Dear Family,
As I told you, five of us - Grandma McFarland, Mother and Dad, my brother and I - lived together in the house on Washington Street. But there were so many relatives living all around us and some of them dropping in on a daily basis that it sometimes seemed like a much bigger family. There was always help available when you needed it and you knew who you could rely on. Even when you didn't necessarily need help, it was nice to have people you knew share chores or simply sit and visit. Making quilts was always a group effort. The flip side was that everyone knew everything about everyone else and their parents and grandparents before them. There were no secrets; none at all. When I was six years old, I contracted diphtheria and, as was done in those days, was promptly quarantined. The County nurse came by and tacked a placard to the front of our house announcing that there as contagion within and warning all people to stay away, and everyone moved out except Mother and me. Dad, I think, stayed with his brother, Uncle Howard; Grandma went to stay with her brother, Uncle Charlie Burnett; and my brother moved in with Grandad Foster and his second wife, known to us as Aunt Zill. Folks came by everyday, and, standing well back, talked to Mother through an opened window. Food and medicine and anything else we needed was brought and left right by the front door. Dr. Paul Curtis, distant cousin by marriage through the Ives family, came from his office in his home across the street, and we got through it. When I began to recover, Mrs. Bailey, who would have been my first grade teacher, brought schoolwork to our house, and that's how I passed the first grade.
Grandfather Elmer Otis Foster lived with us briefly, one time. When Grandmother Loraine Hill Foster died in 1922, Grandad left Chagrin Falls and went to stay with his older brother, Uncle Will, in Mantua, Ohio, about twenty miles to the southeast. Uncle Will was a bachelor who owned and ran a good-sized farm. He had milk cows and chickens and I don't know what all, but his cash crop was oats. He also had a large white barn with his name WILL FOSTER spelled out on the roof in contrasting-colored shingles. My brother tells me that the barn is still there and his name is still on the roof. We would go there sometimes to visit and to help with the haying or the threshing. After a year or so, Grandad came back to the village, moved in with us, and worked at the Chevrolet garage across the street. He liked a bit of fun, and he was lucky. If there was a turkey raffle or a baseball pool, he would enter and usually win. If there was a square dance anywhere around, he was there wearing a turkey red necktie patterned with white spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs, and with his pants tucked into the tops of his black patent leather boots. On the eve of the Fourth of July, he would gather with a few kindred spirits down on Triangle Park and shoot anvils, much to my mother's total disgust.
I guess I had better explain "shooting anvils" since you may not be familiar with that means of celebrating Independence Day and you might want to try it yourselves. First, a small to medium-sized blacksmith's anvil is placed upright on the ground. A large steel nut with a slot cut in one side is placed on top. The steel nut is then filled with blasting powder, or an equivalent, and a fuse laid in the slot in the nut. Finally, another anvil is inverted and balanced on top of the steel nut. After that, you light the fuse and run for cover. The resulting detonation would rattle windows all up and down Main Street and keep folks awake for two or three blocks round. Mother would get so put out that Grandad would not show up for the next few days.
In 1925, Grandad married our Aunt Zill who was Mrs. Druzilla Maria (mar EYE ah) Burnett Wait, a widow and Grandma McFarland's younger sister. They lived first on May Court. Then Grandad decided to get back into the dairy business and they moved up on South Main Street and into an upstairs-downstairs double house on a large lot that ran about a hundred yards east to the railroad track. Down there at the east end, Grandad built a barn. It had a concrete floor, two rows of stanchions with a capacity of maybe eighteen cows, two horse stalls, a box stall in which was stored grain and medicine and such, and a hay loft overhead. But he never got around to running electricity down to it. Now Grandad had a quick temper and he was fiercely independent. He had a rifle, a big old .38-56 lever-action Winchester, about what you would want for hunting a full-grown moose with a bad temper, and he kept it fully loaded, I mean with a full magazine and round in the chamber. It sat by his bed at night and was never very far out of reach. One day while he was building his barn, Mr. Al Crocker, plumber by trade and newly appointed Village Building Inspector, stopped by. Of course they had known each other for years. Mr. Crocker reminded Grandad in a friendly way that our village had a new ordinance requiring building permits and said that if Grandad would stop by the plumbing shop anytime it was convenient the formalities could be taken care of without trouble or delay. Grandad ignored him, and Mr. Crocker went on his way. But then in about a week Mr. Crocker returned and gave his little speech again. Grandad thought about it for maybe sixty seconds, then laid down his tools, pulled that old bear gun out from behind the door, and told Mr. Crocker: "Got all the permit I need right here." Mr. Crocker never pursued the issue.
