The following was written by Lois as part of her memoirs.

It seems a bit unusual for a family to buy a car when neither the mother or the father drives, when out of five children the only driver is a son aged thirteen.  But that is our story. 

Our first car was a sedan, a Graham-Paige, purchased in 1929  before we knew there would be a crash on Wall Street making the purchase of any big ticket item an impossibility.  Burt turned fourteen in September of 1929 and had been taught to drive a year earlier by a neighbor, Charlie, who owned the neighborhood garage and could tolerate having Burt and Alva (then nine) hanging around.

Prior to owning a car we traveled mainly with Grandpa Covert who drove a Jewett, a deluxe model with amber colored glass vases attached to the inside door posts between the front and back seats, one on each side.  Grandma kept crepe paper flowers in the vases.  Sometimes we called the local taxi driven by an old fellow named Bartholomew.  Most of the places in our town were within walking distance,  however.  We always walked to school and often to church.  My dad walked to work.

By the fall of 1933 our lives had changed in several ways.  Mary (the oldest of my siblings) had graduated from Greenville College (Illinois) in 1931 and had married a classmate, Ken Fristoe, from California.  Ruth (second in line) had studied at Greenville for two years, 1929-31, but didn’t want to return there after Mary no longer attended.

Ruth transferred to Muskingham College (New Concord, Ohio) graduating in 1933.

She then began her teaching career in Berea, a small town near Akron.  Burt had graduated from high school and was enrolled in college at Muskingham.  Al was thirteen and in the eighth grade; I was nine and in the fifth grade.  In this interval Al had become the family driver, the mechanic, the navigator, car-washer, changer of flats, and general whatever-else-was-needed.  We had also managed to trade the G-P for a 1932 Dodge, with the guidance of Charlie who knew a good deal for us when he saw it.  (Since our house did not have its own garage, we parked at night at Charlie’s).

(Bear with me.  This background brings us to one of the great adventures of my young life, and is essential to understanding what happened to us in California.)

In October, 1933, Mary’s first child was born.  Of course, it was customary at the time for the maternal grandmother to be the authority for the care and nurturing of the grandchildren.  Accordingly, not to be deterred by the distance from Ohio to California, several of us embarked on an unusual trip.   My Grandpa and Grandma Covert were going with us, he driving his car which by this time was a Willys.  My Mom and I were in the Dodge with Al at the wheel.

In 1933 the distance between Cambridge, Ohio and Stockton, California (our destination) was about 3000 miles.  There were no super highways, no expressways, no detours around small towns for the sake of speed and efficiency.  We traveled west on US Route 40,  known as the Lincoln Highway for much of its length.  We crossed Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and into California.  We drove in the daylight and stopped each evening where we could find accommodations in “tourist cabins,” the precursor to the present day motel.  I do not know now how long it took for the trip; it was probably five or six days.  We ate picnic-style, buying groceries in the little stores as we happened on them and making sandwiches to eat along the way.  At night Mom and Grandma would prepare a simple meal on the hot plate furnished in the cabins.  

I don’t remember much about the cuisine.  At a stop in the wastelands of Utah, however,  Mom had given me a quarter to take into the country store to get a quart of milk.  When I asked for it the clerk and another man in the store responded with laughter. 

“We haven’t seen a bottle of fresh milk here for months” he told me.

I bought  a can of evaporated milk instead.  OK for coffee; not good for cereal.

At one of these stops, Al and I could see a mountain down the road a ways.  We decided to walk to it while dinner was being prepared.  The farther we walked, the more distant the mountain looked.  And, since it was beginning to get dark, we decided to turn around.  Just as well.  We would have missed eating.  We drove for a long time the next morning before passing that mountain.  I learned something about trompe l’oeil although I wouldn’t have known to call it that.

Upon our arrival in Stockton, Mary’s firstborn was already five days old.  But this story isn’t about that.

We were in California from October, 1933 to March, 1934.  In December, for reasons I can’t recall, it was necessary for us to get a new license for the car.  Mom and Al went to the Stockton DMV (maybe not called that in 1933) for the license.  In the course of completing the paperwork, the official asked to see Mom’s driver’s license.  Mom, of course, didn’t have one.  In Ohio at that time, I don’t believe it was required to drive a car.  Al didn’t have one either. 

“I don’t drive,” Mom admitted.

“Then how did this car get here?” the officer wanted to know.

“My son, here, drives us”, was Mom’s reply.

“And how old is he?”

