(Editor’s Note: Robert Caro instructs us to turn every page when writing biography. I don’t remember writing these fragments found in a folder with multiple typewritten drafts of each. Today they make me groan a bit. They are fiction with one foot in reality).
Fragment 1 – Jan. 9, 1980
Father was a union man. He forged implements of the modern farmer at the J.I. Case plant in Bettendorf, Iowa. He was a proud man, proud of his family and heritage; he stood with both feet on the ground.
The union offered him a job as chief steward once. He took it for a while, but ultimately declined it. He went back to school to get out of the plant and be his own boss, to establish himself.
He graduated in 1968, but death in the form of a 1959 Ford struck him as he walked out of the plant after his shift.
Those were hard years, but Jim Peterson was convinced his father knew who he was, and where he was going.
Fragment 2 – 1974
Danny Dziabas shut the door of his upstairs apartment and began walking to the sound of night creatures chirping near the house.Walking under the starlight of Orion rising. Walking from his apartment on Walling Court, near where Bix Beiderbecke had lived. Walking toward Locust Street where revving of car engines and laughter of young people muffled the night sounds. Where headlights and streetlights dimmed the rising hunter. Danny Dziabas walked to the Deep Rock Station and placed a call while a Corvette and a G.T.O. lined up at the intersection for a drag race.
As he finished his call, the traffic light changed to green and the two cars squealed away from the corner.In hot air, smelling of burnt rubber, Danny Dziabas began walking, away from the noise and light of Locust Street toward his nearly empty apartment on Walling Court near where Bix Beiderbecke had lived.
Fragment 3 – Dec. 25, 1974
When the time came Danny began looking up his friends. The first was Milton Murphy who was in possession of Danny’s books and record albums.
Danny and Milton had played together in a band called the Milton Murphy Moose Manglers. It lasted about nine months. Just as they were about to collect their pay from a party on a farm near the Wapsi River, a band mate carried the P.A. head 100 yards and threw it over the bluff into the river, ending both the evening and the band.
Remembering this and other episodes in the Manglers’ history, Danny questioned the sanity of leaving his possessions in Milton’s care in the first place. He knew it would be alright when he heard the dull beat of the base coming through the floor above the entrance hall.
Fragment 4 – Iowa City, 1973-4
In act of simultaneous co-creation Danny Dziabas skied the snow-covered slopes of Washington Street, mountainous mathematics to the left, his just crashed 1965 Volkswagen cavernous time away and in a ditch. Pirouetting on Madison Street, his toe reveals a greenery hidden by newly fallen snow.
I’ve been using the free, on line service FamilySearch to research parts of my family history. It is funded by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
I call it, in a respectful way, the Book of Mormon.
My reference library has a copy of the actual Book of Mormon, replete with a photo of the prophet Joseph Smith from whose translations it was made in 1830. I’ve already opened FamilySearch many more times than the worn copy of the religious text.
Stories about early gatherings of my paternal ancestors include one about the funeral for “Aunt Stella.” I have a photograph of Stella in her coffin with someone identified as “Granny Reed” nearby. Stella was my grandfather’s sister. Oral history is no one knew anything about Granny Reed except that’s what they called her. According to FamilySearch, in the 1920 U.S. Census she is listed living in the household of my great grandfather as his mother-in-law, with an estimated birth year of 1864. Her complete name was Josephine Reed. It has bothered me we didn’t know more. Now thanks to the Mormons there is a better narrative of who she was.
When I write “better narrative” I mean the story is and continues to be a human creation. While there are “facts” to support it, there are vagaries in the U.S. Census data and oral tradition that went unrecorded. The temptation is to take a fact like a U.S. Census entry and make more of it than it actually is. As I wrote this post I found myself rewriting that paragraph time and again to refine my understanding of who was Granny Reed. I’m not sure how much more this discovery changes things.
I love the name Josephine and had we known about it when our daughter was born, it may have been entered into the pool of family names from which we selected hers. Granny Reed was our daughter’s great, great, great grandmother. It’s a fun fact yet not that relevant to our daily lives.
Somewhere in box-storage is a trove of genealogy documents collected from a man named Howard Deaton during a trip to Saint Louis. His focus was on our surname, Some of his work is relevant to our line and some isn’t. Robert Caro advises us to turn every page when researching biography. I don’t know I will have time to go through documents I have, let alone the entire Book of Mormon.
