Family Memories

Judy Todd’s Family Memories as of 2009

Emily has asked that I write down my memories of family stories, especially the dramatic ones. The following tales are not necessarily accurate facts in every detail, since I heard these stories second and third and fourth hand from other relatives. Unfortunately, everyone I could ask for more information is gone. Besides, they wouldn’t always tell me the truth, or they would have re-constructed their memories to make the story better. Regardless of accuracy, this much is clear -- there was a lot of mental disturbance in my family. 

Before I get into the family saga, which is full of mental illness, tragedy, ruined relationships, deaths, grief, loss, frustrated dreams and missed opportunities, like most people’s lives I suppose, I want to make it clear that both sides of my family were highly intelligent and creative and the Todd side especially were lively and funny. My favorite times on family trips to visit relatives in Indiana was hanging around the aunts, my father’s sisters, as they reminisced, told funny stories, made witty remarks, mocked themselves and others, and shrieked with laughter. My father could sell anything, make you believe anything, charm the socks off you, and always make you laugh (if he was in the mood). He was tall, thin, and handsome, with dark curly hair and brown eyes. He lacked empathy and kindness, and when picking out a man, you should always go for kindness.

I have a photo book of forebears with most everyone in it and you might want to look at it as you read this. So, to the best of my now rather poor memory, here goes. I’ll add to this as memories come to me. Most of this story takes place in Indiana, especially Indianapolis.

Let’s start with the Todd side. A lot of them were evangelical Christian ministers and many of them had manic-depression. Sylvester Lemuel Todd (1860-1939) was a farmer who was also a preacher. That’s how it was often done in those days. The preacher earned his living some way other than the church, often as a farmer, and traveled around preaching on Sundays, sometimes at churches, sometimes just out in the open, or in tents. I think it was a hard life. They periodically had “revivals” in big tents that would last for days, with a lot of “witnessing” (telling how God saved them), “saving” of souls of sinners and “repenting” alcoholics, etc. The photo of Lemuel looks rather severe, but I heard this story that he once stood up for an unmarried pregnant girl and helped her out. In those days an unmarried pregnant girl was a fallen woman and shunned by everyone. Of course, I always wondered who got her pregnant, maybe Lemuel or one of his sons?

Lemuel married Mary Magdalene Boyd (1862-1938, of the Boyd clan in Scotland) in 1882, and she looks super severe. One of my aunts once told some of the others about how she remembered hearing about Grandma being pregnant AGAIN and not wanting to be, and she (Mary) would carry buckets of water up and down a hill to try to induce a miscarriage. The aunts whispered about this and tried to divert my attention when I asked about it. At any rate Lemuel and poor Mary had eight living children. Most of them grew up to be preachers, too. One of them was my grandfather, and the only one I ever met was my great uncle Fred.

My father was fond of Uncle Fred, and once when we were driving through some state (Texas?) when I was little, we stopped to see him. He was a nice, very old guy, living alone, and the main thing I remember was that he had this incredibly well trained dog. The dog did all kinds of tricks, and he obeyed verbal commands instantly. Uncle Fred would say, “Go sit by the door,” and this dog went and sat by the door and stayed there until Fred told him to do something else. It was a cute dog, not any pure breed, medium size, longish hair, white and brown.

Another of Lemuel and Mary’s children was a woman whose name just went out of my head. Darn! Just remembered -- Myrtle! Anyway, she was an evangelist as a young woman. She traveled all around the country, which was unusual for a woman in those days, speaking at churches and revivals. I heard she was rather wild and would sneak out her window at night as a teenager. She never married. She died in San Diego in the great flu epidemic of 1918.

The forebears book has a photo of Lemuel and Mary’s 50th wedding anniversary in 1932, and I will try to label the people in the photo. The old couple in the middle of Lemuel and Mary of course. Front row, second from left is Ross’s youngest brother Marshall. First row, fourth from right is Ross’s sister Ruth. Second row, fourth from left is Ross’s sister Dottie (her real name was something else). Third row second from left is Ross’s sister Helen. Last row, tallest man there, is Ross’s favorite cousin Boyd. Last row on right, the handsome, curly haired dark young man is Ross, and to the left of and slightly below him in the cloche hat is his mother Ireme, and to the right of him is his father.

