By Jane and Hope Adams, George and Beverly Musselman, Ruth Alexander, Sarah and Lynn Phelps, Mary and Ewald Fischer This book is gratefully dedicated to our parents and our grandparents. Without them we wouldn’t be here and there would be no story.

Jane Esther Musselman Adams George Hayes Musselman Ruth Ann Musselman Alexander Sarah Alice Musselman Phelps Mary Ellen Musselman Fischer

The Musselmans of Sunset Lane, 1998: Jane, Ruth, Sally, George, Mary Acknowledgements

Many people have contributed to the writing of these pages. The participation of all the Musselman siblings and their living spouses was essential, of course. George, especially, deserves thanks for his genealogical research, his first draft of the section on the Aunts, Indian Trail Lodge, and the Extended Family, as well as putting much of the copy on disk for editing and general adminis- tration. Sally Musselman Phelps, also, assisted in the Aunts’ story as well as her own work. Jean Musselman Santa Maria let us use her Lake Michigan cottage for one planning session. Beverly Musselman hosted us once in Farmington Hills, and Mary Musselman Fischer put us up twice in Hastings, Minnesota, as well as providing space for the family archives. We owe special thanks to Anne Musselman Shannon and her step-daughter Linda Shannon for preparation of final copy, arranging for printing, and copying the pictures. Mary Musselman Robertson designed and produced the cover. Sally Phelps helped outline the material and, with the help of her son-in-law Tom Stone, converted a PC disk to a Mac format for those of us who are technically challenged. Jane and Hope Adams hosted Ruth Alexander for a few days so she could get their stories on tape. Beverly Musselman proof read some of George’s copy. Jane, Andy and Sarah Alexander assisted in telling Bill Alexander’s story, as did his sister and niece, Betty and Nancy Bonell. George Musselman cheerfully drove us to the Musselman homestead in Ohio, to East Lansing, and did research in Saginaw. Mary and Ed Fischer explored Traverse City for information on Indian Trail Lodge. The Archives office at Michigan State University, the East Lansing Public Library and the Paulding County Library in Ohio were all extremely helpful. St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Saginaw, Michigan, graciously sent us what records they had of the Green family. Finally, we never could have accomplished this without computers and e-mail, so perhaps we owe a debt to the technological genius of our century which enabled us to write history, even if we did not make it.

—Ruth Ann Musselman Alexander, General Editor and Compiler

© 2000 Musselman Sibling Association Table of Contents Introduction ...... 2 1 Beginnings in America ...... 4 The Musselman Line 4 The Green Line 17 2 Anne and Hap 1900-1920 ...... 30 3 Growing Up in East Lansing ...... 46 Jane’s Story 92 George’s Story 107 Ruth’s Story 140 Sally’s Story 170 Mary’s Story 189 4 Indian Trail Lodge ...... 201 5 The Aunts ...... 232 6 Extended Family ...... 249 Musselmans 249 Greens 253 7 The Outlaws ...... 259 Hope’s Story 259 Beverly’s Story 273 Bill’s Story 279 Lynn’s Story 295 Ed’s Story 297 8 The Second Half of the Century ...... 311 The Adams Family 312 The Musselman Family 322 The Alexander Family 343 The Phelps Family 390 The Fischer Family 410 Epilogue ...... 421 Time Line ...... 425 Chart of the Family Evolution ...... 429 Introduction ......

Although separated by geography and by the demands of work and growing families, five Musselman siblings—Jane Adams, George Musselman, Ruth Alexander, Sally Phelps and Mary Fischer—have managed to maintain close relationships since the last of us vacated the family home in East Lansing, Michigan, in 1956. Periodic reunions and gatherings for holidays, weddings and funerals as well as back and forth visits among the next generation have kept family ties and connections strong. We even celebrated the joyousness of our family feeling by contributing to and publishing a family cookbook, largely through the efforts of Mary Fischer and Sally Phelps. Most of our gatherings involve food—a genuine Musselman passion, clearly visible in our substantial figures. We enshrined a Musselman physical charac- teristic when we called it The Thick-Thigh Cookbook: Masticating with the Musselmans (For Those Who Prefer Eating to Sex). Since the book included notes and comments about our celebrations and personalities, it might have sufficed as a testament of our family relationship. However, as the years pass (we are now “the old folks”) we realize that our lives, with those of our parents and children, encompass all of the twentieth century and that they probably illustrate many of the events, movements, and changes during this era. We think it might be useful to record our stresses and strains as a family, our adventures and laughter and tears, in the historical context of the “American Century” through which we have passed. We want to leave this record for our descendants—whether they are interested in it or not. By shaping our memories and thoughts and experiences in some orderly fashion and relating them to the world in which we lived, we hope to understand more clearly who we are, where we have been, and how we got to this point in our lives. In the process, we expect to savor again those experiences that have been sad and funny, joyous and Introduction ..... 3 miserable, rewarding and difficult, boring and exciting, triumphant and devastating. In the process perhaps we will learn something about ourselves and our world. We’ll leave it to generations that follow us to determine whether these pages will clarify for them where they are going in the next century, but we hope that they will at least get acquainted with the family from which they have sprung. We write these memoirs not because our experiences have been significant in any notable way, but because of their very ordinariness. We are not famous and our contributions to the world have been modest. We will never make it into a history book that we do not write ourselves. We are boringly typical of a “wasp” American family in the twentieth century: white, Protestant, of mixed northern European heritage. Nonetheless, our lives chronicle the movement of American people from farming to professions, from Midwest small town life to residing in urban centers across the country and the world, from large families to small or blended families, from education ending with grade school to acquisition of professional and graduate degrees. We are unusual, perhaps, only in that we have been endowed with extraordinarily healthy genes. Our parents and most of our grandparents and aunts and uncles lived to old age, some to their nineties. Although we have surely known tragedy and sorrow, we have largely avoided terrible accidents, diseases, and disasters. We have also been extraordinarily blessed with healthy children. In the spring of 1996 we, the five offspring of Harry Hayes and Anne Isabel (Green) Musselman and our living spouses, attended an “Elder Hostel” hosted by the University of South Alabama. The main subject of study was WRITING, in particular the writing of memoirs. Author Terry Cline, the main lecturer, said, in effect: “Just start telling the history of yourself and your family from your perspective. Your descendants will thank you for it. If others in your generation do the same, a multi-dimensional picture of your life and times will result.” The five of us accepted the challenge and what follows is the result of our efforts.

➥ Chapter One ...... Beginnings in America

The Musselman Line We begin with our forebears. We trace our lineage to European peasant stock—large families of healthy people who migrated to America over the course of three centuries. Our family descends from immigrants from England in the seventeenth century, from the “Pennsylvania Dutch” who arrived in the eighteenth century, from the Irish Protestants who emigrated through Canada during the famine of the 1840s, from Scots in the late nineteenth century who also came through Canada. The identifiable connection to the Musselman line appears at the beginning of the nineteenth century when our nation was less than two decades old. We know that a John Musselman was born in 1803 in Shenandoah County, Virginia, where his family had been living for perhaps three generations. This area, known as the “Old West,” was settled largely by Scotch-Irish and the more numerous Germans who arrived after coastal and tidewater regions of the colonies were mostly occupied. Many of the Germans came from the Palatinate near the Rhine where they had suffered religious and economic persecution during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) and the War of Spanish Succession or Queen Anne’s War (1701-1713). Furthermore, Quaker William Penn had established Pennsylvania on the basis of religious liberty. He published a pamphlet that circulated in Europe advertising that fact, and the possibility of buying cheap land on reasonable terms in what would become a great agricultural region. By the third decade of the eighteenth century, these “Palatines,” as they were sometimes called in America, began to emigrate in large numbers. Some of them were members of Protestant groups like the Beginnings in America ..... 5

Mennonites and the Dunkers (or Church of the Brethren). They arrived in Philadelphia and made their way inland by the easiest route to establish farms in the Great Valley of the Appalachians or to join family members who were already there. They formed a substantial portion of Pennsylvania’s population (known as the Pennsylvania Dutch, a corruption of “Deutsch” or German). The Musselmans were part of this ethnic group that eventually drifted south into the Shenandoah Valley. According to family legend, the name “Musselman” was bestowed upon the immigrants by the agent who received them in the New World. He probably did not understand German and our ancestors were no doubt illiterate—the name might well have been a corruption of “Moseman” or some variation thereof. But it became officially “Musselman” in America and has so remained for almost three centuries. According to Maria Adams, German wife of James Adams, one of Harry and Anne’s grandchildren, the name is unknown in Germany as a traditional family name. It is certainly common in America. The internet lists many branches of descendents. It is well known through the famous Musselman Applesauce, the Musselman bicycle coaster brake and some well known sports figures with that name. The first immigrants were fertile and produced many children who gradually pushed farther west across the country seeking new land. They were in turn fruitful and multiplied. We, however, are not concerned with sorting out all of these distant connections. We are concerned with only one line—that which traces back to John Musselman of Shenandoah County, Virginia. Families were large to provide help with the farm work, but there was not enough land for all of the sons to inherit. In a pattern that would repeat itself throughout the nineteenth century, some sons inevitably struck out for new territory in the west. So it was with our great grandfather John Musselman. In 1830 John (b. 1803) married a woman by the name of Eliza Clemmer (b. 1813) and they migrated to Ohio. Ohio had been a state since the year John was born but still had land open for purchase and homesteading under the Land Act of 1820. Like many immigrants heading for northern Ohio in those years, John and Eliza probably came west by way of the Erie Canal (completed in 1825) and Lake Erie. By 1834 they had settled on a homestead in a wilderness 6 ..... Beginnings in America

that would eventually become Emerald Township, Defiance County, but bordered on and perhaps at one time belonged to Paulding County directly south. Their land was situated on the south bank of the Maumee River, a meandering stream that drains most of northwest Ohio and adjacent areas of Indiana into Lake Erie at Toledo. They were located several miles south of the future town of Sherwood, Defiance County. Much of John Musselman’s property many years later became part of the US Highway 127 right-of-way going north through flat rich farm land, which is still relatively unpopulated, to central Michigan. At the time of his venture in homesteading, the area was not regarded as particularly desirable for settlement. Historically, the region had belonged to the Wyandot Indian tribe and was the site of battles with Indians following the American Revolution and during the War of 1812. But even with the removal of the Indians after they surrendered their land in the Maumee Rapids Treaty of 1817, settlement did not occur immediately for a couple of reasons. (There were not more than 3000 people living in the whole strip of northern Ohio west of Toledo and north of the Maumee when John arrived in 1830.) For one thing, transportation to markets was too difficult until the completion of two canals, the Wabash and Erie and the Miami and Erie. Like many Ohio rivers, the Maumee was not really navigable for big barges. The two canals, which joined at the village of Junction in the northeast part of Paulding County, opened up a means of shipping produce east from this region (and from Indiana) via Lake Erie as well as the Ohio River. Construction on the canals was started in 1825 but not completed until 1845. By 1851, the high point of Ohio canal traffic, the tolls on Ohio canals amounted to over $300,000. Railroads soon replaced them, however, and by the turn of the century, they had fallen into disuse. But the primary deterrent to pioneers settling in northwest Ohio in the 1830s was the “Great Black Swamp whose fetid waters lay over the land with the stillness of death.” This area has been described as “a pear shaped wasteland…120 miles long and 20 to 40 miles wide… thickly forested and filled with malarial bogs and pools of water.”1 The arrival of the canals provided incentives for extensive reclamation during the middle part of the century. Settlers had to dig drainage ditches Beginnings in America ..... 7 and clear timber before they planted crops. Farms were literally carved out of the forests. Eventually, the pioneers were rewarded with bumper yields from the rich soil. John Musselman and his large family must have found plenty of work when they established the Musselman homestead in this region. Many settlers and their sons worked for lumber companies in the winter felling the huge oak and other hardwood trees, clearing brush, and removing stumps for extra cash for their families. Our father Harry claimed that he alone cleared five acres with a hand axe—presumably on the land his father acquired in 1891. John Musselman was one of the first settlers in what became Emerald Township. It was not even organized until 1853, almost twenty years after he took up land there. Like other farm families of their generation, John and Eliza had a large family over a great number of years. Eliza gave birth to fourteen children, thirteen of whom survived. Ira, the next to the youngest, became our grandfather. Ira was born in 1857 and told his son Harry he did not even know some of the older family members, since twenty five years separated him from his oldest brother. In addition to his first family, John Musselman fathered two more children by a second wife after his first wife died. In his ninety years, spanning most of the nineteenth century, this hardy pioneer did more than farm and beget children. According to his obituary, he was an active Mason, a “practicing physician” (probably doing required frontier medicine such as lancing a boil or pulling a tooth); he also served as a justice of the peace and operated a tannery and shoe factory. In addition, he built the first school house for the township in 1854 and he was noted as a great reader, particularly of the county newspapers. When Ira was born in 1857, his father was 53 years old, and the boy grew up in the shadow of this energetic man. By that time, the farm was well established and John Musselman was a recognized leader in the rural community. Ira must have had a little schooling at the township school, since he could read and write, and he presumably shared in the life of the farm in those early years. He was too young to fight in the Civil War, but his older brothers and brothers-in-law may have. According to the Paulding County history, scarcely a family in the county was not represented in the Union army. Paulding County 8 ..... Beginnings in America

even welcomed a small number of escaped black slaves from the south, although white people carefully segregated them in a separate school and church. But Ira no doubt participated in local school and community events—corn huskings, box socials, spelling bees, barn raisings. A man of moderate height, slim and wiry looking, he did not create a very imposing figure, and we remember him as rather quiet and unassuming. He did not appear to take the same leadership role in the area that his father had. In 1879 Ira married Esther Luce, a member of another large family living in the area. Esther’s family traced their lineage back more than two centuries to New England. One of her earliest known American ancestors was William Daggett born in Sutton, Massachusetts, in 1661, putting this branch of the family on the American continent early in our national history. The small town of Sutton, south of Worcester, Massachusetts, was far from the center of colonial life in the seventeenth

The Ira Musselman Family (circa 1911) Back Row (left to right): Harry Musselman, Ruth Musselman, Emery Hetrick, Grace Musselman Hetrick, Forrest Musselman Front Row (seated): Ira Musselman, Dale Musselman, Esther Luce Musselman Beginnings in America ..... 9 century. We presume the Daggetts were English Puritans who came to America for religious or economic reasons and who no doubt subsisted primarily off the land for several generations. The family continued to live in Sutton for almost a century and a half. Eventually, one Daggett daughter named Esther married a John Luce. He apparently had joined other New Englanders in leaving Massachusetts for better prospects in Ohio country. The Western Reserve along Lake Erie was once claimed by Connecticut and was, in fact, first settled by New Englanders. By the 1820s, they rapidly took up land in various areas of Ohio. The Luce family settled in the Paulding/Defiance area, probably taking up homesteads there. John and Esther’s son, Hayes, had a daughter, Esther Saphronia Luce. She married Ira Musselman in 1879 to become our Grandmother Musselman. She was born in Defiance County in 1858, but apparently the family had connections in Delaware Bend, Ohio, where she spent her childhood. The town of Delaware now claims both a strong New England heritage and a equally strong identification with the Methodist Church (Ohio Wesleyan College is located there.). In 1895, Esther joined the Methodist Church of Delaware Bend although she also was a member of the local Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) near the Musselman homestead. This is one of the few references to religion in the Ohio Musselman history. We are led to the conclusion that, although table grace was regularly practiced and the family had some affiliation with the local church, neither piety nor religious activity played a very large role in their lives. Ira gave Esther a family Bible in 1886 but no one bothered to maintain family records in it. There appeared to be no regular family prayers, Bible reading, nor notable religious rituals in the course of their lives. Much later, Harry told his son George that his Grandfather John became quite interested in spiritualism in his old age. Harry seemed to imply that it was something of an embarrassment to the family at the time, especially to Harry’s generation. Various forms of spiritualism had great popularity in nineteenth century America, and in the 1880’s and 1890s a form known as “theosophy” gained a considerable following. This may have been the belief in the spirit world that intrigued John Musselman. 10 ..... Beginnings in America

Whatever their spirituality, the family staunchly maintained conventional Puritan morality, emphasizing hard work, thrift, and sober living. Our father (and his brothers) never approved of going to movies on Sunday, did not participate in card games or other recreation of the sort, and sometimes appeared to feel guilty over expenditures for pleasure or luxury, even if it was not their money. Our father always had suspicions about the use of alcoholic beverages. While not a teetotaler, as his later sometimes disastrous attempts to make wine attest, he was never really comfortable with social drinking. If the family did not make church the center of their lives, Esther found a community elsewhere. She was a founding member of Eastern Star of Sherwood, Ohio, and Ira had a Masonic grave side ritual at his funeral. The couple, Ira and Esther, did not leave the Musselman homestead after their wedding. Instead, Ira worked for his father on the farm and they lived in the log cabin that John Musselman had built to live in when he first arrived. Thus even as a married man, Ira lived for some years in his father’s shadow. By that time John had built a frame farmhouse where the rest of the family resided. In September, 1880, in that log cabin, Esther gave birth to Harry, their first child who was destined to become our father. He told us a little about those first eleven years of his boyhood while they resided on the home place. The farm was virtually a self-contained community. Not only did John and Eliza raise their large family on the farm, there were always non-family “hands” who lived with them, and at least one female non-family member for a while. There was a dairy operation. There were animals and fowl raised for work, food, fiber, and leather. They always had eggs except sometimes in winter when the hens quit laying. A garden provided food for the table. Crops included feed for the animals and grain. Grinding of the grain was one operation that was not done on the farm. Grain was floated down the Maumee river to a mill where excess flour was sold. Our father’s favorite place on the farm was the “shop,” which to him was “tool heaven.” Whatever was needed to build, repair, and maintain the simple farm equipment they used seemed to be on hand. Even a forge. Dad’s fascination with tools continued throughout his life, as his shop in the basement of our house in East Lansing testifies. Beginnings in America ..... 11

Ira Musselman’s Farmhouse, Paulding County Ohio Built circa 1891. There originally was an entrance in the diagonal wall on the right with a porch that wrapped around that corner.

He told George that as a boy he was always wild to get into the shop, but he was restricted somewhat while he was young. His interest in the shop rather than in tending the crops and farm animals presaged his future. Farm work was still powered by horses when he was a boy. Dad would devote a large part of his professional life to encouraging farmers to convert from horse power to gas powered tractors and farm machinery and to helping them to do so. But he had other mechanical operations to watch as well. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the railroad network in the United Stated was still expanding and northwestern Ohio seemed isolated enough to need north-south rail service. In 1887 a new line running north through western Ohio was begun that would eventually go to Lansing, Michigan (the Cincinnati, Jackson and Mackinaw) and would one day take Harry out of Ohio. While the work was going on past the farm, including a bridge over the Maumee River, Dad watched its progress. His most vivid memories, he said, were of the exotic odors that came from the huge kettles steaming over open fires. This was the 12 ..... Beginnings in America

food for the railroad work gangs. In later years Dad deduced that the work crews were Italian, and it was Italian cuisine he was smelling. When Harry was eleven, Ira bought forty acres two miles south and a mile east of the homestead. He built a house (which still stands) and moved his family there in 1892. But he probably continued to work the Musselman homestead land. His father, John Musselman, lived until 1893, and the homestead was not disposed of until long after his death. Ira was the only son left at home so the work fell to him. He also needed time to finish clearing his own land and get it under cultivation. By that time, there were two additional children in Ira’s family: Grace Eliza, born in 1884, and Forrest Floyd, born in 1889. Two more children were born after they moved to the new farm: Ruth Fern in 1895 and Dale Talmadge in 1898. A mile west of their new place was Emmett School, the one-room school that Harry and his brothers and sisters attended. However, another educational experience made a big impact upon the young Harry. In 1893 the family visited the Chicago Columbian Exposition. At age 13, Harry was mightily impressed, although he supplied few details. The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 highlighted the work of architect Louis Sullivan in the Transportation Building. Harry may have become interested in the ideas presented there, particularly “form follows function” which later influenced Frank Lloyd Wright, whom our father greatly admired. In all of his later furniture and house building, Harry emphasized function in his design. He probably was also thrilled with the city of Chicago which then claimed more than a million people as well as railroads, shipping, manufacturing, and bridges. To a farm boy from Ohio, it would appear marvelous indeed. He told George about the Columbian Exposition when he took him, with our mother, Jane and Ruth, off to another Chicago World’s Fair, the “Century of Progress” in 1933. He wanted his children to have a wonderful experience equal to his own. Our father never said anything about his teacher(s) in Emmett school, but he often referred fondly to the McGuffey Sixth Reader that represented his literary background as well as that of most American school children of the time. Called “the backbone of the American common school system in the 19th century,” the McGuffey readers imparted ideas, values and standards of conduct to millions of Beginnings in America ..... 13

American boys and girls. The Sixth Reader for the most mature students contained 138 selections from 111 different authors including Bryant, Emerson, Longfellow, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Milton, Dickens, as well as speeches by Patrick Henry and Daniel Webster.2 Out of it were drawn many of the “pieces” that school children were expected to “speak” at Friday afternoon exhibitions for parents. Our father was never a great reader of literature. (The New York Times, Readers Digest, National Geographic, Architectural Forum, Ladies Home Journal and Life were standard reading fare in our house when we were children.) But he greatly admired those who wrote, particularly, as he put it, “those who could blacksmith out a sentence” with ease and clarity. And he credited the McGuffey Sixth Reader with whatever literary knowledge he had. When Harry completed the eighth grade, he was hired as the teacher for Emmett school. He never indicated how old he was at that time, but probably he was older than the eighth grader of today. Rural school teachers were usually required to be sixteen years old in order to teach. High school was not an option for Harry since there was no such institution in Paulding County until after the turn of the century and no provision for him to get to it. At that time, he was not unusual in completing only grade school. In 1890, less than one third of one per cent of the population was enrolled in high school but by 1920 that number had increased seven times.3 Dale, the youngest of Ira’s children, was the only member of that generation fortunate enough to attend high school after one was built in Paulding. It was in teaching rural school that Harry experienced putting on programs to show parents the progress their children were making in learning. Reciting poetry and creating little skits, probably based on the McGuffey Readers, were a major part of the school curriculum. That is perhaps why Harry always encouraged his own children (us) to perform, even without any talent or special training. Rural schools didn’t demand professionalism, and neither did he, even when the results were quite embarrassing. Jane was encouraged to perform the highland fling at age 10, George to master the accordion, and Ruth’s talents were limited to high kicks and clumsily executed cart wheels. He sometimes fantasized that even he might do something with the harmonica. By the time Sally and Mary came along, he must have 14 ..... Beginnings in America

given up thinking we were all ready for Major Bowe’s Original Amateur Hour on the radio—a show he greatly enjoyed listening to. But Harry found the discipline that a rural school teacher was required to maintain difficult. One time he said he found it necessary to punish a boy in his school. He ordered the boy to sit on a narrow board in front of the class. The boy did so for a long period without moving at all. When he told the boy he could go, the lad took off without a word and fled the school. His behavior was so strange that Harry wondered if his punishment had been too severe and the boy might have been injured in some way. Teaching country school did not appeal to Harry as a life’s work and he found farm work too arduous for the satisfaction he could derive from it. For a few years he searched for something to engage his mind and energy. He told some family members that he went to Mason County, Michigan (near Ludington), to work for a year, perhaps at teaching or farm labor. Yet Harry would indeed become a teacher, but at the other end of the educational spectrum. He was destined to teach in college, although he had no notion of that as a very young man. He was sure there were better ways to make a living than either farming or teaching country school. He believed he had the smarts to do something more and realized that education was the way out. The decision to go to college would totally change the course of his life and the lives of the rest of his family. He set his sights on Michigan Agricultural College in East Lansing, accessible on the C.J.&M. RR. This railroad would take him out of Ohio permanently. Harry’s two brothers and one of his sisters, with our father’s help, followed him to MAC in later years. He strongly encouraged his sister Ruth to continue her education—an indication of his belief in the equality of women. Another sister, Grace went off to California. None of Ira Musselman’s family wound up residing in Ohio.4 Our connections with the Musselman farm were slight and our contact with our Ohio relatives infrequent and distant. Jane has the clearest memories. She rode the old plow horse on one of her visits as a little girl, and she has a vivid mental picture of the farm kitchen. It had a table with a kerosene lamp. George remembers watching Aunt Ruth washing the glass lamp chimneys every morning. There was a pump in the kitchen. Beginnings in America ..... 15

George remembers a visit to the Luce farm and to some of the other relatives, who seemed very old to him when he was a small boy. For some years we children accompanied our parents in August every year to the Luce family reunion in Ohio. These are memorable particularly for the outlay of food on picnic tables: platters of fried chicken, meatloaf, ham, scalloped potatoes, pickled beets and hard boiled eggs in jars, watermelon, and an array of cakes and pies. That many of the family members enjoyed themselves at table was evident in their ample size. We children did not like these outings very much—we did not know the other children and were too shy to enter into their activities. The adults, including our father and his brothers and cousins, seemed to have a good time indulging in practical jokes and horse play. The Luce family members appeared ebullient, good natured, and full of fun, whereas the Musselman clan was much more reserved and dour, sometimes downright gloomy. The fact that the Luce family regularly had a reunion of the many relatives living in the area and the Musselman family did not might be attributed to their different attitudes toward work and fun. One reunion that Ruth remembers with horror took place in a park where there was a swimming pool filled with sulfurous smelling water. It was supposed to be healthful but stunk too much of rotten eggs for her to try it. George did go in but he didn’t enjoy it. Ruth thought a family that had a picnic at a park where the swimming pool, usually such a treat, was unswimmable had to be quite stupid. We were all glad when we began working at Indian Trail Lodge in the summer and didn’t have to go to the Luce reunions in Ohio anymore. After their children left home, Grandfather and Grandmother Musselman remained on their farm for a number of years. Grandfather Musselman loved to garden. Even in his old age when he was living with his son Dale in Royal Oak, Michigan, he had a huge garden. He was particularly interested in horticulture. He had a plum orchard on the farm. At least one year he rented out the Ohio place and went to Mason County, Michigan, where he farmed. Since this is the fruit belt of Michigan, near Lake Michigan, Grandfather may have explored the possibility of indulging his interest in growing fruit. He may also have gone there because his son Harry had been there before him and knew 16 ..... Beginnings in America

something of the area. In any case, what he learned did not sufficiently attract him, and he returned to the Ohio farm the following year. Grandmother Musselman died in early 1923, but she must have suffered from either Alzheimer’s or a stroke, because she was confined in the state mental hospital in Toledo at the time of her death. Jane is the only one of our siblings who remembers her at all—she has a dim memory of visiting someone in a red brick building. She believes Grandmother came out of the building. Of course at that time mental illness was regarded as a family shame and so we grandchildren heard very little about her. Our father seldom ever mentioned his mother and our mother only did so in hushed tones with few details. After his wife’s death, Ira stayed on the farm. At Harry’s suggestion, Ira hired his daughter Ruth, at a salary, to keep house for him—again illustrating Harry’s respect for women’s work. A few years later when Ruth married Grant Fox the farm was sold. Ira then made his home in St. Petersburg, Florida, during the winter and with either Uncle Forrest in East Lansing or Uncle Dale in Royal Oak, Michigan, during the summer. He drove down to St. Petersburg in a Model A Ford until he was a very old man. He was quite spry and was a champion at shuffleboard in St. Petersburg, apparently leading a life that was a little more social and certainly quite different from that which he had known while farming in Ohio. When he was in Michigan, he usually paid us a visit. He had adult onset diabetes and he kept his saccharine in a can that originally held a deodorant for sanitary napkins. It sat in the middle of the dining room table while he was with us. We children never said very much to him, nor he to us, but he used to scare us delightfully by pushing out his false teeth, which sent us into giggling fits. In the spring of 1940, Ira Musselman was killed in an automobile accident while he was driving from Royal Oak to Lansing to see us. He was 83 years old. Our extended family on the Musselman side at that time included only Forrest and Dale Musselman’s families. Aunt Ruth had died childless in 1936 and her Canadian husband, Grant Fox, remarried and faded from view. Aunt Grace, who resided in California, came briefly into our lives at Grandfather’s funeral and made several more visits to Michigan in succeeding years, so that we made a belated acquaintance with her. She died in California some years after our father’s death. ➥ Beginnings in America ..... 17

The Green Line Mother’s family, the Greens, had a much shorter history on American soil than the Musselmans. Our mother, Anne Isabel Green, was born in Saginaw, Michigan, in 1889 of parents who were second generation Irish and Scottish. Her father, George Green, was the fifth child of a large Irish family with eleven children. His parents, Daniel Green and Anne Lucas, were immigrants from County Carlow, Ireland, who came to the U.S. through Canada. In spite of their name, the Greens were “Orange Men,” ever loyal to the Crown (through William of Orange) and the Anglican Church. Thus they did not face the terrible discrimination that Irish Catholics faced in Ireland, even though they lived in a Catholic county. According to our mother, her grandfather Daniel Green used to get out his orange colors on July 12, the annual day of celebration for Protestant Irish commemorating King William’s defeat of the Catholic Irish who supported James Stuart at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. According to family lore, Daniel departed alone for Canada and settled in Toronto. From the same County Carlow but somewhat later, when she was sixteen, came Anne Lucas to join him in marriage. Exactly what encouraged them to emigrate and exactly when this occurred is not clear, but it had to be before 1849 because Anne’s sister, Jane Lucas, sent a sampler to her as a wedding gift. Now in the possession of her great-great granddaughter, Jane Alexander, the sampler reads “Tullow School, County Carlow, Ireland, 1849.” Of course, the decade of the 1840s was the height of the Irish potato famine. It reached its peak in 1846-47 when the Irish, particularly the harried, landless Catholic tenants, literally starved to death.5 Thousands and thousands of them emigrated to foreign lands during these years. However, since the Greens were Protestant and supported the Crown, they were perhaps not in quite so desperate a situation. The fact that Jane Lucas was able to go to school would indicate as much. They may even have been tradesmen in Ireland, since Anne and Daniel were able to go into business operating an inn in the Toronto area for a few years after they arrived in Canada. Since they were loyal subjects of the crown, they faced no prejudice in their new country either. They joined 18 ..... Beginnings in America

many Protestant Irish who had settled in southwestern Ontario in the earlier part of the century. Eventually, however, the inn burned down and the Greens moved across the border to Grand Blanc, Michigan, for a new start. Their fifth child, our grandfather George Green, was born in Grand Blanc in 1864. We know little of his older siblings, but Daniel and Anne produced six other children after George, all born in the United States. George Green always proudly claimed that his middle name was Washington (although some records indicate it might have been William). Indeed, as their first-born in the United States, Anne and Daniel might have bestowed that revered name upon him. The Greens arrived during the boom years for immigration into Michigan. After the territory achieved statehood in 1837, people from New York and New England flocked to the southern part of the state looking for more fertile and productive land or for promising business opportunities. There were other immigrants as well: Germans, Dutch, and people from the British Isles coming directly from the old countries. In addition, a large number of Irish, Scottish and British emigrated from Canada in the next couple of decades. The census of 1860 indicates that of Michigan’s population of almost 750,000, about five per cent were born in Canada. This did not include parents like the Greens who had left the British Isles to settle first in that part of the British Empire.6 Like so many Canadian immigrants to the United States, the Greens’ departure from Canada was occasioned not only by the fire that burned down their inn but also by an economic depression in that country in the late forties and early fifties. The repeal of the Corn Laws in England opened up trade which dealt a serious blow to Canadian and English agriculture for a time and adversely affected Canada’s economy. Those residents of southwestern Ontario whose future looked bleak in Canada sought greater opportunity in the new state of Michigan, easily accessible across the Detroit River. The Green’s reason for moving on to Grand Blanc, some fifty miles north of Detroit, is not known. However, having crossed into Detroit, Grand Blanc could be reached fairly easily by the territorial road from Detroit to Bay City. Furthermore, the town was closer to land not yet Beginnings in America ..... 19 taken up whereas the southern counties were already settled. But the Green family did not stay long in Grand Blanc nor did they appear interested in farming. We know that they began buying and selling fish in Saginaw before George was very old, probably by the late sixties or early seventies. Fishing had long been a major industry on Lake Huron, with rich supplies of Great Lakes whitefish and trout. A market to sell fish seemed like a reasonable enterprise for new immigrants. However, the lumber industry soon surpassed fishing. Forests in the northeastern states were somewhat depleted. The great forests of towering white pines which covered the northern half of Michigan’s lower Peninsula were valued as the “king” of Michigan lumber. By the late 1860s, Michigan led the nation in the production of lumber and Saginaw was the capitol of the industry until the end of the century. The Saginaw Valley was a particularly rich area with “more than three million acres covered with white pine of unsurpassed size and quality.”7 Furthermore, the town of Saginaw was strategically located on a large river system (the Shiawassee, Tittibawassee, Cass, Bad, and Flint Rivers, with tributaries, joined to make the Saginaw River which flowed into Saginaw Bay and hence to Lake Huron). This system allowed the cut logs to be floated downstream to sawmills. The demand for Michigan lumber was enormous, especially after the Chicago Fire of 1871. After that, Saginaw was in its hey day as a national lumber capitol. It was also a thriving trade center with a growing population that continued to prosper even after the lumber industry moved on to northern Michigan and Wisconsin later in the century. No doubt, Daniel Green and his wife thought a fish business could be profitable in such a town, as indeed it was, providing livings for several branches of the family for a number of decades. What kind of childhood George Green had is not known, but the members of the Green family were generally jolly, sociable and close-knit. George went through at least the fifth grade before he went to work in the business. He loved to do “sums.” When we were small children, we used to crawl into bed with him early in the morning in Saginaw to play “school.” He set easy problems for us like “If I have seven apples and I give one to Ruth and one to George, how many will I have to eat myself?” 20 ..... Beginnings in America

We always knew the answers and he would say in mock amazement, “’At’s right! Go to the head of the class!” He was quick in making change and even as an old man, he loved to dicker when he did the buying of meat, fish, eggs, cottage cheese and produce for Indian Trail Lodge in Traverse City. Reading the daily paper was an important part of his day, although he read slowly. Obviously, what little formal education he had, he made good use of. Green Brothers’ Fish Market was the center of the family’s life. According to Polk’s City Directory of Saginaw, Green Brothers (George and James) is listed as early as 1891-92 at 602 Genesee Street, dealing in wholesale and retail fish, oysters, game and poultry. George was a young man starting his family at this time, but presumably his parents had been in the business for some years. The market later moved to 601 Lapeer Street. Everyone worked in it: brothers Edward, Daniel, Samuel and Robert are at various times listed in the Directory as “clerking” in the store or “peddling fish.” Our mother told us that her grandmother, Anne Lucas Green, was a very small woman but reputedly the boss of her large family and the market. She made her sons and daughters toe the line and our mother remembers them saying, “Yes, Mama.” and “No, Mama.” even when they were grown men and women with their own families. When our grandfather was only fourteen (1877), he was sent to Philadelphia to buy fish wholesale to sell in Saginaw. The Greens also bought fish from the Great Lakes to sell to buyers in the East. George may have arranged those sales on his trip east. By that time, railroads traversed the eastern third of the nation so that transportation of fresh fish was possible via railway express. The fish were packed in ice in wooden crates with handles and shipped out to arrive for sale the next day. A large German Catholic population had arrived in Saginaw during the middle of century and was a ready market for both local and imported fish. Financially, Green Brothers’ Fish Market operated strictly out of the till. Everyone, even Sarah Green, Grandfather’s unmarried sister who took care of her parents in their old age, got a share of the profits at the end of the week. Yet it seemed to support the family reasonably well, and George Green seemed well suited for working in the business. He was a gregarious, jolly man with an Irish capacity for humor. He Beginnings in America ..... 21 loved town life and the people he met there. He regularly went to the barbershop for a shave, enjoyed passing the time of day with other businessmen, and meeting people. Yet he was neither a drinker nor a gambler. He found most of his social life in church and family. His personality was quite different from that of our other taciturn grandfather. Ira Musselman drew most of his satisfaction from raising a crop, growing a garden, tending his fruit orchard, but he was for many years subordinate to his father on the farm, and he never appeared to become the local leader that his father had been. The Musselman family was reserved but intelligent, hard-working, and loyal to each other. The Greens, on the other hand, were demonstrative, affectionate, and emotional. They liked to talk, laugh, and sing together. Although close to his large family and involved with them in business, George Green was never dominated by them. In fact, he loved people and parties and had a passion for the circus. As a young man he even considered joining the circus, a notion common to many of his contemporaries. He loved little children and usually charmed them with his jokes and cheerful demeanor, always trying to get them to do “the cakewalk” with him. His daughters adored him. Although he could become angry and Ruth remembers him spanking her during a temper tantrum and Jane remembers him slapping the hands of a very small George (perhaps for banging on the piano, presaging the future), mostly Grandpa Green was a jolly Santa Clause figure to children. Ruth even invited him to come to East Lansing to visit her first grade class, which he did. By age 24, when George Green married, he was able to move his bride into a fully furnished home with the furniture all paid for. The young woman he married, Jane Law, had a background that was similar to his own. She was born in Whitby, Ontario, in 1869 but had come with her family to Buena Vista, Michigan, when she was only six years old. The latter was a small village just east of Saginaw. She was the daughter of John Law and Anne Milne Law who, like the Greens, had emigrated first to Canada, then to the United States. But their situation was different from the Greens. They were married before they left for Canada. Their marriage took place in Strathdon, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, in 1850 when Anne Milne, like Anne Lucas Green, was just sixteen. 22 ..... Beginnings in America

Scotland had suffered some of the same economic distress that Ireland experienced in a failure of the potato crops and grain harvests in the forties. Furthermore, there was an increasing drive to move “crofters”—comparable to our tenant farmers—off the land to convert it to sheep grazing. Yet Aberdeenshire suffered less than some other parts of Scotland and in mid-century was still a region of small farms and reasonable prosperity. Still, large numbers of young people left the land for the cities and towns in hopes of a better life.8 Anne Milne was among them when she left for Aberdeen. Increasingly, new worlds lured them farther abroad with a promise of even greater economic opportunity. Some, like our mother’s great uncle William Milne went to Australia or New Zealand. In New Zealand, William ultimately became a much respected headmaster of a school. To achieve this position, he must have had considerable education in Scotland. Others, like John and Anne Law, went to Canada, where they settled in Whitby, Ontario, before crossing into the United States some twenty years later. Our mother and her sisters remembered their grandmother Anne Milne Law as a great reader, particularly of the Bible and history, so she also must have had some education in Scotland. She was an independent thinker, apparently, because she was an early advocate of women’s suffrage. It was she who urged her daughter and son-in-law to allow her granddaughter (our mother Anne Green) to go to college. Our mother reported that Grandmother Law was always interested in new things. When grapefruit first came on the market in Saginaw, she and her daughter Jane Green made a point of getting some to try and they liked it. She was also interested in the Democratic Party, even though she could not vote. She was an enthusiastic admirer of Queen Victoria. Loyal Americans as they were, she and her daughter Jane joined together to give a party to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. In fact, Anne Milne Law was a decided Anglophile. Family legend has it that, although she was raised in the Scottish Presbyterian “Kirk,” she converted to Anglicanism (the Episcopal Church in the United States) when she visited an Anglican church as a very young woman. She liked the liturgy so much that she allegedly “stole” a Prayer Book and promptly converted. For the rest of her life, she was a devoted churchwoman—walking three miles on Sunday to Beginnings in America ..... 23 attend an Episcopal Church in Saginaw, presumably the first St. Paul’s. Built in 1864, it was a wooden structure in what was then East Saginaw, separate from Saginaw City. It burned to the ground in 1885, destroying all records. Presumably this was also the church which the Green family attended when they arrived in Saginaw in the 1870s. A new St. Paul’s was erected in 1887 on Washington Avenue in time for the wedding of Jane Law and George Green in 1888, with East Saginaw incorporated into Saginaw City the next year. Both her devout religious faith and her enthusiasm for British culture were legacies Anne Law left to her daughter and granddaughters. All were active in women’s organizations in the church, sang in choirs, taught Sunday School and otherwise participated in church activities. Concomitant to their enthusiasm for things British was disdain for Germans and German culture. This was the largest ethnic group in Saginaw when the Green daughters grew up and a strong element in their neighborhood. The Greens felt Germans were too “clannish” and authoritarian and too determined to maintain their cultural hegemony. They disliked the fact that the children in the German Lutheran School across the street from the Green home were taught in German and spoke German. Of course, the general anti-German sentiment of Americans especially during World War I, and to a lesser extent in World War II, did not lessen their antipathy. In later life, we children found this prejudice, in addition to others about both African Americans and Jews held by many “wasp” Americans, both annoying and embarrassing. John Law does not figure nearly as prominently in family lore as does his wife although both of them lived to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary in 1900 at the home of their daughter Jane Law Green. They had seven children but only five survived and of those only two besides our grandmother were familiar to us. Jane’s brother John Law and his wife Frances lived in Bay City. The two families were not close because “Aunt Fannie” was a difficult person, although the Green daughters were very friendly with her daughter, “Cousin Rose.” Jane’s younger sister Minnie became a nurse in the 1890s, lived with the Greens for a time before she married John Lines, a man much older than herself. We got to know John and Minnie Lines much later when they lived in Lansing, Michigan. 24 ..... Beginnings in America

We know little of the Law’s life together and not much about our grandmother’s childhood. Nor do we know much about her marriage to George Green. It is possible that they met in the Episcopal Church, although neither one is mentioned in St. Paul’s Church history written in 1899. They do appear in the history written in 1954. The Green name also figures prominently in the list of baptisms, confirmations, weddings, and funerals in sketchy church records. However, neither our grandmother’s nor our mother’s name is among them. Although a model of domesticity after she married and obviously very happy in her marriage, Jane Law held decidedly advanced ideas about women. She finished 10th grade in school, a more than modest achievement at the time. She worked in a book store in Saginaw before she married. She even occasionally helped out in the fish market as a cashier after she was married in 1888. She was a believer in women’s suffrage and in her old age was one of the first to join the League of Women Voters when it was organized after 1920. For a year or two, the Green family took in as a roomer/boarder, a woman by the name of Alice Siminoe. Jane Law Green may have been influenced by Alice.

Anne Isabel Green George and Jane Law Green (Possibly at the time of their marriage in 1888) Beginnings in America ..... 25

She was only a few years older than our mother. She had a job working for Consumers Power Company and eventually rose to become the private secretary of the head of the company. She and Grandmother Jane Green, who greatly admired her, became very good friends. Her example may have sent the message to our mother and her sisters that it was acceptable to have a career instead of marriage. Both Jane Law Green and Minnie Law Lines appear to have inherited some of their mother’s independence and both perhaps bear a slight resemblance to the “new woman” who was emerging at the end of the nineteenth century. Increasingly, young women sought advanced education to prepare them for teaching or nursing or they went to work in offices and shops to earn their own living. The fact that Minnie took nurse’s training reflects this. By the turn of the century, some women were riding bicycles, going to college, and finding new professions for themselves. Jane Addams founded Hull House in Chicago in 1889 partly to provide challenging work for college educated women of her day. Our mother and her sisters represented the next generation, maturing in the early part of the twentieth century, who would benefit from the increased freedom permitted young women to manage their own lives and from their mother’s enthusiasm for this new freedom. Grandmother Jane Green believed strongly in education for women and saw all four of her daughters go off to college. According to our mother, Jane Law Green believed it was wonderful that women actually could be educated, independent, and support themselves, that they did not have to rely upon a man for their living. She wanted all of her daughters to have the choice of marriage or careers. Of her four daughters, only our mother Anne Green Musselman opted for marriage and a family. It is not surprising in the light of these women—Anne Lucas Green, Anne Milne Law, and Jane Law Green—that succeeding generations of the family have also produced independent and strong minded women. Our mother Anne was the eldest of the four “Green girls” (as they were often called). Born in 1889, she lived with her parents in her first years in a rented house at 440 South Fourth Street. There her three sisters were born: Williamina (always known as Willie) in 1891, Jane 26 ..... Beginnings in America

in 1895, and Ellen (always known as Nellie) in 1896. By that time, the family needed a larger house. So soon after the turn of the century our grandfather built a conventional Victorian style house at 918 Federal Street (so named during World War I—before that it was Germania Street), not very far from downtown Saginaw and across the street from a German Lutheran church and school. As children, we dearly loved that house—it was so different from our own (which was an enlarged stucco bungalow style of the 1920’s). The Green home had an unused front porch and a front parlor that was rarely used; a big front hall with an impressive staircase; a pink tiled fireplace with a mirror over it that provided cozy warmth in the back parlor; an upright piano that we loved to bang on; a sideboard with a frightening carved lion’s head on its legs in the dining room; a scary back stairs off the pantry; a huge kitchen where the aunts had not only a gas range, but also a wood burning stove in which they lit a fire every morning to warm up the kitchen; an upstairs bathroom with a big claw-footed tub and another scary stairs to a big attic; a long upstairs hall we loved to run up and down; a big glamorous front bedroom with a bay window and alcove. We used to hear the loud and vaguely comforting church bells from across the street lying in bed on Sunday mornings. The house was a wonderful place for us to visit. “The Aunts” as our mother’s three maiden sisters were often called, provided luxuries unknown to us in our own home. They usually had a box of chocolates in the house, took us to movies, bought us sodas and new clothes, took us out to eat in hotels and restaurants, taught us songs, and told us stories of “Beauty and Beast.” “Little One-eye, Two-eye, and Three-eye,” and “Apanamondus.” Until after World War II, Saginaw water tasted so strongly of its treatment (to purify it from Dow chemical wastes up river in Midland) that no one liked to drink it. There was always a pail of fresh well water and a dipper in the kitchen. We children were thrilled to earn a nickel right after we arrived for a visit by running to get a pail of water from the pump behind the school across the street. Getting a drink from the dipper in the pail was one of the special treats we children looked forward to in Saginaw. Until it closed, we visited the fish market where we were given pieces of salt herring. It was a strange and fascinating place with Beginnings in America ..... 27 sawdust on the floor, lots of ice and fish scales, and a pungent fish odor, but the men wielded knives with agility as they sliced up fish for sale. We also loved to visit Nellie’s classroom in the Junior High School where she taught home economics. When we were there, much fawned over by her students, she had the class make ice cream or fudge. We also visited Saginaw County Courthouse with Aunt Willie where she was a county welfare worker and juvenile probation officer. We sometimes accompanied her when she picked up a child or visited a home. These were different worlds for us. We were always overjoyed to go to Saginaw for Thanksgiving or for independent visits in the course of the year. Our Mother matured in this house and the family continued to occupy it until Mother’s sisters retired about l955. From the beginning, it was a happy household with warmth, love and security. Jane Law Green did not like her children to squabble. “You must love one another,” she told them, an admonishment that bore fruit in their many years of devotion to each other when they were grown. George Green was able to provide for his family very comfortably. They always set a good table and served substantial meals on Haviland china (seconds, but one of Jane Green’s wedding gifts). They always had a horse and buggy and took outings to Saginaw Bay. The family bought their first car in 1912, which Nellie quickly learned to drive. The girls each had a “wheel,” as bicycles were called in those days, and neighborhood friends to play with. They referred often to the Foltz children (their father was the pastor of the Lutheran church across the street) or to the Gallagher children (their father was Rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church from 1891-1911). They took a streetcar to church and Sunday School on Sundays. Our mother had piano lessons and learned to play reasonably well. Singing around the piano in the evening was a favorite activity—all of them loved to sing and Nellie especially had a good voice. She also studied the violin for a while. Willie, unfortunately, could not carry a tune but it never daunted her participation. They all loved to read and subscribed to interesting magazines like the New Yorker and Time which we looked forward to reading there when we got a little older. By the turn of the century, George Green and his wife Jane had 28 ..... Beginnings in America

managed to achieve solid middle class status, with its attendant values. They worked hard but expected to enjoy the “good things” of life including education, entertainment, and the arts. They were Victorian in morality—sex and bodily functions were scarcely referred to, much less discussed. Though very kind and charitable, they were inclined to look down upon those who didn’t live quite like they did. Yet they never believed that one should strive to be “idly rich” nor to value material possessions alone. Jane Green imbued her daughters with a sense that they had a mission to serve others, to make some contribution to the world, to work for the betterment of their fellow human beings. Church, she believed and practiced, must be a central part of their lives. Our mother, Anne Green, would ably fulfill this vision for her in the twentieth century. Jane Law Green died relatively young in 1924 at age 56. She had an infection which left her with endocarditis so that her health was precarious the last two years of her life. Our mother often said that she would not have died had she had the benefit of penicillin. Ruth was baptized as a baby in her bedroom in 1924 because Jane was too sick to go to the church. Jane Musselman Adams is the only one of her grandchildren who has a memory of her. Neither Sally nor Mary ever knew her except through our mother’s stories about her. However, George Green lived on for another fifteen years after his wife’s death, eventually relinquishing his interest in the Green Brothers fish market. His brother, our great uncle Jimmy Green, and his family continued to operate it until almost 1950. A few years after the death of his wife, Grandfather Green joined his daughter Jane in managing a summer resort on the east arm of Grand Traverse Bay outside of Traverse City, Michigan. It was called Indian Trail Lodge, with tents for guests in a grove of pine trees and a big Lodge next to a creek with a dining room for meals. Nellie Green also worked there during the summers. She told us those were the best years of their lives when the family worked together welcoming, feeding, housing, and entertaining people—something they genuinely loved to do. “Grandpa Green,” as he was known, was always the genial host— somewhat stocky but always smartly dressed, with a thatch of white Beginnings in America ..... 29 hair, a broad face, twinkling eyes, and an engaging smile. He was a favorite with all ages. He died at the Lodge in the summer of 1937, after suffering a stroke the previous January. Sick as he was that summer, he loved being at the Lodge and insisted on getting up one evening to greet his guests. He wound up his life as the consummate innkeeper—the same business his own parents had been in when they began their lives together on this continent in Toronto almost a century earlier.

The ‘Musselman/Green Line’ Jane, Mary, Sally, George and Ruth gathered at Jean Santa Maria’s house in 1997 to finalize plans for this book.

➥ Chapter Two ...... Anne and Hap 1900-1920

Unknown to each other, both Anne Green and Harry Musselman spent most of the first decade of the twentieth century educating themselves for the Progressive Era, as these years are identified by historians. In so doing, they were pioneers in the fields in which they chose to study and work—fields that did not exist before the twentieth century. Under industrial capitalism, the nation changed radically during these two decades. Generally, these were prosperous years. Railroads in the nineteenth century opened markets and enabled producers to ship their products all over the country. Electricity, telephones and automobiles came into common usage. Cities grew enormously through heavy immigration from southern and eastern Europe and through the growth of huge industries employing thousands of people, like meat packing, the garment industry, autos, steel, and construction. By 1920, more Americans lived in cities and towns than on the farm, a demographic movement that would continue throughout the century. Wall Street financiers like J.P. Morgan exerted great power over government while political reformers demanded curbs on that power and control of the trusts. An optimistic faith in America’s future, in a federal government that would protect the health and economic rights of the ordinary citizens, in an economy that would forever grow and produce more manufactured goods, in greater educational opportunities for everyone—these beliefs characterized the political movement known as Progressivism, which dominated the period. Although not its primary leader, President Theodore Roosevelt is identified with Progressivism, because in 1912 he bolted the Republican Party and ran and lost on the Progressive ticket, allowing Democrat Woodrow Wilson to enact many of the Progressive reforms. Anne and Hap ..... 31

This was the world in which Anne Green and Harry Musselman came to maturity and which shaped their lives. Their choices in advanced learning, for example, reflected the nation’s faith in science as applied to agriculture and home making. They both entered fields of endeavor which were part of the new industrial age and which were just beginning to professionalize. Soon after the turn of the century, Harry decided to enroll in civil engineering at Michigan Agricultural College. The industrial expansion in the last decades of the nineteenth century had turned engineering into a profession. Before the Civil War most practitioners of the mechanic arts learned their craft on the job, primarily designing canals and railroads and bridges. Engineering was not even listed as an occupation until the 1850 census. That same year

Anne and Harry Musselman at Indian Trail Lodge (During the reunion of 1963) 32 ..... Anne and Hap

Michigan Agricultural College was founded and under the Morrill Act of 1862 became a Land-Grant institution whose purpose was to teach “agriculture and mechanic arts.” After the Civil War, engineering colleges developed rapidly. By the turn of the century they enrolled some 10,000 students nationwide.9 MAC was among these schools, having established a mechanical engineering curriculum in 1885. In succeeding decades, civil and agricultural engineering were added. These developments provided Harry with an educational goal and a career—he became an engineer and ultimately headed the department of agricultural engineering at Michigan State College. For over thirty years he worked hard to “mechanize agriculture,” to increase productivity on the farm by using machines to do more of the work. To accomplish this goal, Harry was involved not only in teaching students on campus but also in agricultural extension projects and farmers’ institutes. In theory, these programs represented a Progressive political goal—using state and federal money to encourage the application of scientific and technical knowledge to farming in order to increase production. In practical terms, Harry’s achievements were far more simple. When Harry retired in 1942, the college newspaper said that he, “unbent the farmer’s back.” However, since Harry had not gone to high school, he could not enter MAC directly. Instead, he prepared for it by enrolling in Tri-State Institute (now University) in Angola, Indiana. Like many such institutions, it offered college preparatory work. Fortunately for Harry, it was located in the northeast corner of Indiana near both the Michigan and Ohio borders, very close to the family farm. There he took enough preparatory courses to pass the entrance examinations for MAC. Harry enrolled at the Michigan school in 1903 and graduated Magna Cum Laude in 1908 with a degree in civil engineering. He never said why he chose MAC over the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor or Ohio State University at Columbus, both reasonably close and both offering engineering courses. Possibly MAC was more affordable and accessible by direct train from the Ohio farm. It might also have been easier to gain admittance there without a high school diploma. In any case, MAC shaped the rest of Harry’s life. He never talked much about his student days. He was, of course, Anne and Hap ..... 33 slightly older than many of the students and already set in his life long pattern of taking his work very seriously and putting forth maximum effort in it. He must have been present when President Theodore Roosevelt delivered the Commencement Address at a semi-Centennial Celebration of the College’s dedication in 1907. Roosevelt spoke on “The Man Who Works with His Hands,” saying, “the permanent greatness of any state must ultimately depend more upon the character of its country population than anything else.”10 The speech was preparation for the appointment of a “Country Life Commission” appointed the following year with Liberty Hyde Bailey of Cornell’s Horticulture Department as its Chairman. Its purpose was to bring rural life into the industrial age, by providing greater opportunity and advantages to farmers and their families. Certainly, our father appeared to support that goal. Harry never mentioned seeing the popular president, although Mother did refer to Liberty Hyde Bailey occasionally so they were certainly aware of the movement. However, the Commission was not a total success with farm folk, who felt that its purpose might be more for producing cheap food for city labor than for improving rural life. Of course, as a free-trade Democrat, perhaps even sympathetic with Populist William Jennings Bryan, Harry may not have been a Roosevelt supporter. He may also have objected to Roosevelt’s imperialism in the conquest of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. But this is mere speculation on the basis of his political opinions when we knew him. Like most students, he was probably more concerned with basic problems of survival than with political issues. He lived in a boarding house with other young men. He spoke once of changing to a different boarding house because the second one served larger pieces of pie, although the price was the same—$5.00 a week. After graduation, Harry took a job detailing steel for a steel fabricating plant in Detroit. He had been on this job about a year when Robert Shaw, who became Dean of Agriculture at MAC in 1908, offered him the opportunity to set up and head the Department of Farm Mechanics. He was, officially, an instructor in Farm Mechanics. At last, engineering, farming, and teaching came together for Harry and provided him with his life’s work. By 1921, “farm mechanics” had 34 ..... Anne and Hap

evolved into the Agricultural Engineering Department offering a major to students because of increased use of tractors, machinery, electricity, and concrete on the farm. Dad became a full professor in 1932 and headed the Department until his retirement in 1942.11 He seemed to recall his bachelor days as a young faculty member more vividly. It was a very jolly time. He lived in boarding houses, at one time it was the “Delta Club,” with other young men in similar circumstances. One of his favorite activities of this time was a “Round Table” which got together regularly for conversation and argument. Apparently, the “argument” predominated, although it appears to have been good-natured. Harry by that time had become interested in ideas and current affairs. This interest was reflected in our family dinner table years later where conversations often involved school or college or local and national politics. As a young man, for all his intelligence and seriousness about his work, Harry had a good sense of humor. He was so jovial during his bachelor years that he acquired the nickname of “Happy” shortened to “Hap.” According to our mother, Harry was given the name from the popular comic strip character, “Happy Hooligan.” (Harry’s initials were H. H. for Harry Hayes which may have made the label even more likely.) This name stuck. We rarely heard him called anything but “Hap” by his colleagues, our aunts, or our mother (she sometimes referred to him as “Papa” although we always called him “Dad” and her “Mom”). Only his own brothers and sisters referred to him as Harry. During these years, Harry was apparently a bit of a sport as well. He participated in the great Michigan State tradition of canoeing on the Red Cedar River that meanders through the campus. He even owned a canoe called the “MisHap.” Other faculty members such as Professor Hartsuch of chemistry and his wife spoke of outings and picnics with Hap on the river when they were young together. No doubt he did some courting of our mother in the Mishap. This was a side of our father that was somewhat hard for us to visualize when we were children—especially during the depression years of the thirties. Middle-aged by that time, totally immersed in his work, often stern and short-tempered, Harry did not then seem like the jovial sport described by others. However, in the grim thirties, with five young Anne and Hap ..... 35 children, a cut in salary, no job security, and general hard times, he probably did not feel much like one, either. While Harry was getting started as a young college professor in a new field of study, Anne Green was also moving toward a profession that did not exist much before the twentieth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, women in much larger numbers were seeking employment outside the home. With the advent of the typewriter and stenography, office work offered jobs for young women who had completed high school. With the emergence of the department store, retailing also offered new opportunities. But some women desired higher education to prepare them for the professional world. Nursing and teaching offered the most acceptable careers for women, although during these years Jane Addams launched social work as another choice by her efforts at Hull House in Chicago. In fact, like many women in the early twentieth century, Addams advocated women’s suffrage not because women were equal to men, but because they had a special interest in the health and welfare of their families. As “housekeepers” of the nation, she argued, their votes could protect the poor, weak and helpless from exploitation by big business and industry. Related to this notion was an effort to professionalize, to give status to, traditional women’s work—that is, homemaking and child rearing. Catherine Beecher had made the first attempts in the mid-nineteenth century by claiming that motherhood and homemaking required specialized knowledge and skills. She encouraged teaching those skills, even establishing Milwaukee Downer as a school to do just that. However, it was Ellen Swallow Richards, a 1870 graduate of Vassar, who founded the professional field of “domestic science” or “home economics.” As the first woman admitted to graduate study in chemistry at MIT, she studied water and food samples and argued that experience in laboratory work would make women better homemakers and mothers by providing them with scientific knowledge of nutrition.12 Scientific knowledge could also be applied to fabrics in clothing and problems of household management. These professional women claimed that students who planned on becoming wives and mothers would benefit from higher education in these areas. Of course they would need teachers to teach them. This not only encouraged 36 ..... Anne and Hap

young girls who intended to marry to pursue higher education, but it also provided a professional field for those who sought careers. Thus, female departments of home economics sprang up in many colleges, especially in the land-grant colleges, like Michigan Agricultural College where Home Economics was introduced in 1896. In Chicago that same year, Lewis Institute on Madison Street at Damen Avenue was founded with an endowment by Allen Lewis. It began as a junior college and academy but later became a degree granting four year school with an enrollment of 3000. It was best known for its curriculum in home economics, engineering and pre- professional courses. Catering later especially to night students, its purpose was “to provide education for students of limited means; to enable young men and women to become self-supporting in their future roles in society,” according to an Illinois Institute of Technology Bulletin. The school remained independent until 1940 when it merged with Armour Institute to become the Illinois Institute of Technology. Lewis Institute was the school that Anne Green chose to attend, largely because a high school teacher had recommended it and she had an uncle residing in Chicago with whom she could live. She did not consider MAC in East Lansing, perhaps because she knew little about it. Because Anne went to college before it was common for young women of her background to do so, she later said she realized she had been reared in somewhat privileged circumstances. But she claimed she had taken advantage of opportunities open to her. She took her education seriously when she went to Saginaw High School, acquiring what cities at the beginning of the century had come to regard as essential for the education of young people. According to her sister, Anne was always in the “top ten” of her class, active in school affairs, holding numerous school offices. Although she belonged to a social sorority and her younger sister described her as a “very pretty” young woman with beautiful skin and brown hair, Anne did not appear interested in the opposite sex. Yet she was very domestic in nature. She devoted her free time to additional sewing classes on Saturday and to church work, especially baking and sewing to earn money for church missions. The Reverend William H. Gallagher was Rector of St. Paul’s during these years and his daughter Anne and Anne Green were close Anne and Hap ..... 37 friends. Late in life, they still corresponded through Christmas notes and other messages. The friendship was an additional motivation for Anne’s devotion to the Episcopal church as well as a factor in keeping her away from any temptations contrary to the standards of her very Victorian parents and home. Anne had already set her sights on a college education because she was genuinely eager to learn. Much later in life, she told her son George that, even as a wife and mother, she tried to learn something new every day. A high school teacher named Jesse Lane had told her about Lewis Institute in Chicago, and both her mother and her Grandmother Law encouraged her to go. George Green may not have been quite as enthusiastic, but he was good-natured and doted on his wife and daughters. Eventually he paid for college for all four daughters. He allowed his youngest daughter to drive their first car in 1912 when she was only sixteen. As an indulgent father and devoted husband, any opposition he expressed must have been token at best. In 1907 at age 17, Anne boarded the train for Chicago to live with “Aunt Maggie,” the wife of a maternal uncle, John Law. According to our mother, it was a rather strict household with few luxuries and little levity. However, Anne’s cheerful and friendly disposition enabled her to cope with limitations. The home possessed no bath tub, but our mother said she “took a sponge bath every night and had never been so clean.” She was able to make hats for her three sisters in her millinery class. She took them home as Christmas gifts. Her sister Williamina said they all wore them proudly at the Christmas Eve service at St. Paul’s. Anne loved her Chicago experience. She liked the city and eventually did her practice teaching at Chicago Commons, a settlement house in an Italian and Polish neighborhood on Chicago’s west side. Run by Dr. Graham Taylor, who was a friend of Jane Addams of Hull House, Anne was able to visit that renowned place. She also became friends with Winifred Collins, an assistant to Dr. Taylor, who was also Jane Addams’ friend. Through her, Anne met the esteemed settlement house leader who was at the time the most admired woman in America. Collins ultimately became head of social welfare for U.S. Steel (formerly Tennessee Coal, Iron and Steel) in Alabama. Later, just about the time 38 ..... Anne and Hap

Anne decided to marry, Collins offered her a job teaching African American women and children for TCIS in Alabama. Although Anne could not take the job, she recommended her younger sister Jane Green who had trained as a kindergarten teacher at Alma College. Jane Green then began some eight years’ work with Collins as director of social work at the Ensley steel mills of TCIS which would eventually bring the Musselman children into contact with African Americans. After two years of college, Anne returned to Saginaw where she taught home economics in Saginaw High School for $55 a month. Again she was active in St.Paul’s church, becoming president of the first Altar guild in 1911. But Anne was not content to remain in Saginaw. Again through the influence of her teacher, she spent a summer at Columbia University Teacher’s College, taking classes and enjoying life in the big city. When we were children, she often referred fondly to her summer there. She quoted a professor who said that “every war was a war for bread,” a man obviously influenced by the economic ideas of Marx and other socialist thinkers who would make such a big impact later in the twentieth century. She spoke of the theater, the Bowery, the lower East side, all of which she visited. Anne already had a profession in mind that was larger than teaching at Saginaw High School. She returned to Lewis Institute to complete her degree. Her experience with new immigrants in New York and Chicago may have accounted for her open acceptance of everyone she met. Although not totally free from the prejudices of her day, she was in practice very non-judgmental, accepting people for who they were in a warm and loving manner. After she got her degree, she taught at De Kalb, Illinois, for a couple of years, where she became acquainted with Dr. Frederick Grant, a clergyman in the Episcopal Church. He later became Dean of Seabury Western Episcopal Seminary in Evanston, Illinois. This contact also resulted in her sister Jane much later being hired as hostess at the Seminary. With Anne’s outstanding academic and employment record, she was soon hired away from De Kalb by the Home Economics Extension program of the University of Illinois. The Extension Service was the arm of the university with a mission to carry the latest knowledge in agriculture and home economics throughout rural areas, Anne and Hap ..... 39 part of the Rural Life movement that Roosevelt had promoted late in his administration. All land grant colleges and universities had these services which were funded by the federal government under the Hatch Act of 1906 to bring scientific knowledge and modern improvements in the lives of rural people. For the next two years until she married, our mother traveled the length and breadth of Illinois speaking and demonstrating to Grange meetings, sewing circles and extension clubs. Illinois was something of a pioneer in home economics education. Most of this time Anne traveled with an older experienced woman by the name of Belle Couclough. For many years after she married, Mother received each Christmas a teacup and saucer of fine bone china from Belle, which was her Couclough Grand china. They were her prized possession and she gloried in setting them out for an afternoon tea party. Mother stayed in contact with Belle as long as they lived. Sometimes travel across Illinois was somewhat difficult and she was put up overnight by one of the farm women after she gave her demonstration to the group. On one such occasion, she had to catch an early train the next morning. She had expected to just get up and quietly leave, but her hostess was up shortly after 3:00 AM to prepare her a hot breakfast of biscuits, bacon and eggs, and coffee. Mother cited this to show how much the women appreciated what the extension people were doing for them. Another time, our mother remembered a luncheon where the creamed chicken was spoiled because it had been placed in an ice box while still warm. It was a good lesson for the women in proper care of food, she said, but they had to hurriedly make something else for the luncheon. In the interest of good nutrition, extension workers also promoted the eating of carrots. In those days, Illinois people did not eat carrots but fed them to the cattle. Anne loved this work and got into Chicago often enough to enjoy the city as well. She was good at what she did—many years later she would use this experience and these skills when she taught cooking and home management to recovering tuberculosis patients at the sanitarium in Lansing. In the late 1930s, one of her daughter Jane’s professors in home economics at Michigan State commented that Anne “was on her way to becoming one of the outstanding women in her field when she gave it up to marry.” 40 ..... Anne and Hap

Just as they do today, professional people in those days gathered periodically for conferences to exchange the latest knowledge. It was at a Conference of Home Economics Extension Workers of the North Central States at MAC in June, 1916, that our mother met our father. Home Economics Extension workers from all of the North Central States were invited to the East Lansing campus to discuss their work. There was, of course, planned recreation for them as well as work sessions. Because they were single women, some of the unattached faculty men had been recruited to dance with the conferees. This was what brought our mother and father together, even though neither one was a particularly experienced dancer. Neither of our parents ever said anything about their courtship, but much of it over the ensuing year and a half must have been conducted by letter. They both continued to work at their jobs in Illinois and East Lansing, although they may have visited each other occasionally. Nationally, war clouds were gathering in the United States as the Great War in Europe ground along, wasting men and resources. Increased pressure for production and preservation of food gave the work of both Harry and Anne added impetus and importance during these years, and the Smith-Lever Act of 1917 was designed to encourage increased production on the farm and better food preservation in the home through the Extension Service. But this did not appear to interfere with the progress of Anne and Harry’s romance. By the summer of 1917, the two were engaged to be married. With that prospect in mind, Harry rented a house in East Lansing. During that fall quarter at MAC, until the marriage, it provided a temporary home for himself and his youngest brother Dale, who was attending college before entering military service. Out of all of Harry’s family, Dale came to know Anne best during these months. He greatly admired her, saying she was someone he loved to talk to. Anne and Hap were married in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Saginaw on December 27, 1917. Because the United States was at war, it was a small simple, though beautiful, wedding, according to our aunts. Christmas decorations made the church and the family home festive. Our mother wore a short white wedding dress. Anne’s sister Williamina was her maid of honor and Harry’s sister Ruth was a Anne and Hap ..... 41 bridesmaid. The Reverend Paul Rinehart, a very close friend of the family and rumored to be an admirer of Anne’s youngest sister Nell, officiated at the ceremony. Forrest probably was best man. The wedding was followed by a sit-down turkey dinner at home which Jane Law Green, with some help from others, prepared for the entire company. The bride and groom then left by train for a visit to Ohio so that Anne could get acquainted with Harry’s family and background. Harry was almost ten years older than Anne, but, having just turned 28, she was also considerably older than the average bride. Although probably very committed to one another, the marriage appeared to be more satisfactory than romantic. Our mother once told George, “I was ready to get married, and he was as good a prospect as any.” She also said she did not know Dad’s exact age when she married him and was surprised that he was so old when she found out. She said he looked and acted much younger. Her acquaintance with the family on the Ohio farm was limited before the knot was actually tied. She had met his brothers and one sister, but she had not visited his home in Ohio until their wedding trip. She said she didn’t realize how primitive their life on the farm was until that visit. Nonetheless, she immediately claimed his family as her own and was loyal and devoted to Harry’s parents and siblings all her life. They were always very fond of her. At thirty-seven Harry was more than ready to settle down to domestic life. According to Anne, he loved having his own home and regular meals. He delighted in inviting his friends among the younger faculty to dinner, so for a time they were very social at home. According to her daughter Jane, Anne anticipated a good deal of formal faculty social life when she married, even to buying an expensive dress of gold lace costing more than $80 to wear at such events. Once he had a home, however, our father’s enthusiasm for going out to faculty social functions waned. He attended those that were required, often with some grousing when he was forced to wear a “boiled shirt,” or tuxedo, but he much preferred informal socializing with family and neighbors. Our mother didn’t experience the kind of social life she anticipated until many years later when our father was retired. In their old age they traveled, square-danced, attended events at the college, and socialized much more than they had as young married people. 42 ..... Anne and Hap

Our mother told us that one of their first decisions concerned the handling of the family finances. She said she had lived too long independently on a salary to have to ask her husband for every penny she spent. On this point, our father was years ahead of his time. He agreed to give Mother half his income from the college to run the household. He would take care of the major home expenses like rent and later mortgage payments, taxes, insurance, and repairs. When they finally owned an automobile, he took care of that. She paid for food, utilities, clothing, and personal expenses for herself and the children. They continued this system throughout their marriage. Mother always referred to her allowance as her “salary.” She did not have to account for her expenditures as so many wives did and she felt this was a great blessing. Our father had great respect for the work women did in the household and was willing to pay for it, as he demonstrated later with his sister Ruth and in retirement when he took over kitchen and household chores while Anne was out working. Later, Anne inherited a little money, including some stock, which provided her with extra cash. She loved shopping and she loved giving gifts and doing things for other people. She quoted her father George Green as saying that “your best friend is the dollar in your pocket,” but Mother was never stingy or tight-fisted with her resources. She was always very careful in her expenditures, as was Harry, so they managed quite well on limited means. I think as children we always believed we were somewhat poor because we heard the expression “We can’t afford it.” so often. However, our mother never complained about money, nor burdened us with her worries about it—which were severe at times during the depression and when our father was seriously ill. She claimed that “The Lord will send me no more burdens than I can bear” and she always maintained a cheerful demeanor. A few events highlight their early years of marriage. The winter of 1918 was very cold and because of the War, the nation suffered a coal shortage. For a time that winter, they had to move in with friends, the Hotchins, since they were unable to heat their own house. Jane was born the following November. They escaped the flu epidemic that scourged the country that year. Jane was delivered at home, since Dr. Bruegal, our family doctor for many years, believed that home would Anne and Hap ..... 43 be less infectious than the hospital. Both Harry and Anne were thrilled with Jane, although our mother said she had the usual worries of new mothers with their first babies and Jane was quite colicky. The next year, they built the stucco five room bungalow at 542 Sunset Lane for a real home of their own and moved into the neighborhood where we all grew up. Our father was too old for the draft in WWI, but just after the war he was recruited for work for the army at Camp Grant in Rockford, Illinois. He was to train returning soldiers in the care and use of tractors since mechanization was becoming increasingly important on the farm. Harry took a six-month leave from the college and they lived in temporary housing with other young families. Our mother said this was fun for her. She and another young mother would put their little ones into carriages and stroll down town nearly every day. When our parents returned to East Lansing, Harry bought their first car, a new Willys Knight. The automobile was his passion and possession throughout the rest of his life—it almost seemed to define his manhood and authority. The car was always his—it never belonged to the family,

The House at 542 Sunset Lane, East Lansing Completed in 1919. The original exterior finish was light gray stucco. 44 ..... Anne and Hap

and he spent hours tinkering, washing, waxing, even painting the several different cars he eventually owned George was born in the stucco bungalow in 1921 and Anne’s and Harry’s lives were thereafter inextricably bound up with those of their children, life on Sunset Lane, and at MAC (later Michigan State College) in East Lansing. In 1923, shortly before Ruth was born, Harry and Anne built a larger, eight room stucco house next door to the bungalow to meet the needs of their growing family. Our father was never satisfied with this house and believed that it was only an “interim” dwelling before he finally built our final “home.” So certain was he of that fact that he never painted the inside of the bookcases flanking the living room fireplace. However, in the next six years Sally and Mary were born, the depression arrived, and 604 Sunset Lane remained the family home for the next forty plus years, unpainted book case interiors notwithstanding. Actually, the house was quite up to date for its time. Originally, it even had a cistern in one corner of the basement to collect rain water which was then pumped to the kitchen. However, the system apparently did not function too well. Eventually, we got a conventional water softener. The living room and dining room were ample in size, and a pleasant sunroom on the southwest corner opened off them both. The kitchen was reasonably efficient. For a time, we had a gas water heater off the sink to wash the dishes. The side-arm gas water heater in the basement was not automatic, but had to be lit whenever a supply of hot water was needed for laundry or baths. Tuesday and Saturday were bath nights, two baths a week being considered more than adequate at the time. We all used the same full bath upstairs (a tub with no shower), although there was also a half bath on the first floor. It was a busy place to serve seven people, with George always at a disadvantage in getting in before his four sisters. The house was heated with a coal furnace and the corner of the basement near the driveway was the coal cellar, into which loads of coal were dumped in the fall and winter. Like everyone else in the neighborhood, Dad had to fire up the coal furnace in the early morning—that sound was a signal that it was time to get up—and lots of black smoke from all the chimneys turned white snow black in a hurry. Anne and Hap ..... 45

The House at 604 Sunset Lane Completed in 1923. The house originally had a light gray stucco finish on the exterior.

In the late 1930s, Dad converted the furnace to gas and had an automatic hot water heater put in. These were a convenience but hardly luxurious, because Dad became even thriftier as he got older. He kept the thermostat low, put springs on all the doors so they closed quickly behind one, and closed off the back hall and the sunroom. If we were cold, we were told to put on a sweater. When Hope and Jane came from Texas for Christmas a couple of years after they were married, the battle of the thermostat took place. The Texans raised it and Dad lowered it. In addition, Dad kept water pressure very low to save water. Filling the tub took a long time, and one usually settled for a few inches of hot water. Not until we were ready to sell the house did we realize that we could have increased the water pressure and had more luxurious baths. Over the years, the house took on the character of the family, always hospitable with Mother’s warmth, somewhat shabby from the activities of five children and their pets, filled with Dad’s inventions, furniture, and devices, and expressing the assorted interests of its occupants, for whom it was always a “comfortable” home. ➥ Chapter Three ...... Growing Up in East Lansing

The dining room table was the spiritual heart of our home on Sunset Lane. Daily family gatherings there provide vivid family memories. Mother and Dad sat at either end of the table, Mary and George on one side, Jane, Sally, and Ruth on the other. Three times a day when we were small, and at least twice a day when we got to high school and college and preferred to sleep in the mornings, we came together around the table. Mother and Dad’s first table was round with a matching buffet, but when Grandpa Musselman sold the Ohio farm, he auctioned off the furniture. Dad bought an old handmade walnut wardrobe and the sides of that became our dining room table when he joined them together, refinished them, and put chrome legs under them. He also designed and made a new buffet and chairs of bent laminated wood with blue seats. Although not really a carpenter, he found building this furniture, plus bent wood living room chairs and other pieces, gave him a chance to experiment with modern functional design that he admired. Yet he was proud of having an heirloom piece of wood from the old homestead. Our house did not have a “breakfast nook” or room in the kitchen for a table (a lack we children always considered a great privation). Sit-down meals in the dining room with table cloth and napkins were a regular part of the day, at seven AM, twelve noon, and six PM. Furthermore, Dad expected meals on time! While we were growing up, there was no such thing as a hot lunch program at school and even while we were in college, we usually came home for lunch. For some years Dad belonged to Lions Club and ate lunch at East Lansing’s only restaurant, Hunt’s Cafeteria, on Tuesdays, but he gave that up during the depression. Mother had to provide a substantial hot lunch (soup Growing Up in East Lansing ..... 47 or spaghetti or eggs or sandwiches and cocoa) for seven, no matter what else she might have done that morning—washed and hung out six or seven loads of clothes, canned many quarts of tomatoes or beans or peaches, prepared to entertain her St. Paul’s Church Guild or the neighbor ladies at afternoon tea. She never complained and was rarely sick enough to be unable to function in the kitchen, but she did tell her daughters when they married that they were lucky their husbands didn’t come home for lunch. Yet the dining room was more than a place to eat. There we learned to talk, to share food, ideas, time, and attention. We brought our experiences of the day and our opinions to the table where they were scrutinized, sometimes ridiculed, sometimes applauded by other members of the family. We argued, discussed, laughed, sometimes cried. Our worst punishment was being sent away from the table. Dad encouraged us to think for ourselves, challenging our opinions and making us back up what we stated, often rather harshly. Ruth especially

Harry Musselman’s Bent Wood Chair He made eight of these for the dining room table. 48 ..... Growing Up in East Lansing

rose to his bait and argued with him. She was sometimes reduced to tears as a result, after which he would sometimes say, “Oh, can’t you take a joke?” That was a close as he came to an apology. He treated us as intellectual equals in argument, which as children we certainly were not, but his encouragement of disputation may have been a carry-over from his debating days at the “Round Table” in college. His respect for our intelligence certainly developed our independence of thought and ability to express ourselves. Furthermore, we eventually realized that Dad believed in us. He thought we could achieve anything we wanted to. Mother’s role in this lively conversation was always that of the peacemaker, changing the subject when discussion became too tense, encouraging us with compliments and sympathy, offering more food as a distraction. One high school teacher, Miss Stophlet, commented to Ruth that we were an “arguing family.” Not that the dining room was ever a place of dread or fear—rather it was the stage where much of our family life played out and where we learned both values and behavior. Mother had received a decorative tray picturing four children on a picnic which she hung on the wall over the buffet. We identified with those children when we were very young, although we were troubled that there were five of us and only four of them. Because the dining room was on the south side of the house, three big sunny windows were filled with Mother’s plants and, while we had him, our canary Pete’s cage. Those windows let the winter sun in and the family warmth out. On a cold winter’s night when we walked down the hill on Sunset Lane from town or college, the light coming from the dining room windows was a beacon of safety and warmth. However hard the day had been, we were assured of good food, conversation, companionship, comfort, loyalty, and support in that room—what constituted love in our household. It was nourishment for both body and soul. The dining room was also a place of much laughter—always when we had visiting relatives and friends: our grandfathers, the aunts, Uncle Dale and Aunt Gladys, Uncle Forrest and Aunt Marian, Aunt Grace when she came into our lives, Minnie and Horace Lines, college students from church, teachers, school friends, and others who shared our table. Guests always seemed to raise meals to festive occasions. Growing Up in East Lansing ..... 49

When there were too many for the dining room table, Mother set up a children’s table in the sun room where the “little ones” ate—usually Sally and Mary, cousins Nancy and Mickey, Marilyn and Betty, sometimes Ruth. Without adult supervision, this was always a riotous time for the children. Food itself was important to the family, since we were all enthusiastic eaters. Mother paid considerable attention to nutrition, putting her Home Economics training to vigorous use. We always had homemade whole wheat bread on the table. Mother had received a bread mixer as a wedding gift which prepared the dough for six or seven loaves at a time which she turned out every week. We children sometimes thought of our family as “poor” because we never had “store bought” white bread. Sandwiches made with that we regarded as a delicacy available only to the more fortunate. Not until we were quite grown up did we appreciate Mother’s delicious bread, but our guests always did! For many years, we had “college milk” from the MAC Dairy delivered by “the milk man” from a wagon pulled by a horse that seemed to know the stops on the route. In summer, we sometimes hopped on the wagon and rode around the corner to Marshall street. Mother did not give us an egg to eat each day. Instead, she kept mental track of the number of eggs she used in a period of time and could probably have named each person’s share in the eggs during that period. She had an “egg man” who came regularly to the house with eggs and cream—in fact we occasionally used the latter to make butter when it was rationed during World War II. We also had an ice man until the 1930s when we got our first refrigerator. He drove a truck and would stop and leave the appropriate chunk of ice in the ice box according to a sign placed in the window. In summer, we picked small pieces of ice off his truck to suck. Mother bought meat carefully so that each person was allotted so many ounces of meat each day. In addition to meat and potatoes, our evening meal almost always included a couple of vegetables and fruit plus homemade desserts. There were no small appetites in the family and we did not let others deprive us of our share. Since fresh fruit and vegetables during many months of the year 50 ..... Growing Up in East Lansing

were not common, Mother canned and preserved them when they came in season. She figured she saved money on food by doing the work herself. Late summer and autumn were times of great activity in the kitchen. She and Dad would go to the farmer’s market on Saturday and bring home whatever looked best that day, often by the bushel if it were apples, peaches, pears, tomatoes, or beans, by the half bushel if it were grapes. Smaller quantities of crabapples, currants, gooseberries, strawberries, raspberries came into the house, too. The house was redolent of cooking fruit or pickling, and by late fall our basement “fruit room” was full of jars of canned fruit and vegetables, pickles, pickle relish and chili sauce, jams and jellies, tomato juice and grape juice. By the next spring, most of the supply was gone. When we grew up and began leaving home, the rate of production increased, since Dad cultivated a big garden after he retired, but the rate of consumption decreased. When we broke up the family home in the 60s, we found jars of food many years old in the fruit room. One year, probably about 1935 in the middle of the depression, Dad got a deal on the purchase of fifty live chickens from a man who agreed to butcher them. George was recruited to help in this activity at the Poultry Department at Michigan State. The man hung the chickens up by their feet, slit their throats, and let the blood drain out. Then they were plunged into hot water, the feathers were rubbed off (George’s job in the process) and they were eviscerated. Dad took them home where he had obtained a large pressure cooker, tin cans with lids and a device for sealing the lids. He and Mother then canned the chickens which became a dinner staple the rest of that year. Mother usually served the chicken with noodles or dumplings, where the rich stock or gravy is still memorable for its chicken flavor. Two or three years later while the depression was still on, there were all kinds of promotions to sell anything. Dad learned of a deal where 500 wrappers from Curtis Candy Company (Baby Ruth’s and Butterfingers) would get a Philco table model radio. He figured out that to purchase the candy bars would be a reasonable price for the radio and we children could sell them to the neighborhood kids. Well, we did sell some and we got the radio, but the family ate most of the candy. (It saved Mother making desserts for quite a while but was bad Growing Up in East Lansing ..... 51 for our figures and our teeth!) Jane and George shared the radio. She had it one week, and he had it the next. In addition to baking bread, Mother baked cakes, cookies, pies and biscuits regularly. George’s and Dad’s favorite pie was gooseberry, but this native fruit disappeared from our table when in the early thirties foresters in Michigan went through the state and eradicated every gooseberry bush. Gooseberries were host to the white pine rust which afflicted the remaining stands of white pine after intensive logging at the turn of the century. Meanwhile, horticulturists had helped develop a high bush blueberry, strongly promoted by MAC, which could be grown and harvested commercially, so this berry replaced the gooseberry in popularity. Although gooseberries are no longer forbidden in Michigan, they are not as widely used as they once were. The wild huckleberry, a close relative of the blueberry, proliferated in burned out or logged over forest areas. Although delicious and sweet, they were very small and grew close to the ground. As children, we gathered them in the woods in back of Indian Trail Lodge, but a morning’s hard work might produce enough for one pie. Dad was something of a food faddist. He often took to heart articles he read on various new nutrition theories. He read that brewer’s yeast was good for one, so he started putting some on his breakfast corn flakes each morning. As more was learned about the role of vitamins in the diet, Dad became convinced that drinking vegetable juices was a good way to get them. Long before vegetable juices were commercially popular, he acquired a food press and pressed quantities of food in it, particularly carrots, since vitamin A was supposed to be beneficial for eyes and myopia ran in the family. We drank quantities of carrot juice and hated it. Fortunately, Dad’s interest did not last too long. He moved on to experiment with dried vegetables, particularly corn, but the smell of the corn reminded us of a chicken coop. Eventually he must have concluded that the results were not worth the effort and we were spared from consuming his nutritional experiments. Food was also a big part of winter holidays. We usually spent Thanksgiving in Saginaw at the Green family home we loved so much. It was always a very elegant dinner at the huge dining room table that we all sat around. The aunts had their cleaning lady, Mrs. Goff, help 52 ..... Growing Up in East Lansing

with the serving and doing up the dishes so we all lingered at the table at the end of the meal, talking and munching nuts and fruit from the big centerpiece. Of course turkey and the usual accompaniments always graced the table, but we children loved special additions that we did not get at home. While the adults had shrimp or oyster cocktail, until we developed more sophisticated tastes, we children had a wonderful fresh fruit cocktail. Eventually, we reveled in the shrimp. A special treat were the big bowls of green and black olives which we devoured, hiding the pits to cover our greed. Three dimensional chocolate ice cream turkeys which Aunt Nell got from one of the purveyors at her high school cafeteria were the special dessert. One or more Green relatives often joined us at the meal as well: Great-aunt Sarah, cousin Rose Law Mcphee, Great-uncle Jimmy Green, for instance. After dinner, the adults often talked politics, which we children disliked until we grew older and joined in. Since all were Democrats and Roosevelt fans, there was much to talk of his programs and other events of the thirties: the Civilian Conservation Corps, which our unemployed second cousin John Lines had joined; the Townsend Plan which advocated $200 a month for people over 65; the sit-down strike in Flint; the activities of Eleanor Roosevelt whom the aunts and Mother greatly admired; the divorces among the Roosevelt offspring; the “purges” in the Soviet Union; the rise of Hitler in Germany. Father Coughlin from the Shrine of the Little Flower in Detroit was in his hey-day during some of these years, ranting regularly against Roosevelt and Communism. Although we children never liked it very well, the adults turned on the radio to listen to his Sunday afternoon program. They did not agree with him, but his dramatic oratory had made him quite notorious and influential at the time so they wanted to know what he was saying. We also walked downtown to look at the Christmas decorations and displays in store windows. Quite often, it began to snow in the afternoon, and Dad was anxious to start home. Sometimes one or more of us stayed over till Sunday— very happy times indeed. Although we spent at least one Christmas in Saginaw before Sally and Mary were born, we usually were at home for that holiday. The aunts would drive over some Sunday before Christmas to bring a car Growing Up in East Lansing ..... 53 trunk full of presents. Mother was a strict believer in Advent. She would not let us put up any decorations until after the fourth Sunday in Advent and usually not until the day before Christmas. She did not even open her Christmas cards until Christmas Day. Because he wanted to get one as cheaply as possible, Dad never got a Christmas tree until the last minute, either, so our tree was seldom a thing of beauty, often oddly misshapen, once with additional branches wired on. In later years we put it up in the sun room, closed off in the winter, but visible from the street. Our lights and ornaments were also rather tacky. Our various dogs and our cat knocked them off the lower branches and broke them over the years. Mother never spent much money replacing them. How we admired the Gower tree next door—blue lights and blue balls—so fashionable compared to ours! Mother’s Christmas baking consisted of rich dark fruit cakes which she gave as gifts and served with a glass of homemade grape juice (or wine, when Dad had luck making it) to guests in the winter months. She also made divinity and fudge, but her specialty were her fondant patties, which we delivered on little plates to the neighbors. Peppermint, winter green, and cinnamon scents permeated the kitchen as she carefully dropped perfect circles of pink and green and white fondant on pieces of waxed paper. Those that weren’t perfect she called “cripples,” reserved for family use. One neighbor, Mrs. Huddleson, didn’t get the patties, but instead received a fresh loaf of Mother’s bread, which she cherished. She in turn sent Mother a jar of homemade mincemeat which we often had in pie on New Year’s Day. Dad had mixed feelings about Christmas—coming from a strong Puritan tradition where it was only modestly recognized and always feeling somewhat guilty about too much self-indulgence in material pleasures. He also was conflicted in his relationship with our aunts and resented their joyous celebration of Christmas in the Victorian tradition. He was particularly resentful of their lavish generosity to their nieces and nephew, believing they were buying our affection. However, he was such a family man he really liked the festivity, assuaging his guilt and jealousy by disparaging comments about the abundance of gifts and the wasteful expenditure of money. We always hung up our stockings in front of the fireplace on Christmas Eve—a 54 ..... Growing Up in East Lansing

very quiet evening except for attendance at Midnight Eucharist when we were older. Uncle Forrest and Aunt Marian usually stopped over with gifts. Dad strung a rope across the living room with a sign “Santa Claus’ Workshop” which we were not allowed to cross on Christmas morning until we had dressed, made the beds, eaten breakfast, washed the dishes, and Mother had the turkey in the oven so that she could join us in the living room. Then we took turns opening our gifts, beginning with the “littlest first.” With seven of us, it was a lengthy procedure. Neighborhood children often showed up before we were finished. Far from feeling deprived, we children savored and cherished this ritual and later instituted it in our own families for a time. We seldom locked our doors while we were growing up, even when we went to Saginaw. We never carried house keys when we went to college—the door was always unlocked. Many people were around in the neighborhood all the time, since no mothers worked outside the home, and any strangers were promptly recognized. Furthermore, our dogs sometimes alerted us to strangers. During the depression, hungry, unemployed men used to come to the back door. Mother always provided them with a meal. They usually swept the drive way or shoveled the walk in return. One Christmas, probably in 1934, Mother had invited a man who worked with Dad at the college, his wife and two children for Christmas dinner. It was to be quite special since for the first time she had bought a large goose rather than a turkey for the occasion. She placed this with other Christmas specialties in our refrigerator just off the kitchen in the entry way to the garage and back porch. The next morning the goose and almost everything else had flown. Mother was very upset—she remembered Dottie growling during the night when she was up with one of the children, but she had heard nothing. She rationalized that perhaps whoever took the food really needed it. She called Hunt’s Food Shop and arranged for them to prepare enough carryout dinners to feed family and guests. It probably cost her a month’s food budget, but she never let on. Other holidays were celebrated as well. Halloween was a time of carving pumpkins and playing pranks like ringing doorbells, soaping windows, and overturning garbage cans until “trick or treating” began. That was really in Sally’s and Mary’s time—when the fraternity houses Growing Up in East Lansing ..... 55 handed out goodies like cream puffs, or one house in town gave away “frost-bites,” an ice-cream bar. The girls then brought home bags of goodies they had collected. Easter was rather quiet, since religion was somewhat controversial in our household. The girls usually had new Easter dresses and we had modest Easter baskets. As we got older, we went to church at St. Paul’s in Lansing, sometimes getting up for the sunrise service. We always celebrated the Fourth of July at Indian Trail. Fireworks were prohibited in Michigan, so we seldom had anything except sparklers as children, but the big celebration was a beach fire in the evening where we toasted marshmallows and sang songs while Aunt Nellie played the ukelele. We watched a few illegal fireworks across the bay. When Mother and Dad moved into the bigger house at 604 Sunset Lane, they usually had a college girl who helped Mother with dishes, child care and housekeeping for room and board. Our second cousin Grace Luce was one for a time. Helen Trinary, a capable girl from the Upper Peninsula who later became secretary in the Ag Engineering Department, was another. Nila Burt was a third. Aunt Jane came to stay with us after Mary was born, but by then we needed all of our space for the family so Mother no longer had live-in help. She then had a cleaning woman to wash walls or windows in the spring and a Mrs. Noble who stayed with us the few times she had to be gone from the house. A Mrs. Lane and later a Mrs. Snell came to sew clothes and later formals for the girls when they were in high school and college. All of these women joined us for the noon meal when they were in the house and Mother always made it more elaborate than usual. Mostly, Mother did her own work. She was very well organized, washing on Monday, ironing on Tuesday, baking on Wednesday and Saturday. Washing clothes involved preparing starch on the stove for Dad’s shirts, hanging the clothes in the basement unless it was warm enough to hang them in the back yard—always a lot of running up and down the basement stairs. Until the mid-thirties, the grocery store in East Lansing delivered and she could call in and charge her order. After the bank holiday in ’33, Mother and Dad decided not to charge groceries anymore and later began going to the first “supermarket” once a week, usually Friday night. Mother loved to shop and once in 56 ..... Growing Up in East Lansing

a while would take the bus to Lansing to shop at Knapp’s or Arbaugh’s, Lansing’s two department stores. What she could not carry home, they delivered. Sometimes, we would go with her to buy clothes. Of course, we also used the Sears Roebuck Catalog for many items. Dad was a great believer in labor saving devices, especially for housework, and he never hesitated to try to make Mother’s work easier and more efficient. He was nurtured on technology that boomed in the first quarter of the century, as electricity began to be used for household appliances. By the 1930s, Mother had an electric mangle, on which she became very skilled ironing Dad’s shirts, an electric stove, mixer, refrigerator, vacuum cleaner and washing machine. In addition, Dad experimented a great deal with labor saving devices of his own. He had a shop in the basement in which he spent many hours, presumably very happy times. He also had a desk and drawing board in the sun room where his plans and designs were made. Some idea would grab him and he would spend all of his leisure time working on it. He was not satisfied to let others develop and refine it for a well finished product. He did the work himself. He also had many ideas ahead of his time. In the back of his mind, he may have had a notion that he would come up with something marketable which would make him a lot of money. But when he was finally satisfied with the basic product, he lost interest in it and moved on to something else. He had great admiration for business men, and fancied himself potentially in business, but he was far better at creating and tinkering than at managing, marketing and selling. For example, he was determined to develop an efficient system of washing dishes, no small task for a family of seven. His idea was to develop a spray gun that would spray hot soapy or clear water on dishes on special racks in the sink. His preoccupation with this project lasted several years. His biggest challenge was to design a spray gun that would shoot clear water and soapy water separately. This involved machining a metal block in a machine shop, since he lacked equipment to do it. Designing and building racks for the sink was simpler, but he tried several configurations before he was satisfied. Eventually, since he felt Mother was somewhat inept at using his system, he took over washing the dishes. We used this gadget as early as the 1930’s. By the Growing Up in East Lansing ..... 57

