't light up the night we had to carry flashlights and just wonder what was outside the beam. I recall a visitor from Chicago being shocked when he started to step outside the door one fall during hunting season. He said, "Wow! I have never seen it this dark.” You can also imagine the beauty streaking across a darkened sky when experiencing a thunder storm. The lightning rods on top of our home deflected the lightning bolts which created a noisy light show as they danced across the flatlands appearing to hit everything in site. I was terrified of it then and I still have a deep fear of lightning, although I love to hear the thunder in the distance on a rainy day in San Diego. One day on the farm I saw lightning strike a chicken. It dropped dead and one near it started running around in circles as if it had lost its mind.
When the annual floods came, family and neighbors would help my Dad rescue our chickens, pets and anything else that needed to be moved to another location. We didn't have much, but when you don't it's especially important to protect what you do own.
The landowner, my father’s employer, was a wealthy man who owned lots of farm land and served on the board of directors of the local bank. My dad's top earnings even after working 25 years for him was $5.00 per day plus what he could earn off of two little patches of land that he was allowed to sharecrop. There was no pension plan, no benefits, no insurance, and no limit on the number of hours Daddy had to work each day. Sunday was his day off. He never complained about his hours, pay, or his boss. I was taught to respect the landowner and his entire family. I looked at them as friends.
My dad meticulously kept a ledger of the income and expenses related to the land he sharecropped and at the end of the year, the land owner settled up with him. The local grocery store owner maintained a running tab for my parents, and when my dad would get his portion of the sharecrops at the end of farm season, he would pay the grocer. I'm sure my dad related to the song, Sixteen Tons, which includes the words "I owe my soul to the company store." Some years there wasn’t any left over for our family. Those were the years my parents would borrow money to make sure my brother and I had wonderful Christmas gifts from Santa.
During the winter months when the weather prevented farm work, my dad didn’t earn the $5.00 per day. He would seek work in local towns and most often in Mt. Vernon, where my mother’s sister and brother in law lived. It was wartimes, and he sometimes worked at a factory he referred to as the car shops. It was one of those factories which converted its production to help out with war needs. Sometimes he would seek employment in Northern Illinois where his brother’s lived.
We were provided a home, a garden plot, and a barn. I believe our house was officially sitting on about 4 acres with 1. acre on one side of a gravel road and 3 acres on the other side. However, the entire outdoors within a mile going in all four directions was our playground. I believe the total land owned by my dad’s boss was 500 acres. Neighboring land did not have homes on it, so we could play there too. Our usage was not limited to just the portion assigned for the home. The river was within a quarter of a mile on the barn side of the road.
My dad was a fantastic gardener, and each year he would grow enough food to feed us through the winter months plus plenty to share with the neighbors. My parents loved to give to others. Daddy was also an excellent marksman, and our meat was usually whatever four legged critter could not outrun his shotgun. We had lots of rabbit and quail. Fresh fish were easy to come by. Mother raised baby chickens every year, so we always had fried chicken, and chicken with homemade dumplings or noodles. Older hens were used for roasting. I would watch when Mother prepared the hen hoping there would be eggs inside of her. I was fascinated by that. Of course, we always had plenty of eggs but it was like winning the prize if the hen had one inside of her. I never was able to gather the eggs from the nests. Those old hens didn't like me. I guess they were preparing me for my future of dealing with bureaucrats in California. They have never liked me much either.
Daddy loved a hot breakfast every morning, so they would buy bacon from the local store 5 miles away in the small town of Burnt Prairie. They would also buy bologna which was used for sandwiches and sometimes fried to serve with eggs in the morning. Most mornings my brother and I had bacon and eggs too. Cereal was a treat and always served hot. Occasionally, when Daddy would get some money from his boss, he would go to Grayville a nearby town which had a butcher shop. He would buy round steak, liver, a few pork chops and maybe a roast. That only happened a couple of times per year. Mother hated it when he went to Grayville. She loved the food and the gifts he would buy, but we lived in a dry county and Grayville was a county away and housed several bars. Daddy always came home with a little too much alcohol in his system. Our county had stills. He was one of their patrons, but I guess once in a while he liked to actually drink legally. Often Mother, Brother Charles and I would go with him to Grayville, and we would go to a movie while Daddy hung out in the bar. Although my father was too closely associated with stills in prohibition days, all of his involvement other than stopping in to buy beer was over by the time I was born. I have a feeling my mother influenced his decision to cancel out his “still career.” Prior to dating and marrying Mother, he also had spent 6 months behind bars as a result of his participation in the alcohol industry during prohibition days. That was never talked about in front of me. I learned about it after I reach adulthood, which explained why occasionally I would hear him refer to when he was “there.” He did drank hard liquor after he met mother, but he claimed he almost choked on a swig of whiskey once, and stopped drinking hard liquor then. There were stories that he also wasn’t a very nice guy when drinking whiskey, and was just a happy and still generous man when drinking beer. I am sure my mother also influenced some of that change in him. I am so glad that I wasn’t around during those years and that my father obviously learned his lessons well before I came along.
Once a year my brother and I would go mushroom hunting in the woods nearby. I loved those trips, because the woods seemed to offer a level of privacy that couldn't be found anywhere else. Mother could make a delicious meal out of the mushrooms we found. Sometimes we would walk along imagining that no one had ever been there before us. There was a tree with a big hollow at the bottom of it. We called that our cave. Our imaginations would soar. Since we had no television and didn't even have a phone in the house, our play was left up to those big imaginations, our bikes, a blackboard, dolls, little cars and trucks and whatever Mother Nature offered us. We also had a basketball hoop, and both my brother and I became star basketball players. When we were children, Charles was always very good to me., and created a lot of childhood games for us to play. I swear he invented miniature golf long before it became a reality. He dug holes and spaced them in the acreage over by the barn. Our golf clubs were the bean poles he whittled to a perfect shape for hitting the ball. We would catch fireflies, which we called lightning bugs, and chase moths, which we called millers. Many years later when I said to my husband, Jerry, “there is a miller in the kitchen,” he was totally confused. He asked what I was talking about. He was horrified that a miller was in our kitchen, because the only miller he knew about was someone who worked in a mill. He finally figured out I was talking about a moth. All of our activities were controlled by the weather. Most were summertime activities. In the winter months, we would skate on frozen water wherever we could find it, and always on the flood waters when they first begin to arrive before the water rose too high. We both loved it when the snow arrived. We made snowmen, rode sleds and jumped into snow drifts. One year my dad got the tractor out of the barn at his boss’s home and pulled a big grader sled up and down the road, so he could drive the car on the road. It was his way of compensating for not having a snow plow. He invited me to ride on it. I felt like the Grand Marshall in a hometown parade. It didn’t matter that nobody saw me except my dad. It was fun.
Our family would go blackberry picking in the late summer and gather pecans and walnuts to store away for special treats during the forthcoming winter holidays. The garden produced enough potatoes and onions to last through the winter. Mother made delicious pickles from our cucumbers. Her biggest problem was keeping Charles and I from eating them during the process. I loved grabbing pickles out of the salted water where they were soaking as a part of the process. We were fortunate. We were never hungry in spite of being extremely poor. We never felt poor.
Charles and I always got new shoes each school year along with rubber boots to wear over our shoes. We always had a warm winter coat. If our coat from the year before still fit, we didn’t get a new coat. During those times, most families bought what they needed and didn’t spend money on just wanted items. Want and need were quite closely intertwined during my growing up years. Most clothes were bought a little bit larger than the kid, so we could get two years out of wearing them. Hand me downs were always welcome. In spite of a meager income, my parents managed to make sure their children had the necessities of life. They were the ones who did the sacrificing. We didn't even realize we were poor. They never discussed finances in front of us. I am so thankful I was not subjected to overly enthusiastic self promoting politicians telling us we were poor and using our situation to get votes for themselves. By not having people pointing out and broadcasting to the world that we needed help in order to survive, we grew up believing in our own capabilities.
Daddy was very creative. It was partly demonstrated the year he sought the help of others and raised our house upon blocks. The cover on the outside of the house may not have been pretty, but it helped us to stay warm in the winter months no matter how odd a 2 story house shaped like a barn and sitting up 5 feet off the ground on red blocks looked. The asphalt covers on the outside which were shaped to look like little phony bricks kept those bitter cold winds from blowing through the walls during the coldest months of the year.
Only a few years later, my high school sweetheart painted an oil of the house as a gift for me. I kept it for many years and then I gave it to my brother. He loved it. He had written a poem about the ole homestead, so I knew he would like the oil painting of it. After his passing his daughter gave it back to me, and I now have it hanging in my guest bedroom by the framed poem.
Mother delivered one of her granddaughters in that old house without the doctor, because he didn't make it in time. He was not our regular doctor Allison. The one who didn’t make it in time was an obstetrician. Dr. Allison was a general practitioner and would never have been late. My sister in law always said the baby delivered by my mother was the easiest birth she ever had although she bore six children. The rest were born in hospitals. On that day when the doctor finally arrived, he said to my mother "Hmmm. You should have been a nurse." Mother said, "I guess I should have been a doctor. That's what I needed tonight." I loved hearing that story, because it was a perfect example of her stepping right past the position that had been assigned to her and standing on the same level as the doctor. It says a lot about her spirit.
Mother was Irish. Her father was Charlie Flynn, and her mother was Nina Denton. In the days when divorce was a rare event, her parents managed to get a divorce. Mother had to help raise her little brother Patrick, because her mother left when he was a nursing baby. She, her older sister Forrestine and Patrick Henry would stay at their grandmother's house a lot of the time when the father was away being a traveling salesman or working in St. Louis. Mother would always speak more highly of her dad than she did of her mother. I am sure her troubled childhood is what caused her to want nothing more in life than a happy peaceful home for her children. It's funny how others can benefit from our bad experiences, while at the same time so many suffer emotionally because of troubled pasts.
Patrick was killed by lightning when he was 11 years old. He was staying with mother and her husband at that time. She adored him, so I can't even imagine how devastated she must have felt when they carried him back from the fields and laid him on her kitchen table while waiting for the coroner. She said her husband was farming in a field nearby, and Patrick had taken a ball of wire down to the field for him. Patrick sit down under a tree with the wire beside of him waiting for Andrew to return to that end of the field when suddenly a bolt of lightning struck the tree. I remember her saying that you could see a dark streak running down his spine. Only a few years later when her first baby was 5 years old, she became a widow on Christmas Eve as Andrew, her husband lay dying from blood poisoning caused by an infected pimple.
Mother was an emotionally tough but extremely gentle loving supportive woman. She was only 5’ 2”, but she looked mighty tall through my eyes. She faced so many challenges in life and did it with grace. She was present when her sister birthed twice and lost both babies. They may have been what they called stillbirths, but I believe one of the babies lived a couple of days. I remember that one of the babies was named Clarence. I know she bathed, dressed and held them before they were laid to rest. When there was a tragedy in our community, she was always there. She would prepare food to take to the homes of the family members, and sit up all night with the sick. I went with her on a few of those occasions. Of course, being a kid, I liked going because there was usually a child around, so I could play. My motives were not pure. She and my dad attended all of the funerals of friends and neighbors’ family. I probably attended more funerals when I was a kid than kids today attend music concerts.
When she died, the pastor referred to her as living her life in a Christ like manner, doing what God would have us do. I had never heard that said at a funeral, and I loved hearing those sweet words. In spite of the fact, she owned so few assets, Mother was always happy for others who received more. There didn’t seem to be any jealousy in her at all about others possessions or achievements.
Her formal education was limited to 8th grade. Daddy graduated from 6th grade. I was fortunate though to have two parents who worked very hard at self education. They were both well read and always up on the latest information. I wonder what their achievements would have been had they had the opportunities afforded children today. My dad was a genius with math, and he taught me to do math without the advantage of using a pencil and paper. Of course, we never had a calculator in our home so I had to do my math on paper or in my head. Years later, my husband would go around bragging about my math skills and challenging bank tellers to add faster with their calculators than I could without them. Mother excelled in language skills. She would become the family speller. She died when she was 90 years old and even at age 87, she would get regular calls from her grandkids asking her how to spell a word rather than look it up. It was easier to call Grandma. She was an avid reader. My dad read well too, but his most amazing skill was math. Mother played scrabble and worked crossword puzzles as long as she could use a pencil. After she had a stroke, she would sometimes reach for my pencil and hold it. She would just lay there and hold it in her hands indefinitely.
Using today's standards, Daddy may have been an alcoholic, but in those days it was called drinking too much. Labelling of people is just something that wasn’t done when I was a child. If someone seemed depressed, it was said she was sad. If someone was displaying symptoms of a mental illness, someone would explain it by saying it is “just his way.” Actually, today no-one would even say that my father drank too much, because drinking alcohol is such a popular activity. Mother rarely ever drank alcohol at all. In fact, I can honestly say I never saw my mother take a drink of alcohol. My father’s drinking certainly created some problems between them, but nothing that would separate them. They would have been married 40 years within a month of my father’s passing.
Daddy liked his beer, but he never brought alcohol into our home. The only time we ever had alcohol at our house would be if my older siblings brought it when they visited, but that would have been a very rare occasion. We were always a family who could have a lot of fun without alcohol. Family fun would include hunting, playing a game of ball in the front yard, making homemade ice cream, sharing wonderful meals and enjoying our conversations. In spite of Daddy’s drinking issues, before she died Mother told me my father had been the love of her life. He never abused her, my brother and me, never missed a day of work, and always made sure we had plenty to eat so life was good for us most of the time. He never even spanked me, and I don’t believe he ever spanked my brother.
I never realized how tough it must have been for my parents, because they always seemed happy and made difficult times look easy. They would borrow money each year to make sure we had a wonderful Christmas. We always had all the traditional food with all of the trimmings for every holiday. Family traditions were plentiful during the holiday season. My parents would buy a coconut every year at Christmastime. When they broke it open, each of us got some of the coconut milk. Our Christmas tree was always cut fresh from the local woods, and I have fond memories of Daddy, Brother Charles and I going out each year to find the perfect tree and later decorating it with Mother's help. My dad would usually put the bubble lights on the tree along with the bulb lights. He always bought tons of Christmas candy and fresh fruit for the holidays, and Mother would make homemade fudge and divinity. She also would box up treats and send to my brothers and uncles overseas. We had turkey every Thanksgiving. We usually had a ham for Christmas, but one year my parents bought a Christmas goose. What were they thinking? It was alive, and they hid it behind the couch knowing that when I came home from school, I would toss my jacket on to the couch next to where the goose was hidden. I did as they predicted, and the goose stuck its long neck out and hissed at me. That was not funny. I screamed, ran across the room while they laughed. Once I collected myself, I found it to be kind of funny too. Would I do it to my kid? No.
My dad was as excited as the kids when it was time for Santa Claus to arrive. He could hardly wait to see our excitement on Christmas morning, and would nag Mother to let us open just one gift before Christmas Day. She would give in and let us unwrap a book or something similar but always a small gift. They always made Santa Claus the hero. We usually got what we wanted most. One year I wanted penny loafers. I still get a warm feeling thinking of how happy I was when I opened that present. Santa had placed a penny on each shoe. Another year, my favorite choice was a blackboard. I opened my other gifts but thought I didn’t get the blackboard until my dad told me to look under the couch. Sure enough …there was my blackboard. I always got a doll and played with dolls through 7th grade. I suspect a 7th grader would rather be caught dead than playing with dolls today.