One of Lemual and Mary’s children was my grandfather, William Henry Todd (1889-1938). He was a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher in Terre Haute and later Indianapolis. He was apparently strict and cold, and his oldest son (my father) hated him for always making his wife pregnant (there’s a theme here -- those Todd guys liked a lot of sex). They had seven live children, and who knows how many miscarriages. His oldest daughter (Aunt Lucille) adored him, copied all his sermons and published a book of them. His younger daughters (Aunts Helen, Ruth, and Dottie) feared him.

I don’t know much else about him. He was a United Brethren minister, and that denomination later joined with the Methodists. He had a big church in Indianapolis and was prominent in his community. They had a big house and servants. His sermons were awful, full of what hell is like, and how sinful all people are, how they need their savior more than anything, etc. I was looking for a quote to use in my own wedding, and I had to search through his book of sermons really hard to find anything positive. It really made me wonder why he was obsessed with sin. The usual answer is to help himself deal with his own temptations.

There was some scandal associated with him and his church at the end of his life and there was a rumor that it had to do with embezzlement of church funds and it contributed to his nervous breakdown. At any rate, he was manic-depressive, and just before he died, he had spent some months in a mental hospital in Florida having a treatment that involved raising his body temperature to 104 degrees. Sounds awful! I have some letters Irene wrote to Will, and she sounded very loving and worried.

He married Irene Ross (1888-1938) in 1910 (?), and she was the daughter of Joseph Ross (? - 1899, of the Ross clan in Scotland, related to Betsy Ross) and Lucinda Caroline Scales (? - 1932), about whom I know nothing. Irene was apparently very pretty, warm, kind, and sweet. She was tall and thin and had scoliosis. All her children adored her, especially her oldest son, Ross, my father. Will and Irene had seven living children, in this order: Lucille, Ross, Helen, Joe, Ruth, Dottie, Marshall. All seven had various degrees of manic-depression, and as of this writing, only Marshall is still alive. Lucille, Helen, and Ruth died of Alzheimer’s. 

As you know, Will and Irene were killed when their car stalled on the railroad tracks two blocks from their home and a train crashed into them, threw their bodies out, and broke the car into many pieces. The photo of the car in an old newspaper is horrendous. This was January 1938, a few days after Ross’s 25th birthday (January 12). He and Hope (my mother) had been married just a few months. Here’s what I think might have happened: Will was depressed because of his trouble with his church, it was just after Christmas, which might have been stressful, and he was just home from the mental hospital, not knowing what he was going to do next. It’s hard to see how your car would stall two blocks from home and that just happened to be right on the railroad tracks and you wouldn’t jump out of the car. Was it suicide? Did Irene see what was happening and decide to stay in the car with him? Did he even hold her in? We’ll never know. But it’s not unusual for a severely disturbed man to kill himself and his wife and often the kids, too.

The Todd children were devastated. Ruth and Dottie were still in high school, and Marshall was in grade school. More on this later. One aunt once told me that Ross was always worried about his parents, and if he heard a siren, he would call home to see if they were alright. Perhaps he suspected his father’s state of mind? 

OK, let’s cover Will and Irene’s children. First Lucille. She was daddy’s girl and very religious and diligent in being his secretary. She played piano for the hymns at her father’s church. The family was very musical, by the way. They all played instruments and sang well. Lucille was a typical oldest daughter -- responsible, always trying to please, highly achieving in school, a goody-two-shoes. Her younger brother Ross delighted in teasing the life out of her, constantly playing practical jokes on her.

One story Ross loved to tell was how when they were kids, all 7 of them clean and dressed up and ready to go to church, he bet Lucille that she couldn’t flatten a cow pie (a pile of cow poo) with a shovel. Of course Lucille had to show that little snot Ross that she could do it. He handed Lucille a shovel and urged all the siblings to stand around the cow pie to see her do it. Lucille hit that cow pie with the flat of the shovel and splatted cow poo all over all of them and their clean church clothes. I guess then the shit really hit the fan, with all of them crying, and the parents angry, and them having to rush off to church. I don’t know what they did -- maybe leave the kids behind. But they must have had to clean up the littlest ones to take with them. It was a funny story, and Ross told it very well, but I also think it was rather mean.