Meantime, Grandad had been buying cows and keeping them out at Mr. Mark Stillwell's place about two miles south of town. When the barn was far enough along he decided to drive them into town. He must have had about fourteen or fifteen by then. For a trail crew he drafted his younger brother, Uncle John, my brother and me. On the appointed morning, after milking, Grandad turned the cows out into the barnyard, all but one old black and white cow that he picked for the herd leader and her he kept in while he put on her a halter with a lead rope. Instead of a leader, old Black and White turned out to be a natural born follower who was upset because she had been left behind. When Grandad unlatched her stanchion, she bolted out of the barn and across the barnyard with Grandad skipping along on the end of the lead rope. This spooked the rest and they all stampeded out through the barnyard gate that Uncle John had opened and headed west on Holbrook Road at full gallop, with the trail crew in hot pursuit. Grandad and Uncle John gave up on the running after a hundred yards in favor of urging my brother and me on to greater speed. We were holding our own until the herd veered left and took off through a field of corn stubble. Now a corn stubble field is no place to run, the ground is rutted and rough and the stubble just high enough to jab you in the ankles. Luckily, the cows ran out of steam and the whole mess ground to a halt well short of the river. With fun-time over, the cattle allowed themselves to be herded back onto the road and back the way we came. As they sorted themselves out, an old white cow stuck her nose out in front. I walked along beside her and she steered very nicely with a gentle hand on her ear. So we paraded over the railroad track and past the cemetery and all the way into town and through the south end of town, and folks came out of their houses to watch The Last Cattle Drive in Chagrin Falls. Grandad was never a church-goer, but he knew all the old Gospel hymns and sang them while he worked. I liked him.
Uncle John lived down on Maple Street with Aunt Emma, his second wife, and his daughter, Christine, from his first marriage. He worked at the feed mill over on Bell Street. Grandad also had four sisters but they and their families never lived in town and we didn't have much contact with them. Uncle Howard Foster, Grandad's second son, with his wife, Aunt Gladys, lived on East Washington Street, too, but way up near the fairgrounds. Uncle Howard worked for the Post Office as a rural mail carrier and later as Postmaster. When he retired he became an officer in the Chagrin Falls Savings & Loan. Aunt Gladys was for many years Village Clerk, being regularly reelected to that office. They had an adopted daughter, Genevieve, two years younger than me. Uncle Platt Hill, Grandma Loraine Foster's only full sibling, and his brood lived on Bell Street and north toward the river. Second cousins Norval and Ruth Hill were, respectively, a year older and a year younger than me, but we never got along very well. Dad's half-second-cousin Claude Hill and his sons, Cecil and Gordon, descendants of Elijah Hill and his second wife, Sophia Carver lived just south of town, as did Dad's half-first cousin, Lynn Thompson, with his second wife, Leta Root. Lynn was descended from Great-Grandmother Loraine Root and her first husband, Hezekiah Russell, and lived in Elijah Hill's old homestead.
