CHAPTER 2
WILL THE CIRCLE BE BROKEN

Spring, 2007

Now smaller in her polyester button-down shirt, my grandma greeted me at the door with a quiet “Howdy!” and ushered me in to “Sit down and stay a while, Honeychile.” I had stopped by as planned with my camcorder, tripod, and an hour lunch break to interview her. Being interviewed wasn’t the problem; it was being the center of attention for the camera that I knew bothered her. I tried to play it down as much as possible. After a few recent conversations with her, it occurred to me she was slipping more and more with her stories from her youth and from when she was raising my dad and his siblings Linda, Jim, and Frank. You should have done this years ago, I scolded myself.
With the camera running, we sat looking at family photos, mostly quiet but now and then she would utter commentary in her warm, meek voice.

Her hair was thinning, but she styled it like she always had: parted on the left so most of her hair covered the indent on the top right of her forehead. With very little inflection, she commented on every other photograph or so.

“That one’s your mom’s dad, right? You want to give that to him?”

“That’s so-and-so’s little kid.”

“They went and tore that building down now.”

“Her and her daughter would bring me pants to hem.”

“I wonder if he’ll ever get married.”

“Do you have a copy of this one?”

“Is this your sister?”

“That’s the one out on Wells Road.”

On playback, the image was grainy and the audio squeaky—you could hear the gears of the camera turning more than you could hear our voices. I wondered if her quietness and reservation was partly due to my noisy camera reminding us it was watching. My prehistoric digital camcorder sat on the tripod facing her, the red light on and recording as she flipped through small photo albums which were not in any kind of order, chronological or otherwise. The process of going through pictures
together just to talk about them is something we did quite often—in fact, we did this whenever I came to visit. Of course, unless Jeopardy or Gilmore Girls were on.

She handed me a black and white photo of herself in a dress and smiled.

“This is before we went to prom.”

“Aww, that’s pretty! Who’d you go with?”

“Oh, I can’t think of his name off hand...just a friend of the family.” I examined it a little longer as she thought.

“An...Ander...Anderson I think was his last name.”

“What happened to your dress?” If there was a chance she kept any 1940s dresses or other vintage clothing I’d be over the moon.

“Well, I came to Ashland right after I graduated and took it to the cleaner. They ruined it. It was a white dress.”

Photos I was very familiar with revealed a vibrant and free-wheeling young woman who seemed to morph into a subdued and controlled one with each passing year.

“Grandma, this is an odd question, but how old do you see yourself?”

After a silent beat, I thought I might rephrase the question, but she spoke up. She understood what I meant.

“In my mind I’m still 16,” she answered. And I knew what she meant—wondering how the years had snuck up on her and made a young girl into a grandmother. A great-grandmother, even.

“Did you ever wish you’d have learned to drive?”

“No, I don’t think so. Getting stuck on the train tracks scared me toobad.” She paused. “Once, though, when I was going with this one guy,we were driving from Ashland to Wooster. He pulled over and told me to get out. So I got out and he said to get in the driver's side, so I drove
for just a little bit.”

Evelyn LaRue Bowers was just LaRue to the Georgia relatives. Eventually, other nicknames followed: “Evie” and “Shorty.” It’d be a stretch to say she collected nicknames with only three. But considering all her other growing collections, it became clear that she had a collection problem. A “problem” that was only really a problem for everyone else in the family. Finding the time to do what she wanted with it all was her real dilemma. No one ever called her a hoarder to her face. They’d just say things like: “What are you going to do with this?” or “I think you already have one of those,” or “Do you really need that?” Rocks, mugs, autographs, magazines, dolls, coasters, placemats, buttons, coins, plastic Scope mouthwash caps, books, recipes, hair cuttings, empty cigarette cartons, teeth, postcards and postmarks, plastic bags, newspapers, newspaper clippings, the elastic waist bands from pairs of Fruit of the Looms, a brick from the old jail, costume jewelry, plastic canvases, scrap
fabric, crochet patterns, Avon bottles, Cracker Jack toys, keychains, yarn and thread, stuffed animals, salt and pepper shakers, Styrofoam and plastic containers from restaurants, beads, coupons, knickknacks of all kinds, and a snowball from the blizzard of ‘78 (preserved in the freezer, naturally).

I never collected autographs like my grandma did, and though many of her more famous autographs were sold, she gave me one she still had in her collection. Frankie Goldsmith, a child survivor of the Titanic, lost his father in the disaster. After living in Detroit with his mother, he moved
to the Ashland/Mansfield area and started a photo supply business. One day, he had come into Gault Cleaners where Grandma worked downtown, and she recognized his name right away. One of the few things she wasn’t shy about was requesting autographs and Mr. Goldsmith was no exception.

She saved the signed scrap of paper in a book called The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters: Thrilling Stories of Survivors with Photographs & Sketches (1912); it was published only a short time after the sinking in April of that year. Her father, Frank Bowers, had owned the copy. She knew I was drawn to the story since seeing a National Geographic special on the sinking and wanted me to have the fragile and yellowed book. Now I had my very own piece of Titanic history plus a
survivor’s autograph. Since we didn’t have an ancestor who had been a passenger on the Titanic, it was the next best thing.

