Kathleen's Memories circa 1926

M's note: I found this on the computer in the business center at the Lenbrook. Kathleen had begun an autobiography, partly at the urging of Richard Prince (who lived on her floor in the Brookhaven Tower - the date/time of the post is guesswork for when it was composed). Ultimately, Kathleen dictated it and Martha Bell (of Peachtree Christian) typed it up (I'm not sure how it ended up on the business center computer hardrive but fortunately it did).

by Kathleen Lindsey

Chapter 1 (Telegrams, Trains, Railroad Depots, Telegraphers)

I have been encouraged to write about my early years of growing up with the telegraph keys, trains and railroads. I don’t suppose there are too many of us left to tell the story.

Both of my parents were telegraphers and station agents for the Southern Railroad, now Norfolk Southern. Dad taught mother telegraphy during World War II when there was a shortage of men and a great need from the troop trains were running and there were important acts of war.

Mother was quite young—still in her teens and I was a baby at the time. The next door neighbor kept me while Mother worked. Dad was self-taught by hanging around the railroad station at a small town where his brothers, my Uncle Paytaw lived. The railroad agent in the small town chose him.

Dad had left the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, near Hendersonville, for the flat lands of Estell, South Carolina. He had grown up on a beautiful farm with a large family—four brothers and four sisters. Telegraphy was in its hay day at the time. It seemed to appeal to him as a career. He had just been out of the Army and had been dismissed during peace times. He was successful in getting a job, or jobs, and worked for the Southern for some forty years.

So I grew up in this fascinating era of telegrams and train rides galore. Much of my childhood was spent the railroad office of my mother. After school, I would walk to the office to be with mother. The telegraph wires would be clicking—clickity click.

There was several keys and sounders in the operation where the dots and dashes of the morse code would be sending messages from all over. I learned the morse code at an early age. It was like a game to me like learning your ABC’s. As a child, I talked with my Dad on the keys, with mother’s help, and this is a memorable experience. I had the strangest feeling at this moment of time.

Telegraphs were going hither and yond on the clicking keys with a symphony of different tones and pitches, some slow and some very fast. The operator had to keep an ear on alert for a special que in order to answer his or her call. Actually, the office became quite noisy at times to the extent that the sounds would bother me and mother had a way of quieting things down. One way was to stick a pencil in a certain part of the sounder. Another was to have a tobacco can placed on the sounder—I think to make louder or resonate softer.

I still have a telegraph key and sounder that was used by my parents. I also have an instrument that was called a “bug” that was used for fast sending of messages. So called, because the instrument message was so fast that it made a buzz similar to a bug. My Dad used it a lot. He was a faster sender than my mother, although she was very good. Dad had more experience. These instruments are in my possession and are for sale.

My mother had a good thought to keep them. She had key placed on a board for travel to Atlanta to the Morse Club Historical Society Annual Meeting which used to take place annually at the Atlanta Woman’s Club. The key was hooked up to a battery so that she could send a message to the main center celebration which I think was in Philadelphia. I was introduced as having cut my teeth on the telegraph key, which was so funny to me but almost true. I thoroughly enjoyed these meetings because the participants had so many interesting tales to tell as we went around the tables. I wished I had recorded them in some way. Now they are all gone and the meetings no longer exist. It is sad to me that this great era is gone. I will attempt to describe in more detail some of the instruments that equipped the railroad office during the time my parents were telegraphers. I have a few pictures of the station—one especially of me and my mother standing at the entrance to the depot and showing a flower garden that she had planted to beautify the area—I was young, about 8 years old and I had a big bow in my hair (picture). This picture appeared in a journal called The Telegrapher (I think) that was published by the railroad and I did have a copy. I did have a copy, but this article has been lost. It was complimentary to my mother and so the good caretaking that she had with the depot in trying to keep the yard pretty with flowers. It was the responsibility of the agent to keep the depot clean and also the yards.

The office had the telegraph wires to the right of the door as you entered and then there was a big desk to the left of the door where mother’s big desk was. There was a big pot belly stove in the center of the room, a setee close by, and then on the opposite side of the room there were 2 big desks. One of them I claimed as mine and I had a typewriter and an ink well. It was the kind of pen that you dip in the ink and, of course, I enjoyed that. Also, indelible pencils which were purple and leave a little purple mark and I loved that color of the pencil. I had paper and pencil, and I probably used up a lot of Southern Railway papers and stationery and I would write letters to my cousin Mary which was fun. We would write each other back and forth.

