Tapestry

By Glen Thomas and RuthAnn Hierlmeier

Our lives are like a tapestry of many colors, woven with threads of different sizes and textures that sometimes must be tied or spliced together.

Somehow, through the triumphs and tragedies of our lives, we complete our tapestry, representing who we have become. Our lives are beautiful, each in our own way. No two lives are quite alike, and the finished product is never what was first expected.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514413807

Glen Thomas

Glen Thomas and RuthAnn Hierlmeier have collaborated as coauthors on Tapestry. RuthAnn has been editor in chief on Glen’s three previously published books, as well as his pending publication of a fourth book, expected to be available in late 2015. For Tapestry, RuthAnn contributed foreword commentaries and has added poignant quotations to underscore and elevate key virtues and qualities to introduce Glen’s stories. It is their hope this book will leave a written legacy to be cherished by friends and family for generations to come. RuthAnn was born in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, and graduated from high school in Belvidere, Illinois, then graduated from Western Illinois University with a bachelor of arts degree, Eastern Michigan University with a master’s degree, and ultimately, the prestigious University of Southern California, with a doctorate of philosophy in education. Glen was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and graduated from Madison Central High School, then completed his bachelor of science degree at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, his masters of business administration at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and completed graduate studies at the Air Force Institute of Technology, and the Rutgers School of Executive Bank Management. With great joy, RuthAnn continues her lifelong commitment to teaching at Stockdale Christian School in Bakersfield, California. Glen retired in 2009 and now dedicates himself to his children, grandchildren, and his writing.

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

Glen Thomas and RuthAnn Hierlmeier have collaborated as co-authors on Tapestry. RuthAnn has been editor-in-chief on Glen’s three previously published books as well as his pending publication of a fourth book, expected to be available in late 2015. For Tapestry, their fifth book, RuthAnn contributed foreword commentaries, and has added poignant quotations to underscore and elevate key virtues and qualities to introduce Glen’s stories. It is their hope this book will leave a written legacy to be cherished by friends and family for generations to come.

RuthAnn was born in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, and graduated from high school in Belvidere, Illinois, then graduated from Western Illinois University with a Bachelor of Arts Degree, Eastern Michigan University with a Master’s Degree, and ultimately, the prestigious University of Southern California, with a Doctorate of Philosophy in Education.

Glen was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and graduated from Madison Central High School, then completed his Bachelor of Science Degree at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, his Master of Business Administration Degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and completed graduate studies at The Air Force Institute of Technology, and the Rutgers School of Executive Bank Management.

With great joy, RuthAnn continues her lifelong commitment to teaching at Stockdale Christian School in Bakersfield, California. Glen retired in 2009 and now dedicates himself to his children, grandchildren, and his writing.

Other Books by Glen Thomas and RuthAnn

We Had to Live: We Had No Choice

Xlibris, 2012

Thoughts from Yesterday: Moments to Remember

Xlibris, 2013

Honor & Innocence: Against the Tides of War

Createspace, 2013

Upcoming in 2015:

Honor & Innocence: Lazlo’s Revenge

All books available at www.amazon.com. Keyword: hierlmeier

TAPESTRY

Glen Thomas and

RuthAnn Hierlmeier

Copyright © 2015 by Glen Thomas and RuthAnn Hierlmeier.

Library of Congress Control Number:         2015916296

ISBN:         Hardcover         978-1-5144-1382-1

         Softcover         978-1-5144-1381-4

         eBook         978-1-5144-1380-7

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.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 10/12/2015