There were McFarland kin, too. Cousin Clarence McFarland, his wife, and their four children lived down on Maple Street near Uncle John Foster. The youngest, Danny, was a year older than I. Cousin Ben Jenks, who compiled THE CLAN McFARLAND (of which I have one of the few copies known to exist), his wife and their three daughters lived down on Solon Road. I've already mentioned second cousin Lee Robens. He, with his wife and daughter May, who was the same age as my brother, lived on Franklin Street. Lee Robens' brother, second cousin Harvey Robens, with his wife and son, Rex, lived on Washington Street near the railroad tracks and later moved east into Geauga County out almost to Chillicothe Road. Harvey Robens raised dahlias, I believe professionally, and got Dad started in that hobby. He was another of Dad's hunting and shooting companions, and according to Dad, the most fearless man he had never known. Now I knew Mr. Harvey Robens; he was slightly built, soft-spoken, courteous - a gentle man in every sense. One day, according to Dad, the two of them had been duck hunting on somebody's farm and coming back took a shortcut through a pasture. About half-way across, they discovered that the pasture was the home and kingdom of a Jersey bull who resented trespassers. The bull lowered his head, pawed the ground, and rumbled in a threatening manner, and Dad suggested a quick run for the fence. Mr. Robens said, "You go ahead. I've never run from a Jersey bull yet and I'm not going to start now." Well, Dad took off and from the other side of the fence watched as the bull came up behind Mr. Robens and, just as he started to hook, Mr. Robens turned and kicked that bull in the nose. The bull let out a bellow, threw up his head, and ran off with blood running out of his nose, and Mr. Robens kept on walking. Cousin Charlie Wilbur was our plumber and lived with his wife and son Johnny on, appropriately Water Street. Up on Bellevue Street was the residence of Mother's three-fourths second cousin Mr. Warren Smith, his wife who had been Nellie Wass, and two daughters spaced about fifteen years apart. The younger, Ruth, got back in touch with me a few years ago and we have been genealogical pen pals ever since. There were more McFarland relatives scattered around town and especially out in Geauga County, but I think you have the idea of what I'm trying to say, and if you want to explore further I might even let you look at THE CLAN McFARLAND.
Most evident among our kinfolk were the Burnetts - clannish and self-confident, they managed to look condescendingly on almost everyone else. Grandma McFarland was, of course, a Burnett. She had three younger brothers and a younger sister, and also an older half-brother, but I don't remember him. The eldest of her brothers was Uncle Harry who married Julia Bliss and had six children. Uncle Harry and Aunt Julia moved to California before I knew them well. Their oldest child, Amy Annette, married John Church. They had six children, the youngest of whom, Rachel Maria, was a year older than me and they lived, fittingly, on Church Street. Mr. John Church was president of the Chagrin Falls Bank until it failed during the Great Depression, and swallowed up my savings account. The next eldest brother was Uncle Joel, who, with Aunt Jenny lived in the sixth house east of ours. Uncle Joel had owned and operated a livery stable but it burned and was never rebuilt, and when I was growing up, he and Mr. Harry Parker had a real estate office at the corner of East Washington and Main Streets. Uncle Joel and Aunt Jenny had two sons, Myron and Harry. Myron lived in Lorain, Ohio, so we saw him and his wife only occasionally. Cousin Harry and his wife lived on West Orange Street, and had two sons, Noel and Walter. After Prohibition was repealed, cousin Harry managed the first state liquor store in our town.
Next in line was Aunt Zill. She first married Mr. Will Wait who, according to my mother's notes, died in 1920 in Silver City, New Mexico, and I'll bet there is a story behind that. They had a son and three daughters. Cousin Lee lived in Florida and I never knew him. Cousin Clara married Otis Eggleston. They lived on a farm just outside of town, and had two sons, Stanley and Howard. Cousin Mary Belle, known as "Mamie" married Mr. William Gifford who was the superintendent of our village water department. In fact, he was the water department. They had a son, Durwood, called "Doc" and a daughter, Kathryn, and they all lived together on South Main Street next to the Stop Over, which meant that their rear property line abutted our west property line by our barn. That is, they all lived there until Mr. Gifford's open dalliance with a teen-age delinquent girl became too blatant and cousin Mamie threw him out. The youngest Wait daughter, Cora, married Mr. Clifford Miner and they lived first on Franklin Street, then on South Main. Mr. Miner was an auctioneer who worked at the Cleveland stockyards and on Saturdays "cried" auction sales of farm and household goods. The youngest of Grandma McFarland's siblings was Uncle Charlie Burnett - sometime farmer, would-be entrepreneur, hustler - long on plans an short on capital. He and Aunt Cora had two daughters and a son. Cousin Ethel married Mr. Albert "Duck" Waite, but had no children. They lived on May Court. Cousin Gertrude married Mr. Robert Richardson, an electrician. They had two daughters, Ellenor, a year older than me, and Marian, a year younger, and lived on Elm Court which was the first street south of May Court. Cousin Richard lived with his parents and never married until, I think, very late in life. Sometimes they lived on their farm on Chillicothe Road across from Lowe's Greenhouse & Nursery. Sometimes they lived on May Court, sometimes on South Main Street in a big stone house next to Sheffield's Monument Works, sometimes in a white frame house further up on South Main. My earliest memory of Uncle Charlie's farm was that he had milk cows, pigs, chicken, and a big field of grain. Then those animals disappeared to be replaced by a large herd of sheep and the grain field became a pasture. We liked to go there late in the winter to see the new lambs. Uncle Charlie had a problem, though, sheep seemed to be disappearing. At the time, he, Aunt Cora, and cousin Dick were living in town and had rented the farmhouse, so suspicion fell on the renters. Our family stalwarts rallied round and took turns hiding in the barn all night but they never caught the thieves. Then the sheep were sold, the barn windows boarded over, and cousin Dick went into mushroom raising on a grand scale. The mushrooms flourished, but apparently the business didn't. We had assumed that Uncle Charlie's farm covered about 120 acres, as he said, but when the property passed out of the family, all that he had actually owned was the house, the barn, and orchard.
