Joy Neal Kidney's Blog, page 9

For the want of a bolt: The forced landing of an airliner in rural Iowa, January 19, 1955

Two young sisters being dropped off the Dexter bus along Old Creamery Road south of Dexter heard the plane sputter, just to the southwest of their rural home. My sister and I watched it descend to the south until we could no longer see or hear it.

Kids being dropped off the Earlham bus on the road a mile east of us watched the same troubled plane.

From where he was working in the barn, Dad (a World War II pilot and instructor) could hear a plane in distress. He headed for the house. Soon we were all bundled up and Dad, along with half the neighborhood, drove toward the area where it went down.

By the time we got there, our bus driver John Herrick had completed his route, the returned to the plane to see if he could help. The 36 passengers and 3 crew were shaken up but okay, so he drove them into Dexter. They gathered in the bank to warm up and to be checked out by Dexter’s doctors Chapler and Osborn, before deciding how to get to their destinations.

The twin engine United Airlines Convair, heading to Omaha from Des Moines, began to have trouble over Madison County. With little control, the pilot crash landed the plane in the Hochstetlers’ field, then slid through fences and across a gravel road, coming to rest in the Lenockers’ field of corn stubble.

How amazing that all 39 people aboard that plane survived. Plane was disassembled, pieces lifted into trucks by crane, and hauled to the Dexter train station. Flatcars carried them to the Convair plant in San Diego for repair. The airliner became a cargo plane, flying another 34 years.

The captain, first officer, and stewardess were given bonuses for the successful handling of the crippled plane. The Lenockers, who served meals to the men who salvaged the plane, were given a set of dishes, which family members still enjoy today. The Hochstetlers got a United Airlines check for $25 for the three fences destroyed by the plane. They still have the uncashed check as a souvenir.

Diorama by Tom Fagen of the downed aircraft in a snowy field of corn stubble.

A chunk of the plane’s propeller is on loan to the Dexter Historical Museum by the Hostetler family. Their son-in-law, Tom Fagen, has made a video of the history of the crash and the plane itself as well as a detailed diorama. The diorama may be seen in the Iowa Aviation Museum at the Greenfield Municipal Airport. 

What caused the plane to crash that winter day? Human error. A Civil Aeronautics Board investigation found that a fastener, or elevator bolt, on the elevator linkage had been removed the night before during a scheduled airframe inspection, but not reinstalled. For the want of a bolt. 

“God meant that we should kneel”

God meant that we should kneel, the short poems begins. Leora Wilson copied this longhand and kept it tucked in her small Grace Before Meals handbook. “Guthrie Center, Iowa, 1950,” she wrote inside the cover.

Kneeling

God meant that we should kneel to do
The things that make life good.
To bathe the baby in the tub,
To polish fragrant wood.

To ight the fire on the hearth,
To tend a flower bed. . .
God didn't make us reach for these,
He made us kneel instead.

- Ella Carolyn Jerauld.

Grace Before Meals: Brief Prayers Arranged For Each Day in the Year compiled by A. William Nyce and Hubert Bunyea, 1938.

Once Upon a Wardrobe, such an enchanting book

College student Megs Devonshire sets out to fulfill her younger brother George’s last wish by uncovering the truth behind his favorite story. What transpires is a fascinating look into the bond between siblings and the life-changing magic of stories.

1950: Margaret Devonshire (Megs) is a seventeen-year-old student of mathematics and physics at Oxford University. When her beloved eight-year-old brother asks Megs if Narnia is real, logical Megs tells him it’s just a book for children, and certainly not true. Homebound due to his illness, and remaining fixated on his favorite books, George presses her to ask the author of the recently released novel The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe a question–“Where did Narnia come from?”

Despite her fear about approaching the famous author, who is a professor at her school, Megs soon finds herself taking tea with C. S. Lewis and his own brother Warnie, begging them for answers.

Rather than directly telling her where Narnia came from, Lewis encourages Megs to form her own conclusion as he shares the little-known stories from his own life that led to his inspiration. As she takes these stories home to George, the little boy travels farther in his imagination than he ever could in real life.

