Arlynn and John: Two Hoosier Lives

By John Curtis Knight, John H. Knight and Arlynn Swope Knight

In her eighty-four years, Arlynn Swope endured many of lifes greatest challenges. She knew illness, poverty, a near-death pregnancy, mental illness in her immediate family, and the suicide of her husband. She lived through the Great Depression and dropped out of school in the ninth grade to help her family survive the 1930s. But through it all, she faced each of the many rocks in her road with love and grit. Hers is an uncommon tale from a most common Hoosier woman, the little woman who was never little but was always there for those she loved.

A veteran of the US Navy with an eleventh-grade education, John Curtis Knight didnt know what he was in for when he fell crazy in love with Arlynn. A welder and factory worker by trade, he built a reputation as a top amateur golfer who became a real player on his native Indiana courses. His life was built around Arlynn and their family, and they shared a rich adventure togetheruntil despair and paranoia led to his suicide when he was seventy-eight.

Theirs is a true love story, one in which these two common Hoosiers share a life of uncommon love. Together they walked, pushed, pulled, and loved their way through it all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469784595

John Curtis Knight

A Hoosier wife, mother and storyteller with a ninth-grade education, Arlynn Swope Knight dedicated twenty years to preserving her family’s story. A father, two-time US Navy veteran and top-flight amateur golfer, John Curtis Knight used the last four months of his life capturing his life’s story. Their son, compiler and editor, John Howard, has a PhD in medieval literature and linguistics. He was a university English professor, vice president and USAID project manager in Central Asia and Afghanistan.

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Arlynn and John:

Two Hoosier Lives

Arlynn Mary Ann Swope Knight

and

John Curtis Knight

with

John Howard Knight

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

Arlynn and John

Two Hoosier Lives

Copyright © John H. Knight

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4697-8458-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4697-8460-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4697-8459-5 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 3/12/2012

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

Arlynn

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

GRANDFATHER’S STORIES

MY GRANDMOTHER,

ANNA MARIE PALMER

MY YOUNGER YEARS

THE GREAT DEPRESSION

A NEW LIFE BACK IN TOWN

AFTER THE BOYS LEFT

EPILOGUE

LETTERS

GENEALOGIES FOR ARLYNN SWOPE KNIGHT: YAGEL-SWOPE, PALMER, MANIER

FOREWORD

JUNIOR: THE BOY

THE NAVY, 1935-39

BETWEEN TOURS: 1939-42

SECOND TOUR: 1943-45

AFTER THE WAR

GOLFING MEMORIES

LETTERS 1996

APPENDICES

FOREWORD

This book contains two self-told tales of the lives of a blue-collar Hoosier couple married for fifty-five years. The first story belongs to my mother, Mary Ann Arlynn Swope Knight, who began her autobiography first and finished it last. In every sense mom liked to have the last word. My father, John Curtis Knight, Jr., wrote his in a rush, shortly before his death by suicide on 16 October 1996.

They did not coordinate the accounts, so although their stories share but a few events, they weave a composite picture of how they were raised, lived before they met, fell in love, created, loved and raised a family, and died. Thus, although loosely a shared story fused by over a half-century of marriage, their life together ends in two books with two tables of contents, forewords and post-story sections, such as letters, genealogies and related information. Perhaps their two stories provide a better idea of their life together—perhaps. Lives and marriages are complicated, even for simple folk.

As early as autumn of 1974 mom began sending me letters with stories about her grandparents, Ann Manier and Joseph Palmer, and their children—my grandmother, Florence, my great aunt, Rose, and my great uncle, Joe. My brothers, Mike and Pat, as well as many neighbohood children and friends had heard these tales often over many years. Sitting on the front porch steps of the Hensch Street home, mom delighted in keeping the lives of her grandparents and her parents, especially her father, Artie Swope, alive for us. She was an animated, engaging, effective story-teller, and as all stories in an oral tradition, many grew with each telling, as she notes in her comments within. What began as a series of letters developed into this much larger project.

