A Life’s Story

By Max Matteson

A fairly detailed account of the life and background of a boy from the midwest that he was encouraged to publish

• Language: English
• Publisher: LifeRich Publishing
• Release date: Nov 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781489739629

Max Matteson

An individual who was fortunately able to take advantage of opportunities provided and to therefore live a reasonably productive, full and happy life.

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Copyright © 2021 Max Matteson.

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ISBN: 978-1-4897-3961-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4897-3962-9 (e)

LifeRich Publishing rev. date: 05/20/2022

Contents

Preface

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

I

dedicate this book to my wife Ruth, my loving companion

for most of my life and the mother of our three wonderful

children: Margaret Anne (Meg), Max and Amy.

Preface

I have written this memoir relying on whatever I can remember, my professional resumes, various cruise books, and the large amount of material that I have saved over the years in my various memento boxes. Those boxes contain most of the items related to my children that were generated at school, camp, or otherwise. Additionally, I retained the business diaries that I kept during the 1970’s, when I worked as an independent consultant. As you read, keep in mind this thought, recorded by someone other than me: When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad things you did do, well, that is memoirs.

Part 1

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This section of my story is my beginning through to the end of my first career, which was as an officer in the US Navy.

In the Beginning

I was born Wednesday, May 28, 1930, at 11:37 a.m. in Hurley Hospital, Flint, Michigan, as Max Richard Matteson Jr. It is my understanding that at some later date, my father, who was also Max Richard, decided that I was the second rather than junior. It was necessary for me to pay a lawyer in the 1970’s to fix the records in order for me to sell a piece of real estate in the state of Michigan using the name Max Richard II. According to my birth certificate, my parents were living at 2101 Radcliffe Avenue in Flint, Michigan, at the time. My mother’s age is noted as twenty-four and my father’s as twenty-two. This is not correct. He was twenty years old when I was born. I have seen their wedding certificate, and he understated his age on that document too. Apparently being four years younger than his first wife bothered him. His subsequent two wives were both significantly younger than he was. Interestingly, the Dow Jones average on the day that I was born was 165.

Figure1.jpg

Figure 1. Henry Matteson memorial.

The origin of the Matteson name in the western hemisphere dates back to 1660. An individual by the name of Henry Matteson (1646–1690) is on record as having migrated to Rhode Island’s Prudence Island in Narragansett Bay from Præstø, Storstrømmen, Denmark, by way of Scotland and Northern Ireland. He is buried in East Greenwich, Kent County, Rhode Island. He married Hannah Parsons there in Rhode Island, and they had six boys and one girl. A DNA test that I took initially indicated that my ancestral background is 57 percent from Great Britain and 28 percent from Ireland (a big surprise). As for the other 15 percent, 3 percent was Scandinavia, another 3 percent is from Eastern Europe, 2 percent from Western Europe, 2 percent from Finland/Eastern Russia, 2 percent from the Iberian Peninsula, and 1 percent from Italy/Greece. Less than the remaining 2 percent is split between European Jewish and North African. Subsequent refining of my DNA data says that I am 45 percent from England and Northwestern Europe, 18 percent from Ireland, 15 percent from Wales, 11 percent from Scotland, 8 percent from Norway, 2 percent from Sweden, and 1 percent from Finland. And finally, on September 21, 2021, my test results were refined to England and northeastern Europe 46 percent, Scotland 20 percent, Sweden and Denmark 13 percent, Wales 13 percent, Ireland 7 percent and Finland 1 percent.

Very early on, starting around the year 1000, French Norman ancestors crossed over the English Channel; this included William I, the winning Norman commander at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. That battle ushered in the dominance of the Normans over the Anglo-Saxons in England. My family tree includes royal ancestors named Capet in France and Plantagenet and Tudor in England. There is even evidence that I have a Roman emperor ancestor named Flavius (March 31, 200–October 3, 279) and an ancestor who was a Roman consul, Marcus Annius Severus (April 26, 121–March 17, 180). Interestingly, they both died in Eboracum, Yorkshire, England. A number of my ancestors came from Yorkshire. Then there is my maternal great-grandfather’s name, Van Pelt, which is traceable back to 1600’s New Amsterdam and the Netherlands and Belgium before that. This is all interesting to me but probably not very meaningful after so many generations have passed.

The DNA test results of my wife, Ruth, indicate that she is 99 percent derived from the British Isles. She definitely has a Welsh component to her ancestry, and many of her ancestors appear to have been Quakers, or members of the Society of Friends. They would have had to leave England due to religious intolerance in the late 1600’s. Her family has resided in Chester County, Pennsylvania, since before colonial times. Mine, however, is spread from New England, throughout the Northeast and Midwest, south into Virginia, and west to California.

My Father

My father was born November 10, 1909, and raised in Arcadia, Michigan, where he graduated from Arcadia High School. When I knew Arcadia in the 1930’s and 1940’s, it had a population of a little over three hundred, according to the sign by the side of highway M-22. However, when you came into town, you could see (and I learned) that there had been much more to the town in the late 1800’s and up until the Great Depression, which began with the stock market crash of October 1929. There was evidence of a number of businesses along the main drag into the downtown business district. There had been docks all along the shore of Bar Lake, on which the town fronted. Lumber had been shipped out along with farm products and, later, furniture that was manufactured in town as the timber thinned out. A furniture factory had been built that could utilize what timber was left, thus giving the townspeople work. Both my granddad Lemuel and my uncle Lyle had worked in the furniture factory for a time. I have seen a couple of the annual company employee pictures that show the factory in the background. It looked like there were a couple of hundred employees, including granddad and Lyle. Eventually, the factory burned down. It was inevitable, I suppose. I do not know what the local fire company was like, if there was one. I do not remember any evidence of one. Those pictures that showed the factory show a line of barrels sitting along the ridge line of the roof. They undoubtedly held water to put out any fire. Obviously, that system did not work. There was a separate, small, concrete-block building in which the mirrors for furniture were made, and that building survived. I remember being in that building. A man by the name of Starkey managed and possibly owned the factory. All I ever knew of him was that he had a home out on Starkey’s Point. The point extended out from town and was between Lake Michigan and Bar Lake.

