Matriarch Tales #10: Grace’s First Love - by Saga

When last we left Grace, her beloved husband George had just died. This installment is about that man, her first love. Next week, we will resume Grace’s tale. For more about Garnett/George’s story during the years of their marriage, please refer to Matriarch Tales #8 and 9.  You can go to https://consortiumofseven.blogspot.com/p/c7-posts.html and scroll down to Wednesday’s list.

My father had two names: George Humes Rader was born Garnett Melvin Marksbury in Marion County, Indiana in April, 1915.  He was the last of 6 children of John and Margrette (Maggie) Marksbury.  The family was from Mercer County, Kentucky, where John is listed as a farmer in the 1910 census. Eventually John, Margrette, and their two daughters moved to Beech Grove, Indiana, where John worked in the railroad repair yards. Two boys were born and then Garnett.  The family was shattered six months later when Maggie died of epidemic spinal meningitis at age 33.

The family story is that the two girls, Virginia and Elizabeth, tried to keep house and keep the family together.  Virginia was 12 when her mother died and Elizabeth only 9. John apparently suffered from alcoholism and was unreliable. One day in 1921, John delivered the three young boys to the Indianapolis Orphans Asylum in Indianapolis. The entry in the roster of children reads:

               Marksbury.  Horace         born 7-5-10

                                   Lucien          born 11-24-12

                                   Garnett       born 4-5-15     

Brout [sic] by the father, John Marksburry, with an order from the Juvenile Court for temporary care. Mother, Maggie Marksburry deceased.

Indianapolis Orphan Asylum, June 6, 1921      

John never returned for his sons. Lucien left the orphanage in July of 1925, having aged out at thirteen. Horace died three years later, and a coroner’s inquest found that he had died of sepsis from an untreated wound in his foot, likely from stepping on a needle. Years later, my father was stopped at the state fair by a man who recognized him from childhood. He told my father that Horace had died from a knife wound to the back, and that the orphanage matron was suspected. Another version of the story was that a group of boys had been playing mumblypeg with a jackknife, which would not explain a wound to the back. In any case, it is clear that orphanage children were neglected at best.

Garnett was in and out of the orphanage, once because he was sent to Sunnyside, a local sanitorium for tuberculosis. Grace remembered that “They thought he had tuberculosis because he was so skinny.”  In any case, there was a nationwide effort at the time to weigh all children to determine if they were undernourished. (25% of those at the Orphans Asylum were recorded at least 7% underweight in that study.) Nutrition camps were created all over the country where children who did not have the “power to gain” weight were given better diets and Sunnyside had such a camp. There was also an open-air school sponsored by Sunnyside and located at the Arsenal Technical High School, which was near the orphanage. A glass of milk every day at Sunnyside was a treat and my father drank milk with gusto for the rest of his life.

As an adult Garnett told stories about the kindness of various adults in his childhood.  I have long been fascinated with how some people who have suffered deprivation, grief, and pain can become bitter and angry while others suffer too and become grateful, gentle, and good natured. Garnett was one of the latter. 

One of his favorite stories was about the bakery down the street from the orphanage where the kids would notice doughnuts cooling by the back window. The doughnuts were in rows on trays and the kids would run a long stick through the holes in a row of doughnuts to steal them.  Now and then they would find a pie and snatch that as well.  When he went back years later to apologize to the owner for stealing his wares, the man said, “Oh son, why do you think that long stick was leaning against the wall there? We knew you all were always hungry.”  

Indeed, the orphanage meals consisted of beans and cornbread several times a week. Sometimes there might be a little pork fatback in the beans. “On Sundays”, he remembered, “we each got a cookie with Sunday dinner. I saved mine up under my mattress until I had at least three, then I could eat them all at once.” He liked most of all to read a library book by the light from a hallway and eat his cookies while he read. As an adult, he could reach into a cookie jar and pluck three cookies at once in a second and without looking. He would also conspire with me so that I could read in bed by light from a hallway without my mother’s notice.

