Stop.....and look. Our trip with Kathy and Bill to Iowa

Thorton Wilder's famous play, Our Town, has this as its message: 

Don't be in such a hurry every day and so distracted every day that you don't "look" at what you have in front of you--the wondrous life and people who are there.

From Our Town:  In Act 2, Emily and others have died and are viewing the town from the cemetery.

 Emily: "Oh, Mama, look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama, fourteen years have gone by. I'm dead. You're a grandmother, Mama! Wally's dead, too. His appendix burst on a camping trip to North Conway. We felt just terrible about it - don't you remember? But, just for a moment now we're all together. Mama, just for a moment we're happy. Let's really look at one another!.....I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back -- up the hill -- to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-bye , Good-bye world. Good-bye, Grover's Corners....Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking....and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths....and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?"

 Ever since I saw this play I have been taken with it.  There is a reason it is so timeless.

 We often don't stop and look in our lives.  

This trip to Iowa with Vicky, Kathy, and Bill was a trip to my past, my family's past.  Our shared past.  And it made me wonder if I had "stopped and looked" during my life at what was important to me---the people who were in my life who I loved....the vast majority of whom are now gone.

We started our trip in a small cemetery in Council Bluffs, Iowa, now on someone's farm, where many of my distant relatives are buried.  They came through the area with the great Mormon migration in the 1850s.  There was a particularly bad winter and many died.  Many of the rest just settled in the area instead of continuing on to Utah.

 

 

Years ago, someone paid to make an engraving of all of the names of people who were buried in that cemetery.  There are a lot of Graybills.

 

 

Someone, I forget who, wrote that "On every headstone are the dates a person lived, for example, 1950 - 2022.  Yet, it's the dash in between the years that matter.”

 

But we know nothing about those "dashes" with other people who are gone forever.

 

The real question, the one asked in Our Town, is whether we "stop and look" at the dashes of the people who are right in front of us in our lives.  

 

Vicky came across a quote some time ago that sums it all up:

 

Amy Harmon, in the book What the Wind Knows:

“We were specks, bits of glass and dust. We were as numerous as the sands that lined the strand, one unrecognizable from the other. We were born; we lived; we died. And the cycle continued endlessly on. So many lives lived. And when we died, we simply vanished. A few generations would go by. And no one would know we even were. No one would remember the color of our eyes or the passion that raged inside us. Eventually, we all became stones in the grass, moss-covered monuments, and sometimes . . . not even that.”  

 

Nobody remembers a single thing about the Graybills who are buried in this cemetery.  Yet they all had lives, real lives.  They laughed, they loved, they hurt, they struggled, they lived.  And now, nobody knows about any of that.  Those lives are just dashes. 

 

What color were their eyes?

 

Twenty-five miles from this cemetery is the town where my father, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc., were born and lived, and, for many, died:  Carson, Iowa.

We spent a lot of time in downtown Carson, which is "gone" like most of my family is gone.  The theater is still there, the Dreamland, where my father, as a child, started a business selling popcorn.  He said he made more money doing this than a lot of men who were supporting families.  The theater is still open on weekends. 

The Dreamland Theater is at the far end of the block, in front of our car that is parked there.  

You can see how empty the downtown area is.  At one time it was bustling with life.  When my father was a child, Carson, a town of 600, had three grocery stores, a dentist, two doctors, a mortician, and two lawyers, a drug store, a lumberyard, a blacksmith shop, two garages, five churches, and two train systems: The Chicago Rock Island and Pacific railroad came from the south, and the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy railroad came from the north.

Now? 

 

On main street there is a small bar that is open on occasion (usually for breakfast and lunch), but the rest of the downtown is closed up....all done....in the past. 

 

 

The building in the middle was, in 1889, the G.W. Berkheimer & Co. Store.  How do I know?  Look at this.  These were some drawings made for the Carson Centennial, in 1981.  Here is the store now, and in the drawing.

 

Now:

 

 1889:

I took a photo of the entrance:  1889, just as the drawing indicates:

I remember this store from my childhood in the 1950s.  When I was a little boy, I would go there with my parents.  It was a grocery store.  The doors were wooden screen doors.  The floors were wood.  It had a really nice "feel" to it--that's the best I can do to describe it.  That's when Carson could support three grocery stores. 

