So how did I come to write this wandering, loosely-organized tale of family history? Friends and relatives weren’t clamoring for it. There were no eager publishers pushing seven figure advances on me in anticipation of my next best-selling oeuvre. The truth is I was simply a passive victim of circumstance. It transpired that one day in the fall of 2019, as I was sitting around being my normal unproductive self, I received a letter from a gentleman named Randy Hobler. He had been a Peace Corps volunteer in the same Libya II program in which Royse and I had served. He wanted to arrange a telephone interview with me as part of his research for a book he was writing on the Peace Corps Libya program. I e-mailed him back and said that I would prefer to write up a narrative and send it to him, since this would serve as a replacement for the journal which I had kept during our year in Qaminis but which I had subsequently lost when we were vacationing in Greece. Although I wrote a great deal of mostly academic stuff in high school and college, since then, for many years, the only things I’d written had been Christmas cards and checks. Frankly, I wasn’t sure what I could produce. Nonetheless, having made the promise, I sat down at my computer and started tapping away. After about a month, to my surprise, I had concocted a fairly long retelling of our time on the southern shore of the Mediterranean teaching English and trying to speak Arabic. In fact, I found that I rather enjoyed the process of calling up all those memories and putting them into a readable form. The document I sent off to Randy was over 12,000 words. He folded my narrative into his book and when “101 Arabian Tales – How We All Persevered in Peace Corps Libya” was published in 2020, many vignettes of Peter and Royse’s life in Barqa (Cyrenaica) province were included. Having sent off that first effort and while going through a box of papers, I found “East of the Marble Arch”, an eighty page mimeographed collection of essays written by volunteers in Libya’s eastern province, including my description of attending two village funerals in our village of Qaminis. The entries were all presented anonymously, but it still seemed to be quite a valuable historical record. I sent photocopies of it to Randy and to the American University (which maintains a digital Peace Corps Community Archive) and neither of them had ever heard of it. Perhaps I had held the only surviving copy. As I basked in the unfamiliar afterglow of these rather modest accomplishments, I realized that, having done the Libya account, I wanted to keep going. Thus, over the next ten months, the muse of nostalgia and temps perdu took possession of me and I cranked out additional – and extensive – recollections of our three years in Thailand. I sent those Peace Corps chronicles to the American University and they are now published online as The Peter Crall Collection. What a boost to my ego. Little moi, a published author.
After that, my hunt-and-peck juggernaut continued. Having developed this literary head of steam, I then moved on to Crall family history, creating a series of narratives almost entirely from memory. Additionally, I edited and organized a few stories that my parents had written, always using my own personal biases when I had to rewrite or embellish any material. There remain several shoe boxes full of family letters, journals, even a formal family history from my paternal grandmother. They are a treasure trove of information, but I simply haven’t brought myself to read and organize them. Personally, I like working from memory because it’s by far the easiest method. You can stay at home at the keyboard and dip your ladle into that cloudy pool of recollections and bring up a story. It beats the time-consuming process of tracking down original paper records in musty basements and library shelves, although I have also done that, as you shall see shortly.
For deep background on our ancestry, I have gone out of my way to spin the threads of a genealogy – almost certainly spurious – that stretches back into the mythological prehistory of Anatolia. Here’s how it goes. Priam was the legendary king of Troy and, although he died during the sack of his city when the Greeks stuck it to the Trojans, one of his sons, Helenus (also called Scamandrios), escaped the destruction and made his way across the Mediterranean to Gaul, present day France. According to Merovingian court legend, there was a descendant of Helenus named Francus, who founded the Frankish dynasty and was the forefather of Charlemagne. That’s all very exciting, you might say, but what’s the connection with the Cralls? The answer lies with a visit I paid many years ago to the Western Reserve Historical Society in University Circle. They have many shelves of books devoted to various family histories and, lo and behold, one of them was about the Cralls in Ohio, who, judging by the phone book and various other measures, are not a numerous clan. I sat down at a table and spent quite some time perusing this volume. My guess is that it was commissioned by a Crall who had the funds and the ego to hire a professional researcher to write a book making the family look important. Now I must admit that I could find no sure connection between the Cralls described in the book and the Cralls I knew. I make the assumption that, somewhere, there is a shared branch of the family tree.
