American Generation 8

This is a difficult section to write because it involves perspectives from me and my siblings, which may be different. I don’t feel fully capable of recounting their childhood and adult memories. So, content provided in this section reflects my perspectives only. Since Ed is deceased, I will have to speak about my memories of his life. Terry and Bonnie are still alive and therefore they can add/contribute to the family history as they wish.

Kessler Family Today – Where Things Stand Now

In terms of my more immediate family, the word that comes to mind today describing our family is “scattered.”  The family resided in a small geographic area in Maryland for over 200 years but now is scattered across the U.S. and into Canada.  My two sisters live in Ohio, just south of Cleveland, and I live in Florida.  One of my sons lives in Columbus, Ohio and the other in Baltimore, Maryland.  I have nieces and nephews in Greenville, South Carolina, Omaha, Nebraska, Huntsville, Alabama, Houston Texas, Salt Lake City, and Oakland California.  We can concur, I think, that scattered is a reasonable adjective.

At the same time, some of my cousins still live near Baltimore while others reside in Ocala, Florida. Some are older than I am, but their memories are about their respective families as there was not a lot of interaction among families when we were younger.

My cousins and I are currently in our 60s.  My children and nieces and nephews are mostly in their 20s, 30s and even 40s.  They have their own children now and it is those children who represent the future of the family.  Because they are being raised in such diverse locations this compilation of family history is more relevant than ever.  Hopefully the future generations will care enough about this work to supplement it with their own stories and perspectives and pass it on after the rest of us are gone.  We owe it to our ancestors to keep their stories alive.

Life at Home in the 1960s and 1970s

My brother Ed was born on May 26, 1947, I was born on December 5, 1953, Terry was born on May 8, 1958, and Bonnie was born on February 3, 1962. My residence from birth to age 16 was 310 S. Furrow Street, Baltimore, Maryland, 21223. This house was built in the late 1800s, was 3 stories tall plus a dirt-floor basement, and 12 feet wide. It has two rooms on each floor. The house was built before indoor plumbing, which was added later, so the outline of the former “outhouse” could be seen in the back yard. When we lived there a bathroom had been constructed in part of the second floor back bedroom. The house was small, consisting of two rooms on each of three floors and a small basement with a dirt floor. A major problem was that when the second floor bathroom was installed the waste pipe was run on the outside of the back wall, so it would freeze in very cold winter weather, creating waste leaks into the kitchen and leaving the family to use a bucket until Dad could find firewood (usually old wood scraps or pieces of furniture), build a fire around the pipes, and thaw out the freeze. This was quite the site on cold, often snowy winter days …. a large fire up the back of a city row house.

There was no air conditioning. The third floor, which Is where Ed and I bunked, was really hot – the house had a flat black tar-covered roof and during the summer is was unbearable to be on the third floor until about 3 am when it would cool enough to sleep with a window fan turned on high. I vividly remember the sweaty nights, sleeping only in undershorts, with a big fan sitting in the window and pointed at the bed.

The blue-collar neighborhood was probably very typical for the 1950s and 1960s. Families worked hard, there were many domestic fights, some families had members who suffered from mental illness, there was drama including fighting and domestic infidelities, and so forth. In many ways, though, this environment offered a lot of stimuli and I have very fond memories of growing up in that neighborhood.

My impression is that children in the city generally fall into generational patterns. My brother’s generation liked fast cars, chasing girls, drinking (and other things like sniffing glue), and were influenced by James Dean movies. The fashion included “pointy toed” dress shoes and a hair style known as a “duck tail” which involved considerable use of hair products like Brylcreem.

But Ed was six years older. My generation consisted more of nerds and jocks and I spent time reading and playing sports. There was a lot of stick ball at the school yard, baseball at the nearby “lot,” and football. Since Furrow Street was very narrow we often could get four or six of us to play touch football in the street, trying hard not to hit someone’s car with the ball. During junior high and high school, I played football with friends from school who lived on the next block, and the team was known as the Smallwood Street team. We would practice at Wilkens Playground and travel to different locations to play other neighborhood football teams. I have many fond memories of playing sports with friends as I grew up.