The office opened into the freight room and inside the freight room was a blue jar which had a copper foot in the blue water and it had wires that were hooked up and that supplied the electricity for the sounder and keys. I will describe this more later in the story.

The office had large windows, kind of like a bay window, from the ceiling to the desk top so that mother could look up and down the railroad track and see the train coming. On the other side of the room was another large bay window from ceiling down to desk level. The Branch line had only one train that came daily, usually late in the afternoon, around 4:00 pm, and this was the big event of the day because it brought freight. It also picked up freight and it went up into the mill yard and across the highway—it was about half a mile up to the mill and dad had a station just about a mile away in a small town called Bath, South Carolina. He had a different type office—a busier office. It was on what’s called “the main line” and he did passenger service as well as freight and express and, of course, handled the mail from the post office there. Mother had the same thing, except for the passenger. There was no selling of tickets to ride the train.

Outside of the station was a big platform that went all around the right side, the back and the left side which was sort of the front of the depot and there were two doors at the opposite end of the place that had originally been for passengers, but apparently, they decided not to sell tickets at that station. One was labeled “white” above the door; and one was labeled “colored” above the door. But, an odd thing happened. It seemed that we didn’t have a place to live there for a while and we lived in the depot itself—somehow through special arrangements with the railroad and so those waiting rooms which were supposed to be seats for passengers were used as a “condo” for us to live in and they put running water in the kitchen which was one of the waiting rooms and that was our kitchen and dinette and the other passenger room was used for a bedroom. Our office was our sitting room. That was it! We lived there until Dad found a better living arrangement.

He had a garden across the railroad tracks which were close to the station and my Dad was a farmer at heart. Dad also had a cow and she had a stall at the far end of the station. It was just a little place he could stand and put a tin roof over it and we had some chickens—so we had eggs and actually I guess there was no store close by. We had our garden and our milk and eggs and that was the way it was.

I remember one time we had picked a lot of butter beans and spread them out on a sheet in the warehouse. We were selling butter beans and I was little. They had a big pile of beans in the middle of the sheet, and it was mother, me and my uncle and a few others shelling beans. It was tempting to me to play in those beans and so I did that. My uncle told me not to play in the beans, and I evidentally didn’t stop it. I got a spanking—the only real spanking I ever got—from my Uncle Herbert. That’s my butter bean story.

I used to play on the platform outside a lot and walk around the station. There were rain barrels on each corner and on the far end of the depot. They contained water with kerosene in them. It made a filmy top which was to keep the mosquitoes down. At the far end of the depot was an outhouse and we did have running water, but there was no bathtub or anything like that. I remember getting a bath in a galvanized metal tub and mother would heat water on the stove and that was the only way we had hot water. I think I got a bath in the tub once or twice a week.

We used a kerosene lamp and candles and I remember one lamp that we had was called a land lamp and it had a real white wick that made a real bright light and we loved that. I still have that lamp and had it converted to an electric lamp.

At night, instead of the outhouse, we used a chamber pot or sometimes called a slop jar with a lid on the top. Mother kept it smelling good with something like Creole in it—sort of like a disinfectant and it had a piney smell to it.

In the freight room, there were two long boards called “skids” and they were used when the train came and the box car door opened, those two skids would be put in the box car and that was the way to bring the freight up from the box card to the freight room. That was something interesting to watch when the train crew would come, it would be a happy time for me because the train crew all knew me and they, of course, would first play with me a little bit, and then they would get with mother about the work that was to be done. Sometimes they took me for a ride on the engine up into the mill yard and I got to sit way up high where the engineer sits. I could feel the heat from the firebox where they put the coal which was red hot. So much heat came out it almost scared you and it was at the same time a very exciting time for me and a little bit scary—the heat and seeing those red coals when they would put fresh coal in with a shovel to the coal. That’s what made the train go.

Another interesting part of the train to me was the caboose (that’s the last car on the train that has the little light hanging down from it). That was always the end of the train. At one time I would go in and see the caboose inside—that was where they kept their papers and important things in a little desk for a long desk. For a long time I had the little desk…it had little pigeonholes in it that they kept different pieces of their mail and papers.