The line in the book that caught my attention was a statement by the author that, based on his research, a descent from Charlemagne to the Cralls, while not proven, can still not be ruled out. That was good enough for me. My conclusion is that all Cralls, no matter what their current station in life, should be treated like royalty. If they’re not, that just shows that the world is a cruel and unfair place.
To turn to facts that are more certain, my mother was born Elizabeth Rhea Hughes in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1916. Her family was mostly Scottish and Irish, with a garnish of Norman/Welsh. Her father was Carl Hughes and her mother was Rhea Hughes (nee Gleason). There was an Aunt Hattie perched somewhere on a branch of that family tree, but I can’t place her with certainty. I have vague memories of Rhea’s mother – my maternal great-grandmother. I can’t remember her name. She lived on a farm in Michigan and I remember a summer visit there as a very young boy. At the first hint of dawn, I would run out the back door and enter an enchanted world as I explored the nearby barns, meadows and fields. I could hear cows mooing and sheep bleating somewhere far off and out of sight in the mist-shrouded half-light. Rhea sang light opera and Carl sold Sears vacuum cleaners door-to-door. My mother grew up during the Depression and her family never had much money. They travelled all over the country looking for work, with the result that my mom would change school systems nearly every year. She disliked that rootlessness but said it forced her to develop good social skills and make friends with a new group of peers annually. She was the eldest child and was about fourteen years older than her two brothers, William and Richard.
Bill Hughes attended the University of Cincinnati where he played football and developed an interest in art. He became a commercial illustrator and then eventually moved to Arizona where he had quite a successful career as a painter of heroic western landscapes, selling his works at high prices to collectors all over the world. He was a handsome, charming man and his marital landscape was a scene of chaos and wreckage, littered with the debris of numerous broken marriages to beautiful women. He left in his wake more children than I – or he – could ever keep track of. His first wife was Joan Guth. He didn’t take care of himself and died at age sixty after his last coronary artery quit on him. His brother said that Bill’s favorite place to eat was the Cholesterol Cafe.
Dick Hughes had a much calmer life. He married a woman of Albanian descent named Lydia. He worked in residential construction and eventually moved to Georgia and was employed by his son Richie who was a successful businessman.
Mom’s family wound up in Cleveland in the mid-1930s and she graduated from West Tech High School in 1934. She must have been a budding artistic talent because she went on to college at the Cleveland School of Art (now the Cleveland Institute of Art). She recalled that the training was intense, with unrelenting emphasis on good life drawing skills. One of her instructors was a genial tyrant named Louis Bosa. At the end of each class he would move through the studio like a drill sergeant to give each student’s work a blunt appraisal: “Good” or ” No good.” You always knew where you stood with professor Bosa.
The taverns and bars around University Circle were regular hangouts for the art students and one favorite activity was trying to stick a wet beer bottle label on the ceiling. Standing on a chair or table wasn’t allowed. The required method was to place the dripping label – glue side up – on a wallet or a coaster and throw the assembly upwards with a spinning motion. It would seem that the chances of success for a group of drunken art students in this undertaking would be very low, but she said it worked and the bar got free decorating services.
Many students picked up part time work for extra income when opportunities arose, and so it transpired that one day Mom was modeling – with her clothes on – as a Mexican peasant girl for a group of genteel Cleveland matrons who were working on their amateur painting skills, although, importantly, one person in that group was not a middle-aged matron. He was a young man, a few years older than Mom, who had recently returned from traveling around the world after graduating from the Case Institute of Technology as a civil engineer. He was a good painter and generally pretty confident in himself. His name was James W. Crall and, as he painted that Mexican peasant girl, he liked what he saw.