After holding so tightly to logic and reason, her brother’s request leads Megs to absorb a more profound truth: “The way stories change us can’t be explained. It can only be felt. Like love.”

My Thoughts

What a delightfully mesmerizing story within a story, a compelling and enchanting wondering of what was behind C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books. I mulled it over for several days, which every good book should cause. I don’t know why I’ve never run into it before. Granddaughter Kate is reading the Narnia books with her parents these days, so Once Upon a Wardrobe recently went home with them!

The Author

Growing up in Philadelphia as the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, Patti Callahan learned early the value of storytelling. At the age of twelve, her family moved to South Florida where Patti found the sanctuary of libraries and began her slow but steady journey into understanding the power of story to navigate confusing times in life.

Patti attended Auburn University for her undergraduate work, and Georgia State University for her graduate degree. Once a Pediatric Clinical Nurse Specialist, she now writes full time. The mother of three children, she now lives in both Mountain Brook, Alabama and Bluffton, South Carolina with her husband.

Patti Callahan Henry is a New York Times and USA Today best-selling novelist of fifteen novels, including the historical fiction (writing as Patti Callahan) Becoming Mrs. Lewis—The Improbable Love Story of Joy Davidman and C.S. Lewis. In addition, she is the recipient of The Christy Award—A 2019 Winner “Book of the Year.” ; The Harper Lee Distinguished Writer of the Year for 2020 and the Alabama Library Association Book of the Year for 2019, and the RNA UK finalist for Romantic Historical Fiction. Here is her Amazon Author Page.

Applique Butterfly Quilt

The iron bed also came from the attic of the farmhouse my husband grew up in. Wedding photos of Clabe and Leora Wilson are in oval frames on the corner. Grandma Ruby Neal crocheted the red doily under the ginger jar lamp. I made the small pillow, with GRANDMOTHER crocheting on it.

This quilt came from the attic of the house my husband Guy grew up in. His mother couldn’t remember whether her mother made it or her mother-in-law. I have a note that a sister of Guy’s Grandma Rosie Coleman Kidney made these butterfly quilts outlined with black buttonhole stitching, so this may have been made by Grandma Rosie.

Glidden, Iowa. 76″ x 84″

A closeup of the buttonhole stitch around one of the butterflies

Checking Traplines Before School

Delbert (18), Dale (12), and Donald (17) Wilson, January 1934, Dexter, Iowa.The brothers and their dad checked their traplines before school, cleaning their catch after school. Sears catalog accepted pelts in trade for food, clothing, and other goods, which was a godsend in those days when jobs were scarce..Note from Ken Herring, a wildlife biologist: “So those raccoons are put up in the old fashion way ‘open’ vs. the ‘cased’ attests to the era. The skins behind an between the guys on the left side are skunks and on the right side are mink. Many people don’t know this but raccoons were much less common in those days. But nonetheless they have a valuable catch there! I also see some muskrats and opossum.”. Clabe Wilson, father of the Wilson brothers, grew up in Guthrie County south of Panora, around Dale City. He said he grew up in the woods and even had a pet wolf that his sisters were afraid of. He taught his sons to hunt and trap, a little fishing. They mostly ate squirrel and rabbit during the Depression, and a ‘possum or two!.This photo was taken shortly before Delbert and Donald joined the Navy to have enough to eat and a chance to learn a job. Five siblings were still at home.—–Please see also Leora’s Dexter Stories: The Scarcity Years of the Great Depression

Three books simmered in my periphery

I’m in the editing stages for Meadowlark Songs: A Motherline Legacy. The ideas for the way it’s written were planted by three books, starting with Luanne Castle’s Kin Types, which I discovered about 2019.

(Tintypes are an old method of capturing photographs on metal, especially popular around the Civil War. I am the keeper of a few small tintypes of my own kin, and I have a feeling that the portrait on the cover of Luanne’s book began as a tintype.) 

