Linnsburg: The Almost Mythical Village

By William D. Turner

How strange to now realize that the end of World War II and my early boyhood years were both an exit and and entrance in American history. As a nation, we were just then losing our fingertip clasp with America's pioneer past and its slow-to-change lifestyle, like young men on a troop train losing their grasp on the hand of a loved one as the train pulled away from the station, bound for some dangerous and faraway unknown. In the Indiana farm village of Linnsburg when I was but four years old, America's journey from its nineteenth century outlook into the hard-earned modern world was almost complete.

The past was fading, but really not that far behind us. My own father, after all, was 14 years old at the death of the statesman and millionaire businessman, Robert Lincoln, the last living witness of Lee's surrender at Appomattox, who also happened to be the elder son of President Abraham Lincoln. The past was not so far removed, even from me. As a small boy, I could still catch glimpses of the long road behind us, while the future was slowly at first, and then with increasing rapidity, coming into view.

The road in front of our house in Linnsburg was cement paved, and automobiles traveled on its surface. Local farmers all had tractors instead of mules. Yet, standing at the entrance of Mr. VanCleave's blacksmith shop, where two or three old-timers sat perched on a sagging buggy seat just inside the doorway, my brother and I were actually staring wide-eyed at a living tableau of rural America 100 years before our time. We had no way of knowing that our generation would be the last tenuous, breathing link to an epic of our country, fading now, like the final flashing glimmer of a summer day in our early boyhood. Traditions within families linger, of course, and shadows of that bygone day can still be found in rural America. In not many years, though, the living memory will fade, and then stories like this will be all that remain of that time in America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667852515

Book preview

Prologue

Most human beings love the feeling of inclusion, permanence, and security that they receive from repetitive ritual and ceremony, an aspect, no doubt, of our social nature. Rituals, especially long established ones, help us to create a visible explanation for things we value and revere but cannot otherwise easily explain.

Military and other state ceremonies can help to give us a sense of collective power and security in an insecure world. Any soldier who has marched to the cadence of drums has experienced that. All religions of the world have some form of ritual and ceremony as a way of giving visibility and connection to the unseen spiritual world. That is why idolatry has been such a tempting visible substitute throughout history for man’s relationship with the invisible God.

The comfort we receive from ritual starts in our earliest childhood. A happy home is full of repeated rituals that parents provide for their children to give the assurance that they will be loved and protected, and that their needs will be provided. Our life at home in Linnsburg was full of these happy, familiar rituals.

We had no fireplace, but at Christmastime, Dad always put up a cardboard fireplace in the living room so Santa could bring our gifts, although I do not recall ever actually believing in a Santa Claus. We knew that the oranges, hard candy, and few, but special, wrapped gifts we received came from Mom and Dad, but they were piled in front of the cardboard fireplace on Christmas Day, anyway. That portable fireplace became as treasured an item for this annual ceremony of giving as did the visibly symbolic and important lighted star used each year for the top of the Christmas tree, to remind us of the star of Bethlehem.

Wayne and I loved the turn-out-the-hall-light ritual that we sang out at bedtime with the full expectation that Dad would do just that, and would give us his smiling admonition, Alright, you birds, get to sleep.

We also had a longstanding ritual of saying goodbye to Dad when he was walking through the kitchen to the backdoor on his way to work, especially when he was leaving for the night shift.

Sometimes it would be from him, See you mañana, to which we would reply, Hasta banana. These phrases could also be reversed between the participants as the mood would warrant. Otherwise, Dad might say to Wayne and me, Abyssinia, to which we would reply, Ethiopia! The happy, comforting aspect of this ritual goodbye to our father was the full assurance that he would return, right on time, mañana.

