MASONIC RING AND EASTERN STAR

While still in Glendive, Dick was sponsored for membership in the Masonic Order, probably by Richard Christle and for the purpose of networking with others active in the construction industry. The organization quickly became an important part of Dick’s life, a quasi-secular substitute for the church he had rejected. He received his first degree on December 26, 1946 in Glendive Lodge, No. 31. In April 24, 1948 (three days after Donna was born) “B. Dick Holzworth … was regularly Received, Admitted and Constituted a Noble of the Mystic Shrine in Al Bedoo Temple of Billings, Mont.” Dick moved rapidly through the intermediate degrees of the Masons and on November 3, 1950, received certification from the “Supreme Council of the 33 Degree” as “Master of the Royal Secret of 32 Degree of the ANCIENT and ACCEPTED SCOTTISH RITE.” In his unique way of putting things, Dick often said “You only get the 33 Degree if you pick buckshot out of the President’s ass.”



Doris joined the auxiliary organization Eastern Star on May 26, 1948 after an extension for the initiation probably related to Donna’s birth the month before.


For both Dick and Doris, the organizations provided rich fellowship with like civic-minded couples and an important way to accomplish charitable work. The Shriners organization built and funded children’s hospitals throughout the United States in addition to other charitable efforts. The organization was open to anyone who held a professed belief in a Supreme Being. Many of the founding fathers were Masons. The religious grounding of the organization frequently came up when Dick talked about his lifelong commitment to it.




Doris continued to be actively involved in the Methodist Church in addition to the work she did with Eastern Star. For most of the years in Miles City, she volunteered at the Holy Rosary Hospital as a Gray Lady, a sort of nurse’s aid.

After he got his Masonic ring, Dick wore it in the place of his wedding ring. In his joking way, he would say that his ring finger was not long enough for two wide gold bands and the Masons understood this. They designed the Masonic ring to serve both functions. When the engraved pyramid faced outward, it was a Masonic ring. When he rotated the pyramid toward his palm, it was his wedding ring. If any of this upset Doris, she never let on. Probably, she understood the deep religious feeling and his equally deep commitment to her covered by the joke. In any event, the ring got such wear that the black etching of the pyramid eventually disappeared leaving a faint indentation of the pyramid barely visible.

Terry joined Demolay, a sort of training organization for future Masons, but did not stay with it after High School. He was later sponsored for membership in the Santa Cruz, California Lodge and was raised to the third degree of Masonry on January 21, 1969. The time from initiation to third degree was within the same short timeframe in which Dick was raised, a goal that Terry set for himself (or so he imagined) when he became a Mason. Our parents never stop setting goals for us, even in their absence.

THE MOVE TO BUSTER’s CATTLEFIELD

A year and change after Donna was born on April 21 1948, Mom notes: “Moved to M.C. [Miles City] in July 49 – The Company built 42 houses plus a building at the “Reform School” in Miles – 51 and 52 built 10 miles road east of M.C. – took out 42 curves.” A later inserted note: “David born M.C. – Dec. 6 – 1951.” Future numerologists and believers in kabala will, no doubt, ponder long and hard over that symmetry of eliminating 42 curves and building 42 houses.





One of those houses, on a corner lot at 704 South Jordan, became the Holzworth home. A lawn, saplings, sandbox and clothesline were installed in short order, followed by a fenced backyard when David became mobil. The clothesline poles were unlike anything seen before or since. Dad or Terry must have welded 4 inch pipe or larger together in a "T" shape, then used a silver metallic paint to finish the job. The base pole was set in concrete. To say that it was overbuilt would be a gross understatement. Mom planted pansies and geraniums along the side of the house. Another one of the houses at 711 Miriam Street across the alley and in the center of the block became the home of Doris’s brother Kenneth, wife Doris and daughter Judy. Grandma Bell moved in with them to care for Judy for a short period when Doris and Kenneth worked on a job in Texas. Scotty became attached to Kenneth and spent more time around Miriam than he did on Jordan.




Even with all the construction, the greater engineering feat may have been the delivery of David Allen on December 6, 1951, weighing in at 10 lbs., 11 oz., growing to nearly the size of Donna (aka Baby Doll)within 16 months. One of the many family jokes turns on that cluster of three memorable dates: the birthdays of David and Terry on the 6th and 8th, with Pearl Harbor sandwiched in between on the 7th. Dad came up with a less stressful way of remembering birthdays. He used to drag out a calendar (any month) and say he could 'look up' the birthdays of all 3 older children by noting that Terry's on the 8th, Ginny Gay's on the 15th and Pat's on the 22nd were all exactly 7 days apart and therefore in a vertical line on the calendar. Consequently, David's on the 6th was two days before Terry and Donna on the 21st was one day before Pat. All he had to do was remember which kid went with which month.



One wonders what the women-folk were talking about the spring of that year. In short succession two cousins were born: David Allen Siegle, the youngest child of Dick’s sister Martha, on January 11, 1952 and, Mark, the oldest child of Dolores Wold who was Martha’s oldest daughter, on January 25, 1952. The three cousins would spend a good deal of time playing together in childhood and trying to sort how an uncle could be only a few days older than a nephew.

The move of eighty miles from Glendive to Miles City in 1949 took much longer over the old road than the frequent trips back and forth after the 42 curves were eliminated. Mom notes: “We spent two summers in Glendive.” The girls went to a Methodist Church day camp and took turns staying on Aunt Martha and Uncle Bill’s farm.

The frequent and familiar drives back and forth to Glendive served as another venue for the Holzworth love of singing and games. Favorite car songs: You Are My Sunshine, She’ll Be Coming Around the Mountain When She Comes, This Old Man, One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall, Ate a Peanut to the tune of There's a Whole in My Bucket and singing along with whatever came up on the car radio. If he was along, Dad always requested Battle of New Orleans. Not everyone knew all the verses, but everyone chimed in on the chorus: "Well, we - fired our guns and the British kep' a-comin', wasn't near as many as there was awhile ago........." He also had a couple of mildly off-color songs and some barnyard poetry that the kids could usually coax out of him. This material comes, like Homer's Odyssey, from an oral tradition, and will not be reduced to writing here. Guileful children can usually wheedle it from their parents. Remarkably, almost no one needs to hear any of it a second time before committing it to permanent memory.

Favorite Car Games: Going through the alphabet by spotting road signs in sequence that contained the next letter (had to know when the Quaker State and Texaco were coming up); reciting the next line on a sequential Burma Shave sign before it could be seen; holding your breath over the long bridges just in case they collapsed before the car got to the other side; counting white crosses on the roadside that marked places of fatal accidents; spotting the "Lighning" sign on the roof of the barn on Grandma Siegle's homestead farm near Fallon; "I am thinking something that is [color, shape, size ,etc.] and the others try to guess it in twenty questions or less.

Before 1954, when Grandma Bell moved to Miles City to stay with Kenneth, and after 1956 when she moved back to the Douglas Street house in Glendive, some of the family stayed at her place when visiting. Glendive and Miles City were great small-town rivals, so Grandma Bell would always bet a penny on the Glendive team against all takers. Some of these games, football and basketball, were broadcast on radio. Grandma was also an avid Canasta player (two deck variety), so all of the kids added that game to the repertoire.

Uncle Bill bought the Douglas Street house so all of the Siegle kids, after Dolores, would have a place to live in town and go to high school. The house could be divided in two parts and had two kitchens. Grandma Bell lived in the smaller part.

Terry, Pat and Virginia adapted quickly to the new schools and made new friends in Miles City. Terry switched from saxophone to clarinet over one summer between his junior and senior year and was accomplished enough to challenge and win the first chair concert position at the start of school in the fall. Pat also remembers that Terry played the saw with a violin bow out back in the garage and made some pretty interesting music.

Pat and Uncle Kenneth’s daughter Judy became fast and life-long friends. Pat also made friends with Sandra Ewalt who lived near the reservoir at the end of South Jordan. Sandra "had a Pinto and a Shetland pony, and we 'rode the fence' of the res every weekend until we moved to SLC."

