Letters From Paris

By DeMar Southard

In 1969, just a few years before my grandmother passed away, she presented my brother, my sister, and me each with a loose leaf notebook of photocopied letters that my mother had sent to her from France while we lived there in a suburb of Paris in 1959 and 1960. The binder sat on various bookshelves gathering dust and was transported with me as I moved from place to place, no less than a dozen times in various cities of Iowa, Illinois, Connecticut, Wisconsin, and Washington during that forty-one year period.

My mother’s photocopied letters were fading and the pages were yellow after only a few decades. By the time my children, much less my grandchildren, are interested enough in their heritage to care to read these letters they would be lost or illegible in their current format.

As a tribute to my mother and father, my ancestors before them, my aunts and uncles, many of whom are mentioned in these letters, and my grandmother whom I loved so much, I decided to transcribe these letters into a format that hopefully will last at least a little longer. Many people who read an earlier printed version of these letters told me that they thought the story they told was fascinating and that I should publish the book for a general audience. Here it is. I hope you enjoy the story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DeMar Southard
• Release date: Sep 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9780989920421

DeMar Southard

Born in 1957 in Pasadena, California. Graduated with honors, Bachelor of Music, University of Iowa Master of Business Administration, University of Iowa. Certificate in Copy Editing, Kirkwood College, Cedar Rapids, Iowa Certificate in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL)

Book preview

Forward

In 1969, just a few years before my grandmother passed away, she presented my brother, my sister, and me each with a loose leaf notebook of photocopied letters that my mother had sent to her from France while we lived there in a suburb of Paris in 1959 and 1960. The binder sat on various bookshelves gathering dust and was transported with me as I moved from place to place, no less than a dozen times in various cities of Iowa, Illinois, Connecticut, Wisconsin, and Washington during that forty-one year period.

Some time ago I heard an historian talking about our loss of historical records on a radio program. Or maybe I read it. But the point was that much of what we know about the lives of our forebears comes from the letters they wrote – bundles of love letters bound with a velvet ribbon or letters from a war-weary soldier that a heart-broken sweetheart saved in a trunk in an attic. Letters from pioneers give us a personal history of the settling of the west and politicians’ journals give us the background of world-changing decisions. Sadly, we are losing that history as the normal mode of communication becomes telephone conversations, email, texts between cellular phones, Facebook posts, and other forms of electronic communication that are heard or read, then deleted and forgotten. Even electronic communication that is stored becomes unreadable as technology changes and paper and magnetic tape, punch cards, eight-inch floppy discs, and other media become unreadable without a museum full of ancient computer and peripheral equipment.

My mother’s photocopied letters were fading and the pages were yellow after only a few decades. By the time my children, much less my grandchildren, are interested enough in their heritage to care to read these letters they would be lost or illegible in their current format.

As a tribute to my mother and father, my ancestors before them, my aunts and uncles, many of whom are mentioned in these letters, and my grandmother whom I loved so much, I decided to transcribe these letters into a format that hopefully will last at least a little longer. If a copy of this book might find its way into a library and be read by some future person for whatever reason, all the hours spent typing them (no small feat, given my typing skills) will have been worth the trouble.

Cast of Characters

Edwin, Daddy Edwin — Linnie Farrell’s (LF) step-father. The grand-children called him Daddy Edwin.

Aunt Dwinna — LF’s aunt (maternal)

Aunt Eunice — LF’s aunt (maternal)

Beth — One of Don’s (LF’s husband) sisters

Betty — LF’s sister in law, Guyman’s wife

Dale — LF’s brother-in-law, Yoby’s husband

Darwin — Jeanette’s son

Dodo — The family dog, left with relatives while the family was in France

Dolly and Harold — Friends of the family and the family photographers.

Don — There are two Dons - one is LF’s husband and my father, the other is her uncle.

E.R. (Eddie Rand) — LF’s half brother, Edwin’s son.

J.D. — LF’s uncle

Jeanette — Edwin’s daughter

Jeanette Leigh — Jeanette’s daughter

L.R. — LF’s uncle

Larry Dale — Yoby’s and Dale’s son

Linnie Farrell — The author of most of the letters, the editor’s mother

Mom, Grandma — LF’s mother-in-law. She and my father called her Mom, The kids called her grandma.

Mother (Bee) — Linnie Farrell’s mother. The grandchildren called her Mother Bee because she didn’t want to be called Grandma or any permutation of that name. (Her name was Beatrice.)

Nadeen — LF’s aunt, Mother Bee’s sister

Pat — LF’s Cousin

Tammy Leigh — Betty’s and Guyman’s 2nd daughter

The Harmon Girls — Jeanette and Jeanette Leigh

The Holly Girls — Guyman’s and Betty’s daughters, Yoby Ann and Tammy Leigh

Yoby — LF’s sister

Yoby Ann — Betty and Guymon’s 1st daughter

DeMar, Don, Don Marion, Linnie Farrell, Sherma Layne,

Bellevue Meudon/Seine Et Oise, France

Prelude

My father, Donald Gene Southard, was born in Miami, Texas in 1930.

Donald Gene Southard, 8 years old

My mother, Linnie Farrell Holly, was born two years later in Stacy, Texas, a town which no longer exists.

Linnie Farrell Holly, 6 years old

They met near the end or shortly after the end of my father’s enlistment in the U.S. Navy as a sonarman serving aboard the destroyer USS Radford during the Korean War.

Donald Gene Southard in Honolulu, 18 years old

When his enlistment ended in 1950 he returned to Texas and went to work for The Electric Supply Company in Pampa, in the Northern Panhandle.

I can’t count all the places my mother lived between Stacy and Pampa, Texas. She and her family of four – my grandmother, Mother Bee, her sister Yoby, and brother Guy – lived a gypsy lifestyle during the depression and war years and lived in no less than twenty towns in probably a dozen states during that time. When my mother graduated from high school, after attending countless schools whenever and wherever she happened to live, she did so early and with honors. I edited neither grammar nor spelling in her letters reprinted here – everything is exactly as she wrote. I believe few high school graduates of the twenty-first century could write so well.

Linnie Farrell Holly at 18 years

My father and mother married in 1952. After the wedding the two of them decided to head for Seattle, Washington to seek better opportunity. But running into a snow storm on the way there, and being stuck in California, they decided to take the next best option and headed for, of all destinations, Florida. As my mother would say, Ha! They arrived in West Palm Beach and through a friend from his Navy days, my father found employment with another electric company as a lineman. A little time in the swamp land of Florida is all it took to discover a deep seated hatred of the heat and humidity and chiggers and other crawly things that a lineman has to live with in the southern part of that state. A little bit of that was enough to convince my mother and father that Florida was not a good place to live and they returned, now with my sister, Sherma Layne, who was born in 1953, to Texas to again work for The Electric Supply Company.

Don and Linnie Farrell, November 22, 1950

The path to a better career seemed to be more education in computers and electronics, so my father began taking a correspondence course from a school in Washington, D.C. Taking a correspondence course and studying at night after work, proved to be difficult living a block from my mother’s parents and close to many other relatives. In Texas, Southern cultural roots run deep and Southern society is extremely friendly and neighborly. Few nights passed without a lengthy visit from a friend or relative, or both, and making sufficient progress in a correspondence course at night proved to be impossible. My parents decided the best thing to do would be to move to Washington, D.C., the home base of the correspondence school, and for my father to go to school full time there as a regular student. Just git ‘er done, as they say.

Thus my father, mother, and sister moved to Washington, D.C., where not only did my father complete the course in computers and electronics, but my brother, Don Marion was born in 1955.

At about the time my