“Thirteen.”  Like don’t all thirteen year old boys drive from Ohio to California as a matter of course?

“That’s not old enough to drive in California, and I can’t issue a license.”

I’m sure at this point there was some head-scratching and shuffling of papers.   And consternation.  And maybe a touch of panic.  Would there be a fine, an impounding of the Dodge?  How were they supposed to get home to Mary’s house if there was no car, or if Al wasn’t allowed to drive it?

Mom, in a pinch, could be pretty unflappable.

“Well, officer, we didn’t know about the rules for driving here.  We certainly didn’t intend to break any laws.  What do you suggest?”

I have seen Mom in action.  I once saw her compliment a farmer on his great looking tomato plants.  We took home a peck of sweet, ripe tomatoes, compliments of the farmer!

“Well, what I can do is give you two weeks to learn to drive and get a driver’s license for yourself.  If you can do that, then I can take care of the car.”

I can imagine Mom’s heart starting to pound.  I inherited my lack of motor skills from her. 

“All right, then.  Just tell me what I need to do.”

“You’ll need to fill out a form for a permit.  I’ll help you with that.  Then get someone to teach you.  After that you come back on (he specified a date two weeks away) and take the tests.  If you pass, you get a license.”

Mom and Al returned with booklets, instructions and trepidation.

The next step, after studying all the written instructions, was finding a hands-on teacher for behind-the-wheel work.  Mary and Ken (her minister husband) were always up to their knees (or on their knees) with pastoral duties.  My Grandpa Covert didn’t seem a likely choice:  he had driving eccentricities of his own.  I had seen him make a sharp left hand turn when his navigator had specified right.  I inherited my directional ambiguity from him.

And so Al, the most capable, and probably the most patient of the lot…but not old enough, became Mom’s driving instructor.  They went out on Stockton’s back roads, into the countryside, on the adjoining highways, finally onto city streets, until Mom learned to steer, to shift gears and manage the clutch.  She could tell which pedal was gas and which was the brake.  She knew signals for the turns, and when it was safe to stop and to go.  Parking was questionable, but she was cautious and managed without bending fenders.

T-Day was at hand.  Mom drove to the motor vehicle office with Al as a passenger.

The written test was a cinch.  Mom was a fast learner.  She also turned out to be a fast driver.  She passed the driving test with only one derog from the inspector…be careful about going too hard on the gas!

With the driver’s license, the car license (we sported California tags all through 1934) and a definite sense of triumph, Mom returned to Mary’s house.  She had the precious license in her purse.  When she and Al got out of the car, she handed the keys to Al.  I can’t recall any time she ever drove again.

When our little caravan returned to Ohio in March, 1934, we took a more southern route home crossing Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas before entering Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and then Ohio.  Al drove the entire way.

I had spend four months in a California school, the Roosevelt Elementary in Stockton.  There were many differences between that and my school at home.  In California I was exposed to spelling words that I had never heard before.  I didn’t know citrus was the other name for oranges, lemons, and grapefruit.  I also didn’t know that there was a lime.  My reading skills were behind the other students.  But I had been through long division in the fourth grade.  That was just being taught in Roosevelt’s fifth grade, and I was the class math whiz.   And that was good enough for me!

Reentering the fifth grade in Ohio would be great!  Or so I thought.  While I was away my class had progressed beyond me, and I had work to do.  My high point was in the geography fair in May.  We each were to choose a state and make a report.  I, with no hesitation, choose California.  My report included some of the things I had learned about the state’s history and a copy of the state song: I Love You, California!

“You’re the greatest state of all.  I love you in the winter, summer, spring and in the fall.  I love your redwood forests; your dear mountains I adore.  I love your grand old ocean, and I love your pebbled shore.”  

Or words to that effect.

I had collected a few abalone shells at Santa Cruz, and had retrieved a piece of redwood which had been battered smooth in the surf.  When I was told not to pack the wood to bring home, I wrapped it in my bathrobe and hid it under the back seat of the car.  The redwood, and my tale of where it came from, was an integral part of my display.  And there were maps and picture postcards I had saved.

I think I was a novelty in the California fifth grade.  In the Ohio fifth grade, I was a sometime celebrity.  

The following was written by Lois as part of her memoirs.

I confess to never failing a driver’s test; I never took one.  There was a time, however, when I really wanted to learn to drive.  Like most teens today approaching driving age, it seemed to me to be a particularly adult accomplishment.