 

We drove past the church my Grandmother and Aunt Hope attended---the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  It is no longer a church.  Kathy had called to ask about services.  She was told there there were only a handful of church members remaining alive so now those few members attend church in Council Bluffs.  The church building had been sold to the Masonic Lodge.

 

I remember going to church there in my childhood. The church is gone, but the building still looks strong.

 

 

We drove past this building--an old railroad station that has been preserved:

 

 

 

 

A drawing of it from 1880.  Looks like the same building if we had taken the photo from the side. 

 

Then we went to the home where my father was born (along with all of my aunts and uncles).  When my grandmother died in 1964, the home went to my cousin (Walter).  Now one of his sons lives there.  So it is still in the family.

 

How it looked when I was a child:

 

And years before that, my father out in front.

My father as a very young boy on the front porch:

 

 

 

My father and his home, from across the street:

 

Re:  the photo below:  Don C was my father's best friend.  Next to my father is his Uncle Walt, Don his nephew but who he considered to be his brother, Wayne, and the little boy is my cousin Ken.

 

 

Added to the above are Don's wife, Grandma, and Aunt Hope.....smiling.  Probably around 1940.

 

Me as a baby there, with mom:

 

 

Next photo is me with Hope and her son Ken.  This was the smile and laughter that I always saw from Hope, remaining with her until she died.  I visited her in an extended care facility shortly before she and Wayne died in 2005 (within six weeks of each other).  She had had a stroke, and couldn't talk.  But her eyes and her smile followed my father the entire visit.  That smile.  Still there, even then.  She had already lost two children and a daughter-in-law in her life, knew her life would shortly be over, but there was this love still in her.  I miss her terribly.

 

I mentioned that my Aunt Hope and Uncle Wayne died within six weeks of each other.

 

But here is the mind-boggling number:  They were married for 76 years.  That is not a typo. 76 years. And died within six weeks of each other.  What a love story.

 

I have many photos of Hope.  She is smiling in all of them....all but one.  I miss her so.  Here I am as a baby.

The photo below was taken in that house, in Grandma's kitchen, with Uncle Wayne, my baby cousin Michael, me, Kathy, and Grandma.  My Uncle Wayne was the father my father never really had.  For example, it was Uncle Wayne, Aunt Hope, and Grandma who met my father at the train station when he returned, ALIVE, from WWII.  His own father was not there to greet him.  And my grandfather never wrote my father, even once, when my father was in the Army in WWII.  Not once.  

 

Wayne always called my father "Trigger."  It was a nickname he gave him many years ago, very affectionate.  I don't know where it came from.  I wish I had asked.

 

See the stove in the photo above?  My father bought this for his mother before he went off to war.  He would have been somewhere around 19 years old when he earned enough money to do this for her.  Only 19.  He also bought her an electric refrigerator and a sofa.  Her home didn't have electricity, so he paid to have city electrical service.   

 

Because my grandfather was an alcoholic, Grandma worked all during my father's and siblings' childhoods doing other peoples' laundry, by hand, heating the water on a stove that was heated with corn cobs, and getting the water from a well.  Supporting all of the children, on her own.  On her own.  And having to deal with the awful pain of losing two children, and then adopting a grandson as her own son when her son-in-law abandoned him when Grandma's daughter Ruth died of Tuberculosis.  All of this during the Depression, and then having to deal, all alone, with the fear of all of her sons being in the military in WWII.  Using an outdoor toilet.  Kerosene lamps.  Water from a well.  Her "refrigerator" consisted of lowering food on a rope into the well. 

All that strength.  All that power.  All that love to give when she had no support.  To quote a line from the original Magnificent 7 film:  Grandma had "the courage of responsibility."

 

It does her no good now for me to say that she is a hero.  But she is.  I wish I had told her then, but I just didn't know when I was a child and young adolescent.   The celebrities who currently prance around to get attention don't even have a clue about what real power is. 

When she died the grandchildren were asked if there were any things in her home we wanted.  I wanted two things.  One was a set of pots and pans that I regularly played with.  Someone else picked those, and my father explained why that person should have them.  I don't remember why, but it made sense.  The other was an old advertisement for an insurance company that hung on the wall in the room where my sister and I often slept when we visited.

I would look at this advertisement when I woke up early, listening to the Mourning Doves singing.  Even now, when hiking, if I hear a Mourning Dove I think of that upstairs bedroom in Grandma's house. 

 

 

I have kept this memento since 1964.  Years ago I had it framed because the glass was falling off of the front.  It now hangs in our home.  I think of Grandma when I walk past it.