The government maintained the two great piers, one on either side of the channel out of Bar Lake, and also periodically dredged the channel from Lake Michigan into the lake and kept it open for commercial traffic. I have seen pictures of a general-purpose screw-driven ship that regularly operated out of Bar Lake. By the time I saw it all in the mid-1930’s, the channel was filled with sand and the piers were falling apart.

The south side of town was primarily inhabited by German immigrants with their own Lutheran church and school, where German was still their language of choice. The north side of town was mainly folks descended from immigrants from the British Isles and Northern Europe, with a few French Canadians thrown in. There was a Catholic church and a Methodist church on the north side of town. I heard once that there was a Black family that lived on a farm south of town just off M-22 on the other side of Bar Lake. There were also a few Polish names thrown in. The factory eventually closed and then burned down, and the mouth of the harbor filled in with drifting sand. The Great Depression had come along, and that killed both the bank and the town.

As for my father, he was an Arcadia High School basketball star and was selected to play on a Grantlyn Rice All-Western Michigan High School all-star basketball team. That is quite something, in as much as he was very flat-footed. I have kidded that his feet were so flat that he could rock on his arches. He went on to earn his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Mt. Pleasant College (now Central Michigan University). After teaching biology courses at the junior high and high school levels and then the junior college level in Flint, Michigan, he began working toward advanced degrees beyond his bachelor of science. After some struggle over roughly four years, he achieved his doctor of philosophy degree at the University of Michigan in 1946. My mother was the primary income source during those years. Around the end of 1945, as he reached his PhD goal, he separated from my mother, and their divorce soon followed. He joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He was a professor in the Zoology Department and a dean for a time until he retired and moved to Frankfort, Michigan, with his third wife. He wintered in Corpus Christi, Texas. He died on January 15, 1990, in Nueces, Texas, at the age of eighty-two. He was put on ice, so to speak, until the ground thawed up north in northern Michigan. His funeral and burial were held the following Memorial Day weekend at the St. Phillips Episcopal Church of Benzie County, Michigan. He was buried in the Joyfield Cemetery on US Highway 31 south of Benzonia. A reception was held at his home at 101 Leelanau Avenue in Frankfort, Michigan.

He had had a section of his colon removed when he was diagnosed with colon cancer sometime during his middle age. Late in life, he had a mild stroke that only affected his right leg slightly. I do not know his exact cause of death. He smoked most of his life, and that affects many things.

The basement of that home in Frankfort was a recreation of his office in the University of Michigan Zoology Building on the campus in Ann Arbor, which I remember visiting. I do not recall seeing his office at the University of Illinois. I pretty much did the same thing when I set up my man cave in Maryland and then on our return to Pennsylvania and subsequently in Delaware too; I essentially recreated the office I’d had in the DuPont Louviers Building outside of Newark, Delaware.

My Mother

My mother, Mary Margaret Patterson, was born September 30, 1905, in Washington, DC, at 1016 Eighth Street NW, where some government building stands today, I assume. She died December 7, 2001, at the age of ninety-six at her residence in the Methodist Country House just north of Wilmington, Delaware, on Route 52. Her father, Claude, was a law clerk in the Department of the Interior, where his brother, Odell, was director. After her father died of tuberculosis back at his childhood home in Greenfield, Iowa, on October 5, 1906, she and her mother, Mary Ethel Van Pelt Patterson, moved to Indianola, Iowa, to live with my mother’s grandparents, Ellis and Mary Wilson Van Pelt. Her mother soon fell ill of TB, and they all moved from Indianola to North Dakota, where it was thought that the cold climate and dry air would help her mother recover from her illness. Amazingly, a former suitor of my grandmother, Richard Nelson, followed her to North Dakota. In spite of her poor health there, they were married. Her newfound happiness was short lived. She died from TB when my mother was two and a half years old. My mother’s grandparents and my mother moved back to Indianola, Iowa, after Mary Ethel’s death. They lived there quietly for three years and then began traveling. Only their son, Will, lived in Indianola by then; their three daughters were all married and had moved away. Will had one son and three daughters. Mother’s aunts were Alice Truxell, the oldest, who had a son, Ellis; Edna Williamson, who had no children; and the youngest, Grace Gaymon, who had a daughter, Faye, and a son, Van.

My Maternal Great-Grandparents

Mother’s grandparents, Ellis and Mary Van Pelt, were continuously on the move, it seems, after they assumed the care of my mother. They were in Rockford, Illinois, for a year. That was my mother’s stepfather’s home. She called him Uncle Dick. Next they lived in Sarles, North Dakota, where her aunt Grace lived.

