Family Roots: Polo and Lanark in Illinois

 My mom’s mom grew up in northern Illinois, farm country that they called “out West” and there were hard times ahead when she was born in 1908 and the tiny baby was forced to sleep in a shoe box on the oven door of the wood burning cook stove. A makeshift incubator of the era. The children of Della McPherson and William Beightol - Grace Viola Beightol and her sisters, Clara and Alice, and brothers, Clarence, Orville, Carl and a baby brother who died as a toddler. Alice later died of appendicitis at 18 and Carl came to visit his sisters after they moved and married in Wyoming.  He decided to ride his horse into the Saloon. It was one of those decisions which change everything. Arrested and told he either enlisted or served prison time, Carl chose to enlist and served prison hard time by completing the Bataan Death March, only to die afterward in a hospital in the Philippines.

Clarence stayed in the family farm with his parents and Orville married a school teacher and lived nearby and continued working on the farm. Orville and Lucille adopted a 5 year old German boy, Freddy. Fred was killed in a car accident when he just finished a stint in the marines and was driving home from the farm in the dark of a moonless countryside and slammed into a car parked in a crossroads intersection with no lights on. After his death, one of his birth siblings came to visit while we were there too.

The two remaining sisters, after Alice died,  had moved to Wyoming and married two brothers. Clara answered an ad for a mail order bride and went to Wyoming. She didn’t fall in love with the man whose ad she had answered but fell for his brother. Grace came to their wedding and ended up marrying the original brother. Those two couples produced my mom, and her four male cousins. Grace and Lawrence had Priscilla Slack, while Clarence and Clara Slack had Roger, Terry, Donald and James.

The family farm outside of Polo and Lanark Illinois, became one of my favorite places as a child. Mom would bring her mom, and once my great aunt Clara as well. They would give the farmhouse a deep cleaning while my brothers and I climbed the cedar trees and played in the hayloft and “helped” feed the piglets and calves and begged to drink glasses of cream straight from the cow to the separator. I would get up early, but they would be up at 4 and milk the cows, eat breakfast and take a nap before 6 AM. My great grandma Della was still working hard but her spine had give up on staying straight  and her eyes were weak. At night she climbed the stairs to bed by putting her water glass a couple steps above her. Climbing up to that level, moving it higher and repeat. Her bedroom was filled with Christmas cactus in old tin cans and she loved to have me read to her before bed. 

Your Earliest Memory

 

Your Earliest Memory?

• by Dixie Dawn Miller Goode on May 19, 2022

I have scattered childhood memories, a dog, an airedale, that we lived 
next to in Cheyenne that “guarded me from my parents in our front yard, 
until the owner came home. We moved from there when I was two. 
I remember going to the house I mainly grew up in in Cody, when 
it wasn’t our house yet, and playing with a boy and girl who lived there, 
and I remember a blue plastic pool filled with stuffed animals in the red 
house we rented in between Cheyenne and home owning in Cody. 
But those are brief and tied only to places or times I can use to anchor
 when the memory is from.
Do you ever remember, remembering something and yet, 
no longer remember the actual event?
 When I was very young, my grandfather’s brother, Clarence,
 was grilling chicken on a backyard BBQ grill and we smelled it 
as we arrived, and instead of going through the house as we usually did, 
I ran around to the side gate and entered the backyard 
with wet laundry billowing on the clothes line, and he turned
 from the Smokey grill and shouted, “it’s the birthday girl!”
Years later, watching my moms silent, black and white 8mm home movies,
 “You won’t remember my Uncle Clarence, because he died when you 
were too young.”
 I argued with her, describing all those details I just mentioned, while her
 little movie only showed him bringing a platter of chicken over
 to the table. But a couple years after that, I remembered watching
 the movie, and the words I had used to tell her about that early birthday, 
but I no longer actually remembered that backyard picnic,
 or that strong man who I knew was happy to see me.
Now my only memories of him are of the fast moving cancer. 
I remember riding along when Mom picked him up and drove him to Dr. appointments. I remember when he was too weak to shift his legs and he asked my Dad to cross his legs for him because he’d been in the same position too long and was hurting.

Thinking back, from this aged place of 58, to that early, probably about age three, birthday, and the people who always have surrounded me each year, with love and fun times and celebrating my birth. I realize that I’ve been so blessed. My family members here today, and those back then are all different people, but that thread of family that connects us, is a thread of love generations long.

Grandparent Memories

 I’m glad I was raised with grandparents who were born in 1875 and 1879(both great grandmas) and 1898 (both grandpas) and 1908 (mom’s mom) they didn’t change much in the things they considered essential as they aged. The never had, so why do I need now list; included electricity, and indoor plumbing, and a phone, or TV. There was a wood cook stove with a built in rectangular reservoir for hot water, coal burner for heat, outhouse, thunder mug under the bed, and buckets of water with a washboard and wringer for laundry. Gardening and bartering and auctions and canning and drying and sewing and quilting were daily things. I thought it was weird but nowadays my own list of never had, don’t need dates me just as completely - no dishwasher in this house. 

