Tag Archives: Harriette Anderson

Love Letters and The Course of True Love

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On Valentine’s Day, we celebrate love. It is the proper week for love stories and love letters. But today, the 9th of the month, is the proper day for telling the love story of my mother and father. For Paul Kaser and Harriette Anderson the ninth of the month–every month–was Valentine’s Day.

They say that the course of true love never runs smooth*–and they are the living proof of the adage.

Since Paul Kaser had lived in Killbuck Ohio, the home of the Anderson family, for a few years when he was young, he claims that he first fell in love with the big brown eyes of Harriette Anderson when he saw her crossing the bridge to bring the cow back in from pasture. And, indeed, who could resist those big brown eyes?

Harriette Anderson

Harriette, Herbert and Bill Anderson Circa 1909

However, since Harriette was older by three years they were eons apart as school children.  When Paul graduated from Millersburg, Ohio high school in 1926, she had already gone off to college and become a teacher.  Both of them had a busy social life and left us photo albums full of his girlfriends and her boyfriends.

But in the thirties, my father wound up back in Killbuck, living with his sisterIrene and her husband Truman Bucklew.  Harriette, a teacher at Killbuck High School, directed a community play, a cheap form of entertainment during the Great Depression. Paul tried out for the play and won a part. But winning a heart is what he had in mind.

It was a play about gypsies with a leading character of a Duchess and that became Paul’s pet name for Harriette. Paul wanting to get closer to the cute director, found that he was having trouble learning his lines (Ahem!) and needed a lot of extra coaching.

During a coaching session, he asked her out. She said she’d go out with him if he’d shave his mustache–never believing that he actually would. But he did, and he never again sported any facial hair. (I don’t even have a picture of him with a mustache–she probably destroyed them!) On November 9, 1934, they went out to dinner at the Hotel Winesburg, in Winesburg, Ohio, which at one time had a fancy restaurant.


Note: Winesburg is a real town that became famous as the fictional setting for a very popular Sherwood Anderson story in 1919.

During 1935, the two of them worked together in politics— I will relate later their adventures as they worked around Holmes County from farm to farm converting Democrats to Republican voters. In the summer of 1935, he went to the larger town of Canton and took a part-time job while he hit the streets in search of work–to no avail. Meanwhile, she went to Ohio State University to summer school to complete her degree.

Although he liked to say he was never unemployed during the Great Depression, Paul had to work at whatever day labor came his way, and at several jobs that had no future.  His college education had been interrupted when his mother died and his father ordered him back to Millersburg after he had been at the Seventh Day Adventist Missionary School in Takoma Maryland for only a month.

Harriette had been hurt by an earlier marriage to a con man who was only interested in her salary, and she had no intentions of being the target again.  Although she was drawn to this handsome young man from play rehearsals, she insisted that he settle down and get a career with a future. And when he promised that he would look for serious employment, so he could make a proper home for her, she promised that she would marry him when that happened.

During the next few years, circumstances generally kept them living in two different towns and dating only on weekends. They wrote love letters to each other almost daily, starting in 1935.

But promises are promises, and Paul had not only Harriette to make happy, but her parents as well. In a satirical letter like a military report written from “field HQ in Canton”, he says:

I shall have to exercise the most stringent economy in order to make out. Think naught of it. Any sacrifice seems trivial in comparison to the end I seek.

In one letter he says that he talked to her mother (Vera Anderson) and although the weapons had been laid aside, the truce was still on.  Harriette’s parents were very uneasy about this marriage. And Harriette’s school teacher friends were wary as well. Only her friend Lois Duncan Fites sympathized.

In his love letters he frequently addressed Harriette as “Duchess” and she signed her letters as Duchess. President Harding (from Ohio) called his wife “Duchess” and so there were Ohio/political roots for the name. One more tie appeared after they were married….read on.

In October 1937 (3 years after that first date in Winesburg), Paul saw a notice for a federal government job in New Philadelphia, Ohio, and went to apply for it. He got the job. They started planning a wedding, still corresponding, because she was teaching in Clark once again and he was now living in New Philadelphia.