They lived there long enough for my mother to attend school and receive piano lessons from a neighbor. One year she won a piano in a contest put on by the local merchants there in Sarles. It was a matter of collecting coupons both placed in the newspaper and handed out with purchases, and she received a lot of help from a lot of town’s people. Mother had one ear that showed the signs of having been frozen during one of those North Dakota winters. It could be called a cauliflower ear. That happened once while she was walking to school. There is also a story of her walking over fences on the snow, but I may have dreamt that one up. Uncle Dick was working out west, and Mother and her grandparents began traveling with him, living in furnished apartments. Mother attended four different schools in Portland, Seattle, and Spokane. They spent one summer visiting her aunt Edna in western South Dakota, where her uncle was building roads through the Badlands. Mother experienced a severe hail storm there, but her Aunt Edna collected hail stones and used them to make ice cream. Mother used to tell us stories of a tornado that drove lumber through tree trunks and embedded a straw in a tree trunk too. Many homes, farm buildings, and businesses were destroyed. However, an insane asylum on top of a nearby hill in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, did not lose a roof shingle. Mother was there at the time for some church-oriented conference. In the fall, they left for Warren, Minnesota, where Aunt Alice lived. Mother’s grandfather bought a small home there, and mother entered school and took piano lessons at a small Lutheran School nearby called North Star. She had her high school sophomore year there and was also hired by the local movie theater to accompany silent movies several nights a week with piano music. The piano was used to augment excitement with fast, loud music; romance with soft, sweet music; and so on. Her grandfather always escorted her home at the end of the evenings that she worked. Her grandfather had a stroke late in 1920. He was in his eighties. He did not live long after that. Her grandmother returned to Sarles, while mother remained in Warren to finish the school year. She received room and board from neighbors, the county sheriff’s family.

Her aunt Alice developed breast cancer and died. Mother had cared for her during her illness through the summer of 1921. That fall, Mother joined her grandmother and attended the local Sarles high school for her junior year. She and her grandmother returned to Indianola, in time for mother to enroll in high school there for her senior year, and also that mother would be near Simpson College. She graduated from Indianola High School the following spring of 1923. Mother had enough credits at mid-year to graduate, so she took bookkeeping in the morning and attended the Simpson Conservatory of Music in the afternoon to take piano and one college-level class.

Mother’s Simpson College Career

Mother’s grandmother became ill and returned to Sarles to live with Aunt Grace. Mother entered Simpson College in the fall of 1923. She pledged the Pi Phi Sorority and was permitted to live in the Pi Phi house.

In college, Mother received the nickname Pat because there were so many others also named Mary Margaret. During her first two summers in college, she went to Chicago to find work. She lived with the Warthens there. They had known her mother and also attended Simpson. They had been residents of Indianola, and Martha, their oldest daughter, was a Pi Phi with Mother. During the first summer, Mother worked in the Wrigley Building for Dr. William C. Gorgas, who was the one who succeeded in identifying the mosquitoes as the cause of yellow fever and malaria during the construction of the Panama Canal. During the second summer, she worked for the Celotex Insulating Lumber Company on Michigan Avenue. She was hired despite the fact that she told the director who hired her that she needed a week off to attend the Pi Phi convention at Bigwin Inn, Lake of Bays, Ontario, Canada. The director’s wife was a Pi Phi. A side benefit to living in Chicago, as far as she was concerned, was being able to attend Chicago Cubs baseball games at Wrigley Field on Thursdays. Thursdays were Ladies Day, which meant that ladies entered the park without having to pay. She and her friends loved those games. She proved to be a very loyal Detroit Tigers baseball fan later in her life, and she finally became a Philadelphia Phillies fan after their success in 1980, which took place after she moved to the Methodist Country House north of Wilmington, Delaware. Having lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for some time, she became very loyal to the athletic teams of the University of Michigan, particularly their football team. I used to kid that she would watch a tiddlywinks game if Michigan was playing.

While she was away at that Pi Phi convention in Ontario, Canada, a representative of the fledgling Miss Iowa/Miss America contest saw a picture of the Simpson College representative to the convention and called the dean of women to ask if Miss Patterson would be interested in entering the upcoming Miss America contests. The dean stopped that idea on the spot because decent young ladies, and especially Simpson young ladies, would not so expose and display themselves. One time while mother was attending Simpson, the dean of women took a group of Simpson ladies to a play in town. At some point, a slightly off-color word was used. The dean shot up out of her seat and proceeded to leave the theater. The Simpson young ladies knew to follow. Simpson College and Music Conservatory was founded by the Methodist Church.

Mother had her first piano recital her sophomore year and her senior recital her third year. These two recitals were required for the bachelor of music degree that she received. She was also elected to membership in the Mu Phi Epsilon honorary music sorority her sophomore year. Mother was elected May Queen by the student body in the spring of her last year. Mother graduated in August 1926 after three years and a summer at Simpson. She had to borrow money from Mu Phi Epsilon for tuition, and she worked in the Pi Phi dining room and kitchen to pay for room and board. Her grandmother living in Sarles had died while mother was visiting during her Easter break from college during her last year. Her grandmother had been eighty-four years old. Mother accompanied the body on the train ride back to Indianola, where her grandmother was buried alongside her grandfather. She was met at the Indianola train station by the Pi Phi house mother and three sorority sisters who lived in Indianola. They supported her throughout that ordeal.

Mother received a job offer through the college placement office and accepted a teaching position in Sheffield, Iowa, for the 1926–1927 school year. She taught vocal music in grades K–8 and also taught a choir and an orchestra in high school—a heavy schedule. The town was not interesting, and it expected much of its teachers. Fortunately, a friend who taught there had a car, so they were able to get away to Mason City, Iowa. That was the hometown of the composer of The Music Man, Meredith Wilson, and there were things to do there. Mother was asked to return to Sheffield, but she declined. She had saved enough money to pay off her Mu Phi Epsilon debt and to travel to and stay in Chicago. There she registered with a placement bureau that was especially for musicians. She was led to interview for a position in the Music Department at Central Michigan University, as it is called today, in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan. Back then it was called Mt. Pleasant Normal School. Mother attended Northwestern University that summer to brush up on some courses and to take piano to further prepare for her new employment on the faculty in Mt. Pleasant. Again, she lived with the Warthens while there in Chicago.

