Pieces of a Life

By Diane Kellogg Pellettiere

You see two very different families, the Merediths and the Kelloggs, when Ruth and John meet in 1926. You watch their recent family history unfold, centering on their parents and grandparents. Ruth's early diaries and John's autobiography form the underpinnings of their story.

Ruth at twenty and John at twenty-seven are from different worlds. John Webb Kellogg was born into wealth, son and grandson of engineers in Buffalo, New York. John's money and future disappear, it seems, when his father dies, leaving little but a sixteen-room house to his second wife, a young Irishwoman, and their two children, John and Dorothy. John is driven to succeed, much like the Scottish-English Kelloggs who preceded himimpatient, quick-tempered. He feels cheated out of the lifestyle he enjoyed as a child. He works his way through the University of Michigan, riveted on making money and living well.

Just out of Austin High in Chicago, Ruth Viola Meredith is a sweet, kind girl who worked very hard to graduate. She loves making clothes, going to movies, and playing games with her girlfriends. She dreams about a steady beau, but no one appears. Ruth, her brother, Jimmie, and her parents live in blue-collar Austin, a neighborhood on the west side of Chicago. Her father came from a farm in Berrien County, Michigan, as a young man. Her mother's side came from the East Coast in the mid-1800s. Ruth's roots are English, Dutch, and Welsh.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Inspiring Voices
• Release date: Sep 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9781462407583

Diane Kellogg Pellettiere

Diane Meredith Kellogg Pellettiere was born on Chicago’s west side, moving to Oak Park at the age of five. She has a journalism degree from the University of Illinois. Diane and her husband, Dan, have lived in Palatine, Illinois, since 1971. They have three daughters, two granddaughters, and two sons-in-law.

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Copyright © 2013 Diane Kellogg Pellettiere.

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ISBN: 978-1-4624-0727-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4624-0758-3 (e)

Inspiring Voices rev. date: 9/11/2013

Contents

Pieces of A Life

A Glimpse of Ruth’s Roots

A Picture From the Past

Looking at Austin’s Beginnings

Ruth -1925

Ruth - 1926

John - Growing Up

Autumn, 1974 – 75 Years – Where Did They Go?

In Ruth’s Words – 1929

Newlyweds Ruth & John

John’s View of Married Life & the Great Depression

Notes & Bits of Ruth’s Diary from the 1940’s On

Diane’s Reflections

Pieces of A Life

June 16, 1996

My mother died at one o’clock this morning. She was three weeks from her 90th birthday, but unaware of that—and almost everything else—lost in the thickening cloud of Alzheimer’s that descended in her 70s. The hospital staff said she had appeared asleep, but was no longer inhabiting that small, frail body, a shell of the one she’d had when I was a child. Not that she was obese at 40 and 50, but pleasantly plump, as my father would have said, giggling from behind his hand, his eyes tearing with the humor of his remark.

This is the story of Ruth and her family, illuminated by her diaries and her husband’s brief autobiography at the age of 75. In those last ten years of her life she slowly disintegrated, both in mind and body. Of course, the downward spiral had started long before when she left her parents’ home to marry. Who Ruth was—and could become—changed on that day. From then on her light-hearted spirit eroded as though a rushing river were wearing it away, bit by bit. Much later she knew the price she had paid for decades of living with a very controlling man, someone narrowly focused on himself and whatever he wanted.

Who was this woman? I thought I knew, but perhaps not without the insight of her diaries. Then again, it’s hard to see your mother as a separate, distinct person. She is blurred by time and the perspective of a child.

A Glimpse of Ruth’s Roots

A baby girl, my mother, was born three or four weeks premature to a blue-collar family on Chicago’s West Side on July 5, 1906. Tired of being pregnant, young Lottie Meredith talked husband Jim into taking her on a bumpy carriage ride on July 4th. Lottie was only 19. Off they went in the heat, heading west toward open prairie and the small towns clinging to the railroad tracks running out of bustling Chicago.

After an hour in the jostling carriage, Lottie said, I hope this will make the baby come quick. I don’t want to wait until the end of July.

Alarmed, Jim turned around and they headed back home, leaving the fields, farms and sprinkling of small towns behind. Soon they were back in Chicago, the wheels spewing dust from the hot, dry July weather. It was Independence Day, so it seemed that everyone was out and about.