40’s a dishwasher spray device had become commercially available. But it was soon superseded by the automatic dishwasher, except in our household, where spray washing of dishes continued. Dad also decided one day that he would electrify Mother’s hand- cranked bread mixer. He devised a round platform that the mixer was attached to with a belt around the perimeter driven by a small pulley on an electric motor. This way, the mixer turned, but the hook that had been cranked by hand remained stationery. Unfortunately, it turned the bread dough the wrong way, out rather than in upon itself. Mother used it regularly without complaint, but she also supplemented it with some hand turning in the right direction when Dad was not around. Another idea he had was for an electric powered lawn mower. He attached a small electric motor to a mower he built and used it for many years before power mowers became commercially affordable. When our standard toaster broke, he devised another that challenged us to keep from burning either the toast or our hands. It was simply an oblong box with an element in it and a grid across it. It worked for us because Mother’s bread slices didn’t fit in regular toasters but fit nicely across the grid. You just had to watch them closely to keep them from burning! Making things fascinated Dad. He built a whole fleet of small row- boats and paddle boards for children to use at Indian Trail Lodge. He built rolling wagons for Mother’s kitchen and for his daughters’ kitchens after they married. He built toy boxes for his grandchildren. He even built a stand for the angel food wedding cakes for Sally’s wedding reception. But his largest creative effort was building a small house. Dad was a great admirer of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and of Alden Dow, a student of Wright’s. He subscribed to a couple of architectural magazines. In 1934 when Franklin Roosevelt said a house could not be built for under $3000, Dad accepted the challenge. With Wright and Dow as his inspiration, he designed a small, functional, flat-roofed house. He devised a system of casting in place cinder concrete walls with a core of insulation. He hired a couple of adaptable carpenters (most carpenters were not working at all at the time) to do the bulk of the work. He did some of the finish work himself. He sold the house for $2900. At the time, Dad received a lot of criticism for his 58 ..... Growing Up in East Lansing

The Experimental House on Division Street – Completed in 1936. Right of the entrance the one car garage has been closed to form an interior room. An addition has been built onto the rear just visible over the living room windows.

flat-roofed design—one woman told him outright that people could not live in flat-roofed homes. Dad made no money on this investment, but his work was vindicated when flat roofed houses gradually became more common. Furthermore, the house he built in the 1930’s still stands more than half a century later— attractive and lived in. Actually, Dad was something of a loner who found his greatest satisfaction in his work, his home projects, and his family. In many ways, he was a good father. He installed quite fancy play equipment for Jane and George when the family moved into the big house, although it eventually deteriorated and was not replaced for younger family members. He was always willing to romp with us on the floor. He played bear and we rode on his back. He taught us tricks, like “stiff like a stick.” We would lie on the floor very stiff and he would cup his hands behind our necks and raise us to a standing position, a trick passed on to later generations. He would have us walk up his body and then he would flip us over or he would swing us up on his shoulders. When he tired of the play, he would line up pillows on the floor and have us turn somersaults. He read to us and was quick to encourage Growing Up in East Lansing ..... 59 any interest we might show in learning something. He was immensely interested in Jane’s food chemistry and household management classes, and he taught Jane and some of her friends the mysteries of the automobile engine when they were learning to drive. Ruth once asked a question about ants and he promptly brought home a book on insects for her. However much he might play with us or teach us, we children never took our troubles to Dad. He was sometimes severely critical, though never abusive. In our family, words were weapons and feelings were injured. Mother was the loving counselor for the children. She was more affectionate, more sympathetic, less judgmental, less demanding than our father We always felt better after talking to Mother. She was also more sociable and more active in the community than Dad. She belonged to Faculty Folk Club, the organization of faculty wives on campus. She was a devoted member of St. Elizabeth’s Guild at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Lansing. She did not belong to a Child Study Club or a book club, like some of the women in the neighborhood, because she said she wanted to join organizations that “did something for others.” When we were older, she served on the Girl Scout Council and Sparrow Hospital Auxiliary. She was also informed and active in politics, working at the polls during elections and later serving as president of the League of Women Voters. When East Lansing was split over the actions of a dictatorial Superintendent of schools, Mother was asked to run for School Board. She won the election and served two terms. Her quiet common sense approach did much to bring back a decent working relationship between the Board and the community. The superintendent was ousted and quite bitter about it. Since he was also a member of St. Paul’s, we continued to see him at church. Sally and Mary used to go into giggles when he was usher, imagining all sorts of dreadful things he might be doing like taking money out of the offering basins. To her shame, Ruth remembers criticizing Mother for taking time away from the family for Board activities. Because of a scandal going on between two teachers, Mother was on the phone a lot and Ruth felt her needs more important than the School Board’s. Mother set her straight, saying that in her activities outside the house, she was valued as a person, not just as a 60 ..... Growing Up in East Lansing

wife and mother serving her family. Mother felt the same way about her later work teaching at the TB sanatorium and at Lansing night school. “I count for something there,” she said. Devoted as she was to her family, Mother wanted to be regarded as a person in her own right. Most people loved her for her kindness and acceptance of others. She was a thoughtful neighbor to the other women of Sunset Lane and was always doing something for someone. In our wasp community of East Lansing especially during the thirties, there were few Jews and no African Americans. Mother became very friendly with a half Jewish, half Irish family, the Fagans. They were notorious for their radical politics in conservative East Lansing. They published a labor paper in Lansing and, like many liberals in the thirties, flirted with Communism and Socialism. Their four daughters were the same age as some of us—Jane debated with their oldest daughter Ruth (much later found dead in the New York apartment of Max Bodenheim, the writer, also found dead), George was about the age of their daughter Mary, their daughter Ann was in Ruth’s class, and Jean was Mary’s age. Mother befriended their Jewish mother, Sadie, who supported her when she ran for School Board. Sadie told Ruth, who became good friends with Ann Fagan for a time, that Mother was one of the few women in town that she admired. Not that Mother and Dad did not have the conventional prejudices that most Americans held at the time. They did not want to deny African-Americans nor Jews their legal and political rights, and they certainly were opposed to violence. But they were cautious about accepting African Americans socially. When Ruth came home one afternoon with Ann Fagan and a black girl from college, both Mother and Dad warned Ruth to be careful about getting involved with people she knew nothing of. Ruth argued and paid little attention. After World War II, when the first black professor was hired at Michigan State, Mother was quite concerned about his finding housing in East Lansing (a covenant existed among realtors). She said she would not mind him as a neighbor, but she would “worry about his friends.” Ruth asked her what sort of friends did she think a Harvard Ph.D. in Biblical literature would be likely to have. It would take our generation and the Civil Rights Movement to break through some of these stereotypical fears Growing Up in East Lansing ..... 61 and taboos, but Mother need not have worried about the professor. A Dean who had been fired sold him her house without going through the realtors. It was located right in the middle of town, and East Lansing began to integrate. In our home, Mother was also a peacemaker so there was little obvious friction between her and Dad. Mother accommodated to Dad’s demands or found ways around them when necessary. One area of some tension early in their marriage was the car. George remembers being in the car when Dad was trying to teach Mother to drive. Dad got extremely cross and impatient with her at some blunder she made turning into the driveway, as he later did when teaching some of his daughters. Consequently, Mother gave up learning to drive and depended on Dad, her friends, or her children to take her places. It was her way of keeping peace in the family, although she lost some independence by doing so. In fact, Dad did not want to share the car with her. Later he remarked to George that their marriage nearly broke up over the matter of Mother learning to drive. Another time, he told George that the automobile was the only thing left that a man could call his own. However, for all of our family talk and lively discussion, there were two subjects that were tacitly forbidden: sex and religion. Mother’s Victorian and Dad’s Puritan upbringing brought quick chastisement for any mention of sex or any crude language. Mother referred to menstruation as the girls’ “sick time” or “time of the month,” although older sister Jane taught us all to call it “the curse.” Mother provided scant information about it to us and we assumed it was something that was never discussed openly. An occasional swear word was frowned upon, but obscenity was totally off-limits. Dad once jumped on high schooler Jane for the expression “spreading the bull” which she once used at our dinner table. That was only appropriate to the barn, he stated firmly, never to be used in the house. He didn’t explain why it was inappropriate and some of us were very unclear about its meaning, but no one had the courage to ask. Another time, when Ruth was riding in the car on a Sunday afternoon, she asked how dogs knew they were married so they could have puppies. Dad snapped, “That’s enough now!” End of discussion. Mother said quietly, “I’ll tell you about it 62 ..... Growing Up in East Lansing

later,” but she never did. Mary once used the word “shit” and Mother, who seldom got angry, was furious, telling her never to use that word again and if she did, she could just leave. Mother called women who used such language “common” and her tone carried such disdain that we knew that was something we didn’t want to be. Yet we never had frank discussions with either parent about sex. Consequently, we children were extremely ignorant and gained most of our knowledge through books and friends. The subject of religion was more complicated. Although Dad had gone as a boy with his family to the local Disciples of Christ church, questions of theology and spirituality had little attraction for him. In college, he became enamored of new scientific ideas, especially applying them to human life. His curious and questioning mind focused on the material world, figuring out ways to harness power to help humans work, building machines that would supplement their efforts, creating more comfortable and effective lives on earth. It is also possible that his acquaintance with Darwinian evolution theory, which challenged Biblical notions of Creation and was widely discussed during his college years, pushed him even farther away from the fundamentalist religion of his childhood. In any case, he seemed more interested in the world as it is with all its burgeoning technology than in how human beings got here or where they go when they die. Mother, on the other hand, was secure in her Christian faith and found spiritual solace in the Episcopal Church. It had been so much a part of Green family life that she never really considered leaving it. The difference in their religious points of view was obviously not settled before they married. Mother had to go to Lansing to St. Paul’s to practice her faith, since the only church in East Lansing for years was an interdenominational People’s Church. To our knowledge Dad never accompanied her. He once told Mary he felt uncomfortable with and did not really like the liturgy and formality of the Episcopal Church. But his opposition was probably more personal and less spiritual than that. He resented the strong influence of Mother’s family, particularly her three unmarried sisters, in the lives of his children. We think he associated the Episcopal Church with that influence. Jane, George, and Ruth were all baptized on separate occasions by the Growing Up in East Lansing ..... 63

Reverend Paul Rinehart of St. Paul’s, Saginaw, with Aunts Nellie, Willie, and Jane respectively as Godmothers for us. Although he was present for the occasions, Dad might have felt that Mother had quite excluded him and his family from that part of our lives, since none of his family was present, and since the events were at Mother’s home church (except in the case of Ruth who was baptized in the bedroom of Grandmother Green who was too sick to attend church.) His resentment toward both church and the aunts grew as the years passed. Sometimes, their participation in our lives was thoughtless and inconsiderate of his feelings. The tension climaxed, perhaps, in mid- July, 1947, at Indian Trail Lodge. Hope Adams called from Texas to tell Dad that Jane had just given birth to his first grandchild. Dad took the call in the office with Aunt Jane on the other side of the counter. While he was talking to Hope, she kept asking “What is it? What is it?” Finally, he interrupted the conversation briefly to say, “It’s a boy!” Jane Immediately ran into the dining room and the kitchen announcing to everyone: “Janie’s had a baby boy! Janie’s had a baby boy!” Dad was crushed—she had taken away his right to make the announcement. He was also furious, and when he got off the phone he turned on Aunt Jane, saying that it was Anne’s right to tell the news, not hers. He said other unpleasant things about the Greens always “butting in.” It was a tense moment. Mother and Dad promptly left the Lodge for East Lansing since Mother was going to Houston to help Jane during her first weeks of motherhood. But there must have been more harsh words, because Mother was crying before they drove away. Later that year Mother told George, who had not witnessed any of this, that Dad had written Aunt Jane a letter of apology. Obviously, any residual feelings were set aside. There seemed to be no tension when we all went to Saginaw for Thanksgiving. The next summer twelve-month-old Jimmy Adams visited the Lodge with his mother and grandparents. His friendly toddling charm so captivated everyone that who announced his arrival seemed unimportant, especially since he had a particular fondness for his Grandpa Musselman. Dad was, in fact, jealous of our affection for the aunts. The Episcopal Church which he associated with them and which was a part of our lives that he didn’t share also became an object of his resentment. 64 ..... Growing Up in East Lansing

When All Saints Church was finally built in East Lansing in 1955, with Mother’s vigorous support, Dad’s attitude softened somewhat. We were grown by that time, and he realized that all of us had asserted our independence from the aunts’ control. Furthermore, they had no connection with this church. He liked its architecture, and he became friends with the priest there, the Reverend Gordon Jones. But he never attended it. Mother once told Ruth that she had not handled the religious issue well early in her marriage. Her policy eventually became, as we remember it, to keep the subject out of the conversation in order to maintain a peaceful household. The result of this conflict was that we never talked about God or Jesus or Heaven or Hell or Grace or sin or any of the Christian virtues as a family—although we gathered clear conceptions of right and wrong in behavior through word and example. We never had prayers at table, nor read the Bible, nor heard what Dad’s ideas of God or the hereafter might be, nor what religious faith meant to him. Mother and the Aunts saw that we were given copies of the Bible or the Prayer Book at Confirmation, but we seldom talked about church in Dad’s presence, since it excluded and irritated him. Like references to the Episcopal Church, our visits to the Aunts in Saginaw were not mentioned much either. Mother used to caution us to hide birthday gifts we received from the Aunts so that Dad would not know about them. What he didn’t know, she figured, would avoid his likely disparaging remarks which she never responded to but which no doubt hurt her feelings. When we got older and criticized him to her for what seemed like his unjust and mean behavior, she defended him and remarked, “The Lord will send me no more burdens than I can bear.” She also claimed he said very nice things to her in private and she was grateful for all of his good qualities as a husband and father. She never undercut his authority nor our respect for him nor openly interfered with his discipline. Consequently, Mother supervised, somewhat surreptitiously, whatever religious training we had. She sometimes said prayers with us at bedtime, encouraged us to go to Sunday School, saw that we were all confirmed in the Episcopal Church. Somehow, religious belief, like sex in our house, was relegated to Subjects That Well Brought Up People Growing Up in East Lansing ..... 65

Do Not Talk About. Ironically, much later when Dad was quite old and we returned home for visits, we saw him sneak out of the house on Sunday morning, as if he were headed for a bar or pool room. When we asked Mother where he was going, she said, “He’s going to the People’s Church, but he doesn’t want anyone to know about it.” Religious faith, like sex, was an embarrassment! He was unable to talk about his longing for a faith community. Even at that late date, when we were grown and had our own families and our parents faced the end of life, religion as a subject for discussion had not come out of the closet. Yet our childhood was blessed for many reasons. Two were our town of East Lansing and our Sunset Lane neighborhood, both good places to grow up in during the second quarter of the twentieth century. Both were economically and socially stable, partly because they were homogeneous—white, Protestant, northern European—and partly because the only real enterprise in town was Michigan Agricultural College (Michigan State College in 1925, Michigan State University in 1953). East Lansing was small enough (in 1930 it numbered somewhat over 4000 residents) so that we all walked to Central Grade School and to East Lansing High School, both within a few blocks of our house. There was a very small commercial area across the boulevard from the campus, with a bank, drug stores, hardware, eventually a clothing store and cafe. But until post-World War II, the main shopping area was in Lansing. On Grand River, one caught first the interurban street car and later the bus to Lansing. There was a also a “bumming corner” where college students stood in hopes of getting a free lift to the city. Very few students had cars until after the war. The campus and town were within easy walking distance, or later a short bike ride, from our house. Even closer was a cigar and candy store called “Teddy’s Retreat,” where we could buy penny candy. That was a favorite destination when we were school age. Compared to cities today, we had few public recreational facilities. We had a very small library attached to the City Hall, with a very cross librarian, whose name appropriately was Mrs. Crossman. She did not encourage reading by children and she disliked our dog Dottie who barked while waiting outside, so visits there were often traumatic. We 66 ..... Growing Up in East Lansing

could venture a couple of blocks from our house to the “cut-across,” a kind of primitive playground with swings, a monkey bar, a tennis court, and in winter a flooded rink for skating. This field was below a ridge that had a pathway down it at one end providing a short cut to Central School (until a college sorority house was built and blocked the path) and a steep slope at the other that provided good sledding in winter. This gave us some play area, but our real social center was our immediate neighborhood of a couple of blocks on Sunset Lane and, for George, a block or so on Marshall Street. Lots of children lived in these homes, mostly offspring of Michigan State College faculty members, most within the age range of our family so we had friends in the neighborhood. Four Gower girls lived next door, three Hootman children beyond them, four Huddlesons, five Muncies farther on, with two Anthonys, two Balls, one Dowd, two Washburns, and two Hallmans across the street. Like our family, these households were stable for many years, with relatively similar incomes and values. Some of us went all through school together, from kindergarten through college. Our parents knew our friends and their families and our teachers. Because of this, we had much freedom and little adult supervision, although we all were called home in the evening when the street lights went on. We roller skated on the sidewalks and skated on the rough ice of the cut-across rink. When we were in high school and could drive, we ventured to the campus or Lansing rinks that boasted music and warming houses. In the spring we played “kick the can,” “hide and seek,” “May I?” “Duck on a Rock” or “Cops and Robbers” on our bikes on Fern Street beyond the Gower house. We played croquet and charades in the Gower yard, slid down the slide behind the Huddleson house, climbed the tree in Hootman’s yard and threw acorns at passing motorists. We swung on the bars in the Balls’ backyard and played “run sheep run” in the asparagus patch and empty lots behind the Hallmans and Washburns. We could ride our bikes almost anywhere in town, sometimes venturing to the Red Cedar River on campus or Pinetum at its eastern edge. In the fall, we often went to college football games and watched the ROTC band perform. We participated in East Lansing High School’s somewhat limited activities—plays, debate, Growing Up in East Lansing ..... 67 chorus, operettas, the school newspaper, paper drives to raise money, and, for George, football. As we grew older, there was a vague loyalty to the “Sunset Lane Gang.” When we were almost grown up, we even went Christmas caroling together one year, and we attended many neighborhood weddings. It was a comfortable, protected childhood among stable families, but in a limited, narrow world which did not accurately reflect much of American life in the twenties and thirties. We had little contact with, nor knowledge of, those different from us in race, culture, or economic level. We rarely even saw an African American or an Asian. We knew little of the blue collar workers of Lansing. We were largely unaware of the street apple sellers, the bread lines, the Hoovervilles that sprang up during these years, as we had been unaware of the jazz age, the flapper, and speakeasies which colored the decade of the twenties, but had little impact on our parents’ lives. In one way we differed from our neighborhood friends. We benefited immeasurably from our wonderful summers at Indian trail Lodge, beginning in 1927 and continuing through the 1960s when the next generation of children experienced the pleasures of that place also. This summer resort, which the Green family managed and eventually owned, was located near Traverse City on the East Arm of Grand Traverse Bay off Lake Michigan. Of course we loved the beach, boats, swimming, tennis, and social life, but our viewpoint was broadened by contact with local dirt-scrabble farmers who came to work for Aunt Jane, with the African American employees she brought up from Alabama to work in the kitchen, as well as from guests who were considerably better off than we were. Much of our life together centered around our summers at the Lodge—so much so that the subject deserves a separate chapter. In addition to our town, our neighborhood, and the Lodge as blessings of our childhood, we had numerous pets which we had the joy of loving and caring for. (Mother actually did much of the feeding.) Dad’s farm background made him think animals were important for a healthy childhood, and he often mentioned, somewhat nostalgically, that we ought to live on a farm. Since we had, instead, a rather large house on a fairly small lot, we had to adapt animal life to city living. Of course, there were no leash laws then, so we had more freedom than 68 ..... Growing Up in East Lansing

we would today, but we must have tried the patience of the neighbors by the variety of animals that made our home theirs for periods of time. First and foremost, of course, were our dogs. We had a series over the years. When George was about seven or eight, he went with Mother and Dad to the farmer’s market in Lansing in the late winter or spring. One of the families that had a produce stall had brought a litter of collie pups to sell. There was one left and as soon as he saw it, George told Mother and Dad that he had to have it. They bought it for him for a few dollars. He named it Trixie, and his friend Bob Hootman got a pup about the same time. The two boys played happily together with their puppies. Trixie was a smart dog and trained very easily—she was housebroken in a few days. She was not full grown when summer arrived and we left for Indian Trail Lodge for several weeks. Dad was going to leave us there and return home to work so Trixie would stay with him for the summer. The aunts were not keen on having a dog on the place. Dad was full of tales about how smart Trixie was and what good company she had been. But before we came home she was gone! He had put her out one morning to romp, as usual, and she disappeared. He could not find her anywhere and finally surmised she was stolen. That was the only dog that George ever claimed as his own. A few years later, a connection of Dad’s gave us a four year old spayed female, part Pomeranian. She was rather small, with black long hair and white markings, and her name was Dottie. Ruth was just completing second grade and summer vacation was about to begin. George was very excited about getting her, as were the rest of the family, but within a day or two, she was missing. Then she showed up and followed Ruth to school for her school picnic and from that time on, claimed Ruth as her mistress. She belonged to the whole family, but the primary bond with Ruth held firm, except during thunderstorms when she seemed to feel safest under Mother’s bed. She slept in Ruth’s room, in her bed, under the covers. When Mother came upstairs at night, she heard Dottie jump from bed to floor, but when she went back downstairs, she knew Dottie had bounded back into her place at Ruth’s feet. Dottie’s special place of repose during the day was under Mother’s Growing Up in East Lansing ..... 69 sewing cabinet where she fit very nicely. However, she sometimes chewed on its legs, eventually ruining the bottom four inches of the sewing cabinet. After Dottie was gone, Dad cut the legs off evenly so we had a shorter sewing cabinet. (Mary Fischer still has it today, with new legs and drawer handles that Ed put on.) There was a floor drain in the basement that did not have a cover on it. Several times during the years, rats came into the basement through the drain from the sewer. Dottie caught and killed them every time. Mother said she could forgive Dottie everything for that. Somehow, the rule about dogs at the Lodge did not apply to Dottie for a few years. When all seven of us piled into the old Willys-Knight to go to the Lodge, with luggage strapped on the running boards and roof, Dottie jumped in, too. She had a great time, sleeping again at Ruth’s feet, even when they shared a bed in one of the tents with Aunt Nell. Dottie used to sit on the dock and watch us play in the water, sometimes barking her anxiety. Finally she would jump in and swim out to us pummeling us to get us to go in shore. When we took out the little rowboats Skippy or Peter Pan or Tinker Bell, Dottie would hop in, sitting either in the bow or the stern. She did not like to be separated from the people she loved—she would walk to school with Ruth until she reached Grand River where the policemen guided children across the street. Then she turned around and went home. If she saw Ruth coming home from school or town, she would run like the wind to greet her. The few times Mother was sick in bed, Dottie set up a watch in her bedroom and would not leave her. A very loving and loyal dog. We had a stream of other dogs that were not as attractive as Trixie and Dottie. Some time after Dottie was gone, the aunts arrived one Saturday with a little male puppy that Aunt Nell had acquired from one of her students. He looked like he was part Dalmatian, since he was white with black markings, one in the shape of a four leaf clover on his rump. We called the dog Lucky, but it was a misnomer for this animal was not blessed by fortune. He never showed any signs of intelligence and he soon outgrew his cuteness, although he was always friendly and willing to chew anything he could get his teeth around. But he grew. And grew. And grew, until he was a big-footed, clumsy, 70 ..... Growing Up in East Lansing

homely mutt, with few redeeming qualities. Dad arranged for him to go to a farm family outside of town, since he was much too large for our limited quarters. Many months later, while the family was eating dinner, we heard a pounding on the front door. Mary was late arriving home and as she was coming through the door, she yelled for Mother to come get this big dog away from her. Sure enough, like a bad penny, Lucky had returned. We deported him once more, this time successfully. Since Ruth wanted a replacement for Dottie so badly, we tried a couple of other times with dogs. When she was in eighth grade, she got Smoky—one of our cousin Mickey Musselman’s pure bred cocker spaniel’s puppies that were a mistake (an accidental love affair, perhaps.) He was a very cute black dog, obviously part cocker spaniel, and she loved him dearly. We had had him only a few months when Ruth came home from school, let him out of the house to romp in the front yard. He ran into the street and was fatally struck by a car. It was a traumatic afternoon. Sobbing, she carried his mangled, bleeding body into the house and laid him on the kitchen floor with a plea to call Dr. Sales, a college veterinarian who lived behind us. Of course, Dr. Sales was not yet home and Mother saw that Smoky was already gone. She tried to comfort a semi-hysterical Ruth in the kitchen while George was having an accordion lesson in the living room. His stoical teacher was unperturbed by all the excitement and continued with the lesson, so George, who was dying to find out the details, played “Over the Waves” on the accordion as a musical background for this family tragedy. Much later, we acquired Midget, or Midgie, another black dog, part cocker spaniel. Her origin is uncertain, but she was a boisterous female who matured early. Before she was a year old, she went into heat— which in our Victorian household we children knew little about. Soon we had about twenty eager dogs in our yard, trying desperately to get into the house. They were big and little, pure bred and mongrel, but they were all horny enough to try to crash through the back door or come up the basement stairs. Even the Huddleson’s unfriendly little rat terrier was hanging around hopefully. Furthermore, we had to tie Midgie to a leg of the couch to prevent her from going out to meet the guys. When she did finally escape and make out with one of the dogs Growing Up in East Lansing ..... 71 just off the back porch, Mother threw a pail of water on them to break up the affair but to no avail. Before long, we had an anonymous post card in the mail, asking us if we were running a dog pound. We finally took Midgie to the kennels where she was neutered, rain washed away her remaining attraction, and the male dogs went home. However, Midgie eventually got distemper and died—perhaps her love life was too strenuous. She was not mourned too long by most of the family. Much later, when Mary was in junior high, she wanted one of Mickey Musselman’s pure bred cocker spaniel puppies from his pedigreed Rusty. The little black one we got, we named Boogie, short for Rhumboogie, a kind of jazz dance popular at the time. She was a quick study and Dad taught her many tricks. She could balance sitting up on a hassock, among other things. He was home bound with his long gall bladder seige at the time and Boogie was a distraction for him. One day George found Boogie sitting up in front of a strange man eating an ice cream cone on Grand River Avenue. George refused to acknowledge any acquaintance with her. Boogie had a regular schedule. Every evening after Dad had listened to the news, Boogie would bring a toy to him to invite him to play. They had a rowdy play for half an hour or so before Dad told her to go lie down, which she did. About nine o’clock, she went to the garage door and wanted to be let out to her kennel for the night. If nobody paid any attention to her, she would be very persistent begging until somebody responded. Eventually, we mated her and she had a litter of pure-bred pups, most of which we sold. Boggie is fondly remembered by the family. The pet we probably had the longest was our cat Funnyface. Just how she came into the family is not clear, but she shared the household with Dottie and outlived her by some years. She acquired her name because, although she was a calico cat, a line divided her face between black and gold. After Dottie was gone, Funnyface took over the rat patrol and did a very good job. One night Jane awoke to hear a crunching noise. She turned on the light and discovered Funnyface devouring her latest kill on her bedroom floor. Funnyface once climbed so high in one of our big backyard oaks that she was afraid to come down and spent the night meowing piteously outside Ruth’s bedroom window. After much tearful pleading by Ruth, Dad got the long ladder 72 ..... Growing Up in East Lansing

and a rake around which he wrapped a towel to form a sort of platform for Funnyface to step on so that he could lower her to where he could reach her. She didn’t understand what he offered and in jumping away from the rake fell to the ground. Although badly shaken by the experience, she landed on her feet and was not seriously hurt. She lost one of her nine lives in that adventure. Unlike Dottie who was the first to hop in the car when we went for a ride, Funnyface hated it. On one of our trips to Traverse City, we had both animals and stopped in Cadillac for gas. Funnyface escaped the car and high-tailed it down the street with all seven of us in hot pursuit. She covered several blocks before we caught her. In the course of the years with us, Funnyface gave birth to more than one litter of kittens. She conducted her romances much more circumspectly than Midgie, away from the house so that we never knew who fathered the kittens. Dad and Mother must have figured that since they didn’t provide any sex education for us, the animals would—much like on the farm. However, even with these examples, human sex was quite unclear to us. Some of the kittens we gave away, but one litter Dad wiped out by putting a sack containing them over the exhaust pipe of the car. Sally and George inadvertantly witnessed this and were appropriately horrified, but Mother presumably knew and approved. We were forever trying to get rid of the surplus. While we had Funnyface and Dottie, we also had Petie, a pretty green canary. He technically belonged to Sally, but everybody enjoyed him and took responsibility for him. From his cage in the dining room window, he became very familiar with the family. Sometimes he would sing and sing and sing, especially when Mother was running the vacuum or the sewing machine. We often let him out of his cage when we cleaned it in the morning. He would fly around enjoying his freedom. Two or three times he was let out without Funnyface having been put out first. One time, he had such a close call, he lost quite a few feathers. Funnyface used to sit watching him speculatively, but she never did what she had a mind to. Instead, one morning we found Petie lying lifeless on the floor of his cage, presumably the victim of old age. We had a few other more exotic creatures. Once Dad brought home a half dozen baby chicks in the spring. He probably thought we would Growing Up in East Lansing ..... 73 have fun and learn something from them, but their life span was limited. At least one was killed when it wandered out of its box under the stove and got caught in the swinging door between the dining room and kitchen. When they outgrew their first home, Dad fenced a space in the back yard, but the neighbors were not pleased when the chickens learned to fly over the fence and get into their gardens. However, before long they were all gone. Another time, Dad brought home a couple of lambs which we bottle fed. We kept them in the garage for a week and they were quite an attraction in the neighborhood. Another time we had a kid goat for a week. We had a fish bowl full of guppies for a while and kept a dachshund for a few months for some college students when Ruth was in graduate school. Perhaps the most unusual animal experience we had was with Dad’s “squirrel circus.” He developed the project after he retired and had to stay home a great deal. We had several very large oak trees in the yard which attracted a great many squirrels. They used to taunt our dogs by chattering at them when they were just out of reach on the trunk of the tree. Dad became fascinated watching them out the front window and began to put peanuts out for them. No matter how difficult he made it for them, they always retrieved them. Eventually, he rigged up a series of devices, a wheel, a sort of trapeze, and other contraptions from which he would hang the peanuts. No matter how far the squirrels had to hang or how often they fell off, they always got the peanut! They would almost come on command, since he used to entertain visitors in the afternoon by putting peanuts out. Within minutes, a squirrel would emerge and go through his paces to get the peanuts. Although, to Dad’s sorrow, we children did not have farm experience, we never lacked for pets. In spite of our apparently sheltered and happy lives, the dominant reality of much of our childhood was the Great Depression of the 1930s. Although college salaries were reduced drastically in 1933 when the state appropriation for the college was cut by forty percent, our neighborhood survived these terrible years without too much misery. Our family had a steady, though limited, income. We never missed a meal, and Dad was able to pay off the mortgage on the house. Yet the grimness of those years colored our lives. Anxiety hung over the decade 74 ..... Growing Up in East Lansing

like a cloud. Every day there were reports of more people being laid off work, including white collar workers with years of experience and many years on the job. Whenever we took a trip anywhere, to Saginaw or Royal Oak, Mother commented hopefully on factories that seemed to be operating. By 1933, almost twenty-five per cent of the population in the country was unemployed.13 Many people were unable to pay off their mortgages and lost equity in their homes. They were not evicted because there were no paying tenants to replace them. Because the banks had so many bad debts, many of them failed and could not pay off depositors. Nearly 2500 banks had failed by 1932. Our parents lost a few hundred dollars, a lot of money in those days, in one such failure. Jane also lost forty dollars which was not paid back until she was in college. We felt an unexpressed fear, especially when Mother used to comment on the need to economize or “It’s over the hill to the poorhouse.” Ruth actually believed that the poor house was on the other side of the Sunset Lane hill. Even though we were not really poor, we thought we were. Uncertainty hung over everyone’s head. Mary was born in January, 1930, at the very beginning of the Depression. With five children under twelve, with no tenure at college, no unemployment compensation, no health or disability insurance, no old age pension, it was a scary time even for those lucky enough to have jobs. The World War I Veterans’ March on Washington in 1932 when they were dispersed by federal troops under General Douglas MacArthur seemed to signal that the nation was on the brink of disaster. Franklin Roosevelt unseated Herbert Hoover as president in the election of 1932. As soon as he took office in 1933, his New Deal introduced a huge number of programs to put people back to work but caused the national debt to balloon. There was tremendous investment in the national infrastructure through public works projects. Government buildings, highways, sewer and water and hydro electric projects, rural electrification, park improvements, reforestation projects were all part of his efforts under agencies like the WPA, PWA, CCC, among others. Our unemployed second cousin, John Lines, worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps for a time replanting forests in northern Michigan. Many shelter belts on the Great Plains were Growing Up in East Lansing ..... 75 also planted by the CCC in order to stop the loss of top soil through the dust storms of the thirties, which Ruth learned about when she moved to South Dakota a couple of decades later. In addition, many a midwestern small town swimming pool was built with federal money during the depression, including the one the Alexander children swam in growing up in South Dakota. Unemployed writers were put to work compiling and writing State histories and guides, and artists were given jobs painting murals on public buildings. Financially strapped students were employed in college under the National Youth Administration, including Ruth a decade later at the University of Missouri. Of course, some workers did not really have much to do, so the WPA worker leaning on his shovel became a favorite cartoon figure of the period. The crown jewel of all the New Deal legislation passed during these years was the Social Security system which became law in 1935. In a serious discussion soon after its passage, Aunt Jane recognized that it would change the way she kept books and paid her employees at the Lodge since she would have to figure the Social Security Tax. However, by the 1950’s, she was grateful for it, since it enabled her to employ Aunt Willie so that she could receive Social Security, which was not available to her in her job with Saginaw County Court. It encouraged the establishment of pension plans, like the one instituted at Michigan State, which gave Mother and Dad a modest income after Dad’s retirement in 1942. Like millions of their contemporaries, the Musselman children benefited from it at the end of the century. It provided part of their retirement incomes. Roosevelt’s Social Security program helped eliminate poverty in old age. Both Mother and Dad were Democrats and supported Roosevelt in the election of 1932. East Lansing, however, was rock solid Republican and voted for Hoover that year and for Alf Landon in 1936. Our family supported FDR throughout his four terms and liked most of his policies. Mother followed the stories of the Roosevelt family closely and greatly admired Eleanor Roosevelt, reading her “My Day” column in the newspaper regularly. Dad was even supportive of the working man’s right to join a union. In Michigan, we were very conscious of the strikes in the automobile plants, particularly the sit down strikes at the 76 ..... Growing Up in East Lansing

General Motors plant in Flint in 1936 which resulted in recognition of the United Auto Workers Union. Ruth remembers her confirmation in May, 1937, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church facing Michigan’s capitol, where the organ music of the church service competed with band music of a union demonstration on the capitol lawn. Dad was very sympathetic and aware of the impact of the automobile industry on Michigan’s economy. When the opportunity arose, he took some of us on a tour of the Oldsmobile plant. We children were aware quite early that we differed politically from many of our schoolmates, although we didn’t really become conscious of politics until we got a radio. Dad was slow to get one. He was intensely interested in radio at first and experimented with crystal sets. George remembers Jimmy Grannum, a young man living across the street also interested in radio, coming over to the house one evening and comparing notes with Dad. However, Dad soon had some serious health problems—a tonsillectomy followed by an appendectomy which distracted him from his interest in radio. George remembers the doctor having to come in the night to remove a clot from Dad’s throat when it didn’t stop bleeding and another instance of Dad experiencing terrible abdominal pain after putting up the tent on a camping trip and drinking a lot of cold water. Mother thought he would die. The result was that he lost interest in radio and did not buy one. George had to go over to the neighbors every night to hear whatever programs people were listening to in those days. The aunts finally took matters in hand and gave the family our first radio in time to hear Roosevelt inaugurated in 1933. We sat in the living room for his speech, too young to understand it, but impressed that Mother wept as she listened to Roosevelt’s assurance that the “only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Although we did not know the seriousness of the crisis in the country, we sensed that this was a significant moment. Roosevelt promptly declared an extended “bank holiday” so that banks could assess their financial situations without facing a run of withdrawals by their depositors. Dad and Mother, like everyone else, had only the money they happened to have in their pockets or purses and had to get along on that until the banks reopened. No one had credit cards then, although we did have charge Growing Up in East Lansing ..... 77 accounts at some stores. Owners of bank stock in those days were legally liable for contributing additional capital to the bank to pay off depositors. Grandfather Green got caught big in that one because of his ownership of a substantial number of shares of one of the Saginaw banks. (As a result, lots of reforms in the banking system were established by the federal government under the New Deal such as Federal Deposit Insurance.) From that time on, the radio played a big part in our lives, as it did in the lives of many Americans during the thirties. Radio and the movies were comforts during the depression. We children listened faithfully to the Lone Ranger, Jack Armstrong, and Little Orphan Annie before dinner, while Dad sat down afterwards to hear Lowell Thomas and the News followed by Amos and Andy. Children’s programs offered innumerable gifts of rings, invisible ink pens, and special watches that you could get with the sponsoring cereal box tops or with Ovaltine labels. Mother never would buy the appropriate items (too expensive!) so we seldom received these coveted gifts. On Sunday evening, we huddled around the radio to listen to comedy shows of Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, Fred Allen, and George Burns/Gracie Allen. Later we laughed at Edgar Bergan and Charlie McCarthy. Mother let us stay up till nine on Monday nights for Lux Radio Theater. As we grew older, we listened to the Lucky Strike Hit Parade to learn what the latest popular songs were, and serial type shows like “One Man’s Family” and “The Shadow.” Mother also listened to the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday afternoons and to Ford Sunday Evening Hour with the Detroit Symphony. Dad did not believe in allowances—he thought we should earn what money we got. He did pay for A’s on report cards sometimes. The aunts used to give us a little money when we saw them and our mother would give a little occasionally for running errands for her. We usually had enough when we were small to pay for candy at Teddy’s Retreat or a Saturday afternoon movie. But when we got into junior high and high school and began to want real money, we were expected to earn it. Jane started working at the Lodge when she was ten years old, and George also earned some there. Ruth and Sally baby sat and waited on tables at the Lodge, but by the time Mary came along, the war was on 78 ..... Growing Up in East Lansing

and labor was scarce. She got a work permit at fourteen and clerked at a downtown store during the Christmas rush, besides waiting on tables at the Lodge. Actually, the Lodge furnished employment for all of us and largely financed our college. That we would graduate from college was a given—both in the family and in the neighborhood. There was never any question about that. Financing it was mostly our responsibility. Mother and Dad helped out by providing our living while we attended Michigan State and the aunts gave us jobs at the Lodge. But at an early age, we simply accepted the fact that we would have to earn our way. This was a depression reality. Dad had one student whom he allowed to sleep in the department, since he had no money for housing and was living largely on milk and crackers. Even when times got better with the coming of the war, depression psychology prevailed and many of our contemporaries were also expected to pay their own way. Tuition was relatively low. With our tips and wages from summer waiting on tables or, for George, acting as busboy and general handy man, and other odd jobs, it was possible to make it. Our experience of the depression took on a more personal dimension in the “scandal” among college officials which broke into the open about that time. It greatly colored our lives for the next ten years. We never knew all the details, but according to college history, “in 1932, five citizens of Ingham County asked that a Grand Jury scrutinize financial irregularities in the College.”14 The allegations involved property transfers, bank deposits, the Music Department, the sale of a horse, campus renovation, all involving illegal use of college funds and property by certain college officials, particularly President Robert Shaw. However, the results of an investigation by the Board of Agriculture, the governing body of the college, claimed that there was nothing improper in these actions and that the allegations were largely the work of rumor and gossip. “A certain few members of the staff… had by continued loose talk and destructive criticisms, endangered the morale of the college as a whole.”15 As a result, three faculty members of long tenure on the college staff were sacked: Joe Cox, Dean of Agriculture and a friend of Dad’s, Jimmy Hasselman, who lived up the street from us and was head of journalism and publications, and Frank Growing Up in East Lansing ..... 79

Kedzie, former head of chemistry, ex-president, ex-dean of applied sciences, and college historian, who had been at State since 1880. Our parents had been very friendly with the Cox family, since he was Dad’s boss, and they continued to be during the height of the scandal. This appeared to put Dad on the side of the accusers, a perception which was to have long lasting effects. The fact that Joe Cox was set adrift after nineteen years of distinguished service at the College and at a time when no jobs were available was distressing to our family. Mother was friends with Katharine Cox and Jane was friends with their daughter Martha. The two families had camped together in the Upper Peninsula. There were strong political overtones to the scandal. After Roosevelt was elected, Joe Cox finally got a low level job at the Department of Agriculture and moved his family to Washington. The following year, in 1933, the Michigan Legislature launched another investigation, which added to the charges but made no attempt to evaluate the evidence. The investigating committee report was not approved by the State Senate. Mother claimed the Legislature white-washed the whole unsavory business, since a series of reforms were promptly instituted in college administration, even though only the whistle-blowers were fired. Because Dad had testified in defense of Cox during the investigation, he was on the wrong political side as far as the administration of President Robert Shaw was concerned. Dad’s situation was not improved when John Hannah, Secretary of the Board of Agriculture, married President Shaw’s daughter. He was thereafter referred to on campus as the “crown prince” and did indeed become President when President Shaw retired in 194l. For those ten years (1932-1942) Dad did not have strong support from the administration. Although he did not lose his position, his salary remained lower than other department heads, and when he ultimately had difficulty with some of his department members, the administration sided with his opposition. However, when Dad took his departmental issues to President Hannah in the spring of 1942, he received such a warm reception and indications of support that he was confident his departmental problems could be resolved. Several days later, he received a letter abruptly offering him the choice of retirement 80 ..... Growing Up in East Lansing

(Dad was 61 at the time) or dismissal. Dad was stunned by such treatment. Since he still had two daughters in junior high and high school, he really had no choice but to retire, in order to be assured of some income. Dad had not really suffered his social and political ostracism during the preceding years, because he was too absorbed in his work, but being summarily dismissed by the administration at the peak of his career was a terrible blow to him. It took him years to come to terms with what he regarded as his failure. Family loyalty surged to the surface. We were all bitter at the shabby treatment Dad received at the hands of Michigan State’s administration after so many years of service. In spite of the fact that various Musselman family members had accumulated a total of nine or ten degrees from Michigan State, we have been unenthusiastic alumni ever since. In retrospect, we now realize that Dad’s day in agricultural engineering education had almost passed by the time he retired. He had always been the champion of the small farmer and much of the work he did in the Department was directed toward this figure in the economy, whose significance was fast disappearing. Furthermore, family responsibilities had prevented him from continuing his education by earning an advanced degree, a fact Mother openly regretted to us at the time of his retirement. The wave of the future in agriculture after the war was going to move to the BIG farm and Agribusiness. President Hannah wanted Michigan State to be BIG also, and he certainly achieved that goal. He wanted staff members who would court big players and bring big money into the school for research, development and promotion. Dad could never have done that nor been happy in that environment. As it turned out, ill health would probably have forced his retirement in a year or two anyway, but he was not permitted that option and felt thoroughly disgraced. Gradually the economy improved. By the end of the decade, the possibility of war overshadowed our worries about the depression. Rearmament gave a boost to industry and put more people back to work. The character of East Lansing began to change as well in the 1940s. As activity at Oldsmobile and other industries in Lansing picked up, the prosperity of management, business. and professional people encouraged them to move to the suburbs—in this case East Lansing. Growing Up in East Lansing ..... 81

They built larger and more impressive homes, particularly on the west side of town. Their children were more affluent than the children of college faculty and had a stronger connection with Lansing society, affecting the make-up of the school population. The change accelerated after World War II, so that Mary’s classmates were in some respects quite different in economic background from those of her older brother and sisters. The college itself expanded enormously during these boom years so that East Lansing seemed less a small town of its own and more simply a part of a great urban area around Lansing. From the late thirties until after World War II, international issues dominated radio news. The rise of Hitler, the take-over of Austria, the pact with Mussolini, the Munich Peace Pact were all brought to us on the radio by international reporters like Edward R. Morrow and William L. Shirer. It was a worrisome time for many Americans and it affected our individual lives in various ways. We had few men students on campus during the War, but special army training units gave the campus a military character, as soldiers marched to classes. Gas rationing limited travel. Football and fraternities almost disappeared when they were overshadowed by the millions of men in the armed services. After the war, men flooded back to the campus under the GI bill, straining every facility from housing to classrooms. Married students became the norm, requiring new types of housing and new campus regulations. Nonetheless, during and after the war, members of the Musselman family graduated from high school and college, left home for employment, went to graduate school, and continued with their personal lives. Nothing external to the household affected our lives as much as the changes that occurred at home with Dad’s retirement and succeeding illness. Almost simultaneous with his “retirement” from Michigan State, he developed a very serious gall bladder attack. He had had them before, but this time surgery was required so that he was hospitalized when his retirement was announced in the paper in the spring of 1942. Most people did not know the full details and thought that ill health was the reason for it. Many figured he would not live long. For a time, we thought they were right. Dad didn’t really recover from the surgery because the surgeon had failed to find the 82 ..... Growing Up in East Lansing

reason for the gall bladder attack (an obstruction of the bile duct). In the following months, he was plagued by all sorts of symptoms. He had allergies, could not eat, was jaundiced, and steadily lost weight until he was a very thin old man. Mother went to work outside the home to help with finances, teaching at the TB sanitarium and at a Lansing night school. She loved the work, and Dad took over as much of the housework as he was able to do while she was the family breadwinner. The next spring, he underwent another operation to remove the obstruction, but it was unsuccessful—Dad believed the surgeon was incompetent and unable to do the surgery. Dad was very sick and weak thereafter and appeared to have a bleak future. Another doctor in Lansing recommended that Dad go to the University of Michigan hospital in Ann Arbor to see a specialist. He and Mother decided to give it one more try. In the summer of ’43, he had a third operation which proved successful. Although he needed a long recovery, by the next year he was fit again and in reasonably good health. He maintained this for some twenty years until in his eighties he developed Parkinson’s Disease. His revenge on Michigan State was outliving most of his enemies and drawing his pension all those years. Mother’s health seemed to be good, although she had some high blood pressure and was rather heavy. After we left home, Mother took in roomers to augment family income. She and Dad became fond of most of the people who lived with them, frequently inviting them for meals. Mother continued to work and Dad struggled to find “something to do” that would make him feel worthwhile again. However, after he turned seventy, their lives for a decade were quite full and happy. Dad finally had accepted retirement and Mother at sixty was still engaged in the community and neighborhood. They traveled to visit their married children and grandchildren, watched the news on TV, worked in the garden, square danced, squired the widows in the neighborhood to the grocery store or the college lecture series. Mother and Dad were able to come to the family reunion we had at Indian Trail Lodge in 1963 and they had made a visit to Ohio relatives in September of that year. In October, shortly after she had written her weekly letters to those of us who lived away, and just a Growing Up in East Lansing ..... 83 couple of months before her seventy-fourth birthday, Mother got up one night with a headache and on the way to the bathroom had a massive stroke which killed her quickly. The family and neighbors congregated in shock for her funeral since it marked a breaking up of the neighborhood and since she was so universally loved. Dad failed gradually over the next couple of years. He continued to live in the Sunset Lane house for a year. George put an addition on his house and on January 1, 1965, he moved in with them. He was frequently quite confused during this time. Beverly, George’s wife, was the woman who came in to take care of the children. George was two people—himself and the other boy who wrote the checks. By November, 1965, Dad could no longer be cared for adequately at home. We put him in a nursing home where he died a few months later in the spring of 1966. Thus ended, after some forty-five years, Musselman life on Sunset Lane. Although family loyalty and unity were nurtured at our dining room table, as well as critical individualism, ours was not a quiet household. Very infrequently, both Mother and Dad resorted to physical discipline (using razor strap or hair brush for a swat on the butt or putting our heads under a cold running water faucet), but gruff, harsh words from Dad or a disapproving look from Mother were much more common. Dad’s personality was so strong that a command from him was usually sufficient to subdue us, and none of us wanted to disappoint Mother. We children scrapped as most children do, but we were articulate enough to argue and yell more often than we punched. We had more hurt feelings and wounded egos than bruised bodies. Furthermore, we all like to laugh and our combined sense of humor erupted as frequently as our quarreling. When we finally grew up, we appreciated each other as friends and companions. Our many get- togethers attest to our enjoyment of each other’s company. However, what emerged by mid-century from living together on Sunset Lane for all those years were five very different individuals. We graduated from college, left home to work, sometimes recycled back home for a time, married, went to different parts of the country, had children of our own during the baby boom years, gradually grew old and retired. Our individual stories and the stories of our families in the second half of the twentieth century follow. 84 ..... Growing Up in East Lansing

Addenda: More about Life on Sunset Lane (as remembered by George Musselman)

THE HUDDLESONS No story of the Musselman’s years in East Lansing would be com- plete without special attention to the Huddleson family. Huddlesons had four children. Lenore and Ruth were of an age. They were close friends until Lenore’s music lessons came to occupy most of her time as they grew older. John was close behind Lenore. Louise was of an age that she was a friend of both Sally and Mary Musselman. Mary Huddleson was close in age to but younger than Mary Musselman. She was disinclined toward friendship with Sally or Mary, perhaps because that was Louise’s purview. Dr. Forrest Huddleson was in the Veterinary Department/School at Michigan State College/University. He was the world’s foremost authority on Brucellosis (Bangs Disease), a very infectious disease of cattle. Among other things it caused cattle to abort. It had the potential to infect other animals and humans. Dr. and Mrs. (Isabel) Huddleson had met and married in Pennsylvania. They moved to East Lansing soon after. Mrs. Huddleson was a highly trained and competent pianist. She brought with her a grand Piano. It was said that during the first year or two in East Lansing she played the piano often. The work of caring for her burgeoning family, especially cooking for it (Another story had it that the first thing Forrest had asked when they met was “Can you cook?”) soon so monopolized her time and attention that she sort of let herself, including her piano playing, go. The children did not lack for love, but her attention to them, as to all her household chores, was very casual. Mrs. Ball, across the street, looked down her nose at the Huddlesons, and thought all sorts of the worst things about the Huddleson children. All the Huddleson youngsters were started with piano lessons. Only Lenore showed promise. She majored in Music at Michigan State. She continued to take piano lessons all through College. She became very competent. Because she could sight read intricate scores she was in demand as an accompanist. Lenore, being such a fine pianist, naturally got Mrs. Hud’s grand Growing Up in East Lansing ..... 85 piano. She married a fellow by the name of Linquist in the U.S.State Department. The piano went with them to India, to Brazil and ended up with Lenore in Austin, Texas. Louise became a constant friend of both Sally and Mary—later on just Mary. They were all always at the Huddleson’s house or the Musselman’s house. Louise was not a pretty girl. Other than the Sally and Mary Musselman she did not make a lot of friends at school, especially when they got into High School. Louise’s abilities and sense of humor were overlooked by her other contemporaries. She found her niche after college. She married Cliff Wright, a veterinarian who had a very lucrative practice in Eastern Pennsylvania. They raised several boys. Their youngest was Tommy. He came with Louise to Paul Fischer's Wedding. It was in Connecticut, not too far from eastern Pennsylvania. Mary, as the mother of the groom had asked that Louise be invited. Louise brought Tommy along to keep her company on the trip. He had

Mary Musselman (left) and Louise Huddleson (circa 1942) 86 ..... Growing Up in East Lansing

planned to continue on by himself for the couple of days, but ended up staying for the festivities. And what a blast they were! As part of Dr. Huddleson’s work a testing laboratory was established on the MSC/MSU campus that ran routine tests for the presence of brucellosis and other diseases on samples taken from cattle all over the Michigan and elsewhere. This laboratory offered part time employment. Ruth availed herself of this during one of the breaks in her studies. Other persons who had connections with, or would come to have connections with the Musselmans did also. This especially broadened Ruth’s acquaintanceship with her contemporaries on campus. In a very indirect way it led to the connection between Ruth and Beverly Holcomb. That in turn led to the connection between Beverly and George. Virginia and Jeanette Moore were also involved in there some how. John Ford, the manager of the lab was single when Ruth worked there. He had a bit of a crush on her for a while. He finally married Jeanette Moore. They as a couple were friendly with George and Beverly until they moved to Arizona. When age forced the retirement of Dr. Huddleson, he went into depression. The Vet school maintained a desk for him at which he could work. He had no function. His death not long after his retirement was particularly upsetting for Mrs. Huddleson. She suffered a range of mental reactions. Within a year or so Louise felt her mother should undergo treatment and knew of a facility near them where she could get it. Lenore had been living at home but was leaving to join her husband. Mary Huddleson had married a veterinarian. She was living in East Lansing. She and her husband had acquired a pair of boston bull pups. They kept the female, Charlene, and gave the male, Charley, to Mrs. Huddleson. Beverly encountered Lenore in the grocery store. Lenore reported that she was packed ready to leave, her mother was ready to leave, but they had not solved the problem of what to do with Charley. Beverly volunteered, “We will take him. If for some reason we can’t stand to have him we will see that he gets a good home.” That is how the George Musselman household acquired Charley, the only dog they had for any length of time. He lived on for about ten years. He was a great family pet. He had a special attachment to George. Of course, it was George who occasionally fried an egg and put it on his Growing Up in East Lansing ..... 87 dog food dinner. When George lay down on the couch, Charley usually joined him there in a most ungentlemanly feet-in-the-air repose. Mrs. Huddleson, cured, returned home after a few months. Meanwhile the George Musselmans had moved to Farmington Hills.

THE NEIGHBORHOOD Marshall Street and Rosewood, a long block apart, both ran west from Sunset Lane. About 200 feet north of Marshall Street Fern Street ran east from Sunset Lane. The former two defined the neighborhood that the Musselman thought to be theirs in terms of where they lived. Directly across the street from the Musselman in the first house north of Marshal street were the Spindlers. They had a son, Robert, who was several years older than Jane Musselman. We knew little about him. The Spindlers got a surprise when they had a late baby, David, born the same year as Mary Musselman. Mary and David were devoted playmates no longer than through kindergarten. Spindlers kept a tight rein on David. He was not allowed to cross the street. Mary played with him often and long, always at his house. I believe he never saw the inside of our house. I think their playmate relationship did not last beyond kindergarten. It was not many years before the Spindlers moved out. The Golightlys moved in. They had a daughter who never got integrated into the neighborhood. Next door to the Spindlers lived the Grannums. They had a son, Jimmy, enough older than Jane that he never was a factor in our lives. He was still around when we were very young. Circa 1925 radio technology was just beginning to evolve. A station in Pittsburgh had started broadcasting. There may have been others. Dad had acquired a crystal set (involving a crystal such as galena (lead sulfide), a very fine wire barely touching the crystal, and a pair of earphones. The earphones were conceited to the crystal and the wire (using only the power of the radio signal to listen to the radio). Jimmy Grannum was also trying to make or use a crystal set. I have a very early memory of him coming over to, I guess, discuss with Dad the results they were having. Mrs. Grannum worked, I think in the real estate business. The Grannums were neither neighborly nor friendly. They had a low tolerance for children. 88 ..... Growing Up in East Lansing

The next house going north was the Hallman’s. Dr. Hallman was a veterinarian, in the Veterinary Department at Michigan Agricultural College (Until in 1925 when it became Michigan State College and in 1955 it became MIchigan State University). They had come to East Lansing before our parents were married. I think Dr. Hallman had invested in some of the vacant property that lay along Sunset Lane. I think the Hallmans built the Grannum house, and soon thereafter the house north of the Grannum house in which they lived when we knew them. The land on that side of Sunset Lane for several lots sloped down away from the street. It was convenient to build houses with garages in the back of the basements. The Grannum house had the driveway on the north side of the house. It went down and turned left into the basement garage. The Hallmans built their house on the next lot with the basement garage facing the Grannum garage. The same driveway turned right into the Hallman garage, The Grannum driveway became a joint driveway serving both garages. (There must have been some legal provision in the deeds for both properties.) That joint driveway was forever a bone of contention between the Hallmans and the Grannums. Mrs. Grannum drove. She frequently came home in the daytime which Dr. Hallman rarely did. There was no parking on that side of Sunset Lane. She would park in the driveway. I think she took pleasure in the way it irked Mrs. Hallman. Catherine Hallman was older than Jane by enough to be a class ahead of her in school. As pre schoolers they were very close playmates. They stayed friends but had less in common as they worked up through the grades. Mary Louise Hallman was a couple of years older that Catherine. With both Bob Spindler, Jimmy Grannum and the Stewart son gone she was the oldest second generation person on the street. I think Dr. Hallman had gotten his veterinary training at the University of Alabama. Mrs. Hallman had been raised in rural Alabama, probably on a plantation (or the remains of one)—a holdover from the pre civil war days. She let on that it had been a gracious life, with plenty of household help. She seemed to have had trouble letting go of that life. Next to the north of the Hallmans were the Washburns. ‘Charley’ Growing Up in East Lansing ..... 89

Washburn ran “The Smoke Shop” in the middle of the business block that was East Lansing. As long as I knew it the shop had a men-only cliental. I think there were pool tables in the back of the shop. I was never in the shop enough to know what sort of things, other than tobacco products, it sold. Washburns had a son, Dick, He was a class behind Jane in school. Dick was pretty much a loner. He became an avid insect collector with an intense interest in entomology. The other Washburn offspring, Joan, was a year younger than Mary Musselman— too young for me to get to know personally. She was a sometimes playmate of Jane Hootman. Beyond the Washburns were the Stewarts. They were elderly. I think they had a son but much older and long gone from home. Beyond he Stewarts there was a lot that was vacant until the late thirties. The house that then was built was the home of the Dowds. They had a daughter Thais. I think she was closest in age to Sally. Perhaps she was between Sally and Mary. Both of them seemed to know her. My memory is that she married into a prominent Detroit family. Beyond the Dowds were the Balls. Mr. Ball was in the Chemistry Department at Michigan State. He was also an avid tennis player. When they came, not long after our folks moved into 604 Sunset Lane, Michigan Agricultural College was still a relatively small school. My memory on the subject is very hazy, but through the haze it seems to me that Mr. Ball was a part time tennis coach, at least for a while. Balls had a daughter Peggy, my age, and another Mary, Sally’s age. I know that Sally and Mary Ball were at times at least quite friendly. Peggy was usually involved in the neighborhood play, but was on a slightly shorter leash that the rest of us. In the early years Mrs. Ball was unique among the mothers in the neighborhood. She drove. Mr. Ball probably often walked to work, or Mrs. ball drove him. Whichever, the car was often in their driveway for her to use. It was a Franklin, probably an early 1930s model. Franklins were up scale, equal perhaps to the Buick or Chrysler but below the Cadillac, Packard and Pierce Arrow. One thing distinguished these cars and made them truly unique. They had air cooled engines. Beyond the Balls, in the last house on the block, lived the Reeds— that is until Jane and their son Jack were along about junior high school. I was somehow led to believe that Jack had a crush on Jane 90 ..... Growing Up in East Lansing

about the time they left. They moved out and the Anthonys moved in. It was the understanding among the neighborhood youngsters that Mr. Anthony had taken the Job at the college that Mr. Reed left. I think the Anthonys had one or more offspring quite a bit older, but their daughter Betty Jane in the class ahead of my midyear class was the only one I knew. By the time she came ‘neighborhood play’ involving boys and girls together was being supplanted by separate girl pursuits and boy pursuits. There were no families south of 604 Sunset Lane, or on the opposite side of Sunset south of Marshall Street with youngsters with whom we played. Immediately north of the Musselmans were the Gowers. The Gowers and the Musselmans maintained connections for many years. I digress to tell more about this. The Gower Family moved in next door to the Musselmans about the time George and Anne were in Kindergarten. They were only a little over a month apart in age. George’s mother had enrolled him in the midyear class four months before his 5th birthday. He and Anne were in the same class room only every other semester. Martha was in the class ahead of Jane. Dora was in the class behind Jane. George was a class and a half behind Dora. Ruth was a class ahead of Helen. In spite of their class separation Ruth and Helen were playmates all through school. Jane’s relationships with Martha and Dora were always friendly. In and after high school Jane was, and stayed, friendlier with Dora than with Martha. They kept in touch over the years. Dora got a degree in Occupational Therapy From Milwaukee Downer College circa 194i. Occupational Therapy was a very newly recognized discipline at that time. Dora was interested in all kinds of crafts. She was the one who replicated ‘Aunt Kate’s’ pickles, and got me started pickling with her wedding present of a jar of pickles and the recipe. Some how Dora had expressed to Jane a wish to have some wool. Perhaps she had acquired a spinning wheel. It so happened that the acreage Jane and Hope bought in East Texas included one or more sheep that sort of just lived there. In the spring before one of the Adam’s trips north to attend a Musselman family reunion Hope managed to catch a sheep and sheared it. On their trip north they stopped in Kalamazoo and gave Dora the fleece. She did what had to Growing Up in East Lansing ..... 91 be done to make the wool useable. She washed, carded, spun, and dyed (and what other processing that was required) the wool. She used the yarn to knit a pair of socks for Hope the next Christmas. The north side of Gowers property was bounded by Fern Street. The house directly across Fern Street from Gowers, fronting on Sunset Lane, was Hootman’s. Helen was very close to my age, Bob, almost a year and a half younger was close to me in maturity. Being the only two boys on the street anywhere near close in age during childhood we were best friends. Jane, the youngest of the Hootmans, was closest in age to Mary Musselman. She was friends with both Mary and Sally. The first house beyond the Hootmans became the home of the Adams family about the time I was in the 8th grade. There was a very large gap between their oldest daughter and Bill, who was a year younger than I. Marilyn Adams was close to Sally’s age. In the house beyond that, up until about 1935, lived the Moores. Virginia was a year older that I. Jeanette was a year younger than I. Susie was Ruth’s age. The Moores moved to a new home on the far east side of town. It wasn’t until in college and even after that Ruth became good friends with all three of the Moore girls. (Their circle also included Beverly). I do not remember the names of the people who lived in the Moore house after they moved out. I do know they had no young children. Beyond the ‘Moore’ house lived the Huddlesons. There was a connection between the Huddleson’s and the Musselmans that is covered in detail. See “The Huddlesons”. Next north of the Huddleson’s were the Hasselmans until Mr. Hasselman lost his Job at Michigan State in the scandal of the early 1930s. Neither their daughter, Elizabeth, nor their much younger son, Bobby, had become factors in the Musseman’s lives before they left. A family by the name of Hertel with several sons all in college moved into the house. In the next house to the north, somewhat late comers to the neighborhood, lived the Muncies. They had two daughters several years older that Jane. Their ‘second family’ started with Helen who was the age of and friendly with Ruth. Jim and Joe were somewhat contemporaries of Sally and Mary. They moved in different circles. 92 ..... Jane’s Story

The Muncie house marked the end of what we considered our neighborhood. North of the Anthonys and Muncies there were no youngsters close enough in age or distance to attract us.

Jane’s Story When he came home from service in World War I, Uncle Dale Musselman called me the “peace baby” because I was born on Nov. 27, 1918, shortly after the Armistice. I am the only child in the family who had any connection with that war. I was delivered at home (Mother’s and Dad’s first rented house in East Lansing) because of the flu epidemic. Dr. Bruegel, who was our family doctor for many years, thought that we would be less likely to become infected there than in the hospital. I don’t have a lot of memories of childhood either in the rented house or in the stucco bungalow Mom and Dad built on Sunset Lane. I remember Daddy once carrying me up from the basement. When he turned I burned my hand on a hot oven. Daddy put jam on it to make it feel better. He felt so bad about it! I knew Katherine Hallman from across the street. The women on Sunset Lane gave teas occasionally in those days, using their best china, linen, sliced lemons studded with cloves, homemade peppermint patties and open-faced sandwiches. The ladies came to such social events dressed in their best, with hats and gloves, and always called each other Mrs. Hallman, Mrs. Gower, Mrs. Hootman, Mrs. Huddleson. They never “coffeed” informally in the morning, although sometimes in spring and summer they would chat briefly over the clothesline. But afternoon teas were the social event of choice—such events gave Mother a chance to use and show off her beautiful china cup collection and she enjoyed using them. When we were very little, Katherine and I ate all the leftovers on the plates and drank the remaining tea in the cups (which often had the remains of milk and sugar as well as tea in them.) Mother said the caffeine in the tea kept me awake all night. Another time at Hallmans, Katherine and I broke up an elegant afternoon tea by coming out of the kitchen eating cold boiled potatoes. I think Mother expected to have quite a lot of social life in East ➥ Jane’s Story ..... 93

Lansing when she married Dad and became a faculty wife. I remember one time she bought a gold lace dress for $80 to wear to faculty functions, perhaps to the President’s Reception. It was very fancy and I’m not sure how much she wore it, because Dad did not really go in for social life much, especially as his family enlarged. I have a few memories of the old Musselman farm in Ohio where Dad was born. I don’t remember Grandma Musselman, although I have a vague picture of visiting a red brick building while I waited in the car. I think she came out. Perhaps this was the mental hospital in which she was confined before her death—I have some sense of that. But I do remember the farm kitchen. It had a table with a kerosene lamp which Aunt Ruth cleaned every day. There was no electricity and perhaps a pump for water in the kitchen. I have a mental picture of Aunt Ruth, who still lived on the farm keeping house for Grandpa, churning butter in the kitchen. When the butter was ready, she began to bake a cake, because she gave me a bit of the butter and sugar she was creaming. I thought it was the most wonderful taste! I must have stayed overnight because I remember going upstairs to sleep. The outdoor privy was a novelty to me. Perhaps this visit was at the time of Grandma’s funeral. I visited a country school and I have a mental picture of a saggy-backed farm horse that I was allowed to ride. The first car I remember was a touring car with isinglass windows. Then we got our first Willys Knight, a three-door car with a jump seat behind the front seat. Then we got a bigger Willys Knight, of which Dad was very proud. We all went out to admire it when he brought it home. It didn’t have a jump seat, but it was as big as the seven passenger Cadillac the Gowers had next door, which had two jump seats. However, with Mary sitting on Mother’s lap and the little stool that George made in the wide space between front and back seats, there was room for the seven of us. I remember coming back from one trip to Canada where we had visited Uncle Grant and Aunt Ruth Fox when they had a house and orchard near Lake Erie. We came through customs at night. It was dark and we five children were tired and sleepy. But the customs people made us unload that old Willys Knight and open all our suitcases (taking them off the running board, from the interior of the car and 94 ..... Jane’s Story

off the fender, since the car had no trunk.) We must have resembled the Okies who were slogging to California during those years to escape the dust bowl. I thought the customs people were very mean to put us through that inconvenience. Daddy was proud of Sally—just a tiny girl, but busily hiding apples behind her so the customs people wouldn’t get them. “While they were opening and going through our suitcases, there was Sally putting one apple after another behind her! She wasn’t going to let the customs men get them,” Daddy laughed admiringly. When I was a little girl, we made camping trips to Tawas City and other places in the lower peninsula of Michigan. On one, Aunt Nellie Green, who was then quite young, and Aunt Ruth Musselman (before she married Uncle Grant Fox) accompanied us. Once I fell and got sand in my eyes and felt miserable. But another time, a rainy afternoon, Mother and Dad had apparently had it with George and me. We were dismissed from the tent. They sent us to the car and made us play there all afternoon. It was the coup sedan with three doors. We were too little then to wonder why they wanted to be alone in the tent. I have vivid memories of Aunt Minnie. Actually, she was our great aunt, Grandma Green’s sister. She and her husband, Horace Lines, lived in Lansing where he had some menial job as guard or something in the Capitol. She came out to East Lansing by street car or bus, often on a Sunday afternoon, and walked to the house. Sometimes Mother would have them both for Sunday dinner, but other times Mother never knew she was coming. But Mother always rose to the occasion of this formal call and served hot tea in her best cups with cake or cookies if she had them. Otherwise she would make cinnamon toast with her wonderful homemade bread. Later when Dad made wine, she would give Minnie and Horace a little wine, which Horace especially liked. I also remember them when they ran a small hotel in Everett, Michigan. It was a very old fashioned hotel—just the bare necessities. I remember spending one night there on our way to or from the Lodge. As the oldest of five children, I don’t remember much about the births of my siblings. But I do think I was forced to grow up a little faster than the rest of them, because I was the oldest. A lot was expected of me. By second grade, I was going down to Lansing by myself on the street car to Sunday School at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Lansing. Jane’s Story ..... 95

Mother said I represented her there when she was kept home by small children, a husband who resented her attachment to the Episcopal Church, and her inability to drive a car herself. I knew quite a few people at church (the Andersons, the Sprinkles) since I went to Sunday School there regularly and like my siblings, was confirmed there. One time I walked to the street car, got on by myself, and on the way to Lansing threw up all over myself and the car. I waited till we were in front of St. Paul’s, got off, went to the restroom, cleaned myself up as well as I could, left and got back on the street car to go home without saying one word to anyone. I was too embarrassed. Nobody said anything to me, although I must have smelled something awful! It wasn’t till I got home again and told Mother that anyone got upset. The most exciting thing that happened to me while I was in grade school was cutting off my finger. I was in fifth grade and one Saturday morning Dora Gower and I were in the Gower basement making stilts for our dolls. Dora looked around for something to cut the wood with, but all she found was a hatchet. I tried to use it and succeeded in cutting off my index finger to the first knuckle. The tip was hanging by a thread and bleeding profusely when I rushed home. Grace Luce,who was living with us, took one look and covered her face with her hands. But Mother called Daddy who came right away and they took me to Sparrow Hospital where Dr. Carr said he could not save the finger tip but sewed up the stump and bandaged it to my elbow. (Today they would probably replace the tip.) I stayed overnight in the hospital and was quite the center of attention when I came home the next day. Mother slept with me for a couple of nights because I had a bandage up to my elbow. I was scared to death the bandage would come off and I would wake up and find this mess on my hand. Mother worried that I would no longer be able to play the piano (I had started taking lessons the year before) and that my disfigurement would bother me. I practiced quite hard after I came home to be sure I could still play, but quickly lost interest. I was never a good piano student and stopped lessons in sixth grade, although the principal Miss Kuhlman did ask me to play a solo once. Also the piano didn’t belong to Mother and Dad and was returned the next year. The missing part 96 ..... Jane’s Story

of my finger never bothered me, although Mother worried about it. In fact, I used to play a trick on people by making part of my finger seem to disappear when I put my index finger in my cheek. In fifth grade, I read and reread the book Swiss Family Robinson but by sixth grade, I had started to read the Nancy Drew books. I was a good student and quite a star, although that year Janet O’Hare arrived and I had competition. We didn’t hit it off—she was the superintendent’s daughter and became the most popular girl in the class. I also had problems when the Bailey School kids from the east side of Abbott Road joined us for their last two years at Central. There were lots of cliques in school among them. I never had any best friends in my grade—Martha Gower and Katherine Hallman were a year ahead of me in school, Dora Gower a year behind. Betty Anderson, whom I also knew from the Lodge and from church, and Kay Baldwin were also younger. Emma Jean Leroy was older. Kay Baldwin was considered quite wild and once I was called into the principal’s office on her account. I stood up for her. She was told she was lucky to have friends like me. Mother worried about the competition between me and Janet O’Hare, I guess, but I was oblivious to it. Dad paid us for our report cards. Of course, I went to Central Grade school in the flush twenties. Once he gave me a five-dollar gold piece. He didn’t believe in allowances, but he did pay for work. He never let us expect money without putting forth some effort to earn it. But my teenage years were a different story, because by that time—the 1930s—money was scarce and nobody’s job or income was certain. I used to beg Mother for bought ice cream from the drug store for Sunday dinner. She said we couldn’t afford it. In warm weather, while we had one that worked, on special occasions we had hand-cranked home- made ice cream which included the pleasure of licking the dasher. But after we got an electric refrigerator in the 1930s, we made do with a crystallized version of ice cream made in the ice cube tray. Yet I participated in a lot of activities. I was a Girl Scout and earned a lot of badges, but I never became an Eaglet. I couldn’t earn the badges that were possible only at Girl Scout Camp, because I didn’t go to camp except one year when I went to Camp Kiroliex between East Lansing and Detroit. I had a wonderful time, earning some of the camp badges. Jane’s Story ..... 97

Years later when I was in high school, after Mother was on the Girl Scout Council and the camp near Interlachen was started, I left the Lodge for two weeks to go to that. It was freezing cold and I wrote to Mother to send me warmer clothes. She sent me my jodhpurs—quite the thing for girls to wear in those days. But I got to earn the wilderness survival badge when we were taken to a peninsula on the lake and had to build our shelter. It was our experience camping in a no-provision place. My partner and I were in charge of building the latrine so we went all out, gathering wood sticks to make the frame and weaving reeds together for the seat, leaving a hole over the pit which we dug underneath. Everyone thought we made a very fancy latrine. I still remember the Girl Scout Camp Song “She sailed away on a happy summer day, on the back of a crocodile.” It has been a favorite when I have sung it to my grandchildren when they go to bed. The primary reason I didn’t go to Girl Scout camp was Indian Trail Lodge which Aunt Jane and Grandpa started to run as a summer resort in 1927. By the next year, I was working in the dining room pouring water and giving butter pats to the guests and from that time on I worked at the Lodge during the summers. By age 13, I was waiting on tables as a full-fledged waitress (no child labor laws here!). It was hard work, but I loved it. In fact, one year when Mother was quite sick, I was afraid we weren’t going to get to go to the lodge when we planned. So I packed for the whole family—which seem to impress people at the Lodge. Then on the American Plan, the Lodge served three meals a day—a huge breakfast, a hot luncheon which was really like a dinner, and a three course dinner. We squeezed orange juice every morning, made salads, shucked corn, set and cleared tables (with linen cloths and napkins, yet!) and swept the dining room, as well as waiting on the guests. We worked seven days a week from the end of June until Labor Day from 6:30 in the morning until 9:00 at night, with only a couple of hours off in the course of the day. Much of this work was done without benefit of refrigeration but with ice from the ice house. We wore pink dotted Swiss uniforms with organdy aprons which we had to wash and iron. In spite of the work, we had a lot of fun. We lived in tents in back 98 ..... Jane’s Story

of the Lodge, using the Lodge bathrooms and showering in the shower across the street. Most of the waitresses and bus boys were college students and later some were friends or relatives (Alan Mick, Marian Patch, Dorothy Baldwin, Helen Gower, Nancy Musselman Cobble, Janie Hootman Drake) and some were former guests (Harry Marsten, Margie Barrett, Don Blanding, Lois Dean, Mary Emily Tessin). There were also lots of young men to make life interesting—Jimmy Connor, Bob Ritchie, Jack Quinn. I was invited to a football game in Ann Arbor and found a place to stay with Margaret Harmon, also a guest at the Lodge. We had enough energy to swim or play tennis on our time off. I played in some tennis tournaments and actually got to the finals with one of the Dean girls. We went to beach fires to sing and roast marsh- mallows and once or twice a summer we went down to the Park Place or to the dance hall at O-At-Ka up the road where we danced and partied. We occasionally went into Traverse City to the movies. Those were wonderful summers. I worked at the Lodge until I graduated from college, using my tip money for my expenses and for college. During the two years I taught school in Marshall, I worked in the summer at the Lodge as a hostess in the dining room. I met a lot of different people of all ages and learned to get along with them since many of the guests became our friends. In high school, I used to clean house in our home in East Lansing on Saturday mornings. My siblings all thought I was doing it to help Mother but I was really doing it so I wouldn’t be ashamed of the place in front of my dates or boyfriends. With three younger sisters and a brother and dogs and cats, the living room always seemed to look a mess. Then I used to have to light the gas heater to heat water to take a bath—I always wanted to be the first on Saturday night so I was the one who lit the heater. I remember I used to have to wash my hair in the kitchen sink where there was a little heater under the counter. However, I was active in high school, debating and acting in the Junior Play. In debate, I got to know the Peter and Sadie Fagan family, because Ruth was another debater. We got to the quarter finals. The Fagans were a radical family who published a labor paper in Lansing. Jane’s Story ..... 99

Ruth was the oldest of their four daughters. She was found murdered in 1954 in an unheated, dingy apartment in New York where she was the third wife of the notorious Greenwich Village bohemian poet Max Bodenheim, who was also murdered. I remember Mr. Schell, our debate coach and Miss Elliott, the drama coach, as teachers. The Junior Play was “Big-Hearted Herbert” and I played the lead. Because I was the first in the family to go to high school, everything I did got a lot of attention. Mother and Dad were more strict with me than they were with the younger girls. I had to be in by 10:00 and Dad always insisted on knowing where I was going and with whom. In my Junior Year in high school, my social life was frustrated when I got sick. Dr. Bruegal diagnosed it as scarlet fever and in those days that meant I was sent to the “contagious hospital” (more familiarly known as the “pest house”) for three weeks. We had a quarantine sign slapped on our front door and the younger children had to stay home from school. I was a terrible patient. I fought every bit of it, at least for the first few days. Eventually, I gave in and had a a pretty good time. Every night Mother and Dad and the kids came and stood outside the window where we could talk but they couldn’t come in. I wasn’t very sick and I never did have a rash, but I had to stay the whole time. I have often wondered if it really was scarlet fever. The aunts sent Evening in Paris perfume and smelling salts to me, which the nurse showed me but I could not touch them or I couldn’t have taken them home. The worst part of it was I missed the J-Hop, the big dance of the high school. The next spring I got the mumps and was really sick with them. And sure enough, even though I had a date, I couldn’t go to the J-Hop that year either so I never went when I was in high school. I remember someone gave me a little radio which I listened to while I was recovering. It was the time of a big coal mine disaster in Kentucky, so I spent a lot of time listening to that on the radio. But I did have some fun in high school. When I was a junior, we had a big paper drive to earn money. Dad let our class store the paper in our garage and it was full to the roof. There was a competition between classes in the drive, so we were always afraid members of one 100 ..... Jane’s Story

of the other classes would come and steal our papers. One night apparently there was some noise on the driveway so Daddy went out and scared away whoever it was with the 8-foot-long blow gun that he had given George for Christmas. If you blew in one end of it the air pressure sent the feathered arrow flying to crash into a board. I’m not sure he actually used it, but he must have terrified the intruders by appearance if by nothing else! In my senior year, Dad built the little house on Division Street. This was a depression house. Roosevelt had said he didn’t think you could build a house for under $3000, which Dad took as a challenge. However, I was soon to graduate and Dad let me have a slumber party in the house before it was sold. It was a great event. We slept on air mattresses or blankets on the floor but both the water and the electricity were turned on, so we had a lot of fun. A mother of one the girls lived nearby, but we were really on our own. In those days, no boys tried to crash the party and of course there was no booze, but we thought we were quite the sophisticates, having a slumber party in our own place. Dad eventually sold the house but he didn’t make any money on it. Socially, I never felt I was really popular in high school—never really up to it. I had some dates, but Dick Publow broke a date to the J-Hop with me when I was a freshman. I dated Parker Gray for a while, but he drifted away. Of course, I had only one good dress while I was in high school. Those were the worst years of the depression (I graduated in 1936) and money was very tight for everyone. I did go to the senior prom but I never considered myself very popular. In college, and when I was teaching school at Marshall, Michigan, I had quite a lot of social life. Good looking Hodd Anderson was a devoted beau, although I couldn’t stand him. He even embarrassed me terribly when he was waiting on the front porch one night when I came home with another guy. My new date simply turned around and walked away when he saw Hodd. The Aunts liked Hodd because he clicked his heels together and bowed and he played the piano, but he was really a nothing. When I was a senior, Bob Owens of Schenectady, New York, gave me quite a rush for a while. I also went to the Military Ball with Francis Yakely and to a ball game in Detroit. We had Jane’s Story ..... 101

Canterbury Club at our house one year when it first started and that resulted in some social life. I also benefited from having Aunt Jane act as hostess at Seabury Western Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, during some of these years. She had a nice apartment and she liked to entertain students who at that time were, of course, all men and who lived a rather strict and restricted life. They ate together in the refectory, had to attend chapel, and went to classes. She thought they lived too narrow a life and concentrated too much on theology. She liked to entertain them by taking them out to dinner or a show or something in downtown Chicago. Aunt Jane always liked to play the grand lady. She would invite me for the weekend, once a whole week, and I would have a little tower room that was used for visiting bishops. I would eat in the “refectory” with the young men. Then she invited one or two and perhaps some other friends to taxi to Chicago, go to the Palmer House, or the theater or an opera, or the Edgewater Beach Hotel to dance. I once even got to see Victor Borge in his early years. In the daytime, she took me shopping at Marshall Field’s or to the Field Museum or some other place. Those were wonderful times in Chicago for me. One of the seminarians once asked me to a Northwestern fraternity dance in Evanston. It was a thrill for me. Daffie and Clifford, the black help that did the meal preparation for Jane in the seminary kitchen and eventually came to work for her at the Lodge, got involved in the activity. Daffy pressed my dress, I looked nice, and the whole staff took an interest in the party. When I finally got there, I saw an old acquaintance—the son of Mrs. Sprinkle, the head of the Sunday School at St. Paul’s, Lansing. He was a fraternity member and must have been attending Northwestern. The spring vacation that I spent at the Seminary was a wonderful week. I even got up early to attend 8:00 communion—a practice service for seniors. They appreciated my coming. Taking the young men out socially was Aunt Jane’s way of getting them into the world and it gave me a dancing partner! I graduated from college in 1940 and took a job teaching junior and senior high school home economics at Marshall, Michigan, for 102 ..... Jane’s Story

$1200 a year. I got a $50 raise the second year. Since I paid only $2.75 for my room, I was able to save $875 over the two years to buy a car, but I didn’t get one until World War II ended. I taught there for two years but at the end of that time, I decided I wanted to do something else. However, I was always grateful for the knowledge of clothing and nutrition and home management that I learned in college even though I didn’t teach Home Ec. By that time the country was at war and I was writing to Hope Adams who was stationed then in Hawaii. I had never met him, but I had heard about him through Mrs. Humphrey at the Lodge—she gave my name to him because he had helped her when she was driving home from Florida through Georgia while the army was on maneuvers there. So we had struck up a correspondence. It’s amazing how well you get to know someone through letters—sometimes better than through visiting. Anyway, I came back to East Lansing in the summer of ’42, lived at home, took a free course in key punch operating from IBM and got a job at a State office in Lansing. In October, Hope was sent back to Fort Knox, Kentucky, for Officer’s training and on his leave came to meet me. He stayed a week and came back later in the fall and asked Daddy for my hand in marriage. When he graduated from OCS, I went to Fort Knox to pin on his bars and then went with him to Houston, Texas, to meet his family. It was a war marriage—it would never have happened if there had not been a war. After OCS, Hope was sent to Fort Lewis, Washington, and I stayed on with his family for a while, visited Sarah Williford in Dallas, and then started home. On the way, I stopped off in St. Louis to visit Ruthie at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. Gad, what a miserable trip that was! It was cold and a horrible little train with a pot-bellied stove which backed into Columbia. (Ruthie said Missouri students called it the Wabash Cannon Ball.) I visited with Ruthie and her friends, who were quite intrigued by my letter romance with a soldier, and we had lunch with Helen Gower who was a student at Stephens College, also in Columbia. Then I got back on the train and started home to prepare for my wedding. Daddy was terribly ill that winter—I didn’t really know how bad. Jane’s Story ..... 103

The second surgery that March of ’42 did nothing but make him weaker. I felt so guilty later when I learned how worried Mother was. She was anxious about letting me go all the way to Fort Lewis, Washington, to be married when she wasn’t sure Daddy was going to survive. Mother said the night before I left was one of the worst nights of her life. She finally decided I should go and if anything happened to Dad, she wouldn’t call me back. Dad didn’t want to do anything to interfere with my plans either because it was wartime. But I wasn’t aware of all that—I was so young then, even though I was 24! Before I left I went to the hospital, put on my wedding dress and showed Dad how I looked. He was so proud, he called Malcolm Doby in to see me. He was a doctor there—he had been in my class at ELHS—perhaps he was interning. Anyway, Daddy insisted on him seeing me in my wedding dress. I was so embarrassed. The only advice Daddy gave me that day was when he asked me if I knew the golden rule. I said I did. He asked me to repeat it and I did. Then he said, “Don’t ever forget it. That’s the way to make it.” Mother never let on how worried she was. I had a couple of showers. The neighborhood ladies gave me a shower and the department wives in Daddy’s old Agricultural Engineering Department gave me one, also. Mother saw that I had a big send off on the train when I left Lansing for Fort Lewis. All the family and Mrs. Gower and some others came down to see me off. Of course, people didn’t travel then the way they do now and going to the West Coast was regarded as quite an undertaking. Going out alone to be married to an army officer in the middle of World War II was also quite romantic. I took the old Grand Trunk Canadian Western train to Chicago and had several hours wait there before the train to Seattle left. Aunt Jane met me at the station with several of her friends from the Seminary— Gay Kramer, and perhaps Olga Lawrence, and someone else. We had a big party in Harvey’s Restaurant in the station, with gifts from all of them. I’m sure Aunt Jane tipped the porter well, because I was so well taken care of on that trip. I told Mother later how nice everyone had been. “All the world loves a lover,” she told me. But of course, it was wartime and everyone wanted to do what they could for a service man even to taking care of his intended bride. 104 ..... Jane’s Story

It rained all day on March 27th, the day I was married. I had made the little veil my matron of honor wore by hand just like mine, but in blue to match her dress. Hope and I went to the Post Chapel in the pouring rain—it’s much more beautiful than our church—and took communion. Hope and I were the only ones there because of the weather. Captain Croft, the Episcopal chaplain, celebrated and read all the special marriage prayers and lessons. It was really nice. Then I quickly did up my hair and we caught a bus for Tacoma. (At the wedding, Captain Croft asked me how I got my hair dry—he said I looked like a drowned rat at the Chapel!). It was a very busy day! We caught a bus to Tacoma, picked up the car Hope had rented, the ring, the license, and my trunk to take to the house we would live in. It was the first time I had seen it. We went to the Post Commissary where Hope got his ration books and we used up my March stamps getting a load of groceries. I went to the Inn, packed up my clothes, took a bath (in cold water—what a life!), and went back to the Chapel with Hope where there was a room for us to dress. We had canceled our order for flowers—they are just too expensive out here. However, the chapel looked beautiful and Eileen and I looked lovely with my orchids and her two huge gardenias. I was really thrilled. I just pinned mine to my Prayer Book—the covering I had made for it made it easy. Of course it was all over in a hurry but reports from all sides said that it was a beautiful wedding. We formed a receiving line at the back of the church and I met Hope’s battalion colonels, who kissed me, much to the surprise of all the boys. We were supposed to go back to sign the license, but we didn’t have time. Some one threw a raincoat over my shoulders, a helmet on my head, and Hope and I were pushed out the door and there were four M-4 tanks, two at an angle on each side with their 76mm guns crossed. We were pushed under these all in a daze—it was a complete surprise, even to Hope, because even army fuel is strictly rationed. No one but the Colonel had heard them arrive. We were piled into a trailer, fortunately covered with white sheets and pulled by a jeep all over the area. The colonel apologized for not giving me a ride in a tank, but said I would have been a muddy mess had I done that. As it was, I wasn’t too bad. Jane’s Story ..... 105

We went to dinner at the Company mess hall where we had dinner with all the company officers and their wives and the enlisted men. We were introduced and cheered and I was given a set of sterling silver for six. (The men can’t give their officers gifts.) We found out later they had all chipped in—decided to skip a cake and gave us silver instead. Hope was so touched. Then we went to the Officer’s Club where eventually the whole crowd came in. It was fun. The orchestra played “What is this Thing Called Love?” for us and we had a great time. Hope liked being accepted by the married crowd—he was out of it before. They all seemed grand. We spent our honeymoon in Victoria, British Columbia—got there by train and boat. We loved it—shopped, slept, wandered around this very British town. I couldn’t get over the meat in the butcher shops, the appliances we could buy which we couldn’t in the US. or the low price of our dinner at one little restaurant—soup, steak, apple pie and everything for fifty-five cents. Our house was cute but quite pioneerish. I cooked on a wood range, just like the Lodge, and we were without a bathtub for quite a while. But we had a lot of fun with the other officers and their wives and spent a lot of evenings out—even ice skating once. However, it didn’t last long since Hope was sent to Company Officer’s School at Fort Knox for about six weeks that summer, and I came home while he was there. I was fortunate to be home because it was a great help for Mother. Daddy had his third operation in Ann Arbor—they finally found a surgeon who could remove the obstruction in his bile duct. I could drive Mother to the grocery store, to church, and to the garden. That’s the summer I got interested in the garden. I weeded and cultivated and harvested the stuff Daddy had planted. I drove Mother down to Ann Arbor, and we waited in Martha Gower’s apartment while Daddy was in surgery. He looked so pathetic when he came out—he was so thin—only weighed something like 110 and was so pale and gaunt. But the surgery was successful and I left again when Hope called that he was through with his training. It was before Daddy came home from the hospital—I think Forrest or Dale must have helped Mother with that. However, the Lodge closed early that summer because of the difficulties of rationing and getting help, 106 ..... Jane’s Story

so Mary and Sally probably returned soon. Ruth was in Saginaw working in a war plant and George had graduated in 1943 and was working for Sperry Gyroscope—deferred because he was an engineer. What a lot of traveling we did then! Hope and I went back to Fort Lewis by train—he was on maneuvers in eastern Oregon that fall while I worked in Olympia. But he was home for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years. Then he was given leave before he was shipped out to England. In January we bought a 1937 Ford Coupe and drove to Houston from Washington. It was a horrible trip—we carried mostly oil since the car burned so much of it and it was cold and snowy—a terrible road from Albuquerque to Amarillo and sleeting in Dallas. I was amazed to see all the cars in Dallas with little candles on their dashboards. They didn’t have heat in their cars so had to do that to melt the ice from their windshields. We had a northern car with heat! After Hope left for England, I stayed with his folks for a while, visited Sarah Williford in Dallas again, and returned home by train to Michigan. Traveling was so uncomfortable. Trains were packed by this time because of wartime travel and limited driving with gas rationing. Daddy was much improved, but I couldn’t stay at home because Mother had taken in a roomer for additional income, and Ruth, Mary, and Sally were still at home. When I did stay home, I slept on the day bed in the sun room. I went to Saginaw to look for a job—that was what Ruthie had done the year before. I answered an ad in the paper and got a job with Sears as an Order Office Field Supervisor. I loved the work. I even had my name on the door of the office. I was paid only fifty cents an hour, but I got my expenses and I traveled a lot visiting Sears Order Offices. I went to Clinton, Iowa, Chillicothe and Columbus, Ohio, Madisonville, Kentucky, as well as towns in Michigan. When I was home, I paid Mother $15 a month for my room. I worked at that job until Hope came home from the War in October, 1945, to be mustered out at Fort Sheridan, Illinois. He came right to East Lansing. I had bought a car, a 1940 Buick—hardly any car like that had more than 40,000 miles on it because of gas rationing. We soon left for Texas. Before that, the Aunties had a full Thanksgiving Dinner for us in Saginaw since we wouldn’t be home for the traditional George’s Story ..... 107 one in November. Mary went with us and it was a lot of fun. On the way to Texas, Hope and I stopped off in Hot Springs to have a sort of holiday before we settled down to work. In Texas, we lived with Hope’s folks while we looked for a house— the great task of returning servicemen. Every day, his sister would drive me around to look at places, but they were awfully scarce. Finally, we found a 1920s house in Park Place, the old east section of Houston. It cost $8000 and was furnished. It needed quite a lot of work, but its greatest attraction was that it came with stove, refrigerator and a wringer washing machine—unavailable for any amount of money at that time. Hope took his old job back with Southwest Drug company and we settled down to married life in Houston.

