Joy Neal Kidney's Blog, page 13

Gold Star Mothers: Lillie Archibald and Leora Wilson

I’d heard Grandma Leora talk about Lillie Archibald, but I only connected some dots to learn that they were more than just long-term friends.

Leora’s brother Jennings Goff married Tessie Sauvago. Lillie was her sister.

Lillie Sauvago married John Silverthorne, who died in 1922. They had two sons, John Sauvago Silverthorne, born in 1916, and Gordon P. Silverthorne, born in 1918.

So Lillie was widowed in 1922, with two small boys. Her sister Tessie died of mumps in 1924, four days after the birth of Merrill Goff.

Lillie remarried in 1925 to Clement Archibald. She lost her firstborn, John Silverthorne, in 1945. During World War II, Leora lost her three youngest sons.

L-R: Donald Wilson (b. 1917). I think the next one is John Sauvago Silverthorne (b. 1916) the one lost during WWII. (His father had died in 1922 and his mother, Lillie Sauvago, was a sister of Tessie.) Lillie married Clement Archibald in 1925 to I believe that’s who the adult is (step-father of John Silverthorne), then Merrill Goff, Dale Wilson, Danny Wilson (front), and Delbert Wilson.

This old photo finally makes sense. Mom mentioned the name Silverthorne and someone lost in WWII.

Maxine and Merrill Goff spent summers with their Sauvago grandparents at Wichita, Iowa. John Silverthorne was probably in Dexter to pick them up for the summer, or to return them to their Goff grandparents in time for school to begin again.So the photo was taken in Dexter, about 1929 or 1930.And to think that four of these boys would lose their lives between 1943 and 1945.Lillie Sauvago Archibald and Leora Goff Wilson, Gold Star Mothers honored in Guthrie Center, Iowa, 1959.Gold Star Mother’s Day is the last Sunday each September.

Those 90th Birthday Celebrations!

Three ladies in my motherline were blessed with celebrations for their 90th birthdays, although they chose different ways to mark their special occasions–one took her first plane trip, her oldest daughter enjoyed an open house, and the next one, also an oldest daughter asked for an excursion on a dinner train.

Laura Goff and her daughter Leora Wilson, September 1958

Great Grandmother Laura Jordan Goff, took her first plane trip to California in 1958. Laura was born in a Guthrie County log cabin, September 28, 1868. She nurtured a family of ten children (plus another who lived only a year), moving dozens of times, traveling mostly by horse and buggy or by train. She’d already taken the train to California to spend time with some of her children and grandchildren. But when she turned 90, she flew there with her oldest daughter, Leora.

 

Leora Wilson with great granddaughters Deni and Christa Scar, 1980

My mother and her sister (Doris and Darlene) held an open house in1980 for their mother, Leora Goff Wilson, when she turned 90. Some of her great grandchildren were there to celebrate with the woman (born in Guthrie County, December 4, 1890) who had given birth to ten children, raised seven to adulthood, only to lose three during WWII. Later she’d made a home in Guthrie Center for her own mother for fourteen years.

Darlene Scar, Gloria Neal, Joy Kidney, and Doris Neal, August 2008, on the dinner train. Guy and Dan Kidney were seated opposite our table.

Mom, Doris Wilson Neal, born in Guthrie County, August 30, 1918, didn’t want an open house. She asked to celebrate her 90th birthday with a ride on the Boone an Scenic Valley Dinner Train, so that’s what we did in August of 2008, including her sister Darlene and only grandchild, who traveled from the Twin Cities to attend.

 

 

If I’m blessed to live another ten years, I wonder what sort of celebration I’d enjoy. Maybe something with my only granddaughter, who will be 17 by then!

Our American Stories, a new one six years after the first one

During the summer, Montie Montgomery, who has produced nearly all of my little recordings, asked if I’d do a few more. I’d been wanting to do one about the care taken by graves registration teams to identify lost remains from WWII, including Danny Wilson.

It was first aired September 10, six years after the first one was carried by WHO-Radio in 2018. You may listen to it here.  It lasts about 10 minutes, after 3 minutes of ads.

 

Photo mentioned in the story.

Danny Wilson’s story is also told in Leora’s Letters and What Leora Never Knew, with his photo in the center of both book covers.

