The Life of Della Jacobs - Part 3f, Bert Frank

When Prohibition was enacted in 1919 it did not stop Bert Frank from drinking, it only redirected the way he went about it. He made his own corn whiskey, and as he produced more then he could consume, he naturally fell into the entrepreneurial spirit of the country and began marketing it.

He set up his still in the basement of their house in Hooven. He made five or six batches a month and that produced three gallons of White Lightening. Mom didn't remember much about the still or its operation, but recalled he used lightening rods off barns for something. One time he got drunk and went to sleep so Mom’s brother Charlie finished distilling the whiskey. Grandma (below) delivered quart bottles of the stuff to a dentist or doctor in Cincinnati. She took the train and was usually accompanied by a neighbor lady.
The drinking got worse, his mental state steadily deteriorated. The violent spells became more frequent, and the family lived in constant fear. Mom said she came to hate him. He beat Grandma, sometimes brutally, and one time he made the three kids sit in chairs while he sharpened his straight razor. He was drunk, and repeatedly threatened to cut their throats, one by one. Mom remembered being so frightened that her mouth went dry. She sat there afraid to move, afraid to draw attention to herself. All she could think about was how thirsty and scared she was.

The family moved to Connersville, Indiana in July 1922. Bert got a good job as the fireman at the electric plant. He worked there for a couple of years and quit. He mostly roamed around, and Mom didn't think he had any kind of a permanent job after that. She knew that Grandma didn’t get any support as she had to take in boarders and do laundry to make ends meet.

His mental condition kept getting worse, eventually degenerating to the point where he won't eat anything Grandma cooked. On one occasion he tore up most of the furniture in the house. The most violent episode occurred in 1924. He threw the dinner out into the yard and beat Grandma and his oldest son, Charlie. Later he woke thinking he had killed Grandma.

Mom’s half-brother, Art Lancaster, got the family back together. The following Sunday while the rest were at the grocery, Art confronted Grandpa about his drinking. Bert threw an iron at him. It bounced off the wall and stuck in the floor. Art hit him over the head with a glass bowl. They wrestled to the floor and Art ended on top and choked Pop into submission. Grandpa laid on a cot in the basement for a day or two and then his son, Joe, drove him to his brother’s home in Whitewater, OH. The family didn't see much of him after that.

He may have come back to Connersville one more time. One night during an electrical storm with lots of lightening and thunder, they a saw man that resembled my Grandfather standing on the street corner. He stood there in the rain a long time looking at the house, and finally moved on. Pieces of news came their way. Someone said he was hanging out at rough beer joints along the Ohio River, places called “Speak Easies” during Prohibition.

He probably drank anything with alcohol in it, and eventually got hold of some bad stuff. A popular drink during Prohibition was made from an extract of Jamaica Ginger. In the U.S. the concoction was called “Jake”. Some bootleggers laced it with a substance meant to fool import regulators at the Treasury Department. The additive was thought to be harmless, but many unlucky consumers discovered it to be toxic. It caused a paralysis known as "Jake Leg", a condition in which the afflicted walked with a odd gait in which the toe touched the ground before the heel. He never recovered. Bert Frank died at the University of Cincinnati Hospital on June 24, 1935. He was 54 years old.
GO TO: Part 4a, The Move to Kokomo, Indiana

TheThe Life of Della Jacobs - Part 3e, Bert Frank

"If you go off with him you'll get drunk, spend all your money, and miss the train", she said.

"No, no!", he said, "I'll be back in plenty of time." And he ambled out of the station and down the street.

Grandma had the tickets, and she stayed at the station with Mom, Charlie and Joe. Time passed, the train pulled in, but Grandpa was no were in sight. They waited as long as they could before boarding the car nearest the engine. Charlie and Joe sat in the end seat with their backs to the wall. They could see all the way down the aisle to the far end. Grandma and Mom sat facing them. She was on the aisle with Mom next to the window.

The whistle blew, steam hissed and the train signaled its intent. Grandpa Bert was late. Then the door at the far end opened and the boys saw him come through. He weaved a tortuous path down the aisle with the Conductor right behind. He was leading a search for Grandma and the ticket she held, and had lead the conductor forward, car by car, from the other end of the train. He was drunk, of course, and the swaying car hindered his forward progress. Just as he came even with them the car lurched and he lose balance falling forward. He bounced off Grandma and sprawled at her feet. He got up and apologized to the woman he did not recognize, but she didn't say a word and the kids made great efforts to maintain a proper decorum. The conductor had enough of this drunk who claimed to have a family on board, and hustled him off the train.

