A CONVERSATION WITH TWO COUSINS
A
CONVERSATION WITH TWO 2ND COUSINS
(WITH
THEIR PERMISSION)
I apologize for
not publishing any posts for awhile; time just seems to fly! Craig and I enjoy traveling in our
fifth-wheel trailer, getting away from Wisconsin winters and visiting areas of the
country we haven’t seen before. We left
home mid-February, 2022 and headed to the Southwest – New Mexico and
Arizona. While in the Phoenix area we
visited with my 2nd cousin, Mary Ellen VAWTER KUN, and her niece (my
2nd cousin once removed) Susan S. (deleted for her privacy). We met at Mary Ellen’s Senior apartment
building and enjoyed lunch together and then went up to her apartment, where
she showed us the beautiful blankets and smocks that she makes and sells. She has won many ribbons at the local fairs,
including “Oldest Participant,” which she pretty much has sewn up (pun intended!),
since she just turned 100 on July 20, 2022!
My
great-grandparents, Francis Marion CHURCHWELL (1843-1929) and Sarah Ann
Virginia DURRETT (1850-1931) reared 11 children; Mary Ellen’s grandmother was child
number two, Frances Josephine “Josie” CHURCHWELL born in 1870; my grandfather,
William Thornton CHURCHWELL was child number 10, born in 1890. So, you can see that although they were
siblings, Josie and Will were born 20 years apart!
Josie
(1870-1947) married Albert Calvin VAWTER (1869-1951) in 1891; they had nine
children. Their son, Francis Marion
VAWTER (1893-1985) married Hazel Ellen ROTEN (1895-1985) and they were the
parents of two girls, Mary Ellen, born 1922, and Evelyn Berneice (1926-1994);
they are my 2nd cousins.
Evelyn married Jack Hamilton S. (1926-2009), and they had three
children; the middle child is Susan S; she is my 2nd cousin once
removed.
Mary Ellen recalled that her dad fought in World War I (U.S. involvement April, 1917-11 Nov, 1918).
MARY ELLEN: “Oh, yes, he was in the Rainbow Division, and his most fun part of the war (laughter), he got to drive a motorcycle into the German lines, back and forth, to distract the attention while the soldiers advanced to other places! In France, he went to see one of the schools there. And when he went in the school teacher told the students where he was from, and they told the kids to go to the map, point it out, and tell them what it was noted for. He said those children went right exactly without even asking any questions, pointed it out, and said, ‘that’s the center of the coal in the state,’ kids knew more about it than our own here. And they gave him a pair of shoes, the wooden shoes that the teacher’s daughter wore, and they wear them when they’re outside and then they put their shoes right by the door, before they come in. There’s separate little moccasins they wear in the house. And this schoolteacher had him come out for dinner one evening. And another thing he told about, well it was in France mostly, he said the whole bunch of them ate in a restaurant one night, and he had to go to the bathroom, he went out around the back (laughter) and he said they had been eating dog and cat meat and didn’t know it; there were all the skins and the skeletons from them.
MARY ELLEN: Oh, yes, I don’t think anybody ever missed a
vote in our family.
JEAN: When I asked Aunt Jean that – Beckie Jean –
she did not remember her mother ever voting, and that made me sad, that Iva
maybe never voted.
JEAN: Neither one of my grandmother’s knew how to drive. Did your mother know how to drive?
MARY
ELLEN: No, she wouldn’t drive. She drove
before they got a stick-shift, she drove the car a few times. But the minute they got a stick-shift she
would never drive again.
Mary grew up in Neosho, Missouri, near
her VAWTER grandparents. I asked Mary
Ellen about her memories of her grandmother Josie.
MARY
ELLEN: Oh yes, we were together a
lot. We grew up – they moved to Neosho,
let’s see . . . Uncle Phil (Albert & Josie’s youngest child) went his last
year of school in Neosho and then they bought that land out on the highway and
built that camp, the cabins. They built
a house and four cabins and then later on he built a little one-room hamburger
stand.
Mary Ellen shared about her grandfather Albert VAWTER.
