I Can’T Dance

By Dolores W Moore

An inspirational book depicting a life of challenges and achievements. It tells of a woman, who stricken by polio as a young child, could never dance - or run - or swim - or ride a bike - or even walk unaided.

Not willing to be cast aside as a "poor little crippled girl" she set goals for herself and worked to reach them.

What she attained by will power and determination was a life of personal satisfaction and professional accomplishment.

Read I CAN'T DANCE to learn what she could do and what she did do. It was not dance.

This is an excellent bookfor any who have a disability or who know someone who does.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 9, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469126135

Book preview

Copyright © 2012 by Dolores W Moore.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2012907077

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4691-2612-8

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4691-2611-1

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4691-2613-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

114977

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Wicklines

John Wickline

Wendell Rucker Wickline

Birth

Grandma King

1937—Move to Martha

The Call to Preach and Cars

Linville House

Trains

Mother

November 1940

Drawing

Polio Years

Labels

4-H Club

Uncle Ben

Junior High School

High School

Boyfriends

Going to College

Steps

College Graduation

BHS

Attachment to my Parents.

Ohio University

1957

Rucker

James

Proposal

Layne’s Birth

Bryan’s Birth

Job at Towson

Mother’s Death

Registration at ONU.

Living in Ada

1974

Polka Festival

Raising a Family

Lunch with Layne

Bryan

Lester

Hired at ONU

Americans with Disabilities Act

Jury Duty

Teenagers

Post-Polio

Heart Attack

Scooter

London

Grandsons

1997 Alaska

ALS

Sonny’s Visit

1998

Life since Jim

Epilogue

Preface

Grandma is old. Just ask my grandsons. They will tell you that Grandma is old. She is old and crippled. We have to carry things for her and help her walk. She had polio when she was a kid. Polio was a bad thing. Nobody gets it anymore. It is old people’s disease.

They are right, of course. Polio has been defeated but some of its victims are still around. All of them are senior citizens now. Many carry the scars from the struggle they waged just to survive.

Because of a childhood bout with polio, I have lived my life in slow motion. But like the fabled tortoise that kept plodding along to win the race, I usually got to where I planned to be. I may not have always won the race, but I always finished the course.

It occurs to me that it is what most polio patients have done. The ones I know are competitors. They always put forth their best effort. They get to the finish line and join the celebration. One even became President of the United States.

People with physical handicaps learn how to cope. They must learn that lesson if they are to succeed. Believe me when I say, They want success.

So, Slow but Sure is our mantra. We may not move as fast as others but you can take notice. We can do it. In our own time, in our own way, with motivation we will meet you at the finish line.

The story that follows is about one little girl with the determination inside that kept telling her, Yes, I can. So, she did.

Introduction

I grew up Baptist but maybe the Presbyterian theory of predestination has merit. My life has been impacted by events and circumstances that could never have been planned or anticipated for that matter. And certainly they could not be controlled. It was as if some outside force determines what was to happen, i.e. predestination.

As I tell my story you will learn how important the month of November is in my life. For good or ill, I have awesome respect for that month.

Wicklines

To understand a person you need to know some basic facts about his origin and how he became who he is. Experiences and culture influence what we become. The study of genealogy has become very much in vogue with people today as we try to understand ourselves.

Family history told to me by my father, indicates that my great grandfather, George Lewis Wickline, was a United Baptist preacher, a blacksmith, and a storekeeper. His wife was Mary Jane Bassett Wickline. My grandfather was named for his uncle, another George Lewis Wickline whose wife was Livicie. The uncle, George Wickline became rather famous for the rifle he perfected in his gun shop located in Gallia County, Ohio. For years his gun shop was on display in a farm museum exhibit at the Bob Evans Farm at Rio Grande, Ohio. A picture of the gunsmith hung on the wall of the gun shop. Unfortunately the entire shop was washed away by flooding in the late 1990’s.

The nephew, George Lewis Wickline, my great grandfather, and his wife Mary Jane ran a small one room store with a post office adjacent to a blacksmith shop at the fork of the road at Polkadotte, Ohio, in Lawrence County.

Polkadotte, Ohio, is an apt name for a spot on the map of Lawrence County, Ohio. You had to run into it by chance if you were wandering the hill country of southeast Ohio. Hardly anyone would venture there by choice unless he worked for the government in some capacity. The Callicoat Cemetery serves as the resting place of many of the pioneers who settled this section of the county. Years ago Callicoat was a familiar name there as were Harrison, Garnelle, Harmon, Fulks and Wickline.

The church at Polkadotte is unique in that it is still in use and in good repair. It is built of logs with mortar between. It has stood over a hundred years as the meeting house of United Baptists, who gathered on a Saturday night once a month for their business meeting and the fellowship of washing their neighbor’s feet in a pan of water. A man would wash a man’s foot and a woman washed a woman’s foot.

