Robert Pope, Jennie V. Turner, Beulah Pope (back) Alice Turner, my Aunt Daisy.
August 18 was my Great Aunt Alice’s birthday. I decided to do a quick post about her. Found a few photographs. Wrote out my memories. Something wasn’t right. I wrote a cousin and my sister asking for their memories. They both sent them and of course all of our memories both overlap and are different. I found my mother’s memories. I looked for more photos. I looked for documents. I realized some of what I “knew” I couldn’t document. So, I’ve spent the last week trying to figure Alice’s life out when there is no one left to ask about particulars. Now I’m working on a timeline to incorporate both the facts and the memories and the contradictions. Today I dug out a photograph I vaguely remembered as being of Alice and my great grandmother Jennie in Canada. As soon as I found it, I realized that the young man and one of the other women were also relatives. The woman behind my great grandmother was her youngest sister, Beulah Allen Pope and her son, Robert is the young man in the front. I recognized them because Robert’s daughter sent me a photograph of them that must have been taken the same day because they are wearing the same clothes. The photo is dated “July 31, 1921 Toronto Windsor, Canada.” I did not realize they were there so early. More wondering and looking. I have ordered Alice’s Social Security application and death certificate hoping to find more information.
Here are three combined photographs using Google Images with photographs of my family superimposed on them. I am participating in World Photography Day on August 19, through the Family Curator website with these photos.
This a photograph of my mother, Doris Graham Cleage, standing on the porch of the parsonage at 210 King Street. This was taken in 1946, Several months after I was born.
St. John’s Congregational Church on the corner of Union and Hancock Streets in Springfield, Mass. My father, Rev. Albert B. Cleage Jr, is sitting on the porch. This was around 1948.
The last photo was taken on the Community house/parsonage that we lived in after the house on King Street was sold. I am on the left, a little girl from church is in the middle and my sister Pearl is on the right. This was taken in 1950 soon before we moved to Detroit.
The “Saturday Night Fun” assignment from Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings (along with some of the fine results) can be found here. It involved picking out a photograph to use in this challenge for August 16 by the Family Curator. For the original challenge you hold up an old photograph and match it up to the present day scene. This means you have to be in the area. Unfortunately, I live far from the sites of my past and that of my ancestors so I was am not able to do this exactly. I also was not able to just choose my photo and let it go at that. Here is what I did.
The parsonage now and us back in 1953.
In 2004 I spent a day driving around Detroit taking photographs of places where I used to live and of other houses family members lived in. The angle of this house fit almost perfectly with the photograph taken in 1953 of my father with my little sister Pearl and me. We are in front of the parsonage on Atkinson. My father was the minister of St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church, two blocks up the street on the corner of 12th Street and Atkinson.
My sister and I shared the bedroom on the upper left. We used to look out of the side window into the attic of Carol and Deborah. They were our age and lived next door and got to stay up much later then we did. They had a wonderful playroom in the attic. I taught Pearl to read by the streetlight shinning into our bedroom. I don’t know why we waited until we were supposed to be in the bed to teach and learn reading.
On our other side lived Eleanor Gross with her family. Eleanor was a teenager and babysat with us during the rare times our parents went out. My paternal grandparents lived down the street and I have a 2004 photograph of that house which I think I will mix with one from the 1950’s. I was trying to think of someone still in Detroit that I could get to take a photo from the proper angle of St. Mark’s. I like this assignment!
I am feeling fine today and I hope that this will find you and all at home well. I am off from my work today. No, not sick just felt like taking a bit of rest and too it has been raining all day and it was such a fine day for sleep before taking my midday nap I had to talk a little to my sweetheart, I only wish I could hear her voice and be made to feel happy. Dear I don’t know anything of interest to write about just now. Things are pretty quiet in Detroit, the factories are all getting ready for a big after war business and I think this city will get her share of it. I am sorry that your mother has been sick, I hope she is O.K. and her self again.
Miss Snow formerly of Montgomery now Mrs. Kelly of Detroit lost her husband last week, I think she will bring the body home for burial. They have him now in storage until she is ready to leave for home with him. Now dear I wrote you sometime ago and told you that I had something to tell you when I saw you, but I just can’t keep it any longer, what I want to tell you dear is this, I feel as if I have tried a single life long enough and now I am going to ask you to become my wife. Now dear, if you will commit to the above request let me know right away and I will write and ask the permission of your mother to marry you, and with her consent we will then fix the time of the wedding. Now I hope you won’t let this shock you any, and please answer me as soon as possible, if we should get married I shall want you to come to this city to live after the wedding, so dear while you are considering the questions of marriage you may also consider the question of residing in Detroit, also.
Mershell “Shell” Graham
Now dear please don’t keep me waiting too long for an answer to this letter, as I am over anxious to hear what your answer will be. Remember me kindly to your mother and sisters, with lots of love and many thousand kisses I close, looking to receive an early and favorable reply
Before Jones placed the evidence before me, I was doing all right with my paper “The Gaylord Gazette.” I wasn’t getting rich, mind, but I was holding my own in a comfortable fashion. I was even approaching that beloved stage where a man can begin accumulating those little extra things, those cultural folderas of gracious living—like, for instance, a fireplace.I was going to put one in the front room of my building. There are two rooms altogether, a large room in the back for my press and linotype and a small room in the front for my desk and Jones’ desk. A rail runs across the front room separating our desks from the waiting room. The waiting room is for the public, people who drop in with a news item or a horsewhip for the editor. No one has horsewhipped me yet, so in gratitude I decided to put the fireplace along that south wall about where those two middle chairs are. Jones likes a fireplace too.