I had always loved these stories, many about ancestors I had never met but many about those I had known and loved. I encouraged mom to consider expanding her story-tellings to something larger, recording not only her ancestors’ stories but her own as well. She took to the idea immediately. Soon letters arrived with tales about her ancestors and herself, her up-bringing, the years during the Great Depression, marriage and my father’s absence during World War II, raising kids and the challenges of mothering and house-wifing. I became my mother’s compiler and editor.

At first it was an easy relationship: transcribe her tales into the computer, make copies and send them back for review and revision. Then she became self-conscious, concerned with every nuance of how to write, how to say things more correct, and how what she was writing would be perceived. I assured her that she should just keep writing as naturally as she told the stories, and we’d worry about the literary stuff later. Being as stubborn as her tales reveal, she both took my advice and didn’t take my advice, being periodically worried about how well she was writing but alternately scribbling furiously for a week with no thought to the nicities of craft. Since she conceived of her audience primarily as family, I tried to convince her not to worry about criticism.

Writing fatigue set in, and during the early 1980s she seldom sent stories, and since I was busy in a new job, I had little spare time to encourage her. Then in the mid-1980s she picked up the task, and until her cancer recurrence in the late winter of 1999, began to send more stories. These focused on more recent events, including marital conflicts, health matters and, sadly, my father’s suicide in October 1996, the circumstances leading to it and its after-effects. Her last letters in 1999 reveal an emotionally weary woman, still struggling with dad’s death and now with her own health.

The range of her stories is amazing in years and observations—well over a hundred years and four generations. She felt a profound obligation to keep these people alive for subsequent generations. Once, explaining why she spent so much energy on this project, mom said, Pete, when we’re gone, the story is all that’s left. She’d never read Homer, the great Irish heroic tales, the Icelandic sagas or other great narrative literatures, but she understood the legacy of story-telling, and she was determined to do her part to preserve her people’s stories.

That determination comes out early in the stories through the love and homage to her maternal grandmother, Anna Manier Palmer, clearly a formative influence in mom’s childhood. Yet nowhere is that love more pervasive and present than in her love for her father, Artie Swope. At mom’s funeral her cousin, Wes Palmer, placed a single red rose on the edge of the casket lid; the note with it read, With Artie at last. As an adult I wondered how my father competed with mom’s love for and idolization of her father; it was deep in her bones and always on her lips. The most likely answer is, he didn’t try. I understood her profound love for her father because as a child, I loved him just as deeply. As mom makes clear, Artie was my father for the first three years of my life when dad was gone for the war. When grandpa died in mid-summer 1957, I mourned for weeks, maybe months.

Artie’s human side left some reminders behind: rummaging around in the trunk of his 1955 Kaiser-Frazer automobile a month after his death, I found a deck of French cards, a full deck of black-and-white 1940s’ or earlier vintage playing cards with nude and semi-nude photos. Now there was a reality check for a grieving grandson—grandpa’s porno cards!

My earliest memory seems to be of Artie. I retain this clear image of being carried in his left arm on a sunny day, and Artie was taking me into the drug-store/soda shop on Lafayette Street across from old Central High School, an area that was once the German section of Fort Wayne but by the late 1940s was fast becoming the African-American enclave of the city. I have this vague memory of how warm his chest was against my small body and how safe and protected that made me feel. Grandpa’s boyhood home with his grandmother, Katherine Schwab, was barely a block-and-a-half away on East Wayne Street. He bought me a chocolate ice cream sunday; then he bought a punch board to play the numbers. I can still picture him punching out the numbers from that punchboard as I made a pig of myself with that sunday. The Black clerks seemed to know grandpa very well; he must have been a regular.

