Willy

Back in the day, 80 years ago, we were farmers. The main income was farming, with a supplemental income through life insurance sales. 40 years before that, dads died inhaling allergens and extracts not intended to be consumed at that level, by doing the work of tending to crops. At home, mamas and their babies and soon to be born babies were left without the main bread winner. And everything depended on the weather.

His grandfather lost his dad before he was born. His mama was a talented seamstress at the turn of the century. Sewing beautiful wedding gowns for clients in their small town. One time, his grandfather was tasked with delivering a beautiful gown, adorned with lace and hand sewn one of a kind detail that we could not even comprehend in Y2K, and dropped it in the mud. His widowed mother had to scramble to repair the damage.

His mama was a university student, majoring in education. It was 1940. She carried on the tradition of her grandfather, who started a small town high school, and was its first principal in the 1880s. She may have came home from her college, 180 miles from her hometown. She was an only, her mama almost died during her birth. But the first of her eight children came to her during that first year of college.

She came home, they built a cape cod on the area that was once the family farm pig pen. The baby was born in August, they moved into their new home, and new life on December 7, 1941.