My paternal grandfather was Roscoe Crall, of Pennsylvania Dutch descent. Roscoe’s only male antecedents which I can remember were Reinhart and David. His ancestors came from Germany and there is a family story that the first Crall to emigrate from Deutschland was turned back several times by storms before finally crossing the Atlantic. Roscoe was an accomplished hunter and had shot and stuffed nearly every animal in North America. The taxidermied heads of pronghorn antelope, mountain goat and bighorn sheep hung from the walls of his living room. An old and spooky moose head with massive antlers hung right over his bed. There was a story that on a hunting trip to Alaska, one of his companions took deathly ill and Roscoe had to carry this guy – who was either dead or dying – out to civilization. He was tall and gruff and extremely frugal, but he had good business savvy and ran a successful lumber mill in Shelby. As a young man, he made the front page of the local newspaper by reining in a runaway team of horses:
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THE DAILY GLOBE, Shelby, Ohio
TEAM RUNS AWAY THRU MAIN STREET
April 10, 1905 – The people who witnessed the runaway on Main street on Sunday afternoon are praising the nerve of Roscoe Crall and the young lady who accompanied him. The young man was driving east when his team was frightened by a Big Four train. The horses ran as if they were wild and at Gamble street attempted to turn north. The young man held to the lines and by hard pulling succeeded in holding them on Main street. They went down through the business district of the town as fast as they could go with the plucky young man holding on to the reins and the young lady sitting by his side as contentedly as if it were a real pleasure.
When the team reached the corner of Main and Broadway they again attempted to turn north. In doing so, one of the horses was thrown to the pavement. The animal had no sooner fallen than Mr. Crall jumped out over the dashboard and landed on the horse’s head. Thus he held the one horse down and hung on to the other by the bridle until help arrived. When he managed to get the horses straightened up he started out South Broadway and assured the fellows who assisted him that he would give the team enough traveling before night.
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(Since Roscoe got married in 1900, I think the young woman in the above story, who sat so nonchalantly through the runaway drama, was his wife Rouie. This might be an example of a small-town reporter not gathering all the relevant facts before writing up a story.)
During the Depression, Roscoe bought a lot of General Motors stock and held it for the long term, enjoying a big gain over time. Another purchase in the 1930s was Crittenden Farm, a 665 acre farm-and-ranch complex in Ashland County. It’s still in our family and is now a designated US historic district and has a place on the US National Register of Historic Places with its own Wikipedia page. The Cralls, at least, called it Castle Hill Farm and its focal point is a large Second Empire-style farmhouse with a spectacular three story spiral staircase . Roscoe and his son Bill farmed the land for many years until everyone had retired, at which point they rented the land out. He had an earthen dam built across a gully in the middle of the property to form Crall Pond, which offered great bluegill and bass fishing. A ninety-seven acre section of virgin forest in the northwest corner of the property was donated by our family to the Ashland County Park District and is open to the public as Crall Woods Natural Area. It should be noted in passing that Dad eventually came into possession of some of the antique agricultural equipment that had been collecting dust in the musty corners of the several barns on the farm. There was a great scythe for mowing grain that had a wicked 35 inch blade attached to a long and gracefully curving snaith (handle). I used that grim reaper on many occasions and can attest that, properly sharpened, it went through tall grass like a hot knife through butter. There was also a small hand sickle which was much less dramatic in appearance but equally capable of cutting your finger to the bone if mishandled. Those two pieces disappeared over the years, although we did manage to preserve what I feel is an historically more important item, an early nineteenth century wooden training yoke for oxen. The main components – a shaped beam with four holes to receive the ends of the two curved oxbows – are scaled down in size and clearly meant for small animals. Since the use of oxen as living tractors ended by the 1840s, two hundred years is a reasonable guess for that yoke’s age. It currently rests in a place of honor over the door of our Paul Creek cabin.