George’s Story I, George H. Musselman, second of five children and only son of Harry and Anne, hereby undertake the project of telling my own story. The bits and pieces of my early childhood that I remember were very pleasant. Some of the incidents that I remember vividly I told my children when they wanted a story about “when you were a little boy.” At my daughter Jean’s request, I wrote out some of these. They are included herein as an appendix to this document. In February of 1926 I was 4-1/2 years old. My sister Ruth was a toddler. Mother, observing that I was mentally fairly sharp and caught on quickly to concepts and ideas, concluded that I was ready for school. She entered me in the mid-year class in kindergarten. I have thought a lot about my feeling of inadequacy, and always being behind the rest of the class as we moved up through the grades. I believe I was not ready socially for school when I started. I was always one of the youngest in my class. In spite of the fact that I assimilated the subject matter, and that my reading, writing and arithmetic skills kept up with the grade level, I always felt that I was running to catch up. My number concepts were especially good, but because I caught on to mathematical processes so quickly, I frequently skipped doing the practice problems. I did not acquire the discipline to stay focused on the mechanics of working the problems. The result of this ➥ 108 ..... George’s Story

was that I was plagued by a tendency to make simple errors well into my adult years. My reading comprehension was good, but I read so ponderously that I found it to be a chore. I did not read everything that was required, much less anything for enjoyment. There is one exception to this. When I was about eight or nine I somehow acquired a copy of The Swiss Family Robinson, probably as a gift. I was totally captured by this romantic tale of adventure, and read it several times. My dad was a little distressed that I did not read more. One time when I was at a loss for something to do he suggested that I get a book to read. I replied that I already had a book: Swiss Family Robinson. Actually I had another book. It was A Boy’s Life of General George Marshall. I tried to read it several times expecting to find out how Marshall spent his boyhood. There was nothing in the first chapter about his boyhood, and the titles of subsequent chapters promised nothing. I gave up and never read it. I had completely misconstrued the meaning of the title. Behind the furnace in the basement Dad had his workbench and tools. He taught me a little about the use of simple hand tools, and when I was about six or seven, he gave me for Christmas a tool chest with small but real tools—saw, hammer, plane, T-square, hand drill, brace and bits, screw driver, etc. In those days eastern white pine was still plentiful. It was soft, fine grained and very easily worked. When I took the notion to make something, I walked to the lumber yard that was located along the interurban tracks about a half mile from our house to buy what I needed. This was when I was still in my pre-teen years. I remember specifically making a pair of stilts. I believe it was the year I was nine, I designed and fabricated a simple stool. I had squared and cut the pieces, and put it together with wood screws. Our family sedan was a Willys-Knight big six. It was basically a five passenger car, but it had a yard of room between the front and back seat. That stool became an auxiliary seat whenever our family of seven would go anywhere. I do not remember anything I ever did which made my father more proud. Most of the children my age on Sunset Lane were girls. Bob Hootman was a year and a half younger than I, but actually I was fairly close to George’s Story ..... 109 him in terms of maturity, and he and I played together a lot. There was also a lot of group play, especially outdoor games—“kick the can,” “red light,” “may I,” “duck on the rock,” for instance—when the boys and girls played together. Down Marshall street, which ran west from Sunset Lane, there were several boys all a little older than I. Even Bob McCarthy, who was in my class in school, was more than a half year older that I. Dick Osmer, Joe Watson, and Graham McKiechen were in the class ahead of me. I played with them frequently in outdoor group play. Among the after school activities that gave us pleasure were roller skating in the spring and fall, and sledding and ice skating in the winter. Our roller skates clamped onto the toes of our shoes and had a strap over the ankle. The clamps tightened with a key, which was frequently hung on a string around the neck. The skates had steel wheels. The system was fraught with problems. If the soles of the shoes got thin they would bend, slip out of the clamps and your skating would come to an abrupt halt. The wheels had ball bearings which we kept oiled. The bearings wore nonetheless, and the wheels got very wobbly. If the bearings didn’t wear, the wheels themselves would wear away due to the abrasion of the concrete sidewalks. It seemed we had constant maintenance problems. My memory is that we would frequently just give up skating for a while because of these problems. There were ice skates that clamped onto the shoes like the roller skates, but somehow we all managed to have shoe skates. Perhaps it was because they made such good and timely Christmas presents. The city had a park playground that took up a low level area that lay at the foot of a ridge that ran south and west of the center of East Lansing. The city flooded part of the area each winter for a skating rink. It was very close to our neighborhood (we lived on the back side of the ridge) and we did a lot of skating there after school. It was not lighted for after dark skating. When we got into high school and had more freedom and mobility because we were driving, we frequently went on Friday or Saturday evening to one of several rinks in the city of Lansing. These rinks were lighted, had warming houses, and music to skate to. These were also occasions to possibly meet contemporaries of the opposite sex from other schools. At least that was the fantasy. The ridge that rose from the park/playground mentioned above 110 ..... George’s Story

had a couple of good slopes for sledding. We used these heavily whenever conditions were right. I always had a satisfactory sled, but I never had a Flexible Flyer Junior Racer. That was the sled to have! When the Cox family moved to Washington, they gave us a flexible flyer that was about the biggest sled made. I turned up my nose at it until we arrived at a stage in life when someone would get a car for an evening and we would go out on country roads and pull sleds behind the car. Then it was the best. In my day, we did not get bicycles until we were at least nine or ten. I think I was ten when I had enough money saved up to buy my first bicycle. I bought it down at the local hardware store. I had only had it about three weeks, when I left it overnight on the front yard and in the morning it was missing. Someone had stolen it. I went without a bicycle for the next couple of years until the Aunts gave me one for Christmas. Those were kind of rough years because the Marshall street gang all had bicycles, and they left me behind frequently. For me, growing up in the Musselman family meant that I started out life with a sister, and every few years I got another until I had four. My memories of my relationships with my sisters, and my perceptions of all our relationships with our parents are probably very different from those of my sisters. They surely saw things differently and reacted differently than I did. What each of remembers and how we saw it represents part of the truth. And the sum of all our memories and impressions could not add up to the whole truth. As soon as I was old enough to be aware of Jane, I was somewhat in awe of her. She was always two and a half years older than I and in childhood that difference is considerable. I sensed that our parents were very proud of Jane. She learned quickly and excelled in school. It was evident to me that especially our father expected a lot of her. I was well aware that the message he was giving her was “You can be anything you want to be, so be SOMEBODY!” So I watched her progress and took vicarious pride in everything she did well or recognition she got. Her sense of responsibility caused her to take on things beyond what Mother or Father demanded. One of these things was that she felt she must devote Saturday morning to cleaning the living room. And clean it she did. Like a tornado going through! Just stay out of her George’s Story ..... 111 way! Frequently this involved rearranging the furniture. Mother always went along with her. Jane also had a cross to bear as she got into high school and started dating. My younger sisters and I were extremely interested in every aspect of her social life. We expressed this interest by hanging around when her boyfriends came to the house and even spying on her. The poor girl never got any privacy. She always seemed to have a date for whatever event was in the offing and her dates didn’t seem to be too bothered by our presence. My sisters had to share bedrooms, and the day Mary (or was it Sally) and Louise Huddleson got into her cosmetics was one of the major crises in the history of the family. I suspected Ruth constructed quite a fantasy world during her pre-adolescence. She read and wrote for hours on end. She loved the movies which tended to be very romantic in those days. Early on she declared that she wanted to be a writer. I never knew what she was writing about, nor as far as I know, did anyone else in the family. For some reason I do not have much of a memory of Sally as a baby or toddler. I think she was a bit quieter and more passive than we older ones. She played mainly with Louise Huddleson, and I do remember that Louise spent a lot of time in our house. I also realize that Sally spent as much time at the Huddlesons. Between the two of them I think they had a pretty good idea about what was going on in the world. In her quiet way, Sally was extremely smart. Mary came along when I was about ten. I have vivid memories of her as a baby. She would sit in her high chair at the table and chatter a blue streak in nonsense syllables. I was absolutely smitten with her. One reason I liked her was that she was a totally uncritical friend, more like a pet dog. I could verbalize to her things that were on my mind. She could not understand, but she would pay attention as if she did. When she finally grew to where she could actually carry on a conversation, it was not nearly as much fun. I think Mother was so busy during Mary’s babyhood that she missed a great deal of it. Mary learned to walk during Christmas vacation just before she was a year old. I was coaxing her to walk, and when she finally did, I ran excitedly to Mother to tell her. Her response was “Oh, for goodness sake, children, pick up your toys in the living room and go get dressed!” 112 ..... George’s Story

By the time Mary began to mature a little, I think our parents were kind of tired out. I remember when Jane was dating in high school she had very strict limits—like being home by 10:00 pm. I think Mary came and went pretty much as she pleased. Fortunately she had a good sense of responsibility and set her own limits, I believe. There is one thing that Mary did that I do not believe any of the others of us ever did. She “talked back” to Dad. I had always considered him much too gruff and never wanted to test him. She did it and got away with it just fine. In retrospect I believe the perception I had of him was the result of misreading him. He demonstrated in many ways that he appreciated people who would stand up for themselves. I loved visiting the Aunties in Saginaw. A couple of times when I was about six or seven, I went alone on the train to Saginaw. One of the last times I visited Aunt Nell before her final illness she asked me if I remembered the time Ruth and I had come to Saginaw on the train. Nobody had been at the train to meet us for some reason, and we had walked from the depot to the house. I had no memory of such an incident. I do remember one time when some of the family had stayed in Saginaw for the weekend after Thanksgiving, when Ruth and I were about six and nine. We had all gone shopping. Nell drove and parked in front of the Woolworth store. Ruth and I had separated from the rest in Woolworth. We were to go back to the car and wait for them when we were done. We did not realize that Woolworth’s was “L” shaped and had another entrance on the cross street. When Ruth and I went out the different entrance, the car was not there. We were completely befuddled, and decided to walk home, a matter of six or eight blocks. I wonder if Nell had remembered that we had once had to walk home and substituted the train bit because she did not remember the real reason. There was one thing Dad did for me that should rate him good marks as a father. For several years starting when I was about eight and continuing until I was twelve or thirteen, he organized a birthday party for me. Because my birthday fell in mid-June, the weather was usually nice. The swimming season was just beginning. Mother would make a bunch of huge pasties (a specialty she learned about during our summer in the Upper Peninsula) as the basis of a picnic supper. Dad George’s Story ..... 113 made sure there was plenty of pop. He would take me and a bunch of my friends to one of the local lakes for a swim and a picnic. These were very popular affairs. Early on I was beginning to have a basic conflict with my father that simmered beneath the surface. I was, by nature, quite casual about getting up in the morning, and if allowed, would cut the time between getting up and being just in time for school to the absolute minimum. Father would not so allow. He would call upstairs to me until I responded, and if I didn’t appear within five or ten minutes, he would come up to my room and crossly insist I bounce out at once. I resented his unreasonable interference. Saturday mornings when Dad was home, he most often had jobs to be done around the house. He would tackle these with much energy. I had a propensity to loll around. He could not stand to see me idle and would give me jobs to do such as sweeping out the garage, raking leaves, and other such chores. Until my job was done I had to devote my time and attention to it. I soon found out that because he was so preoccupied with what he was doing, he did not check up on what I had done. If I did a half-way job and told him I had it done, I was free to go. I did not like myself for being deceitful, but I disliked being stuck in the labor force even more. As soon as I turned fourteen I got my driver’s license. I was eager to drive any chance I could get and started asking for the use of the car on occasion. He never refused! Usually he would ask me what I wanted it for. I always had a good reason, even if it wasn’t true. More deceit, guilt and self-dislike, but the urge to take the car and join my peers therewith was overwhelming. On some occasions when I asked for the car, I sensed a real reluctance on his part to let me use it. I always thought to myself on these occasions “Why don’t you just tell me NO!” It would have been easy to accept and I would not have felt as though I was using him. When I was fifteen, we finally got rid of the old Willys-Knight and had a new 1936 Pontiac. This was a big jump forward—from 45 MPH capability to 80+ MPH capability. It also opened a new source of conflict. Dad decreed that I and every one else in the family who drove, including himself, would limit their top speed to 55 MPH regardless of the circumstances. Any faster was unsafe, he declared. I really chafed under that. When he was in the car with me and I let the speedometer 114 ..... George’s Story

creep up to 58 or 59, he would say “You’re going too fast” and I had to back off. When he was not in the car with me, and I thought circum- stances would allow, I was inclined to see how fast the car would go. Deep inside I knew that if I were really a gutsy person willing to take some risks, make a commitment, and exert myself, I could probably get a job and buy a car of my own. At the time it seemed easier to live with the external and internal conflict and enjoy whatever privileges I could wangle. I felt a little bit the same way about working at Indian Trail Lodge. I hated working for tips. There were times when it was very difficult working for Aunt Jane because my duties seemed to include whatever she wanted me to do whenever she wanted me to do it. But the job was there, and I could accumulate enough in the summer to carry me through the winter if I was careful. By the time I was in college, the country was starting to rearm, and we had entered into a lend-lease agreement with Britain and France to supply them with arms. Summer jobs at good wages were available in industry for those who went looking. It was not until the summer between my junior and senior year in college that I finally took the big step out into the world and got a job at Abrams Instrument Company in Lansing. There is one aspect of my life growing up in my family in East Lansing which subsequent generations would find hard to believe, and that is how repressed my parents and the community were about sex, and how I responded. Sex was not talked about publicly. Newspapers and magazines referred to it only when necessary, and then only obliquely so that only the knowledgeable recognized what they were referring to. The message I got from the very beginning was that you did not touch “it” except to wash it. (I guess it went without saying, and I understood without being told, the exception for urination.) Somehow this message, along with other ideas I picked up, gave me the deep seated notion that anything having to do with the genitalia was DIRTY! My natural interest in it was always accompanied by a tremendous feeling of guilt. I put a lot of energy into projecting a persona that had utterly no interest. I thought to admit interest would mark me as some kind of pervert. To the matter of reproduction, I really never gave much thought. George’s Story ..... 115

I knew that people who got married most often had children that were somehow heaven sent. I also knew that there were things talked about by women in very low voices behind closed doors. I also knew about a couple of high school girls that went away for a semester or two. It did cross my mind a couple of times to wonder how God knew what people were married so he (yes, in those days always HE) would know to whom to send children. All of these things seemed to have no relationship to each other, and my mind was usually elsewhere anyway. I believe I was fourteen when one of my contemporaries told me the facts in plain English without euphemisms. I was incredulous! How could grownups, especially my parents, do things that I had been led to believe were so naughty? For fourteen years my mind had been building a structure of values that was completely at odds with reality, and as I eventually realized, at odds with my own nature. For the next fourteen years, and that’s about how long it took, the part of my mind that wasn’t involved in every day living, working, learning and problem solving went to work to rebuild my value structure. I started reading, and soon discovered that literature contained vistas of human life, real and imagined, far beyond anything in my experience. So did the newspapers. Gradually my perspectives broadened and at some point in time I matured. I’m not sure exactly when I reached that point, but I think I was a bit on the slow side getting there. My relationship with my mother was less complicated than that with my father. She made fewer demands on me, for one thing. She was so busy keeping house and tending to the little ones, she did not have the time nor the energy to work at managing the lives of us older ones. She was supportive when we needed support. She knew our teachers and kept track of how we were doing in school. She made sure that we were clean, well dressed, and well fed. She let us know her disapproval when she felt we were out of line. She frequently used the “What will/would the neighbors (or Aunt Williamina, or your teacher, or your friends, or whoever) think?” approach. I think I responded well to this. Even to this day if it crosses my mind to do anything ugly or selfish or sinful, I am deterred by the thought that people might find out and think ill of me. 116 ..... George’s Story

Church was important in my mother’s life. In retrospect I believe she was one of the most truly Christian people I have known. Father did not have any church affiliation, and to the day he died I never had any idea of what his beliefs in God or the hereafter were. Mother attended St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Lansing. When I was in grade school she tried to get me involved. When she took me with her and tried to put me in Sunday School, all I could see was a sea of strange faces. There was not one other kid from East Lansing Central School among them. I was much too shy to be left alone among such total strangers. One Sunday I was really resisting going with her, and Dad suggested that it wasn’t so important that I go. Without his support she gave up. For me that was not the end of it. I really felt guilty about making such a fuss over going because I knew in my heart that I was something of a coward because of my fear of the Sunday School kids. I think it was in the spirit of atonement that I started completing the preparations for Sunday dinner while Mother and my sisters were at church. Mother would usually have started the meat before she left for church. When they got home from church about 1:00 PM the table was set, the potatoes were ready to mash, the vegetable would be cooked and we would all sit down to dinner before 1:30. This also pleased Dad because he liked to eat Sunday dinner mid-day. When I was fourteen Mother told me that one of my classmates was going to take instructions for confirmation. She suggested it would a good time for me to do so too. So I did, and was thereafter confirmed. There is one passion with which I seem to have been born, and that is the love of music. I believe this manifested itself even before I was in school. Cousin Grace had a piano, and for several years she did not have a place where she could have it with her. She left it with us and we had it in the downstairs bedroom, which was at that time the play room. We had one piece of sheet music that I can remember: The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers. I remember asking Mother to play it for me. I learned the words and sang along. When I was in about third or fourth grade, I begged Mother to let me take piano lessons. I started. In the first couple of lessons I learned that the lines were EGBDF and the spaces were FACE. The lessons were after school, and two weeks in George’s Story ..... 117 a row I forgot about them and did not get home from school until quite late. Mother terminated the lessons. There was a phonograph at Indian Trail with a few records which I played and played. My favorite was Honey. Aunt Nellie helped me decipher the words from the record (it was pretty scratchy). Then I left it on a chair one day and someone sat on it. But not before I had it well memorized. When I was about eleven, I decided to have a phonograph of my own and ordered a wind-up portable from Sears Roebuck with a half dozen records they had listed. My funds were limited so I did not add to the record collection. For Christmas the Aunties surprised me with an album of twelve inch records of excerpts from Gilbert and Sullivan. This opened a door to a world I would explore at length. Miss Weisinger, our school music teacher, had a grade school chorus that practiced for a half hour before school one day a week. I never missed a practice in fifth and sixth grades. When I was in about ninth grade, I bought an inexpensive accordion, found a teacher and took several weeks of lessons. I learned to play Over the Waves and Come Back to Sorento. I also discovered something about music—the circle of fifths. I soon realized I was not making any progress even though I practiced a lot. I bought a guitar, found a teacher, and learned to play The Singing Hills. Again I seemed to not be making any progress and gave it up after a few months. I seemed to have two difficulties in learning to play these instruments. First, I just did not have the manual dexterity required. I couldn’t make my fingers do what they needed to do. I would practice and practice simple movements without any improvement in accuracy or speed. The other problem was in trying to read music. After I learned about dyslexia, I concluded I had something like that when it came to music. In a line of closely spaced notes, I couldn’t tell which ones were on the lines and which ones were in the spaces without looking at each individual note with the others blocked out. When I finally did get a line of music deciphered and tried to play it, as soon as I could hear where it was going, my right brain took control of my fingers and my left brain went blank. (Or am I mixed up as to which brain is which?) About that time one of the music companies brought out a simple 118 ..... George’s Story

electric record player that could be wired into a radio. I acquired one, and during my last two years of high school and into college I bought all the popular 78 RPM records as they came out. I must have had several hundred of these shellac, not very durable records. When I graduated from college and left home, they went into the attic and I never retrieved them. Meanwhile I joined the high school chorus. In my junior and senior year I sang in a couple of operettas: “Iolanthe” and “The Emperor’s Clothes.” Male chorus members were a bit sparse, so in “Iolanthe” all boys had parts. The fellow who played a companion part to mine had real trouble staying on key when singing a solo so I ended up singing a couple of his songs in addition to mine. I realize now that I was no actor, but I did say the words, sing the songs, and move as I was directed. In my junior year I had a part in the class play, the name of which I cannot remember. It was a comedy. I played the part of a bishop who was more interested in getting donations for his church than in doing the work of the Lord. In my big scene with the banker I was soliciting, there was a run of dialogue that was supposed to be one of the comedy highlights of the play. Max and I never did get our lines really learned and the scene died several deaths waiting for us to get our lines out. I carry the memory of this with me. Whenever I have to do anything in front of an audience, I ask myself, “Is this really your thing?” “Are you really prepared?” “Are you going to be a big embarrassment?” When I do not answer “No!” to these questions, I usually wish I had. My talent, if I have one, is for behind the scenes work. In addition to these activities, I joined the St. Paul’s Episcopal Church choir during my last year in high school and first year of college. This really pleased my mother. While I was getting my Masters Degree at the U of M, I joined the Gilbert and Sullivan Society and was Production Manager and sang in the chorus. Soon after WWII ended, 45 RPM and 33 RPM vinyl records were introduced. I flirted with 45’s for a while, and then settled on 33’s. I’ve never been without a record player. Of course I am now into CDs. My tastes in music have broadened over the years. Early on, and ever since, I have had a special liking for theater music. George’s Story ..... 119

I had a brief career in Boy Scouts. I think I was nine the year I joined the local troop that was sponsored by the People’s Church in East Lansing. The boys I was friendly with on Marshall Street all belonged, so I kind of tagged along. I have very little memory of what went on in our troop meetings except the word confusion comes to mind. For some reason, one of my most vivid memories is an occasion when we were given some peanuts, and the scoutmaster gave us a dire warning to not choke on them. At one other meeting a guy by the name of Bill Stack, who was a classmate of Jane’s, gave us a talk about some adventurous type thing he had done the previous summer. The only detail of his story that I remember is that the car he was riding in got stuck in the mud and had to be towed out. When spring came all the guys started talking about getting signed up for scout camp. I decided I would have to go too. I signed up for the first week of the two week session. I think it came very early in the summer. Camp Ki-Ro-Li-Ex was located on a small lake down in the direction of Jackson. I guess it was typical of scout camps of the time. There were a mess hall and headquarters building that were permanent structures. The boys were housed in semi-permanent army tent type buildings—sixteen in each on double bunks. For my Marshall Street friends, who were all the better part of a year older than I, it was the second year of camp. The minute I arrived I felt somewhat bewildered. They knew all the ropes and I didn’t. One of the first formal activities was the swimming test where we were sorted out according to our proficiency in the water. I had learned to swim on my own at Indian Trail, and had all kinds of confidence in my ability to get along in the water. But I did not know the strokes—breast, back, side, crawl, etc.—the way they were supposed to be done. I was put in the “blue cap” class, just one up from the bottom. That was a terrible blow to my pride. Each class only got to swim about an hour a day, the classes were large, and the instruction spotty. Blue caps were on a very short tether. On the last day of camp I finally got promoted to the next class. But the whole swimming part of camp, which I had looked forward to, for me was a bust. I was appointed to be the orderly one day. That meant I hung around the headquarters, ran a couple of errands, walked out to the 120 ..... George’s Story

road to get the mail. I guess we were supposed to work on earning merit badges. I remember squatting before a little pile of sticks with the purpose of lighting a fire. The memory ends there. One of the counselors led a short songfest after dinner every evening. I don’t remember what the songs were, but I remember feeling that they were rather dumb. We were aroused about 5:00 AM one day and hiked a long trail ending at the top of a hill where there was a bonfire and where breakfast was served. Everyone else exclaimed what fun they were having. I remember feeling ornery at having been awakened so early. I suppose if I had been a really disadvantaged kid, a week at a camp like that would have been a completely happy adventure. I had already been spoiled by my taste of summers at the Lodge. In 1933, deep in the depression, Chicago mounted a World’s Fair in an effort to stimulate a little business for the city. It was a big event. They had reclaimed some land from the edge of Lake Michigan, leaving a lagoon. The fair was built on the reclaimed land around the lagoon. Today Lakeshore Drive goes along the site, and Adler Planetarium is on the northeast corner of it. The theme of the fair was expressed in its title: “A Century of Progress.” I believe it rather loosely covered both the century past and the century to come. My father’s one big adventure as a farm boy was a visit to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 about the time he turned thirteen. He was eager to go the this new fair. Toward the end of the summer of ’33, he and Mother took Ruth, Jane and me and off we went. Mary and Sally were three and five. I have no memory what arrangements Mother made for their care. I suspect she had a woman such as Mrs. Noble, who did day work for her and whose children were pretty much grown, come in and stay while we were gone. It was close to the end of summer. We were home from Indian Trail. M.A.C. classmates of Dad, Floyd and Mrs. Barden, operated an apple orchard in Michigan’s fruit belt near South Haven and had invited us to stay over night with them on the way there. About 30 miles short of South Haven, the old Willys-Knight developed an oil leak and burned out the bearings. The Bardens sent their son in a car who towed us to a garage nearby their farm. It took a couple of days to get the repairs done, and the Bardens had us longer than they bargained for. George’s Story ..... 121

They seemed pleased to have us. They were harvesting their first apples, packing them in fancy bushel baskets for the Chicago market. I helped pack a few baskets, but the tops of the baskets were packed first upside down, and ultimately the bushel had to be turned over. I couldn’t quite handle that part of it and I think they were glad when I quit helping. They had a big old player piano in the parlor, but the only roll I liked was “Stars and Stripes Forever.” I think they were glad to see the end of me when we left. We arrived in Chicago in the late afternoon, and through the Fair’s accommodations clearing house, we found a rooming house where we put up for our visit. We had all read about the various exhibits at the fair and each of us had something we particularly wanted to see. Ruth, in particular, wanted to strike off on her own to do her thing. In retrospect I’m a little surprised the folks would let her, but she was insistent. We established a meeting place and a time to gather there, and went our separate ways. Dad stuck with Mother and me for a while and then he also took off on his own. I stuck with Mother. I really remember only about four specific exhibits. AT&T had set up a brand new system they had just developed for transmitting images over telephone lines. Pairs of phone booths were connected by phone lines. On a cathode ray tube the caller in one booth could see the caller in the other booth as they talked. Mother and I held a short conversation that way and I would guess we made the same comment that must have been made several million times that summer—“You wouldn’t want to answer the phone naked!” (A mere fifteen years later commercial television was on the air.) Henry Ford had set up an abbreviated automobile assembly line, and the workers were all school boys. But the cars that came off the line were real and could be purchased. (Years later, when we moved to Farmington, we became acquainted with Jack and Mary Dulmage. They had both gone to Greenfield Village School on the largess of Henry Ford. In 1934, the second year of the fair, Jack was one of those school boys working on the assembly line.) One of the meat packing houses had an exhibit in which workers were packing jars of chipped beef. The workers were all women and every one was a red head. 122 ..... George’s Story

The other thing I remember was a cable car that went from a tower on one side of the lagoon to a tower on the other side of the lagoon. The ads for the fair showed this car as if it were streaking across. What a disappointment when we were in it and it inched its way across, taking a severe dip every time it passed a hanger on the supporting cable. As the day drew on and our meeting time approached, we found the meeting place and there was Father. Ruth did not show. We waited quite some time. We went scouting to a couple of places that looked somewhat like our chosen place. I was getting in a bit of a panic, but I do not think the folks were. They eventually contacted the “lost and found people” office, and they had Ruth along with a dozen or so other children who had gotten separated from their families. Ruth said she really enjoyed her day, and that getting lost was a pleasant adventure. I don’t remember going to the fair a second day nor the trip home. The next year Dad got the itch to go to the fair again and he and Mother took just me along. I think it was just a two night trip. We stayed in a hotel in Whiting, Indiana, both going and coming. I have no particular memory of that day at the fair. The summer when I had just finished eighth grade and turned fourteen, Aunt Ruth invited me to visit her in Canada for the summer. Dad took me to Windsor and put me on the bus and away I went. Ruth and Uncle Grant Fox lived at their 75 acre young peach orchard that backed up on Lake Erie about twelve miles south of Simcoe, Ontario. It was located next to the little resort settlement of Normandale. Their big orchard on the old family farm at Leamington was aging and was not as productive as the new orchard. They had remodeled the house on the farm. It was small, but beautifully done. Theirs was the only peach orchard for many miles around, and they planned to sell the whole crop right at the farm. Grant had a crew of Mennonite hands who were living temporarily in tent structures across the road from the farm. A small band that was playing for the summer in a little dance hall in Normandale was also living in tents. There was no public beach in Normandale. To get down to the lake at the back of the orchard involved going through a jungle of weeds and brambles. And when one got to the beach it was not good for swimming. This was a disappointment to me but I found other ways to amuse myself. George’s Story ..... 123

I did not do any work in the orchard. Most of what was going on was the wiring of the trees so that the weight of the peaches would not break the limbs. Grant was concerned about access to the farm. The most direct road from Simcoe was unimproved for three or four miles from Normandale north. He acquired a grader, and about a day a week a couple of the hands pulled the grader with the tractor to smooth the road. I enjoyed riding along with them. Later, when I went to work for the Michigan Highway Department, Grant claimed he got me started in business. Aunt Ruth had many errands to run and I usually accompanied her. There were trips to Simcoe. She had a friend from her single days visit her for a week. Ruth showed her all around the area and I went along. And what is more, Ruth would occasionally let me drive. The car was a Buick. Nothing could have thrilled me more. Preparations were under way for the harvest season. They had several hundred postcards with a picture of the orchard made and these had to be addressed to long lists of residents in the area to announce the coming harvest. I helped with that. One day a big semi pulled into the farm yard and they unloaded thousands of fruit baskets (bushel, half-bushel, etc.) and stored them in the barn. They had only two peach trees of a very early ripening variety. Ruth made a deal with a man who had a vegetable stand on a main road near Simcoe to take the whole crop of the two trees. Because they were sold, we did not eat any of them. So I got no peaches at all during my stay. They had a very large sweet cherry tree in back of the house. The fruit of this tree ripened while I was there, so I got my fill of cherries. Ruth was a good cook and I got introduced to several things I had not had at home. Welch Rabbit and home made noodles are two that I remember. There was a lull in work that needed to be done around the farm toward the end of July. Ruth and Grant wanted to get away for a few days and they took me with them. We visited Niagara Falls, crossed into upper New York State and toured the Finger Lakes area. On the way to Niagara we were talking about the falls. Grant asked me if I had ever seen a toilet flush. Of course I had. He said then that I had already seen the essential feature of Niagara. 124 ..... George’s Story

Aunt Ruth subscribed to several of what we now call women’s magazines: Ladies Home Journal, McCalls, etc. I discovered in these the sentimental, happy ending, right-wins-in-the-end type of short stories they featured. For the first time in my life I really spent time reading. I could hardly wait for the new issues to come. It was a pleasant pastime. The summer neared an end and Ruth took me to Simcoe and put me on the bus back to Windsor. Dad was there to meet me. I was soon immersed in school. I do remember that we heard from Ruth after the peach season ended. They had harvested over thirty thousand bushels of peaches and sold the whole crop bushel by bushel to people who came to the farm. In the winter of 1935-36, Ruth ran a slight fever for a few days and developed swollen glands similar to mumps. She went to the doctor a couple of times, took the medicine he prescribed and seemed to recover. She had not fully recovered as it turned out. Late that winter the infection flared up and she died very quickly. In the summer of 1936, when Jane graduated from high school and Aunt Nell took her to New York, Mother and Dad attended an Agricultural Engineers Society convention in Athens, Georgia. They took Ruth and me along. We still had the old Willys Knight. I had my driver’s license and helped with the driving. The car was big, heavy and slow and had very poor brakes. At one point in the trip, I rear- ended another car. Fortunately, the heavy bumpers on both cars prevented any damage. The most interesting part of the trip for me was our tour of the TVA work in progress, one of Roosevelt’s construction projects. The tour was part of the convention program. Norris Dam was under construction. The town of Norris was also under construction, and the houses they were building were all electrical to take advantage of all the power that would be generated. The days we spent in Athens were somewhat dull for Ruth and me. The grown-ups had their meetings and functions. I did go with the ladies on a tour of antebellum homes and gardens. On the way home, we drove a ways on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Only a few miles of it had been built and we somehow missed a George’s Story ..... 125 barricade and drove onto a section that was being carved out of the side of the mountain. The farther we went the rougher the road became. There was no place to turn around until we got to the end of the new stretch. There they had built a platform out over the side of the mountain onto which we could drive the nose of the car to effect the turn around. Needless to say, I was not driving, but I knew how bad the brakes were. I was one scared kid. Dad made Mom, Ruth, and me get out of the car, while he negotiated the turn with the workmen giving directions. We all survived. That fall we got a new Pontiac. I entered East Lansing High School (ninth grade) after I returned from my stay with Aunt Ruth in Canada. It was not that big a deal because they had moved the eighth grade to the high school for additional space at Central and Bailey Grade Schools a few years earlier. A year or two later, an addition was added to the high school as a kind of junior high. I went out for football and hated it. But it was the thing to do, my peers were doing it, and I thought it was expected of me, by whom I’m not sure. My build suggested that I should be a football player. So for four years I showed up and that was about it. I really had no athletic talent and I did not enjoy it. I was slow on my feet and I had no fire in my belly that drove me to exert myself. The coach recognized this and I rarely got in a game. I usually played for a few minutes about one game a season. I got a “letter” my senior year for simply having participated. I enjoyed the academic side of High School, the “in class” part of it anyway. I paid close attention in class and learned enough from that to pass the courses. I hated homework, and what I did not get done in study hall periods did not get done for the most part. Themes and essays were the most difficult to get done. Many times I wrote them just before the class in which they were due. I got lousy marks on the appearance, spelling and punctuation. I had no trouble putting coherent thoughts on paper. It was just difficult to read them. I had a natural talent for math and physics. I understood what was going on and could apply it. I had no trouble setting up the problems or knowing in which direction the solution lay, but I was plagued by my tendency to make little errors because of my impatience with the calculations necessary to get the answer. 126 ..... George’s Story

The most important thing to me in High School was being included socially. I guess I felt terribly insecure. Because Mother had enrolled me in the mid-year kindergarten class, I remained in that group all through school.We continued to be quite closely knit in High School and we did many things as a group. For school dances we paired off in couples. I did not want to be involved with a girl at that point. I wouldn’t commit to anything. I was afraid of any entanglement and I was also a little tight with my money. When it came time to go to one of the dances, I asked one of the desirable girls early, or ended up taking what was left. Again in all this there was an element of doing what I thought was expected of me. My peer associations in high school were a very important part of my life. If I had unstructured time, I could hardly stand to be by myself. If there was something going on in the family, I would participate, but the family did not satisfy my craving for companionship. Getting out of the house gave me the physical distance to match the philosophical (or emotional) distance I needed from my father. Looking back, it is clear to me that we were much slower to grow up than our contemporaries in more sophisticated environments. Compared to later generations, we represented total arrested development. I had male friends with whom I was comfortable. When there was not a social event or party, various ones would get together for movies, exploring the countryside, going to school games, and just “hanging out.” In the spring of our senior year, a couple of carloads of guys went on an overnight outing to Crystal Lake about fifty miles north of Lansing. From that point on whenever I and one or two others could get transportation and time, we would head for Lake Michigan and spend a night on the beach. In the eleventh grade, I became friends with Jim Anderson. I admired him tremendously. He was, I thought, everything that I was not: tall, slim, very smart, musically gifted. He could read music and play the piano a little, and he had a good singing voice. He was energetic, focused, ambitious, and adventuresome. In a couple of areas I was a little ahead of him. He thought my record collection was great and my familiarity with music beyond the “top ten” exceeded his by quite a bit. We were at about the same stage of maturity. For the next George’s Story ..... 127 few years we together enlarged our view of life and expanded our horizons, geographically and culturally. We both took mechanical engineering at Michigan State and spent time studying together. Once again I found myself struggling to keep up. He read much faster than I, he calculated faster and more accurately than I, but in seeing through the story problems and setting up equations I was fully equal to him. I had no trouble keeping up with the work. I am convinced I was a better student and got more out of the work by trying to keep up with him. We remained friends but saw little of each other in our adult years until we both retired. Then for several years we spent several days each year opening their cottage. In our youth, I had been dependent on him for friendship. In old age, until he died, it was the other way around. My other best friend during these years was Bob McCarthy. We had started together in kindergarten in the mid-year class and went right through college together. After we got out of the army we continued to pal around together until we both married after reaching thirty plus. Unfortunately, he died in middle age. Out in the world momentous things were happening. Hitler had established himself as the dictator of Germany, with absolute power. He was bent on returning Germany to the position of even more power than it had had before World War I. He was building a powerful military machine for dominance of land, air and sea. In 1938, he threatened Czechoslovakia and Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Peace Pact in an “appeasement policy,” hoping that taking over part of that nation would satisfy him. It did not. In 1938, he annexed Austria. (This is the event central to the plot of the musical Sound of Music.) A year later he had swallowed up all of Czechoslovakia. He had already created the Berlin Rome Axis with fascist Italy, and in 1939 signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union (later abrogated). In the same year, France and Britain formed an alliance with Poland, promising to protect its borders. On September 1, 1939 Hitler invaded Poland. Two days later France and Britain declared war on the Hitler-Mussolini “Axis” and World War II was launched. In the far east Japan had also become very aggressive. The Japanese had annexed Korea and invaded and conquered Manchuria some years 128 ..... George’s Story

earlier. In 1937, they expanded their military activity into the rest of China and southeast Asia, taking China’s capitol Nanking and big population centers and transportation routes. China’s military was ineffective against them. Many people in the United States had no wish to get involved militarily, but Roosevelt led us into a huge rearming program, and proposed a “lend-lease” program where we would supply arms to the Allies. A large segment of the American people were strong pacifists but there were many who felt we could not abandon Europe to the Nazis and Fascists and that our Pacific territories were threatened by a militaristic Japan. In our High School history, government and civics classes we had many discussions and informal debates on what the role of the U.S. should be. On December 7, 1941, while negotiations with Japan for a solution to the Asian situation were going on in Washington, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and crippled our Navy. The United Stated declared war on Japan and the “Axis.” No more such discussions! The pact that the Soviet Union had made with Hitler came apart when he invaded their territory and the Soviets joined the Allies in opposing Hitler. As a midyear student I could have finished High School in February. I chose to go on for another semester. I graduated in June of 1939, just at the brink of the conflict. My dad made a big thing at this point about the fact that college need not be the only option. I could defer college and do something else for a while. So I made a big thing about giving it a lot of thought before I announced my decision. He seemed proud of me for having come to a well-thought-out decision. What a farce! I never considered anything else. Congress was already working on a draft law. What better place to await such a possibility than school? I entered Michigan State in Engineering and took the Mechanical Engineering option. I chose engineering for several reasons. First, math and science came easily to me; I recognized that I had an analytical mind. Second, and this was the most important reason, my view of the world was so limited that I had no concept of the many avenues of endeavor involved in making the world and society go. My father was an engineer. I could see and understand the hardware of the world. I knew that engineers were involved with this. Just what my George’s Story ..... 129 part would be and where I would fit in, I really had no idea. I knew I would need a degree. It was with no more focus than this that I approached my studies. We did not really get into the meat of Engineering in the first few terms. I approached the work the way I had approached high school. In my first two years, I did the minimum studying and shirked doing many assignments. Outside activities intruded. I put a trip to Florida during spring break ahead of everything else. I had a couple of jobs working for a few hours a week for extra spending money, most of which went for phonograph records. St. Paul’s choir took my Thursday evenings and Sunday mornings. I lived at home and was completely unassimilated in college life. I went to classes and occasionally went swimming in the college pool. That was it. I got very mediocre grades. I had a growing awareness of my irresponsibility and self dissatisfaction. I was very depressed. In the middle of my Junior year I got caught up short with some less than mediocre grades. I took a look at myself and did not like what I saw. I was just drifting through school and through life. Also in the back of my mind was the fact that the draft was now a reality, and deferments to complete school might depend on performance. I determined to buckle down. From that point on I applied myself and did very well. It helped that the courses were more interesting. It also helped that we were doing the mathematical grunt work on slide rules. As I mentioned, I studied with Jim Anderson. He had always been very precise, and always knew the material cold. I had learned to depend on my wits and was more reflective in looking at a problem. The combination worked well. We both gained from it. From then on I started getting A’s, and even beat his GPA one term. During Christmas break in our Junior year (1941) Jim and I borrowed a car from a friend of ours and drove to Miami. We made about thirty sandwiches to eat on the way. The U.S. had just entered the war, but the full impact of it had not hit the country yet. The draft age was still twenty one and we were not registered. We had talked about going to Mexico, but Jim’s mother was adamant that Jim not go there. She did not say so, but she did not want Jim leaving the country. She had made no such stipulation about Cuba. It had just not been discussed. So Jim and I spent about fifty dollars each and cruised to 130 ..... George’s Story

Havana. Within three weeks after that German U-Boats were sinking ships off the coast of Florida. After Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941), the whole country mobilized for war. Many commodities were rationed—meat, butter, sugar, other food stuffs, shoes, gasoline, and tires, among them. Most manufactured consumer goods went out of production as factories converted to products for the armed forces. The draft was accelerated and many enlisted. Along with other engineering students, I was given a deferment. Engineering skills would be needed. Jim always had better part time jobs than I. Especially in the summer he made very good money. In the spring of our junior year he bought a 1932 Reo sedan. It was a good car in good condition but very old fashioned. Automobile body design changed radically in the 1930s as attempts to streamline them gained momentum. Mechanical improvements in automobiles were so dramatic that a ten-year-old car was almost obsolete. Nonetheless, it ran well and was in pretty good shape which was acceptable during World War II, since new cars were no longer available. Before gas was rationed, we had concealed a 30 gallon drum of gasoline in some woods which we recovered the next spring to alleviate the shortage. The car gave us a lot of freedom. Weekend trips to Lake Michigan and sleeping on the beach at Camp Blodgett (Camp Blodgett was undeveloped then) were made at every opportunity. That was the first summer I did not work at the Lodge. I had a job as a draftsman at Abrams Instrument Company in Lansing earning seventy-five cents an hour. In their last term of senior year, engineering students had to under- take some engineering problem that interested them, work on it and report on it. Jim had access to a supply of propane so we decided to convert his old Reo to run on propane. We rigged up a system that worked and enjoyed going here and there testing it. We got it to run but at limited speeds and for short distances of several miles. The propane was drawn from the twenty-pound cylinder on the running board so fast that there was not enough heat to maintain the pressure. We took many trial runs, most of them on the way to Lake Michigan. At the end of the term we took pictures of our work, wrote it up, and got “A’s.” Also in the spring of my senior year, I bought a canoe for use on George’s Story ..... 131 the Red Cedar River, a favorite spring activity of MSC students in those days (as it had been in our father’s). That spring, from March through May, the river continuously ran very high. The weir that backed up water for the campus power plant provided a rushing rapids to add a little excitement to canoeing. The canoe did not do much else for me. I had been eyeing a young lady and had the romantic notion that paddling up the river would be fun. I asked her several days in advance and she accepted. When I went to pick her up, she had left a note saying she did not feel like spending an evening in a cold canoe. That was the end of that romance. I did date occasionally. I went to both the Junior and Senior Proms in college and try as I may, I cannot remember whom I took. Most of the dating I did was on a one-time basis. I continued to fear entangle- ments and commitments. Graduation brought another decision time. My friends Jim Anderson and Bob McCarthy who were in ROTC went immediately into service. Engineers were needed in industry, and draft deferments were given to engineers in defense industries. The alternate possibilities were to enlist or to be drafted. I decided to try for a job. I interviewed for several, and accepted one with Sperry Gyroscope Company. They trained me to be a Field Service Engineer on aircraft flight instruments and automatic pilots. The training was in New York City. It was a fun summer. I loved the two months in New York. I had an apartment with a couple of fellows who were in the same training program. Nearby, we learned, were a group of girls in a similar program at IBM. We had a wonderful time visiting back and forth, going to the theater, going to Jones Beach on our days off, and just exploring New York. At the completion of training I was sent to Norfolk, Virginia, to work at the Naval Air Station. During the next few months, I helped a few units with problems with their Sperry gear. I was then sent on a tour of minor army, navy and marine air bases through North and South Carolina and Georgia. While in Georgia I received notice to report for my pre-induction physical. I had the papers transferred to Ft. McPherson in Atlanta and took it there. Sperry advised they would go to work to get my deferment extended. By this time I had come to 132 ..... George’s Story

the conclusion that in reality I was nothing more than padding on a cost-plus contract Sperry had with the government. I passed the physical and headed for New York, turned in my tools and returned to Michigan to await notice to report for induction. I was sworn into the army in Detroit on August 2, 1944. I had three months of basic training in the Armored Corp (Tanks) at Fort Knox, Kentucky. From there I was sent to Officers Candidate School at Aberdeen, Maryland. I had already begun to sense that I was not very compatible with the military. The first six weeks of OCS proved it to me. The refusal to commit to anything had greatly controlled my life to this point. Now another trait of my inner being asserted itself. The army could have and do what it wanted with my body, but I was going to keep “myself” for “myself.” So while I always appeared to go along, my mind was hanging back, taking exception, looking for alternatives. In retrospect, I realize I was not helping to fight the war, I was fighting the army. Needless to say, I did not do well at OCS. At the end of the first four miserable weeks, I was told I would have to repeat. I could not see going through that again. I resigned from OCS. Eventually, they put me in a 60-day course in instrument repair school at Aberdeen, Maryland, where I learned how to repair optical instruments. I really enjoyed this. I had a pass most weekends and made several trips to New York, Washington, and Baltimore. Just as I was about to be sent overseas, the War ended. VJ Day came in August, 1945. Until the Allies were sure that the peace was real, permanent, and that no other hostilities would break out, like with the Soviet Union, for instance, things proceeded uninterruptedly. I was sent to Seattle via Fort Ord, California, and was put on a ship headed for Saipan. This was a delightful tropical island. The western side was protected by a reef with many excellent sand beaches. Bananas, mangoes, and papayas were cultivated by the locals. The little farm sites had been abandoned. The people had been moved into the village, so we foraged for the fruit. We got acquainted with other units and there was lots of camaraderie. We were well stocked. As thousands of men were shipped home, the food that was still in the pipeline kept arriving. We had George’s Story ..... 133 wonderful steak and roast beef meals. On Saipan I was given work to do. Collection of garbage and trash, and greasing the fuse plugs of bombs were two of my jobs. I got fat and tan, but I enjoyed myself. After ten months I was returned to the States and discharged on August 26, 1946. I was turned loose in the world, and I had not the slightest idea of what I wanted to do. I went to the Placement Office at Michigan State. Industry was still converting back to civilian production and the situation was very fluid. Of the things they had listed, I chose to interview for and accepted a job in the testing laboratory with Gibson Refrigerator Company in Greenville, Michigan. I soon felt stifled. Greenville was a very closed community. I met no other single people. For the first six months I had no car. Again I did not really commit to the job. I bought a very used 1936 Ford from neighbor Anne Gower, and that helped greatly, mostly in getting back to East Lansing for weekends. It had a rusted, leaky body, but the frame and the engine were sound. I had my first wheels! When I learned of a job with a sewer contractor as bookkeeper and office manager in Lansing, I took it. I really had to scramble to get a handle on the bookkeeping, but I took over an existing system and soon had it mastered. The contractor was also building some houses on speculation. I found I enjoyed seeing construction progress and I learned a tremendous amount in areas I had had no exposure to previously. After about two years on this job, the contractor began to have financial difficulty and was becoming testy when I questioned his practices. We agreed that I should leave, but not before I had managed to buy a new Nash Ambassador and saddled myself with payments. My sister Mary had a couple of weeks to fill in the fall of 1949 so she and I went down to visit Jane in Houston. Mary returned home. I answered an ad in the Houston paper, and got a job with a large Houston contractor that needed a Layout Engineer for a job they had building some flood control structures on the Atchafalaya Spillway near Patterson, Louisiana. I had had a one term course in surveying my freshman year in college. I knew that if I arrived on the job and showed I could set up and use a level and transit I would have no 134 ..... George’s Story

trouble figuring what to do with them. I bought a surveying text book and spent the weekend boning up. I carried it off with no problem. I learned a lot about heavy construction, the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, and Louisiana. It was an interesting winter. I spent Christmas with Jane and got to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. In the spring of 1950 just as that job was winding down I learned that a contractor in Manistee, Michigan, needed a layout man, and I headed north. I spent the summer in Manistee working on a hospital and school that were being built simultaneously by the same contractor. I enjoyed the outdoor work, the somewhat unstructured work day, and seeing construction progress. But I found working for small contractors was no life for me and I did not know how to go about using this experience to get a more stable position. I got along well with the job superintendent but after only three months on the job something I said or did or didn’t do caused the owner to dismiss me. I stopped to reflect. I had had three jobs in two and a half years. The best that continuation on that path could offer was the life of a gypsy, which I certainly did not want. I carried the deep seated conviction that because I had not really given my all in my engineering studies, my credentials were somehow tainted. I also perceived that they were not germane to what I was interested in. Back in East Lansing again I enrolled in a beginning course in Geology at Michigan State. I was enthralled by it. I decided to take advantage of the GI Bill which was there waiting for me and get a degree in Geology. I enrolled in Graduate School at the University of Michigan in February, 1951. I was going back to college the way it should be done: living away from home, studying hard, and participating in campus life. I enjoyed being in school again. I roomed in a house with a congenial group. I studied hard and did well in my courses. I joined the Gilbert and Sullivan Society and gave that a lot of time as Production Manager and sang in the chorus of Princess Ida. I got a part time job working twenty hours a week in the Michigan State Highway Department Testing Laboratory in the East Engineering Building at the University. The first summer I was there the Highway Dept. gave me a full time job in the field as an Aggregate Inspector. The second summer I went to Geology Field Camp in Marquette, Michigan, and Lead, South Dakota. I finished George’s Story ..... 135 the course work for my degree in February of 1953. I had started a thesis—plotting the ground water table in the Ann Arbor area from well drillers records. It took me until mid March to finish it, getting my Masters in Geology that spring. Meanwhile, the Highway Department convinced me I should take a position with them as a Soils and Materials Engineer. I considered it a good opportunity. It involved both my engineering and geology train- ing and kept me close to construction, which I now knew excited me. From this point on, the negative feelings I had for my father gave way to uncritical acceptance of him. My aversion to commitment evaporated. Suddenly my life had focus and I was ready to take on some real responsibilities. I had dated a couple of girls during my two years at U of M but nothing developed from that. I was looking for someone to share my achievement and good fortune with, and called Beverly Holcomb for a date. I had met her a couple of years earlier through my sister Ruth. I courted her for a few weeks and we were married on June 19, 1953. This concludes the story of me as an individual.

Addenda: Stories of Childhood I Told my Children THE STOLEN APPLE (This one is not from my memory, but from what my mother told me.) On a beautiful fall day when I was three, Mother let me go outside to ride my kiddy-car on the sidewalk. She proceeded with her housework, checking on me from time to time through the window. During an interval between one look and the next, I disappeared. She was frantic. She looked for me up and down the street, checked the neighbors, and I was nowhere to be seen. She was just about to call the police and my father when she spotted me coming over the hill up the street from our house. I was eating an apple. “Where had I been,” she asked. “Downtown,” I replied. “Where did you get the apple,” she asked. “Adams grocery store.” I guess I had helped myself to the apple from the baskets of fruit that Mr. Adams had displayed in front of his store. (And Mother did not even trade there.) THE CUT TOE The summer I turned five, my father was to be working for a time in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He took the family along and 136 ..... George’s Story

rented a cottage on Lake Superior near Au Train. He even hired a girl, Helen Trenary, to help mother. Ruth was a toddler still in diapers. Early one afternoon I was outside and was playing around the area where they burned the trash. I stepped on a piece of broken glass. As soon as I saw blood, I went screaming into the cottage. The wound was not severe, and I felt quite a bit better when Mother tied a bandage around my toe. At this point Helen T. suggested that it would feel better still if I would rest it. So I went and put my foot up on the bed. “You’ll rest it much better if you get up on the bed with it,” she said. I thought to myself, “She just wants me to take a nap.” But I did as she suggested anyway. The next thing I knew I awoke to the smell of dinner cooking. The cottage was on the east side of the Rock River, a small stream which flowed into Lake Superior there. The Cox family (from East Lansing, friends of our family. Jos. Cox was Dean of Agriculture at MAC) had a cottage on the west side of the river. There was a foot bridge across the river which had a hand rail on only one side. Just into the woods on the west side was a small building I now believe to have been a privy. Martha Cox, a playmate of my older sister Jane, told me there was a man who lived in the building who ate little boys. I believed her! So with a bridge with only one handrail leading to possible devourment, I spent the summer on our side of the river. I do not remember there being any “plans” for that summer, but Father must have had to stay on in the Upper Peninsula after it was time for the rest of the family to go home. What I do remember was getting ready for bed on a train, and going to the end of the “sleeper” (the Pullman car) and watching while another car bumped into and hooked onto ours to the sound of hissing and men yelling and other bustle. I now believe this was in St. Ignace or Mackinaw City where the train had to be put on and taken off the ferry for crossing the Straits of Mackinaw.

FALLING OUT OF THE CAR I have disconnected memories of riding on country gravel roads. The farmsteads seemed to be close to the road and the chickens were allowed to run loose. We frequently encountered them in the road, had several near misses and at least one encounter that was not a miss. This was in the days when Father had a Willys-Knight coupe sedan, George’s Story ..... 137 probably dating from a year or two after I was born. The car had a back seat, but only one back door, which was on the right side and opened toward the front. Father was always preaching safety, and one point he emphasized was making sure the car doors were shut tight. One way to make sure was to open the door and slam it again. This of course was done at the time you got in. My memory of this particular incident starts when we were riding along and it suddenly occurred to me that we may not have checked to make sure the door was shut tight. I immediately decided to make sure, but when I opened the door to slam it, the wind jerked it fully open and me with it. The next thing I remember was seeing the rear of the car down the road and thinking they were going to go on without me. They didn’t. After another gap in my memory we are in the upstairs bathroom and Mother is picking bits of gravel out of my scalp. I don’t believe I was taken to a doctor. Mother probably diagnosed that there were no broken bones.

DID I EVER TELL YOU THIS ONE? My sister Ruth was born in mid-February when I was 2-1/2 years old. I remember vividly a bright spring day a couple of months later. People were out and about enjoying the weather. Mrs. Gunn, a neighbor, passed the house, saw Mother, and asked if she could see the new baby. Ruth was in the baby buggy in the front room. As Mrs. Gunn looked over one end of the buggy, I stood on the axle at the other end and looked. After Mrs. Gunn exclaimed about what a nice baby Ruth was she turned to me and asked “How do you like your little sister?” I replied “She’s dumb.” End of memory!

THE DAY RUTH BROKE HER ARM Ruth was old enough to be on roller skates so I must have been about eleven or so. Once again it was spring. A few weeks earlier our father had brought home half a dozen baby chicks. He probably thought having them would be learning experience and fun for us. They were soon running free in the back yard, but not for long. One by one they soon succumbed from a variety of causes until there was only one left. We called him/her Tillie. It somehow became a real pet, following us around and being allowed in the house. On the bright 138 ..... George’s Story

late spring day in question, Ruth put on her roller skates, I oiled them for her, and off she went. She went across the street to the Washburn’s walk from the porch to the sidewalk. The slope was more that she could handle with the freshly oiled skates. She fell and broke her arm. Mother immediately called Dad at the office, who hurried home with the car to take Ruth to the hospital. In the rush-rush confusion to get Ruth into the car and leave the house secure with my older sister in charge, there were many passes through the spring-closing screen door on the back porch. Tillie chose to follow someone through, just far enough behind that the door slammed closed on her neck. Later in the day we asked Mother if she was going to serve Tillie up for a meal. She said no. Tillie was probably wrapped in paper and put in the garbage.

THE SLEDDING ACCIDENT I think it was the winter I was ten. Forrest Street, the street behind our house, had a fairly steep slope to the north and leveled out just where it was crossed by Fern Street. It must have been December because it was already dark and was not quite yet supper time. They neither plowed nor salted the streets, and the snow on Forrest street made for good sledding. Along with myself, there were five or six others about my age sliding down hill. Ordinarily we would post one of us at the crossing to warn of traffic. We were all going to go one more time before going home to supper. I was last in line to go and was already on my sled on the way down when the shout “CAR” came. I was going so fast I did not have time to think before I was in the intersection. And so was the car. I remember it was a Ford Model A coupe. I slurred and hit it cornerwise so that my head hit the running board and the side of the sled broke and one end of the broken rail punctured my side slightly. I was dazed, and when I finally recovered awareness, I was riding in the car on the way to the college hospital. The driver of the car was the older brother of a classmate of mine. My parents arrived at the hospital almost as soon as I did. The doctor found no serious damage to me. He dressed my wounds and sent me home with my folks. The worst part for me was going to school the next day with my head bandaged from ear to ear. George’s Story ..... 139

THE DAY I SKIPPED SCHOOL In the February before I was five years old, my mother decided I was smart enough to be in school, so she entered me in kindergarten in the mid-year class. East Lansing was growing, and there was not room in Central School for kindergarten. It was temporarily located in quarters also being temporarily used by the People’s Church (non- denominational but with a Methodist slant, and for years the only church in East Lansing) down in the business block of E.L. So we kindergartners did not go to school with the older children. On the day in question I was walking by myself to school after being out a day or two with a cold. About half way there my mind began thinking thoughts like “What if they do not remember me?” and “Suppose they have moved it without telling anybody.” I was too frightened to go on. I turned around and went home. I did not want my mother to know so I decided to sit down on the porch and wait until it would be time to get home before going in. But she quite soon discovered me. I don’t think she understood my fears. I’m not sure I was able to articulate them. She did offer to go with me to school the next day and I reluctantly agreed to go. I remember walking into the room, seeing a couple of familiar faces and suddenly everything was all right again.

MORE ABOUT KINDERGARTEN The teacher—I think her name was Miss Clark—announced that the next day we were going to undertake a project of making jelly. Each student was given a note to take home naming an item the student was to bring for the project. Although I couldn’t read I knew mine said a cup of sugar. The next day, when the project was to start , I remembered I was supposed to have given Mother the note. I also became aware that most of the others had forgotten. Carol Lott’s mother was there to help. Magically, it seemed at the time, everything needed was on hand for the project and the jelly got made. I puzzled a long time over the question: If so many of us forgot what we were supposed to bring, how could everything necessary be there? I gave up, and forgot everything about it until years later. We seemed to have all kinds of things to play with, including some 140 ..... Ruth’s Story

things I now really wonder about, such as pieces of board, a hammer and a saw. One day we were all working on building some sort of a structure with big building blocks. In the middle of it Bob McCarthy picked up a board and started sawing it in half on a angle. I followed what he was doing and knew instinctively that it had no connection with our building project or anything else except sawing a board in half. When Miss Clark praised him with “That’s right, Bob, you’re doing a good job” I remember thinking, “He doesn’t know what he is doing and she is praising him for nothing.”

Ruth’s Story As the middle child among five siblings, I often felt quite isolated from other family members and forced to fend for myself in the childhood scramble. The greatest space gaps among my siblings were between me and George (2 years and 7 months) and between me and Sally (3 years and 7 months). George and Jane had their own older pursuits and Sally and Mary played with each other. At family gatherings with the Musselman cousins, Nancy, Mickey, and Marilyn were Sally’s and Mary’s age. I never knew whether I belonged at the adult table or the children’s table. During my grade school years, I spent most of my time and energy playing with my friends Helen Gower or Lenore Huddleson, who lived next door and down the street. I virtually ignored my siblings except to scrap with them, which I think was often. Helen Gower was a particular friend with whom I spent innumerable hours. We walked to school together—even in college when we both had eight o’clock classes on campus. We had sleep overs and ate at each other’s houses. Helen’s father died of cancer when she was only ten. In the year or so preceding his death when he was very ill at home, she virtually lived at our house. It was Mother’s way of helping out Hazel Gower. She always called her “a fifth daughter.” Helen and I still exchange Christmas notes on developments in our lives, and my children used to love the stories I told them about our childhood together. Inside our homes, we played school, house, church, dolls, paper dolls, barber (actually cutting each other’s hair once). Outside ➥ Ruth’s Story ..... 141 we jumped rope, rode our bikes, played wood tag, croquet, hop scotch, and “May I?” In the winter, we made snow angels and slid down our terraced yard on sleds. She was a year behind me in school but we were only five months apart in age. We got into the usual mischief—coloring accidentally on the Gower’s carpet, messing up the Musselman kitchen in one of our attempts to “play" cooking, picking the heads off Mrs. Buchanan’s tulips, failing to do household chores required by our mothers. But we were devoted to one another and constant companions. I remember being terribly worried that she would not get any Christmas presents the year her father died. It was the bottom of the depression and Mother mentioned that they were “hard up." Actually, Mrs. Gower did have to manage carefully, but her husband had left her quite a bit of property as well as their lovely home, so they were not destitute. I didn’t know that, of course, and I never related my fears to anyone. On Christmas Day, I was not content until I had gone over to her house to see what she had received. I was so relieved to find a toy stove and her pile of gifts that when I wrote my thank you letter to my aunts for my presents, I carefully listed every one of hers, barely mentioning my own. The aunts were under the impression that I had not liked my own presents. They could not have been more wrong, but nothing I was given made me as happy as the fact that Helen was not forgotten! As I grew older, I became more introspective and more obsessed with myself—possibly quite normal in preadolescence, although I think I was precocious in self-absorption. Although I now look back on an incredibly secure and happy childhood, in those years I became increasingly critical of my family, my circumstances, and myself. In my 1936 diary (I was eleven), I wrote “Was crabby as usual.” I had particular trouble with Jane and Mary. Yet I kept trying to improve. I once wrote that “I’m going to resolve to get the better of it [my temper]. Even with Mary. She is so trying.” I did not specify why Mary irritated me so much, but I was sure that as the youngest she was very favored and spoiled compared to the inconsiderate treatment I believed I was accorded. Most of the time, I felt little fondness for my siblings. I was a in my teens before I could stand to be in the same room with George. I 142 ..... Ruth’s Story

believed he was put on earth specifically to annoy me, even when he was only breathing. In fact, I can’t remember anything he actually did except exist that bothered me. Of course, at that time I had a low opinion of all boys. Jane was a constant trial and seemed to harangue me unmercifully with her efforts to keep the house clean and neat. Almost six years younger, I could not conform to her standards, especially in the south bedroom which we shared for a few years. I felt like a poor lodger there. I used to dread Thursdays because that was the day she appointed to clean our room. I had two alternatives— participate and be criticized for my ineptness or escape to play with my friends and be subjected to her tirade for not doing my share of the work. It was not a happy choice. I was in third or fourth grade when I persuaded Mother to let us switch roommates so that I shared the north bed and bedroom with placid and compliant Sally. Mary, eleven years younger than Jane, confounded her tyranny with constant mischief (like getting into her make-up and jewelry) and seemed unfazed by any tongue lashing. I’m sure Mother agreed to my proposal in order to maintain as much peace as possible—I don’t remember that Mary or Sally were even consulted. But as I was now the oldest in the bedroom, I could run it the way I wanted. This was not the first bedroom switch that I recall. I have terrified memories of Mother and Jane trying to move a bed around the landing on the stairs when Mother and Dad moved into the downstairs bedroom (which had been a playroom with a piano up until that time.) Perhaps it was because Jane was old enough to want more privacy, of which there was little for her in our household. Mother and Dad were ensconced in the downstairs bedroom when Mary was born in 1930, because I remember coming home excitedly from first grade to see the new baby in that room when she and Mother had returned from the hospital. Mary was so tiny in the bassinet beside Mother’s bed that she seemed both unthreatening and very uninteresting to me. I think I ignored her for many months. However, George gave her a great deal of attention. I remember once, when she could not have been more than 9 or 10 months, she was very fussy while Mother was trying to get dinner for seven on the table. George played with her on the couch Ruth’s Story ..... 143 to stop her crying but to no avail. Then Dad picked her up, put her on his shoulders and danced through the living room and dining room with her. She giggled out loud and laughed with glee. I was amazed. I had never heard a baby laugh out loud before and I was thrilled with the sound. It seemed to make everything right in the world. I was too ignorant to connect the facts that I had noticed Mother getting fat, and after the arrival of a new baby sister she seemed much less so. Hospitals produced babies as mysteriously as grocery stores produced “bought bread,” which I regarded as a great delicacy. You went to the store or the hospital and you came home with a loaf of bread or a baby, as the case might be. No one in those Victorian times disabused me of that notion. Some years later, when Mother finally informed me that babies grew inside a woman’s belly, I assumed they came out through the belly button. By standards of the 1990’s, I was downright retarded in my sexual sophistication. Somehow I thought religion and church fell into the same whispered category as sex because nobody ever talked about it in front of Dad. Mother for a time had us kneel down by the bed at night and say the “General Thanksgiving” from the Prayer Book as well as the Lord’s Prayer. To this day I know that prayer by heart (1928 Prayer Book version). I used to love to go to church with Mother or Grandpa and the aunts— I’m told I could sing all of “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus” at age three. They gave me pennies to put in the offering plate, and I loved being dressed up and playing on the kneeler. However, I did not like Sunday School. For a while I tried to go to St. Paul’s, Lansing, but I didn’t know the other children and felt out of place. I also tried joining some of the Sunset Lane children—Helen Muncie and Lenore Huddleson—in Sunday School at People’s Church in East Lansing. One embarrassing incident turned me away from that until I was in my teens and wanted to be with other young people at the Sunday Evening Fellowship. We were given envelopes for our offering and I, always determined to do the correct thing, thought it essential that the date on the envelope be correct—that the Sunday School wouldn’t accept your offering if it wasn’t placed in the envelope for the appropriately dated Sunday. One Sunday, walking to Sunday School, I discovered I had an envelope dated for another month. I was dismayed and decided to tear 144 ..... Ruth’s Story

open the envelope and simply put my pennies loosely in the offering so no one would know I had made such a grievous error. Carelessly, I simply discarded the envelope on the ground. To my horror, during the Sunday School assembly, in front of all the children, a teacher held up the envelope and presented what she thought was a little object lesson in giving. Some erring, selfish child among us, she said, had taken the money from the envelope in order to go to Teddy’s Retreat (a nearby candy and tobacco shop that was the children’s favorite haunt) rather than give the money to God. Such a child could not be a true Christian. I sat in shame, humiliated that she had so mis- interpreted my innocent act. I prayed that no one revealed that the envelope was the one I had discarded so that I wouldn’t be pointed out as the culprit. My prayer was answered, but I never returned to that Sunday School. Quite early, I began to think up projects in which I could be both manager and star. Putting on the first chapter of Little Women in our living room at Christmas time was one such project when I was ten or eleven. I was in love with that book—Jo March was one of my idols and Katharine Hepburn another, after I saw her play my beloved character in the 1930s movie version of Little Women. I identified with her as I read and reread the story. Jo was a tomboy, which I rather fancied myself. She wanted to be a writer and I was already playing with that dream. She didn’t want to grow up and neither did I. Like me, she had one older sister and two younger sisters. We both struggled with our tempers. Her little sister Amy annoyed her almost as much as Mary annoyed me. Little Women was one of the first (of many) books to profoundly influence my life, so it is not surprising that I wanted to dramatize the first chapter which I had practically memorized. For the living room production, I enlisted Helen Gower, Lenore Huddleson, Janie Hootman, and Sally to play female members of the March family: Meg, Marmee, Amy, and Beth. I, of course, was Jo. I even allowed George to do some sound work (ring a doorbell, I think) behind a blanket that substituted as a curtain. I went around the neighborhood inviting everyone to the show and wrote the aunts and Grandpa to come over for it. To assure their attendance, I told them all that “refreshments would be served.” Then I went home and informed Ruth’s Story ..... 145

Mother. Somewhat taken aback, she nonetheless rose to the occasion and produced a chocolate cake and the inevitable homemade grape juice in the middle of her other preparations for Christmas. Needless to say, the audience was enthusiastic, even though, as I recall, a good many things went wrong in the production. I also produced countless “shows” at Indian Trail Lodge where I enlisted kids to sing, dance, play the piano and act out skits, no matter how clumsy or tone-deaf or untalented they were. (I’m not sure Josephine McDonald ever recovered from the humiliation of watching her daughter Katherine “dance”—even I was a little dubious about her performance.) But I was a real impresario, and the show went on. I advertised it with handmade signs in the office, actually charging a few cents in admission. Today I blush to think of the travesty of entertainment we inflicted upon paying guests in the Lodge. Of course, enough of them were parents and grandparents who cheerfully paid the admission and had the decency not to boo us off the stage (the Lodge living room floor in this case). I basked in the parental congratulations and gleefully counted up our take, which usually was enough for soda pop all around. I liked the applause almost as much as running the show. Yet for all my enthusiasm for managing and performing, I often felt quite estranged from the family—that I really didn’t belong in it, especially as I moved toward adolescence. By then I was reading Jane Eyre and Daddy Long Legs. I somehow got the notion that I had been adopted, that I had a real mother or father somewhere, even in Heaven, who would truly appreciate me in ways that my family did not. Perhaps this was indicative of the isolation I sometimes felt, or perhaps it was just preadolescent angst. In any case, the likelihood of Mother adopting a middle child when she was perfectly capable of bearing four others did not seem at all incongruous to me. Nor did my brown eyed, dark haired, chubby resemblance to my parents and siblings cross my mind. However, when I asked Mother if I had been adopted, my fantasy was quickly shattered. She laughed and assured me that I had been indeed born into the family. Her response was both disappointing and reassuring. I was an imaginative child longing to escape from what I perceived as a decidedly prosaic life. On the other hand, I dearly loved 146 ..... Ruth’s Story

my mother and felt secure and protected in the very family that I believed failed to understand me. I think my birth order in the family contributed not only to my vague feelings of estrangement, but also to my feisty independence and self-reliance. By age twelve I was planning my future and launching on projects of self-improvement. Even then I made resolutions and plans to lose weight, to eat less and to exercise more. Well over half a century later, I’m still making the same resolutions and plans. I was determined then to achieve something significant and I’m still trying! A true American child of Benjamin Franklin. No wonder Franklin’s autobiography and Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” struck such a responsive chord in me when I encountered them in high school. They became a sort of Gospel for me for many years. In seventh grade I acquired my own desk—which I had fervently requested for Christmas—and began to create on paper the perfect world for myself that reality denied me. My heroine was always an only child with beautiful long curls (my hair was painfully straight), who had a frilly bedroom in a House and Garden home and a horse of her own to ride. Her pretty mother adored her daughter, and her young handsome father did marvelous things like riding horses, flying planes, and going to dances. He certainly never smoked cigars nor wore high shoes nor refused to let his darling daughter go to movies on Sunday, like my real father. Of course, my fictional heroine’s mother would also buy Ovaltine for her daughter because Little Orphan Annie on the radio said it made you strong and healthy and loved by your classmates. (Mother felt it was a waste of money. She said that milk mixed with ordinary chocolate syrup or cocoa was just as good. She was not as persuasive as the ads.) In any case, my fantasy world was not the hard-up, noisy, arguing family or shabby house that I lived in. I knew my fantasy kind of life existed because I had seen it in the movies, which I passionately loved. I spent hours reading movie magazines about the glamourous life of movie stars and filling scrapbooks with pictures of my favorites (I’m told Ronald Colman was a favorite among the men, but my diary mentions both Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart prominently.) I both envied and hated that child icon of the thirties, Shirley Temple, because she had everything I Ruth’s Story ..... 147 dreamed of and because I thought I could, with proper opportunity, sing, act, and dance better than she could. The gap between my fantasies and the real world didn’t penetrate my consciousness for some time. I took ballet lessons in fourth and fifth grade and was not even the best in the class, much less ready for the professional world. I sang a solo in the Central School Glee Club under Miss Weisinger when I was ten. It was one verse of “In the Bleak Mid-winter” at the annual Christmas Caroling program. But by seventh grade, I realized sorrowfully that I could not read music nor sing harmony well. As for acting, I had a major part in the junior play in high school, but I never felt really comfortable taking a role. I tried hard to develop skill in speaking before an audience by entering both declamation and oratory contests in high school, but I never won any prizes. I took riding lessons for a few years, taught by an ROTC cavalry officer (before World War II, of course!) and became reasonably proficient, although I fell off my horse many times. I was dismayed that my sister Mary rode better than I did after only one term of lessons. Coming to terms with my limited talents was one of the hard lessons of growing up. My sense of separation from family members perhaps accounted for the large part that dogs have played in my life. I have only the vaguest memories of the collie Trixie, so beloved by the family—mostly of a discussion of her disappearance out on the driveway. But I was at the end of second grade when Dottie came into my life, and she was my constant companion and most trusted friend until the end of sixth grade. Dad brought her to the house one spring day, a four-year-old black Pomeranian mix, which he had acquired from a friend. She was old enough to be a rather quiet dog, but very loving. At first, she disappeared for several days, and Mother believed she had run away. All of us felt very sad about it, but I no more than the rest of the family, for we had no special relationship yet. And then, one morning, she reappeared on the back porch, and I greeted her enthusiastically as I was on my way to school. It was the day of my second grade school picnic, the last day of the school year. I petted Dottie, talked to her and started off to school. To my dismay, she followed me. I tried to get her to go home, but she 148 ..... Ruth’s Story

happily trotted along beside me and ignored my entreaties. I didn’t know what to do, because I didn’t want her lost again and was afraid she could not find her way home. I didn’t think we would have to stay in the classroom on picnic day, so I finally decided to chance her coming along. But we did have to go into the classroom and, for reasons unknown to me, Miss Gordon insisted on us sitting quietly at our desks while she read to us before we started on the picnic. I was terrified that Dottie would be sent home, or I would be punished for bringing her in. Since she was not very large, she hopped up beside me on the seat, curled up and went to sleep. I thought perhaps Miss Gordon would not see her. It was too much for the other kids. They kept looking at her and at Miss Gordon to see what reaction would be forthcoming. I resolved to stay with Dottie—if she was sent home, I would go too. Finally, Miss Gordon became aware of the distraction, looked back and saw Dottie. My heart was in my throat and I must have looked very scared. She took a long look and almost smiled, but she continued reading. She never said anything to me. After what seemed like hours, we finally escaped and went on our picnic—I think we walked to the Red Cedar River. I was joyous when Dottie accompanied me all the way, never leaving my side. From that day forward, she was my dog. We were almost inseparable. Dottie slept under the covers at my feet every night and would accompany me as far as Grand River on my way to school before turning around and going home. She deserted me only when it thundered loudly. Then she crept under Mother’s bed where she probably felt the safest. I often sneaked her food from the table, which Mother didn’t like, and played with her outside. There were no leash laws in those days, so she had the run of the neighborhood, but she was a neutered mature dog and did not stray too far. She barked at the paper boy and mail man, growled a bit the night our goose was stolen from the refrigerator, but she did not really threaten anyone. For a couple of years, Dottie went to the Lodge with us. She rode in the car and even slept at my feet in Nellie’s bed when I lived with her in a tent. We had wonderful times with her, exploring the creek and the woods back of the Lodge, playing on the beach, and especially Ruth’s Story ..... 149 rowing in the little boats Dad made for us. She never liked me to leave without her and would usually hop right in, sitting in the bow. Some- times, when we children were swimming out at the little raft, she would run up and down the beach barking. Finally she would jump off the dock and swim out to us. Like a faithful nanny, she pummeled me with her front paws to go ashore. I sometimes did to appease her. She lived with us in the little house next to the Lodge, was generously fed by Maudie out the back kitchen door, and altogether lived the life of Riley. I was terribly sensitive to any criticism of her. When some Lodge guests said she would be a beautiful dog if she were just properly trimmed, I felt so bad, I took her to the little house and cut some of her ruff with the scissors, crying all the time I was hacking. I felt awful because she so patiently let me snip as if she understood the anger I felt toward those people and how ashamed I was for her. Another time, she rode into Traverse City with us in Nell’s car. We left her there with the window open while we shopped. I didn’t think it was wide enough for her to jump out, but I failed to notice that she was not in the car when we returned to it. I did not miss her until we were back at the Lodge. Then I was heartsick and inconsolable. She was lost in Traverse City. She wouldn’t know the way to the Lodge. She would get hit by a car on the road. My uproar must have been well known to guests as well as family, because that night after I was asleep on the cot in the little house, Mother and Aunt Nell burst in with “Look, who’s here!” I never said a word—just lifted the covers and within seconds, Dottie had snuggled down at my feet. In my little world, God was in His Heaven and all was well. I have never felt greater peace or comfort. I don’t think I even thanked the guests who had found Dottie wandering about in town and brought her back. Dottie was also the center of the biggest tragedy of my childhood, an event that took me years to get over, if I ever really did. There was vague talk of putting Dottie to sleep, especially as she got older and more snappish with strangers, but I never took these threats seriously. Aunt Jane had decided to forbid dogs at the Lodge, so obviously Dottie couldn’t come with us anymore. She would stay home with Dad. I missed her a lot and when Dad was coming to get us to take us home, I asked Aunt Nell if Dottie could come just for those few days. She got 150 ..... Ruth’s Story

a sympathetic look on her face, put her arms around me and said, “You don’t really want Dottie to come, do you?” I began to cry, and said “Yes, I do.” I sensed something terrible had happened, but Nell did not tell me. I went to find Mother to discover why Dottie could not come with Dad. She had the unenviable duty of telling me that Dad had had Dottie put to sleep, because she was an old dog. I was thunderstruck and heartbroken. She wasn’t that old—nine or ten years. She wasn’t sick or mean. How could he have done that? Without even asking me? Or telling me? I had never even had the chance to say goodbye to her. I was shattered by the loss but even worse, I felt betrayed by my father and mother, who did this dreadful thing and never even consulted me. I felt absolutely powerless. I ran away—as much as I could. I found a hiding spot in the juniper shrubs on the beach and cried for a long time. I heard Mother and the Aunts searching for me and did not let them know where I was. Then I went out in one of the rowboats by myself to grieve, not wanting to talk to anyone. I’m sure they were worried about how hard I had taken this event, but I was too absorbed in my own misery to care. After a long time, I swallowed my tears and returned. No one referred to the incident again, although I think great efforts were made to cheer me up. It was my first experience with death and loss and one I have never forgotten. I continued to miss Dottie in the ensuing months. One morning that fall when we were back in East Lansing, I had such a longing for her when I woke up that I cried again. I went down stairs and asked Mother where Dottie was buried. Both she and Dad felt bad that I still grieved and assured me that I would get another dog. I acquired many over the years. Riddled with guilt, Aunt Nell brought me a darling little spotted white puppy who grew into a huge, clumsy, not too bright Dalmatian mix that we inappropriately called Lucky. He was impossible to keep in town on our small lot, so we put him on a farm. When I was a miserable thirteen in eighth grade, I got Smoky, part cocker spaniel that I think had come from one of cousin Mickey’s dogs. I loved him dearly and needed him dreadfully in that friendless time of my life—but he was hit by a car in the front of the house. I wept over him as he died on the kitchen floor. Once again, I felt that I had lost my best friend. Ruth’s Story ..... 151

Their have been other dogs. When I was in high school, I learned a little more about sex through Midget (Midgie) coming in heat, but she died of distemper. Boogie was really Mary’s dog but everyone in the family loved her. When I was in graduate school, I kept a dachshund for some friends for a while. When I had my own family, we had a series of dogs—Princess, Gretchen, George and Louie—that were part of the family. After I was widowed, I had a loving toy dachshund, Ebony, who was a wonderful companion. I accidentally killed her. Without my knowledge, she sneaked under the car when I backed out of the garage. That was a grim and terrible day. To cheer me up, Sarah sent me Sadie, a street dog she had acquired from a friend in Boston. However, Sadie was neurotic and uncontrollable. I finally had to put her down since she attacked anyone who came to the house. When I had to dispose of an old or sick or troublesome dog myself, I was more sympathetic with Mother and Dad’s decision about Dottie. I never had a dog I didn’t love—even Midgie, Lucky and Sadie—but none of them were as uncritically cherished as Dottie. The childhood wound of her loss took a long time to heal. My adolescence was traumatic for me and probably for the family. I was moody and often rude to Mother. For a time when I was thirteen and in eighth grade, I hated Dad who seemed to live in a different world than the one I inhabited. I hated growing up. I never wanted to wear high heels, stockings and long skirts or bother with make-up and hair curlers. I was determined to be able to run, skip, or turn cartwheels when I felt like it, to sit on the ground, to play on swings and teeter- totters forever—a real Peter Pan syndrome. I was somewhat younger than my classmates since I had started school at four, and I think I was slower to mature. I felt estranged from them as well, especially when the girls began to be interested in boys and clothes. I thought they betrayed and deserted me. I spent hours at my desk creating a fantasy world on paper. I looked forward to Saturday mornings when I took the bus downtown to the Armory for horseback riding lessons. Since I had lost faith in human beings, I planned a career raising horses and dogs. Reading Black Beauty and Albert Payson Terhune’s books on collies encouraged my fantasy. Nonetheless, during my thirteenth year, I conformed to Mother’s 152 ..... Ruth’s Story

desire that I be confirmed in the Episcopal Church. It meant going to Lansing by bus every week to Confirmation Class, but I became friends with Susie Moore and Jayne Van Alstyne from East Lansing, so did not find it too distasteful. The event itself on May 1, 1937, is etched in my memory as a significant moment in my growing up. It was a beautiful spring Sunday. Across from St. Paul’s on the Capitol lawn a labor demonstration was in full swing with band, cheering, and speeches. Michigan had been torn by sit-down strikes the preceding year. The recently organized industrial union, United Auto Workers of CIO, had just completed labor agreements with General Motors and Chrysler but Henry Ford strongly opposed the union. He used company guards to strong arm union organizers. In fact, a few weeks later union leaders were beaten and mauled outside the Ford Rouge plant in Dearborn. The demonstration on the Capitol lawn was in support of the union. The church doors were open and the noise of the demonstration competed with the organ music inside the church, creating a kind of counterpoint of the secular with the religious world. I felt the collision of anger and fear from the Capitol lawn with the joy and awe I experienced in the service. I was thrilled, not only by my white dress and little veiled head piece or by the laying of the Bishop’s hands on my head with the words “Defend, O Lord, this thy child…,” but by my dawning realization of the complexity of the adult world I was entering. In the course of the next year, in spite of earlier protestations, I reluctantly emerged from childhood. By age fifteen, boys suddenly looked interesting to me. Owning saddle shoes and skirts and sweaters like the other girls of my class became of paramount importance. I had my first pair of silk stockings (nylons were still a novelty) and pumps with heels for church or parties. More importantly, I developed an immense curiosity about the people of the world—who they were, what they did, what they believed, how they came to be in a particular place, how they differed from one another. I remember telling Dad how much I looked forward to going to high school—not for activities or friends but to learn. Dad responded with such understanding and enthusiasm, I realized he was no longer the remote, unfeeling person I had disliked so intensely. My view of the family totally refocused. My siblings became more engaging than I had imagined possible. I made Ruth’s Story ..... 153 friends with George, Sally, and Mary, and I admired Jane. One of the great benefits of adulthood has been my enjoyment of the company of my sisters and brother as good friends, not just relatives. From being a desultory student, I now became purposeful. Classes in biology, Latin and world history, reading Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet in English whetted my appetite for more. I especially liked writing and worked hard on class themes. I began to envision a career in journalism for myself. I wrote brief columns on high school activities for the local East Lansing paper and eventually became editor of the “Trojan Trumpet,” the mimeographed rag that qualified as a school paper in East Lansing High School. Eager to put my talents to work, when I was fifteen I asked for a typewriter for Christmas. Mother and Dad obliged, but I was a long time learning to type. Because I did not have good hand and eye coordination, I never gained the proficiency that I admired in others. Nonetheless, I was so eager to express my opinions in print that I entered local essay contests. I wrote patriotic essays for American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars and Eastern Star. I won a few prizes. The biggest one of $125 in my senior year paid my first year’s tuition at Michigan State College. As my ambition soared, I needed money and soon found that I could make enough spending money by taking care of small children evenings and Saturdays. Some regular customers paid me well, and I liked the children I cared for. The demand for money became greater when I learned of a four week summer journalism institute for high school juniors at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. I was determined to go. I had already had a taste of Chicago which thrilled me. I had visited Aunt Jane at Seabury Western Theological Seminary in Evanston when I was fourteen. It was an exciting trip. In addition to the theater (I think we saw Ethel Barrymore in The Corn is Green), I had fallen so completely in love with a handsome seminarian from North Dakota, Chilton Powell, that I got up to go to eight o’clock communion in the hope of seeing him. (I was rewarded.) He sat at our table at dinner and was remotely polite but hardly interested in an awkward love struck fourteen-year-old. It didn’t matter. My imagination supplied when reality failed. Years later, I knew I had chosen judiciously. My secret idol became Bishop of Oklahoma. 154 ..... Ruth’s Story

To finance Northwestern, I added to my available funds by waiting on tables at Indian Trail Lodge, a job I was never fond of. I was not as efficient as Jane, Sally or Mary, and I found working for Aunt Jane almost impossible. However, I stuck with it for three summers to pay for the the Journalism Institute and later for college. The Institute was well worth my sacrifice of Saturday nights baby sitting. I met high school students from all over the country. In addition to classes in reporting and editorial writing, we took some tours of Chicago, saw Lillian Gish in Life with Father at the theater, dined and danced at the Edgewater Beach Hotel, and swam in Lake Michigan. All of these budding young journalists were intensely interested in world affairs. War had broken out in Europe the previous summer and France fell to the Germans while we were in Evanston. The heady discussions of international issues (and sex) were intellectually intoxicating for me. At the end of the sessions, I won a prize for my essays on contemporary issues, a copy of Lincoln Steffans’ autobiography which I have kept to this day. I returned to high school full of energy and ideas to make something of the school paper. We put out an extra when East Lansing beat Lansing Central High School in football for the first time. More seriously, I became involved in an issue of freedom of the press. By this time, I was good friends with Ann Fagan, the local radical. She awakened my latent “Don Quixote” yearning to pursue justice throughout the world. I had a political science teacher I greatly admired, Mr. Gernant, who taught us that election officials must provide and papers must publish the exact results of the election. In our school election for student council officers, the unpopular principal Mr. Cook received two votes for “dog catcher.” Although I hesitated a long time, I finally decided I must assert the freedom of the press by publishing the “truth.” I had no faculty adviser nearby to prohibit me. The next day the Trojan Trumpet created a small sensation. Students loved it, but the faculty was highly critical. I was called to the principal’s office and admonished for my poor judgment. I thought I might be suspended or expelled. Ann Fagan was exhilarated. She was ready to lead a student walk-out or climb on the barricades. Fortunately the administration had cooler heads and decided the incident would Ruth’s Story ..... 155 receive less attention if they dropped the issue. Nothing further was said or done and we had no reason to protest. Although I was a school leader and an Honor student, my social life in high school was a flop. Like most adolescents, I suffered over that failure. I was never in the most “popular” group. I acquired a group of girl friends—the “Gang,” as we called ourselves—with whom I partied occasionally and attended school events. We were good students generally, but less sought after by boys, although several became involved with the opposite sex by the time we were seniors. I attended a couple of dances, but missed the big ones, like the junior and senior proms. I struggled with weight, which was a great handicap. While friendly with some of the boys for jokes and conversation, I was not the one they asked for dates. Most of the time, I comforted myself by setting my sights on greater events in the future. Mother used to assure me that my “place in the sun would come eventually.” When I graduated from high school, college was my only option. I wanted desperately to go away to school, but did not have adequate funds for the first year. Scholarships were less available then. I was offered a small one at Christian College, a small girl’s school in Missouri, but even that did not provide nearly enough money for me to attend. A graduation trip with Aunt Nellie along the St. Lawrence River to Montreal, then through New England to Boston, opened up the larger world. I regarded New England and New York as the intellectual and cultural centers of the world. I had been inflamed by Emerson’s essays “Self-Reliance” and “American Scholar,” nurtured on Louisa May Alcott, and I read Aunt Nellie’s New Yorker. Concord, Massachusetts, thrilled me. I stood by the bridge where the Minute Men “fired the shot heard round the world,” saw the Emerson and Alcott homes, and visited Walden Pond. I loved Boston immediately for its history and its tradition. Enrolling at Michigan State College that fall with students I had known in high school was a huge let-down, but I soon found the courses exciting and the professors much more demanding than high school faculty. I did well in my studies, especially in history, English, and geology, but I had not completed my first quarter when Pearl Harbor on December 7th changed the whole college scene. Mine was 156 ..... Ruth’s Story

the World War II class, entering in 1941 just before Pearl Harbor and graduating in 1945 shortly after VE Day and shortly before VJ Day. Our college life was overshadowed by the great world conflict. Men dropped out of school to enlist, others and younger male faculty members were drafted, intercollegiate athletics virtually disappeared, fraternity houses became housing for girls. Eventually, soldiers trained on campus in the ASTP program, marching to classes in formation singing, and meeting coeds on weekends. From the middle of my sophomore year until I graduated, I had no boys in my classes. Female classmates left school temporarily to see their boyfriends before they were shipped overseas or to marry them. I wasn’t interested in anything so serious, but I felt decidedly side-lined by the war. Great events were taking place in the world, and I wanted to be part of them. I began college as a journalism major and I had visions of becoming a foreign correspondent. I set my heart on going to the journalism school at the University of Missouri. By 1942, I had saved enough money for at least a year away so I transferred to Missouri. With high hope, I boarded a train for Columbia, Missouri—that is one train to Chicago, another to St. Louis, another to Centralia, Missouri, and finally, what we jokingly referred to as the “Wabash Cannonball,” an old coal fired train that backed into Columbia. Train travel during the war was hardly glamourous. Trains were crowded, slow, with many delays. I was up all night and twenty-four hours late getting home at Christmas. Nonetheless, my year at Missouri gave me dormitory experience and life-long friends. My roommate, Edith Myers, and a girl across the hall, Marilyn Quinn, have remained in contact with me, and we see each other regularly. I loved the sociability of dorm life, although my grades took a tumble that first semester (I even flunked swimming since I never managed to get to the eight o’clock class.) The second semester, I did better, but I had already concluded that I was not aggressive enough to be a good reporter. Literature, history and ideas attracted me more than “covering a beat.” By the end of the year, I decided to become an English major. My justification for remaining at the University of Missouri disappeared. Mostly, I felt the world was passing me by. I wanted to do something for the “war effort,” to use the expression of the time. I had just turned Ruth’s Story ..... 157 nineteen and was too young (and too heavy!) to join the military. In the spring of ’43, my sister Jane stopped in at Columbia to visit me on her way home to prepare for her wedding. Her mail romance with a soldier sounded like a movie scenario and had all the girls in the dorm agog. I was just as enthralled, but involvement with a soldier was not the kind of adventure I sought. I wanted to participate myself, not assist participation of someone else. I got the idea of working in a war plant as so many women were doing. When I returned to Michigan that spring, I went to Saginaw to try my luck at the General Motors plants there. They had all converted to war production by that time since the last automobiles had rolled off assembly lines soon after Pearl Harbor. Sure enough, I got a job at Chevrolet Transmission. My two years of college impressed the personnel office so I was put in the tool room which was skilled labor. It was a foolish assumption since I knew nothing whatever about tools or machinery. It also caused some difficulties with the union, and I was then moved to tool grinding where other women were working. I never really understood what we were producing or my exact part in it, although I was under the impression we made parts of planes. I did what I was told and got along well with my co-workers. They fascinated me because they came from a kind of life that I had never known. Most had not finished high school, most had been terribly poor during the depression, and their language and jokes reached a vulgarity that I had never heard. My job did not fulfill my romantic notion of gloriously serving my country, but I wore a pants suit and cap and was jokingly referred to by the family as Rosie the Riveter. What delighted me most of all was the money. I worked the graveyard shift which paid more; we worked seven days a week, so I got time and half or double time for the extra hours; and my first week included the Fourth of July, for which I also got double time. My first week’s pay was more money than I had ever seen in my life. Furthermore, I lived with Aunt Willie in the old family house in Saginaw so my expenses were minimal. Since I slept all day, I never had a chance to spend any money. In September, when Chevrolet Transmission’s cost-plus contract with the government ran out, I was laid off, but I got another job at Saginaw Steering Gear which paid just 158 ..... Ruth’s Story

about as well. By December, I had enough money to pay for two years at Michigan State. I decided to go back to college and major in English. I was adamant about not becoming a school teacher so I refused to take the education courses which prepared teachers. By this time, I dreamed of becoming a writer, although I no longer wrote much beyond what was required for my classes at school. I returned to Michigan State for winter quarter, eager to learn. Some of my professors had a profound influence upon my thinking. The primary one was John Clark whose eclectic teaching style, wit, humor, and passion for literature were an intellectual tonic. He challenged every idea I had but he introduced me to a whole range of books and periodicals that I did not know—the Nation, Commonweal, the Atlantic Monthly, as well as literary and social criticism and the history of ideas. Much of what I later studied, taught, and wrote reflects the influence of John Clark. By going to summer school in the summer of 1944, I graduated with my almost entirely female class in June, 1945. Like hundreds of starry-eyed Midwestern would-be intellectuals, I was determined to go to New York in September and become a famous writer. I worked in the office at the Lodge that summer to earn money to fulfill my dreams. They were soon shattered by the realities of New York life in September of 1945. Service men were returning from Europe by the thousands, and wives and girl friends were there to meet them. Housing was exceptionally tight. Hotel stays were limited to five days, as were stays at the YWCA, where I resided for a while. Through the assistance of Jayne Van Alstyne, who was already living there, I finally found a room in Brooklyn Heights with a shared bathroom down the hall and a scary man next door who wanted to “borrow my typewriter.” I used to move the dresser in front of my door every night. Business and industry were busy converting back to peacetime production, and lots of workers who had held off through the war now called strikes, which complicated transportation. I found a job easily at a small salary with Bantam Books, which was just getting started in paperback book publishing. Before I had been on the job a week, an elevator strike meant that I had to walk up to the thirteenth floor to go to work. It was too much for me—I could not find new housing and I was terrified where Ruth’s Story ..... 159

I was living. I was too overwhelmed by practical difficulties to give the city a chance. The brightest moment for me in New York was going out to dinner with George while he was in New York for a short time. Jobs were more plentiful than housing so within a week I took another one with the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut, where housing was provided. I promptly took the train out of New York. I no longer had to worry about room and board, since they were both provided on the campus of the Institute, but the pay was minimal and the atmosphere stifling. The Institute was an expensive and tony mental hospital, where many rich and famous patients came to deal with alcoholism, drug abuse, and a variety of mental problems. It was run by a Dr. Burlingame and involved all kinds of activity for the patients (or guests as they were referred to), including educational therapy. That was the sort of work I was supposed to do, supervising their extension courses. However, before long I was put in charge of the library. I felt ill prepared for both of these jobs and was never entirely sure what my duties were. There were so many young people doing this kind of work that the place seemed something like an extension of college. My inability to get away from the campus depressed me, and I really did not like the work. I visited a Missouri friend from Connecticut on one break and attended the wedding of Helen Muncie, a classmate from East Lansing who was working at Pratt Whitney, in November. I cherish that day because she developed breast cancer in a few months, and I attended her funeral at home six months later. At the Institute, I felt increasingly restricted to a place that I did not like doing work that I did not like. Soon after Christmas, my big brave adventure was over. I quit my job and returned home, feeling very chastised by my failure in the real world. Mother and Dad were sympathetic and not at all critical as they welcomed me home. My future at that point seemed very bleak. I had given up on two jobs and I did not know what I wanted to do. Through Mother’s suggestion, I soon found a job on campus testing cow’s blood for Bang’s Disease. Once again, it had no relation to what I had planned for my life. However, it paid well. Although I had no training or experience, it was a simple test to perform, and we had good supervision. Even after reimbursing Mother for my board to help out 160 ..... Ruth’s Story

at home, I was able to save money. There was comfort in being at home while I recovered my pride. Meanwhile East Lansing was booming. Through the GI Bill men were returning to campus by the hundreds, often with wives and children in tow. They needed housing, furniture, civilian clothing, and automobiles, and they brought a kind of optimistic vitality to the campus. We had a jolly bunch of veterans and veterans’ wives working in the lab as well as taking classes. Suddenly, I had a new group of friends and became quite social. I still pondered my future but my job at the lab gave me a breathing space. Without any real direction from me, my future fell into place. In June I flew to Minneapolis to attend the graduation of my old college friend, Marilyn Quinn. She had transferred to the University of Minnesota. My roommate Edith had married a St. Paul native, Mitchell Lazarus, and was also living in the Twin Cities. We had a happy reunion. I loved the city, was intrigued by the University of Minnesota, and discovered that it had a graduate program in American Studies. It appeared to be just what I had been looking for. I had begun to consider graduate school and a career in college teaching. High school teaching had tempted me, but that would require returning to school for education courses. If I went back to school, I wanted to study something that really interested me. With so many veterans back on campus, the demand for college teachers was great. I now recognized that I was happiest in an academic environment. Over the course of the summer, I applied to the University of Minnesota, was accepted and awarded a small assistantship. In September of 1946, I took the train to Minneapolis and changed the direction of my life. My year at Minnesota was both fun and traumatic. I lived with Marilyn Quinn who held a couple of different jobs during the year, winding up at the University of Minnesota Press. Once again, housing was less available than employment. Competition with returning servicemen for even makeshift apartments was fierce. Our first room was in a home with six children with only a curtain dividing our room (a converted front parlor) from the family dining room. We shared the second floor bathroom with other tenants. Our best time to claim the shower was two o’clock in the morning. Many times, we started up Ruth’s Story ..... 161 the steps to use the bathroom, only to have a second floor tenant dash in and stake it out first. Sometimes in the evening while I was studying, a few little heads peeked at me from under the curtain. In addition, we had to take two street cars to get to the campus. The final indignity came when our landlady asked us to leave because we smoked. Needless to say, we were not unhappy to depart. We found a better room in Prospect Park. This was closer to the U, we had more privacy since we were the only tenants, but now we were on the second floor and the bathroom was on the first. We left that place in the spring when the landlady lost her job, had a nervous breakdown, and appeared to be hallucinating. Our final and best home was in a make-shift apartment a few blocks from the University. We had minimal cooking facilities, but still shared a bathroom as well as an icebox (yes, an ice box!) with two other couples on the floor. Actually, this apartment was considered a find and Marilyn lived in it for a year after I had completed my Master’s Degree. The University had trouble absorbing the huge number of returning GI students—Minnesota’s enrollment rose to around forty thousand. The school lacked classrooms, chairs, faculty, and textbooks for a time. The place seemed unusually disorganized. I liked most of my own courses, especially the literature and philosophy classes. The latter was held in a radio studio and broadcast to other students who could not get into the room. My political science professor scarcely showed up the entire quarter, so his course was a bust. I learned almost as much from assisting Professor Joseph Kwiat in an undergraduate class as I did in my own studies. I took role and graded papers in a Humanities in the United States course. I benefitted from both his lectures and his dynamic teaching. We remained friends until his death when he was over eighty. I made several other good friends among the graduate students but had little social life and no real dates. My work for the Master’s Degree was completed in July. Although I did not do well on my oral exams, my committee mercifully granted my degree. I resolved to do better if I ever had another chance. Finding employment as a college teacher in 1947 was easy. My yen to see the world impelled me to accept am instructorship at Oregon State College in Corvallis, Oregon. After a few weeks at home and at 162 ..... Ruth’s Story

the Lodge, I headed west on the Empire Builder out of Chicago. The scenery—the North Dakota plains, the Rockies, the Cascades, the Columbia River gorge thrilled me. I felt nervous over my first professional job, but I was determined to do well. At twenty-three, I was younger than some of my veteran students so I tried to dress as maturely as possible. I need not have worried. From my first day of class, I knew teaching was my calling. Learning how to teach grammar, sentence structure, and paragraph organization challenged me, but I liked my students and I loved the work. I was gratified that they liked me as well and asked to return to my classes winter quarter. What I did not anticipate was how much fun I would have over the next two years. Three other single female teachers, slightly older than I, had also joined the staff and we soon became friends. The second semester we rented the house of a faculty member on sabbatical, taking turns cooking. For me, it was a trial and error task! Many young single men recently out of military service were finishing their college work or beginning their teaching. They were uncritical recipients of our meals and hospitality. Our house became a hang-out for them. We all had many dates and parties. All three women married men they met in those two years, one of them at the end of our first year. I attended her wedding in Seattle before I returned home in June. The second year I shared an apartment with another who also married very soon thereafter. I was not at all interested in getting married yet, although almost every woman I knew was doing so. There were too many goals I still wanted to pursue. In addition, the guy who had attracted me and with whom I spent the most time during my two years in Oregon was brilliant but unstable. He was a Michigan native who had done graduate work at Yale, and we hit it off from the start. A great conversationalist and reader, I think I fell for his mind and his wit. Unfortunately, he was in the process of divorce, which he neglected to tell me, even while attempting a reconciliation with his wife. His mercurial temperament made him impossible to get along with for any length of time. Although we remained friends, eventually I found even his friendship more burden than pleasure, especially since he had alienated almost everyone else. Ruth’s Story ..... 163