About this time, Pat and Virginia started piano lessons. Virginia took piano first for awhile at Sacred Heart from a nun; after Pat went along once she knew then and there she would NOT take lessons if that was the only option! Pat took lessons instead from a woman working in the back of the record store. Virginia moved on to the saxophone.






Donna enrolled in Mrs. Hamlet's Kindergarten, blazing the path and starting another set of teacher expectations that David would eventually need to meet. Mrs. Hamlet charged ten dollars a month for tuition. Her school was about a block away from home, in the basement of her house. Donna also had a red toy wagon that had her name painted on it. Pat was the artist, and she used left over silver metallic paint from teh clothesline project. David could not read, so did not think twice about using Donna's wagen to haul things around, like his brother Terry, who added a turbo charger with his hands to the rear wheels when the going got a little tough.

David, being the youngest, got lots of attention from the older kids, in part because he was always getting into something: a chocolate cake pan left unattended, his diaper pail and then wandering around so much outside that he was finally rigged with a harness that could be attached to the clothesline when a fence around the backyard was not enough.




By now you should be wondering why this segment is called the Move to Buster’s Cattlefield. This requires a little historical background. Wikipedia gets it right: After the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, the US Military created forts in eastern Montana including one where the north-flowing Tongue River flowed into the east-flowing Yellowstone River. Fort Keogh (named after one of the battle dead) started as a few rough winter cabins, but grew into a moderate sized western fort, from which its commander, General Nelson A. Miles, effectively brought the remaining "uncontrolled" Native Americans into subjugation during the last decade of the 1800s. At first the camp followers referred to the makeshift village as "Milestown", but popular usage (perhaps more accurately "self-promotion") turned it to "Miles City". Livestock speculation brought thousands of cattle to the open ranges in the late 1880s, the railroad was extended through the area, and Texas drove numerous cattle to Miles City to fatten them on free grass and move them to where they could be loaded on trains bound for the slaughterhouses in Chicago.

In his inimitable way, Dad made short the transition from a fort associated with Custer and the Little Bighorn to the “Cow Capital of the West.” Custer’s Battlefield became Buster’s Cattlefield.

A HORSE NAMED DORIS

Dick, and his brother Jakie, gentled horses and did some farming, mostly wheat and sugar beets. Most of the farming in that dry region required irrigation from the Yellowstone River or one of the few creeks that did not dry up during the summer. Average rainfall (including snow)was less than 20 inches a year, drier than the Sahara Desert. There were no large pumping stations, sprnkler systems or drip watering devices. Irrigation meant manually damming the ditch and using siphon tubes to suck the water out to each row in the field.

By contrast, gentling horses must have seemed like playtime. One of the horses, Dick named Doris after a girlfriend that is not the Doris that he married. He probably dressed pretty much like he appears in the picture, basically a working cowboy's gear. Family legend has it that Dick ride the horse named Doris in a Fourth of July parade in 1933 when the Doris that he married first noticed and met him.

Dick was twenty at the time, and Doris just sixteen, but already graduated from high school. Grandma Bell kept a close watch on her small flock, and it is not entirely clear that she, at first, approved of Dick, even though he came from that same strict Lutheran upbringing that produced Dudley Bell.



During one notorious evening when Dick was over to a family dinner he, characteristically, voiced the opinion that a lemon gelatin dessert made by Grandma Bell with Jello and Graham Crackers (with a lot of butter and sugar) “tastes just like kerosene.” Somehow the courtship survived this ordeal. Dick and Doris continued to see each other, especially at barn dances where her older brothers were playing and her older sister could keep a watchful eye. As for the dessert, it survived too as a Holzworth family favorite (including Dick), restructured with raspberry Jello, but known only by the name “kerosene”, something of a puzzle to guests served up for the first time.

Everyone knew, or suspected, that Dick and Doris would marry soon after she turned eighteen. In fact, on January 30, 1937, her eighteenth birthday, they eloped to Terry, Montana, and were married by a justice of the peace. The marriage remained secret for a short while. In those days, a married woman was not supposed to work. Doris continued to live at home while Dick went about setting up in a farmhouse to be shared with Jake and Rosie on a tenant farm near Sydney.



Dick and Doris moved in with them in the spring. The sharing arrangement barely lasted through the summer. Too many cooks repeatedly spoiled the broth. Immediately after Terry was born on December 8, 1937, Dick and Doris moved on to a tenant farm near Fallon, Montana. Dick farmed and also worked on the construction of a major irrigation ditch, putting in dawn to dusk days from planting to harvest. In 1938, they bought their first new D4 Caterpillar tractor. At some point along the way, Dick acquired another favorite horse named Chief.



They “lived in a 3 room house heated by coal heater & range – no running water or electricity – thot we were lucky to have gasoline lamp & iron – plus a gas washer the next year.” Things were touch and go for awhile after Terry was born. The country doctor used a forceps without either skill or finesse. Terry recovered nicely in a fairly short time. Grandma Bell lived on the farm with Doris and Dick for a while, but soon moved back to Glendive because she could not get used to Dick’s habit of making an announcement about going somewhere 30 seconds to a minute before departure time.



“In ’39 we bought the Middlestadt farm buildings ($300) & moved them to West Glendive on a 1 acre plot in ’40 – Virg. Born Aug. 15, 1940 before the house was ready – so lived around plasterers etc.” How do you move a house and other farm buildings? Just figure it out and do it, the Holzworth way. Dick jacked them up off their foundations, braced them and got some wheels underneath them, then went for a Sunday drive to Glendive. Archimedes redux.

In 1940, “Dick started building stock water dams plus farming.” Built dams is an understatement. Busy as a beaver, he built stock water dams over much of Eastern Montana and the Western Dakotas. By the time of Pearl Harbor, his work was deemed essential to the war effort, which made him ineligible for the draft, and a classification that also prevented a voluntary enlistment, much to his chagrin. Dick became the “best dam builder” in the region.



Pat was born on January 22, 1942. In the summer of 1943, the family of five went along on the dam building circuit, living in a trailer, sometimes moving twice a day. Mom’s account: “Cooked for 3 or 4 tractor operators & hauled our water along in 50 gal barrels.” It took a lot of cooking to fuel the little construction company. Either then or a little later, Terry came up with an imaginative way of categorizing hunger: "I am long hungry like a banana, not round hungry like an orange." Terry also remembers doing a lot of fishing that summer. "One time we caught more bullheads in an evening of fishing than we could ever eat, more than a hundred as I recall. And I always had a 'scraped' place next to the trailer to play in while we were on the job."



Terry got his first electric train while the family still lived in West Glendive, and the first family pet, a black terrier named by the name of Scottie, also arrived. Terry also pioneered the usual childhood diseases, doing a double with measles and chickenpox in the same school year. By second grade, Terry had developed decided opionions about his teacher and did not hesitate to tell Mom that he would not go back to school if he had to stay in her class. Mom eventually won the argument, but only after walking him back to school "several times."

The business side of things continued to go well. Mom's note: “1944 we bought the Sample house in Glendive & fixed the upstairs for mother.” The price: $10,000 paid in cash, about 33 times the price paid for the Middlestadt farm buildings and a clear indicator of how well the business was going. The Sample house appeared on postcards as one of the premier residences in Glendive, then still a major railhead and switching yard. With all the extra rooms in the Sample house, Grandma Bell and Dick’s niece Dolores, the daughter of his beloved sister Martha, joined the family. Delores mvoed into town to go to go to Dawson County High School. Doris and Delores became close friends.

Mom probably needed all the help she could get from both Grandma Bell and Dolores to keep control of three very active kids. In addition to the usual scapes and bumps, there were some near escapes from more serious things. Terry took a tumble when playing on a moving ladder in a store. Pat lost control of a sled and got a nasty cut and bloody nose. Pat also decided to express her artistic side one day by writing her name in giant crayon letters on the hallway wallpaper. She "just knew Mom & Dad would be so proud that I could write my name at the age of (3?-4?). Wrong!!! Bug Mistake -- HUGE!!!" She was more than a little disappointed when Mom and Dad were not fully appreciative of the effort. Terry, and either Pat or Virginia, were occassional sleepwalkers. Terry would put march about the house as though he was playing in the band. One of the girls picked strawberries in her sleep. Dad talked to them. "Are you have a nightmare?" Answer: "Yes" Dad: "Do you want to feed it some hay?" These events were great entertainment for the kids that were awake.

