William (Buck) R. Buckingham - Part 2, His Parents



Dorma Leora Manlove

My grandfather, John Harrison Buckingham, a cabinetmaker, was employed for many years as a woodworker in an Auto body factory in Connersville. The second born in 1881 in Franklin County, Indiana, he was the only male child in a family of five siblings. I know he was tall, slender, had red hair and gray eyes because that info was listed on his WWI draft card in 1918. He was also deaf in his last years, but I don’t know for how long. I know little more about him. He died of cancer in 1939, six months before I was born.

I’ve never seen a photo of him. I spoke to my Aunt Martha a few months before she died in 1998. She was the youngest, probably her father's pet, spoke warmly of him, and said she had many family photos and was going to send them to me. She had suffered a stroke a few years earlier, and wanted to get someone to write names and dates on the backs of the photos. Sadly, she passed shortly thereafter, and I don’t know what happened to her collection.
My Grandmother, nee Dorma Leora Manlove, was a big woman, tall, broad, and stiff of body. She carried herself as if her spine was fused throughout its length. Grandma had "lockjaw" (tetanus) when she was a child, so her jaw emited a clicking sound when she chewed food.

Brother Don and I visited Grandma Buckingham several times in the mid-1940s. I have little memory of her other than those visits. Her house was a big two storied building with covered porches, on the front and one side. It sat back a ways off the road. Two old trees near the gravel road shaded the front yard.

Grandma rented one side to a family who had a boy named Larry. He was our age and the three of us played in the creek (below) just down the road. I doubt that things had changed a whole lot in the thirty years since Dad was a boy. Grandma lost the farm in 1950 and moved to California to live with her daughter, Annis. She died there in 1962.

By the time I became aware of life it seemed that nearly everybody referred to Dad as “Buck”. I don’t know when that nick-name became common, but it was probably after he left home because there were too many in the family for all of them to be called “Buck”.

Dad graduated 3rd out of a class of 110 in 1930 from Connersville High School. Four years later he managed to graduate from Ball State Teacher’s College. His sister Annis attended college in Muncie Indiana also and graduated the year before him. It was in the middle of the Great Depression and I never heard how the two financed their higher education, but they probably worked their way through college. Aunt Annis’s daughter, Sarah said that, “My mother often talked about her college days. She worked as an au pair to the college administrators and their families. She never mentioned to me that Uncle Bill was there at the same time she was, odd.” Aunt Annis moved to California in 1937.
 GO TO: Part 3, The Hobo