Here are others produced by Our American Stories with Lee Habeeb.

How can you reconcile tragic losses with a loving God?

Twenty years ago, Jerry Sittser lost his daughter, wife, and mother in a car accident. He chronicled that tragic experience in A Grace Disguised, a book that has become a classic on the topic of grief and loss.

Now he asks: How do we live meaningfully, even fruitfully, in this world and at the same time long for heaven? How do we respond to the paradox of being a new creature in Christ even though we don’t always feel or act like one? How can we trust God is involved in our story when our circumstances seem to say he isn’t?

While A Grace Disguised explored how the soul grows through loss, A Grace Revealed brings the story of Sittser’s family full circle, revealing God’s redeeming work in the midst of circumstances that could easily have destroyed them. As Sittser reminds us, our lives tell a good story after all. A Grace Revealed will helps us understand and trust that God is writing a beautiful story in our own lives.

A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows through Loss

How does a human being, a survivor of a terrible accident, go on living without three family members (three generations) were killed in the same accident? Jerry Sittser was widowed and the father of three motherless children because of the crash. What happens to a man’s faith in God and how does he help his children through catastrophic losses when he doesn’t know how himself? Sittser describes how utterly bewildering life was for years, how he coped, grieved, managed to keep teaching and parenting, holding onto grace and hope at the same time. Incredibly helpful.

A Grace Revealed: How God Redeems the Story of Your Life

This thoughtful and hopeful book reminds us that even though we live through losses, sometimes enormous life-changing losses, our stories can be part of God’s overarching story of redemption.

Jerry Sittser is a professor emeritus of theology and senior fellow in the Office of Church Engagement at Whitworth University. He holds a master of divinity degree from Fuller Theological Seminary and a doctorate in the history of Christianity from the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books, including A Grace Disguised and The Will of God as a Way of Life. Married to Patricia, he is the father of three children and two stepchildren, all grown, and nine grandchildren.

He also has other books, which you can discover here.

Kids and Fist Fights

My sister and I didn’t hear any discussions about getting into fights at school, probably because we didn’t have brothers. I was interested in the stories I heard about a couple of tussles including the Wilson brothers. The first one happened about 1926, when they’d just taken a new job as tenant farmers along Old Creamery Road in Madison County, Iowa. The Wilson youngsters began classes at the nearby country school. 

Delbert Wilson is on the left in the back row. The teacher is the woman with the dark hair, with Howard Davidson beside her. Penn #4 Schoolhouse, 1926

Husky followed the five oldest as they hiked the gravel road to the rural school on the corner not half a mile south. Delbert and Donald were sixth graders at the Penn Township school. Doris was the only one in third grade, so the teacher had her join the fourth graders. Twins Dale and Darlene were first graders. 

Delbert soon got into a fight with Howard Davidson, the biggest kid in the school. Delbert won. The boys became fast friends, all the way through high school at Dexter. 

Clabe had told his boys that if they ever got in a fight, to make sure their thumb was on the outside when they made a fist.  Hitting someone with the thumb inside the fist could easily dislocate the thumb.

During the 1930s middle brother Dale got into a fight with a bigger kid on the way home from school. Danny and Junior ran ahead to tell their mother. The high schoolers, Delbert and Donald, were already home.      

     “Donald, you go see what’s happening.” Leora paused, holding a dish towel. “Danny and Junior, you boys stay here. Donald, make sure it’s a fair fight.”

     A bedraggled Dale came home with Donald. “Mom, it was a fair fight,” Don told her, “but the other boy’s shirt got torn. His mother is really mad. She even said, ‘Mrs. Wilson had better get over here or she’s liable to take a trip’.”

     Leora laughed. “Well, it’s been a while since I’ve been on a trip!” She asked Dale if he was okay. He was, just roughed up a bit.  

     That episode got around the neighborhood. Next time neighbor Mr. Neal saw Leora, he called out, “Mrs. Wilson, I hear you’re gonna take a little trip!” 

—–

What messages did you grow up with about getting into fights?

