life story as fiction Archives - Gail KittlesonGail Kittleson

For A Hill Country Christmas, each author has been sharing “stuff” about ourselves on our new FB page, Hope for Hardscrabble Times

In search of brilliant things to write, I came upon this tidbit from a rural 1960’s newspaper:

If you’re from the midwest, I imagine this won’t seem peculiar. But for my author friend out in Connecticut, it does. She marvels at the “stuff” written about friends and family, right in the weekly local newspaper.

The marked names (in yellow) are my cousin’s doing–she has the patience to find and send these remnants of the past my way, and I’m sograteful. In this instance, the farmer who lost his pinky finger in an accident played a huge role in my childhood, and reading about his accident tweaked one of my most vivid memories–the day he got tangled up in the corn picker.

It’s the only Thanksgiving I recall, at Grandpa and Grandma’s, eating turkey with all of the cousins, crammed into a plain small farmhouse. On warmer holidays we ran around outside, chased chickens, swung from the gate–figured out something to pass the time.

But late November in Iowa turns nasty cold, so we most likely sat around…maybe played cards or something. Lots of younger cousins kept me busy, and my aunts Donna and Shirley Donna and Shirley, mentioned in this issue, too, took an interest in us kids.

Then the phone rang. Dad had gotten hurt, so an uncle and Mom took off to drive him to the hospital. And we waited. My tendency for catastrophic thinking had a heyday…one of our uncles lost his entire arm in his corn picker and wore an interesting but kind of scary metal hook. Surely Dad would come home minus an arm, too.

Of course, it took forever to hear an update, so this scenes became stuck in time. I remember Aunt Shirley trying to comfort me, “Now, Gail. It’s probably just the very tip of his finger.”

In the end, “it” wasn’t as bad as I imagined–only a forfeited pinky finger. Dad had been through WWII, driven a truck across North Africa, watched a B47 fully loaded with soldiers returning home blow up on the tarmac.

That Thanksgiving day when I was about ten or eleven, he drove himself back to our house to clean up before going to the hospital. And he wore his lost pinky with pride, I might add.

Interesting how a few lines in a newspaper can make the memories flow!

If you like this step back into history, you’ll LOVE our FB page…HOPE FOR HARDSCRABBLE TIMES! Please give us a LIKE and a Follow.

https://www.facebook.com/ahillcountrychristmas

Joy Neal Kidney joins us today with her new book called Leora’s Letters. This story of love and loss during WWII features Joy’s mother, a young woman with dreams disrupted by huge loss. Yet she continued on to live a meaningful life–lessons for us as we face our own challenges.

Joy will give away one signed paperback copy of Leora’s Letters to a commenter. I’m finding treasures within–there’s nothing like letters straight out of the World War II era. Thank you, Joy!

An Iowa Waitress Became an Officer’s Wife–in Texas, by Joy Neal Kidney

It was the only formal gown my mother ever owned. She bought it for the opening of the officers’ club at the Marfa Army Air Base in Texas. Doris had just become an officer’s wife by marrying Warren Neal, an Iowa farmer who’d earned his pilot’s wings.

Doris Wilson had been a waitress in Perry, Iowa, at the McDonald Drug Store, which had a soda fountain and a restaurant area. In fact, she was serving Sunday dinner there when the announcement of the attack on Pearl Harbor interrupted the background music playing on WHO-Radio.

She remembered thinking that all her brothers were liable to be drafted. One by one the five Wilson brothers left to serve – two in the Navy, three in the Army Air Force.

Dale Wilson and Warren Neal, both Iowa farmers, had enlisted as air cadets in 1942. They were awarded their silver “wings” and became officers on the same day a year later – Dale at Roswell, New Mexico. Warren at Marfa, Texas.

Warren was retained at Marfa as an instructor for advanced cadets. With calls for women to enlist to help with “the cause,” Doris had begun the process to apply for the WAVES. Warren was afraid they’d get separated forever so he asked her to get married instead.

Doris, wearing an aqua suit, and Warren in uniform were married in May 1943 in Dexter, Iowa, then headed for Marfa, Texas.

They’d just gotten settled when they were to attend the formal opening of the new officers’ club. Doris’s first formal gown for the dance was nearly the color of the suit she’d been married in a few months earlier – aqua, short-sleeved, accented with lots of small ruffles.

She wrote home that she had fun at the dance and felt like Cinderella.

That fall, she wrote her brother Dale, then in combat in New Guinea, “I’m going to let you in on a secret. We haven’t told anyone yet, but we are going to have a boy (we hope) next May.” Dale never got her message. The V-Mail letter was returned, still sealed, marked “Missing in Action.”

Decades later, I – the boy she’d hoped for – was the first person to open the little V-Letter and read it.

—–

There’s no photo of her wearing the aqua gown. I remember seeing it as a child only a couple of times among her keepsakes in the storeroom of our old farmhouse.

But now it’s been passed on tome, Doris’s firstborn, who eventually became the keeper of poignant family stories and letters and terrible telegrams.

Treasures, like the aqua gown, to wonder about. Did she ever get to wear it again?

To feel like Cinderella once more?

Connect with Joy online:

http://joynealkidney.com

https://www.facebook.com/joy.kidney