As mentioned above, there was no air conditioning in our house – only one house on the block (the Hedricks) had a window air conditioner and it was amazing when I occasionally got to go into the air conditioned room. I also grew up during an era of black and white television. Color television did not mature until the mid-1960s.

The Beginning: Furrow Street

I’ve always wanted to write a book titled “Furrow Street.” This is the location, in Baltimore, Maryland that my family resided when I was born (University of Maryland Hospital, Dec 5, 1953). It is definitely “in the City,” located approximately 2 miles from downtown Baltimore in what was, in the 1950s, a blue-collar residential/industrial area.

Furrow Street is one of those narrow streets scattered throughout the City. I would estimate that the street was no more than 30′ wide, enough for parked cars on either side and one lane of traffic. The sidewalks on either side were about 6′ wide and ran from the roadway to the walls of the little row houses. There was no grass on the street except for a few small trees plants in a 4′ square opening in the sidewalk.

The neighborhood was constructed in the 1880s and 1890s. The small row houses were built to house railroad workers in an era when gas lighting was just becoming popular (the gas pipes are still embedded in the walls in the homes). Initially there was an outhouse in each backyard but by the time I grew up indoor plumbing had been added. The back of the houses included a yard as wide as the house (12′ wide) and about 24′ long. Most were predominantly concrete with some dirt area for whatever purpose the homeowners decided. All yards were fenced (typical wire fences) and had a gate that opened onto a concrete alley about 8′ wide (enough to get a car through). The backyards of the opposing houses were on the other side of the alley.

During the 1960s most houses did not have clothes dryers so every house had clothes lines in the yards. Most were long close lines made out of cotton rope that ran from near the house to near the end of the yard. Most houses did have clothes washers, but they were the old wringer-type washers where the clothes were automatically washed in the tub but had to be run through two wringer-bars in order to squeeze out the water. There was no spin-cycle on the old washers.

Our house, 310 Furrow Street, did not have an automatic hot water heater. The hot water heater had to be lit in order to heat the water and turned off before too much heat/steam built up inside the tank. There were many occasions of panic when we lit the heater and forgot that it was lit and when we finally remembered we raced to the basement to turn off the water heater.

The houses on our side of the street consisted of three floors plus a basement. There were two rooms on each floor. The first floor was the living room and kitchen. The stairs, on the left side of the kitchen led to the second floor. A first back bedroom was on the left and it also had the family bathroom (probably 6′ wide by 8′ long) and a second front bedroom down a tiny hallway was considered the “master bedroom.” It was about 12′ wide (as was the entire house) and 12′ long. A stair ran between the two bedrooms to the third floor and there was a back and front bedroom of about equal size on the third floor.

The house also had a basement with a dirt floor in the back half and a concrete floor in the front half. The ceiling was low; pipes were exposed in the ceiling and the walls were brick. There was a small basement window at the front of the house and a small basement window at the back.

The roof was a flat roof and the third floor back bedroom had an opening in the ceiling that could be accessed via a ladder to reach the roof. The houses were not air-conditioned. I will mention later about the first house on the street that installed a window air-conditioner and when that occurred. It was challenging to live and sleep in these houses was very difficult on hot, humid 100+ degree days. That is why the city was so “alive” at night and well into the early morning hours – it was too hot to sleep. Going to bed at 3:30am was not uncommon.

We had a gas furnace that was imbedded in the kitchen floor to heat the entire house. A small opening was cut in the kitchen ceiling leading to the back second floor bedroom and that was how heat was able to rise to the upper floors. I can tell you that it was very cold on the third floor where I slept because very little heat rose to the third floor.

By reading this post you can start to get a sense of the home and conditions in which we spent the early years of our lives.

Growing Up in the City

We grew up in the city during the 1950s and 1960s (and the early 1970s). Although people might have a negative view of City life based on contemporary perspectives, our early years were much more innocent and carefree than might be the case today in the same neighborhood and similar circumstances. Dad was working at the Lord Baltimore Hotel and Mom was working at Locke Insulators, so we had enough money to get by. I will say that Dad was not very good with his money, so we never really had extra money, but we seemed to pay the bills, at least most of the time.