That's what she had in the way of home decorations--a free insurance advertisement.

Anyway, because my father, as an adolescent, could earn some real money, the first thing he did was provide for his mother.  Now, at least she had an electric clothes washer (which she got second hand).  And she could heat water on the electric stove instead of over a corn-cob burning stove (coal was expensive so she had little of it), and when she had guests in the living room they had a nice couch to sit on.

Now, when doing other peoples' laundry, she could do it much more easily. 

 I'm so glad to have a photo of this electric stove.  

 

After the war, this is what my father did for his mother, in his own words:

 

"During World War II, the army had a program that would help with financial support of a wife, mother, father, or children. When I first went into the service, the soldier that processed me told me that I could send money to my mother if she needed it. The deal was that they would take money from my paycheck and put some with it (I have forgotten how much I sent and how much the army matched) to send my mother.  I did this every month that I was in the service. I meant for Mom to use this money so she wouldn’t have to work so hard.  When I arrived home, Mom said to me, “The money you sent home (over $850.00) is in the bank.” She had not spent a single cent.  So I decided that I would use that money to modernize her house so her life would be easier and more pleasant.

First I dug a trench 7 foot deep from the middle of Mom’s house to the center of the street and put in a sewer. Then I filled the ditch partly full and laid a water pipe in the trench and connected to city water. Then I dug a trench about 18 inches deep from the center of the house to the alley and put in a pipe for natural gas. I converted the kitchen pantry into a bathroom. I hooked up the sewer and water and installed sink and a toilet stool.  Mom now had a bathroom, a kitchen sink with running water, a natural gas stove to cook with, hot running water, and a natural gas stove to heat the house. I cut a window in the bathroom so there would be some light and ventilation. Then I bought hardwood flooring and laid a new floor in the living room and dining room. I also fixed the plaster that was missing throughout the house.  Mom now had a nice modern house that she deserved.  No more using corncobs, wood, coal, pumping water and going outside to the toilet."

This is my father. 

 

The next photo is the house, across the street from my Grandmother's home, where my dear Aunt Hope and Uncle Wayne lived from the 1930s through the 1950s.   When they bought this home it was just a shack.  Wayne made it into a home--building a basement, running electricity to it and water, etc.

 

 Someone has put a lot of effort into restoring this home.   How it looks now:

 

 

Photo from the 1950s of their home, with my father, me, my uncle Wayne, and cousins Walter and Ken:

 And me with my Grandma at Hope and Wayne's:

Hope in the 1962 Carson school yearbook:

 

In the 1960s, Hope and Wayne moved up the street one block:

How it looks now....almost the same.

Photo from inside this home, around 1963, showing my parents, me and Kathy (sitting), Ken's wife Karen (who died very young in 1980) at the far left, Wayne, my grandmother, and baby Melanie, Ken and Karen's oldest child.

Hope and Wayne took care of Grandma until she died in 1964.  Here is an article written by my Aunt Hope in 1982 about her mother, my grandmother.  It's so beautiful:

You can see why I called her my "dear" Aunt Hope.  A photo of her when she was, in fact, around 10 years old.  With my father (as a baby) and my Aunt Laura who I was also close to.  The photo was taken 100 years ago.   (See?  Hope is even smiling at age 10)

During this trip we decided not to go to see Uncle Walt's farm.  I mention Uncle Walt because he was my father's other father figure.  He was my grandmother's brother.  He lived simply, on a rented farm, not far from Carson.  We decided not to try to find his farm because we weren't really sure how to get there, and we visited the farm the last time we visited Iowa.  He is in some of the earlier photos above.

My father worked on his farm as a teenager, during the summers.  Sun up until sun down.  And he loved it. 

Photos of Walt's farm and home from an earlier visit.  

My parents had just gone to Carson to visit when, upon arriving home, they found that Uncle Walt had died.  They got right back into the car and drove there again.  My father wanted to perform his burial service. 

 Then we went to the Carson cemetery:

 

Grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles.  All gone.  Only memories now.  Did I "stop and look" when they were alive?

I don't think so, and that sort of hurts.  But for most of these folks I knew them as a child.  All I can say is that I know I enjoyed being in Carson and being around them.  And they mean something to me.  That's the best I can do.

__________________________________________________________________

Our next stop:  Lamoni, Iowa.