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

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CONTENTS

Author Biographies

Authors’ Note

Foreword: Trumpet Call: Long Journey Home

Foreword: The Wishing Skin

Foreword: A Golden Crown

Foreword: Special Moments

Foreword: Tv Jack

Foreword: Always Do Your Very Best

Foreword: Christmas at the Cozy Inn

Foreword: Punkin’s Elkhorn Christmas

Foreword: Crackerbox Palace

Foreword: The Glove

Foreword: The Fish Hatchery

Foreword: The Barn Fiddle

Foreword: Cap’n Eddy

Foreword: Wilderness Vision

Foreword: Ah, Those Were the Days

Foreword: Call of the Wild Trilogy

Foreword: The Fairy-Princess-In-Waiting

Foreword: Live, Laugh, Love

Epilogue

AUTHORS’ NOTE

Our lives are like a tapestry of many colors, woven with threads of different sizes and textures that sometimes must be tied or spliced together. Somehow, through the triumphs and tragedies of our lives, we complete our tapestry, representing who we have become. Our lives are beautiful, each in our own way. No two lives are quite alike, and the finished product is never what was first expected.

We like this quote from Gabriel Garcia Marquez because it captures the reality of our experiences.

What matters in life is not what happened to you,

but what you remember and how you remember it.

Some of these stories have been published in previous books, or will appear in a book yet to be published. Others are fresh and new. RuthAnn wanted to add her touch by writing the forewords and focusing on the virtues, values, and character traits exhibited in the stories. We hope each reader finds something that touches their own life or brings about an emotional pause.

____________________________

A caveat, as in our previous writing:

Perception and memory are strange companions–each believes the other is perfect. Over long years and difficult lives rife with emotion, the further one is removed from events by time and circumstance, the closer perfect perceptions and memory seem to become until each of us believes we perceived events correctly and remember them accurately.

The truth, of course, is that our perceptions become willowed, slanted this way and that by our own points of view and opinions. Memory plays tricks on all of us. As for ourselves, we can’t say whether we accurately remember the early events of our lives, or if what we really remember are the movies, photographs or accounts of others–the stories we’ve heard, or think we’ve heard. Those stories themselves are burdened with misperception, fading mental acuity, and the bias of the storyteller. We confess to all of those.

Alas! Each of us is entitled to our opinion. We cling to our personal version as if our interpretation is critical to the consistency of our lives, without which consistency we would have to reorder ourselves, a task we aren’t usually willing to undertake, fearful of where it may lead. We become comfortable with our own view of truth–it is how our mind makes sense of events and determines our emotional responses. In his book Paradise Lost, John Milton opined of truth as follows: The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, or a hell of heaven. It is our hope that this book does more of the former and less of the latter. Our desire is to find a bit of heaven in the hell of life’s tribulations—the joys amid the sorrows.

FOREWORD: TRUMPET CALL: LONG JOURNEY HOME

[Fortitude, tenacity, destiny … ancestor’s strength becomes our strength]

Some of us are fortunate enough to know our family history back several generations. Photographs, or even tintypes, of great, great … and even greater grandparents underscore how times have changed. Stories of wagon trains, log cabins, laying mile upon mile of railroad tracks, clearing woods for farm fields, and picking cotton seem unreal to us … something that history books record, but not personal. We understand that their lives were difficult, but when we know the details, our hearts yearn to know their stories.

If we look at troubles and tragedies of days gone by from our comfortable and safer perspective, we can better appreciate the tenacity, the fortitude, the courage that life demanded. Trumpet Call: Long Journey Home offers a glimpse into the adventures, tragedies, and triumphs of the Sewell family from Wabash County, Indiana. A saga that few today could imagine living. As we read, we marvel at their strength of character; we sigh with relief that we do not have to live it, as they lived, but deep inside our admiration may ignite our courage.

Our ancestors may not have felt as tenacious or courageous as we label them today. They did what they had to do to live, always seeking a better life. They lived out their hardships as did their neighbors with whatever dignity and grit they could summon; it is perhaps our duty to give them their accolades posthumously, our own testimony to the travails of our forbearers

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Memories may escape the action of the will, may sleep a long time, but when stirred by the right influence … they flash into full stature and life with everything in place.