So you see, I was easing along pretty debonair. Gaylord was a comfortable little town. Not too big and full of news like some. That is until Jones uncovered that evidence.
Even though I am an old newspaperman of the old school, I was mortally shocked when the thing was brought out into the open. Of course you may say a newspaperman should be immune to shock, and that’s all right for you to say. But I am the one who has to rebuild his whole philosophy of life at my age.
Jones is my demon reporter. Kristin Jones is her full name but I just call her Jones on account of she is a good “newspaperman.” She is the product of the Gaylord public schools with four years of Vassar thrown in for confusion. She has a gigantic capacity for managing. When she returned from school she immediately looked for something to manage and I, sitting there, very comfortable in my snug little office must have appeared the easiest thing to get a grip on. Jones has a stranglehold on the Gazette now, but I jut can’t find it in my heart to complain. She manages with such a flair that it is good just to sit and watch her.
Jones is twenty-two and she has deep brown eyes and wavy brown hair which bounces on her shoulders. Sometimes, though, when she is turning out some deathless prose for a threatening deadline, she piles it up in a disheveled heap on top her lovely head and it is something, I’m telling you. And when she puts on her little derby hat and dashes out of the office with her big brown brief case, I have to chuckle. She is a journalist, she says. She says that is what they call it at school. She says the day of the sloppy reporter writing his story on the back of a grimy envelope is gone. The reporter has a responsible position and with this responsibility comes the necessity for dignity—and a briefcase.
I say “O.K.” I am too old to argue with youth. Why I have been out of State University nine years! I’m going on thirty-two. But when I was in school, I always wanted to be one of those slick newspaper guys with a cigarette and chewing gum. But like I said, we older folk have got to step aside and let the young folk have a say. We had our chance. Besides I am an owner, publisher, editor and reporter so I got to be a little bit pompous and such.
But don’t mention these sentiments to Jones anymore. I used to and she would get mad for some reason or other. Like once she was trying to make me start a readers’ survey.
“What’s that?” I asked at a complete loss.
“A survey,” she said patiently, “to determine your readers’ preference in reading material.”
“Oh,” I said, “I know all about what they prefer.”
“Why don’t you print it then?”
She was getting a bit pointed here, I thought.
“Too much of that stuff ain’t good for them,” I said innocent as a lamb.’’ Well she certainly laid me out. And she was right too. What right had I to assume to know my readers’ taste and then on top of that to decide whether it is good for them yet.
“O.K., O.K., “ I interrupted when she stopped to inhale. “You are right. It’s just another new idea an old man like me never heard of. Thanks for bringing it up.”I leaned back in my chair like I wasn’t long for this world.
“I appreciate your teaching me these new, youthful methods,” I added. I sort of groaned like my hardening arteries were hurting. For some reason this seemed to irritate Jones, but she controlled herself. “Just what is it your readers prefer but you feel is too rich for their blood?” Jones asked, obviously changing the subject back to the point. “Comics,” I admitted. Jones slapped her derby back on her head and switched out. She forgot her briefcase. I wondered what I’d said wrong.
So you can plainly see why I steer clear of the “youth question” now. Anyway I am busy putting out a paper, and it is getting harder all the time. I’ve been so restless lately. Some days I have the awfullest time concentrating on the “Notices of Auction Sales.” I go through the “Marriage Announcements” like sixty though.
And in the evening when the breeze is soft and the quiet is dark and full of shadows, I find my usual pastimes are boring me. Last night, for instance, I walked out on the poker game at the firehouse and went for a walk. I take a lot of walks lately. Oh it’s rugged all right! And now on top of all, Jones has got that evidence.
She had been mentioning, for weeks, that her evidence was almost complete and she said I would be proud of her good work when she “exposed” the culprit. I wondered who it was. I hoped it wasn’t anyone I knew. I found out Tuesday afternoon.
I was just getting comfortable when Jones came in. My feet were nicely balanced in the top drawer of my desk and a soft clover hayish wind was nuzzling my neck. Two little flies were buzzing against the screen—buzz—buzz-buz-bu—b. I had only just closed my eyes for a mere second when she rudely flung my feet from their comfortable position and into the wastebasket. I felt trapped!
She had on a green sweater and a skirt. I don’t know what color her skirt was but it was a green sweater. It had little pockets on each side and a pin was stuck on the left pocket.
“Well,” she said looking at me with those eyes, “have you got to the nerve to see my evidence.”
“Do it take nerve?” I asked in a veritable chaos of confusion.She reached deep down in her briefcase and drew out a nickel notebook. She fixed me with a narrowed pair of eyes.
” June 19—“ she began, but something forced me to speak.“Jones, my dear,” but she raised a hand for silence.
“Because, said Jones, “the evidence concerns you and your walks and things.”
“I haven’t got the nerve,” I sobbed, “take it away.”
“On one condition,” she said.
“Anything,” I pleaded.
So now we are married and Jones manages me and the Gazette legally. I wonder why she never asked me in for a dish of tea when I was walking by her house all those times.
