My Aunt Marjorie died recently, thereby closing the book on my father’s nuclear family. Her passing has touched me not only because of who she was, but also for what it represents.
Clare and Lulu Myers raised their six children on a farm a couple of miles north of Beaman, in southern Grundy County, Iowa. They had been born in the 1890s, and their children were born between 1915 and 1929. My dad, Keith, was the oldest, and Marj was #4, born in 1925. There were four sons and two daughters.
All of my memories of grandparents Myers are good ones. They were hard-working, honest, caring people who were deeply involved in the life of their small community and its Methodist Church. They were remarkably aware of the world beyond their corner of it. My grandfather had a little college and I believe hoped to be a teacher, but family obligations took him back to the farm. Grandmother was an avid reader all of her life.
It is nearly impossible for me to imagine how they raised their children as successfully as they did. The decade before the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s saw the agricultural depression and droughts of the 1920s. Then came World War II. Fortunately, their farm was on some of the most productive land on earth, and their hard work as a family assured their children of food and shelter and basic clothing, if not much else. I do not remember my father ever saying they went hungry, but he often said they were poor but didn’t know it because everyone they knew was in the same boat. They would not understand being considered “privileged.” They would smile modestly if you recalled that they had “fed the world” during and after the Second World War.
Each of the six children knew traditional measures of success. They all married (only one marriage ended in divorce), they all bore children (a total of 16, 12 of whom are still living), and they all achieved the comforts and benefits of middle class American life. So far as I know none of them ever crossed the law in any but the most minor of ways. They all made their communities better places, and some made contributions that were felt beyond those communities.
Five of the six were Iowans to their deaths. Many of the next generation have also remained in Iowa, but several live out of the state. Only two of my fifteen cousins are farmers today, and both those families have supplemented their income in other careers.
My generation, transitioning into old age itself, treasures later memories of the mature Clare and Lulu Myers family. We remember family gatherings with our grandparents and their six adult children and their families. Our children only know about those if and when we tell them about them. Their children will not likely know any of their names or where and how they lived.
History tends not to take special note of families like that of Clare and Lulu Myers. For the most part they will be remembered, if they are remembered at all, as names and perhaps bland notations in old government records. But the rememberers of the memories that matter–of life and laughter and death and despair in that little farmhouse and the land around it–are now silenced. The emotions and passions that went into living in that place at that time can no be longer felt exactly as they felt them then. We have some pictures and some written first-person accounts, but no one will be able to say ever again that we were there ourselves.
They are the kind of people and families, of all classes and careers and nationalities and races, whose work and devotion made us who we are today. They made our life as a nation better than they could ever have imagined. How quickly, and how sadly, we forget and try to move on.