- John Muir

TRUMPET CALL, LONG JOURNEY HOME

William Tecumseh Sherman White was born on April 27, 1863 in Wabash County, Indiana, and died on July 10, 1948, also in Wabash County, where he was buried at the Pleasant Hill Cemetery in North Manchester. He was the son of Gilman Bryant White and Mary Jane Stewart White who are my maternal great grandparents. This story is based on Uncle Sherman’s personal writings, titled by his heirs as Sherman White’s Family History and Memories. The original is written in longhand by Sherman himself and is thought to have been completed in about 1940 when he was seventy seven years old.

Thank you to Penny Ann (White) Meeks, granddaughter of Sherman for sharing this precious historical record, and to Willadean (Kelly) Milar and Beverly (Hoot) Wagner, for helping to interpret, transcribe and preserve the original manuscript.

Sherman wrote his memoir in journal style. In chronological order, he recorded significant events that took place in his grandparents’ lives, Hamilton and Hannah (Downs) White, and his parents’ lives, Gilman Bryant and Mary Jane (Stewart) White. On seven occasions between 1841 and 1882, the family set out as pioneers from Wabash, Indiana, to seek their fortunes in the western territories, which at that time were western Missouri, Iowa, Arkansas, and Kansas. Sherman himself was a participant on the last six journeys, so his is a personal recollection.

Some parts of the story are drawn from an account recorded by a granddaughter of Gilman and Mary Jane, my Aunt Mary Jane (Sewell) Reahard, sister of my mother, AnnaDell (Sewell) Hierlmeier. Aunt Mary Jane wrote a memoir titled The Covered Wagon Story gleaned from accounts of the western journeys related to her by her uncles and aunts, but in particular by her Uncle Sherman who was very dear to Mary Jane and her sisters, including my mother, AnnaDell, as they grew up in Indiana.

I was privileged to have known Aunt Mary Jane personally. She and her husband Everette Reahard visited my parental family home in Madison, Wisconsin, on several occasions during my childhood, but the highlights of my memories come from our visit to her home in Bonita Springs, Florida in 1950, when we stayed with them in their fishing cottage perched over the backwaters of the Gulf of Mexico, which I called the fish house. I have written of that wondrous experience in my book, We Had to Live: We Had No Choice. Many years later, a short while before Aunt Mary Jane passed away, my wife, RuthAnn, and I also had the pleasure of visiting with her where she lived alone in her home among the pines outside Bonita Springs. For several mesmerizing hours, we learned much of the history of the Sewell and Reahard families in southwest Florida, and came away feeling we had connected with an important part of the family heritage, and holding a copy of the Sewell family genealogy which she had been instrumental in preparing. She was intelligent and gentle, with a sweet smile that reminded us of my mother, who loved and admired Mary Jane and all her sisters greatly.

What I relate here is based on the events presented by Sherman and Mary Jane. I have sculpted them into a story for the purpose of examining the spirit and the character of the people involved. It is my hope their story, told in this fashion, will be inspiring. I present a narrative of how it may have been for Sherman White as a teenaged boy, sixteen months into a journey that had taken him and his entire family from Wabash, Indiana, to Cadillac, Michigan, then on to St. Louis and Springfield, Missouri, and finally to Prairie Grove just outside Fayetteville, Arkansas. It is an introspective into how he must have felt during the most difficult times, written so that we may know him and our ancestral family better.

Date: New Year’s Eve, 1881. Upon reaching Prairie Grove, it would be four more months before the family would return to Wabash. In Sherman’s own words:

"Father traded one of our horses for a yoke of oxen. I helped move a neighbor family to a place about fifteen miles away the first time I ever drove an ox team. I had forgotten to take along my tobacco and in mention of it after supper that night one of the women in the home offered me a chew of hers. This was the first and also the last time a woman ever gave me a chew of that filthy weed. We traced our course back through Eagle Gap and Waldron to Fort Smith [Arkansas] where we recrossed the Arkansas River then on north [through] Van Buren to Prairie Grove [25 miles west of Fayetteville, Arkansas] which we reached on New Year’s Eve in 1881.