The little town where mother had her station was called Clearwater and my father’s station was Bath, and so some of us said you go to Clearwater and take a Bath. Anyway, that was just a funny thing, but the little town itself was owned practically by the mill company—the manufacturing company that manufactured textiles. It was very small, just a couple hundred people maybe, and it had a church, I think it was a Methodist Church. Everybody went to the same church and I remember Mother used to play the piano some. She was taking music lessons on the side and there was a music teacher in that town. She was very good. She later moved to Aiken and I took music lessons from her for quite some time. I would ride up to Aiken on the streetcar.

Besides the church in Clearwater there was a company store. That was the only store in the town and I think they had a little bit of everything—kind of like a country store. There was a community center and there was a nice lady that ran that. She taught the girls courses like home ec. She taught us how to make simple things. You could go there to play games and they would have entertainment at times. The school that I first went to in the first grade, I remember, was very small—like a one room school house. They later built a nice grammar school there and I went through the 5th grade there. My 5th grade teacher was Mrs. Mimms and she seemed to take a liking to me and I made a scrapbook during the 5th grade. She gave me magazines and things that I cut out and pasted into an album and strangely enough, I found through a friend of mine, that they had placed that book in the education department there in Aiken which is the County seat and it was on display there. I had never known that and I was a little bit proud to know that happened. It was all about South Carolina.

After the 5th grade my Dad found a home in Bath where he worked, which was just a mile away, and we moved from the depot to Bath and I transferred to the public school there.

We moved into a much bigger house and it had running water. Dad had installed a pump and we had a Delco system, and we had a bathroom. I think by this time we had electricity. I was older and I went to the latter part of grammar school at Bath. After that, I went to a high school called Langley- Bath which was from two small towns—Langley (just beyond Bath) and they combined to have the school named Langley-Bath High School.

Telegraphy Instruments
(M's note; this was to be the next chapter. Kathleen had some actual telegraph instruments in her apartment. We gave these to Mr. Prince for him to donate to any institution that would like to display them.)

Later Version of the 'early years' w misc additions

The Life of Kathleen Lindsey

CHILDHOOD

Chapter 1  (Telegrams, Trains, Railroad Depots, Telegraphers)

         

          My early years were spent growing up with the sounds of telegraph keys, trains and railroads.  I don’t believe there are many of us left to tell the story. 

          My parents were telegraphers and station agents for the Southern Railroad, now Norfolk Southern.  During World War I, Dad taught mother telegraphy when there was a shortage of men and a great need.   The troop trains were running, there were important acts of war and lots of train movement. 

          Mother was quite young—still in her teens.  I was a baby at the time.  We lived in Pelion, South Carolina, a very small town.  My Dad basically taught himself by hanging around the railroad agent in the station in the town where his brother, my Uncle Plato, lived.  The neighbor who lived next door kept me while Mother worked.  

          Dad left the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, near Hendersonville, for the flat lands of Estell, SC.  He had grown up on a beautiful farm with a large family—four brothers and four sisters.  Telegraphy was in its peak.  It appealed to him as a career.  He had been in the Army and dismissed during peacetime.  He was successful in getting jobs, and worked for the Southern Railroad system for some forty years.  His first job was at Hambury, SC, a few miles from Augusta, GA.  Next was Clearwater, SC were he met my mother.  Later, her first job was at Clearwater.  By the seniority rule, the person with the longest service could “pull: a job when a new one came open.

          We were living at Pealion, SC—a very small town.  At the time, mother thought she ready for delivery, she rode the train by herself to Augusta, Georgia to be at her parents home.  They lived on Wrightsboro Road in Augusta.  Mother wanted to have a specialist, a Dr. Mulherin, because her first delivery had been difficult.  My sister lived only a few weeks due to a head injury.  I was born in the front bedroom of my grandparents home.  Dad came at my birth and he sent a telegram to all of the family members to announce my birth.  I have a picture of them at the Grove Park Inn in North Carolina.  (PICTURE)  They had met in Clearwater at the depot and had married at St. James Methodist Church in Augusta, Georgia in 1909.  They spent their honeymoon at the Grove Park Inn.

          His first job was at Hambury, SC, a few miles from Augusta, Georgia.  Next was Clearwater, SC where he met my mother.  Later, her first job was at Clearwater.