What’s more, none of the girls I knew were drivers, and only a few boys could drive.  In high school I did not know anyone who owned a car.  Once in a while one of the boys could borrow the family car for a special occasion, perhaps to go to the “prom.”  In my small town almost all the transportation was on foot, or as my Grandma Covert put it “on shanks’ mare.” 

My brother, Alva had learned to drive before he even reached the teens.  He and my brother Burton had been taught by Charlie Mumma, a neighbor who was also a local mechanic and garage keeper.  Charlie and his wife, who suffered from some sort of disability, lived down hill from us on Gomber Avenue about five houses away.  They had a grown daughter who lived in New York, and no sons.  My brothers were allowed to hang around his garage in their free time (stolen from homework, no doubt) and be his apprentices.  He rewarded them with an intimate knowledge of spark plugs, carburetors and valves.  And they learned to drive even before my family owned a car.  

My earliest experience behind the wheel was sitting there trying to be as tall as I could, turning the steering wheel.  The engine was not running, the brakes were set.  I went through the motions of shifting gears, mentally.  I was on my way, zooming off to unknown adventures, the wind blowing in and one hand on the wheel.  This was all the practice driving I had for three or four years until I was thirteen.

I don’t know what persuaded Al to teach me to drive.  I didn’t have money to pay him.  There was nothing I could use for blackmail.  He had always been impervious to flattery.  Maybe something in my inferior sisterhood position touched his finer fibers. 

On a warm Sunday morning while my parents lingered for a meeting following the church service, Al and I were waiting in the car.  He was no doubt bored and I had already been through the church bulletin from back to front.

“Alva,” I wheedled for at least the thousandth time, “why don’t you give me a driving lesson?”

I was prepared for his sigh, and the exasperated “Forget it!”

Instead, “Well, maybe I will.”  He started the car.

In only a few minutes we were out on the county road between Cambridge and Byesville.   On the shoulder he stopped the car without cutting the engine.  He moved over into the passenger side.  I climbed out of the back and into the driver’s seat.  Step by step he went over the moves to release the brake, shift gears using the clutch, steering and keeping an eye on everything around me. 

With extreme caution I eased back onto the road with only a few fits and starts, and managed to avoid the approaching traffic.  At that time and place you would only meet another car every mile or so.  Al told me that a little farther on we would come to a gas station and turn around there.  I started slowing from a walk to a creep too soon; I had no sense of distance and how far I was from both moving and immovable objects. 

“You need to go a little faster.”

I responded with more pressure on the gas pedal.  We jerked ahead.

“No, ease up now.  Start using your brake!”

I responded with pressure on the brake pedal.  We jerked to a stop.

The sudden stop caused the engine to die.  Resuscitation required using the ignition which I had not practiced.  It was more complicated than I expected.  There were keys and buttons and pedals, and I hoped no one would come up behind us and honk.

Al patiently saw me through the maze.  We lurched along a few more yards to the gas station.  Gas stations in the 30s had pumps with a glass tank on the top.  You could see the tank emptying as gas flowed from the pump into the car.  This station had two pumps side by side positioned back from road with room for cars to make a comfortable curve into the station and back out again.

I managed to slow down and make a fairly graceful arc to the station.

“That was pretty good,” Al said.  “But you have to back up to swing back out into the road.”

I was elated:  “Pretty good!”

Going into reverse was a whole other set of instructions—more tricky than going forward.  How would I steer driving backwards?

“Hold the wheel like this” was Al’s hands-on instruction.  “Now you shift into reverse, and gradually give her some gas.”

My hands were locked on the wheel.  I needed some help with the shifting, but I knew where the gas pedal was.  I didn’t wait for the next part of the lesson.  I gave her some gas.

Our 1932 navy blue Dodge sedan obeyed immediately.  Wheels turned, gear in reverse, gas flowing freely.  We made a rapid, almost complete, backwards circle.

We stopped when Al pulled the emergency brake.  I had missed the gas pumps by inches.

Elation I found a short-lived emotion.

Al jumped out and yanked open the driver’s door.

“YOU!  Get OUT of this car!”

I didn’t quibble; I was quaking too much.  We were both white.  I rode in the back seat as we drove silently back to the church.  I didn’t look at his face in the mirror.  I didn’t want to see his expression.  Mom and Dad were still in their meeting.

We never talked about it.  I never asked to drive again and Al never offered.  He often chauffeured me if I needed a ride, but my career behind the wheel (for a while at least) had lasted less than half an hour. 

For a long time I had no driving ambition.

The following was written by Lois as part of her memoirs.