MARY
ELLEN: Albert was a mean man. Uncle Vernon was next to Daddy (Francis
Marion was the oldest child) and then Uncle Arthur, and they all had the
measles, all three of them. And Dad was
getting over them first, but the other two still had them. Well, (Albert) wanted them to chop wood, so
those three kids with the measles was outside in the wintertime chopping
wood. Uncle Arthur passed out, and he
wouldn't get up when Grandpa told him, and he (Albert) took a stick of wood and
hit him on the leg and the hip, three times!
And Daddy took the ax and says, "If you hit him one more time I'll
kill you." Daddy had to leave home
because when he threatened his father, you know, that was bad. So he moved in with neighbors two miles away,
and six months later Grandpa came and got him, he said, ‘I need you to work in
the field, come on home.’ That was just
one incident.
They had
to move every year. He (Albert) would
try to get every woman that he came in contact with, didn't make any difference
if it was in front of Grandma or where. And
then when they lived in Neosho, I was back – course we lived there for a long
time – but I was back a lot when they got older, too. And Grandpa would take up
with every woman that come in the camp that he could take up with. His mother, Grandpa’s mother was just like he
was, and Grandma, you would ask Grandma how she lived with Grandpa and she
would never say a word against him, never at any time; she would say, his
mother was the meanest person she ever knew.
(Albert was) the only child of marriage – I think he had six
step-sisters from one parent and six or seven from the other – he was the only
child by that marriage. That’s the way I
remember, pretty close to that, anyway.
(I looked the VAWTER family up on Ancestry.com: Albert’s father and his first wife had six
children, then she died. Albert’s mother
and her first husband had six children, then he died. Albert was the only child of the second
marriage of both of his parents.)
One house
they lived in – about a year and a half, and (her dad) never went to a school –
the same grade – until they got to Neosho, and he got to go three grades in the
same school. That was it. This was cute; one time – you know, Grandpa
Vawter always moved because he’d get in trouble with the women in the
neighborhood, and they had to move every year, year-and-a-half, constantly on
the move. And every time they’d move,
they’d build another house, and put in an orchard, and they’d just start (getting
fruit) and then they’d have to move again.
So, your Grandpa (Will Churchwell), wrote a note one time (laughed) and
he addressed it “A. C. Vawter on the run!”
He was 16 or 17, or something like that! (Remember the 20-year age
difference between Will and his sister Josie.)
“A.C. Vawter on the run.” And do
you know, Grandpa never allowed him in the house after that.
And
somewhere in those pictures that was in the trunk that Evie had, was a picture
of Uncle Benny, and myself, and my sister, Evie, we were all sitting on the
front steps in Neosho. Uncle Bennie
would come there two or three times, but Uncle Willie, they never came when we
lived in Neosho, only when we lived in Denver.
Ben CHURCHWELL with nieces Mary Ellen
and Evelyn VAWTER
Albert C. & Josie VAWTER on the
porch, Neosho, Missouri
My dad was
a schoolteacher. All of the time we
lived in Missouri he got $10 a week, for 65 hours, and one time he got a raise
to twelve and we thought we were rich.
(laughter) That was the biggest
improvement that we’d had till I don’t know when. And they always gave their ten-percent to the
church, that, regardless even when he made $10 a week, that was it. And I think about a week before they talked
him into moving he had changed jobs and got a raise to $15 a week, and that was
when we should have stayed in Neosho because we raised all of our own food and
that made a big, big difference. And in
Denver during the Depression, we went hungry a few times, because we didn’t
have any place to raise food and money just didn’t go that far, we didn’t have
it. I can remember during the Depression
in Missouri, there everything you got was delivered to the house. Before we got the cow, we got milk delivered
to the house every morning, for 10-cents.
I was never in a grocery store until we moved to Denver, because Mother
and Dad would go once a month and all they got was just staples you know, that
they had to have. And when we were
growing up, they had flour in 25- and 50-pound sacks of cloth instead of paper,
and it used to be just a plain color, and then they finally got to making
flowers on it, and that was our clothes.