My paternal grandmother was born Roucilvie Stauffer in 1884. Her ancestors were Swiss. She told me she was born in Crestline, Richland county and married Roscoe in 1900, when she was sixteen. Brides were young in those days, and the start of the new century was considered an auspicious time to wed. Thanks to Wikipedia, I know that Crestline is one of the highest points in Ohio at 1142 feet, and that Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train stopped there on April 29, 1865 at 1:07 AM. Some research has been done into her family history and it sits unread somewhere in my house. Rouie liked to garden, and she raised an heirloom type of tiny-eared sweet corn, white in color, that made the most wonderful small popcorn, a type that is never sold commercially. The Force was strong in her and she outlived Roscoe by many years. Rather than move in with family, she chose to continue living in that Second Empire farmhouse and managed well by herself for a long time. Royse and I visited her on several occasions during the late 1970s and early 1980s. We would sit in the parlor with her and she would talk about the old days. Her speech was rural and from the nineteenth century. She spoke of washing curtains in “sal sodie” and of things happening in the “forenoon”. Outside the front door by the gravel driveway was a very old manual water pump with a long handle and a tin cup hung on a piece of wire. One person would work the great squeaky handle up and down maybe a dozen times before water was coaxed up from the depths and the other person, holding the cup below the spout, got something cold to drink. A great country treat on a hot summer day. Eventually she did become unsafe alone and Bill moved her to a nursing home. We visited that facility in Ashland and, when we first saw her, she was moving briskly down the hall with her walker, but carrying it rather than actually using it. She lived to be 104, and as Royse and I were driving to her funeral in Ashland county on a cold January day in 1988, I had an unusual experience which told me that her spirit was alive and kicking. As the snowy winter fields rolled by, I suddenly heard her speak to me in my mind. I could sense that she was smiling and pleased. She told me, without words, that she was happy we were coming to her service. So, what the heck, that tells me there probably is a spirit world.
Rouie was as short as Roscoe was tall, but they managed to have three children, all boys. The younger sons were George and Bill. The eldest, James William Crall, was born in Shelby, Ohio in 1913, so he was a small town boy not a farm boy. He was short, smart and rather adventurous. In the early winter, when there was just a thin layer of ice on the Black Fork river which ran through town, he and some fearless pals would get up a running start and slide across the thin iced surface at high speed as it sagged and bowed beneath them. It was the risk that made it a sport. Velocity alone preserved them from a frigid baptism. In high school he ran the high hurdles and was one of the best in Ohio because he had the honor of losing to Jesse Owens in the state championships. Achievement clearly ran in his blood and he attacked scouting with a vengeance, rising to Eagle Scout, mastering every skill and activity in the handbook and sporting a ceremonial sash filled border to border with merit patches. Dad’s teachers also identified him early on as a gifted student and encouraged his parents to steer him towards college rather than trade school. This was probably a painful prospect for Roscoe since it would require him to spend money. So it was that Dad enrolled at Case in the fall of 1931, where he had an active and successful four years. His grades were good and he was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society. He was also a member of the social fraternity Beta Theta Pi. As a member of the Case swim team, he was state champion diver. He was president of the student government Case Senate. What a show off.
He graduated in 1935 with a degree in civil engineering and, as the family legend goes, he sold his textbooks for $35 and spent the next year traveling – with no fixed plan and with very little money. He hitchhiked to Texas to see some friends and spent some time in Mexico, where at one point he was down to two dollars in his pocket. After that, he joined the Merchant Marines and worked as a deckhand on commercial freighters. His first voyage was to Spain and Italy with an eventual return to New York City at the end of the year, where work was hard to come by and the temperature was below zero. He was well-pleased to get a job on a freighter bound for Shanghai via the Panama canal, all of which promised warm weather and more adventure. He got to see Yokohama, Mt. Fuji and Kobe before moving on to China, Thailand, India and a return home through the Suez canal. He wrote about these travels in an article which was published in the Case Alumni magazine.