Well, poor Lucille grew up to marry the Reverend Ford. He was like one of the first televangelists, except he was on the radio. He was well known, a famous radio personality in Indianapolis, and I guess they had money that he brought in by getting listeners to send money so he could spread the Word of God (see the movie “Elmer Gantry” or read the book to get an idea of how all this emotional, hothouse Christianity worked). He was also a womanizer, as many of those charismatic evangelists are. Lucille soon had three little children, David, Irene Ann, and Bill, and her husband began his life-long affair with the housekeeper. Then her supportive mother and beloved father were killed in a tragic accident. After a few years, Lucille’s husband had her declared insane and locked up in a mental hospital so he could be with the housekeeper. I guess divorce was too shameful. This was in the days when husbands could have wives locked up just on their say-so. Maybe Lucille was insane -- I am sure she was sad and depressed. But even then there were alternatives to locking someone up away from their children for years. Lucille received lots of electroconvulsive shock therapy and always said it took away her memory. Her children only heard their father’s side of the story and were very angry with and estranged from their mother for decades. Two of these children (David and Irene Ann) came to Grammy’s funeral.

Some wealthy woman, perhaps doing volunteer work at the mental hospital, took pity on Lucille and helped her get out of the hospital, divorced from Ford, and set up in an independent life. She became an elementary school teacher and moved to California, Vista and Chula Vista. She moved frequently, married and divorced a couple of times, and tried to reconnect to her adult children, who had all moved to California before her. She wrote long letters to my parents, always including lots of news clippings and quotes from the scripture. She would write Bible verses in different colors of ink along the sides and margins of the letters. Her hand-writing varied in size and readability. She probably did these mailings while in a manic phase, and we wouldn’t hear from her when she was depressed. She was definitely ODD. But she had suffered a lot and did the best she could and always managed to support herself and live on her own, until she got Alzheimer’s and had to go into an institution, where she eventually died.

Then came William Ross Todd (1913-1979), a couple of years younger than Lucille. He was severely manic-depressive his entire life and was also alcoholic. As a teenager, he ran away from home a lot, got in a lot of various kinds of trouble, rode the railroad with hoboes, was generally a burden to his proper parents. He used to tell stories about riding with the hoboes. One I remember is that he almost died from smoke inhalation in a tunnel a train went through. They were riding on the roof of a train car, and he didn’t know that in tunnels you were supposed to lower your head and cover it with your jacket in order to avoid the smoke the train engine generated. The hoboes saw him passing out and put his head down and covered it for him and saved his life, he used to say.

Now that I look back, some of these stories do not make sense. Ross was born in 1913, so he would have been 15, 16, 17 in the years 1928, 29, 30. The stock market crash was in 1929 and the Great Depression didn’t really get going until the early 1930s. Perhaps hoboes were always around. So maybe he could have ridden with hoboes. The railroads were the major way to travel then. The interstate highway system didn’t exist and not that many people had cars in the rural areas so hitch-hiking was not the way to go. Sneaking onto freight trains was how homeless people and the very poor and run-aways got around.

Ross hated going to church all through his childhood, hated organized religion, and would never attend church when we were young and our mother took us or ever after. He did everything he could to get out of having to listen to his father’s sermons, including letting mice go in church. He hated having to attend dinners with parishioners where they always served chicken, and he never ate chicken as an adult. He also said he hated having to cut off their heads as a kid. Being a PK (Preacher’s Kid) was a burden to him, and I’m sure he was a burden to his parents. I do remember him sobbing his eyes out during the crucifixion scene in “Ben Hur,” which he took us to see at Cinerama when we were teenagers. Was he remembering his religious roots? Was he sad over the waste of it? Over his own loss? We never knew and never will. Afterwards he kept telling this joke about a woman who found a million dollars (he could make the story real elaborate) and it ended with, “How’d you like to’ve been her?” (been her -- Ben Hur -- get it?)

When he was 18 and done with high school, his parents used their influence to get him into West Point. In those days, if you weren’t some kind of student star, you got into West Point by having your congressman or senator get you in. Maybe that still happens today. Anyway, it was a very big deal to get into West Point, and it must have meant a lot of effort on is parents’ and their friends’ parts. The night before the physical, he got drunk and showed up severely hung over and got rejected at that point. 

When he was 18 or 19, he got a girl pregnant (I know nothing more than this) and was put in a mental hospital for depression and given electroconvulsive shock therapy. I don’t know if these two events were related. Maybe he was depressed over the West Point fiasco. That’s all I know about that.

