David Scott and Julia Ann Snyder

While there is no specific evidence detailing that Leta’s parents, my great-great grandparents David and Julia Ann Scott, had a tumultuous relationship, there is circumstantial evidence that they had a complicated one.

David Scott was born on March 26, 1855 to Samuel and Mary Scott, prosperous farmers with 200 acres of farmland in Ottawa County, Ohio. Samuel was the fifth of eleven children of whom three died young. Julia Ann Snyder was born to Daniel and Louisa Snyder on July 8, 1858 (although, interestingly, her tomb stone says 1861) in Sandusky County, Ohio. When they married, David was 22 and Julia (sometimes referred to as Julia Ann) was 19.

While David and Julia both grew up on farms, they did not become farmers. Instead, David took a job in a factory, and Julia managed their household—in a cabin in Ottawa County. From 1879 to 1894, Julia gave birth to either eight or eleven children. She claimed that six survived: Aaron, Mabel, Fred, Nellie, Louise and Leta. One of the still unsolved mysteries is the origin of Mabel, who was born only two months after Aaron and therefore, could not have been the birth child of Julia. The other is whether or not Fred is also a son named David.

In around 1897, the family underwent a tremendous rearrangement. David and Julia divorced. Aaron left home (at around age 14) for Arizona and then Reno. Mabel also left the family, married and resettled near Vancouver, British Columbia (for the rest of her life). Not long after the divorce, Fred left home, too, for California and then Oregon. (Due to the crossover of information, it is likely that Fred is same person as the son David. Neither is listed as a member of the Scott household in the 1900 census, in which son David would have been 17 years old. The 1890 census was destroyed. No birth record for Fred has yet appeared in any search. If he were a different son, then he would be younger than son David who was born in 1883, indicating that he left his parents’ home when he was at most eleven years old. While not impossible, that is pretty young.)

The remaining household consisted of Julia and her daughters Nellie, Louise and Leta. Aaron did not wander for long and returned to the family by 1900. This census lists Julia Scott as the Head of Household living in Lake Township of Wood County and divorced. Four of her living six children lived with her. Her employment was as a “day laborer.” David Scott has not appeared in any 1900 census search.

Between 1900 and 1910, Aaron and Nellie both married, and David returned. His wife took him back and they remarried. The family moved to Toledo. According to the 1910 census, the household consisted of David and Julia (both unemployed while only in their 50s), Louise (age 20) and Leta (age 16). The daughters were both employed as machine operators at a factory.

Over the next decade, Louise and Leta both married and set up their own homes. As for David, the new household arrangement seems not to have worked, and he left Julia once more, this time for California where he seems to have lived out his days. Julia died in 1924 and is buried alone.

Leta and Granddaughter-in-law Patricia

All the family stories indicate to me that while she spent a great deal of her adult life as a rover, my great-grandmother Leta held a special respect for women who dedicated themselves to their husbands and children. This is in no way is to conclude that she was an irresponsible or neglectful wife (when she was married) or worse yet a bad mother. As I have noted previously, she fought for custody of her children in an era when men usually retained custody. (Women had only recently been granted the Constitutional right to vote.) Further, she overcame a custody battle with their father (in 1927) and kept them with her until they were teenagers, when I believe, circumstances forced her to make an extremely painful decision to send them to live with their father.

While separated from her children, she moved in with her brother Aaron, his wife Florence and their two daughters. During that period, while she lived scandalously, she held a deep respect for her sister-in-law and the home life. In fact, one story has her creating a disturbance at a bar to so thoroughly rile her brother that he would drag her home, where his wife had need of him.

Leta’s daughter, in particular, was a dedicated homemaker, wife, mother, grandmother, daughter, daughter-in-law and even granddaughter. Leta honored her daughter and worried that she spoiled those she took care of.

Leta and five of her seven grandchildren, ~1952

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Leta was strict with her grandchildren, but loving, as well. When her daughter and son-in-law went on an extended business trip/vacation to Europe, she stayed with their two teenagers (ages 16 and 14) for several weeks. She enjoyed spending time with all of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Family was key, and she provided tremendous positive reinforcement to anyone in her own who was dedicated to family.