Two other events marked my years at Oregon State. At Christmas in 1947, I traveled to Houston to become Jimmy Adams’ Godmother at his baptism. He was just six months old and enchanting. I enjoyed seeing Jane and Hope, but it was a long trip. I took the bus to Los Angeles and spent a day with Aunt Grace, whom I had met at Grandpa Musselman’s funeral. She asked her current boyfriend to drive me all over the city. I felt sorry for him because she criticized him the entire time. I discovered that she lived a very active social life in LA for an old lady. She put me on the train to Houston. The second Christmas I spent in the hospital having my appendix out. I recovered easily. At the end of two years, I was ready to move on. I never really liked the Oregon climate. The constant rain and cloudy skies depressed me and while the temperature was not often below freezing, the damp chill seemed worse than bitter cold and snow. Furthermore, American students were beginning to go overseas to study on Fullbright grants or other programs. That appealed to me, but it was too late to apply when I learned about it. I was again uncertain of my future. If I stayed in college teaching, I knew I would have to go back to graduate school, but I didn’t know where. I didn’t think teaching opportunities were great in American Studies, since not many colleges had added that curriculum. I wasn’t sure about a degree in English since I knew I would probably have to take linguistics and that did not appeal to me. I did what we always seemed to do when we were in a quandary. I recycled home. By this time, Mother had taken in roomers to increase her income and Mary was still in college at home. For a time, George was around also. Nonetheless, Mother made room for us. I looked around for a a job in the area—Dad encouraged me to be enterprising and create my own job somewhere that would use my talents. I was a reluctant entrepreneur and his ideas came to naught. I worked in the office at the Lodge for the summer and enrolled at Michigan State again in the fall with a vague idea of earning a Ph.D. in English. In casual conversation with a local college chaplain, I mentioned my interest in history. He suggested I take my degree in that. Immediately, the idea felt right to me. I would not have to take linguistics and I could put together a program of both American history and literature, the areas 164 ..... Ruth’s Story

that I liked best. Maneuvering through the bureaucracy to get the necessary approval for this switch required some doing, but in the course of the year, I achieved it. I was a bonafide candidate for the Ph.D. in American intellectual history, I had a graduate committee, a program, and a part time job. Eventually, I had an assistantship in the history department as well, so with my savings from Oregon, I was able to finance my program and pay Mother for my board. My three years at Michigan State were punctuated by a lot of social life. I became very friendly with other graduate students in the history department. I had a romantic fling with a young Italian graduate student from the Iron Range in the Upper Peninsula. I helped him with his course work and thesis, and he took me to dances—he was superb dancer. The idea of marriage came up briefly in our conversation, but I could not envision myself spending my life with such a devout Roman Catholic nor with a small town high school teacher, which he planned on. I was not ready to take the big step anyway. We corresponded briefly after I finished at Michigan State, but our contact gradually died out. Another distraction during these years was Sally’s wedding. She was the first in the family to marry at home so all of her sisters were bridesmaids. Jane came north with her two little boys to participate. Lynn Phelps joined Hope Adams as another “out-law” in the family. Finally getting my Ph.D. was another defining moment in my life. I had to rethink a great many ideas. I really wanted to work on women’s history for my dissertation, but I had no major professor to take it on, since it was hardly a legitimate subject in those days. I knew nothing about it—nothing was taught. I did not know how to proceed, especially since my suggestion got such a negative response. So I settled for a dissertation topic which was not my choice—the travel literature of Americans in Germany in the nineteenth century. I dogged my way through the research with almost no assistance from my major professor, even spending a couple of weeks in Washington with Doris and Merwin Phelps (Lynn’s brother) while I worked at the Library of Congress. When it was almost complete and my major professor had approved it, other history professors in the department who were on my committee would not approve it and told me so. It became a Ruth’s Story ..... 165 departmental conflict between my professor from Harvard and another professor from Wisconsin, who had different interpretations of American history. I was caught in the middle. I did not know what to do. I couldn’t sleep. I was paying a typist to prepare the final copies for me so I shuddered at making many changes. For one wild moment, I thought I would present one dissertation for my advisor and another for the two who were critical. My basic beliefs were severely shaken. For ten years, I had put most of my faith in academia, in people using their intelligence and reason to resolve the world’s problems. I believed, foolishly, that learning lifted one beyond petty jealousy and ignoble actions, that it fostered integrity, compassion, and a desire for justice. I now saw men whose minds and learning I admired behaving like schoolboys wrangling over a marble game. I had not been a faithful churchgoer for years, but I now went back to the church. I decided I wanted to believe in something bigger than those men, bigger than human reason. I would put my ultimate faith in God rather than scholars. It was more a commitment than a conversion, but it calmed me in the last few days before my orals which, with the tension in the department, promised to be exciting. In fact, in addition to my committee, some six other faculty members attended. Having put everything in God’s hands, I was calm, cool and relaxed during the exam. Not so one of the warring faculty members. He raised his voice, got red in the face, couldn’t find the pages he wanted. I answered his questions precisely when he finally got them out. He was still not satisfied with the dissertation, but I sensed that the sympathy of the rest of the committee was with me, not him. Afterwards, the committee was slow to report out so I knew there was an argument going on. They had passed me but insisted on changes in my dissertation. That frightened me because I did not yet have a job for the fall and I had only fifteen dollars left in the bank. I didn’t know how I could pay for extensive revisions. Traumatic days followed. In meetings with the department head and faculty members, I finally satisfied them with token changes in the dissertation. My major professor admired my “spunk” and the story of the uproar circulated on campus. Dad was furious at my treatment and was quite willing to 166 ..... Ruth’s Story

go to his old nemesis, President Hannah, over it until I assured him it wasn’t necessary, that I could handle it myself. Much later, I believed that these men would not have treated a male candidate with the same patronizing disdain that they treated me. This was 1952 and the “feminine mystique” was in full flower. I realized I was the first female Ph.D. the department had produced, that my committee was all male, and that women were regarded as potentially less worthwhile as scholars because they were destined to marry and have children. I had excellent grades and good recommendations, but my department head had already informed me that I had entered a “suicidal field.” History teachers were not in demand, he said, and as a woman I would have difficulty being hired at all. I accepted this as the way of the world, since there was nothing I could do about it. I inwardly writhed at the injustice of it. I soon learned the truth of the department head’s assertion. Many veterans had graduated and taken jobs, reducing enrollment. Furthermore, the entering class in 1952 had been born in the middle of the Depression when the birth rate was low, further reducing enrollment. Colleges cut their padded staffs and history teaching positions, especially for a woman, were almost nonexistent. I had an ace in the hole—I could teach freshman composition and there was more demand for that. The job I was finally offered, after the school year started, was in freshman composition at South Dakota State College in Brookings, South Dakota. I had never heard of the school, but a man in Dad’s old Ag Engineering Department had come from there, so I had a little information. It was a land grant college, which I was already familiar with, the town had an Episcopal church which, with my new commitment, was important to me, and the salary of $3800 sounded marvelous. I accepted the position with alacrity. I learned when I arrived that I had been hired because their enrollment had jumped to 1800 students as a result of recruiting. I was grateful. Once again, I went west, not east as I had once dreamed, but the Chicago Northwestern Dakota 400 train that took me there gave me hope. The closer we got to South Dakota, the more the land opened up to prairies and sky. The towns became smaller, the farms larger, and the people fewer. I thought I was going to the end of the earth. I arrived Ruth’s Story ..... 167 on Saturday night. The man who would eventually become my husband checked me in at the Sawnee Hotel. Even then I noted his courtesy and helpfulness. The next morning, I set out early to look at the town and find the Episcopal Church. I couldn’t find the town—at least what I thought should be the business district. On Main Street there were two blocks of very small two story buildings, no cafes or restaurants that were open, one stoplight, and nobody about. I kept thinking there had to be more “town” on another street, but I was wrong. I found the Episcopal Church a few blocks away and attended the morning service with about thirty-five other people. My department head, a very nice man who had met me at the train, had invited me to dinner that Sunday. It was another introduction to South Dakota. I heard his fourteen year old son talking on the phone saying, “I can’t. I ain’t ate my dinner yet.” Such grammar jarred my shocked ears, but his father laughed and said, “Please, Allen. There’s an English teacher present.” I learned that this was the common spoken idiom of the region and quite acceptable socially. An English teacher had a lot of work to do. My first year in Brookings was professionally difficult but personally enjoyable. I found an apartment that cost only $38 dollars a month and I relished finally having my own place and getting a regular income. However, I soon learned my place in academia. I was the only Ph.D. on the campus who was only an instructor, my salary was so low in comparison to others of equal qualifications that it was off the salary chart, and two young men with almost identical credentials to mine had been recently hired as assistant professors at better salaries to teach literature. I experienced sex discrimination first hand but felt helpless to combat it. In addition, I felt pressure to publish something from my dissertation but that research and writing carried so many unpleasant memories, I couldn’t bear to touch it. However, I liked teaching, even freshman composition. I knew I was competent. The seven English Department faculty members were close to my age. We had all come from out of state. We enjoyed each other’s company and had good times together. There was little to do in a town which closed down after the second feature at the movie house began at 9:00 pm. For entertainment, we formed a Great Books 168 ..... Ruth’s Story

group, a music listening group, a play reading group, and ping pong games. We had lots of parties together. I continued to believe I should do something to advance professionally. On my way home on Christmas break, I interviewed in Chicago for a job with a publishing company. Although it appeared promising, it wasn’t teaching. I hesitated to commit to anything because I hoped to go to Europe during a future summer vacation. I decided to stick with a college schedule until I had accomplished that. In spring break I flew to Florida to visit the Aunts in their new home. Mary was there, too, and we enjoyed the sunshine and beach. During my first summer home, I was bridesmaid for my good friend Beverly Holcomb who was marrying my brother George. I worked at the Lodge for a time and then traveled to New York to visit friends from Minnesota. This time I loved the city. During the next two years, I became more deeply entrenched in Brookings. I sang in St. Paul’s choir, joined the League of Women Voters, and became involved in small town politics. By this time, I had many friends in church, on the faculty, and in town, and I had a better apartment. I walked almost everywhere, since I did not yet own a car, but in a small town people were generous with rides. Bill Alexander came into my life. I had known him casually the preceding year but the second year he asked me out. I liked him a lot, but he confessed that he had another woman in his life. I asked him if he were married. He said no. I asked him if he were engaged. He said no. He told me about the other woman to be completely honest, he said. Assuming I would no longer be interested in him, he shook hands and told me he had enjoyed knowing me, as if we were separating forever. “I’m not going anywhere,” I responded. I knew I would continue to see him in church and in town, and I went out with other men occasionally myself. But his integrity impressed me. In any case, that year I celebrated my thirtieth birthday and decided I probably would not marry. I began to think seriously about my career. After considerable reflection, I permanently shelved my dissertation, putting that part of my life behind me. I decided that any further study or research I did would be on women. I had finally recovered from the trauma of graduate school. The following summer I went on a bicycle trip in Europe. It was not the best organized, but it was a great deal of fun. I traveled part of Ruth’s Story ..... 169 the time with a small group that included Mal and Virginia Marsden from Brookings. We cycled in the Netherlands, Germany, and Alsace Lorraine, but we sold our bikes when we got to Switzerland and took the train or hitchhiked, which was common in Europe in those days. I spent ten days in Paris, went to Rheims and Belgium and then traveled for a month in England, Scotland and Ireland. Part of the time, I was by myself, part with a woman I met on the tour. I stayed in youth hostels, some pretty primitive, in international student centers, and in the YWCA in London. There were students from all over traveling that summer so it was very informal and friendly. I sailed out of Quebec on a Dutch ocean liner and returned on another to New York. It was the trip I had looked forward to for so long and I was not disappointed. When I flew back to Brookings that year, I felt like I was coming home. I had friends, social life, another apartment, and work I liked. I finally persuaded the Dean to let me teach some history. In his usual illogical manner, he assigned me to a History of England section, which was certainly not my major area of knowledge. However, I blundered my way through it and did not make too much of a fool of myself. In the course of the year, I was offered a couple of jobs which did not appeal to me—one at a church college in Indiana for which I had to sign a paper that I neither drank nor smoked. I had reluctantly signed a loyalty oath at South Dakota State (those were the days of the McCarthy hearings) but I balked at agreeing to this prohibition. I was offered another job at Oklahoma College for Women, but by this time Bill Alexander was very attentive. I realized our relationship were getting quite serious so I spent a lot of time thinking about marriage. We were extremely compatible, liking the same activities, the same people, holding the same values. I liked being with him—much of our courtship consisted of hours of talking. (There wasn’t much else to do in Brookings.) I really wanted to have a family and I genuinely liked children. Especially important since I remembered the tension over religion in my own family, we shared a faith that found expression in the same church. My biggest worry was whether Bill could accept my Ph.D. I had been so brain-washed by the then current feminine mystique theory that I believed men were intimidated by female brains. I had concluded that my Ph.D. frightened 170 ..... Sally’s Story

potential husbands away, so I had kept it well hidden. In fact, Bill did not know about it until after we were engaged, when I dragged it out like some bastard child that I had not acknowledged. He was mildly surprised, but accepted it with grace. He was relieved that I could continue teaching and support myself if it became necessary. Once we decided to marry, events proceeded quickly. I took Bill home to meet Mother and Dad, who liked him very much. I decided to be married in Brookings because that was my home with both my church and my friends. It was a very social time, with several parties before the ceremony. Bill’s father and brother lived in Brookings. Mother, Dad, Sally and Mary drove out for the wedding. Bill’s sister Betty and her children came, as did Bill’s aunt and uncle. Furthermore, Brookings voted to go wet on July lst, and the first package liquor store in town was located in the hotel. We celebrated at our wedding on July 16 by having spiked punch at our reception in the church basement. It shocked a lot of people but not most Episcopalians. We moved into a third floor apartment after a brief trip to Minneapolis. So we began our lives together in a town and a state I had grown to love.

Sally’s Story I came into the world on an appropriate day, September 5, Labor Day, 1927. I was christened Sarah Alice, but nobody except Dr. Bruegel, who delivered me, ever called me anything but Sally during my childhood. As the fourth of five children, I had three siblings who presented formidable role models, since they had all done well in school and I always felt a strong need to keep up with them. As I think back on my childhood, it does not seem like I have many distinct memories. I know that it was generally a good childhood, basically happy, but my memories are limited to flashes of times. For instance, I remember going to Ontario to visit Dad’s sister, Aunt Ruth, and her husband, Grant Fox. For some reason, we went to Leamington to watch a cargo ship being loaded. I do not remember why we went or who all was there, but I can see very plainly the picture of the ship being loaded. I was impressed that large cartons of Heinz products were being put on board and our talking about “Heinz 57” varieties. But I ➥ Sally’s Story ..... 171 have only a snapshot memory of the house and none at all of the part of the visit at Uncle Grant’s peach orchard. My earliest memories begin about age five. I remember coming home in tears one day because someone had done something to make me cry, but I have no idea what or who it was. I can still see the lavender gingham dress I wore. My memories of kindergarten consist of having to go to the bathroom. One time on the way home from school, I had to go so bad that I went behind a tree at the house on the corner of Sunset Lane and Oak Hill Street. Being behind the tree I thought nobody could see, but actually it was quite a small tree and I was clearly visible to the world. However, apparently no one was looking. Another time was when we were bundled up in snow suits and lined up to go home when I couldn’t wait any longer and, not able to get out of my clothes, went in my pants and to my embarrassment, made a puddle on the floor. In school, I was a very good little girl. My horror of doing anything wrong was based on how my parents would feel. I lived in dread of disappointing them. I was scared of my father at home and generally tried to avoid his censure, for although I don’t remember his ever using it, his threat to get out the razor strap was sufficient. His snapping my head with his thumb and forefinger were enough to put the fear of any further punishment in me. However, I don’t remember relating that fear to being naughty in school. Rather, I was conscious of their high expectations and feared their disappointment if I didn’t measure up. Their expectations were made greater by the fact that I followed Jane, George and Ruth, all of whom had done well. I felt I was expected to measure up not only by Mom and Dad but by the teachers who had taught all of us. Miss Dean was my third grade teacher. She was a rather petite blonde who wore her long hair pulled back in a bun. My major memory of first grade was sitting at small green tables to do our work. Larry Allen was in my class. He was a retarded youngster and in those days there was no special education for children with disabilities. Larry was a hulking kid of 13, who simply sat out his days in the first grade class. I can see him now, hunched in a kindergarten-sized chair, randomly scribbling on the table top with a crayon. I have often wondered what became of him. 172 ..... Sally’s Story

It’s funny what makes memories stand out. In second grade I had Miss Howard. She was beginning to gray and wore rimless glasses and was stockily built. She was a good teacher and I liked her class. The one distinct memory was of waxing leaves. We had to collect pretty autumn leaves and then we waxed them to preserve them. I think we used them to decorate the bulletin boards, but I am not sure. My fourth grade teacher was Miss Nuttle. She was tall and a rather commanding personality. She had short, dark, wavy hair and also wore rimless glasses. Her face was strong-jawed and she had a rather large mouth. Looking back from an adult’s point of view, she was really quite a handsome woman, probably in her thirties. Although I can picture her plainly, I can’t remember anything specific from that year except that she was quite stern. Our playground activities involved endless games of jacks, marbles and much rope jumping. We were pretty good jumpers, with two girls swinging the long jump rope and the others jumping in and out. I was pretty good at jacks and could do most of the variations. I wonder now where all the variations came from—if they were just handed from one child to the next, or if we made them up as we went along. I went to Central School and to get there we had to walk over the hill on Sunset Lane and across a large park area to cross Grand River Avenue (the main highway through East Lansing). There were Safety Patrol boys (only boys were allowed in those days) to help us cross. They were equipped with long bamboo poles with white flags on the end to hold us back until it was safe to cross.They would sometimes use their poles to knock off sugar beets from trucks going by, carrying the beets to the refinery in Lansing. We thought it was great sport to chew on the beets. Miss Kuhlman was principal of the school. She was probably in her fifties, graying and stern looking. She also taught 6th grade. The bell was in the principal’s office and she would designate 6th graders to ring it to start school and to end it. It was a real honor to be chosen. I was thrilled when she picked me. I rang the bell every day for weeks, until I was heartily sick of it. I don’t know why she didn’t replace me—maybe I was so dependable she didn’t want to bother, or maybe she just forgot, or maybe it really was a sort of punishment I was too Sally’s Story ..... 173 naive to see, but I know that I hated the job by the time I didn’t have to do it any more. Sunset Lane was a wonderful place to grow up—a stable, solid middle class neighborhood, lots of kids quite close in age and not a lot of traffic. In good weather we gathered after supper a couple of houses down to play games like Kick the Can and Statue Tag. I played most often with Mary Ball and Jane Hootman. My sister, Mary, was closest to Louise Huddleson, who was actually in my class. Marilyn Adams was the third playmate I had, but she was mostly the odd person out with Mary Ball and me. Both Mary (sister) and I liked to go to the Huddlesons. Mrs. Hudd, as we called her, was quite a character and always had lots of goodies to eat. Dr. Huddleson, who had an international reputation for his work in veterinary medicine, was like a figure from another planet to us. He rarely came out of his den and when he did, he rarely had anything to say. When he did speak, he was very gruff. The Huddleson kids just seemed to ignore him, so although we were rather scared of him, we did too. Mary Ball’s mother was a rather prissy little woman, but she was the only woman in the neighborhood who drove a car. That set her very much apart from the other mothers in my eyes. While my dad took our car to the college every day, Mrs. Ball had the car sitting in her driveway and she could go anywhere she wanted at any time. I was the fourth of five children with the biggest age separation between me and my next oldest sister, Ruth. My younger sister, Mary and I were “the little ones,” somewhat set apart from the others. Jane, the first child in the family, was nine years older that I and I wonder now how she survived. Mary and I loved to play with her make-up and to watch her get ready for her dates. We also peeked out the windows when she came home and stood on the front porch with her boy friends. I never will forget the day Mary and I and Louise were getting into her things and pulling out the dresser drawers to stand on to reach the top. The dresser toppled over with a horrendous crash. Dad came tearing up stairs to see what had happened. Louise flew out of there so fast you couldn’t see her going. On the other hand, Jane often made life miserable for the rest of us. She felt as the oldest, she had to be surrogate mother and she 174 ..... Sally’s Story

undertook things Mother didn’t necessarily want her to do. She assumed the job of cleaning the living room and dining room every Saturday morning and she practically kicked the little kids out of the house while she did it. She bossed us terribly and if we didn’t get out of her way, she’d complain to Mother loudly. While Mom appreciated the help, she often said it was almost easier to do it by herself than to put up with everyone’s complaints. I remember our dinner hour with much warmth. Although I remem- ber some fights, I mostly remember lots of good conversation. On the other hand, I hated the nights when things got too stormy, and still do not like confrontational arguments. I also remember many meals with a lot of laughter. One night in particular stands out, when Ruth and George began to tell about seeing the Marx brothers in “A Night at the Opera.” Their description had the tears rolling, we laughed so hard. When I was quite little, Dad often took us for rides on a Sunday. Sometimes we went to visit a farm of one of his former students. I received my first sex education on one of those visits. I must have been about seven. The children on the farm took me to see the animals and in one of the barns, a goat was in the process of giving birth to a kid. I watched the whole process. I think if Dad had known what I was doing, he probably would have been quite horrified, since kids were not exposed to such things then. Mostly though I was quite bored with the farm visits. As we got older, we were not terribly thrilled with the rides. I remember one Sunday when Dad suggested a ride and Mary and I wanted to go to Lake Lansing, which was an amusement park outside of town. Dad refused but insisted that we ride along with him and Mom. We were, of course, very sulky and unpleasant during the trip. Dad ended up taking us there, but only to watch a few minutes, not go on any of the rides. Dad had a garden plot outside of town for several years and he and Mom would go out to work it. Mary and I, being too young to stay home with the others, were taken along. I hated it. I don’t remember that we were expected to help, but I do remember being bored stiff as we played around the edges of the plot. I credit this experience with my aversion to gardening. Sally’s Story ..... 175

In my youngest years, Mom did her grocery shopping by phone. Each weekday morning, she would call in her order to the local grocery store by a certain time and it would be delivered that day. By the time I was eight or nine, the first supermarket opened on the outskirts of Lansing. Dad began to take Mom shopping on Friday nights. It became quite an adventure for Mary and me to go along. We usually managed to persuade Mom to buy some kind of treat. Mom had three sisters, none of whom had married, and we were their family. They lived in Saginaw and they usually came over for a day the weekend before Christmas and brought us bountiful gifts. We couldn’t wait for them to come because they gave us the exciting gifts. Mom’s were the prosaic ones—things we needed. Dad did not participate much in the gift giving, partly because he worried so about spending money, but also because the Aunts had usurped that function and he felt rather out of it. He also did not really know how to give or receive. If he gave a gift, it was what he thought you ought to get, with- out regard for whether you would like it or not. On the receiving end, he had difficulty accepting any gift. One year in art class in high school, I made him a laced leather key case. I did a very good job on it and I was very proud of it. After Dad got it, he took it apart and remade it and then proceeded to show me how he had made it “better.” I was crushed, though I didn’t share my hurt with anyone for many years. To the day he died, Dad never could receive without feeling he had to pay for whatever he got in some way. After I was married and had children, and Mom and Dad would come to visit, he always had to do some job for me to “pay” for their stay. If I didn’t give him a job to do, he would take one on for himself and often what he went ahead and did was a problem for me. As a consequence, I started planning ahead what I would ask him to do when they came to visit. Another Christmas-related memory is our Thanksgiving visit to the Aunts in Saginaw. This is Christmas-related for Mary and I would often stay over the weekend with the Aunts and they would take us Christmas shopping. We always went on Friday to the dime store, as they were called in those days—either Woolworth’s or Kresge’s. Each of us received 1 dollar to buy all our presents. It was usually Aunt Jane who went with us and she helped us in selecting things that wouldn’t be too awful. 176 ..... Sally’s Story

It must have been a real treat for Mom to have the Aunts keep us until Sunday after Thanksgiving. They always gave us a good time. As we got older, they often had a party for the Saginaw kids we had gotten to know up at Indian Trail Lodge, the summer resort they ran up on Traverse Bay. I remember one party was a lunch at the Bancroft Hotel in Saginaw, the toniest place in the city. There must have been about eight kids there and we were really rather abominable. We must have been about middle school age and we all kept ordering more food, being very silly and noisy. It was fortunate that we were in a private room. Nell was the aunt who chaperoned us that day and she just shook her head and laughed when she told her sisters about how very naughty we were. By today’s standards we weren’t bad at all, but we weren’t the nice, quiet, proper kids that were expected then. In 1933 and 34, Chicago mounted a World’s Fair. Dad and Mom went and took the older children. Mary and I were left at home and Mrs. Noble took care of us. Mom left the money for us to have an ice cream cone every day. There was a store over near Mrs. Noble’s house that had the biggest ice cream cones in town. The cone was a double one and you got two scoops in each side for a nickel. Needless to say, that is where we went for our ice cream every day. Dad sometimes made trips to the agricultural stations MSU had in other parts of the state. One summer he took Mom, Mary and me along when he visited the station in the Upper Peninsula. This was a wonderful trip. We took the ferry across the Straits of Mackinaw (there was no bridge then) and visited the agricultural station which seemed to be out in the middle of nowhere. Mary and I decided we would walk to the little village near by. To get there we had to walk past the cows in the field and we were scared stiff of them. The village turned out to be nothing but a general store, a tavern and a church, which was a big disappointment. Dad then took us on to the Kewanaw peninsula, the Soo locks and Mackinac Island, which were very exciting. Not all the things the Aunts did were kindly to us. The summer before I was to start junior high school, Nell decided on the spur of the moment one day, that it was time for me to cut my hair. I had two very long, very fat braids down my back. I was not unwilling to give up the braids, but the way she did it really hurt. She decided one Sally’s Story ..... 177 afternoon that it should be done, got the scissors and simply chopped off each braid in front of a whole bunch of guests. Then they all laughed at how funny I looked, with all the ragged ends. This was a terrible thing to do to a child just entering junior high school, when looks were all important to self-confidence. The trips to The Lodge were long and tedious. It would take us about 8 hours to make the drive. As I remember it, we sat with Dad and two older kids in front and Mom and three younger kids in back, with Mary sitting on Mom’s lap when she was a baby and when she got older, one of us little ones sat on a stool. Dad occasionally smoked a cigar in the car and one year that did me in. Along about Mt. Pleasant, I got sick to my stomach and threw up all over the back seat. It was in the country and where we stopped was by an oil field (there was some oil pumped in Michigan in those days) and the only water available was very brackish. I can still taste the saltiness of it. Whenever we were starting out for a trip, Dad would set a time to leave and would be fretting at all of us to get in the car by that time. One time, I must have been about seven or eight, I had to go to the bathroom at the last minute. When I came out of the bathroom, everyone was in the car and I was terrified that they were leaving without me because I wasn’t ready on time. However, once we were all in the car, Dad always had a reason to get out and go in the house again. He came in the house again when I was so scared, probably to find me, and I was not left home alone. I wonder if that episode had anything to do with my compulsion to be punctual. As Jane and George got older and started to work at the Lodge, they often went to the Lodge ahead of the rest of us. Then we had more room in the car. I remember one year we took the cat along and that was a miserable trip. The cat got sick and Mary and I pretended we were playing a game as we cleaned it up with toilet paper Mom carried and threw it out the window, so Mom and Dad wouldn’t know. Both Mary and I started working at the Lodge at very young ages, since the arrival of the war years meant that help was much harder to get. We waited table for breakfast and dinner and served carry-out sandwiches for lunch. Since families tended to come back each summer for their vacations, 178 ..... Sally’s Story

we soon learned who the best tippers were, and Aunt Jane always assigned them to us, so that we could earn more money. There were some real characters, who came for long stays. One was Calvin Palmer, known as Uncle Puss, a well-known politician and wheeler-dealer, who had made and lost a couple of fortunes in his lifetime. He was a great flirt and kidder and we had a lot of fun with him. One of the things we waitresses liked to do was to go skinny-dipping on hot nights after work. Once we made the mistake of leaving our suits on the dock. Uncle Puss came down and stood on the dock, pretending he didn’t know what we were doing. It was a long time before he walked away and let us come out. After that we would leave our suits on the raft, so we wouldn’t be caught again. Traverse City, being in the heart of cherry growing country, held a cherry festival every year. The biggest event was a parade. One year, shortly after WWII, when cars were still very hard to get, the parade organizers put out a call for convertibles for celebrities to ride in. Tom Sample, one of the Saginaw kids who came to the Lodge, had a con- vertible and so he, Mary and I went down the day of the parade to offer it. It turned out that it wasn’t needed, but the parade official told us to go ahead and ride in it anyway, so the three of us crashed the parade. We had a lot of fun waving to people who had no idea who we were. In my growing up years, movies and radio were the major sources of entertainment. We kids all had our favorite movie stars and we would spend hours cutting pictures of them out of movie magazines. Ruthie’s favorite was Katherine Hepburn, while I thought Norma Shearer was the greatest. I used the money Dad paid me for cutting out pictures of buildings for him and any baby-sitting I could get to go to the movies. Dad was quite strict about what it was proper to do on Sundays and we weren’t supposed to go to movies, but by saying I was going to play at Jane Hootman’s or Louise Huddleson’s, I went as often as I could. Boogie was my favorite pet. She was a cocker spaniel and she was never allowed to sleep in the house. Dad made her a doghouse in the garage and from the time we got her, she slept there. We had a number of cats, all of whom seemed to be female, because we had numerous litters of kittens. We couldn’t give them all away, and I was horrified when I once saw Dad get rid of them by putting them in a paper sack Sally’s Story ..... 179 and attaching it to the exhaust pipe of the car so they would be asphyxiated. I also think he drowned some of them in an old barrel he had in the garage. Aunt Jane spent a number of years in the thirties serving as the hostess at Seabury Western Theological Seminary in Evanston, Ill. during the school year. While she was in Evanston, she had Mary and me come to visit and it was a thrilling trip. We went by ourselves on the train to Chicago. I must have been about 11 and Mary about 9. Mom gave us money to go to the dining car for our lunch and we felt very grown-up. Aunt Jane met us in Chicago and took us to Evanston on the El. She gave us a wonderful time, although I don’t remember what all we did except to go shopping in downtown Chicago to see the decorations at Marshall Fields. They had an enormous Christmas tree in the atrium of the store and it was all decorated with real toys. Needless to say we were awed. I don’t remember how long we were there, but Nell came from Saginaw to bring us home. One of her friends, Elsie Harris, was with her. She was quite a character and I didn’t know quite what to make of her, but she kept us laughing most of the way home. As we were driving along, a car behind us began to indicate that we should pull over. It was just a plain car and Nell ignored it for quite a while. It finally passed us and as it did, the occupants held up sheriff’s badges. So Nell stopped and they accused her of some traffic violation and bawled her out for not stopping sooner. She turned right around and bawled them out for not having a marked car so she knew who was signaling her. They got quite defensive for they were not in uniform either. They had been out hunting and when Nell started accusing them, they turned very friendly and showed us what they had caught and let us go on with a mild warning. When Jane came down with scarlet fever, we were all quarantined for two weeks. We would stand in the yard and talk to our school friends as they went back and forth to school. I believe it was one of those days of quarantine that we were in the front yard and were eating suckers. A bee landed on George’s sucker just as he was putting it in his mouth and the bee stung his tongue. That was more than a bit uncomfortable! 180 ..... Sally’s Story

I think with horror about how thoughtless of Mom I was during my high school years. Those were the years when Dad was ill and forced to retire from the college. It was about three years that he was in bad health and had several hospitalizations. She was worried about him and about finances and I offered her no support or assistance. I fault her somewhat for never sharing her concerns with us and making clear to us just how sick Dad was at times, but I should have been more sensitive to her. I did help with the money worries by doing a lot of baby-sitting and earning enough with my job at the Lodge to buy all my own clothes. But it wasn’t a conscious effort to help out. It was more the freedom it gave me to buy what I wanted, and to have things I knew Mom wouldn’t feel we could afford. The one way I did help was to drive the car for Mom, taking her to church and grocery shopping. One time when Dad was in the hospital, Great-aunt Sarah, Mom’s aunt who lived in Saginaw, died and Mom wanted to go to the funeral. I drove her over and back, but she didn’t tell Dad we were going until after we got back. She was afraid he might not like my taking the car that far, especially since gas was rationed at that time and we didn’t have a lot of it. As the only boy, George had a bedroom of his own. The four girls shared two rooms and who roomed with whom changed periodically. George had a record player in his high school and college years and every morning would put on a record while he was getting dressed. As a consequence, I grew up with an extensive knowledge of Gilbert and Sullivan and the popular musicals of the day, since these were his favorites. I got to know many of the songs so well that I knew all the words. In those days, Gilbert and Sullivan operettas were popular performances for high schools. George and Ruth both were in them. Ruth was in the fairy chorus in Iolanthe and I have a clear picture of her “dancing” around the stage in her fairy costume and high top gym shoes—the kids weren’t allowed to go barefoot! By the time I reached high school, Gilbert and Sullivan were no longer performed. The musical show was more of a review and I was not part of it. But, like George, I have never lost my love of those operettas and go to see them whenever I can. I did try out for the junior play but didn’t get a part, which didn’t help my self-confidence. Sally’s Story ..... 181

I remember very well George being the bishop in the play Nothing But The Truth. The whole family went to see him in it. Mom and Dad sat on the main floor, but Mary and I chose the front row of the balcony so we could see better. Right in the middle of a very quiet moment in the play, Mary let out a resounding burp. George even heard it backstage and knew it was one of us. I about died of em- barrassment and wanted to crawl under my seat. The Aunts did a great deal to encourage our interest in musical comedy. They saw all the shows and Nell, with her love of singing, learned all the words to the music and passed them on to us. They took each of us on a trip when we graduated from high school, which often included a few days in New York, where we were taken to a show or two. Since I graduated just at the end of the war, when gas was still rationed, they could not take me on a tour of the East Coast as they had the older kids. Instead, Nell and I took the train to New York and spent a week there. We really took in the shows—if I recall correctly, we went to seven plays and musicals. I loved every minute of it. When we went out to the Statue of Liberty, it began to pour. We were dressed up then in city clothes, which meant high heels. My feet were so soaked that I could not stand to wear them so took them off and went barefoot till we got back to the hotel. Were my feet filthy! As is obvious, the Aunts had a tremendous influence on our lives. They were our fairy godmothers. They introduced us to many of the finer things in life, and as three single women leading very satisfactory lives in the working world, they were wonderful role models for my sisters and me. I grew up in a time when marriage was the be-all and end-all for women. Like all other girls I wanted to get married, but with the Aunts’ example, I knew that life could be very satisfying if I didn’t. I have fond memories of many of the things the Aunts gave me. One was a dress, a navy blue print school dress with “New York” printed all over it in yellow and red. It had a circular skirt which I just loved. I would spin around to make it fly out in a circle. I wore that dress every day that I could. Sometimes I think I wore it every day for a week. Another dress I loved was what we called my Dresden china dress, because the colors and the print made us think of a very delicate piece of Dresden china. It was a pale pink taffeta with a very dainty 182 ..... Sally’s Story

blue flower print and a blue velvet sash. It was a beautiful dress and I loved it dearly. When I was to be married, the Aunts took me on a shopping trip to Detroit and bought me a beautiful navy blue going- away suit and white straw hat. One summer Forrest, Dad’s brother and Marian, his wife, invited me to go with them to a cottage for a week before I went to Traverse City. I didn’t want to go because I wasn’t comfortable with them, but I felt I had to. I did have fun swimming and playing with my cousin Marilyn, but her sister Betty was a bit of a spoiled brat and was always making things hard for us. Marian and Forrest seemed to bicker a lot and Forrest was very critical and authoritarian at meal times and I hated that. I was very happy when the week was over. Dad’s other brother, Dale, lived in Royal Oak and we saw them a couple of times a year. Dale was very playful and a great tease and Gladys, his wife, was a very warm, out-going person who made everyone feel very welcome. Their daughter, Nancy, was my age and we were great friends. We couldn’t wait to get together to play when we were little and as we grew older, our folks let us visit each other by ourselves. It was fun to go to Nancy’s and I became quite well- acquainted with her friends. One thing that always intrigued me at Uncle Dale’s—Aunt Gladys always served cookies as a dessert for breakfast. I thought that was a heavenly idea. When we were in high school and I went to visit Nancy, she would arrange dates for me. Since I never dated in East Lansing and was pretty much out of the social loop, this was a big thrill for me. Once she fixed me up with a boy 6’4” tall. It wouldn’t have been a problem, except that I didn’t dance very well and trying to dance with him was very difficult. I was quite embarrassed. After the dance, we went to a hamburger joint where you sat at the counter and your hamburger and coke were delivered to you on a little train that ran the length of the counter. Nancy also worked with Mary and me at the Lodge one summer, and that was the summer that we started to smoke. We were feeling rather rebellious at the Aunts’ close supervision, and smoking made us feel more grown up. We also knew it was something adults didn’t approve of our doing. Sally’s Story ..... 183

Nancy and I went to the University of Michigan together. I remember once we were in the same German class and the professor was calling roll. We had both cut class the last session and as he called our names, he said, “Miss Nancy Musselman, you were absent last time, weren’t you?” She replied that she was. Then he asked the same question of me. Then he said, “You are twins, aren’t you?” When we said no, he asked us how far apart we were in age. We said we weren’t sisters, but we decided afterwards we should have said two months, and let him try to figure that one out. Dad’s father had been a farmer in Ohio, and after he retired, he lived in Florida during the winter and would stay mostly with Uncle Dale during the summer, but he would spend a few days with us. Since Dad married late and Grandpa Musselman was killed in a car accident when I was about ten, I never got to know him very well. My only memories of Grandpa Musselman’s death was that Glad and Dale and the kids came to East Lansing and my greetings to them were totally insensitive to the occasion. I was only delighted that Nancy and Mickey were coming. I was quite embarrassed after my rousing welcome that all the adults were so somber and weepy. The other event which made Grandpa M’s funeral notable was that Aunt Grace came from California. Until that point, I did not even know that Dad had a sister, Grace. Before the war and while we were too young to work at the Lodge, Dad would often bring us home in time to go to the Luce reunion. This was a reunion of members of his mother’s family and was usually held in a park in Sherwood, Ohio. I did not like to go. The ride there was long and when we got there I didn’t know anybody, and there never seemed to be any kids who would play with Mary and me. It was okay if Dale and family were there because I could play with Nancy and Mickey, but I still hated being reintroduced year after year to relatives I didn’t remember. I also was a little snot about some of Mom’s relatives. She had a cousin, Marian Prall, who moved to East Lansing when I was in high school. We weren’t close, but there was some interchange between the families, usually having dinner together. I remember Mom insisting that I go when I raised a fuss about it and being very sullen and unpleasant about it while we were there. Mom must have been very 184 ..... Sally’s Story

disgusted with me. It was very boring, though. Marian’s two boys were younger than I and we had nothing in common and they were just as uninterested in Mary and me as we were in them. Since I had watched the baby goat being born when I was about seven, I knew where babies came from but I didn’t know anything else until after I matured. I started to menstruate at age eleven and was totally unprepared for it. When I first discovered blood in my under- pants, I hollered frantically for Mom. She came, took one look, called to Jane to take me upstairs and fix me up. Not one word was said about what was going on. I went to bed with a stomach ache which might have been cramps, but also might have been stress. I was scared to death, too scared to ask any questions because nobody ever talked about such things. I never did and went for a long time without knowing when to expect my period, how often it would come and how long it would last. Eventually I found that the couples for whom I baby-sat often had books that taught the facts of life and I learned what I needed to know about all aspects of sex from their marriage manuals. I wanted desperately to be popular in high school, but at the same time, I felt I didn’t fit in. The children I had been closest to growing up, Mary Ball and Marilyn Adams, were part of the social elite of my class. In high school they moved with the jocks and the cheerleader group, the group to be envied. When I did try to join in their group activities, however, I didn’t enjoy myself because the things they did seemed so silly and I just felt on the outside. I remember many afternoons when I came home from high school and cried on Mother’s shoulder about how unpopular and what a social failure I was. She listened with endless patience and repeated her bromide “Your turn will come” over and over. She was right, of course, but it didn’t help much at sixteen. There was another group which moved quietly through their own social events, but I was too enamored of the top group to see that they might offer me more companionship. I never made an effort to join that group. It wasn’t till late in my senior year in high school that I realized that this other group had so much to offer. They decided that every kid in the class should go to the senior prom and paired couples up so that we all could go. They arranged for me to pair up with Pierre Gonon. He was a boy who had not lived in East Lansing very long so Sally’s Story ..... 185 he was still a bit of an outsider. We were included in the dinner beforehand and going for hamburgers afterwards, all that the prom consisted of in those days. I was very happy to have a chance to go, although my date was not thrilling, and was very grateful to the kids who planned it all. I was a very good student and enjoyed learning. Dad had an unusually advanced view for his time of what women could do. It never occurred to him that his daughters couldn’t have any career that they wanted. He was totally unaware of the social pressures that were placed on women to get married, or to do only those things that were “women’s work.” Because I did so well in chemistry and physics, he thought I would make a good engineer and tried to persuade me to head in that direction. I talked to both my chemistry and physics teachers and both agreed that I could do the work with no problem. Mr. Fuller, the physics teacher, was realistic enough to warn me that it was a man’s world and that I would find it very difficult to be accepted in that world. After talking to him, I felt enormous relief, for now I had a reason not to do it—which I think I was looking for. I did decide to major in chemistry, but that only lasted until the first semester in college, when I found my real interest lay in the social sciences. Because I felt so out of place in high school, I kept thinking that, if I could just get out of East Lansing, I could make a new start and be much happier. As a consequence, I didn’t settle for going to MSC, but applied for a scholarship to the University of Michigan. It involved taking a test, getting recommendations and of course, a good grade point average. I got the scholarship, which paid 4 years of tuition as long as grades were held up. With that, and my pay from the Lodge, plus some working during the school year, I was able to pay for almost all of my college years in Ann Arbor. I did make a new start in Ann Arbor and enjoyed those years tremendously. Although I didn’t accept Dad’s idea of engineering, he was very pleased when I settled on economics, which in those days was also a man’s world. I was one of only two women in the department. Since World War II had just ended, there were very few men on campus that first semester. By my second year they were flooding the campus as huge numbers of veterans started to school under the GI 186 ..... Sally’s Story

Bill. The colleges were all over-crowded and having to adjust rapidly to such enormous growth. They were still dominated by men. Only 5% of the women in my age group went to college in those days. With so many students being older and intent on getting on with their lives after years in the service, the student body was generally more serious and very hard-working. I dated a number of not very memorable men on a casual basis. We often went to the Union to dance on Saturday night. This was the era of the big bands and ballroom dancing was a popular activity. I was never very comfortable dancing, though, because I wasn’t very good at it. Competition was stiff in the classroom and there was much interest in national affairs, as recovery from the effects of war dominated the news. I voted for the first time in 1948 and there was much excitement over the election. This was the election that Thomas Dewey was predicted to win. Ballots were still counted by hand then and returns took a long time coming in. It wasn’t completely determined that Harry Truman had won until the next morning. Students gathered in large numbers on the “Diag” the next morning discussing the outcome. I worked very hard in Ann Arbor and loved it. I lived in a dorm, Stockwell Hall, all four years, being opposed to sororities and also unable to afford one. I made several very good friends there and we generally had a lot of fun. I had a wonderful roommate my first year, by the name of Wilma Lyons. She and I got along famously. Having my cousin, Nancy there as a freshman was also a plus. There was an eternal bridge game going. Bridge was the first thing I learned when I arrived at the dorm as a freshman. I was not always a “good” girl. I remember my first drunk in my freshman year. I came back to school after semester break a little early and so did a student from New York. In those days New Yorkers could buy liquor at 18, whereas we had to wait till 21. This girl had brought back a fifth of whisky with her. She and I and one other girl pretty much polished it off that first evening. I staggered back to my room and fell into bed. Of course the bed immediately began to rock and within a very short time, I was getting nauseous. It got worse and worse and finally, I struggled up and tried to get to the john, but no sooner was I on my feet, when my stomach said “no more” and deposited its Sally’s Story ..... 187 contents all over the floor, including our throw rug. While other girls complained about the horrible smell, I struggled to clean it up. However, there wasn’t much I could do about the rug. I had no facilities for washing it. So the only thing I could think of was to wrap it up and send it home to Mom, with a white lie about how it happened. I have wondered many times what the poor postman thought was being sent. Because my high school years were spent during the war years, there were quite a few restrictions on life, including rationing of gas, meat, butter and other food items. We saved metals like foil, copper and tin cans. These restrictions lasted for several months after the war ended and were still in effect when I went to Ann Arbor. We had to turn in our ration books at the dorm and for the first six weeks of the semester, we had no meat at meals at all. One night the rumor flew through the dorm that we were having meat for dinner. Everyone was thrilled. However, when we went down to dinner, we found that, yes, we had meat, but it was liver—what we came to call “shoe leather” in later weeks because it was so poorly prepared. What a disappointment! I met Lynn Phelps in the fall of my senior year. The girls at Stockwell were invited to a men’s dorm for a listening party. Michigan was playing the football game away from Ann Arbor and it was quite usual for dorms to host parties where the student listened to the game on the radio. When the invitation was issued through the social director, my roommate was specifically requested to come. She was intrigued with who could be asking for her and wanted to go, so I agreed to go with her. When she arrived, she was immediately snagged by the young man who had asked for her. I was approached by Lynn, who was doing his duty as a resident assistant. We chatted quite a while, but I left without feeling that I had met my future. I was quite surprised when he called the next weekend and asked me out. From then on we began to date steadily. We had a lot of fun with my roommate and other close friends and their dates. By spring we were beginning to talk marriage. It was shortly after I met Lynn that I had another incident with alcohol. At that time, my two closest friends and I all turned twenty- one and could legally drink. We decided to have a cocktail party before the fall dorm dance. I invited Lynn. We borrowed Helen Gower 188 ..... Sally’s Story

Henderson’s apartment (she grew up next door to us in East Lansing), thought we knew how to make Manhattans and had the party. Our drinks were deadly and of course, we were higher than kites when we went to the dance. In the middle of the dance I got sick to my stomach and made a mad dash for the john. Just as I straightened up after losing all my drinks in the toilet and flushing it, I saw my corsage had fallen in and was disappearing down the drain. Since I still didn’t know Lynn very well, I was too embarrassed to tell him what had happened. I pretended it must have just fallen off and we looked all over the dance floor for it. Of course the girls in the dorm had lots of fun over the incident and made endless oblique references to it. They even gave me a miniature toilet with a rosebud in it for Christmas, accompanied by an hilarious poem. Along about February I told Lynn what had really happened. It was amazing that he hadn’t learned of it earlier with all the fun we had over it. Studying was a joy to me and I tackled a heavy schedule. I chose my major, economics, not only because it interested me, but also because it was very challenging. It was also considered a men’s course, since there were very few women in the department. I was one of two in my class who majored in it. I remember taking a course called price theory in my junior year. I did not realize that this was a course many graduate students took, too, so I had stiff competition in the class. I was horrified when I faced the first bluebook. There were two essay questions and I couldn’t even begin to answer the second and felt I did a lousy job on the first. I came out of that test sure that I had failed it. Actually everyone else had as bad a time as I and I ended up with a B on it. My academic record was very good and each year I was on the list for the Honors Convocation. I don’t think Mom and Dad missed one of them. I made the honor fraternity, Phi Kappa Phi, but missed Phi Beta Kappa. One classmate chose all her class load with an eye toward getting admitted to Phi Beta Kappa, but she was admitted to Law School in a joint curriculum in her senior year. So she wasn’t eligible. Boy, was she mad! I had never given that a thought in choosing my classes. I certainly would never have chosen econ if that had been my goal, for there were a number of classes, like statistics and accounting, which were real pains for me. Mary’s Story ..... 189

Following graduation, I got a job in the economic analysis department at Ford Motor Co., at the corporate headquarters in Dearborn. It was difficult without a car to find a place to live and I heard of a woman in Ann Arbor who commuted. She had room in her car, so I found a room in Ann Arbor, and rode back and forth with her. The fact that Lynn was there was a big incentive. He had been admitted to medical school and was buried in his first year. We would go out for short breaks on an occasional week night and see each other on weekends. He gave me an engagement ring at Christmas and we decided to get married in June. The job at Ford was a good one for a woman just out of school in those times, but it was boring and I found the practical application of economics did not appeal to me at all. My job involved a lot of compilation of statistics, making graphs and charts. It really did not involve anything that challenged me at all, since all analysis was done by the men. But that didn’t thrill me either. I was given one project that Henry Ford II asked for directly. It was a analysis of bicycle manufacturers. I spent several days combing the Detroit Library for information, but since most of the bike producers then were privately held companies, the statistics weren’t available and there was little I could come up with. I never knew why he wanted the information. At the end of my first year after graduation, Lynn and I were married and so began the next phase of my life.

Mary’s Story I was born on an extremely cold night on January 9, 1930. I was the fifth and last child of Harry and Anne Musselman. It was the beginning of the Great Depression and I am sure my arrival was more a concern and a worry than a blessed event at that time. Mother later said that it was very comforting to rock and nurse a new infant and shut out the problems and worries facing everyone. My first memories were experiencing the swirl of people around me and a full dining room table. I sat on my Mother’s left and I think I had that seat for the rest of my time spent in that house. A very early memory was my mother on the telephone (in the dining room) talking ➥ 190 ..... Mary’s Story

to my dad, telling him that my sister Jane was diagnosed with Scarlet Fever and would have to go to the “contagious” hospital. She was crying and I am sure very frightened. It was such a vivid memory that I expect I was frightened too. Mothers weren’t supposed to cry. Of course, Scarlet Fever was much more serious then because penicillin had not been discovered yet. The telephone was in the corner of the dining room at that time and was later put in the kitchen. Mother had a predictable schedule when I was little and I think that schedule stayed pretty much the same until Dad retired. She always wore rather worn cotton house dresses, older shoes, a worn sweater (always had on a corset) and this was her outfit for her morning chores (Monday wash day, Tuesday ironing, the rest of the week other chores along with daily cooking both lunch and dinner for the whole family). In the afternoon she changed her clothes to a nice dress and shoes. Some days she would go to various organizations such as Faculty Folk Club, St. Elizabeth’s Church Guild, League of Women Voters, Girl Scout Council, etc. I do remember that in my very early years, Mother had a cleaning woman once a week. During the depression many women needed to work to help their families. On Saturday, Mother made about seven loaves of bread, baked a cake or pie and cleaned up the house again with the help of my sister, Jane. Sunday we always had a nice dinner about one o’clock and then Sunday evening was snacks (popcorn and apples were a favorite). Dad’s schedule was just as predictable. Every day he went to the college to his office in the Agricultural Building and even had to go in on Saturday mornings. When he came home on weekdays, he sat and read the paper and we always had supper at six. He would listen to the news on the radio right after supper and we weren’t to be too noisy at that time. On Saturday he tended to the outside of the house and the car. He even repainted our old Willys-Knight a couple of times. I know that I always felt very comfortable and secure at home. I was always glad to come home. When I did come home after elementary school I liked it best when Mother was there which she was the majority of the time. I particularly remember coming down the hill toward our house on my way home from ice skating. It was dusk and the first thing you see is the lighted dining room windows Mary’s Story ..... 191 and the table was set. I felt such warmth and comfort at the thought of being home. I was the youngest child and life was fairly easy for me. However, it was not always perfect. I think I must have observed my older siblings’ behavior and learned what was acceptable behavior and what was not. I really don’t remember much strong discipline. There was the threat of the razor strap but it was never applied. I was always pretty careful around Dad so as not to bring his wrath down on me. Being the youngest, I was probably spoiled and I do remember having a tantrum or two and once having Dad put my head under the faucet to cool my temper. Mother was never very harsh about discipline but she had a way of showing her disapproval without words. I was always sorry after misbehaving as I so longed for both Mother’s and Dad’s approval. Although I shared a room with Sally at first, I eventually moved in with my oldest sister Jane. George had his own room, and Sally and Ruth shared a room. I think Jane and I even shared a bed. Jane is eleven years older than I so the bedroom was mostly hers. Thinking back I realize how difficult it was for her to go through the teen years with a little sister getting into her stuff and not really having any privacy. Jane did get on my case every Saturday morning when she cleaned. It was best to go to a neighbor friend’s house to play and stay clear of our house. When I was sick, and I think it was the same for Sally, I was brought downstairs to Mother and Dad’s bedroom for the day so if I needed anything Mother didn’t have to run up and down stairs. That was rather comforting. Most of our toys (books, dolls and doll related items) were kept in the sun room and Sally and I were the only ones playing with toys by this time. The older siblings were beyond toy playing. Sally and I were brought up together as we were the youngest and still needed the most supervision. I played a lot with my neighborhood friends. I spent a lot of time down at the Huddlson’s house playing with Mary and Louise (mostly Louise who was two years older). Things were very loose at their house and we could find lots to play at and with. Mrs. Huddleson was a very casual housekeeper, a wonderful cook and lots of fun to be around. Dr. Huddleson, when he was home, shut himself in his den so we didn’t bother him. There were many other playmates and we 192 ..... Mary’s Story

had the whole quiet street to ourselves. We would take long bike rides out to the country and also over to the college barns to see the animals, particularly in the spring when the baby animals were very new. Other games we played were Scrub Baseball, May I and Kick the Can. Of course we talked and speculated on sex and growing up. At home we played with our dolls and later with our paper dolls. We drew and colored new clothes for the paper dolls and then made up stories about them. The scenarios were all pretty much the same. Our woman paper doll would finish college, then go to New York City and have a career, usually as a model, and then, of course, meet the man of her dreams and get married—end of story! Our play was mostly in the sun room, but at Christmas time the tree was put up in the sun room. It was rather chilly in that room in the winter. It had lots of windows and to save on heat Dad would shut off the register and close the glass doors going into the sun room. He was always working to save on heat costs one way or another. We had mighty cold bedrooms on winter mornings. I also liked to play upstairs. I liked to listen to my brother’s records. We had an old wind-up Victrola downstairs but George had an electric phonograph with a nice collection of records. George’s bedroom was the most interesting. Because of the style of the house the room had a sloping ceiling and interesting small windows. You could go through his closet and there was a door at the back to go into the attic. There were old trunks and other things stored there. Playing upstairs sometimes did lead to trouble. My friend Louise and I were snooping into my sister Jane’s things (make-up, etc,) and we pulled out the bottom drawer of the high dresser to stand on to look on the top. The weight pulled the dresser over and created a crashing sound. We knew we were in trouble. Louise tore downstairs to run home and flew by my dad who was running upstairs to see if anyone was hurt. I don’t recall any punishment. I think he was glad no one was injured. Dad always seemed to be working on some project. He would paint the car, work on something in his basement workshop or at his desk in the sun room. Our basement was very much a basement, or should I say cellar. When you came down the steps all the way, you came into Mary’s Story ..... 193 the laundry room. There was a big table by the steps where the laundry came down the clothes shoot and piled up on the table. The washing machine was by the table and the rest of the room had lines to hang the laundry when it was too cold or rainy to hang outdoors. There was also a room with shelves where all the home canned goods and the pickle barrel were stored. There was another small store room. The whole other half of the basement had a very large furnace and Dad’s workshop. Dad experimented with different kinds of food preservation including dehydrating, juicing and making sauerkraut. He also dabbled in wine making. One time be brought the jugs of wine up to the dining room where it was warmer. I don’t really remember why (perhaps to speed fermentation). We were having Sunday dinner and all of a sudden a jug blew its plug and sprayed all over. In spite of the mess, everyone laughed, including Dad. When I was born my mother was 40 and my dad was 50. In primary school I was not aware of the difference between the ages of my parents and my peer’s parents. By junior high I was more aware of the difference. Particularly when my dad was retired from Michigan State and I was only in eighth grade. He had been very ill with a botched gall bladder surgery. That summer he deteriorated so much—and finally had a successful repair surgery at the University of Michigan and began to get his strength back. Also, World War II was going on then and the Allies had begun the invasion of Europe. It was a very worrisome time for my mother. There she was with a husband who was extremely ill, my sister Jane getting married and her new husband Hope being shipped over to Europe. To top it off, my mother did not drive. Fortunately, one could get a driver’s license at 14 so my sister Sally could be of some help. Mother did not share her worries with us and I have no doubt money was one of the big ones. I just don’t remember being terribly concerned myself. Of course my dad would get well. My sisters husband would be O.K. We would always have the money we needed. I was probably so absorbed with the angst of adolescence and being a part of the school social scene that I wasn’t aware of the worries. My mother just quietly carried the burden. She always kept worries to herself. The country was coming out of the depression by the 1940’s and 194 ..... Mary’s Story

during the war everyone was working. East Lansing was changing. The town had been mostly faculty and local business people and a few people who worked in Lansing. By the time I was in upper elementary school and later there were more executives from the auto industry and related businesses living in East Lansing. There was definitely a more affluent group of residents. My parents never really discussed money in front of us. I never felt poor but I just knew we definitely had less discretionary income than some of my school friends, and I knew there were things I would never ask for or expect. I felt our house was rather old and tacky. I loved it and felt very comfortable there but I wasn’t too thrilled to have friends over. In addition, I had older parents and a retired dad always there. There really was no place for me to be alone with friends. Some of my girl friends would pick me up on the way to high school and would come in and finish off their hairdos in front of our living room mirror. Of course, there was my dad sitting in the living room. I am not sure what I was embarrassed about—whether it was the chatter of my friends in front of Dad or my dad sitting there in the living room in front of my friends. It was all part of the angst I mentioned. My mother would say, “The hardest part of having a baby at 40 is having a teenager at home in your late fifties.” My dad was in his late sixties and retired! I don’t think it is so uncommon today. Fortunately, very early my sister Sally and I had a great opportunity to work summers at Indian Trail Lodge. The war made it a little more difficult to find help and both Sally and I were already knowledgeable about waiting table. So at thirteen I began to wait on overflow crowds and the next thing I knew I was full time and had regular tables. I worked every summer after that until I finished college. From that first year on I bought my own clothes, had my own spending money, and paid my way through M.S.U. I am sure it made a big difference for Mother and Dad. As soon as the war was over Mother began to rent rooms to male college students, so I had to share an upstairs with at least two males. I don’t even recall that it was much of an inconvenience, although one once threatened to come into my room. In addition to feeling rather poorer than my friends was the political preference of our family. From the time I remember my first Mary’s Story ..... 195 election when FDR ran against Landon I would hear talk at school from kids on the playground that FDR was socialistic, etc. Most of the kids at school came from Republican families and I found myself getting into arguments about who was a better candidate. The whole experience made me feel somehow different from others and it was always important for me to have our candidate win. Of course, politics was a common subject at the dinner table. I remember being upset by a boy in my class whose father worked under my dad at the college. He told about how his father and fellow employees joked about their Democratic boss. I knew whom he was talking about and I felt angry and uncomfortable. When I was in junior high Mother ran for the school board. It was quite a controversial election with one faction anxious to oust the superintendent and one faction rather loyal to him. My mother sided with the faculty and knew the schools needed a change to a new superintendent. Mother won her seat on the board. The superintendent resigned. Morale among the teachers improved. I was proud of my mother but I was concerned that maybe some of the talk would reflect on me with my peers. The bottom line was that they didn’t know or care about a school board election. Mother and Dad went to every activity we were in in high school. So did both Aunt Marion and Uncle Forest (Dad’s brother living in East Lansing). I loved being part of the high school scene and participated in everything I could. I was in the junior and senior plays, many assembly skits, chorus and musical shows, officer of the senior class and active in getting “guys” elected to the offices of President of the Student Council or Senior Class President—heavens, that it should be a girl! I was a good but not outstanding student and avoided the sciences as much as I could. Being the fifth child, the pressure was definitely less to come home with top grades. Seeking my peer’s approval was much more important. I really don’t remember Mother and Dad saying much about it. Dad had by this time become very loose with the car and in my senior year gave me a set of keys for it. Of course, I was expected to drive Mother on errands when she needed to go someplace. Times had definitely changed since my oldest sister’s day when she had to muster her courage to ask for the car. Dad took a long time to adjust to retirement. It was very difficult 196 ..... Mary’s Story

for him. He became quite depressed and moody and I was very much aware of it. Mother was enjoying working again. She was teaching a night class in the Lansing school system and teaching a class at the TB Sanitarium in Lansing. Both positions were in her field of home economics. The household had definitely changed in my high school and early college years. For a while, I was the only child at home. Sally sometimes came home from the University of Michigan and sometimes one or the other of my siblings would come home. After I was in college my sister, Ruth, came home to work on her Ph.D. On the whole, though, I never had much supervision and was pretty much left alone. Occasionally Dad would get on my case since it was hard to avoid him. One morning at breakfast I was doing some last minute cramming and he decided to start lecturing me on how I should study ahead and shouldn’t be doing it now. Needless to say, he made me very angry and ruined my cramming time. I do remember our Christmases as very special. I really think my mother loved Christmas. We definitely made it quite traditional. We didn’t begin Christmas preparations until after Mother’s birthday, Dec. 15. I think she probably made her fruitcake before that. We never put up our tree any sooner than a day or so before Christmas. Dad always looked for a bargain tree and then would try to do a little patching to fix it up. One time he tried to move a branch from the bottom to the middle to fill it out. It was less than successful. His comment was, “Now I know why they say only God can make a tree.” After the lights and balls were on the tree, my sister Jane controlled how the tin foil icicles were to be placed on the tree one by one in just a certain way—no just throwing them on. Even after she was not around at Christmas we always did it her way! We did exchange presents with each other but everything was wrapped and from the time I can remember Christmas, Dad put the presents under our stockings that were hung by the fireplace and then put a rope across the living room. We did not start opening our presents until we had breakfast and made our beds and Mother had finished the kitchen preparations she had to do. When we did sit down to open our gifts we did it in rotation, starting with the youngest right up to Dad. No one opened until their turn. Gift opening went on for quite Mary’s Story ..... 197 a while. Our Aunties were very generous with us at Christmas. My dad resented this and it did create tension between Mom and Dad. The present opening was followed by checking with other neighbor kids to see how they fared with Santa and then we came home to a Christmas dinner. Great Aunt Minnie and her husband Horace came from Lansing to have dinner with us. Before Christmas there was the usual baking and candy making—lots of sugar and good smells. When I was old enough I joined my mother and my siblings to go to the the 11:00 pm Christmas Eve service at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Lansing. Christmas stayed the same every year I was home. I did not learn the facts of life at home. Mother and Dad were not demonstrative and sex (even the word) was never mentioned. Everything I learned, I learned from my friends. We were all very curious and the only way we found out anything was by pooling bits of information. Actually it turned out to be limited but very accurate. I was never told about menstruation but having three older sisters I knew about it and was familiar with the Modess box on the shelf. Mother and I were shopping in Lansing for Easter when I was 12. I went into the restroom, discovered that I was beginning to menstruate. I told Mother. We picked up the necessities and that was that. When I was only about nine we were on a Sunday ride and visited a farmer friend of Dad’s (this was a common outing for us on Sundays). On the way home Dad was telling Mother that Mr. Curley was having trouble with the bull on his dairy farm. I said, “Well, why does he keep a bull anyway?” My Dad just snapped at me, “Never mind now!” I suspected there was something more to learn and eventually did. I honestly don’t think Mother and Dad could talk about sex. My aunts were very much a part of our lives. Two of the aunts lived with their father George Green in the family home in Saginaw, Michigan and worked there. Aunt Nell ran the school cafeteria in a large high school. Aunt Willie worked for the probate court and mostly worked with runaway children and adoptions. When I was very little Grandpa Green still had the fish market and I remember when he gave me a hug there was slight fish odor to his clothes. Aunt Jane worked several different places, but by the time I was aware she was the hostess at Seabury Western Seminary during the school year, and had managed 198 ..... Mary’s Story

and then bought a summer resort, Indian Trail Lodge. Aunt Nell worked at Indian Trail in the summer, running the kitchen and helping in the office. Grandpa Green helped too. He passed away at Indian Trail when I was about seven. I spent whole summers at Indian Trail at a younger age than my siblings. When my grandpa was ill my mother stayed longer to help care for him so I enjoyed almost all summer beaching, swimming, having lots of playmates who were children of guests and having wonderful meals with ice cream every night. Everyone was on vacation so having fun was the goal. There were many jolly times. To this day I look back on those days as perfect summers. Because I had spent so much time there and had free run of the place, I was very familiar with the various jobs. Some of my favorite memories of Indian Trail were the hours on the beautiful beach and fun in the clear water of the bay, playing and talking on the raft, marshmallow roasts on the beach with Aunt Nell playing her ukelele and singing all the old songs which we had learned, making up costumes and putting on shows for the guests, piano sing alongs, the special parties, snickering about some of the weird guests and making lots of friends. I went through my teen summers there. Mother was often not there so the aunts oversaw my comings and goings. They were quite opinionated at times and we didn’t always see eye to eye. At Indian Trail I met so many different people, some a little nuts, some very eccentric, and some just lots of fun. I also enjoyed those who worked at the resort, particularly the black women my aunt brought up from Alabama to work and cook in the kitchen. My Aunt Jane had worked in Birmingham, Alabama and Maude Pierson (she was the main cook) had worked for her there. Maude would bring two or three other women to work with her each summer. Mary Johnson came almost the same number of years as Maude. I loved visiting with these women and joking around with them. I would receive lots of unsolicited advice from them. All of my sisters worked at Indian Trail as waitresses, and my brother worked as baggage boy, driver, gofer, and busboy. There were times when working wasn’t so great. Aunt Jane was not an easy boss. She would get into such a dither and in everyone’s way when she felt rushed. It was best if she never came into the kitchen. I definitely had Mary’s Story ..... 199 it easier working at Indian Trail than my older sisters and brother. I started in the late war years and worked in the post war years. Lunch had been deleted so we only waited table morning and evening. We also didn’t live in tents. People were more affluent and the tips were better. That summer opportunity added a spark to my life. There was no question that I would go to college after high school. I went to Michigan State and lived at home. I paid for everything (clothes, entertainment, books and tuition) all through both high school and college. Mother felt very strongly that a woman should have an education and have some sort of career before she got married. I never questioned that program and just assumed that was what we had to do. I didn’t like college my freshman year and complained about it. My father said rather impatiently, “What do you want to do, work in a dime store?” That seemed to be the only other choice. I fiddled around the first two years of college trying different majors. Before my junior year I had to choose a major so I decided on political science and ended up with a rather general liberal arts degree. Nothing outstanding. Almost all my friends in school were preparing to go into teaching, but in Poli-Sci I was definitely in heavily male dominated classrooms. I joined a sorority, the one my sister Jane had been in, and lived in the house a couple of semesters. I had a good time in college but at graduation I was ready to leave school, home and East Lansing and be on my way to my new adventure. I loved and admired my mother very much. She was kind, tolerant and caring. She took disappointment well and I think her very strong religious faith sustained her over many difficult times. She never complained, raised her voice, or talked about her troubles even when she was ill. My father was very much involved in his own thing and didn’t socialize much. He seemed to always want to work at something either in his basement shop or some other project. During the early years of his unexpected forced retirement he was recuperating from illness and looking at life without meaningful work. It was very difficult for him and he was quite depressed. He worked a little bit later on. After I left home he adapted to his retirement and he and Mother began to have a little more social life. You could always talk to Mother about almost everything, whether it was frivolous or not. Chatting with Dad 200 ..... Mary’s Story

was not the same. Probably, one of the most difficult things between Mother and Dad were mother’s sisters and Dad’s jealousy of them. He resented them showering us with gifts at Christmas and the other special treats that he could not afford. The aunts didn’t handle the relationship well either. However, the family always went to the Green home in Saginaw for Thanksgiving and it was a festive time. Mother learned to skirt around Dad and kept her relationship with her sisters strong. Mother was a devout Episcopalian, and we were all confirmed in the Episcopal church. Dad never participated in this facet of our lives. I think that was also a bone of contention with him but he never offered an alternative and accepted it without saying too much. I feel very blessed with the home and family I grew up in. I always felt secure, loved and accepted. My parents had a very strong moral standard and we were expected to live up to that standard. I am sorry my mother died when I was only 33. There are so many things I would like to have asked her as I went through motherhood and getting older. While I was growing up at home I was all wrapped up in self and didn’t even think of these questions. On the whole growing up at 604 Sunset Lane was good and I am thankful I was so lucky. It was a good run.

➥ Chapter Four ...... Indian Trail Lodge

When Aunt Jane took over management of Indian Trail Lodge for the Grand Traverse Resort Association, she began to think about what kind of a resort it should be. She wanted to make it a truly unique place. Aunt Nell agreed to manage the kitchen. Jane arranged for her Alabama cook/housekeeper, Maud, and a couple of other black women to come north for the summer to cook and work in the kitchen. She hired college girls to wait on tables. Grandpa would be the official greeter and would do the marketing. The resort was located astride Highway US 31 (at that time a gravel road that went north to Charlevoix, Petoskey and Mackinaw City) at the foot of East Bay about three miles east of Traverse City. On the inland portion of the property there was a large house that had been the home of a lumberman, sawmill operator and, for a while, a Congressman by the name of Mitchell. A good sized dining room had been added on the side of the house overlooking Mitchell Creek. The creek emptied into the bay and formed the east boundary of the property. A large Kitchen had also been added on the back of the house. Next door on the other side stood a small house that had been a tenant’s house. A few hundred feet further to the west was another larger house that had been the superintendent’s house. In back of the main house was an ice house. In back of the tenants house was a pump house. Back of that was a garage building to accommodate about ten cars side by side. A couple of these were converted into two bedrooms with a connecting bath, using a recycled footed tub, to accommodate the Alabama kitchen help. The main house, which came to be called “The Lodge,” had five bedrooms on the second floor. The Superintendent’s house, which came to be called “The Annex,” had nine bedrooms on two floors. 202 ..... Indian Trail Lodge

The portion of the property on the bay side of the road, “The Grove,” was about 300 or more feet deep and had about 800 feet of white sand beach. There were a couple of dozen wood floors scattered over this property among the tall pine trees. Wood-frame-and-canvas “close to nature” tents were erected on these each summer. Centered among them was a building with a men’s and women’s toilet and shower and water heater. A couple of additional spigots on the grounds provided cold water. Each tent was equipped with electric light, a wash stand and slop jar, a hall tree for hanging clothes, a dresser, chairs and one double or twin beds. It was somewhat primitive, but comfortable. All in all up to 80 or more guests could be accommodated in addition to the family and some of the help. The place was operated on the “American Plan”—the daily per-person rate included accommo- dations and meals, use of all facilities on the beach, later the tennis and shuffleboard courts. The dining room was also open to transients— people not staying at the Lodge. There were occasions when as many as 120 paying guests would be served at dinner, usually fewer at breakfast and lunch. Another 15 to 20 mem­bers of the family and help were fed breakfast and/or lunch and/or dinner. A core clientele had come to the Lodge, as we came to call it, in previous years and came again in 1927 when Jane Green and her father took over. Other business came in off the highway. Some friends and acquaintances of the Green family from Saginaw came to try it out and, we believe, lend support for the new enterprise. In any event, from the first summer, Jane’s management of the place was a success. The Association was happy with the arrangement. For the first time the place made a profit. The guests showed their satisfaction by coming back year after year. Jane was the manager but all the major maintenance and improvements had the be negotiated with the Association. A man by the name of Hobbs represented the Association. It is presumed he was the president of, or chief officer of, the Association. He would come by with his wife two or three times during the course of the first few summers, ostensibly for a social visit. He really wanted to see how business was going. He drove a Huppmobile of which he was very proud. He kept it waxed and buffed until it shone. He was more Indian Trail Lodge ..... 203 important locally than just for his involvement with the Resort Association and the Lodge. After World War II when the county rebuilt the extension of Garfield Street down to Kingsley they named it Hobbs Highway in honor of him. Indian Trail Lodge was just a small piece of what the Grand Traverse Resort Association owned. All the property from the Lodge west almost a mile to Eighth Street, and from the beach to the railroad tracks, about one eighth of a mile inland, was theirs. This wooded land had all been platted and was just about to be sold for building lots when the depression came along followed closely by World War II. This amounted to about a fifteen year reprieve from the encroachment of urbanization on the Lodge. Those pine woods with bracken and huckleberry undergrowth were a fun place to hike and ride horseback. After World War II when the lots were sold and houses built, and every beach lot had a pretentious house cutting off the view of the bay from the highway, the area lost most of it’s charm. The “close to nature” tents had to be erected and dismantled every year, and the furnishings moved to and from them. This was extremely labor intensive. At the same time people were beginning to expect a little more refinement in their accommodations. Within a couple of years the Association started replacing the tents with simple cottages consisting of one or two bedrooms with plumbing. By the time World War II started twenty four of these cottages had been built. Six more were added after the war. By then there were only three or four tents still in use as housing for the waitresses and a couple of young men who did the chores, carried baggage for the guests, and frequently doubled as waiters. Eventually even these tents were discarded. The little tenant house, which housed the Musselman family when they were at the Lodge, was moved to the back of the Lodge and was used to house the help. Another labor intensive job was providing ice. There was no delivery of artificial ice in the early years. In winter, men with a team of horses would be hired to go out on the bay, cut blocks of ice and haul them into the ice house. Several tons of the blocks were stacked in the ice house and completely covered and surrounded by thick layers of sawdust. Each day or two during the summer season the 204 ..... Indian Trail Lodge

“bell-hop-bus-boy-waiter-all-chore” young men Jane employed would have to fetch blocks of the ice, rinse them off, and put them the kitchen iceboxes. By the early thirties artificial ice could be delivered from town. It was not until after the war that a restaurant type electric refrigerator was installed. Cooking was done on and in a coal fired range. Lighting the fire in the morning was another of the chores that had to be done. Maud knew her range—just how much coal to add, just where on the cook top was the right place for each type of cooking, and just where in the ovens were the best temperatures for baking. When the old range had to be replaced in the later years, Jane was able to find an oil fired range of the same type to make the transition easy for Maud. During World War II, dining room service was scaled back to breakfast and dinner. Take-out sandwiches were prepared to order for lunch. The guests seemed to prefer that to the substantial hot meal previously served at noon. Lunch was less interruptive of their activities. A laundry was in the basement under the kitchen. Originally it was just a wringer washer and tubs. All the table linen was laundered between each use. Tablecloths and cloth napkins were used for all three

The Beach and Cottages at Indian Trail Lodge (circa 1938) Indian Trail Lodge ..... 205 meals. The laundry women carried the wet laundry out and hung it on lines in the garage/icehouse area. Bed and bath linen was sent to a commercial laundry in Traverse City. Domestic water came from a deep well. Even in late summer it came to the surface icy cold. A spigot at the pump house was the place to get the coldest, freshest drink. This was handy to the tennis court and visited frequently by the tennis players. Inside, the pump house was chilly even on the hottest day. Some perishable items like lettuce and fresh flowers were kept there. Of course, the whole water system had to be drained in the fall. Winters were cold and there was no heat anywhere. The primary attractions of the place—the beach, the meals, the family atmosphere, and the quality of clientele—kept people coming back year after year. The customers became more like friends. Jane Green was a truly charming hostess. As long as Grandpa lived, he was also a jolly host. Good humor reigned, and people had fun which was almost guaranteed. From the beginning it was Jane’s intention to include Anne’s family in the scheme of things, if only for the chance to be close to the children for a few weeks each year, and let them have the fun of the beach. The first summer, 1927, she rented a cottage for them in Agosa, a cluster of cottages on the extreme southeast corner of the bay closest to town. Anne was expecting the birth of Sally in September and probably needed the rest. Every day Nell drove down and took Jane, George and Ruth to the Lodge in mid morning. They spent the day there and she drove them back in the evening. One morning, Jane and George, who were eight and six at the time, surprised everyone by walking the mile along the beach to the Lodge. The first few years we went to the Lodge for no more than three weeks. After the first summer we stayed right at the Lodge in “the little house next door.” Dad never stayed more than one or two nights when he took us up and and came back to get us. His work went on through the summer. Also, he was never comfortable there and spent much of his time finding something to do for Jane Green—painting or fixing. Mother got a rest from house work and meal preparation, but she still had to care for us and keep us out from underfoot. In most of those first five or six years she had one or two in diapers which meant she 206 ..... Indian Trail Lodge

had to do laundry every day. She spent hours on the beach under a parasol supervising our play on the beach and in the water. Of course, she couldn’t swim so could have done little to rescue us from deep water, but there were always plenty of other parents on the beach as well. None of the little boats were to be taken out beyond the depth of the first (or little) raft, and the beach sloped very gradually into deep water so it was a fairly safe place for children to play. Besides, it was Mother’s visit “home.” We became very well acquainted with the Aunties and Grandpa. Day times for the guests were taken up with the beach, shuffleboard, tennis, and day trips to Traverse City and the surrounding area or golf on the challenging Traverse City golf course. There was no need to provide any organized activity. Over the years a tradition developed for holding several evening communal activities periodically. About once a week there would be a beach fire/marshmallow roast. Nell would play her ukelele to accompany all the old time songs. This activity was especially popular with the children. The Musselman children were expected to participate, and help with the fire and the singing. It was a fun thing to be obligated to do. At least once a week, if there was anyone there who was willing to play the piano, a song fest, and perhaps some spontaneous dancing, would prevail in the living room. Many of the older folks seemed to like to come and just watch and listen. Another activity that eventually became almost a weekly “must” was a bingo party. One of the guests would usually run the bingo game. There were always card games on the spacious screened porch and the aunts entertained in the office many a night with stories and conversation, which were particularly popular with some guests. An activity that happened spontaneously once in a couple of summers, and then became sort of an end-of-season tradition was a big late-night kitchen party. These were basically make-your-own ham sandwich affairs. The guests who were there for these occasions really thought they were the “in” crowd. In early 1937 the Resort Association decided to sell the lodge. They gave Jane first refusal. She, Nellie and Williamina bought it in partnership—it was considered a big financial step in those days. In the summer of l936 Grandpa green was still functioning fairly well. Indian Trail Lodge ..... 207

One of the Guest Cottages at Indian Trail Lodge

He continued to do the daily shopping for perishable food stuffs, especially the meat, chicken and fish. George or Ruth almost always accompanied him on these excursions. It was evident to George that Grandpa was failing. He had severe prostate problems that interfered with his urination. It embarrassed George that Grandpa felt the need to relieve himself every five minutes, and sometimes availed himself of less than private places. He was also experiencing eye problems due to the rupture of blood vessels in the back of his eyes. In the late fall at home in Saginaw, he suffered a stroke that left him pretty much an invalid. When the spring of 1937 came and he continued to live, the Aunts decided to take him along to the Lodge and care for him there. Jane had the little house next door fixed up with one large room with a half bathroom on the back of the first floor. There they ensconced him. They hired a full time nurse to care for him. Business proceeded as usual throughout the season with one hiccup. He died in the middle of the summer. He was taken to Saginaw for the funeral. All the family attended. The guests were wonderfully sympathetic and helpful. The staff continued the work without a blip. One of the first guests, if not the very first, the first summer was a man by the name of Charlie Deas. He was a Planters Peanut promotion 208 ..... Indian Trail Lodge

man. He drove a peanut shaped vehicle, and had a peanut suit he occasionally wore. He and Grandpa became good friends. He returned many years, always very early in the season. He was the first of many piano players who graced us with their talent. During one of the earliest summers, a family by the name of Timmons came from Dallas for a couple of weeks. In a couple of subsequent summers they brought Mrs. Timmons’ sister, Sarah Williford, with them. Sarah was a single kindergarten teacher, more or less a contemporary of the Aunts. She continued to come after the Timmons stopped, and became very much one of the family. Sarah was a gambler and played the horses. She confessed to Ruth one year that she lost so much money the previous year that she did not have enough to tide her over the summer. She was at the Lodge that summer as a non-paying guest, helping out by tending the front desk, and doing other things that needed tending to. The summer Grandpa died she took charge while the family all went to the funeral. Sarah was great fun to be around. She always had little intrigues going. She had a knack for sizing up people and enjoyed speculating about them. She had an irreverent nickname for everyone that seemed to catch the essence of the person. All the guests liked her, particularly the children. She was a real asset to the place. The Timmons family, mentioned earlier, was not the only family from Dallas that came the first few years. Another was the Richies. The Richies continued to come for many years. They had one son, Bob, who was about Jane’s age. Over those years Bob developed a real attachment to the The Aunts, particularly Nell. He continued to send them a Christmas card with a report on his life and his family every year until Nell died. He had five children, and bunches of grand children when his last card came. Over the years Aunt Jane employed a number of people from the area who are memorable because they came from such different backgrounds from ours. Maud and Louie King had a bare, primitive little house a few doors east across the creek. Louie, especially, had worked for the previous management as caretaker and handy man. He was involved in the off-season work—putting in the ice, assembling and disassembling the tents, raking leaves, etc. Throughout the winter Indian Trail Lodge ..... 209 he did a weekly mouse patrol of the main lodge, emptying and resetting his traps. In the spring there was recorded at each trap location the number of mice he had caught. His knowledge of the place and the things that had to be done were helpful to Jane. Louie had lost an eye and had a hernia that was never fixed. Some summers he worked during the season and some summers he did not. He was tall, lanky and bent. He could crow like a rooster, and if you did not know better, you would think someone in the neighborhood kept chickens. He was rough cut, untutored, and fiercely independent. Jane handled him quite well, but even so he would quit every so often when something annoyed him, usually a guest. In one of the later years Ilya Schkolnik, a violinist with the Detroit Symphony, came with a new wife. His first one, who had apparent mental problems, had died. The new wife was as odd as the first. She believed that the only pure water fit to put in the human body came from the watermelon. So they ate large quantities of watermelon in their cottage and put the rinds in their trash. Louie had to gather the trash. He came into the office after about a week of this and announced. “Jane, either the watermelons go or I go.” Of course , Jane worked it out for him. Maud was a devoted wife to Louie. She was short and heavy with straight short hair, and very earthy. She worked in the laundry, and once a week she would mop and wax the linoleum floors. When she was doing the latter they were her floors—don’t tread on them! Louie died in the late 1940s. Maud lived on into the 1950s. She loved to talk about her miscarriages, illnesses and operations when she was socializing with the family. Her comment to Ruth when she admired three-month-old Jane Alexander was, “How did she come out of you?” Another one of the local help, Mrs. Korb, seemed elderly the first year, but she worked for years in the laundry and washing dishes. She was a widow with a small farm a couple of miles south of the lodge. She had a son, Jerome, whom none of us ever met, but whom we learned much about. He had left the farm, gone to Detroit, and was making a good living. He was her pride and joy. At the end of one summer when George had been particularly friendly with some of the kitchen women, he bought them little token gifts. He gave Mrs. Korb a small box of face powder. The next spring she told him how much 210 ..... Indian Trail Lodge

she enjoyed it. She had never had face powder before. She said she had always used flour. These people were uneducated and very poor. They worked very limited farm land. Their summer employment provided a better livelihood for them, and during the winters these women borrowed books from the little library that accumulated over the years from contributions of family and guests. The Lodge was tremendously important in their lives as well as ours. There was another mousy little woman who washed dishes for many years whose name we do not remember. What we do remember is that she also had lost one eye. Sarah Williford referred to her as OE, and that’s what she became to all of us. One day Nellie had occasion to be a little cross with her about some small thing. OE wept more tears from that one eye into the dishwater than most people could weep from two. Clara Fouch from Traverse City was a chamber maid for many years. The local Buick dealer told Jane one year that Clara and her husband had come into the dealership and bought a new car. When the deal was made, they brought a bucket full of cash to pay for the car—her tips and pay for many years of work. They counted out enough for the car and had a little left over. After one summer later on, Ruth Grossman, a guest from Saginaw, saw Nell in the winter and mentioned that she had a diamond broach that she could not find when she had packed up to leave the Lodge. She did not want to accuse Clara of taking it, but believed that Clara was the one who would have had the opportunity. Nell suggested that she write to Clara, tell her she had missed the broach, and ask her if she might have found it when cleaning up. Ruth did so, and the broach came later in the mail. Clara never showed up again to work at the Lodge. After purchasing the Lodge, Jane was glad to be employed during the winter as hostess at Seabury Western Theological Seminary, because it gave her a living plus a small income so more money could go to pay off the Lodge. There she had a black couple named Clifford and Dafford Sales who worked in the kitchen. She brought them to the Lodge to work three summers. Clifford and Dafford were cordial to, but not friendly with, the Alabama women. The cultures from which they came were too disparate. Clifford and Dafford had the Indian Trail Lodge ..... 211 sophistication that came from living as lower middle class blacks in Chicago. The Alabama women came from a rural deep south existence. Dafford had a beautiful singing voice and knew many of the popular songs of the day. George enjoyed singing with her—especially since she knew “Hey! Babe, Hey!” Both Clifford and Dafford died not too long after their summers at the Lodge. When Maudie and the other kitchen women arrived from Alabama, they were always fairly thin. When thy left at the end of the summer they had gained quite a few pounds. They ate very well at the Lodge. Jane withheld some of Maudie’s earnings, with her consent, and sent them to her through the winter months. Maudie might have been able to manage her money had it not been for the people in need back home who wanted to share whatever she had. Their train journey from Alabama to Traverse was long and arduous, but when they arrived there was an old fashioned bathtub with hot and cold running water waiting for them—something they did not have at home. Once in the later years the group included Zilla, a fairly bright and energetic person, and Evelyn, who made up in flesh what she lacked in smarts—a lot! Shortly after they arrived, Jane saw Maudie running from their quarters shouting “Miss Green! Miss Green!” Jane hurried out to meet her. There was a crisis, indeed. Zilla was in the tub taking her bath and Evelyn, who was to be the next to bathe, sat down on the edge of the tub. Her mass completely unbalanced things. The tub tipped over, spilling Zilla and her bath water onto the floor. It broke the water supply pipes loose and hot and cold water gushed clear to the ceiling. Jane managed to get the water turned off. The next day a plumber was called to reinstall the tub. As calamitous as it was, it provided Jane with a great story to regale people with. Over the years there was a parade of waitresses and waiters, mostly college students and teachers, who came and went. A family by the name of Lewis owned a bank in the little town of Marion, Michigan, about half way between Saginaw and Traverse City. Sarah Lewis was one of the waitresses in the early years. Her brother Ralph Lewis followed her for several summers. Ralph was tall, slim, athletic and cocky. His first summer he became friendly with Bob Richie, a guest somewhat younger then he. In a discussion of physical prowess Ralph boasted that he could run to the end of Old Mission Peninsula, a 212 ..... Indian Trail Lodge

distance of 22 miles. Bob bet him he couldn’t. Ralph spent all his spare time training, made the run and won the bet. This upset Aunt Jane because she was sure it interfered with his work. When George’s children entered Bailey Elementary School in East Lansing, their principal turned out to be Brewster Lewis, a brother of Sarah and Ralph. In the late 1930s we had a Mildred Schrotberger from Galesburg, Illinois. About 1947 we had a Jean Curry from Galesburg, Michigan. Mildred was a middle-aged school teacher—very school teacherish in manner. One evening after the dining room work was done, Mildred was sitting at the writing table in the “office” passively participating in a discussion of the subject of the day. Sarah Williford was behind the counter. At least one of the Green sisters was there and two or three guests. Sarah noticed Mildred suddenly turn toward the writing table, take a piece of stationary and start to write furiously. Several minutes later Mildred came to the counter for a stamp, put it on the envelope, slapped it down on the counter and exclaimed, “There!” and left. Sarah was so curious to know what “There” was all about that she conspired with Ruth to commit a federal offense: steam open the envelope before putting it with the rest of the mail. It turned out that Mildred’s pique was expressed thusly: “Here I sit with a BA degree and I am being ignored!” Jean Curry was also a teacher, but still quite young. She was on the waiting list for a new car (production still lagged way behind the pent-up demand resulting from the war). Her name came to the top of the list while she was at the Lodge, and her dealer arranged for the car to be delivered to her by a Traverse City dealer. Her problem was that she did not know how to drive. It fell to Sally to go with her to pick up the car and drive it back to the Lodge. In the next couple of weeks in their spare time Sally taught Jean to drive. One year in the mid-1930s before the season started, a couple by the name of Faith and Francis Buige stopped at the Lodge to inquire if there might be work for the summer. They were both teachers in the Grand Rapids area. Jane hired them. We do not know if she hired them because Francis played the piano, or if that was just a happy circumstance. Play the piano he did, and very well. For the next few summers we had a resident piano player, and many joyous evenings were spent around the piano listening and singing. One evening Indian Trail Lodge ..... 213 nothing was planned, and George asked Aunt Jane if we could ask Francis to play. Jane acquiesced “If he is willing to.” George went over to their quarters to ask him and caught them just as they were about to go to bed. George lied! He told Francis that Jane wanted him to play. Francis agreed reluctantly, with a lot of “Oh! No!” in his voice. In retrospect George rued his manipulative way. It was a dirty bit of business on his part. These people all worked hard, especially the kitchen and dining room people through the thirties. Three full meals a day were served, and all were hearty and delicious. Fresh squeezed orange juice, hot or cold cereal, bacon and eggs, and wheat cakes were some of the choices for breakfast. Entrees for lunch included such things as timbales, veal or lamb chops and fish turbot. Dinner always offered a choice of chicken, fish and one other meat. Light deserts such as custards were served at lunch. Cherry or huckleberry pie, ice cream and sundaes were offered at dinner. All except the ice cream were made on site. At the end of the thirties the full course luncheon was dropped. Fast frozen food preservation was developed in the mid thirties, but grocers and butchers shops did not have freezers. Turkey had never been available except in the late fall and winter around the Holidays. To help promote a year-round market for turkey, Michigan State College Extension people advised institutional food service managers that frozen turkeys could be procured from wholesale suppliers and encouraged them to start serving it. One such person happened to be at the Lodge and told Jane and Nell about the idea. They decided to try it. The next season, about 1937, they served it as a Sunday dinner option. It turned out to be very popular. As memorable to us as the help were some of the guests who came over the years and who became friends. The first summer Aunt Jane had the Lodge, a party of people by the name of Palmer—Calvin, his wife Anne, his only son “Rap” and Rap’s wife Doris—came from Detroit. Bob and Margaret Anderson from Cincinnati came to be with them. Rap and Bob had served together in the Red Arrow Division in WWI. They liked to party and play golf. We believe it was the following winter that Rap died. Calvin, whom we all eventually came to know as “Uncle Puss,” was of course devastated. To fill the void he adopted 214 ..... Indian Trail Lodge