The piece de resistance came about one spring day when Terry wanted to ride around on his scooter. His version of the story: "One spring I decided to fire up the Doodle Bug but it would not start. I thought it was maybe too cold in the garage so I poured some gasoline, pobably an inch or so in a metal bucket thinking I would have a fire that looked like a kerosene stove or something. Wnen the match hit the surface it went Whoosh!!!!!! and flames went nearly to the ceiling. No I kept the doors closed to keep the heat in so smoke filled the place pretty quick. I needed to get that fire out in a hurry so I threw a small piece of 2X4 in trying to douse it. That tipped the bucket over and now I was in deep shit. I ran for the house and as I did so Grandma came out to see what was up. Mother called the fire department and Grandma calmly found a blanket and beat the remaining flames out as the fire ran out of gasoline. The fire department came to make sure it was out and I was branded a fire bug by one of the older boys in the neighborhood for a while. Needless to say I was totally embarassed but learned a valuable lesson. My ego sustained the most damage through this exercise. Of course the older boy assured me that my parents would have to pay the full cost of the fire department response out of pocket."




“1946 Dick merged with James D. Fogg in Miles City – building roads & a hospital in S.D. – Donna was born April 1948.” Uncle Richard Christle, who had awarded some WPA work to Dick when he was getting started, advised against going into the road construction business. He thought the risks of losing the performance bond and the engineering required to meet specs far outweighed the potential rewards. Nevertheless, Dick and Doris decided to give it a go.



In 1949, the children were 11, 9, 7 and 1. A fifth child, Duane Allen, died the day after he was born on August 17, 1946, most likely because of complications during delivery that could have been avoided with better hospital care. Terry had already begun to show the aptitude for music that would eventually equal or exceed the markers set by Kenneth and Gerald. No child of Doris had to endure the torture by violin. Somewhere along the way, the family had acquired an upright piano and a saxophone. Terry took to the saxophone and was already playing far above his peers. That same saxophone would serve as the introductory instrument for Virginia, Donna and David. Pat took to the piano, later played the accordian and even had a certain famous routine with a ukelele.



All of the children went with Doris every Sunday to the Methodist Church in Glendive. They also went to a Bible school day camp in the summer. Terry, Virginia and Pat went to grade school where they all did very well, each of the younger children being reminded without respite what good students the older Holzworths were, in that way setting high expectations for the next one coming along. Each of the siblings, however, had already begun to find his or her own niche.

The girls claim that Terry had it easy, being the oldest and a boy, ergo Dick’s favorite. Terry would probably beg to differ, the girls having no idea of the pressure to perform under the close supervision of a perfectionist who constantly and loudly insisted “Goddammit! If you are going to do something, do it right!” The girls did have a point, though, that Dad spent more time with Terry tagging around behind absorbing all of that mechanical reasoning and problem solving that would eventually serve him extraordinarily well as a civil engineer.

As Terry once put it, “When I got to college, and I saw how the professors analyzed problems, I said to myself, now I know two ways of doing the same thing, but the first way (Dad’s way) usually made a lot more sense from the practical and economical point of view.” During one summer of college, Terry and another engineering student who ranked very high in academics, had a paying job of painting signs on the roofs of buildings meant to be visible to small aircraft. Terry was bemused by the inability of the math whiz to come up with a practical solution to the layout of the signage.

Nevertheless, one wonders if the drive to excel in music, something outside Dick’s sphere of influence, might have been fuelled in part as an escape to a happier place.
All of the children took to the water, Terry so much so that his high board diving may have caused some permanent hearing problems. Virginia and Pat developed an early love of horses and horse-back riding, a passion that remained with Pat forever after.

Virginia developed a fierce competitiveness in almost everything she did, absorbing by osmosis that single minded willfulness that drove Dick. Virginia did not start talking until Pat arrived on the scene, at which point she became, almost instantly, very chatty. She picked up from Mom a love of sewing, embroidery, crocething and knitting, all of which were undertaken somewhat competitively, i.e. how much could she do and how long could she do it – a work ethic embodied by Dick.

Pat was more of a tomboy during the Glendive years, with a flair for acrobatic tricks on swings and monkey bars that sometimes bordered on the reckless and truly dangerous. Pat also seems to have been the primary beneficiary of Dick’s “horse whispering” abilities. The family pet almost always became, in some way, her pet. She was able to elicit remarkable responses from every dog that she had a hand in training, including the incredible Roxie who seemed to be talking (“Hello", "I love you” but not, as I recall "What is your name?") and doing better than Trigger with numbers. More about Roxie when the family moves to Salt Lake City. Pat, quite wisely and sanely, opted out of the overachiever syndrome that had taken hold, early, fast and furiously, with Terry and Virginia.

Board games, card games, picture puzzles and puzzles of other kinds were a big part of playtime and relaxation for kids and adults. Everyone learned to play pinochle a fairly early age at first looking on and "helping" Dad play his cards, then later playing alone. No prisoners were taken in any of these games. Curiously, everyone of the kids learned to deal and play cards left-handed.

During these years and later summers when the family returned to Glendive, one or more of the kids spent time on Aunt Martha and Uncle Bill's farm near Fallon. They had a white mare named Spitfire that Pat and Virginia both vividly remember getting to ride a few times bareback. The farm also had artesian water, brought up by a hand pump, that had a very distinctive taste. With all the things to do and all the Siegle kids to do them with, the farm was a fun place to be.

Dick gave each of the children a nickname that stuck for life, at least within the family. Dad used only the nickname. Terry became Butch, Virginia became Ginny Gay, Pat became Skrachi and Donna became Baby Doll. Pat's name orginated from her special relationship with diaper rash when she was a baby and probably would have been spelled as Scrathy if anyone had ever thought to write it out. The present spelling comes from Pat's e-mail address. Donna got her name by begging for a pair of pajamas decorated with baby dolls. She got the pajamas and the name. When Terry was born, Aunt Lucille lobbied for the formal name Richard Terrance Holzworth, arguing that he would need it as an adult. Terry always went by Terry, and Dad never called him anything but Butch.

Dad also had a standard rule for deciding when one of the children was ready to drive: Legs had to reach the peddles and had to be able to see over (or through) the steering wheel, roughly 10 to 12 years old. Even before driving age, however, all of the kids began to learn by sitting on Dad's lap and, from time to time, holding the wheel or turning on the blinker. Terry wrote, on the occassion of Mom and Dad's Golden Wedding Anniversary: "I have always been proud of becoming an 'operator' at the age of four on the D-4! [mid-size Cat tractor] I also remember the first time I began using the steering clutches, was it the TD-14, even though you told me to just go forward and reverse. Of course, we both still tell the story of the time the TD-14 stalled when we were moving and you came back to rescue me."

In 1949, the family moved to Miles City, but that is another chapter.

GROWING UP IN GLENDIVE

Sometime before her stroke in 2000, Doris sat down at the writing desk her children gave her one birthday and, in her neat and legible script and no doubt using her favorite Parker Jotter ballpoint pen, wrote in blue ink the highlights of her childhood, first as a paragraph in the story of her mother’s life, and then a longer version.

“Doris was born at Michael’s [Guelff, younger brother of Elizabeth Bell] homestead at Pleasant View near Glendive. Elizabeth moved to her mother’s [Grandma Grote formerly Anna Grein Guelff] house at 217 E. Hughes in Glendive that spring. She spent 8 months at Galen T.B. [tuberculosis] Hospital near Butte that year while Grandmother Grote took care of the children. She lived there 16 years with a widow’s pension & taking in washing and cleaning for others. All the children graduated from High School & Gerald from U. of Montana.”

