Leta looked out the front window anxiously, not because of
the rather stormy weather, but because of the guests she was expecting for dinner.
She and her husband Bob had been home from church for an hour. The service was
at 10:30 a.m. Following it, their usual practice was to have dinner with Leta’s
daughter Vivian, her husband Ed and toddler Donald. However, this stormy summer
day in 1941 was different. She was going to meet her son Dale’s young lady.
Dale was 26 years old, and in Leta’s thinking a good
marrying age. He was employed in a secure job at Spicer Manufacturing, making
automobile parts. In fact, he worked in the same factory as her husband. He was
thrifty, living with his father and grandparents, the same place he had lived
since he was an adolescent. While he liked to spend his Friday and Saturday
nights drinking beer with his friends, he was never excessive about it. He was still
a little excitable, carrying some nervous energy that he had difficulty
controlling at times. Leta attributed this to his still being single. Marriage
would help him settle.
The girls’ name was Kathryn Peer. She was the sixth child of
Slovakian immigrants John and Juliana. Her father was a farmer, but he had only
purchased the farm in 1935. Prior to that he worked in a glass factory. Juliana
was a homemaker. How could she be anything else, having given birth to nine
children? Dale told Leta that they were a close family. Kathryn—or Kate as she
preferred to be called—was the oldest girl and helped her mother until her
parents moved from Rossford where they had been living to the farm. She didn’t
want to move, even though she was still unmarried, so she moved in with one of
her older brothers and worked as a maid for two families who lived nearby.
“Are they Catholic?” Leta asked, almost accusingly.
“Yes,” Dale answered. “And I’m taking instruction to
convert.”
“What?” Leta demanded.
“I have to, Ma,” he said. “We can’t get married until I’m
Catholic, too.”
“You want to marry this girl?” Leta asked.
“Yes,” he answered definitively. “Wait ‘til you meet here.
You’re going to love her.”
Leta had been raised to be suspicious of Roman Catholics.
They had strange rituals, incorporated dead people called saints into their
belief system, and had to be one hundred percent obedient to their Pope, a foreign
religious and political leader whom they believed was specially chosen by God.
Leta was not 100% obedient to anyone. They also, she was told, thought that the
Pope and his religious collection of bishops, monks, priests, and saints were
directly connected to God. A regular person was not worthy to pray to God on
her own. They even had altars dedicated to various saints, like the Virgin
Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ. They were instructed to pray to her. On the
other hand, Leta prayed to God. Sometimes she prayed to God a lot. She was also
startled by their belief that during communion, the wine and bread were
actually turned into the blood and body of Christ. Once when she was a girl,
she was tempted to go into a Catholic church and pretend that she was Catholic
so she could taste the bread and wine for herself. While she didn’t know what
flesh tasted like, she did know what blood tasted like from cut lips and losing
her baby teeth. Besides, if the bread actually turned into flesh, it wouldn’t
taste like bread, and she knew how bread tasted. As she grew older, her
interest in performing such a test waned, but the wariness about Roman Catholicism
continued. So she had some trepidation about Dale’s choice of female
companions.
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