Mom’s and my idealizations aside, Artie Swope was all too human. Still, we loved him deeply, and doesn’t that get to the heart of what mom is doing in these stories: creating an image, an interpretation of the lives of the people she loved, selecting what she cherished, retouching and even ignoring the blemishes and cracks in her memories in order to save what made her love them?

I once recommended Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune to mom, and a couple months later while visiting her, I asked if she’d read the novel yet. Rather excitedly she jumped up from the dining room table and grabbed the book, then pointed to this passage about its main character on the opening page: "Eliza Sommers discovered early on that she had two [talents]: a good sense of smell and a good memory. She used the first to earn a living and the second to recall her life—if not in precise detail, at least with an astrologer’s poetic vagueness. The things we forget may as well never have happened, but she had many memories, both real and illusory, and that was like living twice…She entered the place of her dreams along a much traveled path and returned treading very carefully in order not to shatter the tenuous visions against the harsh light of consciousness."[1]

That’s the way I think that I remember and write, Pete, she exclaimed.

Indeed, she and Eliza Sommers may share that story-making process.

Mom wrote each of the stories without thought to a grand plan; she wrote each as it came into her mind without reference to an outline or to previous stories. She often would send me an inch or two-inch piece of torn-off stationery with a one- or two-sentence addition with a side-note, such as This goes on page 56 without any instructions about where on page 56 it should be inserted. She didn’t even jot down what she’d already written, so two years or four years or ten years later I would receive another version of the same story. When that happened, sometimes I would send both back to her and ask her to combine them. If the newer version had only minor variations or added details, I would meld the new and the old, send her the combined versions and both originals, and ask her to make changes and send it back. Sometimes she’d call me and say, Well, Pete, you go ahead and decide what’s best, an instruction I generally refused. It’s your story, mom. You have to decide. In her final letters and stories in 1999, I did have to decide when she was too ill or dispirited to respond.

Because my mother was an oral storyteller, she could write the same story in two versions ten years apart and nearly replicate the original version, often line for line, phrase for phrase, word for word. As a medieval lit professor and admirer of the oral tradition in literature, I was amazed and impressed with mom’s ability to reweave the same story over widely separated periods of time. She made me reconsider some of my doubts about the memories of those great epic singers of tales. Whether she knew it or not, Arlynn Knight was working within an ancient tradition, and I was impressed as well as honored to be part of it.

No doubt, as she notes in the Introduction, some of these tales have grown in the telling. Her opening tales about her grandfather, Joe Palmer, and his brothers, such as The Muck Lantern and The Open Grave, just might stretch credulity a tad. Mom once joked to me, Well, Pete, they just got better over the years. Just a bit, Mom, just a bit!

So she wrote out of an oral rather than a written tradition. Mom stopped her formal schooling in the ninth grade at the old St. Augustine’s Academy for girls in Fort Wayne, Indiana when the Great Depression forced her to work to help her family survive. Although she read regularly all her life, she did not naturally absorb some of the basic standards of writing. She was very aware of that shortcoming and often asked me to correct those problems—spelling, punctuation and grammar. She dropped commas like I use pepper—all over the place! So I have made some of those corrections. Mom was a blue-collar Hoosier complete with pronunciations and personal expressions that derive from Indiana and probably her mother and father’s German ancestries, such as to home for home, as in I was sent to home, perhaps from the German idiom zu Hause.

As a sign of her respect for her ancestors, she also capitalized family relationship titles, e.g., grandmother, dad, mother, etc. Dad did not follow that practice, so I have respected their choices even though that makes for a stylistic inconsistency between these two autobiographies. I can live with that and honor their choices.

She variously wrote worsh, warsh and wash for wash. Similarly she said and sometimes wrote zink for sink, libery for library, and chimley for chimney, although not consistently; she recognized the variance in these uses, so I have corrected these occasional pronounciation-spellings. Her grammar is often non-standard but then, so was mom!