Grandma loved to tell that story, and she always finished it with the statement that people would ask her why she didn't tell the conductor that the man was her husband. She would say, "Well, he didn't recognize me, so why should I recognize him". They continued on to Catawba and were met at the station by Grandma's nephew Ray Jacobs. Grandpa was there on the platform too. His clothes were rumpled and dusty, but that was understandable for he had ridden the "rods" all the way from Covington.

“Riding the Rods” is the least comfortable and most dangerous ways to hobo. The "rods" of the old railroad cars were two long metal rods each running diagonally, from corner to corner, beneath the car. They were below the floor and formed an "X" where they crossed in the middle. There was room at that point for my granddad to lay straddled across with his body conforming to the "X". A rider held on for dear life as the ground passed by at a blur a couple feet below. It was windy, dusty, and could be mighty cold, but it was a free ride.

Pop had a job as a Fireman at the H.S. & I. Steel Mill in Hooven in 1920 His younger brother Bernard Frank worked there as a laborer. Bernard and his new bride, Beatrice (below), lived just down the street.
The steel mill manufactured iron ingots, and one fell on Grandpa’s foot. He hobbled around shoeless for several days, fussing incessantly, and finally escaping into drink. He got half-looped and decided it was time for a bath. The man had many faults but lack of hygiene was not among them. He took regular baths during an era when many insisted the act to be an unhealthy practice.

The family kept the tub in the shed out in the back yard. Bert limped outside to get it but found two smaller tubs stuck inside. He wrestled with the balky objects for some minutes but could not break them loose. Grandma and the three kids were watching the spectacle from the back kitchen window and witnessed Grandpa throw the tubs to the ground and haul off and kick them...with his sore foot. Considerable hollering and cussing resulted from this unfortunate oversight. Grandpa danced a comical one footed two-step while cradling his crippled paw in both hands.

It was not easy to have sympathy with a man who so often terrorized them. But they dared not laugh; it was too dangerous. All four were snickering and Grandma kept saying, "Don't laugh, don't laugh", so they scattered to different parts of the house with hands clamped across their mouths. Mom dove into a closet and burrowed under a stack of clothes to muffle her eruptions. She thought the boys ran out the front door, but didn‘t recall where Grandma hid.
GO TO: Part 3f, Bert Frank

The Life of Della Jacobs - Part 3d, Bert Frank

Grandfather Bert worked for the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, commonly known as the L&N. One job he had was as a fireman - that's the guy who fuels the engine's furnace - with wood in early days; with coal by the turn of the century. I don't thing he was the one to actually shovel the coal - he gave the order. The furnace heated the boiler that produced the steam power to move the train. It was an important job. The heat in the firebox was controlled by the fireman and that in turn was a critical factor in maintaining the boiler pressure.

In later years Grandpa worked as a "Walking Boss" or "Straw Boss" on railroad construction projects. It was his job as an overseer to keep the crew working. Most of the crew were black men. Mom said he was not supposed to do physical labor, but was unable to stand by without taking a hand, and often joined in anyway. He was a good worker and he had good jobs and made good money but it was too often wasted on booze and the family was often in want.

Bert Frank’s life spanned the period when railroads were in the forefront of National events. His parents house was next to the tracks; he grew up with trains, traveled, worked and lived on them. The L&N ranged far into the south, and one of his jobs involved the double tracking of the line coming north out of Alabama. There was a lot of mining through that area and the lines were being improved to support that industry. Again, most of the labor crew were blacks, and Grandma said it was a shame the way the railroad treated them. She said that many lay buried in unmarked graves alongside the tracks .

The family lived in railroad cars for several years. The white employees were assigned passenger cars parked on side tracks, while the blacks were relegated to box cars that had a few small windows. Preparation for moving was simple; the stove pipe was taken down and the stairs brought up. Mom was born in one of those railroad cars. She remembers Grandma telling her that Grandpa carried her to the stove and she cooked breakfast for the family right after she was born.

Companies crisscrossed the continent laying thousands of miles of track. Most of this building commenced after the Civil War and continued into the Twentieth Century. The railroads reached their peak in the 1930’s and then started to decline. It was a boom time and many men got rich, but it was also tumultuous with much poverty and hardship. Grandpa Bert quit working for the L&N in 1917 when the family moved to Hooven, OH, but that did not stop his romance with trains.