In 1932, when Ross was 19, the summer Olympics were held in Los Angeles. That’s when all the palm trees were planted here and the Coliseum was built. A wealthy woman paid Ross to drive her in her big fancy car all the way to Los Angeles to see the Olympics. Looking back, I imagine this was also his parents’ doing, perhaps as a way to keep him employed after the mental hospital. Anyway, he often talked about this trip. It must have been something. Driving from Indianapolis to Los Angeles over the two-lane highways and byways that existed then, staying at funny motels and nice hotels, eating at diners on the way. It took several days. What fun for a young man. He loved Los Angeles and its sunshine and wanted to return. It’s odd now that I think of it, but he never told stories about the actual Olympics. He mentioned the Coliseum, but not the events. 

After that, Ross had a variety of jobs, including selling Christmas trees. Ross could sell you anything. He used to tell this story about how people couldn’t afford the big trees on the lot, so he chopped them in half, and sold the little trees for less. Then he had all these tree bottoms left, and his boss got mad at him about that so he decided to show him. He’d tell how he’d convince people that these topless trees were better, that they were the latest fashion, that rich people preferred big bushy trees, and he sold all those, too. At some point, he and his friend Don Miller opened their own gas station.

In the meantime, smart, pretty, talented little Vera Hope Brown was growing into a sexy teenager who was stacked. Do you know what stacked means? Big boobs. She played piano in Ross’s father’s church, and Ross always said that the first time he saw her, he told his mother that that was the girl he was going to marry. Hope was not allowed to date, so the only way Ross could get to know her was to go over to her house and play pinochle (a card game) with her mother and brother. Ross knew how to be charming and funny, and I can just imagine how he wormed his way into the family. He must have flattered Hope’s mother until she thought he was coming to visit her and not Hope. Or maybe she was always suspicious of him. Hope’s father died suddenly of a heart attack when she was 17 or 18, and I’m not sure whether Ross began courting her before or after that. I only remember stories of him playing pinochle with her mother.

At any rate, one night in August, 1937, Ross arrived on Hope’s porch and said come with me right now and marry me or never see me again. Hope walked right out the door with him into his waiting car and off they took, with Hope’s mother and brother in hot pursuit right behind. They drove like crazy over the state line (which state I don’t actually know) and found a preacher to marry them. Hope’s mother never forgave Ross and refused to speak to either of them for seven years until I was born. At least, that’s how they told the story. I think it must have been more planned than that, because they actually met Ross’s parents, who were thrilled beyond compare that their wayward son was marrying the darling Hope, at a church, where a preacher the parents knew married them. It might not even have been across any state line. Maybe Hope got cold feet at the last minute and that’s why Ross had to threaten to never see her again. Can you imagine? She was just a teenager! (He was 24.)

Hope worked as a secretary and Ross at his gas station, and they lived in various tiny apartments. Perhaps they were happy and madly in love. Perhaps their early marriage was full of stress, since Hope’s family rejected them and Ross’s father was having his church troubles and going into the mental hospital in Florida. However it was, it was soon interrupted when tragedy struck, with Ross’s parents’ sudden death just a few months after they were married. This event affected them the rest of their lives. Ross’s cyclical depressions always came around Christmas and lasted for at least a couple of months, and they were killed in January. Hope got pregnant a couple of times and Ross insisted that she have dangerous, painful illegal abortions each time, since he couldn’t handle it and I’m sure she agreed that he would not be able to. 

After Ross’s parents’ death, various family and congregation members took in the two of Ross’s sisters who were still in high school, but no one knew what to do with the youngest brother who was in about 6th or 7th grade. Hope and Ross took him in, but he was understandably very difficult. He acted out his grief and rage by making inappropriate sexual advances to girls, including Hope, and they finally decided to put him in an orphanage. The two girls who were in high school also acted out, I understand, with various romantic escapades, and they married very young.

Well, back to Ross. World War II soon disrupted their lives. Ross was either drafted or enlisted in the army. He was a sergeant, played saxophone in the base band and led the marching band of his company. He never got shipped out of the United States or saw any combat, but he got sent to Texas, the east cost, Colorado, and California. Hope continued to work as a secretary and went to visit him several times. He also got to come home sometimes. So here goes with some army stories.

The army would have fixed Ross’s teeth, which were full of cavities because he loved sweets and people just didn’t brush and floss and go to the dentist regularly like we do now. Fixing his teeth would have been a long process, so Ross, in his usual impatient and impulsive way, told them to “yank ‘em all out” and they did. For the rest of his life, he suffered from his dentures. I can remember him at the kitchen sink, swearing and trying to file down something on his false teeth either to get rid of some piece that was bothering him or to make them fit better. Yet he was vain and would never allow anyone to see him without them. 