“Lived at 204 E. Hughes St. till 1936 then to 210 Douglas. All children went to Lincoln School thru 6th grade -- Washington school thru 7 & 8 – then to Dawson Co. High School – All graduated in the top fourth of their class and all made the National Honor Society. Childhood memories were playing cowboy in the big barn behind the [Hughes St.] house. Almost the whole yard was a vegetable garden & lots of food was “canned” for winter use. The house was heated with a coal heater in the living room & range in the kitchen. Upstairs bedrooms had a floor grate where we’d stand to dress in the cold mornings. Mother traded for milk by doing laundry & we kids had to walk 3 blocks to get it each morning. We were encouraged to be in music – all learned to ‘play’ the violin – the boys went on to the baritone & other instruments later. Kenneth played banjo & fiddle for country dances & Gerald the sax for town dances & later at the U.M. [University of Montana] where he worked as well as going to school. Doris & Gerald sang at a Kiwanis lunch when in the lower grades & all were in most operettas thru school. “

Here the ink on the page changes to black, probably indicating that some time had passed before she made this next entry.

“Kenneth worked summers on a farm till he was thru school. Gerald had paper routes & Doris helped him – Both girls did baby sitting – 10 cents and hour and Doris did housekeeping on Sat for 50 cents – 5 hrs. Kenneth got on WPA [Work Projects Administration] as family breadwinner for a few years. Lucille got a secretary job there also – Gerald was a baker for Carey’s Sweet Shop fro ’35 to ’38 – then went to U.M. at Missoula. Mother went with him the 1st year. Doris first job at Purple Tea Room – 3.50 a week – 7 days – split shift – 3 mo. – then to a newspaper at $30 a mo – 6 mo – then to Carey's as a waitress $30 mo, meals & tips – still 7 day week.”



Typically modest, Doris omits the remarkable fact that she skipped two grades and graduated from high school the same year as her older brother Gerald. Her account of her childhood, both written and oral, reflects both matter-of-factness and cheerfulness, though much of it was lived hand to mouth and most of it during the Great Depression. “We always had something to eat,” she would say, “and Mom always found a way for us to do some special things, like music and dances. We never felt that we were especially poor, and when the Depression came, everyone else was in the same fix that we had been in all along.”

Old family albums and bits and pieces of notes that Grandma Bell had made, reveal other interesting facts. In the same brown 3” x 6” F-211 Harold Square Memorandum Book (Standard Quality) that she used for the other children, Grandma Bell carefully noted:


Doris Harriet Bell
Born Jan. 30 1919.
Thurs. 11 P.M.
Weight 6 1/2 lbs.
“ Feb 6. 1920 – 19 lbs.
“ “ 1. 1921 32.

No additional weight notations appear for the first three children who weighed 8, 8 and “almost 9” pounds respectively. No mention was made of her “lazy eye,” a hereditary trait now easily corrected by surgery.

Elizabeth did start a baby book for Doris, just as she had for the first three children.
Many of the places for entries were left blank, possibly because the relevant events happened while she was away at Galen. She did record the name of the attending physician, Dr. Danskin, and also entered after "nurse" Mrs. Mike Guelff, her sister in law, and Mrs. A.D. Hammond. Florence, Mike's wife, was the adopted daughter of the Russ family. They had made the move from Eden Valley, Minnesota along with the Guelffs.

Above those entries, the name of the father "Dudley Howard Bell" appears before the name of the mother, initially written as just "Elizabeth" with "A. Bell" apparently written in afterward. The same apparent after-entry appears to have been made on the Christening page. On the family record page, she enters her name as "Elizabeth Guelff Bell". This baby book entry may be the only record in which Elizabeth wrote her name with a middle initial, probably signifying "A." for "Anna" after her mother.

Under Pet Names, we see "Yottie, Sister and Polly." None of these stuck. Doris' First Outing Date is recorded as "Feb. 14 From Glendive to Brockway." According to the Baby Book, W. Judson Oldfield (Minister) baptized Doris in 1919, but the day of baptism does not appear. The book lists her sponsors as Mr. and Mrs. Hal Corkery, Mrs. Corkery being her Aunt Marie Guelff Corkery who would pass away in 1923. A few of the "First Dates" are filled in: "First Short Clothes, May 1st, 1919; Stands Alone, Jan, 30. 1920; First Step, Feb 20. 1920; First Word, Mamma." As we will see, eighteen years later, Doris took another stand on her birthday.

During at least two summers, cousins from Iowa came to visit. These four children of Nicolas Guelff and their widow mother moved to Iowa after he had died of a botched operation in 1921. Some of the children were farmed out to relatives. Doris remembered fondly her summertime cousins Irene, Eva, Evelyn and Lawrence, especially the second visit when they were older. Irene, as a young teenager, hitchhiked from Iowa Glendive all by herself.


When contacted in the spring of 2007, a few months before she passed away, Evelyn (Lynn) who was closest in age to Doris, also remembered the summers in Glendive and her Montana cousins.

Doris kept a much used Holy Bible, King James Version "with ideal helps", bearing the cursive inscription Glendive, Mont., Oct. 6th 1929 and below the elaborate gilded words "Presented To", the cursive Doris H. Bell, all in a practiced hand, from the Congregational Sunday School. Without exception, the Bell children went to church every Sunday, but each child had the choice of church so long as it was neither Catholic nor Lutheran, the agreement reached between their parents before marriage. Lucille and Doris went to the Congregational Church. Sometime after 1929, Doris joined the Methodist Church where some of her closest friends were members. Both Doris and Lucille looked forward to Sundays. Though not nearly so accomplished as their brothers with musical instruments, they developed good singing voices in the church choirs. Church was a natural and joyful part of their lives.

Last but not least, mention must be made of the family cat Calico.

THE BOOK OF JOB

 

The short essay, Is Religion a Crutch, first appeared in August 2007.  The essay and the sermon that inspired it, in retrospect, were significant milestones on a journey that eventually led in January 2010 to an intensive study and practice of Judaism.   That study and practice in turn is now focused on a disputation (patterned on a lawsuit/indictment of sorts) depicted in the Book of Job.  I have found a delightful and highly intelligent companion and guide in William Safire's, The First Dissident: The Book of Job in Today's Politics.

An engaging aspect of Judaism (at least in some variations) involves constant re-thinking of the relationship of man and divinity, variously imagined as wrestling with an angel (Jacob); the woman who laughed at Hashem for promising her a child and heir in her eighties (Sarah); Abraham negotiating for the salvation of a few good souls before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; or Tevye chastising Hashem for the burdens of his life in Fiddler on the Roof.

The Book of Job clearly ranks among the most perplexing and disturbing stories of the Bible along with Abraham's near sacrifice of his only son.  How can these intentional acts be reconciled with the concepts of justice, kindness, mercy and omnipotence?   What are we to make of the frequent genocidal acts of the Israelite conquest of Canaan?  For that matter, was it really necessary to wipe out humanity in the Great Flood?  Weren't the Ten Plagues and the inundation of Pharoah's pursuing army a trifle over the top?  Why put the tempting fruit in the garden in the first place?

The Book of Job serves as a sort of summation of these arguments against the existence of a just order in the universe through the intentionally inflicted suffering, at the hands of the Satan but with divine go-ahead, of the most righteous among men.  Essentially, the Satan (the original Devil's Advocate) asks for a test of the purity of Job's faith and worship by posing the question:  how do we know whether Job is righteous for the obvious material rewards that he has been blessed with, the usual herds of camels, goats, oxen and sheep, a loving and beautiful wife, and a host of children all above average?  In the story, God accepts the wager and lets the Satan go to work, inflicting emotional distress on the innocent Job (but horrific pain, suffering and death) on all of his children in addition to wiping out all his livestock and material possessions.  Job, of course, remains ignorant of the wager, but nevertheless remains steadfast in his faith and worship.  Further afflictions are then visited on Job himself, leading to his wife's suggestion that he curse God and die rather than put up with this raw deal.  Again, he declines, but does curse the day he was born and serves up an indictment against the divine injustice of things, an implicit rebuke of the Almighty.