Lottie’s plan worked. She did go into labor. The following day Ruth Viola Meredith was born with the help of a midwife. Because Ruth was so small—under five pounds—Lottie greased her and kept her in a warm coal oven with the door ajar for the first weeks of her life. Perhaps the midwife had suggested it. Lottie’s mother had died when she was nine.

Since pouring through Ruth’s diaries, I’ve wondered if that strange start in life was linked to the memory problems she had in school and later the crushing blow of Alzheimer’s. Did having a coal oven for a crib play a part?

Ruth was named for her two grandmothers, Ruth Olmstead Meredith and Viola Hawley Weekes. Her mother was blonde, blue-eyed Carlotta Lola Lucretia Weekes and her father was James B. Meredith, age 25. (He had no middle name, so added the B., for his Maryland-born grandfather, Benjamin Meredith.) At five feet seven inches, Jim was just three inches taller than Lottie and echoed her coloring. They went on to have one other child, James William, in 1911.

Lottie and Jim met through church, a key place to find a mate over a hundred years ago. They came from different parts of the country, both with troubled families.

Jim spotted Lottie when she walked in. The Baptist church had a small congregation, so a pretty new face with bright blue eyes wreathed in thick, long blonde hair stood out. Wearing a pale pink dress, Lottie looked to Jim like a dream come true. He had moved down from a farm in Berrien County, Michigan, got a job in Chicago and, at 24, was eager to marry. Lottie was standing with another woman, her friend Martha Miller.

Hello, Martha, he said, walking up to the two women. "I see that you’ve brought a guest.

Hello, Jim, I’d like you to meet Lottie Weekes. She has just moved into my neighborhood.

How do? said Lottie, smiling and gently taking the arm Jim offered to go up a few stairs into the sanctuary. Martha Miller trailed them, sitting with them as they got acquainted before the minister stepped up to the pulpit.

I am fine—and so glad to see a new face, especially a pretty one, said Jim. He winked and smiled, not wanting to seem too forward.

I haven’t been in a Baptist church before, but thought I would go with Martha to see what it was like. It’s so close to where I live with my father and brother.

Oh, has your mother passed on?

Yes, in 1896. She was only 38. Two of my brothers have died too, one as a baby and another as a boy.

Within a year, they had married.

Lottie was born in Chicago. Her parents had come west, flowing with the river of migration from the East Coast in the 1850s. Lottie’s mother, Viola Hawley, was originally from New York or New Jersey, arriving in Illinois as a small child. She rode west with her mother, Mary Lewis Hawley, her older sister, Laura, and Laura’s husband, Joseph Cornell, who worked for the railroad. Mary was in middle age and without her husband. The Hawleys and Cornells lived in Clinton, Iowa before Mary and Viola moved on to Chicago.

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Mrs. Millard, Jimmie and Lottie Meredith at 5351 Monroe St., Chicago in 1917. Lottie lived with Mrs. Millard for four years after her mother’s death.

On the other side, Jim Meredith was from southwestern Berrien County, Michigan near Niles. His father, Nathaniel, and his grandmother, Esther Ann Pullman Norton Lyons Meredith, had moved up to Michigan from Illinois by 1860, just in time for him to fight in the Civil War. Born in Maryland in 1801, Nathaniel’s father, Benjamin, was an Army man. He had fought in the Seminole War—which was also known as the Florida War—as well as the Black Hawk War in northwestern Illinois. Benjamin, a wheelwright, was one of the soldiers who accompanied Black Hawk to Washington D.C. after he was caught with his tattered band of women, children, and old men.

How I would love to have Benjamin’s reflections on that trip to the East! Was he sympathetic toward Black Hawk? Fearful? How interesting that Ben made wheels and fixed wagons in the Army for a living. His grandson and great-grandson were also very able at making and fixing things with their hands.

After his tour of duty ended in Missouri in the late 1830s, Benjamin stayed in the West. At 37, Ben and Esther Pullman, who had been married twice before, settled in western Illinois’ Hancock County on the Mississippi River. Had Ben served with one or both of Esther’s husbands? Twelve years younger, Esther was born in 1813 in Spafford, New York. I wouldn’t be surprised if Ben had had another wife earlier in his life.