He had a big round scar on his back right about in the middle. If we asked, he’d say he got it running away from a Jap (they were all racist) in Jibooti. He actually got it goofing around with his buddies on the parade ground. Still, it looked like an awful wound. He was plagued with back problems his whole life, and maybe that injury had something to do with it.

I have letters Ross wrote to Hope during the war, and they contain references to asking for money because he was short and had a debt, thanking her for money she had sent, or promising to pay her back. Did he have drinking and/or gambling problems then? Or smart as he was, could he really just not budget? Where would he spend money anyway, stuck on a base in the mountains of Colorado? As long as I knew him, he hated gambling. But then?

I was born in 1944, in the middle of the war, and my sister 2 1/2 years later. My father was demobilized in California and he and Hope and I moved into Roger Young Village, a set of quonset huts where the LA Zoo is now. I remember parties and jam sessions in little smoke-filled rooms with lots of people laughing, drinking, and playing and listening to music. Ross smoked since his teens and didn’t quit until he was in his 50s. Jean was born while we lived there, and Hope’s mother visited us there once.

During our childhood, which is another story, not covered here, Ross changed jobs and moved the family every year or two, except for five years in Whittier. Ross’s temper and alcoholism and contributed to these job changes. Sometimes we moved because of these job changes, sometimes because of trouble with the neighbors, sometimes because Ross was having an affair. He also tried to start his own uniform supply business and his own furniture store, but these did not work out. At some point he “retired” early and Hope earned the living. He was very disappointed with his lot in life, and he suffered from manic-depression. When he was 65, he went into rehab and tried for sobriety, but soon after he turned 66, he suffered ventricular fibrilation and died. He had stopped eating and had lost a lot of weight and became dehydrated and all this contributed to his sudden heart failure. The autopsy showed no cancer.

A few months before he went to rehab, his best friend Tom Mulhern was diagnosed with liver cancer and given six months to live. When Tom’s time was almost up, Ross told him not to worry, that he (Ross) would be there (heaven) before him (Tom). Ross died exactly two weeks before Tom. When we went to get clothes to bury Ross in, we found a brand new, dark gray three-piece suit hanging in an almost empty closet -- a suit that fit his then much thinner figure. He had never owned anything like that before, and we didn’t know he’d got it. When we went through his things, there was very little left, as he had somehow gotten rid of most of his possessions before he died. It was like he knew he was going to die. A mystery, as always, with him.

Now Helen, the saintly aunt. She was patience and kindness personified. Even though she was not very well off, she would give away any “extra” money she got as gifts or other ways. She married Lloyd Huehls, who when young was a “hunk.” They had three boys: Mark, Brian, and Patrick, two of whom became manic-depressive in later life and the third was hypomanic -- that is, always sort of manic. They lived in a tiny white clapboard house on ten acres with a creek in Indianapolis their whole lives. Lloyd could do anything with his hands and worked as a carpenter and builder and did clever wood carvings for fun. With education he would have been an excellent engineer. All his life he wished for time to read, but when he retired he went blind. Helen lived a long life, but ended her days institutionalized with Alzheimer’s.

Hope lived with Helen and Lloyd while she was pregnant with me and Ross was away in the army. Maybe Lloyd was away too. She stayed with them after I was born, and I shared a crib with my cousin Mark who was born soon after me. When we were kids, we loved visiting the Huehlses and running all around their land, eating the corn they grew, playing with their pig Fred, and going on canoe rides with the boys. 

Will and Irene’s second son and fourth child, Joe, died long before I was born, of pneumonia I believe. There was something very wrong with Joe, but no one was very clear what it was. Some said he was epileptic. He was run over by a car as a kid, and had a bad head injury. He did not speak, again I don’t know why, and did not go to school. But he was a very talented musician and could play any instrument he picked up. He wandered the neighborhood and often did not come home for stretches at a time. He would go down to the speak-easies (Prohibition was 1920-1933) and jam with the jazz musicians. He was in some sort of institution when he died as a young man.

Then there was Ruth. She was the pretty, funny, lively, sexy aunt. She was in high school when her parents were killed and lived with various families until she married Bobby McColgin at a very young age. Bobby was a handsome lady-killer. They made a fun pair. They had a cute son, Bobby Junior, who visited us as a young man when we were teenagers and came to a bad end. Ruth and Bobby Senior got divorced, but even after that, Bobby McColgin would send me and Jean boxes of LP records. He worked at Columbia, and I would guess that he’d have his secretary select some extra LPs they had lying around and box them up for us. He sent us lots of musicals and movie sound tracks -- maybe this is where my love of musicals came from.