Questions to Ponder: Leora’s Dexter Stories: The Scarcity Years of the Great Depression

A couple of book clubs have read Leora’s Dexter Stories, then gather to discuss it. One club read all three Leora books and voted this one their favorite. Here are questions at the end of this book to help start conversation about those Great Depression days: 

Questions to Ponder

1.  Leora was blessed by having the support system of family, even her parents and adult siblings living nearby. At what points in the story does she have to let go of a family member? How do those losses affect her? What does that say about her character?  

2.  Marilynne Robinson, through a character in her book Gilead, says, “It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.” Do you agree that it’s a good thing to know what it is to be poor?

3.  A character in Willa Cather’s My Antonia says, “But, you see, a body never knows what traits poverty might bring out in ‘em.” Having lived through the challenges of 2020 (Covid-19, hurricanes, a derecho storm in the Midwest, an especially contentious election), what traits have those brought out in you?

4.  In Song of the Lark, Willa Cather says, “The fear of the tongue, that terror of little towns. . . . “ If you’ve lived in a small town, what are the drawbacks? What about the benefits? 

5.  “. . .[T]he depression that began in 1929. . . came on harder and faster, it engulfed a larger part of the population, it lasted much longer, and it did far more and far worse damage than any before it.”

     In Brother, Can You Spare a Dime, Melton Meltzer said that no one can understand America today without knowing something about the Great Depression of the 1930s.  Even the lives of those who suffered through it are different because of that disaster, he said. “The deepest wounds of the depression were borne by children.” 

     Do you have family stories that have come down from those Great Depression years? 

6. I’ve heard that people tend to collect or even hoard the things they missed out on as children. My mother Doris couldn’t have enough towels and sheets in the linen closet. She also collected dolls. Can you relate to this?

7.  There have been times in our history where world events create such an undertow that it affects individual lives. Besides the Great Depression and Covid-19, can you think of other events that have been turning points in your own life? 

8. “The way I see it,” says Billie Jo in Karen Kesse’s Newbery Medal Winner Out of the Dust, (one sentence from poetic lines) “hard times aren’t only about money, or drought, or dust. Hard times are about losing spirit, and hope, and what happens when dreams dry up.” 

     Which do you think is harder: poverty of material things or poverty of spirit? 

Leora’s Dexter Stories is also available as an audiobook, done with Virtual Voice. You may listen to a sample of it below the book cover.

Remembering 9/11/2001

The summer of 2001 had been miserable with strange all-over pain and exhaustion, with all sorts of tests to try to figure it out. The medical folks finally settled on fibromyalgia as my malady, with nothing they could offer for relief. (One did have me try an antidepressant, which made me feel worse, and getting off of it even caused troublesome side effects.)

I was on the computer the morning of September 11. Friend Jorja alerted me to turn on the TV, that something awful had happened.

I watched in disbelief, with a heating pad wrapped around my side–shingles. I spent the rest of the morning glued to the TV in horror, a heating pad wrapped around my right ribs. My husband Guy, an air traffic controller, watched with me as the second tower was attacked. What a terrible day.

Guy did go to work, just in case. The only plane in the air was Air Force One, north of Des Moines that afternoon, heading back to the US Capitol.

The doctor had diagnosed my shingles, even before the blisters appeared. I argued that I wasn’t old enough (I was 56), but he insisted he’d treated high schoolers with it. The meds didn’t help much.

I’d been accompanying Zlatka to her prenatal exams, mainly to corral her two older children. I learned that I shouldn’t be around her until the blisters dried up, that the virus that caused shingles could harm her baby, which was due within a month. I’d planned to go through labor and delivery with her (as I had for her first baby born in America two years earlier).

The blisters were gone in time, but those other miseries were part of the day Zlatka’s new baby was born. I can always figure out how old Denis is because of having shingles during the terrorist attacks right before he was born in 2001.

It’s still hard to fathom those heinous terrorist attacks, that Denis is already grown up, and that I still deal with a miserable mysterious malady all these years later.

The Wilson Brothers played ball against Nile Kinnick and Bob Feller

Nile Kinnick and Bob Feller, who are remembered on the north side of the Dallas County Freedom Rock®, were well-known to the Wilson brothers, who are remembered on the south side. They were from Dallas County towns whose schools played each other in sports. 

And all seven of these men served in WWII. Nile Kinnick won the Heisman Trophy in 1939 at the University of Iowa, where the stadium is named in his honor. The Kinnick family also lost another son, Lt. Benjamin Kinnick, a B-25 pilot in the Pacific.

