College for Her Kids

My father’s father’s father’s mother died in childbirth in Lafayette, Indiana. When his father remarried, he didn’t get along with his new stepmother, so was sent to live with his father’s sister in Nehawka, Nebraska. Stepmothers have that effect on some people. When he arrived in the tiny town where his aunt lived, he saw Francis, an eleven-year-old girl and decided that he was going to marry her when she got older. In a small town back then, I guess this was not creepy at all. They waited seven years to get married, when the bride turned 18 (and the groom was 27). The bride, the daughter of Walker Bates, had only a fourth-grade education. All her life she wished she could have gone to school longer. She wished she was as smart as a fifth-grader.

She agreed to get married on one condition: That her children go to college.

All five of her children, one boy and four girls, went to college. Back then, a girl going to college was unusual. Four sisters going was downright weird. One of my grandparents was her son, Stuart. He married Carolyn Shurtleff, a college graduate, and both of my grandparents on my mother’s side, William and Gertrude Wilson Houghton, were college graduates, too. Weird.

In the photo:

My father’s father’s father James Rough is in back next to his wife Francis (Walker Bates’ daughter) in the dark dress. This was taken in the 1920s. The photographer clearly did not know any good jokes.