Later Ruth married Francis Egan and they had Ruth Anne and Frankie junior. Ruth developed Alzheimer’s at a relatively young age and died of it after a few years. As an adult Ruth Anne was in a car accident and ended up years in a semi-comatose state. She had been one of our favorite cousins -- really vivacious, pretty, and fun.

Next was Dottie who was married and then divorced and then married a man with the last name of Edwards. She had a daughter named Danelle that Hope was fond of. Aunt Dottie was always doing church activities. She always seemed a little sad, lost, and dithery to me, but I didn’t know her very well. She died of cancer in her late 60s.

The baby of the family was Marshall, who as I said is still alive as of this writing. He spent his teen years in the orphanage, where he met Margaret. They married at a very young age and had five children: Mike, Marshall Junior, Jodie, Marla, and Mark. They had a tempestuous relationship and were divorced and remarried once or twice, usually followed by a baby. Finally they stayed divorced and Marshall eventually remarried and then divorced again. The few times I met him, he seemed depressed. He phoned me to tell me he couldn’t come to Ross’s funeral because he was too busy at work. Hmph!

Marshall and his family were the only ones who lived in California (San Diego) when we were little kids, and we had a couple of visits and a picnic with them that were a lot of fun. Jean and I were about the same age as the two oldest boys, and they were pretty wild and fun.

Margaret had a bad stroke in her 50s and was not well ever after. Mike was in the service until he retired. Marshall joined the army, and while he was stationed in Germany, his 2 1/2 year old daughter put her finger in a plug and was electrocuted. He had another daughter, who as a married young woman named Kelly Leggett was friendly with Hope. Kelly’s husband was the chief accountant for the building of the new Getty. Mark jumped off a bridge over a freeway as a young man and killed himself, because of depression or drugs I assume. Jodie and Marla are still around, very overweight, but coping with life, with various children of their own.

We have completely lost touch with most of these cousins and second- and third-cousins. Hope maintained contact with many of them, but now that she and the aunts are all gone, it just seems too overwhelming and sad. It’s interesting to speculate about the legacy of poor Will and Irene. There’s the genetic contribution of Will’s bipolar disorder. There’s the trauma of their deaths. And World War II derailed the life paths of thousands of young people anyway. Everyone tried their best within their personal limitations and historical constraints.

Now the Brown side. At least it’s smaller. William Henry Brown (1870-1947) married Maude Jeffries (1876-1953) in the early 1890s. Will was a “wanderer” and left home for weeks at a time. No one knew where he went or why. Alcoholic benders? Eventually he did not come back at all. Maude was a small, cheerful woman with club feet. I actually met her when we visited Indiana in the 1950s. I had never seen such a tiny, old person. Will and Maude had two sons, Richard and Lorie Benjamin (1895-1936). 

Charles German Bonesteel (1856-1940) married Emelia Minnie Richter (1860-1925) in 1879. They had these children: daughter Rae (1881-1955), son Maurice (1889-1931), and my grandmother Rose Echo (1898-1973). Photos of Echo show a beautiful, ethereal young woman with long, long hair. Her father, a farmer, was unkind, but Echo was very, very attached to her mother. Lorie came to work on their farm, and Echo’s father encouraged him to marry her to get her off his hands. Maybe Lorie wanted to marry her, and maybe she wanted to marry him or at least get away from her father. They were married in 1916 when she was just 18 and he was 21, and they had a loveless marriage, at least on Echo’s side. 

I say this because Echo, the only living grandparent I had, rarely spoke of her husband and then only in the most disparaging way. Once she knocked him out with a fireplace poker. She spoke with disgust about how he favored colored shirts, but when he died, she made sure he was buried in a white shirt. When I was considering marriage as a teenager, she wrote me a letter saying that the day after she was married, she wished she “had her girlhood back.” 

Echo was a difficult person. She had periods of depression and periods of rages. She was a controlling parent, refusing to speak to her daughter (my mother) for weeks as a form of punishment. Another punishment she used was threatening to throw herself from the second story window or otherwise kill herself. She spent time in a mental hospital for depression when my mother was a child, and I would guess that might have been when her own beloved mother died. Her children were sent to live with relatives. In addition, she was a phenomenal cook, amazing seamstress, and creative crafts maker. She had a lot of artistic talent. She was active in her church and had a lot of friends. She always sent me and Jean a ton of Christmas presents. She had several heart attacks and died of congestive heart failure.