My grandpa was born in 1898 and my grandma in 1908 and this is how my grandma responded to everything. Show her some gloom and doom prediction and she’d list several other times people thought the world was ending. Laugh at a haircut and she reminded my mom that she once cut her hair into a Mohawk and dyed it red with mercurochrome. Show her the Pacific Ocean and she says Yellowstone Lake is about the same thing, take her to the redwoods and she grumps, “they don’t look red to me.” If I ever said “I wish it was the weekend (or my birthday, summer or Christmas)” she would counter with, “don’t wish your life away.”

And now she has been dead since 1989 and I still hear her voice telling me there is nothing new under the sun and this too, will pass, faster than you want it to.

One morning when I was about four I went out to the rabbit hutch we had next to the kitchen porch for my pet bunnies. The rabbits were gone and our American badger was inside snarling. At me. I ran inside, my grandpa went out, and somehow, for the rest of my childhood there was a tanned badger pelt with long claws clicking against the wood on my child sized rocking chair’s back spindles.

My mom’s paternal grandmother was born among the Sioux in 1875 and died in 1973 when I was ten after sharing my bedroom the last two years of her life. The family talked much about her and her husband homesteading and driving stage for Buffalo Bill but I never even heard about the Pine Ridge Reservation relatives until they came for her funeral. I can’t imagine the changes in her life, but since no one talked, I have to. Born and living there through both Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee, then married at 17 to a white stage driver and disowned by her dad for marrying a white man, so unable to visit her mom until she was 57 and her Dad died. Moving to Cody, Wyoming before there was a town and raising four sons and living to be 98. How different the world she arrived in than the one she left.

My maternal grandmother never got over growing up in a farm family of eight kids, all born around 1898 to 1908. And never forgot storing things when they were abundant, to use year round. So when the fields were bursting, she had her own crops but teamed up with mom and her cousins to share their crops and labor.

Emma Belle Lafferty and Frances Ralbon Slack

Lawrence Slack

Emerson Miller and my brother Lance

Lawrence Slack T age 17

We made sauerkraut, braided onions and garlic, canned so many types of beans, corn, pickles and tomato. And then everyone had more than what they had grown themselves in their “root cellar.”  They didn’t dry or smoke much when I was a child. And I’m not sure why, but suspect they felt indulgent using the freezer for those items like meat and fruit. Or canning jelly, and applesauce and pie cherries. I don’t do anything like the volume they did, but we trade our apples and pears and plums for garden goods and can some things. And keeping water here is essential as power cuts my well, many times we’ve figured out a way to get water from the well without the pump but never installed a hand pump on the kitchen sink which several of my family members had. Here we closed schools a month ago, and people shopped like it was tsunami season, and a bunch of items haven’t come back yet, but I have a big order in for today at curbside pickup and we could have gone another month before filling that if I wasn’t getting specifics for three birthdays and Easter. Ugh, sorry. Once again I’m rambling.

“What Was Your Mom Like When,. . .?”

 

I’ve never known anyone who was so compartmentalized in my life, as my Mom. When I think of her, it is with intense love, and great regret. I miss her, but I always felt conflicted. We were best at getting along once we lived a thousand miles apart. She was a loving person who had trouble believing she was worth loving and I wish I had understood her more when I was younger. She changed a lot, so that when I remember my Mom, who was 24 when I was born, I remember a different woman than my brother, who was adopted only 4 1/2 years later, remembers. My youngest brother, born when my first brother was 8 and I was 12, had a different mom altogether, even though to the world we all had Priscilla June Miller as our mother. 

When I was a child, Mom was loving, demanding, scary, and unpredictable. She was Eleanor Rigby from the Beatles song, “wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door.”

I understood that line as soon as I heard the song, instantly remembering the screaming woman who had out “the board” to spank me, dropping it in the potato bin when the doorbell rang, the furious scowl transformed into a delighted, welcoming smile as she smoothly pulled open the inner door, unlatched the screen door and beamed, “come in, come in.” to the Avon lady or neighbor who had just “popped in for a visit.”

She might drag me from bed in the middle of the night to beat me with every hanger I had left on the floor of my closet, or to hug me and cry that I had never loved her. But she always smoothed on some lipstick, pulled a precurled wig over her hair, donned a dress with a big twirly skirt and high heels before taking me to school or church. She always kissed me goodbye at the door or before letting me out of the car. 

I didn’t understand as a child, the damage done to her soul by being the odd one out in school. I heard the stories of having to wear two pink Terry cloth towels her mom had sewn together into a “dress” and having to wear thick woolen stockings and a crown of long braids wrapped around her head when the popular girls wore Bobby socks and saddle shoes and a high, short pony tail dancing with every movement. I saw her make excuses to avoid meeting my friends moms, and missed the “they won’t like me” behind the excuses. I knew that her friends were mostly poorer, needier, happy to have her bring groceries and canned food when we came to visit. I missed the belief that no one would like her if they didn’t need something from her. She couldn’t trust friendship without strings attached. 