Even though my family moved from the house where I was born when I was three years old, I always knew about it because our move was only two houses away.  Mine was a home birth, which was not uncommon in 1923.  The attending doctor was Dr. Fred Lane who was, incidentally, an across-the-street neighbor from my Covert grandparents. 

Doc Lane, I presume, suffered from the occupational malfunction of many physicians, indecipherable handwriting.  When I needed a copy of my birth certificate several years ago, I found that my mother was listed as Lena Calvert (maiden name).   Fortunately his forte was patient care, not filling out forms.  Before we moved from 315 N. Sixth Street to 235 N. Sixth Street I benefited at least on two other occasions from his services.

My next closest sibling, Alva Covert McFadden, had also been delivered to 315 by Dr. Lane, March 22, 1920.  Although Alva (shortened to Al in later years) was less than four years older than I, the difference always seemed more to me.  Maybe because he grew tall early; maybe that he always demonstrated a self-possession unusual for his years.  I don’t recall that he was ever intimidated by the challenges that he met, although as a child I may have tried my argumentative skills on him. 

My mother used to tell it this way: before I was school age, Alva and I were sitting on the front porch steps one day and I, evidently displeased, was scolding him vigorously for some lack in his character.  Al was sitting there quietly looking at me.  Mom intervened.

“Why can’t you two get along?  Mary and Ruth never quarreled like this.”

Al kept his considerable peace.

“Well,” scrounging for my most devastating  logic, “one of them wasn’t a boy!”

If I suffered from a condition known as non compos mentos, I may be able to credit Al for that, and as I grew older perhaps took my revenge in bratty little sister ways.

One of the visits to 315 by the good doctor was the result of my brother exercising his strong arm, demonstrating his ability to throw far and high.

Our house straddled a narrow lot.  Not much space on either side, but there was a long backyard.  A large elm tree shaded most of it, a wooden swing hanging from a rope attached to one of its gnarled limbs.  This was essentially my swing.   No one else was small enough to sit in it, and ironically, I wasn’t tall enough to get onto it without help.  And if someone boosted me up I couldn’t get down by myself, unless I let go and fell out.  Swinging was not always an option.

In this long back yard was a chicken coop, though we didn’t have chickens.  I wasn’t allowed to play inside the coop.  Between the back of the coop and the neighboring yard was a grassy space,  ideal for me to sit with my doll and tea set.  Beautifully quiet and secluded, out of sight from the rest of the yard.   Mom had to call me to know where I was. 

My doll’s name was Belomb.  Pronounced BE-lomb.  I named her before I knew that dolls were called Barbie, or some other appropriate girlie name.  She was pretty scruffy before there was a replacement for her.  Her painted-on face and hair had been washed almost colorless.  An arm was missing.  I don’t know why.  I was never one to practice surgery on my dolls.  She had two sets of clothes made for her by my sister Ruth.  Changing and rechanging outfits was an essential part of her day.

It was the practice in my house that toys were returned to some designated location when the play time was over.  My Mom used to tell me:  “Pick up your belongings and put them away”.

I have convinced myself in later self-analysis that I gave Belomb her distinctive name believing that when Mom called my toys my “belongings,” she was referring to my doll. 

My tea set was china with a farm motif, mostly a hen and some chicks.  Breakage was rampant, and I finally served tea with both Belomb and I drinking from the same cup.  I don’t think I ever named the tea pot.

On an afternoon when I was behind the chicken coop, occupied with my “belongings,” Al was on the other side practicing his throw.  He was putting all his muscle behind a half-brick.  The objective was to see if he could get enough heft to clear the roof of the coop.  He could.  The missile surpassed the ridge, rolled down the slant, then glanced off the back of my head.

Need I say that the events following the beaning are somewhat hazy?  I don’t know who heard my cry or how I got to the house.  I can recall being on the back porch with blood on my yellow dress.  My Mom washed off my head in a basin of water.  Eventually Doc Lane showed up and pronounced me alive. 

In Al’s defense, he didn’t know I was behind the coop.  The next time the doctor came to attend to a head wound for me, it was all my own fault.  How many times had I been cautioned about twirling around making myself dizzy?  I think that experience is a kind of high for children.  But yes,  I once dizzied myself enough to fall against the end of a metal bedstead, and cut my head. 

We moved from the house at 315 because our family outgrew it.  There was a window in its front door, the glass partitioned into little squares across the top half.  When the morning sun shone through, it splashed a hundred tiny rainbows into our living room.

The following was written by Lois as part of her memoirs.