I went to college in Lamoni, Iowa.  From 1966-1970.  It was a church college, for the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  About 20 years ago, the church renamed itself the Community of Christ.  I don't know why--probably a last ditch effort to maintain members as they had been losing them like a lot of small churches have been losing members..  

I wrote a blog entry about visiting Graceland on this trip with Vicky, Kathy and Bill.  It is here:  Dan at Graceland, July 2022.    To summarize: it was hard to describe being there.  I had not been back for 52 years, and Graceland was almost unrecognizable, but yet pieces were recognizable.

Like for Carson, it was all in the past.  "My" Graceland is gone, no more.  I was out of place that day at a college where once I had a place.

None of the professors who taught me are alive, as far as I can tell.  In particular, the ones who made the most impact on me are not alive.

Graceland only exists for me as a memory.   I never told a single professor how important they were to me.  Why don't we think to do that? 

_______________________________________________________________

We drove to Des Moines that evening.

The next morning we met with Janice, our cousin, and her husband, Larry.  Janice is one of only four cousins I have left on my mother's side.  Some died tragically too young. A few have died after living long lives.  All aunts and uncles on our mother's side have been gone for many years.

We had a nice visit with them.  Then we went to see our Aunt Dorothy Brubaker (the Brubaker family seen above in the cemetery) who lives in Des Moines....in the same home she has lived in for 56 years.

Dorothy is officially a cousin-in-law, although I always thought of her as an aunt.  Her husband, Don, was my father's nephew.  As I mentioned earlier, after he was born, his mother, Ruth, died from Tuberculosis (see the photos of the gravestones above), and his father took off, abandoning him, leaving him in the care of my grandmother.  

Despite her obvious emotional pain, my Grandmother raised him as a son.  My Grandmother had already lost a daughter (Bea) to the Spanish Flu some years before.   Even though she was actually his Grandmother, Don always considered her as his mom and called her "mom," and so does Dorothy.  Like a lot of grandmothers have done forever, when called upon by circumstances Grandma became a mom again.

Here is a photo basically displaying how Don was a son, not a grandson, to Grandma.  This photo was taken at Grandma's funeral in 1964.  All of her children living at the time, including Don.  

I remember this funeral.  Grandma lived with Hope and Wayne for her last few years, as she had serious arthritis and needed assistance.  I remember Hope saying that when she found her dead, she just grabbed and held her.  She needed to "hold her one last time."  

This is the only photo I have of Hope, and I have many, where she is not smiling.

Don died in 1999 from Leukemia--far too young.  Don and Dorothy's daughter, Terri, died two years ago.  Dorothy is still reeling from her daughter's death, quite understandably.  Terri was living with her at the time, and Dorothy discovered one morning that she had died the night before.  Dorothy said over and over during this morning's visit: "Well, I guess that's just life," as she cried.  I'm glad we were there. 

She is preparing to go live with her other daughter in New York.  We all knew that this was the last time we would ever see each other, but nobody said anything.  She was so grateful we had stopped by.   It really made her happy.  Made us happy too. 

From her door she watched us drive off.  My final remaining aunt or uncle.  I know I will never see her again.  And my final living connection to Carson, Iowa, as she grew up there.
 

A photo of Don, Dorothy, Terri and Lisa in the mid-1960s at our home in Fort Collins.  They were in the phase of life when it is all looking up and looking ahead.  Don went on to be a school principal and then Superintendent of Schools in Des Moines.  There is a school named for him.  This was a man who a father abandoned, but whose family stepped in to raise him and treat him as a brother and as son and who made a real contribution to the world as a result. 

 

My father and Don as an adolescent, when my father was home on leave in WWII.  Dad sure looks snazzy in his uniform, doesn't he?

 

The photo below is one of Hope (on the left), Dorothy (in the middle), Mom (on the right), Kathy, me, and probably cousin Ken (in the back doing a somersault) in the early 1950s. 

(see Hope smiling?  Told you she was always smiling) 

 

 

70 years after this picnic photo above was taken, on our recent trip, we met up with Dorothy again.  A lot has happened in that time.

Did we all "stop and look" in those intervening years?  And appreciate each other and really look at how much in our lives was good?

___________________________________________________________________

Next stop:  Oskaloosa, Iowa and surrounding communities of Lacey and Rose Hill

Oskaloosa is extremely important in our family's history.  My mother grew up on farms in the surrounding communities of Lacy and Rose Hill.  Several of her brothers and sisters farmed in the area.  And many relatives are buried in the area, including her grandparents.