Anyway, Lorie and Echo Brown soon had two children, John Wesley (1917-1979) and Vera Hope (1918-2003). They lived in a two story house on Hannah Avenue in Indianapolis. When we visited as children, we thought it was a big, fun house, with two sets of stairs, an old organ, and interesting things all over. It had a huge kitchen where Echo would bake Wacky Cakes, cookies, fruit cakes, and make hand-beaten fudge that was the best thing I ever tasted.

While she said Echo was difficult, Hope adored her father. He was warm, kind, easy-going. Also tall and handsome. He worked at Eli Lilly during the Depression, so it affected the Brown family less than others. He used to bring the experimental mice home for Hope to play with. He made a telescope with Wesley -- they even ground the lenses for it. 

Lorie died at home one evening after work of a mild heart attack in front of his teenage kids. They didn’t have 911 in those days, and no one knew CPR. This unexpected loss was emotionally traumatic, but it also created an economic crisis for the family. Echo, who had only an 8th grade education (not uncommon in those days, especially for girls) had to go to work with no skills and no experience. She got a job at the elementary school across the street from their house for 25 cents an hour as a cleaner and “nurse.” Hope had to cancel her plans to attend college. 

I always thought there was something creepy about Wesley, Hope’s older brother. He was mean, opportunistic, and grasping. He was enormously overweight and drank 12 cokes a day. He teased people mercilessly in a mean way. When they were children, he teased Hope so much that it drove her at one point to jump up with a knife and cut part of his ear off. Since she was the world’s sweetest, most patient person, he must have been really aggravating. Peggy told me about how he teased his mother all the time.  She worked at the elementary school as a janitor, but she would tell people she was the school nurse, and perhaps children did go to her for first aid. But rather than allow her this cover-up for her pride, Wesley would always say, “Oh, no, you just cleaned the toilets.” He’s repeat over and over, “You’re just a crapper cleaner” or something to that effect. Peggy loved him, so he must have had some saving graces, but I don’t know them.

Wesley married Imogene (1921-2000) in 1945, and they had two children, Peggy Jean, born in 1948, and years later, John Wesley Junior, called Johnny, born in 1961. Imogene’s father owned a hardware store, and after he died, they ran it. Imogene was warm and kind and had a prodigious memory. 

Ross hated Wesley. I don’t know if it was because he was always so mean to Hope or if it was because Wesley tried to stop his marriage to Hope or both. Echo had a Great Aunt Rose, who was a Madam in Chicago and made a fortune from prostitution. Wesley heard that she had died, and he had Echo put forward a claim to her estate. Echo inherited quite a bit of money. She always tried to treat her children equally, and she said she had a will. But somehow Wesley “couldn’t find” the will after Echo died in 1973. Remember, he and his wife and kids lived with Echo. This situation infuriated Ross. He thought Wesley was cheating Hope, and he insisted on hiring lawyers and fighting this through the courts. It was nasty. After five years, Hope did inherit some money from her mother, but most of it went to lawyers. Once she got the money, Ross insisted that they buy a new condo in Sierra Madre for cash. Once they moved in, in late 1978, Ross went into rehab and into his rapid physical decline. He was dead by February 1979. Wesley was dead by June 1979. The two widows, Hope and Imogene, became friends again.....

Now at last, we come to Hope, the true heroine of this saga. She was a very bright, pretty child, who had the gumption to do some pretty interesting things. She had a newspaper route. In those days, boys would deliver newspapers on their bicycles and then collect the money every month, etc. Boys did that, not girls! But Hope did it. She won the state championship spelling bee and was sent to the national spelling bee in Washington, DC. In high school, she was beautiful with a ready smile, and she was very popular. She was elected a Princess for the Queen of the May. And she had at least one marriage proposal before Ross. She got straight As and was planning to attend college on a scholarship. She did all this despite her difficult mother, who did not allow her to go out with boys or do much of anything. Her mother must have allowed piano lessons, because Hope was a brilliant pianist and organist. She played for the choir at church, where, as I said before, Ross spotted her.