I met a neighbor girl my age the summer following 6th grade. She had a tiny house by their home, and her parents had turned it into a play house after their relative who had been living in it left. We would play for hours in there and always had dolls as a part of whatever we were doing. We also used magazines to cut out photos of beautiful homes and home interiors, which we would paste into a catalog in an orderly fashion beginning with an exterior photo of the home and each room thereafter when you entered our make believe future homes. This playmate lived about 3 miles from my home, so we could only get together when her mother would either pick me up or drop her off at our house. Whereas my first playmate who was the son of my father’s boss most often played at my house, my new playmate most often would have her mother pick me up to play at her house. One day we decided to walk to my house. We were about half way there and saw her mother coming down the road. We were not ready to end our day, so we hid in the ditch beside the road and her mother drove right on by. What were we thinking? It is not as if she wouldn’t come back looking for us. Anyway, my girlfriend broke out with a horrible poison ivy rash all over her face and the rest of her body. It didn’t affect me at all. It would seem I have an immunity to poison ivy, but I have never tested that theory. I remember my girlfriend's mother asked me if I washed my face in cold water. She said my skin was so healthy without a pimple to be seen anywhere. My girlfriend had some acne problems as can be typical for adolescents. She had read or heard that it was best to wash your face in cold water. Of course, I was doing that, because it was the only water available unless I wanted to heat up water in a teakettle. I am sure the fact that I ate fresh fruits and vegetables daily helped.
My paternal grandparents lived 1/2 mile away in another rented home. Grandfather was mean when he was drunk, and often, Daddy had to go rescue my grandmother and bring her to our house. I barely remember her, since she passed away when I was 4. I recall getting homemade biscuits with honey and butter when I went to her house. She had a rocking chair in her living room and she was usually sitting in the chair if she wasn't working around her home. I recall getting awakened in the middle of the night when she died. Of all the things to stick in my brain, I know my mother put one of my dresses on me in the middle of the night, because we had to go to Grandma’s house. I also have memories of serving as a flower girl at her funeral. I believe I shared that assignment with my little female cousins. We carried flowers from the hearse to the grave site. My brother, Charles wrote a lot about her so I have learned the most of what I know about Grandma from reading his works.
Grandpa Meserole moved to Northern Illinois after Grandma died. Several of my dad's brothers lived up there, and it was probably too painful for him to hang around his house after he lost his wife. I have memories of my maternal grandparents. I saw a lot more of Grandpa Flynn because he would hang around our house if he was not on the road. I asked my mother once what he was doing when he was traveling all the time, and she said she didn’t know but he might be selling apples. He was a very interesting man. I believe he worked on a street car in St. Louis at some time in his life. Mother told me when the race riots started in St. Louis, her dad brought her and her sister over to stay with their Grandmother in Wayne County, because he didn’t want to risk their getting hurt. Obviously, my mother and sister lived with their father in St. Louis for a while, since she said her dad brought them over to their grandmothers to stay in order to keep them safe.
I also know the Shelton Gang carried out some of their “business affairs” in St. Louis. Grandpa Flynn knew the Sheltons who were notorious gangsters. I never learned of their history until after I became an adult. I have a photo of my grandfather and Earl Shelton riding in a car in St. Louis. My dad was friends with the Shelton family members too, so I thought of them as neighbors and friends of the family. I remember going to Roy Shelton's house when I was a little girl and as we entered, he was sitting downstairs with a shotgun on his lap. There was a huge cowbell that was hanging over the entrance door which rang when someone was entering his home. My mother and I walked on into the house where we were served drinks and cookies by Mrs. Shelton, while Daddy went down the stairs to talk to Mr. Shelton. I can also remember my dad stopping on the street to talk to Carl Shelton when we would go into the town of Fairfield. My brother, Charles was at a school near where Carl Shelton was ambushed and heard the gun battle the day he was killed. When Roy Shelton was murdered he was actually riding on his tractor farming his land about a mile and a half from our house. Eventually any Sheltons who survived the attacks moved away and did not disclose where they were living.
Grandpa Flynn once bought a couple of beautiful little ruffled dresses for me, which I refused to wear. I was a tomboy. When he was 60 years old Grandpa could still stunt ride a horse and turn hand springs. Once when we were staying in Mt. Vernon, Illinois during the winter months, he broke his leg. However, on icy days he would want to meet me at school and walk with me so I didn't fall down on the ice. Grandpa would come to meet me with cast and all.
My Grandmother Files, who married Mr. Files after her divorce from Grandpa Flynn lived in Mt. Vernon, Illinois which was a town about 40 miles away from our house. She would visit us on the farm a couple of weeks each year. She was always very kind to me, and I still have a garnet ruby ring she bought me for my birthday when I was about ten. She had a stroke and was paralyzed on her left side, but she walked with a walker and later shared a home with a woman who had a disabled daughter. She must have been fairly young when she had the stroke, because I don’t remember knowing her before she was disabled. I don't remember much about her dying either or even her funeral. I do remember attending a lot of funerals when I was a child. My parents were always paying their respects to someone. They knew so many people and wanted to be there for other people's needs. They would sit up all night with the ill to help out families who had a sick loved one at home in the dying stages. As a kid, I actually enjoyed some of those times because it meant I would get to play with the children of other people who were helping the same families.
I always loved school. My official education began in first grade when I attended a one room country school for the first six of my elementary years. They didn't have kindergarten, so I was enrolled in first grade when I was 5 years old. My one room school served 8 grades. That meant I could hear what was being taught to every grade through the 8th. I often was fascinated at what other classes were learning.
One of my very favorite activities in those early elementary years was preparing for the annual Christmas play. The teacher would bring a playbook to school and allow us to look through it and then she would assign parts for us to play. We didn’t have tele-prompters, so we had to memorize our part in the play. I would spend hours at home saying my lines to my mother, so I could make sure I would know them the night of the play when all of the families came to watch us entertain. One year stands out in my mind. My part required me to slap another kid. I guess I got a little carried away, so I really did smack him pretty hard. The audience laughed, his face turned bright red, tears welled up in his eyes and I was horrified. I know exactly who took that hit, but that will remain my secret. The annual Christmas party and play were memorable evenings and fun for all except maybe the night my school mate received that slap from me. The Christmas Party evening would always be the beginning of our Christmas vacation.
The school was closed down when it was time for me to enter 7th grade. The last time I visited my hometown it was still setting on the hill, but was filled with bales of hay. Obviously, it had become a farmer’s storage building. On the same little hilltop a few feet away was the one room country church I attended. I could and did walk through it the day I visited. It still had a couple of items in it, but for me it was overrun with memories. My family and I walked through the graveyard behind the church looking at tombstones and familiar names from our past. My daughter, Dana, created a fun memory for our family on that day. She was just a little tyke. My brother yelled across to my mother and said, "Mom, here is Goldie Locks' grave." Dana went running to where her Uncle was standing saying, "I want to see Goldilocks' grave." Later that day when we returned to my sister's house, her Uncle asked Dana what she had been doing while he was working, and she said, "We were looking at dead piles." Needless to say, he came into the house and asked my sister, "What did you do with that kid today?" Life is often a lot more fun if we look at the children's perception of it.
I don’t know why the school was shut down, but I am sure it was due to not having enough kids to make it practical to keep it open. After it closed, I was bussed to Burnt Prairie, Illinois, the very small town located about 2 or 3 miles from my original one room school and 5 miles from my home. In my new school, only 7th and 8th grade were in the same room. For some reason, I was sent from 6th grade to 8th grade and then took 7th. I believe it was because there were not enough kids in one of those grades, but it was always said that 7th grade was harder than 8th grade, so they sent us to 8th grade first. That still doesn’t make any sense to me, since that would be an easily solvable problem.
I loved the teacher I had in the one room school, so I would have preferred to stay there, but I am also a person who adapts to the ever changing situations in my life when there isn’t really many other options. I have some really fond memories of the man who taught during my two junior high years. I don’t recall any personal conversations with him, but always felt safe in his classroom and found his manner of presenting material was really helpful. He treated all kids in a respectful way. I loved the beginning of his classes each day. We stood with our hands over our hearts and recited the pledge of allegiance to the flag. There was always a kid assigned to raise the flag in the morning and lower it at the end of the school day. Following the pledge of allegiance, the teacher led us in singing. There was an old song book for every kid. Some of the songs we sang then would be judged as inappropriate in today’s classrooms, but we never looked at any of them as political. We just sang and focused on our singing and listening to Mr. Whetstone’s booming voice. He surely must have sung in his church choir, because his voice was very powerful, and he obviously loved singing. We did not have any music with our morning singing. I loved it and if I were a teacher today, I would start the school day by singing with the kids in my classroom.
Throughout my elementary education, recesses were scattered throughout our day, and they were as routine as attending school. We always played outside even during the winter months with snow on the ground. We also had very little homework. The teachers taught us the material and assigned time for us to do our school work while we were in the classroom. Parents were never asked to help the kids with their school work. During those years where I lived, the teachers looked at the educating of the child as their job. The parents were expected to teach the kids value systems, but not the actual school work. Teachers were also allowed to discipline children who misbehaved with some limitations.
Our school always participated in what they called track meets. There were tug of wars, running long distance and short distance track, relay races, shot-put, distance jumping and pole jumping events. Most kids had an assignment for those events. I recall running relay races at the competitions and at school and practicing other events at the school such as distance jumping and what we called foot racing. One of my friends and the only other girl in 1st grade when I started school was a very fast runner, so she was always our track star throughout our 8 years of school. I tried hard, but could never outrun her. I also participated in tug of wars at school and may have in competition. I don’t recall if I actually competed in some of the events against other schools except relay racing. I was prepared for all of the activities, because my older brother would hold make believe track meets with me at home. I recall that once he wanted to time how fast I could ride a bicycle around our house. He gave me a trophy, which was probably a dish from the kitchen and he took a photo of my standing with my bicycle holding this “trophy” while smiling like I had just won the Indy 500.
I really enjoyed most of all basketball competition with other schools. I definitely excelled. I recall one year that I was a cheerleader and we had little navy skirts with white shirts. When I played basketball, I wore my gym clothes, which was a one piece blue shorts outfit we all wore for gym class. When competing against other schools, I would wear my gym outfit and during 1/2 time, I slipped the navy blue cheer skirt over the lower half of my gym clothes and did the cheers. I was playing on the boys team and against all boys teams, because we did not have a girls basketball team in junior high. I have a 3 times great niece who is an outstanding basketball player. She is very petite and is competing in one of the midwestern networks against older and bigger players and is greatly admired for her skills. I also was a very good soft ball player and played on corporate teams after I graduated from high school and began working in the corporate world. I usually played first base and was very good at hitting the ball. I remember scoring several home runs in one of the seasons.
My first year of high school was spent at Mills Prairie, a country high school between Burnt Prairie and Mill Shoals, Illinois. Once again, I was quick to adapt to a new school and made new friends who were coming in from other school districts. I had assumed I would spend 4 years there, but my dad had different plans following an incident at school. It didn’t involve me but all of the freshmen class received collateral damage.
My childhood was excellent. I was taught values that would stay with me for life. Although I may have occasionally disregarded them, I grew up knowing right from wrong. There wasn't an in between, and I never had to find myself in life. I knew exactly where I was at all times. No doubt living in a remote area and learning how to entertain myself prepared me for the role I am playing now in life with a husband who has dementia, as well as quarantining during the big COVID-19 scare. I also am fully aware that you don’t need lots of money in order to be happy. I believe when people grow up poor and unhappy, they tend to blame the unhappiness on not having many possessions. Those of us who experienced happy times in our life even when we didn't have a high income know that it doesn't require wealth to be happy and that actually too often money can get in the way of happiness..
When my parents advised us on the importance of treating others as we would like to be treated and the importance of being truthful in all matters, they always gave examples of real life experiences. It is strange sometimes what we remember. I have a clear recollection of my dad telling me how important it is to treat people in a kind a respectful way at all times and especially those who have less or are not as capable I developed a passion for learning. He shared his personal experience about being bullied by a couple of older and bigger kids when he was a child. My parents were Southern Baptist, but more than rigidly following a church doctrine, they demonstrated how one goes about their days with God as a constant companion. It allowed me to see God as real and a friend. I have fond memories of county fairs, school activities, being a star basketball player, celebrating family holidays in grand style and playing pinochle with my parents and brother during long winter evenings. I believe I was well liked by my teachers. Not every kid at school liked me, but none bullied me, and I was liked by many. I was never friendless in school, and even today, I feel so badly for children who are forced to go to school everyday if they don’t have any positive relationships at the school.
My large extended family made me feel loved and secure. I realize today how richly blessed I was to be the baby sister and to have such respect within my home. I naively thought most families were like ours. I never thought of myself as living a sheltered life, because my parents never seemed to be hiding the outside world from me. Current and world events were discussed in front of and with the children. Both parents sought information about our time when we were away at school, and they listened when we talked about what was happening at school. They were willing to discuss and explain anything. In fact, Mother said that if a child is old enough or aware enough to ask a question of an intimate nature, then you answer it truthfully. However, she believed in responding to the question and leaving it there. In other words, it isn’t necessary or wise to overload the child with a sex education when they have one easily answerable question. The story goes that one evening Mother and I were sharing the double seated outdoor toilet. I was about 7 or 8 years old, and I asked, “Do you have to ("F" word here) to have a baby?” My mother said the first thing she did was thank God she was in the dark so I couldn't see her face and she asked for guidance. Needless to say, she was shocked. Her answer was “Yes, but that isn’t a very nice word, so we don’t use that word.” Then she asked, “Where did you hear that word?” I told her, and I remember exactly the person I named who was an older girl in my school. Yes, there are some disadvantages to one room schools also. Obviously, the young children are vulnerable to the older kids.
Mother believed timing was something that needed to be given consideration when having discussions with children regarding intimate matters. I recall her talking with me about some of the player lines one might hear from boys and why they might be saying them. That conversation probably happened at the beginning of my teen years. It definitely was before I started dating. At each phase of my life when there was something I might be facing, she was always there sharing her wisdom. She prepared me for the pain of childbirth, and presented it in a way that served to reduce most of the fears I had. Overall, I was taught by both of my parents that problems are solvable, and the answer lies in how we perceive and react to them.
Mother was at home most of the time during my childhood. She was always there to greet me when I came home from school. She said when I was 13, some days if she said how was your day, I would be upset with her for asking and other days I would be upset with her if she didn’t ask. That sounds like a 13 year old girl when hormones are raging. When my first daughter was 13, I drew a line in the sand and went to war with her. 10 years later when my baby daughter was 13 I was going through menopause. I was also an experienced mother of teenagers, so I told the youngest both of our bodies are ranging with hormonal issues. We are going to make this work or we won't survive. The hormones will kill us.. I didn’t draw the line then for my new teenager. Instead knowing that didn’t work out too well, I decided open communication was the most important part of our relationship, so I tried to understand whatever was going on in her life at any given time.
A couple of times per year my mother would work outside of the home after I was born. Those times were always related to harvesting crops and always only lasted a week or two. One year my dad’s boss bought a corn picker. My father would drive the corn picker, and when the hopper was full, it would be loaded into a wagon or truck and hauled to the grain storage barn. My mother would then work all day helping to keep the elevator going while making sure the corn made it from the wagon to the grain storage through the little open door at the top of the barn. At the end of the day, she would go home and prepare a hot meal for her family. She never complained.