          So I grew up in this fascinating era of telegrams and train rides galore.  Much of my childhood was spent in the railroad office of my mother.  After school, I would walk to the office to be with mother.  The telegraph wires would be going clickity click, clickity click constantly. 

Several keys and sounders were in operation where the dots and dashes of the morse code would be sending messages from all over.  I learned the morse code at an early age.  It was like a game, like learning ABC’s.  As a child, I talked with my Dad on the key, with mother’s help.  This is a memorable experience.  I had the strangest feeling at that moment.  To send a message the telegraph key had to be opened to the right; to end the message the key was closed.  (PICTURE—KEY)

Telegrams were delivered immediately after being sent, often a sign of death, especially in wartime.  So many words at a rate (picture--telegram).

Telegrams were going hither and yon on the clicking keys like a symphony of different tones and pitches, some slow and some very fast.  The operator had to keep an ear on alert for a special “sign” in order to answer his or her “call”.  Actually, the office became quite noisy at times to the extent that the sounds would bother me.  My mother had a way of quieting things down.  One way was to stick a pencil in a certain part of the sounder.  Another was to have a red Prince Albert Tobacco can placed on the sounder—to make louder or resonate softer.

I still have a telegraph key and sounder that was used by my parents.  I also have an instrument called a vibroplex that was called a “bug” used for fast sending of messages.  So called, because the instrument message was so fast that it made a buzz similar to a lightening bug.  My Dad used it a lot.  He was a faster sender than mother, although she was very good.  Dad had more experience.  These instruments are in my possession and are for sale, also a railroad lantern that belonged to mother, a required possession for emergency use only.  Torpedoes were kept.  They made a purple light meaning danger.

My mother was smart to keep them.  She had a key placed on a board for travel to Atlanta to the Morse Club Historical Society Annual meeting, which took place annually at the Atlanta Woman’s Club.  The key was hooked to a battery so that she could send a message to the main center celebration, which I think was being held in Philadelphia.  I was introduced as having “cut my teeth” on the telegraph key, which was so funny to me but almost true.  I thoroughly enjoyed these meetings because the participants had many interesting tales to tell as we went around the tables.  I wished I had recorded them.  Now they are all gone, the meetings no longer exist.  It is sad to me that this great era is gone. 

I will attempt to describe in more detail some of the instruments that equipped the railroad office during the time my parents were telegraphers.  I have a few pictures of the station—one especially of me and my mother standing at the entrance to the depot and showing a flower garden that she had planted to beautify the area—I was young, about 8 years old and I had a big bow in my hair (picture).  This picture appeared in a journal called The Telegrapher or Dots and Dashes, which was published by the railroad.  I did have a copy, but this article has been lost.  It was complimentary to mother about the good caretaking she had with the depot in trying to keep the yard pretty with flowers.  It was the responsibility of the agent to keep the depot clean and also the yards.

The office had the telegraph keys to the right of the door on entering, then there was Mother’s big desk to the left.  A big pot belly stove stood in the center of the room with a coal scuttle, a settee close by, and then on the opposite side of the room there were 2 big desks.  One of them I claimed as mine.  I had a typewriter, an ink well, pens and pencils.  It was the kind of pen that you dip in the ink. I enjoyed that.  (I called it inking.)    Also, indelible pencils which were purple and left a purple mark.  I loved that color.  I probably used up a lot of Southern Railway papers and stationery and I would write letters to my cousin Mary, which was fun.  She answered.  She was Aunt Katie’s daughter who lived in Hendersonville, NC.

The office opened into the freight room and inside the freight room was a blue jar (Leyden) which had a copper foot in the blue water.  It had wires that were hooked up to the key that supplied the electricity for the sounder and keys.  Mother had an unusual copy machine with a wheel on top.  She used melted sealing wax on important letters with a heavy weight to stamp by hand.  I liked to watch her do these things.

The office had large windows, like a bay window, from the ceiling to the desk top so that mother could look up and down the railroad track to see the train coming.  On the other side of the room was another large window from ceiling down to desk level.  The Branch Line had only one train daily, usually late in the afternoon, around 4:00 pm.  This was the big event of the day because it brought freight.  It also picked up freight and it went up into the mill yard across the highway—it was about half a mile up to the mill.  Dad had a station about a mile away in a small town called Bath, South Carolina.  He had a different type office—a busier office.  It was on what’s called “the main line” and he did passenger service as well as Western Union telegraph, freight American Express and handled the U.S. Postal mail from the post office across the street.  Mother had the same thing, except there was no selling of tickets to ride the train, nor did she handle the postal mail.