Meantime, Uncle Charlie was also into real estate. May Court was an L-shaped cul-de-sac, and there were two or three acres of undeveloped land between the angle of the L and South Main Street, which somehow came into his possession. He planned to put a street through and develop a residential neighborhood. He had the high ground cut down (thereby ruining our best sledding hill) and the low ground filled in (thereby covering up the creek and killing a cherry orchard), but that's as far as the project ever got. He borrowed wherever he could, including all of Grandma McFarland's liquid assets, and cast covetous eyes on Mother's share of Grandfather McFarland's estate. Grandfather McFarland was, by all accounts, able and astute. He ran his farm and had a cheese factory down by the brook that turned his excess milk into a more saleable product. He was one of the initial investors in the first telephone system in Bainbridge, and the first telephone switchboard was in his parlor. He invested early and profitably in stock of the City Ice & Fuel Company. When he died in 1914, he left their home and part of his estate to his widow and the bulk of his assets to his daughter. I've heard it said that this was because he well knew the Burnetts and Uncle Charlie in particular. Mother managed to withstand a determined siege by the whole Burnett clan but it did create some ongoing tension. Through it all, Uncle Charlie maintained the appearance and impression of a successful and well-to-do man, and was a village councilman for awhile. He dressed well, smoked good cigars, and was unfailingly genial and courteous. You couldn't help liking him,
With all of those relatives around and most within easy walking distance, there was constant visiting back and forth on a daily basis. These were not formal visits - no one bothered to knock; you just opened the door, called "Yoo hoo" and walked in. As I said, no secrets. And no one needed a reason to visit, your presence was reason enough. Just about everyday, after the dinner dishes were done, Grandma would change her dress, put on her hat and gloves (and coat and boots if the weather dictated), loop her sewing bag over her arm, and go visiting. Or some of the aunts and cousins would come to our house. They would sit and gossip and sew and reminiesce, bringing out old memories like photos in an old album, reliving them, and then carefully putting them away for another time. Everyone carried sewing with them - tatting or needlework or kitting and worked on it as they talked. They regularly preached and firmly believed that "the devil finds mischief for idle hands" and they weren't going to let that happen to them. There were more formal visits, too, when some family would come for Sunday dinner. That's when we kids had to get dressed up and be polite, circumspect, and (hardest of all) quiet - for a whole afternoon. There were never any larger family gatherings for the simple reason that no one had room in their dining room or their house. On rare occasions there would be a family reunion of some sort held at someone's farm where planks laid across sawhorses served as tables and bales of straw as seats.