These are decisions one makes in compressing the story of a life into a hundred thousand words. If anything, the challenges of crafting a story come into high relief. What I’m writing will by its nature be a story built today with a perspective of right now. I don’t see how any biography or historical work can be anything else. There is a politics of history, a minefield of historian’s fallacies. There is also a poetry of history. What we hope to do is create a narrative grounded in something real that transcends the lived life upon which it was based.
At age 68 there is an urgency to get something down, edited and finished.
With Christmas and New Year’s on a Wednesday, from Dec. 20 until Jan. 7 I will have worked only two days at the home, farm and auto supply store. Yesterday I needed to get out of the house.
I found a box and filled it with discards for the public library book sale, the second such box this winter. As soon as it was filled, I drove it in, donated the contents, and socialized with friends. There will be more donations by the time I get organized for 2020 writing projects.
Afterward I stopped at a convenience store to buy a lottery ticket before finding my way home. Restlessness abated.
Who reads poetry? Why do we read it?
These are not a random questions. I have a few hundred books of poetry I’m either going to read, re-read, or get rid of. I’m interested in the 21st century case for reading poetry in a time of social media. I believe there is one.
I read poetry. When I do it’s mostly because of how I connect to the poet.
I’m thinking of Lucia Perillo who taught at Southern Illinois University during the time I was regularly visiting the Shawnee National Forest. I’m not sure I met her but the creative community there was small and tightly knit. Her poetry resonates of that time.
I’m thinking of Donald Justice who I encountered at the UPS terminal in Coralville. He was shipping books to himself in Chapel Hill, N.C., leaving Iowa.
I’m thinking of Robert Laughlin, William Carlos Williams’ editor at New Directions, who spoke about his last times with Williams at an event at the Lindquist Center in Iowa City.
I’m thinking of poets who visited and stayed at our rental on Gilbert Court in Iowa City: David Morice, Darrell Gray, Pat O’Donnell, Jim Mulac, Sheila Heldenbrand, Alan Kornblum, and the rest.
I’ve noticed there are many bad poets and plenty of good ones. If we can find ways to connect with poets, it makes time engaging and worthwhile. It smooths off the rough edges. Poetry can give us a different way of seeing our lives. We can get lost in the words, conjured images, and emotions. We need that from time to time.
As we begin a new year filled with tumult and uncertainty, I am reading again. I’m not ready to give up on the imagination. It’s there we may find relief and salvation.
Snow flurried outside the dining room window for a while. I thought we might return to normal winter weather. The thought passed and snow stopped without accumulation.
We need a good streak of very cold days to prune the fruit trees. Last year it was difficult to find such a streak yet I’m hopeful this year. I’m not going to wait for ideal conditions. I’ll take what we get in our evolving climate.
This year’s reckoning with the past and planning for the future is taking more time and effort. It’s not because I did more. The process has been more organized and thoughtful than in recent years. I’m conscious of my age and weighing carefully which projects and activities will get my attention. At the end of it I want a definite plan with time lines. It’s a better process.
While our personal lives went okay in 2019, our participation in broader society was like the wafting odors from nearby feedlots. It was hard to stay separate from the international shit storm.
As Julian Borger pointed out in The Guardian, 2019 was the year U.S. foreign policy fell apart. “Donald Trump’s approach to the world is little more than a tangle of personal interests, narcissism and Twitter outbursts,” he wrote. That’s no way to run a country, even if a majority seeks to isolate American interests from the rest of global society. We can do better than this.
Steven Piersanti wrote on DCReport.org, “Under the bankrupter-in-chief, the national debt is skyrocketing while economic growth is lagging.” Trump is running the country just like he ran his failed businesses, according to Piersanti. “The country’s economic resources are being wasted and our economic health is endangered.”
“The next 12 months will determine whether the world is capable of controlling nuclear proliferation, arresting runaway climate change, and restoring faith in the United Nations,” Stewart Patrick wrote at World Politics Review. Those things matter to everyone and positive outcomes on any of them are dubious without American leadership. President Trump, ditcher of nuclear arms control agreements, critic of the need to address climate change, and bad-mouther of the United Nations does not appear to have an appetite or the capacity to lead at home or abroad. The prospects are bleak on these fronts and more until government changes hands.
It comes back to personal planning for next year. What amount of time will I devote to addressing these problems? The overarching motivation is to remove our current federal elected representatives from office and replace them with people who understand the importance of foreign policy.