Her mispronunciations caused great laughter in our home, but respectfully so, as she ran into new unfamiliar words and read her way through difficult literature on her own. One of our favorites came after a trip to a then new store in a mall: she noted that she’d just been to Pierre 1 for Pier 1. However, the family’s all-time favorite was during her courageous foray into ancient philosophy when Socrates came out sow-crates. Mom laughed along with us, but from then on, she always pronounced that ancient’s name correctly. However, every now and then in this book she’ll lay down a word like primeval, as in her tale about her great uncle, Joe Manier, The Klondike Gold Rush, or she’ll write French language place-names in her dream-tale about being in Paris with dad, The Dream Letter. I suspect she found a dictionary or travel atlas for those. Unschooled yes, but a quick learner and a reader!

For me the task was to try to serve mom’s wishes that she not appear like an illiterate rube, of which she was very self-conscious, so I’ve made corrections as I have seen a need but also have tried to keep her voice here, not insert mine. Mom reviewed and okayed the vast majority of these corrections. This is her life and her version of it, not mine. I’ve never meddled with the substance of her stories.

In them you’ll see her sensitive, even romantic heart and learn how throughout her life she had to negotiate the pains of living, loving and losing. Of course, you’ll also see her angry, frustrated and lonely side. For the most part she wrote like she talked: emotions often raw and on the surface, making little effort to hide her feelings. My view is that mostly mom faced her demons well, no matter her frustrations at the time, wrestling with the difficult choices that are not always clear or simple in the turmoil and rush of the decisions.

The stories accomplish what mom wanted: to preserve people she loved and how she chose to remember them, and herself, for her descendents and anyone else interested. However, they did something else: they made my father write his own life’s story. Paranoid and depressed in the spring of 1996, dad discovered that mom had been writing her life story when he found an envelope from me with the revised manuscript in a drawer, the envelope addressed to Arlynn and John Knight.

A few weeks later when I was visiting from Wisconsin, he asked How long has this been going on, Pete? He plopped the envelope and the stories on the dining room table in front of me.

Oh, about twenty years. Didn’t you know? Don’t you guys talk? I joked.

Not much, I guess.

Two weeks later I began to get mailed installments of his life story. He wanted me to manage it the same way that I’d managed mom’s. I did. I just didn’t know how short a time I’d have to work with him. But that’s another story, and that follows my mother’s.

Noteworthy, however, is that a couple of months after dad’s death I was in Fort Wayne helping mom, and I had dad’s rough manuscript with me. Mom wanted to know what I was reading at the dining room table, our family coffee-and-conversation gathering place, so I told her it was dad’s story. Of course she hadn’t know that he was writing one!

Can I read it? she asked.

I don’t see why not. Not like he’s going to object, I joked.

So she took the manuscript, and I went over to my brother Mike’s house for the night.

Next morning I was back at mom’s drinking coffee after breakfast, and she laid dad’s manuscript on the table. She obviously had spent the night reading it because she a variety of colored sticky-notes jutting out from its edges.

She opened the paper stack to one sticky-note, jabbed her right index finger on a line and said, This didn’t happen like this!

It was your father, not he or John. That meant this was serious.

I read the passage, then looked up at mom and said, It did to him. If you have a different version, write it. She never did send me alternative versions to that incident in dad’s story, graciously backing away from her chance once again to have the last word.

All her life mom was a talkative woman; she talked a lot, often driving a subject into sound without sense until everyone was worn down hearing it. When I first took my new girlfriend (later my wife, Linda) to meet my parents, she was annoyed that when mom talked, the family men, including me, would often continue to read newspapers or carry on converesations. How rude, Linda thought. After a few months around the Knight house, she understood that mom would continue to talk whether anyone listened or not. She needed to verbalize, and she did. I doubt any of us were proud of our behavior, but the words kept coming, no matter what we did, so we just ignored a lot of the word-flow. She had a lot of trouble letting go of gripes, and it contributed to dad’s desire to be on the golf course—quietly, and by himself. As he explains in his story, inherently he was a shy man and learned early as a boy the restorative gifts of nature and silence. Sadly mom’s need to talk also made her three sons less enthusiastic visitors home as adults since generally we could anticipate something stuck in her craw and being talked to madness after we were there for a while. On the up-side, no doubt this incessant need to talk kept these stories alive as she told and retold them to anyone who would listen. How I wish I could hear her voice today.