"This trip was one of the most eventful and tragic of all our travels. We camped in a tobacco barn. This building was built of logs and very high [ceilings]. The spaces between the logs was left open to allow a free circulation of air among the tobacco stalks that were hung on pieces of timber for the purpose of drying.

Adella [Sherman’s sister Anna Adella, my maternal grandmother] with some of us went into town to visit some friends, Dr. John Nance’s family, with whom we were acquainted, and she became sick. There was a snowfall that New Year’s Eve and the wind blew snow into the building. We camped there a few days, Mother hanging up some blankets to keep the snow out. Della [Anna Adella] became worse and we called Dr. Nance who pronounced her illness typhoid fever. Houses were scarce and we had to move into a small cabin not much better than the old tobacco barn. Father, George and I got a job cutting wood. About the first of February we secured a little frame house a half mi [mile] farther near the base of the mountains. On the 24th of February my father, George, and I came home from work sick with the fever. Dell was just able to be up and we called Dr. Rogers …

Now, reader, imagine with me how Sherman may have related the story if he were here with us today:

By the middle of the night I thought I was dying. Sweat poured off me as fast as Momma could wipe it away and though it was a freezing night and the wind whipped through the cracks in that old house, I was burning up with the fever. I tried to ask Momma to let the cold draft come over me but I couldn’t make the words come out except in a weak mumble. She kept putting more blankets on me, though it’s hard for me to remember because I kept going to sleep, then waking up with a start. It seemed as if I was in and out of sleep for weeks.

I don’t know if I was hallucinating or dreaming. I couldn’t really tell where I was except that once in a while I could hear Momma talking in a muffled voice. I couldn’t tell what she was saying, just that she seemed scared.

As I drifted to sleep, I remember seeing the dreamy image of a little boy of about six years old dressed in tattered old clothes and sitting between what must have been his parents on the buckboard of a covered wagon. They all looked tired and sad as the horses strained to pull the wagon through the heavy mud. Then the wagon stopped and the grownups seemed frightened. I could see them go into what looked to be a tavern, holding something tightly wrapped in a blanket. I started shivering as I thought about what I was seeing in my stupor.

Then I saw them stopped near a nearby woods, making a meager camp. The woman was crying. The man was holding her tightly. Then just beyond them near the woods and in the shade of a tree I noticed a white wooden cross and a fresh pile of muddy red dirt. The young boy rushed to the cross only to peer fearfully down to see a crude wooden box sitting stone cold in the bottom of the hole. The boy stood stiffly and silently as if in disbelief for what seemed like a very long time. Then he bolted back to the wagon as if chased by a ghost. By the time he reached the wagon I could see it was my brother George crying, but Jimmie was missing. [Jimmie: Sherman’s younger brother who was just 13 months old]

I was startled and woke up, groggy and unsure of what had just happened. Slowly, it became clear to me–little Jimmie had died, and I was that boy I saw in the dream. In my delirium my mind had flashed back to the day Jimmie died of malaria. He was buried near Fort Smith, Arkansas. I quivered in fear like I never had before. I was sure I was dying too.

I tried to raise my head to look around. I wasn’t sure where I was or what was happening. I thought I heard Mom’s voice calling me, but she was far, far away. Then, my mind wandered again. I remember thinking I had died and the family gathered around to look at me with their sad faces.

But, I wasn’t dead.

Falling into hysteria, I somehow saw my Grandfather Hamilton White and my Grandmother Hannah; I knew it was them, though I couldn’t see their faces. Then it occurred to me … I had never seen them or even a picture of them. All I knew was what I learned from stories I was told, and now I could see them as if I hovered above, silent and unseen … but they had no faces.

Grandpa and Grandma, along with Uncle Benjamin and my Dad, Gilman, Aunt Rebecca, Uncle George, Uncle William, and Uncle Craig were all together on a river raft crossing a big river. I recognized it was