Canal Fulton, Ohio Photo: Ileana Johnson 2017 |
Born and
raised in West Virginia, he became an Ohio resident after he met his future
bride with whom he fell in love head over heels. If you ask him, he does not
mind telling you that she begged him to marry him and has the picture to prove
it. She was eighteen when he took her to the prom and he was a handsome lad
of twenty-one.
When Ray was
ten years old, his beloved mother had a nervous breakdown. Back in those days,
they committed patients and treated nervous breakdowns in insane asylums. Of the five children, three
of the minor boys were put into foster homes. His childhood ended then as daily
chores took over his diurnal existence for the next five years. Ray had a paper
route when he was nine years old but he had never made a whole lot of money as
a delivery boy.
But now,
placed with an older farming couple, the boys had to feed the animals, “slop
the hogs,” the chicken, and milk the cows before they went to school. They
learned how to work hard for their keep. They ate beans and potatoes, not so
much meat, but never went hungry. There was no heat in the old farm house, the
boys hated to get out of bed and step on the stone cold floor. There was a pot-bellied
stove for cooking, an outhouse flushing over the creek, a Sears and Roebuck
catalog for toilet paper, plenty of chores, and many life-long lessons in work
ethic and responsibility.
Every Sunday
they went to an old Methodist country church. If there was a revival, they went
to revival with their foster parents. There were pie socials, ice cream socials,
and other family-oriented activities. They were part of a family but were
missing their mother’s love, a mother who was too sick to treat them with
kindness and affection.
Ray went to
school every day smelling like cow manure because they had to do chores first
thing in the morning. In his inimitable language, Ray laughs that it did not
matter a hell of beans because everybody else smelled the same.
When Ray
left the foster family’s West Virginia farm, he moved to Ohio to work in a
steel mill. One brother went into the Navy and one into the Air Force. Ray worked in a grocery store, on the docks, in a steel mill, and pretty much any job to make a
buck.
On a blind
date, a blindness from which he had never recovered, he met the love of his life,
Joan. His best friend asked him to go on a double date with a woman he’d never
met. As Ray tells it, his buddy was looking for a “sucker” in order to appease
his girlfriend whose friend was single. He could have said no, but he was
smitten the moment he saw her. A very defiant young woman with bright blue eyes,
Joan was in a hurry to get married so she could get away from her controlling mother
Aida.
Ray and Joan
got married on Saturday and Ray got fired on Monday. But the in-laws were nice
enough to set them up in a trailer, rent free. Young and immature love can
cause temporary blindness but true love conquers any adversity.
Ray learned
how to build trailers from scratch, to weld, to wire, to do carpentry, to
brick, and to cement foundations, skills that saved him a lot of money and helped
him build two homes. He is in great demand to this day because he can fix
anything. Additionally, in his spare time, he served in the U.S. National Guard.
Out of the tragedy of his mom going into the asylum, Ray fashioned himself into
a life-long Renaissance man and weekend soldier who could fix anything with
string, a paper clip, dirt, and spit.
From Ray’s
blind date came love, marriage, and three beautiful children. And one day, decades
later, fate brought Ray’s youngest son, a captain, across my moonlit path in
Mississippi and he became my husband.
After 59
years of marriage, Ray lost the love of his life to a lengthy and painful
illness. Joan is buried close to a thicket of blue spruce in the cemetery where
he bought a plot fifty years ago.
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