Job then gets cold comfort from three friends.  The first, Eliphaz, the Temanite, pleads the case that Job's suffering is part of a cosmic general retribution for something that may be akin to inherent human imperfection.  In the King James version:

4:7-8  Remember, I pray thee, who ever perished, being innocent? or where were the righteous cut off?  Even as I have seen, they that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, reap the same.

Eliphaz also takes Job to task for hubris he sees in Job's curse of his birth:

4:17  Shall mortal man be more just than God?  shall a man be more pure than his maker?

As Safire points out, this and other passages must be read as suffused with irony since it has been stipulated (as facts may be at trial) in the wager with the Satan that Job was pure as the driven snow.  Job repeatedly protests his innocence, an innocence to which God, the Satan and the reader are privy, but not Job's interlocutors.

Then comes Bilbad, the Shuhite, restating, sharpening and focusing the argument of Eliphaz makes it personal, but lays the blame on Job's children:

8:3-7  Doth God pervert judgment?  or doth the Almighty pervert justice? If thy children have sinned against him, and he have cast them away for their transgression; If thou wouldest seek unto God betimes, and make thy  supplication to the Almighty; If thou wert pure and upright; surey now he would awake for thee, and make the habitation of they righteousness prosperous.  Thogh thy beginning was small, yet thy latter end should greatly increase.

Again, as parties to the wager, we cannot reconcile Bilbad's account with the stipulated facts.  We know Job's refutation to be well founded.

The comes Zophar, the Naamathite, further honing the accusation and laying blame to make it personal to Job:

11:2-6  Should not the multitude of words be answered? and should a man full of talk be justified?  Should thy lies make men hold their peace? and when thou mockest, shall no man make thee ashamed?  For hast thous said, My doctrine is pure, and I am clean in thine eyes.  But oh that God would speak, and open his lips against thee;  And that he would shew thee the secrets of wisdom, that they are double to that which is!  Know therefore that God exacteth of thee less than thine iniquity deserveth.

Bluntly put, Job is told to shut up and stop whining.  He is too small and finite to understand God's purpose and surely deserves what he is getting.  Again, we know it ain't so, at least as to deserving what he is getting.

Enter from nowhere a fourth voice, not a friend, the young whippersnapper Elihu, with an indictment against lawyers that I do not take personally.  This translation comes from the New English Bible, much closer to the original Hebrew meaning:

36:15-19:  Those who suffer he rescues through suffering and teaches them by the discipline of affliction.  Beware, if you are tempted to exchange hardship for comfort, for unlimited plenty spread before you, and a generous table; if you eat your fill of a rich man's fare when you are occupied with the business of the law, do not be led astray by lavish gifts of wine and do not let bribery warp your judgment.  Will that wealth of yours, however great, avail you, or all the resources of your high position?

No pain, no gain.  A pretty hard sell knowing what has been stipulated.

Then comes a scene which probably inspired a parallel encounter in the film version of The Wizard of Oz. This from the King James version:

38:1-4  Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said,  Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?  Gird up now thy loins like a man: for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.

This and more intimidating intimations of mortality go on for another chapter or so, but no clear and direct answer to Job's complaint of injustice comes forth from the whirlwind.  When called to respond, Job (like Dorothy) says meekly as it appears in the Jewish Publication Society Hebrew-English Tanakh:

40: 4-5 See, I am of small worth; what can I answer You?  I clap my my hand to my mouth.  I have spoken once, and will not reply; Twice, and will do so no more.

More metaphorical thunder and lightning ensue, as if the abject apology for complaining about manifest injustice were not enough, and Job says:

42: 2-6  I know that You can do everything, That nothing you propose is impossible for You.  ho is this who obscures counsel without knowledge?  Indeed, I spoke without understanding Of things beyon me, which I did not know.  Hear now, and I will speak;  I will ask, and You will inform me.  I had heard You with my ears, But now I see You with my eyes; Therefor, I recant and relent, Being but dust and ashes.

Job does, indeed, shut up and stop whining, as advised in a gradation of ways by his three friends and the young interloper Elihu.  An epilogue follows, neatly tying up the loose ends in an entirely unsatisfactory way by restoring Job's camels, sheep, goats and oxen (lions and tigers and bears, oh my) though nothing further is said about the preceding slaughter.

In the Wizard of Oz, we have the dog Toto to thank for pulling back the curtain to reveal the machinery that resides in the whirlwind.  Dorothy then confronts the almighty Oz in a fashion that sets him back on his heels.  The protagonists are rewarded for their suffering in an imaginative award ceremony that puts them in touch with their inner resources.

I will not attempt here and now a theory of the Book of Job that will can compete with that devised in the Wizard of Oz or by that word wizard Safire.  After all, Job was from the land of Uz, a jurisdiction where other laws may apply.   But I would like to agree with Safire that the Book of Job, through the sly use of irony, does fulfill a Toto-like purpose.  We are left to ponder the big questions of good and evil and how to reconcile a belief and worship of a power that appears to be, in Woody Allen's memorable phrase, a chronic underachiever when it comes to fulfilling his promises to righteous people.  In that sense, the Book of Job is a powerful and poetic precursor to the Socratic dialogues, in particular Plato's Republic.   The ultimate challenge of Job is the call to wrestle with Providence, and to figure out what that means.


************************************************

IS RELIGION A CRUTCH?


Part bravado, part taunt, uttered in contempt, "religion is a crutch" in the mouth and mind of the speaker, reduces faith to a desperate illusion. In the brave new world sans religious faith, the clear-eyed skeptic (in his own eyes) ascends to heroic (dare we say demigod like) status by fearlessly embracing a godless accidental universe that, like individual lives, ends abruptly and without purpose. Two prominent spokesmen for this well-traveled point of view are Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, The God Delusion and A Devil's Chaplin, among other tracts, and Daniel Dennett in Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

One can almost hear between the lines, that rousing poem learned many decades ago in middle school:

Invictus by William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul
In the fell clutch of circumstances
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of change
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the year
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Were this a story along the lines of The Devil and Daniel Webster, a faint order of sulfur would be in the air. But, I think, the better parallel comes from Greek myth or tragedy and, instead, we should be able to smell the wax burning from the wings of Icarus.

I do not contend with Professors Dawkins and Dennett. In fact, I concede that religion is a crutch. In turn, I ask the esteemed Professors to concede that science is a crutch. I also ask them to concede that science and certain aspects of religion, equally, are faculties of mind that are necessarily and undeniably the result of natural selection either on genes or memes.

Now let's define some terms -- "religion", "science" and "crutch". With some humility, let's start with "crutch". In partial deference to the Oxford Don, the The New Oxford American Dictionary will serve as my authority on this point, though the concepts of "religion" and "science" may require more elaboration. I had considered the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary, but it has a little too much information for present purposes. Two definitions appear: "1. long stick with a crosspiece at the top, used as a support under the armpit by a lame person [in sing.] figurative a thing used for support or reassurance; They use the Internet as a crutch or support for their loneliness. 2. archaic another term for CROTCH (of the body or garment.) I think we can safely rule out the second definition and the literal meaning of the first definition as pertinent to the discussion. I believe that Professors Dawkins and Dennett would agree.

Note the use of the term "used" in the definition. Although the dictionary physically describes a crutch, the figurative usage depends entirely on a metaphorical analogy to the use of a crutch. In other words, a crutch is a type of tool designed for a specific use. Humans themselves sometimes describe themselves as homo habilis, the animal that makes and uses tools, crutches included. Tools essentially make up for the many biological deficiencies that humans, described by Aristotle as featherless upright bipeds, have when compared to, for example, cheetahs when running, Australian shepherds for herding sheep (or humans for that matter) and falcons for flying, which brings us back, for the nonce, to Icarus.

Now to the tougher terms. Religion, according to our dictionary of preference, is either/and/or "1. the belief in a god or gods who made the world and who can control what happens in it: I never discuss politics or religion with them.; 2. one of the systems of worship that is based on this belief: the Christian/Hindu/Muslim religion." This definition probably works fairly well for Dawkins and Dennett in view of their primary agenda: the defeat of attacks on the concept of evolution by means natural selection from certain organized religious groups who in turn feel quite threatened by, in their view, the Dawkins and Dennett assertion that science trumps their theology, or worse, constitutes an act of theocide.