At the same time, I can’t let politics be a single thing that absorbs all my time. Regardless of the Republican shit storm, we each need balance in our lives.
It’s taking a little longer to plan this year but the premise of it comes back to my tag line. How shall we best sustain our lives in a turbulent world?
A toast to 2019, an aspirin and vitamin for 2020, and off we go into an uncertain future with the potential for great things.
Our family holiday season begins with our Dec. 18 wedding anniversary and continues until New Year’s Day. Two weeks of slowing down, eating more traditional food, reading, reviewing the past, writing, and planning.
2019 was a difficult year. It was a pivotal year. It was a year of coming to terms. There were gift cards.
The first gift card came from the home, farm and auto supply store in the amount of $125. Receiving a gift card in lieu of a salary bonus is a leftover from when the family that founded the retail chain was more involved. The founder’s son continues to make rounds of the stores and knows me by name. He sent a personal birthday card with some bad information about how long I’d been employed. It’s the thought that matters. They also provide a paid holiday on our birthday which in my case falls during this end of year period. I made it to age 68!
The second gift card was re-purposed by my spouse. She spent the $100 gift on herself, but didn’t use the card. She gave it to me and I considered it a welcome birthday present since it was the only one.
Where does one spend this kind of gifted money? At grocery, hardware and other retail stores mostly.
Major purchases included some premium bay leaves ($8.99), a fifth of Jack Daniels No. 7 ($27.55), a Craftsman screwdriver set ($29.67), a 24-bottle case of Stella Artois ($26.63) and a set of storage bins for garden seeds ($29.67). I also got a bottle each of low-dose aspirin and B-12 at the pharmacy, jars of organic seasonings clearanced at the home, farm and auto supply store, some Boetje’s mustard (a local specialty that used to be made in Rock Island, Ill.), a package of roasted chestnuts for New Year’s Eve, and a new Craftsman box cutter to place near the recycling bin. We’re lucky to be able to afford these luxuries.
We received a screwdriver set from the best man at our wedding. Some of them had gone missing over 37 years. It was a purchase of hope as in I hope to spend more time organizing the workspace in the garage and shedding some of the duplicated and unnecessary tools accumulated at dozens of household and farm auctions. Something just feels good about having new tools. They match the ones we got as a wedding present exactly.
The price of the whisky was shocking as I hadn’t bought any for more than a decade. A recent newspaper survey showed Iowans prefer cheaper varieties like Black Velvet Whisky and Hawkeye Vodka. I don’t drink spirits very often and the gift cards were the reason I even considered getting a bottle, it’s like free money and Jack Daniels is a personal holiday tradition. Besides, the local small batch spirits were too expensive at $50 for a fifth.
I bought the beer at the wholesale club, another luxury. My favorite is Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, which my father preferred. PBR is not available there. The plan is to drink a bottle when we have pizza or chili for dinner while reminiscing about my several trips to Belgium. The case should last into spring. At that time my memories will likely be worn out and I’ll get a case of something else to ice down in a cooler for after yard work. Had it not been for the gift cards I would likely have gone without beer at home until summer.
The bins for seeds were an impulse purchase. I examined them and found there was enough space in each drawer for the packets to lay flat. It will go a long way to clean up the workspace where I sort seeds for my weekly planting sessions at the greenhouse. Now the bins need to be labeled so I know what’s in them. More work to do this holiday season.
No one got rich off my shopping spree. I feel better for the fun of unexpected shopping. Whatever anxiety I had about whether the gift cards would work was offset by the adventure in spending them. It was just enough of our consumer society to recall what it is and sate my desire to shop. That done, I can better consider what 2020 will bring.
Voters should attend the Democratic or Republican precinct caucuses on Feb. 3, 2020 if they prefer either party.
The main attraction is the presidential preference. Plus, there is more! It’s a good way to hear what’s going on inside each party without filters. Good heavens! No filters! We need that.
I live in Big Grove precinct in which the number of registered Democrats dropped by about 20 percent since 2008, with Republicans remaining about the same. According to the Johnson County Auditor’s office, Democrats currently have more voters than Republicans with 32.6 percent compared to 31.7. No preference voters are the largest group at 35.3 percent.
Our precinct voted for President Obama in the 2008 and 2012 general elections, for President Trump in 2016. What that says is a lot of no preference voters do have a preference; it’s just not for a political party. They prefer to vote for candidates they feel will address the country’s most pressing needs regardless of party. That likely remains the same for the 2020 election.