Outside of the station was a big platform that went all around the right side, the back and the left side which was sort of the front of the depot and there were two doors at the opposite end of the place that had originally been for passengers, but apparently, they decided not to sell tickets at that station.  One was labeled “white” above the door; and one was labeled “colored”.  Oddly we didn’t have a place to live for a while so we lived in the depot—through special arrangements with the railroad company.  Those waiting rooms that were supposed to be seats for passengers were used as an “apartment” for us to live in.  They put running water in the kitchen, which was one of the waiting rooms, that was our kitchen and dinette, the other passenger room was used for a bedroom.  The office was also our sitting room.  We lived there until Dad found a better living arrangement.  We had a wind up phonograph in the freight room.  My parents like to dance.

He had a garden across the railroad tracks, which were close to the station.  Dad was a farmer at heart.  He had a cow and she had a stall at the far end of the station.  It was just a little place to stand with a tin roof.  We had a few chickens.  We had Dad’s garden, milk, eggs and chickens.  There was only a Company Store.

Now, a butterbean story…we had picked a lot of butter beans and spread them out on a sheet in the warehouse.  We were shelling butter beans.  They had a big pile of beans in the middle of a sheet, and it was mother, me and my Uncle Herbert and a few others shelling beans.  It was tempting to play in those beans and so I did.  My uncle told me not to play in the beans, but I didn’t stop it.  I got a spanking—one good wallop on my bottom—

the only real spanking I ever got—from my Uncle Herbert.  I never forgot it.

I used to play on the platform outside a lot and walk around the station boxcars with mother to check numbers.  I liked to climb up the ladder on the boxcars to the top. 

There were rain barrels on each corner of the platform and on the far end of the depot.  They contained water with kerosene in them.  It made a filmy top which was to kill the mosquitoes.  At the far end of the depot was a two-hole outhouse.  We did have running water, but there was no bathtub.  I remember getting a bath in a galvanized metal tub.  Mother would heat water in the kettle on the stove.  That was the only way we had hot water. 

We used kerosene lamps.  I remember one lamp we had was called an Alladin lamp and it had a real white wick that made a bright light.  I still have that lamp and had it converted to an electric lamp.

At night, instead of the outhouse, we used a chamber pot, sometimes called a slop jar with a lid on the top.  Mother kept it smelling good with something like Creolin, a disinfectant that had a piney smell.

In the freight room, there were two long boards called “skids”.  They were used when the train came, the boxcar door opened, those two skids would be put in the box car and that was the way to unload the freight from the box car to the freight room.  That was something interesting to watch.     

        When the train crew would come, it would be a happy time for me because the train crew all knew me and they would first play with me a little bit, and then they would get with mother about the work that was to be done.  Once they took me for a ride on the engine up into the mill yard.  I got to sit up high near the engineer.  I could feel the heat from the red hot firebox where they put the coal.  So much heat came out it was scary seeing those red coals when they would put fresh coal in with a coal shovel.  That made the steam train go.

Another interesting part of the train was the caboose (that’s the last car on the train that has the red light hanging down from it).  That was always the end of the train.  One time I went to see the caboose inside—that was where they kept their papers and important things in a little desk with pigeonholes. 

The little town where mother had her station was called Clearwater and my father’s station was Bath, and so some of us said “you go to Clearwater and take a Bath”.  Anyway, that was just a funny thing, but the little town itself was owned by the mill company—the company that manufactured cotton textiles.  It was very small, just a couple hundred people maybe, and it had a church.  Everybody went to the same church and I remember Mother used to play the piano and sometimes taught Sunday School.  She was taking music lessons and there was a music teacher in town.  She was very good.  She later moved to Aiken, I took music lessons from her for quite some time.  I would ride up to Aiken on the streetcar.  The streetcar ran from Augusta to Aiken, and was later replaced by a bus or taxi.

