I mentioned that I was finding plenty of new fuel for this family scrapbook. In the happy, happy and much quieter, calmer Forties and Fifties and even later, we fortunately didn't have the brusque habits and short attention spans bred by our electronic media, TV and today's e-mail, text messages, Twitter, and the like. We actually wrote letters, frequently, of many pages. In a dump box I've found dozens of such delights, from aunts, Mom, one from Dad, other relatives, various friends. Even my sisters had the habit. And, like Mom, I've saved much, including at least 50 of her letters. Anyway, this particular charmer is from my baby sister, JaVee, written with punchy Imagist power to me when I was teaching at Minot State (ND). She was 10 at the time, and the "Monday 7, 1964," would have been September, I think, after I'd been home in Center for the summer and then returned to Minot to teach.
For readers who need to know the references beyond the power of the compact descriptions: Sam Key was the County Treasurer; his wife, Kay, worked in the County Assessor's Office with Mom (who was Deputy County Assessor), and they were friends accordingly, so that we visited Sam and Kay sometimes when in Bloomfield. Grandpa Koftan lived behind us in Center. Of course, he, like everyone else there and elsewhere, knew everyone in the courthouse.
Ethel Clark was the Center Congregational Church--later Church of Christ through merger--pianist and choir director for 50-some years, Mom an alto in the choir for nearly that long (53?). Ethel was my piano teacher, and I was in junior choir and then senior choir under her direction. Sue and JaVee worked for her when they were little, helping clean (she was rather bitchy with them). Charlie, her husband, had an abstract office on Main Street. Their son, Tom, was a year ahead of me in school. Charlie's mother, the little steel-corseted Rose Clark, was my Sunday School Superintendent.
JoAnn Davison Eisenbeiss, Stan's wife, married into an old Center family after her 1957 Center High graduation. Joyce was their daughter, Kelly their then new son, with Rodney to come as a later third and final. I don't know who was in the hospital but assume she means JoAnn and the baby boy.
Peases had lived next door to us in the Superintendent's house, which Robert/Bob was for my junior high and high school (and longer). Maxine was one of Mom's best friends. Their first three boys played with my sisters, next-door neighbors, after all. I think this visit was because, by this time, Bob was Creighton's superintendent, where the family naturally then lived, and so a stop after the Creighton hospital's maternity ward (Lundberg Memorial, where Sue has now worked for 30 years or so).
And I found one from me to her, from the Minot days.
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