No one knows how the general election will turn out. I’m willing to bet people will continue to say they are “not political” as they did during the recent school board election. Still, there are parties; there have to be in our form of government. The precinct caucuses offer the best opportunity to find out what politics is like in a welcoming environment.
I hope voters will consider being “political” at least this one night.
~ Published in the Solon Economist on Jan. 2, 2020 and in the Cedar Rapids Gazette on Jan. 5, 2020.
Life without internet, Cedar Rapids, Iowa. 1986-1987
It’s been a quiet day in Big Grove where ambient temperatures were in the 50s and remaining snow melted.
I spent most of the day organizing material for a longer piece.
The idea is to organize documents and artifacts, dating from before I was born until the present, that are currently stored in a hodgepodge manner, using three-ring binders. Having lived a stable life, such documents survive. Once organized, I’ll write and pin a timeline to a bulletin board where I can hang stories, maybe twenty of them. It sounds straight forward, but the documents and artifacts are spread everywhere in the house. I relish the work.
A sense of place will help organize the stories once written. In presenting family history, I see a couple of narratives first.
The first place will be Lincoln County, Minnesota where my maternal great, great grandparents settled in the 19th Century. I visited there only once yet while there I collected a thick sheaf of documents, artifacts and experience.
I’ll write our history coming up in Southwestern Virginia. A published family history mentions the first presence of our ancestors in mid to late 17th century. I made three or four trips to the home place, including some as a child. I have a banker’s box of documents I collected from a man in Saint Louis who spent his retirement researching the Deaton lineage. I’m not sure how much of that is relevant but it needs review. If needed I’ll make a trip back to Virginia to research important missing pieces.
The culture of Northwest Davenport played an important role in my K-12 years. I will focus on the time immediately after my parents wed until I left grade school. It was a time when the Irish and German immigrant culture was in transition to something else, although we wouldn’t see what it would become until the time Mother moved to live with my sister toward the end of her life.
In addition to family history, I expect a brief remembrance of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Davenport and Iowa City.
There will be a story about the three years I lived in Mainz, Germany while in the U.S. Army. More than anything after schooling, military service helped me learn to live on my own and exposed me to a variety of people and experiences.
I’ll tackle my transportation career and our nascent family life in two places, in Iowa City after getting my masters degree and meeting Jacque, and in Merrillville, Indiana where we lived for six years.
Other places that seem important at this writing are Colorado Springs, Thomasville, Georgia, Orlando, Florida, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Chicago, and our more than 25 years here in Big Grove.
There will be stories focusing less on a sense of place and on a broader, subject-specific narrative. It seems easiest to begin writing by understanding the collected artifacts and memories, by crafting a narrative about the place where they were significant.
I’m a long way from getting stuff organized. For now, it’s time to gather and finish making our traditional Christmas Eve dinner of chili and cornbread.
Turns out I developed an entire philosophy of stuff back in 2011, soon after the realization we had too much stuff.
New stuff continued to pile up but we’re over that now. Culling has begun. I took a load of books to donate to the Friends of the Library book sale last week.
The impetus has been recent awareness of mortality, highlighted by the death of Mother. She did things right and disposed of much of her stuff during the years before she moved in with my sister. Many of us would emulate the best qualities of our parents. We can’t take stuff with us when we die, and what reasonable person wants to leave the trouble of sorting it to others?
We have a duty to reduce, reuse and recycle all the stuff our consumer society has wrought. These days I’m working more on the reduce part of that.
I’ve long felt an urge to go shopping when my calendar is blank. When I lived in Mainz, Germany, if I had a free weekend, I felt I should cross the Rhine River to Wiesbaden and visit one of the big box stores. Living in that large community provided different options for food and clothing from what I could find at the Kaserne’s Post Exchange. Last Saturday, after a political event, I drove straight home, resisting the impulse to head to the home, farm and auto supply store or the warehouse club without a specific shopping list. It felt pretty good.
It’s time to put my philosophy of stuff into action.
1. If I use it, or am very likely to use it, keep it where I can get at it.
2. If I can use it for grounding my writing, keep it in a filing system.
3. If it is a family keepsake, keep it in a special place.
4. If it does not fit into 1-3, pick a disposal method.
Now begins the hard work: carving out time to reduce the amount of stuff before late winter gardening prep begins. Maybe easier said than done, but this year there is hope.