Chief among those in her family to be such was my own mother. While they knew and recognized each other as family for several years, their relationship did not begin to blossom until I was born in 1963, one day after Leta’s eighth husband Richard died suddenly.

While in the midst of funeral necessities, Leta spent a lot of time with my mother in the hospital, where they kept each other company during short winter days and life passages. From that point on, they became good friends, spending hours and hours in conversation over the next 20 years. When we were children, my mother took us faithfully to visit her in her second floor duplex apartment. After she moved into the senior residence, we continued to visit a couple of times a month at least. In 1976, my grandmother-her daughter died and shortly thereafter my parents divorced, but my mother and Leta continued to enjoy each other’s company. After my mother remarried at the end of the year, we continued our family. And even after my little brother Nathan (my mother’s son by her second husband) was born, my mother brought him along to visit. Leta loved having the little guy visit with her.

They talked about the family, their situations, their fears, their intentions, their regrets, their hopes, the world—life. And this continued. First my older brother Jeff grew up. Then I went away to college. They remained faithful to each other all that time.

You see, my mother, having grown up in a household almost solely maintained by a working mother, set as her life’s goal to be a full-time wife and mother. And she pursued this goal with an uncommon dedication. Even when her marriage was troubled, she held tightly to her passion. And I believe that my great-grandmother admired her for it, even going so far as to chastise her grandson—my father—for his disrespectful behavior when she felt he warranted it.

This is simply a part of her.

Grandma Eckman's favorites, Part Two

This is the second exercise of my great-grandmother's favorite things as part of character development and refinement. Following is a random list, in no particular order of 43 of her favorite things. I don’t know why there are 43; I just pulled this from a web site:

1.             A Scotch at the end of the day before dinner

2.             Playing cards with family and friends

3.             Picnics

4.             Getting her hair done

5.             A drive

6.             A good piece of banana cream pie

7.             Watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” on television

8.             Easter dinner

9.             Her granddaughter-in-law Pat

10.           The way sheets smell after drying on the line

11.           Ironing

12.           Clucking chicken toy she received one year at a restaurant

13.           Sewing

14.           Listening to a good church choir

15.           A clean house

16.           Frilly lace underwear

17.           Laughing

18.           Couples holding hands

19.           Perfume

20.           Hot fudge sundae

21.           A walk on a pleasant summer evening

22.           Shrimp cocktail

23.           Full moon

24.           The smell after a spring rain shower

25.           A long, hot bubble bath

26.           Thick juicy steak

27.           “M*A*S*H” starring Alan Alda

28.           Biographies of great men

29.           Lipstick

30.           Bacon

31.           Warm sun on my face and shoulders

32.           Sunrise

33.           Going to church

34.           Filet-O-Fish sandwich

35.           Strong coffee with sugar

36.           Earrings

37.           A man in a tie

38.           Caramel apples

39.           Thunderstorms

40.           Caesar salad

41.           Hamburger and ice cream for supper

42.           Christmas carols

43.           Getting postcards

Grandma Eckman's favorites, Part One

Many writers use various tools and guides to assist them in developing characters and story. As part of mine, I have combined several questionnaires to determine several of my great-grandmother’s favorites, and included some comments from her, as if the answers were acquired in an interview:

Flower: African Violet

Movie: “Easter Parade”

Actor: James Dean

Actress: Joanne Woodward (Leta: “And not just because she married Paul Newman. I liked her even before that.”)

Movie Genre: musicals

Song: “I Got Lost in his Arms” (Leta: “That’s from ‘Annie Get Your Gun,’ you know.”)

Singer(s): Bing Crosby (Leta: “Even though he was a shit to his family”), Nat King Cole (Leta: “He sang pretty good for a colored guy – you like colored men, don’t you?” Me: “Grandma!” Leta: “Well, you seem to have a little bit of that in you, like how my granddaughter liked much older men, only different.” Me: “No, I mean, no one uses the word ‘colored.’ It’s—“ Leta: “I know, I know, Black.”), the Lennon Sisters, Mother Maybelle Carter, Elvis Presley, and Norma Zimmer on “The Lawrence Welk Show.”

