Walking Through Kossuth

By William David Boling

Sit down and try to relax as you walk through Kossuth with David as he takes you with him and his family on his life experiences from his earliest memories to the present. He allows us to get a glimpse of what its like to have been born with a birth defect and the subsequent tumultuous ride that spawned a chain of events that led to the recording of the highs and lows that he experienced as he walks us through Kossuth. Youll laugh and possibly weep as he reveals some of his most intimate life experiences. You may walk away a better person after reading this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 9, 2011
• ISBN: 9781452082875

Book preview

DEDICATION

I would like to dedicate this book first and foremost to God. When I didn’t think I could make it another day He always carried me through. Secondly, to my wife and best friend, Donna. Without her support and belief in me this likely would never have come about. Also to Lesley and Laura, our daughters who have stood strong in the face of adversity. To our sons-in-law, Bugsy and Eden who have displayed unwavering strength when the times were tough. To Dr G. O’Daniel who has performed miraculous surgeries on our precious Brody and Katie and many other children. Also to the Smile Train and their team for helping children worldwide be able to smile where there is little hope and to those who support this worthy cause silently and without fanfare I give my simple and humble thanks.

Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 1

That summer started out like every other one we’d ever had before the year of 1953. People were coming and going up and down the narrow, curvy state highway that ran directly in front of our old clapboard-sided, two-story farmhouse on their way back and forth to work at the local factories and who knows where else. Farmers were going to town to buy and trade things they had produced on the farm, as it was called back then. Life was going on as best people knew how at that somewhat innocent period in my life’s history. This is the story of life—my life, that is—and those with whom I grew up from the beginning of my earliest memory until now in this tiny place called Kossuth, the only place I’ve ever lived, my little country home.

Fortunately for me, I was blessed with a wonderful and industrious mother and father to whom I owe not only my physical existence but much of who I am today. My dad, Charles, was apparently a very shy man throughout much of his early adulthood as he didn’t marry until he was twenty-nine years old. I know this from hearing him testifying in church about walking the hills on his farm as a young man and asking the Lord to send him a wife. I suppose his supplications were heard, because he did find his wife to be, Roba Nicholson, when he hired a group of workers one summer to pick tomatoes for him. With twenty acres of tomatoes on the vine ready to be picked, I’m sure he would have been most grateful if the Lord himself would have come down and picked a crate or two of tomatoes. In a way I guess he did. He just used a human being to help do His will, which was the way it usually seems to work. Anyway, my mom to be came to Indiana from Clay County, Kentucky, with her folks and four siblings to try to make a better life for themselves in Washington County, Indiana. What I recall from my dad telling the story of how he found his wife that summer is he knew that his prayers had been answered when he saw the young little woman out there while he was truck farming among his large field of love apples. I’m sure that there was at least a small amount of banter floating around as the shy twenty-nine year-old man from Kossuth met and married up with the young tomato-picker from Kentucky. As with all things, there had to be a beginning, and this beginning was the union of a successful marriage that was surely sanctioned by God Himself.

Anyway, back to my parents earlier years. After a small marriage ceremony, they did what apparently several newly hitched couples did at that time—they moved in with my mom’s parents, Pittman and Nell Nicholson. It now seems unusual for a newly married couple to move in with the bride’s parents, but somehow it worked out for the time that these families lived together under one roof. I remember the old house that they lived in. It was a large, two-story structure that was old and very drafty, probably a typical house for that period. My first memory of the old place was going over to Mum Nicholson’s on one very cold winter day for a family get-together. It must have been Christmas Day, because I was relatively sure that there were some presents around. I remember the wood box that they kept their firewood in for the wood stove, which must have been their primary source of heat. The cold floors with the worn linoleum were little comfort to the many children running and playing in their socks on that cold and blustery winter’s day. The upstairs was neither used nor heated at that time, but it was used as a place to store things. I can’t remember Mum’s husband, Pitt, as he was referred to, because he had died when I had been just a little boy, but obviously, he and Mum were pretty good people to allow their new son-in-law and daughter to begin their married lives together with them. I’ve also heard my mom talk about her dad, Pitt, being an educated man. Apparently, he went to the University of Kentucky, which was pretty remarkable for that time period. Pitt succumbed to lung cancer and died in 1955 at the age of sixty-five. I was only two years old then, but I can remember my family telling stories of me trying to sing Ain’t Nothing But a Hound Dog for any and all who would listen, and Pitt getting quite a kick out of my innocent antics. I must have been exposed to music very early in life, because I’ve always thoroughly enjoyed it.

I have no idea when my mom and dad moved out of the house that they had lived in with Pitt and Nell Nicholson. I remember my dad talking about what a good cook Mrs. Nicholson had been, and I can attest to the honesty of that. Out of respect, my dad always referred to his mother-in-law as Mrs. Nicholson. Anyway, Nell and Pitt had six children, but one died as a baby, so when they moved up to southern Indiana, they had three boys and two girls. The boys were Barkley, Roosevelt, and Carlton, and the girls were Alpha and my mom, Roba. None of their children had a middle name, as it just wasn’t the custom at that period of time. After Pitt died and their kids got married and moved out, some of the family built a small home for Mum Nicholson. Roosevelt, his wife, and kids lived in the old, two-story house until they eventually tore it down and built a new home themselves.

As for my dad’s side, his life came full circle in a way. He was born and died in the same old, two-story farmhouse in which he and my mom had raised their family. My dad and his only other sibling, his sister, Roqual, were the children of my grandfather, Jesse, and his wife, Floy. As with both of my sets of grandparents, they were all of the agrarian nature, farming for a living. I never remembered either set of my grandparents ever driving a car, but I know that Pitt and Jesse both drove at one time in their lives. Jesse and Floy traded houses with my parents once upon a time. Apparently, Jesse and Floy, along with their children, lived in the two-story farmhouse where my dad and Roqual had grown up. After my dad graduated from high school, he started farming on his own and acquiring some land. He then bought a farm from the Ribelin family and wound up with a small bungalow that he and my mom lived in after they’d left Pitt and Nell Nicholson’s home. My grandparents, Jesse and Floy, didn’t need the big house anymore, and because my dad and mom were starting to have children, they actually needed more space. They eventually wound up with six of us, three girls and three boys, and that was how it all began for us in the little hamlet of Kossuth.

According to the ancients, it is somewhat of an honor to be the firstborn, and this honor fell to my sister Jean. Jean was a beautiful child, and she remains a beautiful person as an adult even today. She was the type of child who didn’t give my mom or dad any trouble. With such good fortune found with their first offspring, my mom and dad decided to expand the Boling household, and my mom found herself in the family way again. The next child was another girl named Linda Lou. Most of the good genes must have been used up on Jean, because Linda was cut from another pattern. Not to say that she wasn’t a good and decent kid. It was just that she had and still has to this day that look in her eyes. The gears are always moving, turning, and grinding out thoughts and deeds to be enacted upon the unsuspecting recipients of her mind.

The family had two girls and no boys yet, but this deficiency was filled when Mike entered the household one hot, August day. Mike’s given name was Charles Michael, named after my dad. Mike