Elizabeth Warren at North Central Junior High School, North Liberty, Iowa. Dec. 21, 2019.
On a clear, beautiful day when ambient temperatures reached into the 50s, I drove across the lakes to North Liberty where Elizabeth Warren held a town hall meeting.
James Q. Lynch of the Cedar Rapids Gazette estimated 500 attended. There was not a lot of other action in the area to occupy us the Saturday before Christmas.
It was Warren’s first town hall meeting since the Dec. 19 Democratic candidate debate.
Warren’s campaign staff will be released for the holidays on Monday so the weekend was a busy time for them and staff of several candidates touring Iowa, notably Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Michael Bennet and Joe Biden.
This was my fourth Warren town hall this cycle. I know the pitch well. Her presidency would focus on the long-standing issue of corruption in government. Corruption has been present since the founding, although is more visible today, blatantly so. That Warren makes addressing corruption the centerpiece of her campaign and potential presidency is most of what attracts me.
Each time I’ve heard her speak I learned something new. The first question was what to do about the media environment that contests basic truths and contributes to a lack of legislative progress. Warren pushed back on this, using her family as an example.
She has three brothers of which one is a Democrat and two are Republicans. She and her siblings debate politics yet often agree on issues, she said. She expanded that to say there is much agreement among people in society regardless of their politics. What puts the brakes on solving problems, especially big problems like the climate crisis, environmental quality, finance, and excessive student debt, is corruption by powerful and moneyed interests. She has a plan to address that. Having such plans is a hallmark of her campaign.
The recent Solon School Board election highlighted how right Warren is to push back on the media as the main problem confronting us. Our election was hardly covered by news media outside our local newspaper and me. It is easier to find common ground when our children’s education and future are at stake. I knew the political party registration of the six candidates but that played only a minor role is picking two for whom to vote. Somewhere in the wilderness between relevant local politics and the national government things get lost.
Warren talked about how a toaster oven caught fire in her kitchen when she was a young mother. Eventually regulation solved the problem by requiring an automatic shutoff switch in such small appliances. The same basic principal of problem identification, scientific investigation, and working through potential solutions until one could be found and regulated has other, more profound applications. It is a common sense approach at a time when common sense seems sorely lacking in our politics and government.
I drove home immediately after the event, retracing my route. Neighborhood families were out walking on the trail and working in their yards in the mild weather this Winter Solstice. It was great to hear Elizabeth Warren again in Iowa. I’ll miss it when the Democratic National Committee eventually removes our first in the nation status. That is not today.
Mother sent this email on Aug. 13, 2000, after a family reunion in Davenport, Iowa.
The Nadolski family reunion was held on the 12th of August, 2000 at Fejervary Park in Davenport, Iowa. The reason that park was chosen is that in the old days we often had family picnics there and when they where alive, Catherine and Frank Nadolski held court, she in her dark flowered dress with a lacy collar and he in his dark pants, white shirt and suspenders. They sat in a prominent position, where they could see everything that was going on.
Grandpa would take his cane and hook a child around the waist, or sometimes the neck, and pull them toward him so that he could ask them questions and, I presume, when you gave the right answer to his question he sometimes gave you a nickel. Of course, a nickel meant much more then than it does now.
You could get an ice cream cone for a nickel or a candy bar. Grandma sat in her place and rarely smiled and didn’t ever have a conversation with me, or any other kid that I saw. Their daughters and their daughter’s families would provide the food and take the opportunity to have a good time together.
The kids all loved it. It was a fine park with swings and slides and Indian Rock to climb on and we had the best time. The food was always the best.
Traditional Polish foods as well as plenty of potato salad, deviled eggs, hot dogs and cakes and pies and my personal favorite, bologna with mustard on white bakery bread. I don’t think any of the families where rich, certainly we weren’t, but the pleasure of the moment and the memories of those simpler times in our lives is priceless beyond all wealth. When ‘family’ was not only a bunch of people with a genetic link, but a group of people with a palpable connection. Not only that, we could see our connection right there in Fej park; she in her long dress and he with his cane. They where and are our connection. The genes that live in all of us and show up in so many faces. The driving force that impacted on the way each of us have lived our lives.