Editing mom’s autobiography inevitably put us into conflicts, and what follows is the result of some heated discussions. In fairness, however, mom usually conceded to me the high ground. My education and job as an English professor carried some weight in such arguments. That said, mom and I developed all that follows over nearly thirty years of letters, telephone and nose-to-nose conversations, and collaboration.

A few explanations about the form of the contents are in order. When mom dated a story, I have noted that date in brackets at the end of the story; if she wrote a couple versions, I’ve noted the original dates of the versions. I’ve done so in order to give the reader an idea of the time and devotion that mom gave to this project. Most of the stories about her ancestors and her childhood originated in the 1970s and, given four inter-state moves for my family over thirty years plus generations of computer platforms and programs, I no longer have some of the original manuscripts, just some faded dot-matrix print-outs of the earliest ones.

The footnotes, I hope, are informative and not intrusive or distracting. They provide data and information about mom’s and dad’s family members, or they attempt to add explanatory information since sometimes a context is needed to understand a situation that they are describing. Some notes spot where their memory of dates and places was foggy but which they never corrected. Finally, the dating information might be useful to any who are interested in our family. In addition, our family’s genealogical data and photographs are on my Ancestry website (www.ancestry.com) and open to anyone. Please share, borrow and pass it on to other family history collectors.

Section headings are mine as are the arrangements of each chapter. As mom’s collection was developing, I sent mom the accumulated manuscript once a year, and she asked me to put the tales in order. Some stories she titled; others came without one. For the latter I am responsible although she approved most of my suggested titles.

The Letter section is my doing. I found leftover letters and believe they offer insights into this complex woman whose love for her family was profound.

The photographs were selected to put faces to family people and events, not to provide any comprehensive visual coverage of the family. Neither space nor resources allow that luxury. That said, the photographs should supplement the stories at critical spots, especially ones like the large Palmer Family Reunion with its extensive albeit incomplete identifying information.

Any remaining mistakes are mine.

This all should have been done years ago. At first, following dad’s suicide and then mom’s death, I just didn’t want to get back into their hearts and heads. I needed some emotional distance, so I tucked this away and avoided finishing the job I’d promised them. After a few years working abroad, then keeping busy with a variety of obligations, I had a little more time to turn back to this. I began with dad’s, the more disordered manuscript, the most painful to deal with. That done, I came back to this one and found more letters from mom tucked into an expandable folder. Out they came to be entered in the right spots. By now, of course, she was gone, so I spent considerable time checking the information from the new entries against old ones, seeking historical and genealogical information and other sources to verify aspects of her stories. Many times I wished both of them here to answer questions that I cannot solve. As mom would say, Ain’t that always how it is?

Mom was right, of course: finally, all we have is the story. To both of you, through your writings you still live. We miss you.

I hope readers will enjoy these tales from two common, everyday, blue-collar Hoosiers. In their common ways they were extraordinary, uncommon people. Certainly recent shifts in research and publications give more weight to the common person’s role in how we understand our history, so perhaps their stories add to our larger understanding of all of our pasts and insights into human behavior.

Finally, my thanks to my wife, Linda, for her loving support through this long and drawn-out labor of love. She’s always understood why I had to finish it. To my brothers, Michael and Patrick, thanks for your input and support. Michael, you especially were there with mom and dad, dealing with the daily annoyances, enduring the aggravations, being a loving, helping, supportive son to the very end. Please know how much we love you for that perseverance and presence.

Now, mom’s story.