The town of Hooven, sits in the southwest corner of Ohio, just thirty miles from Cincinnati. Catawba was across the Ohio River, about the same distance south of Cincinnati. The family went by rail on visits home. Roads in those days were rough and tiresome, and trains more convenient. On one of their trips the train stopped in Covington, Kentucky, with a layover of several hours before they could transfer to another train. The family got off, and had lunch near the station, but Grandpa got fidgety after a while and decided to look up his cousin Buddy Austin. Buddy was one of his old carousing friends from the past so Grandma was anxious as to the likely outcome should the two get together.
GO TO: Part 3e, Bert Rides the Rails

The Life of Della Jacobs - Part 3c, Bert Frank

For all his short coming Grandma’s brother Bud loved kids. He had a blacksmith shop in Catawba and Mom used to hang around playing in the shop. She was Bud's welcome guest nearly everyday and ate many meals with him and Aunt Minnie. It seems that Uncle “Bud” and Aunt Minnie were the ones to raise Mom’s older brother Art.
I ask Mom about her earliest memory, and she recalled standing on the bridge next to Uncle Bud. The bridge spanned the train tracks not far from his shop. She said, “Uncle Bud stood beside me firing a rifle at the train that was passing under the bridge. Some years later she ask Grandma why he was doing that. Grandma was surprised to find that she had been on the bridge that day, and said Bud was really aiming at Uncle Bernard Frank (below, b.1894), Pop’s younger brother. The train was heading north toward Cincinnati, but I don't believe its direction mattered much to Great Uncle Bernard as it was a convenient and timely means of leaving the vicinity.”
Bud developed the idea that Uncle Bernard was playing around with his wife Minnie. They socialized, playing cards, and people began talking. Mom’s brother, my Uncle Charlie, said that he once caught Uncle Bernard and Aunt Minnie in a compromising position and reckoned Uncle Bud had some justification for his suspicions.

Mom said that her Uncle Taul Jacobs, born in 1865, was by contrast, an even tempered fellow who built and repaired covered bridges in the surrounding counties. Sometime about when Grandma Julia Bailey Jacobs died in 1912 the two brothers ceased speaking - She never knew the reason. The only time they called a truce to their silence was when Mom stuck her fingers in the washing machine gears.

It was a cool day so Grandma had sat her on top the washer, thinking she’d be warmer. Mom promptly reached for the wrong thing and her finger tips slipped into the gears and were mashed and badly cut. Uncle Taul was right close but he and Grandma were not able to stop the bleeding. Taul knew that Uncle Bud had powdered resin at the shop that would stop it. They took Mom to Bud's and the brothers worked on her fingers until the emergency was over. They then reverted to shunning each other.

Mom’s Uncle Bud was the only one of his large family to operate an automobiles. None of his siblings drove. Uncle Taul tried once. His only attempt was in a neighbor’s fenced field but he gave it up after removing a good portion of the fence. Ironically Uncle Taul died in an auto accident in 1925. His son was driving in near-by Falmouth when the car was hit by a train at the main crossing. Uncle Bud was shot and killed by his son-in-law in 1957 - his end did not greatly surprise some people.
GO TO: Part 3d, Bert Frank

The Life of Della Jacobs - Part 3b, Bert Frank

Grandma married Bert Frank in 1905. He worked for the L&N Railroad as a fireman, and they were often on the move. My Uncle Charles was born in Versailles in 1907: Uncle Joe followed in 1909. He was born in Catawba, and Mom was born in Paris in 1913. Versailles and Paris makes it sound as if they were world travelers, but the towns were actually small villages in eastern Kentucky.


My Grandfather Bert had one of his spells just after Uncle Joe was born. He had been drinking and was in a surly mood. Grandma Della overheard him mumble something about he'd "fix the sons-o-bitches this time". She asked him what he meant by that. He told her that he had placed dynamite in his sister Dora's (Mom called her Aunt Dode) house and was going to blow it up at midnight. He stumbled into bed and passed out shortly thereafter.
Dora (photo above) was married to Grandma's older brother Taul - a case of two siblings of one family (Grandma and Taul) married to two (Bert and Dora) of another. Mom said this was not uncommon as folks were less mobile due to the rough roads and slow horse travel. Many people spent their lives within a few miles of home. They often married neighbors; ones they had known all their lives, playmates of their youth.

Bert’s weird behavior was well known and his threats were not taken lightly. Grandma got up soon after he was asleep. She was afraid baby Joe might wake and start crying so she wrapped him in a blanket, and quietly carried him out of the house. Aunt Dora’s place was only a short distance. Dora’s general store and post office, a popular hangout for the locals, sat behind the house. A flower garden and raspberry patch lay between the two.

