Joy Neal Kidney's Blog, page 80

Tribute to Those Who Served to Defend our Freedoms: Latham Hi-Tech Seeds Blog

Leora’s Letters: The Story of Love and Loss for an Iowa Farm Family

Shannon Latham shared one of the nicest posts about the Wilson family story on her blog October 23, 2020.

Miss Grissell Held Office Before it was Legal for Her to Vote–1920

Miss Grissell Held Office Before it was Legal for Her to Vote–1920

“Miss Grissell speaks at Christian church tomorrow at 2-30 — and tells the women how to vote. think I will learn how its done.” 

Those words were written October 19, 1920, in pencil on a postcard by Laura Goff of Guthrie Center to her daughter, Mrs. Clabe Wilson.

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My great grandmother, Laura Goff, was probably the first woman in my motherline to vote in a presidential election.

Just who was Miss Grisell? An aggressive suffragette? She had been a Guthrie Center primary school teacher and, in 1909 was secretary of the State Teachers Association.

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But by 1920, Blanche A. Grisell had become the Guthrie County Recorder. Even though she’d run for office and been elected, this would be her first time to vote in an election, and a presidential one at that. 

This was the first election after the Great War, and the first after ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, granting women the right to vote. At 2:30 on that October 20 afternoon she gave a talk about voting to a meeting of the WCTU (Women’s Christian Temperance Union) at the Christian Church in Guthrie. 

Republican Warren G. Harding won the presidency in a landslide victory.

I don’t know whether Laura Goff voted Democrat or Republican. Her oldest daughter Leora Wilson was a staunch Democrat, but a granddaughter was a poll watcher for decades as a Republican. I wonder what they’d think of this fence-sitter, unenthusiastic about either political party.

When I voted for the first time, I’d done my homework and was sure I’d chosen the best man. That led to disappointment and disillusionment by politics. Maybe I’d already become apolitical from tuning out Grandma Leora’s brothers, who’d argue politics every time they visited her at her home in Guthrie Center. 

The granddaughters and great granddaughters of Laura Goff honored her in 1995 with a commemorative brick in the Plaza of Heroines, a fund-raiser for the renovation of ISU’s Botany Hall. It was renamed Carrie Chapman Catt Hall. 

[image error]Darlene (Wilson) Scar and Doris (Wilson) Neal at the Carrie Chapman Catt Hall and Plaza of Heroines dedication at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, October 6, 1995.

Carrie Chapman Catt, a suffragette, was valedictorian and the only female graduate of Iowa State’s Class of 1880, she became President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, founded the League of Women Voters, and worked for both the League of Nations and the United Nations.

According to a 1995 editorial in The Des Moines Register, the Plaza of Heroines at ISU is made up of “2,500 bricks engraved with the names of women whose lives touched the world–and whose votes counted.”

Since becoming old enough to vote, I’ve cast a ballot in every presidential election. My ability to do that began with Great Grandmother Laura Goff’s generation given the legal right to vote in 1920. 

That was the first election in which the votes of American women counted. 

Published by The Des Moines Register October 16, 2020.

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Our American Stories, Part 3

Our American Stories is a refreshing alternative to the media’s daily dose of negativity.

We’re to think on things that are true, honorable, commendable, and worthy of praise. Our American Stories has a whole smorgasbord of them archived on their website, and a feast of new stories being aired on radio stations every week.

If God is part of those stories, He is included. Some stories are serious, some are redemption stories, some are just plain fun, like the master chef who told about when he lost a turkey.

Some I didn’t expect to be interested in, but so many times it’s the back story that’s precious and compelling, like Bill Withers and his song “Grandma’s Hands.”

I’ve enjoyed being able to share some of my tales through Our American Stories. Someone told me they like listening to my “grandmotherly voice.”

Why the American Flag Means So Much to My Family is an 8-minute listen.

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I like what young producer Montie Montgomery did with the background to this 8-minute story about our Old Upright Piano:

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Hmm, I don’t remember okaying boots in the house!

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Clabe Wilson: His Last Autumn

Hospital News, September 13, 1946, The Perry Daily Chief: “Clabe Wilson has been admitted to the Kings Daughters Hospital as a medical patient.”

Clabe fell when he got out of bed. Stroke.

When he asked for a drink of water at the hospital, a nurse set the glass on a table, but he was unable to reach it. When Leora learned this, she asked if she could stay to help him. They were glad for the offer and put a cot in the room for her. She took over Clabe’s nursing.

