Mama and the Leading Citizen

A Story for Mother’s Day

    Mama grew up in a board shack set on the rolling prairie of central North Dakota, a middle child among eight siblings. Her parents, hard-working German immigrants who’d had the misfortune of settling on some of the poorest farmland in the state, barely managed to feed all those mouths.

    Marie had beautiful big brown eyes, but unfortunately, they were crossed. Her parents couldn’t afford treatment, but the rural school district would pay for glasses if she could get to an eye doctor. Mr. Schuller, the school board president, the most respected man in the community, owned one of the first automobiles in the county. He offered to take the little girl to the doctor on his trip to Minot.
  
   Neither Marie nor her family knew Mr. Schuller personally. None of them had ridden in an automobile, nor had any of the children been to the big city. Marie was thrilled and excited when the shiny new Model T Ford two-seater with a fold-back top drew up in front of their home. Mr. Schuler boosted her in and off they went. She held on tightly to keep from being bounced out onto the dirt roads.

    The school board president left her in the receptionist’s office while he went about his errands. Later she ate lunch with him and another man in a restaurant. The two men retired to a curtained alcove. When they finally came out, their breaths smelled of alcohol.

    They finally started for home, the other man in the passenger seat. Marie climbed into the back beside some baskets of apples. The car veered toward one side of the street, then the other. Out in the country, they drove faster, but the weaving didn’t improve. Once the Model T darted toward a team of horses pulling a buggy. The horses reared, then took off at a gallop, as the shouting, fist-shaking driver tried to regain control.

    A couple of times the car ran into the ditch, but the men got it back on the road. Soon it got dark. The car’s headlights ran by a magneto (a needle fixed on the flywheel of the engine.) When they sped up, the lights got brighter, but when the car slowed, they went out.
  
   Finally they reached the town where the second man lived. Mr. Schuller didn’t stop when he came to intersections. Pedestrians scattered at their approach. One very large man couldn’t get out of the way in time. The car hit him, spinning him around. They stopped then and a policeman led the two men away. Someone took Marie to a big hall.

    Then Mr. Schuller appeared and told Marie what she was to answer if someone asked her about the accident. The room became very quiet. She saw a man sitting behind a big desk, with the school board president and the man he’d hit standing before it. Suddenly the man behind the desk asked Marie, “Little girl, did the driver stop before he drove through the intersection.”

    “Y-yes,” she gulped, knowing the answer was a lie, but answering as she’d been told.

    The man who’d been struck turned around and glared at her, but they were allowed to go.

    Twice more the car ran off the road, once nearly upsetting. Apples flew out and scattered all over the ground. In the dark, they gathered up what they could find and the driver got the car back on the road.

    Suddenly the car swerved across the road and over the bank, rolling onto its side. Marie was thrown into a field. Dazed, she got to her feet. She heard a moan. Stumbling through the tall grass she felt her way back to the over-turned car and tripped over Mr. Schuller’s sprawled body.

    “My leg,” he groaned. She realized that his leg was pinned to the ground by the steering wheel. She tugged, trying to raise the car off him. “Stop! You’re turning the wheel and hurting me worse,” he told her.

    She tried again to lift, pleading with God to please help. Mr. Schuller finally dragged himself free. He staggered up onto the road, where car lights had appeared in the distance. Their rescuer was the only other neighbor who owned a car. He quickly drove Marie home. Her parents were sleeping soundly, trusting that the respected Mr. Schuller would bring their daughter safely back.

    Marie eventually got her glasses, and her eyesight began to improve. But her opinion of their wealthy neighbor never recovered.

Tulip Time in the Skagit Valley

You know that spring has arrived in Washington’s Skagit Valley when blossoms open in the tulip fields. The blooms were late again this year, but judging from the hordes of people oohing and aahing from the sidelines this weekend, the spectacle was well worth the wait.

 Rows of bright tulips stretched across rolling fields, striping a living quilt in rainbows. Another rainbow of nationalities mixed together in the crowds that moved along the edges of the fields. People from all corners of the earth, all ages from infant to ancient, called to each other in a kaleidoscope of languages. Because children are admitted free, at least at the farm we visited, there were many families: Asian, Hispanic, East Indian, American Indian, girls and women in bright saris or the native dress of Bangladesh. We saw every shade of skin color, black to brown to cream-in-your-coffee tan; blue-eyed blondes, redheads, some with hair as black as crow’s wings. But on every face was the same happy smile.

 The Skagit Valley Tulip Festival runs through the month of April, with the tulip crop scattered over hundreds of acres throughout the Skagit Valley and festival activities scattered throughout the valley as well. Hundreds of thousands of visitors come from all fifty states and as many as fifty-one foreign nations.

 

Photos by Joan Husby
Taken at Tulip Town, Mt. Vernon, WA

"The Old Man's Draft"

Thomas Manford Rawlins in about 1942

    Cousin Jackie, our family genealogist, recently sent a document that rocked me back on my heels. It was a copy of a 1942 registration card for my then 63-year-old grandfather, Thomas Manford Rawlins. It brought back memories of poorly-understood events and conversations from that time in my life.

    In the spring of 1942, I had been in my 1st grade classroom when the mailman brought my father an envelope from the U.S. Selective Service. It was an official summons from the draft board to serve in the United States army. My younger sister, still at home, remembers our mother weeping in despair. Our parents had five small children to support, the youngest only a few months old. How would Mom manage by herself if her husband had to go to war?

    Fortunately for all of us, Dad found work as a logger about that time and received an “essential worker” deferment. But Grandpa? His shaky signature on the card indicates that he was already sick and unable to work. Was America so desperate for fighting men that they actually drafted senior citizens?

    Not really. This was the fourth of a total of seven draft registrations initiated by the Selective Service during World War II. Known unofficially as the “Old Man’s Draft,” it was meant to provide the government with a pool of men aged 45-65 who could help out on the home front by taking the place of young men who’d been drafted to fight.

    On April 27 1942, the official registration day for the Fourth Draft, long lines formed outside local draft board offices around the country . Many men waiting to register voiced their regrets that they were too old to fight. Feeling that this was one way they could serve their country, they registered willingly.

    I don’t know how Grandpa felt about it. And I don’t know if any of the men who registered for the “Old Men’s Draft” were actually called to serve. But it was a measure of our country’s spirit that everyone, young and old, felt a sense of being in the war effort together, whether we fought, collected scrap metal, planted victory gardens, or saved for war bonds.

    Some were drafted. Many volunteered. But almost everyone had a part in winning the war, including America’s “old men.”

Grandpa's draft card. Reverse side holds physical description. His eyes were blue, like mine.