She also attended college in Oskaloosa.  And, the bigee, it was in Oskaloosa that she and my father met and fell in love.  So Oskaloosa's like, uh, kinda important to me!

The four of us started our day in Oskaloosa visiting Penn College.  It used to be called William Penn College.  It is a Quaker school.

My mother attended Penn College from 1939-1941, earning a teaching certificate.  

Here is where it gets really fun.  This is a photo we took on our trip of the main building at Penn.  Bill and Vicky are in the photo:

 

 

Now, look at these photos from 1941, of my mother in the same spot:

 

 

Kathy and I comparing the old photos with our mother dancing in them with the building.

The chapel on campus

Mom skipping rope with the chapel in the background.  82 years ago.

 

One thing you can say about my mother:  She knew how to have fun:

 and she knew how to live life large.  

After she graduated from high school, her mother gave her two choices as a gift:  a new gold watch or a road trip (not called road trips in those days).

She chose the road trip.  So, with her brothers and sisters they traveled to the west coast, a lot on Route 66, camping and fixing their own food.  Some photos:

And then, the clearest indication of her adventurous spirit--in 1997 Kathy and Bill invited me to go with them through the Grand Canyon, on the Colorado River.  They said I could invite someone else.  

I invited mom and had the experience of a life-time with one's mother.  She was the oldest person on two large rafts....I was the second oldest to give you an idea.  But she did EVERYTHING that even the younger people on the trip wouldn't do, like take the hard hikes.  I was so damned proud. 

And, as a result of that spirit, my mother and father, traveled the world.  They experienced life.  Here is a map showing all of their travels.  They have been to places where you can't go now.  It is an amazing accomplishment.

From Our Town:  “Do human beings ever realize life while they live it ?-every, every minute?”  

Our mother wrote a diary of her life.  It's so beautiful.  I can't imagine that she "realized" life every minute, but it is obvious from her diary that she grabbed life and realized what she had and appreciated it.  She had such a good time at Penn those two years, making friends, taking classes, skipping rope!

Now, as we did on this recent trip with Kathy and Bill, we are going to leave Penn College and travel down the road a few miles to Lacey, Iowa.  

But, we'll be back to Penn College later.

Lacey figures into our mother's life both before and after Penn College.  

Her father farmed outside of Lacey, renting two farms in her childhood.  One of them was super nice.  But he lost it during the Depression.

Here are photos of both farms.  Both have been torn down, and we don't know the exact locations.  Many years ago I saw the second farm (second photo) when it was abandoned. 

 

 

Our mother started school in Lacey.  Her oldest sister, Irene, was a teacher there at the time.  Here is the school. about the time our mother started there:

She did all of her elementary schooling there.  More on this school later in the blog entry.

We found the church where my mother's family attended during her childhood:

Photo several years ago:

 Today:

 

In 1933 her family moved to Rose Hill (another small town close to Oskaloosa).  

And attended church here:

We found this church this week:

It's fascinating, really.  Homes, schools, and businesses come and go in Iowa, built and torn down, but churches are still standing. 

I found this photo in my mother's stuff:

 

We looked around, but "living" in Rose Hill means living somewhere in a 5-mile radius of Rose Hill.   We couldn't find this farm.

A photo of my mother in her high school junior and senior banquet dress.  Even though she and her parents were living in the Rose Hill home (above), she elected to go to Barnes City for high school. She graduated from high school at age 16 or 17. 

 

From my mother's diary:  

"I remember the day that my mom asked me if I wanted to go to Penn College. I
did not know what to say.  I was too surprised.  I never thought there would
be enough money to let me go to college.  I did have the scholarship for
tuition but needed a place to live. 

We were still living out north of Rose Hill so I had to stay in town during the week.  Someway we found out about Joyce Barnes and that she was going to stay with her grandmother who lived right on North Market.  I think my parents paid $l.50 a week for me to share the room with Joyce.  We both brought food from home and cooked for ourselves.  We both learned to cook a little."

My mother's parents struggled to make a go of it with a large family and with the eviscerating effects of the Depression.......yet they still wanted her to go to college and set it up so she could go.   

My mother went to Penn and graduated with a 2-year degree...enough to teach school.  More on that later.

She graduated in 1941--the year my father started at Penn before the war.  They just missed each other.  Can you believe that?