When I was in 8th grade, I sometimes wore my dad’s flannel shirts to school. One day I was dropped off by the school bus driver at the boss’s home where my mother was running the grain elevator. I was horrified, because I knew my dad would catch me wearing his shirt. He only had a couple of nice flannel shirts. He wore what was called work clothes, which were a matching shirt and slacks while working. The flannel shirts were for the times he went somewhere during his time off from work. I remember on this particular day, I had on a blue flannel shirt. I loved it. He was astounded to say the least to see me in his shirt, but he laughed about it. Today I can understand why he did. He was 6’ 2”, and I was a skinny kid of probably 5’4” at that time. His shirt probably looked like a nightgown on me.
My dad worked 6 days per week, so there wasn’t a lot of leisure time in his life. When he came in from the field on hot days, the evenings would be very warm also. There was no ocean breeze. He worked all day in the hot sun and came home to rest in a hot house. When I was in 1st or 2nd grade, my parents had electricity wired into our house. My parents then purchased some electric fans. The best way to seek relief from the heat was to lay in front of a fan. They were the kind with big blades behind a wire cover, but open enough to cause serious injury when those with curious minds would stick little fingers into the openings.
On one particularly very hot Sunday afternoon, my dad decided that we would all go to the Old River bottoms for a picnic and swimming. Normally, he spent his Sundays working in the garden and listening to St. Louis Cardinal broadcasts on the radio. Harry Carey was the announcer. IMy dad was looking for a place where he and his family could cool down from the summer heat. Mother always made the best picnic food ever, and that was almost as much of a treat as going swimming. She fried chicken, made potato salad and usually baked beans and if we were real lucky, she would add some banana pudding to our picnic meal. That river swim would be my first official swimming trip. The most I had done before that was wade around in the backwater when Mother would allow it and also in the small creek across the road from our house with very little water in it. My mother had a fear of backwater and especially children being in the water for two reasons. She was concerned we might drown, and when the polio epidemic hit so many children ended up with severe lifetime handicaps caused by polio. She was terrified for us to play in backwater or any water that wasn’t flowing water.
Of course, I didn’t own a bathing suit. None of us had swim clothes, so we swam in our clothes. The water was bath water warm, and I couldn’t wait to get into it. My dad insisted on walking around an entire area in the river to make sure there were no deep holes or pockets that would suddenly be over my head before he would let me enter the water. I was given a designated area and told to not go beyond that in any direction. There was a river within a half mile of our home, but I was forbidden to go play near the river by myself. The rapid waters near our house were not conducive to use as a swimming hole. On the family outing, we went to an area where the waters were calm. It was a very special afternoon when my parents had the rare pleasure of just playing with their kids. My dad was an amazing swimmer and demonstrated his skills. I was in awe that he knew so many different methods of swimming. He tried to teach me, but the only thing I ended up learning how to do that day was to totally relax and float on my back. Most of the time Mother watched nervously from the sidelines, but she, too, really enjoyed the family time. We probably went to the river to swim and spend a couple of hours 3 times at most during my entire childhood, but even today, I can close my eyes and bring the happy and peaceful times forward into the memory file in my brain. I had no way of knowing that someday I would have a swimming pool outside my front door, albeit would never offer quite the same experience as the private swim in the river on those long hot summer days.
I’m not sure of whether I was attacked by a rooster before or after my grandmother’s death. I am thinking the rooster attack came first because I have no memory of having a cow on our farm except for one when my sister was milking it inside of the barn on that fateful day a rooster decided it didn’t like me. I do have a few other memories of my grandmother. On the day I received my first black eye, I was standing outside the barn door while watching my sister milk a cow. I noticed a rooster standing outside the door too, and he was watching me. Perhaps this was the day I would learn that body language speaks the truth when lips may be lying. The rooster wasn’t talking to me, but there was a look in his eyes and the way he was standing warned me I might be in a touchy situation. I wanted to go inside with my big sister, and she told me to go ahead and walk inside. I told her I was afraid of the rooster, but she assured me the rooster would not hurt me. I took one step forward and the rooster landed on me clawing his way up my side to peck me in the eye. I ended up with a huge black eye, and the rooster ended up in the chicken and dumpling pot the next Sunday. I was my daddy’s baby girl, and his retaliation was swift and pleasing unto me. That is probably what created my fear of chickens and it surely was the beginning of my belief in a justice system. I recently learned from my sister there was one rooster on the farm that always chased me if I came down the stairs from our front porch. I have a feeling that was the guy. He finally caught me, while never realizing what his fate would be for doing so. There are so many lessons to be learned on a farm that give us insight into traveling through this world filled with human beings from all walks of life. Today I can see a lot of those same lessons being taught by life's experiences. Apparently, the rooster was determined to attack me so he never gave up. When he caught me, he had no way of knowing he was sacrificing his own life. People too often have done the same. We can want something so badly, but when we get it, sometimes too late we realize it wasn't a win and especially if the sacrifices we have to make are greater than we ever anticipated. I am also hearing the words in Kenny Rodger’s song, The Gambler. "You've got to know when to hold them, and know when to fold them. You can tell what their cards are by the way they hold their eyes." The rooster should have folded that fateful day, and I should have followed my gut feelings based on what I saw in the rooster’s eyes.
Ricky (the landowner’s son) was five months younger than me. I was born in November, and he was born the following April. I am told that we played together even as toddlers when his mother would leave him with my mother. In fact, we were both still in cribs when we were introduced. He was like a cousin to me, and we spent a lot of hours together. By the time we were four years old, we wanted to spend everyday together. His mother was laughing one day and telling my mother that Ricky didn’t like the way she made sandwiches. He wanted her to fold them over the the way Joyce’s mother did. My mother told her that I asked her to use a knife and cut the sandwiches the way Ricky’s mother did it. That just sounds a little bit like the behavior of dogs who always want to eat the other dog’s food.
Being a little boy with a very rich family, Ricky had every imaginable farm equipment toy. He would bring a bag of toys when he came to play at my house, and we would play under the house for hours. We would designate areas for our farms, and we would go through the whole process of farming our fields and growing our crops in detail just as we saw our fathers do day after day after day. Sometimes we would keep the same farms going for days.
One day we decided to go across the road that ran in front of my house and play in the little creek. We waded in it, and we got a little carried away building dams and trying to catch little tadpoles that float around in creeks. Soon we heard my mother calling, and then we realized we had wandered quite a ways down the creek and away from the house. We had also been told that we could go over there but not to get into the creek. Normally very obedient, we blew it that day for sure and when we looked up, my mother was standing with a paddle in her hands waiting for us. We were quite a distance from the house, but we could clearly see her standing there with a paddle in hand. She would later share with Ricky’s mother that as we approached her, Ricky walked slower and slower and slower, while I, of course, marched forward with confidence probably knowing that she was not really going to spank us. However, we never did that again.
Ricky and I were inseparable, and although he had the farm toys, many of our activities involved a great deal of our imaginations. We would play cowboys and Indians. If we didn’t have toy guns, we would use sticks as guns. Our horses were bean poles. My dad always carried a handkerchief in his pocket when working. We would tie the handkerchiefs around the top of a skinny bean pole, hold on to it like it was the reins, put the other end of the bean pole between our feet and trot around the farm looking for Indians. Obviously, political correctness did not exist in those days. Proving how much influence videos and movies have on children, Ricky and I watched cowboy movies when we went to the Saturday night shows. The Indians were always the bad guys. It is interesting how your viewpoints can change on some things when you grow up.
There were a couple of barns across the road from the house. One barn was newer than the other. They stored farm equipment in a center aisle in the newer barn with large grain bins on each side. Sometimes Ricky and I would climb up into the rafters of the barn and drop down into the soybeans. That was so much fun, and it would entertain us for hours. You can compare it to kids jumping around in the plastic balls today in family entertainment centers. Our parents knew that we played in the soybeans, and we were told not to spill them. In other words, we could play in the beans but we had to make sure that we didn’t cause any of them to spill over the sides. One day when we were playing at Ricky’s house, we decided to play in the soybeans located in his dad’s barn. There was a wagon parked inside the barn, and Ricky and I decided to play in the wagon. We got into big trouble. When we came in at the end of the day, there were soybeans all over the place. I believe Ricky got a spanking. I didn’t get a spanking. My parents always talked to me about the importance of being obedient and how my behavior could impact others. They spent a lot of time in my childhood teaching me about cause and effect. I was so sorry that Ricky got a spanking and of course, glad I didn’t. Although my parents never spanked me, they certainly had a way of making me believe it could happen. I never looked at it as thinking I could get by with nonsense.
Someone decided when Ricky and I were about six years old that we could gather the eggs when playing at his house. That is when I found out he was also afraid of getting eggs out of a nest if a hen was sitting on them. I was so happy that I could just be a cheer leader and help Ricky, but then I found out he wouldn’t reach under a chicken to get eggs either. We would get sticks and try to intimidate a hen off the nest. Wearing gloves, we would poke those poor chickens and try to scare them away. It only took a few attempts of having us gather the eggs daily when that job was taken away from us. Somehow his parents figured out we were shaking up the chicken house, so we lost that job. I’m sure the hens were as happy as us when we stopped hanging out in the henhouse.
Ricky had a little sister, and I had an older brother. My brother was 6 years older, and his sister was about 4 years younger. However, I don’t recall playing much with my older brother until after Ricky’s family built a new home in the town that was located about 30 miles away. We never really included his baby sister in our play either. Occasionally if we were really bored, we would sneak around the house and tease her when she was sitting on their enclosed front porch playing with her dolls. It didn’t take us long to get in trouble for doing that.
We were buddies and busy exploring nature and catering to our imaginations. We climbed to the highest rafters in the barns and up the tallest trees to look into the birds’ nests.
Once we were riding in the back of a pickup coming in from the fields at the end of the day, and we dared each other to jump out of the truck first. Of course, I was determined to win, so I leaped out long before a reasonable person would have jumped from a moving truck going down a gravel road. I had some wounds, but I considered myself a winner. That’s how I looked at it. Ricky bailed out after me, but he waited until the truck had slowed down to a speed that wouldn’t be apt to cause injury.
When Ricky and his family moved away to his new home, I was sad. My lifelong playmate was gone, and albeit our lives were only about 5 years at that time, there were no other playmates for me. The good news was that he would come back with his family and spend weekends on the farm and sometimes more days during the summer months, but it was never the same after they left. He was probably about 11 years old when he stopped coming to the farm on a regular basis.
It was after he stopped returning to the farm very much when he decided he wanted a horse. His dad who really knew little about horses bought one for him and decided to ride it before letting Ricky on it, and the horse threw him and almost fell over backwards. It was not a good choice for a child for sure. He bought another and dropped her off in our pasture across the road. I’m sure it would have been a great horse for anyone who knew how to ride horses. In fact, the little boy who sold it to them came down to sow Ricky how to ride it. Of course, I watched all of this with great interest. I knew I would get to ride the pony any time I wanted when Ricky wasn’t there. Finally, they found the perfect horse for Ricky and left it on the farm. My brother rode it a few times and one day I decided to give it a try. The horse ran away with me. I was clinging to its back like a monkey. It couldn’t toss me off, but it was definitely toad’s wild ride through the country roads. I was afraid someone would come around the corner in his or her pickup truck and we would have a head on collision. Finally, the horse got tired of running, and when it stopped, I leaped off and walked it home. Ricky couldn’t handle that one horse either, so one day Ricky’s dad showed up. That horse was loaded up and taken away and a man delivered a spotted pony. It was a very gentle pony, and I rode it, Ricky rode it and in between riding, I played with it much like one would play with a dog. One day it was rolling around on the ground and actually fell out of the pasture. It accidentally rolled under the barbed wire fencing, down a bank and into the ditch across the road. It just stood there looking perplexed and waited for someone to lead it back into the pasture. I cried the day Ricky’s father had it picked up, because Ricky wasn’t coming to the farm anymore so he had no use for it. Soon Ricky and I drifted apart as we each made friends with the kids in our respective schools. The toddler years and the few years which followed were over.
Saturday nights were movie nights in the little town that was located five miles away. The movies were shown on the side of a commercial building, and we would sit on benches.I was always trying to find someone in my family to take me to the Saturday night movies. When Ricky’s family was still coming to the farm on the weekend, he would be standing outside his house as we drove by, so we would stop and pick him up. He was starting to annoy me then. He had moved away. He didn’t know my new friends, so why was he imposing himself on my new friends? I would feel guilty though for thinking that way, because he had been such a great buddy. After all, we had ridden stick horses and played in creeks together. We had farmed our imaginary farm lands for hours, nurtured baby kittens, fought off the cranky old hens sitting on eggs, jumped around in the soybeans for hours and teased his baby sister. We even munched our way through my dad’s garden goodies more than once. However, I was recognizing and accepting that our time together was over. It would always be a great part of my childhood, but both of us were changing and making new friendships in our respective schools. I didn’t want to have to explain to my new friends why he was hanging around. They didn't know him, because he never attended any of the schools in my area.
It wasn't long after I started being annoyed by his lingering around sporadically. I didn’t see Ricky for several years when one day he came to the farm after we were both in high school. He invited me to attend church in the town where he had moved. I invited a girlfriend of mine from high school to go with me and told her he and I were like cousins, and maybe she would like to meet him. I didn't know if he was looking at his invitation as a date, so taking someone along would be a good way to make sure he was seeing it like me. She thought he was really cute, and when she said that, I was shocked. Ricky? I had never thought of him as a guy really. He was just Ricky I remember it was a pleasant day, attending church and I don’t recall if we went somewhere afterwards for a soda. I don’t really even remember much of the details of the day, so obviously nothing spectacular happened.
It would be many long years before I saw Ricky again. I had two marriages behind me, so a lot of living had happened when we would see each other again. It was totally unexpected that we ended up in the same place at the same time. It was sometime after the year 2000, because I know my mother had passed away at the time. I went back to visit my sister who was living within a few miles of my childhood home. She told me that Ricky’s mother was in a nursing home in a nearby town and asked if I would like to visit her. I was very happy to be able to do that. When we knocked on the door to her room, a deep male voice said, “Come in,” and there sat Ricky. He was visiting his mother on the same day, although he, too, lived some distance away. He certainly didn’t live as far away as me, since I was living in California and he was residing somewhere in the Midwest. Sometimes you just have to wonder about the coincidences in life. It was really fun to catch up with each other. His mother was still as gracious and lovely as I had remembered. He was a businessman and owned a chain of restaurants. Neither one of us had ended up living on a farm. I guess we “farmed” enough land underneath my childhood home with his toy farm equipment to last us a lifetime.
His mother shared some memories of the years when we were children. She told one story about the day my house had caught on fire. It was a laundry day and something in the laundry room, which was built on to the back of our house had caused a fire. My mother was working at putting the fire out, and had my brother helping her. She told me to go get my father. He was farming land on the south side of Ricky’s house and Ricky's house was a half-mile south from our house. I got on my bicycle and rode it as fast as I could. When I passed their house, Ricky's mother told us that Ricky yelled and said, “Joyce, stop and play.” I responded, “I can’t. Our house is on fire.” She said she was working in her garden and suddenly she thought, “Did she say their house is on fire?” She ran to her car, drove down to the field to get my father, knowing she could get there faster than me and thankfully, delivered my father to our house quickly enough so that he could help put the fire out. I was a kid following my mother’s orders and didn’t think about stopping when I saw Ricky’s mother.
Ricky and I did have our disagreements when we were kids. Sometimes he would get so mad he would say, “I am going home, and I am not coming back.” Other times, I would tell him to go home and never come back. We could have a fight like that in the morning and by the time my dad drove his tractor in at lunch time to Ricky’s house where the gas pump was located and where he could switch out the tractor for his car to drive home for lunch, Ricky would be waiting for him and ask for a ride to our house. He would drive up with Ricky, and Mother would just put another place setting on the lunch table. We called it the dinner table then. Ricky loved my mother’s cooking, so he ate at my house a lot more than I did at his house. However, I did have meals with his family, and I thought his mother was a wonderful cook too. Sometimes his mother would ask my mother how she fixed certain foods because “Ricky loves that.”