Bob as a sort of surrogate son. From that time on Uncle Puss and the Andersons rarely missed a summer vacationing together at Indian Trail. In later years, in retirement, they spent several weeks there each summer. They loved the beach and the water, they played a lot of golf, and they partied. Both Bob and Uncle Puss held their liquor well. Bob and Moggie, as Margaret was called, were childless. They seemed to enjoy the family atmosphere of the Lodge, and took a lot of interest in the Musselman youngsters as we grew up. Moggie was a first rate pianist. What there was no music for, she could play by ear. However, the piano bench was stuffed with the sheet music of all the popular songs of the era. She was very generous with her talent. Whenever the Andersons were in residence we could count on a evening or two a week of singing around the piano. After quite a few years Doris Palmer remarried to a man by the name of Bill Ring. He must have been very well to do. That summer she drove up from Detroit ahead of him in a Cadillac convertible with the top down. Of course she and the friend who rode with her had extravagant hats to protect them from the sun. But it was Uncle puss who became the real character of the Lodge. He was portly but handsome, with a fringe of white hair and a white mustache. He always looked very dapper when he dressed up. He had a long line of flattery which he lavished on women, particularly young women. He intimated to the men, especially the young men, that he had an uninhibited side that had led him into some exotic (or erotic?) adventures. He loved to sing and had a repertoire of off-beat little songs that were, if not risque, somewhat irreverent, such as “Sing a Song for Lydia Pinkham!” But he could also sing all the verses of “My Country, Tis of Thee,” and did so on the celebration of VJ Day in 1945—winning a one hundred dollar bet in the process. Uncle Puss owned a car but did not drive it himself. He worked for the City of Detroit and we think the city supplied him informally with drivers. When he wanted a driver at the Lodge, he got one of the young men around the place to drive him. George was recruited for three such opportunities. Once when George was only sixteen he drove Uncle Puss back to Detroit and Uncle Puss paid George’s fare to fly back to Traverse. Another time it was to make his annual pilgrimage to visit some old cronies in Manistee. The third time it was to go fishing, Indian Trail Lodge ..... 215 and Dick Sample, another guest at the Lodge, went along. During these outings he regaled them with stories (confessions!) of his youth. In 1932, in the depths of the depression, a couple of unemployed musicians stopped at the Lodge. We believe they made a deal with Jane to put them up for little or no money in exchange for giving little concerts. Mr. Abas played the cello. Mrs. Abas played a harpsichord which they carried with them in their panel truck. With the help of some of the staff and guests the harpsichord was set up in the back parlor. Their concerts consisted of rather highbrow baroque-type music. They arranged to put on a public concert at the Park Place Hotel in Traverse City and advertised it with posters around town. So after about three weeks at the Lodge, the harpsichord was moved to the Park Place, again with the help of some of the guests. All who helped of course got complementary tickets. They also gave comps in lieu of tips for the people who worked at the Lodge. Without all those complimentary tickets, there would have been very few at the concert. They did not come back to the Lodge after the concert. The next year with times still tough, a five piece combo was playing at Oh-At-Ka Beach, a dance hall a couple of miles up the road. They made a deal with Jane to play for their dinner two nights a week. They set up in the living room and played during dinner. It really added nothing to the place. If anything it was a nuisance. But as with the Mr. and Mrs. Abas, Jane took what she could get for her handouts. Dr. Jack and Gladys Sample were prominent Saginaw people. Jack Sample’s father had been the Green’s family doctor. Gladys was a Humphrey, a family that had made big money in the lumbering business and had interests in mineral wealth in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Gladys’s brother, George M. Humphrey was head of Cleveland Cliffs Iron Company. He became Secretary of the Treasury in the Eisenhower Administration. The Samples started early coming to the Lodge for several weeks each summer, bringing their horses up with them. They were stabled at the Fair Grounds in Traverse City and the Samples, with their two adopted sons, Dick and Tom, rode regularly. Jack was still working and did not stay the whole time. Dick was about Sally’s age and Tom was just Mary’s age. Tom and Mary played together most of the time when they were about five. That summer, Jane had 216 ..... Indian Trail Lodge

had a lot of painting done in the spring. The cans of leftover paints were just inside the basement door from the driveway where the painters had left them. One day Mary and Tom got into them. Before they were found, they had covered themselves with several colors of paint. All paint was oil based in those days, so there was much scrubbing with turpentine before the children were cleaned up. But it was not in the nature of Aunt Jane, Nell and Gladys Sample to scold them. They just laughed about it and it became part of the lore of the place. When the Sample boys reached their early teens, Gladys bought them a sixteen-foot Snipe, a popular sailboat of the era. They anchored it out a ways from shore so it was always ready to go. The boys sailed a lot. Tom liked to push things to the edge, and as a result he capsized the boat frequently. The people on shore were always horrified when they saw it happen. But the boat floated, Tom was always able to right it even- tually, and always made it back. It distressed his mother to the extent that she made a deal with him that she would give him a dime every day he did not tip over, and he would have to pay her a dollar any day he did tip over. Thereafter Tom only capsized about every tenth day. Gladys was a bit of a dilettante and took an interest in the Detroit Symphony. She was particularly friendly with Ilya Schkolnik, the concertmaster. We think it was because of the Sample connection that Ilya and his first wife started coming to the Lodge and so did several other members of the orchestra. Ilya’s wife was heavy, reclusive, and old-world looking (we believe they were actually immigrants from Russia.) She was so isolated from everyone, it was obvious that Ilya looked elsewhere for fun and companionship. He spent a great amount of time playing two-handed pinochle with one of his orchestra cronies. He also liked to play tennis with the Samples. When Jack Sample was not there, Gladys and Elya were more or less equally without partners, so they evened things by being available for doubles, or by playing against each other. No one ever detected a hint of impropriety in the relationship but there was a lot of interesting speculative talk. The McDonalds were another Saginaw family, friends of Aunt Nell, who came several summers. Josephine McDonald was a Greenway, a family that owned a string of newspapers of which the Saginaw Daily News was one. Jack Indian Trail Lodge ..... 217

McDonald was the Editor in Chief of this paper. They had two daughters, Kay and Patsy. Patsy became a particular friend of Mary’s. One afternoon after some tennis, the players repaired to the beach to refresh. Jack McDonald decided to take Sample’s boat for a sail. Gladys went with him. They sailed east to the far side of the bay, and were probably two or three miles from the Lodge when the wind died. And it stayed dead. The afternoon stretched into evening. Back on the beach Jo McDonald began to fret. Had they capsized, she wondered, or even drowned? As more time passed her anxieties rose higher and became more overt. “Why doesn’t someone go rescue them?” she kept asking. Everyone else tried to reassure her that the sailors were perfectly safe—the boat wouldn’t sink and they had life jackets. She would not be mollified. The problem was that she was more worried about what might be going on in the boat. About dark the boat made it back, with much laughter from Gladys and Jack about their adventure. Josephine did not laugh with them. Gladys Sample was a stunning looking woman—tall, slim and fair with a gracious manner. Saturday evening on the last big weekend of one summer when all the other women in the place were giving their best summer clothes another wearing, Gladys appeared for dinner in classic black—dress, hat, gloves and shoes. She absolutely stole the show. It made every other woman in the place feel very ordinary. She was very well aware of her coup, but carried it off without showing the least bit of this awareness. The night Gladys Sample wore black became part of the lore of the Lodge. Another group that came many summers was the Schleuter family from Cincinnati. Mr. Schleuter was the manager of Alms and Depke, a major department store in Cincinnati. Mr. and Mrs. Schleuter had three children. The oldest, Bob, was the age of George. A girl, who we think was epileptic, and another boy completed the picture. Mrs. Schleuter’s father and an uncle also came. And last but not least there was Miss Myers (everyone in the family referred to her as Miss Myers). Miss Myers was also a high ranking employee of Alms and Depke. And it was fairly obvious to outsiders that Miss Myers was a paramour of Mr. Schleuter. But no one in the Schleuter family acknowledged or showed the slightest awareness that anything was going on between them. The 218 ..... Indian Trail Lodge

family seemed to be closely knit, and Mr. Schleuter played the role of husband and father as if there was no other interest in his life. But when he and Miss Myers would stroll off down the beach together he was not playing the role of husband and father. This was another source of lots of speculative talk among the help and the other guests. One summer Gladys Sample and others decided we were going to have a beach parade in costume. Gladys was going to ride her horse from the fairgrounds in the parade in a flesh colored body stocking as Lady Godiva. The Schleuters were there, and Miss Myers called down to the department store in Cincinnati and had them send up a bunch of costumes which she offered to people to wear. Even our parents got into the spirit of the occasion and Dad came down the walk as a cave man with his mate (our mother!) by his side. It was a real shock! Among the cleverest and cutest were Mary as an organ grinder and Tom Sample as her monkey. They were about seven years old. A friend of Jane’s from her Alabama days, a single woman by the name of Olive Hester, came for several years in the mid thirties. She taught biology at one of the Louisiana State Colleges, possibly in St. Charles. She may have come the first time as a paying guest, but in subsequent years she helped at the front desk and with some office work. Her fond- ness for Jane was obvious. She also took over arranging the flowers. There was a gladiola grower that came by about once a week with a panel truck full of gladiolus of all colors. He sold a bunch of twelve for a quarter. The Lodge always bought four or five bunches. Olive had a wonderful time fixing grand bouquets for the front office, living room and porch, and little sprays for each dining room table. On occasions when the glads were not in season she would go out and pick field daisies. Occasionally cut flowers were bought from local small time gardeners. There were always fresh flowers and Olive made that her thing. Every so often a bat would find its way from its nesting niche into the house. That was a signal for anyone present to grab a broom and try to swat it down. If it didn’t get swatted down, it could usually be chased outside. One day someone got one. There were several young people around, and Olive, being the biology teacher that she was, decided to give a biology lesson right then and there in the office. She dissected the bat, giving a brief lecture in anatomy as she did so. We Indian Trail Lodge ..... 219 didn’t figure it out until later, but apparently the Aunts were revolted by this. A day or two later Olive left. Aunt Jane’s only comment some time later was that “Olive didn’t really fit in.” If there was more to this whole thing, and some of us speculate there was, nothing more was ever said about it. Many guests provided us with vivid memories. A couple by the name of Harmon had a daughter, Margaret, who was just Ruth’s age. They were rather dull people from Detroit. Margaret had been trained to play the piano, but her sight reading was almost non-existent. She had enough manual dexterity and memory that she had amassed a small repertoire. But she could not play for anyone to sing because the popular music stymied her if she had to play by sight. The most interesting aspect of her musical talent was that her piano teacher was the composer of “Sweetheart of Sigma Chi,” a song that had escaped its fraternal origins and had become widely known and recorded in the 1930s. Ruth visited Margaret in Detroit once and learned how limited their lives really were and how neurotic Margaret’s mother was. She enjoyed ill health. There were a couple of young men from Cincinnati who came together to the Lodge several summers. Walter Martin continued to come alone after his “friend,” whose name none of us can remember, stopped coming. Walter had taken up with the Hogan family from Saginaw. Carl Hogan and his wife (another one whose name we can’t remember) had two sons who were preteenagers at the time. We were never sure what all the relationships were. Mrs. Hogan was attractive but seemed to have no personality at all. Carl, a lawyer, was quite out-going. The Hogans seemed to take Walter into the bosom of the family. Was either Mr. or Mrs. Hogan particularly attracted to him? Or did they like the attention he gave to the boys? He definitely gave attention (we think unhealthy attention) to the boys! Whatever the case, Walter visited the Hogans at their home in Bridgeport. The home faced US10, the main route from Detroit through Flint and Saginaw to the north. Walter was in the front yard with the boys when the younger one ran onto the highway, was struck and killed. Walter was back with the Hogans at the Lodge the next summer and described the incident in detail to anyone who mentioned it. 220 ..... Indian Trail Lodge

For many years from the late 1930s onward P. (for Peter) F. Trainor and his sister May Trainor, both elderly, came to the Lodge and always had rooms in the Annex. P.F. had been a newspaper writer—we think on the Saginaw News. He had a real flair for writing. He wrote a fine little memorial piece when Grandpa Green died. He also wrote and gave a commemorative address at the Lodge celebration of VJ Day. Their brother Arthur was a wealthy man in Saginaw, and had also been connected with the Saginaw News. We think he had owned the paper before it was bought by the Greenway-Grand Rapids Press interests. Art and his wife were childless until in their late years they adopted a baby girl. The child was somewhat small and frail. They brought her to the Lodge in the late 1940s. Mary waited on them, along with P.F. and May, and felt sorry for the little thing with all those old people. Art and his wife died when the girl was about nineteen, and she inherited their whole fortune. By then the Aunts were retired and living in West Palm Beach. They heard that she had gone shopping on Worth Ave. in Palm Beach, the ritziest strip of all, and she looked so young the shops would not give her credit. She could have bought them all. In the war years a Moore family came several summers to the Lodge. Mr. Moore, a rather ugly but nice man, was a real estate agent in Detroit. Mrs. Moore was a poet who claimed her poetry had been rejected by some of the best publishers in the country. She wrote a poem for the Lodge celebration of VJ Day. Their pride and joy was their daughter, Grace. When she was in the early- to mid-teens, she played the violin, and her parents used to patiently sit and listen to her practice. She also liked to dance and took lessons from Arthur Murray and eventually became an instructor there. While they were at the Lodge, her parents took her down to the Traverse City USO to dance with the sailors who were training in Traverse City, while they sat on the sidelines and admired her. We all thought this to be somewhat incongruous because, although not really overweight and reasonably attractive, Grace was endowed with an enormous rear end that seemed out of proportion to the rest of her. But she was obviously adored by her parents. There were other guests whose human foibles amused us. Harley Burdick owned a seed company based in Saginaw. He was a small, wiry, still somewhat frisky late-octogenarian. He came several years to the Indian Trail Lodge ..... 221

Lodge with his second younger wife. One evening everyone was sitting around the perimeter of the living room listening to someone performing on the piano. Suddenly Harley’s false teeth popped out and went skidding across the floor. The same summer late one evening in the Annex people heard a loud crash. It seems that Harley had turned out the light and taken a big jump into bed. But he had forgotten that that day he had moved the bed. Louie Hirschman was a physician in Detroit. He had married Hannah, the widow of one of the cereal Kelloggs. She had a grandson, Johnny Kellogg, whom she brought to the Lodge. In Detroit she and Louie lived in the Statler Hotel, where, it is said, she wandered into the kitchen to have her nutritional needs taken care of just as she did at the Lodge. A few years after the war, the Hirschmans built a big cottage on the beach one or two lots west of the Lodge. Dr. Hirschman was one of the foremost proctologists in the country. He acquired the epithet of “super dooper pooper snooper.” In late middle age George went to an elderly doctor in Livonia who several times talked about his wonderful mentor when he was attending Wayne State University. When this doctor one day mentioned how his mentor had pioneered in rectal surgery George said, “That sounds like Louie Hirschman.” George’s astounded doctor said, “Yes, it was.” Adele and Joe Clark and their children were guests at the Lodge for many seasons. Adele and the children usually stayed two or three weeks. Joe stayed only part of the time. Adele was a Risdon, a family that owned the Risdon Dairy, one of the biggest in Detroit. Joe was in Risdon management. Adele gave the impression of being a little girl who never grew up. She was flighty and impractical, and a loving but otherwise incompetent mother. Her children seemed to be well provided for but incompletely cared for. One summer while the children were still little, a week before they arrived, shipments of things began coming from Hudsons in Detroit. Adele had bought a play table, chairs, and other things to keep the children amused while she was at the Lodge. Joe apologized to Aunt Jane for the having to deal with it. Adele might have been a little girl, but she had certainly not ceased to grow laterally. She was a Mrs. five-by-five. Her most notable act for the guests was lying sunbathing on one of the picnic tables on the beach 222 ..... Indian Trail Lodge

in a skimpy bathing suit. However, she was forgiven everything because she was a terrific pianist, and she loved to play for people. Of course she did not exactly sit on the piano bench. She sort of leaned against it. One August 25th morning she breezed into the office all excited, “Just think, girls, only four months until Christmas.” Despite her haphazard raising of her children, they turned out to be very nice people. Among other pianists we remember who shared their talent with us were Marie Richter and Ivadel Moore. Both were single middle-aged ladies. Their souls were at opposite poles. Marie was in the travel business in Detroit. She was romantic and expressive, and it showed in her music. She loved especially the music of the early 20th century operettas of Friml, Herbert, Romberg and Cohan, as well as the current popular songs. Ivadel was a music teacher, She was rigid and unemotional. It showed in her music. When she played for us to sing it was very frustrating. There was not even a hint of any swing or syncopation in her playing. What was on the printed page was delivered, nothing more and nothing less. Another couple that came for many years from that first summer on were Esther and Emanuel Maltz from Chicago. Mr. Maltz was in the jewelry business. Beyond that he was a fisherman. They always came early for the opening of bass season, arriving by train. Mr. Maltz did not drive, but he had a couple of acquaintances in the Traverse City area who were fishermen, fishing guides, really, who took him out, usually to Lake Leelanau or Glen lake. He would always go off early in the morning and would not return until late afternoon. And he NEVER came back without a nice string of fish. At first we gave him credit for being a really first class fisherman. But as his one hundred percent success rate went on year after year, we had serious doubts. It wasn’t until about the twentieth year, more or less, that one time he took one of the other guests with him. His secret came out. They had an unsuccessful day fishing, and spent the last part of it visiting people whom Maltz knew might have live fish in traps. They bought the trophies they came back with. Mrs. Maltz usually spent the afternoon on the beach after which she would bathe and dress for dinner. Before she left her cottage she would, it seems, douse herself with cologne. If the wind was out of the north you could smell her long before she arrived at the lodge. Indian Trail Lodge ..... 223

Maltzes had a son, Harold, who married Rose. They soon had a daughter, Naomi, who was a contemporary of Sally. But Rose was much too Jewish even for the Maltzes. They felt she did not measure up to them and could not be trusted to bring up the child properly. Esther and Manny declared that they would raise Naomi, and they did. We think Harold was irresponsible, a bit of a lush, and financially dependent on his parents. Otherwise he would never have agreed to such an arrangement. Naomi lived with her grandparents and came with them to the Lodge. Over the years it became evident that she bore psychological scars from the circumstances of her upbringing. She ultimately married well, but it did not last last long. While it did last, Naomi visited our house with Joe, her husband. They started sending Christmas cards. When they divorced Joe apparently got the Christmas list in the divorce settlement. Our parents continued to get Christmas cards from Joe for many years after he was out of the picture. In later years Harold and Rose started coming to the Lodge occasionally. Rose had a slightly eastern Mediterranean look about her, but she seemed to be full of fun and quite likable. We could not warm up to Harold at all. The Dean family from Nashville, Tennessee, was another family that came regularly from the early years on. They had nine children, but the ones we became most acquainted with were Lois and Catherine. The Deans had a tennis court at home and were happy when the Lodge built one after the first year or two. Mr. Dean was really into tennis, and all the family except Mrs. Dean played. Lois and Catherine were very good. Mr. Dean swung a mean racket, but he was very heavy and did not get around the court too well. He only played doubles. If there were a number of people playing tennis Mr. Dean would watch the play with interest. When a set was over he would suggest to one of the players who had been playing that he or she team up with him and take on a couple of others. The player he wanted to team up with was the one he had sized up as the best player. Dean would plant himself, usually close to the net if he was not serving, and return all the balls that came his way. His partner had to cover the whole rest of the court. When he was winning Dean was noisy and had a lot to say. When he was not winning, he was very quiet—almost morose. 224 ..... Indian Trail Lodge

The Deans were somewhat sanctimonious, reflecting their mid- south religious background. They looked down their noses at any untoward behavior. Mr. Dean had once watched George return from an errand in the car. He felt George had pulled into the drive too fast. He gave George a short lecture on how driving like that might damage the differential. George listened politely, but went away shaking his head in disbelief. The Deans had absolutely no use for liquor, unlike other guests who liked daily cocktail parties. One time a young couple in a cottage near theirs had put out a few empties for the maid to take away. That evening when the Deans showed up for dinner, Mrs. Dean pulled Aunt Jane aside and said in whispered tones, “There is a lot of drinking going on in cottage No. xx. Are you sure those people are married?” This became a kind of inside joke. A couple of evenings later when the Deans passed on their way to the dining room Sarah Williford whispered to Aunt Jane, “Are you sure the Deans are really married?” Macy Kitchen was a history teacher at Saginaw High. She had been there long enough to have had our mother and our three aunts in class. We believe she came in the beginning to lend support to Jane Green’s undertaking. She did not drive and came on the train. She came back every year until she died. She always had the same room on the second floor of the annex. She was a staunch Republican and was always ready to get into a political discussion in the front office on her way to or from the dining room. She never came over to breakfast. Whatever waitress was assigned to her took her a tray for breakfast. It always included a glass of the juice poured off of canned prunes. With her very thin body, stern thin face, a long thin nose, black hair, and pinch-on type glasses, she was a stereotype of the old maid school teacher. She could look down her nose with disapproval. She took an occasional walk down to the beach and sat on a bench viewing the water, but she spent most of her time sitting on the annex porch reading or chatting with some of the other elderly people who preferred staying in the Annex. On Fridays she did not appear until very late in the day. That is the day she sent her hair out to have it done. Max Heavenrich owned a department store, including THE men’s clothing line, in Saginaw. He and his wife Minna were frequent guests at the Lodge. Max had gone the the University of Michigan at the same Indian Trail Lodge ..... 225 time as Mr. Milliken, owner of the Traverse City department store. Jane had already become acquainted with local people, and this was another connection. Eventually Jane Esther got to know John Milliken, about her age, and George got on a recognition acquaintance with Bill Milliken who went on to become Governor of Michigan in the sixties. Max Heavenrich was a gentlemanly and generous person, and we all liked him. He loved to come up in the evening and chat with the Aunts, where there was always a lot of laughter. He was always interested in Jane’s business, giving her advice on occasion. Minna was very involved with her numerous family members who sometimes accompanied them but were not as easy to get to know. She could not hold her liquor very well, a manifestation of which was her inability, when she’d had too much, to hold her water. When she had had a cocktail or two before dinner, she always made several trips to the bathroom during dinner. Once she came back from one of these trips with toilet paper dangling below her dress. At least once a summer she would let go inappropriately and someone would have to mop up. One summer Mrs. Sample hired Bob, Heavenrich’s youngest son who was then in college, to be a counselor, activities director, and companion for Dick and Tom. Bob went on to medical school. A young, poor Jewish man by the name of Ben Moorstein who was an acquaintance of Bob and also had medical school ambitions seemed to have attracted the interest of both the Millikens and Heavenriches. Through that connection Jane hired him a couple of summers. Another Saginaw clan that frequented the Lodge included the Tessins and Quinns. Emil Tessin had been a probate judge for a while in Saginaw County and Aunt Willie had worked for him. His wife, Mary, had been a Quinn. They had three boys, Maurice (Moe), Emil, and Tom, and a daughter, Mary Emily. Mary Emily was about the age of Sally and Mary. Mary Emily, Emil and Tom were quite lively youngsters, but Moe seemed totally lacking in spark. Maurice Quinn was an older brother of Mary. He and his wife had two children, Jack and Peggy, older than any of us, and then much later a tag-a-long girl, Lucy, younger than our Mary. There was another brother/uncle who also came a time or two without children. Although the families were sometimes there together they were quite independent of one another. 226 ..... Indian Trail Lodge

They were all very Roman Catholic. Lucy became a nun. Mary Emily eventually came back as a waitress for a summer. Another Catholic clan from Detroit were the Winks and Haynes. Mrs. Wink and Sylvia Haynes were sisters, born into the Fisher Body (General Motors) Fisher family. That is probably how Bill Wink got his Chevrolet dealership. The Winks had two boys, Bill and Bob. Haynes had two adopted daughters, Jill and Joan. These were perfectly nice people, but neither culturally or intellectually very stimulating. Jill followed the pattern. Over the course of the several summers Moe Tessin and Jill Haynes found each other, and eventually married. This was the only romance out of many summer flings that developed at the Lodge that actually ended in marriage. It was common for young people who had grown up coming to the Lodge to apply for a job as waitress or bus boy/waiter/bell hop when they became college age. Lois Dean did so. About the third summer Lois worked for Aunt Jane, she showed up with a husband in tow. Aunt Jane put Howard to work, too. It took a little shuffling of the live-in help to accommodate them as a couple. When the Deans came that summer they had Catherine with them. She was by now a young adult. There was something stormy going on in the family. A couple of times at meals Catherine spontaneously burst into tears. Her parents sat there, rigid and solemn. We never really discovered what was troubling her. Naturally we speculated. That was part of the fun of the place. Among other former child guests who later worked at the Lodge when they were in college were Harry Marston, who was a lot of fun and had a crush on Mary. Marjorie Barrett, daughter of another Detroit Symphony violinist and a contemporary of Sally and Mary, worked for a time in the office one summer. A good many friends and relatives of the Musselman children also earned summer money waiting on table: Marion Patch, who was Jane’s friend; Helen Gower, Ruth’s friend, and her cousin Ruth Davis; Jane Hootman, a friend of Sally and Mary; and our cousin Nancy Musselman. During the Depression, one of Dad’s best students who was extremely poor, Alan Mick, became one of Jane Green’s best workers, after Dad suggested he apply for a job. Actually, the Lodge provided a considerable amount of college money for many students over the years. Although the work was hard, Indian Trail Lodge ..... 227

The 1959 Musselman Family Reunion Standing Left: Jane Green, Harry Musselman. Seated Left: Anne Musselman. Standing Right: Ellen Green, Sarah Williford. Seated Right: Williamina Green. Back Row (left to right): Bill Alexander holding Andy Alexander, George Musselman, Jim Adams, Tom Adams, Jane Adams, Mary Fischer. Middle Row: Lynn Phelps, Ruth Alexander holding Sarah Alexander, Sally Phelps holding Katie Phelps, Beverly Musselman holding Anne Musselman, Ed Fischer holding Mark Fischer. Front: Tom Phelps, Jane Alexander, Dan Phelps, Jean Musselman, Mary Musselman, Anne Phelps there were many moments of fun on the beach or at parties or in the water. The guests knew their waitress by name and sometimes became quite good friends with them. Counting one’s tips (usually cash) was always an enjoyable pastime until one got into town to go to the bank. Through the early 1950s the Lodge continued to do a thriving business. Toward the end of the decade business began to change. The road past the lodge was rebuilt to a four lane highway with a mountable median strip, and traffic increased tremendously. Houses were built on the lots in the subdivision in back of the Lodge. The creek channel was changed. Summer homes were built on all the beach front lots west of the lodge. Many more motels with much more modern accommodations were built east of the Lodge. Maudie’s health began to fail, and the problems of running the kitchen and dining room increased. There was increasing demand for a bar, which the aunts had no interest in running. In 1959 Jane cut back the dining room operation. In 1960 the Lodge 228 ..... Indian Trail Lodge

(the main building) was sold on a land contract to a couple who developed it to be a good and fashionable restaurant. They were from Detroit and competent managers of the kitchen and dining rooms, but very poor managers of the business. They took too great a portion of the proceeds for their personal lives, and then had trouble paying their bills. Rather than worry about getting their payments, the Aunts sold the contract at a substantial discount. The beach side of the property with all the cabins was sold to a couple, the Nieds, who started redeveloping it immediately. They combined several of the cabins into units with minimum kitchen facilities. This cleared space for a modern small motel. Subsequently they built a two story building with rooms facing the beach, eliminating more of the cabins. Eventually they built another such unit which eliminated all the cabins. The Aunts held on to the “annex” until the fall of 1962 when they

The 1963 Musselman Family Reunion Back Row (left to right): Tom Phelps, Tom Adams, Ed Fischer, Jim Adams, Bill Alexander. Third Row: Lynn Phelps, Sally Phelps, Jane Adams, George Musselman holding Peter Musselman, Ruth Alexander, Beverly Musselman. Second Row: Williamina Green, Ellen Green, Anne Musselman, Harry Musselman, Jane Green, Mary Fischer holding Paul Fischer, Jean Musselman. Front Row: Anne Phelps, Mary Musselman, Jane Alexander, Mark Fischer, Andy Alexander, Dan Phelps, Katie Phelps, Anne Musselman, Sarah Alexander. Indian Trail Lodge ..... 229 sold it to a dentist who had built a home on the beach nearby. While they had it, they fixed up one room for cooking and eating. There was room for members of the family to visit them there. Our memories of Indian Trail Lodge do not end with the sale of the business. In 1959 Jane encouraged all of the family to come for a week together. Everyone was there for a week except Hope Adams, who had a business to run, and the unborn (Paul Fischer and Peter Musselman). We were all served our meals in the dining room. The twenty seven of us, counting the Aunts and our parents were the major piece of business in the dining room the week we were there. We had a group picture taken with all of us sitting on the steps to to Lodge porch, flanked by our parents, the Aunts, and Sarah Williford. Again in 1963, with our father growing old and feeble, we felt it was time for another reunion. The best place we could think of was still Indian Trail. We reserved enough of the remodeled cabins to accommodate us. The kitchenettes that the Nieds had fixed up in the combined cabins proved to be adequate for our food preparation. Every one was there again except Hope Adams. There were no unborn. Paul and Pete had both arrived. Our parents were thrilled to have us all together again. Again we had a group picture taken—this time on the beach. Our timing was indeed fortuitous. We were concerned about our father surviving much longer, but it was Mother who died on October 7th that fall. In 1967 we had another reunion. George had started a new job with Michigan Bell and could not get off for the week. He showed up for the two weekends. The Adams boys were also involved in other things by this time and were not there, nor was Hope. This was the one time when the weather did not cooperate. Some rainy days were spent scouting for real estate with the thought of acquiring our own place. Real excitement was generated when it developed that Marion Island in West Bay was for sale for $275,000.00. But the bubble burst when in was learned that this was just the down payment. In 1971 we had another big reunion at the Lodge. The Aunts were there and stayed in the Motel. By this time, the children were either teenagers or were becoming so. They had a very good time together learning to water ski behind the Phelps boat. The boy children all 230 ..... Indian Trail Lodge

13 of the 15 Cousins at the Family Reunion in 1971 Left to right: Peter Musselman, Sarah Alexander, Paul Fischer, Anne Phelps, Katie Phelps, Jane Alexander, Jean Musselman, Anne Musselman, Mary Musselman, Andy Alexander, Tom Phelps, Dan Phelps, Mark Fischer

stayed in one cabin and the girl children in another. We took a picture of them lined up on the beach. Our final reunion was in 1974. It is most memorable because it capped the summer of the Watergate Congressional Hearings which had kept us all glued to the television all summer. President Nixon resigned in August while we were together at the Lodge. We found a TV to listen to his farewell speech and sat on the beach and devoured the story in the Traverse City paper. The week was also notable because Jimmy and Maria Adams, who had married the previous year, arrived at Traverse City airport so that the family could welcome her into the family. It was the first marriage in the next generation. We feted the Aunts during this week, and our offspring cooked up and put on a show for them that they loved. This was also the time Mary planned a big spaghetti dinner, but it took forever to get the pots of water to boil on the little 110 volt hot plates that were provided. We sang, danced, and laughed waiting for the spaghetti water to boil, which became something of a family joke. We were delighted to see the end of Nixon’s presidency but not so delighted to see the changes taking place on the Lodge property that would end our reunions there. Indian Trail Lodge occupies a special place in our lives. In 1981, Indian Trail Lodge ..... 231 the Traverse City Record Eagel carried a story by Karen Anderson Petrovich about her childhood memories of summers at the Lodge. She recounts the excitement of first glimpsing the bay at the end of the trip from Grand Rapids, the smell of the pines at the Lodge, the warmth of the greeting by Jane, Willie and Nellie, the wonderful sand beach and clear blue water, Maudie’s fried chicken, singing around the beach fires. She wrote, “Indian Trail Lodge was more than a resort, it was a way of life. Although the accommodations were modest, there was a kind of elegance about the place, something spacious and intimate and secure.“ Yet she knew even then that it was disappearing. Today there is nothing left of what was once Indian Trail Lodge except the name. The Nieds fully developed the beach side with modern resort motel facilities. The main Lodge has been replaced by modern com- mercial buildings. Even the Aunts, who made the place what it was, are gone. For the five Musselman siblings there are still many wonderful memories. What we are today was partly shaped by our Indian Trail Lodge experience. It was much fun while it lasted and will forever be for us a place of natural beauty, good living, friendship, and fun.

The beach at Indian Trail Lodge was the scene for all sorts of fun. ➥ Chapter Five ...... The Aunts

Williamina Catherine Green Williamina Catherine Green was born on November 19, 1891, in Saginaw, Michigan, the second of four daughters of Jane Law Green and George Green. She was known as “Willie” her entire life. She was a rather awkward child and had difficulty speaking clearly when she was small. Today she would probably be given speech and physical therapy, but in those days, she simply managed as best she could. As a result, she was rather shy as a child and always something of a homebody, very close to her family. She adored her older sister Anne who was probably her best friend all her life. Outside the family, her most important activity in childhood was St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, and she was baptized and confirmed there. There were few activities for children at the church but the family participated in all the congregational activities, such as church suppers. She went to Sunday School on the street car with her sisters. It was a very small Sunday School. Sometimes, the four girls were all in the same class. However, Willie’s best friend was the daughter of the Rector of St. Paul’s, the Reverend William Gallagher, and she spent much time with their family. As a result, she felt very close to the church. When she graduated from Saginaw High School, Willie attended Alma College for a couple of years, but she also went to Ypsilanti Teachers’ College at Ypsilanti, Michigan, to earn a teaching certificate. She often spoke of taking calisthenics there and when she was middle aged and quite heavy used to illustrate the bending exercises for us. We were very amused by these demonstrations since Willie was so limited physically, but she told us she lost two inches around her waist during that year. After leaving college, she tried teaching elementary The Aunts ..... 233 school. On her first day of class she was so terrified, she could only think of one word to say, “Sit.” She hated teaching, feeling she was a real failure at it although she continued for a few years both in Michigan and in Elkhart, Indiana. During World War I, she passed the Civil Service exam and was offered a job in the War Insurance Office in Washington, D.C. Her younger sister Nell accompanied her for the summer and found a job at National Geographic Society. The two women had a happy time exploring Washington during the summer. Since Nell planned on another year at Lewis Institute, she only intended to stay for the summer. Willie, however, stayed on. When Willie returned home, she got a job with the city of Saginaw’s social welfare department. Among her responsibilities were previewing movies for moral content and approving or disapproving them. The new medium attracted the attention of religious groups because movies appeared to portray sex and violence too graphically and attractively. They were considered potentially corrupting of the young. Actually, Willie enjoyed her task because she saw lots of movies and was entertained by them all, even the questionable ones. She had led such a sheltered life and had so little experience with the opposite sex, we always found her role in this work humorous. The other part of her job was inspection of public dance halls and establishing rules of behavior in them. This also sounded uproarious to us. Willie was somewhat clumsy and a poor dancer. Furthermore, she was such a gentle, accommodating soul, we could not imagine her as this kind of moral policeman. Nonetheless, she won headlines in the Saginaw Dailey News in 1920 when the ordinances she proposed outlawed the “shimmy” and “cheek-to-cheek” dancing. This was just the beginning of the “roaring twenties” which would be characterized by radical changes in women’s dress, music, dance, and youthful behavior. However, Williamina Green was a mild and gentle judge and throughout her life was quite tolerant of young exuberance. She claimed the public dances in Saginaw were well-conducted, that she had cooperation of organizations giving the dances and of the Auditorium management where they were held, and that the young people were quite well behaved. Even when she was much older and had had much experience dealing with “juvenile delinquents,” she 234 ..... The Aunts

was not critical of young people. In 1947, she claimed that children of that day were “better behaved and more honest” than their parents. For a couple of years, she joined her sister Jane in Alabama, working in the social welfare program of U.S. Steel in Bessemer . This was part of a patriarchal program that many companies engaged in to provide loyal and trained employees and to prevent unionization. Willie taught home economics to both white and black workers and arranged a variety of activities for them, including Sunday night church services. She left after two years and returned to Saginaw. In 1923 she took up her life’s work as the first juvenile probation officer of Saginaw County Probate Court. This was a political job, since she was appointed by the County Probate Judge. In the course of the next thirty years, she worked for some seven different Probate Court Judges. Throughout her years of work, Willie approached it with an almost religious fervor. She worked primarily with girls, picking up and delivering runaways, providing welfare to the poor (there were no federal government programs then), providing care for pregnant single girls, arranging for adoption of babies, counseling families in crisis and sometimes settling family disputes. She gave of herself endlessly. Many a holiday when we visited at Saginaw, Willie would be on the phone with a client, listening to their woes and giving advice while the rest of us celebrated. She shared her religious beliefs freely by teaching part of the Catechism to the children she dealt with. She even baptized a dying baby on at least one occasion. She had learned to drive a car, which was essential in her work, but some of her travel was by train. She reported that she used ice cream cones to keep children good natured when she had to bring them back on the train from places like Kansas City or Cincinnati. She genuinely cared about her clients and was infinitely patient in trying to resolve their difficulties. Willie always lived at home in Saginaw in the bosom of her family. When Jane bought the Lodge, she could only come on weekends since her work was year round, but she usually drove up on Friday night and returned early Monday morning. She relished the relaxation at the Lodge. Once in a while she helped out in the office, particularly selling at the cigarette and candy counter. Jane never made much money when Willie was on deck, because she was inclined to sell nickel candy for a The Aunts ..... 235 penny. The children loved her, needless to say. Her primary activity outside the home was church. She was active at St. Paul’s in Saginaw, serving as President of St. Cecelia’s Guild for a term and was also active when she retired to Florida. She could not carry a tune, but she knew all the hymns by heart and sang them lustily, anyway. She was active in the League of Women Voters and was invited to join Zontas, an organization for professional women. She traveled some on her vacations from the Court House, going to Bermuda, New York, New Orleans, Montreal, or Hot Springs, Arkansas, for a week or so with her sisters or friends. Willie and her sisters were brought up to be “ladies” in the Victorian sense. Since three of them lived together most of their lives, they were able to avoid most unpleasant household tasks. They always had household help to do the major chores. Willie did little of the cooking—that was Nell’s department—but her specialties were icebox cookies and divinity which she made for friends at Christmas. She prided herself that they were always made with “the very best ingredients.” She was very tidy and disliked disorder. She picked up newspapers almost before her sisters had read them and gave away her clothes long before they were really worn out or out of fashion. In spite of her neatness, she loved children and could tell an engaging story for them. We used to love her “Beauty and Beast” and “Little One Eye, Two Eye and Three Eye.” She was generous to a fault. Williamina had no professional training in social work although her Alabama experience and her work in the City Welfare Office had given her brief related experience. In fact, when she began work with the Probate Court, social work was just in the process of becoming a recognized profession for women through the work of Jane Addams and others in the Settlement House movement in Chicago and New York. For many years, the concept of aid to the poor was divided between organized charities which provided direct assistance through “case workers” according to their standards, and social reformers like Settlement House workers who sought to change conditions that created poverty and social problems in the first place. After years of opposition, the two groups came together as a National Conference of Social Work in 1917. Three years later, the University of Chicago established a graduate program in social work, after which the field 236 ..... The Aunts

became a recognized profession for men and women, with specific academic preparation. This was ultimately important for Willie, because she lost her position after the election of 1952. The last Judge who appointed her had died and the newly elected Judge of Probate replaced her with someone with professional academic training. It was part of an effort to professionalize the system, but it was crudely done. Willie was given only three weeks notice of dismissal at Christmas time and, of course, as a political appointee, had no pension. It was a terrible blow to Willie’s pride and self confidence, one that took her some time to recover from. Her sisters Jane and Nell and the Lodge came to her rescue. She promptly joined Jane in the new house in Florida that winter, and Jane immediately put her on the payroll of Indian Trail Lodge so that she could build Social Security credit. Nell joined them on her spring vacation, as did Ruth from South Dakota and Mary from Chicago. Gradually, Willie rebuilt a life for herself in Florida, becoming active in Holy Trinity Church and helping Jane with the books and reports at the Lodge during the summer. She continued her contacts with her friends in Saginaw and with extended Green family members, as well as with her beloved nieces and nephews. Although she had most of the biases of her class and time, and like her sisters, liked to play the role of “Lady Bountiful” to those she felt were less fortunate than herself, she tried hard to live up to what she saw as her responsibility in caring for others. Though she saw much of the ugly side of human nature in her work, she never lost her faith in God’s purpose and the basic goodness of people. She was always optimistic, and less judgmental and more tolerant in her old age than either of her single sisters. She had no enemies because it was impossible to dislike her. In the mid 1970s when she was over eighty, she suffered serious organic brain syndrome and came very near death. At one point she was in a coma and her sisters were anticipating her death and thinking about taking her body back to Saginaw for burial in the middle of winter. Astonishingly, she made a complete recovery which she attributed to a miracle wrought by the prayers of family and friends, although a new medication probably also assisted. She lived another The Aunts ..... 237 five years before she had a similar but less acute siege. She was moved into a nursing home where she gradually deteriorated, succumbing on November 24, 1984, several days after her ninety-third birthday. By that time, the Aunts had bought burial lots in Florida where Willie was the first of the three sisters to be buried.

Jane Stuart Green Jane Stuart Green was born on March 24, 1895, the third of the four daughters of George and Jane Law Green. Of her childhood little is known except that she was said to have been a somewhat sickly child. She irritated her sister, Williamina, because she was pokey and dawdled in going to church and school. At a young age, probably in her teens, she had a “female operation.” No one knows exactly what that referred to. “Female operation” was as explicit as the people of her generation got. She told Ruth that when, in her dotage, she had her gall bladder removed, the doctor was quite interested in that operation she had had so early in the century. Considering this was at the end of the first decade of the 20th century, she got very advanced treatment. Because of her health, she was catered to as she was growing up. This, along with her flair for the dramatic, probably contributed to the image she always projected of herself as the “grand lady.” She was more dreamy and romantic than her two earnest, hard working older sisters. She also proved to be something of an adventurer. She went two years to Alma College, taking Primary Education which qualified her to teach. Her first job was in Muskegon, teaching kindergarten. After a year of it, she decided she did not want to teach. She went to Chicago for a while thinking she might “go on the stage.” She also wanted to experience “life.” She claimed that once she wanted to experience what it felt like to be without money and with no job, to do without a meal. She had found a place to live in a Girl’s Friendly Society House and embarked on this adventure. But at the end of the first day the House needed someone to wash dishes and recruited her for the job. She never missed a meal, although she missed the dramatic life experience she had sought. Other details of her time in Chicago and the pre-World War I years are rather skimpy. 238 ..... The Aunts

About that time, circa 1917, her sister Anne, through her Lewis Institute connections, was sought for a job with the Tennessee Coal Iron and Steel Company (which had become a part of U.S. Steel in 1907) to work in a welfare program they were starting in Birmingham, Alabama. Such actions were taken by some industries at the time both to forestall labor union organizing and to develop a stable work force. The southern labor force was limited by experience and education. Black workers were hired in southern steel mills, but their turnover rate was very high as they periodically left jobs to work on farms and in cotton fields. With increased war production, retention of workers became imperative, so the welfare program was designed to provide this. Anne, however, was planning on marrying and could not take on this job. She recommended her sister Jane. Jane joined a force of several women doing this work, under the leadership of Winifred Collins who had worked in a Settlement House in Chicago. They lived together in quarters provided by the company. The thrust of the program was to take poor, uneducated, rural black people, and teach, train and develop them to be employable in the mill. This meant things like teaching them to read and write enough that they could recognize and write their names, how to tell time and live by the clock, hygiene (like brushing their teeth), dress and grooming, and other skills they would need to fit into the industrial world. In addition, the women provided kindergarten care for small children. In addition to training workers for the mill, the staff needed a person to keep house and cook for them. Jane found a likely prospect, taught her to read, write and cook, and put her to work. This was Maud (Maudie) Pearson, whom Jane would later hire to cook at Indian Trail Lodge, and who would become part of our lives through that. Jane worked in Alabama for seven years. After Grandmother Green died in 1924, Aunt Jane saw, as part of her mission in life, a responsibility for easing Grandfather Green’s loss by providing him care, companionship and an interest in life. She left her work in Alabama and returned to Saginaw to live, to be of assistance to her father. On the lookout for a new career in which she could involve her father, she answered an ad in the Saginaw Daily News for a manager of a summer resort in Traverse City, Michigan. In the late The Aunts ..... 239 winter of ’26-’27 she and Grandpa drove to Traverse City to meet with the owners of the resort, the Grand Traverse Resort Association. They returned to Saginaw with a commitment to take on the project of managing Indian Trail Lodge. From that time until she retired, every late-spring and summer were taken up with the management of Indian Trail. Requests for reservations started coming in well before the season started. For many years she handled all the correspondence with hand written letters. In later years she hired a typist part time for a couple of weeks to type her correspondence. She kept her own records and did her own bookkeeping. None of us was ever taken into her confidence as to what her system was or what her bottom line figures were. We just know that she turned a profit and always seemed to have plenty of money. By the end of September every year, Jane was pretty much free to follow her whims. One of the first such winters Blanch Booth, an acquaintance in Saginaw who had come to Indian Trail, wanted to take a motor tour of the Southwest with her mother. She invited Jane and another women to go along, and Jane accepted. The tour took a couple of months. They packed a lunch for the first day out. They got as far as Owasso before they stopped and had a picnic. They made it to Kalamazoo the first night. The pace of the trip was pretty slow for Jane, but she said she just agreed to whatever the others wanted to do, and enjoyed herself. One year she went to Florida to help after a hurricane disaster. The Florida boom of the twenties had increased interest in it, and with Jane’s free winters, she soon began to take trips with Grandpa to Florida. Most winters until Grandpa got sick she and he went to Florida for part of the winter. At least one of those winters she managed a small inn or rooming house located right on the water in the St. Petersburg area. She and Grandpa did not go back to the same place every year. They tried various areas of Florida. During one of these sojourns in Florida they took a trip to Havana for a few days. One of Grandpa’s favorite stories was the chance meeting of one of his Saginaw friends in a cemetery in Havana that they were wandering through. During the first couple of summers at Indian Trail a single man 240 ..... The Aunts

came as a guest with a group of people from Detroit. Bert Riley had something to do with the Dairy business. (We think he had designed a carrier for milk bottles or some such thing.) He made an energetic play for Jane, with lavish gifts and entertaining. We were all too young to be very aware of the situation, but the talk later was that Jane recognized that he was an alcoholic and gave him negative encourage- ment. Ruth remembers Jane Green showing Mother a negligee Burt had given her when Jane came to stay with the children while Mother was in the hospital having Mary. That was the last that was heard of him. During one of her winters in Florida, about 1935-36, Jane met a newspaper reporter and columnist by the name of Casey Adams. He had a national reputation in press circles and was widely read. He was quite enamored of Jane. He came to Traverse City to see her over Memorial day. George was there that weekend. From what George observed and from what Jane said, it was clear that Mr. Adams wanted her to marry him. But by this time she had invested too much of herself in the business and in her life as a free spirit. She turned him down. In 1937 the Grand Traverse Resort Association decided to sell Indian Trail Lodge. They gave Jane first refusal. Jane, in partnership with Nell and Williamina, purchased the property. Taking on such a debt seemed like a very daring step for them in those years. About the same time, our mother was contacted by an old church acquaintance from her years in DeKalb, Illinois, regarding her interest in taking a job as hostess at Seabury Western Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois. Mother was too involved with her large family to be interested, but once again she suggested Jane for the job. The job fit Jane’s schedule very nicely. Having purchased the Lodge, she felt she could use additional income. When her living was provided at the Seminary, more money could go toward paying off the debt. The seminary operated on the school year basis and Jane still had her summers free for Indian Trail. Jane spent seven winters at the Seminary. As hostess she welcomed and took care of the guests of the seminary, she presided at the required refectory meals, and performed other social functions. The main portion of her job was planning the meals and running the kitchen. She had a good cook, Dafford Sales, whom she later recruited for work at Indian Trail. Jane enjoyed her encounters with the many church The Aunts ..... 241 dignitaries she came to know. She also enjoyed being next door to Chicago. At one time or another during those years she had each of us come to Chicago for a weekend and showed us around the town. Jane Esther was of an age to be of interest to the younger students at the seminary. She took George to the stock yards, Adler Planetarium, and to see Eva LaGalien in a Sherwood Anderson play The Star Wagon. She made a point of including a few students on the evening outings. During the course of the year she managed to include most of them on one such occasion. And whenever she came back to Michigan from Chicago she always brought a box of “Mrs. Snyder’s” chocolates to her nieces and nephew. Jane’s last winter at the Seminary was 1941-42. The United States was at war. Jane had the feeling that some of the students entered the Seminary to avoid the draft. She thought she should be making a contribution to the war effort. She was ready for a new adventure. The opportunity came. Houghton School of Mines (later Michigan Technical University) in Houghton, Michigan, was being used as an Armed Forces training center as were most colleges and universities during the war. They needed a manager of the school dining facility. Jane spent the next three winters doing the job for them. Houghton was the antithesis of Chicago. It is isolated in the far north of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula at the end of the line on a branch of a branch of the Chicago North- western Railroad. Jane took the severe winters in stride. She felt she was making a real contribution by giving the young men going through the training the best meals possible. She told us that on Sunday mornings when only a few would show up for breakfast, she let them cook their own eggs if they wished. And many of them did. She also acquired a few interesting recipes from the Army mess manuals. After the war ended in 1945, Jane did not again have a regular winter job. By this time, the Lodge debt was largely paid off. She began going to Florida again. She soon became well acquainted with the state and decided she would like to spend her retirement years there. She particularly liked West Palm Beach, because it was a year round community rather than just a winter resort town and it had a junior college and a large established Episcopal Church. In 1952 she bought a lot in West Palm Beach and contracted to have a small house built. 242 ..... The Aunts

That same year her sister Williamina lost her probate court job. Willie came to Florida for the winter and Jane immediately put her to work for pay at Indian Trail so she could build social security credit. About 1956 Nell retired on her pension from her job at Arthur Hill High School. The family home in Saginaw was sold and the three sisters became permanent residents of Florida. After they were relieved of summer work at the Lodge, Jane and her two unmarried sisters did some traveling. They toured the west extensively by car. They took one rather comprehensive tour of Europe, going over by steamship. On a second shorter trip they flew. They all found the flying experience unsatisfactory and flew only when essential for emergencies. They took a tour of Mexico and went to the Bahamas. They took their sister Anne on a trip to New York. They drove through New England to visit Jane Alexander at Mount Holyoke and they visited Jimmy Adams at West Point. After the Lodge was completely sold, they spent some time in Ashville, North Carolina for relief from the hot Florida summers. Jane led a very active social life in her retirement years. The house on Sunset road was in a very friendly neighborhood and the sisters became acquainted with the children and their parents in the houses nearby. Holy Trinity Episcopal Church was a center of activity. Especially during the first dozen years or so, many former guests from Indian Trail as well as friends from Saginaw who took winter breaks in Florida dropped in to see Jane and her sisters. They were popular, because they were very good company. Jane had a talent, a spirit and a drive that affected her entire life. From her mother, she inherited a talent for mimicking and dramatizing. It was this ability that made her a raconteur. She was amused by people, saw the humor in situations, and could tell a story, often with embellishments that conveyed what she saw and experienced. In a sense her whole life was a role she played—that of the “grand lady, the lady bountiful.” People were attracted to her and charmed by her. She could absolutely enchant children with her dramatic telling of fairy tales. Jane only played her “grand lady, lady bountiful” role on her terms. One could never assume more than was offered. She needed to be in control and she always wanted to be the giver. From that standpoint she was somewhat difficult to read especially by her nieces and nephew The Aunts ..... 243 when they worked for her. She was not a good boss and was most successful with the black help whom she treated very paternally. College students were less receptive to this. Jane also reflected her deep seated racial prejudice. In Alabama Jane had absorbed the common “we love our colored folks but they are not like us white folk” attitude of southerners, which was reinforced by her contact in retirement with many older southerners in Florida. She did not favor social integration of the races, and she was suspicious of “foreign looking people.” For example, when the aunts visited Jane Alexander at Mount Holyoke, they invited Jane to bring her roommate and a couple of other friends for lunch. Jane Green and her sisters later mentioned how a “pushy Philippine girl” barged right in and came along. They were not at all nice to her. Jane Alexander was embarrassed by this behavior. Jane Green and her sisters could not imagine, much less acknowledge, that their niece would have non-Anglo-Saxon friends—even though by this time it was the middle of the 1970s. Their prejudice became the basis for some arguments with their great nieces and nephews who visited them in these years. The aunts found the Civil Rights Movement and the cultural revolution of the of the sixties hard to accept. Jane stayed in relatively good health until the last couple of years of her life. She underwent major surgery about 1970, suffered a broken collar bone in 1975, and in 1978 she was taken ill while visiting Traverse City and had to be flown home to Florida. By 1983 she had become feeble and withdrawn and went into a nursing home. She died in her sleep March 6, 1985, just two weeks short of her 90th birthday. She was buried beside Willie in the Florida cemetery.

Ellen Georgia Green Ellen Georgia Green, or Nell or Nellie as she was always called, was born in Saginaw, Michigan, on November 27, 1896. She was the fourth daughter of George Green and Jane Law Green. She was baptized in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, like her older sisters. As the youngest and prettiest of the girls with a bubbly personality, she was much cherished by the entire family. Anne Green Musselman always said that Nellie was spoiled, but a happier, friendlier, more good-natured and gregarious 244 ..... The Aunts

person would be hard to find. In later life, she did indeed like to manage to the point of being called “bossy.” Nell grew up in Saginaw in the pattern of her older sisters, attending Sunday School and being confirmed at St. Paul’s Church. She was, perhaps, a little more daring than they were. She rode a bicycle and learned to play the violin. More significantly, when her father pur- chased their first car in 1912, she learned to drive. She was only sixteen, but she was never thereafter without access to a car. She loved to drive and her love for the automobile made her a true child of the twentieth century. She bought her last one (of many!) when she was ninety four, and finally gave up driving a few weeks before her death at age 96. After graduating from Saginaw High School, Nell attended Lewis Institute in Chicago for two years, as her older sister Anne had done before her. She reveled in the sophistication of the city, especially the music, theater, and restaurants. She loved to travel, to see new places and meet new people. After her first year of college, she accompanied Willie to Washington where the latter had a Civil Service job. Nell found a mail clerk job with the National Geographic Society, which enabled the two women to explore Washington in their free time over the summer. They had a wonderful time. When September came and it was time for Nell to return to school, she knew she had lied to get the job by saying she intended to stay indefinitely. When it was time to leave, she couldn’t face her employers. She just wrote a letter. After completing her second year at Lewis Institute, Nell returned to Saginaw and took a job teaching home economics (cooking) at Saginaw Junior High School. She continued her education by attending summer school—one summer at Columbia University in New York and another summer at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She also took two years away from teaching to join her sister Jane in Alabama working for Tennessee Coat, Iron, and Steet Company under U. S. Steel. She participated in the same kind of welfare work that her sisters did, teaching black and white workers basic skills necessary to get along in an industrial world. She returned to Saginaw to resume teaching home economics and to live in the family home. Nell always had an active social life and Saginaw provided plenty of friends to keep it that way. During her working years, it revolved The Aunts ..... 245 around a group of her contemporaries that she had known since high school. They got together regularly for “pot-luck” suppers and bridge, and she always had an escort for the society dances held in the course of the year. One devoted beau was Bill Wicks, one of two single brothers who remained her friends for many years. They were offspring of a rich lumber family in Saginaw with a very domineering mother. Nell accompanied the family on trips to Detroit to see plays and stay at the Book-Cadillac or Statler Hotels. These brothers were quite artistic, had gone to Armour Institute in Chicago, ran a gift and decorating shop in Saginaw, and had a summer place in Tawas, Michigan. Through them, Nell joined Saginaw society, where she was always popular because of her personality. In many ways, she was a liberated woman before the movement came into flower. She never let the lack of a male escort prevent her from going where she wanted to go, eating where she wanted to eat, or attending any function she wanted to attend. She also learned to play tennis and golf. Coming into full maturity during the “roaring twenties,” she bobbed her hair, wore short skirts, danced the Charleston, learned to smoke cigarettes and to play the ukelele, and defied Prohibition by drinking illegal liquor occasionally with her “crowd.” She loved singing and dancing at parties and was exceptionally good at both. Barely five feet tall, with very tiny feet, of which she was quite vain, she was cute and lively and full of fun—in many ways the epitome of the flapper era. On the other hand, Nell was devoted to her family, adored her sisters and her parents and never wanted to live any place but the family home. For all her popularity, she never appeared anxious to marry or to go off alone with one man. She was exceptionally careful around the married men in her crowd so that wives would not get jealous, although she was popular with all of them. She once said she and Bill Wicks had talked of marriage, but she wasn’t interested until after his mother died. By that time, she claimed she was too settled in the com- fortable “single blessedness” she and her sisters had achieved. (With Sarah Williford, they used to drink to that quite often at their private cocktail parties at the Lodge and in West Palm Beach.) Nell appeared to have an enormous drive for sociability, for fun, for good times and 246 ..... The Aunts

good living, but very little sex drive. She admitted as much when she was a very old lady and told George, “I’ve never was a sex-pot.” In 1927, she became part of the Indian Trail Lodge staff as manager of the kitchen and that occupied her summers as long as they owned the place. She abandoned continuing her education for a degree and devoted her life to running the Lodge kitchen. These were the best years of the family, she told her great niece Sarah, with all of the family working together at a place they loved so much. She operated the kitchen efficiently, smoothly, and calmly, producing, with the help of the cooks, meals which made Indian Trail Lodge famous among its guests: huge breakfasts with Maudie’s famous wheat cakes; wonderful fried chicken or baked white fish or trout, fresh cherry pie, fresh green beans or corn from nearby gardens. When Saginaw built a large new high school, Nell transferred to it to operate its cafeteria. There she remained until she could qualify for her pension in the mid-fifties. She retired to join her sisters in West Palm Beach for the winters and continued with the Lodge for a few more years. Nell was a great favorite among the guests at the Lodge for her talent and personality. She had a good sense of humor and an infectious laugh. Her strong contralto voice and love of singing enabled her to lead sing-a-longs and beach fires. She knew most of the popular music of the day and had a repertoire of standard favorites as well as novelty ditties, parodies, and even slightly naughty songs that she could play on her ukelele. Without her, beach fires could be rather dull affairs. Nell’s love of music was much wider, however. She also sang in the choir at both St. Paul’s in Saginaw and at Holy Trinity in West Palm Beach. She had a passion for theater, particularly musical comedy, and made a point of seeing most popular Broadway productions by trips to New York, Chicago or Detroit. Through her influence, her nieces and nephew became acquainted in the 1930s with such figures as Ethel Merman and Noel Coward and the magazine The New Yorker. All the best shows played in Detroit in those days. It was possible to drive to Detroit, see a matinee, and return the same day. Ruth remembers accompanying her Mother , Aunt Nell and Aunt Jane on a trip to Detroit from East Lansing. It is memorable for her because she saw Eddie Cantor singing “Making Whoopee” in the movies. The Aunts ..... 247

Nell lived over thirty years in Florida retirement. She and her sisters settled into a comfortable pattern of church work, socializing with friends, entertaining the family periodically, and travel. Nell always drove the car (Willie gave hers up when Nell retired to Florida.) The three sisters entertained all of their nieces’ and nephew’s families in Florida at various times, as well as Anne and Hap while they were alive. The afternoon cocktail party became a ritual, although Nell limited herself to only one drink. Sometimes they had a glass of wine before lunch or in the evening. They had many friends and entertained them often until it became too great an effort. Then they took their guests out to lunch. They traveled to Europe, Mexico, all over the United States, and the Bahamas and came to family reunions at the Lodge in the summer. Politically and philosophically, Nell was a liberal and that is the way she lived her life. Like her sisters, she was a great admirer of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and later of the Kennedys. She did not accept every social change that occurred in her long life, but she believed in people’s right to order their own lives according to their beliefs without having to bow to the judgments of others or of the government. In matters of protection of people, property, and the nation, and in exercising one’s right to the detriment of others, she believed in obedience to the laws and in ethical and moral standards in the absence of statutory law. As a result of her work in Alabama and de facto segregation of the black working class in Saginaw, like most Americans during the first two thirds of the century, Nell believed that the black race was inferior to the white race and that the black race preferred to be “with their own people.” During the Civil Rights Movement of the sixties, she lived in Florida among many older, traditional southerners , and her segregationist views were strengthened. She also reflected a prejudice against Jews which was strong among some Floridians, in part because of the number of New York Jews who wintered in the area. Although she had not expressed this before, since some of the Lodge’s most loved guests were Jewish, in her old age her latent prejudice emerged. When confronted with this inconsistency and reminded of her Jewish friends at the Lodge, she always responded, “But they were just like us.” 248 ..... The Aunts

Nell expressed these prejudices strongly among family and friends to the dismay and embarrassment and sometimes argument of her nieces, nephew, great nieces and nephews. There is no doubt that in her encounters with Jews and African Americans, they may have sensed her prejudice. But Nell’s sense of propriety would never let her be anything but courteous in these encounters. All people were drawn to Nell by her bouncy good humor, her vitality, her love of life, her intelligence, and her depth. She took her religion seriously. She was in church every Sunday. She knew the order of service by heart. She believed what she recited in the Creed. She knew she was forgiven. She was forgiving of others. She believed in the power of prayer. She let each day’s trouble “be sufficient unto itself.” She believed there was some sort of life after death. She was generous with herself and her worldly goods. Her faith was well placed. It always seemed that someone “up there” was watching out for her. Nell’s greatest wish was that she die in her own home in Florida. Her nieces and nephews arranged for her wish to be fulfilled by taking turns staying with her a week at a time during the last six or seven weeks of her final illness. They were supported by her friends, neighbors, the church, and the hospice program. She died July 15, 1993, at the age of 96. All of her nieces and her nephew attended her funeral and saw her buried beside her two sisters in the Florida cemetery.

➥ Chapter Six ...... Extended Family

Harry Musselman’s Siblings Father had two brothers and two sisters. They were, in order of birth, Grace Eliza (1884-1969), Forrest Floyd (1889-1962), Ruth Fern (1895-1935), and Dale Talmage (1898-1983). Father went to Tri-state at Angola, Indiana, for a year to take courses that would give him the knowledge he needed to pass the entrance exam to Michigan State. It is believed, based on old photographs we have, that he roomed with an Emery Hetrick while there. We believe this is the connection that introduced Grace to Emery, whom she married. They had two children, Ruth and Milton. Grace was a difficult, unforgiving person. She left the marriage and went off to California with the two children. She had almost no contact with the family for many years. Ruth died at the age of eleven of some unnamed disease. Milton, at the age of about nineteen or twenty, made a trip back east and visited some of his relatives in Ohio and Dale in Royal Oak. George met him at Dale’s when he and Father went there to attend an air show being staged in Detroit. A year or so later after returning to California he died. He was living away from home at the time. The circumstances of his death are unclear. Aunt Grace told several convincing but conflicting stories. She told one person it was suicide. She told another it was murder. A third story claimed that no one, not even she, knew the cause of his death. Grace had worked as a practical nurse in California. At some time her eye sight got quite bad and she was on some sort of pension or assistance from the state. When she came east for Grandpa Musselman’s funeral, she took umbrage at some innocent thing said by one of Forrest’s family. She carried a grudge against Forrest and his family to 250 ..... Extended Family

her grave. She owned her home in Long Beach and some of the family visited her there. Forrest got the door slammed in his face when he tried to visit her. She had a very brief second marriage to a man named Dickinson. We think he may have been a lush. Grace made a few trips east in her later years. Her last attempt to do so was by train. She apparently had a run in with the conductor over something and made such a fuss that she was put off the train in Chicago and sent to a hospital. The authorities got in touch with Dale who went to Chicago and took her back home to California. She died not long after that episode. When Forrest, Ruth and Dale reached college age they all followed Father’s example and attended Michigan State. He never said so, but we think Father may have encouraged them with a little financial aid. Forrest one time told this story on himself. He was told by his mother that he must accompany her to Sherwood to get some supplies. He was feeling very put upon for having to go. They were going in a horse drawn wagon and to get to Sherwood they had to ford the Maumee River. In the deepest part of the river a vinegar jug that his mother was taking along to be filled floated out of the wagon. Forrest saw it go and could have grabbed it, but was feeling just ornery enough that he did not. His mother surmised what had happened and was very angry with him. Forrest did have a sense of humor, but we rarely saw it. He and his family were very loyal to us, and attended every event in which we were involved. Forrest was drafted into the WWI army before he got his degree. He returned to East Lansing after his discharge and perhaps to school. Marriage to one of his schoolmates, Marion Grettenberger from Okemos, and the decision to go into the real estate business ended his college career. He did not graduate, although Marion did. Forrest and Marion struggled for several years while he was getting his business underway. Marion helped out by teaching piano lessons which she continued to do into her late eighties. Their first child, Marilyn, was born in l929. A second daughter, Betty, was born in 1934. Marilyn went through the East Lansing schools as a classmate of Mary Musselman Fischer where they were friendly but not close friends. Marilyn went on to Ohio Wesleyan where she got a degree in Home Economics. She got a job teaching in Capac, Michigan, where she met Extended Family ..... 251 an enterprising farmer, Roland Ledebuhr. They were married about the same time as George and Beverly. Within a few years Rollie quit farming, they moved to East Lansing, and he went into the real estate business with Forrest. He eventually took over the business. Marilyn and Rollie had a girl, Amy, and a boy, David. Amy married a fellow connected with the petroleum business. They settled in Texas. David married, settled in East Lansing, and went into the Musselman Realty Company. The business passed to him as Rollie became more inactive. Betty also went to Ohio Wesleyan. She was an airline stewardess for a while after she graduated, and then married Dick Eiler, a friend from college. They had three daughters—Brenda (b. 1959), Bonnie (b. 1961), Betsy (b. 1963)—and a son, Richard (b. 1967). They settled in California. Betty and Dick were amicably divorced in the late 1970s. Young Richard was severely injured in a motorcycle accident some time after graduating from High school. It was Betty’s nursing, mothering, and doggedly persistent working with him that brought him back to a fully functioning person. Betty got deep into yoga and this, practicing and teaching it, has become her thing in life. The scrimping and saving in Forrest’s early years in business, his investments in property around East Lansing, and Marion’s inheritance of property in Meridian township paid off well. That branch of the family is by far the best off financially of any of us. Although Ruth once spent a few days with her Aunt Ruth in Canada, George was the only one of us who spent any length of time with her. He gleaned very little from her about her early life. She apparently worked for a time on one of the passenger ships that plied Lake Erie, probably one of the summers while she was attending Michigan State. She told George that she had awakened in her bunk and was pondering getting up when a wave splashed through the port hole right in her face. Before she was married, she accompanied Hap and Anne, Jane, George, Ruth, and Aunt Nellie on a camping trip when the children were very small. Father’s mother died in the early 1920s. Ira wanted Ruth, who had recently graduated from Michigan State, to return home and keep house for him. Father told his father that if she did, she should be paid. Ira agreed. A few years later when Ira retired Ruth went out into the 252 ..... Extended Family

working world with her degree in Home Economics. She was working as a nutritionist when she met and married a Canadian farmer by the name of Grant Fox. Ruth and Grant had no children. Grant Fox was a peach and tobacco grower and a good business man. His big interest was peaches. The family farm near Leamington, Ontario, was in peaches. He had several blocks of acreage around Leamington where he grew tobacco. He and Ruth bought a farm at Normandale, Ontario, on Lake Erie and set out a new peach orchard. The orchard at Leamington was aging and declining in productivity. They moved to the Normandale farm. George visited them there in the summer of 1934. Ruth was doctoring for what seemed to be a mild infection. The following winter it flared up and she died of it. Grant remarried and went on with his life. The family saw him only a few times after Ruth’s death. By the time Dale came along there was a high school in Paulding, about eleven miles south of the farm. We understand that Dale boarded in Paulding during high school but still made the commute to and from the farm many times. He said that during that time he used every means of transportation available. He walked the whole distance, and sometimes jogged most of the way. He went on horse back. He drove a horse drawn wagon or buggy. He rode a bicycle. He walked to the village of Cecil where he could get a train. In his last year the family got their first car and he drove that on occasion. Dale graduated from Michigan State and married Gladys Lewis, a schoolmate from New York state. They stayed in East Lansing for a while, perhaps while one or both of them finished school. Dale got a teaching job in Hamtramck and they moved to Royal Oak where they lived until after Dale retired. Gladys taught Kindergarten. Dale went on to night school and acquired a couple of degrees in law. He was admitted to the bar but never practiced law as a vocation. He was many years principal of Hamtramck High and eventually became superintendent of schools in Hamtramck. This was a Polish community, completely surrounded by Detroit. Dale’s legal training made him useful in helping immigrants to citizenship. Dale and Gladys had a daughter, Nancy, in 1927 and a son, Dale Jr., in 1930. Nancy went to the University of Michigan at the same time her cousin Sally did. They were close in age and good friends. She met Milan Extended Family ..... 253

Cobble there and married him. Cobb, as he was familiarly called, went on to get a doctorate in engineering, and ended up teaching at the University of New Mexico at Las Cruces where they still live. Their four sons are Stephen (b. 1949), a political consultant currently director of the ARCA Foundation in Washington D.C.; Bryan (b. 1953), an artist; Kevin, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manager of the San Andres Wildlife Refuge at Las Cruces; and David (b. 1959), a builder in New Mexico. Dale Jr. (Mick within the family) went to Ohio Wesleyan and married Mary Ziegler whom he met there. They have four adopted children—Carrie (b. 1958), David (b. 1960), Andrew (b. 1964) and Susan (b. 1969). Mick worked in a number of business management jobs in the Cleveland area before buying a business in Fort Myers, Florida. They stayed in Fort Myers after retirement. Their youngsters have all settled in Florida and are pursuing professional careers.

On the Green Side Grandfather Green had two sisters and a whole flock of brothers. The sisters were Sarah and Nellie. The brothers included William, Ed, Bob, and Jim. There may have been a couple more, since Grandpa was allegedly one of eleven children. When Nell was asked to name them one time, she named about five and said, “I think there were one or two more.” We know very little about William, except that he was not a very friendly sort. Perhaps the Aunts had very little exposure to him when they were growing up. From Mother we gathered that Bob never married and died in early middle age. Ed married a woman of German background from Cincinnati, Carrie. They settled in Lansing, so we came to know them a little. They had one son Edward. He was younger than Nell by a few years, perhaps fifteen to twenty years older than George. They owned a large Victorian House right in downtown Lansing. Ed, the father, died before Edward was grown. Carrie continued the job of raising her son, supporting herself at least in part by operating a small parking lot on the land adjacent to their house. We visited her there when we were children. She was a rather domineering mother, and shepherded Edward through Michigan State and Seabury Western Theological Seminary. 254 ..... Extended Family

Edward became an Episcopal priest. He married a woman by the name of Fannie whom he had met while attending Seminary. The aunts believed that she considered herself a cut or two above them since she had come from a “good family” in Evanston. Edward had churches in Pentwater and Tecumseh, before he was called to Christ Church, Dearborn. He is reputed to have done very good work there among the youth. Relatively early in the marriage, Carrie moved in with the family and lived with them until her death. Ed and Fanny had three sons—David, Edward, and Bobby. We got to know them because they spent some time at the Lodge for several summers. By this time Fannie had mellowed and became quite good friends with the Aunts. The children were devoted to them and kept in touch with them for years. The oldest was something of a brain but quite unconventional among his childhood contemporaries (telling riddles in Latin, for instance.) According to family stories, he went to Harvard, became quite involved in a theater group, and was much influenced by the “hippie” culture of the sixties. Eventually, however, he matured and married a Jewish woman and is now Librarian at General Theological Seminary in New York. He faithfully sent a Christmas card to Nell until her death. The other boys we have lost track of. According to what George heard from an ex-parishioner of Christ Church, Edward became something of a lush. He eventually took a church in Monroe, Louisiana, where he retired and eventually died. The Aunts regularly visited Ed when they came to visit George’s family after he moved to Farmington Hills (outside Detroit). One time, Ed invited the entire family to dinner at the Dearborn Country Club. George remembers with pride how well his four small children behaved and how politely they suffered through the experience of a formal dinner with people they did not know. Great Uncle Jim was the youngest of the Green boys. He married a woman by the name of Clara. They had two daughters, Helen and Maryann. They lived eight or ten blocks from the Aunts in Saginaw and Jim was a partner in Green Brothers Fish Market. Helen married Lee Harrigan, who also went to work in the fish market. He was Roman Catholic and Helen joined his church. They had three children—Lee, Clare, and John. Clare was about George’s age, but as often as we went Extended Family ..... 255 to Saginaw, we rarely saw them. Perhaps, the Roman Catholic affiliation gave them a different circle to move in. We believe Lee Junior was killed in World War II. Clare married, had children and the last we know was living in Milwaukee. We have no idea what her married name is. John was slow but seemed capable of productive work and could hold a job. He accompanied his parents when they retired and moved to Florida. The aunts kept up some contact with them and saw them occasionally in Florida. Maryann was a pretty woman. She married a man by the name of Dorr when she was very young. He was a washout as a husband. Among other things, he got deep into debt gambling, and Uncle Jim had to bail him out at least once. Maryann eventually divorced him, but not before they had two sons—Stuart and George. She later married a Lansing man—Ed Praul. He adopted Stuart and George and they lived in East Lansing. Stuart was a very good student, quiet and academic in personality. Ruth knew him as an undergraduate history student while she was in graduate school at Michigan State. He went on to graduate school himself and ultimately taught at some university in New York City. Uncle Jim was jolly and gregarious, and very Irish. He lacked Grandpa Green’s polish, but he had the same quick sense of humor and love of people. After his wife died, the Aunts invited Uncle Jimmy to the Lodge where he was something of a favorite. When George was in military service and visiting in Saginaw on furlough, Uncle Jim took him to lunch at the Elks. After lunch, he took him around and introduced him to all his cronies. Uncle Jimmy spent most of his days there in his old age playing cards and “chinning” with his buddies. Great Aunt Nellie married a man named George Steete, who was a printer by trade. They lived on Fourth Street, a few blocks from the Aunts. They had no children. Nellie died of breast cancer while still relatively young and when no one spoke of that disease except in whispers. Her sister, Great Aunt Sarah, was a spinster. She was the daughter who stayed at home and cared for her parents in their old age. She also kept house for Bob and possibly one or two other brothers before they married. She never held a job but she was supported out of the fish market just as other members of the family were. She was 256 ..... Extended Family

an unofficial silent partner. She was somewhat involved in the church, belonged to one of the guilds, and drove her own car. After Grandpa Green died, the Aunties took responsibility for her. They always had her and Uncle Jimmy for Thanksgiving Dinner . Great Aunt Sarah had a jolly disposition and could be a lot of fun, but she also often behaved somewhat eccentrically. We used to speculate on why she did not marry. The family story is that once when a young man came to call on her, without explanation she left the room and went up to bed, leaving the young man cooling his heels in the parlor with other members of the family. Not the sort of behavior to encourage a prospective husband. Once she invited us children with Aunt Nell over to lunch. The meal became quite hysterical for the children since she had not planned well. The first servings of food were huge, the last were hardly visible on the plate. We could hardly restrain our giggles when she dished up the ice cream. She used to suggest to Aunt Willie, “Let’s go out for a soda.” Willie often obliged, but she always got stuck with the bill. When Sarah was mad at the Aunts for something or other, she used to call them up on the phone and hang up when they answered. They always knew it was Aunt Sarah and laughed over it. She was well into her eighties when she died suddenly alone in the old family home. Aunt Nell took it upon herself to settle Aunt Sarah’s estate. She sold her piano to some people who called the next day and said they had found five hundred dollars hidden in it. After that, Nell examined all the furniture before selling any of it and found quite a bit more money Sarah had hidden. She actually had quite a little estate, which was a great help to our mother when Dad was retired. Mother and the Aunts had one other cousin on their father’s side that we are aware of—Hattie, who lived in Connecticut. We do not know which of the brothers sired her. The Aunts kept loosely in touch with her for many years. Ruth, Nell, Jane Musselman and Willie visited her on their trip to Montreal and New England in 1941. At that time, Hattie and her husband were managers of a state park on the Atlantic coast near Niantic. They had a daughter about Ruth’s age. In their old age, the Aunts lost touch with this branch of the family. Our Grandmother Green had four siblings, but only one brother Extended Family ..... 257 and one sister that we know anything about. Her brother, John Law, married a woman by the name of Frances and they had one daughter, Rose. They lived in Bridgeport a short distance from Saginaw, but “Aunt Fanny” was not particularly loved by the family members because she was rather ill-tempered. Rose was about Jane Green’s age and they were good friends when they were growing up. Rose married a retired navy man named John McPhee, but they had no children. John died while Rose was still a relatively young woman. She remained single for quite a long time and during the war years when help was short, the Aunts hired her to bake the pies at the Lodge. She baked wonderful pies. We got to know her then—Mary and Sally particularly because they were working in the kitchen. She was the only cousin that the Aunts were very close to. Later she married a Bridgeport man named Seibert. They visited the Aunts while they were in Florida and kept in touch for a few years. Grandma Green’s younger sister Minnie became a trained nurse, an acceptable field of employment for women at the end of the nineteenth century. For a while she lived with the Greens in Saginaw. However, she gave up nursing when she married an older man named Horace Lines. We never knew for certain what he did for a living, but he was all talk and no substance. For a year or two, they tried running a little hotel in a little town in north central Michigan. That did not last long and they moved to Lansing. They took in roomers. During the Depression, Horace got some sort of political job as a guard or guide in the Michigan State Capitol, which was close to the house they lived in. We often saw Minnie at St. Paul’s Church which was on the other side of the Capitol from their house. She used to attend all the weddings there, some of which were quite social, even when she knew none of the participants. Minnie and Horace had one son, John. He was probably eight to ten years older than George. Minnie was very protective and possessive of him. Mother once commented that she thought it was odd that John was still sleeping with Minnie when he was fourteen years old. By the time he finished high school, he was exhibiting some peculiar traits. He couldn’t seem to hold a job and there were efforts in the family to help him out. Aunt Jane gave him a job at Indian Trail, but 258 ..... Extended Family

he left within a couple of weeks. He got into the Civilian Conservation Corps, but he bolted that one. In fact, Nell picked him up hitchhiking on the way home from the Lodge. He was back in Lansing living at home when he was picked up by the police for “peeping.” His mental condition deteriorated, and eventually he was committed, largely through Aunt Willie’s assistance, to the State Mental Hospital at Kalamazoo (then called the State Hospital for the insane). As an untreated schizophrenic, he lived on for many years. After Great Aunt Minnie died, Aunt Willie took it upon herself to keep track of him, sending him birthday cards and Christmas presents, visiting him when she was in Michigan. He died in middle age in the mental hospital and she arranged for his burial. The Aunts and Mother always acted very responsibly in maintaining their connections with the generations above them. Whenever they came to East Lansing to visit us, the Aunts always made an obligatory visit to Aunt Carrie or Aunt Minnie. One of us usually accompanied them on what were often deadly dull visits. (The going and coming were pleasant.) However, Ruth developed a relationship with Aunt Minnie, since she was very fond of orange marmalade, something Aunt Minnie made. She carried on a correspondence with Aunt Minnie while she was at the University of Missouri and even visited her and had her to East Lansing to dinner once when Ruth was living alone in the East Lansing house while in summer school.

➥ Chapter Seven ...... The Outlaws

Between 1943 and 1956 all five Musselman children married and proceeded to raise families of their own. The spouses we acquired greatly enriched the life experience of the family, bringing to it different backgrounds and different points of view. All of them, however, were from ethnic and religious backgrounds similar to our own—white, Protestant, northern European. Two were born and raised in Michigan, although not in East Lansing, and attended Michigan State College and the University of Michigan, respectively, where they met the members of the clan they married. The others came variously from Texas, Minnesota, and New York and were met by mail or by our own travels about the country. All of them came from smaller families than the Musselmans, claiming none or one or two siblings. Perhaps they felt they had been swept into a maelstrom when they encountered so many vocal, articulate family members. Nonetheless, they succeeded in maintaining their own distinctive identities, adding diversity and talent to the family gene pool. We affectionately call them “the outlaws” and their stories follow.

Hope’s Story I was born Hope Wallace Adams on March 13, 1915, in Portsmouth, Virginia. I was named Wallace which was my mother’s maiden name and Hope after my paternal grandfather Hope Adams of Wharton, Texas. I think the hospital must have been a navy hospital, because my Dad was an electrician in the Navy at the time. We lived in Virginia during World War I. I don’t remember living there, but my sister was born five years later, and I do remember that. I was playing with the 260 ..... Hope’s Story

kids next door when their mother came in and said that she guessed my Dad was happy because he had a little girl. That’s when I first knew I had a sister. Within a week or two I had traded my sister off to another neighbor for a dog, a little black and white dog. So I didn’t have a sister anymore. I had a dog. A week or so later, I was playing with the dog and hit him on the head accidentally with a rock. It knocked him out, so I took him back to the woman who gave him to me and told her she could have him back, but I didn’t want the sister so she could keep them both. My Dad must have been transferred to Norfolk at the Naval Yard, because I remember he had a battery shack on the grounds next to where the submarines were tied up to the mother ship. He took me on them. I went down into the submarine and was led all over it and when I came out, the crew stuffed my pockets with candy and gum. I was six or seven years old at that time. Later my Dad was transferred to a mine depot which was up the river from Norfolk. There were just acres and acres of mines that the navy put into the water to blow up ships. I also remember a great big farm where the black people would come in and hitch up the mules and plow. Soon after that my Dad was discharged from the Navy, probably in 1923 or 1924. He wanted to go back to his home in Texas. He was born in Lissy, Texas, a little tiny town south of Houston, ten or twelve miles west of Grolenberg. I remember going down to Lissie for family gatherings when I was in my teens. It was on the railroad line going west, and it was named after my Dad’s sister. She was nicknamed Lissie and was a favorite with everyone, so when they named the town, they called it Lissie. The Adams family was connected to Coopers and Alexanders and several other families that lived in the area. We had an old Great Aunt Helen that we used to visit in Lissie. I was her favorite because I was named after my granddad. She had a great big grandfather clock that showed the phases of moon and the planets as well as the time, with a big swing pendulum. It had come with the family on the covered wagon when they came west to Texas. I don’t know where they came from in the east—possibly the Carolinas. Everybody argued over who was going to get that clock when Aunt Helen died. My grandmother was Alma Henderson, who was a daughter of Hope’s Story ..... 261

Pinky Henderson, the first governor of the Republic of Texas. Her family had come into Texas in the 1840’s, maybe earlier. Her sisters and some of the family were all members of the Daughters of the Texas Republic, but of course my Dad’s sisters weren’t. My mother was from Philadelphia—my father had met and married her while he was in the navy. He had joined when he was about 19 or 20 and served 20 years, although I think he got time and a half for service during World War I in a battle in the English channel. I remember one reunion we had when my grandmother was about 87. She was a little bitty woman about five one or five two. She told me to go out and saddle up a couple of horses, which I did. Then she came out and jumped from the ground into the saddle without putting her foot in the stirrup. We rode out on the prairie and she showed me where the family had come in on covered wagons when she was a little girl. They lived under the trees with the Indians until they built a house. They had grants of land under the Homestead Act of so many acres that they had to prove up on by building a house, barn, fence etc. Of course, they built sod houses then. This must have been in the 1860s or 1870s. She pointed to a clump of trees and said that’s where your Daddy was born. So I’m not sure where he actually was born, but it was in the area of Lissie or Eagle Lake, another town nearby. An old black man from Wharton told me he saw my granddad killed on the steps of the Courthouse. He especially remembered because my name was also Hope Adams. According to the story, my granddad was eating lunch one day when someone came to tell him there were a bunch of men dressed in coats (and it was summertime in Texas when nobody wore coats) over on the courthouse steps. So my granddad went down to the courthouse to see what it was all about and that’s when they shot him. He had fifteen or twenty bullet holes in him when he died. The men probably were from Sugarland. My grandmother was a widow then without any money so she had to go to work. She couldn’t take care of the children so she put them in a Shrine children’s home. My Dad was raised in a Shrine home. According to the story, my granddaddy, whom I was named after, was rumored to have been in Alpine, which had the reputation of being a pretty wild town. He had gone in and cleaned that up. So he was well 262 ..... Hope’s Story

known for being fast with his gun and was made Sheriff of Wharton. One day even Wyatt Earp came into town. The story was that Sugarland wanted the land down there for sugar cane. Most of the settlers couldn’t read or write and so they signed papers with an “X” and it was pretty easy for Sugarland to cheat them out of their land. l think my grand dad was fighting Sugarland for taking land away from the people. They said he found some stranger forcing someone to sign a paper giving away their land and saying they were going to California, and he didn’t like that. Once he caught one of the gunmen from Sugarland with two people tied to a wagon wheel and they were rolling the wagon wheel over to the river. He stopped them. So that’s probably why he was eventually shot and my grandmother had to put her kids in the Shrine children’s home. Our family came back to Houston after my Dad left the Navy in about 1923. We drove from Virginia in an old Studebaker Velie (a great big touring car with 32- or 33-inch wheels on it). It had a cloth top held down on the windshield with a couple of straps and the back end was completely packed full of stuff we were taking to Texas, with blankets on top of that. That’s where my sister and I rode, on top of all that stuff. At night, we would stop by the side of the road and build a fire to cook supper. Dad would stretch a tarp over the car and some of the ground. He and my Mom slept on cots on the ground while we slept on the quilts in back. We drove all the way down to Lake Pontchartrain like that but when we got there the water in the Lake was too high for the ferry to run. We had to wait about a week to get across it before we got to New Orleans. Then we drove across the swamp to the Mississippi River. The roads were just a couple of ruts in those days. Most of the roads ran along the side of a railroad track and how good they were depended on the weather. We crossed the River on a flat boat and came on over to Texas. We got to Liberty and found the Sabine River was also high. They had a big iron bridge over it, but the boards on it were loose and they went clackity-clack as we drove over them. Mother made Dad stop the car. She got out and walked across the bridge because she was afraid to drive over it. On the other side of the river, the flat land was all flooded so we couldn’t go on the road. We had to wait about ten Hope’s Story ..... 263 days till the water went down. A whole lot of cars were parked there waiting with us. My Dad used to wade out with a stick to measure the water to see if it had gone down enough. We finally got over to Beaumont and then on to Houston. I spent the rest of my childhood on the north side of Houston. We stayed with my grandmother next to the Southern Pacific Hospital when we first came back to Texas. My sister and I slept on the front porch on a pallet because there wasn’t room for us in the house. My Dad bought three lots on Fulton Street which was then outside of town. We stayed in the house they built there until I went in the army. Then the folks bought seven acres out on Hardy Road. In both places we had livestock. We had about four thousand chickens. I had a horse and we had a cow which I took care of. We didn’t have any pasture so I had to stake the cow out on the road. And on Saturdays, I had to clean the manure out of the chicken house before I could go anywhere. We stayed there for a long time—until I went into the army. We were a mile outside the city limits, but we came into town to school. I walked or rode my horse. Then when I was a little older, I got a Model T Ford and drove into town. I sold twenty-eight chickens to buy the Ford. The only way my Dad let me do it was if I agreed to take my sister to school and bring her back. He would buy the gas and keep the tires on the car but I had to agree to do that. So every damn day, I had to wait for her in order to drive the car. It was a mess and interfered with everything I wanted to do. I got out of school about 1935. But in 1933 and 1934, the National Guard was recruiting anybody they could find big enough to go to their summer camp at Palacious, a boot military camp. They didn’t care how old you were, or whether you were in school or not, they just recruited you for the two weeks at summer camp. So I jumped in like a dumb ass and volunteered—I was in Thirty-Sixth Infantry Division, Company A. It was in the days when you wrapped your legs in those kind of leggings and you had wool pants like they used in World War I. We drilled on World War I equipment, too. We had bayonet practice, target shooting, hiking with a pack. I stayed with it for more than a year—meeting once a month. Later when I went into the Regular Army, I got credit for two years for my National Guard Service. I volunteered 264 ..... Hope’s Story

with the 36th Tank Company. On January 6th, 1939, we were inducted into the regular army. I had tried to get into the Navy but they wouldn’t take me, because I had an overbite, but the army didn’t care. I was sent to Fort Benning, Georgia, for training. Columbus, Georgia, was a little country town of 2000-2500. It had a main street about six or seven blocks long with an esplanades down the middle. I was with my good buddy Cornie Taylor whose Dad was a Baptist preacher in Houston. I had gone with his sister Leola, but we had broken up. Cornie and I kind of hung out together. He had a pretty good voice and I had been singing at school. Originally, this was a small base with just 200 troops until the Guard came in but as we got closer to war, draftees started to come in too. Then they had several thousand men and then they brought in the 2nd army division— suddenly you had 20,000 people shopping in this little town. There were drunk soldiers all over main street on weekends, and there were twenty customers for almost anything in the stores. So pretty soon Columbus, Georgia, put signs out—“No soldiers allowed.” There wasn’t much for them to do in town, then. But Cornie and I joined the Baptist church and sang in the choir so we were taken home to dinner on Sunday by little old ladies. We rode down the main street in big automobiles. And we were able to go out with their daughters so we had a pretty good time. In the spring of 1941, the 193rd Tank Battalion was combat ready and ready to go—one of the few Army units like that. We had been up to the range and had tanks. There was big preparation for war going on by this time since we were sending aid to England and it was pretty clear to the administration that we were going to be involved eventually. The Fifth Infantry division was shipped out of Charleston, South Carolina, to go to Greenland, and the smoke screen to cover up that action was a big army maneuver of all the units in Georgia including the 193rd Tank Battalion. We were there playing at war so that the troops going to Greenland would not be noticed. That’s how I met Mrs. Humphrey and eventually became acquainted with Jane Musselman, whom I married. At that time I was in the motorcycle section and we rode patrol at the back end of the column behind the tanks and command cars. Then we rode ahead of everyone Hope’s Story ..... 265 to block crossings so that when the tanks and column came up they could pass through. We were on the highway going from Georgia up into the Carolinas and I was riding at the back end of the column when Mrs. Humphrey’s car came along behind us. Her chauffeur wanted to pass around the column because we were moving quite slowly but he wasn’t able to do it. She was quite an old lady and asked me for help. I told her to follow me and I would lead them and signal when they could break into the column—the tanks would let them in and wouldn’t bother them. That’s the way I led them through about fifteen or twenty miles of army vehicles on the highway. When we got ahead of the column, she stopped the car and held out something in her hand from the window. My commanding officer told me to go see what the lady wanted. When I got up to the car, she held out some money. I said I couldn’t take money so they started up again. A little farther on, the car stopped again. She held her hand out again, and my commanding officer said, “Adams get up there and see what the hell that lady wants and then get her out of here.” This time she had a couple of packs of cigarettes with a card between them that had her address on it. I took the cigarettes and when I read the card, I found out that her name was Mrs. Watts Humphrey. She told me to write to her so she could express her thanks to me. When we got to Carolina, I sat down on a log and wrote to her. We corresponded for a while and she found out I was single and didn’t have a girlfriend. She said she was going to introduce me to some of her friends. So she sent me a list of about eight or nine women that she knew. Most of the women were older (Aunt Nellie, Aunt Jane and Aunt Willie Green were also on the list!), but Jane’s name was among them and she was near my age. Mrs. Humphrey told Jane about me and she had apparently told her to ask me all sorts of questions about where I was from, what I did, what our unit did, how big it was, etc. That’s what she did. I started getting letters asking all these questions. We were constantly being indoctrinated about keeping our mouths shut, about not saying anything about what we were doing. I didn’t know anything about Jane or what she looked like. I had a good buddy, a Lieutenant from Colorado and I mentioned to him that I thought she was asking too 266 ..... Hope’s Story

damn many questions. He thought so too. So we turned the letters over to the FBI. We didn’t know it at the time, but they started to check her out by asking about her from friends and neighbors in East Lansing. She had put in for some sort of job with the State Government in Michigan and she thought the investigation was connected to that, but it wasn’t. It was because of the letters she was writing to me. Later on the report came back that she was okay, a law-abiding good American citizen. So I could go ahead and write to her. Eventually the maneuvers in South Carolina were over and we went back to Fort Benning. During the time I was at Fort Benning—in the little town of Columbus which now had thousands of service men stationed there—there was a lot of antagonism from townspeople about the men getting drunk in town on weekends. I went to the MP section. I made a suggestion that the MPs send a couple of trucks into town every couple of hours on weekends to pick up the drunk off-duty soldiers and put them on cots in tents on a place we had fenced off near the post. When the service men woke up they could go back to their units. Well, as a result, the town of Columbus, Georgia, gave me a key to the city and I still have it. During this time, I was sent to school at Fort Knox several times for special training—for automobile mechanics, tank mechanics, motorcycle mechanics, radio school. It seemed to me I was always going to school for something. I was at Fort Knox, Kentucky, on December 7th, 1941, in the afternoon. I had a date with a girl from across the Ohio River and I was taking her home when I heard on the radio that all personnel should report immediately to their base stations, that all leaves were canceled. I took her home, took the car back to the Lieutenant I had borrowed it from, returned to camp, packed up my stuff. We immediately climbed on an express train from Chicago to Miami (that had been stopped en route) and within an hour we were going straight through to Fort Benning with no stops. We were dumped off and learned that our units were already packing up and being loaded to ship out. We were one of the few units combat ready with tanks and ammunition and training so we were quickly loaded on flat cars. Company A had already gone, B was on its way. I was company C so we finished loading and away we went. We arrived in California at the Hope’s Story ..... 267 ship docks, loaded our tanks and equipment onto ships and within a few days we were gone. Because of the danger of Japanese submarines off the coast of California, we were sent north by Seattle, up around Alaska. We passed Attu, and then headed across the Pacific. Our destination was Copper. I later found out that that was the code name for Corregidor. But just beyond Midway we ran into Japanese submarine and naval forces. The convoy split up and our troop ship with our tanks was sent to Honolulu. As we pulled into the harbor, I was standing on the back deck of the ship and I saw a torpedo just miss the ship by about 6 feet, but then they swung the anti-submarine net behind us and we were safe in the harbor. We unloaded our tanks and went up to Schofield Barracks, the army base. It was about 14 days after the Pearl Harbor attack, with dead bodies still floating in the Navy Lagoon and evidence of the bomb attack and strafing of Schofield all around us.We began to pick up the pieces. We were the 193 Tank Battalion of the Tenth Tank Group. We set up base at Schofield. I kept writing to Jane, but we were under strict censorship. I couldn’t talk about the weather, or seeing a pineapple field, or the sun shining—it might indicate to an enemy we were in Hawaii. There were so many things we couldn’t say. We set up a perimeter defense around the island of Oahu. I had by that time been made staff sergeant. We didn’t have any officers in the battalion so I was acting as an officer and was transferred to Head- quarters Company from C Company. We had to wait for some officers to come in from the States, but there wasn’t much communication between us and the West Coast because of Japanese submarines between us. No ships would leave. We were really pretty much on our own. I had two or three tanks with men at various places on the island: at Waikiki Beach, on the northern coast and at several other places. The men lived right there. They really couldn’t have done much if the Japanese had attacked, which was expected, because there weren’t enough of them. We stayed in that position until after the Battle of Midway. After that the War moved to the South Pacific, ships could come from the West Coast, and we were no longer in a combat zone. About this time, I was sent to Officer’s Candidate School at Fort 268 ..... Hope’s Story

Knox. I had been writing regularly to Jane and hearing from her. By this time I had a picture of her which I still have and she had a picture of me. When I got to Fort Knox, all the classes were full, so I was given 60 days of leave till another class formed. I went to Houston to see my folks and then I went to East Lansing to meet Jane. I stayed about a week, saw her and where she lived. I met her family and we got along pretty well and became well acquainted. Things went from better to better. I graduated from OCS. Jane came to Fort Knox to pin on my bars as 2nd Lieutenant. I was sent to Fort Lewis, Washington, with the 735 Tank Battalion, which was being formed out there. We decided to get married soon so she went home to get ready and to come out in March. We were married at the Post Chapel with a lot of celebration afterwards, going under crossed tank guns and being driven around the Fort. We went to Victoria, British Columbia, on our honeymoon. Our first home was a converted chicken house and the landlady showed Jane how to light a fire in the wood stove. She said Jane could use some wood nearby for kindling. I later discovered that the “kindling” Jane was using were shingles that the lady planned to put on her house. In a few months, I was sent back to Fort Knox for additional training. We drove a Model A coupe that burned oil over the continental divide in January on our way back to Houston. We nearly froze to death. We stayed with the folks in Houston for a little while and I have pictures of Janie milking a cow on the wrong side. Eventually, I was sent overseas and Jane returned to Michigan. We shipped out of Boston for England to prepare for the European invasion. I liked my time in England. Because I was an officer, I had a jeep so I went all over England when I had a chance, to Stratford-on- Avon, to Sherwood Forest, to castles. We were stationed near Coventry and that meant there were a lot of American soldiers hanging around without much to do on their off-duty hours. So I met with the Lord Mayor of Coventry, a Mrs. Hyde, and we opened the top floor of the White Horse Pub on Friday nights as a place where GI ’s could go to dance and meet girls and have some recreation. They were taken in by truck and they had a curfew. That made things a lot better. Of course, Coventry had a Spitfire factory and so was subject to a lot of bombing. Most of the time we were preparing our tanks for water landing, Hope’s Story ..... 269 making them waterproof with a snorkel on top. Finally we went south into all the confusion at Southampton where thousands of troops, tanks, trucks and men were assembling for the invasion. All of these tanks had to be loaded on boats to cross the Channel. We were loaded on an LCT, a Landing Craft-Tank. We hit the beach on D-Day 4-5 hours after the first wave and the beach was full of trucks, men and tanks. We were ordered to sit out in the water since the beach was too crowded so we didn’t disembark until the next morning. By that time the tide was out and we were on dry land. Also by that time, bulldozers had carved out a slanted road up the hill at the edge of the beach so we could drive our tanks up there. We were ordered up and told to go “that way” when we got to the top, firing on any Germans we came across. We were hopelessly lost. General Patton had not yet come ashore and the Third Army had not been organized and for some reason we were attached to a British unit. This was hedgerow country which made it hard for tanks to go over. It exposed their vulnerable bottom side which could be penetrated by German artillery. We couldn’t really do much. We were taking only 2-3 acres a day. However, with some left over German equipment, we finally devised a kind of fork that we attached to the front of the tank and that plowed right through the hedgerows so then we didn’t have any trouble. We could go right through them and the infantry could follow. We finally joined up with our own units and broke out at St. Lo. Patton’s Third Army was on the run and fought through to southern France and then came up in a big sweep to central France, called the Palisade Gap. Montgomery for the British Army was supposed to be coming in from the north in a pincer movement which would cut off the German Army and bottle them up in France so that we could take thousands of German prisoners. But Montgomery didn’t move so the Germans escaped and we had to fight them again in eastern France and western Germany. We were with the troops that finally took Metz in a big battle. After the war was over I got a medal from the French government for taking the town of Metz, which they said had not been taken in several hundred years. Then we went east into Germany. This was difficult with every little town fortified and every gas station hiding anti-tank guns and haystacks full of artillery pieces. 270 ..... Hope’s Story

We moved into Germany and crossed the Saar River. We were still with the Fifth Infantry Division. We had been with them all the way across France. We fought house to house in Saarlaudern and Uber Saarlaudern. We would crash through the wall of a house and then the infantry could go in. Then I got a radio message to go back to the Saar River, to oil and gas up our tanks and be ready to move at a moment’s notice. So we did that. The gas trucks met me, and we gassed up and reloaded ammunition. We were sent to the front of the Third Army’s attack in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge. It was winter and there was snow on the ground. The Germans had painted their tanks white and they wore sheets over their uniforms so you couldn’t see them against the snow. We stuck out like sore thumbs. We were in the town of Wilts and I got orders to report to an Infantry Division west of where we were. I had to take my tanks over the mountains in icy weather with them slipping and sliding all over the place. It took us a day and a half to get there but then we were in the battle for Bastogne. We had six tanks with an Infantry division. We were set up to offer support for the Infantry. We were between an infantry division and an armored division. An infantry general for the first and only time admitted to me he didn’t know how to use tanks. I told him we weren’t really able to fight a tank engagement, since there were too few of us (I had six tanks), so he should let the armored division lead the way and the infantry would follow with our support. That’s what we did and after several days of hard fighting we finally took Bastogne. But we did it only after the weather cleared and the air force came in to give us some help. When our unit had a reunion at Bastogne much later, the kids loved us—gave us candy and gifts because we freed them from the Germans. The Belgian government also gave us a medal after the war for relieving that town. All this time we had been part of the Fifth Infantry Division, but they were sent south to the Eagle’s Nest, where Hitler was supposed to be. We were then attached to different divisions for a few weeks. We were switched around from here to there. Small tank units like mine were not used for heavy tank fighting but for support for infantry units, so we were moved around for whoever needed us. That’s the way we fought our way across Germany, supporting different infantry units. Hope’s Story ..... 271

Eventually we got across the Czechoslovakian border. We were in a huge valley about a mile and half across near the little town of Johanngeorgenstad, which I later found out was the home of Horner, the maker of musical instruments—mouth organs, organs, accordions, squeeze boxes. They had warehouses full of them. (Later, I told an American officer about them and he came and looted the warehouses, sending instruments back to the States where he made a lot of money on them.) We had two or three companies of infantry. That morning we were ordered to make a forty-five minute rolling barrage at daylight, but it stopped after about 16 shells. Then I heard on my tank radio. “Don’t shoot anymore Germans. They have surrendered. The war is over.” We were supposed to tell the Germans. I put a piece of white sheet on the front of my tank and drove over to where we thought there was a machine gun nest on the opposite side of the valley. Our intelligence had told us there wasn’t anything over there but a few German soldiers. I told the first German soldier I met that the war was over, but he didn’t believe me, so I asked to see his commandant. And I kept moving farther and farther back to their headquarters till I finally came to their division commander. Then I realized that what I had planned to attack with a couple of companies of infantry and six tanks was an entire mechanized division with artillery and tanks. But they were directing their fire at the Russians who were just a few miles away to the east. They hated the Russians more than they feared the Americans. The commandant didn’t believe me until he came back and heard the information on our radio. Then we had to take charge of disarming and providing for 5000-6000 German troops. We got them to surrender their weapons. I quickly contacted the Adjutant General’s office, MPs, and the Quartermaster corps and they soon arrived to take charge of disarming them and setting up camp for the German soldiers. We were then moved back and back into Germany because Headquarters had determined where the American Zone and Russian Zone were to be. At one time we were ordered to leave a place at midnight and the Russians moved in at 1 AM. The Germans went to sleep with the Americans in charge and woke up under Russian occupation. They hated that because they hated the Russians. 272 ..... Hope’s Story

At one point we were across a road from Russian troops with only a log as the demarcation line between us. We had one incident that caused quite an uproar. A couple of German girls were walking down the road when two Russian soldiers sneaked over to the American side, took them into the woods and raped them. An American sergeant had watched the whole thing and could identify them. I talked to the girls and got their story. We knew who the Russian soldiers were so we decided to lure them back over to the American side of the road. We cooked up a meal of bacon and fresh bread and coffee near where they were camped. Sure enough, they came over to eat with us. We gave them cigarettes. After they had eaten, I arrested them and put them under guard in the basement of the guest house where our troops were being quartered. I intended to court martial them for raping the girls. It caused all kinds of trouble. A few days later, a couple of Generals drove up and told me I was about to start World War III, that the incident had gone all the way to the Pentagon. They said I had to return the Russian soldiers to their own authorities. I turned the men over, they were led into the woods and in a few minutes we heard gun fire. The Russian officers killed them. I asked them if they were killed for raping the girls and they said, no, they were killed for getting caught. By this time, I was anxious to return to the States. I had acquired a lot of points because of my years of service, so I began to negotiate a quick return. I was sent to Paris and then to England in charge of some short term servicemen who were going to be sent to the Pacific. We took a train to Cherbourg and then a kind of tug boat to England. I was in the middle of the English Channel when the Japanese sur- rendered to the Americans and the whole war was over. For a while, in the confusion following that, I was kind of forgotten. The Army seemed to have lost track of me. Eventually, after quite a lot of pressure from me, I got orders to depart on the Acquitainia for the States. We were given baths, money and new clothes. Officers were housed on the top deck and on the return trip to the United States, I was fortunate to have long conversations with Professor Picard, the balloonist, who was then doing underwater research. That made the trip home pleasant. We arrived in Fort Dix and I spent a few days in Philadelphia while Beverly’s Story ..... 273 waiting to be processed. I visited some of my mother’s people there. Then I was sent to Fort Sheridan, Illinois, the closest place to Michigan where I was finally discharged from the army in October, 1945. On the train trip to Illinois, I had a layover in Kentucky. I went into a hamburger joint and said I wanted a plate of raw onions and some sweet bread. I had been in the service for over six years and that’s what I wanted to eat more than anything else—raw onions. After I was discharged, I immediately headed for East Lansing to get Janie and we returned to Texas to take up married and civilian life. The hardest part of military service were the days when we were shooting and getting shot at every day. I was wounded a couple of times with minor wounds but I went right back into battle. I only lost six men in my tank company during the whole war. And I remained in the Army Reserve until retirement, as well as volunteering for the Sheriff’s Department, which I continued a lot longer after I had to retire from the Army Reserve. I liked my military service and police work as a change from running a business after the war.