Dora, a light sleeper, woke at Grandma’s whisper. The two quietly searched the building and found a large cache of dynamite. Grandpa Bert had placed enough to vaporize the house. They put the sticks in gunny sacks, and dragged them a quarter-mile to the Licking River. Grandma managed to return to bed without waking Bert who got up shortly thereafter. He went out but soon returned. She said he had a quizzical look on his face, but returned to bed without saying anything.

Neither Grandma nor Aunt Dora said anything about the incident to their husbands. Aunt Dora feared that Taul would shoot my Grandpa if he ever found out. She said she could not bear the idea of her brother being murdered by her husband, and Grandma didn't want her husband murdered by her brother.

Times were rough and so were the people. Few had any education; many could neither read nor write; sophistication was as foreign as Easterners. This is not to say that people were dumb or lacked common sense, but a crude ignorance prevailed. Differences were often settled with a gun, and sometimes that did not take much provocation.

My Granduncle Clarence (Bud) Jacobs, one of Grandma’s older brothers (born in 1878) shot Grandpa Bert. I'm not certain as to when this happened but it was sometime after my Grandparents got together, but before Mom was born in 1913. My Uncle Charlie didn't recall anything about the episode but Mom remembered Grandma telling her about it when she was a young women. The incident took place at a tavern that was run out of the basement of some neighbor women's house. Several men were sitting outside, Grandpa being among them, and Granduncle Bud was above on the hill (this house was also built into the bank next to the railroad tracks). Uncle Bud was kicking gravel over the edge onto them, and after a while Grandpa Bert said something about the "SOB" and the next thing anyone knew Bud had come down and shot him in the stomach. Grandma said he, "swelled up like a poisoned pup", and the doctor said he would have died if the bullet had been "a paper thin distance to one side".

Grandma often described Uncle Bud as being cantankerous, quick tempered and caustic - a natural at making enemies. My Uncle Charlie remembered him shooting at blacks when they got off freight trains to relieve themselves. He don't know if Bud was really aiming at them or just trying to scare them, but it certainly wasn't very thoughtful disturbing people while they were conducting their private affairs. Blacks were treated like that in those days as many people thought of them as less than human. They were considered to be fair game for such torment - sometimes it was far worse.
GO TO: Part 3c, Bert Frank

The Life of Calla Della Jacobs - Part 3a, Grandfather Albert Frank

My grandfather's name was Louis Albert Frank. I never met the man, but my mother described him as fastidious, an immaculate dresser who wore neatly tailored suits, Stetson hats and Douglas shoes - two quality clothing brands of 1900.

She said he held his lithe frame ramrod straight giving many people the impression that he was taller than his five feet nine inches. His slim body was crammed full of nervous energy. He was always on the move. Most called him Bert; Mom referred to him as “Pop“. He played the guitar, sang railroad songs, and could be charming. But the man was an enigma. Bert was literate and capable, possessing qualities we associate with success. “Pop” repeatedly displayed traits of an unprincipled scoundrel.

He had “Spells”. That’s what Mom called them. He was mean when they occurred, often beating my grandmother and terrorizing Mom and her two older brothers. The “spells”, usually associated with booze, came without warning; one moment he would be light and jovial, the next, dark and sinister. His erratic actions set the family on an emotional edge. His children grew up fearing him.

When Bert was about twenty he started hoboing. A hobo was an itinerate laborer, usually a male, who often hitched rides on trains. The term became popular in the late 1800’s when many were riding trains, but not all were paying - they were hoboes. Most of the time he traveled with his cousin Buddy Austin, or a friend named Howard Boner. On several occasions Bert jumped trains to Texas, worked the fields at harvest time, and moved north as the crops matured.

The railroads considered hoboes to have reached infestation levels by the turn of the century, and hired private security agents to keep them off the trains. The hoboes called them “Bulls”. One of them cornered Bert and his friend, Howard as they got off a train in Texas. The “Bull” carried a heavy railroad lantern that he used as a weapon, swinging it at their heads, and sending them to the hospital. Howard was a member of a family that could afford to have a silver plate placed in his skull. Pop didn’t receive special treatment, and folks wondered if the beating had anything to do with his crazy "spells".

Bert was born in Pendleton County, Kentucky in 1881. He was the middle of five children, three brothers and an sister second in line. His father, a French-Canadian named George Albert Frank, came into the county in about 1870. Family tradition held that George Albert was born in Strasbourg, France in 1849, immigrated to Canada with his family in 1855, and drifted south when he was a young man.