Ricky’s mother was a schoolteacher. She was a very religious woman, very attractive and spoke very softly. I remember my mother saying that she never spoke badly of anyone. Gossip was a sin, and she came very close to living a sin free life. When she married Ricky’s dad, he was a widower and had a son who was much older than Ricky. He was probably in college when Rick and I were small children, so I rarely saw him. He would graduate college and become a very financially successful man. He had also received many honors for his service in the military. My mother told the story of his delivering Ricky one day to our house, because Ricky had pitched a fit to come and play at our house. My mother said that he was very angry with Ricky when he drove up to drop him off one day. He said, “Here’s this kid. He needs his butt whipped, and if he gives you any trouble, whip it.” He considered Ricky to be a very spoiled kid when comparing his own childhood to Ricky’s. Owen was a very disciplined young man. Ricky’s parents didn’t have any children for several years after they got married, so they were quite thrilled when Ricky was born. That may have contributed to their leniency with my playmate. I was the baby in my family, so the two of us were well suited.
My father worked for Ricky’s dad for over 30 years. He never worked on Sundays. Although many farmers in the area would work seven days per week and especially during high season for farmers, my father’s boss and owner of the land never allowed anyone to work on his farms on Sunday. It was a day of rest as designated by God and a day to worship. Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy were words in the Bible that he religiously followed without fail.
My dad’s boss and his wife belonged to the Methodist Church. Our family attended a little Baptist Church that was located on a hill about 3 miles from our house. I believe my grandmother who lived near us was a member of the Presbyterian church. In the final days of his life, my Grandfather Flynn joined the Catholic Church. Once in a while I would go to church with Ricky and his family. It was a larger church both in size and in membership. I always felt a little out of place. On the other hand, I loved going to our little East Antioch Baptist Church on the hilltop. I liked the feeling of love for each you could see amongst the people. I loved hearing about Jesus and admittedly, I also loved it because it was another opportunity for me to hang out with other kids.
The revivals on warm summer evenings were the best. A visiting preacher would come to our church, and hold services every night. Mother could always talk my father into attending some of the revival nights. If looking at the congregation from the doorway when entering the church, on revival nights the men would be seen sitting in the corner on the right side of the church. The ladies would sit on the benches in the middle of the church, and some would sit on the left near the front of the church where the people who sang the best would usually sit. They were not designated as the choir, but they would tend to congregate to that area during the revivals, since that is where they sit on regular Sunday mornings. On Sundays, it was assigned as an area for the choir. I’m sure they enjoyed sitting together and singing, because it would be easier than sitting by someone who couldn’t sing very well. Everyone sang the old religious hymns unless there was a special singer or group of singers invited in for entertaining during special services. I recall one preacher saying that good singers had big mouths, and that God had made him ugly and given him a great big mouth so he could sing really well. He was one of my favorite revival preachers. Some people would get upset if a preacher’s sermon included a topic which they felt was about them. My parents always said if you leave church feeling uncomfortable from the words in a sermon, it is a good sign you needed to hear it. Listening to those special traveling preachers convinced me that even if we could hide undesirable behavior from our parents, God always knew what we were doing. I decided unless you wanted to go to hell, you better try to live a life pleasing unto God. We were also taught that once we were in grace, we would always be in His grace. It meant to me that although we would sin, God would forgive sins if we asked for forgiveness and truly repented for whatever we had done. I certainly didn’t think it meant that I had a season ticket for sinning. I looked at those words as comforting and instead of being something to fear, it was comforting to know that I was loved by Jesus and would go through life with a permanent advisor available 24-7.
When the church filled up for revivals, sometimes you had to share your songbook with another person. I remember sitting by mother and falling asleep on her arm or lap. Later when I was a few years older, she would allow me to sit with the kids who sat on the left side of the church on the benches in the back as you entered through the door. Mother would give conditioned approval, which meant if I did not act in a respectful manner, I would find myself sitting by her. I remember one evening when a couple of girlfriends and I were having fun and someone in our group laughed. It was just loud enough to be heard and my mother’s head was one of a few mothers whose heads spun around and gave us looks of evil. That was all it took for me, because my mother never looked at me in that manner. I didn’t want to lose my special privilege of sitting with friends.
Another reason I loved the revivals was influenced by the sharing of our home with the visiting preachers. The church members would take turns offering housing and food for the revival preachers. I remember a few times that it would be our turn. It was always a lot of fun, and I felt a little safer in our home at night when one of God’s chosen messengers was there. We would pray before our meal and before bedtime. Everyone loved my mother’s meals, so I am sure they enjoyed staying there too in spite of the fact our home offered humble surroundings. We were probably the poorest family in the church, because most of the other people owned their farms. I remember a couple of families who seemed to have less than we did, but it may have been caused by the fact they had a house full of kids. It was during those times I learned that ministers of God were just human beings like the rest of us. They played softball, laughed and joked around just like our family.
One Sunday following church services, my father invited a family to come home with us for dinner. Another person asked if they could come too. My father said, “I don’t care if the whole church comes home with us.” Well, they did. There may have been a few who didn’t, but a large number of the people at church came to our house for Sunday dinner. It never seemed to bother my mother at all when extra guests showed up unannounced. She would just have my brother chase down another chicken or two, so she could kill, clean and cook it. She would also open another jar of her freshly canned food if it was during the winter months or grab some more from the garden if summertime and cut up a few more potatoes, which we had year round. During garden season, we always had fresh tomatoes and green onions on the table.
When additional and unexpected guests arrived, Mother would boil more tea leaves and make the sweetened ice tea everyone loved. We always had tea and coffee in our cupboard, and we never kept soda pop in our home. Soda was a special treat, which we would usually get if we went to town with one of our parents. I loved choosing which bottle of soda I wanted and of course, I drank it while at the store leaving the empty bottle with the store owner. My favorite sodas were coke, orange and chocolate. At home, we always drank coffee, tea and water. Mother had an ice pick which she used to pick pieces of ice off of the big chunk in the top of our icebox. She would put those small pieces of ice in the ice tea pitcher. Our ice was delivered on a regular basis and when we needed it. If we were about to run out, Mother or Daddy would tell the ice man the next time we went to the little town, and he would deliver more. We didn’t have electricity, so the ice kept the refrigerator cool too. It was in a different section of the refrigerator and had its own door, but it kept the entire icebox cool. When we got electricity and a refrigerator, it took time for me to adjust to stop calling the refrigerator ice box. Before we got the icebox, my parents kept baby bottles cool by hanging them in the well.
My father spent a lot of his Sunday afternoons working in our garden. Each year he would prepare a plot of land over by our barns and make a huge beautiful garden. He would always make sure to plant enough seeds, so he could share our food with other families. I loved watching him and mother work in the garden. When it began to produce, it was like a snack bin for my friend Ricky and me. Who knew then decades later it would cost more money to buy the type of food that the poorest of the poor families were eating when I was a little girl growing up in the middle of Nowheresville.
Following my first memory of my mother hovering over my crib during the night time hours, I remember being awakened in the middle of the night, so my parents could take me to my grandparents’ house. My grandmother had died. I don’t really remember many details of my relationship with my grandmother. I clearly recall that I knew that meant she would not be with us anymore, but my understanding of death was so limited. My brother who was 6 years older than me shared his many fond memories of her in his writings during his later years. I now realize that losing her was a huge loss to him. He said she was a religious woman, and that she had very long hair because she did not believe in women cutting their hair. He told me that he use to brush her hair and loved it. I bet she did too. It was one of my favorite things when I had little nieces and nephews hanging around. I would ask them to brush my hair. I have always loved having people play with my hair. My granddaughter Carson would often play like she was a beautician and I was her client. She did that until she moved to Northern California, and now she is moving back to San Diego. However, she is 13, and I am sure playing with Nana’s hair is not on her list. My Grandmother Meserole believed the bible taught that a woman’s hair was her shining glory, so she had long hair all of her life. In her later years, she always kept it groomed on top of her head, so it was a real treat to my brother when she would take it down, sit in her rocker and allow him to brush it. What an honor. I’m know my grandmother did not approve of my father divorcing his first wife. She did not approve of divorce. I remember people saying that she was very close to my father’s first wife who was only 15 or 16 years old when they got married. My dad was 17. She probably became more like a daughter to my grandmother. They had 3 children when they divorced. It could have been hard for her to accept my mother as a replacement for the woman she practically helped raise. She would not have judged Mother for not being with her husband, because my mother was a widow when she started dating my father and he was already divorced. However, it wouldn’t make it any easier for her to accept her son’s decision to divorce. Mother told me that my grandmother once made a couple of dresses for my cousins, and apparently, my father said something to her about excluding me. A few days later she came to our house and said, “Here is a dress for Joyce, as she handed my mother a dress in a rather abrupt manner.” Of course, I never heard about any of this until after I was fully grown with children of my own and my grandmother had long been in her grave. If your parents live long enough, they finally tell you some of the family secrets before they pass. Since I am obsessed with human behavior and made a lifetime career out of that passion, I was always all ears when my parents started “spilling the beans.” Based on some of the things I learned, I should be writing about what really goes on behind closed doors in a large extended family. I could probably create a best seller.
My father was the oldest son in his family, which had six boys and one girl. His sister who was my Aunt Maggie was next in line followed by 5 more sons. Grandmother was pleased to have seven children, because she considered the number seven to be God’s number. My mother in law, Grace, also had 7 children, and she mentioned to me one day that it was God’s number.
My grandfather was a fisherman and also a heavy drinker. Today I assume he, too, would surely be labelled an alcoholic. From the stories I have heard, I believe he had a nasty personality when intoxicated, and was often abusive to my grandmother. I never saw any of this behavior. I was not as close with my paternal grandparents as I was with my maternal grandparents. There were family rumors about my grandfather and whether true or not, my Mother never let me be alone with my grandfather. That suited me just fine. I was mad at him anyway, because one day I was sitting outside along with my mother and one of my brothers. He turned a snapping turtle loose on our front porch, which he thought was cute. I was terrified. I leaped up onto a bench sitting on the porch and that little experience may be why I am afraid of Marty’s giant tortoises today.
We are shaped by our experiences in life. When a baby is born, it comes with a brain much like a blank slate. The parents have a huge responsibility for what is programmed into those little brains. One of the reasons we can predict human behavior is based on the fact that given the same set of circumstances in a person’s life, there are very few choice options.
I have a faint memory of my parents having a neighbor couple over one evening to play cards and while they were playing cards, our front door opened and a hand reached in and above the door taking my dad’s shotgun. I wasn’t bothered by this at all, so any memories I have may be caused by the discussions that followed the event. Anyway, my dad leaped up and got into his car and headed for my grandparents’ home. My grandfather was drunk, and my dad picked up my grandmother and brought her back to our house. Grandpa had told her he was going to burn her clothes and then kill himself. He started a little fire in front of their house and since she could see the flames, she began to cry. My mother and father assured her he was staging a scene and was not burning her clothes. He then shot the gun off a few times. Of course, he never killed himself, and once he sobered up, he was regretful and my grandmother returned to her home. None of this caused me any concern, because I was so very young and my parents obviously sheltered me from it by not talking about it in front of me. I also heard after I became an adult during those years when my parents were elders my father was guilty a few times of saying he was going to kill himself when he was drunk and he would shoot off a gun on the back forty to shake up my mother. The difference between my grandmother, apparently, and my mother was my mother never believed it. Some of these situations could have happened before I was born, because they certainly didn’t happen during the years that I can remember.
When my grandmother died, I later learned that all of her sons were drinking the day before her funeral. Obviously, living in a dry county doesn’t prevent people from getting alcohol just as confiscating guns from reasonable people would not keep criminals from getting them. Grandmother was adored by her children and drinking was their way of dealing with the pain of grieving. One of her sons who really never drank even got drunk the night before his mother’s funeral. He was her youngest son, and he was also one of my favorite uncles. The day of Grandma’s funeral, it was very very cold. It was December in the Midwest. I was a flower girl, which meant I helped carry flowers from the hearse to the graveyard for the graveside services. My little cousins also were flower girls. I was freezing in my little short dress my mother put on me for the day.
Grandma’s 5 living sons were stone sober and dressed in their Sunday best suits and ties. One son had passed away before her death. Her sons would never be disrespectful of their mother by drinking on the day of her funeral. Of course, her only daughter, my aunt, was not drinking, because she never did. The brothers were burying a lady, and they would make sure she received the respect to which she was entitled. I have fleeting memories of this. I just recall being awakened and my mother helping me to get out of pajamas and into clothes that night Grandma died. I wish she could have lived longer, and I would have known her better. She certainly raised some fine children with tons of integrity.
My grandfather left the area and moved to Northern Illinois shortly thereafter. My dad’s brothers were spread out over Northern Illinois from Rochelle to Chicago and mid state in Atlanta, Illinois. I believe my grandfather first visited my Uncle in Westmont, Illinois and later bought a mobile home in the Atlanta, Illinois area near another uncle. He may have spent a few years staying at different homes during the time period after losing Grandma, but he eventually settled in the Atlanta area. Several years later, he was run over by a train and killed when he was walking home one evening. That was really horrible. I was very sad and internalized a lot about the manner in which he died. His funeral service was held in Southern Illinois, and he was buried next to my grandmother in the Union Church graveyard where many of my great aunts and uncles were laid to rest. My mother’s parents are also buried there.
Following Grandma’s death, only my father and his sister remained in the Southern Illinois area. The rest of her family scattered across the state of Illinois. Of course, there were lots of my dad’s family including his uncles and aunts and dozens of cousins still living in Southern Illinois. He had family all over the state of Illinois.
One of his uncles and his aunt would come to our house once per week, so mother could do their laundry. My great aunt was a very large woman, so that caused her to have difficulty with household chores. They did not have a washing machine. They would arrive in a buggy pulled by a horse once weekly, so mother could do their laundry. As was typical of my mother, she never complained about the assignment and she and my great aunt would visit throughout the process. My mother told the story of the time that she was hanging clothes out on the line, and when she came into the house, my great Aunt Mamie was trying to pick up ice which had fallen in the floor. She was so embarrassed, because she was snooping and got caught. She told my mother that she had always wondered what was in that upper door over the ice box, so she opened it and when she did, the block of ice slid out on to the floor. I can imagine just how embarrassing that was for her. I am sure my mother had quite a laugh over it.
Another time when Aunt Mamie was leaving, her extreme weight caused a step to break on our front porch stairway and her leg got stuck. She was so embarrassed, and there was a lot of excitement. Fortunately, she didn’t break her leg.
Before my grandmother passed away, I would sometimes ride with Uncle Otis and Aunt Mamie in their buggy with them to my grandmother’s house. This is just another very faint memory because I was so young when my grandmother passed away and the very early years are foggy in my brain. I do remember asking them to let me ride in it. I would still love riding in a buggy being pulled by a have horse. In my memory, their buddy looked like the buggies you see in the movies being driven by Mennonites on the east coast.
