The summer of 1969, Mom and Dad and I made our annual eastward trek from California once school was out. I didn't know it would be the last time, that my father would return to California to sell our house and move our belongings back to the midwest a couple of months later.
Usually, we took a fairly direct route from Barstow to central Iowa, but, that year, we went north, through Sacramento and to Reno, Nevada, where my father bought the most wonderful parka. The shell was a cuddly tan knit. A large and colorful Native design of a Thunderbird (of course) was embroidered on the back, and the hood had thick fur around the edge. My mother wore that coat for years after Dad died.
We also stopped in Boise, Idaho, where I met my Aunt Jean and my cousin David for the first time. Although I talked on the phone with each of them decades later, I never saw them "face-to-face" again. It rained a lot while we were there and David made little paper boats that we sailed in the flooded ditches. Aunt Jean was very pretty. Our two cats didn't get along with her cat and she just laughed and found a way to make it all work.
Isn't it funny what you remember?
Catherine Jean Holmes was born in Perry Iowa in 1918 and named for her paternal grandmother, Kate, but she was always called "Jean." She had just turned a year old when her father, Fred, died in a car accident in 1919.
Fred Holmes had been the only child of Kate and James Holmes. He had two children by a previous marriage, but was divorced and their mother had taken them to Montana. Kate's sister, Julia Grady, was a teacher, like Jean's mother, Inez. Kate and Julie included Inez in many of their activities -- self improvement correspondence courses, painting china -- and also helped care for Jean when Inez went back to work. Compared to Inez's parents, the Holmes family was relatively affluent. This picture was taken in James Holmes' study. Jean was a remarkably pretty child, with lovely blue eyes and a sweet face. Kate, James and Julia wanted her to have every advantage. She was the basket that had ended up with all their eggs.
In 1923, Inez, married George Wayne "Shug" Thomas and moved a few miles east to Woodward. Jean was six years old when her half-sister, Dorothy (my mother), was born the next year. She grew up with Shug, Inez, Dorothy and Shug's mother, Dora. Inez continued to teach and Dorothy and Jean sometimes accompanied her. Mom said she and Jean were both bored to tears with their own classes when they went to school because they'd already been through all the lessons multiple times.
Kate and Julia continued to include Inez and Dorothy in their invitations, but they also spent a lot of time with Jean. They told her they would give her a tour of Europe when she graduated from school. Jean confided to Inez that they also told her that if Inez didn't do what Jean wanted, she should say that she would just come to live with her grandparents and Julia. On the one hand, I'm sure Kate and James had been devastated by the loss of their son. They were devout Catholics and knew when Jean was born that she would not be raised in the Catholic faith (Inez was Methodist and Fred was divorced), but I expect that separation was hard for them, as well. Still, it's never fair to force that sort of loyalty test onto a child, especially one who has already been through so much.
Jean graduated from Woodward High School, the same school from which my brother and my mother and I all graduated, in 1936. She worked part-time as an operator for the telephone company and was an accomplished card player. The pretty girl had grown into a beautiful young woman. The Holmes family suffered as much as anyone else during the Great Depression and James Holmes became ill and died that summer, so instead of a tour of Europe, Kate and Julia gave Jean a piano and paid tuition for two years at the State University of Iowa in Iowa City.
By the time she returned to Woodward in 1938, Dora Thomas had passed away. Julia Grady died that August, leaving Jean three barrister bookcases full of her books. Jean took a job at the Woodward bank, living in the little house in Woodward, while Inez and Shug and Dorothy lived in a house on the grounds of the State Hospital where Inez was principal of the school and Shug managed the considerable farm that provided much of the food for the residents.
Then, in June of 1941, Shug died at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, following surgery to remove a pituitary tumor. Jean told me later that she had asked for the words "and was a true father to her" be added to Shug's obituary to reflect their relationship. She and Inez had their ups and downs, she said, but Shug was a wonderful parent, with fair discipline and loving encouragement.
The United States entered World War II in December. Once Dorothy completed high school in the spring of 1942, she took a job as a linotype operator in Nevada, Iowa, renting an apartment there. Inez moved to Rock Island, Illinois, to work at the Arsenal. And Jean remained alone, in Woodward. Kate's health was failing. She sold their big house in Perry and moved in with a woman in Woodward who provided nursing care for her. All of the furniture that she kept was sent to the little house where Jean was living. From the pictures that remain, Jean did go out with friends, sometimes including her little sister, but there wasn't much mention of entertaining or social events in the newspapers during the war years. It must have seemed as though she had lost or been abandoned by just about everyone.