Later, through my Dad’s devotion and my brother’s needing an advocate, and being there for my Dad during a drawn out cancer battle, she began to see her own worth, but by then I had moved away, and then dementia set in and I was missing her, even if I was in the room with her, and again, I didn’t really understand how her stiffening body betrayed her, and made her need support, until she was gone and I found her in my own aches and fears. Now sometimes I cry or scream for my mama - missing the woman I never really convinced that I loved her and wishing there could be another opportunity to tell her she was enough for me.

My First Big Trip

 My first big trip is one I never have remembered. I wouldn’t know about it except that it was a favorite memory of my Mom and Dad and one they told me about several times.

    We went across the country from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh on Amtrak. Or the other direction. My Dad grew up in the Pittsburgh area and most of his siblings were still in that area, but his Dad and the oldest Sister (Dorothy, who had raised him after his Mom died when he was seven) had moved to Orange, CA and another sister lived in Anaheim. I was only 6 months old. They got lucky and their sleeper was in the forward facing nose of the train so they looked out from bed, over the empty tracks in front of them. I think that view at night with the stars and moon and ever changing landscape must have felt like having their own private universe  

    The one thing that they loved was a young boy named Anthony Bonaducci who was about three. The boy was fascinated by their baby with red hair like his and he kept coming back to talk. He also had a scam going that made them laugh. He would drop a piece of paper in the aisle and then tap the shoulder of a man sitting near by. “Hey mister, there is garbage by you. If you give me a dime, I’ll throw it away for you.”

    It was many years later when I was playing the Partridge Family album that my cousin gave me for Christmas. My Dad pointed at one of the pictures on the cover and said, “He looks like what Anthony Bonaducci would look like if he has been older.”

    Of course, Danny Bonaducci did look a lot like his big brother. That was confirmed later in a Tiger Beat Magazine story. Back then I couldn’t just Google the info I wanted.

    Then in 2017, we booked tickets on Amtrak for my husband, youngest son, his daughter and I to go from Klamath Falls, Oregon to Denver, Colorado to visit my Father in Law for Christmas. But Papa Harvey died on December 4 and we ended up traveling via Amtrak for his funeral and a family reunion instead. Now my granddaughter can’t remember that trip but my stories remind her. During the journey she was enthralled the the beautiful views and enjoyed meeting new people and never bored of snuggling with her Grandpa and her Dad and for once getting as much of their attention as she wanted.

Laura Goode, Dec. 15, 1953 - March 7, 2022

 

Today I learned of the death of Laura Dee Goode. She died 1600 miles away, and nearly two weeks ago but until today her family did not know it. On March 6 my husband talked to her, and she responded with shock and irritation when he said she was nearly 70. She won’t get there now, not with her 69th birthday still nine months in the future she will never see. 

When I was 18, I met her youngest brother and once we were dating, I decided to travel with him to visit his family. She told us we could stay in her house but she would be out of town for that weekend. We got there to open doors and a welcoming note and that is exactly who she was back then.  Generous, welcoming, the life of any party. My husband assured me, well not yet my husband, that “she will love you because I love you.” And she did. Even when we lost a python in her house that first visit and had to leave her a note of warning as we left. (Greg’s roommate had asked us to take it to the Reptile Gardens near her home because it had gone nine months without eating after being bitten by its last meal. She found it in her dryer months later and sold it.)

As we grew older and I got to know her, she became a bit more unstable. Life wasn’t kind to her. Her only son died when he was in a custody battle for her grandkids. He stepped in front of a moving train and she lost him, and any chance of every seeing those beloved grandkids again. She also suffered from chronic pain and tried about every thing from pain clinics and drugs to meditation and acupuncture but always the pain shaped her life. 

She also was not exactly smart or stupid, but she didn’t think the same way other people do. She wasn’t cruel on purpose, but she said whatever she was thinking, and it was often harsh. She didn’t think people should be offended if she meant to honestly let them know something they could fix, but still people would resent being told their sink was stained, their shirt was threadbare, their recipe needed more of this and less of that and they really needed to take a shower and pick up their crap.  Why does everyone get so upset? She did think differently, so she was always repeating the punchline of a joke, and then frowning and saying, “I don’t get it?”

That was life for Laura, a joke she didn’t quite understand told by family members who talked too loud and too much but always were welcomed in her kitchen to a big pot of spaghetti sauce and a lot of love. 

But she was eternally naïve, she wanted to be loved and she wanted to help people, and she gave everything, over and over, not just to stray cats, and homeless women and the men she let in her heart and home until once again her mental issues chased them away. She picked up people from anywhere and when she was used and abused, she did it again. This life tested her and has finally left her. 

I’m so sorry, that it wasn’t easier for her, but I’m grateful for the way she opened her door and her heart and welcomed me into her family.