Mother always would go down with Dad and pick out prettiest ones and we
had bloomers you know, down below the knees, and the plain white was our
underslip, and then the flour sacks was our clothes. And I hated those bloomers, I’d go to school
and pull them up! (laughter) I’d pull
‘em way up just as high as I could pull ‘em!
I don’t know why we had to wear bloomers and nobody else did. But that’s what we had to do. Same way with long underwear in the
wintertime, I’d roll ‘em up. (laughter)
MARY
ELLEN: We moved to Colorado in ’36.
JEAN: Okay, I wondered because your dad is in the
1930 census in Missouri, and then the 1940 census in Denver.
MARY
ELLEN: We moved in June, ’36, from
Neosho to Denver. When we moved to
Denver, the Dean of Girls, her name was Mrs. Sweet, and the first time I went
in to talk to her, she says, ‘Whenever you learn to speak English properly you
can come and talk to me. Otherwise,’ she
says, ‘you get someone else to do the talking.’ And you know she never talked
to me the whole time I was in high school, she wouldn’t do it. She said I had to get rid of that accent, and
talk properly. I never had an accent
(laughter). The Taxi came and took me
the other day to the doctor and when he asked where I was going, he says, ‘What
part of the Ozarks are you from?’ And I
said, ‘How can you tell?’ Because I know
that I don’t have the accent that I used to, he says, ‘By the tone of your
voice.’ I don’t know (laughter). I’ve had a lot of people tell me that; in
Seattle, the same way, when we had the station there, the uh, one man came in
one afternoon and I said, ‘Good afternoon,’ and he said, ‘Oh, you’re from the
Ozarks.’ Just like that. I know there’s still some words that I get in
– I tried to dictate – (laughter) – I tried to dictate that book on there, and
you never heard such words! ‘Ann Little’
always turned up for some word, I don’t know what it is – Ann Little –
something I say – in every sentence, when I say it, that’s what comes up when I
dictate it. Now I’m so self-conscious I
can’t even talk on the thing!”
Mary Ellen and Susan share about
Mary Ellen’s parents, Francis Marion and Hazel Ellen ROTEN VAWTER.
MARY
ELLEN: My mother never went more than
the 8th grade, she felt like she was not as good as a lot of people
because she didn’t have the education.
And she never read anything except her Sunday School quarterly
books. I never saw her read a paper, a
magazine, or a book. That and her Bible,
that was all she ever read.
SUSAN: And then there was Grandpa (Francis Marion
VAWTER) – who had tons of books everywhere, stacks of them! The entrance to that house when you went in
the front door there was a huge hallway and then the stairs up, and there were
bookshelves from floor to ceiling in that hallway. They were full and then he had stacks of them
on the floor and they were stacked this high (about 4 feet) on the floor and
then around his TV chair in the dining room they were stacked everywhere. He read and read and read and read.
MARY
ELLEN: He read all the time – I have seen him work all day then sit up all
night and read all night.
That was
Depression days, that’s the reason we moved, trying to get a job, and he
couldn’t get a job, absolutely none . . . About half we were in Missouri and
the other half in Denver. And Mother’s
sisters – she had four sisters living there (Denver) – and they thought,
because being in the big city, you know, he could have a chance of getting work
more, he went on WPA.
(The Works Progress Administration was a government program that
employed and paid men when no other work could be found. Many city, county, and state beautification
projects, and highway and road improvements were done through the WPA during
the Depression.)
When we
went to Denver, he went on WPA, he just couldn’t stand it hardly, he was so
ashamed because he had to do that. He
even grew a mustache to try to disguise himself, and that’s when Mother came
down – she went to work in the fur store, repairing fur coats and she got strep
throat and the doctor was treating her for the flu and her fever went to 109,
and the doctor took her to the hospital, a different doctor that they called
in, and he stayed with her three days and nights, they packed her in ice, and
that’s when her mind was different, her disposition, everything was different
when she came out. So, with that, and
the years she had Alzheimer’s it was 21 years.