My mother was Lina Belle Covert, the oldest child of Sarah Ellen Lindsey Covert and James Ellis Covert.  Her mother Sarah, usually called Sadie, had a brother Charlie and a sister Belle.  There may have been other siblings.  Sadie was born in Virginia to farming parents, the father having fought in the Civil War.  I think her father’s name was Charles.  Sadie’s birthday was February 2, 1868; she sometimes joked about being born on Groundhog Day.

Sometime after the war the Lindsey parents separated and Sadie’s father disappeared from the family scene.  Later her mother married a man named Church, and my mother always referred to her grandmother as Grandma Church.  This puzzled me when I was a small child because I didn’t then know that a person could ever be married to more than one other person. 

Belle, three or four years younger than Sadie, was kidnapped at the age of eight from the Church farm.  Her family did not know what had happened to her, only that one day she was gone.  And she remained gone for ten years.

It turns out that her father, Charles Lindsey, had left Virginia for the Oklahoma Territory where he met and married a new wife.  I don’t know why he returned to take Belle.  Whether he was wreaking revenge on a former wife or whether he considered Belle a rightful division of property is only speculation.  Was she taken because she was the youngest?  Would he have taken Sadie or Charlie if he had happened on one of them first?

When Belle returned she told this story:  Charles and his wife took her to a train where they rode in a box car for several days to Oklahoma.  I don’t know if she immediately knew this man was her father, or if she came to accept it.  In Oklahoma she lived on the plains in a dugout house, and attended a school for local children in a rural community.  When she was about sixteen, she was on her way to the country store, a small structure whose roof overhung a porch and was supported by wooden posts on either side of the front door.  An Oklahoma cyclone was building as she approached the store, and she was fighting against the wind and rain to get inside.  A young man whom she didn’t know was also trying to reach the door.  At the fiercest of the storm, when it seemed she wouldn’t be able to get there, he pulled her onto the porch and circled her and one of the posts with his arms, holding her there until a letup in the gale when the storekeeper rescued them.

The story doesn’t end with the passing of the cyclone.  The young man, a salesman visiting a customer, and Belle eventually married.  The husband then took his bride on a trip to Virginia to find her family.  And so, after ten years, Belle saw her mother again. 

Belle’s subsequent life is a blank to me.  I don’t know where she lived or when she died.  I do know that she had at least one child, a daughter Maude.  Maude married a man whose last name was Jerde, and they owned a dairy farm in Wisconsin. One of Maude’s children was a girl named Ila about my age.  I met them when they visited us in Cambridge, Ohio on the occasion of Sadie and Jim Covert’s 50th wedding anniversary in the fall of 1935.

The following was written by Lois as part of her memoirs.

“Let me live in a house by the side of the road, and be a friend to man.”  ‑ Edgar A. Guest

“He was a man, the best I have ever known.”

My brother Al wrote this to me following my father’s death in 1969.  Dad lived 84 years, spending the final seven years of his life living with my sister Mary in Berkeley, CA after my mother died.

Dad was a very quiet and private man.  Most of the little I know about his early life I learned from my mother.  In fact there was only one incident, which I’ll recount later, that I ever heard from him directly.

His name was Thomas Monroe McFadden, born at Raven Rock, West Virginia, on September 22, 1885.  Raven Rock was in Pleasants County, bordering the Ohio River in the area opposite Marietta, Ohio.  I never heard anyone call him Thomas or Tom.  Most of his friends and some of the family called him “Mac” or simply “T.M.”  My mother and his mother called him “Roe.”  He was, my mother said, named for his father, Thomas Kemp.  I was never given an explanation for “Monroe.”  His mother was Mary Martha McFadden.  I was in my late 20s before I knew that Thomas Kemp and Mary Martha had never married.  In the groundless assumptions that children are wont to make, I believed that my grandmother (whom I knew as Grandma Bailey) had been married to a McFadden who had left her a widow with a child when she was still very young.  Later she had married a man named O. D. Bailey, a country storekeeper, who I knew was not related to me.

My father never lived with his mother and Mr. Bailey.  He always lived with his maternal grandfather, Enos McFadden and his grandmother, also a Mary.  I have seen Dad’s birthplace, a log cabin set back from an almost impassable rutted road in the West Virginia countryside.  From the outside it seemed too small to house Enos’ large family.  And, reflecting back, I can’t imagine how they managed to raise enough food in those uneven fields to subsist. 