Musical instrument: cello

Author(s): Mark Twain (Leta: “He just keeps me in stitches.”) and Garrison Keillor (Leta: “I haven’t read any of his books—I know he writes them—I just listen to him on the radio.”)

Book Genre: mysteries (Leta: “I never much liked love stories—too forced. Love doesn’t work like that.”)

City: Fort Lauderdale (Leta: “But after the time I visited my sister Mabel, I sure had a thing for British Columbia.”)

Country: “I always thought that Spain sounded like a place I could go, but I don’t know anyone who’s ever been there.”

Food: ice cream (Leta: “Sometimes I would eat it for breakfast, but I had to be careful. It all goes to your hips, you know.”)

Drink: Scotch

Restaurant: Bill Knapp’s, Mel Berman’s and Ponderosa Steak House

Breakfast: steak and eggs

Snack: Pop-Tarts and Ovaltine

Candy: fruit flavored jellies

Color: blue (Leta: “I know, nearly everyone likes blue.”)

Place to shop: Woodville Mall

Things to do: sew (Leta: “I always loved to sew, even when I was a little girl.”)

TV shows: “The Lawrence Welk Show,” “Julia”, “Laugh-In”, “M*A*S*H”, “The Six Million Dollar Man,” “Gunsmoke”, “Little House on the Prairie” and “Concentration.”

Madame President

They called her "Madame President" at the senior residence, and not without reason. For one thing, she had been there a long time, and in control of all of her faculties. She was still mobile, which was fairly rare, especially for an extended period of life. At 86, she was one of the oldest residents, although by looking around, one would think she wasn’t. She knew all the staff—nurses, aides, nuns, cooks, doctors, cleaning people—most of the other residents, and the inner workings of the home. And she was sturdy. No one trampled on her, pushed her around, or interfered with her own personal management.

She didn’t quite remember where or how she got the designation, but as we walked from where I met her in her room down two corridors and through the main lounge, a voice from one of the stony-faced women sitting in front of the television called, “There goes Madame President.”

Grandma Eckman pretended she didn’t hear it, but I noted how she simultaneously stood taller and walked faster. It was a tremendous honor and great responsibility, which she took seriously. She was a kind of a take-charge person, and in a place like this there was ample opportunity.

With pity she noted that many of the other residents had been dumped there by children and other relatives when they didn’t have children, or in some cases, when they outlived their children. “It’s a hard thing,” she noted from personal experience, “to outlive your children.” Yet she wore her grief at the unexpected death of her daughter—my grandmother—with dignity.

I wouldn’t say she had a regal bearing, but folks did take notice when she walked past or when she said something. Her voice was a flat alto with a lot of resonance. Sometimes I thought she was braying, but even if she was, everyone paid attention.

She earned the respect of her “the inmates,” as she called them, as well as the staff via an uncanny power to speak with people. When she did this, she invested an intensity that projected her interest and compassion. After all, there were many sad stories accompanying these people—of grief, loss, rejection, confusion. And she would sit with them, look at them with those intense blue eyes and stroke a hand.

She also paid attention, and she knew when staff members were behaving inappropriately to the residents, even surly or demented ones. And she never failed to stick up for the weaker. Her common phrase, often shouted across a waiting room or from the hallway, was, “Try it a bit differently.” And if she knew how, she would proffer that as well. “Hold her hand,” for example.

And she would broach no mistreatment or disrespect toward herself. I recall a time when I found her in the kitchen telling the cooks that the next time they served her a dried out pork chop, they would find it the next day in the most unexpected place they could think of. “And I guarantee you,” she concluded, “it will ruin your day.” Or she could be found taking her own linens to the laundry, if she was “inadvertently missed” on laundry day.

Once, one of the nuns told me that she had stopped a potential brawl between three angry and very dissimilar residents over which television program to watch, maneuvering all three into a compromise that kept them contented for months.