In the late 1990s husband Dan and I visited the southern area of Hancock County near the Adams County line where the Merediths had lived 150 years earlier. I half expected to see an old house or barn, at least some remnants of the Merediths so many years earlier. Sadly, there was a dilapidated, abandoned gas station and little else.

Hancock County is best known for a town named Nauvoo where the Mormons settled, built a large, prosperous city and then fled for their lives to escape the wrath of the local citizenry. Both jealous and fearful, the local folks didn’t understand them. The Mormons trekked on to Iowa and parts west.

Jim’s mother’s family had come from upstate New York in the mid-1800s. His mother, Ruth Parks Olmstead, spent time in at least one mental institution in Michigan. Was it just a menopausal issue or something more severe and permanent? I remember my grandmother telling me how her mother-in-law would throw playing cards in the fireplace because she thought card games were sinful. It probably wasn’t so unusual then, especially among Baptists.

That long-ago Ruth was a four-foot, nine-inch woman whose big stick was her anger. Jim’s brother, Arthur, also had some mental issues, the picture of what they were shadowed. This wasn’t something you discussed back then or even when I was a child. There was a stigma, as though that family’s roots were tainted. If you didn’t speak of them, perhaps the raised voices and hallucinations would fade away or friends would pretend not to notice the craziness.

A Picture From the Past

But back to Mother…How can I describe her? I see old pictures in my mind’s eye. One is a sepia-toned photograph of a woman and two young children, sitting on a dark brown mohair couch that I remember well. On her lap is a roly-poly one-year-old girl wearing a dainty white dress with puff sleeves. Her wispy white blonde hair is very short. She looks absorbed in watching the cameraman or perhaps a toy he is holding. It’s me, Diane.

Next is my brother, Ken, age six, who is also blonde and blue-eyed. He wears a striped shirt, short dark velvet pants with wide straps over the shoulders and looks somewhere between bored and annoyed. Perhaps whatever toy the cameraman was holding was much too young for him. He’s not wearing glasses yet.

The third person is my mother, who looks so pretty, slim and young. Her dark blonde hair is stylishly short and wavy. The bodice and abbreviated, full sleeves of her dress are made of a light-colored filmy, lacy fabric. The lower part of the dress is dark velvet. It’s 1937 and she is 31 years old, married eight years, living upstairs in the two-flat her parents owned in Austin, due west of downtown Chicago on the border of suburban Oak Park.

The contrast between that picture and another taken in the mid-1940s is startling. You’d wonder if this were the same woman. She had gained weight—perhaps 15 pounds—quite a bit for her five-foot, one-inch, small-boned frame. Always buxom, she looks much heavier through her whole mid-section as well as in her now-plump face. She’s wearing a light-colored toast brown dress that I remember. It was fitted in the bodice, belted with a full pleated skirt. Her hair is in the popular up-do style. She’s sitting on a couch in the living room in Oak Park, still smiling, but not as relaxed as in the earlier picture. She looks so much older. It’s 1944 and she’s 38 years old, married 15 years.

SCAN02.jpg

Ruth (31), Diane (1) and Ken (6) seated on a brown

mohair couch, 5458 Iowa St. in Chicago, 1937.

Why would she appear so different? We’re going to look for the answers in her diaries. Sometimes it’s hard to sort out the cast of characters in the entries, but what emerges in the early years—late teens, early twenties—is a happy girl who was young for her years. She loved to go to the movies, to follow the lives of movie stars, to read stories in magazines, to go to school clubs and church functions. She and her good friend, Wanda, would sometimes dance together just for fun. On the other side of the coin, Ruth was worried about school because it wasn’t easy for her.

Looking at Austin’s Beginnings

So you can picture the setting, Ruth grew up in Austin, a neighborhood on the far west side of the city of Chicago, nine miles from the Loop downtown. (The Loop is one of 77 officially designated community areas located in the city and got its name from the two-mile circuit of elevated railroad known as the El that forms the hub of the rapid transit system in Chicago.) For most of the years since the Ice Age withdrew, Indians had occupied the area. They avoided the swamps and sand dunes, favoring the rivers and higher land. French explorers visited the area off and on from the late 1600s into the 1700s.