Mom possessed only a vague memory of him. Her old brother, my Uncle Charlie, said he had a full white beard, and wore a narrow brimmed hat that had a deep furrow lengthwise on top. He ran the Licking River ferry in Catawba. Mom claimed he spoke and wrote five languages, but she couldn't say which ones they were. She remembered him as brooding - a silent man with little to say. In those days children did not speak unless spoken to, and I expect Grandfather Frank had little to say, especially to a five year old girl.

Bert’s' mother, Mary I. Austin, was a local woman. Mom didn't remember much about her but Uncle Charlie said she was, “a mean old woman", and he never liked her. Her father, Henry Austin, born in about 1810, wandered into Kentucky in the 1830’s from Virginia. He appeared in the 1840 US Census as living in Fayette County, and was married to a Kentucky woman, Louisa Blanderham. By 1850 they had moved to Harrison county where Mary I. was born. The family had settled in Pendleton County by 1860.

Most people lived on farms, few had more than a couple years education. Grandma attended through the 3rd grade. There were probably no books other than the Bible in her home, and the family couldn’t afford them anyway. One didn't need much education to do farm work, and there were no electric lights to make it easier to read or study, or do much of anything after dark. It was a different type of life, simpler, but neither easier nor more difficult than now.
GO TO: Part 3b, Grandfather Bert Frank

The Life of Calla Della (Lancaster, Frank) Jacobs - Part 2, Grandma’s first husband - John P. Lancaster

Grandma Della married John P. Lancaster (above) around 1902. John, also born in May of 1883, was nearly the same age as his young wife. They were both born and raised in the Catawba area so its likely they grew up knowing each other, maybe they were longtime sweethearts. That would be speculation as nothing about their marriage has yet been found, not even their marriage date.
I know more about his parents than I do of him. John N. Lancaster, his father, was born in Kentucky in 1840 and was living in Pendleton County by the time he was ten years old. He was still at home in 1860, but joined the Union Army in October of 1861, served in Company A, Kentucky 18th Infantry Regiment throughout the war. John N. was discharged in July 1865, and returned to Pendleton County to marry the widow Elizabeth Morgan Bowling shortly thereafter. I don’t know whether Elizabeth’s first husband, William Bowling, died in the war, but he was born in Virginia, and might have served for the Confederates in a Kentucky Mounted Infantry company.

John N married Elizabeth in 1866 or 1867 and raised her three young children. Elizabeth had twelve children to reach adulthood. Nine of them were with John N. Lancaster. John P. was next to the youngest. He appeared only in the 1900 US Census, and was living with his parents and younger brother Arthur.1903 must have been a terrible year for Grandma. Her brother Ben (above) came down with a mysterious illness. He was closest to her, both in age and companionship. Grandma nursed him, even though she was pregnant, but there was nothing to be done. He lay in bed with a fever for several months before he died. His parents buried him in their backyard in Catawba. Shortly after that Grandma had her baby, Mom’s half-brother Arthur. Her husband died just before or just after the birth, and she was left a widow with a young child to support and no way to make a living.

Grandma’s first born, Arthur Clarence Lancaster, was most certainly named after his two uncles. “Arthur” after John P. Lancaster’s younger brother, and “Clarence” after Grandma’s older brother, whose nickname was Bud. It’s a mystery as to why he was not named after Ben, in memory of the brother, so dear to her, and who had just passed.

I think Grandma moved back with her parents after John died. My Uncle Arthur grew up in the family home, and his Grandparents helped to raise him. The 1910 US Census listed Arthur living with Grandma’s parents, Charles and Julia Jacobs. Her brother, Clarence (Bud), was still living with them. Both grandparents died two years later.

Uncle Art and Uncle Charlie, Grandma’s oldest, were with great grandmother Julia when she died. The three had taken the horse and buggy to the country to get eggs. She had a stroke on the way back. It was in July and a thunderstorm was raging. The boys, ages nine and six, were frantic but the old horse took its head and brought them all home. Grandpa followed her that December. Arthur was living with Bud, his wife Minnie, and two year old daughter, Mildred, in Catawba in 1920 (per US Census). It seems Bud had inherited the family home and started his blacksmith business. Sometime in the 1920’s Art moved to Connersville, Indiana to be with his mother and three half-siblings, Charlie, George (Joe), and Hazel (my mother). He married in about 1928 to Marjorie Louise May of Orange, Indiana. All my memories of Uncle Art and Aunt Marj are centered around their little farm on the edge of Orange. (Photo page 5 - Grandma, Uncle Art, and me)
There is no telling now, but I can’t help to think that her life might have been happier if John P. had lived longer than the few years allotted him. Her second husband looked promising on the surface, but appearances can be deceiving.
GO TO: Part 3a, Grandfather Bert Frank

The Life of Calla Della (Lancaster, Frank) Jacobs - Part 1b, Catawba

The place was most certainly the focus of family activity for many years. My Grandmother was probably born in the house in 1883. She was the youngest in a family of fourteen children. Large families were not unusual in those days. Death was no stranger, and four of Grandma’s siblings died in infancy. Ten grew to adulthood, but three were taken in their early twenties.