She told me that how she lived was important, as well as how her fellow residents lived. This was, after all, a place where they were to be cared for and, more importantly, their home, and she treated it like the place she was making for herself to live in.

A musing about Mabel Mae Scott

As noted previously, there is a sibling conflict in my great-grandmother’s family, namely she has a brother Aaron (with a birth record) and a sister Mabel (without a birth record) born respectively in March and May of 1882. Mabel’s birth information is included in her death information, and she is referred to a few times in other documents as a sister to Aaron and also my great-grandmother Leta.

I keep trying to figure out how this can be. While I have recovered some new information recently, it does not provide any conclusive detail, but it has lead me into a creative storyline. In this newly recovered information, there is a newspaper clipping noting that five of the Scott siblings were reunited after 33 years, when sister Louise and her daughter traveled British Columbia to visit Mabel, and then brought her back for a family reunion. Alas, whoever saved the clipping did not include the date, but based on other information, it takes place before 1946 and around Labor Day. The article notes that while visiting Mabel was going to visit an aunt named Lydia Lutman.

Front row (l to r): Louise Scott Wescotte, Florence Burrell Scott,Mabel Scott Worthing, Nellie Scott Jaquillard, Leta Scott Fields; back row: Hiram Wescotte, Aaron Scott, Floyd Worthing, Frank Jaquillard, Bob Fields

Lydia is the younger sister of Julia Ann Snyder Scott. While I have found her death record, I have not yet found her birth record or her marriage record. But from the article, with all of the Snyders and Scotts in the area, why would Mabel choose only Aunt Lydia to visit?

Unless…

Thus, my musing.

What if before she married Lydia found herself with child? And to help out her sister, Julia and her husband David took the child after it was born, giving Lydia the freedom to marry and have a safe and “appropriate” family life. Now, because we know that Aaron left his family for a while, what if Mabel and Aaron were raised as twins, and only later on found out that actually Mabel was a sister in family life only. This may have caused a rift in the family life, particularly for Aaron and Mabel who both may have felt betrayed and subsequently left—he to become a vagabond of sorts in Arizona and Nevada, and she to British Columbia, where she married another American (Frank Worthing) and set up a household. (It may even be possible to have brother Fred disappear as well as a result of this long-lived subterfuge.

Then, 33 years later, her sister Louise basically visits Mabel to reconcile, and Mabel agrees. Much of the family is reunited and going forward the siblings remain in regular contact (and even visit one another). I do know that in the 1950s, after her husband died, Mabel joined Leta on a trip to Florida. I have a bookmark in Leta’s Bible and pictures as evidence.

While I am strongly considering this scenario, my research is yet incomplete and at any time, a different may alter what I am considering.

Bad luck with men

"I had bad luck with men,” my great grandmother told me one afternoon while we were sitting in a small lounge of the senior residence where she had been living for over ten years. She was 86 years old, and I couldn’t tell if she was thinking about this just at this moment or if she had been thinking of it her entire life.

“I just couldn’t seem to keep one,” she continued. “You see, I always wanted to be married, have a husband to love and do things with, a home, laughter. As  a young woman, I loved to laugh. I married two of my husbands because they made me laugh. That’s never a good reason to get married, because if you’re not laughing, then you start looking around and seeing that you aren’t where you want to be, that you’re not getting what you need, that the man you’re with is not a man you should be with or some of all of that.

“I married a couple of others just for sex,” she added.

“Grandma!” I could feel my heart leap in my chest and choke me a little. This was my great-grandmother after all.

“I liked to have sex,” she admitted, “make love, whatever you want to call it.”

“Everyone likes to have sex,” I shared.

“Not everyone,” she corrected, and then explained, “which I learned reluctantly. But there was something more to that for me. I liked to have a lot of sex. At least once a day, in fact. And even men who think about sex all the time and would like to have sex all the time, just don’t or they can’t. Honey, I could get turned on by the squeeze of a shoulder and a look. And once I was turned on, there’s only one way to turn me off.

