Dear Woman of My Dreams

By Lois Kathryn Herr

Dear Woman of My Dreams is Kathryns 1923 diary, covering her nineteenth year. This coming-of-age story is told in her own words as she goes about her daily life at college with her friends and with her mother and grandmother at home. She writes to the woman that she sees as herself in later years, and the book closes with a brief chapter based on letters and the diary Kathryn wrote when she was one hundred years old. All this has been creatively edited by her daughter to include enough material for the reader to follow both the cross-country train trip that Kathryn and her grandmother took in the summer of 1923 and the various details of time and place that one would not necessarily find in a diary. Illustrations and references link four generations of strong women, and the work is based on an extensive family archive. This is the first in a series of stories based on the women of this family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514489079

Lois Kathryn Herr

World-traveled but deeply rooted in Pennsylvania, Lois Kathryn Herr documents the lives of real people. In 2009, she published Dear Coach: Letters Home from World War II about her father and his athletes. Currently she is working on real-life fiction based on letters, journals, pictures, and other memorabilia from her mother’s family. Dear Woman of My Dreams is the first in this series. Herr majored in English at Elizabethtown College and the University of Pennsylvania then received an MBA from Fordham. She forged a successful twenty-six-year business career with Bell Laboratories, AT&T, New York Telephone, and NYNEX. In 2003, based on her experiences in telecommunications, Herr published Women, Power, and AT&T: Winning Rights in the Workplace, documenting the 1970 EEOC case against AT&T. That case established affirmative action in corporate America, and her book describes the individuals and the adventures that went into making it happen.

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Copyright © 2016 by Lois Kathryn Herr.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016906996

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5144-8905-5

                Softcover       978-1-5144-8906-2

                eBook            978-1-5144-8907-9

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.

This is a work of creative non-fiction in which names, characters, places, and incidents are retained as those known to the diary writer.

Last names were removed and editorial changes were made, but very effort was made by the author to remain true to the diary writer's intent and to reflect the relationships as she described them.

All images are the property of the author.

Rev. date: 05/16/2016

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Family tree:

Elizabeth Smeltzer m Joseph A. Stober, Jr.

        daughter Rebecca m E.O. Hassler

                daughter Gertrude m Harper Nisley

                        daughter Kathryn

Relatives we visited on the 1923 train trip:

INDIANA -- Smeltzers

MISSOURI -- Stobers

                Ellenbergers (Hassler family)

COLORADO -- Millers (Hassler family)

CALIFORNIA -- Nisleys

OKLAHOMA -- Millers (Hassler family)

Dear Woman of My Dreams

DEAR%20WOMAN.jpg

Kathryn's Diary

Creatively Edited by Her Daughter,

Lois Kathryn Herr

Preface

* The Women *

Elizabeth Smeltzer Stober (1833--1875) and her husband, Joseph A. Stober Jr. (1834), had thirteen children between 1854 and 1875, Rebecca being the oldest. Elizabeth kept the family together and maintained their inn, while Joseph served in the civil war. After Elizabeth's death, Joseph married Susannah Yeager and, within a few years, moved to Missouri.

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Elizabeth Smeltzer Stober with her daughters, Elizabeth, Rebecca, Lottie

Rebecca Stober Hassler (1854--1931) was twenty when she lost her mother and, ultimately, her father when he married the housekeeper, who was about the same age as Rebecca. Rebecca left home over her father's folly and the two never spoke again. A few years later, Rebecca married a widower with two small boys. E. O. Hassler and Rebecca not only farmed and raised a large family, but they were also both active in politics, local schools and government, literary societies, church events, and the new Grange movement.

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Rebecca Stober

Gertrude Hassler Nisley (1878--1955), the oldest of Rebecca's six children, convinced her farmer parents to send her to college in 1898 and subsequently graduated in 1900 from Cumberland Valley State Normal School (now Shippensburg University). She married her sweetheart, Harper Nisley, but was a wife, widow, and mother all within two years. She taught for forty years and led many organizations; Gertie became a central pillar of the extended family.

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Gertrude Hassler

Kathryn Nisley Herr (1904--2007) was born at the family farm 5 months after her father's death. Her mother, Gertrude, left her house in Harrisburg and retreated to her parents' farm for the birth and for the next 12 years until she bought a home in Progress for herself, her parents, and her daughter. Kathryn, who graduated from Lebanon Valley College in 1925, taught at the high school and college level. She lived to be 103.

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Kathryn Nisley

Part One

Kathryn's Diary

Diary: Private

To all who open this book: If you are a stranger, I ask that you, out of respect for another's private possessions, read no farther. If you are a friend or a relative, I entreat you, in the sacred name of friendship and love, not to read one word of that which I have written in pencil. This is my diary, written for my eyes alone. It contains the thoughts, dreams, and ambitions of just a girl. If you are tempted to read even one line of it, remember that I am trusting in your honor.

Kathryn Nisley

Progress, Pennsylvania

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Diary Cover and Note to Readers

March 6, 1923

10:00 pm

This is a queer time to start a diary, I know, but if I don't begin it when I have the inclination, I'm afraid it will never be written. I am writing this diary for my eyes alone, and I shall write as though I am talking to someone, and that someone shall be the woman I am going to be someday. I want to have a record of the events of my nineteenth year, the last year in which I may have the precious privilege of attaching teen to my name and age. I wonder how I shall feel when, years in the future, I turn over the pages