There was a time when business was transacted every day in Catawba. It was an active village in the late 1800s. My mother once talked to her Aunt Lydia about it. Lydia was Grandma’s eldest sibling - 23 years older. She told Mom she could remember when there was a Post Office, depot, store, several saloons and a church. There were more houses in the early days, more than the eight or nine Mom remembered. There were also three large tobacco barns, a dock, and a ferry boat that carried tobacco wagons across the Licking River. The district had been a leader in growing tobacco, but the plant is hard on the land, and the soil eventually gave out; times changed, the railroad pulled out, and people drifted away.

Lydia, born in 1860, was twenty-three when Grandma was born, and had been married five years. Three of her sons were older than their aunt. Most of the rest of her siblings were already grown, and Grandma probably grew up with the two brothers that were closest in age, Clarence, known as Bud, (b. 1878) and Ben (b. 1881).
I think she was closer to Ben (above w/Grandma) as he was only two years older, and I remember her telling stories of experiences they shared while growing up. One particular story still intrigues me.

When she was a girl Grandma said it was not uncommon in the evening to see a ball of light suddenly pop up from the ground and hover a few feet above. When she and Ben chased after one of the hazy spheres it would recede, traveling away from them at a speed to match their own. The orb would eventually drop back into the earth. I’m not sure, sixty years have passed, but I think she called them jack-o’-lanterns, maybe because they reminded people of Halloween pumpkins. She said she never saw any after she grew up.

Mom and her brother, Charlie, went back to Catawba in 1992 for a last visit . They said the area had not really changed that much. Roads that were narrow dirt lanes had been paved. Telephone poles lined the road. Catawba was in decline when they were young. For a while it was a ghost town with a few decaying building. Even those were gone. But off the road, hidden in a tangle of brush and weeds sat an old abandoned house shrouded in vegetation. One building still left., and they recognized it - like going back in time.

Nothing else remains of those bygone days except for three gravestones in the backyard corner of a newer house. Those mark the graves of my great grandparents, Charles and Julia Jacobs. They died in 1912, a year before Mom was born. The third grave is Ben's, their youngest son. He was twenty-two years old when he died in 1903. The gravestones were placed there many years later by a Grandson - a man named Raymond Jacobs. The stones don't mark the actual site of the graves as all the references were long gone, but Raymond knew they had been buried in the back of their own yard, next to their son and near the church. They may not be under their stones but they're close by.
GO: Part 2, Della's first husband

The Life of Calla Della (Lancaster, Frank) Jacobs - Part 1a, Catawba

My Grandmother, Calla Della Jacobs, was born in Catawba, a Kentucky backwater community 30 miles south of the Ohio River and Cincinnati. Catawba owed its short existence to the Kentucky Central Railroad that built a line in 1852 from the Ohio river heading south through Falmouth, the capital of Pendleton County. Catawba developed amid side tracks and switching facilities five miles north of Falmouth. The Louisville & Nashville (L&N) Railroad acquired the line sometime around 1870. My great grandparents, Charles and Julia Jacobs (below), moved to the village during that decade.
The Catawba Road runs east along a winding hog-back ridge from State Highway 27 before dropping into the river plain where the village once existed. The drive is picturesque, offering panoramic views into the ravines that lie on each side of the road.
Such hilly terrain poses problems to railroad builders as their objective is to maintain a level roadbed, so the tracks were laid along the route of least resistance - the flood plain of the Licking River. The railroad snakes its way north from Falmouth approximating the curves and bends of the Licking as it flows toward the Ohio. Catawba sat within a large horseshoe bend about five miles north of Falmouth.

