Forgive my indulgence, I just found it cathartic to write this.
On January 17, 1913 in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in eastern Kentucky in a remote corner of Elliott County, a child was born to a farming family. It was their 11th and last child, but two of his older siblings did not survive to adulthood. A sister died at 12 years old and a brother died as an infant.
While his family was better off than many, having 350 acres, farming on the mountainous terrain was very difficult. He was put to work at the age of 5 or 6 packing water to his parents and older siblings on the hillsides. When he was old enough he did start attending a one-room schoolhouse during the school year. The education was of a very poor quality, though, with a teacher who was often tardy and did not demand discipline from the students. Feeling that school was a waste of time, he did not finish the 5th grade.
At about 11 years old he started working in a coal mine, but very quickly realized this was not what he was going to do with his life. He did various jobs for the next several years, leaving home at the age of 14. When he was 17 he was working at a steel mill in Ironton, Ohio when he received word that his father had gotten lost in the fog and fallen off a cliff while out campaigning to be elected to the school board. His father’s body was not found for 8 days, but his father had survived for 2 or 3 days after the fall. His father wrote his will inside a checkbook while stranded at the bottom of the cliff with a broken leg. It would be over 40 years later that the will would finally be executed.
For the next several years he worked at various places including an automobile factory in Illinois. He was told that he was considered for a management position there but they decided to go with the gentleman that had a high school diploma. This was a story he would later relate to his own children to stress the importance of an education. During this time he also got married and had a son. The marriage was short-lived though, ending in divorce. The wife had custody of the son, but he did see him often throughout his life becoming close to his son and his son’s 6 children.
In the early 1940’s he took a job in South America building airplane hangars. While working there in 1942 he received notice that he had been drafted and returned to the states. He entered the army. He did training at Miami Beach, Florida and Tucson, Arizona before being assigned to the 801st Engineering Aviation Battalion and stationed in India. They built airstrips for the army in India. He had a camera with him in India and took pictures of the things that interested him. This included the gorgeous palaces and temples as well as funeral pyres and the large “vats” that had vultures sitting around the rim waiting to eat the corpses that were placed in it. He was discharged from the army shortly after the end of World War II.
Near the place where he grew up their was a young 20 year old woman. This woman was the oldest of 6 children and her mother had died when she was 12. For the last 8 years she had been the one responsible for cooking and cleaning in a household of 7 people. She desired more than anything to be able to move out of this house and be free of this responsibility. When she saw the handsome man back from the war she decided to pursue him, even though she was 14 years his junior. They decided to get married but her father did not agree. They took off to the next county and on April 16, 1947 in Louisa, KY they were wed. Ten months later they had their first child, a son. Three days short of a year after that they had their second child, a daughter. During this time they moved to the Columbus, Ohio area and he started doing construction work. He joined Local 200 of the Carpenters and Joiners Union.
He and his wife bought an acre lot on the banks of the Big Darby Creek and built a basement on it. The family lived in the basement while he worked at his jobs and then worked at building the house above the basement in his spare time. He ticked off his wife during this period by buying a television to watch wrestling before she had a proper stove to cook on. Eventually the house was finished and the family was able to move into it. During the next several years he continued to work in construction and raise the family. Many of his siblings and relatives had also moved to the Columbus area. Almost every weekend some of them would get together to play Euchre or Pinochle.
During these years he did have a brother murdered by being tied to a railroad track and another brother was killed in an automobile accident. He also had a sister that lost 2 children, one by running into a clothesline while playing outside. Though these tragedies caused a lot of grief, life goes on and so did his. While he and his wife were not getting rich, they were raising there children to have a much better childhood than the one he had.
In February of 1964, when his youngest child was 15 years old and one month after his 51st birthday, he and his wife had a third child. I am that child. In 1968 or 1969 he bought a motor home. In 1969 he got an offer to go to a job in Hawaii and work on building condominiums overlooking Waikiki Beach. He accepted, but to avoid the high house or apartment rent in Hawaii he had the motor home shipped over and found a vacant lot to rent to park it on. So he, my mother, and myself lived in Hawaii for a year in a motor home. He worked on the condominiums and I attended kindergarten. My older brother and sister had already graduated from high school (he was pursuing his engineering degree from Ohio State University and she was working as a beautician). My sister was also now married and had a son.
In the early 1970’s two major events happened in his life. Triggered by an injury that he had suffered at work some years previous, a cancerous spiderlike growth appeared on his spine, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. Through surgeries and treatment he perservered, finally regaining the ability to walk although remaining legally disabled. At around this same time the state of Ohio decided that the Big Darby Creek needed a dam placed on it and forced him to sell the house that he had built. Having retired due to his disability, he bought the lot in Elliott County that his wife had been raised on and placed a mobile home on it. In the summer of 1972 he, his wife, and I moved in. No dam was ever built on the Big Darby Creek.
He had worked hard all his life and was unable to stop despite his disability. He would repair the house or work in the garden. He would tend to his one or two farm animals that he generally kept to have butchered for meat. He would work in his garden. He would then pay for this activity by lying in bed in pain for long stretches.
He finally had his father’s will executed and received approximately 35 acres of the land that his father had farmed. There was a coal boom in the mid 1970’s and he had the coal mined off his land. While it did not make him wealthy, it did provide a nice cushion for retirement. He also spent some time logging the land, a task that I was required to assist with.
In 1983 after I had been in college about a year, he bought what was to be a winter home in Florida near Lake Okeechobee. After a couple of years the difficulty of maintaining two homes led him to sell the Kentucky home to his nephew and Okeechobee became their permanent residence. They lived in Florida for several years. As he saw the last of his siblings die of various maladies of old age he grew increasingly conscious of his own mortality. He felt that when he was gone his wife should be near family. So despite the objections of my mother, in 1996 he bought a small house in Elliott County and moved back home.
On January 17, 2002 he celebrated his 89th birthday. When I called to wish him happy birthday he mentioned proudly that he would be 90 years old next year. Around this time, though, we started noticing that he would sometimes forget things. Things like the rules of the card games that he had always enjoyed so much or something that he had been told not too long previous. By the time his 90th birthday rolled around he had to be reminded right before leaving that he was going to a birthday party in his honor.
Over the next 2 years he would start remembering less and less of the present and start living in the past. On December 11, 2004 he lost his first descendent to death when my sister’s only son was killed in a one-vehicle accident. This was a fact he understood when told, but would only remember for a few minutes at a time. In the next few months he became impossible for my mother to care for as he would sometimes wander off in the night. His physical health was also failing so he was admitted to the hospital and then when well enough a nursing home. He returned to the hospital one more time before going back to the nursing home.
On April 27, 2005 at 1:07 am, in the presence of his wife of 58 years and the three children they had raised together he drew his last breath and passed away peacefully. He leaves behind 4 children, 13 grandchildren (one deceased), 15 great-grandchildren, and 2 great-great grandchildren. 2 more great-grandchildren are on the way and my wife and I are expecting his final grandchild in November.