Admittedly, Dad and Mom were mostly working during the day. At first, we had babysitters – I remember a black lady named Mildred and several white ladies including one who became important in Bonnie’s life – Mrs. Paine. As we got older the boys were old enough to manage the house without having a babysitter around. Our house was always messy – we were not very neat or clean. Often, as a teenager, I would clean the house each Friday … move the furniture and sweep all the clutter into the middle of the room and then sort and throw away and Mom would be so happy when she came home from work – she tried to give me $1 for doing the cleaning when she could.

You can’t really imagine the joy that would come from that dollar. Things were so much cheaper then. I could buy two comic books for 12 cents each, a Pepsi for 12 cents and a whole foot-long hotdog (from Thelma’s Sub Shop) for 45 cent and still have change left over. I would take this treasure trove to my room and lay on the bed and enjoy the submarine, drink and comics – I can actually still smell the foot-long as if it were yesterday … the fried onions and the mustard.

I also recall waking each morning to the sound of the “Hucksters” riding their horse-drawn wagons loaded with fruit and vegetables up the back alley. The horse’s bell would be clanging and the Hucksters would be singing “strawberries, cherries ….” and stopping as women came to the back gate and made their purchases. There was also an old man named Andy who would walk up the back alley carrying a basket of soft crabs. I can recall Andy saying “Soft Crabs” as he walked. The memories are clear and vivid.

We all went to public school with the exception of Bonnie during junior and senior high school. The elementary school was Public School (PS) #98, also named Samuel F. B. Morse, which was only about three blocks from home. From there we went to different junior high schools because the community characteristics changed over time. Ed, whom we called by his nickname Will or Willy until he went in the Navy in 1964, went to Hilton Junior High School and then to Edmonson High School and I went to Rock Glen Junior High School and then to Baltimore Polytechnic High School and then graduated from Southern High School. Terry went to Rock Glen Junior High School and then to Southern High School. Bonnie grew up during the racial turmoil of the 1960s and court-ordered busing and desegregation and there was no recourse but for Mom to enroll her in a Catholic middle school and then Archbishop Keogh High School.

I’ll come back to the tumultuous events that occurred both nationally and within our family during the 1960s because it is worth discussing in some detail. It is essential, beforehand, that I describe the early times which I remember with absolute fondness.

We children, Ed, Tom, Terry and Bonnie grew up in a different era from today. Parents did not monitor and control every activity or the whereabouts of the children once we moved beyond toddler age. In the summertime the inside doors were open because it was hot and only the screen doors (referred to as storm doors) stood between us and the outside world and when it was really hot it was more fun to be outside than inside. So we developed social networks based around activities that we liked to do.

Edgar F. Kessler III – Short Biography

In our early years the family and neighbors knew Ed as “Will” or “Willy.” He was a fun-loving brother – always into various interesting endeavors. He liked all things wild including snakes, frogs, and praying mantis insects. He built and stocked multiple aquariums and often went to different wooded areas like the Frog Pond and Yellow Lake. He liked to fish and at one point he took up golf, sneaking across the nearby railroad tracks to the local golf course and playing several holes (without paying, of course). He and I would use pair of rolled-up socks to play “tackle” football in our tiny living room, tumbling over chairs and tables and sofas. I had more than one bloody lip from these football games (keep in mind that Ed was six years older and substantially bigger than me). Mom would fret and curse and tell us to stop, Ed would charm her and we would resume tearing up the house.

Like many youth, Ed experimented with available thrills which sometimes tended to get him into trouble. Teens in the late 1950s tended to hang in gangs trying to live out the James Dean image – while Ed did not belong to a particular gang he sometimes had “run ins” with them. I remember one time Ed went out on a Saturday night – he had his hair greased into a style known as a “duck tail,” wore a black leather jacket and wore pointed-toe shoes and we were all awakened after midnight because Ed had been involved in a fight and had been beaten pretty severely. During this time, he occasionally became inebriated. At one point he experimented with a dangerous practice known as “sniffing model glue” which would give a “high,” but also lead to violent behavior. I recall coming home via the back alley one night and he was in a rage and actually upset the kitchen table and made Mom cry. During this time period Ed and Dad because very confrontational and I believe that this led to Ed’s joining the Naval Reserves at age 16, sending him on to a new phase in his life.