In 1835 Henry De Koven obtained title to 280 acres of land that would later include Austin. (If his name sounds familiar, it may be because a street in downtown Chicago named for him was where Mrs. O’Leary and her famous cow resided.) A few farmers moved into the area and cleared the land, but no community developed until the arrival of a group of families from Cicero Corners, New York, in the 1850s. They lived in a six-mile square area from Western Avenue west to Harlem Avenue and from North Avenue south to 39th Street. It included present-day Cicero, Austin, Oak Park and Berwyn.

Chicago grew rapidly, swallowing up small towns. The Austin community was developed in 1865 by a man named Henry Austin. His vision was homes on wide tree-lined parkways and gracious living. Very little of the modern day Austin reflects his dream. By 1874 there were 1,000 residents, thanks to steadily improving suburban railroad service—which Ruth later used to go shopping and see the movies downtown.

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The Meredith family in 1914: Jim, Jimmie (3), Lottie and Ruth(8).

When the Merediths moved there in the early 1900s, Austin had been annexed by Chicago. They bought a two-flat that was originally a house, it was said, and the oldest one on the block. It was pale tan-yellow stucco on the outside. As a child, I can remember running my hand over its rough texture. The powerful musty, damp smell of the stone basement with its low ceiling was overwhelming. Outside in the back yard next to the house were two angled doors that opened upward, revealing steps that took you down into the basement. There was no other entrance.

Austin attracted upwardly-mobile Germans and Scandinavians at first, followed by Irish and Italian families. By the time Ruth was in high school, Greek families were appearing in the neighborhood. Many years later, my best friend during high school lived in an apartment in south Oak Park. She and her family had moved from Austin. Her father, born in Greece, moved to Canada and down to the United States later. In the politically-rigid McCarthy era, he was on a government watch list because of his Socialist leanings. His wife was nice to me, but I always had the feeling that her husband disliked what I represented—a business-owning, entrepreneurial family with a house, two cars and an overbearing self-made-man for a father.

The original small Austin village became both heavily-populated and diverse. There were brick or frame two-flats, small frame houses, brick bungalows in the area where Ruth lived and larger apartment buildings, three-flats and row houses farther south in Austin. By 1930 over 131,000 people lived in the Austin neighborhood.

The Meredith’s two-flat offered a way to earn additional money, though tenants came and went often. That extra apartment also meant extra work. Papa worked at Western Electric, Mama was a homemaker and the two children, Ruth and Jimmie, were in school. Ruth was 18½ and Jimmie was 13½ when this diary begins.

Ruth’s diaries had started before she met John. She seems open and carefree in her 1925 diary, unfortunately written in faded red pencil. It says Priscilla 1925 Diary on the once-red leather cover, now blackened with age. It came from a store called The Fair, Chicago, Illinois, according to the first page. Ruth was a junior in high school when she entered the first lines. She reveals more about her thoughts and feelings in her early diaries than she did later on. She may have become concerned that someone would read this, delving too far into her life—and here we are.

Ruth -1925

New Years Day – Thurs., Jan. 1, 1925

Alice called up about eleven o’clock this morning and we arranged to go downtown to McVickers Theatre. We took Jean with us. ‘Peter Pan’ the picture was very good. The leading part was played by Betty Bronson. We enjoyed it immensely. I got home at six o’clock and I left at one o’clock, before the goose was in the oven, so I missed New Year’s dinner. Grandpa Weeks was here when I got here. I won Jimmie a game of Ring Toss 35-30.

Years later my mother told me that she didn’t like her grandfather, William Walter Wilson Weekes. He was a carpenter earlier, but a handyman in his later years. He had lost his wife in 1896 after a six-month illness. Two of his four children, Leroy and Walter, died in 1891 and 1894. Son Lewis served in World War I, but was a victim of the terrible mustard gas. According to Lottie, he was not the same when he returned from the War. Still a young man, he lost his balance while riding on a wagon and was killed, trampled to death.

By 1925, Lottie and her family were all William Weekes had left. He rented a room in a boarding house on Aberdeen Street in Chicago and, as an old man in his 80s, did odd jobs to survive, doubtless getting money from Lottie from time to time. Maybe he was an embarrassment to Ruth—or she felt he was taking advantage of her mother. She was a teenager, unable to see past her own life to understand her grandfather’s lonely, sad path or to see past the old man to the ambitious young fellow who had come from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania so many years before, seeking his fortune in the ashes of the Chicago Fire.