My great Uncle Otis and Aunt Mamie were very nice people who lived about 4 miles from us. They never had any children of their own. Uncle Otis was a brother of my grandfather and his wife, great Aunt Mamie, was a sister to my grandmother. In other words, the brothers had married women who were sisters. This seemed to be a fairly common practice in those days, which also carried into the next generation. When brothers marry women who are sisters, their children become double cousins. It makes for wonderful family reunions, because everyone is biologically related to someone who is in attendance in spite of the fact there was no incest involved. I once asked my uncle why this happened so often, and he said that nobody else would marry the Meserole’s. I loved his response. He always had a great sense of humor
One day Aunt Laura had a stroke and was bed fast for many years thereafter. She lived close by Uncle Otis and Aunt Mamie. Both Aunt Mamie and Aunt Laura were sisters of my Grandfather Meserole. Her daughter and a son took care of her at her home until she passed away. . When her health worsened and they knew the time for her leaving was near, friends and neighbors came to their house and she had 24 hour per day support. In those days, hospice care for people who were in the dying stages of their lives was always provided by a circle of friends and neighbors. They didn’t label it hospice and instead looked at it as helping to take care of a person or family in need. Actually, during those days in our country, no-one was too quick to cast a label on people or their behavior. Today we seem to have a label for everything. People always would bring food, so a family in need did not have to cook. If someone was critically ill or a family lost a loved one, all of the neighbors would deliver food, so there was always a huge variety of dishes and favorite recipes.
My cousins devoted their lives to being there for their mother from the time she became physically disabled until the day she drew her last breath. I was happy to hear that after her passing, her son and daughter each ended up dating people and eventually they each got married. They certainly had earned and deserved to have a life and create a family of their own.
During our growing up years my large extended family would continue to grow larger and larger in numbers. My paternal grandparents had 7 children which included six boys and one girl. My father was the oldest. My dad would produce 3 boys and 1 girl who joined together in our family with my widowed mother’s daughter, which created a family with 4 children. When my brother and I were born, it made six children. 3 of my uncles had at least six children and one had two children. My aunt on my father’s side had 2 boys and a girl. My brother ended up having 2 boys and a girl and 2 stepchildren. One older brother only had two children, but one had six children. My older sister had four children and another one had 2 and adopted one. I have lost track of my many cousins and their children, but reconnected up with some of them on Facebook, that well known social media network developed in the mid 2000’s. I began using it in 2010. I have so many nieces and nephews when taking into consideration the grand nieces and nephews. I don’t know the numbers, but there are lots. I have noticed some common traits amongst this very large and extended family and one of those is a love of children. Another commonality is that so many work in some capacity in the human care field.
My actual contact with the outside world was limited during the first 14 years of my life. When I started first grade, Ricky’s parents had already enrolled him in a school in the nearby town, which also served as the county seat of the farming community where I lived. With the exception of my immediate and extended family, Ricki was my only source of socialization during my earliest years. I loved school from the first day and would continue to love attending school for many years to come. It opened up a whole new world to me. I enjoyed making friends and loved learning. I looked forward to each day. There was one girl and one boy in my first grade class. The boy had some special needs, but of course, I didn’t know that at the time. I just recognized that he had more difficulty with our lessons, and we would sometimes help him. The girl and I always competed against each other for the highest grade. She was very smart, so I had to work hard.
Since we didn’t have any electronics because we did not even have electricity in my home, the only influence on me from the world at large was a battery operated radio, which was strictly controlled by my parents. I remember gathering around the radio in the evening with our parents and listening to Fibber McGee and Molly, Sky King, Jack Benny and of course, the Grand Ole Opry. Every night my dad would listen to Gabriel Heater, who always presented war news. We had to be quiet when Daddy listened to the news. I can still hear Gabriel Heater saying, “Bad news tonight.” My dad had a son and two broth’s hers on the front lines, so he lived in fear of losing one of them.
By having limited contact with the world outside my home, I was not exposed to a variety of value systems, because everyone in the whole countryside pretty much believed in the same things. It wasn’t complicated to figure out the difference between right and wrong. Everyone believed in God. The United States was filled with patriotism, and all citizens were united against communism. It is much harder for children today when they enter school and interact with kids from many different backgrounds who have a variety of beliefs. Most often, some of those conflict with what the parents have told them, and they are forced at a very young age to choose what to believe. Throughout my elementary education, teachers never discussed their personal political or religious beliefs in the classroom. Those matters were left up to the parents. The news reporters operated under the same principles. They did not broadcast their own political opinions or dissect the news in an effort to influence the listeners. They just reported the facts.
I was taught to read right away when I started school. My reader was a book about Dick and Jane. Dick and Jane had a dog named Spot, and a cat named Puff. They also had a baby sister named Sally. I could never wait to read the next chapters, because they came to life in my mind. Later as I advanced in reading, I always preferred to read about real life experiences or books written in such a manner that it was easy to believe the fictional story was real. Favorite fiction books included Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I also loved The Bobbsey Twins. I loved studying all about the history including both the history of the United States and World History. My favorite, however, was the history of the United States. I found it fascinating to read about the professional and personal lives of presidents of the United States. My favorites were Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. Later I collected all of the presidents books. John Kennedy was a favorite president. Somewhere along the way, I made sure that I read all of the books written by the Presidents and the First Ladies after they left the White House. I also excelled in math and even had A’s in Algebra until a little incident happened during my first year of high school, and I was given an F. When my dad met with the principal of another high school the summer before my Sophomore year, the principal asked me what happened. He said it was very unusual to see straight A’s and then an F. My dad immediately spoke up before I could answer and said, “That is MY F.”
I know now there was a lot about life that wasn’t inside those books not being discussed in the classroom. In fact, it was not even discussed in my presence in our home. For example, I never knew anything about people being gay. i never heard curse words. My father’s boss and family were very religious, and my parents never cursed either. I was probably 10 years old when I heard my mother say, “Shit,” and I was shocked. My dad had slipped a flyswatter on her toe while she was sleeping, and her toe got stuck inside the little wire on the end by the handle. Her surprising outburst caused all of us to end up laughing after they got the flyswatter off her toe. I saw my dad accidentally hit his finger with a hammer one day and he said “Doggone, the Doggone, the Doggone.” I can guarantee that would not be the words used today by most men. My friends didn’t curse. If a person would curse in front of women or children, he would have been scolded by another man if it was overheard. After I got older, I heard that my brother had cursed at the man who hauled us to school when the man had said something bad about my dad’s boss. I was shocked. The story goes that my brother who was probably 12 or 13 at the time swore at him and then slapped him. I find that unbelievable. It would have certainly been out of character for him to do that, but he did highly respect my father’s boss. That driver was picking up the school kids in remote areas like ours in his Model A. He was always very kind to me, but I did notice that he did not seem to like my brother. My brother graduated into high school about the time I entered 3rd grade at the one room school. The man my brother slapped had stopped hauling kids to school, and a neighbor couple shared the job between themselves. Sometimes both of them would be in the car when they picked kids up. They drove a nice station wagon. I actually remember how happy I felt when getting into their nice car. They didn’t have any children and were always so nice to all of us. Even when a child, I remember thinking that it was sad they didn’t have any kids of their own.
I don’t really remember attending school with my brother. He was only six years older, so I would have been in the one room school with him a couple of years. My brother told people he had to drop out of school to help with the family income. I don’t remember his helping out on the farm and right after he dropped out of school he moved to the Chicago area. Maybe he sent money to my parents. He got a job right away and lived with my Uncle and Aunt. I remember the difficulty my mother had in trying to get him out of bed to go to school. Every morning I dreaded the battle, because he would get so angry. I can imagine it was an easy sell if he did drop out of high school to help out with the family income.
He was very intelligent, so obviously missing the last few months of high school didn’t slow him down. As the years went by, he attended courses related to his career whether it was when he worked in the telephone industry or being in charge of an accounting department. Charles spent several years working in the printing industries both in Illinois and in California. He also was an amazing mental health counselor, who was loved by all of the patients. He could calm the most disturbed in the midst of an episode. When he was 19 years old, he was installing switch boards for Automatic Electric out of Chicago and traveled all around the United States.
When I look back into our life together now, I believe he suffered with depression even when a kid. He certainly did in his adult life. With the additional schooling he received later in life, he was very well educated. He had an impressive native intelligence, which obviously was a genetic gift. Intelligence has never been lacking in our family members. It isn’t guaranteed that it is always used, but we have it available. When computers entered our lives, Charles was all over the technology. He was developing computer programs before most people in the world knew how to even use a computer. He also was a writer of poetry and won many awards for his writings. I loved him so much, and when he passed away, it was a very difficult loss to me. He was working for our company handling all of the accounting, so I saw him 2 or 3 times per week when I would stop in at our main offices. One Friday afternoon, I said goodbye to him without a clue, he would be gone before Monday morning. He had a deep faith in God, so I know where he is spending his time now. Anyway, when he isn’t communicating with some of us down here who haven’t left yet.
Each time I entered a different school which was only three times during my early life, I would make new friends right away. I changed schools when I started junior high school and when I started high school. The first time I started a new school where I didn’t know any of the kids was my sophomore year of high school. I don’t remember experiencing any difficulties when entering a school without friends. I liked people so within a couple of weeks at most I had made friends. I attended my first year of high school in a small high school located in the country. Most of the kids in my junior high school also transferred into that school, so I already knew people when I enrolled there. However, there were also kids in that school I didn’t know when I started and who became friends with me. My father had noticed my love of school, which pleased him very much. My parents always supported my school endeavors.
My first year of high school was fun. I remember learning to dance the Charleston, a slumber party at the school, playing on the basketball team, home economics classes and my English class which I loved. My Algebra class was taught by the high school principal. One of the girls in the class had a father on the school board, and she acted up on a regular basis in Algebra class. I’m not sure her father being on the school board gave her the impression she she didn’t have to follow the rules. However, it was interesting to observe the daily interactions between her and the principal. I remember one particular scene when he grabbed her chair and shook it with her in it, and when he finished, she looked up at him and said, “Thanks for the ride.” Somehow, and I don’t remember exactly how her behavior t led to the principal deciding that if a child was out of control at school, he would make the whole class stay in after school. Of course, the parents were accordingly notified. My parents never discussed it with me, but a few days later a kid told me my father was in the principal’s office. What?!!! A group of us tried to listen outside the door that day, because we could see 3 or 4 dads in the principal’s office. We didn’t know what they were discussing. I later found out they were angry because he was planning on holding kids after school for something another kid had done. My dad said “if you hold my daughter after school and she is walking home and something happens to her, I will hunt you down and find you even if you are hiding under your bed.” He said, “You don’t have to worry. Joyce is a good student.” Another man spoke up who only had sons and said, “a girl is not a bit better than a boy. You had better not keep my boys after school either. Besides I need them to help with farming when they get home.” I guess the father’s won in the office that day, because we were never all kept after school, but I got an F on my next Algebra report card. That is why my dad told the principal of my new high school that it was his F.
Some things have faded from my memory such as how I got to that high school located out in the country. Obviously, I had to be bussed, but I just don’t remember a driver or even the type of vehicle. I lived quite a distance from the school, and I know my parents did not drive me back and forth. I also know my dad was not going to allow me to walk home from school.
When my sister’s husband passed away either during or following my first year of high school, she moved back to our hometown area. She lived in a different school district which made available to me the opportunity to enroll in a high school in a different county and town that offered more classes. She rented a house located only about 4 miles from my home. I moved into my sister’s house before beginning my sophomore year in high school. I did ride a school bus to that school. My sister got a job managing the cafeteria of an elementary school located between her house and the town where I would go to high school. Sometimes I was picked up at her house but most of the time I rode with her to the elementary school, because the high school bus always stopped there to pick up kids. Later, my sister hired my mother to help in the kitchen, so I got to see my mother every morning before going to school.
Once again, I quickly made friends and loved most of my teachers. My sister was in her late 20’s or early 30’s and a widow with 3 kids. My mother was 32 when I was born, and my dad was almost 40, This meant my parents were older when I was in high school. I loved living during the week at my comparatively much younger sister’s home. We spent hours talking and enjoying some of the same things like American Bandstand. I had fun putting her hair into different styles. She even had a telephone in the house. Imagine that! I went to my parents’ home on weekends. The kids at the elementary school raved about how much they liked the food my mother and sister prepared. In fact, many years later when I was with my sister and we found a couple of the former students farming out in the middle of nowhere, one of them remembered my sister and started talking about the great meals she cooked when he was a student at the school. That was wild.
My sister and my mother both tried to make sure I had some of the latest fads shared by high schoolers, and also that I got to participate in school activities of choice. I continued to take pride in making good grades, so I ended up in the National Honor Society. I had some special assignments given to me by teachers, which I enjoyed. One year I was asked to write the high school future predictions for each member of the senior class. I enlisted the help of a girlfriend, and we had fun doing that. I believe I was also asked to participate in writing the wills of seniors in one of the high school annuals. I liked working on the school annual. High school was fun. My friends and I would walk to the Dairy Del at noon for a milk shake and sandwich, pass notes to each other in the hallway between classes, and try to stay out of trouble in the study hall. When I got home from school, it was American Bandstand time. I had many favorite entertainers beginning with Elvis Presley. Rock and roll was the music of choice during my teen years.
By the end of our 3rd year in high school, my girlfriends and I were pairing up with guys. I had met a guy from another school just before graduating my junior year when I was with a bunch of kids who had taken a school trip to the big city of Evansville, Indiana for a shopping trip.
He was a senior in his high school in a neighboring town. I met him just in time to be invited to his prom. That was a great big deal for several reasons. When I had graduated from 8th grade, my dad’s boss’s wife (Ricky’s mother) had purchased a beautiful 8th grade graduation dress, which was advertised in Seventeen magazine. She picked me up, took me shopping and helped me find the perfect dress and shoes. I never realized until later years that my mother probably would have loved to have gone with us. Maybe she was invited and chose not to go. I hope that was the case. I have a feeling she just gracefully didn’t ask to go with us. Anyway, when the bosses wife heard I was going to the prom and although she had moved away to town, she once again insisted on giving us the money for a prom dress. I chose a yellow gown, which was all net and satin.
The night of the prom, my niece and nephews were watching with interest, because I was dressing up in a different style of clothes. They were very excited about my big event evening. I remember lining them up on the couch and telling them when my date arrives to just sit there and be quiet. They did exactly as I had asked them or maybe ordered them to do.
In the process of getting dressed, I was concerned that my bra was showing. I didn’t have a strapless bra. My sister recommended I not wear one. I then asked her to pretend like she was dancing with me to see if she could see down the front of my gown. She assured me she couldn’t see anything because of all of the netting at the top, so I actually went braless. I had a boutonnière for him, and he brought an orchid corsage for me. It
was considered to be very special if your boyfriend got you an orchid, so that was a pleasant surprise. He wasn’t even officially my boyfriend yet.
Following the exit from my sister’s home, my date took me to his house, because his mother wanted to get pictures and meet his date. When we drove up and got out of the car, his little 5 year old brother ran into the house yelling “Mom…come and look! Clayton Delbert has the most beautiful girl in the world with him.” I guess little brother liked my gown too. I just think his little brother had not seen many girls in his life. That evening preceded the beginning of my life with a teenage sweetheart and what I would later call my second lifetime. My first life were the childhood years on the farm with my parents.
My date’s school had created a beautiful evening for those who attended the prom. For the first time, I was a bit intimidated by hanging out with kids I did not know, although my date had arranged for me to go to the home of one of the girls following the prom so we could all change clothes before going to the movie. He wanted to make sure I felt comfortable hanging out with kids I didn’t know. The movie they had chosen for our prom was Gidget. As I recall, I didn’t get home until around 2:30 in the morning following the midnight showing of the movie. It was, indeed, a grand and memorable evening.