Much of the ink has been spilt, in recent times, on the teaching of "intelligent design" as an alternative to natural selection as the mechanism for evolution in American secondary classrooms. A readable and excellent summary of that conflict can be found in Kenneth R. Miller's Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution. More about Miller's attempted synthesis in a later essay.

With its focus on "god or gods" and the creative agency attributed thereto, this definition of religion excludes, among others, practitioners of Taoism as well as Buddhism and, a fairly hefty segment of the world's population. Dawkins and Dennett, though they focus primarily on the creation aspect of some religions, do in fact appear to have a more ambitious agenda of removing from the realm of reality any basis for a moral way of life grounded in any kind of rational foundation. Such systems, they seem to imply, cannot co-exist with a rational science. "The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference." River Out of Eden at 14.

This brings us, then, to a definition of science. Oxford tells us that science is 1. the study of and knowledge about the physical world and natural laws; or 2. one of the subjects into which science can be divided, e.g. biology, physics and chemistry. To this we should add, I think without objection from either Dawkins or Dennett, that true science generally results from a method that requires the formulation of a hypothesis based on the observation of facts that can then be verified or falsified by testing the hypothesis in a clinical or natural experiment capable of replication. I take this to be a simplified statement of the scientific method as stated in Karl Popper's Conjectures and Refutations.

Earlier in this essay, I called upon Dawkins and Dennett to concede that science is a crutch just as I conceded that religion is a crutch. Now I must explain why both concessions are necessary. A crutch, you will recall, in the literal sense is a useful tool fabricated by a human for the purpose of compensation for one of humankind's many biological deficiencies, namely a susceptibility to lameness that four or more legged animals seem able to cope with admirably by employing one of their redundant appendages. In the figurative sense, a crutch is a thing used for support or reassurance.

Perhaps you think I have given up the game by first conceding that religion is a crutch in both the literal and figurative senses. The truth of the matter, every religion that I can think of begins with the premise, undeniably true, that all men are limited and finite with an imperfect understanding of a vast and apparently unlimited universe in space and time (or space-time). Given the human condition, a crutch of some sort would seem to be necessary and desirable to cope with, well, the infinite and the place of man in that infinity. Why else go on?

But you might say, crutches are the devices of men. Are you then saying that religions are also invented by men? Did man invent God? And if you say that, don't you concede that all religions are, in fact, illusions, having no basis in reality?

Frankly, I am unaware of any religion that is not associated in a one-to-one mapping with humans. No evidence indicates the existence of religion prior to the emergence of humans; no other species engages in practices that we would accept as evidence of religion. The jury is still out, of course, as to whether such conditions may be found, eventually, either in the geological record or on other planets in other solar systems.

The same can be said of science, and more to the point, the scientific method. Clearly, and undeniably, science and the scientific method are crutches (useful tools) associated in a one-to-one mapping with humans. No evidence indicates the existence of science prior to the emergence of humans; no other species engages in practices that we would accept as evidence of science.  The jury is still out, of course, as to whether such conditions may be found, eventually, either in the geological record or on other planets in other solar systems.

We might also add that science, or at least the scientific method, is a relative latecomer to the human toolbox, say within the last 400 years or so. Given the evidence of religion in human societies almost as soon as there were human societies and the nearly universal presence of religions in all relatively long-lived societies would seem to suggest that religion, or at least certain aspects of religion, have either adaptive value in the survival and perpetuation of the species (be fruitful and multiply), or at the very least, place no negative burden on the carrier of the God gene or God meme as the case may be. It may be too early to tell whether the same can be said of science, especially in view of the fact that science has produced various means to achieve the annihilation not only of the species, but also the planet.

Some interesting work has been done to identify the so-called God gene, defined as a propensity in the bearer toward spirituality. See, e.g. Dean Hamer's The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into Our Genes. Suffice it to say that this research poses a very difficult problem for those who would argue, on the basis of natural selection as the mechanism driving evolution, that religion is an illusion while science is not. The ability to do and understand formal science is something reserved to a relatively small percentage of the species. The ability to practice and appreciate religion, in one form or another, appears to be nearly universal. I take this truth to be self-evident as a necessary implication of evolutionary theory: the creation endowed all people with certain inalienable cognitive functions, a primary one being spirituality.

More on this in the next essay.

POSTSCRIPT

The title of this essay was inspired by a sermon delivered last Passover by Rabbi Mitchell Wohlberg of Beth T'filoh Synagogue in Baltimore, Maryland, where my father-in-law has been a member for most of nearly nine decades. The ideas expressed, however, grew out of a discussion among my son, my wife's godson, my father-in-law and me at my father-in-law's home when an Orioles game was rained out a few years ago. The discussion went well into the evening and continued among father, son and godson on the trip back to Washington from Baltimore. I leave it to the reader to decide whether Book I of The Republic of Plato was also a source of inspiration.

THE SLEEPING GIANT

Today was one of those days, increasingly frequent of late, that I picked-up the morning paper and immediately asked myself what I had been doing for the last 37 years. Right there, in the center column that the Wall Street Journal reserves for sometimes humorous but always off-beat and certainly off-Wall Street stories, appeared the headline:

Dinosaur Hunter Seeks More Than Just Bare Bones
Prof. Horner Searches for Traces of Blood, DNA; Lucky Break From T. Rex

Dateline: Jordan, Montana

Now why should this create a moment of existential angst?

Several reasons. Professor Horner* is one of those rare and fortunate individuals who have been able to pursue a dream that began in childhood and pursue that dream in a place he dearly loves. In contrast, as Jared Diamond noted in his book Collapse, Montana grows children for export along with cattle, sheep, wheat and copper, mainly because the economy is not strong enough to provide jobs. As a result, more people alive today grew up in Montana than live there now. I am one of the exports.

Next, the article goes on to recount the exciting work with his colleague, Professor Mary Schweitzer, that appears to hold open the possibility that DNA might be sufficiently preserved in the marrow of a 68 million year old Tyrannosaurus Rex bone to be analyzed. As the WSJ put it in their graphic Paleontology Lesson "Analysis of soft tissue found in the bone of a Tyrannosaurus rex revealed that proteins were virtually identical to modern birds. Bone from the modern emu was virtually identical in structure, orientation and even color." In short, even if we don't know that a T-Rex tastes like chicken, it certainly has a similar genetic blueprint.

Mary grew up in Montana in the same small town and went to the same schools that I went to. She was also exported, to North Carolina State University. In her case, however, she at least gets to spend her summer months doing fieldwork in Montana, albeit in the badlands. The Hell Creek formation where the T. Rex bone was found is aptly named. Less rain falls there than in the Sahara Desert. Jordan, the nearest town, had a population of 364 in 2000. No River Jordan flows through it, though sometimes a trickle appears in Big Dry Creek.

Another aptly named formation, the Sleeping Giant, dominates the horizon north east of Helena, my hometown.** The formation invites stories and legends. Here is one that I may have heard, or maybe I am just making it up. The giant went to sleep in the last days of the dinosaur. He was a mighty hunter and had a very big appetite. Like the great bear, when food became scarce, he knew he had to hibernate to survive. So he found a great valley next to his drinking place on the Missouri and laid down to rest. From time to time, when someone pulls from the earth the bones of one of his great kills, dreams disturb his sleep and the earth shakes as it did with devastating effect in 1935 and again when Quake Lake was formed on August 17, 1959, the night before my oldest niece was born.***

Now to the point. Dinosaurs as iconic symbols of Darwinian evolutionary theory have become the poster children for seismic faults in American culture, politics and religion. Supposedly, one cannot subscribe both to the concept of God, including the attribute of Creator, and to the theory of evolution as the result of natural selection. So we are asked to join opposing armies in this cultural, religious and political war: science or religion, Republican or Democrat, Red state or Blue state, pro-life or pro-choice, intelligent design or unintelligible chaos, a purpose driven life or a meaningless existence.