I never heard my Dad speak of his father.  My mother told me that Thomas Kemp had come from Pennsylvania with an oil surveying crew, and that his family “had money.”  They had prevented their son from marrying my grandmother. 

I know that Dad always cared for his mother.  We often visited her from our Ohio home, driving on weekends to her little house uphill from a stream that flooded regularly each year.  We always brought her food and money and Dad also tried to keep Mr. Bailey’s store supplied with flour, corn meal and pancake mix from his mill.

As a youngster my Dad attended a country school, and after finishing the eighth grade level taught at the school for a few years before he left to attend business college in Marietta.  I don’t know what ignited a spark in him to make his way from the painful circumstances of his childhood and seek a better life.  I don’t know how Grandfather Enos raised him or treated him.  I do know that my father developed into a thoughtful, caring man.  He valued honesty and hard work.  He loved reading the Bible and teaching his Sunday school class. 

Sometimes the values we learn come from some hard lessons.  And, if we are fortunate, we find great blessings in those lessons.  I believe this was true for my Dad.

On one of our West Virginia trips, we made a side trip to see the farm where my Dad was born.  He had pointed out the family cabin and the approximate area of their farm.  Across a shallow valley sat a tumbling down barn.  I asked if the barn also belonged to Dad’s grandfather, and I heard this sole account from my Dad’s early life.

The barn had belonged to a neighbor; the homestead was already gone.  My father was about my age at the time, ten or so.  During the long summer day, my father, bare footed and thread bare, worked on the farm at various chores.  In this particular summer, he had been going to work for the neighbor when his own work was done, having been promised that he would get a quarter after two weeks, a virtual pot of gold.  Dad wanted to earn money to buy firecrackers for the Fourth of July.  When he finished the tasks he received a shiny quarter, the first he had ever owned.  Because it was already almost dark, Dad had to wait until the next afternoon to head for the store, cutting across fields and following paths that would be either muddy or dusty depending on whether rain had fallen recently.  When he finally reached the store, all the fire crackers had been sold. 

“What about your quarter?” I wanted to know.

“I went back home and gave it to my grandfather.”

I cannot think of this story even now without feeling his disappointment, without swallowing hard to clear from my throat that lump of anger at the fell clutch of circumstance.  We drove on silently, no one saying a word, not Dad, not my mother, not my brother Al, and especially not me. 

I recall a day during the depression years, when every penny was spent with scrupulous care, I had been left with dad at the mill and would walk home with him after work.  Dad had locked up and, as we proceeded toward home, we were stopped by a young man and woman coming from the direction of the railroad tracks which ran directly behind the mill, both carrying a blanket roll and evidently travel worn.  It was not unusual for down-on-their-luck men to ride the rails and look for work wherever the train took them.  Rarely, however, had I seen one accompanied by a woman.

“We’re on our way to Cadiz,” the man told my Dad.  “My wife has an uncle on a farm there, going to take us in if we can get that far.”

His wife was standing behind him looking at her worn out shoes. 

“Mister, could you spare us a little change?”  he asked.

I knew my Dad had two half-dollars in his pocket.  I had seen him count them earlier in the afternoon.  He had been watching the couple and had the coins out almost before the question.

“Mister, I can’t tell you how…” 

But Dad was interrupting, “Now that will get you on the bus to Cadiz.  You’ll be there tonight.”  He motioned to the depot next to the train station.

Then Dad told them, “Over there is Armbrusters’ bakery.  You go in there and tell them Mac sent you for something to eat.  They’ll take care of you.”

Dad took my hand and we were walking away while they were trying to find words.  I looked back and saw them hugging.

I learned much later that Dad had a standing agreement with the Armbrusters—they would supply food from the bakery to anyone he sent, and keep account of their costs.  Dad would repay them in flour and cornmeal from the mill.

During the Depression, bartering was a sensible way to conduct business.  Cash was so scarce that farmers couldn’t buy feed for their livestock for months at a time.  Dad worked out an arrangement with many of his rural customers to keep on supplying the feed, and wait for harvest  to be repaid in grain.  There was a handwritten ledger in which each farmer had his own section.  All the transactions were recorded as to the cost of the feed, and the value of the grain received.  It’s almost a given that more feed was supplied than grain brought in, especially if the crops had been wind wracked and hailed out, or fields flooded.  When the milling business was sold in 1941, Dad closed out the ledger.  On page after page which indicated that he was owed money he drew a diagonal line and printed the word “forgiven.”