For the first year of Ed’s Naval Reserve Service he attended weekend drills at the U.S. Naval Reserve Center located at Fort McHenry. He did not actually leave home for military boot camp until about a year later. First, he went to Bainbridge, Maryland for boot camp and then he volunteered for submarine service. I recall how painful it was the first time we took him to Baltimore’s Union Train Station, and I watched him board the train for New London, Connecticut, realizing that he was likely leaving home for good. There were a lot of tears.

The rest of Ed’s life was spent away from home. While attending submarine school in Connecticut he met and married JoAnne Popowski, from Bridgeport Connecticut. It Is ironic that our maternal ancestor, Thomas Fairchild (see fairchildfamilyhistory.wordpress.com) was a founder of Stratford, Connecticut, which is part of the Bridgeport area, located on Long Island Sound at the mouth of the Housatonic River. Ed and JoAnne had two children, Karen Marie (10/4/1966) and Matthew (5/18/1973). The family moved from location to location over the years, from Norfolk Virginia to the town of Thurso on the north coast of Scotland, and back to Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Ed was at sea on long deployments on submarines. His first deployment was on a fast-attack class sub named Sea Leopard. He was a radioman and based on photos of the radio-room on the Sea Leopard his working space was very tight. He later transferred to the first nuclear submarine, the Triton which had large working and living quarters. However, since the Triton was nuclear-powered it could make longer-deployments which increased the strain on sailors stationed aboard the submarine. Ed also had shore-duty assignments over the years, working at the Naval Communications Center at the Norfolk Naval Base.

When I was drafted during the Vietnam Era in 1972, I enlisted in the U.S. Navy. At Ed’s request I asked for “brother duty” and was given a shore assignment at the Fleet Training Center in Norfolk after completing boot camp and Electronics Technician “A” School at Great Lakes, Illinois. Although Ed and I did not work in the same location we both enjoyed the benefit of coming home after work each day. While stationed in Norfolk from 1973-1975 Ed and I both enrolled in college – Golden Gate University had an on-base location and my senior officer encouraged me to enroll. I did so and convinced Ed to do so as well. We both attended classes, sometimes together and eventually graduated. I received an Associate of Arts degree first and then a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration.

Ed continued to progress as an enlisted man, reaching the rank of Senior Chief Petty Officer (E-8). At the age of 32 he applied for Officer Candidate School (OCS) and was accepted. He left home to attend OCS in Rhode Island. During this time, he and JoAnne were experiencing marital stress that ultimately led to a bitter divorce. Ed met and later married Donna Faye Dabbs who was also a graduate of OCS and a Naval Officer.

Ed and Donna were later deployed to Guam. Ed had become a Naval Supply Officer, and he was in charge of the Naval Exchange and all retail operations in Guam. Later he and Donna returned and he worked at the U.S. Naval Sea Systems Command in Washington, D.C. During this time, he and Donna purchased a home in Huntingtown, Charles County, Maryland. This was where he and Donna lived when they adopted Suann Kessler and Mary Kessler.

While living in Maryland Ed retired from the military and returned to school, earning a master’s degree in social work (MSW). He spent time while going to school teaching industrial arts and vocational technical courses in Calvert County High Schools. At some point he and Donna decided that they wanted to relocate to Texas. He applied for a position with the U.S. Veteran’s Administration Hospital in Houston, Texas and was hired to work as a substance abuse counselor. He worked at the VA until he retired.

Ed struggled with health issues. He had a quadruple by-pass at age 54. He was a Type-2 diabetic. Heart disease complicated by diabetes continued to take a toll on him through his 50s. He succumbed to heart failure at age 62 on June 10, 2009, at a hospital located in downtown Houston. He was buried at a VA Cemetery north of Houston.