When he was discharged twelve days later, the Wilsons rented a hospital bed to use at home. Son Delbert, who’d moved home with his family after Junior was killed, mixed up eggnogs for his father. They had to be patient to feed him, though, as he needed time to concentrate on each swallow.

Doris, with her toddler and baby, visited her folks October 4. Joy talked to her grandpa in the tall bed. Clabe’s eyes had lost their glassy look, and he was improving.

The next day Delbert phoned Doris. Their dad had died.

[image error] One of last photos of Clabe Wilson, taken on Mother’s Day 1946, Omaha, Nebraska.

Obituary, October 10, 1946, The Perry Daily Chief:

Funeral Services Held Yesterday for Mr. Wilson

Funeral services for Claiborne (Clabe) D. Wilson, local farmer who died last Saturday, were held at 2:30 p.m. yesterday at the Workman Funeral Home.

The Rev. Lyle V. Newman of the First Christian church officiated and burial was in Violet Hill cemetery.

Mr. Wilson, son of the late Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Wilson, was burn Jan. 7, 1888 near Coon Rapids in Carroll County.

During his lifetime he farmed in various localities, including Guthrie Center, Dexter, and Minburn. He had moved to his present home about two years ago.

On Feb. 15, 1914 he was married to Leora Goff, who survives. Also living are two dons, Delbert G. of Perry and Donald W., who is in the navy; two daughters, Mrs. Warren D. Neal of Redfield [mailing address] and Mrs. Alvin C. Scar of Earlham; a half-brother, Fred Davis of Des Moines; three sisters, Mrs. Alice McLuen of Stuart, Mrs. Fonnie Kiggens of Boston, Mass., and Mrs. Verna Parrott of Des Moines, and several nieces and nephews.

Preceding him in death were three sons, all casualties of the recent world war. They were Dale R., Daniel S., and Claiborne Junior. 

One of the bouquets of flowers sent to the funeral had a card that read, “Down the Road.” It wasn’t until several days later that Doris figured it out. The flowers had to be from “Don and Rose.”

It hadn’t been quite five years since Doris had heard the foreboding announcement of the attack on Pearl, while serving Sunday dinner in a Perry restaurant. The devastating events since then seemed to outweigh the exhilarating ones. Doris tired to keep dark thoughts buried while she cared for her family out in the country. She wasn’t always successful. From the house on the hill, she could see pastures. Fields of drying corn. The song of a meadowlark rippled across the barnyard. Her brother Danny’s favorite bird. Its song was at once hopeful. . . and haunting.

 

Leaves on the Porch (poem)

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Leaves on the Porch

 

Strewn on the porch

their good morning

a winsome welcome

 

I should sweep them away

but I like them there

right where they skittered

 

Crisp and dry

brown and russet

Nature’s blessing

Seedcorn Caps

Seedcorn Caps

Twenty-nine farmers helped harvest Dad’s soybeans three months after his death in 1980. Forty years ago. Ten women brought food and helped in the kitchen. Three also sent food. 

Back then, men didn’t wear their caps indoors, not even in a cafe.

When I was a girl on the farm, Dad and Uncle Bill wore engineer-type caps, striped like their Big Smith overalls. More modern farmers began to wear seedcorn caps, and jeans instead of bibs. 

With shirtsleeves rolled to his elbow, Dad wore overalls because there were handy compartments in the bib for his pocketwatch and a DeKalb bullet pencil, but before long he was wearing seedcorn caps, like the rest. 

 

When my son was small he didn’t like wearing a cap, even when the Cubmaster encouraged it, not even when other suburban Cub Scouts wore them, announcing whether they were Wolves or Bears or Webelos.

No, Dan waited until high school. He began by wearing his cap backwards. He wore it everywhere, except in the shower and when he slept. It announced even from a distance that there was a high schooler.

Back in the day, it wasn’t polite to wear a cap indoors. But with regular packs of tall, enthusiastic cap-wearing boys invading the house to plunder the refrigerator, well a mother was reluctant to enforce an unwritten rule about headgear. 

Well, okay, it’s a temporary thing, sort of a high school ritual. He’ll outgrow it.

Not exactly.

When Dan left for college, everyone wore them there too. The only difference was that the college kids wore theirs with the bills forward. 

I asked why college kids wore caps, since they’d likely be mistaken for highschoolers.

“Bad hair days.”

“Boys have bad hair days?”

“Only on days they don’t have time to shower before class.”

Ugh.