Great-Grandfather Ellis Van Pelt, Civil War Vet

My great-grandfather Ellis Van Pelt is a point of pride for me. My mother passed on to me a single page of a letter written on both sides by my great-grandfather to his bride-to-be, Mary Wilson. The letter is incomplete—it is obvious that there is at least one more page—but it is still very interesting. At the time it was written, he was a State of Iowa militiaman in camp at Muscatine, Iowa, during the Civil War. It was just after the first battle of Bull Run, or Manassas, as the Rebels called it. The letter is written on regulation military-issue stationary. The militiamen were there to be sworn into federal service. After the swearing-in, they boarded a riverboat and sailed off to war as one of the early Iowa Volunteer Infantry regiments. Years later, when my mother was living with her grandparents, the three of them traveled in California, and Great-Grandfather Ellis decided that he would apply for an army pension for his service throughout the Civil War. His application was rejected, as many were. The story is that the regiment’s officers at the swearing in for federal service had not listed him on the rolls because he was too young. Apparently, he was an earnest young man, large for his age, and a farm boy experienced with handling horses, so the officers had taken him along. He said that he noticed that every time the action became heated, the officers would hand the reins of their horses to him and tell him to take the horses to the rear. I have a book on the history of the Iowa Twentieth during that war, and it relates a story very similar to what Great-Grandfather Ellis must have experienced. I have never been able to confirm which regiment he was in, although he mentions the Seventh Regiment in the letter, which reads,

Dear Mary

I embrace the earliest opportunity to address to you a few lines, by this I mean, since our inspection and acceptance. It is but about fifteen minutes since we passed through the dread ordeal. Of some 80 boys who were called out to muster but one was rejected. His name was Luke Imes from Lecada. The cause of his rejection was because one of his legs was shorter than the other which caused him to limp. The poor boy is much dejected on account of it but it was no fault of his. We are now Uncle Sam’s men and feel the importance of our situation. I think from the tenor of the Eastern dispatches that some of us will be ordered east. We are not dispirited at the news of the defeat at Manassas Gap on the contrary we feel anxious to wipe out the stain on our banner. I think that this defeat will be rather beneficial than otherwise but am sorry that our experience has been purchased at so great a price. I think that the sensation presses will stop their incessant chatter of Forward to Richmond. We now know the strength and position of our enemy and will act accordingly. Three boys arrived and joined our Company namely Charley Hills, Orland Redman and Oliver Patten. We now have a very good Company. We will be [illegible] off tomorrow then the boys will have their own cooking to do. Some of them have growled at the fare. Hereafter they will have no one to blame but themselves and the Commissary. Some two or three new Companies arrived and were sworn into the 7th Regiment among them is a Rifle Company from Muscatine. Billy Ketcham is among their number. Several boys among the different Companies refused to take the oath and were drummed out of camp. This is a very disgraceful proceeding. No one who ever expects to be respected would wish to submit to it. For my part I would rather be shot. We had no one to drum out. I feel kind of sorry that Wash Echard was not here that we might have the fun of drumming him out. Word has been received by Colonel McDowell that our arms were shipped last Saturday. If that be true we will soon have them. I hope that this is the case. The boys last from home state that the girls and citizens generally interested to pay us a visit soon. I hope this is the case and you will make one of the number. Cash Baldwin, son of the firm of Baldwin & Hatch came with the boys today and tried to get the office of Ensign of our Company but failing in this he joined the Muscatine Company. Had he come as a private his chances of promotion would have been much better. He will find that we do not buy soldiers. We want volunteers. We are all in good health at present and are in fine spirits. We are anxious to take the field as soon as possible. I am sorry that space forbids more. I have forgotten some things so I must …

Figure271.JPGFigure272.JPG

The rest of the letter is missing. His handwriting is beautiful. There is a penciled note at the top of the letter by M. E. (Mary) Wilson that reads, My first letter from my boy that went to war.

Munnis Kenny

My father had a maternal ancestor, Munnis Kenny, who was a Michigan state representative in the first state legislature after the territory was granted statehood on January 26, 1837, becoming the twenty-sixth state of the United States of America. Munnis Kenny was born December 10, 1788, and his wife, Patty Campbell, was born February 21, 1792. The date of their marriage is January 12, 1818. Munnis’s copy of the handbook that was issued to members of the state legislature was handed down to me, and I passed it down to my oldest daughter, Margaret Anne Meg Matteson Aument. I also received a sampler made by Munnis’s daughter Martha, that I also passed down to my oldest daughter. Martha was my ancestor, and she was born January 1, 1819. These dates come from her sampler. The sampler lists Martha’s brothers and sisters and their dates of birth. Toward the bottom, she started a list of the deceased.

Peirce Quilt and Math Primer

Meg also has a quilt made by an ancestor on her paternal grandfather’s side of the family, the Peirces. The quilt has the date 1846 stitched into it. Meg and I obtained the quilt during an auction that followed the deaths of my wife Ruth’s aunt Helen Peirce Runk and uncle Tom Runk. The auction was held by Donald Runk, their son, and his wife, Marjorie Scott Runk. Helen Peirce Runk was Ruth’s father’s sister, Meg’s great aunt. At one point during the auction, I actually made a bid over Meg’s bid. We were the only two bidding by that time. There were other bidders, but they gave up, probably because Meg and I were so intent on buying the quilt. We also obtained a mathematics primer that the quilt maker’s husband had used as a boy. He was a Peirce and had signed it and otherwise made notes in the primer. Meg has that item too. Donald Runk and his wife, Marjorie, held the auction after they moved into Aunt Helen and Uncle Tom Runk’s country home west of Coatesville, Pennsylvania, upon their deaths. Don and Marjorie Runk considered the items they put up for auction to be surplus after they refurbished the home. Don returned our money later when he saw the auction records and noted what we had purchased. He figured that as family members, we need not pay for the two items that we had won.