Grandma also took pictures. Which is a kind of collection all its own. Pictures of clouds, flowers, rainbows, hot air balloons, spring leaves, summer leaves, fall leaves, gardens, large snowfalls, gifts, food, floral arrangements, people, animals, people with animals, people crying, people laughing, people smiling, people swimming, people riding bikes, people dressing up, people taking pictures, people eating, people playing instruments, people wearing wigs, people in open caskets, clowns, neighbors, her young sons dressed up like little girls, herself in a mirror, kids playing, parades, injuries, presents, fairs, road signs, funny signs, picnics, buildings being torn down, buildings being built, relatives’ grave markers, humorous or interesting grave markers, landmarks, historical artifacts,
places she used to lived, the TV when someone she liked or knew was on it, and lastly, pictures of pictures. She’d get doubles or triples made and make sure you got one if it involved you.

Within her quiet and accommodating demeanor remained a hopeful and curious girl, keeping a close eye on the world around her, attempting to collect and record her observations like a scientist of the natural world. But for her, the research was purely for the collecting and for the keeping.
Her scrapbooks are a circus of content. They are filled with the interesting, cute, funny, clever, and bizarre. Lined with clippings of movie stars and popular singers, weddings, and engagements of local couples as well as celebrities, photos and drawings of human and animal babies, and the
occasional pressed flower or four-leaf clover. Comics and cartoons—even a few of her own drawings. Sad accidents or weird crimes committed locally and worldwide; even articles on the events of World War II, of classmates she knew who were killed in action or missing.

“Here’s Mae and I at the Miller Street house.” She handed me a loose black and white photograph tucked in between the pages of the next small photo album she placed on her lap. Sly smiles matched their smart bobbed hair, high heels, handbags, and corsages pinned on the upper left
of their identical cropped swing coats.

Mae was a familiar figure in our family’s story and a household name—no last name was needed when she was mentioned. In the mid 1940s, Grandma’s parents still lived on the farm in Ashland County. Grandma Bowers’ younger brother, Bob, who had moved up to Ashland from Georgia after his time in the war, was called upon to be a “taxi driver” to his slightly younger niece, Evelyn, when she was finished with high school back in Akron.

He was also kind enough to give the neighbor’s daughter, Mae, a lift into town. Both being the same age, Evelyn and Mae became quick friends and an inseparable duo while Uncle Bob chauffeured them to their places of employment. Daily, Grandma was dropped off at Cresco, a men’s garment
factory which manufactured leather and cloth jackets and coats where she worked as a seamstress. Mae’s daily stop was at the Ashland High School for office work. After learning to drive, she stopped catching rides with Bob and Evelyn, but the girls’ friendship continued to grow. Grandma wasn’t as independent as I’m sure she’d thought she’d be when she was young. But Mae, on the other hand, was always very independent: she would go on to have a successful career while being a divorcee and single mom. In their retirement years, she would pick up Grandma on Tuesdays to go grocery shopping together. They fondly referred to it as “Mae Day.”

While Mae never remarried, Grandma had divorced and remarried within the same year. It was 1966 and after seventeen years with Phil Lawrentz, she would meet and marry Donald Junior Boreman, better known to family and friends as Pete.

Evelyn and Pete went down to Winchester, Virginia, and made it official at the Justice of the Peace. I asked Grandma to retell the story to me for the camera.

“I remember going to the place that marries you—whatever you call it, and uh, I picked up something. I think it was a pinecone, or something from the tree there and he says ‘C’mon! Let’s get this blankety-blank thing over with. I’m getting hungry,’” she said with a smile that confused me. Pete came into their lives as an alcoholic who, when drunk, became angry, jealous, and controlling. The autographs of famous people she’d been collecting for years? He sold them. Her diaries of life prior to him? He burned them. He moved Grandma and the kids to a new house and isolated them for a time. Even Mae was kept at a distance during those early years of their marriage. Whenever I heard about those early “Petermo” days, he did not sound like the grandpa I grew up knowing, but I was always comforted by the knowledge the future held for him: a change of heart.

I started to wonder how dysfunctional cycles get started. Abuse, alcoholism, rage, workaholism, overeating, hoarding. What allows them to become part of a family’s identity and story? And furthermore, I wonder what’s exaggerated in these recollections grandkids like me get told—and
what’s left out altogether. Grandma passed me a family photo and said, “You can have it. ’Cause
when I die, somebody will say ‘who’s that?’” I guessed that to mean I could fill in the blanks when questions arose. But I was certain my dad’s generation would help me out if I got stumped.

“Well, I hope strangers don’t get your pictures.”

“I do too.”

Much like the contents of the many boxes piling up in her home, her stories were filled with bits of memories and random treasures from the past—never in much of any order. She would gently set them out for me, like the pretty or interesting stones she collected: once part of a bigger rock, but nearly impossible to place back into its original form.

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