I didn’t let my dad down in my new school. I’m sure now that he probably had a lot of concern as to whether he was making the best decision and hoped I would adjust okay in a new environment. Although I didn’t know anyone at the new school when I started, I would later find out that one of the older students was my dad’s X wife’s son. This meant that he and I shared two brothers and a sister, but we were not related. We use to enjoy telling other kids that leaving them puzzled. I only attended one year with him, because he graduated from high school before my junior year. He autographed my sophomore year. Later he and his wife was killed in a tragic automobile accident. My sister adopted his infant son who became my nephew. Neither he nor I could have possibly foreseen that would happen. Life is fragile and should never be taken for granted.
I also met some kids with my last name, and unfortunately, they had some issues related to their reputation and school attendance. The female was older than me, so I think she was only there one or two years at most with me. The other one was a boy, and he was younger than me. I never could get my geography teacher to understand that I never knew him. He would come around and speaking very low so as not to embarrass me say, “Joyce, you are such a good student. Why isn’t your little brother here?” I would tell him that he was not my brother. That would last for a month or two and invariably, he would be back asking me about my little brother. It annoyed me far more than it should have bothered me. Now I can see that he was compassionate and really just wanted to help a student who was failing. The girl followed me into the restroom one day and asked to borrow some money. I loaned her 50 cents. She never paid me back for the loan. Thereafter, when she approached me, I told her no. I remember at the time when I realized that she wasn’t going to pay me back it brought to mind something my father had shared in our family dinner table discussions. He said it is worth loaning a man a dollar to find out what kind of character he has even if he doesn’t pay you back.
It was a varied and interesting group of students in my new school. They were geographically divided in the county and typically, kids hung out with the kids from their respective geographic areas. There were the farm kids that lived south of the school, and the farm, dairy and private business kids that lived north of the high school. There were the group that rode the bus in from west of the high school and likewise from east of the high school. I rode the bus with the kids from the western side coming in from Ellery, Illinois. Those families were mostly farmers. Some had beautiful orchards. However, one family owned race horses and had several other types of investments. Collectively the kids attending my new high school came from families of which many were quite well off for the times. Once again, I really didn’t feel that my coming from a family who barely could get by on their income made a difference. I actually got along with all of the kids from differing income levels including the most wealthy and the poorest. I just loved people and at that very young age, I pretty much could read their feelings and I communicated with them accordingly. When one young lady got pregnant, I couldn’t shun her. My heart would feel her shame and depression, so I made it a point to talk to her. When the school’s bad boy who was known to drink alcohol and once ran away would meet me on the walkway when I was headed to the local Dairy Del, he would look down at the sidewalk as he passed by and did that until I started saying hi to him. The first time I did that, he looked startled but responded. Soon he would always look up, smile and say hi when our paths crossed.
Today my husband has dementia, and there are many things and experiences he can’t remember. However, he loves to tease me and remind me that I was always good to the bad boy, while he clearly states his first and last name. My husband and I were having a heated argument during our younger married years, and he said something that set wrong with me and I reminded him that I had always been good to people and that I even was friendly to ‘the bad boy,” in high school, only I said the kid's name. When I said that and right in the middle of our “fight,” he burst into laughter and asked me who in the hell is Junior. Thereafter, he periodically will tease me over that statement and he still gleefully laughs when doing so. I have to admit there are some things I wish he would forget.
Although I got along well with all of the kids from the different areas, I definitely had my special best friends. One was from north of the school and the rest were from south of the school. I had so much fun with them, enjoyed their friendship, and I hope they, too, have fond memories of those years. Today when I see children struggle when entering new schools and note the cruelty that comes forth from some kids, I am even more grateful that I was blessed to be attending a high school with wonderful people.
Character was very important in my high school. The majority of kids were of good character. By today’s standards, even the kids that wore a label of not of good character then would be considered good kids today. One girl was judged for dying her hair. Dressing conservatively was important.
Good conduct in school and good grades were important in the assessment of character. My group of friends and I were competitive with each other for grades but always happy when each other received a good grade. I was shocked when I found myself selected for the National Honor Society, which stands for character, scholarship, service and leadership. I didn’t even know what it meant. My parents heard about it when someone who had seen it in the paper walked up to my mother and congratulated her for my being in the National Honor Society. Later, I would find it influenced my employer to hire me shortly after high school graduation. I was wearing my pin, and he recognized it. When the kids were gathered around the announcement in the hallway so many years ago, and one of my girlfriends excitedly told me that I was selected, I really didn’t understand what all of the fuss was about.
Living with my sister was perfect. . My sister was younger when I moved in with her than my mother was when I was born, so to spend my high school years in her home was a bit more exciting than living at home with my parents. I loved my parents so very much, but my sister and I not only watched American Bandstand together, she enjoyed so many of the things I enjoyed. She was willing to drive me into town on summer evenings and just cruise around seeing who was also driving up and down the streets and circling back through the town. She would take me to after school activities and pick me up afterwards. Although she was 14 years older than me, a widow and mother of three children, she was fun and young. She would remain so all of her life. In the evenings at home, she would let me style her hair. I loved using bobby pins to set her hair in pin curls, and the next morning before school, I would comb it out and pull it up into various types of styles on top of her head. She had reddish brown hair, and it was complimented by her very blue eyes. My mother once told me that when she was pregnant with my sister, she wanted a blue eyed baby girl. She said she was so thrilled when her first baby was all that she had asked for in her prayers. The color of my sister’s eyes haven’t really faded much in her later eyes, or if so, there is plenty of blue left in them.
If I missed out on anything during my elementary and high school years, I can’t imagine what it would have been. It was seemingly a storybook life. From my earliest memories of joyful holiday seasons filled with traditions such as going with my dad to pick out a Christmas tree in a neighboring wooded area, and watching him hang bubble lights on it after we got home while my mother brought out the string lights and Christmas bulbs, helped to create beautiful holiday memories. We always had lots of tinfoil icicles, and my brother and I would hang those on the tree. He and I also skated on frozen backwater in my back yard, played in the snow and enjoyed everything nature offered to us during Midwestern winters. Homemade candies, snowfall on Christmas Eve, track meets, hayrides, Christmas plays and attending church on Easter Sundays even if we missed sometimes throughout the rest of the year, all added to those wonderful times and experiences tucked away in little storage compartments in my brain and they can be pulled out when something triggers my memory files.
In the fall of 1957, I started my new school and sophomore year at Edwards Senior High School in Albion, Illinois. To me, it was a huge school when compared to Mills Prairie where I had spent my Freshman year, both in numbers of students and the size of the building. Although it was intimidating and I was a lot nervous, I quickly made friends with both my teachers and the students.
Good kids far outnumbered bad kids in the 1950's, so it was pretty easy for me to become pals with the good ones. We shared common value systems. We didn't smoke. We didn't drink alcohol. We would not consider making out with a guy, and actually, didn't even talk about that. Naughty to us was chewing gum or talking during class and once a year playing Halloween pranks on people. We were also very competitive with each other when it came to grades, which made life a lot easier for our teachers.
I loved the fact that every day I could walk through town to the Dairy Del for lunch and experience being a part of a community filled with people. Having spent the first 14 years of my life in such a remote area of the county, seeing lots of people everyday and tasting a bit of city living contributed to my love of going to school in a big way.
Although I was entering my second year of high school, I had never had a real date. I really don’t count the one with my girlfriend’s brother with the loud muffler as a serious date. During 7th grade, I had a boyfriend. This meant that we would hold hands and sit by each other on the school bus on our way to school events. He played basketball. I played basketball, and I was also a cheerleader. We sneaked a kiss once in a while but nothing more than that. My mother loved to tell the story of my coming home from school on Valentine's Day very upset, because he had given a larger valentine than mine to another girl at school. What I didn't know is that he had mailed a very special valentine to me expressing his undying love for me. Of course, then I was a happy girl and took it to school to show all of my girlfriends. It was a big issue to get something in the mail, and he knew when he went to the trouble to buy it and send it I would love him forever. He almost lost his girlfriend though, because it arrived a day after the holiday. We were so much in love or so we thought. At the end of the school year, he graduated because he was an 8th grader. I never saw him again and don't recall ever thinking about him again except as my first real boyfriend.
I did meet a guy at a skating rink just before the end of my last year of elementary school, and he asked me out. I told him I wasn't allowed to date until I turned 16. We skated together and during the summer he showed up at an outdoor movie in Burnt Prairie. It was a place where they showed movies on the side of a building, and kids came from all around to watch the Saturday night movies. This guy lived in another town and had a friend old enough to drive. I was shocked when he showed up one night and slid into a seat next to me. However, I thought he was the cutest guy I had ever seen and soon we were holding hands and kissing. His lips were always warm, and I considered him an excellent kisser. I would learn much later that he actually showed up at my parent's house after I turned 16 to ask me out. My dad wasn't very happy about that when a guy showed up at the house asking for me. Mother told me he got stuck, and my dad had to help him get out of a small ditch in front of our house. I can't even imagine how that conversation went with my father. The only time I ever saw him again was once again at a skating rink and he was driving in as my sister and I were leaving.
There were two really cute guys on my school bus. They were brothers, and it didn't take long for me to develop a crush on one of them. Although I wasn't allowed to date, I could attend all of the community events which included hay rides. One evening I went on a hayride, and the cute guy on the bus chose to sit next to me. Once again, I held hands with a guy and stole a kiss or two when we thought no one was looking. He and his family farmed next to where my dad farmed in the bottom lands, so the next summer I spent looking across the fields and wondering if he was on the tractor. As time went by, he and I became friends. I couldn't date and of course, he could so soon he was dating the girl that he would later marry. We continued to tease each other on the bus and even after I moved away from home and would return to visit every 5 years or so if I ran into him, he would tease me. He always called me Pudgy and we laughed about my nickname, since I was very thin as a young woman.
Before my second year of high school ended, I once again identified a guy I thought was cute. I heard from others that he said I had the shape of a movie star, the best one he had ever seen. However, he was dating one of my friends so there was no way I would consider seeing him outside of a classroom. We flirted in study hall occasionally but I kept that at a level that really could not even be recognized as flirting. I remained an admiring friend of both of these guys through my sophomore year and on into my junior year until I later during the junior year met the guy I would marry.
My only other dating was a disaster. My sister let me go out with a guy who lived in town and was about 25 years old. That actually turned into a scary evening, because he was very aggressive and tried to go beyond the limits I had set for myself. I couldn't wait to get home and made the decision then to not even consider going out with older guys again. I assumed they all acted like he did. I don't even remember his last name.
By the time I entered my third year at Edwards County High School (ECHS,) I didn't think life could be much better. I was well liked by my teachers. I had plenty of friends, and I enjoyed going to high school. I also was confident that I would get my driver's license in the fall. I didn't have a car, but I knew my sister would let me drive hers. It seemed I had the best of both worlds by having my loving parents nearby but getting to live with a young sister who liked hanging out in town herself. September arrived and I entered my third year of high school soon to be 16 with a couple of official dates in my history and not a lot of desire to pursue another one. I always loved September. I enjoyed everything about school and was happy to be seeing my friends on a daily basis again. My best friends and I tried to take the same classes, passed notes in class and wrote letters to each other during the time we were not in class together. Life was good. My mother was still working at a local elementary school as an assistant to my sister who was the school's cook and cafeteria manager. That meant I got to see her every morning when I went there with my sister to wait for the bus to pick me up and take me to high school. I loved my mother so much, and it was great to see her everyday.
My sister liked to go into town and drive around, which meant I could look for friends and sometimes stay in town even when my sister had to take her kids home. Someone would always give me a lift home. I now had a telephone in my house, which was fantastic. Friends could call, and I also could listen in on the line when people called my friends' houses. Each house was given a distinct signal. Our signal was three short rings followed by a long ring. We could hear all of the neighbors picking up their phones when our phone rang. After all, it was the home of a young widow woman with her 16 year old sister living there. I always liked to grab the phone if they were calling the home of the guy I liked at school. Other than that, I wasn't too excited about listening to other people's phone calls.
Soon I would be able to get a driver's license. Once I turned 16, I could just go take the tests and if I passed, I was handed a license without any restrictions or required training time. My sister taught me to drive her car. When I reached the legal age to drive, I couldn't wait to get my license. I passed, but I thought I had failed. When we started the exam drive, the examiner looked at me and said, "Joyce, a good driver drives with two hands." I figured I had blown it, so I relaxed. I was shocked when he passed me, and I walked out with a driver's license. Even today so many years later, I tend to drive with one hand on the gear shift in the middle of my car and one on the wheel.
Since American Bandstand had became a part of my daily life, my sister and I would talk about our favorite dancers on the show including Justine and Bob and worry if they didn't dance together for fear they had broken off their relationship. My girlfriends and I would try to copy their clothing and hair styles. I often stayed overnight with friends and usually there was a special event going on during those times such as a school sock hop or church hayride.
My mother bought a poodle skirt for me and a pair of rock and roll black and white oxfords. The style was a little more sleek than the standard black and white oxfords, and there was a small buckle on the back. My favorite gift from Mother though was a charcoal gray skirt and vest. I loved it. I can still remember how thrilled I was when I first saw it. I had never seen one like it. My girlfriends and I always shared clothes. My gray skirt and vest was a popular item. I didn't have a lot of clothes, but my parents and sister always managed to make sure I didn't feel left out on the latest trends. My sister purchased a pair of red velvet shoes for me when velvet shoes were the rage. As skirt lengths shortened, my girlfriends and I would just roll our pleated skirts up at the waste and wear a sweater over them. Of course, short in 1959 was considered to be just above the knee. No decent girl would have worn a mini skirt length. I lived in a place and time when ladies did not even dye their hair. It would have been improper. I could wear light powder using a powder puff, a dab of lipstick and use an eyebrow pencil but never heard of eye liner or mascara.
In the spring of 1959 we ordered our senior class rings, and my mother allowed me to order one with a pearl inlay, although it cost a little more. I was so happy that I could get one with some type of stone in it and especially my favorite. I loved seeing the 1960 on it knowing that was the year I would graduate.
Throughout the school year, life seemed to be filled with school activities, overnights with girlfriends, movies, daily walks to the Dairy Del and pep rallies. It was easy for me to make good grades, so I didn't have to study too hard. It left me lots of time for socializing. Soon I found myself a member of the National Honor Society. The teachers had posted the honored students' names on a bulletin board in the hallway, and one of my girlfriends came running to me yelling that I was in the National Honor Society. Apparently, my teachers liked me even more than I realized, because students are selected by the teachers. My mother heard about it when the principal of the school where she worked congratulated her on my membership. He had read it in the local newspaper. I had yet to learn that my National Honor Society pin would even get me my first good job after high school nor could I have ever predicted just how far those traits would much later take me in life. I loved seeing the letters standing for leadership, character, scholarship and service engraved into the pin.
Sometime after the first of the year in 1959, I went on a field trip with my home economics class. I believe it was during the spring time, because I was wearing summer clothes. I don't remember the exact date, but I remember the day. It was a fun event spent with friends hanging out at a shopping center in Evansville, Indiana. Evansville was at least and hour away from the school, so it was a big event. Since we didn't know what time the bus would return to Albion, my sister told me to call her when I needed her to pick me up. The bus dropped us off at the town's only open restaurant and while I was waiting for my sister to pick me up, I found myself eye to eye with a good looking guy. Later I found out he and his friends were driving by the restaurant and he saw us inside and came back to check it out. He later told me it was because he saw me, noticed my long hair and thought it was very attractive. He told his friend he wanted to meet me. Either he or his friend knew someone who was sitting in the same booth where I was sitting, so when they came into the restaurant, they joined us in our booth. He sat directly across from me. I had on a new pair of moccasin slippers that I had purchased that day and a pink candy striped skirt. I was wearing a white sleeveless blouse. Before he left, we exchanged phone numbers. When my sister and I got home that night, I told her I met a really cute guy and described his smile and his eyes. I told her he had a big smile, nice teeth and soft looking eyes with long eyelashes.