In the next few weeks, I invite you to the white water to see if we can find the clear channel through this cultural divide. The choices may be false ones. We will explore the river carefully and provisionally, having a great deal of respect for the rocks and shoals in the stream and the vabtage points from the shore. We will attempt to navigate the river, not try to blast our way through it.




*To see a short list of Professor Horner's scientific publications, go to http://www.montana.edu/wwwes/facstaff/horner.htm. He has also written or co-written many books for the educated lay reader.

**To see the Sleeping Giant on web cam go to http://www.deq.state.mt.us/webcam/photos/met_041129_110000.jpg.

***http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_Lake.

David Brooks in White Water: An Appreciation

Had he been raised in Montana, David Brooks might have been a white water rafting guide. This will probably come as a surprise to a nice Jewish boy reared and educated mostly, if not entirely, east of the Mississippi. It is a career path that he probably never contemplated.

Nevertheless, he has the temperament. A guide needs to find the true and safe channel through a series of rapids, in conditions constantly changing and in the midst of the roar and chaos of a rushing current. He has knowledge of the river, a cool head and the crucial ability to see ahead while simultaneously maintaining the rafting equivalent of an even keel.



These abilities differ not much from the skills that Brooks brings to his role as one of the few reasoned and moderate conservative commentators amidst the clamor of the ranting talking heads on the right and left of American politics.

Brooks also fascinates by his ongoing struggle to understand and to explicate to his perplexed and frightened Northeastern readership the zeitgeist that moves the evangelicals, socially conservative blue collars, southwestern suburbanites and other elements of that political coalition lumped together under the conservative label. And he seasons all of his commentary with a generous portion of humility and self-deprecating humor.

Good rafting guides are much appreciated in the white water where, more than likely than not, all will sink or swim together.

WHAT ABOUT THE BELLS?

This genealogical quest had three beginnings. The first was over 40 years ago in a time before search engines, the World Wide Web, personal computers, digital cameras, cell phones, FAX machines, electronic databases ... well, you get the picture. The primary investigative tools for the family detective were no more sophisticated than those available to Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. Musty libraries, government archives, the memories of aging parents and grandparents, old Kodak pictures, family Bibles, the carved-in-stone repositories of dates from the family plot and old letters.

My favorite aunt, Lucille Christle, first got the bug, probably not long after the devastating flash flood that wiped out her home on the banks of Rapid Creek in 1972.* Aunt Lucille and Uncle Richard had only a few minutes warning from the time the Pictola Dam burst and the wall of water inundated their home, moving it off of its foundation. Most of the family albums, along with everything else they owned, was swept away or irreparably damaged. Aunt Lucille set about retrieving what she could and then contacting relatives everywhere to get copies of what she could not salvage.

Even before the flood, Aunt Lucille and Uncle Richard traveled quite a bit around the United States, attending various Elderhostel** events. These travels took them to and through places where distant relatives lived. The seminars appealed especially to Lucille who was something of an autodidact. She also started and kept up a correspondence with relatives they met.

Perhaps on one of these trips or because of the correspondence, Aunt Lucille found out that her grandfather Albert Bell had enlisted in the Union Army. Naturally, she wrote to the National Archives and got back from them photocopies of his military records. She then re-copied and circulated them to family members, including my mother Doris Bell.

Aunt Lucille passed away in 1984 before she had been able to peel another generational layer of family history. Even in her last illness, though, she and Uncle Richard managed to make one last trip to Helena, Montana in August of 1983 to attend my wedding, and in her very calm and direct way to say good bye, still very interested and curious to know everything about our plans and where life was headed next.

The second beginning happened in the midst of a family crisis in 1989. My wife suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage while at work. These stroke-like events are often fatal within the first few minutes, and probably would have been in this case but for the proximity of George Washington University Medical Center,*** a very astute and clear-headed supervisor and a very quick response to a 911 call by a paramedic team.

My mother got on the first plane from Helena to Washington, DC, planning to stay indefinitely to help out with the care of our three year old son and, as it turned out, the first several months of a lengthy convalescence after my wife came out of a two week coma. Both to pass the time and to take our minds off the possibility that yet another generation would come to age without one parent, Mom began to organize family pictures and to write-out dates, names and places of all the extended family that she kept in touch with over the years.

Later the same year, Mom and I made a trip to the National Archives and to the Maryland Archives to see if we could find out anything more about Albert Bell. After a few hours of winding and re-winding microfilm, we thought we had him connected to a Samuel Bell, who was living near Hagerstown, Wayne, Indiana before the Civl War. This did not seem, at the time, to fit with the family story that the Bells were Pennsylvania Dutch. Mom went back to Helena, and we returned to the frenetic professional life of DC.

After Dad passed away in 1993, Mom sold the house in Helena and moved down to Salt Lake to live with Donna. Mom continued to get letters and inquiries from various branches of the family about who was living where, doing what and so on. Not until much later, after she had a stroke in early 2000 that significantly affected her short term memory, did I find out that she had made a couple of trips to the LDS Family History Library. One of the many knowledgeable and friendly volunteers there had helped her begin to organize her notes on family data history forms. These meticulously completed forms, along with a treasure trove of other information, had been stored in an old Samsonite briefcase and some shoeboxes in her closet.

Typical of Mom, she decided that she would recover from the stroke in time to attend my wedding to Roslyn set for July 16, 2000. And this she did with the devoted care and attention of Donna, Virginia, Terry and Perrylee, a sort of recovery commando team. They were joined by Pat for the final airlift operation from Salt Lake City to Washington, DC.

Over time, Mom gradually regained her ability to talk, but the short term memory problem persisted, making it nearly impossible to have a meaningful conversation, especially since we were mostly restricted to long distance telephone calls. When it came out later, the movie Fifty First Dates*** perfectly illustrated the problem.

Later that year, I made a change to my AOL subscription, which triggered an offer of 90 days free use of Ancestry.com. It's free, so I thought "why not?" To get started, I called up Mom to see if I could get some basic names and dates. Then came the surprise -- she remembered almost everything from ten to 70 years ago as though it happened yesterday! Now we could talk!

When I reported this to Donna, she remembered seeing something stored away in Mom's closet that might be helpful. Virginia also remembered helping Mom prepare some of those family group sheets. And so the third phase of the quest got underway, combining the pencil and paper labor from the 80's and 90's with the high tech developments of the 21st Century.

Mom drove the search until she passed away in August 2005. After each weekly report on some new bit of information on one line of the family or another, she would always come back to the question "What about the Bells?" She continues to drive the search today as I hear her voice asking that same persistent question every time I fire up the search engine.

I heard it again last weekend after my son and I attended services at St. John's Evangelical Lutheran Church in Hagerstown, Maryland,***** where Captain Peter Bell (1736-1778), a fifth great grandfather, rests in peace under the western foundation of the church that his father-in-law, Johann Friederick Vogeler helped to establish in 1769.




* For pictures of the flood's aftermath go to http://sd.water.usgs.gov/projects/1972flood/photos.html.

** http://www.elderhostel.org/.

*** Among other things, the GWU Medical Center is famous for treating President Reagan after the assassination attempt and Vice-president Chaney for his heart problems. http://www.gwumc.edu/.

****http://movies.aol.com/movie/50-first-dates/15418/main?flv=1&ncid=yInozwVMCu0000000742&icid=rbox_movie_titles.

***** http://stjohnsfamily.org/.

THE SPANISH INFLUENZA

I had a little bird,
Its name was Enza.
I opened the window,
And in-flu-enza.


Rope Skipping Rhyme from 1918

It started with a few soldiers getting sick at Camp Funston, Kansas in early March 1918. These soldiers died after a short and violent illness. They were the first of an estimated 50,000,000 to perish worldwide; 550,000 Americans and about 17,000,000 in India.* Unfortunately, among the last to contract and die from the disease were Dudley Howard Bell on November 12, 1918 and his sister-in-law Merle Alberta Malvern Bell, the wife of Charley Bell, about the same time.

