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 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