Beverly’s Story I was born in Muskegon, Michigan on July 13, 1923. My parents were Truman Holcomb (1886-1981) and Minnie Van Antwerp (1888- 1944). Both were reared on farms and went through the eighth grade in a one room country school at Bristol Michigan, a village near Cadillac. Dad then had one year at Ferris Institute in Big Rapids. Beyond that he was self educated in botany, history and architecture. He was a carpenter and Mother was a self-taught expert seamstress. Truman and Minnie were married on June 29, 1910. In 1916 they moved to Muskegon with two little boys, Wendell (June 1913 - Sept. 1977) and Alden (Feb. 1916 - Dec. 1921). Alden died as the result of a leaky heart valve at not quite six years old. A third boy, Russell, was born in October, 1919, and is still living. In July of 1921 a girl, Jacqueline, was stillborn. I came along two years later and was a very welcome child. During my childhood I was always aware of my Mother’s grief over the death of two children in six months. Dad built a thriving business as a building contractor. We lived very ➥ 274 ..... Beverly’s Story

well until the depression when his business failed leaving him with huge debts because of money he had invested in unfinished houses (which he could not sell) for which he was never paid. He was forced into bankruptcy and never really recovered. When I was nine we moved to Shelby where Dad had built a Phillips 66 gas station which he ran with my oldest brother who was then nineteen. The Muskegon house was rented to a family who seldom paid any rent. We lived in an old house next door to the gas station. There was no bathroom. We used the toilet in the gas station and bathed in a wash tub in the kitchen with water heated on a wood stove. This was a happy time for me. There were lots of children in the neighborhood, a wonderful hill for sledding, open spaces for play and a satisfying fourth grade experience. It was a terrible time for my parents who somehow spared me the awareness of our desperate poverty. In December of 1933 Dad sold the gas station, dislodged the renters from the family home in Muskegon, and we moved back there. My parents were able to refinance the house through FHA. The monthly mortgage payments were $38.00. Dad went to work for the newly formed WPA (Works Progress Administration, one of Roosevelt’s programs to put people back to work.) He was involved in the construction of a large causeway park between Muskegon and North Muskegon. When that was completed he started to work for the Muskegon Heights Board of Education in charge of building maintenance at all the school buildings. He stayed on that job until Mother’s death in 1944. His salary was only $150.00 a month, but it was regular, and Mother, a good money manager, was content. The rest of my childhood and adolescence were uneventful and happy. I was healthy. I had lots of friends. I loved school and did well. Mother had been quite overweight for years. In about 1935 she was diagnosed with adult-onset diabetes. She tried to control the diabetes with diet, but was never really well after that. I was aware of her failing health, but in my self-centered adolescence I was not affected by it. The adult who most influenced my thinking, my attitudes, my interests and my behavior was my high school biology teacher, Verne Fuller, a single woman in her late thirties. She often took a group of students on Saturday nature hikes, mostly for birds with instruction Beverly’s Story ..... 275 in botany thrown in. She took some of us to Audubon Society camp outs. She was always available after school for those of us who had special projects in the lab. It was at Verne’s urging that in the summer of 1946 I went to the University of Michigan Biological Station (bug camp) at Douglas Lake near Pelston, Michigan. There I took Ornithology and Entomology and earned seven credits toward my degree. This was a peak experience of my college years. I kept in touch with and developed an adult friendship and corres- pondence with Verne which lasted until her death in 1997. She was my mentor in my formative years, and a dear friend in my adult years. I graduated from high school in 1941. I went one year to Muskegon Junior College on a scholarship. By the middle of 1942 the war had created a severe labor shortage, and jobs in defense industries were available. I took advantage of this and went to work in a steel foundry chemistry lab running “cook book” quantitative analysis on the steel produced there. The steel was used for tank treads and probably in other armaments. I was working 54 hours a week (the maximum the law allowed for women)—ten hours on week days and four hours on Saturday. My weekly paycheck was about $45.00. I paid five dollars a week for room and board at home and socked the rest of it away for college. Russ was in England preparing for the Normandy invasion and Wendell was in Alabama about to be shipped overseas when Mother died of an acute kidney infection in April, 1944. Wendell was called home and arrived a few hours after her death. Shortly afterward he was over seas in combat. About the same time my boyfriend, George Wickstrom to whom I was unofficially engaged also went overseas. We served a purpose for each other. I had a guy in the service and he had a girl back home who wrote him letters. The relationship ended shortly after he came home. Two months after Mother’s death my grandmother Holcomb died at age 83. The following month my cousin Fales, the navigator on a bomber, was shot down over Italy. He was initially declared missing in action, and later declared dead. I kept working until the fall of 1944 when I went off to Michigan State, carried a full academic load and worked twenty hours a week in 276 ..... Beverly’s Story

the periodical room of the college library at $.45 per hour. During two summer terms I worked full time in the library. It was through my library employment that I met Virginia Moore who introduced me to Ruth Musselman. This is significant. During this time Wendell had returned home and was discharged from the army. (Wendell married Marguerite Drabinski in 1952. He had one daughter, June). Russ had taken his discharge in France, married an eighteen year old French girl, mastered the French language, and attended the Sarbonne University in Paris for a year. In 1946 he came home with his bride and went off to study at the University of Chicago. He and Rosine were divorced in 1953. (Russ married Annabel Welsh in 1955. They had a natural son, David, and an adopted daughter, Dianne). Dad moved to LaMesa, California, where he worked as a finish carpenter. He married Hattie Tennant in 1951. I never liked Hattie, and she never liked me, but with two thirds of the United States separating us I only saw her about five times so it didn’t matter. Back to the chronology—I graduated in June, 1947, with a BS Degree in the Division of Physical Sciences, even though I had been a biology major for nearly two years. I also had enough math credits to declare a math major. One day just before graduation the head of the Mathematics Department, Dr. Frame, approached me and asked what my plans were. I had no plans at that point. He asked me if I would be interested in a graduate assistantship. I would be teaching two freshman math courses and taking two graduate courses, tuition free, with a stipend of $300 per term. I jumped at the offer. Veterans were beginning to show up in droves at the registrars office to use their GI Bill benefits and instructors were needed. At the end of fall term, Dr. Frame again approached me with an offer to teach a full load and take one course per term for twice the money. I accepted. I proceeded toward my Masters Degree while getting some valuable teaching experience. I continued on this path until I finished my Masters Degree at the end of winter term 1950, and was thereupon unceremoniously dumped. It was not because my work was unsatisfactory but because, as Dr. Frame explained, the Department had a policy of not hiring their own graduates as instructors. During these years I had become friends with Ruth Musselman (and Beverly’s Story ..... 277 coincidentally had been rooming on Marshall Street within sight of the Musselman’s) and had been a guest in the Musselman home quite often. I became acquainted with her parents. Her sister, Mary, had been a student of mine. I was aware that she had a brother but had never met him. From March to August, 1950, I worked as a bookkeeper for a steel splitting plant in Dearborn, Michigan, I returned briefly to East Lansing before starting a teaching job at Greenbrier College for Girls in Lewisburg, West Virginia. While in East Lansing I received a call from George Musselman, Ruth’s brother, inviting me to a beach party at Lake Michigan with several of his friends and their wives and dates. He wanted to take a date, and Ruth suggested she had a friend, me, who might be willing to go. He picked me up in his Studebaker and we had a very pleasant first date. Our second date was two and one half years later. For two years I taught at Greenbrier College, a school with an enrollment of about 120 which offered the last two years of high school and the first two years of college. I was paid $2500 a year plus room and board. I taught all the math during my first year there. In the second year, after the retirement of the science teacher and only male on the faculty, a local retired teacher was hired to teach the high school math and science courses. I took on college chemistry and biology in addition to my college math courses. I managed to keep a few chapters ahead of the students in the science courses—relearning what I had forgotten. What a fraud! But I was never found out. These were good years. The living quarters were suites for two single women with large separate bedrooms and shared bath. Meals were in the dorm with the students. The food was excellent from the kitchen of “Miss Sally.” I made several life long friends and had a rather interesting social life. During spring break of 1952 I drove to East Lansing to visit friends. (I had just purchased my first car, a 1947 ford sedan, for $700). I learned that Michigan State was hiring instructors in the basic college for a new course—Natural Science. This was to replace two former courses of Biological Science and Physical Science. Since I had background in both these fields I decided to apply. I was hired to start in the fall with a one year contract. 278 ..... Beverly’s Story

Back in East Lansing again I felt as if I had come home. My teaching load consisted of one huge lecture section, and three lab sections involving fifteen hours of classroom time per week. I renewed my friendship with Ruth Musselman who was back working on her PhD. On New Year’s Eve, 1952, neither Ruth nor I had any other plans for celebrating the dawn of ’53, so she came over to my apartment. We spent the evening chatting. We talked about the fact that we were both approaching thirty, that if we were going to marry we should do it fairly soon, and if we were not going to marry, we ought to decide what we would do with the rest of our lives. This led to Ruth relating the story of her Aunts Willie, Jane and Nellie and the lives they had led as single women. Ruth also mentioned that her parents would like to see her brother, George, settled in a career and perhaps a marriage. He was at that time working on his Masters Degree in Geology at the University of Michigan. I playfully asked, “Why wouldn’t he do for me?” Ruth’s response was, “You know, I think the two of you might hit it off.” That was the end of that discussion. In March of 1953, when George was home for the weekend, Ruth mentioned to him that I was back in town. He called me and we spent our second date (two and one half years after the first one) in my apartment doing the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle and listening to Gilbert and Sullivan records. We were married on June 29, and that’s how I became one of the outlaws in the Musselman clan forty six years ago. I should add here that if I had gone in search of the perfect mother- in-law for me and married whatever son came with her I couldn’t have done better on either score. She never offered any advice I didn’t ask for. She never interfered, never criticized. She was helpful when I asked for advice. She always introduced me as her daughter, not as her daughter- in-law. I admired her. I loved her. I missed her when she died. I was also very fond of my father-in-law. He was always a good friend to me.

Addendum: A Brief Genealogy The Holcombs, originally from England, were in America before the Revolution. Wesley Holcomb (1824-1892) and Rhoda Graves (1822-l904) were the parents of my grandfather, Frank Holcomb. They Bill’s Story ..... 279 came from near Buffalo, New York and homesteaded at Bristol in 1869. There were three teenaged daughters; Elvira, Eliza and Emily and Frank, the only boy, about ten years old when the family came to Michigan. Frank Holcomb (1858-1936) married Ruth Ellen (Nell) Sutton (1855- 1944), the third daughter of James Sutton (1832-1925). (James was born in England and stowed away on a ship to America at the age of nine after being apprenticed to a tailor. Of course he was found by the crew and was put to work. He sailed the high seas for many years until he married Mildred Robinson and became a farmer.) Frank and Nell had three children; Jennie, Truman (my father) and Floyd. John VanAntwerp (1818-1903) and Elizabeth VanTiesen (1821-1902) were the parents of my maternal grandfather, Clarence VanAntwerp. They came to America from Holland as newlyweds around 1840. Clarence (1862-1949) was the youngest of their twelve children. He married Harriet (Hattie) Latimer (1864-1951), the daughter of Frank Latimer (1829-1896), a coal miner in Ohio and Lucinda Brooks (1833- 1910). Clarence and Hattie had three children; Elmer, Minnie (my mother) and Gladys. Somehow all these people ended up at Bristol, Michigan living and working on farms by the time my parents were school children.

Bill’s Story Written by Ruth Alexander with assistance from Jane, Andy, and Sarah Alexander and Betty and Nancy Bonell In some ways, Bill Alexander’s progenitors resemble the Musselmans, a fact that Bill and I discussed before we married. Like us, he was the product of northern European ethnic groups—Scotch Irish through the Alexander line and German through the Achterkirch line of his mother. His father, George Hubert Alexander, shared similarities with our Grandfather Green, in both appearance and personality. Of medium height, with a thatch of white hair, deep set eyes, and a ready smile, he was genial, gregarious, and always smartly dressed. He loved the hotel business and hotel life, which, like Grandpa Green, he entered late in life. He had a good baritone voice and loved to sing, and he was devoted to the Episcopal Church. Furthermore he was first ➥ 280 ..... Bill’s Story

associated with the lumber business in Minnesota where its center had moved from Saginaw, Michigan, by the beginning of the twentieth century. Specifically, his lumber business thrived in Hibbing on the Mesabi Iron Range of Minnesota during its glory days of growth in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. G.H., or Hubert, as he was commonly known later in life, differed from George Green mostly in that he came from a later generation, having been born February 20, 1888, the same year that George Green married Jane Law. Like the Greens, G.H. Alexander’s forebears had come from Ireland to Canada, when in 1828 his grandfather, Thomas Alexander, came as a young boy to join his father near Fredericton Junction, New Brunswick. However, the Alexanders were “Scotch Irish”—Scots who had earlier migrated from Scotland to the province of Ulster (now northern Ireland) which the British took over after a rebellion in 1611 under James I. They encouraged Scottish and English settlers to take up land that was formerly owned by Catholic Irish. Unlike the Scotch Irish who settled in large numbers on the American frontier in the eighteenth century, the Alexanders were not Presbyterian in religious belief but loyal to the Anglican Church. When he grew up, Thomas married a woman from New Brunswick, Frances Shirley, and together they reared a large family while he farmed and worked as a lumber man. His oldest son, William Henry, however, got a job as an employment agent for a lumber company. In 1883 he married Sophie Catherine Good who was also born in New Brunswick at Bathhurst in 1865. They began married life in Oconto, Wisconsin, on the shores of Green Bay off Lake Michigan. George Hubert was the second living child of this marriage. He had an older brother Shirley, two younger brothers Don and William and two younger sisters Verna and Doris. He moved with the family from Oconto to Duluth, Minnesota, in 1893 when he was only five years old. His mother, Catherine Good Alexander, had a brother Herbert who had a wholesale lumber business that transported lumber out of the north woods to Duluth where it could be shipped by rail or boat. He hired William Henry to work for him. G.H. grew up in Duluth, went to high school there and sang with his older brother Shirley in a boy’s choir in the Episcopal Church. He was confirmed there in 1907. Shirley Bill’s Story ..... 281 found favor with a man in Duluth who thought he showed promise and who sent him to Harvard, an accomplishment of which G.H. was always very proud. On finishing high school, G.H. began working as a time keeper for his uncle Herbert Good’s lumber company for $1000 a year. He continued to learn the lumber business for a number of years, even being sent out to Portland, Oregon, by the company to become more familiar with logging in a lumber camp. Eventually, he worked in Hibbing. There he met a young grade school teacher named Josephine Eugenie Achterkirch, who would later become his wife. Josephine’s father, Henry Achterkirch, had emigrated to the United States from Niemberg, in what was then the Kingdom of Hanover, Germany. The German states were in turmoil during the Revolutions of 1848. After the defeat of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the German States were under the control of Prince Metternich of Austria through a Confederation. Espionage, censorship, control of the universities, enabled him to control any movements toward liberal or nationalistic reform for several decades. Toward the middle of the century, however, strong liberal movements arose to demand more demo- cratic governments and to unite a fragmented Germany out of competing monarchies of the Confederation. These were part of the Revolutions of 1848 which swept through Europe that year and forced Metternich to flee to England. During this unsettled period, Henry Achterkirch’s father was a General in a German mercenary army. He wanted his sons to escape military service. He arranged for Henry and his brother to be sent to America, virtually as stowaways, according to family legend. The Revolution of 1848 failed to bring about the democratic unity that the liberals hoped for. Repressive regimes were reestablished in most German states. As a result, German immigrants flooded into the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century. Many settled in the Middle West—especially in states and cities that were just opening up—Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, and St. Louis. Henry Achterkirch eventually farmed near Nurstrand, in southeast Minnesota. Ironically, after fleeing Germany to escape the army, he fought in the Civil War for the union cause. Military service took him to Missouri and there he met another German girl, Elizabeth Lindemann of St. Louis. Many years later, Bill Alexander came into possession of a Book 282 ..... Bill’s Story

of Common Prayer that allegedly belonged to his grandfather, Henry. Bill was under the impression that Henry had carried it during the Civil War, but the inscription on the fly leaf, although nearly illegible, says July 9, 1866, and the book was only printed in 1865. It obviously came into Henry’s possession after the Civil War. Perhaps it was used in his wedding to Elizabeth Lindemann although the Achterkirchs were always staunch Methodists. In any case, Henry and Elizabeth Achterkirch settled in Minnesota on the farm and reared a family of six children. Josephine, born in 1885, was the youngest. She had two older brothers, William and Ernst, and three older sisters, Minnie, Emma, and Anna. According to the story Bill told, when Andrew Maas, then a young attorney from Minneapolis, asked Henry Achterkirch for his daughter Emma’s hand in marriage, the old man was not very well. Before he gave his consent to the marriage, he made Andrew promise to take care of the two younger girls, Anna and Josephine, until they married. Andrew was true to his word. Until she married, Josephine made her home with her aunt and uncle in Minneapolis when she was not teaching in Hibbing. Anna, who never married, lived with Andrew and Emma for many decades until both were dead and Andrew had left the bulk of his estate to his dependent sister-in-law. Both Henry Achterkirch and his wife Elizabeth died in 1903, the former under suspicious circumstances that may have been suicide. Josephine’s baptismal certificate indicates that she began life as a Methodist and that was the faith that most of the Achterkirchs claimed. In fact, one cousin became a Methodist minister. Josephine, however, decided early to leave the church. According to her, at age twelve when she was expected to formally join the church, she refused and ran away, hiding in the barn. She objected to the strict Methodist moral code that prohibited dancing and card playing. She was particularly fond of the former. She was only eighteen when her parents died. Her home thereafter was with Andrew Maas, his wife, and her sister Anna in Minneapolis. It is possible she began attending the Episcopal Church there since they lived not very far from Gethsemane Church, the oldest Episcopal Church in the city and quite prominent in Minneapolis society at the beginning of the century. Bill’s Story ..... 283

Josephine had some normal school training before she took a job teaching grade school in Hibbing. Like many small towns of the period, it held town dances. It also had an established Episcopal Church. In the course of her life there, she met G.H. Alexander and the relationship flourished. In January of 1912, they were married in Gethsemane Episcopal Church in Minneapolis. After the Achterkirch farm was sold, Josephine had received an inheritance of about $5000. This provided the necessary capital for G.H. to open his own retail lumber business in Hibbing. He had enough experience to make a go of it and Hibbing was growing. It had already experienced considerable prosperity from the harvest of Minnesota timber but with the discovery of rich deposits of iron in 189l and the development of open pit mining, the town entered its real boom. The demand for steel skyrocketed in the twentieth century, especially with the opening of World War I and the increasing popularity of automobiles. The mines produced great quantities of ore which could be shipped out of Duluth on ore boats to the steel mills around Chicago, Cleveland and Pittsburgh. The city grew with the min- ing industry and G.H. prospered from the lumber he sold for housing. “I built hundreds of small houses,” he once told me. G.H. was able to invest in other property, eventually buying an interest in the Androy Hotel on the Main Street of town. He also built the Alexander building across the street from the hotel. This structure housed residents on the upper floor and a hardware store on the ground floor. William Andrew Alexander (always called Bill) was born on the eve of World War I, on August 12, 1914. He was the oldest of three children, followed by his sister Elizabeth born in 1917 and his brother George Hubert Junior (always called Hugh) born in 192l. Bill was a somewhat sickly baby who had colic and did not gain weight as fast as the doctor thought he should. He was much doted on by both parents. His father once told me they almost killed Bill with their worry and attention. However, Bill survived and the family prospered. So prosperous did they become that by 1923 they moved into a large, beautiful home on the edge of town at 3822 lst Avenue. The house required both maids and gardeners to maintain which G.H.’s lumber business provided. In addition, Josephine had a long bout with stomach ulcers after Hugh’s birth, so the new baby had a full time nurse to care for him. 284 ..... Bill’s Story

Throughout the twenties, the family lived in opulence. Both G.H. and Josephine loved beautiful things, so they furnished their house elegantly with paintings, expensive furniture, and exquisite china and silver. They gave elaborate parties for Hibbing’s wealthy mining society which also flourished during these years. Always generous and a big spender, G.H. gave his wife valuable jewelry. Like so many twentieth century men, he had a love affair with automobiles—especially big, expensive cars. He owned the first automobile in Hibbing, a Franklin. He loved to drive and he drove fast, even into his old age when he drove a Chrysler. Once when a Judge chastised a ticketed Betty Alexander for driving too fast, he turned to G.H. who was with her and said, “You do, too!” He belonged to the Shrine and participated in the prohibition drinking and partying that characterized the roaring twenties. Both he and his family along with some of their good friends in the mining industry actively supported the Episcopal church, contributing to it generously. They spent their summers at their cottage at Swan Lake, not too far from Hibbing, where the children played with their cousin Herb Good and loved the water. Even there, they had hired help to take care of the cottage and the kerosene lamps. They made frequent visits to Minneapolis to shop and to visit Josephine’s sisters Anna and Emma. The Maas family had no children, but unmarried Anna Achterkirch lived with them, and all were fond of the Alexander children and remained close to the family. Meanwhile, everything was not going as well for young Bill. Somewhat rickety and small for his age—he never grew beyond 5 foot 3 inches—his mother dressed him in expensive clothes from Dayton’s and Young Quinlan’s in Minneapolis. His nearest playmates, however, were the sons of miners—mostly second generation Czechs, Croats, Slavs, Poles, and Italians. They were bigger than Bill, came from very different backgrounds, and dressed very differently. They teased and bullied him unmercifully. He said they threatened to wash his face in the snow regularly and usually succeeded in doing so. He was naturally shy, having been protected at home to the extent of taking his first few years of schooling there. He had little experience with rough and tumble playing with children other than his siblings. He managed to survive grade school, but by the time he reached junior high, his sense Bill’s Story ..... 285 of inadequacy and inferiority was so great that his school work began to be affected. G.H. and Josephine decided to do something about it. They enrolled him in a private Episcopal high school, Shattuck Military Academy at Faribault, Minnesota. Shattuck had grown from the primitive school that the Reverend Dr. James Lloyd Breck, one of Minnesota’s pioneering Episcopal missionaries, established in 1858. Under the direction of Bishop Henry Whipple who took over its supervision in 1860, it grew into a boarding school for young men. Adjoining schools, St. Mary’s for girls, and St. James for younger children, were eventually added. Shattuck became a military school after the Civil War when a returning soldier on the faculty introduced military drill. Its military training lasted until 1974. In Bill’s day, the students wore uniforms, which immediately appealed to Bill. “Everybody dressed alike,” he said, so that he was no longer a target for taunting because of his fancy clothes. His roommate was Bill Bowen, a young man from North Dakota who would eventually become an ophthamologist. He and Bill remained good friends until Bill Bowen died of a heart attack in his fifties. Although not an outstanding student, Bill Alexander was happy at Shattuck. He liked the military routine and the discipline of drilling, even to being the first one up in the morning to blow reveille on the bugle. He also liked the scheduled study hours. His enthusiasm for system, organization, and routine stayed with him the rest of his life, making him an excellent manager of a hotel or of materials in a hospital later in life. This training also made him a first class Executive Secretary of any organization that he belonged to. Work and duty always came first with Bill. The stiff college preparatory curriculum of Shattuck challenged him to work hard but later made his first years of college a breeze. He loved running and was active in track. This also stayed with him when he took up running again in middle age. The only prize Bill ever won was the “Plugger’s Prize.” The prize was awarded to “that senior, not an honor student, who, in the judgement of the faculty, had been most faithful and conscientious in his school work throughout the course of his time at Shattuck.” Bill was indeed a plugger all his life, a hard and systematic worker, who could hang in there when everyone else gave up. 286 ..... Bill’s Story

The Alexanders shared some values with the Musselmans— especially a Victorian attitude toward sex. They never discussed nor mentioned it. Bill said he had no understanding of sex before he went to Shattuck. The only teaching his father gave him was his comment in the bathroom before he left his son at the school: “They’ll tell you that pulling that thing will make it grow. Don’t believe them.” That was the extent of Bill’s formal sex education. However, the boys at Shattuck enlightened him—and probably each other—over the course of his stay there. He graduated in 1932 and that summer took a driving and camping trip with Bill Bowen through the Black Hills of South Dakota. This was years before there were good roads and Mount rushmore was only in the planning stage. There was little development in the Hills. Nonetheless, the boys had a wonderful adventure. They felt very independent and grown up as thy drove an old car on unimproved roads in the mountains. At the same time, the Alexanders were facing hard times. The depression had wiped out much of the Alexander fortune. G.H. lost heavily as did many others on the Iron Range in the early 1930s. In fact, the federal government considered it to be one of the nation’s permanently depressed areas because of its dependence upon a natural resource which maintained a single industry. When lack of industrial production forced down the demand for steel, the demand for iron went down as well. An additional complication made G.H.’s circumstances even more precarious. By 1918, the open pit had moved too close to the town of Hibbing because the Oliver Mining Company under US Steel owned the mineral rights to the land under the town. They wanted to dig ore there. Consequently, the north section of town was gradually moved two miles south. One building at a time was mounted on steel wheels and rolled to the new area. But the lumber yard was not moved. According to Bill, his father ran the business as long as he could from the old site and then “just sort of walked away from it.” That was no doubt part of his losses during those years. By that time, the family apparently lived on his other investments. The depression years were somewhat difficult for the family. Under pressure of the Hibbing society that he mingled with, G.H. drank quite heavily, had an automobile accident, and the household was full of Bill’s Story ..... 287 strain and tension. There seemed to be enough income to maintain the house on a reduced scale and to live reasonably well, but apparently there was a good deal of worry about the future. When he finished Shattuck, Bill had no idea what he wanted to do and family finances were such that he was not encouraged to explore options far from home. He spent his first two college years at Hibbing Junior College, where he did very well. He entered into Hibbing social life, dated a little, and went to parties. He worked part time at the Androy Hotel, cleaning bathrooms and the basement. He also was very active in the Episcopal Church. Had anyone suggested it, he might have considered a vocation in the church, since his faith was deep and genuine and his greatest pleasure came from serving people. But the idea did not occur to him—he later said he never felt holy enough. Nor did it occur to anyone else. His father finally suggested the hotel business and Bill agreed. He liked providing food and housing for people and he liked the idea of managing such an enterprise so it seemed a reasonable choice. One of the few colleges that offered a curriculum in hotel administration was Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Bill transferred to Cornell for his last two years of college to complete the major in hotel administration, specializing in accounting. His years at Cornell were primarily devoted to pursuing his education. He enjoyed his experience in Ithaca, although his energy was expended on his studies. In fact, he at first joined a fraternity but later moved out of the fraternity house to avoid the distraction of the social life. He graduated from Cornell in 1936 and immediately was hired by the Radisson Hotel in Minneapolis to work in their accounting department. His main job that year was setting up the Social Security System for the employees, and he enjoyed the work. However, his father had a nineteenth century idea that a father in business ought to provide a place in that business for his eldest son. The lumber company was no longer a possibility. With a friend and business associate, G.H. began looking around for a business opportunity that he could purchase. In 1937, the two men settled on two small hotels in small towns in South Dakota, the Dudley Hotel in Brookings and the Lake Hotel in Madison. These were old fashioned “country hotels,” 288 ..... Bill’s Story

according to Bill, close to the railroad depot and catering heavily to traveling salesmen. The Brookings hotel even had a warehouse where they could display their goods to local merchants. G.H. Alexander’s action was controversial from the beginning. He had not consulted either his wife or Bill about the purchase, neither of whom was confident of the earning potential of the hotels. His down payment was small, so they had a substantial debt to pay before they had money to make improvements on the properties. The hotels had few amenities that many travelers were beginning to expect. G.H. did not have the necessary money at the time to bring them up to a standard that the Alexanders believed was minimal. I once asked Bill why his Dad bought the hotels and he said, “They were all he could afford.” Furthermore, the partner was not compatible with the family and they soon bought him out. In spite of misgivings, the family took over management of the hotels and dining rooms, changing the name of the Brookings place from the “Dudley” (named for the former owner ) to the “Sawnee.” This became something of a joke in the family. They considered the name Alexander too long to be economically printed on towels and stationery, so the family decided to use a six letter nickname for Alexander, “Saunie,” but changed the spelling to what they thought was easier. Most people thought it was the name of an Indian tribe, appropriate perhaps because the hotel was located not far from the Flandreau Sioux Reservation. Of course, it had absolutely no connection with Native Americans. But the name was also often confused with the song about a river and was constantly called the “Swanee.” It never really reflected the Alexander name and to the family’s amusement was frequently mispronounced. In any case, ownership of the Sawnee Hotel changed the direction of the lives of the Alexander family and ultimately moved them from Hibbing, Minnesota, to Brookings, South Dakota. Bill took over management of both properties in 1937, gradually making improvements in them. He worked hard for a few years and occasionally his father and mother, sister and brother visited him or he made trips home to Hibbing. After the agricultural depression of the twenties and the terrible drought of the early thirties, South Dakota’s economy gradually improved. Many farmers had lost their Bill’s Story ..... 289 land during those years or had given up and moved to the west coast for better opportunity. The population dropped during this decade from 693,000 in 1930 to 643,000 in 1940. In 1937, South Dakota was still a very rural state with few modern conveniences in many places. More than half the population still lived on farms. Although Brookings and towns had electricity, electrification did not come to rural areas of the state until after World War II. One room country schools proliferated on the prairies—almost five thousand in 1930-31. Many roads were impassable during some seasons of the year. On the other hand, three railroad lines provided passenger service as well as carrying freight in and out of the state. Very small towns flourished to serve the needs of local farmers. Brookings was one of South Dakota’s larger towns because its chief industry was South Dakota State College, a small agriculture, home economics, and engineering school. Madison claimed a small General Beadle State Teachers College. The two hotels were cheap but spartan—most rooms without baths, telephones, radios, air conditioning, or access to elevators. Yet with an improving economy, they made money, especially during World War II. The war economy demanded farm commodities and placed strict limitations on civilian construction. Guests made do with whatever facilities were available as part of the “war effort.” The war changed everything. Bill was called into military service in 1941 so could no longer manage the business. His younger brother Hugh had begun a hotel administration course at Michigan State College, but also left for military service. G.H. and Josephine moved out to Brookings for the duration of the war in order to run the Sawnee. Their daughter Betty, after some years at Mills College in California and at the University of Minnesota, was called to join them in order to run the Lake Hotel in Madison. Josephine helped in supervising the housekeeping of the rooms. Cleanliness was always an important standard for the Alexanders. She and G.H. took short afternoon drives and regularly attended church and church functions. Some people remember her regularly walking over to Kendall’s Drug Store to buy chocolates for G.H. They always had kept them around and nibbled on them every day. It was a more restricted life for them than they had had in Hibbing, but Josephine had developed 290 ..... Bill’s Story

some heart problems and did not have very good health. Small town life seemed to agree with them. Once in the Army, Bill was sent to officer’s school because of his military experience at Shattuck and because of his college degree. However, he was never cut out to be an officer. He could do the class work well and accepted the discipline, but he found it difficult to give anyone commands. His gentle demeanor, his compassion for human failure and frailty, his unwillingness to make anyone uncomfortable did not give him the leadership qualities required of a military officer. The army eventually found him his niche however. He spent most of the war running officers’ clubs—first in Georgia and eventually overseas in England, France, and Belgium. He did not see combat, but he did see poverty and misery among the Belgian people near the front. He was horrified to see old women rummaging in garbage cans for food and felt guilty because he could do so little for them or for others in poverty. He did his war job well and was honorably discharged in 1946. His brother Hugh, on the other hand, had been shipped out of Minneapolis to the west coast on a train with old cars which had only primitive heating. Partly because of the wretched traveling conditions and partly because of close contact with so many strange men, Hugh caught cold. Always subject to allergies and asthma, he developed bronchial pneumonia and wound up with serious lung problems for some months in a Denver hospital. Neither Josephine nor G.H. knew where he was for a period of time and frantically tried to locate him through the Red Cross. When he was able to travel, Hugh was discharged with a disability pension. The worry of Hugh’s illness affected Josephine’s already frail health. Worry exacerbated her difficulties. She survived only until Bill returned from service in 1946. A month after Bill’s arrival home, she died in Brookings at age 61. She was a few years older than G.H. The family did not have the heart to go back to the Hibbing home without her and grieved together in their new environment. The cross above the altar in St. Paul’s Church was given in her memory by the Alexander family. Bill was eager to get back into civilian life and threw himself into the hotel business. For a number of years it went well. All business in South Dakota was dependent upon agriculture, which boomed Bill’s Story ..... 291 during these years. Worldwide demand for food grew enormously after World War II because Europe was too devastated by the conflict to produce much. The Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe and agricultural subsidies to meet the demand made the upper Midwest prosperous. Good times in the prairie and plains states even helped reelect Harry Truman in 1948 with his campaign slogan “You’ve never had it so good!” Usually overwhelmingly Republican, many agreed with Truman and voted Democratic. Furthermore, the hotels had little competition for a few years. A couple of motels, really more like off-the-road tourist cabins, were built in Brookings: one on highway 77 going south to Sioux Falls and one on highway 14 coming into town from the east, but they provided no food and did not really threaten hotel business. An old wooden structure, the Bates Hotel, was down the street from the Sawnee, but it had even fewer amenities and did not get the most affluent trade. The Chicago Northwestern “Dakota 400” came into Brookings every night from Chicago on its way to Rapid City and returned early every morning. In addition, Jack Rabbit Lines operated buses out of the hotel lobby every day with east/west, north/south connections to Rapid City, Minneapolis, Sioux Falls, and Watertown. Although Brookings boasted only one stoplight in town on Main Street, what traffic there was, the Sawnee Hotel profited from. In addition, the hotel dining room provided one of the few restaurants in town and served some of the clubs, Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions, every week. Bill was eager to make improvements in the Sawnee Hotel. It seemed to hold more potential for growth than the Madison Lake Hotel. Soon after the war, the Alexanders sold the Lake for a considerable profit. That money enabled Bill to begin remodeling many rooms, adding bathrooms and more modern furniture. Recognizing the growing power of automobile travel, he improved the hotel parking lot and made a more attractive entrance to the hotel off it. Meanwhile, after the death of Josephine Alexander, G.H. Alexander and Betty and their wire haired terrier Perky continued to live in Brookings. Although G.H. still owned his house and the Alexander Building in Hibbing, he found the more modest social life of Brookings preferable to the social pressures of his former home town. He no longer attended Shrine and 292 ..... Bill’s Story

Elks Club events or hunting and fishing week-ends with the other men, so he no longer felt the same pressure to drink. He had developed some business contemporaries and friends in Brookings and at St. Paul’s Church, with whom he enjoyed socializing on a modest scale. Later he developed prostate trouble and had a long hospital siege. Most of all, G.H. liked living in the hotel. Although Bill ran the business and kept the books, G.H. did the banking and wrote the reports for him. He was a better host to the guests than Bill. He enjoyed talking to the salesmen in the lobby, taking his meals with them in the restaurant. He loved his car, taking drives in the afternoon and occasionally varied his routine by visiting Minneapolis or Hibbing. He eventually took longer trips with his brother Shirley to visit distant relatives. Since the business was in Brookings and none of his children now resided in Hibbing, in 1948 he sold the family home. That same year Betty met Jack Bonell, a young man who had grown up in Brookings and graduated from South Dakota State in civil engineering, where his father had been on the engineering faculty. After the war, he followed in his father’s footsteps, joining the engineering faculty at the University of Nevada. He was visiting his step-mother who temporarily lived in the Rectory of St. Paul’s Church as a kind of housekeeper. She was a friend of G.H. and introduced them. The meeting between Betty and Jack led to a year’s correspondence and an engagement the following spring. After an August wedding in 1949, Jack and Betty returned to Reno, Nevada, to live, but the Bonell connection strengthened the Alexander tie to Brookings. Thereafter, Bill began major remodeling of the hotel. He had the artistic and design advice of his brother Hugh, who had recently returned from Arizona. Hugh had gone there to recover his health after the war and to complete his college work at Arizona State University. He even worked in a men’s store in Arizona for a while before returning to the rigors of South Dakota’s winters. Betty and Bill drove an old Pierce Arrow out to bring him home, visiting New Orleans on the trip. After Hugh was established in the hotel, they redesigned the entrance and front lobby, changed the dining room into an air conditioned Cactus Grill, opened up a couple of banquet rooms in the back, made a popular studio room for salesmen on the first floor, and refurnished Bill’s Story ..... 293 a comfortable apartment for G.H. and Hugh on the second floor. By the beginning of the second half of the century, the Sawnee Hotel was as comfortable and up-to-date as any small town hotel in the region. It was also now the Alexander home. Bill threw all his energy into the hotel business. He was a member of the North Central Hotel Association and was President of the South Dakota Hotel Association. He was on the Brookings Chamber of Commerce Board. In 1955 he became President. He was active in his business, in the community and in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. He sang in the choir, used his hotel equipment to help maintain the church building and property, and offered shelter to indigents who wandered into the church seeking assistance. With his cousin Bob Alexander, a student at SDSU, and Hugh to help in the business, his father to run small errands and reliable help on the desk, Bill’s business life seemed to have stabilized successfully. On the other hand, his social life languished. He said he sometimes felt more like a coffee pot in the Cactus Grill than a human being, so totally was he involved in his work. He and Hugh took time off for a trip to New York for theater and sight-seeing, and he drove out to Reno to visit Betty and he visited his Shattuck friend Bill Bowen. But he still lived in the hotel and expended most of his energy on it. Singing in the church choir was his one regular outside activity. He did meet an attractive woman in church named Christine whose family farmed in Arlington. He took her out a few times. However, she traveled with a siding company and looked forward to having plenty of money to spend on clothes, vacations, and good living. Although the hotel was doing reasonably well, it carried a substantial debt. Bill could not see how he could provide the kind of life she was interested in, so the romance died almost before it started. In 1952, Ruth Musselman showed up in church the first Sunday in October. She had just taken a job teaching English at South Dakota State College, a week after the quarter had started. St. Paul’s Episcopal Church was small enough so that any new face was worthy of comment. Bill soon knew who she was and what her activities were. She joined the choir and they became speaking acquaintances, actually conversing a little at a choir party in the spring. Bill made no aggressive 294 ..... Bill’s Story

moves during that first year. She went home to Michigan for the summer. The next year, he took her to a traveling production of Mr. Roberts in Sioux Falls but he did not follow it up in any serious way. He was still carrying a torch for Christine, and Ruth appeared to have several college faculty friends who engaged her attention. In the autumn of 1954, he made a more determined pursuit, coming over to help paint her apartment one night and regularly taking her to and from choir, since she did not have a car. The trips home from choir became longer with detours to Aurora, a little town seven miles east of Brookings, which had a couple of cafes that sold beer. Brookings was dry at the time, although Bill knew several bootleggers in town who flourished. Aurora, unglamorous as it was, was a favorite haunt for college students and townspeople who wanted a drink. For a couple of fifteen cent beers, you could have a night on the town. One Saturday night, Bill took her to a local roadhouse, the Knotty Pine in Elkton, a town even farther away where they not only drank beer but danced to a juke box. This was the closest they had come to a real date. There- after, he became increasingly attentive, even taking Ruth to the train at Christmas and picking her up when she returned. By Ash Wednesday, he was seeing her regularly, and the choir was making book on a future alliance. The big day was Easter Sunday, April 10th. Ruth entertained Bill, his father, and another man, who was alone because his wife was in the hospital, for Easter dinner in her apartment. It was a very simple meal but Bill liked to eat and he realized that Ruth could cook. (He didn’t know how limited her knowledge was!) That cinched it. Taking advantage of a beautiful spring day, after dinner Bill drove her all the way into Minnesota before he got the courage to propose marriage. But that afternoon changed the course of their individual lives. They returned to Brookings that evening to tell G.H. who was delighted that Bill, at age forty, was finally taking the plunge. The next morning G.H. went to his safety deposit box in the bank and took out a diamond which he gave to Bill to have reset for Ruth. It was a short engagement. Bill visited Ruth’s family in June when she went home to prepare for the wedding which was to take place in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Brookings, where they had met. On July 16th, the knot was tied. Ruth’s family was present—her mother and father, her Lynn’s Story ..... 295 sister Sally Phelps, and her sister Mary, who was her only attendant. Bill’s sister Betty came from Reno with her two small children, Nancy and John, and other Alexander relatives attended as well. Hugh was his brother’s best man. Most of the guests were church members or colleagues of Ruth’s from college. Bill’s individual story now ended as Bill and Ruth together began a new Alexander family.

Lynn's Story As part of the Musselman saga, I will add a few paragraphs as one of the “outlaws.” I joined the family when I married Sarah Alice Musselman (Sally) on June 17, 1950 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Lansing, Michigan. It was a joyous occasion indeed, with my brother Merwin as my best man, and members of my family in attendance. Our lives have been enriched by many good times with all the members of the Musselman clan, sometimes at our home in Goodrich, Michigan, and later, and more often, at our home in Madison, Wisconsin. I was born Lynn Andrew Phelps on February 1, 1926, at Mercy Hospital in Cadillac, Michigan. My parents, Charles Lloyd Phelps and Doris Sadie Gullekson Phelps lived in Manton, a community of about 1000 people twelve miles north of Cadillac on US 131. Word has it that my mother stated that I looked like a fish! Be that as it may, I don’t think I look too much like a fish now! I joined one sibling, Merwin Charles Phelps, who was three years older than I. He also later attended the University of Michigan, became a librarian and worked for the Library of Congress. We saw quite a bit of his family, his wife Doris and his three sons, who lived in or near Washington, while he was alive. We still keep close touch with Doris and her grown sons. My early years were much like those of any small town boy growing up in northern Michigan. Dad owned and operated the local coal, lumber, and feed business which served the local farmers. His business was augmented by the Pennsylvania railroad. The sandy soil of the upper half of Michigan’s lower peninsula did not lend itself to successful farming except for the cherry orchards along the north- western shore of Lake Michigan, so this area which had once provided lumber riches suffered considerably after the lumber was gone. Farmers ➥ 296 ..... Lynn’s Story

could not really compete with those on the rich farm land in the southern part of the state. During the early part of the twentieth cen- tury, railroads which had been built for the lumber industry, hoped to improve their profits after its decline by promoting northern Michigan as a resort area. The Grand Rapids and Indiana line, later bought up by the Pennsylvania Railroad, called itself the “fishing line” to capitalize on Michigan’s northern lakes. With other railroads, they built resorts at Charlevoix, Harbor Springs, and Petosky on Lake Michigan, as well as the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, to lure tourists to these summer places. Before automobiles and good highways took away their traffic, they did quite well bringing tourists north from Chicago, Detroit, and Cincinnati. Indian Trail Lodge under the Grand Traverse Resort Association was actually a later off-shoot of the same economic thrust, although it looked forward to increased highway traffic for its future rather than the railroad. During the many months when the resorts were not open, the railroads had to rely on local business. It was this part of the Pennsylvania railroad line that benefited my father’s busi- ness when I was growing up in the twenties and thirties. Although we lived through the depression and certainly suffered from our share of economic hardship, I don’t remember ever going hungry. We did have an outdoor privy which was attached to the woodshed. I faintly remember the addition of the indoor plumbing and bathroom, probably a great boon to my parents. My greatest mis- fortune during childhood was losing my mother to lymphosarcoma, one of the malignant lymphomas, in 1938. I was twelve. She was ill for about six months. However, Dad remarried a few years later, so Kate Reiser Phelps became my step-mother. She handled the task of surrogate mother very well and Merwin and I learned to love her as a natural mother. We both learned to play the piano, a skill which I have enjoyed greatly over the years. I love music and have played the organ in churches I have attended as well as singing in choirs. I still play for family gatherings since all of the Musslemans like to sing, as does my own family. After graduating from Manton High School, I went off to war in 1944. I spent two years in the Air Corps as cryptographic technician, serving in Kunming, China, and finally at Atsugi Air Base near Tokyo, Japan. I received an honorable discharge in 1946 and entered the Ed’s Story ..... 297

University of Michigan where I earned an M.D. in 1953. I met Sally at the University when the residence hall where I lived invited some of the young ladies from Stockwell Hall over for a listening party for one of the away football games. We had a pretty good time, and when I needed a partner for a party a few weeks later, I called Stockwell Hall and asked for Miss “Busselman” or some such name. I was referred to Sally and eventually learned her correct name. We started dating soon thereafter and ended up in holy matrimony in 1950. We will celebrate our fiftieth wedding anniversary in 2000. After a year’s internship in Traverse City, Michigan, I practiced medicine in Goodrich, Michigan, for nineteen years, where we brought up our four children. We had a summer cottage on Potter Lake where I had a boat and did a lot of water skiing. I became quite accomplished at it. In 1973, we moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where I joined the medical faculty of the University of Wisconsin medical school. I retired from the University in 1990 and Sally and I have been enjoying retirement ever since. I like being active and doing things. In addition to water skiing, I have been canoeing and sailing and I now enjoy bicycling. Sally and I have taken eight European bicycle trips. I have enjoyed taking a lot of pictures with various cameras and put together whole slide shows of Musselman family reunions. I like tinkering with machinery and gadgets around the house. I like playing the piano and I have fun doing two piano works with some friends. I now like working on the computer and have become interested in art and in downtown Madison where we now live. Sally and I have enjoyed many national and international travel opportunities as well as watching our children grow and wed and produce nine grandchildren and one great grandchild. We hope to have many more years of fun and frolic.

Ed’s Story My father, Ewald (Ed) Fischer and my mother, Martha (Diefenbach) Fischer emigrated to the United States from Germany in 1923. They did not know one another until they met in New York City. They were married in 1927. ➥ 298 ..... Ed’s Story

Martha was born on April 21, 1903, in Bad Liebenzell, Wurttemberg, Germany to Carl and Wilhelmina (Fass) Diefenbach. I never met my grandparents. Carl was a fairly prosperous butcher and had his own shop in Bad Liebenzell employing several individuals. They managed a slaughtering operation, as well as a retail establishment which still exists. The shop was on the ground floor of a 15th century multi-story building. The upper floors served as the family home. The shop has a plaque mounted on the building indicating it is an historical site as the oldest, still operating, butcher shop in that area. Both of Martha’s parents were Lutheran. Martha was the youngest of twelve children, one of whom died shortly after birth. She was the only member of the family to emigrate to the United States. Carl, Martha’s eldest brother was also a butcher, but somewhat less successful and prosperous than his father. His wife Catherine gave birth to several children. They lived to a ripe old age and had a very successful marriage. Carl was easy going and Catherine was very loving. They were still alive in the mid-50s when Mary and I were in Germany. We were fortunate to see them several times. The rest of my mother’s siblings that I know of were Lydia Schaible, my mother’s oldest and favorite sister. Lydia was married to Carl, a successful contractor who had been married to her sister Amalia, but Amalia died young leaving two small children. Lydia raised the children. Lydia apprenticed in a restaurant business and worked as a dining room hostess prior to her marriage. Carl served on the Russian front in WWI under General Hindenburg and was a great admirer of his commanding officer. Lydia was very generous. During the U.S. depression she sent us many packages containing clothing for me (lederhosen, short pants, boys suits, etc.), food such as smoked sausages (wurst), candies (marzipan, chocolate liqueurs, chocolates, etc.). My mother and Lydia were very close and corresponded often. Wilhelm, a brother of my mother, was an accountant but was killed in WWI in France. A sister, Marie, was married but had no children. Another sister, Johanna married Eugen Burkhardt and had a daughter Laurie. A sister, Wilhelmina never married. A sister Luisse married a butcher, Wilhelm Lorcher, who took over her father’s butcher shop. Another brother Friedrich was an office manager who served in Ed’s Story ..... 299

WWI. His wife, Antoinette, was French and died at an early age. My mother said she had a very difficult time during WWI, being French and living in Germany. My father Ewald (pronounce in German with a long “a”, followed by “wahld”) was born on February 22, 1905, in Ausburg, Bavaria, Germany. I know very little of my father’s parents or siblings. His father, Carl, was a trolley conductor. My father indicated that his father was very easy going and his mother was the strong adult in the family. He had three siblings, one male and two females. My father was the second born. My father’s immediate family all emigrated to the U.S. After living in New York City for several years the entire family, with the exception of my father and grandfather, moved to Columbus, Ohio. My father stayed in the New York City area and my grandfather, when I last saw him at about the age of five, lived on a small farm not far from Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. I do not remember ever meeting my grandmother. My father’s siblings are as follow: Finny (a nickname), the eldest, was divorced and then married the owner of a beauty shop in the Columbus area. She worked in the shop for many years. They retired to Florida. Elsie, the youngest, married Finny’s first husband and died at an early age. They had one child, a girl who was raised by Finny. Siegfried, the youngest, had two marriages. He had two daughters in his first marriage and a son in his second. He served in WWII and then worked for many years for an electric utility south of Columbus. Mary and I saw him twice in the 1970s and then lost touch. We did not receive responses to cards and assume he died. With the exception of Elsie, my father had a poor relationship with his parents and siblings. I do not fully know the reason. If I had to speculate, I would label them as a rather dysfunctional group. My mother Martha Diefenbach came to the U.S. as a means of escape. As a young woman she gave birth to a son out of wedlock. In that place, at that time, she had disgraced herself and her family. She was therefore financed to a steamship ticket and given a small amount of money to start a new life in the U.S. She was eighteen years old, knew no English and had only one contact in New York City. She left 300 ..... Ed’s Story

her son with Lydia who raised him as her own to adulthood. He became an accountant and migrated to South Africa immediately after WWII. Upon arriving in the U.S. my mother’s contact helped her get a job as a housemaid. My mother had been trained as a beautician, but because of her lack of English she could not get a job in that field. Her shyness (fright?) probably contributed to this. While shopping one day she met an older lady from Germany who became a lifelong friend. Mrs. Hessling became a mother, of sorts, and helped my mother get a better job, guided her through the maze of the city, and gave her a shoulder to lean on. My mother’s most fortunate employment was a job with a fairly prosperous family, the Bechers. Eugen (the source Paul’s middle name) Becher was from Leipzig and was a German educated engineer. He was VP of Research for American Metal and Thermite. He had the patent for the thermite process for welding rails. He was a very pleasant, kind man with distinct German appearance and behavior. He always wore a suit and vest, took off his vest and jacket to garden, and sported a small white mustache. I think my exposure to him led me to take engineering in college. Mrs. Becher came from a Polish Jewish family. She had been Mr. Becher’s secretary. They married and had one child, Hildegarde. Hildegarde never married and was a devotee of opera all her life. She had extensive voice training in the U.S. and Europe. Mrs. Becher was very nice to my mother. She taught my mother to speak English and to cook. Being the youngest, my mother had never cooked in Germany. She learned to cook Mrs. Becher’s favorite German dishes, such as sauerbraten with noodles and red cabbage, as well as some of Mrs. Becher’s family recipes and conventional American dishes. My mother stayed in close contact with the Bechers until their deaths. I can remember going to the Becher’s home after WWII was over. Mrs. Becher always had a room full of CARE packages ready to send to Mr. Becher’s relatives in Germany. Mrs. Becher, despite the treatment of the Jews in Germany, was able to separate that horror from what she saw as a family obligation to help relatives in need. They were remarkable people. During her employment at Bechers my mother met my father at a German Club dance in Yorkville, a German section of New York City. Ed’s Story ..... 301

After a relatively short courtship they were married in the courthouse in Manhattan. My mother no longer attended church and my father’s entire family had separated from the Catholic church, so a church wedding was not even considered. In later years I was led to believe the Bechers were not too fond of my father. He was a bit full of bluff and bluster, something Mr. Becher would have considered unseemly. Upon arriving in the U.S. with his parents, my father had no trouble finding employment. He had apprenticed as a watchmaker for four years in Germany and had a journeyman’s license. Since many trained Germans worked in watch related jobs, he got hired by a watch and clock firm which serviced wealthy clients. He repaired clocks in homes in the city as well as in the lower Hudson valley as far north as Tarrytown. His excellent training had included making parts on a small jewelers lathe. He made parts for old grandfather clocks, some of which had wooden movements. He did quite well financially. For a short time after arriving in the U.S. he lived with his family. After moving out, he resided in a boarding house used by immigrants. Another boarder there was a Scot who helped my father learn English. Several years later he found out that he was saying some words with a German accent and a bit of a brogue. His major recreation was related to music. He was a fairly capable musician—violin, mandolin, guitar— and played in bands. Due to his fondness for night life and partying, he made contacts which grew into a part time job as organizer of parties on German steamships tied up in port awaiting their next crossing. Since alcohol could be served aboard these ships during prohibition, prosperous party goers would pay well to go aboard and live it up. My father made contacts on the ship and arranged for these affairs. The band he played in provided the music, the ship provided the food and beverages and he got a fee for organizing the event. I sometimes think this was a high point of his life. He always liked to eat, drink and make merry. For several years my parents seemed to do quite well. My mother convinced my father to open a lunchroom in Tarrytown, N.Y. across from the Chevrolet assembly plant. Using her cooking skills acquired at Bechers, she cooked and my father waited on the counter, handled the cash register, and jollied the customers. It was probably a good 302 ..... Ed’s Story

fit—my mother was a hard worker and shy, my father was a schmoozer, liked to talk and was sort of bouncy. Their main customers were the workers going on and off shifts at the plant. The hours were long, but they made a profit, assembled a nest egg (my mother’s influence—my father was a spender, not a saver) and felt quite prosperous. My father got a Chrysler coupe, my mother got a fox fur stole to wear around her neck and she made a triumphant return trip to Germany. She had made it in the New World. They sold the lunchroom and my father opened a watch repair shop. He bought a boat and went fishing with his buddies on the Hudson. While my mother was in Germany he lost the business due to inattentiveness and mismanagement. She had no idea he was in trouble and I assume the loss hit her pretty hard. However, they still had the nest egg, now invested in supposedly safe bonds. My mother got a job as a cook and my father went back to watchmaking in another person’s business. He was a good watchmaker but a poor businessman. Their next blow was the Crash of ’29. The bonds they held were a Ponzi scheme type of holding and were worthless. I don’t know how much they lost but I recall my mother once mentioning a number in excess of $20,000. I think the loss destroyed my mother’s outlook on life thereafter. She became obsessed with establishing a secure future and my father could not strike a happy balance between responsibility and pleasure. This led to a very lean period. I was born on November 14, 1930. My parents were in tough straits and my mother had a difficult time finding employment. For a short time I was sent to live with the relatives in Ohio. I don’t remember this at all, but it obviously led to friction between my parents and between my parents and the family in Ohio. My mother felt they treated me somewhat shabbily, but I don’t remember the situation at all. The first period in my life I recall fairly well was living in an apartment building in Jersey City, N.J., at about the age of four. My mother was working as building superintendent to pay for part of the rent and my father was working in Manhattan at a watch and jewelry store. My mother’s job consisted of cleaning the halls and common areas, the front steps, etc. I remember playing hide and seek Ed’s Story ..... 303 in a nearby graveyard with the neighborhood kids. The gravestones and monuments provided plenty of places to hide. I played in indestructible lederhosen, provided by Lydia, quite often. Shortly thereafter, in about 1934, we moved to Easton, PA. My father got a better job at Fishbone’s Jewelry Store. We lived in one half of an attached house at the west end of town. My father made enough to get a small Ford and things were a little better. Despite my poor start in school there I did ok. Since both my parents worked and we lived on the edge of town, I had a lot of freedom. Most days after school I was at other people’s homes. Summers I roamed the countryside with buddies, swam in the creek which had the usual tire on a rope and a short waterfall we could slide down. The route to the creek was along a railroad track. My parents never knew of the creek or the route to it. My mother couldn’t get work, but tried several things. She tried selling first aid products (bandages, tape, ointments, etc.) door to door. It was a total failure—she spoke with an accent, was shy and couldn’t sell. I recall her being very discouraged after spending several weeks walking the town and making almost nothing. The Fishbone family were very good employers. They paid a reasonable wage and were kind to my mother and me. My mother liked borscht and Mrs. Fishbone sent my mother a quart whenever she made it. My father got candy from Mr. Fishbone to bring home to me. One year my father won a prize at the store at Christmas. It was a large chocolate bunny which my dad gave to me. I thought it was huge and spent several weeks munching on chocolate. My father made some contacts in Nazareth, PA, which was nearby. He played in a band there and we made some friends resulting from that. My schooling started in Easton, PA. I went to the Wilson Boro Grade School, which started in the first grade—no kindergarten. The first week in school I was sent to the principal’s office for talking in class. I was told to sit in the chair in the hall and wait for the principal to see me. After waiting quite a while I decided to go home and walked the one half mile or so home. Since my mother was off working, I had a key, went in, put on play clothes and went out to play. The school panicked—they couldn’t find me or reach my parents. It caused quite a stir. 304 ..... Ed’s Story

Down the street from the school was the Wilbur theater. Movies on Saturday were ten cents—the news of the day, two cartoons and two feature films. If you saved your ticket stub the movies on Wednesday after school were free. They also gave away depression glasses and dishes to adults. Our next stop was Rochester, NY. My father got a better paying job at Hershberg’s Jewelry Store after three or so years in Easton. My father drove up with a car full of stuff to start work. My mother and I rode up a couple of weeks later in the moving van. She got a job as a cook in the Wegman’s grocery store cafeteria, which made her feel a bit better. I did well in school and things were looking up. Probably one of the most fortunate things for me happened in Rochester. I went to the YMCA and my father heard about their summer camp, Camp Cory, on Keuka Lake in the Finger Lakes Region east of Rochester. I attended the camp that year and went or worked at the camp every summer until I was eighteen. I learned to swim, sail, play tennis, etc. at camp and met kids from backgrounds totally different than mine. Camp Cory was the high point in my growing years. Rochester was a whole new experience—better and more organized schooling, the structure of attending swim classes at the YMCA, including initial exposure to an indoor pool and ping-pong tables, and attending camp in the summers. I also learned to ski while in Rochester. I first became aware of the strain between my parents during those years. Some of the dissatisfaction was subdued, but on a few occasions, it got pretty rancorous. The kids I met at the Y were a new experience. During the school year I had my first exposure to black kids and during the summers at camp the majority of the boys were from upper middle class or even wealthy families. During the years in Rochester, I think my parent’s marriage started to really deteriorate. They were so different. My mother was shy, serious (almost somber) and very security conscious. My father was outgoing, full of himself, loose with money and irresponsible. My mother was convinced he had a lady friend and she was probably right. In 1939 while I was in the fourth grade we moved to Brooklyn, N.Y. From the latter part of the school year, which was called 4B, through my high school graduation we lived above Louie Scarpa and family in Ed’s Story ..... 305

Sheepshead Bay. Our neighborhood was a melting pot—Italian, German, Irish, Swedish, Polish and Russian Jews, and a few blacks. It was a pretty blue collar area which included a tailor, an ice man, several fishermen (the docks were a twenty minute walk from our house), a longshoreman etc. The kids were a lot tougher than I was used to and my name (Ewald) and my Rochester (non-Brooklyn) accent led to lots of after school fights the first school year. I didn’t fare very well in most of them but I did learn how to avoid situations and run a bit faster. Another complicating factor was my level in school. The New York schools were about a semester ahead of the Rochester schools in math. Fortunately I had a teacher who stayed 1/2 hour after school to tutor me for the entire latter part of the year. Had she not done that I’m sure I would have slipped into a real hole. My father had a better paying job at Crouton Watch Company, a custom watch and jewelry firm. The pay was good, he liked the location (mid-Manhattan) and my mother was glad to return to the city. All her life she liked New York City. We lived in the upper half of a two story house. The owner, an ice man called Louie Scarpa, lived on the first floor with his wife and two daughters. Louie made wine every year and had two fig trees. I helped him with the wine making and wrapping the trees before winter came. That first year in Brooklyn my father took me to see the Navy Day events in Manhattan. Most of the Atlantic Fleet was anchored in the lower Hudson River and sailors were ferrying visitors out to the ships in life boats. I went on board a cruiser and had on my sailor suit. A gunners mate, who I thought was enormous, sat me on top of the barrel of a large gun—I think it was probably a ten inch. I was hooked. I wanted to go into the navy and eventually did. My mother had a friend from prior years about six blocks away, which made her more comfortable. She got a job at Schrafts as a cook and a few years later she started cooking at Macy’s 34th Street store. WWII had started and my parents were pretty edgy. Their concern about being German immigrants when the U.S. was at war with Germany proved to be unfounded. It was probably the result of tales they had heard from older Germans about the WWI related incidents. Although the concerns related to the war were a constant issue because 306 ..... Ed’s Story

of relatives in Germany, we prospered. The depression fears were over, but my mother never forgot those lean years. My parents bought new furniture. My dad and I went skiing and we took a week’s summer vacation to Kennebunkport, Maine, several times. I went to Camp Cory every summer for six weeks and, as a kid from Brooklyn, I was something of a minor celebrity. Toward the end of the war my father again went into business for himself. The results were predictable. With no boss to constrain him, he once again blew it. In addition, he once again met a lady friend. After the business failure, he got another job, but the marriage was on its last legs. Once the war ended my mother sent several packages of food and clothing to her relatives in Germany monthly. This went on for three or four years and, in a small way, made up for the help Lydia had given us in the thirties. Starting in 5th grade I liked school, especially history and geography. Several of my teachers were widows or had never married. They were a dedicated and helpful group. The math problem was licked and they encouraged me to go to Brooklyn Tech, a pre- engineering high school. I got admitted to Brooklyn Tech and went there from 1944 to 1948. It consisted of 6600 boys going to school in a fourteen story building in downtown Brooklyn. Some of the environs led to a real education. Hookers, pimps, bookmakers, etc. were a common sight a few blocks from school. The student body was bright and pretty diverse—Asians (mostly Chinese), every European nationality, a few blacks. The teachers were terrific. I worked for a while on the school newspaper and thought that would be a more interesting career than engineering. When I mentioned that to my father, he played the real German papa. He told me in no uncertain terms that an educated man should be an engineer, a doctor or a lawyer. Since Mr. Becher had encouraged engineering and I had no interest in medicine or law, that was it. Brooklyn Tech, despite its technical leaning had a good English and language department. I really enjoyed four years of English and took, but didn’t enjoy, three years of German. The competition took its toll and I graduated in the 2nd fifth of a graduating class of over 600. The attrition rate was high at Tech and the graduating class was always less Ed’s Story ..... 307 than half the size of the freshman class. My navy dream was still alive so I tried to get into the NROTC program that offered a full cost college scholarship to entrants who agreed to serve four years after graduation. I passed the written tests but flunked the physical. My teeth were out of contusion even though I spent four years in braces. The physical in those days was tough—zero defects. O. I didn’t want to go to college in New York City, so I applied to schools I’d heard about at Y camp—Syracuse, Cornell and Brown. I got accepted at Syracuse, not at Cornell, and the Brown interviewer told me I couldn’t afford Brown unless I got the NROTC scholarship. Those were the days of blunt honesty. I entered Syracuse in 1948 as a freshman in mechanical engineering. When I graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School in 1948 and went off to Syracuse University, my mother asked my father to move out. Shortly thereafter she moved to the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and my father moved to Yonkers, NY. They never saw each other again, although they never divorced. My study habits during my college years were lass than exceptional. The first two years I enjoyed the University environment, participated in the social life and studied barely enough to get by. The inability to knuckle down to studying cost me the summer between my freshman and sophomore years—I had to attend summer school to get my grade point average in shape to qualify as a member of the sophomore class. While at summer school I worked at odd jobs provided by the University job referral service—lawn mowing, painting, hedge clipping, etc. I joined a fraternity in my sophomore year and lived in the fraternity house my senior year. I was fraternity vice president and ran the kitchen my senior year. The kitchen did run a minimal profit, thereby avoiding a need to dun all the members at the end of the year to make up the loss. Dunning had been a long term occurrence, so the guys were happy. The last two years of school I shaped up my study habits and graduated in 1952 with a BS. My favorite courses were the two I took in economic history, which gives a hint as to my interest in most of my engineering courses. The summer between my sophomore and junior year I worked at the Continental Can Plant in Syracuse. During my junior year I started 308 ..... Ed’s Story

working part time at a rendering plant as a draftsman and helper to the plant engineer. The environment was not great, but the pay was ok and I did learn something. The following summer I worked full time at the rendering plant. During the four years at school I saw my parents sporadically— holidays, an occasional week or weekend. My mother and father each came to Syracuse a few times. Syracuse and the nearby Finger Lakes Region were more of a draw than New York City. I still had contacts in upstate New York with several friends from Camp Cory and visited them, particularly in the summers. My mother worked at Macy’s, with one short try at another job, until she retired in 1971. She had moved from Flatbush to Queens, NY in the early 60’s and stayed there until her move to St. Petersburg, FL in 1972. She had many good years in Florida and, when she could no longer care for herself, moved to Hastings, MN in 1984. She died at a nursing home in Prescott, WI on November 20, 1993. In keeping with her wish, she was cremated and her ashes sprinkled in New York Harbor. As she said, “I came in through New York Harbor and I want to go out the same way.” My father changed jobs several times before he retired in the 70s. He maintained a relationship with a woman librarian from Yonkers, NY for the remainder of his life. She had a small home in Stroudsburg, PA in which they lived for a number of years. I saw him in Stroudsburg a few times but did not meet her until his death on January 15, 1979. She had two children, one of whom treated him as her father. The other girl was obviously the child of a prior marriage, but the younger one may have been my father’s child. His significant other seemed like a very nice person and they appeared to be very devoted to one another. She used the name Fischer. I sent her cards a few times, but did not get a response after a few years and assume she died shortly after my father did. My father is buried in Stroudsburg, PA. Following graduation, I spent the summer of 1948 at odd jobs—the can plant, the A&P plant in Brooklyn, etc. I knew I was going into the Navy and was awaiting the start of an OCS class in Newport, RI to get called up. In August the draft board was breathing down my neck. I contacted a naval officer I knew from my pre-OCS acceptance interview Ed’s Story ..... 309 and he got me sworn into the Navy. I went to boot camp for a few weeks and then got transferred to Newport. Pending the start of my class, I worked in the kitchen, marked papers and served as a gofer. The class started in the early fall and finished about four months later. It was typical OCS from a spit and polish viewpoint, but we spent about six hours a day in classes, some of which were quite rigorous. A few of the attendees fought the system or couldn’t hack the course work. They were reassigned to boot camp and spent the remainder of their two year commitment as enlisted men. The rest of us played the game and finished without much sweat. I then went to diving school in Bayonne for about three months, was sent to a few short schools and then drove to San Francisco. After a week’s delay, I flew to Japan and hung around for quite a while waiting for my ship to return from Korea. I boarded the ship in August and returned to the U.S. several months later. I spent the next couple of years in various west coast ports towing targets for fleet gunnery practice, doing some diving, and towing ships from port to port. During that time I met Mary and, after a few ups and downs that Mary can describe better than I can, I proposed and Mary accepted. After finishing my original tour of duty, I extended for two years to get an assignment to the Rhine River Patrol in Germany. Following our marriage in March, 1956, in East Lansing we drove back to San Diego via Las Vegas for a very short honeymoon. Mary had a teaching contract to fulfill and I had to fly to Germany to report for duty. After a short time in Wiesbaden, I was transferred to Mannheim. Mary joined me there and we spent almost two years in Germany and traveling Europe. We returned to the States and I was discharged in the fall of 1957. I thoroughly enjoyed my naval experience. I learned a lot, saw a lot and met some interesting and varied people. The stay in Europe provided a great opportunity for us to travel and get acquainted with my German relatives. My last commanding officer was a bumpkin. However, that didn’t prevent us from having fun and getting to know one another well. We shared a great experience. Since meeting Mary our life has been a joint venture. We will there- fore have to jointly write the next episode. 310 ..... Second Half of the Century

The Musselman Siblings and Their Spouses Back Row (left to right): Lynn Phelps, Beverly Musselman, Hope Adams, George Musselman, Ed Fischer. Front Row: Jane Adams, Sally Phelps, Ruth Alexander, Mary Fischer

➥ Chapter Eight ...... The Second Half of the Century

Over a ten year period, from October, 1945 (Jane and Hope actually married in 1943 but could not establish a permanent home until after World War II) to March, 1956, all of the Musselman children married and moved into the world to establish families of their own. These were the years of the baby boom and almost all fifteen of their children can be counted as “boomers,” from James Adams born in 1947 to Peter Musselman born in 1962. Their families reflect some of the cultural, sociological, and demographic changes that occurred during the second half of the century, particularly in regard to family, work and children. As traditional nuclear families, the Musselman children and their spouses settled into ranch style or split level homes in suburban or small town settings. At least part of the time, the Musselman women were full time wives and mothers. They neighbored, gardened, and exchanged Christmas cards with pictures of their children. They became active in nearby Episcopal churches. They participated in school and community activities, from Little League ball and Boy Scouts to serving on school boards and city councils to singing in church choirs and volunteering in political campaigns. They bought cottages and beach houses or took family trips to the West, to Florida, to the East Coast, or to Washington, D.C. As their children grew older, some of the women went to work outside their homes, using professional skills acquired in college. When they reached retirement age, some moved to apartments or townhouses to follow a different life style. In retirement, they have traveled, elder hosteled, volunteered their services in various capacities. In short, they are typical of most of their generation who experienced childhood in the Great Depression of the thirties, World War II, and raising families in the second half of the century. 312 ..... The Adams Family

Their children also reflect the changing attitudes of their generation during the same period. They grew up with television and rock and roll music. They often attended different colleges than their parents or grandparents had and felt the need for additional academic education. Three have Ph.D.s, several have one or more Master’s, one is a practicing orthodontist. They have migrated to different parts of the country, often to big cities: New Jersey, Boston, Pennsylvania, Minneapolis, Indiana, Nebraska, and Mainz, Germany. Some settled fairly close to their parents in Madison, Wisconsin or in our home state of Michigan. They experienced the cultural and sexual revolutions of the sixties and seventies as well as the trauma of the Vietnam War, although only one served in that conflict. They have traveled the world. They experimented with computer dating, living and traveling with significant others, divorcing, and marrying divorced mates. They have step children, blended families, childless marriages, and two join the increasing number of Americans remaining single into mid-life. Some have created traditional families with one or more children. Now that almost all have reached middle age, their marriages appear relatively stable. What follows are the individual stories of the families established by the Musselman children.

The Adams Family After the war Hope and I settled down in Houston, Texas, in our Park Place house and proceeded to produce a family. The house needed a lot of work so I spent quite a bit of time on that, putting up sheet rock and painting. Hope went right to work installing refrigeration with the same company he had worked for before the war, but it wasn’t long before he wanted to go into business for himself. So he started his own service business. The postwar building boom made that possible and promised a better future. At first, he worked out of our home and I took his calls while he was out on the job. I gradually did all of the office work. I didn’t want to go back to teaching—I would have had to take a year’s work in Texas history and civics to get my Texas certificate. Then Hope’s business soon required me to be at home taking calls because he was so busy. ➥ The Adams Family ..... 313

Anyway, that year I became pregnant with Jimmy (James Wallace) who was born July 14, 1947—Mom and Dad’s first grandchild. I had some trouble after the delivery, and Mom came down to help me out for the first few weeks. It was terribly hot. Mother wasn’t used to Texas heat. I remember she had trouble with swollen ankles then and for the first time in her life did not wear stockings to the grocery store. Of course, air conditioning was just coming in, but we didn’t have it yet. Hope did put an attic fan in the house, and Mother commented that that helped her enormously. She said the thing that got her through those hot weeks she stayed with us was the watermelon which she had every afternoon. She could buy one for a nickel. Hope joined with his father’s former partner in business for a while, when his own business became just too much for him to handle alone. That enabled me to go to the hospital when the boys were born (Tommy arrived in November, 1948) and stay home with them, because he was in business with someone else. However, he became independent again in 1950 because he wanted to do the new things. That meant air conditioning rather than just refrigeration. So we started Adams Equipment Company. Eventually we bought a building and I ran the office. I put the boys in day camp in summer when they weren’t in school but managed to be home when they got home from school in the afternoon. I worked in the business until we sold the building and the business in 1977. We did continue to sell some heaters for a while, but we were really retired from the actual business. Ruth came down for Christmas in 1947—she was teaching at Oregon State then—for Jimmy’s baptism. She was his Godmother. He was a darling baby and quite the pet of the entire family. I took him north to the Lodge in 1948 when he was just a year old where everyone made much of him. By that time I was pregnant with Tommy (Thomas Hope Adams) who was born on November 3rd. When I was at the Lodge that summer of 1948, Sally and Mary were quite grown up and waiting on tables. Ruth was back from teaching at Oregon State, so we had quite a good time together as grown women. I also got home to participate as matron of honor in Sally’s wedding in June of 1950 when both the boys were quite small. Three year old Jimmy had cowboy boots of which he was inordinately proud. He 314 ..... The Adams Family

found they made a lot of noise when he ran up and down the pew during the ceremony. Uncle Dale did his best to keep him quiet, but Jimmy provided an interesting distraction to the business of the wedding. That same year we again spent some time at the Lodge before Hope drove up to get us. The boys were quite small but loved the beach and attention from grandparents, aunts, great aunts and Lodge guests. Hope was working so hard with his partner then that he couldn’t get off work to go with us. He was so anxious to get away when he finally was able to go that he came home from work, took a bath, packed up and drove off. He was in such a hurry that he didn’t even empty the tub. His bath water was still there when we got back to Houston. He only stopped once to sleep on his way up to Traverse City, Michigan. We went to various family reunions at the Lodge over the years, especially the last one Mother was at in 1963 and the one in 1974 when Nixon resigned while we were there. Of course I came home for Mom’s funeral in 1963 and Dad’s in 1966. We also came to East Lansing once for Christmas when the boys were small, I think about 1953 or 1954, but they were disappointed that there wasn’t much snow. They both got cowboy suits for Christmas, but Tommy was unhappy because his wasn’t exactly like Jimmy’s. Jimmy found a little patch of snow in Hallman’s yard across the street that he packed in a shoe box. It made him quite happy. Mother and Dad also drove down to visit me, as did other members of the family at various times. We also took the boys to Florida one year to have Christmas with the aunties. The boys were fascinated with the coconuts that fell from the palm trees, so we took several home, along with presents and numerous other souvenirs. When we had our country place near Houston, Hope always took visiting cousins out to learn to shoot pistols at a target. It thrilled the kids but horrified some of my sisters. Then for a few years we had a beach house in Galveston and some of the family visited there. We had a lot of good times there and rented it out when we couldn’t be there. Now, Hope has another country place near St. Augustine in east Texas that he has worked on for years . He’s built a house and maintains his farm vehicles there. I don’t go up there much with him now, although I went there after Tommy died. We stayed in our Park Place house until 1954, and then we bought The Adams Family ..... 315 the brick ranch house on Sarong Drive where we still live. We closed in the patio for a family room and eventually I got a green house and had a big garden. We have had so many happy times here—mostly with the boys. Their awards in Boy Scouts, their awards in school, their awards for acolyting at church were certainly some of the happy times. Then we spent a lot of time looking at property. Hope wanted to use his Texas Veteran Land Loan—a wonderful program to enable veterans to buy land. So we looked and looked at land. It involved an awful lot of tramping over the ground, but it was fun for the boys. We picked up lots of ticks and saw lots of interesting places. I asked Hope once how far we had walked that day and he said he thought about ten miles. We finally bought thirty acres in Montgomery County—that was our first but not our last piece of land. That’s when I first had a suspicion that something was wrong with my leg. At the end of that long walk, my foot was flopping, and I dragged my leg. Something seemed wrong with my whole left side. That began about three years of visiting doctors trying to find out what was the matter. At first, they thought I had multiple sclerosis, but after three years, my disability was no worse so the neurologist decided I didn’t have that. At one point, I thought it might be Lymes disease because we had been around so many ticks. But finally an MRI that I had four years ago showed that I had had a stroke. I don’t remember any incident where I felt it, but obviously the damage was done. After five years when I had shown no progress and they decided it wasn’t MS, they started me on physical therapy, but that was about five years late so it wasn’t very effective. My use of my leg came back a little, but it’s still weak. It has been especially troublesome since I broke the hip of my good leg on a visit to Jimmy and Maria’s in Germany in 1999. During the early years I brought my arm back kneading bread and I brought my leg back driving with a stick shift. That was awfully hard until I got more strength in it. And I still can’t lift my toe. I’m now using a walker and cane to get both my legs back in working order. We had our ups and downs in business over the years. I was quite upset over the business one day—we had some really rough times— when Jimmy was in 6th grade. I said to him, “You better plan on 316 ..... The Adams Family

getting a scholarship since I don’t think we’re going to be able to afford to send you to college.” I think it was about the time he spent one summer with Mom and Dad and the family in East Lansing and at the Lodge when he was about eleven. Hope was active in the Army Reserves and heard that Jimmy might try for an appointment to West Point. So that became an objective of Jimmy’s and he worked all through high school for it. He got his God and Country Award in Boy Scouts, but he loved that activity. He was in the high school version of ROTC. The whole extended family knew he was preparing to go to West Point. Everything he did led to that and he finally did get an appointment when he graduated from high school in 1965. It was not the best time of the century to be going to a military academy, since the nation began to be very involved in Vietnam and that was not a popular war. By the time Jim graduated in 1969, anti- Vietnam War sentiment made men in the military subject to criticism and worse, and Jimmy said he felt a lot of disapproval from his contemporaries who were not in service. He served in Germany right after he graduated and did a tour of duty in Vietnam before he left the military. But he did well at West Point and learned a lot and still keeps in contact with some of his fellow West Point classmates. Hope and I went up for his graduation, which was a lot of fun. Tommy followed in Jimmy’s footsteps and always felt pressure to maintain his standard, which was difficult. He had different talents and abilities. He didn’t get his numbers very well in the early grades, but because he could read well and charmed his teachers, they passed him along. Mathematics thereafter was always a problem for him. He played football in high school and had a wonderful bunch of guys who were his friends. They came over to the house often. When he finished high school, he went to Stephen F. Austin College in Nacogdoches, Texas. He didn’t find it very satisfactory. It was smaller than the high school he had graduated from and he said there were too many Baptists there. Anyway, the next year he came back to Houston and went to the University of Houston for a couple of years. He didn’t live at home though. His Grandmother Adams had given him some money and he said we had supported him all those years, it was time he supported The Adams Family ..... 317 himself. Like so many of his cohorts, he tried some of the activities that his generation was experimenting with—like smoking pot and surfing. He even tried growing a little marijuana. He was an avid surfer and loved being on the beach and in the water. That’s the way he got acquainted with the (Rio Grande) Valley and Port Isabel and Padre Island. He went down there to surf and he made a lot of friends That’s where he wanted to live. Quite a few of his friends had also decided to settle there. He took a course in geography at the University of Houston which he also loved. At the end of his junior year, he went to Germany to visit Jimmy who was stationed there. He traveled all over Europe and realized that he could be in the real estate business without a college degree. So when he came back from Germany, he moved to Port Isabel to start a business. He bought some property and got established with some of the other young businessmen. When Ruth came to visit in the spring of 1980, Tommy came home to see her. He also joined the cousins and our family on our reunion boat trip up the Mississippi, from LaCrosse to Winona in 1982. Jimmy met his wife Maria Tomaschko in Germany, while he was serving in the Army. She had a Czech background but was born in 1951 in Ebersdorf, Germany. She was an elementary school teacher, when Jimmy married her in 1973. The next year, 1974, they returned to the United States for a visit at the Indian Trail Lodge reunion where they met the whole family. Maria was simply overwhelmed at the welcome of the cousins when their plane arrived in Traverse City. There were something like 19 people there to meet the plane at that little airport— most of the cousins, aunts, uncles and great aunts. Those were still the anti-Vietnam War days, and army officers did not have a particularly popular image among many American young people. Jimmy had no desire to make a career in the army, so he left the service as soon as he had completed his required tours of duty. He worked for a while in Germany, but he and Maria returned to the United States in 1977. They were in Houston when Ruth attended the National Women’s Conference that the Carter administration sponsored in Houston, and Maria was very interested in the Women’s Movement which was just gaining strength. To the amazement and 318 ..... The Adams Family

delight of all the relatives, Jim and Maria took a long motorcycle trip around the United States visiting family and friends in Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, among other places. Their arrival on their BMW in their leathers certainly impressed their cousins. Ruth even invited Jimmy to visit her class in Literature of the American West at SDSU and he simply wowed the students. They asked more questions of Jimmy, especially about his BMW, than they had the entire semester. Jimmy and Maria wound up their trip in California, where they really hoped to stay. By that time, Jimmy was interested in getting into graduate school to get an advanced engineering degree and a business degree, and Maria wanted to get a Master’s in elementary education so that she could teach in the United States. They began their advanced academic life in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where cousin Nancy Musselman Cobble and her husband Milan lived. They got Jim started at the University of New Mexico. Jim and Maria stayed there for a while but the University seemed too redneck, remote and isolated to them. They were determined to go to California. Jim finally got an assistantship at the University of California at Berkeley and they happily lived there until they returned to Germany in 1985. Their daughter Franziska was born in 1980 and their son Peter in 1982. Their third child Kira was not born until 1990 in Mainz where they have lived since they returned to Germany. The worst thing that has happened to us was Tommy’s death in Mexico in 1985. I’ll never get over that. He was living in Port Isabel when he went on a fishing and sightseeing trip to Mexico with his friend Ronnie. He had married Angie about two months earlier—but they had been living together for a couple of years. She had planned to go with them, but at the last minute she couldn’t go—something about her job. She later said that Tommy had a very bad dream about the trip the night before he left and she didn’t want him to go. He left his boat with Ronnie in Vera Cruz while he went to Oaxaca to meet his friend Steve who would show him the Aztec ruins located near there. He checked into a hotel, met Steve and, dressed like typical tourists, the two left early in the morning to go sightseeing. They never returned. The Adams Family ..... 319

Their bodies were found almost ten days later in a little village, without any identification on them, nor any money. They apparently had been killed where they were found, although they may have been picked up someplace else, since kidnappings in Mexico were common then. Angie had not heard from Tom for days and was very worried. Then she got a phone call from an unidentified person in Mexico whose broken English was difficult to understand but she did finally get the message that something had happened to Tom. She called Jimmy, who was just about to leave California for Germany. He got in touch with us. We called the Embassy and eventually got the official information. Hope had to go to Mexico to claim the ashes of Tom’s cremated body, and he dealt with the Mexican authorities, who knew very little about the crime. It was a terrible and frustrating trip. We called the rest of the family. George and my sisters came to Texas for the Memorial Service at St. George’s. Jimmy, of course, was here—he was so wrought up that Maria insisted that he fly back from Germany, even though they had just moved there. Angie, of course, was here with her family and lots of our friends from here and

Thomas Hope Adams 1948-1985 320 ..... The Adams Family

elsewhere came for the service. It was a dreadful time, but the priest was very helpful and the service was nice, particularly because Tom had been an acolyte at St. George’s. It was a bad year in Mexico for tourists, for surfers, for anyone. There were quite a few violent deaths of Americans. The Embassy had recommended that travelers not venture out at night. At one point early in the tragedy, the Embassy identified Tom’s and Steve’s bodies as anthropologists, because there were such scientists in the area. There was quite a market in Indian artifacts, so some thought that might have been a motive for the killing. But Tommy really had no knowledge of that sort of thing, so it does not seem likely that he would be engaged in that kind of business. Nor was there any evidence of attempted drug deals, although that was rumored at the time. Tommy had no money. Ready cash is usually associated with drug dealing. Anyway, it was impossible to find out—that is such a desolate area of Mexico and there was such bad feeling between the local and federal authorities and so much corruption among the Mexican police. We had a terrible time getting any accurate information. Jimmy didn’t think the place where Tom was killed was on the known drug route from South America, but whenever anyone was killed in Mexico, there was always a suspicion that the victims were seeking drugs. Tom and Steven may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time and simply been robbed. I didn’t cry much until I went to the country with Hope but the most healing thing was the Memorial Service that Angie had at the Chapel on the beach at Padre Island. The minister didn’t know Tommy, but he asked Tom’s friends about him and they each spoke. It was just unbelievable the love that people expressed—his friends, his next door neighbors, and the people he worked with. They all told me how much he meant to them. His ashes were scattered over the Gulf, and the cousins contributed to a Memorial for him in the library at Padre Island, the place he loved so much. Hope and I took over settling the estate because Angie didn’t have any money and didn’t really know how. A good friend of Tom’s, a lawyer who lived there, handled it for us. It took a long time. The property was not yet in Angie’s name, and she had no money, so we covered the balloon note when it came due. She got the house and we took his other property, which we finally The Adams Family ..... 321 sold, although some we have had to repossess and sell again. We had to make lots of trips to the Valley before it was all settled. Angie became involved with someone else so we have lost track of her. Since then, we have been retired and do some of the things retired people do. Hope continued his volunteer work with the Sheriff’s department which he had begun in 1958. He flew many different places to bring back prisoners to Texas. He had to keep up his training all that time. He was also in the National Guard when he left the Army and when they organized an Army Reserve unit, he was in that until he retired. He kept up the Sheriff’s work because he knew he would eventually have to retire from the Army. He really likes the work for the Sheriff’s department. He also works at our country place in east Texas, and goes to an occasional gun show. I work hard at Trash and Treasure, our used goods store at St. George’s, gathering, sorting, and selling used items. It’s open on Saturdays and we have a work day during the week. I play bridge with a group of friends of long standing. I love my garden and spend a lot of time on it. We enjoy the produce out of it. I have my greenhouse and compost pile of biodegradable kitchen garbage, so stuff is growing all the time—I even start plants to sell at Trash and Treasure regularly. I’ve been president of our Episcopal Church Women, and I shop for our local Food Pantry. I bake homemade bread to give away at Christmas as well as other times and send pecans from our pecan trees to my sisters and brother at Christmas. We have also traveled some. We’ve gone through the Panama Canal. We’ve done Army trips to the European World War II battlefields, and to Spain and Morocco. We’ve also been to many reunions of Hope’s Army unit. Of course, we’ve taken many trips to Germany to see Jimmy and his family—sometimes going to Switzerland or Austria from there. We’ve also made trips to Michigan—I went to my 60th high school reunion, which was fun, and to many other family gatherings. I went to Florida to see the Aunties while they were alive. We were in Florida to celebrate both our 50th wedding anniversary and later my 80th birthday. Jimmy and his family came over to Disney World for the former, and we spent the latter with Mary and her family and Jimmy, Peter and Kira from Germany at a resort near Fort Myers. 322 ..... The Musselman Family

We also have had some visits from the family: Tom and Dan Phelps at different times, Mary, Ed and Ruth for one Christmas, Uncle Dale and Aunt Glad, and Aunt Marian and Uncle Forrest, when they were alive. More recently, we’ve seen cousins Marilyn and Rollie Ledebuhr who come down to see their daughter Amy and her family. I see my friend Emma Jean Leroy from East Lansing sometimes as well, although she is quite involved in her musical activities. Hope doesn’t have much family left but we see friends from his work in the Sheriff’s Department or from church some. Jimmy has worked for several different computer companies in Europe and the United States that often seem to get bought up by other companies. Their children have gone to school in Germany. Of course, they are all bilingual. Jim travels a great deal and gets to the United States quite often on business which he usually tries to combine with a stopover to see us. Maria teaches school in Germany where she believes teachers are more respected and better paid than in the United States. Much of the family has visited Jim and Maria in Germany. Cisca (as Franziska is called) has finished secondary school. She has not made up her mind yet where she will go to college. But she has visited in California since she left and has fond memories of her childhood there. The University of California at Berkeley appears to be high on her list, but time will tell. The generation that will dominate the first part of the twenty-first century is all growing up and we who lived through so much of the twentieth are getting old.