Ruth also has ancestors, the two Peirce brothers, Samuel and Joshua, who established and developed Peirce’s Woods or Park just east of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, on US Route 1. Pierre S. DuPont bought Peirce’s Woods in 1906 and then developed it further into the now famous Longwood Gardens. The original Peirces were Quakers, or members of the Society of Friends, as were many others in the Chester County area. Pierre S. DuPont developed Delaware State Route 52 between Longwood Gardens and his work place at the DuPont Company, near Wilmington, Delaware, to enable his commute to work.

My Parents Marry, August 6, 1929

My parents were married in Dr. Herman Spencer’s living room in Alma, Michigan, near Mt. Pleasant on August 6, 1929. Dr. Spencer was also on the faculty of Mt. Pleasant College, and his daughter Hannah was a good friend of my mother’s. My mother and Hannah toured together. Mother was the pianist and Hannah was an operatic singer. Also, somewhere along the way, probably at Simpson College, mother became friends with the Lane sisters of Hollywood fame. Lola Lane was the most filmed of the three. After the wedding, my father worked as an assistant in the Chemistry Department and took some further courses at Mt. Pleasant College. My mother also took courses that would permit her to get a Michigan teacher’s certificate and a bachelor of science in education. The two of them then moved to Flint, Michigan. My father had a job with the General Motors Buick Division until he was offered a teaching position in the City of Flint Public School System. My mother eventually took a position with the Flint Public School System also as the music teacher at a junior high school.

My one sibling, my brother, John Warren, was born November 6, 1932, also in Hurley Hospital in Flint, Michigan. He was what was called a towhead. That meant he was naturally platinum blond when his hair grew in. He had one black hair in the middle of the top of his head, for which I teased him. He was easily teased, and I was mean enough to do it. He grew up to be six foot, two and a half inches tall. He was very athletic with skills that I never even came close to having. He was also very intelligent, earning his PhD in zoology, more specifically, in entomology, at the University of Illinois. Upon his graduation with his final degree, he began working for the United States Department of Agriculture at their station in Florence, South Carolina. Eventually he retired to a ten-acre conclave on the shore of Silver Lake just outside the town of Battle Lake, Minnesota. He and his wife, Anna-Marie, had three children, Mathew, Mark, and Marie.

Flint, Michigan

My father was offered his first teaching position after college in the Flint, Michigan, public school system. Some of my earliest memories are of my father teaching as the biology teacher at Zimmerman Junior High School there in Flint. There were interesting things in his classroom, such as a swordfish bill and other things people brought in to him to use. One summer, we headed north to Arcadia with a large, preserved diamondback rattlesnake curled up in the bottom of a ten-gallon drum on our trailer. In January 1937, the family moved into our first house. It was a rental on Zimmerman Street within easy walking distance of Zimmerman Elementary and Junior High School. Prior to that move, we lived in an apartment over a grocery store more or less across the street from the schools.

To this day, I can picture some of the poor kids who arrived at school in the winter with nearly frozen fingers. The teacher told them to hold their fingers in the drinking fountain’s running waters until their fingers warmed up. There was, however, considerable pain involved in that process, and the appropriate howling ensued. The classic maypole was erected one May Day celebration out on the lawn of the school, and the faculty appointed me King of May, along with appointing some little girl queen. That was good, because all we had to do was sit there watching as the other kids scampered about that pole pulling ribbons.

My father’s brother, Lyle, lived with us for a time while he attended Flint’s junior college. I do not know how successful that was. As an eighty-four-year-old, I got into genealogy and developed what I called the Max Matteson Family Tree on Ancestry.com. As a by-product of this interest, I was contacted by Lyle Jr., who had generated his own version, called the Matteson Family Tree. We traded some family history back and forth. One of my father’s sisters, Flossie, was also offered help in continuing her education, but she married and had my cousin Charles Chuck Schlief instead. It had to be something like that, because my father from that time on, for as long as I was around him, would not acknowledge the existence of Chuck’s mother, Flossie. My father did not change his attitude until he had the opportunity to observe my Aunt Flossie’s competence at the bedside of my grandfather Lemuel when he died in the early 1940’s from complications related to a broken hip. My Aunt Flossie had become a registered nurse and knew what she was doing. She had divorced Chuck’s father and later married a man named Kowalski. He was a well-known sausage producer around the Detroit area and in Hamtramck, Michigan, a Polish enclave back then.

I saw Aunt Flossie only one time during my life. She was visiting my grandmother in Arcadia when I went up there with mother and my future wife, Ruth, on a trip following our engagement. Chuck was also called Chuckie when he was young, and I presume that his given name was Charles. Chuck and his wife, Louise, settled in Warren, Michigan, and had three daughters aged ten, eight, and four in 1974. My Aunt Flossie died in Warren, Michigan, on October 30, 1963.

I have fond memories of one event that occurred a number of times there in Flint when we lived on Zimmerman Street. There was a small hamburger joint on one of the more prominent roads nearby that we would go to for a family dinner out. The hamburgers were so good, and we always had chocolate malted milk shakes to go with the hamburgers. We were living in the midst of the Great Depression, so simple pleasures were important.