Saturday, Jan. 3, 1925

"I met Grace downtown at Kimball Hall, where we played our numbers, for the recital, before a group of Mr. Watt’s students. I was very angry with myself for getting nervous, but I didn’t fall down anyway, for I went right through the piece, with Grace at the second piano.

Tonight the whole family went to the Iris Theatre at Chicago Ave., and saw ‘K, the Unknown’, which is the same story on the screen that I gave Alice for Christmas in book form. I liked it immensely."

Ruth was having a busy week. She took piano lessons from Grace Fletcher and happened to have a recital coming up in a few days. As a warm-up, Ruth played for two different groups on January 3 and 4. She had even made a new dress from copper color satin-back crepe and had new pumps and stockings. The person she mentions, Alice, was a close friend, but not a school mate.

Ruth seems so young compared to myself and my friends in 1953 when I was a junior in high school. College was the next step for most of us coming out of Oak Park High in 1954, while in Ruth’s day, it was the exceptional man or woman who would have gone to college. My husband grew up just a mile from where Ruth lived, but by 1957 when he graduated from Austin, college was a goal for many graduates.

Monday, Jan. 5, 1925

"Started back to school today and because I tried to use my brains a little I developed a headache. I was glad to get back to typewriting.

Before school Margarite Klina curled my hair at her teacher’s house across the street from Austin High. She has been doing this some time and I surely appreciate it, for she doesn’t charge anything because she is supposed to be practicing on me.

Tonight I sewed a little on my dress, and tried to break my new slippers in by wearing them around the house."

The hair curling was the deep, soft wavy Marcel style that was so popular in the ‘20s. Finally the big day came—the recital.

Thursday, Jan. 8, 1925

"This has been some day for me, for it has been one continual rush. I finished my dress this morning and showed it to Mrs. Galbraith, who let me take a pearl buckle to put on the side.

When I got home from school, I ate and dressed hurriedly. We took Mrs. Diehl with us to the Recital.

Down there Irene Fletcher and I had some time keeping the kids quiet during the recital.

I was a little nervous while playing, and in one place Grace got ahead of me, but it came out all right. Got home at 11:00. Wanda and her sister was there."

Wanda Thiel was Ruth’s best friend. I remember a sweet photo, taken in 1925 or 1926. Each girl had her arm around the waist of the other, holding her own skirt out to the side. Their heads were tilted toward each other, touching. They were two peas in a pod, silly and fun-loving. There’s another picture of Ruth in the same pose taken with another friend, Evelyn, when she was 14.

Mrs. Galbraith was the tenant upstairs in the Meredith’s two-flat. The Diehls were friends of the Merediths. Irene Fletcher was the sister of the piano teacher, Grace.

Sunday, Jan. 11, 1925

"Went to church & S.S. this morning & B.Y.P.U. and church tonight, quite religious.

Saw Loraine for first time in over a month and we had a lot to say to each other.

Tonight Elmer somebody from Judson church was at our church. I happened to know him and he me, because we were both at Grace Fletcher’s Bunco Party. Also, Louis Forman’s father was at church and spoke to us; Louis & his sister both from Judson, were at my bunco party, but Elmer was not.

As we were leaving church, Margarat said she had a nice compliment for me and will tell me tomorrow night."

Ruth went to the Austin Baptist Church. When I called my former church in Oak Park, I found out from the pastor, who was very helpful, that B.Y.P.U. is Baptist Young People’s Union. It must be a really antique designation by now. Judson Baptist was another church in the same area. Ruth doesn’t say what the compliment was, but at a Sunday School class meeting the next night, Elmer picked up Margarat and wanted to take Ruth home as well. She declined because her father was on his way to get her. Interesting how different the ubiquitous phones make the world today.

SCAN04EvelynandRuth.jpg

Posing for the camera are girlfriend Evelyn Frier(left) and Ruth at age 14, August 1920.

Friday, Jan.16, 1925

"Oh boy, I made three copies of letters in typing. Had a test in English and Ind. History.