The Musselman Family We attempt herein to summarize some of the aspects of our life as a couple and as a family. We have stuck more or less to chronology. For the later years when our offspring were old enough to have better memories of what went on than we do, we do not attempt to cover what transpired in their lives, and we go into less detail about our own lives. We hope that eventually all of our children will record some of their memories so as to broaden the perspective of our life as a family, and to give to their children a better understanding of who they are and how they came to be. ➥ The Musselman Family ..... 323

Ypsilanti and East Lansing While George was working on his Masters Degree in Geology at the University of Michigan, Beverly resigned her job as teacher of Math and Science at Greenbrier College in West Virginia and returned to Michigan State to teach Science in the new Natural Science course in the Basic College. She renewed her acquaintance with Ruth. Ruth mentioned to George that she was back. George finished his Masters thesis in March, 1953. He was looking for someone to celebrate with and called Beverly for a date. That date, spent working the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle, led to another spent listening to Gilbert and Sullivan records. That led to another and another and shortly they were engaged. On the 29th of June they were married in the Peoples Church in East Lansing. George and Beverly entered into their marriage at mid-century with the intention of raising a family. The first half of the century had been marked by: Political revolution—The overthrow of the monarchy and the institution of communism in Russia was destined to impact world relationships for decades to come. It occurred during World War I which had begun because of old Euorpean enmities and competition in trade and world power. This war, instead of settling things, set the stage for the rise of Nazism and Fascism and Hitler’s attempt to Germanize all of Europe. Japan set out to subjugate and control the entire Far East. The free world allied itself with Russia and eliminated the threats from the Axis in Europe and Japan in the far east in World War II, but China ultimately fell to the communists. The Soviet Union along with China remained potential threats to world peace. Consolidation of the industrial revolution—The first half of the century saw the fruits of the industrial revolution spread throughout the developed world. Wheels, power, and communication became available to the masses. Flight had to wait until mid-century, but it caught up. Social stability—Except where fighting and military operations interfered, people grew, married, formed families, and labored in the traditions of their local ethos. Little did George and Beverly, nor did most other people of the 324 ..... The Musselman Family

time, realize what kind of a world they would be bringing their children into. The technological and social revolutions that marked the last half of the century would greatly change the culture in which their children were to grow up. George had accepted a job at the Michigan State Highway Depart- ment Testing Laboratory in Ann Arbor, so after a short honeymoon and a week or two in Beverly’s apartment in East Lansing, they found a place in Ann Arbor—the first floor of a house on the south end of East University. They enjoyed being close to the University and took advantage of some of the things the University offered for diversion. But Beverly was pregnant and the urge to have a place of their own was strong. They learned of a subdivision being built in Ypsilanti that offered a basic house at a price and down payment they could afford. They made the plunge and moved into a little house on Clarita Street in January, 1954. They sold Beverly’s car to help with the down payment, a step that each of them, especially Beverly, from time to time regretted. Jean was born on April 6, 1954 at Women’s Hospital at the University. It was a good thing she did not come early. The hospitalization that covered her delivery did not kick in until near the end of March. 1954 was also the year of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision by the supreme court saying that separate but (un)equal schools for minorities was not good enough. These were not the best of times for Beverly. She recalls: I was stranded in a new subdivision with no lawns or trees except for a few stick-like saplings that would eventually become trees, and all the houses were exactly like ours. With no car and three months of pregnancy followed by three months of a colicky baby, the big event each week was going shopping in the evening by myself. Then like magic the colic ended and the baby was delightful. I made a full time job of tending to, playing with, and admiring her. I met a few neighbors I could relate to and things began to look up. George recalls: I had more than an hour of commute each day. This was complicated by accepting on occasion other commuters as passengers to help with the gas expense. The woman next door was one. She had a job in Ann Arbor not too far from where I worked, but she got paid for all the partial hours she put in and would work right The Musselman Family ..... 325 up to the time I appeared to pick her up and sometimes a little longer. But these hours in the car gave me time to listen to the radio. I heard a lot of the Unamerican Activities Committee hearings being conducted by Senator McCarthy. Like many other Americans, I was disgusted with the way the committee was poisoning the political atmosphere and destroying many people, especially in the arts and entertainment fields, by accusing them of being “fellow travelers” of communism. McCarthy had a couple of young lawyers, Cohn and Shine, who were very center stage and particularly active in pursuing this dirty work. If at the time they had been exposed for what they were, they would probably themselves have been pilloried. Years later when they were outed as homosexuals, the country was not so excited by such things. George continues: One day I most distinctly remember was the day that the University of Michigan announced that a polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk had proved effective. With a new child to raise we were overjoyed at this news. Jean was a colicky baby—restless, awake a lot—until at the end of three months she finally settled down. She had lots of time in those early months to eat, grow, and take in the world around her. Dr. Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care became Beverly’s indispensable source for guidance. This book helped millions of mothers of that era with their child rearing. His philosophy was that babies and children are all different. They do not respond the same way to the same things. He offered suggestions but allowed that if they didn’t work, parents could go with whatever they might find that did work. This approach was seen by many as too permissive. Dr. Spock became controversial when he became an early and vehement protester against the Vietnam war. Then in the 1980s when the youth of America seemed to all be in rebellion, it was popular to blame Dr. Spock’s “permissiveness” for the whole problem. Fortunately he lived into the 1990s when saner judgment prevailed and he got due recognition. With Jean through the worst of babyhood, Beverly decided she was ready to expand the family and became pregnant with Mary. Fall, winter and spring passed and a blistering summer of 1955 arrived. Beverly was particularly uncomfortable, being in the last stages of 326 ..... The Musselman Family

pregnancy. Mary’s due date passed and the heat continued. The extra two weeks until Mary came seemed interminable. The bright note was that Beverly was going to get out of her Ypsilanti isolation. George had been transferred to a job in Lansing. George located and bought a house at 337 Division Street in East Lansing and the Ypsilanti house was sold. Then things got complicated. The purchasers of the Ypsilanti house had been promised possession. The tenants in the East Lansing house were disinclined to move. Beverly developed phlebitis and had to return to bed in the hospital, the standard treatment at the time. Beverly had taken care of Grace Sponberg’s children while Grace was in the hospital during the week before Beverly’s wedding. Now Grace agreed to take Mary. Jean was taken to her grandparents. It was three weeks before the family was reunited. The impasse over the respective occupancies was resolved. The buyers of the Ypsi house agreed to let George and Beverly store their furniture in the basement, and the family, with two babies moved in with George’s folks until they could get possession of their new house. Just at that time George’s sister Mary came home from California, having become tenuously engaged. The folks already had four roomers occupying two rooms. There were now a total of eleven people living in the house. On the good side Beverly could nurse her leg along, Mary could confide her misgivings about her engagement to Beverly, and both children were perfectly behaved. On the other side George had to sleep in the unheated sun room and had continuous nasal problems—allergies, colds, reactions to stress or whatever. He was also dealing with the problem of getting the tenants out of 337 Division Street. Mother, however, welcomed them at home. In November, after five weeks of crowded living, movers brought the furniture from Ypsilanti and the family moved into 337 Division Street. The house had cost more than George and Beverly felt they could comfortably handle. There was plenty of room so they furnished two rooms for student roomers. This arrangement lasted until the arrival of Anne and did help defray payments on the house. As George began to get raises at work, the room rent was no longer needed. About the same time as George and Beverly’s move to Division Street, Mary The Musselman Family ..... 327 broke her engagement and moved back to California. The strain on the Sunset Lane house was eased. Life in East Lansing was pleasant. They were within easy walks of groceries, drugs, movies, Post Office, library, and the pediatrician. Their house was in a rather congested neighborhood, very close to the campus, but there were neighbors they felt fortunate to have. Directly across the alley in back of them were the Barrons who had three girls close to theirs in age. The six girls were invariably all at one house or the other. Both Nona Barron and Beverly got some quiet time over the days. Also across the Alley and offset a few houses were the Kenyons. Dawn Kenyon was just Anne’s age and Susan was Jean’s age. They played together a lot. Next door a fundamentalist minister with two children slightly older than theirs moved out, and a family with six boys moved in. The three youngest Fetter boys spanned the ages of their four when the family increased with the birth of Peter. Down Sycamore Lane that ran the block from their house to Bailey school were the Levaks with two girls the ages of Anne and Mary. Around the corner on Ann Street lived a Jewish family by the name of Forstat with an oldest girl, Susan, the age of Jean, and twins, Robin and David, the age of Mary. Robin was much more precocious than David. Their youngest, Gary, was just a little older than, although not nearly as mature as Peter. The Forstats were pleasant people but had different ideas how to rear children than the Musselmans did. The older ones were always saddled with the care of the youngest one, even though Mrs. Forstat’s only job was that of homemaker. Beverly joined the MSU/Community chorus. There she renewed a friendship with a former student of hers, Anne Garrison, a very intellectual type and several years older than Beverly. Anne introduced Beverly to St. Monica’s Guild at All Saints Episcopal Church. There she met several women who would become long time friends. She also became acquainted and very impressed with Gordon Jones, the rector of All Saints. They started going to church and putting the children in Sunday school. Beverly found that Episcopalianism, especially as preached by Gordon Jones and Bob Gardner, the student chaplain, was something she could live with, and she became confirmed. They became quite good friends of the Gardners and Hickoks through the 328 ..... The Musselman Family

St. Monica’s connection. Gardners and Hickoks also had children more or less contemporary with theirs They discovered a curious thing. They started pledging to the church. Over several years they gradually increased their pledge. It seemed that every time they made a decision to increase, a few weeks would pass and then their financial situation would improve. Some of this was due to routine raises in George’s pay. But then he passed the Engineer’s Registration exam, and some raises became more than routine. This seemed to continue after they moved to Farmington. They joined Trinity church, continued with increasing pledges, and the first thing you know Beverly got part time teaching work at Oakland Community College. Over the next few years the work became more lucrative. They were not convinced that good things happened because they pledged. They just learned that the giving never hurt them. Because they did not go out much, their social life in East Lansing built slowly. As the children got a little older they found more opportunities to mix socially with friends both old and new. They entertained and were invited out. They also had lots of contact with Grandma and Grandpa Musselman. They never imposed on them for routine baby sitting. When they had a special occasion, like the birth of Peter, the grandparents were eager to help. About their second or third year in East Lansing, their next door neighbors gave them a peck of cucumbers that had been given to them. Their wedding present from Dora Gower Thompson was a jar of “Aunt Kate’s Pickles” with the recipe attached. George decided to try it out. The pickles turned out so good that every year thereafter George made pickles. He eventually expanded to other kinds of pickles and relishes. As of this writing, the cupboards are bulging with the 1999 pack. No way could they eat them all, but they do make unique gifts. During their twelve years in East Lansing there were momentous changes occurring in the world that would impact the lives of all Americans. World War II had taken millions of American men out of their home towns and showed them the rest of the USA and much of the world. The GI Bill sent thousands of them to colleges and universities. The result of this was that many of them settled away from their original home areas. This footloose population without The Musselman Family ..... 329 extended families around was one of the factors setting off the social revolution to come. In 1955 Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested. This marked the real beginning of the civil rights movement, at least for white Americans. Martin Luther King Jr., a Montgomery minister, led the Montgomery blacks in a long bus boycott that forced the end of the “Jim Crow” laws on buses. In 1957 Russia put Sputnik into orbit before the U.S. could put a satellite up. In its panic the U.S. concluded that we were behind Russia in many ways and the reason was that our education system was failing. Suddenly the schools made crash conversion to “New Math” and a quarter of a generation suffered in bewilderment because the schools were not prepared to teach it. In 1959 the St. Lawrence Seaway opened, eventually admitting the sea lamprey to the Great Lakes, the first of many such invasions. In 1960 a lunch counter sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina, inaugurated the crumbling of another racial barrier. Kennedy defeated Nixon after snowing him in the first televised presidential debates. In 1961 the “Bay of Pigs” invasion of Cuba failed and the Peace Corp was established. In 1962 the U.S. put its first manned space craft in orbit. Russia installed some missiles in Cuba well within the range of the U.S. but removed them after a face down with Kennedy. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published, raising world wide environmental awareness among the citizenry. In 1963 civil rights unrest intensified with the black march on Washington where Martin King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. A defiant Governor Wallace, facing the National Guard, stood aside as the first black students entered the University of Alabama. Kennedy was assassinated. Anne Green Musselman died. In 1964 the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed by Congress and involvement in the Vietnam War, which had been building slowly for years, greatly increased. Medicare was established. Johnson defeated Goldwater in the presidential election. In 1966 our involvement in Vietnam (and Cambodia and Laos) surged again and for the rest of the decade got progressively messier. Protest against the war, especially by draft age people escalated along with it, leading to the massive demonstration led by the “Chicago Seven” at the Democratic convention in 1968, and the Kent State Massacre in 1970. 330 ..... The Musselman Family

Back at 337 Division Street Anne was born on Mary’s second birthday in 1957. Beverly and George had their hands full with three pre-schoolers. They had to be fed, tended to, cleaned up after and bedded down each night. And played with! Both parents read to them and as they got older played endless games with them—Old Maid, War, and Concentration with cards, Sorry! and other board games. Yahtze and Cribbage were introduced. They caught on quickly. Most of the child care and house work fell on Beverly. She had her wringer washer and the basement or back yard to hang clothes, including diapers (no Pampers!) to dry. She did the dishes in her old wall hung sink. There was a large area rug in the living room, but no rug in the dining room. That was just as well because of all the spills. When Anne came along the laundry began to overwhelm and they got an automatic washer-dryer located in the breakfast room. They got their first TV set, a 13-inch black and white. They were not in the kind of transportation strait jacket they had been in in Ypsilanti. George frequently had the use of a state car. He also rode the bus to work on occasion. About 1959, Aunt Willie had retired. After storing her old Plymouth coupe for a couple of winters in Traverse City she sold it to George. It served them as a second car for several years until they passed it on to Beverly’s brother. Four and one half years after Anne was born, in February 1962, along came Peter. Because he was more or less uninvited, he seemed to know that it was best to be a boy, be cheerful, be bright and be easy to raise. He was all of these things. Consider this. It was only a year or two after his birth that the contraceptive pill became available. If it had been available two or three years earlier Peter might never have been. The richness he has brought to the family and to the world far outweighs the burdens he had placed on the family’s and world’s resources. The “pill” did become widely used in the 1960’s and continues to be a big factor in the ongoing social revolution. The house had a useless deck extending across the back over the playroom and breakfast room. By enclosing the deck they added a long narrow additional room upstairs. The three girls shared the two back rooms. Peter had the small front room. They next remodeled the kitchen with all new appliances. The Musselman Family ..... 331

By 1960 the grandparents were beginning to succumb to old age. Harry developed Parkinson’s Disease and had to give up driving. Anne took a couple of falls and as the result of one broke her collar bone. It fell to Beverly to take them shopping once a week. These were not exactly carefree outings but Beverly gritted her teeth and was a good sport about it. Father lived alone for a year after Mother died. George and Beverly added a room on the back of their house which he occupied for a year before being put in a nursing home. George recalls: My work at the Highway Department was enjoyable and went well for quite some time. My work involved the supervision of the people who did the sampling and testing of materials used in highway construction. Most of these materials were the sand, gravel and quarried stone that were processed for use in the subbases and pavements of the roadways. There were also manufactured items to be tested such as concrete and clay sewer pipe. In addition there was the freshly mixed concrete itself, and cured concrete to sample and test. I frequently had the use of a vehicle. I was out and about the state a lot. I visited quarries in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. A couple of years after moving to the Lansing office, I passed the requisite exam and became a Registered Civil Engineer. This enabled me to move to higher classi- fications in the State Civil Service system and gave me added prestige. He further recalls: My boss at that time was Ray Durfee, who had recruited me and had asked to have me in his group. After three or four years he was promoted to another job and a man by the name of Joe Brehler was moved in over me. I made many gestures to welcome Joe as my boss as the head of the group. He had also been transferred from Ann Arbor but for some reason was not allowed expenses for the period of time before he moved his home to Lansing. In his snit about this he came to Lansing as seldom as possible, and for weeks at a time we did not see him. He did not even initiate telephone calls to inquire as to what was going on. As a result, those of us who were in the office took care of things ourselves. When Joe finally did take over the reins, it was difficult for me and the others to turn to Joe for things. We had found we did not need him. No working rapport was ever established. In 1956 Congress passed the Federal Highway Act that established the Interstate Highway System. The country still had a massive defense 332 ..... The Musselman Family

budget. We were still nervous about the capability and intentions of the Soviet Union. The rationale for the big increase in highway funding to build the Interstate system was to provide routes for military traffic in the event of a national emergency such as an invasion. President Eisenhower, being a military man was able to sell this idea, even though the argument seemed specious. Michigan at that time still had one of the best highway systems in the nation and decided to get out ahead on the Interstate system. It floated a $500 million bond issue to provide matching funds for the federal money. The result was that for the next several years the Michigan State Highway Department, and along with it the Materials group, was busy, busy. By the mid 1960s construction was tapering off and maintenance was absorbing more of the available funds. As the work slowed down, poor working relationships became more of a problem. George recalls: As time went on things did not get any better. I admit that I had developed a dislike for Brehler. I could not make myself butter him up, flatter him, or otherwise ingratiate myself with him as I knew I should. We operated for quite some time coolly engaging in only what discourse was necessary. I realized that with the slowdown neither he nor I would be moved to any other job in the Highway Department and that for my own comfort I should find something else. I engaged a consultant who helped me uncover the job at Michigan Bell. Grandpa Musselman occupied his little apartment at the back of the house for eleven months. At the end of that time he had become quite balmy and irresponsible. He was placed in a nursing home. He died five months later. George’s share of Harry’s estate provided them with some discretionary money. They bought a VW bus and started taking excursions. That summer George was able to get a three week stretch of vacation and they took a trip across the U.S. to visit Beverly’s father in San Diego. They made it a real adventure, visiting many national parks, relatives, and, of course, Disneyland along the way. In the next couple of years they made trips to Cape Cod, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and to Florida at Christmas to visit the Aunts. The extra money also allowed George to hire a consultant to assist The Musselman Family ..... 333 him in finding another job. He found and accepted a job with Michigan Bell with headquarters in Southfield. They bought a home in Farmington Township (that soon became the city of Farmington Hills) and moved there in April of 1967.

Farmington Hills George started with Michigan Bell on March 6, 1967. Bell gave him time off to house-hunt, so he and Beverly came to Farmington within a few days to do so. They had already decided they wanted to be in the northwest suburbs of Detroit. His work location was on the Lodge Freeway in Southfield. Farmington Township was the next area out from there. They located a real estate agent who showed them a number of houses. They had arbitrarily set a price limit of about $30,000. They decided on the Hearthstone Road house because it was priced about right, and had the little room on the lower level that could be used as a fourth bedroom. Their offer was accepted, but they could not get occupancy for a few weeks. They moved about the third week of April. Had they known then what soon became apparent, how much home values in the area were escalating, they might have chosen a bigger house. But it would only be five years until Jean would be off to college. The children seemed to handle the switch to new schools quite well. Their first summer in the metropolitan area Detroit was struck by a massive riot. It started with a raid on a blind pig (an illegal drinking establishment) on 12th Street. People started harassing the police, some buildings were set afire, and when the fire department arrived, they were harassed. Some of the agitators started breaking the windows of businesses on 12th Street. Looting started. The Police had already lost control. When people saw that they could burn and loot with more or less impunity the riot spread throughout central Detroit. Most of the looting was done by usually law abiding citizens, both black and white. A Detroit Juvenile Court judge, James H. Lincoln, who was responsible for processing the 703 boys and girls arrested during the riot, wrote a perceptive report,16 in which he analyzed the causes of the riot and recommended changes in the Federal and State taxing and spending policies that would tend to cure the social infection, rather 334 ..... The Musselman Family

than just treat it symptom by symptom. Today, 30 years later, the tug of war between “cure the cause” and “punish society’s failures” factions goes on unabated with the latter making most of the gains. Jean had taken up the clarinet, and when school started in the fall she joined the band. Later in the fall the band had a concert. George and Beverly attended. When the concert was over, George was hailed by Dick Griswold, a classmate of his from East Lansing High School and Michigan State. It developed that the Griswolds lived on the next block over from Hearthstone, no more than 100 yards away. John Griswold was in Mary’s class, but they moved in totally different circles. Griswalds became George and Beverly’s best friends outside of the group of friends they made at Trinity Episcopal Church. As soon as they got to Farmington George and Beverly joined Trinity church, and found themselves in a group of people who thought as they did. The Rector was Joe Pelham, a highly cultured and educated black man. He attracted a lot of liberals and activists to the parish which made life there very interesting. George and Beverly were also told in no uncertain terms that they must join the choir. This was Mary Dulmage talking. The Dulmages became very close friends, and George sang under Mary’s direction for many years. Later Beverly joined the choir. Beverly was elected to the the vestry the next winter. During her term Pelham left and she was on the vestry that called Jack Hooper. Hoopers also became very close friends. Hoopers had known Sally and Lynn Phelps from the time that Jack was vicar of the church in Davison that they attended. In the spring of 1968 Michigan Bell employees went out on strike. George was assigned as an information operator in Mt. Clemens, about 30 miles and 30 stoplights away from home, on the 1:00 PM to 10:00 PM shift. He had a company car assigned to him. It worked out that he would stay in a motel after work in Mt. Clemens, get up at a reasonable hour, drive home, have a mid day dinner, and drive back to Mt. Clemens. Peter would come home from kindergarten while he was home. He had been teaching Pete to play cribbage, and they got a lot of practice during those days. The strike dragged on for six weeks. George got paid for the over time, and with part of the money they bought the kitchen butcher block table. The Musselman Family ..... 335

Social and political unrest continued to keep the country in turmoil, most of it generated by the Vietnam War. At the Democratic Convention in Chicago in the summer of 1968 a protest was led by seven liberal (some would say radical) activists. They were joined by hundreds of young people from all over the country. They practically dared the Chicago Police to over react, and over react they did. The seven were indicted for many crimes and misdemeanors because of their activities. After lengthy and boisterous trials and appeals, they were all acquitted. The tremendous focus on the unrest surrounding the Democratic Convention probably cost Hubert Humphrey the margin of victory. Nixon won the election. 1968 was also the summer of the Stonewall Rebellion in New York City. Homosexuals had always been harassed mercilessly by the New York Police. In mid summer the police conducted a raid on a gay (this term for homosexuals had not yet come into use) bar and the homosexual frequenters of the bar spontaneously decided they had had enough and fought back. Suddenly gays all over the country began to feel better about themselves and became more assertive everywhere. About three years later George was a delegate to the Diocesan Convention in Detroit. Bishop Emerick had been in a squabble with a local gay organization about using church facilities for meetings. On the second day of the convention the members of the gay organization brought their protest right onto the floor of the convention. Rather than facing them, the Bishop adjourned the convention right then and there. Many of the priests and other delegates were somewhat sympathetic to the protesters, met with them to vent their feelings, and asked what they could do. Jeff Montgomery, the leader of the group and still today the spokesman for the local gay community, invited anyone interested to attend their next meeting where they would present their case. Because the feelings of the sympathizers seemed to be so strong, George thought many of them would show up as invited. He went. Was he surprised! He was the only one. A year or two later Emerick retired, George was again a delegate to the convention to elect a new Bishop. The gay group was there in force and greeted George like a long lost friend. It made George quite uncomfortable. In 1972 the failure of our campaign in Vietnam and the continued 336 ..... The Musselman Family

and strengthened protest against the war stimulated tremendous interest in the coming presidential election. Beverly ran for precinct delegate to the Michigan Democratic convention and won on write- ins—the Musselman’s, the Hooper’s and the Hiber’s. She attended the state democratic convention. When George McGovern, the democratic candidate for president came to Detroit, Beverly and Mary went to see and hear him. In his speech that day he cited the implications of the Watergate break-in that had occurred a few months earlier, and stated that not enough attention had been paid to it. It was not until after the election, which Nixon won, that the Watergate scandal began to unfold and finally led to Nixon’s resignation less than two years later. In 1970 George was assigned to monitor and expedite the construction of several building projects in the Lansing area. So, after having moved to Farmington, he spent six years commuting to Lansing. Beverly had gone over to Oakland Community College Orchard Ridge, just across the freeway from their subdivision, and talked to the head of the Math Department about getting a teaching position. In January of 1971, she was hired to teach two evening classes. From then on she taught every term, including summers. They started having her teach geometry and algebra, but she soon moved on to trigonometry and calculus. Calculus was a challenge for her. She had not taught it since graduate school. She did some boning up before the first class, and managed in her review to keep a couple of chapters ahead of the class. She carried it off very well, and the Math Department recognized that she was a competent and enthusiastic teacher. In Fall term of 1974 they needed a half-time math teacher in their “Learning Lab”. The functions of the Lab were to assess students’ background in the subject matter so they could start in the right courses, to provide them with self-directed remedial courses, and to assist students in understanding specific concepts they were stuck on. Beverly was particularly good at the latter. Over the years she saved many students from failure. In the fall of 1976 Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn set up a similar program and hired Beverly on a half time basis. These institutions assumed time required outside the class room for each hour in the class room. Beverly’s hours in these Labs were considered class room hours. She had no papers to correct nor lessons The Musselman Family ..... 337 to prepare. So the two half-time jobs actually added up to one full time teaching job of twenty two hours a week. She had the best of all worlds. She was well paid, she loved the work, and she could pretty much make her own schedule. George and Beverly lived simply. They were somewhat casual about house keeping. Except for special occasions meals were not at all fussy. Beverly scheduled herself to be home when the children got out of school. The automatic appliances did most of the work on dishes and laundry. Life was not nearly the rat race it is in most homes where both parents work. The years slipped by. In math and the sciences Dunkle Junior High and North Farmington High were particularly good. In Literature they were spotty. Jean did extremely well in school. She got the Bernard McCrait award for “Outstanding Student” at Dunkle. She played clarinet in the band at Dunkle. She finished at the top of her class at North Farmington, and was a National Merit Scholar. She studied hard and read a lot. She never found in Farmington the equivalent of the two close friends she left behind in East Lansing. Mary’s record almost equaled Jean’s but she was a very different kind of student—less of a scholar and more of a doer. She also played the clarinet. She always had a project going for school, or was sewing or doing art work. Whatever she was doing, her activity seemed to take up the whole house. Anne again was in the top few in her class. She was the organized one. When she had a paper or project to do, she got right on it and got it done. Peter made a good record in school, but he did not do it by working hard. He attended his classes and was alert enough to get from them what he needed to know. He responded extremely well to an English teacher he had in 9th grade, and to the composition teacher in High School. He honed an ability to write. George and Beverly agreed that there were three important things that should be provided for children beyond a loving and nurturing home: Whatever was necessary for their health, education, and a bit of adventure. Fortunately their children were born healthy and stayed healthy. Peter inherited a trait of weakness of the abdominal wall, and had to have hernia repairs as a toddler. Jean and Mary each had an imperfect bite. George and Beverly did not consider these bad enough 338 ..... The Musselman Family

to be detrimental to their health nor to seriously affect their appearance. They did not submit them to orthodontics. In retrospect they have twinges of regret. While in dental school Jean had her bite corrected at considerably more inconvenience than if it had been done when she was adolescent. Mary lives with her imperfect bite and gives no indication that it is a real problem to her. With the income that Beverly was bringing into the family coffers George and Beverly felt they could give the children free rein in choosing their schools for college. Jean chose to go to Earlham, a Quaker school in Richmond, Indiana. She made an excellent choice. She thrived on the casualness and friendliness combined with the high academic standards that were hallmarks of the school. She majored in Biological Sciences. She went on the school’s wilderness excursion in the late summer before her sophomore year. She did part of a semester in Vermont where part of the curriculum was craft work—glass blowing being one of the things Jean tried. She did a semester in England, and stayed on through the summer working in the British equivalent of the conservation corps. After graduation she stayed in Indiana, worked in her field for a couple of years in Indianapolis, and then entered Dental School at IUPUI . She continued on to specialize in orthodontics. She met and married John Santa Maria from Crawfordsville, Indiana about the time she finished her training. John has a degree in chemistry. Jean went into practice in Crawfordsville. She and John have a girl, Anne, born in May, 1988; and a boy, Peter, born in May, 1991. Mary chose to go to Kalamazoo College which she found to be well suited to her needs. It was small and congenial, with high academic standards and opportunities beyond the limits of the campus. She took a combined major in Biological Sciences and Art. She started there by taking a pre-admission sailing and wilderness excursion. Her required off-campus “service” term was spent at Ashoken, a camp in New York State where city children were given exposure to rural life. Her foreign studies semester was spent in Spain with considerable travel in the rest of Europe. Her off-campus stint in her “field” was spent at the University of Georgia Marine Institute on Sapelo Island. This latter place so appealed to her that she returned there after graduation to work. There she met and married Roy Robertson, a zoologist and The Musselman Family ..... 339 member of the Institute staff. She commuted to Savannah to attend the Savannah School of Art and Design and got a second Bachelor’s Degree. She and Roy moved to Atlanta so Roy could attend Georgia Tech where he got a Master’s Degree in Statistics—more marketable than his Ph.D. in Zoology. They have two girls, Sarah, born in February, 1984, and Ellen born in November, 1985. Roy ended up working in Philadelphia, and they live in Palmyra, New Jersey, just across the river. Mary has a little art business offering graphic design, desktop publishing, web site graphics, illustrations, and water colors. Anne chose to go to Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. This school seemed to have been a good choice. For one thing, she made many enduring friendships. Anne majored in Russian. The interim term of her junior year was spent traveling to Russia with a group from Macalester. She spent several weeks in Ann Arbor during her senior year working with a publisher of Russian works. After graduation Anne stayed on in St. Paul. That had become the center of her life—where her friends were. She shortly got a job as a typesetter with a growing company, and her efficiency soon took her to top pay for this work. She had a full social life. Eventually she met and married David Shannon. David was divorced with joint custody of two daughters— Kate, born in September, 1979, and Linda, born in April, 1981. They were eight and almost ten when David and Anne were married. Anne developed a very good “non-mother” relationship with them. David had not gone to college, and expressed regrets that he had not done so. Anne encouraged him to go for it. Over several years while David worked part time and Anne full time, David attended first Community College and then the University of Minnesota and got a Bachelor’s Degree in Actuarial Science. David is the youngest of a large, close family, and Anne is very much integrated into the family. She is fond of them all and they are fond of her. Peter’s choice was to do as many of his high school chums did— go to Michigan State. He lived in a large dorm. There were many distractions. He did not find a subject in the letters, arts and sciences that inspired him. His mind constantly strayed to other possibilities. This led to a somewhat off again, on again college career. In the off periods he worked at a number of jobs, mostly in the food service 340 ..... The Musselman Family

business. George and Beverly were indulgent through all of this. Peter never came home to live, but he occasionally needed help living away from home. In 1988 Peter worked as a summertime manager for a golfer friend who owned a Pizza Parlor in Interlochen, Michigan. When his friend decided to sell his business, Peter bought it. About the same time Peter married an Interlochen woman, Lesia Schroetter. She had a three year old son, Scott, born in August, 1985, whom Peter adopted. They soon had a second son, Christopher, born in April 1989, and a third son, Thomas, born in April, 1991. Peter’s business has done well. The “adventure” that George and Beverly enabled Peter to have was not of the typical variety. He let himself be blown by the winds of circumstances, and came to earth as a solid and substantial citizen and dedicated family man. But now return to the story of George and Beverly. Mary Dulmage proposed early on to some choir members that four couples, Dulmages, Clements, Musselmans and Dandos, get together once a month and play pinochle. They started out with cards and dessert. The Dandos were not very committed to the idea, and were soon replaced by the Cranes. They also expanded from dessert to pitch-in dinners, and from just dinner and cards to other activities—going out to dinner, going to the theater, and going trailer camping and on other trips, especially as their children got older and could be left alone. The Dulmages eventually moved to Alabama and were replaced by Bob and Phyllis Murray. Each of these couples was friendly with the Hoopers, and they were included in many of the doings. They have been blessed to have had such good friends, but age is taking its toll. Phyllis Murray has died. Mary Dulmage and Mary Ellen Crane are wheel chair bound. Ken Crane and Bob Murray are diabetic. Dick Griswold also has died. Changes in the communications industry forced changes in George’s job over the years. In the late seventies it was the miniaturization of telephone switching equipment. There was a flurry of building new small facilities for this equipment in the many small towns in the state. But in the old big central offices, the new equipment released acres of vacant space. Much of this space was then remodeled for conventional offices. In 1982 a settlement of a suit against AT&T resulted in the splitting up of AT&T. The Musselman Family ..... 341

Ameritech was created and absorbed the Michigan Bell portion of AT&T. The need for a big force of people to supervise construction evaporated. George was moved into Building management and put in charge of the Mechanical Systems in the Detroit Headquarters Complex. In 1983 he was given sole responsibility for all operation and maintenance of the HQ complex buildings. In late 1985 he was assigned to be the head of the Mechanical Design Section in the Building Engineering Office in Southfield. For the first time since he graduated from Michigan State he was doing exactly what his Bachelors Degree indicated he should be doing. He was on this job for a little over a year, and on the 20th anniversary of his employment with Michigan Bell, he retired. During this time Beverly was giving excellent performance on her jobs at OCC and HFCC. For a long time there was the expectation that a full time teaching job would eventually open up in the Math department at OCC Orchard Ridge. Indications were that she would be recommended for it. Eventually such a job did open up. Beverly applied for and inter- viewed for it. There turned out to be a couple of glitches. Although the job was at the Orchard Ridge Campus of OCC, the appointment had to be approved by the Math departments at all five of the campuses (the others were Auburn Hills, Highland, Royal Oak and Southfield). Beverly suspects that either there was a little age discrimination against her, or the Orchard Ridge Department wanted to keep her where she was. For whatever reason she did not get the job. The teachers union at OCC was very strong and had things very much its own way. In the fall of 1987 the head of the Math Department was desperate for a teacher for two classes. The new Dean made a commitment to Beverly that she could keep her half time job in the Lab if she agreed to teach the classes. She did teach the classes and continued in the Lab. The union, at the instigation of the head of the Math Department, filed a grievance because under the union contract part time faculty (who received no benefits) could not teach more than half time without getting benefits. Meanwhile full time math instructors had started tutoring students in the Lab (mostly their own students) and Beverly continued to have a full appointment schedule. In the grievance the union maintained that Math faculty had first 342 ..... The Musselman Family

claim, as overloads, on the hours Beverly was working in the Lab. The union won, and at the end of the first week of May Beverly was told that her job was eliminated, and she was out without even a day’s notice. She had already told her boss that she planned to retire in June since she would turn 65 in July. She finished out the term at Henry Ford Community College after which she was free to join George in the traveling they both wanted to do. Beverly immediately applied for both Social Security and a pension from the Michigan State Employees Pension Plan. Her pension from the latter turned out to be more than she had anticipated. During the seven and one half week summer terms when the Labs were closed, Beverly had always been offered a class to teach at OCC and she always took it. She took the summer off in 1987 after George retired. In mid-June they embarked on an eight week tour of the northwest and west. The middle two weeks were spent on a cruise to Alaska. They visited all the extended family members living in Wisconsin, Minnesota and South Dakota on the way out. They visited Betty Eiler in California, and friends in Sacramento and Reno. Their last night out they spent with Jean in the Crawfordsville house she and John had just bought and moved into. During the course of the next ten years they: • Took a cruise from Montreal on the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Erie Canal, the Hudson River and Long Island Sound to Warren, Rhode Island (1988) • Took a five week self conducted driving tour of England, Wales and Scotland (1989) • Took a two week cruise from Copenhagen up the coast of Norway, and to the major Baltic capitals including Leningrad. (1990) • Took three (plus) week cruise/tour of Australia, Indonesia and Singapore (1991) • Took a three week cruise/tour of Tierra Del Fuego, Antarctica, Argentina and Iguazu Falls (1992) • Took a three week cruise of the Mediterranean Sea and Greek Isles (1993) • Took a two week cruise/tour of Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands (1994) The Alexander Family ..... 343

• Took a one week cruise/tour of Iceland (1995) • Took a one week cruise through the Panama Canal (1996) • Took a three week Cruise/tour of India and the Middle East (1997) They have seen most of the world they wanted to see. When they were not traveling, they kept busy at home. George got into physical fitness when he retired, lost fifty pounds and has kept it off, by vigorous and systematic walking. When he retired and Beverly was still working, he took over the kitchen. He has continued to raise cucumbers and tomatoes. When George took over the kitchen, Beverly continued as the clean up person, taking on whatever messes were made. Beverly has continued to be active in the affairs of Trinity Church. She delivers meals-on-wheels. She does a lot of reading. She frequently shops for the Head Start Food Pantry financed by Trinity Church. She attends a weekly writing group at the Senior Center through which she as made good women friends. For the first few years after retirement she conducted, pro bono, a course through the Women’s Center at OCC called “Scared of Math” for women who had always been afraid of Math. It was very successful and much appreciated by the women who attended. It was a two hour session once a week for ten weeks. They both enjoy word puzzles—crossword, crostic and cryptic—and spend quite a bit of time on them. They see their children and grandchildren often enough to keep abreast of their lives and development. They look at them and say to themselves, “We were very good parents—or, more likely, we were very lucky.” Their biggest complaint at the time of this writing is that their friends are getting so old. Otherwise they are contented and see nothing in the near future to change this. They will accept whatever comes.

The Alexander Family When I married Bill Alexander on July 16, 1955, I knew I was allying myself with a family and a business that was thoroughly entrenched in Brookings. Inevitably the independence that I had cherished all my life would be swallowed up in these relationships. On the other hand, I had grown up in a strong, close family with a lot of people ➥ 344 ..... The Alexander Family

around to amuse, annoy, entertain, challenge, ignore, criticize, and support me. The independent life I had pursued since I had left home often carried the price tag of loneliness and pointlessness. This conflict between a desire for a life of her own and a yearning for a husband and children troubled many twentieth century women. Like so many women of my generation, I wanted to have it all—self fulfillment in paid work that I loved plus a husband, children, and home that provided affection, companionship, and community to make the rest of it worthwhile. Ultimately the demands of women like myself led to sweeping changes in the political, economic, social and cultural life of the nation. In a small way, I was part of and participated in achieving those changes. Of course, in 1955 I could foresee none of this. All I knew was that almost every woman of my acquaintance was marrying and having babies—the 1950s were, after all, the height of both the feminine mystique and the baby boom. With a hard-earned Ph.D. and a mediocre academic job, I seemed clearly at odds with that reality. I wondered if something were wrong with me. Why had I put learning and professional achievement ahead of more feminine pursuits? After it was published in the United States in 1953, I read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and understood the dimensions of sexual discrimination, although the book was too theoretical to have much relevance to my life. More meaningful to me, I had the example of three aunts who had remained single and had made good lives for themselves. In some ways their lives looked more entrancing to me than that of my mother who had given up her professional life for marriage and children. On the other hand, I loved small children and, more important, I had bought into the then current feminine mystique: the woman who denied herself the experience of caring for a man and bearing his child did not fulfill herself as a woman and was likely to evolve into a frustrated and crabby old maid. (I’ve long since discarded that theory!) When I reached my thirtieth birthday and had not yet married, I deliberately decided to devote the rest of my life to building a career in college teaching and to concentrate my research efforts on women in literature and history. A year later, Bill Alexander came into my life in a serious way. I believed I had found a man, a community, The Alexander Family ..... 345 and a region that I loved enough to give up my dreams of an independent career. In addition, I was willing to risk the entanglements of a family business and in-laws who lived in the same community for the pleasure of creating a home and family. It helped that I liked my husband’s family from the outset and felt comfortable with them. Therefore, that July day I quite consciously, and with some trepidation, surrendered for the foreseeable future my own ambitions to the demands of marriage and motherhood. Yet in the back of my mind, I knew that my desire to write, to teach, to achieve something on my own was only postponed—eventually it would resurface to demand fulfillment as well. Obviously, I had no idea how these issues would play out at the time I married, but our first year highlighted our inter connection with the Sawnee Hotel and the Alexander family. In the preceding spring, Bill had been elected a delegate to the 1955 Episcopal Church Convention in Hawaii in August and early September. We postponed our honeymoon till that trip and took only a short weekend in Minneapolis before settling into a third floor apartment recently vacated by faculty friends of mine, Mal and Virginia Marsden, who had moved on to Elmira College, Elmira, New York. It was a hot dry summer. The apartment had no air conditioning and no shower. I took a lot of cold baths to make life tolerable. I discovered how beautiful summer prairie nights could be with immense star-spangled skies and warm breezes blowing through ripening corn and wheat. Almost every evening, I accompanied Bill when he drove some of his kitchen help to their homes in Bruce, a hamlet some fifteen miles from Brookings. They were some of the best moments of the day. We combined our two week trip to Hawaii, with a visit to Bill’s Shattuck roommate, Bill Bowen, then living in Tacoma, Washington. From a cottage on Waikiki beach, Hawaii appeared a Pacific Paradise. One of the issues of the 1955 convention of the Episcopal Church was a resolution to permit women to attend the convention as elected delegates. In those chauvinistic days, it was defeated. In my new status as a dutiful wife, I outwardly concurred, but I felt very phony and uncomfortable taking that position and in my heart did not accept it. Fortunately, not being a delegate, I was not directly involved in the 346 ..... The Alexander Family

dispute. After a beautiful and romantic time on Waikiki Beach, I returned to the drudgery of teaching on campus in the fall while Bill managed the hotel. I was inspired by neither the students nor the subject matter of my classes. In my effort to put my Ph.D. to use, I had maneuvered with the Dean to get out of teaching freshman composition and into teaching history. The best I was able to accomplish was teaching five sections of a new “integrated” course: Introduction to the Social Sciences. I did my best for my students but I hated it. I had never liked the “social science” aspect of history, which measured and quantified information to form its theories. I always regarded history as one of the liberal arts, related to culture—to literature, philosophy, language, and the arts. Now I was dealing with a minimum of history, but a whole lot of sociology, economics, and political science. By my fifth class of the same uninteresting material at three o’clock in the afternoon, I had lost every bit of enthusiasm I had managed to muster at eight in the morning. I dragged myself home. Furthermore, within a couple of months, I discovered I was pregnant. My classes were on the third floors of Central and Old North, the oldest buildings on the campus. I had to walk up two flights there, as well as two flights to our apartment on Sixth Avenue. I was tired and sleepy and dropped books and coat on the floor before I flopped on the couch when I got home. Bill always said he could follow my trail of discards to where I was when he came home. For these reasons, I was thoroughly ready to quit teaching and devote myself to preparing for motherhood at the end of winter quarter in March. During that first year, I also learned how demanding the hotel could be—open seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. Working endless hours, Bill had nursed the business along fairly successfully for almost ten years. He did not find it easy to make time for his wife and home. I wasn’t seeing enough of him—a constant issue since I competed with the hotel for his attention. He was spending so little time at home, although he cherished those precious hours, that I felt we should move into the hotel until the baby was born. I wouldn’t have to cook— difficult for me with teaching and my limited experience—and we could be together more easily. We gave up our apartment in December, stored our limited furniture in the warehouse, and settled into a hotel The Alexander Family ..... 347 room with bath. I spent many evenings in the Alexander apartment in the hotel watching TV with G.H. and Hugh while Bill worked—my first experience with TV. This arrangement worked so well that Bill and I proposed moving into the Alexander apartment and moving G.H. and Hugh to an apartment outside the hotel that a friend of theirs had just vacated. They were agreeable, but I think now our demand was quite outrageous. Our situation was only temporary, we thought, until we could decide where in town we wanted to live. We contemplated remodeling the hotel to create another apartment for us as well as buying a house. We didn’t have the money together for a down payment and we hadn’t decided where in a rapidly expanding Brookings we wanted to buy. As it worked out, we were in the Alexander apartment two years. I think that G.H. and Hugh must have rued the day I came into the family since I know their living was not as comfortable as they were used to. In March of 1956, after we were settled in the apartment I was able to go back to East Lansing for Mary’s wedding. She was the last of the family to marry. Sally, cousin Marilyn Ledebuhr, and I were all very pregnant at the wedding so Mary had her friend Pat McDonald as her maid of honor. Our first daughter Jane arrived on May 18th in 1956. She was healthy and a pretty baby after her head lost its point when she was a day old. When he first saw her a few minutes after she was born, Bill said he secretly vowed he was going to love her anyway. We were thrilled with her but I was the epitome of a nervous mother. I was terrified of taking her home from the hospital. I spent hours planning exactly what I needed to “do” as a mother. I think I approached caring for my first child as I would a research paper! I believed if I could just keep her alive until my mother arrived, she would teach me what I needed to know. Somehow, we all survived those first weeks. Mother’s confidence in caring for Jane gave me confidence, as well. By the time she left, I even began to be critical of Mother’s handling of the baby and believed I could do it better! I gradually relaxed and realized that if I fed her, rocked her, bathed her, sang and talked to her, loved her, she would grow and develop by herself without my “doing” anything. She was a charming, talkative, 348 ..... The Alexander Family

loving toddler who soon became the pet of the hotel staff. Ann Cowles, the housekeeper, who had no children of her own, became her surrogate grandmother—for our other children as well when they arrived later. In those first years, Ann was our cherished baby sitter. Everyone loved Jane. Grandpa Alexander used to take her with him when he did the banking in the morning. The two years that followed are something of a blur because we were beset with more troubles than I had ever before encountered. Sometimes I wonder that our marriage survived those times. First there were health problems. Since I wanted another child and since Bill and I were already so old, I was quite willing to get pregnant again soon. In spite of the doctor’s previous warning that my age might make it difficult for me to conceive, I was pregnant before the year was out. However, I miscarried almost as soon as I knew I was expecting. I then discovered a lump in my breast that had to be removed. I was terrified. It turned out to be only a cyst but I had in the meantime developed a severe case of eczema on my hands and arms. I was miserable. After considerable doctoring, I traced the rash to an allergy to eggs. It then cleared up quickly. Although I now eat a limited number of eggs, it has never recurred. Jane had one serious bout of diarrhea at nine months which also frightened Bill and me, but she also recovered quickly. By the time I went home with her for a visit the summer of 1957, I was pregnant with Andy. Jane was much admired and I had a chance both in East Lansing and at the Lodge to show her off. In October, Bill developed a bad case of bursitis in his shoulder which put him in the hospital for a few days. When he was released he, Jane, and I took a trip to the Black Hills to give him a badly needed vacation. It was a wonderful trip since it was off season for the tourist business and the weather was superb. It was my first trip to the Badlands, Mount Rushmore, Spearfish Canyon, Deadwood, the gold mine at Lead, the Crazy Horse Monument, and all of the spectacular beauty of that region of the state. It was a bright spot in a grim year. Jane was a wonderful traveler. In addition to our health problems, the hotel business was down. The post-war economic boom was over and the Eisenhower recession had set in—agricultural products were no longer in such huge demand as farming recovered in Europe and the rest of the world. That winter, The Alexander Family ..... 349

Bill’s brother Hugh had a recurrence of bronchitis—always a danger for him—and he was unable to do much in the hotel. Andy arrived three days before Christmas. He was a husky eight pound, nine ounces, delivered easily after a couple of hours of labor. I felt wonderful after his birth and went home on Christmas Day, very early according to childbirth practices in those days. I did have a twinge of longing for East Lansing where I knew the rest of the family had gathered to celebrate Mother’s and Dad’s fortieth wedding anniversary. My euphoria was short-lived. With two children under two, our nights were broken and wakeful. Bill began sleeping on a rollaway in the living room since I was up with one or the other several times a night, but he often wound up with one of them in his bed as well. We played what we called “musical beds.” We also pondered what to do about the hotel since that decision seemed to precede our decision about a house. There was no agreement among the family—Hugh wanted to sell, G.H. was reluctant to give up his “home,” and Bill was uncertain what he could do to support a family. Always an extremely generous man, G.H. frequently spent money that he really did not have, from both the hotel and the Alexander apartment. Bill kept the books and G.H.’s largess often made his life difficult. It was becoming clear that the hotel could not forever support all of us. By late winter, Bill was having great difficulty sleeping and suffered constantly from tension—what probably now would be called anxiety attacks. He went to his doctor who did not take his complaint seriously although he prescribed Valium, the popular anti-depressant. Bill went to the dentist and to the eye doctor to see if that would help. I was very worried about him, but did not know where to turn. The only psychiatrist in South Dakota at that time was connected with the State Hospital in Yankton, and there were no local mental health facilities available then. Bill finally asked Dr. Henry outright for a referral to a psychiatrist, and he sent him to a doctor and a hospital in Sioux City, Iowa. Hugh drove us down for a consultation and Bill ended up staying there three weeks. I came home in dismay—with two very small children and a sick husband, I felt quite helpless and vulnerable. Our friends from church rallied around and, of course, living in the hotel meant I had plenty of help. Hugh and I drove down to visit Bill once 350 ..... The Alexander Family

and he seemed much more relaxed. The psychiatrist was reassuring and indeed in three weeks Bill was ready to come home. He appeared much better, although he had problems with recent memory since the standard treatment in those days was electric shock treatments.When we were both back home, we spent many, many hours talking—he talking and I listening. When he returned to the hospital for a follow-up visit with the psychiatrist, he was released—he needed no more treatments and no more sessions. His “nervous breakdown” or depression, or whatever it was, had been quite short-lived, although Bill in the future had to avoid letting himself get too tense with overwork and worry. Thereafter, we scheduled regular recreation and vacations, but the hotel was always ready to devour him. Our first rehabilitation act was to move out of the hotel so Bill could have a separate family life. In May, 1958, we looked at a one year old brick ranch house in the morning and purchased it that afternoon. An inheritance check from Bill’s Uncle Andrew provided us with the down payment. The house cost nineteen thousand dollars, more than we intended to spend. It seemed like a lot of money at the time. However, we had it on contract for deed at 4% interest! We thought 6% interest was terribly high when we took a mortgage on it a few years later. Of course, these prices now seem ridiculously low. We moved in June and were thrilled with our first real home. The Bonell family came that month to try to iron out the family ownership of the hotel and Alexander Apartment Building in Hibbing, Minnesota, problems which were still unresolved when they left. However, in July, I left with the two children on a visit to Michigan. The future of the hotel was still uncertain. This was probably the rockiest time in our marriage. Bill and Hugh had put the hotel up for sale and I didn’t know where we might be living, although I was comforted knowing we now had a roof over our heads at least for the time being. I also worried about Bill’s health. My visit in Michigan was hectic as well. Jimmy Adams was staying with Mother and Dad for the summer, while Hope and Jane went through some rough times in their business. Jimmy was wonderful with the little ones, but he had a lot of energy and needed a lot of activity. The aunts were thinking about selling the Lodge so the future looked uncertain there as well. It was fun seeing the family, even the Royal The Alexander Family ..... 351

Oak cousins, but it was a trying visit for everyone, I think. Jane, just two, was still adjusting to a new brother while she visited so many places, slept in so many different beds, and saw so many new faces. She screamed whenever I went out of the room. Andy, just six months, clung to me fiercely and didn’t want to stay with anyone else. We all needed the stability of home, and I gladly returned to our new Brookings house and whatever the future held for us. I was determined to hang in there no matter what! Actually, the problems all seemed to resolve themselves. The hotel didn’t sell but business had picked up and remained strong for the next decade—through the Kennedy-Johnson years. Although agriculture was still producing surpluses, the college was growing and within a few years the baby boom generation began enrolling to ultimately create the turbulent sixties. As a result of college growth, Brookings prospered, and we prospered with it. We didn’t sell the hotel so Grandpa Alexander continued to have a home there. Hugh became interested in other lines of work, eventually getting his Master’s in history and teaching high school in Kansas City. To seal my optimism that fall of ’58, I got pregnant again (unintentionally!) and Sarah was born in June of 1959. She was an eight pound delight with a happy disposition and an independent spirit. Mother came out to stay with the children while I went to the hospital. I was determined to have my tubes tied to prevent further pregnancies. At Bill’s age (44) and with my obvious fertility, I wanted protection against another pregnancy. Bill, of course, agreed—especially when other children called him “grandpa” while he played with our kids on the slide in the park! Mother and Dad also came out for Christmas in 1958—Andy was a year old. He had just learned to walk and loved to run around naked, which somewhat distressed my father. Andy adored Jane and followed her wherever he could. He charmed everyone, especially Grandpa Musselman. We also had acquired our first dog—a not too bright but very devoted mongrel, Princess. She quickly centered her affection on me, although she liked playing with the children. She also insisted on sleeping on our bed, something Bill tolerated with good humor. During these years, I was a full time homemaker and mother. For the most part, they were happy years. I enjoyed learning how to cook and 352 ..... The Alexander Family

manage the household. I sang in St. Paul’s choir and was active in St. Anne’s Guild at church. Bill was on the Vestry and on the United Way Board for some of these years so he had activities outside the hotel. We socialized with some of the other younger married people with children in the church. Janet and David Pearson lived right next door and their Tom was just Andy’s age so the two became good friends and remained so until adulthood when both acquired Ph.D.’s in English. The Hortons lived behind us for a while and their Barbara was Jane’s age. When they moved, the Engstroms moved in and Nancy Engstrom and Sarah became and remained good friends until adulthood, going all through school together. The Bonnemans, friends from church, had three children close to ours in age and lived only a couple of blocks away. Barbara and Jane have been lifelong friends. It was a wonderful neighborhood—just a couple of blocks from Hillcrest Elementary School and Hillcrest Park which provided a swimming pool in summer and a skating rink in winter. Bill loved his home—this retreat from the hotel was a great boon. He still worked long hours and had employee problems, but we coped. We socialized also with some of my old college friends, but I felt out of the circle and was less interested in their activities. I took the kids swimming in summer and he took them skating in winter. I traveled back to Michigan every year while Mother and Dad were still alive, either with or without Bill. The Chicago Northwestern train ceased running in the early sixties, a portent of the future, as the interstate system began to be a reality. Interstate 29 passed less than a mile from our home when it was finally completed. One year Bill and I took Andy and Jane to visit Mary and Ed in Syracuse, New York (she was then expecting Paul in June). We left Sarah with the Musselmans in East Lansing. Mother had planned to take care of her, but she broke her collar bone. Beverly took her for the week. We visited Niagara Falls and the Marsdens in Elmira (they had adopted two small children about the ages of ours) before we fulfilled the purpose of the trip, attending a gathering of hotel administration alumni at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Bill connected with some of his cronies. Another year much later we flew to the Hotel Association meeting in New York City for a few days, this time leaving the children with Mary in Minnesota. The Alexander Family ..... 353

In spite of these diversions and leading the kind of domestic life much touted at the time, I began to grow restless. My mind was turning to mush, to use the popular expression, from lack of exercise. I didn’t have the self-discipline to shut out distractions in order to write, so I began reading. I got the six volume History of Women Suffrage by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Jocelyn Gage and perused it in wonder and awe. I reread all of Jane Austen. I had enjoyed her work in college, but by this time I really understood it. I felt I had met some of the women she described at Women’s Club, which I was pressured to join. This organization was not my cup of tea—very formal, with roll call, a classic dessert (a square of something with whipped cream on top), and “papers” delivered by members. I, needless to say, was asked to give “papers” (on assigned topics!) The meetings were deadly—I was probably the youngest member present— and I dreaded them. I was overjoyed when I went back to teaching and could resign a few years later. During these years at home, I was also invited to numerous neighborhood coffees, but I found these tedious as well—I quickly tired of endless discussion of child rearing, gardening, homemaking, and cooking, none of which I felt especially competent at, except cooking. Basically, I was bored and needed something more than house and children to challenge my energies. When I was called to see if I would take a couple of sections of freshman composition in the fall of 1961, I leaped at the opportunity. Bill was equally enthusiastic—he had sensed my frustration and need for intellectual stimulation. In my boredom, I had planned a reorganization of both the church and the hotel—neither of which came to pass, fortunately, but I think he was afraid I might insist on them, if I didn’t find something to do on my own. Jane had started kindergarten, Andy was three and a half and Sarah was two. I paid my friend Coral Bonneman to take care of the children with her own for the three mornings a week I was at the college, and I went off to teach. Although they were only composition classes, I felt I had suddenly come out of hibernation. I was alive again. I was even eager to read student papers. I also appreciated the extra money which bought us a new TV. I did not have to teach spring quarter which was fortunate, because Mary was hospitalized for surgery and I took care of her 354 ..... The Alexander Family

children then. The Fischers had moved to Hastings, Minnesota, by this time. I was so glad to have some family relatively close. The Fischer and Alexander children were very companionable, and we had a great deal of fun together, at their house or our house or when the Aunts entertained us at the Curtiss Hotel in Minneapolis. I also frequently talked to Mary on the phone . She became my chief counselor during these years. It was a comfort to have her nearby. She was always a willing listener and gave good advice. After that fall, I never stayed home again full time until I retired. I filled a position of someone on sabbatical leave the next year and finally had the challenge of teaching American literature and other literature courses. I had found my calling. I loved the work and I loved the students. I taught part time until all the children were in school and then took a full time position as an assistant professor. I eventually worked up to full professor with tenure. I taught graduate and undergraduate courses in literature, supervised Master’s theses, as well as teaching composition. Although I loved studying history, I preferred teaching literature—always from an historical perspective. As I advanced in academia, I realized that I was actually fulfilling the promise I had made to myself long before, to achieve something in my own right. I was a full fledged faculty member with responsibilities on committees, as well as fulfilling classroom and departmental duties. And I had a husband and children at home. I was in Heaven. Although the sixties were fraught with the tragedy of assassinations, the turmoil of race riots and youth rebellion, and the increasing horror of the Vietnam War, for me these were mostly wonderfully satisfying years. Bill was well and the hotel thrived. These were the good years of childhood for our offspring—the nearby grade school, swimming, music and dance lessons, recitals, Little League baseball games, Sunday School and the Christmas pageant, gatherings of the family in Michigan at the Lodge in 1963 and 1967, get-togethers with the Fischers on the Fourth of July and other times, trips to the Twin Cities, neighborhood functions, picnics at Oakwood, summer vacations at Enemy Swim Lake or the Black Hills or at Green Lake in Minnesota. We had a couple of happy trips to Florida to see the Aunts, flying one time and driving the other. When the children were old enough, they The Alexander Family ..... 355 went to Cass Lake Episcopal Camp in Minnesota with the Fischer boys. We also took a major trip by train one summer to visit Betty’s family in Reno and to explore San Francisco—a memorable time for us all. Of course, there were dark times as well, personally as well as nationally. Mother’s sudden death in October, 1963, was an emotional kick in the stomach. Happily, she and Dad had visited us the year before. We took them to the Black Hills, which they had never seen. It was a fun, though somewhat wild, trip with all seven of us in our Studebaker Lark, but Mother and Dad were good sports. We also had the marvelous family reunion at the Lodge in 1963 which gave us such happy memories. The Jack Kennedy assassination shook us as well as everyone else in the country. Dad’s death a few years later was expected and more acceptable since he had failed so much and was in a nursing home. It was sad, but not as much of a shock. Thereafter, I no longer made annual trips to Michigan (our family house had been sold after Dad moved in with George’s family). I only returned for reunions with my brother and sisters and their families at the Lodge, and once in ’86 for my forty-fifth high school reunion in East Lansing. Then I stayed with Aunt Marian Musselman and marveled at the changes in town and on campus. Although I was devoted to my aunts and siblings, my emotional center was now with my own family. Even that was shaken at times during this decade. Sarah had some medical problems as a very little girl. When she was five, she had major corrective surgery on her bladder in a Sioux Falls hospital. It was a difficult time—driving to Sioux Falls every day for two weeks to be with her, as well as worrying about Andy, who was sick with worry about Sarah. Actually, she recovered very well, but the same summer Bill had polyps removed from his rectum, a possible harbinger of his later cancer. He was slow recovering from that. I seemed to have someone in the hospital most of the summer of 1964. We wound up with a great trip to the Black Hills together and everyone got better. Another summer Andy and Jane had their tonsils out but that seemed a mild ordeal in comparison to the others. In the course of the decade, my interests had expanded beyond classroom teaching into two other areas that would dominate my life for the next couple of decades. The first was the Civil Rights Movement. 356 ..... The Alexander Family

I became increasingly aware of civil rights activities in the south with the Birmingham bus boycott launched by Rosa Parks, Freedom Riders, the lunch counter sit-ins, James Meredith’s attempt to enroll at the University of Mississippi. However, Martin Luther King’s speech and the March on Washington really riveted my attention and galvanized me into action. Bill and I watched it on TV and knew we were watching something historic. From that time on, I began to take what limited action I could in Brookings to make people aware of injustice to African Americans in our country. There were only fourteen hundred blacks in South Dakota at the time. Most of them were at Ellsworth Air Force Base so it was not an issue that seemed particularly relevant to provincial South Dakotans. I studied and learned—adding black literature to my American literature classes, writing letters to the editor of the Brookings Register when appropriate, and working with Bill in advocating equality in public accommodations in the hotel association. The passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 seemed a triumph. Gradually, I woke up to the fact that the Lakota/Dakota Sioux people were the big minority in South Dakota. I knew almost nothing about them. They were half the membership in the Episcopal Church in South Dakota, since there had been an active missionary effort here in the nineteenth century under Bishop William Hobart Hare. Yet heretofore I had been hardly conscious of them. Ashamed of my ignorance and neglect, I promptly added their history and culture to my study schedule, scrounging around to find books that I could add to my classes. Over the course of the next decade, I became aware of a very diverse America, including both Hispanics and Asians. The concept of a multi-cultural nation superseded the notion of a “melting pot” on which I had been raised. During the sixties also, a few African students arrived on campus to study agriculture. Some of them attended our church. I invited them to dinner and discovered they were lonely and isolated from the town and other students. Being family men, they became great friends with my children as well as with me and Bill. I tried to arrange some opportunities for them to meet other people. One spoke to Jane’s grade school class. They were invited to various organizations. I gave a dinner for them at the hotel and helped launch a host family program for The Alexander Family ..... 357 international students on campus. Over the ensuing years, I had several adventures with international students, including housing one in my basement, helping several with family problems, caring for a five-year old boy from Kenya while his father finished his degree, and working with our Congressmen to get him a passport to return to Kenya. In my effort to make South Dakota students more familiar with African American students, I applied for and received a grant to bring a reader’s theater and choir from Lincoln University in Missouri, an historically black college, to the SDSU campus. Black students roomed with South Dakota students in the dormitories while they were visiting. Their concert of Gospel and traditional black music was very popular, but the project had only limited success. By 1970, I had persuaded SDSU faculty to let me and another woman in political science team teach a humanities course called “Black and Red in American Society.” It got a huge enrollment and was the first general course on campus dealing with race. After the first year, I took over the course alone. If I didn’t know much about blacks or Indians, SDSU students knew even less. Many had never seen an African American in the flesh before they came to SDSU and most had the stereotypical image of the “drunken Indian.” Universities were open to innovation in those heady years. I was able to have many African American and Native American speakers in to give the course some authenticity. I learned much from them myself. Few texts were available at first, but I dug up enough paperbacks of black and Indian literature to give the class some substance. In the summer of 1970, I attended a Humanities Seminar at Northwestern University on teaching Black Studies so I also gained some academic background as well. The other issue I became involved in over the course of this decade was the Women’s Movement. Although I remained deeply committed to racial equality as an issue, women’s rights were closer to my experience. I knew first hand about sex discrimination and about the problems of women in the professional world. I remembered that I had once considered going on to law school after I graduated from Michigan State. I suggested this plan to Mother who told me I would have a very difficult time as a woman. I accepted her prediction as the way of the world the same way I accepted my inferior position on 358 ..... The Alexander Family

campus. There was nothing I could do about it anyway until after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Not until I read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963 did I realize that other women had similar feelings and experiences. Friedan spoke directly to me, about women like me. I immediately began talking about the book and reviewing it for various organizations I belonged to. I ran into considerable opposition at the time. I followed the progress of the Women’s Movement in the press, speaking up for women on campus and helping to organize a local chapter of National Organization for Women. I soon acquired a local reputation as a “women’s libber.” Since one of the challenges women faced was the educational establishment and I had direct experience with that, I decided to run for election to the Brookings School Board, then an all male bastion. I lost on my first try in 1968, but I received many more votes than the incumbent. Two years later, in the summer of 1970, I ran against another incumbent of the unpopular board and won a five year term by a huge margin. My first official actions as a board member were to approve new policies which permitted women teachers to wear pants to school and to allow pregnant teachers to remain in the classroom as long as they felt able to do so (previously they had had to leave by their fifth month.) Both of these controversial issues, race and sex, surfaced while I was on the board. Some parents objected to using Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land as part of the junior year English curriculum because of language and scenes with sexual and homosexual implications. One board member argued that because it dealt with a black boy’s life in New York City, it did not apply to South Dakota children and was nothing they needed to know about! Jane was then a junior so it put her in a difficult position because this was an issue her classmates paid attention to. I staunchly defended use of the book. It provided South Dakota youngsters with a glimpse of what life was like for urban blacks, but I opposed censorship on any grounds. I claimed that the poverty and violence to children described in the book were more “obscene” in American life than any references to sex or homosexuality. The reporter for the Brookings Register, recognizing a good story when he saw one, took my photo during the heat of the The Alexander Family ..... 359 discussion. I landed on the front page the next day claiming that “This is not a dirty book.” Actually, I had a lot of support in town and the final decision kept the book as part of the curriculum, but allowed students of parents who objected to it to read something else and to be absent from class during the discussions. Of course, all this hubbub encouraged many more students (and parents) to read the book than might have otherwise, so perhaps our opponents did us a favor. The women’s issue that came before the board had larger consequences. In 1972, in a political reversal in South Dakota, the Democrats won the governorship and the Legislature. We had two Democratic Senators, George McGovern and James Abouresk, but state government was traditionally very conservative. Democratic Governor Dick Kneip served two four-year terms and made human rights part of his program. It was a major issue nationally, of course, with the passage of Title IX in the Education Amendments of 1972 which banned sex discrimination in education. Enough women had been elected to the South Dakota Legislature to make women’s rights an issue in South Dakota. One of Kneip’s actions was the establishment of a Human Rights Commission with Mary Lynn Myers, a staunch articulate feminist, at its head. They produced Human Rights Rules for public schools and for employment. Those rules became very controversial in Brookings in 1973 over an athletic issue. The administration of the Brookings School District proposed adding an interscholastic athletic program for middle school and fifth grade boys in some sports, presumably a training ground for high school players. I objected vociferously to the program. There were few athletic programs for girls, let alone interscholastic ones. I also disliked the introduction of such high pressure competition for such young kids. I brought a copy of the Human Rights Rules to the Board meeting and pointed out where Brookings was not in compliance. Needless to say, on this issue, I stood alone. I was quickly voted down—the rest of the Board decided they simply would ignore the state regulations. I reported my defeat to some other feminists in town, who promptly filed a complaint with the Human Rights Commission. The result was an investigation and a hearing in the state capitol in Pierre at which we all had to testify (I was not included in the charges 360 ..... The Alexander Family

made by the women in town, so my position on the Board was awkward indeed.) We received lots of publicity and state attention. Since Brookings was in reality quite forward looking in its programs and policies toward women, except in athletics, the school system received only a slap on the wrist and a requirement to inaugurate girls’ athletic programs. I was sharply chastised by many (and applauded by some) for bringing up the issue. I found myself a spokesperson for women in athletics—ironic because I had never been much of an athlete and was not interested in sports. I later spoke on the subject of women’s rights in education at a national convention of school boards in Miami, at a National Education Association meeting in San Francisco, at education meetings in Mandan and Grand Forks, North Dakota, and in Glendive, Montana. I was astonished by how many Americans in the 1970s could not accept the notion of equality of men and women, particularly in the sacred male province of athletics. However, a big change was coming. Women increasingly demanded equal facilities, time and coaching under Title IX . Schools and universities faced big loss of funds if they did not comply. Even in Brookings, the tide turned quickly. A few years after I left the Board in 1975, the Brookings girls’ basketball team won the state championship. The fathers of those girls were more supportive of programs for women than I was. It meant scholarships! At the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies, I began to publish articles in professional and scholarly journals on the school issues I had been working and speaking on. Both my writing and public speaking increased even more after the establishment of the National Foundation for the Humanities, with its attendant state councils in 1973. The South Dakota State Council was located on the SDSU campus. From that time on, I participated in panel discussions, forums, and public programs all over the state—in places like Bison, Burke, Canton, Oglala, Sisseton, Yankton, Chamberlain, as well as Sioux Falls and Rapid City. Driving across the prairies and plains of the state in all seasons of the year deepened my affection for its landscape and sky. Under Humanities sponsorship, I participated in a radio program on Native American literature as well as in several research projects. These usually dealt with issues concerning either minorities or women in The Alexander Family ..... 361

American culture. My school board experience and years of teaching had built my confidence in public speaking, and I have been told I have a good speaking voice. In any case, I was as busy as I wanted to be, learning and gaining experience every year, and reveling in my activities. Meanwhile, life as home was equally fulfilling. The children did well in school, had friends that they seemed to enjoy, were growing and developing better than I could possibly ask for. We added a toy poodle George, and later one of his offspring, Looie, to our family. Bill and I had worked out a system of shared household duties. I took a seven-thirty class in the morning since he could be home with the children then. We both rose very early—something I learned from Bill—and while I planned and prepared the dinner we would have that evening, he got the breakfast. When I went off to school, he washed the dishes, saw that the children dressed and made their beds, and got them off to school. I made lunch and dinner for them, oversaw after school activities, and put them to bed, since Bill often had to be gone in the evening. However, we ate dinner together regularly every night where we shared the day’s events. On weekends we did lots of activities together—sledding in the winter, going to Sioux Falls to eat and shop or go to the movies, picnicking at Oakwood Lakes, bicycling, and walking the dog, mowing the lawn and working on the yard. We had Grandpa Alexander, and Uncle Hugh if he was home, for dinner every Sunday and holiday and we quite often had other company as well. Our dog Princess shared her devotion between me and Grandpa Alexander, whom she also adored and who used to feed her prime rib scraps from the Sawnee kitchen. He also covertly threw scraps to her from our table even though Bill asked him not to. It amused the children. Bill had introduced a Friday night buffet at the hotel featuring a whole baked halibut flown in fresh from the coast. It was very popular and we regularly enjoyed that festive meal together. We put the money I inherited from Mother and Dad into remodeling our house, making separate bedrooms for the girls in the basement, as well as a TV and play room, and remodeling our kitchen to include a dishwasher and small eating space. We were always very involved in church activities. Bill was a lay reader, we both sang in the choir, I helped with the Sunday School, 362 ..... The Alexander Family

especially in producing the Christmas pageant. We attended church pot lucks, picnics, and Lenten studies and helped put on a Diocesan Convention. But by the end of the sixties, in both church and nation, change was inevitable. Father Frank Thorburn, who had officiated at our wedding and baptized all our children retired, as did Bishop Conrad Gesner. In the course of the next decade, the church struggled with the two issues that fractured it for a time: Prayer Book revision and the ordination of women priests. Bill and I and our parish wrestled with both those issues until the 1976 General Convention in Minneapolis approved the ordination of women and the new prayer book. I felt much relieved. Political change came as well. Assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, race riots in the cities, as well as the nation’s increasing involvement and conflict over the Vietnam War produced tumult in the nation in 1968 that would lead to the election of President Richard Nixon. Change also loomed for our immediate family. The seventies provided me with much professional satisfaction, but the family trouble, anxiety, and heartache of that decade overshadows that memory. The first change for us would be the status of the Sawnee Hotel. By the end of the prosperous sixties, the demand for modern motels in Brookings was strong. Two were eventually constructed just off new Interstate 29 on the east edge of town: a Holiday Inn and the Stauralite Inn. Their arrival required a change in the city liquor laws so that each hotel could run a bar. As a result, on-sale liquor in Brookings was finally made legal. Bill had a big decision to make. He had never had to run a bar when on-sale liquor was illegal in town, but now he faced the fact the he had honestly never wanted to. He couldn’t bring himself to take on that challenge which would demand much night work and many problems. Yet our small, plain rooms with few amenities like swimming pools and bars could hardly compete with the new facilities. The Sawnee appeared doomed as a profitable enterprise. We owed little money on the place by this time, but the county levied a heavy property tax on it. In the county court house and finally in court, we fought to have taxes on the Sawnee reduced, but were not successful enough to save the business. Taxes in South Dakota have always been inequitable. The state adamantly opposes an income tax and relies on The Alexander Family ..... 363 sales tax and high property taxes to fund its state and local services. Because there was so much exempt property in Brookings in 1970 (schools, 37 churches, city owned telephone and utilities, city owned liquor store, college property, Elks Club, etc.) and so few taxable industries, property tax fell heavily on established businesses like the hotel. Efforts were even made to provide periods of grace for new businesses so they would move into town in order to increase the tax base. (3M and other industries eventually did.) The two new motels received that favor. Property taxes made maintaining the Sawnee as a hotel in the future impossible. Bill and I discussed alternatives. In the late sixties, college teachers were in great demand because of huge baby boom enrollments. We considered selling the hotel and moving to a college town near the Twin Cities where I could teach and he could find other work in Minneapolis or St. Paul. We explored some possibilities, but there were a few drawbacks. First of all, the children did not want to leave their schools and friends in Brookings. Second, G.H. Alexander, who had turned eighty, was clearly failing; and would have to be provided for somehow. The hotel made a wonderful personal retirement home for him, but we weren’t sure he would be willing to move to a comparable place that wasn’t called a “hotel.” Finally, I loved my work. I had always believed I had more to offer a school like SDSU than I would a larger, more prestigious school where I might feel less needed. In the end, we decided to remain in Brookings, to keep the hotel in some sort of operation as long as it was at all functional. When the new motels were fully in business, we closed down the food business and put the property on the market. In 1973, we found a buyer—Teen Challenge, run by the Assembly of God church. They had a program of housing young men with alcohol and drug problems in order to rehabilitate and convert them through Bible study and religious classes. Of course, this activity took the property off the tax rolls so it was possible for them to make a go of it. A man with a construction company in town and a member of the Assembly of God church bought the place for the program and converted some of the first floor to office space for his own company. In addition to caring for the young men, they continued to provide 364 ..... The Alexander Family

housing for the indigent and the traveler seeking very cheap housing. Of course, everyone who stayed there received some proselytizing for the denomination. The building continues to function in that capacity to this day. Somewhat regretfully, Grandpa Alexander moved into Brookview Manor, a nursing home. However, he adjusted to it, living quite like he had at the hotel. In the morning he dressed in suit and tie for the day, took his cane, and walked to the dining room just as if he were living in the hotel. He sat in the lobby and read his paper. In the afternoon, Bill took him out for a ride in the car, and on Sunday he went to church and had dinner with us. He brightened up all the other residents because he was so cheerful and because he looked like he was a man who had business to attend to. It was a reasonable transition. He still had income from the Alexander Building in Hibbing so he could continue to regard himself as a man of property. Bill was not so lucky. In the course of the hotel negotiations, he was diagnosed with a possible tumor in his colon, allegedly discovered by some new diagnostic tool which had a whole bunch of doctors participating in his examination. (I told him he should have charged admission!) In any case, it turned out to be a false alarm—when they operated, there was no tumor. I was furious, but Bill recovered easily, insurance paid the bill, so I chalked it up to a bad medical experience and was determined to be more skeptical in the future. Of course, the next time was no false alarm. By this time, I was earning a respectable salary so we had no real financial worries although the money from the hotel sale mostly covered expenses and debt. Women on campus got big raises from the Board of Regents in the early seventies because of a threatened suit by some women at the University of South Dakota. Even if money was not an immediate problem, Bill needed to find something to do. To everyone’s surprise, he turned at first to politics, which for a time dominated our lives. He had switched parties to vote for Lyndon Johnson in 1964, largely because of the race issue. Although fiscally conservative, he did not like Richard Nixon. Hubert Humphrey was originally from South Dakota so we both voted for him in ’68, even though he was too liberal for Bill. Opposition to the Vietnam War cost The Alexander Family ..... 365

Humphrey the election. The national turmoil on campuses across the nation over the war in ensuing years affected even SDSU’s conservative campus. On Moratorium Day, students and faculty participated in a campus march and a demonstration at which I read Mark Twain’s “War Prayer.” Some ROTC members walked out of formation during Governor’s Day ceremonies. The greatest excitement came with the occupation of President Briggs’ office by some students and faculty, in which one of the wilder faculty members socked the President. By ’72, when the anti-Vietnam War hero, South Dakota’s own George McGovern, ran for President, our children were old enough to actively campaign for him in town. Sarah especially became interested in politics for a few years. I had backed McGovern ever since he first ran for Congress in ’58. The story was that at that time Democrats in South Dakota could meet in a telephone booth. McGovern had built the party from the ground up, eventually getting elected to the Senate. The fact that both our Senators are now Democrats is probably traceable in part to McGovern’s early work. In any case, we supported McGovern’s doomed presidential campaign vigorously. These were tumultuous political times. Baby boom children had hit adolescence and college. This new anti-war generation dominated the Democratic National Convention that year but alienated many traditional Democrats. Bill and I knew he didn’t have a chance, but our enthusiastic, idealistic children were greatly disillusioned when their candidate was so badly beaten. During the next year and a half, we followed the Watergate scandal avidly, glued to the television that early summer of ’74 during the Congressional hearings. Andy particularly was captivated by the political drama and has remained a discriminating and knowledgeable observer ever since. We were at the Lodge with my siblings and the children’s cousins when Richard Nixon finally resigned. The result of all this political activity for the family was that the Democratic party asked Bill to run for City Auditor in 1974. He had excellent qualifications, but the person holding the position was from out in the county and had lots of rural support. Rural residents resented Brookings’ dominant position in the county and believed they had a claim on that particular office. Nevertheless, Bill enjoyed campaigning, 366 ..... The Alexander Family

meeting people he had not met before and getting to know more about county government. McGovern was running again for the Senate, and both Sarah and Andy worked actively for him. Through the campaign, Sarah met Tom Daschle, whom she later worked for and supported when he ran for Congress. Although McGovern succeeded in defeating Leo Thorsness, Bill lost his election. His only triumph was that he forced his opponent to actually campaign for the first time. In the course of Bill’s electioneering, he met the new administrator of the Brookings hospital. After the election, he immediately hired Bill as materials manager of the hospital. Bill loved the work—quite similar to some aspects of hotel work, except, as he said, the guests were all lying down and he didn’t have to deal with employees. It was a happy arrangement for all—his work was excellent, he was popular with the hospital staff, and he loved his job. During these years of politics and Bill’s change of employment, we also struggled with moderate teenage difficulties in our immediate family. Not the drug, alcohol, rock concert, and rebellious sexual behavior that plagued some families and were the subject of much discussed “youth culture.” Our offspring were quite conventional— good students, didn’t smoke, drink, or carouse at night. Perhaps that was the problem! They can tell their owns stories better than I so I will confine myself to what I perceived in the family. Outwardly, Jane seemed to be a model student but she expressed her unhappiness at home, especially to me. She had a tough time growing up, not unlike my own uncertainties at that age. I was not as understanding nor as helpful as I might have been, but I was buffaloed by her teenage anxieties, because to me she seemed so attractive, talented and accomplished for her age. However, she was moody and irritable at home and our relationship was quite rocky. This became apparent when she entered Middle School in sixth grade. Brookings inaugurated Middle School with Jane’s class. They were the guinea pigs for this new arrangement. It plunged sixth graders from childhood into adolescence precipitously. Jane was not ready for it. Her friends suddenly became interested in clothes and boys, white she was still playing house with her dolls. She had progressed so smoothly in grade school that her misery and sense of being “different” from The Alexander Family ..... 367 her peers came as something of a shock to me. Throughout her middle and high school years, she seemed out of sync with most of her classmates. She had several close friends among the girls and she did well academically, but like so many girls at that age, she thought she was unattractive, unpopular, and a social failure. She was not a member of the “in group.” In truth, her interests in high school did not follow the usual pattern. She cared not at all about football and basketball games, cheerleading, school organizations. She was a superb baby sitter because she enjoyed children so much. She was always in great demand by parents. For several years, she was in charge of the nursery at St. Paul’s Church—probably there has never been a more creative teacher of the nursery class in Brookings. She became a candy-striper at the Retirement Center and was equally popular with the elderly. She was so good that one summer she was hired as an activities director at the Center. She had a special relationship with a one hundred year old lady from our church, Neva Harding, and spent hours talking to her. She held a popular story hour for some of the residents, reading from South Dakota women writers that I was just beginning to research. I used to comment that in another time and place Jane would have made a great nun. She was so miserable at times and so unhappy at home that I think Bill and I would have sent her to St. Mary’s (the girls’ school affiliated with Shattuck) if we could have afforded it. She went to one dance in high school, participated in synchronized swimming, and made costumes for one of the plays, but most of her interests—4-H, working at the retirement center, with adult retarded, baby sitting—were totally apart from the high school scene. I was determined that she go away to college, something that I had longed for in my own youth but was denied by lack of money. I made certain we could afford it. Looking back, I am not certain going away to school was the best plan for her, but my reasons seemed right at the time. I wanted all the children to go away to college. Since I was on the School Board during some of their high school years (when parents are something of an embarrassment to their children) and I was also fairly prominent on the SDSU campus, I thought they should get their college experience far away from my shadow. In the summer before she graduated, we took a trip to Boston 368 ..... The Alexander Family

to look at colleges and to launch Jane on an American Youth Hostel bike trip along the New England coast. She had her own independent adventure with new young people. She enjoyed biking and got along well on the trip. She also decided on, and was accepted by, Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. I thought a woman’s college might give her an opportunity to develop on her own. In the tumultuous year of 1974, she graduated from Brookings High School. As a Board member, I was able to give her her diploma at her high school graduation. Both Bill and I were proud of her. We put her on a plane for Massachusetts that fall to go off to college alone. Coming from a small school in South Dakota, Jane found the adjustment to more sophisticated, better educated classmates difficult. Her first year was reasonably successful, and I visited her at school during her second year while I was on sabbatical. I was vaguely aware that life was not going as well as it might be, but she seemed happy with her circumstances and her friends. She talked more about the poor black child she was tutoring in South Hadley than about her her classes at school. She had not lost her interest in helping people! However, by that summer, she became quite depressed, enough so that we felt it essential to get her some professional help. The result of this was that she stayed out of Mount Holyoke two years. She attended the University of Minnesota for a couple of quarters and worked one summer in Minneapolis with Sarah and her boyfriend from Mount Holyoke days, David Bogan. There were even vague plans that she would eventually marry David, a student at Dartmouth, whose family lived in Springfield, Massachusetts. By the fall of ’78, Jane was eager to return to Mount Holyoke. She graduated in 1980, with a major in social history. In her senior year, she did a major project writing the life of Neva Harding, the woman she had spent so much time with at the Brookings Retirement Center. In spite of all this, Jane struggled off and on with depression for a number of years. Andy’s high school years seemed much less traumatic than Jane’s, leading to my belief that it is easier to raise boys than girls. Even as a preschooler, Andy’s interest in books manifested itself. They were his favorite toy. He was a highly imaginative child, liking people and places much more than things. He was never interested in toy cars, trucks, The Alexander Family ..... 369 and building equipment like his cousin Mark. He always did well academically. Like most of his grade school contemporaries (their favorite playground game was “kill the carrier”), he was an avid sports fan. He played Little League ball, finally becoming a pretty good hitter. He and Bill went to Minnesota Twins games and yelled and cheered during Sunday afternoon pro football. In fifth grade, he envisioned playing pro football when he grew up. I knew his lanky build made that an unlikely prospect but I didn’t rob him of his dream. To his disappointment, he did not make the middle school basketball team. He was a good swimmer and swam on the Brookings swim team a couple of summers, but he was not likely to make it in the most popular jock sports. Fortunately, one of his middle school teachers suggested he go out for cross country running. That became his sport. Bill had recently fallen for the jogging craze, getting up at five o’clock in the morning to run. Andy joined him. He went to a cross country summer camp at SDSU and ran cross country all through high school, winning his letter. One year the team won the state championship. Another year he ran the Jack Rabbit 15, a long run from the little town of White to Brookings. Cross country also enabled him to continue to play trombone in the band through most of high school years. Although quite reticent in early adolescence (he said as a freshman in high school, he just wanted to be “another face in the crowd”), by his junior year he had developed strong friendships with boys in his class. In his senior year he became Student Body President. Unlike Jane, he had a lot of fun and quite enjoyed high school events, getting a great deal of amusement out of some of his teachers and of the activities of high school. He took a girl to the prom, although he did no serious dating. In addition, he was a faithful acolyte in St. Paul’s. Both he and Jane went to “Youth Group” at church, but found it not very meaningful. They did not go out at night to cruise and felt no strong need for a “youth center”—the big enthusiasm during those years. Andy worked for Bill in the hotel until it closed and then got a job bailing hay and doing manual work with other laborers for a local entrepreneur who ran a mobile home park and had other business interests. Andy found that experience equally entertaining. Although the work was physically demanding, he got a kick out of the language 370 ..... The Alexander Family

of the men he worked with. On our way home from taking Jane to Boston, we also looked at Cornell, Bill’s alma mater, and at the University of Wisconsin in Madison as possible schools for Andy. Andy immediately settled on Wisconsin, feeling very comfortable in its liberal, laid back atmosphere. He graduated from Brookings High School in ’76, winning the English prize, and enrolled in the Liberal Studies program at Wisconsin in the fall. It was a good choice for him—giving him a good background in history, classical philosophy, and literature. For his first two years, he lived in the dorm and had a part time job cleaning latrines, something Bill had put him to work doing at in the hotel. In his last two years, he lived in a house off campus with other students, among them his old friend Tom Pearson from Brookings. Andy fitted in well at Wisconsin and was happy there. By that time, the Phelps family had moved to Madison and Bill had an uncle living there, so Andy had some family connections which he saw very infrequently. He graduated early with a double major in English and philosophy at the end of fall semester in 1979. As the third Alexander to appear in the Brookings schools and just a year behind Andy, Sarah had to assert her individuality to be distinguished from her older brother and sister. A very happy child, she played with Jane, with her friends Nancy Engstrom and Shelley Lefevre, with Andy and the Van Steenberg children next door. Even as a toddler, she struggled to keep up with her siblings. Her medical problems just before she started school created a scary experience for her. She had to be in the Sioux Falls hospital alone for nearly two weeks. She recovered quickly, however, eager to master riding her bike again. In grade school she developed a passion for the Laura Ingles Wilder books. We went over to De Smet to watch a production of The Long Winter on the Wilder homestead. She loved dancing lessons and did well in a couple of recitals. She also loved ice skating and swimming and became fairly proficient at both. Middle school was not as traumatic for her as it had been for Jane, perhaps because the system was a little more experienced in dealing with the children’s transition from grade school, perhaps because Sarah had the example of an older brother and sister to follow. She was also a good student. The Alexander Family ..... 371

By high school, Sarah began to display her feisty independence. Like Jane, she did a lot of baby sitting and genuinely enjoyed being with young children. Some children she particularly liked were the three Mikkelsons who lived in our neighborhood. Their father was a local attorney, the son of a former Governor of South Dakota. He become Governor himself in 1986 and served until he was tragically killed in a plane crash in ’92. He was a very warm, friendly person who became a state legislator while Sarah was still baby sitting their children. She developed an interest in journalism and worked on the school paper. In her junior year she was selected as one of four journalists to attend Girls’ State, a week long camp where students set up a mock government and elect officials. Journalists cover the politicking. Boy’s State was sponsored by the American Legion, Girls’ State by the Legion Auxiliary. Sarah was furious when she learned that the journalists selected for Boys’ State had their expenses paid, but the girls had to pay their own way. I was no longer on the School Board, but I suggested she call the Human Rights Commission. Almost immediately, her complaint became a widely publicized case of sexual discrimination. Sarah was on TV, and had to go to Pierre to testify before a legislative committee. Unfortunately, I was unable to go with her. She drove out with George Mikkelson who was kind enough to look after her a little in that political jungle. I was very grateful for his help. I really admired her courage and confidence, since her action created a great deal of opposition from the Legion, a powerful force in the state. Sarah held her own, but of course she didn’t win the case. During the Legislative session, a special bill was passed exempting Girls’ and Boys’ State from the rules of the Human Rights Commission. I told Sarah the bill should have been named for her—her little action required the South Dakota Legislature to pass a special law! As editor of the school paper, Sarah also went after some stories that were not the usual province of student papers. She had attended journalism camp at SDSU and was quite willing to continue crusading. She challenged a faculty/student counseling program that she believed was secretive. How the student counselors were selected, and what their function was, was not made clear to the students who were to be “counseled.” I believe there was even some money involved in the 372 ..... The Alexander Family

program which the public was unaware of. She ran into difficulties getting the faculty to provide information but her story raised questions. Eventually the program came under scrutiny of the entire community and was later dropped. One faculty member, Fred Oien, criticized her for meddling in faculty affairs. Ironically, he had been an outspoken advocate of student involvement in college faculty affairs when he was a student at SDSU. However, Sarah was somewhat disillusioned about journalism by her experience, although like her sister Jane, she continued to enjoy writing. She got a job as a checker at Spies Supermarket and saved enough money for a trip to Europe after her senior year. In her last semester in high school, she enrolled in a college course in history at SDSU which she found somewhat more challenging than high school history. She also did a long paper on her Grandmother Musselman (some of which is used in this Memoir) and won the English prize for her efforts. Although she had some good friends, her participation in the social life of Brookings High school was limited After a trip to Europe with other young people, she enrolled at the University of Michigan. During her first years, she lived in the dorm, but eventually she moved to German House. She majored in history and for a while considered working in politics for a career. One summer she worked in Washington for George McGovern’s office, along with many others, but she did not particularly like the Washington scene. After Tom Daschle was elected to Congress, she worked in his Sioux Falls office and became acquainted with some South Dakota Democratic party leaders. She particularly liked responding to constituents’ complaints and difficulties with federal social services. The next year, 1980, McGovern ran again for the Senate and Daschle for Congress. Sarah took fall semester off from Michigan and attended South Dakota State while she worked for the Democratic party in Brookings County. Daschle was elected, but George McGovern was defeated—largely by the anti-abortion forces in the state. As a father of five children with grandchildren, he was portrayed as anti-family, while James Abnor, an unmarried man who ran against him became identified as the family man! Sarah’s experience with the rough and tumble of political campaigning and infighting turned her away from politics as a career The Alexander Family ..... 373 choice. Another summer, she was the cook at Thunderhead Episcopal Camp in the Black Hills, again working with youngsters. She had a wonderful summer, particularly in becoming acquainted with Native American life. Her steadiest boyfriend in college had been a Chinese student from Hong Kong, so her interest in other cultures was already well advanced by the time she graduated in the spring of 1981. Meanwhile, during the children’s college years, my own life expanded professionally into ever wider interests. I was President of the School Board during the last year of my term in 1975, but I had already decided not to run again. For one thing, I gradually discovered that the real decisions were not made by the Board at open and official meetings, but at gatherings of school administrative personnel with former coaches who had moved into banking, real estate, and financial services in town. They met at places like the Elks Club or VFW or coffee gatherings downtown on Monday mornings, with nary a Board member in sight. Certainly not a woman. For example, we were presented with a recommended candidate for the position of Athletic Director. After we approved him with cursory discussion, I learned that his wife had already been offered a job as a grade school teacher. It was a done deal before it ever came before the Board. I realized we had very little real power. Secondly, in 1973, I had been appointed by Governor Dick Kneip to the Commission on the Status of Women. I couldn’t have been more honored! I wanted to devote my time and energies to the issue so close to my heart. That activity plus teaching provided me with more than enough to engage my mind. I served six years on the Commission—one of the most satisfying challenges of my life. The twelve members of the Commission met regularly in Pierre or elsewhere around the state, so I did a lot of driving and got to know even more of my beloved South Dakota. I became good friends with many feminists across the state, one of whom I still see regularly. We organized conferences, published a newsletter, issued press releases, studied issues, and called attention to many problems affecting women: equal opportunity in employment and education, the need for reliable and affordable daycare for children, domestic violence, discrimination in credit, banking, and the justice system. We even visited the penitentiary and the state prison for women, then at Springfield. Our 374 ..... The Alexander Family

top priority was full ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution (passed by Congress in 1972 and ratified by South Dakota in 1973). Our second priority was reproductive freedom. (The Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 legalized abortion and gave women the right to choose.) Needless to say, by the second half of the 70’s we faced huge opposition on both these controversial causes. Although we were mostly middle aged married women with children, we were viewed as radical feminists bent on destroying home and family. The Right to Life organization and Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum worked strenuously against us and won a great deal of support in South Dakota, particularly in conservative West River and gradually in the South Dakota Legislature. More personally meaningful for me than our political action was the historical research that the South Dakota Commission on the Status of Women sponsored and encouraged for the national Bicentennial. Women scholars all across the country were busy trying to reclaim our past. Although I had long been interested in women’s literature and history on the national scene, I had focused little on South Dakota. In the late seventies, I turned my attention to this rich unexplored area which absorbed most of my scholarly energy for the rest of the century. In addition to becoming acquainted with South Dakota’s fascinating women of the past through the work of the Commission, I was selected for a three-year Modern Language Association project “Teaching Women’s Literature from a Regional Perspective.” It enabled me to do research on South Dakota women writers myself and to direct some students in it as well. That group met regularly in New York where I learned what other scholars were discovering about women writers in their regions. In the last year of the project, I chaired the Great Plains Region of the group, holding a Conference in Lincoln, Nebraska. Later I published a substantial number of articles on South Dakota women writers based on my research which began in this project. The highlight of Commission activity came with the International Women’s Year Conference in Houston, Texas, called by President Jimmy Carter in 1977. At our state Conference in Mitchell, which both Sarah and Jane attended with me, I was elected one of the delegates. While I was thrilled with being elected and participating in the action, The Alexander Family ..... 375 personal sorrows and tragedy soon overshadowed my enthusiasm. Our sorrows began in 1975 with the death of G.H. Alexander of congestive heart failure. His life seemed a triumph and his funeral service celebrated it. He was buried in the family plot in Lakeview Cemetery in Minneapolis. However, his death meant a division of his remaining estate, mostly shares in the Alexander Building in Hibbing and personal property, including jewelry. It caused some strain in the family. Both Betty and Hugh, I think, were unhappy with the settlement, since G.H.’s decisions on disposition of his personal property had never been made clear. Betty and Hugh did not see each other again, although we saw Hugh when he came home for the holidays. Two years later in August ’77, Hugh committed suicide by driving to a remote spot in Wyoming and asphyxiating himself in his car. He was missing for ten days before his body was discovered. It was a terrible time for the family, especially for Bill who had to go to Wyoming to retrieve Hugh’s things and arrange to have his body cremated. Andy, the last member of the family to see Hugh alive, had stopped to visit him in June as part of a trip to Texas to visit a school friend. He had noticed nothing unusual in Hugh’s behavior at the time, although Hugh was a private person, never inclined to reveal himself. In early July, without any explanation, he sent Bill a handwritten “last will and testament” which greatly puzzled us both. We didn’t know what to make of it. Bill talked of driving to Kansas City to see Hugh or calling him, but he never got around to it. That’s why Bill felt so guilty after Hugh’s death in August. He believed he had not paid attention to Hugh’s cry for help. It was a grim fall for both of us, since Hugh’s affairs were in something of a tangle. Betty Bonell went to Kansas City to straighten them out. In October, Bill developed abdominal pain which we thought might be a gall bladder attack. Although in June he had passed a physical for his hospital work, he was soon diagnosed with colon cancer. This time it was real. The bottom dropped out of my world. At that point, none of the projects in which I was engaged seemed important. Surgery to remove the growth revealed that the cancer had spread to his liver. I was devastated, not knowing what to tell the children who were away at college. I considered canceling my trip to the November International 376 ..... The Alexander Family