During the six month period that he lived in Shanghai, he took a number of jobs, one of which was as a film critic for an English-language newspaper in town. In later years, he confessed that he had written some of the movie reviews without actually seeing the pictures. He probably enjoyed walking Shanghai’s famous Bund along the Huangpu river in the evening, rubbing shoulders with the sailors, adventurers and shady characters who thronged the city in those days. My guess is that he had his pocket picked there, because we do know he lost his passport while in Shanghai, since the replacement document has been preserved, with its carefully hand-lettered information written out by a clerk in the US consulate. He painted a lot of watercolors in China, many of which he brought home but some of which he sold there for pocket money, so there’s still a chance that somewhere in the People’s Republic today a framed watercolor, painted and signed by a young American engineer, hangs on someone’s wall.
The need for a real job drew him back to the States. And so it was that Jim Crall and Betty Hughes met in that art class, probably in 1936. While she was still in school they dated and he worked. They were quite the stylish young couple and a photograph has survived from that time showing them very au courant – Dad in Jodhpur riding pants and Mom in a bohemian outfit that was straight from a left bank gathering of Parisian literary exiles. The record is a little sketchy on when and where they got married but it might have been in Georgia in 1939 because Dad worked for the Schaeffer Construction company there and Mom worked for a department store designing window displays.
They returned to the Cleveland area and Dad went to work for the Leonard H. Krill Co., a construction firm. And they started a family. Susan was the firstborn and arrived as an affirmation of life on December 7, 1941 – a day that had its share of sorrow and certainly needed a positive note as a counterbalance.
My father always had a series of hobbies and interests that he pursued with considerable energy. He was a gifted craftsman and made a grandfather clock out of walnut – his favorite wood. He fashioned a lovingly detailed model of a 1930s-era racing plane complete with a glass windshield and a landing gear with wheels that turned. My brother Steve is the guardian of that treasure.
He was a passionate angler who could catch fish when no one else got a nibble. A rainbow trout wound up on his hook in the Chagrin river – a body of water that in the 1960s had no trout, and his pursuit of bonefish in the Florida Keys was the stuff of legend. He was a wizard at three cushion billiards and regularly trounced the competition at the Cleveland Athletic Club. A story goes that at a tournament in Chicago he beat the former world pool champion Willie Mosconi at billiards. Documentation of this claim is lacking. He went through a kite phase and would often be found on the large, windy fields of Hawken School on County Line Road flying exotic-looking hand-made creations summoned out of silk, tissue paper and bamboo. When my parents came to see us in Chiang Rai, Dad made sure that on the way over he scheduled a stop at the famous Hamamatsu kite festival in Japan. He never became a hunter like his father and said that, on his one and only hunting trip, he went all day without seeing anything until, on his way home, he spotted a squirrel up on a branch. He took careful aim with his shotgun and loosed both barrels on the poor critter, which must have been pretty much atomized, since he could only find tufts of fur afterwards. This experience did not make a positive impression on him. I remember that Dad’s naturally high level of energy showed up when he got behind the wheel of his car. He was not genetically predisposed to drive at or below the posted speed limit and he got so many tickets that the traffic court judge handed down an order that restricted his freedom of movement and specified that he could only drive between home and work until he stopped speeding.
Mom never really traveled internationally before she got married – perhaps Canada but not much beyond that. She did relate a funny vacation story from her childhood. One summer, perhaps after her dad had sold a lot of vacuum cleaners and had some pocket money, they headed for the Canadian border (either Lake Superior or the Boundary Waters), where they hired an elderly local to take them through a maze of small islands till they spotted one that pleased them as a campsite. The local had never been there before, Mom’s family had never been there before, and they had told no one where they were going. They just instructed the old geezer to come back in a week to pick them up. So while they enjoyed their seven days of tranquility, they were counting on their enfeebled guide not to have a heart attack and to be able to pick his way back through a watery maze to that little island he had seen only once. Otherwise, it probably would have been half a century before someone stumbled upon their bleached bones and clear evidence of cannibalism.