There was a vacant lot down on the corner of our street that was low and swampy. There were many crayfish living there in their many holes in the mud. We kids would gather there and try to collect crayfish. To do that, you had to get the crayfish out of the holes. No one had a shovel; that would have been the answer to the problem. Instead, the older boys would try to get the younger kids, like me, to stick our smaller hands into the holes and pull out the crayfish. Of course, the crayfish would back into their holes and sit in there, using their big front claws to defend themselves. I do not remember ever sticking my hand into a hole for the older boys.

At some point during my early years, probably when I was five or six years old, my brother and I received several little chicks at Easter time. I had just recovered from the chicken pox at that time, but my brother, John, was in bed with the disease. I apparently deduced that those little chicks had brought on the chicken pox, so I put them into a steaming pot of hot water. I was too young for me to remember the reaction around there when the chicks were discovered, but I heard about it later when I was old enough to remember the story.

Our next-door neighbors there on Zimmerman Street were Mr. and Mrs. Patty Ryan. They were empty nesters and befriended our family. They had both emigrated from Ireland and still had their original pronounced brogue. They owned an English bulldog named Pug. It was a very kind and mature dog and looked out for my brother and me if we got too close to the street. It would come over to us and push us back toward the house to a safe distance from the street. One day a neighbor lady that lived on the street behind us gave a piece of cherry pie to each of us neighborhood boys. Pug had gone along with us and was standing nearby. A nasty kid in our group picked up some driveway gravel and shoved it into one of Pug’s ears. I do not remember Pug’s reaction, probably because he did not do much but go home, nor do I remember how Pug made out after that experience. I do, however, remember shoving my piece of pie in that kid’s face.

Arcadia, Michigan

Chuck lived with my grandparents in Arcadia while I was growing up. The three of us—John and I and Chuckie, as we called him—played together all summer long for a number of summers. We spent hours rolling our wagons along, kneeling in them on one knee and pushing with the other leg, going up and down the sidewalk that was on our grandmother’s side of the street. We also spent many summer days swimming and laying around in the warm sand on the shore of Lake Michigan, which was only a short three-block walk from our grandmother’s house. Of course, we started every summer off with a good sunburn. There was not any lotion used in those days. You just figured you would get that first good burn, peel, and then begin to tan. We just hung out at grandmother’s house a lot too. Fortunately for her and our grandfather, it was summer, and we actually did not spend that much time in their house. We would trap bumblebees in their hollyhock flowers with our hands just for fun, and the challenge of doing it without being stung was exciting. Chuckie was not very adept at doing that. He was stung many times, but he carried on. Our grandmother had a rain barrel under one downspout that collected rainwater for uses like washing her hair. Otherwise, water was pumped from a well behind her house with a long-handled pump. We would take cucumbers from grandmother’s garden, hollow them out and float them like boats in that rain barrel. We also liked to eat raw peas out of her garden’s pea pods. Once John ate enough raw corn off of the cob to make him very sick to his stomach. Actually, our grandfather did the heavy work for the garden, which was quite large. The toilet facilities, a two-holer with a Montgomery-Ward catalog, were in the shed or small barn that was behind the house. There was also a chicken coop beside the shed. There were usually six to ten egg-laying hens in there. The three of us, on at least one occasion, decided to climb in and out of the hen house by way of the door that the hens used. I have heard since that occasion that chickens can pass bad germs to people, but that experience did not bother us. We must have been fairly young and small in order to fit through that door.

I also remember one time being in the cow pastures at Peak’s Orchards south of Arcadia on the other side of Bar Lake, the lake next to town. Some of my family members were there to pick cherries, so John and I, who were quite young, had to while away the day running around the hills. A local Arcadia boy by the name of Maxie Brown was also with us. We were fascinated with the cow bones that we found out there. Several summers later, John received a BB gun, and he became a great shot. Our father let John know that he could shoot cedar waxwing birds. That bird specialized in eating cherries, and perhaps that made it a bad bird in cherry country. Anyway, one summer, John must have shot close to seventy birds. It was not because he was not sympathetic to birds. Several years later, the family was walking to the back door of the Detroit Street house in Flint when John picked up a walnut and threw it in the direction of a robin. Amazingly, he hit the robin in the head, and it dropped over dead. John was very upset; a robin is a good bird.

John was interested in guns. He later owned a .22-caliber rifle and used to do things like shoot at rats in a junkyard. About the time that he received that BB gun, when he was around twelve years of age, he pestered our uncle Lyle to let him fire Lyle’s shotgun. Well, Lyle finally relented, loaded the thing, and handed it to John. John aimed it in a safe direction and pulled the trigger. The next thing he knew, he was flat on his behind. He learned then that there was a difference between his BB gun and that shotgun. Lyle then told John that he should only pull one trigger at a time.

The section of the Lake Michigan shoreline on which we played, sunbathed, and swam was at the end of a town street that provided a right-of-way to the water’s edge, which is to say that it allowed anyone to get to the beach and water because the street allowed public access as though it extended out into the water. The land north of that street, as it approached the beach, was owned by the Walther League, a German-American summer resort. The resort had a large clubhouse facing out onto the lake and housing for the guests. That is all that I could tell from the public beach. The resort was private property. The interesting feature of the beach there where we swam was the presence of the remains of a wooden schooner sailing ship that had washed up during a storm in the late 1800’s or early 1900’s. As the story went, the ship’s hull was loaded with grain and was being towed by a steam tug along the shoreline there. At some point that day down near the piers, the tow broke loose or was cast off because of the difficulties in a storm. I recall mention of the captain’s wife and a child that were on board along with several crew members. Some were rescued, and some were not, as I remember the story.