I couldn't imagine that he didn't have a girlfriend, so I figured he was just out cruising around in our town with his friend, since he went to a different high school a few miles away. His friend attended my high school. My friends and I had always looked at Mt. Carmel High School boys to be a little on the rough side.
I was really surprised and pleased when he called the next day, but I was still cautious because I wasn’t sure of his intentions. My mother had always talked quite openly with me about the lines that guys would hand out in order to influence you into doing things you would later regret. I was prepared to not buy his story. Yet, I couldn't help but be a little excited at the thought of spending some time with him anyway and was comfortable with being able to resist his charm should he try to smooth talk his way past my value system. We went on a couple of dates, and then he invited me to his prom. That told me he didn’t have a girlfriend at his school or he would have invited her to his prom and certainly wouldn’t show up there with another girl on his arm.
It was rare for teens to be on the phone with each other during my high school days. There were no cell phones and many homes did not have a phone in them. Phones were to be used for only practical reasons. He told me he often went out to his dad's workshop and used that phone, so his parents wouldn't realize he was using it. That may have been the first example of the steps we would later take in defiance of common sense and our mutual parents' wishes.
When he walked through the door the evening of my first prom, I looked at him and knew I was in love although we had only shared a few dates. In his hand, he held a beautiful orchid. I was so thrilled with the orchid, him, and still terrified of what lay ahead. I was thankful I would be returning to my sister's house, because my father would have probably been out looking for me when midnight came and no daughter. I so wanted to go to the movie with him following the prom, so we worked it out that I would be at my sister's for this wonderful prom date. He had planned ahead with my comfort level foremost in his mind. He treated me like I was an entrusted gem, and I felt so protected and safe.
So we met in the spring of 1959 and quickly fell in love. We wanted to be together all of the time. It became more and more difficult to say goodbye to him following dates. He was working as an apprentice meat cutter, another impressive accomplishment for someone his age. I would soon learn that he was very responsible and any money he spent on me came from his own earnings. I think most of his monies were spent on gas and our dates. I never paid for anything.
By the time summer rolled around, we were painfully in love with each other. Some of our friends would fight and break up, but we never went through that. We neither one could stand to be angry at the other for any length of time. It was painful to care that much and have to be apart living in separate households. We got along so well. I was jealous of him. I thought he was good looking, so in my heart I felt he was every girl’s dream. People talked about his good looks, and I think that along with my age contributed to my jealousy.
Sometime during the summer, he started talking about us getting married. By this time, I was already wearing his class ring which signified to the world we were going steady (exclusively dating each other.) Of course, I wanted to get married but I was also afraid of the consequences such as hurting my parents, not finishing school and afraid that if we got married, I would get pregnant. I wanted to graduate from high school, so I didn’t want to get married and get pregnant.
Soon, he was not just talking about getting married. He had developed a plan. He even enlisted a couple of people to help us. He grew a beard in an effort to look older. He wasn't quite 18, although he would be in November. In order to legally marry, a person had to be 18 or have parental support. I was only 16 and also had a 17th birthday coming up in November. Our parents would never have given approval for our marriage. The people he asked to help him were a young married couple who had been married in Shawneetown, Illinois. They knew exactly where to go, what it cost, how to obtain the license and where to meet with the man who would perform the ceremony.
The day came and as planned, my boyfriend picked me up for what my family thought was our usual Friday night date. Instead, we then went to Mt. Carmel where we met up with his married friends. They were to be our guides for the evening. They knew how to pull off an underage marriage. I was very nervous and kind of getting cold feet about going forward, but his friends told me how wonderful it was to be married and that I had nothing to fear. Soon we were on our way with his friends driving, while my soon to be husband and I sat in the back seat holding each other. There were no seat belts in cars in the 1950's, so we could sit close. How close a girl was sitting to a guy in a car usually was considered to be a sign of the depth of their commitment. I was glad we were alone in the back seat, because I was so scared. I was afraid we would have a car accident, and my parents would always wonder what I was doing so far away from home. I never wanted to disappoint my mother and father, who had worked very hard to make sure I had every opportunity possible. I knew they made sacrifices for me and I knew of their hopes for my future. They trusted me. I was afraid of what was going to happen when they found out we were married. I was afraid of getting married, but I wanted to be with my boyfriend for the rest of my life. I was a very insecure girlfriend, so I was afraid if I did not marry him, someone else would come along who would be happy to be his wife. My mind was on fear overload as we road along over the country roads to an unknown destination. I was operating on blind faith that since he was with me, I thought I it would be alright.
I remember thinking that the drive there was taking forever. My boyfriend kept telling me everything would be fine. The couple in the front seat talked about the excitement of being married. They seemed so happy to be carting us away to our destiny. Even today I have a hard time imagining why they would be so enthusiastic about a casual friend getting married. I think they were surprised I wasn't pregnant, because most teens didn't run away to get married unless a baby was on its way. I was just head over heels in love for the first time in my life.
We found the place where we were to be married, which was just a simple home. For some reason, I found that more intimidating than I would have had it been a big office building. An older man and his wife were there. They examined our paperwork, charged a fee and then he recited the marriage vows with us and pronounced us husband and wife. That quick it was over. We were now Mr. and Mrs.
The trip back to Mt. Carmel seemed much shorter, and soon we were getting into his car and he was taking me home as if it was just another evening. Our entire lives and future had changed, because of what had just happened but we were treating it as if this was just another date night. He walked me to my front door, held me a little tighter, tenderly kissed me good night, told me how much he loved me and said that everything would be all right and he left. I was alone and felt for the first time the tremendous burden of acknowledging I was deceiving my family. I was glad I had a night to sleep before getting up to face them. It would be difficult to not tell them. However, I would keep that secret for a long time. I never told my best friend. I never told my sister. I never told my parents. I never told a sibling. Who would have ever thought a teenage girl could keep a secret from everyone? He kept the secret too. We knew we were husband and wife, but to everyone else in our lives, we were just like other typical high school sweethearts. We had barely known each other for almost six months, and we were married. I was still a virgin.
When I woke up alone the morning after my wedding night, I found my emotions were still moving up and down the scale. What have I done? What will my parents think? What will my friends think? What will my teachers think? What happens now? We had previously agreed to keep our marriage a secret, so I didn't have to worry about someone finding out right away. I was hoping the couple who attended the wedding kept our secret, as they had promised. My mind finally stopped wondering. I started to feel so happy that we would be together forever. Although we had not consummated our marriage, I felt in my heart that we had finally proved our love for each other. I snuggled under my blanket thinking about my new name. That was both a happy and frightening thought, and it was the last thing I was thinking when I fell back to sleep that Saturday morning. It was September, 1959, and I had just started my Senior year in high school. The Senior year in high school is such a special time that every child should be able to experience. It was certainly quite a beginning for me …the beginning of final year in high school, and the beginning of what I now know to be my 2nd lifetime.
I believe the choices I made at that time indicated I never placed complete trust in others even at such a young age. Most teenage girls would share such exciting news with a best friend. I didn't. I wasn't even tempted, because I was afraid the secret would not be kept. I doubt if I could have kept such a secret from my mother if I knew one of my best friends were secretly married. If I had been able to tell anyone, it would have been my sister, Jean. We were close. I knew if I told her it would be putting her into the tough spot of withholding critical information from our parents. I couldn't do that to her. The only person I could discuss this significant change in my life was the man I had married.
Our decision to get married not only impacted us. My sister, Claribelle, had always looked forward to making my wedding gown. My father's boss had already arranged for me to attend nursing college in Evansville, Indiana. I never knew this at the time I said yes to marriage. Why would anyone have told me, since none of them knew that I head over heels in love and would step way out of my character to sneak away and get married. Our respective sets of parents never dreamed their kids would get married before they graduated from high school. I loved school and was envious of those kids who could afford to go to college. I knew my parents could not afford to pay for a college education, so I did not even discuss with them that I wanted to go. I knew it would make them feel bad. I didn't know anything about grants, available scholarships and the fact that my nursing education was paid for if I chose to accept the offer. I didn't even know my big sister was planning on making my wedding gown. Would knowing have made a difference in the decision to run away and get married? Today, it is easy for me to believe I wouldn't have done that if I knew I could go to college, because at the time, some of my friends were planning for college, and some were planning for marriage after graduation. Not thinking college was an option, I chose marriage. However, today it is also easy for me forget the intensity of teenage love. After all, I had been complaining to my mother that I would be an old maid from the time I was about 13 years old. She laughed over that. Little did I know I would end up with more than my fair share of husbands before my life would end. There have been a few times in my life I think old maid would have been a good choice for me.
Like most teenage girls, life was all about me then. I never thought about whether my boyfriend had any fears that he needed to discuss. He seemed to accept the role of confirming that life was all about me. Our discussions were always about how I felt and what I needed. He was only a year older but more emotionally mature. He had always worked helping his dad on the farm. By the time he reached his third year of high school, he was working for the A & P market chain in their meat department. He, too, had always carried out his parent's wishes.
When I finally crawled out of bed the day after my wedding, I found it wasn't just another day. My future was on a new course. The guy I had called my steady boyfriend could now be called my husband. He was now my future.
He did well in his new role of husband. When I was frightened, he made me feel safe. When I was sad, he turned my mood into happy. If I was angry, he calmed me down. When I was jealous, he offered me reassurance. When I was happy, he shared my joy. My future had arrived. I would forever belong to this man, or so I thought. I had not yet learned that forevers sometimes end early.
Three months before high school graduation, we decided it was time to tell our parents. I don’t recall exactly what caused us to finally let people know. We had spent the better part of my senior year double dating, attending high school activities and saying good night to each other at the end of our evenings. Nothing much had changed except we had finally consummated our marriage. I made him wait for a few months after we were married, because I wanted him to prove that he hadn’t married me for “that.” I guess he had the patience of a saint.
As we had planned for after graduation, we decided to move to Northern Illinois where we would both have more opportunities for employment. My brother, Eddie, lived in DeKalb, and he invited for us to stay with him until we got jobs and a place to live. My brother also had a good friend who worked for another large grocery chainstore network, and he introduced them along with providing a recommendation for employment. We were thrilled when he got the job. I got a job working at a local newspaper in Sycamore, Illinois, which is the same city where my husband was employed. We both were making good money for a couple of kids, so soon we rented our own efficiency apartment. We moved out of it within a couple of months into a nice apartment across town. I changed jobs and went to work as a private secretary to the DeKalb County Superintendent of Schools. DeKalb County is the 2nd largest county in the state of Illinois, and my job was located in the court house.oo I was wearing my National Honor Society pin when I interviewed for the job, and was pleased when the Director noticed it. It was a good thing for me that he was another man with patience, because it took me a couple of months to really settle into my new assignment. I had to use my shorthand to take dictation and transcribe letters. My dad’s advice to take business courses in high school was paying off for me in a big way. The court house was only a few blocks from our apartment, and also only a few blocks from the store where my husband worked. We both could walk to work, and sometimes we did. I remember walking to work on cold mornings in the winter months when it would be so cold I had to pull my winter neck scarf up to cover half my face. It would feel so great when I stepped inside the warm court house.
My job as a private secretary gave me lots of experience. There were only three others working in my offices. The superintendent had a private office, of course, and I shared full time an office with the assistant county superintendent of schools. Both men had earned their doctorates in education. The school psychologist also worked part time in our office. She spent most of her time out in the field, but she could see how much I enjoyed helping her with typing and talking to her about the children she treated. Helping her out with her office work was the key factor that motivated me to want to study psychology. I admired her and her work so much. There I was a high school graduate who got her job because I was wearing my National Honor Society pin, and had good grades in high school. Shorthand was required. Typing was required. I had to really step it up though to keep up since I was surrounded by doctors. The assistant superintendent had been injured very badly in WWII. He had significant damage to one side of his face and was blind in one eye. He was a very good man, had a beautiful wife and four kids. His last name was Sawyer, and one of his kids was named Tom Sawyer. He loved telling the story of his birth when family and friends all contacted him urging him to name his new baby Tom. Anyway, he loved teasing me about my somewhat southern accent due to my having spent my entire life in Southern Illinois. Sometimes I laughed with him and other times, it annoyed me. I can look back at that time period in my life now and know that he was pushing me to overcome any limitations.
Within a couple of years I was offered a higher paying job at a large corporation, so I accepted and worked there for only a couple of months and quit. It was a successful company, but the work environment was very strange. I then landed an even higher paying position at another large corporate office in town. I loved the people at Turner Corporation. I was an assistant in the marketing department. While at Turner Corporation, I also learned how to run the switchboard. I joined the softball team, playing first base, made friends with some of the other employees. We spent time together outside of work. One of the women and her husband we going on vacation to Yellowstone National Park at the same time my husband and I planned a vacation traveling through Colorado and Wyoming so we could check out the western states. We arranged to meet up with them in Yellowstone where they are camping in a tent, and we had planned to stay overnight with them. My husband had a little bear encounter, and I should say a big bear encounter with an end result of the bear biting a chunk out of the front seat of our brand new car. Needless to say, we decided not to spend the night there in a tent so we went on our way.
When we returned , I worked a month on my job and decided to accept a higher paying position at yet another large corporation. The job was less demanding in the beginning, because I was just a stenographer in a steno pool, and I liked that. Soon, I found they were asking me to also send out the telegrams. A few more weeks and the teletype girl went on vacation, so they asked me to handle that until she returned. Shortly after she returned, one day maintenance moved both the teletype and the telegrams machine from her office on another floor to a table right behind my desk and chair. I was learning that if you do an assignment and do it well, it could become your job. I never received salary increases with the extra assignments. Although I had signed up for the softball team, nobody ever said anything to me about it. I decided they didn’t want me on the team, so I contacted the girls at Turner Corporation and played on their team. When the two corporate teams played each other, the girl who headed up the team of my new employer wasn’t happy that I was playing for another team. They didn’t know I had signed up. After looking into it, we learned a woman working there had a very similar name to mine, and they thought she had signed their sheet. She was a very large heavyset woman, and they didn’t want her on the team. I continued to play on my former employer’s team anyway. I loved playing first base, and we were quite a team. I recall one game when an opposing team player intentionally leaped up into the air and stomped down on my foot. I had caught the ball. She knew she was out, so she intended to make me pay for it. I never said anything, but when she came up to bat again and once again I caught the ball, stepped on first base and she was out. Only thing different about this out was that just as she leaped I brought my knee up and she went flat. Life has a way of teaching us the lessons we need to learn. Later her little family shared an apartment building off four apartment units. We were both pregnant. My second husband I lived upstairs in one apartment. My parents lived downstairs in another apartment, and she and her husband lived in a large apartment across the aisle from my parents. We became really good friends and kept in touch for a while after I moved to California. That kind of confirmed to me something else my dad had taught me that we should treat all people respectfully because even an enemy can become a future ally.
My husband and I had no children, and we seemed to have more money than good sense. We bought new cars, took the two week vacation in Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico while passing through several other states and stopping to see lots of sights along the way. We stayed at a dude ranch. We also swam in a hot spring pool in Glenwood Springs, Colorado.
When home, we bowled on a regular basis, and went into Chicago often to walk through the museums. We especially liked the Museum of Science and Industry. Clayton wore black pants and white shirts to his job, but I bought new clothes on a regular basis loving the large wardrobe I was creating. I received many compliments on my choices and of course, since I was tall and slim, I could wear reasonably well just about any style.