In the 1930s, getting one’s driver’s license and then a car was a big, exciting deal – not a birthright as it is today. Mom recalled that she felt proud and accomplished when she was finally able to get behind the wheel by herself. One incident which occurred early in her driving career left a lifelong impression on her. One day, when her mind was on something important like boys and not on the road ahead, she did a “genuflect” and rolled through a stop sign. Sure enough, a policeman hiding nearby caught her. He was possibly driving a 1930 Model A patrol car with only a sign welded on top that said “police”. Nevertheless, he waved her over and, after inspecting her license, gave her a stern lecture about obeying traffic laws – a dressing down which probably included veiled references to seizing her vehicle, putting her mugshot on a wanted poster and throwing her in the hoosegow for a week. That experience was sufficiently traumatic that, for the rest of her life, she would always come to a complete halt of several seconds at every stop sign and then scan the horizon for law enforcement before proceeding. She also got an important lesson in fuel management one time after she had been driving for several days with her gas gauge needle right on “E” for “empty”. Just as she crested a hill, her engine sputtered and then stopped, proving that the gauge hadn’t been kidding. As she began coasting, she had the presence of mind to check her brakes and slip the transmission into neutral. The transportation gods were smiling on her that day. As she came to the bottom of the hill, a gas station materialized as if on command and she was able to roll nonchalantly right up to a pump as if this had been her plan all along.
With such modest adventures as a prelude, it was therefore an extremely big deal for Mom when they dumped their kids with a strict, old-school babysitter and took off for Europe in 1957 – Mom’s first trip to the Continent. (This outing all the way from Cleveland to the Old World represented quite a large leap up the travel food chain for them. The occupants of the lowest rungs of this regional status ladder were rustic folks, particularly the ladies, who lived in small towns in central Ohio. A big shopping day for them would be hitting the department stores in Columbus with lunch at the Lazarus cafeteria. The social elite in the state capital, however, considered it de rigeur to make periodic runs to Cleveland for sales at Halle’s and Higbee’s with lunch and the latest exhibition at the Museum of Art. You see the pattern.
Clevelanders went to New York and Eustace Tilley and his crowd partied in Paris.) Ocean liners were still quite fashionable at the time and so, while that hired witch was spanking their kids and administering enemas if they didn’t poop on time, Mom and Dad sailed across the Pond, enjoying a posh five days on the SS United States. Mom was by nature a little excitable, so as the ship docked in France at Le Havre and they boarded a train for a short trip along the Seine, her anticipation at finally seeing Paris, the City of Lights and the city of her dreams, grew so extreme that she literally got sick to her stomach and almost threw up. She recovered to a standing position, however, and went on an epic sightseeing rampage to every monument, museum, park and bistro in her guidebook. I believe she also did similar damage in Germany, Italy and Spain, with Dad pulled along in her slipstream, cashing American Express travelers checks every few minutes. Dad may have started the family wanderlust, but the two of them jointly passed on a full blown case of the travel itch to their descendants.
Dad worked for many years for the Krill company and eventually rose to be president of the firm, a position he held for quite some time and which gave him wide experience in commercial construction and in real estate. At some point – in the early 1960s perhaps – he had some unspecified but decisive conflicts with the Krill board of directors and got fired. A painful chapter in his life, to be sure, but a crisis is also an opportunity, and he was not unemployed for very long. Almost immediately, he was hired by the architectural firm Dalton, Dalton, Little and Newport. They had a real estate division and jumped at the chance to harness his expertise, and he spent several well-paid years with that firm. Eventually, although Dalton begged him to stay, he struck out on his own with a plan to become an industrial real estate developer. This would require him to become a real estate broker, so it was back to school as he dove into textbooks to prepare himself for the difficult state licensing exam. The first time he took the test he failed. That was a bitter pill for him to swallow, and he did not like to talk about it. He just went back to the books and succeeded on his second attempt. With that license on his office wall, he looked for vacant land on greater Cleveland’s growing edges that had potential to be developed as industrial parks. He took out loans, bought promising sites, obtained zoning approval to subdivide the land, and then put in roads and utilities. Finally, he sold the individual parcels to companies that wanted to build offices or factories. His most successful ventures were in Lake County.