From Leora Wilson’s memoir: “So many young folks do not remember Nile Kinnick of Adel, Iowa–a great football player. He was lost in the Caribbean (Navy Air Corps) in W. W. II. And Bob Feller of Van Meter, Iowa, a baseball pitcher. Delbert and Donald of Dexter played against their teams during their high school years in the 1930’s. They both admired those two boys–what great players they were.”

Her middle son Dale, Wilson also played against Bob Feller in 1936. “Van Meter has the best ball team in the county,” Dale reported to Delbert and Donald, who had joined the US Navy two years earlier, “and maybe in the state. Bob Feller is their pitcher and he has already been wanted by some teams. We played them and they beat us 13-0 and didn’t even try.” Bob Feller became a major league baseball pitcher, known as “the Heater from Van Meter,” who took four years from his career to served in WWII. He was later named to the Baseball Hall of Fame. 

Leora Wilson would be surprised and blessed that her sons are honored on the same memorial stone as these two great athletes who also served in WWII. And that this  Freedom Rock is in Minburn, not far from where, starting in 1939, Clabe Wilson and his sons were tenant farmers.

The Wilson brothers story. My journey of researching what happened to the three Wilson brothers who never came home.

The Wilson brothers of Minburn: Donald, Delbert, Dale, Daniel, Junior

The most recent issue (September 2024) of The American Legion Magazine has an article called “Crossed Paths in Adel,” about Nile Kinnick and Bob Feller, by historian Mike Chapman.

What’s a book that opened your eyes to a new perspective, and more. . .

September 6 is National Read a Book Day! How about one of these? 

Amazon Author Page offers a chance to recommend books in specific categories, limiting the number of words you can include. I don’t know how anyone would happen onto this strip toward the bottom of my Amazon Author Page, but here are my choices: 

What’s a book that opened your eyes to a new perspective? Charity’s Fireby Craig Matthews

” Unseen entities are at war over the humans, who encounter such devastation. It’s full of caution, but also hope.”

 

What’s a book you couldn’t put down?Broken People: From the case files of Sheriff Will Diaz (ret) – A story of Redemption (The Lawman Book 3)by William Ablan

“It’s about policework, bad choices, family dynamics, PTSD, and second chances.”

 

What’s a book that left an impression on you?The Raffle Baby: An astounding lyrical novel inspired by a shocking true story of the Great Depressionby Ruth Talbot“This is the mesmerizing story of three youngsters caught up in the vortex of the Great Depression. “

What’s a similar book readers would like? Above and Beyond: radio silenceby William A. Wright

“Based on the life of his father, Wright has written a masterful and introspective history of WWII. ”

 

What’s a book that is important to you? The Modern Christ: A Contemporary Retelling of the Story of Jesusby Dan Hambright“”The Modern Christ” is the ultimate “what if” story. What if Jesus were born in contemporary America?”

Lustron Houses

Our son and his family recently stayed in an airbnb that turned out to be a Lustron home.

The Des Moines area has a sprinkling of them but we’d never been inside one of these prefabricated enameled steel houses before. There was a shortage of homes after WWII so a Chicago industrialist and inventor, Carl Strandlund, came up with the idea of low maintenance houses which would also be very durable.

They set out to construct 15,000 homes in 1947 and 30,000 in 1948. The houses sold for between $8,500 and $10,500.

With enameled steel panels inside and out, as well as steel framing, the homes were usually built on concrete slabs with no basement.  The frame was constructed on-site and the house was assembled piece-by-piece from a special Lustron Corporation delivery truck. The assembly team, who worked for the local Lustron builder-dealer, followed a special manual from Lustron and were supposed to complete a house in 360 man-hours.

Its plant in Columbus, Ohio, a former Curtiss-Wright factory, only built 2,498 Lustron homes from 1948 to 1950 because the company couldn’t pay back start up loans from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

Many of these houses remain in use today. Several have been added to the National Register of Historic Places. The Lustron Houses of Jermain Street Historic District is a notable grouping and historic district in New York state. And some are popular as airbnbs.

A list of Lustron houses.

A closeup look at a Lustron home.