Shortly after my mother began college, her parents moved from Rose Hill to a farm outside of Oskaloosa. We drove out Burlington Road to try to find my grandparents' final farm  They lived on this farm from 1940 to 1954.

We found it.

Here is a photo of the farm, taken some years ago by my mother:

Photo of mom when she was living there.  (nobody likes to think of their mom being "hot".......but sheesh, she was!)

Another photo of this home, or part of it anyway.  That's Janice, who we met up with the on this trip, and her younger sister, Linda, who died early at age 40.  That shouldn't happen.

This is the farm where I have my only memory of "doing something" with a grandparent.  In the early 1950s, my Grandfather would wake me on cold Iowa mornings, heat my clothes over the coal-burning stove, and take me out with him to do the chores.  How I loved that.

I can remember feeding the sheep. One time, I was sitting on a fence in the barn and one particular sheep was being very aggressive about getting the corn I was holding.  I remember Grandpa telling my parents, and everyone laughing.  My only memory.  My grandparents would be too old to give that kind of energy to little children.  They gave love, and that's enough.  

We drove up the lane to this farm.  A woman was outside, and I explained who we were.  She graciously allowed us to look around, and even look inside, which I remembered.

Since when the first photo was taken, some unknown years ago, they have added a front porch.  They have lived in the home for 54 years. 

Now, after my mother graduated from Penn in 1941.

From my mother's diary:

"My first teaching position was in a country school about six miles west of Oskaloosa. I had about 13 students.  I believe I had all 9 grades because there was kindergarten also at that time.  Teaching in a rural school was very difficult.  Recitation was about 5 minutes a class.  Then those students were to study while the other children came to the recitation bench to have their short time with the teacher.  There were many subjects especially in the upper grades.  So the time went very quickly.  There was also supposed to be time for P.E., art, and music, taught at one time to all the students.

I walked to school every day carrying my lunch that was prepared for me.
I had the older kids walk to the closest house to get a pail of water for the day's use.  When I arrived at school I had to check the huge furnace to see if there was any fire left.  If there was I would take out any big clinkers, stir it up, and add coal to get it started again. Sometimes it would take a long time to get the room warm at all.  After school at 4:00 p.m. I had to put down sweeping compound (an oily sawdust that would take up the dust) and sweep the whole schoolroom.  Any papers to correct had to be taken home to work on.  Also, I had to carry in 5-7 buckets of coal for the next day.  And for all that, I received the princely sum of $50 a month. 

I had moved back home and started  riding to Oskaloosa from home with Roland and then to the school with someone who worked in Eddyville.  That was better and I got through the school year.  I weighed about 90 lbs.  Both years I taught in the country the students and I were sick.   

The second year I applied and got to teach in the home school about a mile from my parent's home.  I walked to school, and Dad and Mom let me take their car to school on days that they did not need it.  The coal room was attached to the school so it was easier to carry the coal in as it was needed.

The students were very good kids and they would help me a lot.  There were two boys in the seventh grade and two in the eighth, and they practically taught themselves.  One boy had a brother who was mentally incapable of learning but he came to school to be with the other kids.  And he was no problem.

Those old school buildings were not very tight and we would have 4 or 5 mice out playing while we had class.  I would set out several traps every night and always have a few in the traps.  The older boys would take them out for me and reset them.

I think I had about 12 students that year.  I am convinced that almost all of us had the whooping cough that year.  We all coughed every day all day for a month or so.  That year I got $65 a month."

....and now we return to Lacey.

As you remember (!), my mother attended elementary school in Lacey, which is a few miles from Oskaloosa.

After her two years of teaching in a country school, she got a job teaching at the same Lacey school.

Years ago I traveled through the area with my parents and saw the Lacey school where she had taught.  I think Jules and Emily were with us:

Remember how nice it looked in the photo shown earlier?  Now, it was abandoned and overgrown. 

 

Her school picture:

 

 

 

We looked for the school, or where it had been, on our trip, but couldn't find it.  I had hoped that at least there was a sign indicating where it had been.  We could find no trace of it.  A school for a small community that had been used for 70 or 80 years.  Gone. 

....and now it is time to return to Oskaloosa

My mother returned to Oskaloosa to live.  She had a very good friend there and they rented apartments.  We have a few photos of where they lived, and an approximate address, but could not find anything resembling the house.