Garnett/George talked fondly about a custodian who smuggled in buckets of lard and ground peanuts to make peanut butter.  The children would sneak to his room behind the coal furnace, where he would spread a concoction of peanut butter and honey onto stale bread. He called his concoction “goo”.  Most Sundays at our family breakfast table, my father would create an elaborate ceremony to make goo. He would place a large dollop of peanut butter on a saucer, drizzle a generous stream of honey over it, and make figure eights through the mixture until it was creamed together to his liking. My mother would produce hot toast at just the right moment, on which he would spread the delicious goo, then pass the toast pieces around the table. He waited until everyone had been served before he ate his toast and goo with great relish. “That guy kept us alive on bread and goo,” he would often say.

On Sundays the children were cleaned up and marched to church, “to show off how Christian the matron was.” The matron was not one of his favorite people. When a new kid came, he remembered, “we would put him in the center of the row and we always sat right in front of the church. In the middle of the sermon one of us would fart, or make it sound like we did, and we would all turn to frown at the new kid.”

Sundays also meant that children who were eligible for adoption were lined up for viewing. One Sunday Garnett was placed in the line-up, which is when he knew that his father was never coming back for him. A couple came down the line one Sunday and chose Garnett. Bessie Rader told him later that she chose him for his beautiful brown eyes. She felt guilty because she loved her dogs more than people, she once told him, so she adopted him.  In October 1925, ten-year-old Garnett went to live with the Rader family, who had money and social standing. At one time they lived in the mansion where President Henry Harrison had lived. On the lawn of the house was a limestone sculpture of a squirrel atop a tree stump. Garnett wanted to open a walnut that had fallen from the tree nearby, so he smashed it against the squirrel’s nose. That nose appeared sharp enough to break a walnut hull, but instead the squirrel’s nose broke off. “I got quite a spanking for that one,” he would remember. Garnett was probably what could euphemistically be called “a handful”.  

The family traveled to hotels where the waiters fussed over young “Mr. Garnett”. They taught him how to pour water from a pitcher, moving the pitcher further and further from the glass. He was given rolls of cash to carry and was expected to pay in restaurants. He was transformed from a neglected orphan to rich boy overnight.

Although they were required to keep their foster child for two years, after a year with the Raders, Garnett returned to the orphanage for four days, then left for another year and returned again.  What he rarely talked about was that when the Raders ran out of money in 1927, they sent him back to the orphanage at age 12. “They kept their greyhounds, though, and fed them steak,” he would say with sorrow. The lesson he drew from that experience was one he repeated many times: People are more important than money. Returning to the orphanage, the poverty and sparse meals must have been a terrible blow.

What saved his spirit were the generous adults, such as the custodian, the baker, and a few teachers and librarians. And books. He read everything he could find and, true child of Appalachia, he told stories. He was an effective speaker even as a child. I found his orphanage records after a long search because a digitized 1924 newspaper article mentioned that in thanks to the local Rotary Club for a donated movie projector one of the orphans, Garnett Marksbury, gave a  brief speech.  So, at the age of 9, he was chosen to give a speech. He would have been only nine years old and was probably charming and funny even then. He certainly was later.

The talent for speaking earned him a year of college. He won a Peace Declamation Contest in 1934 and the prize was tuition for one year at DePauw University. The Raders promised him they would pay for room and board to supplement the scholarship.  But when the bills came due they reneged on their promise.  He worked in the college library by day and at a bowling alley by night setting pins by hand, a dangerous job. He remembered getting into trouble at the library because he laughed out loud while reading Ogden Nash.

By 1933, Garnett had applied for the Civilian Conservation Corps, a program of the New Deal to provide employment to working class people in need.  CCC records show that he requested that $25 a month be sent from his pay to his father in Beech Grove, Indiana. They also show that he went AWOL and was discharged September 30, 1933 and re-enrolled the next day. My mother remembered this incident. Garnett was assigned to a work detail at Fort Harrison in Indianapolis and one day he just walked away. He walked all the way to Beech Grove, a suburb about fifteen miles away to see his father. To his everlasting sorrow, his father would not speak to him and he walked the fifteen miles back to his CCC assignment.  