My sister Mary told me that after dad died she heard from several of his farmer friends.  Some of them said, “Without your father, my family would have starved…”

Perhaps dad typified the “common man.”  But he was a very good man.  And goodness is not a common quality. 

“He was a man, the best I have ever known.”   Thanks, Al.  It would look good on his headstone.

The following was written by Lois as part of her memoirs.

My mother and father attended rural schools, the one-room warmed by a wood-burning stove.  Mom lived in Noble County, Ohio and Dad in Pleasants County, West Virginia.  As a child, I often read their left-over texts, the venerable McGuffey’s Readers.  I do not have the originals; they were evidently casualties of the move to California in 1941, when Mom working alone cleared our home in Cambridge and disposed of most of the contents.  Because of circumstances at that time, she was not able to pack and transport the accumulation of personal items we had left in our house. 

I do have four replica McGuffeys, which were gifts to Mom and Dad at Christmas in 1958 from my brother Burton and his wife Doris.  These are exact reproductions of the “revised” Eclectic Readers, the preface to the 6th Reader dated January 1880.  In explaining the revision from the 1879 books, this statement appears: “In the revision of the Sixth Reader, the introductory matter has been retained with but little change, and it will be found very valuable for elocutionary drill…The character of the selections, aside from their elocutionary value, has also been duly considered.  It will be found, upon examination, that they present the same instructive merit and healthful moral tone which gave the preceding edition its high reputation.”

There is also a reading list for grammar and high school students which includes seven Shakespeare plays; Paradise Lost, Books I and II; Franklin’s Autobiography; and selected essays from Emerson, Carlyle and Matthew Arnold. 

The readings are from writers known and appreciated in the 1880s, most of whom are unheard of for 21st Century students.  But having been exposed to them as a child, I am even now subject to their sudden appearances and sometimes relevancy in moments of reflection.  One of the Readers presents a poem, “The Old Oaken Bucket” by Samuel Woodworth. The opening lines are (and I know this from memory):

“How dear to this heart are the scenes of my childhood
When fond recollection presents them to view…”

The verses describe the bucket hanging at the well and the delights of getting a cold drink after a hot morning of working the fields.  The old moss-covered, iron-bound bucket stirs the poet’s warm remembrance of his father’s farm and familiar scenes.  Of course, being a McGuffey selection, there is a moral.

Elocution, a then-universal element of children’s training, was taught in my school system by requiring us to recite from memory assigned passages from literature.  Our instructors would then critique the performance and grade us on our effectiveness.  Sometimes teachers would hire out as tutors for students whose parents wanted special training for their children.

Thus my mother hired a teacher to give elocution lessons to my sister Ruth during one summer’s vacation.  She was by nature quiet, perhaps shy, and Mom may have thought the lessons would encourage her to be more vocal.  Ruth was about junior high school age.  Her teacher, Miss Stella Burris, came to our house once a week and listened to the recitation … as did I, out of sight in the stairway.  Ruth’s exercises included tongue-twisters, like Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled Peppers and She Sells Sea Shells by the Seashore.  My favorite was one which began “’Zekial crept quite close keeping quiet…”  One day I was repeating this to myself, becoming more enthusiastic with my rendition than usual, resulting in my banishment to the outdoors for most of the other lessons.  Miss Stella Burris was not amused.  I can’t blame her:  she was getting paid for only one tutee.  Or she may have thought I was “making fun.”  And I was, for me. 

I thought that after the summer was over we would never hear of Miss Stella Burris again.  Not so.  Some years later when I arrived at school in the fall of my sixth grade year, I was met at the door by my home room teacher, Miss Stella Burris.  Of all the ups and downs of my academic career, the most positively down came at the hands and mind of Miss Stella Burris.  

The following was written by Lois in an email to Colleen on July 14, 2010

Presidents’ Day, 2003, weekend I spent with my granddaughter, Colleen and her husband, Ryan.  This was our second “annual”  observance.  This year Colleen and Ryan had dinner with me on Saturday evening. On Sunday we drove to  their home in Moreno Valley.  Tom, Sue and Christina met us there for dinner on Sunday afternoon, and they drove me home after lunch on Monday.  The hours are spent, invested, in good food,  good music, good conversation and board games….sometimes not so good….

The subject was memory. 

“Mom, what is the very earliest memory you have?”

I’ve been asked that before, and have had time to sort through the files.  Many memories, particularly anecdotal ones, are of the type “this I beheld or dreamed it in a dream”… when we are not sure they are real or the recollections of someone else telling about an occurrence, or perhaps residuals from a sleep sequence.  So, the earliest memory, which I claim as my own because it is unlikely that someone would have described it to me, is of sleeping on a train.   I would have been two.