When he was home for a weekend, my only firm request was that he not wear the cap at the table when his grandma was there for  dinner. “She’d consider it disrespectful.”

“What’s it got to do with respect? Mom, it’s only a cap.”

Well, he arrived at the dinner table capless, and other social graces also seemed to come back to him.

His senior year, the upperclassmen began leaving their heads uncapped. Maybe they’d heard the rumor that regular cap-wearing can cause early baldness. Maybe they were just leaving a fad behind. Or perhaps they were getting serious about job hunting.

 

The fall after Dad died, those twenty-nine seedcorn-cap-wearing farmers gathered to harvest his crops. Uncles Bill, John, and Sam, several cousins. Neighbors Larree, Walter, Fred. Lee, Dwayne, Kenneth, Robert, Dale, Steve, Orville, Carroll, Richard. 

My sister Gloria and I were at Mom’s farmhouse early to help her get ready, to do one of our childhood chores when having “men for dinner” of making sure the sink in the utility room was clean, that there were plenty of towels. There was plenty of help in the kitchen to stir the gravy, mash the potatoes, slice the desserts.

As the men parked pickups in the farmyard and sauntered toward the garage, Gloria and I went out to thank them and to direct them through the garage to wash up. Men in overalls and jeans took off their caps, giving us a nod and maybe a comment about Dad.

After they’d all gone in, there was Mom’s car, dotted with dusty caps–red, green, brown, navy. They rested on the trunk and the roof.

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Gloria and I looked at each other. For several minutes we couldn’t talk, sniffling and wiping tears.

She slipped out later to take a picture of those caps politely parked there, symbolizing the caring of country neighbors. 

Danny Wilson: US Military Cemetery, St. Avold, France

POSITIVE IDENTIFICATION

On September 9, 1946, at St. Avold, France, at 3:00, in the afternoon, Lt. Daniel S. Wilson, formerly Unknown X-7341, was reburied between Unknown X-7330 and Unknown X-7318. Chaplain H.M. Trebaol conducted the service.

[image error]St. Avold U.S. Military Cemetery, France. A-60927 A.C. War Theatre #12 (France) – CEMETERIES. 10×10 print rec’d 18 October 1946 from The American Battle Monuments Commission, Washington D.C. Copied 18 ct 1946. Released, 22 Oct 1946, JIA.

One copy of WD AMC Form 1042 – Report of Interment – place in burial bottle and buried with remains.

Danny Wilson’s parents never learned any of these details.

The book Crosses in the Wind tells the poignant story of the men who were part of the Graves Registration Teams, including their very thorough training before following American soldiers into battle.

Official letters asked whether Mr. and Mrs. Wilson would like their son Daniel’s remains to be brought back to Iowa, or whether they’d prefer their son would be buried “near where he fell,” in an American cemetery in Europe. Leora decided the family just could not go through another funeral, so she signed the papers, and had them notarized, for him to be buried overseas.

Not Just Yet (poem)

Not Just Yet

Everyone expected
her to move to town.
Mom was in her eighties,
walked with a cane
and a new hip. She said
she guessed she’d better
begin sorting and thinking
about moving to town.


But that October,
by herself, she planted
a bed of red tulips.
A hundred of them.


(early 2000s)

Danny Wilson: Compelling Documents about His Identification

It had been over a year since the end of the war, and at least eight months since Clabe and Leora Wilson had been notified that their son Dan’s grave had been located in Austria.

More information that the Wilson family never learned about, until my request for Daniel S. Wilson’s 293 (Casualty) File:

August 22, 1946, a “Report of Investigation Areas Search” form was completed for “Unknown X-7341.” This unknown was believed to be Daniel Wilson, but because his identification tags where not with the body, positive identification could not be made. Chief of Police Franz Mueller and Bergermeister Hermann were interviewed for the report.

Unknown X-7341 was also disinterred that day from the Schwanberg cemetery, to be reburied in the new U.S. Military Cemetery at St. Avold, France.’ By September 9, Unknown X-7341 had been positively identified as Daniel S. Wilson by the following facts:

The laundry mark on the clothing of X-7341 agreed with the initial and last four digits of Lt. Wilson’s military number. [W-0058]
The date and place of death of X-7341 agreed with the Missing Air Craft Report for plane 44-24123 of which Lt. Wilson was the sole occupant.
German Dulag record KSU 2882 indicated that Lt. Wilson was buried in the civilian cemetery from which X-7341 was disinterred.
The cross over the grave from which X-7341 was disinterred was marked “Daniel S. Wilson” and the date of death.
A statement by a civilian that the identification tags for Lt. Wilson were present, enabling the marking of the cross.
Lt. Wilson was the only American buried in the civilian cemetery from which X-7341 was disinterred.