The social structures of the families, the clans, and the village were as complex as they were rigid. There were people that you spoke to on the street, and others that you spoke to only if they spoke to you first, and still others that you didn't speak to at all - or so parental dictates ran. The Burnetts looked down on just about everyone , including the McFarlands. The McFarlands looked down on the Fosters, probably because Grandad Foster had for a couple of years worked on Grandfather McFarland's farm and the McFarland's didn't appreciate their only daughter marrying the son of their former hired man. There may have been a educational bias, too. According to family lore, Gandfather McFaland attended Hiram College and may have graduated from there. He was district school superintendent for a time. Mother graduated from high school; Dad never did. Mother bore an intense dislike for Aunt Gladys Foster and carried on a feud with her for the whole time I lived at home, although it seemed to me that the feud was mostly one-sided. My brother said it was because Mother thought Aunt Gladys had snubbed her on the street, and that may be so. I think another factor may have been Mother's oft-expressed contempt for Aunt Gladys' family, and her regret that Uncle Howard married "so far beneath himself." We were forbidden to speak to them - Uncle Howard or Aunt Gladys or cousin Genevieve - and Mothr was serious about it. She one time handed me a few licks with a buggy whip when my brother snitched that I had spoken to Aunt Gladys on the street. I had, because I liked them. One time during World War II when I was home on leave I started down town to buy a new razor because mine was broken. On the street I met Uncle Howard who asked me where I was going (family members did that). I told him, and he said "Don't. I want to bring you a razor and I want you to use it." In a little while he came by and handed me an old solid-brass chrome-plated Gillette safety razor with a three digit serial number, and told me this. "When I was leaving for France in 1917 (he had been a sergeant, Company B, 112th Engineers) I started down town to buy a razor, but your Grandad said 'Take mine. You've been using it anyway.' I did, and this razor and my new Testament were the only things I took to France that came back with me. I want you to use it, but I'd like it back when the war is over." I took it, and used it, and returned it after the war. I had hoped that it might come back to me some day, but after Uncle Howard died cousin Genevieve didn't know where it was. Uncle Howard also had a unique piece of furniture, homemade, a chair that converted into a table and vice versa, that he said came from Maine in a covered wagon. I never knew what happened to that either. Just for the record, I was, by request, a pallbearer at all three of their funerals: Uncle Howard, Aunt Gladys, and cousin Genevieve.
There were other people that had all the perorgatives of family but I never knew just how they were connected, if indeed they were. During cousin Robert Teare's last visit he raised the question: "Who was Aunt Sam?" We spent some time speculating but never came up with an answer. Aunt Sam was a dear little old lady of seventy-odd years, bent, wrinkled, missing a good number of teeth, with white hair like a halo around her head. She was one of the sweetest souls I knew and baked the best sugar cookies ever. She lived all alone on the north side of Holbrook Road about two hundred yards east of Franklin Street, in a gracious white two-story house with board-and-batten siding and a covered porch across the front and half-way down each side. There was a white-painted barn, and a white-painted fence across the back and down the west side of the property; Midway in the back fence was a graceful arbor and just beyond, on the left was the privy. Further on, on the right, was her vegetable garden. Connecting all of these was a gray-painted raised board walk that went all the way around the house and out to the road in front. The front yard was tree-shaded and a wind break of big old pines ran along the west line. Except for Mr. Mark Stillwell's place down at the crossroad, there wasn't another house within a mile in any direction, but her place was immaculate - and she did it all. She mowed the entire lawn, tended the flower beds and vegetables, painted the fence and the walkway, and every couple of weeks put on her hat and coat and gloves (always), and with her market basket over her arm walked the two miles or more into town to shop. If she stopped in Dad's store, or came by our house to share the abundance from her garden, or we happened to see her on the street, whoever was available would get out the car and, when her shopping was done, drive her home. If none of us happened to see her, she walked home. Dad and Uncle Howard both felt some measure of responsibility for her, and we stopped in at least once a week. Aunt Sadie Teare, Dad and Uncle Howard's sister, and cousin Robert regarded her with affection and, I think, stayed with her a while during their extended visit following Uncle Ezra Teare's death in California. But who she was beyond that we never knew.
When I met someone for the first time, the conversation invariably went like this. He/She: "Paul Foster, eh. You must be Elmer's boy." Me: "No, I'm Homer's boy." She/He: "Homer's boy, eh. You must be the eldest." Me: "No, I'm the younger." So I was catalogued, tagged, and slotted into the complex social fabric of the community. And now, children of mine, I sometimes wonder, by moving from Chagrin Falls, did we deprive you of your rightful heritage, or did we spare you from a load of family baggage?
Love,
Dad