There was a coast guard station up in Frankfort, and my family went up there at least once to watch the demonstration of the lifesaving procedure that used what is called a breeches buoy to transport personnel from a foundering ship to shore. Years later when I was a young junior officer on a US Navy destroyer, I was high-lined from that destroyer to an Essex-class aircraft carrier, and then, several days later, I was high-lined back. The navy’s high-line was the old beeches buoy by another name and use. That stay on a carrier came to an end because it was released to return to port. As a result, I had a ride in a helicopter to another carrier, where I continued my air controller training. I was high-lined back to the destroyer from the stern of that aircraft carrier.

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Figure 2. Kate and Lemuel Matteson wedding picture.

My Grandfather Lemuel Loyal Matteson

We did not see much of or hear much from our grandfather Lemuel. While I knew him during the Great Depression, he was employed at the local furniture factory, worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), sharpened saws, and he sold bait down at Mosler’s rowboat rental—in that order, as far as I know. Mr. Mosler was one of granddad’s good friends. Once, when my parents, John, and I were driving north out of Arcadia on M-22 toward Frankfort, we passed a gang of WPA workers doing some minor repairs along the road. My grandfather was there, and he was the only one actually working. The others were leaning on their shovels. As a young man, he was one of those lumberjacks that harvested the timber of northern Michigan that was used to build Chicago and the West. When the timber was almost gone, he turned to farming, but the soil in northern Michigan is mostly sand and makes for poor farming. So eventually, sometime before 1920, he moved his young family into Arcadia, Michigan, and built a small house there. He also built a small barn and a chicken coop behind the house. An outhouse was built into the barn. There was a well with a pump right behind the house and convenient to the back door.

I have seen a violin or fiddle in my grandparent’s house that grandfather played as a young man for dances held on a platform down along the road to Mosler’s boat rental. When I was very young, I remember seeing that platform although it was dilapidated by that time.

The only thing about our grandfather that ever seemed to peeve our grandmother was that he would leave his used chaws of chewing tobacco lying about on window sills for later use. My brother, John, told me that Granddad carried white peppermints in the top pocket of the bib overalls that he always wore. They were meant to cover the smell of chewing tobacco on his breath. John seemed to have been much closer to our granddad than I ever was. John used to trail him down to Mosler’s boat rental and fish, either from the shore or from the very narrow finger piers between the boats. He would tell of watching granddad catch great northern pike there and how he did it. First granddad would catch a minnow with a small hook. Then he would switch to a large hook and bait it with the minnow. The minnow would then catch the large fish. John used to tell of another occasion when he was with granddad while he was doing something with his shotgun—the same gun that I once watched granddad use to dispatch one of their very old cats off to cat heaven after first placing the cat next to a hole that he had dug for the purpose of burying it following the shot. John remembers one act of granddad’s that upset our mother. When the evening card games were played at the house my parents had purchased across the street from our grandparent’s house, granddad would excuse himself as needed and go out to the front porch to spit tobacco juice. In the dark, his aim was worse than in the daylight, and he would thereby stain a white porch post out there. My grandparents were married in Manistee, Michigan, on June 14, 1899. Granddad died in 1945 at the age of seventy-one following a broken hip.

There is a story that was one of several that our mother loved to retell. It concerned Mr. Mosler, granddad’s friend, who had a small fleet of row boats for rent on Bar Lake next to Arcadia. One summer morning in the late 1930’s, my brother, John, came running home from Sunday School at the little Methodist church on the corner of our street exclaiming that Mr. Mosler had been found as a baby floating in a basket down in the bulrushes on the shore of Bar Lake. My last memory of my paternal grandfather, Lemuel, was seeing him sitting in the sun near the Mosler row boats waiting for someone who might buy the angleworms that he hoped to sell.

The evening entertainment for the adults in the family usually consisted of playing cards at grandmother’s house at the dining room table. Later it was a tossup which house was used but usually grandma’s. I can picture my father, Uncle Lyle, Granddad, and a fourth person—either Grandmother or my mother—sitting at that table slapping cards down. They mostly played euchre and sometimes pinochle. Grandma had a player piano in her front room. There were a number of music rolls that went with it. Uncle Lyle was the only person who I ever saw use that piano. He played a few of those music rolls for us boys. My mother offered to teach both John and me how to play that piano, but that proved hopeless. Neither of us was inclined toward music of any sort, especially in the summertime when we were outside just about all the time playing and swimming.

My Grandmother Katherine Mae Robins

Once a month for the three months of our summer, Grandma, as we really called her, would fire up the big, black iron cook stove that had been moved to the cellar when a kerosene stove was installed in the kitchen. Once the iron stove was hot, she would heat up a vat of oil. When the oil reached the right temperature, she would cut out and drop in the dough to make what we all called fried cakes. They were unembellished doughnuts—no sprinkling of sugar, no nothing. They were outstanding hot and very good in any case. Grandmother’s maiden name was Katherine Kate Mae Robbins. She went to finishing school as a young woman in Beulah, a town in Benzie County. Several of her charcoal sketches from finishing school were framed and hung around her house. In her later years, she returned to her love of art and did a number of small oil paintings of scenes around Arcadia. I have three of the eight-by-twelve-inch oil paintings that she did on a canvas boards. One shows a perspective of Lake Michigan as it would have looked from a ten-acre piece of property that I owned for a few years up there on Matteson’s Bluff. Later in her life, she lived with Chuck’s young family down near Detroit. I have cards and letters from my grandmother, and I noticed that toward the end of 1963, her hand was getting very shaky. She died there where Chuck lived in Warren, Michigan, that October at the age of eighty-four following a stroke. She had a great sense of humor. When the price of a regular mail stamp went from two cents to three, she stated that she did not think that her two cents worth was worth three cents, but she continued to send me cards and letters anyway, especially on my birthdays. She once sent me a box of oil paints. I had shown artistic inclinations, and she had noticed. When she died, her obituaries recognized her as the poet and artist that she was. She had her poems published in the local newspapers and in a book assembled by the town of Arcadia at it’s centennial anniversary. Apparently, she was called Aunt Kate around town there in Arcadia toward the end of her life. My cousin Phil Wheeler had the charcoal of four kittens that we all loved.