—–

SCHWANBERG, AUSTRIA

On the 18 [sic] Feb 1944 an American fighter plane of the LOCKHEED P 38 type was flying low over the small town of SCHWANBERG. While four other planes of the same type flew hundreds of feet above. It is not know wether [sic] the air ship was damaged or not. The plane was loosing [sic] altitude untill [sic] it was flying at tree top level. when the wing caught in a tree and tore off, then hit a telephone pole, slid and caught fire. The German soldiers who were in the vicinity came to the scene of crash. They removed the body from the plane. It is unknown whether personal effects were found by the German soldiers as they turned nothing more than name, rand and serial number which they told the police. They took off the identification tags of the deceased. The deceased was buried in the community cemetery. A casket of wood was furnished by the community. The burial was reported by the Burgermeister in routine searching operations.

(signed) Pfc Peter P. SIGHT 46050319

On September 9, 1946, at St. Avold, France, at 3:00, in the afternoon, Lt. Daniel S. Wilson was reburied between Unkown X-7330 and Unknown X-7318. Chaplain H.M. Trebaol conducted the service.

[image error]St. Avold U.S. Military Cemetery, France. A-60927 A.C. War Theatre #12 (France) – CEMETERIES. 10×10 print rec’d 18 October 1946 from The American Battle Monuments Commission, Washington D.C. Copied 18 ct 1946. Released, 22 Oct 1946, JIA.

I was heartened by the care that went into the identification of this one casualty of the war, to make sure the remains they buried were indeed those of Daniel S. Wilson.

 

Dad’s Six Rules: Guest Post by Lee Warren

Dad’s Six Rules by Lee Warren

My dad has been gone for twenty years now. I still find that hard to believe. But quite often, I find myself thinking about the six rules he seemed to live by.

After I consulted with my siblings, I wasn’t at all surprised to hear that we’d heard him say the same things, even though we didn’t necessarily grow up in the same household (my dad married twice and had two children in each marriage).

Here are his six rules, in no particular order:

1. There are two types of people in the world – givers and takers; be a giver.

He had a theory that you only needed to sit in a room with someone five minutes to determine which type of person he or she is. Dad didn’t have much tolerance for takers. I don’t think he avoided them as much as he kept an eye on them.

2. Never pass a red kettle.

Continuing with the theme of giving, after seeing how one of my nieces, who has cerebral palsy in her lower extremities, benefited from the work of a couple of charitable organizations many years ago, I told my dad it made me even more aware of the needs of charities and it made me want to do more for them.

“Never pass up the opportunity to drop something into a red kettle,” he said, referring to the Salvation Army’s red kettle at Christmastime. But I knew he was talking about more than just the Salvation Army.

3. If somebody asks you for something, give it to him or her if you can.

Sounds amazingly consistent with what Proverbs 3:27 says: “Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to do it.”

“And he abided by that rule,” one of my sisters told me. “Almost every time I asked for something (a new piece of clothing, a few bucks, to go out for dinner, to spend the night with a friend, a toy or some candy at the store) his answer was ‘I don’t see why not’ and he made it happen.”

He once pulled three hundred dollars out of his pocket to offer to buy me a laptop at a computer trade show when I was beginning to express an interest in writing. I knew it was all the money he had in the world. The laptop wasn’t worth it, so we didn’t buy it, but I never forgot that.

4. Keep spare change in your pocket so you can make a phone call if you need to and a dollar in your glove compartment so you can buy gas if you run out.

The specifics are dated, but the sentiment is timeless. Always try to keep a little in reserve, just in case.

5. The system is fine – it’s the people who run it who are broken.

Underneath Dad’s compassion was a healthy suspicion of people who seemed to operate with little or no regard for others.

6. Take a lot of photos. The older you get, the more important they will become to you.

In 1998, I had an instant camera. The film cost nearly a dollar per photo. As my family gathered at one of my sister’s houses that year, I shot a few photos and then ran out of film. I didn’t plan to shoot more that day because of the cost. Dad handed me a ten dollar bill and said, “Go get more film. You can never shoot too many photos – especially in a situation like this.”

He was right. Boy, was he right.

Link to original article.

Lee Warren’s website