This is a list of chapters for the story of bigjac:
1. Enoch and Ada, my father’s parents.
2. Little Don (my father’s childhood.)
3. Mark and Edna, my mother’s parents.
4. Little Eva (my mother’s childhood.)
5. Don in World War Two.
6. Don and Eva: from first date to wedding day, in 20 days.
7. Making babies.
8. Adonna
9. Lois
10. Laura
11. Mark
12. Brent
Mark (bigjac) chapters:
13. Growing up
14. The Mark and Pam years
15. The single years
16. Mark and Tonia
17. Daily Kos
18. The in-laws, my new family
19. Retail sales work, for 26 years
20. My bucket list
21. Topics of interest to me.
My father’s father was named Enoch Fleetwood Herbert.
He was born in the nineteenth century, but I’m not certain if he was born in the 1880’s or the 1890’s.
He married Ada Frances Kelly. (Sounds rather Irish, right?)
They had a farm in Hickory County, Missouri, which is in the Ozark Mountain region, but not in the steepest of the Ozark mountains.
They had five children. My father, Don Wallace Herbert, born the 9th of December, 1924, was the youngest, by far. He was an uncle before he was born.
When my father was about 8 years old, his father, Enoch, was kicked in the head by a horse, and died from his injuries. My father told me this story, many times. He had to deal with losing his father, when he was only a child. He told me he sat and thought, that day. He sat and thought about his father dying, while his father was dying.
I was in the hospital room when he, my father, died. Like father, like son.
Enoch died in the farm house. This was 1933, in rural Missouri. Massive head injury, plain to see. The nearest hospital was many miles away, and the transportation would have been in a Model T Ford, or a horse and wagon, and the doctors had very little treatment for such an injury, at that time.
His mother remarried. She married a man named James Gump.
Jim Gump chewed tobacco, but during the depression, when they didn’t have enough money for tobacco, he chewed tree bark. The way my father told the story, he chewed slippery elum (my father pronounce the tree name, elm, elum) he said his step dad, Jim Gump, chewed slippery elum bark.
Sometime in the 1960’s James Gump died, and my grandma remarried, when she was in her late sixties. She married a retired sheriff. His name was Franz Tipton. So, on my grandma’s tombstone is:
Ada Frances Kelly Herbert Gump Tipton.
Hmmm. That seems to cover chapters one and two, Enoch and Ada, and my father’s childhood.
I will write about my mother’s parents and my mother’s childhood, in the next diary.
A poem:
I met a woman born in 1895.
She smiled at me, her grandson.
I met a little baby, born in 2017.
She smiled at me, her uncle.
I feel the centuries rolling by,
since I saw the face of the nineteenth,
lived half the twentieth,
and we are nearly a quarter of the way into the 21st.
Thanks for reading.