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 (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