Everything about that short and happy life in Linnsburg seemed to be a defining affirmation that the good old days really did exist. These stories I have to tell are the stuff of dreams. A dream, of course, has only one perspective — that of the dreamer. Yet when my older brother, Wayne, and I sit down on his front porch on a summer evening, with redwing blackbirds swooping, diving, and trilling above the willows, and a Valley tabernacle chorus of cicadas begins to rise in a screech of insect voices, joined by a base section of croaking frogs, a Linnsburg story has a way of calling to us from some ethereal place where boyhood dreams abide. A thought comes to us, a reminder of a long-ago chapter in our lives when the world was all in order. Then, as in a time before men put their histories down in writing, the storytelling begins.

The First Grader

Chapter 1

The Brick Schoolhouse

I was six years old and angry. Not merely angry, but vehemently angry. I was enraged but impotent to do anything about it. After all, I was just a first grader and without authority, as far as I knew. I had just witnessed a terrible injustice, and with that came the knowledge that the guilty person would not be subject to punishment. It was not until years later that I learned that life was full of unpunished violations of outraged justice. This was only my second encounter with this terrible knowledge.

My first experience with this sense of moral outrage was when my white mongrel puppy, Teddy, was killed by a speeding car in front of our house in Linnsburg. The driver, a young man, had almost stopped his car in the middle of the road as he looked back over his shoulder to see what animal he had hit. He was driving a white station wagon with faux wood paneling on the sides. I ran screaming, crying, and furious to the concrete roadway, my mother not far behind me. I was an eyewitness to murder, and I saw the murderer’s eyes, frightened and remorseful, lock briefly on mine before his head turned back to the roadway as he shifted gears and drove rapidly away. I ran out to the middle of the road and cradled Teddy’s head in my small hands, his furry body covered by a blanket of blood. Tears streamed down my face as Teddy looked up at me apologetically. By the time my mother knelt down beside me, his playful puppy eyes had grown fixed and vacant. It was also my first experience with death and the forever loss of someone beloved. Mother and I buried Teddy in the vegetable garden. Alas, I would learn that death was permanent and without remedy, in the same way that some cases of injustice would be, and I equally resented both.

The second perpetrator of injustice to which I was a witness was by no means anonymous. It was Mrs. Meek, my first grade teacher. This is how I see her 65 years later: she was a tall, middle-aged woman with a tight, barrel-shaped middle, obviously constrained by a girdle, as fashion dictated in that day. She had an exaggerated posture that gave her an imperious look. Her gaze was piercing, demanding, uncompromising, and unsympathetic. She was an intolerant woman, clearly determined to succeed where our mothers had failed in disciplining our minds and wills, which were spoiled by parental pampering. She wore long skirts, as did most women at that time, and long-sleeved blouses with lacy cuffs. Her cheeks were rouged, her lips carefully glossed, and each eyebrow plucked into a precise arch. Her skin was blanched, suggesting a person withdrawn and aloof. She was the first person I ever knew whose reading glasses were suspended like a medal of honor on her chest by a slender neck chain. She had chestnut hair with a tight, permanent wave, styled with bangs in the Mamie Eisenhower vogue. Her censorious gaze hovered over us as we hunched over our work.

She terrorized our classroom as would a prison warden whose authority was beyond the reach of the law, and we, six-year-old first-time offenders, all innocent of truly major crimes, watched her every move without looking directly at her, bound to our desks by the chains of implacable fear. We…were… going…to…learn…and…she…would…see…to…it. She had the unquestioned authority of the entire United States government behind her, and that irrevocable fact was clearly reinforced by framed and unsmiling, although somehow sympathetic, portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, hanging above the blackboard that extended from her corner desk across one wall of the classroom.

Our wooden desks were aged, commensurate with a red brick, two-story school house with basement that had stood since 1913 a block from the Mace country store. Each desk had a pencil slot at the top and a rounded opening in the top right corner designed to hold an ink bottle, to which we were not yet entitled. The flat tops, angled slightly upward, were indented by pencil marks and carved initials from previous generations, and darkly stained by the tears and sweaty, grimy hands of hundreds, whose little lives had been processed before us through this high-ceilinged room.

While we bowed over our altars of learning, Mrs. Meek sat isolated behind her large desk in the far corner of the room, opposite the door and near the high windows, the American flag always her backdrop, affirming her unquestioned authority. Her gaze followed us like a metronome. Nothing escaped her scrutiny.