One time, at a Fourth of July family picnic that was held in the backyard of my parents’ house there in Arcadia across the street from Grandma’s house, Grandma was sitting in one of my parents’ canvas folding chairs. The bottom of the chair split, and Grandma sank almost to the ground. Her knees were up under her chin, and she was very, very embarrassed. She was a shy person anyway. She would object if anyone wanted to take her photograph. Everyone probably should not have laughed at her predicament. Homemade ice cream was the treat that day.

My Cousin Phil Wheeler

Phil was my aunt Frankie’s only child. Her given name was Frankiedell. The story that I have heard is that she died at the age of twenty-nine in 1932 while sitting in a dentist’s chair. Apparently, the dentist was an inexperienced administrator of anesthesia. Phil’s father, Warren Wheeler, remarried, and Phil had two half-sisters, Sally and Patricia, from that marriage. Toward the end of his life, Phil and his wife, Helen, lived near Floral City, Florida, near their daughter Carol and her family. Phil and Helen had two other children: Philip, the oldest, who is seven years older than Carol, and Janet, the youngest, who is seven years younger than Carol. Young Phil also moved to Florida to live near both his parents and his sister Carol. Phil, my cousin, was six years older than me and preceded me through Ann Arbor High School. According to the swimming coach there at the time, Dobbie Drake, Phil was a swimming star during high school, specializing in the backstroke. Phil also visited Arcadia and stayed with Grandma every summer while he was in high school, and I used to see him there. My mother told the tale many times about how Phil, while staying with my grandma, would run across town to a house that my parents were renting to use the more or less modern flush toilet in that house. Apparently, Grandma’s two-hole outhouse was not something that he wanted to use. He joined the army air corp in 1943 during World War II and became a P-51 fighter aircraft pilot. He was delayed in going overseas in order that he might be a swimming instructor at his training camp. He was not happy being held back from overseas action. Eventually, he was sent to Italy, and although he arrived late in the war, he managed to fly twenty-one missions escorting B-17 and B-24 Bombers.

He was awarded an Air Medal for shooting down one German ME-109 and shooting up four steam locomotives. Ruth and I visited Phil and Helen after they moved to the Floral City area, as well as before that when they were living on his twenty-eight-foot sailboat moored at a marina in Palmetto, Florida, during the winters. When Phil left the air force after the war, he went back to college at Ypsilanti Normal College, now Eastern Michigan University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree before becoming a math teacher in the Ypsilanti public school system. There was a slight hitch in his plans when he was called back for the Korean War, but he survived that. The air force had him flying badly used-up aircraft to their retirement, as I understand it. Most of them had missing or had inoperable instruments. That soured him on making it a career, and he returned to civilian life again. He enjoyed sailing on Lake Huron, and when he retired, he and Helen sailed down to Florida in that twenty-eight-foot sailboat and never sailed it back. Amazingly, they spent ten winters living on that sailboat at that marina in Palmetto while they summered back in Michigan.

Phil passed away Saturday, September 14, 2014, at the age of eighty-nine and was buried with full military honors at the Florida National Military Cemetery in Bushnell a week later. Phil and Helen had been married for seventy years. They had the three children already mentioned, seven grandchildren, two step-grandchildren, nine great-grandchildren, and two step-great-grandchildren.

Phil was the one who introduced me to building model airplanes. One summer, I had sent away a cold-cereal box top and twenty-five cents in order to receive a large Ford tri-motor-airplane model kit. I did not have much experience building airplane models yet, and it would have been quite a job for me to build that one. I suppose I might have been able to build the normal, much smaller ten-cent models by that time, but maybe not. Anyway, Phil was visiting Grandma across the street, and he volunteered eagerly to build it for me. I subsequently built many more balsa-wood-and-paper model airplanes and also enjoyed destroying them in several ways. For example, I would swing them overhead clockwise while John swung another one counterclockwise. We would then walk toward each other until the planes collided. Another form of destruction was to set the tail on fire and fly the plane from an upstairs window. I also built a number of model boats and ships throughout my life. I liked to build model airplanes and display them by hanging them from the ceiling of my office or later, after moving to our retirement home, hang them from the bathroom ceiling. There was one hanging from the ceiling of my oldest grandson’s boyhood bedroom for a time.

My Aunt Mae Matteson Putney

I also had an Aunt Mae, my father’s oldest sister, who lived on a farm about five or so miles east of Arcadia with her husband, Harold Putney. They had two families. First, they had my cousins Beulah and Warren, and then, when those two were in their twenties, Aunt Mae and Uncle Harold had Neasa and Phyllis. Their farm had four or five milk cows, some oats, potatoes, corn, cucumbers, strawberries, chickens, and a horse for plowing, but the farm’s cash crop was sour cherries. If a late frost caught the cherry flowers, the crop would be lost. The orchard had to be placed to minimize the possibility of that frost occurring. You also wanted the orchard placed such that it was protected as much as possible from the wind. Bruised cherries do not sell. I earned my first money, a ten-dollar bill, picking cherries in Uncle Harold and Aunt Mae’s orchard. I believe at that time when I picked cherries, cherry pickers were paid at the rate of twenty-five cents a lug. A lug was a wooden box that held three ten-quart pails’ worth of cherries. I may have picked