 

 

 

Driving to Lacey to teach would not have been a long drive. She rode to Lacey from Oskaloosa with some other teachers.  Two of them had cars so they took turns driving.

So, while my mother was having a grand time in Oskaloosa, what was my father doing?

Answer:  waiting to invade Japan.  

I had mentioned that he arrived at Penn College just as mom was graduating in 1941.  He stayed for a semester.  One day he walked out of a movie theater that was showing How Green Was My Valley to find Pearl Harbor had been bombed.  He joined the Army right away.  

After the war, he returned to Penn to finish his degree.  And then something happened on this very spot where I am pictured on this current trip:

How many people know the very spot where their parents' met?  

I'll give the description of the meeting from my mother's and my father's perspective.

My mother's version:

"It was on a cold late afternoon in January, l947 that I first saw Frank.  I don't know why Lena and I were together because we saw one another only to ride to Lacey to teach.  But we were crossing the street at the corner of Market and A Ave. and he came across too and Lena introduced us.  We both said hello, I guess, and went on.  I can remember the coat I had on.  It was blue and brown plaid-one of my favorite ones.  I wore light-weight boots over my heeled shoes(maybe you have seen them in a '40's movie).

I had heard of this wonderful Frank Graybill who was the life of the party wherever he was, and now I had met him.  Eleanor and Lena (who both taught at Lacey) thought he was the best thing ever,  I did know that he was going to college at Penn and assumed that he was a veteran (almost everyone was those days with the GI bill that enabled veterans to get an education). So we both said hello and went on.   I don't know if our paths would have crossed again but one day soon after I was in Doug's (a hangout for the college kids) cashing a two dollar check and he appeared behind me as I was standing at the front register.   I remember that he said, "Did you write that check for enough money to take us to the movie?"  Before we parted we had a date for a couple of nights later."

 

My father's version:

In February or March of 1947, I was on my way to a restaurant to eat dinner when I met three girls. I knew two of them, and they introduced me to the third girl whose name was Jeanne Bunting. A few days later I was in Doug’s restaurant, and this young girl came in to cash a check. I asked her if she would make the check large enough to take us to a movie. Then I asked her for a date, and she accepted. We went to a supper club in Ottumwa, Iowa, which was about 30 miles south of Oskaloosa, We had a few drinks and a meal. Then a few days later I asked her for another date and we went to Ottumwa to a movie. We continued dating until sometime in May when we decided to get married.

Someone needs to tell them to get their stories straight.  We know the EXACT spot they first met, but don't know if it was January, February, or March.   hmmmmm,

Then we went to the cemetery in New Sharon. 

 

 

 

The grave of my uncle Vincent, Aunt Dorothy, and cousin Judy, who died far too young in 1966 at age 21 of Mononucleosis.  

 

 

 

Judy is the girl at front, left.

Our journey through Iowa was more than simply looking, once again, at memories from my childhood.  

It was, instead, a journey to reflect on the meaning of all of those memories.  

So many people, important to me, are now gone.  Were they happy?  In some ways, their happiness seems a miracle since many of my relatives lost children at young ages, and so many people from my childhood, from my family, died at young ages, cruelly.  Many worked inhumanely hard during the Depression, barely staying alive.  Yet, they kept their families going.  A miracle. 

 

And for many, life could be seen, on the outside, as brutal.  But was it that way, for them, on the inside?  Did they have daily joys, daily triumphs?  I'll just never know, but I'm betting they did.  They were just too strong to not look for joys in their lives.

So little I know of any of them.  

Did they stop and look at their lives, and appreciate the people in them?  And try to "see them?"  I hope so. 

From Our Town:

 

“Let's really look at one another!...It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed... Wait! One more look. Good-bye, Good-bye world. Good-bye, Grover's Corners....Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking....and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths....and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?"

 

Stop and look.  

Two times as an older adult I had experiences with my parents that I really treasure.  Both times were, oddly, in a Mexican Restaurant in Mesa.

After we had finished eating, we just sat and talked.  I talked on and on about how great they had made my childhood--all of the specifics that I had remembered, that I had "looked" at while growing up and realized how great they were.  Then, many years later, this time with Vicky, I did the same thing with them.  Because Vicky was there, she has helped me re-create what I said to them.  Now I wish I had said more. 

It's really important to me that I told them, that they knew that I had "stopped and looked" at what they did that mattered when I was a child.

“Does anybody realize what life is while they're living it- every, every minute?”