Kin Types

I first “met” Luanne Castle through her genealogy website, The Family Kalamazoo. Soon I discovered her delightful collection of poems and flash prose of family stories, Kin Types, in 2019. It must have planted a seed or two about capturing individuals in glimpses, but I was in the middle of publishing Leora’s Letters.

My review: “The stories of ancestors help keep them alive. Luanne Castle does that regularly on her blog called The Family Kalamazoo, but in this slim volume of 19 poems and flash prose, she captures individuals with a vignette of well-chosen details that give you goosebumps, even a lump in your throat. They are poignant, sharing some harsh scenes as well as how one name is so ubiquitous in her ancestry.

“I especially enjoyed the one about family resemblances in old photographs, and noting the names, dates, and places as her forebears crossed the ocean from The Netherlands and Germany and ended up in Michigan. I also enjoyed finding pictures of some of these on her genealogy blog.

“This delightful chapbook helps keep alive individuals largely forgotten otherwise.”

The Horse Lawyer and Other Poems

When I came upon The Horse Lawyer and Other Poems by Greg Seeley in 2021, I was so taken with it. What a compelling way to preserve and share the soul of three generations of farm families, through the author’s fatherline in free verse! Not only that, but the Seeleys lived on the same nook of Iowa soil over a span of 125 years.

Even then I wrote that Greg’s book made me want to try something akin to it with my own family stories. My brain began gathering ideas for five generations of my motherline.

Grief Songs: Poems of Love & Remembrance

Leora’s Dexter Stories came out in 2021, the same year Elizabeth Gauffreau’s Grief Songs: Poems of Love & Remembrance was published. Liz’s beautiful little book sparked a longing to try something similar, sometime. My review: “These captivating poems, along with winsome photos, is a bittersweet journey through grief over profound losses but also deeply layered family love. The pipe, those saddleshoes, a dress with smocking–what endearing details. A very compelling collection.”

Again I was taken with how details about a person could be conveyed with so few words, powerful glimpses bringing them to life.

Nurturing the Ideas

These three books simmered in my periphery while I worked on Leora’s Early Years and What Leora Never Knew, but once in awhile a free verse about a family story would nudge forward. I’d started notebooks for three other possibilities for the next manuscript, but the motherline idea began to germinate. And their stories wanted to emerge mostly as free verse.

Luanne and Liz are award-winning authors with several published books. Both have offered welcome encouragement for the Leora books these last few years. I’m so thankful they planted seeds, plump with promise, which I tucked away until time to encourage them to bud in the soil of my own motherline stories (which have grown to include seven generations).

Greg Seeley, a retired CPA, has also written family-based historical fiction. Recently he’s been caring for his wife who unfortunately has dementia. Greg graduated from the University of Northern Iowa, which was called the State College of Iowa when Favorite Guy and I studied there. Greg’s verses are set near Afton in southwest Iowa, where his dad was the last generation on the farm.

One endorser of Kin Types called it the “place where literature and history intersect.” My verses will never be called literature, but I hope the way they’re presented will spark ideas for readers to capture stories of their own kin. 

Event Horizon, Book 4 in The Lawman series by William Ablan

Event Horizon

Fairy tales usually end with “They lived happily ever after.” But when murder is involved, “Not everyone lives happily eve rafter.” And the act of murder thrusts Undersheriff Will Diaz and his friends into a manhunt through the rugged San Juan Mountains of Conejos County, Colorado. Trouble is, Will has already lost against a man he thinks of as a brother, yet is committed to bringing to justice.

The Author

William Ablan is in reality Richard L. Muniz. Rich is a former police officer and Military Policeman who served in the Gulf War. Today he works in the Information Technology field, teaches, and lives in Greeley, Colorado, with his wife and family.

My Thoughts

A welcome time off to go deer hunting with friends leads Undersheriff Will Diaz on a manhunt for a murderer. Not only has the hunted man killed a friend, the killer is a long-time friend and “blood brother” of Diaz himself.