In the fall of 1918, Dudley Bell was lean, fit and in his prime. He and his wife Elizabeth had proved-up and perfected their homestead rights to a half section near Brockway, Montana. Three children – Kenneth, Gerald and Lucille – had blessed their home and marriage and a fourth – Doris – was expected in January or February 1919. Two days before his death, Dudley loaded up a horse drawn wagon with sugar beets and set off to deliver them to the rail depot in Terry, Montana. Elizabeth and the children had some mild flu symptoms, and stayed behind.

The fateful journey changed everything. By the time Elizabeth delivered Doris on January 30, 1919, she was physically and emotionally exhausted. In another time and place, she might have quickly remarried to a similarly situated widower. However, she had been ex-communicated from the Catholic Church because of her marriage to the Lutheran Dudley Bell. His family, with the exception of his older brother Charley, was far away in Missouri. She became dependent on her mother Anna and her stepfather John Grote.

The homestead was sold. Elizabeth and the four children moved into the large Grote house near the railroad depot in Glendive, Dawson, Montana. As noted on the 1920 census, the house had a great many occupants, especially during the winter months. The younger Guelff children had not yet left the nest. Those who had and were working farms nearby came into town after the harvest and stayed until time for the spring planting. Occasionally, a tenant working for the railroad also lived there. One such tenant was Jim Cashman, who eventually married Katherine, one of the twins.

Elizabeth probably suffered a nervous breakdown, though the official reason given for her extended stay at Galen, a Montana state hospital facility, was treatment of tuberculosis.

The worry and wear was etched into her face, which can be seen in a photo taken in the summer of 1920 or 1921. By the time she turned 29, her hair had turned completely white.

Somehow, the children were insulated from most of the trauma of losing their father. Though relations were often strained between Elizabeth and her mother, the grandchildren remember a doting and nurturing grandmother and step-grandfather.

Eventually, Elizabeth and the children moved to another house owned by Grandma Grote. To make ends meet, Elizabeth took in laundry. The children, as soon as they were able, earned money to contribute to the household.







* For a concise account of the pandemic, its causes and its devastating effects go to http://virus.stanford.edu/uda/index.html.

EXODUS: EUREKA TO MARSH

On September 9, 1914, Eureka*, McPherson County, South Dakota bustled with the energy and commerce of a German-speaking immigrant community that had arrived over the preceding three decades almost exclusively from the Black Sea region near Odessa in Ukraine, Russia. Benjamin Holzworth was born that day on a homestead farm not far from Eureka, six miles west over the line in Campbell County.** He was the fifth child of Jacob Holzwarth and Magdalena Stadel. He was almost immediately nicknamed “Dicke,” the German equivalent of chunky, no doubt because he was a big baby with a big appetite.

Dick, as he came to be known in the English speaking world, did not grow up near Eureka. Less than two months after Dick was born, his father Jacob died of a broken neck sustained in a horse drawn sledding accident. Dick was baptized at the Hoffnungstall Evangelical Lutheran Church in Campbell County on December 17, 1914. His father died on November 5, 1914 and was buried in the church cemetery. The gravestone in the cemetery where the church once stood is engraved Jacob Holzworth, which probably means that Jacob was the first of the clan to use the more anglicized spelling of the name.

In later years, Dick often told a grotesque joke about Jacob’s death, probably his way of masking the deeply felt absence of his father in his life: “My father knew the exact day, time and manner of his death. How did he know? The judge told him.” Magdelena told Dick often that his father was a kind and generous man who worked hard and cared for his family. Perhaps the idealized father helped to fill a void, but it may also have set a high standard untouched by the tempering effect of reality.

Following Jacob’s death, the homestead went through probate and the many debts were paid off. Most likely through the church network, Magdalena, at the age of 35, married the 41 year old widower Johannes Siegle on March 10, 1917 at the Hoffnungstall Church in Campbell County. John and his seven children had moved up to Marsh, Prairie County, Montana from Oklahoma or Kansas. Magdalena and her five children joined them. A thirteenth child, Frederick, was born to them on January 16, 1920.

In this family that doubled overnight, Dick’s oldest sister Martha became a second mother and took little Dicke under her wing. He thrived in the one room country schoolhouse, getting nearly perfect marks through the eight grades that were thought sufficient for a future farmer. Most likely, he was a teacher’s pet. That special place, however, did not isolate Dicke from the other boys. He says he learned “the English alphabet at school, the German alphabet at home and the dirty alphabet on the schoolyard.”

One iconic family photo survives from Dick’s childhood. Dick has his head turned slightly to the right and hair combed forward and to his right, probably to hide a growth on his forehead that was not removed until he was in his twenties.




Front row: Magdelena, Dick, Fritz, John
Back row: Freda, Martha, Bill, Jacob S., Jacob H., Chris, Edwin



A sharp line can be drawn from the right shoulder of John Siegle to the top of the photo. Everyone to his right does not seem to be particularly happy about the experirnce; everyone looking to the camera (except John) is smiling). The principle of composition seems to be a typical one of girls and young children grouped around the mother and the older boys with the father.

Dick was much less enthusiastic about church, though he had little choice about attending in this deeply religious family and community. He often said that he could not stand the hypocrisy of people praying on Sunday and sinning the rest of the week. By way of explaining his refusal to attend church (except for the marriages of his children and occasional funerals), he often told the story of a minister who had murdered and cut-up a servant girl living in the parsonage, a story that has not yet been documented. In any event, Dick received communion and confirmation on June 23, 1929. Even though he disdained organized religion, he had a deeply held belief in God and a spiritual side that surfaced when he viewed the cloudless starlit prairie skies or the mountain vistas of western Montana.

Life on the farm meant hard work, and hard work for Dick was the essence of life. He intuitively understood the physics of machinery in an age when machinery was rapidly replacing the horse. At the same time, he had a gift for handling horses and all other animals. Dick often told a story about mending fence when he was a boy. The farmhand who was showing Dick what to do forgot to bring his wire clippers and hammer with him, so he left Dick at the fence and walked back to the shed. By the time he returned five minutes later, Dick had somehow “cut” the wire and re-stapled it to the post. “How did you do that?” the somewhat simple-minded hand asked. “With my bare hands,” said Dick picking up a piece of wire and bending it back and forth quickly until it broke, then taking a rock and a staple to attach another loose end to the post.

Dick did credit John Siegle with being a good but demanding teacher, always insisting on doing things “the right way.” Probably more through careful observation than patient explanation, Dick quickly picked-up on the “why” as well as the “how” of the way machines worked. It is doubtful that Dick ever heard of Archimedes either then or later in life, but his understanding of leverage and basic mechanical principles clearly outstripped that of his siblings, and by most accounts, almost everyone else in the community. While still fairly young, Dick could fix almost anything with a pair of pliers and some baling wire. He could move almost anything with simple pulleys and levers.

Life in the home was typically German: strict and authoritarian, with the father apparently controlling everything. Only a low German was spoken in the home, John and Magdelena having limited English. Church services were also in German. Prayers were said before every meal; no talking unless spoken to; food served to the working men in order of age with the women and then the children taking what was left. In the case of chicken, Dick got the feet, something he never forgot, but a tradition that did not pass on to his own family. But no one went hungry. Magdelena cooked and baked all of the traditional German dishes, and did so with great skill. She also liked her own cooking, evident from the photo and one of her few broken English phrases: “ I veigh two hundert und thirty pounds.”

By the time he was 16, Dick was ready to leave home. He had by then developed the rock hard, but lean body of a sugar beat farmer, who had also become something of an amateur wrestler. Just under 5’ 10” and weighing less than 150 pounds, he overcompensated through his quick intelligence, capacity for long and physically demanding work, a natural athleticism and enormous self-confidence. Either then or soon after his mantra became “Mind over matter.”

He joined his older brother Jacob and began gentling horses, including a horse named Doris.

* Eureka is now known as the home of the founder of the newspaper USA Today, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka,_South_Dakota and for its kuchen factory that supplies the state dessert. http://www.shgresources.com/sd/symbols/dessert

** An interactive platt map of Campbell County can be found at the genealogical website www.ehrman.net/campbell/index.html. Click on Section 7, 126N 74W and you will see the names and boundaries of the homesteads of the Holzwarths, Stadels, Siegles and their neighbors, all immigrants from the Black Sea region.