But, we’re not sure when she went into Alzheimer’s, but after you know
more about what to look for, I think it was the day she started up to her
sister’s who lived up the road, Aunt (Nobles?) and the same side of the street,
four blocks up the street, and instead of going like she always did, she turned
and went to Colfax and must have been several hours later because it was just
shortly before Dad got home from work, she was standing in the middle of the
intersection on Colfax and 16th Street that goes through there, and
she had her purse with her so they knew where to bring her home, so after that,
that’s when Dad retired. But anyway,
when he got off WPA, he went into construction, he was construction
superintendent, (until) he retired.
SUSAN: He built the Denver Mint, and all kinds of
interesting buildings.
MARY
ELLEN: Cherry Creek Shopping
Center. When (Mary Ellen’s son) Francis
was little, he used to go with him on weekends, when he went inspecting that,
and climb up, he was all over that.
Every Saturday he’d go with his grandpa down there. And they took Neusteters building, even at
that time it was a real old, old building, a half a square block, yea, half a
square block, and they had to put a new foundation underneath it, and they
worked at night, and they put that foundation under there with – kept the store
open the whole time, no one even knew they were working, I don’t know how they
ever did it, but they did. I think that
was about the hardest thing. And then as
you go through the South, like Neosho, Oklahoma City, what other city, Miami in
Oklahoma, you’ll find public swimming pools and the little bathing houses that
go with them, he was on the crew that built those.
Neusteter’s, 1924.
(Rocky Mountain News Photo Collection, Box 416)
Mary Ellen recalls the
family going to visit Will and Iva in the country.
MARY ELLEN: That was a
treat for us, because you know, you
didn’t go often in those days. A short
distance was a long trip. We’d go to
Stratton, oh, I would say we went five or six times . . . for the day. One time we stayed all night, it was stormy
and we stayed all night, and I can remember we had blankets we spread on the
floor and slept on the floor and that was such a treat, us kids.
JEAN: What do you remember about Will & Iva, my
grandparents? Did he – was he strict,
was he loving, was he both?
MARY
ELLEN: He was like his mother, his --
not his mother, he was like his oldest sister, like my grandmother.
JEAN: Oh, like Josie.
MARY
ELLEN: Yeah, Josie; they had the same
disposition, and just the sweetest of the whole family.
I shared that I was surprised to learn how long Will and Iva’s
family lived in a sod house.
JEAN: When my mom talked about the soddy, I always
thought she meant when she was little, but that picture I have of my
grandparent’s 25th wedding anniversary they’re standing out in front
of a sod house. Did that stick in your
mind that they live in a sod house, or was that more normal back then?
MARY ELLEN: “When they were built right they were good
air-conditioned places. In Hungary, when
we went to Albert’s, one of his relatives, aunt or great-aunt or something, she
still lived in a sod house. There was
one neighborhood where the whole town was sod houses.
My mom mentioned Cousin Marion, who
was Mary Ellen’s dad, in her diary, as well as Mary Ellen and her sister,
Evelyn. She talked about going and visiting
Evelyn’s school at one point, and Cousin Ted (Mary Ellen’s uncle) visiting from
Missouri.
MARY
ELLEN: He came out to visit us before he
moved there. And they moved next door,
two doors down from us, later on, on Buck Street, and they lived there, I think
Teddy (Ted, Junior) was four, about five years old, when they left there. Do you know . . . the folks paid $3,000.00
for that house on Fox Street; do you know what it’s on the market for
today? $795,000.00, that old
neighborhood! They’re re-building the
school across the street, to face 8th Avenue. That’s where Jack and Evelyn grew up.
SUSAN: Fox Street, 724 Fox Street, 80204. Gosh, how do I remember that?
CRAIG: You were pretty close to the Platte River and
Spear Boulevard.
MARY
ELLEN: We never lived anywhere except
that one house in Denver. We lived there
just . . . fifty years? I think that’s
true . . .
SUSAN: Well, Grandma and Grandpa lived there
sixty-five years, didn’t they?
MARY
ELLEN: It was fifty or more, I know, I
mean the folks I’m talking about. Dad
just couldn’t hardly give it up because he said it was the only house that he
ever lived in one year or longer.
She also shared her experiences during World War II.