The rail line ran through the village in a man-made trough twenty feet deep. The Catawba Road crossed the gap over a wooden bridge. My great grandparent's house sat directly facing the bridge on the far side of the tracks. Their little home (above), sitting on a corner lot, had four rooms downstairs and two up. The front appeared, with a little imagination, to resemble a rectangular clown face with a tall window (eye) on each side of a narrow door (nose). The front door faced a narrow lane that ran parallel to the tracks. Turn left at the bridge and follow the narrow lane running in front of the house, and a person would arrive at the small house where Mom lived as a child (above). It was no more than a hundred yards down the lane. The place was very small but had two front doors in the center, like a duplex. The whole house could not have been larger than a couple hundred square feet. I don't know for what purpose it was originally build, but it sat on top of the bluff overlooking the train tracks below. Across the tracks on top the other side sat Mom’s Grandparent Frank's house. If one continued straight from across the bridge (east) on the lane that ran beside the house the next building encountered was a blacksmith shop. Grandma’s brother Clarence (Bud) became the owner of the family house after their parents died in 1912, It was his shop. Then the road started to make a hundred-eighty degree curve to the right (as shown on the above map), and at that point you would find the only church (above) in town. It was aligned with the other buildings so the road curved away from it. The church was a modest building with one large room and a bell tower near the front. The road continued its half-circle ending at another brother’s, William (Taul) and Dora (Frank) Jacobs house. Taul Jacobs was a covered bridge builder, and Dora ran the local post office. Their place was a wood framed structure built into the east bank of the railroad bed and facing the tracks. There is an old picture (above) of Mom, Hazel (Frank) Buckingham, when she was about two years old. It shows her sitting on the stone front step with her Uncle Taul in the background. She had a flower in her hair. In that picture she would be looking across the tracks to the train station on the opposite side.

GO TO: Part 1b, Catawba

Courting Mary, Part 2 - The Wedding

Mary’s younger sister, Angie, moved up from Oklahoma that fall to try life in the far north The two got an apartment by Lake Spenard, at which I spent considerable time. Angie stayed till after Thanksgiving, but decided she preferred a hot, humid, and conservative Oklahoma, to a cold, wild, and free-wheeling Alaska. Mary needed a new roommate or she needed to move. I needed to look after my house, and invited her to move in with me. We transfered her stuff on a cold day during the Christmas vacation of 1981. All went well except for a couple plants that didn’t care for the temperature they had to endure.
Fast forward a few months to a Chinese restaurant on the corner of Minnesota and Benson Avenues. I proposed marriage over a sampler “Poo Poo Platter”, our favorite appetizer plate. She said she didn’t know. We always wondered what significance we should ascribe to the fact that the place closed shortly thereafter.

We arrived upon an agreed October date. Neither of us had much enthusiasm for big weddings, so we decided to have a small ceremony at the house and to limit the wedding list. We sent out no invitations and asked only a few close friends. We were both teaching at West High School, the number of possible attendees were enormous, so we decided to let word-of-mouth take it to where ever it went. When someone asked me about it I would tell them they were invited and what time to show up. I had given the end of the year faculty party at my house several times over the years so all knew where we lived.

Charlie Hostetler arranged a bachelor party for me at Clinker Daggers. About a dozen, mostly fellow teachers from West High, escorted me out of single hood with a raucous dinner that was apt for the occasion. Luckily we all made it home without police intervention.

I was finally getting married after forty-two years of blissful bachelorhood. There was a bit of a quandary concerning my upcoming wedding though. I had no idea who to ask to be my “best man”. There would have been no problem if my brother Don had been available, but as he was farming in Wisconsin, and had neither time nor money to break away, I was in a puzzlement to decide the stand in. I could ask Charlie Hostetler or Dan Wilson. I had done a lot of things with both of them over the years, but to ask one seemed to be slighting the other. Then there was Doug Jackson and Wes Warner. And there were others, a bunch to pick from, and under different circumstances any one of them would do. So I kept procrastinating till nearly the last minute, and then one day the answer presented itself.
Mike Bujno had been my renter roommate for five years. He was from Poland and we were talking one day when it occurred to me that Mike was also one of my good friends. We had liked each other from our first meeting and had come to respect each other. He had entrusted me with his life savings one year when he went back to Poland for a extended visit. He handed me a sizable cashiers check in my name, and wanted me to keep it in case something happened to him. I said fine, but what did he want me to do with it in case something did happen. He wanted me to send it to his parents in Poland. So Mike was a perfect choice for best man. He was my newest friend, and kind of neutral. I ask him then and there and I think he was surprised and flattered by my request.

Next we needed a person to tie the knot, and luckily, there lived one right next to us. Gordon Corbett, a Presbyterian Minister, and his wife Winn had been neighbors and good friends for ten years. Gordon said he would be happy to perform the wedding, so Mary and I reworked the traditional wedding ceremony, omitting items such as obedience of the wife to the husband, until it was nearly unrecognizable.