What he told us about his time in the CCC was that he helped build rock walls in at least three state parks and that he contracted a dysentery that almost killed him. It was discovered that the dishwashers weren’t rinsing the soap adequately from dinnerware, which caused the diarrhea. I sometimes wonder if this was a true story because he told it when my brother and I were arguing over whether he had thoroughly rinsed the dinner dishes I was required to dry.

Eventually, Garnett returned to Indianapolis and went to work for his foster father despite the way the Rader family had treated him. This may be evidence of his desperation to earn a secure living. My mother recalled that the Raders were looking for a place for Garnett could live, which means he was not going to live with the family. It was at this point that he took a room in my grandmother Bertha Rachel’s boarding house. There he was my mother’s photograph on the parlor piano and romance ensued.

In 1940 just before his 25^th birthday and a month before he married my mother, Garnett changed his name to George Humes Rader.  No explanation of this name change was ever discussed in the family, but there were a few hints about Garnett/George’s relationship with the Raders. He always pronounced Bessie’s name with a certain rancor and felt that she never wanted him because she preferred her dogs. I don’t remember ever hearing him talk about Charles. His namesake was Bessie’s father, George Humes Rader, was Bessie’s father and a successful businessman. He worked his way up from laborer to hotelier; his obituaries describe him as highly esteemed dean of Pennsylvania hotelmen.

On their fifth wedding anniversary, George said in tears. “Do you realize,” he said to Grace “that I have never lived with a family for as long as five years?”  He delighted in her, in me, and in my brother. He was never what one would call a provider for the family, but he was adept at teaching us all sorts of lessons and bits of hidden history.  He was well read and self-educated, a master storyteller, a happy host to every guest, and a secret benefactor who would drop bags of groceries or Christmas toys on the doorsteps of people he know needed them.  

George at 27 with bald me age 6 months

His charm and storytelling served him well in the various sales jobs he held. He often had a new moneymaking scheme in mind and started a company with a partner, but nothing ever panned out. In that sense, he was like his foster father. I understand now that his relationship with money was fraught, no doubt as a result of his childhood and the sharp differences between the orphanage deprivations and the Rader mansion and wealth. I believe he self-medicated with alcohol to numb the pain of his memories.

My outstanding memories are seeing him in his armchair, book and unfiltered Camel cigarette in hand and glass of Jack Daniels on the table beside him. My mother had to call his name several times to rouse him from his reading. I remember times when I was sick and tucked into my parents’ big double bed under one of Nancy Alice’s quilts. He would tell me how a patchwork quilt was made, how a coal mine was constructed, how George Washington’s false teeth were made of wood, and other fascinating things. I remember how he loved babies and could always charm a smile from them, even the fussy babies of strangers in restaurants. I treasure memories of him with my older son.

With the only grandson he knew in 1967

I remember how he and my mother worked hard to create a nursery and Sunday School classes for the young families in their church. They were very active in the church until an unsuspecting member of the congregation came to visit one day and forcefully urged my father to contribute money. He felt his devotion to the congregation meant nothing to the church and never went back. He could talk about religious hypocrisy at length. 

In February 1968 George saw a doctor for a physical because his new office manager job required it. He reported a clean bill of health but died two days later of a heart attack at age 52. No doubt his malnourished childhood contributed to his early death, but so did the three packs of unfiltered Camels he smoked every day and the Jack Daniels he loved. In the petty cash drawer of his new employer there was an IOU for $25 he had borrowed. The employer brought it my mother's attention when she called to tell them he had died.  She hung up the phone, sobbing, "He used that money to buy me roses for Valentine's Day." 

Next time, Garnett's mother, Maggie. 

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