By November 1937, Mother would say:

“[If you transfer to California] I might even go in a short notice myself. I am funny that way, sure funny how I do, eh! One minute I could marry you now.  Tomorrow if necessary.  Then, not that I love you less, but I get so practical or unpractical I am not sure just which and think we hadn’t ought think of it until we can start as we would like to. I am sure it would be much nicer (if we had the nerve, to be married and start together).”

Because of her parents disapproval, the couple decided a church wedding in Killbuck was not right, so their friend Lois Duncan Fites volunteered to have the wedding at her home in Newark, Ohio. It was scheduled for June 9, 1938, soon after Harriette finished the school year and returned from a trip with other teachers and students. She was soon to turn 32 years old and he was 29.

Harriette Anderson

Harriette Anderson (or Kaser) at camp. undated

She had mentioned in one of her love letters that she looked forward to a trip, but instead, their honeymoon was spent at a 4-H camp where Paul had landed a weekend job.  Since Harriette loved road trips, and went on one almost yearly, I can’t swear that this is a honeymoon picture, but it is, as they would have said, a swell picture!

In her reminisces, Harriette told the story that people still wagged tongues about the the King of England abdicating to marry his beloved Wallis Simpson. They were married a year before Harriette and Paul and became the Duchess and Duke of Windsor. Naturally, that story was the one that Paul and Harriette acted out at the camp’s skit night. Another love affair that did not go smooth.

Always the romantic, Paul wrote in one of his love letters to Harriette in June 1935:

Remember Lois’ fireplace, Garfield farm, the Winesburg Hotel, mustaches, stocks, promises, and that I need you more than I need food.

If you’ve been paying attention to their story, you may recognize at least half of those references.

She resigned from her teaching job and moved to New Philadelphia where they were living when I was born (as Paul claimed, nine months, 2 hours and twenty minutes after they were married.)  They still did not have enough money for the kind of life they dreamed of, but were happy paling around with other young couples who also had to search through the sofa cushions to come up with enough pennies to buy a Sunday newspaper.

They continued to struggle and to spend more time than they wanted to apart for many years, but they had achieved the main goal. They were married. They had two more children in the next ten years, Paul William Kaser and Paula Kaser Price. And the marriage lasted until my father died, seven years after the fiftieth wedding anniversary pictured here.

Paul and Harriette Kaser

Paul William Kaser at the podium, with Paula Kaser Price on the far left, and me hiding in the blue dress. Paul and Harriette on the right. 1988, Scottsdale, AZ.

*Apologies to the grammar police but “they” don’t say ‘run smoothly.’ “They” say ‘run smooth.’

Sources

The information in this post comes from the stories told me by my mother and father or from their letters during the period of 1935 to 1939, or from my father’s extensive files of his employment. Family pictures are my own.

Rhema Anderson Fair, The Dynamo Who Inspired Me

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Note: WELCOME all Fair cousins (and all fair cousins as well). I hope you’ll add your memories of Rhema and Earl and also hope you’ll poke around and find stuff about Daddy Guy Anderson, Vera Anderson, Telmar Anderson, and other ancestors we have in common. Make yourself known to me. Love to meet relatives. I’ll be sharing a recipe from Rhema in December.

Remembering Rhema Anderson Fair, (1901-1996), my aunt, she who made the gravy.

Rhema Anderson Fair

Rhema Anderson (Fair) in 1909, about 8 years old.

Rhema Anderson was the sour-looking little girl in the 1909 family picture.

Telmar and Rhema Anderson

Telmar and Rhema Anderson, Photo from the collection of Kenneth J Fair at Ancestry.com

In fact, she didn’t look very cheerful in other childhood pictures, like this one with her brother Telmar.

 

 

No wonder the little girl was a bit grouchy.  Her mother died when she was 2 years old. When her father, Guy Anderson remarried a year later, she was sent to live with Franklin Anderson, Guy’s uncle. And when Rhema was eleven, Frank Anderson’s wife Sarah  Jane died.

Although she had contact with her father, and briefly lived with him, she must have felt like something of an orphan. I hasten to add that Frank and his wife Sarah Jane who had no children of their own, made a warm home for the little girl. But maybe Rhema just wasn’t suited for farm and farm community life.