Arlynn

PREFACE

An artist paints the beautiful garden as he sees it—depth, color, light and shadows. He tries to make people see what he sees. But in writing, the author must use words to create those life images and make a person understand every word, every sentence about a time he has lived. The reader must feel that he is there, in the story, just as the writer lived his life—the laughter, the tragedy, the hopelessness, the loneliness, the fear of being alone, the empty days and nights, the feeling of not being needed any more, in other words, living out what years or days he has left alone.

The generation gap may put the reader at a loss to understand the older generation. To that younger generation this story may be like a child of six years trying to understand a novel by Charles Dickens.

This is what I am struggling with. I try to write my life story, try to tell this story as I lived it. The story may be too primitive for the younger generation to understand. I hope this story won’t be too boring since I don’t have much knowledge about writing. I look up words in the dictionary that I have forgotten how to spell. I hope I’m not wasting my time or the reader’s.

I often wonder as I reread and rewrite if I’m getting down the real meaning of the life I lived as I lived it. Do my words mean what I’m trying to say? Do the words of frustration, hopelessness, despair and joy really tell those emotions? Or the feeling of having a befuddled mind, of trying to think when in reality, the shock of my husband’s suicide left me for a time with a blank slate of a mind.[2] Or the pressure of having to face the responsibility of running a house when I never even knew how much the phone bill was. Or the nightmare that woke me up again and again at four o’clock in the morning, the cold sweat, the screaming. How can I ever write this, give this what I want to, the meaning and effect it had on me? I get so frustrated with my mistakes. I stop, but I do pick up the paper and try again.

How do I make this interesting?

I hope my sons and grandchildren will enjoy my life story. What we were in life, how we lived, our tragedies, our accomplishments, the courage to cope in failures and go forwards as long as we have a breath in our bodies, and finally to be able to leave behind all of these memories for those who follow us, to show our families that we made a little bit of history ourselves—that’s why I’ve been writing all of this. I hope that everyone will be able to understand how I lived; otherwise, without this story, they never will know what the past lives of their grandmother and her people were like. If the future is built on the past, then we ought to leave our children and their children some record of that past.

I have lost so much of my father’s and mother’s pasts that I would have treasured—just one more hint that I would have treasured. When they are gone, that knowledge is gone, and there is no way of knowing more about who they really were, who you really are, and that’s an empty feeling, a lonely part of one’s life, making our parents strangers—you lived with them but didn’t really know them.

That’s why I’m trying to tell my story—to fill in some of the pieces about me so that Pete, Mike and Pat and their children and grandchildren will have some small idea of who I was, who they all were who went before us. Trying to do this is hard and confusing for me, a pretty uneducated person. I hope this comes out good for all of those who will ever read it. [2-17-88]

I’m trying to live in the present as I write about the past; some of it I want to forget. I try to write about today, not yesterday, but I often think that my writing is wasting time, the little time I may have left of my life. I ask myself why I write at all with so little knowledge of how to write. So far I have not found the answer. Maybe someone will answer that question for me some day. Until then, I just keep writing. [6-10-99]

INTRODUCTION

So that the reader will understand why this child, Mary Ann Arlynn Swope Knight, growed up and got into trouble so much, as I see it now I was raised with seven adults, and these people could not replace the young people I needed to keep me busy. As my Grandmother Anna Manier Palmer said, One cannot put adult heads on young children. This is true; Grandmother came from a large family.[3] I remember standing near the window, watching the rain, and I was so lonely I cried; many a time I didn’t know what I was crying about. I had children to play with outdoors, but Dad[4] worked nights and had to sleep days so I couldn’t invite them into our house. The rest of the folks were working and were too tired to entertain me after work.

No doubt this is why I remember Grandmother so well. She sat down because of her swollen bad leg that had holes in it[5] and held me. I was one child that needed someone to play with who had the energy I had.