She delighted in forcing untrained fingers to duplicate the straight and curved lines long ago employed in encoding the English alphabet. If it were not for the consenting statutes regarding public education, this could otherwise have been described as a sweat shop of impressed child labor.

The strangest thing was her mouth. Her lips, exaggerated by her lipstick, were constantly moving, forming and reforming into the soured grimace of a pout. Mrs. Meek continually pursed and un-pursed her lips when sitting in idle concentration, and only years later did I understand that she must have had the sore gums caused by canker sores or poorly fitted false teeth.

I was totally fascinated by the movement of her mouth, so much so that, in spite of myself, my pencil stopped moving on the page and my rapt gaze focused in hypnotic concentration on her lips, sliding back and forth across her teeth, until suddenly, transfixed, my mouth began to involuntarily make the same movements, an acolyte blankly mimicking the motions of his master.

Suddenly, and without warning, I was stunned by the rapid counter rotation of Mrs. Meek’s gaze that caught my lips in a laser beam of threatening outrage. My mouth came to attention. Horrified, I turned back to my work like someone awakened from a trance. For long minutes I did not dare to look up again, but finally, I had to, just to be sure that some dreadful consequence was not about to overtake me. With an expression of absolute calm and poise, she slowly glanced my way, and in one fleeting second, I realized we were never to mention this despicable episode again. I turned reverently back to my work without another upward glance until the bell for recess rang. Sitting closest to the exit, I was the first one out through the door. I remained on guard for days thereafter, but there was no apparent retaliation planned for my indiscretion.

Mrs. Meek was committed to the rote discipline of learning. In her mind, I am sure, it was this process that would eventually and mysteriously produce the joy of learning. So far, in my opinion at least, the experience of her classroom was more penitential than providential. Like a scowling drill instructor, she roamed the classroom, ready to terrorize us into perfect penmanship. Since by virtue of genetic destiny I was born left-handed, chirography would never be my forte. It would be my fate that the chunky medial side of my left hand would forever drag across the page following my pen or pencil, leaving behind a constant shadowy smudge on my work. This defect would be a wearisome irritant to elementary school teachers I would encounter, beginning with Mrs. Meek, as they stood looking over my written efforts. Ultimately, the American educational system reconciled itself to my left-handed deficiency.

And then there was reading. I think we learned to read in spite of Mrs. Meek, our nascent skills relentlessly pushed forward by judicious praise and indiscriminate intimidation. If Mother had not already impressed upon me a love for books, I never would have made it.

Oh, for those halcyon days when the Teutonic necessity of kindergarten had yet to arrive in rural Indiana, and my preschool education had begun under the tutelage of my mother. When the morning dishes were washed, she would sit down with me on the old, worn davenport, with springs on one cushion already poking through the thin fabric like jonquils in March along the back sidewalk. Wiping her still-wet hands on her ever present apron, her long, slightly graying hair swept up into long rolls (snake holes, she called them) on both sides of her forehead, Mother would sit next to me with a book in her hands resting on her plump middle, her patient smile and intelligent gray eyes ready to encourage my imagination and curiosity. These were the two requisite ingredients, I later understood, essential for true scholarship, but only if coupled with the ability to marshal focused concentration. Distraction would always be the enemy of achievement.

Poverty had prevented Mother from completing her final year of high school, but never robbed her of a probing intellect. From her memory she could easily quote verses from the Bible, as well as sonnets from Shakespeare, or lilting lines from Robert Burns. My education began well before Indiana sentenced me to the gulag archipelago of Mrs. Meek’s first grade classroom.

Our primary textbook at home was the Bible, supplemented by her reading to me assorted fairy tales, such as Hansel and Gretel, or the Norwegian tale of Three Billy Goats Gruff, as well as other stories and poems from my mother’s childhood memories. My indisputable favorite was our well-worn, illustrated copy of Fisherman Simms,¹ written by my great aunt and the truly pivotal