MARY
ELLEN: Well, during the war (World War
II), war started right after I got married, and all the trains – uh, Walter (her
first husband Walter OVERLIN, married in 1941) was stationed in Oklahoma City
first, and we stayed – another girl from Denver, her husband was there, we met
on the train – we stayed there first and we sold, or we passed literature out
for politicians, for six weeks we were there.
And then we went to, I went to Florida, she went somewhere else – I
don’t remember where – but we went through Kansas City, and then I stopped at
Grandma and Grandpa’s, on the way down, and on into New Orleans.
When I got to New Orleans I had to go to a hotel for
overnight. And the taxi driver at first
he said there’s no vacancies anywhere, then he says, “I know where one is, it’s
not a nice one but it’s clean. And he
said everything you’ll find is perfectly clean.
(laughter). When I opened the
door the cockroaches were about that big (3 inches) they just flew every
direction you could think of. But the
bed, it was clean.
From then on to Florida – Jacksonville, Florida – that’s where I
was all during the War, the trains were the old wooden seats and wooden backs,
and no doors over the front, you could sit on the step, hang your feet out, and
they didn’t say anything at all, it didn’t make any difference. But I met a young Jewish boy and he said, he
wanted to know what I did, I think he was about, had to be a teenager or
something, he was a young kid, but he was very knowledgeable, and he said,
“What do you do?” and I had never done anything special except Mother had
watercolors, and I said, “I like to paint, but I’ve never done it before.” He was going to Jacksonville, Florida too –
he said, “You go in this photo shop, watch the girl paint,” and he said, “see
what you can do,” so I did (laughs) I never painted a picture in my life, with
this oil and all that. And I watched her;
the man said, you know, “Are you experienced?”
I said, “Oh, yes, I can do it.”
(laughter) I sat there, out of the corner of my eye I watched her put
all this stuff on the picture (photographs) first – Sepia, and she’d put this
solution on, so I’d put it on mine, then she’d put something else on, and I’d
put it on mine – I don’t know what it was – and then I saw her start coloring,
so I’d do the same thing, and it passed, so I got the job. I did that for, I don’t know, for a long
time, and then Kay’s Jewelry store in Jacksonville had a studio, photo studio
upstairs and it was all automatic, the cameras, you’d set them, you know, where
you could picture the child and it automatically adjusted the thing – and I
said, “Oh, sure, I’ve had experience
(laughter) I worked there the
rest of the War. We took mostly
servicemen’s children. It was so much
fun.
Mary Ellen shared her memories of my mom in later years.
MARY
ELLEN: “Mildred and I used to meet when
she was on her way to Denver General (Hospital), when she worked there, we’d
meet at the corner and talk in the mornings, and just visit awhile, and sort of
made a habit of doing that.”
MARY ELLEN: Is Beckie still
alive?
WILLA JEAN: No, Aunt Jean
died . . .
MARY ELLEN: More than a
year ago?
JEAN: 20 . . . yeah, I
think so. Yeah, she was really starting
to lose her memory, and so they did have to put her in a Nursing Home.
MARY ELLEN: I never heard
from her again until after her husband died.
JEAN: Well, she was
preceded in death by Doug, then she was preceded in death by my cousin
Marshall, he had diabetes and he passed away and then Aunt Jean died, must’ve
been early either 2019 or 2020, I’ll have to look it up here, and then her
daughter passed away of a heart attack. (I got that backwards, Deb died before her
mother.) So, her oldest boy Doug is the
only one left.
We had to end
our visit to get back to our dog in our RV, let Mary Ellen rest, and let Susan
drive home to her two dogs. It was such
a great visit, and I was so happy to finally meet these two amazing women who
are Facebook friends that I had never met before! Mary Ellen celebrated her 100th
birthday with many friends and family.
She is an amazing centenarian,
still going strong!! May God continue to bless her as she is such a blessing to
others!
Mary Ellen VAWTER KUN
Year unknown
Willa Jean
LAREW HOFFMANN, Mary Ellen VAWTER KUN, Susan S.
Arizona, 3/26/2022
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