Mother had no trouble with me when I had someone to play with. I would do anything just to have someone to play with, and the kids knew this and took advantage of it. It’s pitiful, as I see now. I never heard a baby cry; I never seen brothers and sisters fight. I spent money on the children that I played with, then they would run away from me. I cried many a time. I was sent to home more than once because I would wait outdoors for children when they ate their meals, me outside bothering the parents. I had many toys and talked to my dolls a lot. This is why I gave my cat such a rough time. Idleness is the devil’s playhouse, an old saying from Grandmother. Dad gave me tap-dancing lessons, violin lessons, ballet, even elocution lessons, but no one knew that I just really needed someone my own age. I said many a time I would never raise an only child, but this is just what the doctors told me would happen when my first son, John Howard (Pete),[6] was born: this woman will not have another child.

Since this was the case, I made up my mind that he would never be lonely. He was mine, and I would never leave him; he would enjoy children, even if I had to take him where there were children, and this I did, mostly at the old playground in Franke Park near Spy Run Creek. We just about wore the wheels off of that old stroller going back and forth from Dad’s house on Hofer Street to Franke Park. Well, that trip but also up Goshen to State Street to Wells, and then one block to old Miller’s Drug Store and its soda fountain; Pete loved chocoloate ice cream sundays, so we made lots of trips to Mr. Miller’s for those. We had very little money, but our days were full of love, laughter and learning about books since he so loved to be read to.

Like some children he was afraid of falling when he started to walk. I held out my hands to him so that he knew I was there to keep him from falling, and I repeated over and over, You can do it. With his first step he ran into my arms. That first step gave him, just like his two brothers who did the same thing with me, the courage to go into the Navy out of high school and then to Indiana University, Brown University and Notre Dame to become what he is today, a Doctor of English literature, a college professor and an academic dean.

Then, against all the doctors’ advice, Michael Joseph came along soon after John came home from WW II.[7] He was a live one—blonde and blue eyed, full of vinegar and busy as a mad bee. Like his older brother Mickey Joe went into the military after high school and then to Indiana University and became a soils’ testing scientist. Then, eight years later, Patrick Paul[8] surprised us, and later he too went from high school to the Air Force, like Mickey, and then to Oklahoma State University and became a fire safety engineer and safety manager.

They make me so proud, so in spite of all the sadness lately, my three sons, their wives and my grandchildren tell me I’ve had a good life overall.

This is a story of a little girl growing up alone, very lonely, vulnerable and naïve. It’s a story about her life with her loved grandmother and grandfather, her own mother, her Uncle Joe Palmer, Aunt Rose, and her father, a man who gave her so much in life and who she has never forgotten or stopped loving. It’s about the people she grew up with at Precious Blood Grade School, about her neighbors, her own family after she married; her trials, mistakes, her influence on her sons’ lives and people’s influence on hers; about her upbringing, who to trust, to care about, and how not to be selfish; about how to put aside her goals in time of the needs of others, and to help folks in need. This little girl was going to set the world on fire without a match. She was going to make something of herself. Little did she know how naïve she was, only one of her mistakes. She learned that she had to make many decisions that would affect the lives of others, sometimes against her real desires, for her father, her mother and her family. This is a story about her regrets, her triumphs and seeing her sons achieve an education that she never did. This is about her tears of rejection from folks she trusted when she needed their help. Mostly this is a story about love, hate, trust and distrust. This is the story about the person she was and the person she is today.