Women’s Year Conference in Houston but Bill would not hear of it. I think he foresaw that I might be facing years alone since I was almost ten years younger than he and that I would need work to sustain me. As soon as he seemed to be recovering from surgery satisfactorily, I sadly left for Houston. Although my mind was only partly engaged at the meeting, it was an exciting time. Women of all ages, shapes, sizes and colors met in Houston, led by former Congresswoman Bella Abzug, with the wives of four presidents in attendance (Roslyn Carter, Betty Ford, Lady Bird Johnson, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.) With minimal opposition at the Conference, we hammered out an ambitious, and somewhat unrealistic, agenda to improve the lives of women. Yet even at this Conference of feminists, women knew little about their own history. The Conference opened with a tribute to the Seneca Falls Convention, called in 1848 by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, where women first demanded their right to vote. (In fact female runners carried a torch from Seneca Falls to Houston to symbolize the connection between the two meetings.) We knew it had taken women some seventy years to make their demand a reality. The nineteenth amendment to the constitution was finally ratified in 1920, but the story of their efforts was virtually ignored by high school and college history texts, to say nothing of most academic historians. So ignorant were most women of their past in 1977 that Susan B. Anthony’s grand niece was present at the conference and was honored for her distinguished relative’s part in the Women’s Rights Movement. However, Susan B. Anthony was not present at that first convention and didn’t join the movement until the 1850s. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s name was not even mentioned in the opening ceremonies in Houston because few knew anything about her. Still, it was inspiring to be in the presence of so many feminists and to feel a part of the “Second Wave” of the Women’s Rights Movement. The Conference was the high point of the women’s movement of the seventies—the rest of the decade is bleak in my memory. Conservative opinion grew in the country, fueled by the growth of the religious right. In 1978, Republican William Janklow was elected governor of South Dakota and in 1980 Ronald Reagan became President. The Equal Rights Amendment never achieved ratification The Alexander Family ..... 377 by 37 states. In February of 1979, South Dakota’s strong Republican legislature rescinded its ratification of the ERA. Bill was too sick for me to go out to Pierre to testify against their action. Not that my words would have made any difference. By appointing three strong Right to Life women to the Commission and by stripping it of funding, Janklow effectively killed it. (We thought his appointments ironic since these women had lobbied against the Commission they became members of!) When I commented to a reporter after my final Commission meeting in July that Janklow had abolished the Commission, he responded by attacking me in the press (his standard practice.) Although he had never met me, he found out that I was a registered Democrat. I didn’t know what I was talking about, he said. I had never supported anything he did and I was merely mouthing the Democratic Party line. I learned then that Janklow was a man to be feared. He almost always attacks the person, rather than the issue. He served two terms as Governor until ’86, then came back to serve two more in ’94, so he commands great power in the State. He’s an arrogant, vindictive bully who uses his power to bludgeon his opposition. Because of his long tenure as governor, he has come to regard South Dakota as his personal fiefdom, with Republican vassals supporting him and the rest of the population treated as serfs. In spite of my despair over this turn of events in politics, it was a mere blip of discomfort in a year of misery. I had bigger things to worry about. Bill recovered from his surgery fairly well and was able to work during his six months of chemotherapy. Although we knew the cancer was just in abeyance, we hoped he would at least be able to see the children graduate from college in the coming couple of years. After school was out in ’78, Bill and I drove west, crossing the continental divide, visiting Grand Canyon, Phoenix, cousin Nancy and Cobb in Las Cruces, Albuquerque, and Santa Fe. It was our first and only trip alone together, a precious memory for me. On the way home, we stopped in Kansas City where Hugh’s estate was finally being resolved. Bill did quite well that summer and we had a happy Christmas with the children home, although Bill was showing some ominous symptoms. We even had the house painted and planned to do some redecorating. 378 ..... The Alexander Family

The next three months are a blur. The cancer returned. In January, in terrible winter weather, I drove Bill to get additional chemotherapy treatments in Minneapolis, although they did very little good. I stayed at Mary’s. Since I had to return to teach, Mary and Ed put Bill on the plane to come home. From that point on, I struggled to keep everything going—my teaching, informing the children at their various colleges without unduly worrying them, keeping Bill’s medical appointments, talking to Bill’s sister in Reno regularly. Everything else I canceled— organization meetings, conferences, and humanities presentations, staying with Bill as much as possible. We went out to dinner on my birthday, the last time he felt good enough for that. The doctor kept talking about another year, but I could see Bill going down hill week by week. In early March, he spent some time in the hospital to control pain. He was put on a drug that did help the pain, but made him a little spacey. Fortunately, the children came home for spring break and stayed on. For Bill’s last few days, we were all together at home. On Sunday, the twenty-fifth, a lot of people came to visit him, people from church, our friends the Hendricksons. Father Jim Hauan, a former priest who drove down from Fargo, and the lawyer who had worked on Hugh’s estate. Our priest at the time, Father Kenneth Fieber came every day and was my best friend though this ordeal, especially before the children were home. I hired a retired teacher, Gen Walz, to take my classes for a week. On Monday, March 26th, Bill reached the end of the road. The children and I were with him at the last, as well our dogs, George and Looie (Princess had long since died). His last words were “I am so blessed!” spoken in such a cheerful tone that we knew he was not in too much misery. He died quietly shortly after two that afternoon. Bill’s sister, my brother and sisters, and Mary’s husband Ed came to Brookings for the memorial service at St. Paul’s. Bill and I had planned a joyous hopeful celebration of his life, and the service was certainly that. Many people from town and college were present and there was lots of music. Bishop Gordon Jones came up from Sioux Falls to celebrate the Eucharist, and Father Fieber was his usual buoyant self. Bill had willed his body to the University Medical school so there was no casket. He was later cremated. We buried his ashes in the Alexander plot at Lakeview Cemetery in Minneapolis when the children were The Alexander Family ..... 379 home at Christmas. One of the memorials Bill and I had talked about was a stained glass window over the altar at St. Paul’s. That project gave me something concrete to think about the next year. In May of 1980, St. Paul’s celebrated the installation of a beautiful window designed and created by Mary Egert of Brookings. It blended both Native American and Christian symbols with a dove of peace. Knowing that the window was in place and that Bill would have been delighted with it gave me a kind of “closure” to his death—to use a popular current term. Nonetheless, there was still a gaping wound in my life. Professionally, I stumbled through the rest of the semester at college and spent the next year largely putting one foot in front of the other. I think at that point I gave up being a politically active feminist. The combination of Hugh’s suicide, Bill’s death, the defeat of the ERA, and the surge of conservatism in the elections of Janklow and Reagan made my memories of those years too painful. For several years I could not bear to look at the research I had been working on nor the women’s issues I had been so involved with. Politics repelled me. I was further shattered in 1980 when Father Kenneth Fieber, who had provided such a steadying hand through my woes, was diagnosed with lung cancer in August and died in October. The world seemed to shake under my feet. I could count on nothing in this life. Once again, as I had in an earlier crisis, I turned to the faith, tradition and liturgy of the church for the comfort of a vision larger than the travails of this world. In the course of the that year, I visited all the family including Sarah in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I attended Andy’s somewhat raucous but expeditious graduation at the University of Wisconsin in December. Jane’s traditional one at Mount Holyoke the following spring began with the graduates processing in white dresses carrying red roses which they placed on Mary Lyons’ grave. An interminable speech by novelist John Irving followed before Jane finally got her diploma. Sarah’s graduation from the University of Michigan in 1981 ended in a riotous picnic with some of her friends. After graduation, Jane went to Boston to fulfill her ambition of “working with the poor,” something of a surprise to me since I had not foreseen her degree from Mount Holyoke as leading to that outcome. The next year, she persuaded Sarah to join her in Boston after her graduation. 380 ..... The Alexander Family

Andy, however, finished in mid-year and had a fellowship at Wisconsin for the following fall. I suggested that he apply for an assistantship in English at SDSU for spring semester so he could acquire some teaching experience as well as a couple of graduate courses. I was delighted to have someone living at home with me. Meanwhile, I needed a new direction in my own life. I wanted to see if I could travel alone. At my colleague Phil Hendrickson’s suggestion, I applied for and received a Canadian Faculty Fellowship to study Canadian literature at St. John’s College, part of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. In late June of 1981, I drove to Canada alone and lived there for a marvelous eight weeks. I explored Winnipeg, wandered around Manitoba, attended a class, made friends with faculty at St. John’s, took a boat trip down the Red River to Lake Winnipeg, and became generally acquainted with our neighbors to the north. A whole treasury of Canadian writing opened up to me: Margaret Lawrence, Hugh MacLennan, Susanna Moody, Margaret Atwood, Gabrielle Roy and others. My enthusiasm for teaching flooded back. When I returned to campus, I added Canadian literature to the curriculum, organized a writer’s conference featuring some of the scholars I had met in Manitoba, and co-chaired a Humanities Seminar on Canadian culture. The latter was a huge success, attracting scholars from all over the state. The next summer with my friend Margaret Allen from Winnipeg, I attended the Canadian scholarly meetings in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and spent a couple of weeks driving with her around the Atlantic provinces. I found them enchanting. She and I have visited each other since and still correspond. My professional energy returned. When the position of English Department Head came up in ’82, I applied for it and was hired. I had tried once before five years earlier but ran into real opposition from some of the male members of the department. However, they now accepted me and I eagerly launched into administration. These were difficult years of retrenchment in colleges, but I enjoyed establishing some policies that I thought benefited the department. I encouraged faculty members to take sabbaticals, to enrich their knowledge by exploring new material, to support student writing, and to develop relationships with English majors and alumni. I finally was able to The Alexander Family ..... 381 complete the research and writing on South Dakota women writers that I had begun a decade earlier and dropped after Bill’s death. I published a series of articles on the subject and wrote introductions for the reissue of a couple of out-of-print books. I was no longer an active political feminist, but I relished being an academic one—teaching women’s history and literature. My humanities course “Women in American Culture” attracted a substantial following, especially of nontraditional students. My professional life was zipping along very satisfactorily; not so my personal life. When Andy left to pursue his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto in 1983, I suddenly realized how alone I was. He had lived at home for a semester when he came back to Brookings. When he decided to continue working for his M.A. at SDSU and not return to Wisconsin for philosophy, he moved into a house with other graduate students. For a few years he was at least around, in and out of the house occasionally. He taught English as a second language to Malaysian students and filled in for a faculty member on leave at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, as well as teaching at SDSU. When he finished his M.A., he applied for and won a fellowship to the University of Toronto in Canada from which he received his Ph.D. in 1988. After I watched him drive off to Toronto and I knew the girls had their own lives to live in Boston, loneliness overwhelmed and depressed me. The house seemed very big and full of ghosts. I moved into Andy’s room and converted Bill’s and my bedroom into a kind of study. I never used the living room or dining room unless I entertained the department. I was always happy on campus or at the office, but dreaded long lonely times in the house. I finally sought some counseling in Sioux Falls, where my mild depression was characterized as “delayed grief.” After a few sessions, I felt much better. My spirits lifted. Ever since that gloomy time, I have relished living alone. I never wanted to remarry. My study of women writers had led to discovery of and an intense interest in the work of Elaine Goodale Eastman, a New England woman who came to Dakota Territory to teach Indians in the 1880s. She married a native physician who became a famous writer. Little was known of her married life. I bent my efforts toward recovering her 382 ..... The Alexander Family

story and understanding her. From Jane, I heard about Mary Bunting Fellowships at Radcliffe/Harvard. I applied for one and received it in 1987. I took a semester sabbatical to go to Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was a magic time for me. I loved Boston. I saw Jane frequently, my contact with the other scholars was stimulating, and I was engrossed in my research. I went to the Berkshires where Elaine had grown up, to Smith College where her papers were, to the libraries of Harvard, Boston and Yale. I lived in a former professor’s house in Belmont, just over the line from Cambridge. I marveled at public transportation that took me all over Boston so cheaply (non-existent in South Dakota). By this time, Jane had years of experience in Boston. She had found work in the city immediately after college in home health care but soon became aware of a new homeless population. They were appearing on streets in every big city in the country. She switched to work at Boston’s best known homeless shelter, Pine Street Inn, for a time. She soon realized that homeless women did not have a place to eat and were frequently afraid of going where men were. With another woman, she decided to found a soup kitchen for women. I thought her idea was crazy and predicted it would not last more than six months. I was dead wrong. The two women persuaded the Church of the Covenant in Back Bay to surrender its basement for their purposes. The Women’s Lunch Place opened by serving twelve women in November, 1982. For a time Jane continued to earn a living working at Pine Street Inn, but she soon managed Women’s Lunch Place full time by herself. Over the years her project grew and expanded. By the turn of the century, it served breakfast and lunch to a hundred or more women six days a week. It has a Board of Directors, a professional staff, and many volunteers. It has become a recognized Boston institution and raises many thousands of dollars in contributions every year to support its work. Jane is still its Director and guiding spirit, insisting on table cloths, flowers on the tables, eating with the women who are treated as guests, and providing numerous services and advocacy for them. When I came to Boston in 1987, Jane had a tiny apartment in Jamaica Plain, although she had lived in various places previously. Sarah was not in Boston that fall because she had gone the previous spring as a Volunteer in Mission to Zimbabwe for the Episcopal Church. The Alexander Family ..... 383

After college, she had joined Jane in Boston. Unfortunately, it was during the Reagan recession and jobs were hard to find. The two sisters lived together in a Dorchester apartment where they acquired a wonderful street dog named Sam. Until his death, he was very much a part of the lives of Jane, Sarah, and Andy in Boston. In her first years in Boston, Sarah was a substitute teacher and took temporary jobs. Eventually, she got her teaching certificate and took a position teaching in a Catholic junior high school for a year. She liked the children and the nuns, but did not find teaching a happy experience. The pay was abysmal. Since she liked working with adolescents, she worked as a counselor in a residence for disturbed youngsters—work that satisfied her in spite of irregular hours. She lived in various group homes after she and Jane left the apartment they shared, but for five years she lived in a group house in Cambridge where she was very contented. She had good friends there, she became active in Christ Church, Cambridge, and through that connection found out about the opportunity in Zimbabwe. In 1987, she spent nine months in that country. I topped off my wonderful sabbatical fall by visiting her in Africa at Christmas. I met her friends, we traveled to a native town, to Victoria Falls, to a reserve where we were both moved by the sight of a proud bull elephant, whom we felt we had intruded upon. Her work in Zimbabwe had come to an end so she returned to Boston with me. Andy also came to Boston in December of ’87. He had finished his dissertation and was low on funds. I suggested that he look for a job in the city, since there were so many colleges in the Boston area. I thought he might pick something up. Because college enrollments had fallen and budgets were tight, teaching jobs were very difficult to find in those years. His specialty, seventeenth and eighteenth century English literature, was not in demand. Ethnic, minority, world, and colonial literature as well as linguistics and rhetoric crowded more traditional studies out of the curriculum. Andy defended his dissertation successfully in 1988 and finally got adjunct teaching at Suffolk University and at Rhode Island College in Providence, Rhode Island. The latter was a long commute. Eventually he got a temporary full time position at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy which paid quite well. 384 ..... The Alexander Family

Thus, for a few days, we were all together in Boston in January, 1988, before I returned to South Dakota. We borrowed an apartment next door to Jane’s. The three children decided to live together to save money and, after some weeks of searching, found a large fairly comfortable apartment in Jamaica Plain which they fixed up for themselves. There they resided for a couple of years with Sam, the dog who adored them all, and Elsie, the cat who adored no one. Soon after she returned from Africa, Sarah found a job working with Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees, starting her on the road to a career in social work. The children all seemed to be able to earn enough to keep body and soul together. There were no marriage plans in view. I returned to South Dakota very contented with my family. I was only reluctant to leave because it meant the end of my glorious fall semester. South Dakota’s snow covered prairies looked beautiful to me when I drove home from Mary’s where I had left my car while I was gone. But I had little enthusiasm for administrative work. I was eager to continue with my research and writing on Elaine Goodale Eastman. By this time, I was sixty-four and looking forward to retirement. I had also developed arthritis in my knees. I began a long process of keeping myself functional. Miraculously, I learned about the Wellness Program at the University which included a six a.m. water aerobics class. Even before I set foot in the pool, I knew this would be a Godsend for my aching knees. It was. I could do anything in the water without any pain. The university pool was a dream come true. Gradually, with the exercise (I was also walking a lot), I lost thirty pounds and tightened up muscles. I am convinced that water aerobics kept me out of a wheel chair. Although I had to take medication for pain until I finally had both knees replaced a decade later, the exercise strengthened my muscles so that I can now walk and go up and down stairs reasonably well. I had already decided to resign as department head in spring of ’89 and to teach for one more year when two events occurred that made it necessary. I was offered a chance to join the summer tour of the Great Plains Chautauqua as Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Although reluctant at first, I was thrilled that Everett Albers of North Dakota Humanities Council believed I could do it. I finally agreed. It meant, first of all, a great deal of study and preparation on the life, writing and friends of The Alexander Family ..... 385

Elizabeth Cady Stanton. That was a joy. Secondly, it meant eight weeks of summer travel from Kansas to North Dakota, spending a week in little towns, putting up a tent, and giving historic presentations of our characters. It was much work but much fun as well. However, I worried about what would happen to my house and yard while I was gone. I had let students live in it while I was in Boston, but I didn’t want to do that again, especially in summer. The second event that determined my future was learning about a proposed new apartment building which would have underground parking and an elevator. I promptly claimed an apartment and put the house that I had lived in for thirty years up for sale. It took many months to sell the house and to get the apartment built, but both were concluded in May, 1989, shortly before I left for Chautauqua. Dismayed at losing their childhood home, Jane and Sarah had flown home the previous October, rented a U-Haul, spent a few days sorting out what they wanted to take, loaded up and drove back to Boston in record time. I put everything else I didn’t take to the apartment up for auction. It paid my moving expenses and bought some furniture for my new place. I felt like a ton of weight had been lifted off my shoulders when I spent the first night in my light and spacious new home. My possessions were reduced to a more manageable size, I no longer had to worry about the yard, or snow removal, or maintenance, or even safety since the apartment had a security system. I could just turn the key in the lock and leave. I felt wonderfully free. So began my new life. My last year of teaching was not particularly happy. I retired joyfully with the prospect of unscheduled time to fill as I wished. Before I did my second Chautauqua tour as Stanton, Jane, Sarah and I drove to Johnstown and Seneca Falls, New York so I had first hand knowledge of where she lived. We also stopped in Rochester to visit one of the few remaining children of Elaine Goodale Eastman. After Chautauqua, I was able to spend time doing serious writing about Eastman’s life and work. I published several articles, one of which won an award. I gave up the idea of a book because the family was uncooperative about use of letters from her private papers. Like most retired people, I found plenty of other activities to keep me busy. I had been chair of the Brookings Food Pantry in Brookings since its founding 386 ..... The Alexander Family

1982. I had also been appointed by Governor Mikkelson as historian on the Board of Trustees of the Historical Society in 1988. Both of these organizations engaged me in different ways. I also directed a Humanities program which required speeches in Chamberlain and Yankton and publication of an article. My life took a different turn a year later. I had flirted with the idea of going to an Episcopal seminary for a year. I felt no call to the priesthood but I wanted to study Scripture, theology, and church history. I interviewed at both Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge and General Theological Seminary in New York. Although expensive, I thought I could get along fine at either one. That winter when I was working hard on an Eastman paper, I found it increasingly difficult to read my computer screen unless I used a large font. I went to my ophthalmologist who told me my eyes were no longer correctable with glasses. She sent me to a specialist in Sioux Falls who recommended contacts with special glasses. I struggled with them for two years but found that they did not help my reading and were too much trouble. I was terrified of the prospect of not being able to read. How could I live without that? However, my sympathetic doctor recommended that I get talking books from the State Library under the Aid to the Blind program. I was accepted for the program and began to listen to, rather than read, books. It gave me a new lease on life. I also got various other aids—magnifying glasses for kitchen, reading chair, bedroom, a big magnifying glass with a light for my study where I did my research. I managed. I learned to live with this disability just like I learned to live with arthritic knees. Fortunately, my eyes have not become a great deal worse, although I’m not sure I will pass another Driver’s test (due in two years.) I gave up all thought of the Seminary—that much required reading I did not think I could do. One door closes. Another opens. I was aware of the Episcopal Women’s History Project for some ten years before I became involved in it. When I saw its first meeting announced in Episcopal Life in the early 80s, I wished that I were not so involved with being Department Head so that I could attend. While I was at Radcliffe, I met Mary Donovan, one of the History Project’s founders. Her book, A Different Call, about women in the Episcopal Church had just been published The Alexander Family ..... 387 and she spoke at Christ Church about it. In 1992, I learned that EWHP was holding a Conference in Minneapolis at St. Mark’s Cathedral on women in the church in this region. My research on women writers in South Dakota had led me to study women missionary teachers as well. I decided to do a paper and submit it. The result was that I read the paper, was elected to the Episcopal Women’s History Project Board, and began a whole new area of research and writing. I was totally involved in EWHP for six years, serving as Secretary of the Board and as representative on the male dominated Historical Society of the Episcopal Church. I published a couple of articles on women missionaries in scholarly journals, but wanted to reach a wider audience. For two years, I wrote a monthly column in the Diocesan newspaper, usually featuring some church woman in South Dakota history, Native American or white. These were immensely popular with women of the Diocese who hope that they will eventually be compiled in a book. Being a member of the Episcopal Women’s History Project Board meant a lot of travel—to North Carolina, New York, Atlanta, Dallas, Austin, Berkeley—for meetings. In addition, I represented EWHP at a couple of major conferences involving women in the church—one in Salvador, Brazil, and another in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. I also made some journeys of my own that I had long dreamed of. I joined an Elder Hostel for two weeks in Israel, falling in love with that area of the world. The following year I went on a three week cruise based on the journeys of St. Paul. We visited Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, and Rome and listened to some very informed lecturers. Both trips were great experiences. Out of my contacts in the church through these activities, I became a reader for the General Ordination Examinations—a lot of work but a lot of learning, as well. Consequently, without going to seminary, I have accomplished some of the study I was interested in. Like so many retirees, I have found that I am busier in retirement than I was at work. How did I ever find time for a job and family? While I have been involved with these adventures, my children have been equally active in their own lives. Sarah was the first to move out of their joint apartment. She lived in various places before she bought a condominium of her own, the first floor of a triple decker in 388 ..... The Alexander Family

an attractive multiracial neighborhood in Dorchester. She has made it her own in decorating and furnishings. She finally realized that her forte was social work, especially cross cultural social work. She proceeded to get her Master’s of Social Work degree at Boston College. She has worked with white juveniles in trouble and with Vietnamese and Cambodian families. She published an article on Amerasian youngsters. Currently she is director of social services for the International Institute of Boston. She has traveled to Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand and, of course, to Europe and Africa. Sarah has a very big heart and has provided a temporary home for a Bosnian family, a Kosovo family, and a Somali woman. Her three beloved cats also call her apartment home. She teaches Sunday School at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Dorchester which has a racially mixed congregation with a strong Caribbean flavor. She has had several serious relationships with young men, including a Chinese, a Bangladeshi, a New Hampshire man, and a Haitian, among others. None as yet has been worth a trip to the altar, but Sarah has not given up hope. When Andy finished his year at Mass College of Pharmacy, he decided to return to the middle west. He secured a three year teaching opportunity at Iowa State University and moved to Ames. He enjoyed his work there and especially his contact with his old friend Tom Pearson, who was then at Iowa University in Iowa City working on his Ph.D. Through Tom, and his future wife Jane Lohr, Andy met Linda Kruckenberg who was also in graduate school in English at Iowa City. They attended Tom and Jane’s wedding in Virginia together and the next year decided to marry. Their wedding was in Dubuque, Iowa, in 1993. (Linda’s father, also a hotel man, had an interest in the Holiday Inn there and that seemed the most convenient place.) Andy was then offered a tenure track position at Wayne State College in Wayne, Nebraska, teaching English and ethics. It was too good an opportunity to pass up. Almost immediately after their wedding they moved to Wayne where they continue to live. Andy has been promoted and has tenure. Linda endured the indignity of adjunct teaching for a while but now works with her father in stock transactions on the Internet. They have bought a house and have acquired a friendly dog, Clara, who is the pet of the whole family when we are together. They The Alexander Family ..... 389 usually spend Thanksgiving in Brookings and I see them at other times of the year as well. Jane continues to direct the Women’s Lunch Place. She has won numerous awards for her work—from Mount Holyoke, from the Council on Women in New York, from Brookings High School, and from other organizations in Boston and New England. She does public speaking in and around the city and is quite well known among non- profit groups for her work with homeless women. Their newsletters go out to many people across the country, and the WLP’s Mother’s Day and spaghetti dinner fund raisers have been especially successful. Jane has an enormous passion for her work and for the women she serves. Sometimes, she lets one of them stay in her apartment for a while. She decorates her apartment with many plants which flourish under her care. She has a talent for making any place she lives in cozy and comfortable. She cooks lavish meals for company. Both she and Sarah have been involved in contra dancing in recent years and both have worked at their writing. Jane has many friends in Boston, on the street as well as living in posh neighborhoods in the city. She has had numerous men friends, some of which I have met and others I have not. She has not wanted to make any of them a permanent part of the family. I am gratified by the accomplishments of all my children and their dedication to service to others. Their father would be as proud of them as I am. But I am not yet relegated to the rocking chair. My most recent adventure has been a return to the Great Plains Chautauqua. This time instead of portraying an historic figure I am Chief Chautauquan. I set the historic context, introduce the character from the past, and moderate the discussion that follows his or her presentation. This program means ten weeks driving across the Great Plains, from Oklahoma to North Dakota plus Iowa. It is strenuous work since I am on stage every night for five nights, but it has been rewarding and fun. My heart is in this part of the country where the people are so grateful for what we bring them. This Chautauqua program deals with my favorite period of history: 1900-1920. It includes the historic figures of Theodore Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie, Booker T. Washington, Jane Addams, and Charles Eastman (Elaine Goodale Eastman’s husband). These were also the the years that my mother and father were young. 390 ..... The Phelps Family

There are many parallels between that period and America at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In fact, it was my Chautauqua experience that caused me to turn what began as simple stories of the lives of my brothers and sisters growing up in East Lansing into a chronicle of a twentieth century American family. The University of Alabama which organized the Elder Hostel on family history that we attended three years ago would no doubt be astonished at what has resulted from that week we spent together there.

The Phelps Family Lynn and I were married at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Lansing, on June 17th, 1950. My sisters did much of the planning since it was the first wedding at home where the family was present. Jane came home from Texas with her two little boys and was matron of honor. She had been married during the war to a Texas soldier she had met through the mail. She traveled out to Tacoma, Washington, where he was stationed to get married. Ruth, Mary and George were all living at or near home. The reception was held at Mom and Dad’s house and it was a nice June day. It was good that the weather was perfect, since the house was really too small for the crowd that came. We really did not expect so many people to come. Since we had very little money and no car, we borrowed George’s car to go off on our honeymoon. We drove to Kalamazoo, where we spent our first night, left the car there for George to pick up and took a bus to Macatawa, a summer resort on Lake Michigan. We spent a few days on the beach and then took a bus back to East Lansing, loaded up our wedding gifts in Dad’s car and he took us to Ann Arbor to set up housekeeping. Following World War II, veterans flooded college campuses using the GI Bill. As a result, housing was still very tight for students. We had a hard time finding a place to live. Through Lynn’s cousin, Elaine Hardin, who had an in at the University, we were able to get a unit in some temporary university housing. The housing consisted of a 20’x20’ building divided into two units by a wall down the middle. All the facilities, stove, cupboards, bathroom, space heater and water ➥ The Phelps Family ..... 391 heater were lined up along this interior wall. This permitted the hinged sides to be folded in, the floor to be folded up and the roof folded down, so that the two units could be loaded onto a semi trailer to be easily moved. The wall between the units was so thin that you could hear your neighbors’ conversation quite easily. We learned to live very quietly! The university didn’t care what we did with the places since they were shortly to be removed, so Lynn put up a divider in our 10 by 20 space. In the front was our living room, dining area and kitchen and bedroom (we slept on an awful let-down sofa with two humps on the sides and a big valley in the middle). In the back we made Lynn’s study and our dressing room. Lynn spent many hours studying. I had ear phones for the radio, so I could listen to it without disturbing Lynn. That kept me from being too bored. Because the living area was so small, I could reach everything I needed to while hooked into the radio. (There was no such thing as transistor radios or TV for college students in those days.) We did buy a car though, after the first few months. It was just too hard to manage without one. We had a lot of fun in those days. While Lynn worked very hard and we didn’t have much money, neither did anyone else. Lynn belonged to a medical fraternity and our social life revolved around those activities. We got together with other couples to share meals, played lots of bridge, and did other things which didn’t cost much.We adopted a cat, whom we named Flowerbelle, while we were there and had a number of adventures with her. She got pregnant and delivered five kittens one night, almost on our bed. We woke up in time to realize she was in labor and pushed her off the bed into a box we had prepared. The kittens spent a great deal of time in the storage area under the couch. We were able to give the kittens away and didn’t want to have that happen again. So Lynn asked another med student, Roy Patterson, to help him and they proceeded to tie her tubes. Lynn got a book out of the library on how to do it and Roy, who worked part-time in a lab where they did the operation, served as assistant and anesthetist. They had quite a time—she stopped breathing at one point and Roy had to give her mouth to mouth resusitation—and she got an infection in the incision after it was over, but eventually she recovered. Again with 392 ..... The Phelps Family

Elaine’s help, I was able to get a job in the Investment Office of the University so that I no longer had to commute to Dearborn and could walk to work. I got pregnant early in Lynn’s junior year, and as the University was closing the temporary housing project where we lived, we had to find another apartment. We found a decent one within walking distance of the med school, and moved in a week before our first child, Thomas Andrew, was born on June 15, Father’s Day, in 1952. A med school friend helped us move and as the last thing, he took the cat in his car. It was about a mile away from our old place and when he had to make a left turn close to the new apartment, he rolled down the window and the cat was out like a shot. Since there was no place to park, there was no way he could stop to find her. We left word with people still living in the old apartment complex in case she found her way back there and after a week she turned up, so she was restored to us safely if a bit scraggly. Tom’s arrival on the scene had an immediate unexpected impact. Lynn had been working as a research assistant on a medical study the summer before and had volunteered me as a subject. The study was on diabetes in pregnancy and I had a schedule of insulin and glucose tolerance tests throughout my pregnancy. As a result I had to stay 10 days in the hospital for all the tests following delivery. This wouldn’t have been so bad, except that I had a topical reaction to something in the hospital and broke out in a horrible itchy rash. With the temperature in the nineties, I was miserable and felt that if I could just get out of there, I would be fine. The doctors finally traced it to the stuff that was used for hand washing in the nursery and since I was in the nursery a lot, I was constantly exposing myself. However, nobody told me and I went on using the stuff for several days. I finally found out by accident, when an intern happened to ask the doctor about it in front of me. It was a great relief to get home. Tom was a very colicky baby that first summer. I suppose I had a lot to do with that. We would sometimes take him out for a ride in the car, because that seemed to soothe him. Lynn and I had our first fight over a platform rocker he bought without consulting me and spending what seemed like a lot of money in those days. However, that rocker was a blessing with the baby and I spent many hours in it. The other The Phelps Family ..... 393 support I had was that my hospital roommate was also a med student’s wife and we spent many hours together during that first year. Once he got past the colic period, Tom was an easy baby, except for when he started to want to feed himself, which he did at about 8 months. He couldn’t handle a spoon yet, so he insisted on dipping his hand in the food like a shovel with the palm face down and scooping up the food on the back of his hand. He then conveyed it to his mouth, his nose, his chin, his hair and his clothes. But no way would he let me do it for him. He was a constant mess. He also did not creep, but conveyed himself lying on the floor and pulling himself along with his arms. As a consequence he got dirty from his head to his toes. It wasn’t until about a week before he walked that he finally got up on his hands and knees to crawl. Just after Tom’s first birthday, Lynn graduated from medical school and we moved to Traverse City for his internship. Lynn’s dad sent one of his trucks down from Manton to move our bits and pieces of furniture. We moved Flowerbelle in the trunk of the car and listened to her crying the whole trip up to Traverse City. That summer of 1952 was a wonderful one for me. Although Lynn worked long hours, I had the Lodge to escape to and I did almost every day. Aunt Jane provided a crib I could use for Tom’s naps and the rest of the time we spent on the beach. Tom loved the sand and the water. Since the family was there a lot, I didn’t have to worry about help in looking after him. Lynn’s folks were close, Manton being just 35 miles from Traverse City. There were also two other interns’ wives, both of whom had kids, to socialize with. One of them lived just a few blocks away, so it made a nice walk for Tom. We were fortunate that our apartment, though very tacky, was also very roomy. It was upstairs over a print shop, so was a bit noisy during the day, but very quiet at night. The owners lived in a house that was the front part of the building and had a sizeable yard and vegetable garden at the side, so Tom had considerable play space. He would help himself to the vegetables and once ate a whole green pepper, which did a good job of keeping him awake most of the night. At least, that was all I could attribute his wakefulness to. Anne arrived on January 29, 1954. It was cold and snowy that day 394 ..... The Phelps Family

and I had a case of diarrhea. It is not fun to have when you are nine months pregnant and due to deliver at any moment. It brought on labor and about 11 that night, I called Barb Scallin, another intern’s wife. We had agreed to cover for each other as she was also near delivery. She came right over. I had to call a taxi because Lynn was on call at the hospital that night. It was snowing hard and I think the taxi driver was nervous about taking me, because he wouldn’t even carry my suitcase into the hospital. Anne arrived promptly about 2 hours later. Anne was a good baby and Tom accepted her very well, but the rest of that intern year was hard. The winter was long and with two small kids, it was hard to get out. Lynn worked many nights and weekends and was usually pooped when he was off, so we didn’t do much. As a consequence, I was glad when June rolled around and we moved on to getting started in a practice. We liked Traverse City and would like to have stayed there, but there wasn’t really room for another family doctor. Lynn heard about an opening in Goodrich at a medical meeting in Grand Rapids. At that time, he thought he would practice for three years to get us on our feet financially and would then take a residency in internal medicine. The Goodrich job seemed like a good place to start. A house was provided for us at very low rent and so we decided to move there.

The Goodrich Years When we moved there in 1954, Goodrich was a rural village of about 700 people. What made it unusual was that it had a small hospital. In the early 1920’s, Dr. Amos Wheelock practiced there. There was an inter-urban rail line which ran between Flint and Pontiac and people would use that line to come to see the doctor. When they needed special care, Dr. Wheelock would keep them in his home with his wife doing the nursing. As the number of cases grew, he developed a small hospital and attracted other doctors. When he died, the other doctors took over running the hospital, though it was still owned by the family. Two houses adjacent to the hospital had been provided for the doctors. The hospital was an old frame building with no elevator, but the staff was very good. It was a very convenient situation for Lynn as he could walk over to the clinic and hospital, and the practice was The Phelps Family ..... 395 not too demanding. However, as the area grew in population over the years, more doctors were needed and were hard to get, so it became more demanding. I began mixing with the young mothers in town and for the first year or so, I had a difficult time. I admit that I was an educational snob, and needed some time to begin to appreciate those who hadn’t had the opportunities I had had. There were also the problems of being an outsider in a town where there were so many inter-relationships. I had to be careful what I said because I didn’t know who was related to whom. However, I didn’t make too many booboos. And it helped that we became friends with Jean and Myles Harriman. Jean was a nurse in the hospital so knew many Goodrich people, but she and Myles lived about 12 miles away at Potters Lake, so they were not part of Goodrich. They also liked to play bridge and were good company. We began to see a lot of them. In the summer they regularly invited us out to the lake and we had a lot of fun swimming and water skiing. In 1959, the cottage near theirs came up for sale and we decided to buy it. Being as close to Goodrich as it was, we could go out there even when Lynn was on call, but at the same time patients in general could not bother him when he was not on call. The telephone was unlisted and only the hospital had the number. Even those close friends whom we invited out were respectful of our privacy there. The cottage was a dump. We did quite a bit of work on it to make it more useable but it was still a dump. The plumbing was always a problem. We had our own well and pump and shared a septic tank with the neighbors. Lynn and Myles spent a lot of hours on the bathroom floor, dealing with pump and plumbing problems. Almost every winter there were places where the pipes were not drained adequately and would break. Each spring Lynn would put a valve in the spot that froze. One spring Jean asked Lynn why he had left the bathroom sink on the floor through the winter. He hadn’t, of course. The water in the pipes had lifted the sink right off the wall and it collapsed on the floor. But dump that it was, we had wonderful times there. Wally and Alice Caminsky and her parents had the cottage between us and the Harriman’s and they also became close friends. Our kids were all pretty 396 ..... The Phelps Family

much of an age and played together, and we shared meal preparation and clean-up so life was pretty easy. We developed a way of playing bridge that included the six of us and there was an endless game going on. Anne was just 5 months when we moved to Goodrich. In those days babies were given solid food at six weeks. It was a good thing she was for I had been nursing her and apparently had dried up on her. She didn’t complain about being hungry and she slept through the night, but she wasn’t gaining very fast. We called her our “Buchenwald baby” because she was so small and seemed to be all eyes. One day when she was about 4 months, I decided to try giving her a bottle after I finished nursing her. She took a full bottle. I never nursed her again. She liked to lie in her playpen and hoist herself up on her heels and the back of her head, looking at the world upside down from a back bend. She learned to talk and sing quite early and at 18 months could sing “Davy Crockett,” a song very popular at the time. Dan arrived on the scene on March 26, 1956. Lynn and I had been to East Lansing for sister Mary’s wedding on the 24th and on the 25th Lynn’s folks came on their way home from Florida. About 2:00 a.m. the next morning, I walked to the hospital and Dan appeared about 7:00 a.m. Kate and Dad were able to stay and take care of the other kids till Mom could get there to take over. Couldn’t have been better timing. Dan was born with no muscles in his eyelids and so could not open his eyes until he learned to do so by raising his eyebrows and tipping his head back. From the time he was born, he had a charm that endeared him to everybody. He was also an imp, getting into everything and trying to keep up with his older brother and sister. The house we were renting was getting small for our growing family and we had to make a decision about what to do. Lynn decided that he really liked being a family physician and taking care of all age levels and so we decided to stay in Goodrich and buy a house. Lynn’s partner had built one on speculation and we decided to buy it. It was a great place for the kids, with other kids in the neighborhood and plenty of open space on a dead end road. The only problem was that the road was not paved and every spring the road went out with the frost so The Phelps Family ..... 397 that there were huge pot holes and deep mud holes. But we became very expert at maneuvering through them. Katie arrived on the scene on April 26, 1958. Lynn was scheduled to go to a medical meeting in Atlantic City on the 27th and I had told him he could go if the baby had come. She arrived at about 6:00 p.m. so he was able to leave early the next day. Mom again came over to take care of the kids. The other kids received her arrival without any particular problems. Dan’s first action was to climb in the bassinet with her and try to feed her a carrot. The next few years were filled with the activities of raising small children. Dan underwent two separate surgeries on his eyes using muscle from his leg to correct the lack of muscle in the eyelids. It was done at the University of Michigan hospital and I was able to stay right with him in both cases, the first when he was three and the second when he was five. We were very fortunate that we had Mrs. McDermitt next door. She was a grandmother who was willing to come in to take care of the kids while Lynn and I were away. The kids called her their third grandma. We made occasional trips to New York, to Puerto Rico and to San Francisco. We spent a lot of time at the cottage. We started attending the Episcopal Church in Davison and became very involved in church affairs. Lynn became the volunteer organist and choir director. I sang in the choir, served as ECW president and both of us served on the Bishop’s Committee. We also made periodic trips to see Lynn’s folks in Manton and to Traverse City, often getting together with my siblings and their families at the Lodge. It was great fun when all of us and our 15 children were there at the same time. When the kids were nine, seven, five and three, we took a trip to the Black Hills in South Dakota, stopping along the way to see Mary in Minnesota and Ruth in Brookings, SD. We had a great trip, since Bill, Ruth’s husband, was in the hotel business and gave us lots of help in planning what we would do and see. We saw Wall Drug, Mount Rushmore, a rodeo, the buffalo herd, a gold mine, the “Trial of Jack Magee” in Deadwood and the Passion Play at Spearfish. We even rode horses with Katie perched in front of me. What was memorable was that she cried the whole way. 398 ..... The Phelps Family

The kids’ school years were not without incident. When Tom started kindergarten, he had to go down to the corner to get the bus and would not go without me. We had a big undisciplined boxer dog, whose purpose in life was to protect the children. I had to put her on a leash, something I never did otherwise, when we went down to the bus. If I didn’t, she would run back and forth in front of the bus so it couldn’t go. One day Mom and Dad and the aunts were visiting and decided to escort Tom to the bus. Josie would not let them leave the yard. I finally had to drag her in the house so they could go. The kids never played outside without her being there, too. I did not have to worry about anyone laying a hand on any of the kids. However, Josie did not stay around too long. She hated being put out in her dog house at night and would come barreling into the house in the morning. When she started coming in and jumping on our bed and urinating, she became a problem. It would go right through the spread and blankets, and spread out on the sheet, so we did not know it had happened until we went to bed at night. It happened on my side of the bed several times, but when it happened on Lynn’s, we found a new home for Josie. Over these years we acquired many pets. Amos, a miniature poodle joined us not long after we got rid of Josie. He had been found by friends wandering along one of the major highways in the area. They tried to find his owner, but had no success. Since they already had a dog, they offered him to us. I fell in love with him right away. He was a wonderful pet—quiet, good-natured, gentle and very undemanding. He was with us 17 years, but his life was not uneventful. He broke a leg in the spokes of a bike and it never healed properly, so he had a limp. When he was 14, he got a piece of bone stuck in his throat and had major surgery to remove it. He had to have almost all his teeth removed as he aged, and he became deaf and nearly blind. Eventually, with great sadness, we had him put to sleep. We had a series of cats. Living on the edge of fields and swamp as we did, we often were plagued with mice and the cats earned their keep. We had Smudgy when Katie was a baby and she let Katie pull her whiskers and crawl all over her, simply moving away when she was tired of it. Another cat we were very fond of was Sandy, a male, The Phelps Family ..... 399 who spent much time outdoors, sometimes disappearing for weeks at a time. He would come home with various wounds but he was the happiest cat imaginable. His purr was so loud we could hear it all over the house. We also had a whole series of other animals, parakeets, gerbils, and tropical fish. One time we went away and had the neighbor girl come in to feed the menagerie. She failed to close the bird cage tightly, the bird got out and was devoured by the cat. The neighbors felt terrible and insisted on buying another bird. In first grade, Tom hated going to school. He had to go out to a two room school quite a distance from home and he didn’t like his teacher. He would hide in the ditch on his way to the bus so he wouldn’t have to go. There were two boys in the upper elementary grades who came to my rescue and saw that he got on the bus. He finally adjusted, but never did like his first grade year. Anne did not like going out to Atlas school either, but there was a neighbor girl her age who went with her, so it never bothered her as much. For Dan and Katie, the kindergarten teacher lived right across the street, so they had no problems with adjusting to school. However, Katie had a very difficult time in first grade. My mother died in the fall of that year and it affected Katie severely. She was apparently afraid something would happen to me. I had to go to school with her and stay much of the day for several months. After she was used to going by herself and staying, she often was “sick,” having stomach aches and sore throats and any other symptom that would allow her to stay home. She also had another problem in that she had no self-confidence. From the time she was very little, she had heard “Katie, you are too little,” “you are too dumb,” “you don’t know anything” from her older siblings. I could see what it was doing to her, but there was little I could do to stop it. With these two problems, she did not do well in her early years and that further eroded her self-esteem. She really was able to do the school work, but didn’t think she could. The effects of these early years stayed with her until she finally graduated from college, when she finally realized that she was okay. Generally speaking Tom was a very biddable kid, and quite cautious about trying new things. We had a pontoon boat at the cottage which 400 ..... The Phelps Family

we would take out to the middle of the lake for swimming, since the shore in front of the cottage was too mucky. We would put life belts on the kids so they could swim safely. It took Tom a long time before he would go off the pontoon boat by himself. When he finally made up his mind to do it, he was shaking as he climbed down the ladder, but he succeeded and after that was quite at home in the deep water. He took his big brother responsibilities so seriously that it was a pain in the neck for me and the other kids. He was terribly bossy. The other kids really resented it and it was the cause of most of the turmoil in the family. Dan was quite different. He was much more venturesome and always needed a sidekick to do things with. There was another little boy his age down the street and the two of them had lots of adventures. One night after I had put the children to bed, I heard water running somewhere and finally tracked it down to an outside faucet to which the hose was attached. We heated our house with oil then and had an underground tank in the back yard. The two little boys had decided to play oil man that day and had put the hose down the air vent, which had somehow come uncovered, and turned on the water. When they turned it off, they didn’t get it all the way off, and so the water trickled into the tank all day. We had to have 135 gallons of water pumped out! Anne was generally a good child and unobtrusive in her play. A little girl down the street was just her age and the two of them spent many hours together. Anne didn’t much like to spend the night at Shirley’s house, though, because the first time she did, Shirley’s parents had a very noisy fight. They yelled and screamed and threw things at each other. Anne was scared—that is something which didn’t happen at our house. Except for Katie’s problems at school, the school years were happy and easy ones. The kids stayed out of trouble at school and generally did well scholastically. We took several trips to Washington D.C. to visit Lynn’s brother and family and took the kids to all the sights. It was an easy way to see the city, since we could do one or two things a day and the kids had a lot of play time with their cousins besides. Over the years, they saw just about everything, though they have since forgotten much of it. The Phelps Family ..... 401

During those years, Lynn was working hard. A number of doctors came and went at the clinic and he carried much of the responsibility. In the early sixties, the old hospital was closed because it was a fire hazard. The community came together to raise the money for a new one and it, along with Lynn’s new office building across the street, opened in 1963. Lynn served as chief of staff for the hospital for several years. His practice was large and he went out of his way to give good service. He was very slow to cut down on house calls, but gradually did so after the new hospital opened and the emergency room was staffed regularly. He still got up nights to see his patients there though. I was active in helping to establish a hospital auxiliary and worked on various projects. We had a small gift shop and I took my turn staffing that. We had a float in the annual parade and that was built in our garage a couple of years. About the time that Katie started school, someone from Flint proposed a teen dance hall in Goodrich. They approached the village and a public meeting was held. Although they had elaborate plans for maintaining control on the grounds of the dance hall, I had concerns about the traffic and the behavior of teens coming and going, so I spoke out quite strongly against the idea. Apparently this impressed some people and they asked me to run for the school board. I agreed and was elected that year. I continued to serve for 10 years, until we left the community. This being the turbulent sixties, the school had to deal with teacher shortages, school crowding, and learning to negotiate with teacher unions. I created quite a stir when I suggested that we try to hire a black teacher to expose our lily-white school to some diversity. The idea fell like a thud in the school board meeting and the next morning when I walked into the local downtown gathering place, conversation stopped dead! It was obvious what everyone was talking about. I served as secretary and treasurer of the board, but I knew that as a woman, I would never be president. I did what I could to foster more opportunity for girls in athletics, but as Title IX was not yet in existence, I did not have much success. Music was always important in our household. Lynn played the organ regularly at church and the whole family sang in the choir. The kids all took piano lessons, although both Tom, Dan, and Katie did 402 ..... The Phelps Family

not continue long enough. Anne did quite well and continued at it long enough to still be able to play in her adult life. The kids all played in the high school band and sang in the school choruses. Both Anne and Dan had singing parts in high school musicals. In addition to Babes in Toyland, Anne played Aunt Eller in Oklahoma. Dan played Harold Hill in The Music Man. Tom did not have the ambitious music teacher that the others did so there were no musicals, but he did have a part in the school play. Katie moved to the Madison school system in her sophomore year, so her school music was pretty much limited to band. When Tom was 16, we gave him a stay at a sailing camp in the Bahamas for six weeks. While he was gone, the rest of us went to Quebec and New England, and had a lot of fun touring that area. The kids especially loved the lobster, named the ones they ate after their friends and collected all the antennae. We then drove down to New York to meet Tom, but he wasn’t at the airport as planned. After some frantic telephone calls, we found that the camp had ended early and he had gone ahead to his uncle’s in Washington, D.C. where we were headed next. In Tom’s junior year, we were asked to take a foreign student for the year and decided to do so. Horst Bierhaus arrived on a blistering hot night in late August. He was a bit older that Tom in years and much older in experience, being quite sophisticated. He was a very nice kid, but felt quite restricted by the rules and regulations we expected him to follow. He fell in with a rather wild group, but they managed to avoid getting into trouble, so outside of a bit of worrying, we had a good year. He became genuinely fond of us as we did of him and still remain in contact after all these years. The kids enjoyed having Horst so much that they wanted to have another student. So in Tom’s senior year we had Per Gardsell, a Swedish boy. He was a huge success. He and Tom were very close. When he first arrived in August, he was kicking a soccer ball around at the cottage and our neighbor, Wally Caminsky, suggest that he go out for football. He did, became the team’s kicker, helped them go on to the conference championship by earning the most points for his kicking. He fell in love with football, so we took him to a University of Michigan game The Phelps Family ..... 403 and a Detroit Lions game. He sold magazines to help raise money for the senior trip and in the process won a trip for two to New Orleans for the Sugar Bowl game. He wasn’t allowed to travel without a chaperone so Lynn and I decided to go with the two boys. We didn’t care about the game, but just had fun exploring the city while the boys were off on their own. The summer Tom graduated from high school, we took the kids on a two month tour of Europe. Lynn had spent a whole year planning and making arrangements and it all went remarkably well. We kept a journal of the trip and details of what we did and saw can be found in that. When we returned in September aboard the Queen Elizabeth II, Tom went off to Carleton College in Minnesota. In January, we gained another exchange student, Michel Bazieu from France. Mike was very young and hadn’t gotten along with his first family. He wasn’t a success with us either, although I enjoyed him. But he was very critical of everything American and that did not go over well with our kids or those at school. He got involved with the rebellious ones (this was the ’70s) who were not really very rebellious but were definitely outsiders. Nobody was sorry to see him leave that June. The next summer Anne had her turn at a summer trip. She went on a tour of the west with a group of kids, mainly from the east coast. They camped the whole way for eight weeks. The summer Anne was 17, Dan won a scholarship to band camp at Michigan State University for three weeks. While he was there, and Tom was attending a summer course in Rhode Island, we took the girls to the southwest, visiting Arizona and New Mexico. In addition to visiting the many national parks and monuments, we visited Aunt Alice in Tucson and my cousin, Nancy, in Las Cruces. In Anne’s senior year we had another student, this time a girl from the Philippines, Dalisay Fonicier. She was a delight, but in many ways closer to Katie in maturity than Anne. However the girls got along very well and Dolly entered into school life eagerly. She was part of the Belle Cantos, the girls’ singing group that was quite elite and that Anne was part of. Anne chose to attend the University of Michigan and went off to Ann Arbor, where she majored in German. She took her junior year abroad, studying in Freiburg, Germany. 404 ..... The Phelps Family

It was during these years that things started to get very difficult for Lynn in practicing medicine. Jim Laird, his partner, pulled up stakes and ran off with a nurse, with whom he was having an affair. After that it was very difficult to find family physicians and there were several trying experiences. The stress was beginning to make life miserable for him and he decided that he would have to leave Goodrich. It was during Dan’s junior year in high school that he began to look for another opportunity and that came up in the spring when he was hired by the University of Wisconsin in the newly established Family Practice Department.

The Madison Years: The Younger Generation We made the move in the summer of ’73. We found a lovely house on a wide area of the Yahara River and settled in. It was probably a mistake to take Dan out of Goodrich for his senior year. He had been a big fish in a little pond in Goodrich and he was definitely a little fish in a very big pond in Madison. He did not do too badly in school work but he got involved with kids whose values were very different. They were not bad kids, but had no goals in life. By the end of the year, he had gotten deeply involved with Debby Pond, whose background was a totally dysfunctional family. We tried not to show too much disapproval, but in teenage rebellion, he moved in with her family. His school work fell off and he barely graduated. They were married in August of 1974 when he was just eighteen. He tried a number of jobs to support his new wife, but couldn’t get more that minimum wage, so he enlisted in the Air Force. By this time, Debby was pregnant and Dan Junior was born August 10, 1975, after she joined Dan at an air force base in Colorado. Katie survived the move in better shape. She still had a problem with her feelings of inadequacy academically, but she did satisfactorily. She made some friends among some okay kids. Her senior year we had another exchange student, Ajeet Singh from New Zealand. Ajeet was Sikh and her family had migrated to New Zealand from India. In her culture, families were very close and did everything together. She expected that she and Katie would be inseparable. Katie, on the other hand, expected that, after the first few weeks, they would each do The Phelps Family ..... 405 things on their own as well as together. Since we did not understand this cultural difference, the problems between them grew over the year and were never resolved. It cast a real pall over Katie’s senior year. During his senior year in high school, Tom had gotten very involved with Laura Levine, and they became engaged at Christmas of his freshman year at Carleton. Lynn and I tried to hide our dismay and worry that he might get married before finishing his education. However, our worry was tempered by the fact that he was away most of the time and by the middle of his junior year, the engagement was off. He had by then found Donna Campbell at Carleton. They graduated together in 1974 and both came back to Madison. They found jobs and were married on December 28, 1974. Donna did very well in her job and moved up to a good sales position. Tom’s job was merely a time filler until he decided where he wanted to go and after a couple of years decided to seek a Ph.D. in engineering. It took him quite a long time because he had to take a number of courses he hadn’t had to be admitted to graduate school, but he persisted and was granted his doctorate in 1987. Andrea, his first child was born in 1984. He got a teaching job at the University of Missouri and the family moved to Columbia. It was there that Rosemary was born in 1987. Tom was not happy in the collegiate setting, however. He liked the teaching but hated the push for more and more research money. He also was discouraged with the lack of state support for the University. He found a job with a consulting firm in Ann Arbor, Michigan, whose mission was to help small companies in making greater use of computer technology. He and Donna bought a house in Brighton, about 20 miles from Ann Arbor and since that time have been firmly settled there. Tom’s job was shifted to another company but with no changes and he remains happy with it. Donna is currently employed by the Brighton schools part time as a lunch room supervisor and is active in school affairs. Anne graduated from the University of Michigan in 1976. She took her junior year at Freiburg, Germany, and Lynn and I went over to spend a couple of weeks touring with her during her spring break. Katie joined her in England for a summer of the two girls hosteling. Following graduation, she wanted to stay in Ann Arbor for a while so 406 ..... The Phelps Family

she got a job with an organization that did business training. After a year there the company decided to move to Washington, D.C. Anne was able to get another job with one of the company’s clients in California, so she and I drove across the country to get her settled in Tustin, CA. She worked at that job for a while, but was not happy with it and decided to fulfill a long held desire to dance, so she became an Arthur Murray ballroom dance teacher. She did this for several years, and when her brother Dan was stationed near Las Vegas, she went to visit him and looked up Tom Stone there. He was a California native and was a friend of one of Anne’s friends. He showed Anne and Dan around and in the process they got interested in each other. After courting long distance for a while, Tom moved back to California and they were married in 1984. When they began to think about raising a family, they decided to move back to the Midwest and came to Madison in 1986. Both found jobs quite easily and in 1988 they bought a house in Oregon. Janet was born in 1989. For several years they had a struggle, as Anne was staying home with Janet and Tom was finding his way around the computer business. David was born in 1991 and Eric in 1994. Eventually, their economic status improved and Tom found himself quite in demand. Anne started keeping in shape by doing aerobics with her sister and became a teacher herself. Music is important in their household. Tom and Anne sing in the church choir and Janet in the church children’s choir. She also sings in the Madison children’s choir. All three of the children take piano lessons. Tom had a supporting role in the 1999 Oregon Straw Hat Players’ production of Guys and Dolls. Anne is president of the Oregon Library Board and has become a part-time aerobics teacher. Dan’s army life lasted eight years. It was during this time that Sarah was born and his marriage to Debbie broke up. She remarried another service man. Dan had a hard time adjusting and married a servicewoman on the rebound. The marriage lasted just 5 months. During this time also, he made big efforts to stay in touch with his children. Dan Jr. inherited his father’s eye problem and he flew to England, where Debby was then living, to be with him when he had his surgery. After eight years he decided to get out of the military and came back to Madison to go to the University of Wisconsin. During that time, he had Danny The Phelps Family ..... 407 and Sarah living with him some of the time. When they went back to living with Debby, he moved to Deerfield to be near them. He graduated from UW in computer science and has been employed by a number of companies since then. He is currently part of the management of a growing computer software company. In 1997 he married Linda Welch, a buyer for a natural foods cooperative, and they have settled on a plot of land in the country, where Linda has a large garden and they are active in a number of sports. Dan Jr. and Sarah both graduated from Deerfield High School and Dan went on to the University of Wisconsin—Whitewater where he graduated in 1997. He is currently living and working in Milwaukee in the YMCA child care program there and planning on pursuing a graduate degree. He is currently living with Shannon Giacolone, a young woman he met through the Internet. Sarah had rather a rough time following high school. She did not want to go to college at that time and tried a couple of jobs which didn’t work out. She had a very traumatic break-up with her boyfriend and went into a severe depression. Fortunately, she was able to overcome this and eventually met another young man, Tony Scribner, with whom she developed a lasting relationship. They were married in 1997, shortly before their son, Avery, was born. Tony is a graduate of UW-Plattville in engineering and is working for a company near Lake Mills where they are currently living. Sarah is now taking courses in nursing part-time and working for a day care center where she can have Avery with her. Katie graduated from East High School in Madison in 1976. It took her longer than four years in college to decide on her major and meet all her requirements, but she finally graduated in 1982 with a degree in elementary education. She met Jim Meland while she was still in school and moved in with him shortly after graduation. She taught in the Madison school district for several years. When she and Jim decided they wanted children, they decided to marry and did so in 1988. Jason was born in 1989 and Joey in 1993. Katie decided to stay home with the children, but soon found that too confining and began taking aerobics training. She now teaches aerobics and does training on a part-time basis. Both the children are musically inclined, with Joey 408 ..... The Phelps Family

especially showing interest and aptitude very early. Jason is also very sports-minded. He participates in soccer, swimming, tennis and golf and has earned a black belt in karate.

The Madison Years: The Older Generation The move to Madison brought a great sense of relief to Lynn in his professional life. The stress of running an understaffed practice and being involved in hospital affairs was no longer there. He was in charge of a clinic, overseeing the residents, seeing patients and taking staff call, meaning that the residents saw the patients and consulted with him. He only had to go to the hospital when there were problems they could not handle, although usually he would refer them to specialists in those cases. After a few years he was made head of the residency program, which involved overseeing the various aspects of the residents’ training and the staffing of the program. It involved the development of out-state clinics as well as overseeing the selection of each residency class. Eventually he found that he did not want all the administration of the residency program and he missed the direct contact with patients. He returned to being a clinic director. By 1988, he found that he could work less by sharing a position with another doctor nearing retirement and the two worked out an excellent plan of two months off and two months on. During that time we did a lot of traveling. In 1990, both doctors decided to retire fully from the University. For the next two years, Lynn did locum tenens, filling in for other doctors for various lengths of time in a number of places around the country. We spent time in several places in Minnesota, using the opportunity to visit both my sisters, Mary and Ruth. We both went to Yakima, Washington, using the chance to tour both Washington State and Oregon. We spent six weeks in Bath, Maine. He also worked a couple of places in Wisconsin. Both the trips to Maine and Washington coincided with some business I had with the League of Women Voters. I joined the League when we moved to Madison to learn more about the community and as a way of meeting people. Because I had no other commitments other than a University course or two, I was able to give quite a bit of time The Phelps Family ..... 409 to it and as a result, I was made president of the local League. From there I moved to the state League Legislative Committee, where I became chair and oversaw the League’s lobbying efforts with the state Legislature. As chair I was on the state board and did a lot of traveling around the state. In 1985, I was elected president of the state League. As a result, I got to Washington, D.C. fairly often and was able to spend time with Lynn’s brother’s family. Following my term as state president, I was asked to serve on the national League nominating committee and traveled frequently to Washington and other parts of the country looking over potential League leaders. In 1990, I served a second term as chair of the committee. This was a challenging experience since the League was then undergoing a lot of leadership and staff problems, and it tested me. In both cases the committee was quite critical of the board’s actions and made a number of changes. As a result, there was a rump slate nominated by board members who had not been asked to return. Dealing with that at convention was very difficult, since we had to be very careful about our reasons for not asking board members to return. As chair, I took most of the guff. However, the changes we made did a great deal to smooth out some of the problems in the national office. I left the nominating committee in 1992 and since then have continued to be active in the state League, staying on the state legislative committee and doing short-term or one-shot tasks for the local League. I have also been active in the Wisconsin Women’s Network, a coalition of organizations supporting women’s issues. I have served on the boards of both the Network and its fund-raising arm, the WWN Education Fund. For a couple of years, I served on the board of WYOU, the local viewer access TV station. In 1992, Lynn decided not to do any more locums, because he did not feel he was keeping up with medical progress and no longer felt competent in prescribing new drugs, etc. For several years we did a great deal of traveling. We both went on a medical mission to Guatemala which came about as a result of the time spent in Yakima, Washington. He also went on a mission to Haiti, when I did not go with him. We had done a lot of traveling after the children were out on their own. We had managed several trips to Europe, sailing trips in 410 ..... The Fischer Family

the Caribbean and a long trip to Asia, when we visited Dan who was stationed in Okinawa at the time, Dolly in the Philippines and Ajeet in New Zealand. We went to China on a medical tour and to Isreal with a church group. In retirement we really began to travel much more frequently. We took a trip to the Galapagos with Merwin and Doris. We took a number of Elderhostel service trips, spending three weeks each in Poland and Indonesia helping teach English to both children and adults. Each experience was different and in both cases we received much more than we gave. We also worked on two scientific research projects, on the fresh water dolphins on the Upper Amazon in Peru and on the spinner dolphin at Midway Island. These were very different trips and both fascinating. We kept detailed journals of our experiences. It was rewarding to know that we were essential to the research, since our presence not only help fund the projects, but it would have been impossible for the researchers to make all the necessary observations without the help of the volunteers. We have also enjoyed biking and have taken a number of tours of Europe by bicycle. These too we have documented in other places. In 1987 we moved from our house on the river, to a townhouse in downtown Madison as part of our retirement plan. Lynn has become very involved in our downtown neighborhood affairs, serving on the local neighborhood association and becoming an active advocate for protecting the area as a desirable place to live. In addition to my League and Wisconsin Women’s Network activities, I also work regularly in the Grace Church Food Pantry and chair an ad hoc coalition working to improve the state’s welfare reform plan. We take advantage of the many cultural events that Madison has. We have been blessed with good health and the financial means to enjoy life and look with optimism to the future.

The Fischer Family graduated from Michigan State college in June, 1951. I was very anxious to leave home and start being independent but didn’t have enough money. I worked that summer at Indian Trail Lodge to put some money ➥ The Fischer Family ..... 411 together so I could go off to the city. My choice of a big city was Chicago and that summer my aunt’s wonderful friend, Sarah Williford, was also working at the Lodge. Her brother was manager of the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago and she arranged for me to stay for a night at the hotel and to have an interview for a job there. In September I was off to Chicago. On my train ride to Chicago I ran into an old friend I had known since childhood, Pat MacDonald. She was going to be staying at the YWCA on the near north side of Chicago. That is where I planned to stay until I could find an apartment. The end result is that I began working in the reservations department at the Palmer House, lived a few days at the “Y,” convinced Pat to stay and look for a job and share a place with me. I also ran into two other college friends and the four of us got an efficiency apartment together. I didn’t stay long at the hotel. I ended up working in the same management consulting firm that employed Pat. I ran the travel desk for the consultants, arranging their flights and train reservations and tickets. I also helped with other tasks when needed. It was a great time and a lively place to be. We took advantage of all the things we could that the city offered. Many friends dropped in to see us so there was lots of company and lots of fun. Unfortunately, one by one the roommates moved away. I was ready for a change so I moved back to East Lansing and worked in a travel agency and then decided to go to California. I had quite a few friends there and it was “the” place to be! Right after Christmas of 1953, I packed my five suitcases and took the train, the Santa Fe Chief, out to San Diego. One of my roommates from Chicago was there. I stayed with her a week and then her fiance returned from overseas and I was her maid of honor in her wedding. Then I went to San Francisco and lived with two friends from high school days. I worked for Philco Corp. I didn’t like the work much although I thought San Francisco was great. Most of my single friends were teachers and the need for those was very great in California as it was growing so fast and these were the baby boom years. I decided to try teaching. I attended San Diego State College in a one year teaching certificate program for people who already had a B.A. degree. Tuition was $27.00 a semester! I had enough to manage that if I worked part time and borrowed a little. I knew one person who was great in 412 ..... The Fischer Family

connecting me with other women and I was able to move into their apartment. Some left at the end of the summer but we were able to find a wonderful house and a couple of other roommates. It was a very California Mexican style house built around a courtyard with beautiful plantings. The owners had a gardener continue to care for the grounds. It was a very busy year. San Diego was a big navy town which was still very active. We were invited to attend officer dances and of course never lacked for dates. I met Ed, my husband-to-be early in the fall of 1954. Soon after that his ship left for the Orient and I didn’t see him again for almost six months. In the meantime I finished school in June and became engaged to Harry Gilham. I had a contract to teach the following year but decided to leave with Harry, who was now discharged, and go with him to Atlanta to visit his family and then go back to East Lansing, work and plan a wedding. It was a good thing I did just that. I got to know Harry better and had some serious questions about him. I definitely didn’t want to be Harry’s “Yankee” wife. I wondered later if Harry would ever marry. I worked in East Lansing for a while at the travel agency and then after the break up went back to California. I was able to move back in with former roommates in a different but fun California house. I was immediately hired to teach first grade. At that time there seemed to always be a need for teachers in California. I started dating Ed again very seriously. We finally decided to get married and we were married in March of 1956 in Michigan. I had a week of spring vacation. We drove back to California. A week later Ed left for an assignment in Mannheim, Germany. After school was over I drove the car back to Michigan, visited with my family, drove on to New York City, stayed with Ed’s mother, arranged to have the car shipped and then flew over to join Ed. Our married life really began in Mannheim, Germany. It was still post WWII and there were still many American bases in Germany and other European countries. I was able to get a teaching position in the Armed Forces School, so we had some extra money. Ed had plenty of leave time so we did lots of traveling. It was a wonderful experience for both of us. We were also located only about 88 miles from Ed’s relatives in Germany so we were able to get acquainted with them. The Fischer Family ..... 413

We returned to the U.S. in time for Christmas in 1957. I was pregnant with our first child, Mark. After a hectic job hunt we settled in Syracuse, New York and Ed worked for Niagara Mohawk Power Corp., a public utility corporation. We were typical of the young married post WWII couples and were just at the end of that period. We settled into an apartment in Syracuse in January 1958. Ed was working and I was fixing up the apartment and preparing for the birth of Mark. I was reading Dr. Spock’s baby book, which was the popular baby care book at that time. Mark was born on April 7, the day after Easter that year. We went through the usual trauma of first baby, but he grew into a very pleasant and happy baby. We wanted a house and ended up buying a split level house in a fairly new development west of Syracuse. We purchased the house on the G.I. Bill. Ed also began going to evening classes at Syracuse University to get an MBA degree. This was also financed by the G.I. Bill. Our life was the normal pattern of suburban living at the time. I had many neighbors that were also home during the day with young children and we would enjoy coffee and take walks together. We discussed children and fixing up our houses at great length. No one had much extra money. On June 14 of 1960 Paul was born. With two little ones, I was busy. Ed was busy with work and school. I was also busy with activities at our area Episcopal Church which was full of other young families. When Ed finished his MBA degree, we decided that he would look for another position. The job market was pretty good and Ed felt there were better opportunities than those apparent at the Utility. After sending out several resumes, the best opportunities offered seemed to be at 3M in St. Paul and IBM in Poughkeepsie N.Y. After discussing the offers, we decided to go with 3M. Returning to the Midwest and living in Minnesota attracted me. Ed thought that 3M was a growing company offering long term potential and was attracted by what little he knew of Minnesota. We moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, in November of 1961. Ed drove out ahead and looked for housing for us. I flew to Michigan to visit Mom and Dad. When Ed found housing and moved in our furniture I flew to Minneapolis with the children. We had a rented house on the 414 ..... The Fischer Family

near east side of St. Paul. Ed’s work was located at a 3M plant south of St. Paul. As we got acquainted with the area we also looked at where we might possibly buy a house. It was a rather tough year. We had a terrible winter. There was record snow which seemed to fall every weekend from November to Easter. We were also introduced to some of Minnesota’s bone chilling cold. Fortunately we had some good friends from our days in Germany living nearby and through them we met other friends. We were also closer to relatives. Ruth and Bill Alexander were only a four and a half hour drive away in Brookings, South Dakota. It was fun to have the children get to know each other and share holiday times together. It was very helpful to have them there when I had to have a hysterectomy and they were able to take care of the children. The summer of 1962, after the rough winter and I was feeling O.K. again, we started to look for a house very seriously. We didn’t like east St. Paul much so we began to look at other locations. Just south of Ed’s plant was the town of Hastings on the Mississippi river. It seemed like a very pretty town and the idea of living in a small town rather than a suburb looked rather good to us. We found a brick rambler in Hastings and moved there in October 1962. Hastings was having a growth spurt and there were many new people moving in. We quickly became acquainted with many of the newcomers like us. The children had many playmates in the neighborhood and during the winter months our base- ment was a favorite place for them to play. They went to a neighborhood elementary school that was only about three blocks away. Through the 1960’s our life was pretty much elementary school for the children, work for Ed, volunteering for me. We were very involved in our community. The schools were our big priority and we were active in getting new school bond issues passed. We were also concerned with city government and were anxious to see that enough park land was dedicated as Hastings grew. Ed ran for and was elected to the Hastings city council in 1966. After four years on the council he served two more years on the city planning commission and then dropped out of city politics. I had the opportunity to teach in a summer remedial program. Later I taught at the Hastings State Hospital (since closed) tutoring adolescents who were patients there. Eventually The Fischer Family ..... 415 we had a regular program of morning school with three teachers covering remedial math, reading and social studies. It was a good schedule for me. We went to a family get together at Indian Trail Lodge the summer of 1963. All the family made it and we had a wonderful week together. It was the last time we saw my mother. She died that fall. It was a sad time. The following month President Kennedy was assassinated and from then on the rest of the 60’s were turbulent times. The civil rights movement hit its stride, the Vietnam war was heating up more, the women’s movement was now being spurred by Betty Friedan, and many other changes in lifestyle were happening. We participated in politics, changes in our church, and kept up with our children’s schooling and activities. It was a busy time. When Paul was born in Syracuse, Ed took his vacation, stayed home and painted the house. After that he said he would never spend his vacation at home again. So, we went on many family trips. Some of those were getting together with all the Musselman clan in Michigan at Indian Trail Lodge. We were able to keep in contact with all of my family. My father died about two years after my mother died. Ed’s mother, Martha Fischer, came to visit us almost every year while she was still living in New York. We also visited her sometimes. His father, Ewald Fischer, came to visit once. We visited with him a couple of times. He came up to Cape Cod while we were there and then we visited him in Stroudsburg, PA. Mark and Paul were extremely busy in junior high and high school. Fortunately, they were both good students and liked school. They both played in the band, Mark on the clarinet and Paul on the drums. Both Mark and Paul swam competitively in junior high and it meant going to lots of summer meets in addition to meets during the school year. However, both boys decided not to continue with the swimming and concentrated on sports they liked better. Paul ran cross country and spring track. Mark played on the football team and the tennis team. They were also able to take part in the fun activities and were very much a part of the high school scene. We knew there was a certain amount of partying and, like all parents, worried when they were out at night with the car. Clothing, hair styles, manners, etc. had gone 416 ..... The Fischer Family

through quite a change so there was some adjustment for parents. We had to roll with the change. During the anti-Vietnam war years I became more active politically. I began attending the D.F.L. (Minnesota’s Democratic party acronym— the F. L. stood for farm and labor) caucuses and participating in the party. When our ward representative on the city council moved, I put my name into the council to replace him. I was appointed and became the first woman ever to be on the council. The following fall I ran for the seat and was elected. I had five years on the council. There were many changes in Hastings at that time due to growth. Our ward had been flooded in 1965 by the Vermillion River. There was a lot of flooding that year in Minnesota due to heavy snows, a cold winter and then a sudden thaw. Ice had jammed up at one of the bridges so that as the water flowed down, it took a new course and ran through our ward. Our house was on high enough ground to avoid being flooded, but we were surrounded by water. The bridge was later rebuilt and the county highway straightened, but a large piece of property was still considered flood plain. The property owners wanted to develop it so there a was move to straighten out the river, rip rap it and destroy the beauty of the river. The U.S. Corps of Engineers would do the work. The Hastings Natural Resources Commission objected, as did a number of other citizens. We felt that open property offered an opportunity for a wonderful greenway on the south side of Hastings and future park land. While I was on the council, we were able to persuade the council to buy the land and keep the river intact. There were many citizens in my ward who objected, but as time has gone by I think everyone now agrees it was a good decision. After leaving the council, I again became active in the D.F.L. I particularly became active in the D.F.L. Feminist Caucus. This group had been formed to pass the E.R.A. (Equal Rights Amendment) and continued to defend women’s rights. They needed an office person, so for a meager salary I worked three days a week in the office. It was a very interesting experience. During the 70’s and 80’s Ed and I were also quite active in the Episcopal Church. We both did our part by serving on the Vestry and as Senior Wardens. The boys were in college by this time and Ed and I had more free The Fischer Family ..... 417 time to do some traveling. Some travel was done independently and some was tied into business trips. I did not take a permanent-type job again to permit the freedom to travel when the opportunity came up. I just kept up with my volunteering. I served on the United Way Board, Family Board, as an officer in AAUW and then served ten years on the Dakota County Library Board. Hastings was and is quite provincial. We were anxious for Mark and Paul to be exposed to other parts of the country and students from other places so we encouraged them to go to schools away from the state. Mark went to Dartmouth and Paul went to Duke University. They both found it hard at first, but they soon adjusted and ended up doing very well and making lasting friends. They were home summers and worked at a variety of jobs. Ed’s father retired to Stroudsburg, PA, where he died in the winter of 1979. Ed’s mother retired to a condominium she had bought in 1970 in St. Petersburg, Florida. She did not travel up to see us after 1976. She found it too difficult. The boys weren’t getting to see her, so when they were in college and from that time on, we all flew down to spend Thanksgiving with her every year. When she was 85 she was having more and more difficulty taking care of her apartment and herself. We had been suggesting she move to Hastings. We found an apartment for her and she and I flew up. Ed and Paul rented a moving van and drove her things from Florida to Minnesota. It worked out very well until her health failed even more and she really couldn’t live alone. She then went into a nursing home and died there at the age of 91. During the entire period in Minnesota, Ed worked at 3M in a variety of jobs. He started out as a process engineer, became a process engineering supervisor and in 1964 moved into a systems and procedures related position as a manager providing liaison between several manufacturing divisions and the data processing function for the corporation. In 1968 he joined the corporate data processing organization as manager of company manufacturing systems. In 1971 he was promoted to manager of all corporate systems activity. With the advent of personal computing, many changes occurred in the field and in 1984 Ed became Director of the personal computing support 418 ..... The Fischer Family

and services function within the corporate organization. He held this position until he retired in November 1991. Mark finished Dartmouth in 1982 and took a position with Mobil Oil Company in Albany, New York. After two years he went to the University of Chicago for two years and got his MBA. He took a position with Raychem Corp. in California. He ended up with them in the Detroit area. There he met Danette Hamel who had been previously married. Danette had two children, Ryan 6 and Jennifer 4. Mark and Danette were married in Detroit in March in 1987. They bought a house in Farmington Hills, Michigan, and the children began school. In February 1989 Bradley Fischer was born to them. Mark’s company sent Mark to England so the whole family moved to Marlborough, England and lived there almost two years. They handled the move very well and made the most of their time there. They were transferred back to Detroit. They sold their Farmington Hills home and bought a nicer and larger one in the same development. Their daughter Lauren was born in October, 1992. With Raychem, Mark’s next promotion would have required a move to California. Mark was approached by another company about a position in the Detroit area. The opportunity presented and the desire not to move to California led to their decision to take the position with this other company, a small manufacturer that supplies the major automobile manufacturers. Mark is now the director of marketing, planning, research and development. He enjoys the flexibility and ability to be in on the decision making process offered working for a small firm. His has been a very busy household. At present Ryan is in third year at art school at the Detroit Institute of Art. Jennifer is in her freshman year at the University of Michigan. Lauren is in second grade and Brad is in fifth grade. They are now living in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Paul majored in accounting and economics at Duke and after graduating he went to work for Coopers and Liebrandt, an accounting firm. He had passed the C.P.A. exam but needed to work for a public accounting firm for two years to qualify for a C.P.A. license. He worked with them in Boston and shared an apartment in Brighton with three other Duke graduates. Two of them were women, one of them being Donna Lynch, whom he later married. He finished his two years there The Fischer Family ..... 419 and decided he wanted to teach, so he applied to grad schools. He ended up getting his Masters and Ph.D. at the University of Rochester. In the meantime Donna had finished schooling in Boston to be a teacher and was teaching at Jeffersonville, N.Y. and then at Armonk, N.Y. They were married in August 1986. Paul finished his Ph.D. in 1991 and accepted a position at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. Donna was able to get a teaching position in an elementary school. They enjoyed Vancouver very much and became very well acquainted with it. In November 1992 their daughter Katherine was born. The tenure track at U.B.C. was only three years. Paul was pretty sure he was not going to get tenure so he decided to teach a year elsewhere and extend the tenure time. He began to send his name around. Instead of a temporary teaching position he was offered a tenure track position at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. They moved to Swarthmore, PA, bought a house there, and Paul had a quick and easy commute to school. It was a very pleasant location and they were there for six years. At the end of 1998 and the beginning 1999, Paul knew he wouldn’t receive tenure but would now have a good possibility of being hired at a school that would give him tenure immediately. After much interviewing and several offers, he took a position at Penn State in the business school. He and and Donna and Katherine are now living in a new home in Port Matilda, PA which is on the edge of State College. It is a very pretty area and they are getting settled in. Following Ed’s retirement, the time was finally available for us to see the world on our schedule, not 3M’s. We had always planned to travel in our retirement and keep up with our families. Ed’s mother was still alive but in a nursing home. Ed was now available to give her much more time. I was able to go to Florida easily to help out our remaining Aunt, Ellen Green. We also made ourselves available to help with our grandchildren when needed. Just before Ed retired, he had triple bypass surgery. It went well and he recuperated on schedule. It was an even greater encouragement to retire. He was able to give ample time to keeping up recommended exercise. We have traveled to New Zealand, Australia, Amazon River, Costa 420 ..... The Fischer Family

Rica, China, Thailand, Europe, South Africa, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Russia, etc. We have enjoyed doing road trips around the U.S.A. Every Thanksgiving we have a week in Florida with both our sons and their families. In the summer we had been getting the family together at a resort in Minnesota, but last year we made a change and went to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. After thirty five years in our brick rambler with a big yard, we moved to a new twin (condo) home in early 1998. Although getting a new place built for the first time in our lives and the following move were hectic, we are finally getting settled in. We are extremely comfortable, have plenty of room, no yard to maintain or snow to plow and we are thoroughly enjoying it. As the millennium approaches we look back and realize we lived in a fascinating century during which we were very blessed. Our hope is that the next century will be better for everyone.

➥ Epilogue ......

The twentieth century has ended and the twenty-first century has begun. Since we began compiling this epic of the Musselman children of Sunset Lane, Mary, the youngest, has turned seventy. We have now all lived at least our allotted three score and ten years, and most of us considerably longer. We have been undeservedly fortunate. Through no effort of our own, we were born and grew up in the United States, of healthy, intelligent, and honorable parents, in a family that functioned as a family should, in a neighborhood and community that nurtured and enriched us, in a century that provided us with opportunity for education, for full lives of work and recreation, for establishing families of our own. Tom Brokaw called ours the “greatest generation.” A better name might the “the most favored generation.” Although the depression was a struggle for some, and World War I and II, the Korean and Vietnam Wars a tragedy for many, our generation benefited from post-World War II prosperity, from low interest rate mortgages, from huge medical advances like penicillin, polio vaccine, and heart surgery, from the GI Bill, and from Social Security and Medicare. If we had even modest investments, we lucked out in the Great Bull Market of the 1990s. The story of our family life through the century reveals some characteristics of our nation during those years. One is an American passion for the automobile—so important to Harry and George Musselman, to Nellie Green, to the Musselman girls who, unlike their mother, learned to drive. Our offspring take cars for granted. American mobility is expressed in the amount of travel that the family has indulged in, both on this continent and throughout the world. Education has expanded from a luxury for the rich to a necessity for 422 ..... Epilogue

all, evidenced by the energy and resources poured into learning in the course of the century by Musselman siblings and their children. Even more obvious is the work that the next generation is engaged in— activities unknown to their grandparents and amazing even to us, clearly reflecting the technological revolution at the end of the twentieth century. Several are directly involved with computers and telecommu- nications. Jim Adams lives in Mainz, Germany, and works in sales and service for an American company that is installing fiber optics in Europe. Jean Musselman Santa Maria, an orthodontist in Indiana, is installing a computerized system to design and make appliances that will incrementally push the teeth into alignment. Her husband John does biotechnology work for a high tech pharmaceutical firm. Mary Musselman Robertson has started a small graphics art business on her computer at home in New Jersey. Anne Musselman Shannon does desktop publishing for a printing company in Minneapolis. Peter Musselman, in addition to running a pizza restaurant with his wife Lesia, has done some successful commodities trading on the internet. The Phelps family are heavily into technology: Anne Phelps Stone’s husband Tom markets and services computers; Katie Phelps Meland’s husband Jim sells all kinds of electronic equipment; Dan Phelps is a computer programmer; Tom Phelps uses his engineering degrees to “develop and implement tools and techniques, many computer based, that support effective distributed product design.” Andy Alexander’s wife Linda trades stock options on the internet. The others are all computer literate but use technology more indirectly in manufacturing, business, the professions or human services. Mark Fischer travels the world marketing products used in automobile manufacture for a company in Michigan. Roy Robertson, Mary Musselman Robertson’s husband, works for a Philadelphia company as a statistician. Dave Shannon, Anne Musselman Shannon’s husband does actuarial insurance work. Paul Fischer teaches accounting and finance at the Smeal business school of Pennsylvania State University. Andy Alexander teaches English and philosophy at Wayne State College in Wayne, Nebraska. Most of our daughters and daughters-in-law who have had children Epilogue ..... 423 have stayed at home at least part time while their children were small, but eventually have returned to the work force. Some have devoted their lives to responding to their “calling.” Maria Adams, Jim’s wife, has followed a traditional female career as an elementary school teacher in Germany. By settling refugees and immigrants from all over the globe for Boston International Institute, Sarah Alexander continues social work begun in settlement houses at the turn of the nineteenth century. Her clients no longer come just from Europe but from Asia and Africa and Latin America as well. Grandmother Anne Green Musselman would be familiar with Maria’s and Sarah’s work, but she would not recognize (even though she would applaud) the jobs some of the other women do. Donna Phelps, Tom’s wife, works with “at risk” children in school at Brighton, Michigan. Danette Fischer, Mark’s wife, has used her paralegal training to assist women at a “domestic abuse shelter.” Paul Fischer’s wife Donna is a “special education” teacher. Jane Alexander founded and directs a soup kitchen and advocacy program for “homeless women” in Boston. Dan Phelps’ wife Linda is a buyer for a “food co-op.” All of these terms, agencies, or job classifications have been created by changes in American families, economic life, schools, and lifestyle in the last third of the twentieth century. Similarly, Katie Phelps Meland and Anne Phelps Stone teach “aerobics” classes—not the old “calisthenics” of one hundred years ago. As a final manifestation of the changes wrought in employment in the last half century, the oldest granddaughter of the Musselman siblings, Franziska Adams, wants to train first as an airplane mechanic and ultimately become a pilot for Lufthansa Airlines. The oldest grandson, Dan Phelps Junior, has a degree in psychology and works in a day care center for children in Milwaukee. Nobody in 1900 could have predicted such a role reversal. Unquestionably, change will continue. The preceding summary is only a snapshot of a moment in time, which will soon be outdated. However, through all the changes of the century in work, education, and mobility, the one constant among the Musselman siblings has been our faith in family. We all have personality quirks and character flaws, and we regularly annoy and irritate each other. But our marriages have held firm throughout the century. Our devotion to our parents, 424 ..... Epilogue

our children, our aunts and uncles, our in-laws and their families—and to each other—is unfailing. In an uncertain world, these bonds have endured—perhaps because we have also had much fun and many laughs together. We can wish for nothing more for the next generation than that they experience the same loyalty, steadfast love, and jolly times that we have had. Since we began compiling this memoir, the oldest of us at 81, Jane, fell while visiting Jim Adams and family in Germany and broke her hip. She is doing well at the moment, but she reminds us that we are in fact fragile mortals. Between our parents’ lives and our own we have experienced all of the twentieth century. That was our time. The twenty-first century is not. It belongs to the next generation and their children and grandchildren. In the twentieth century, our generation did not achieve genuine world peace, abolish poverty even in rich America, establish equal justice for all, nor “respect the dignity of every human being.” We tried. Perhaps we moved humankind an inch or two farther along the road to that glorious ideal. We leave the next steps to the generations that come after us. We wish them success on their journey through time. We pray they are as blessed as we have been and that they enjoy the trip. —Ruth Ann Alexander, Compiler and Editor, February, 2000

➥ Time Line ..... 425 Significant Dates in the Musselman Family History

1803 John Musselman was born in Shenandoah County, Virginia. 1813 Eliza Clemmer was born (she became John’s wife). 1830 John and Eliza Musselman homesteaded in Ohio. 1857 Ira Musselman was born (12th child of John and Eliza). 1858 Esther Luce was born (she became Ira’s wife). 1864 George Green was born (June 24). 1869 Jane Law was born (she became George Green’s wife). 1879 Ira Musselman and Esther Luce married. 1880 Harry Hayes Musselman was born (Sept. 13, first child of Ira and Esther). 1884 Grace Musselman was born. 1888 George Green and Jane Law married. 1889 Anne Isabel Green was born (Dec. 15, first child of George and Jane) Forrest Musselman was born. 1891 Williamina Green was born (Nov. 19). 1895 Jane Green was born (Mar. 24). Ruth F. Musselman was born. 1896 Ellen Green was born (Nov. 27). 1898 Dale Musselman was born. 1907 Anne Green graduated from Saginaw High School.17 Entered Lewis Institute. 1908 Harry Musselman graduated from Michigan Agriculture College. 1909 Anne Green returned to Saginaw to teach. 1910 (circa) Harry Musselman became Instructor of Farm Mechanics at M.A.C. 1911 Anne Green returned to Lewis Institute. 426 ..... Time Line

1913 Anne Green graduated from Lewis Institute and started teaching at DeKalb, Illinois. 1915 Anne Green started working for the University of Illinois. 1917 Harry Musselman and Anne Green were married in Saginaw, Michigan (Dec. 27). 1918 Jane Musselman was born (Nov. 27). 1919 (circa) Harry and family moved into new bungalow at 542 Sunset Lane, East Lansing. 1921 George Musselman was born (June 11). 1923 Harry and family moved into new house at 604 Sunset Lane, East Lansing. Esther Luce Musselman died. 1924 Ruth Musselman was born (Feb. 13). Jane Law Green died (Dec. 16). 1927 Jane Green and her father took over management of Indian Trail Lodge. Sarah Musselman was born (Sept. 5). 1930 Mary Musselman was born (Jan. 9). 1934 Harry Musselman built experimental house on Division Street (completed in 1935). 1936 Ruth Musselman Fox died. Jane Musselman graduated from East Lansing High School. 1937 Green sisters bought Indian Trail Lodge. George Green died at Indian Trail Lodge. 1939 George Musselman graduated from East Lansing High School. 1940 Ira Musselman died. Jane Musselman graduated from Michigan State College. 1941 Ruth Musselman graduated from East Lansing High School. United States entered World War II. 1942 Harry Musselman, Professor of Agricultural Engineering, retired from Michigan State College. He had first and unsuccessful gall bladder surgery. Time Line ..... 427

1943 George Musselman graduated from Michigan State College. Jane Musselman married Hope W. Adams at Fort Lewis, Washington (Mar. 27). Harry Musselman had 3rd major surgery that finally fixed his gall bladder problem. 1944 George Musselman was inducted into the U.S. Army (Aug. 2). 1945 Sarah Musselman graduated from East Lansing High School. Ruth Musselman graduated from Michigan State College. World War II ended. Hope and Jane Adams settled in Houston Texas. 1946 George Musselman was discharged from the Army (Aug. 26). 1947 Mary Musselman graduated from East Lansing High School. Ruth Musselman got M.A. Degree from the University of Minnesota and started teaching at Oregon State. James Adams was born (July 13). 1948 Thomas Adams was born (Nov. 3). 1949 Sarah Musselman graduated from the University of Michigan. 1950 Sarah Musselman married Lynn Phelps (June 17). 1951 Mary Musselman graduated from Michigan State College. 1952 Thomas Phelps was born (June 15). Ruth Musselman got Ph.D. Degree from Michigan State College and started teaching at South Dakota State College. 1953 George Musselman got M.S. Degree from the University of Michigan. George Musselman married Beverly Holcomb (June 29). 1954 Anne Phelps was born (Jan. 29). Jean Musselman was born (Apr. 6). 1955 Ruth Musselman married William Alexander (July 16). Mary Ruth Musselman was born (Aug. 11). 1956 Mary Musselman married Ewald (Ed) Fischer (Mar. 24). Daniel Phelps was born (Mar. 26). Jane Alexander was born (May 18). 428 ..... Time Line

1957 Anne Musselman was born (Aug. 11). Andrew Alexander was born (Dec. 22). 1958 Mark Fischer was born (Apr. 7). Catherine Phelps was born (Apr. 26). 1959 Sarah Alexander was born (June 5). 1960 Paul Fischer was born (June 14). Indian Trail Lodge was sold in the spring (main lodge and beach side of highway). 1962 Peter Musselman was born (Feb. 6). Indian Trail Lodge “Annex” was sold in the fall. 1963 Forrest Musselman died. Anne Green Musselman died suddenly (Oct. 7). 1965 Harry Musselman moved into quarters in George’s and Beverly’s House (Jan. 1). Family house at 604 Sunset Lane was sold. 1966 Harry Musselman died after five months in nursing home (Apr. 22). 1969 Grace Musselman Hetrick died. 1979 William Alexander died (Mar. 26). 1983 Dale Musselman died. 1984 Williamina Green died (Nov. 24). 1985 Jane Green died (Mar. 6). Thomas Adams died (June 7). 1993 Ellen Green died (July 15).

➥ Family Evolution ..... 429

Chart of the Musselman Family Evolution

John Luce Esther Daggett

John Musselman Hayes Luce Daniel Green John Law Eliza Clemmer ? Anne Lucas Anne Milne

Ira Musselman George Green Esther Luce Jane Law

Harry Musselman Anne Green

Jane Musselman George Mussleman Ruth Musselman Sarah Musselman Mary Musselman Hope Adams Beverly Holcomb William Alexander Lynn Phelps Ewald Fischer

James Adams & Jean Musselman & Jane Alexander Thomas Phelps & Mark Fischer & Maria Tomaschko John Santa Maria Donna Campbell Danette Hamel Franziska Anne Andrea Ryan Peter Peter Rosemary Jennifer Kira Bradley Lauren

Thomas Adams Mary Musselman & W. Andrew Alexander Anne Phelps & Paul Fischer & (Deceased) Roy Robertson & Linda Kruckenberg Thomas Stone Donna Lynch Sarah Janet Katherine Ellen David Eric

Anne Musselman & Sarah Alexander Daniel Phelps & David Shannon Linda Welch Kathleen Daniel Linda Sarah & Tony Scribner Avery

Peter Musselman & Catherine Phelps & Lesia Schroetter James Meland Scott Jason Christopher Joseph Thomas

➥ Footnotes

1. Ohio Writers’ Project, The Ohio Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 1940), 532-536. 2. Mark Sullivan, Our Times, edited by Dan Rather (New York: Scribner, 1996), 140. 3. Ibid. 4. Half a century later, a couple of his grandchildren—two of our cousins, Marilyn Musselman and Mickey (Dale Jr.) Musselman—attended college at Ohio Wesleyan in Delaware. 5. Walter Phelps Hall and Robert Greenhalgh Albion, A History of England and the British Empire (New York: Ginn and Company, 1946), 638-639. 6. Willis D. Dunbar and George S. May, Michigan, A History of the Wolverine State, Third Edition (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William Erdsman Publishing, 1995), 243. 7. Ibid, 339-340. 8. T. C. Smout, A Century of the Scottish People, 1830-1950 (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1986), 61. 9. Stephen J. Diner, A Very Different Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 165. 10. Louis Gould, The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (Lawrence, Kansas: U. of K. Press, 1991), 287. 11. Madison Kuhn, Michigan State: the First Hundred Years (East Lansing: MSU Press, 1955), 291, 310. 12. Ibid, 102 13. Reader’s Digest, Our Glorious Century (Pleasantville, New York: Reader’s Digest Association, Inc., 1998), 444 14. Kuhn, 341. 15. Ibid. 16. James H. Lincoln, “The Anatomy of a Riot” (New York: McGraw Hill, 1986). 17. Hoyt Library in Saginaw could not confirm that Anne was in the class of 1907, but could confirm that she was not in the class of 1906, ending the myth that she graduated from High School at age 16.

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