When she was 18, Rhema became Rhema Anderson Fair when she married Kenneth Earl Fair (1898-1994). They lived  on his family farm in Clark Township, Holmes County, Ohio. Earl, who had 3 years of college,  taught school in Clark, and that’s where my mother, Harriette Anderson, had her first teaching job.

While Rhema and Earl lived in Clark, they had two boys–their only children. Rhema’s affection for Franklin Anderson, the man who raised her, was expressed when she named her first son after him.

You can see in this picture how tiny Rhema was. Mother may be standing slightly uphill, but she was never more than 5’4″, so Rhema Anderson Fair is about five feet tall.

Rhema Anderson Fair and family

Harriette Anderson, Baby Richard (Dick) Fair held by Earl Fair, Frank Fair and Rhema Fair on farm in Clark, Ohio 1925

Some time around 1940, the Fair family moved to Kent, Ohio,  Rhema took a job at Kent State University  as a housemother at a dorm, and Earl finished his college education. (I assume he got free tuition since she worked at the University.) These two, who had always lived on a farm or in a small farming community, took to city life and the University milieu like they were made for it.

Earl went to work for one of the big rubber companies, and that’s where he worked until he retired, as Rhema climbed the administrative ladder at the University, winding up as head of Student Housing at Kent State University. She wasn’t just a good cook…it seemed to me was good at everything she touched.

She was intelligent and witty and cute, besides. She always had a beautiful home and she was one of my role models because like many of the women in our family, she had a career outside the home before it was a routine thing for women to do.

Rhema Anderson Fair at Kent State

Rhema Fair at Kent State unversity. Photo from the collection of Kennth J. Fair at Ancestry.com

Always smartly dressed, and coiffed, she seemed to be a whirlwind of activity, known for her high heels clicking down the hallways, carrying the  5″2″ powerhouse around the campus. Since I had the same small feet that Rhema had, she used to send me shoes she tired of from her enormous collection, and bred a shoe collecting mania in her niece.

I remember one time proudly showing her everything in my closet, and she oohed and aahed over each dress and blouse, although in retrospect, it was not a very impressive collection.  She sent me the BEST Christmas presents–always just perfect for me–a purse, a scarf–perfume. Maybe I was the girl she never had (she had two boys) and that’s why she enjoyed sharing girly fashion things with me.

Her sour look in her early pictures could not be further from the cheerful, laughing Aunt Rhema that I knew. I remember her as  always interested in the person she was talking to, focusing her soft brown eyes on yours sympathetically. As a teenager, I felt that she understood me better than most adults. And maybe she did, since she worked with young people all the time.

When she and Earl retired, they left the lovely home they had built in Kent and moved to northern Arkansas  where Earl could fish and swap yarns with the locals.  They later lived with their son Frank and his wife Ruth in Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

Earl credited his long life to smoking cigars and drinking bourbon and branch water, and Rhema credited hers to keeping up with Earl. Their younger son, Dick, who died in 1968, at 43, did not have any children, but Frank made up for that. Rhema and Earl were very proud of their large family of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

In December 1986 the family gathered in Pine Bluff for this picture.

Rhema Anderson Fair and family

Rhema and Earl Fair (Seated on gold chairs) and Family, Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Christmas 1986

Rhema wrote a chatty letter to her half-sister Harriette Kaser (my mother) along with the picture.

“How’s this for progeny.  We even look sort of ‘smirky?’ But really aren’t they a good looking bunch?….Earl and I just ‘muddle’ along–We are well considering Earl is 89 yrs old and I will be 86 in July…”

She told where all the grandchildren and great-grandchildren are living and working and talked about some minor medical issues. But, really, hearing that Earl was 89 and Rhema is 86 made me look at the picture again.  Really?? 89??

Rhema passed away in 1996 at the age of 96, two years after Earl, who also had lived to 96.  Those are some genes to have in the family tree.

Oh, one more thing. In that letter to my mother that came with the picture. Rhema, known for giving fancy dinner parties and hobnobbing with the University set, says “I just made mush.  Earl wants mush and sausage gravy for dinner.”  There’s that gravy again. You can take the girl and boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of their cooking.