I was probably working my way up the ladder in the latest job without realizing it, since they were giving me more and more responsibilities. One of my co-workers and I became good friends. I really for the first time in my life began developing a life of my own. That is when my first forever relationship began to unravel. We were having some problems. I was very unhappy. I had spent my childhood looking forward to being a mother someday, and that wasn’t going to happen with us. Adopting was not an easy task in those days, so I felt hopeless. I became depressed and after extensive testing, the doctors diagnosed me with an overproductive thyroid gland. At that time, they used a radio active pill to conduct the test. I couldn’t touch it, but I could swallow it. Over productive still sounds to me like it would cause a person to be overweight. However, when a thyroid over produces, it has just the opposite result. I was very thin. That is why I always say I was skinny when skinny wasn’t cool picking up the phrase from the country song “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool.” Anyway, I ended up with taking a pill a day, and they predicted I would have to take it all of my life. When I became pregnant with my first baby, they checked my thyroids and they were normal. I no longer had to take a pill a day, and apparently the thyroids have been normal ever since that time.
I started experiencing an overwhelming feeling of sadness during the holidays in 1963. My mother was super concerned about it. An awful gloom came over me that I couldn't shake. I have experienced it about three times. These intense feelings seem to always arrive around the holidays as the year end is approaching. It feels like there is a pit inside my stomach. Today I call it a “knowing” … knowing that something threatening is going to happen. My mother asked me one in that winter of 1963 if I knew who was within this gloom. Coincidentally, my husband walked into the room at that moment and I knew. I knew something was going to happen to him. I looked closely at him. When he turned around, I pointed my finger towards his back and said to my mother, "It's him. I feel he will be gone." In my mind, I thought maybe he was going to die. Thereafter, I tried to pass it off as something to ignore and finally I summed it up by telling Mother I just didn't think we were going to have a good year ahead of us. I didn’t like having those feelings, and I still don’t like it today. Perhaps if I had recalled that experience before the year 1964 was over, I would have been a lot more careful with decision making. I have forgotten a lot of things about the time period, but I have never forgotten that feeling and the word gone has taken on a whole new meaning. At the time, I was thinking about someone dying, but obviously dying isn't the only reason people go away. Within the first two months of the new year I would see the beginning of the reasons why I may have felt an impending doom. My brother and sister in law's infant son, passed away a few days after he was born.
My husband and I separated before the summer of 1964 was over. We had moved from our apartment into our own brand new mobile home, which was located in a very nice mobile home park just at the edge of the city and across from a city park. We traded our 1963 Ford and a 1960 Chevrolet Impala in for a 1964 1/2 Ford. It was silver, had red bucket seats and a powerful engine. We both loved it. My dad told me that we should be saving some of the money we were making for later in life, but we were young and foolish. Everything seemed to be going along ok. I had yet to learn what 1964 had in store for us.
When I think of those 5 years of married life now, I realize today it would at most just have been a long engagement. I can’t say that I should have gone to college right after high school graduation, but it was an experience I should not have cheated myself out of at that time in my life. I have always loved being in a classroom. The climb upward would have been much easier had I gone to college after graduation instead of spreading my education out over many years.
Our marital separation and divorce was not pleasant, but it was far from being a traumatic event in our lives. He remarried within a month of our official divorce, because he was trying to avoid the draft. However, he was drafted anyway shortly afterwards into the army. He divorced his 2nd wife and married again within another very short period of time. He spent 40 plus years with his 3rd wife, divorced again and soon after married his fourth wife. I think some people just cannot be happy living alone.
I met the man who would be my second husband shortly after my
first husband and I had separated. I wanted a break from office
jobs, so I was working in a truck stop when he came in around
midnight asking for a hamburger and a cup of coffee. He was quite
different from my estranged husband, beginning with his being 7
years older than me. He was rather old fashioned but one of those
people everyone would say was a really nice guy. He just believed
that women belonged at home with their children, and expected his
wife to be the typical house wife. He was handsome, and I knew his
brother who worked at the same printing company as my father and
brother.
Jim had two children when I met him. He showed me photos of his daughters, and they were beautiful. He had been divorced for several months. One of his daughters had long dark hair, and his baby, who was less than a year old, had bright red hair. His wife had left him with the children when they separated. Later she returned and when they were officially divorced, she received full custody. Jim had visitation rights. When I met him, all of those decisions had already been made. It was understood in family courts during those years that children should be raised by their mothers unless something very serious was going on with a mother. His visits were scheduled on Saturdays, and he had no overnight privileges with his kids. That seemed to work for him, because he worked during the week, and she wasn’t working. She had moved in with her parents. One of the kids was only six months old when I came into their life. Jim had told me the baby was an infant when she left and left the kids with him. His X had been an only child until she was in her 20’s and her parents had one of those surprise middle age pregnancies. She loved her baby sister, but her years as an only child showed. She had a temper and that showed too. One day Jim bought the kids some clothes, and the next day she tossed them out her window in the rain on to our front yard. Once she saw my mother and I in town, and she started following us down the street displaying angry behavior. I don’t even know what she was saying, but it was non stop talking. My mother finally turned around and calmly said, “you know if you stop talking, people won’t know you are crazy.” It was kind of funny, because she stopped. Other than that experience, I never ever came face to face with her or had a conversation with her. In fact, I didn’t talk with her that day either. I was ignoring her.
Jim and I were married in May. We moved to California the following year. He was ordered to pay $50.00 a month child support for his two kids. He also had visitation rights in California, but we didn’t even have the money to fly to Illinois to see them. He could have brought them to California to visit a couple of weeks during the summer months, had we the income to support it. We lived from paycheck to paycheck. He was paid every Friday. When we went to the grocery store, we went with a list in hand, so we did not overspend.
When we first moved to California, I was so homesick. We didn’t have communication privileges like we have now. It wasn’t even available. No cell phones, and calling long distance was very expensive. I wrote letters home and received at least two letters weekly from my mother. I loved my parents so much and although I was loving my new life as a mommy, I missed them. It was a happy day when I found that they were planning to move to California when they retired. Retirement was just a word to them. Within six months of arriving in California, they were both working. They didn’t have to do that, but they wanted jobs. Mother went to work as a cashier at Coronet’s, and my dad got a job at the Santee Water Department. They had installed a new reclamation plant, and he worked there.
It would be many years before Jim reunited with his girls. Unfortunately, as often happens, when kids are alienated from a parent, they are not really bonded with the missing parent. They spent some time with him and then one left and returned to Colorado. His younger one stayed in California and spent more time with him, but she got mad at him over something and stopped visiting him. I was no longer living with him either when that happened, so I don’t know why the separation again. They never came to his funeral either, I don’t even know if they know he passed away.
Although Jim and I were separated and divorced, we remained friends until his death. He met a wonderful woman who was perfect for him, married her and they were together many years until he passed away. We saw each other on a regular basis, since he worked at the company my husband and I created. He and his wife attended our family Christmas parties. They always invited us over to their home for Thanksgiving. We went a few times. Normally, I would fix Thanksgiving dinner for family at my house. I guess you could say I closed the door on my 3rd life too (childhood, 1st marriage and 2nd marriage) but I shut the door to my 3rd life very gently.
Jim and I had two children together, a son and a daughter. That marriage gave me the experience I had craved. I was finally a stay at home mommy. During our marriage, I fixed his breakfast every morning before he went to work. I packed his lunch, which he carried in a large black lunch pail. He called it his lunch bucket. I loved every minute of being pregnant and adored my babies. For the first 7 and 9 years respectfully of their lives, I provided all of the care to them. Jim never changed a diaper, never bathed them, and never fixed their meals. He and I both believed that was the way it should be done. He worked out of the home, and it was my job to tend to the house, husband and children. To help with income, we opened our home up to foster children. We did that for three years but the day we had to give up a little boy who had come to us when he was only 8 months old, I told my husband that I couldn’t do that anymore. I cried for days over losing the baby and his older sister who was the same age as my daughter. It was heartbreaking, because the baby had come to think of us as his parents. His mother visited him, but to him that was more like a fun aunt came by. He cried and reached for me when the social worker and Mama came to get him. When he went out the door that day in the arms of a social worker, I knew I would never see him again. I had a lot of fun taking care of foster kids, but that was just too emotionally painful. I usually gathered up all of them to take to Sunday school every week along with some neighborhood kids. I actually made their clothes and made my husband and son matching shirts. I had never been much of a seamstress, but I decided to learn how to do it and found it was pretty easy. I just followed the instructions. I made lampshades, couch cushion covers, baked cookies, prepared my husband two hot meals daily and of course, packed his lunch. I also did all of the house cleaning. Jim took care of the lawn and outside areas. When they picked up Baby Donald, I worried that my own children might fear someone would come by some day and pick them up. Everything breath I took during those years, I had children on my mind. I earned the title “Santee Housewife” from a musician friend. He always smiled when he said it and had a twinkle in his eye. Another musician friend said my husband looked like a country boy, and I looked like a city girl. That was kind of funny to me, because Jim told me once he remembered seeing me walking down the street in DeKalb, Illinois a few times before we ever met. He said I always looked like I was going somewhere with a purpose. I had more than one person say that Jim and I really didn’t seem like a match for each other. For most of the years we were together, it was like fulfilling a dream of mine. I finally was a Mommy, and was living with a man who adored all children. He was good to me. I was good to him. We were happy.
I still wanted to go to college though, and he didn’t think a woman should do that. He didn’t like it that a girl friend and her husband were bringing me books to read and encouraging me to venture out. In hindsight, perhaps he was right. That same couple actually loaned me $500, so I had the money to get a place to live.
In the meantime, I kept insisting and finally, my husband relented that I could go to school after we stopped accepting referrals from the foster program. He agreed to take care of our two little ones while I attended school a couple of evenings per week. I loved the whole process of enrolling, choosing my courses and meeting new people from differing walks of life. Having always loved school, it was great to be back in a learning environment. College campuses were wonderful places in those days. Most were beautiful in design, and you felt a common bond with everyone you met when walking around and with other students in every classroom. It was better than the elementary and high school experience, which I would have thought was impossible. It was as if I had been away and finally was home again. I believe it was my destiny to be in school, but I had certainly taken the long way around to get there.
I ended up choosing to study psychology beginning in community college, and later I followed that up with business school and a couple of years of law school. However, while still with Jim, I just worked on my general ed courses in the local community college. I continued to give guitar lessons in my home to help out with income. Jim began to earn more money on his job. Before the kids started school, we were able to buy a new home. He used his veteran’s benefits, so we didn’t need money for a down payment.
When we stopped taking in foster children, and I started teaching guitar, it felt so good to have a guitar again. I had sold my Fender guitar to pay for the cost of the birth of my first baby. That had been a difficult decision, but Jim, who was a mechanic at a Cadillac dealership sold his tools to help pay for our move to California. If he could sell his tools, I reasoned that I could certainly sacrifice a guitar. When I began teaching, I bought a used Greco Trini Lopez model. That led to the husband of my best friend joining me in playing music. He went to the same store and purchased a new electric Ventura model. We all had a lot of fun together. I played lead guitar, and he played the chords. We had so much fun we decided to take lessons together to improve our skills. He wanted to learn how to play bar chords. I wanted to learn how to play notes on multiple strings at a time and to play up the neck. These new friends were actually the sister and brother in law to my brother’s wife, so they were really family to us, although we were not blood related. We had picnics together, played music and started going out dancing on weekends. We met other musicians, of course and that led to our having jam sessions and pool parties.
Another couple who were related to them soon joined us in our activities. They, too, were related to our friends. Their daughters called me aunt. The man in that family played guitar, and he and his wife were both fantastic dancers. Soon their elderly parents started attending some of our gatherings. It was as if we had reinvented a large extended family in California. For several years, we would all have a great deal of fun.
I was still a stay at home mommy, and during the long hot summer San Diego days, I would fill up a little swimming pool in the backyard for the kids. We had chow chow dogs, went camping and had off road motorcycles to ride in the desert. Sometimes we would ride the motorcycles on the back roads of East San Diego County in the area where we lived. Once we bought a chow chow puppy for fifty dollars, and the breeder bought her back from us a year later giving us $500. She was gorgeous, and they wanted to show her. Cricket ended up becoming a number one champion. When that happened her value and the value of any puppies she might have was greatly increased. Throughout it all, it was a peaceful time in my life. My husband continued to treat me well and I enjoyed my new home and the suburban lifestyle. We had fun with our friends, and life was good. Yet, I always felt unfulfilled. During that time, I still had not yet enrolled in college.
I had been attending the community college about 3.years when my father passed away. That really threw me into a tail spin. Within 3 months following my dad’s death, I told my husband I wanted to separate. I often wondered just how much my father’s death contributed to my unhappiness, because I just didn’t feel as connected with my husband anymore. I had been super close with my dad. I was his baby girl. I recall looking at him in his coffin and thinking that it really wasn’t him, because his spirit was obviously gone. I was devastated. One evening I was crying, and my husband told me I really needed to get over it, because I couldn’t change it. I just wanted to get in the car and go down the road when my dad died, but of course, there was a traditional funeral and family arriving from out of state. My mother would have been horrified if I wasn’t there.
When Jim and I separated, we agreed that whoever stayed in the house would keep the children, and he wanted to be that person. He had lost everything when his x wife had divorced him, and there was no way I could consider adding to his hurt over the separation by fighting with him over a house. I didn’t want the kids to be forced to change schools. We were trying to disrupt their lives as little as possible. In hindsight that was a pretty naive thought, because when parents separate it is a major disruptive issue with kids regardless of how well the separation is handled. It was emotionally tough for both of us in the first few months following our separation, but we adjusted to the change.
My mother was visiting her sister in law in Chicago when we separated. My Uncle Joe who was my dad’s brother died six weeks after my dad. The widows were working through their grief together. I picked Mother up at the airport in San Diego when she returned. The first thing I said to her on our way home from the airport was “I am going to tell you something, and I don’t want you to say a word …not one word.” I can’t believe I did that, but God bless my mother she didn’t say a word. I told her Jim and I were separated and that the kids were living at the house with him. I let her know that I was still involved in their lives and Jim and I were talking daily, which we were at that time. I am sure Mother had a million questions she couldn’t ask.
When Jim passed away many long years later, I was deeply moved and felt honored when his wife of many years asked me to sing Amazing Grace at his service. I printed out the words to the song, so everyone at the could have a copy and choose to sing along. I chose a couple of my favorite verses and of course, we repeated the chorus. My son told me that it came out really well. Jim had a beautiful graveside service attended by the people he loved the most. Jim’s wife had given him the best of care throughout his illness. Her children and grandchildren also loved him dearly, and he loved them. When they would have a new grandchild, he would call and invite me over to see the new baby. He was our mutual son’s hero, and he adored his son. In fact, he loved all of his kids. Our son and daughter were his only birth babies who he raised, but he shared in the parenting of one of his girlfriends’ babies before he met his wife. He treated that child as if she was his own daughter. He also helped his wife with her grandchildren who lived with them a lot during their childhood years.
It was a very sad day when Jim was laid to rest. Everyone who knew him would say that he was a good man. I guess I could say in one way that 3rd lifetime of mine ended for me then. However, I was left with a ton of memories and our beautiful mutually shared son and daughter and one wonderfulgranddaughter. I recall saying as I got out of the car at the graveyard, “I don’t think I can do this,” but I did. I wasn't referring to singing "Amazing Grace." I was referring to standing by his graveside. Part of my soul went with him.
I got the correct site.
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