So this is my story and the story of those who loved me and those who I have loved and still love. It’s not very complicated, and I hope any reader will find something worthwhile in it. [2-17-88]

GRANDFATHER’S STORIES

At this time of the year, autumn, when I walk in dry leaves and crisp air with the fall colors all around me, I remember the stories my Grandfather, Joe Palmer,[9] told every year to all of the kids I grew up with. I smile to myself as I recall how fascinated we all were as we listened to the way the old man spun out these yarns. Even now, as I tell them to my grandchildren and watch their faces and wide eyes, as they listen to me, I know I’m bringing some of the past back to the present. This they otherwise would never know; some things never change, even with time. These yarns may or may not be true; each year Grandfather may have added to them, and maybe I have too. Even so, either way, as I enjoyed them, and my children enjoyed them, so now are their children doing so. I am not a writer, but I will do my best in retelling these tales so that they won’t be lost in the past, as so many things have a way of doing. I hope the reader will enjoy them as much as the people do when I tell them. And I hope a little of what my Grandfather was to me and my young friends will come through yet one more retelling.

The Muck Lantern—A Halloween Story

Late in October the weather in northern Indiana is at its best for ghost stories and tales of goblins, witches and the mystery of the unknown.

The children in grandfather’s days of growing up made their own recreation; they did not have radio, let alone TV, or even much trick or treating because the farms were far apart and the kids had lots of chores to do even at night. So they made up exciting things to do on their own. In the 1880s the people were very superstitious; parents told their children, Don’t walk under a ladder; it’s bad luck. Or if a black cat crossed in front of someone, it was thought to be a bad omen. I think some of this came from the past of witchcraft, superstition and plain old ignorance. My grandfather’s boyhood home was on a 80-acre farm in Pleasant Township, Indiana.[10] So the nine boys and their three sisters had to help after school at night. In those days the farms were bordered by large wooded areas because much of the woods were still being cleared off the land. The children walked miles to the one-room school with one teacher for eight grades.[11] In late October it was close to dark when they got home.

Late in the fall, when the sun set early, about dusk time they had to pass an old graveyard near the dirt road but back a ways in the woods that were on both sides of their road home. Folks told the children never to go into the graveyard because a long time ago a man was buried in the woods, and he had come back to life. So the graveyard was never used after that because someone had seen a person, or a person’s ghost, back along the creek that bordered the woods of the cemetery. From a long lack of attention the graves’ headstones were broken down; others were leaning over or sideways from being knocked down or just sinking into the wet, soft, dark Indiana ground.

So the boys always ran past the woods as fast as they could, not taking any chances on the way home from school, especially when it started to get dark early about the time of Halloween.

One day the older boys made a dare to the younger ones. On the night of Halloween all who were brave enough would go into the woods to see if the story of the ghost was true. They had to go on Halloween because everybody worth anything knew that was the best night to find a ghost, that on All Hallows Night the spirits of the dead walked the earth.

So it was settled. All of the boys, big and small, would be in the old cemetery woods. No girls allowed!

After dark when the boys had all of their chores done, they left home and scruffed along the dusty dirt road to the woods. The evening was brisk, dotted by moonlight sifting its way through the deep shadows of the pin oaks, black walnuts, cottonwoods and sycamores lining the banks of the creek and bordering the woods. The dappled moonlight made the tombstones look larger than a good-sized man. As the moon rose higher through the tree branches, the breeze began to play in the trees, knocking small branches against one another, breaking off twigs that fell to the ground, adding to the creaking sounds of the huge, gnarled trees. As the swishing of the branches increased, the boys clumped closer together to protect one another from the sounds and from the things that were out there, as my Grandfather used to say.

My Grandfather had an old rusty kerosene lantern, but as he held it up, the breeze made the flame waver and the light flicker, and the light just shined harder and sharper right into his own eyes, half blinding him to the path ahead. He put his hand over the top of the lantern to stop the effects of the wind, but his hand got hot and he had to let the wind play with the light. That, of course, made the shadows in the woods do even stranger things, dancing between darkness and light.

Soon some of the younger boys got scared and said that they didn’t want to go into the woods any farther. They didn’t care what it was that everyone was so scared of in that old graveyard woods, and they didn’t care any more if their older brothers called them chicken. Of course, without their older brother, Joe, who had the lamp, they sure weren’t going to try to find their way out of the