A Halloween Tale: Harriette’s Haunting Story of a Dead Body

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My mother recorded many of her memories when she was in her eighties and nineties, and one of them tells of a very scary night with a dead body in the house. This reminds me of a Mark Twain story–something that Tom Sawyer might have experienced.

As background, in the early twentieth century, Killbuck Creek, running slowly through Killbuck, Ohio, froze in the wintertime from bank to bank, and Harriette Anderson (Kaser) (1906-2003) remembered “we had one gorgeous skating party after another. ” So skating was second nature to all the children.

One skating night with her brothers was very unusual, however.

The three children about seven years before this story.

The three children about seven years before this story.

Bill and Herb and I had been allowed to go skating that night.   We never were allowed to go skating alone at night, but we went out with a gang that went skating over on a pond, not in the creek. I wasn’t very old–probably ten or eleven and Bill was a year older and Herb a year younger [That’s close. According to records, it was before March, 1919, so mother would have been 12, Bill 13 and Herb 10). When we came home, we were aware of why we had been allowed to go skating.

Some time before, a very elderly aunt of my father’s was brought home from Florida quite ill. [‘Aunt Am’ Amy E. Anderson Roof was born in 1843, so would have been 75 when she died.] My mother and dad were taking care of her. [Vera and Guy Anderson].

Aunt Am passed away while we children were out skating and I’m sure this was the reason Mother and Dad sent us out to skate, so that we would be out from under foot at this particular time.

Of course, we were very curious about this sort of thing, but as soon as we got in the house, we noticed–well, actually before we got in the house, we noticed–that the undertaker was there and they had shut off the room in which Aunt Am had died and they were working on the dead body.  At that time nearly everyone who had a death in the family, they were buried from the home and the undertaker came and prepared them for burial at the house, which they did with our Aunt Am Roof.

Dad and Mother were tired because they had been up so many,many nights caring for her.  Before they went to bed, they had put us upstairs, tucked us in good and tight  because it was quite chilly.  The boys were in the first room upstairs in a double bed, and I had a three-quarter bed in my own little room in the back of the upstairs. I’m sure that night [my parents] went to sleep so soundly because it was the first night that they had been able to sleep straight through for a long time.

In the middle of the night, I wakened and realized that my bed was directly over where Aunt Am’s dead body lay on the floor below our rooms.  I was so sure that she was coming up through that floor after me.  I don’t know why.  We had never been frightened by bodies before, but I was quite frightened.

I couldn’t stay in my bed any longer.  I got up to the foot of my bed and called “Bill! Bill!”  He answered immediately because he wasn’t asleep either because evidently he had death on his mind, too.  We were thinking  Aunt Em was down there and she was dead. We hadn’t had any experience with a dead body before this.

I asked, “Bill will you come in here and get me?” and he said, “No, Harriette, I won’t put my feet on the floor of your room, but if you get to the foot of your bed and jump off as far as you can, I’ll reach in and get you. ”

So I got to the foot of my bed and I jumped as far as I could jump to my door, and Bill reached in and grabbed a hold of me and jerked me into the boys’ room.

I felt much better because I was no longer directly over that dead body of Aunt Am that lay straight under my bed. I got in bed with Herb and Bill, and we lay there and we talked until we heard a rooster crow.

We were so delighted. Bill said, “Well, it’ll soon be daylight.  Then we won’t be afraid.  The rooster’s crowing; it’s getting to be morning.”

It turned out that our parents were sleeping so soundly they didn’t hear us, even when I jumped.  They were sorry when they heard our story that they had not told us, but it never once entered their minds that we would have any fears at all because they had no fears and didn’t expect us to.

So that was our first experience with death, which was rather frightening for three little kids. It was a winter experience that we had related to skating, but thank goodness not a regular winter experience.

 

Bill and Harriette Anderson in 8th Grade, a couple of years after the event.

Bill and Harriette Anderson in 8th Grade, about the time of the event.

What was your first experience with a dead body?  Were you ever in a house where a body laid in state in the living room?