“Now it may be different for gay men like yourself. You have a kind of sexual freedom that women of my generation didn’t. So I would get married, of course, because that was the proper thing to do. The problems would arise when that fantastic first burst of sexual energy would wane, and I’d realize that my husband was, well, not the kind of person I wanted to be married to. He was a drinker or lazy or a slob or lousy in bed or want a servant or just downright mean. And men lie to get women into bed with them, even easy ones like me.”

I confess it was very disconcerting to hear my great-grandmother say she was easy, but before I could protest or even gasp, she looked right into me and shut me up. This was her time, and she didn’t want me to interrupt.

“I spent a lot of time in bars, and speak-easies during prohibition. At least in those places there was no question about what I wanted.” She sighed. “I met a lot of men that way, but mostly not good ones. Some of them were married, of course, and I wouldn’t knowingly sleep with married men. That would be unconscionable,” she emphasized with great seriousness. A few of them would be charming, and kind of woo me, which I liked, but really, they just wanted easy sex.

“It’s funny, darling,” she noted ruefully, “there I was, attractive, friendly, willing, available, dedicated, honest—oh I was never dishonest about my pursuit of men—and a good cook, housekeeper—a good wife—and yet finding someone who was equally good to me and sexually compatible proved to be impossible. But I tried. God knows I tried. I just didn’t have good luck.”

Cousin Connie Chetister

Constance Chetister is my cousin, more specifically my dad’s cousin. She is the daughter of Dale Chetister, who is the brother of my grandmother Vivian Metzker. Vivian and Dale are the two children of my great-grandmother Leta, the subject of my novel.

 

For a long time, I have been trying to contact Constance (Connie) for a couple of reasons: 1) she is most likely the keeper of her parents’ and Leta’s final documents, photos and so on; and 2) next to my dad (and mom), she is the oldest living family relation with memories of Leta and potentially several of her husbands. I recently reached her via phone and learned quite a bit in a conversation about her life, her family and her feelings toward Leta.

First, of course, is Leta. Sadly, Connie didn’t have much new information to provide. In fact, she only remembered husband number eight, Richard Eckman and then only vaguely. Memory, she noted, is not her strong suit. However, she, like everyone else I have talked to (aside from my grandfather, Vivian’s husband) was very fond of Leta: “I adored my grandmother,” she said, “and I learned a lot from her, especially about faith. Grandma told me when I complained something about going to church that it’s not going to church that makes a person; it’s how she behaves during the rest of the week that counts.”

She also shared with me some tidbits about her parents—Leta’s son Dale and daughter-in-law Kathryn. Most telling is that she recalled not growing up in a household with much affection, particularly from her mother. With her own children, she vowed and then practiced a policy to hug and hold them all the time. She also noted that her parents didn’t talk much about themselves or their parents. In fact, she had no idea that Leta was married eight times (at least). She also shared that her father Dale suffered all his life from injuries he sustained when several others beat him up. This prompted my father to recall that for a time, Dale was a vagabond of sorts beginning his late teen years and before he joined the navy during World War II.

Dale and Kate had four children. Connie is the oldest, and then came Duane, who died of infantile paralysis when he was barely four years old. Next was Christine, who died of cerebral palsy at age 27. Their fourth child was Alan who lives in Arkansas (and is next on my list of family members to contact.) Losing two children is a lot of grief for parents to bear.

Connie was also very open about herself. Currently, she is the primary caregiver of her third husband Lillard (Lee), who is in the early-to-mid-stages of Alzheimer’s. She also has several of her own medical issues and seemed a bit older via telephone than she actually was. However, as my dad noted, she was always attracted to older men. This is borne out in the ages of her second and third husbands. Her second husband was sixteen years older. She married her first husband Ed in 1962, and good Catholics that they were, they immediately began having children—four total: Christopher, Jennifer, Eric and Nicholas. She and Ed divorced in 1979, shortly after she learned that he was gay. While he loved her and married her believing the Catholic teaching that she could change him, he just couldn’t hide his own emotional/sexual feelings and needs any longer. Initially, this was quite an upset, but over time, they became friendly until his death in 2010.