There are also some beautiful vistas as the manhunt leads into the mountains of southern Colorado. One scene at night: “Mighty Orion had shouldered his way past the zenith and the ghostly Pleiades shivered in the night. The Moon painted the snow-covered mountains and trees with ice cold light.”

Please have a look at the author’s website and his Amazon Author Page.

Today (December 30) is the last day the first ebook in the series, The Cross and the Badge, is free. You might want to grab a copy!

 

Emilia, pioneer girl, was Born the Day before Iowa became a State

Emilia Moore was born in Indiana December 27, 1846. The next day, Iowa became the 29th State in the Union.

And when Emilia was eight years old, her family loaded two immigrant wagons in Indiana and headed for the state of Iowa, which was as old as Emilia. The Moore family arrived in Guthrie County June 2, 1855.

Emilia grew to womanhood and married David Jordan, who built a log cabin for them, just west of Monteith just a couple of years after President Lincoln had been assassinated.

Monteith became an official town in 1880, when the branch train, affectionately known as the Liza Jane, was completed from the main line of the Rock Island Railroad north to the county seat of Guthrie Center.

Emilia and Davy Jordan were the first of three generations to live in and around Monteith, which never had a population of more than 78 people. The nearby pioneer cemetery is filled with those folks, their kith and kin, and memories of the old days.

This is the house, built in 1882, west of Monteith. David and Emilia Jordan are the first adults on the left. The photo was taken about 1896. The house was still standing in 1967, but is no longer.

You might also enjoy Leora’s Early Years: Guthrie County Roots

Free Kindle Read: The Cross and the Badge by William Ablan

Right about now, someone is saying those immortal words, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

There isn’t you know.

But for five days, starting Christmas Day and going through the 30th if December, and if you have a kindle account, you can read The Cross and the Badge for free. After that, it goes back to its regular price.

It’s, of course, a bit of marketing with hopes that if you like it, you might go out and purchase the other three novels.

So, let’s talk a little about The Cross and the Badge.

If there’s a single line that will describe the book, it’s the phrase, “Home ain’t home anymore.” Often times I’ve spoken of how veterans don’t always feel like they belong in the place they left. It’s a little like they left being a square peg, but they come back a round one. but everyone around them tries to make them fit back into the square hole.

Will Diaz will return from the Gulf War to a place he knows but seems to have changed. He’ll have a new job as a detective with a department he left years before. He’s going to mend fences with old friends, face new threats, and learn to anchor deep into his faith in God as he deals with the past and faces an uncertain future.

Hope you enjoy it, and Merry Christmas.

Click here for the kindle edition.

My thoughts: I’ll review the newest book in the Lawman series, From the case files of Undersheriff Will Diaz (ret.) soon: The Lawman–Event Horizon. This is a stand-alone novel but you’d enjoy it even more if you get acquainted with Will Diaz and his cast of lawmen, friends (childhood, Army days, townspeople, pastor), and family from the earlier books.

Faith and friendship weave through the nitty-gritty of police work. I was caught up in the authenticity and heart of this compelling story from the beginning. Don’t miss this!

Norfolk Island Pine

My dorm room, Lawther Hall, State College of Iowa, Cedar Falls, Iowa, December 1965. Taken by my boyfriend, yes, my Favorite Guy.

You can just barely see it in the lower left of the photo, a Norfolk Island Pine, decorated for Christmas. (Noticing the radiator behind me, I can still hear the pipes clanging in the wall, Lawther Hall, State College of Iowa.)

Grandma Leora’s house was too small for a Christmas tree, so she started decorating a Norfolk Island Pine. It grew so large that it ended up in a corner of her entryway, where she added tinsel and baubles every Christmas.

As a college student, I also decorated a small Norfolk Island Pine. I have a feeling that Mom may have given it to me for just that reason. I haven’t had one for several years, but maybe I need another one. Nah, I’d have to water it and keep it alive. I did not inherit Grandma’s love of gardening, but I sure enjoy it as a fond memory.