When we were children watching our mother deal with our father, who was mentally ill and alcoholic, but we did not know that then, we wondered why she ever married him. Let’s look at where she was at that point in her life, only 18 years old. Her beloved father had died a year before. She had just graduated high school, with her dreams of college dashed. She faced the prospect of living with her crabby, controlling mother and her mean older brother, while she worked as a secretary to help support the family. Along comes this tall, dark, and handsome older man, a rather wild man perhaps, but lively and fun. When we’d ask her why she married him, she’d always say, “He made me laugh.” He adored her, and as I said, he was very persuasive. When he stood on her porch that evening and said, “Come marry me,” it must have looked a lot more appealing than her prospects at home. Little did she know that she was leaping from the frying pan into the fire. 

Hope, as you know, was a wonderful person, warm, kind, generous, loving, always giving more than she got. She saved Ross’s life. Because of her, he did not kill himself, kill someone else, or end up in prison or an institution, although he came close to these things. Twice I know of, he sat up all night with a shot gun in his mouth, while Hope calmed him and talked him out of suicide. She was a very loving mother. As a child and teenager, I sometimes resented her for not protecting us from him more, but she was doing her best at an impossible balancing act. Now I am amazed at how well she handled him and raised us and worked full time, too. At least he did her the kindness of leaving her a young widow at age 60, so she could relax and do as she pleased for the last 24 years of her life, except of course when she was doing all kinds of nice things for US. She did get to travel (to China and Europe) and she took music composition at UCLA and she did oil painting. And of course she retired early so she could babysit Emily while I went to work. What a giver she was! Oh, I miss her!

As I said, memories of my childhood are many and too long to tell right now. But now that you know this history, you can probably guess how it was. I turned out pretty well, despite these genetic factors and family dynamics, all due to my mother. I tried to be almost as good a mother as she was, so you benefited from her influence, too. We have all turned out pretty well. She would be proud of us.

Jean’s additions/corrections:

(a)  Dad's rides on the trains with the hobos:  In my memory of the story about the hobo saving dad's life from the smoke in the tunnel, the hobo put dad's head in a satchel.  I'd always remembered that because I'd never heard of a satchel before, it sounded really uncomfortable to have your head stuck in one, and dad said he thought the hobo was trying to kill him at first!

(b)  Seeing the movie "Ben Hur":  I thought we saw that movie at the old Egyptian Theater in Hollywood (not the Cinerama).  I remember that the decor for that theater, sort of went with the movie.  Also, I remember dad

sobbing his eyes out during the scene where Ben Hur finds his mother and

sister living in the Valley of the Lepers (previously he was told they were

dead), and his mother won't let him get near them because they have leprosy

and are so disfigured, and his mother wants him to leave them, so he won't

catch it.  Since you've described how dad adored his mom, I can understand

why that scene would be so especially moving for him.

(c)  Marshall's family: I remember that Jodie's real name was Marsha, because everyone in that family had a name that started with the letter "M" (Marshall, Margaret, Mike, Marshall, Jr., Marsha aka Jodie, Marla, and Mark).  I always found that interesting and had asked Mom why Jodie's name didn't start with and "M", and she told me Jodie was a nickname and Marsha was her real name.  Another interesting tidbit about Marshall (but certainly not key to this narrative!) is that one of his marriages after divorcing Margaret, was to a woman that played professional Woman's Football!

(d)  Mark's suicide:  I was told that he had jumped off the Coronado Island Bridge into the ocean.  (A lot of suicides have taken place there over the years).  I remember going to a Seminar for work on Coronado Island, and as we drove over the bridge I looked down and thought how very far down it was and what a horrible way to die.

(e)  Hope (our Mom) not only had to cancel her plans for college after her dad died, but she also had to go to work to help support the family.  I remember Mom telling me that her older brother Wesley, on the other hand, did not go to work to help support the family.  And that Wesley had a car (that Grandma insisted he needed), even though Mom rode the bus to work everyday to downtown Indianapolis. [Maybe he “needed” the car to drive Echo around. That’s the car they chased Ross and Hope in.]

(f)  Rose Echo (our grandmother) inherited money from a Great Aunt Rose, who was a Madam in Chicago.  I didn't know this interesting history!  I think it was dad who had told me some vague story about the money coming from some distant relative, "crazy Uncle Harry", who was a drunk and a derelict in Chicago and everyone thought he was a penniless bum, and yet he had all this money in the bank when he died "in the gutter", and grandma was the last surviving relative, so she got it.  That sounds like dad to cover up the part about the Madam! [That’s why he and Echo so opposed the name Rose.]

(h) I remember Mom telling me that she had played the piano for the church since she was 9 years old!  And I was always so impressed with that - - she could play that well at such a young age and she was poised enough to be able to play in front of all the church attendees even though she was so young.