 Besides the church in Clearwater there was a company store.  That was the only store in the town.  I think they had a little bit of everything—kind of like a country store.  There was a community center that was run by a nice lady.  She taught the girls courses like home economics.  She taught us how to make simple things like pimento cheese and hot chocolate.  You could go there to play games and they would have entertainment like Maypole dancing on May Day. 

The school that I first went to in the first grade, was very small—like a one room schoolhouse.  Later a nice grammar school was built and I went there through the 5^th grade there.  My 5^th grade teacher was Mrs. Mimms and she seemed to like me.  I made a scrapbook during the 5^th grade.  She gave me magazines and things that I cut out and pasted into an album and strangely enough, I found through a friend of mine, that they had placed that book in the Education Department in Aiken which is the County seat.  It was on display there.  I had never known that and I was a little bit proud to know that.  It was all about South Carolina.

I wish she had taught me more 5^th grade arithmetic.  When I got to medical school, some of us had to repeat our 5^th grade math (fractions) in a chemistry class.

After the 5^th grade Dad found a home in Bath where he worked, which was just a mile away, and we moved from the depot to Bath and I transferred to the public school there.  Dad invested in real estate that extended to frontage on Bath Lake where we had swimming and boating.

We moved into a much bigger house with running water.  Dad installed a Delco pump well system, and we had a chain flush bathroom with lavatories in each bedroom.  I was older, I went to the latter part of grammar school at Bath (9^th grade).  After that, I went to a high school that was from two small towns—Langley (just beyond Bath) combined to have the school named Langley-Bath High School.  (picture)

The school was within walking distance of our home.  It was a large stucco building, all on one floor, with a big auditorium.  I spent four years there and continued with piano lessons.  I took Algebra, English, French, Home Economics, Science, and typing.  My typing teacher later married my Uncle Herbert—they met at our home.  For a while, we rented rooms to teachers.  The school had football; I took basketball and tennis.  There were no guns, knives or drugs in school like now.  School was good.  We did a play coached by the English teacher.  My good friend Carolyn Grice had the lead role.  I played the black maid—they blacked my face and put a pillow over my stomach to make me fat.  My often repeated line was “I ain’t saying nothing”, the audience laughed at me a lot—I was a sight.

Carolyn and I liked to swim in the lake.  We would follow each other with the boat to see how far we could swim.  We did some diving.  Dad had a motorboat, not outboard, the kind you hook on the end of the boat.  On Sundays, he would take us for a ride.  It was fun.  (picture)  We played tennis after school in the afternoon.

TELEGRAPHY INSTRUMENTS will be added by david as a foot note or appendix!

          Indoor plumbing was a luxury.  We had 3 bedrooms, kitchen, dining room, living room, and a screened porch.  It was a big house located near the high school so that I had a short walk to school on a dirt road.  The “big house” faced the Augusta-Aiken Highway.

          Bath had a railroad station in the center of town and across the tracks was a Company store with a post office inside, a church close by, large brick mill, a drug store which was privately owned, and a theater that showed silent films with piano playing.

TRAVEL STORY TO BE INSERTED SOMEWHERE…(typed September 6, 2010)

            When I was about 11 years of age, my parents decided that we would take a long trip to Spokane, Washington to visit my Uncle Grover who was the one brother who said he wanted to get as far away from home as possible.  He didn’t return to visit the family, so Dad decided we should visit him by train.  This would be the longest train trip for us ever.  Since we al used railroad passes, it would help on the expenses.  We were all excited about using the dining car and the Pullman.  It took us about 5 days to travel from Augusta to Spokane across the whole wide west.  It was such a treat to use the sleeping car and to watch the porter make up our beds at night.  Sometimes in the day, we could move into the day car or the observation car.  The scenery was beautiful as we passed through the Rocky Mountains and some of the national parks.  When we stopped at Glacier National Park depot, I remember looking out the window and there was a big tall Indian standing there.  He had eon the brightest feathered outfit I had ever seen--to behold, almost unreal.  I don’t know if he worked for the railroad or if he was traveling.

          After we left Chicago, we were on a new railroad line called the Burlington Northern.  It was such a smooth ride that even a child could tell the difference.  From there on no more jerking and squealing on the tracks.  I learned that the western trains were the best.  And the mountains were different from the ones in North Carolina that I was familiar with—more ro0cks and crags and fewer trees—a different kind of beauty.