Inside the church was designed with two front doors each leading to an aisle to the front of the church. There was a section of pews in the middle of the church reaching from one door to the other. Other sets of pews extended from the aisle to the side walls on both sides. Interesting was the fact that males and females did not sit together. The middle section of pews had a divider down the middle. Women sat on the right side of the church and men on the left.

The front of the church had a raised platform with seats on the far left. This was the Amen Corner. Men who were staunch supporters of the church sat there. When they agreed with what the preacher said, they sanctioned it with a loud Amen. On the right side of the platform were seats for the choir. A pump organ sat there too and was the instrument for their music.

My great grandfather, George Wickline was ordained in that church in 1891 and was pastor there at the turn of the twentieth century. It was not unusual to have more than one preacher to preach on Sunday morning. Pastors were sometimes shared with other churches and did not preach the same place every Sunday. It was not unusual then for the service to run long when there was a preacher there.

The story is told by family members that one Sunday George was preaching a sermon that went on for a very long time. His wife, Mary Jane, spoke up in the congregation and said, That’s enough, George.

George L. Wickline, my ancestor, died in 1917 of Bright’s disease. His son, John helped Mary Jane with the store until it burned. She died in 1928. George and Mary Jane are buried in Callicoat Cemetery at Polkadotte, Ohio.

On my paternal grandmother’s side of the family, the Ruckers, preaching was a preferred vocation also. My grandmother, Jennie Rucker, was the daughter of Asa Lanty Rucker, who was a circuit rider in the Marion District of the Methodist Church in southern Ohio. He served as pastor to a number of churches in the mid-nineteenth century.

The Ruckers are buried in the Lawrence Chapel Cemetery in Lawrence County, Ohio. I can remember as a child visiting Lawrence Chapel Church that once stood beside the graveyard named for it.

John Wickline

There are a few things you are sure to find in multiple Wickline generations. These things are: using the same names in every generation, working as a smith, owning a store and being a preacher.

John William Wickline was my grandpa’s name. You can find cousins with that name too. This John was the only son of George and Mary Jane Wickline. His wife was Jennie Rucker Wickline.

To support his family, John was a school teacher. He taught in several different schools in Lawrence County, Ohio. During the time John was a school master, schools were one room structures where grades one through eight were taught. The central heat was a pot-bellied coal burning stove in the center of the room. The water fountain was a bucket with a dipper. The toilet was out back with a moon cut in the door. McGuffey was the authority on what should be included in the curriculum at each grade level and guidance counseling came on the side of an oak paddle.

John not only taught school, he was proficient in teaching church members new songs and how to read music using shaped notes. At that time hymn books were printed with shaped notes. Each note of the musical scale, do, re, mi, sol, fa, la, and ti had a different shape. When John taught a new song, the singers first learned it by learning the place on the music scale indicated by the shape and singing the notes by name rather than the song words. John would use a pitch pipe to start the tune at the correct pitch. At home Jennie would play a pump organ and gave organ lessons to pupils. So the Wickline family grew up loving and making music.

Tragedy struck the Wickline home in April, 1921. Their oldest child, a girl was twelve. Five other children followed at two year intervals. Jennie was due to bear another child that spring. Something went wrong. In that era children were born at home. A woman was fortunate if a doctor was able to attend the birth. As it happened, a doctor was there when Jennie gave birth to another son, called Fred. But things did not go well. An infection developed and Jennie could not recover.

The family lived in a two story home with a hallway dividing the first floor down the middle. Stairs to the second floor were located in this hallway. Jennie lay in her bed in the room on the right at the front of the house. At bedtime Wendell started to go up to his bedroom and glanced in at his mom as he passed the door. Jennie saw her son and said to him, Good night, Wendell. Those were the last words he heard from his mother. The next morning she was gone. Wendell became an orphan at ten years of age.

Jennie was buried near her parents at Lawrence Chapel Cemetery near Rappsburg, Ohio. For many years Wendell took his family to visit her grave on Memorial Day.

Wendell Rucker Wickline

This part of my story is about Wendell Rucker Wickline, late of Salt Rock, West Virginia, the man I called Daddy.

Wendell was born in March, 1911, in Proctorville, Ohio, to John William and Jennie Rucker Wickline. He had one older sister, Mabel, and was the second son to be born in this family. However, the first son died at birth and was buried in Callicoat Cemetery at Polkadotte, Ohio. Therefore, Wendell assumed the role of oldest brother in the family. There was one more girl and three more boys born to John and Jennie Wickline. The family moved from Proctorville on the Ohio River to the hill country near Scottown to a spot called Polkadotte.

A few months after the children’s mother died in 1921, John remarried. His second wife was