The day soon arrived, an overcast Saturday in October. We had two cakes, one that said, “Macho Mary, and Big Bad Joe”, and the other was inscribed with, “A Computer Programmed Marriage”. The second one had to do with the fact that we had just completed a college course in computers and were thus proficient in throwing around arcane terms like BYTE, CPU, RAM, ROM, and GIGO which stands for: “Garbage In, Garbage Out”. Word of the wedding got out. We had a full house of guests but were not swamped. There was a good variety of participants, and they segregated themselves to upstairs and down. The more straight-lacers were up stairs and some of their noses twitched as whiffs of wacky tobaccy wafted up from below, but all went well. I asked Charlie Hostetler to take photos of the ceremony and all was ready except that the best man and the maid of honor were missing. Both came after the ceremony was over. I looked around and saw Wes Warner standing in the back. Mike was my newest friend in Alaska and Wes was the one I’d known the longest, so I ask him to sub for my sub. Pat Tremble, a former striper at PJs was to be the maid of honor, Mary ask Rita Atchison to sub. Rita, a former student of mine, was married to Johnny, who use to live above Mary when she was on Roosevelt Street. And thus we commenced our adventurous and tumultuous life together.

Courting Mary, Part 1 - Meeting

Mary and I met in the library at West High School in Anchorage. We were registering students for second semester. She worked the Spanish table which happened to be next to biology, the one I manned. That was in late January of 1981. It was Mary’s first year at West but she had missed most of it due to a serious auto wreck in October. I heard, shortly after the accident, that the new Spanish teacher was in the hospital, but thought the announcement referred to another person. So, there I was, sitting next to the survivor, but ignorant of the fact. I personally registered the presence of a cute, petite, thirty-something next to me - one that was quiet and without much to say.

Another thing I noticed was her newspaper. It was open to the puzzle section, and she was working the cryptoquote. Crossword puzzles are one of my addictions. Hers was blank, and I was in need of diversion, so I gallantly offered to take it off her hands should it be a bother to her. She surrendered it graciously, but without a word.
I didn’t see her again until the end of the school year when a number of us converged on the La Mex for a TGIF session. That commenced a night of bar hopping, including several games of pool at the Mid-Night Express, and Missile-Command at the Fly-by-Night Club. I called her the next day and invited her to breakfast at Gwennie’s as it was handy to both our homes.

The next week we went to a movie, Popeye, starring Robin Williams. I made a big impression on that occasion - got to the ticket booth and realized I had no cash. I now have a deep appreciation for the anguish and pain Mary must have felt in making an unsecured loan to a questionable, high risk client. She was stoic when handing over the bill, but the transaction passed with a certain inertia, a reluctance to let go. I paid her back the next day, and have been paying ever since.

Summer vacation commenced and I left shortly thereafter to work on my cabin, which I was building in a cove on Seldovia Bay, across from Homer. She sent a big box of home made chocolate chip cookies - my favorite. The generous act lead me to the erroneous impression that she liked to cook. We didn’t see each other again until I invited her for a visit near the end of the summer. (Photo below: Summer 1983 @ Cabin)
That fall Mary wanted to know if I could help her find land she bought near Talkeetna. She had five acres in Bartlett Hills Subdivision, one of those land lotteries the state ran in the early 1980‘s. We drove three miles north on the Talkeetna Spur, turned east onto Yoder Road, went another four miles or five miles before getting to place in the road I did not wish to ford. We started walking and were soon picked up by a guy in a jeep who said he had a place up the road where he was going to grow strawberries. He dropped us off at the edge of the subdivision. There were no roads into it at that time. (Photo below Summer 2000)I searched the brush at the side of the road, and found a survey marker. After consulting the map it seemed that her land was yet some distance away. We hiked southward. It began to drizzle shortly thereafter, that slow, steady, dripping that all residents up here know too well. We trudged through tall grass and climbed over downfall for nearly an hour.

Mary became noticeably tired so I found a downed tree for her to sit, gave her my rifle, and said I’d go on and see what I could find. I told her that I didn’t think I’d get lost, but if I had not returned in a hour to fire the rifle once. I continued south, stopping and glancing back after a few steps. Mary sat there in the middle of the wilderness, looking small, wet, and very insecure. I went on for twenty minutes, found another survey marker and knew I couldn’t make it in a reasonable time. When I got back Mary was sitting there patiently waiting my return. I was moved by the trust she seemed to place in me. And she could cook. That knowledge inched me one step closer in thinking I might marry the woman some day.

GO TO: Part 2 - The Wedding