It was with those memories and the warm heart they produced that I attended the first ever family reunion that I know of. I had looked forward to this occasion for the better part of this year and I will tell you that it did not disappoint. God gave us a glorious day. It was an unusual August day for Iowa. Usually it is very hot and humid in Iowa in August, very often with temperature in the 100s and humid as a swamp, but we really lucked out, or maybe it was a little Divine influence with so many Nadolskis up there.
I went to the park early so that I could really spend the whole day there and it was a lovely setting and so peaceful in the morning. Lots of trees around and plenty of room for the kids to run around and still be seen by their parents. I stayed and visited for a while with Marge and Bob and Sue Ellen and her daughters and then I had to run home and get the rest of my stuff and when I came back to the park, the people started to arrive. This was the best part. Seeing the people come. Many familiar faces and some that I had never seen before. There where people there from the families of Aunt Tillie, my mother Mae, Aunt Pauline, Aunt Barbara, Aunt Eleanor, Aunt Johnnie, Uncle Harry, and Aunt Marie.
It was lovely to see all the cousins come. Their families with them. I don’t think I ever saw so many smiling faces. Cousins who lived far apart getting to know each other again. Sisters and brothers talking, head to head about the old times. Cousins who never knew each other finding out that they had a common bond, like my kids talking to one of their cousins whom they had never met who told them ‘I loved Aunt Mae’ and my kids and Katie’s kids finding out that they weren’t the only ones who knew or loved their remarkable grandmother. The laughing about old times and the tears when the memories became so painful. One of the most prevalent common bonds among us was that we had all lost someone who was a Nadolski. Those moments when the memory of those members of our family who have gone forever brought a lump to the throat and took us back to when they where here. Oh how those sisters and Harry would have loved being there. Can’t you just see the wide smiles and joy in their eyes. Shirley said that they where sitting in the rafters of the shelter, looking down and smiling at us and I believe she was right.
I know that like all of you, I would give anything to have 5 more minutes with my mother. I know in my heart I can’t, but it is gatherings like these that help keep her and all of them alive.
Soon there where more people than I could count. 128 signed the book, but I know there where about 200 there. It was just great. Kids running around having a ball. Groups of grownups who just all looked like each other.
People laughing and crying; renewing friendships and just getting to know each other. The universal fun of watching children play; seeing a grandma and grandpa with fear in their eyes looking for a misplaced child; women talking about absent children and grandchildren; husband and wives just smiling with warm eyes at their spouses having such a happy time with their cousins; soon to be Grandma, patting the pregnant belly of a daughter-in-law; hugs and kisses from distant cousins; groups loading up a car and making a potty run; kids trying to toast marshmallows on a fire that wasn’t there; Dad’s watching the kids while Mom got caught up on the gossip; the food line with so much amazing food (one thing for sure, we all know how to cook); kids amazed that they can have as much ice cream as they want; everyone there because on Saturday, August 12, 2000 this was the place they wanted to be.
The most heart rendering moment was when a young man talked to my sister and said that he belong to the family, but he wasn’t sure how. He thought he was a descendant of Aunt Eleanor. That was so sad to me that someone wasn’t sure where they fit in the family and, paradoxically, so joyous because he had sought out his family and found them.
I also want to talk about a generation that is rapidly disappearing. It is my generation. When Uncle Floyd died recently, we lost the last one of that generation. We are now the older generation. We lost so many of our generation in the past few years and we are dwindling down to fewer than I can believe. So I want to talk about those of us who are first cousins who where there. Kenny and Marge who are the last two of Aunt Barbara’s children; LeRoy who is Aunt Johnnie’s son; Midge and Jimmy who are Aunt Eleanor’s children; Jan who is Uncle Harry’s daughter; Shirley and Winifred (Tiny) who are Aunt Pauline’s daughters; Larry who is Aunt Marie’s son; and Catherine and Lorraine who are your Aunt Mae’s daughters. When grandpa died in 1951, he had more than 80 direct descendants, most of whom where first cousins and there just aren’t enough of us left. It is good to know that many of us get together from time to time and we enjoy each other’s company but I sure would like to see more of my extended family. A lot of what keeps us from seeing family is just pure and simple geography. I have stayed in Davenport but it seems as though no one else did. Midge, Jimmy and I are the only ones left in Davenport. Hard to believe.
To those of you who couldn’t be there, we missed you. To those of you who were there, we where delighted to see you. To all of you, always remember that ‘we are family’ and the family is everything.
Journey Home 
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