          When we got to Spokane we were met by my Uncle Grover and Aunt Viola.  I had not met them before.  Uncle Grover was an engineer with a Northern line.  They had no children so I didn’t have anyone to play with but we kept on the go sightseeing.  There were beautiful gardens that we visited, beautiful flowers and trees.  I learned a new tree called the monkey tree.  The redwoods were beautiful.  After a few days in Spokane, the three of us traveled to Seattle by train with the plan to go by boat to Vancouver.  Again we got a discount on the fare by being railroad people.  The steamship boat that we had was named Princess Kathleen.  I got a thrill out of that and pretended it was named for me.  This was indeed exciting.  There was a grand piano in the lobby of the ship.  I played a song called Ramona.  I was a bit timid, but something made me want to play on that big piano.  There was some motion on the water, but I don’t remember getting sick.  We did sight seeing in Vancouver and again, beautiful gardens.  Totem poles abounded.  It seemed like a different world to me—I felt like my horizons had been expanded by that trip.  The most extensive trip we had ever done…before it had been short distances like to visit grandpa in Hendersonville, NC or to the beach.

THE ELI LILY PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANY STORY

          When I married my husband, he was going to the Southern School of Pharmacy on the G/I bill—it was his junior year.  He was recently back from 4 years of European duty in the U.S. Army Air Force, night fighter squadron.  In his senior year, his class traveled to Indianapolis to tour the headquarters of the Eli Lily Company.  The wives were invited.  It was a bargain trip, thanks to help from Eli Lily and a very enjoyable trip to see how so many pills are made and prepared for distribution.  Little did we know at that time that his first job after graduation in June 1952 would be as a Sales Representative for the Company.  This was memorable because our son John was born on June 6, and while I was in the hospital, I received a letter stating that I had passed the examination that made me Board Certified by The American Board of Anesthesiology.  This was my final big exam.

          My husband Jay went to work for Lily.  All employees were required to buy stock in the company which was a good thing.  So this was the beginning of our stock portfolio which slowly grew to about 500 shares.  My husband left the company after a short time because it required traveling through much of the State and being away at nights sometimes.  So he went into retail store pharmacy.  I was doing Anesthesiology at Piedmont Hospital at the time, which required me being ON CALL every other night and every other weekend.  Jay was needed at home.  We continued to invest a small amount in the stock.  As the years went by and our son, my second child grew up, I decided with the two of us, to give the stock to John as a gift.  I think it was Christmas in the 1980’s.  I remember trying to decide on half of the shares or all.  I decided to give John all 500 since we had a modest portfolio of our own.  We wanted to encourage John to invest some in the stock market.  During the years following, the stock split four times over a span of many years so that John had 2,000 shares—not bad for a good dividend stock.

          The sad part of the story is that John died April 29, 2008 of Coronary Atherosclerotic Heart disease at home by himself.  He also had vascular dementia.  He had been a heavy smoker for many years—since high school at North Fulton.  He had not been diagnosed for the heart and was being treated as heartburn.  He kept this from me.  He had actually retired on disability from the Atlanta Journal Newspaper as Sales Manager for over 25 yrs.  He told me he was offered regular retirement.  He kept a lot from me.  We lived together for many years.  He was age 55 at his passing—much too young.  He had made a Will leaving me with living rights to the house, but the house and property go to my grandchildren from Uncle John.  Of course, I was supposed to die first, so we never know.  I was living at Lenbrook at the time and for 8 years in my 90’s because of his dementia he had not handled his finances well and had a lot of credit card debt, a loan on the house, and just a complicated mess of bills.  I am co-executrix with my son-in-law who is handling the estate.  The house I had deeded to John is now up for sale in this slow economic downturn.  Beth and George received the assets associated with his work--the 401K, IRA and so forth, for which I was glad because they are young with a long life ahead.  This will make them feel more secure to have

 been so fortunate.  Because of the ambiguity in the Will regarding the stocks, the Eli Lily stock goes to them, the real prize, and some leftovers too.  I think an interesting generational stock evolution over 3 generations thus far.  Thank heavens for a good stock like ELI LILY and all the good the company has done with their extensive research and good pharmaceuticals that are well tested.  They also make contributions to many foundations over a long period of time.

AS OF October 7, 2010 (save to CD and printed for Kathleen’s revisions)