We went to St. Petersburg, Florida, the winter that my brother Burton was ten,  he, my Mother and Dad, my brother Alva and I.  We traveled by train and slept at night in a Pullman car.  My memory is of my Mom and I sleeping in the lower berth, I next to a window.  At some time before I closed my eyes, my Dad parted the curtains which shielded us from the aisle of the train, far enough to stick his head inside, and said something to my Mom. 

My actual memory, however, is much less significant than the trip itself, the reason for it and the results.

Burt was in those days termed a “sickly” child.  From his birth in 1915 he had been afflicted with epilepsy, sometime with bouts severe enough to incapacitate him, and often keeping him home from school for days at a time.  Our family doctor, old Doc Lane (he officiated at my home birth in 1923 and was a neighbor of Grandma and Grandpa Covert), had told my parents that Burt was not thriving and that he might not survive another Ohio winter.  Under this shadow the five of us took up temporary residence in a small bungalow on the sand at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico.  St. Petersburg was chosen for its reputation for reliable sunshine, and because distant relatives of my grandparents lived and ministered to a church there. The local newspaper, The Daily Sun, promised to give the St. Petersburg residents a free paper for any day the sun did not shine. 

Burt had immediate access to all the sand, sunshine and warm Gulf water one could ever wish.  Almost all of every day, except Sunday, we played on the white sands, splashed in the water and gathered shells left by the tide.  Our cottage was in a row of identical structures built to accommodate visitors from colder climates.  I have heard that Burt, running in from the beach one day, mistakenly went into a neighboring house.  He solved the identity crisis by piling up shells on his porch to guide him home. 

One section of our beach was used as a children’s’ playground with swings and slides.  We sometimes played there.  I seem to recall, although this may have been suggested to me, that Burt would take me down the slide on his lap, and that we would fall off the end of the slide into the soft, warm white sand. 

During this winter our family attended the church where we had some sort of family connection….I’m not sure which.  Going to church was accepted, expected and respected in our family.  It was as routine as getting up and going to bed; and when the church was having services we were usually there.  My parents were active Christians, both in the church and in their daily lives. I sensed this in their day to day conduct rather than in any overt display of “religion”. I know that they were greatly burdened for the child they feared to lose.  I learned this, of course, much later in my life.

And so, according to my mother, their little church was conducting Sunday morning services.  At the end of the sermon, the pastor announced that one of the congregation had requested prayer for healing.  This was not at all unusual, for our church taught that God intercedes in human lives and answers the prayers of the believers according to His will.   The pastor then invited anyone else who had a need to join him at the altar for prayer.

My Mom asked my brother, “Burton, do you know what they are talking about?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Do you want to go up there and have them pray for you to get well?”

“Yes.”

My mother took Burt’s hand and they went forward.  At the altar the pastor asked what their specific need was.

“My child, Burton.  He has seizures and wants Jesus to heal him.”

“Burton, do you believe Jesus can take away the seizures and make you well?” he asked.

“Yes”.

In turn, the pastor prayed for the three or four who responded to the invitation, placing his hand on each head and naming the condition God was being asked to heal.  The congregation  prayed silently.

I don’t know the effect of the service on the others that morning, but my Mom said that Burt , who had been having seizures every two or three days, had only two very slight “spells” afterward.  And that by the time we returned to Ohio in the Spring, Burt was like a new boy.  He had acquired some flesh on his bones, a healthy tan and a new Southern accent.  He delighted our neighbor, Mrs. Porter, saying

“How’re y’all, Miz Po-tah?” 

I remember the church services I attended as a child ending with the congregation standing and singing, in unison and a cappella:

“PRAISE GOD  FROM WHOM ALL BLESSING FLOW,

PRAISE HIM ALL CREATURES HERE BELOW,

PRAISE HIM ABOVE YE HEAVENLY HOSTS,

PRAISE FATHER, SON AND HOLY GHOST.”

Amen and amen.

The following was written by Lois in an email to Colleen on July 14, 2010

I have a fragrance, “Elusive”  The aroma is pleasing, but would be hard to describe. The first spritz is strong, definitely noticeable. But it dissipates. Before long it is only a faint wafting.  Then nothing to call attention to itself. Then, unexpectedly, it comes back. Maybe a definite “Here I am”. Maybe only a whiff that says “I was here once”.

Memories may be elusive.