I don't know exactly when in 1944 that Jean "disappeared." She was 26 years old. Her employers contacted Inez, who came home to Woodward, as did Dorothy. If they found a letter, they never told anyone. Inez hired a private detective.
At some point, it must have become clear that Jean hadn't left by herself. There were only a few hundred people in the town, and someone else went missing at the same time she did. Harry Hass was 39, the married father of five. He and his wife had operated a café, but closed it when he went to work in a munitions plant in Des Moines.
It took quite some time, but the private detective was able to find Jean. She and Harry had gotten married in Kansas a few months after the war ended, and Harry had gone to work as a cook for a restaurant in Boise, Idaho. Their son, David, was born in 1950. For the next decade, Jean corresponded with and spoke on the telephone with Inez and Dorothy. Then in 1960, when Jean was 42 and David was 10, Harry died. Inez encouraged Jean to come home to Woodward, but she refused. Inez did go to visit them, and kept a few precious pictures of David, along with the mountains of photos of me that began to accumulate once I was born in 1961.
We moved to California in 1964, and I think there was probably a mention that "we should stop by to visit Jean and David" most years but somehow never actually found the time to do so. When we finally did in 1969, I was just old enough to kind of understand and remember that I had an aunt and a cousin, and these were them.
Patrick was born later that fall and by 1970, the four of us lived in a big old Victorian rental on Main Street in Woodward, about four blocks from Inez's little house. I was in the 3rd grade in that same little school that Mom and Jean had attended. None of Harry Hass' grandkids were in my class, but I knew them, and I knew their parents, because that's how it works in a small town. They were all nice people.
My father died in November of 1970. Not quite two months later, Inez fell on the ice and broke her hip.
Before having surgery on her broken hip, Inez signed a quit claim deed, giving her house to Dorothy and Jean. A few days after the surgery, Inez died. Jean gave her half of the house to my mother but would not come back for the funeral. It was very cold and the snow was very deep; flying from Idaho to Iowa would have been expensive and uncomfortable. I suspect Jean never wanted to return to Woodward. But Mom wouldn't forgive her for leaving it all up to her to manage and the two of them didn't speak again for even longer than their first break.
I think it was about 1995 when the sisters made contact again. I suspect it may have been Mom's growing mastery of the internet that allowed her to track down Jean's address and phone number, or maybe Jean just picked up the telephone and dialed the same number that had rung the little house in Woodward for almost a century by that point. In any case, Mom flew out to Boise and stayed with Jean for about a week, meeting all of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren; David and his wife lived next door to his mother. Mom and Jean spoke on the phone once a month or so. Mom was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer in September of 1999. I kept Jean apprised as Mom's cancer progressed, and let her know when she died. I spoke to her on the phone a few times after that, and we exchanged some correspondence, mostly about the collection of Shug's letters that I had privately published. Jean said that she loved the little book but that I shouldn't have spelled his nickname "Sug," but "Shug" because he always did; maybe someday I can do a second edition. From the questions Jean asked me, I know that the two sisters never discussed the past -- she knew as little about my mother's life as we did about hers.
As I emptied out the little house, I asked Jean what she wanted done with the Holmes things that had remained there all those years. She asked that I send a Limoges chocolate set to her, but said the furniture was just too big to deal with. I sold a couple of pieces at auction, sending her the money. We donated the books to the Hometown Perry Iowa collection and I kept the barrister bookcases.
The next time I tried Jean's phone number, the line had been disconnected, and so I gathered my courage and called David, hearing his voice for the first time in forty years. He said that Jean had dementia. I asked about sending out the hand-painted china and other Holmes things that remained and he said he had his hands full of too much stuff already.
I know from the internet that Jean died in 2011.
In the end, the sense I had was that Jean regretted having hurt people, but that she would have done it all over again if she'd had to. She made a choice about whom she was going to be and she kept on choosing it.
It's hard not to try to find some sort of lesson from this story. I say that I write things down because, in order to learn from what happened, we need to remember it. I don't know that I've learned anything from this. And do I really know what happened? I have some letters and photographs, some no doubt very imperfect memories. If there's one sad truth about genealogy, it's that we don't always get to understand people's actions, or how things transpired.
But it's too bad we couldn't have been more of a family.
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