My parents were lifelong friends with Bob and Rilla Stickle. Bob was an architect and designed buildings for the Catholic community in the United States and also in Europe, and through them we met a French architect named Jacques Barillet when he and his family came to visit the Stickles in Ohio. They had a bright and vivacious daughter named Josie and I was put in charge of showing her the east side of Cleveland. We cruised around in my little rattletrap VW bug. One of the stops we made was at Moxahela Farm, the home of Nick Jones, a University School classmate of mine. Nick’s family grew a lot of produce and in the summer they would set up a little vegetable stand at the end of their driveway where shoppers could take what they wanted and leave money in a cigar box on the honor system. Josie was quite surprised by such an arrangement and remarked that such a setup would be unheard of in France. The Barillets would later host me and a college friend for a memorable visit at their summer home in northwestern France. The Cralls and the Stickels vacationed together all over Florida and the Caribbean – the guys would fish and the girls would pursue birdwatching and shopping. Betty and Rilla were truly cut from the same bolt of cloth with their many shared interests and they called themselves las Abuelas Vagabondas – the Rover Grannies. I think it was Rilla who introduced Mom to the Redlands farm district a few miles north of Homestead. The farms in the area grew a wide variety of fruits and vegetables – including many exotics – and, in addition to the big wholesale business they had, would sell their produce at roadside stands. Mom enjoyed driving the quiet back roads there, buying mangoes and longans, all a safe distance from the glitter, rush and decadence of Miami. Another place they all loved was Cozumel island in Mexico, and Dad spent quite a bit of time investigating the possibility of buying property there but, in the end, the labyrinthine workings of Mexican real estate law and the Latin mind stymied him. Bob and Rilla must have had a trendy streak because they convinced my parents to try marijuana. It’s kind of hard to picture my folks puffing on a joint, but they said they did try it, although with underwhelming effect. Bob was also a pilot and flew his own single engine plane. Dad related one particularly terrifying near-death adventure in Alaska as he sat next to Bob with a stopwatch in one hand and a map on his lap. His navigation assignment was to call out time and course changes to Bob as they flew in foggy, mountainous and unforgiving terrain trying to reach a remote landing strip on the coast. One of Mom’s most ambitious birding trips was to Trinidad, which she described as a truly glorious experience, with many species added to her life list, and one of the few times she was able to dodge her lifelong insomnia and get some deep, restful sleep.
Mom wrote very well, although she never talked about it, perhaps because she lacked self-confidence and feared criticism (she once remarked that she could never operate a retail outlet of any kind for fear that no customer would ever enter the store). She penned several accounts of her travels – Yellowstone, Mexico, London, Spain and Libya. They were short, hand-typed memoirs placed in binders and quietly put away for posterity to discover. To me, they were wonderful gems of narration, often illustrated with her own sketches, and fully deserve to be passed down to future generations. She had a natural sense of style in everything she did. She dressed with a classy and refined flair and could decorate a house like no one else. When Ford came out with the Mustang in 1964, she was an early adopter and very quickly had a yellow convertible pony car. One unfulfilled ambition she had was to work on an archeological dig. When she did eventually explore the possibility, she was told that her health and age precluded participation.
She became pregnant with me on or about June 6, 1944. So as the Allies invaded the beaches at Normandy, I began preparations to invade my parents’ lives in nine months.