Ed, Donna, Suann and Mary lived in Pearland, Texas, near Houston. Throughout his life and into retirement, Ed delved into myriad hobbies. He played piano, painted using oil, was a lifetime active amateur radio operator, worked with stained glass, fished, played golf, owned and loved a variety of pets, and lived life to the fullest. He was a brilliant storyteller, easily mesmerizing those around him with stories and perspectives that seemed novel and intriguing. Near the end of his life, he completed an outline for a novel. Much more could be written about Ed and his amazing life. He is missed by all of us who knew and loved him.

Thomas G. Kessler – Short Biography

Writing about oneself is particularly challenging. Self-perception is fraught with all of the inner voices that cause us to struggle to find internal peace and harmony. However, I will try to provide as direct and assessment of my life as possible.

In my early years I was very shy and timid. If I talked to others, I assumed that what I had to say was not important and so I spoke in a low voice – Ed would always ask me to repeat what I said and sometimes he would get angry with me. Mom used to say that I was “too kind for the harsh world” because I had empathy with people and animals and was generous to a fault with my friends. Of course, these behaviors made me easy game for neighborhood bullies. One kid in particular (Jimmy Goetz) used to wait for me when I walked to or from school and threaten and chase me. It was a particularly uncomfortable experience.

Over time I outgrew some of those early behaviors. In terms of being bullied, one day the bully mentioned above came down my alley and saw me playing in my yard. He actually came into my year, picked up a ball and started throwing it at me and challenging me to fight him. After a few times I “exploded” and jumped on him and started beating him repeatedly. Mom came running out of the house and pulled me off of the bully, but that ended the serious bullying.

As I got older, I started to get involved in games and sports. At first, I was clumsy with sports but over time I developed sufficient hand-eye coordination to be pretty good at football and baseball. But the real memories are of the neighborhood kids getting together on hot summer nights for games of Green-Line/Red-Line. In this game there was a box (sort of like a prison) and two teams of players. One team would be the runners and would get five minutes to scatter into the neighborhood and hide while the other team would be the chasers. If the chasers caught a runner, they would put him or her into the “box” and guard, it. If a runner tried to sneak and could put their foot inside the box without getting tagged, then everyone in the box could run free. We played this game for hours and hours and it involved intense running so we would get seriously soaked with sweat. Sometimes this game would go on until 11pm or midnight. Often our parents would stick their heads out the front door and call our names. I can still hear my mom call “Tommmmmmmmy” in that North Carolina accent of hers.

I played a lot of sandlot sports too. I hung out with a group from the next block over, on Smallwood Street and we would play tackle football throughout the fall. The guys on my block would go over to a shopping center near the house and we would play baseball during the summer. We also played touch football on our street. It was fun … we would play two-on-two, and the QB would tell the receiver go out and cut in front of the blue car and I’ll hit you there. Sometimes the young guys who owned the car would come out and raise hell because we would hit their car.

I could go on and on about things that we did. After Christmas we would gather used trees from back yards and pile them below a hill nearby referred to as “The Lot” before Westside Shopping Center was built (and even after it was built) and we would leap off the hill into the trees. I can still remember the smell of the pine needles. I can also remember the occasion when a tree stump would pop up and whack us in the head which was quite painful.

Ed, Terry and I attended Samuel F. B. Morse Elementary School (Public School #98) on Ashton and Pulaski Street. We attended from grades K to 6th and then went to different junior high schools. Bonnie was caught up in the 1960s desegregation movement, bused to a predominantly black elementary school and then was enrolled by Mom in St. Mark’s Catholic School in Catonsville. Ed went to Hilton Junior High and Edmondson High School. I went to Rock Glen Junior High School and Baltimore City Polytechnic High School. I dropped out of high school for a brief time, but when Ed found out he came home from his Navy assignment and helped me re-enroll in Southern High School which is where I graduated in 1972. Bonnie went on to Archbishop Keough High School (later merged with Seton High School) on Caton Avenue and Terry dropped out of school. I believe that Terry later received her GED diploma but I’m not sure about that.

I spent some time after high school working at the G.E. Plant where my mom worked on Hanover Street in South Baltimore. I was a laborer. I had a full Senatorial Scholarship to University of Maryland, but this was the end of the Vietnam War, and I received an unfavorable lottery number for the draft. I took my pre-induction physical at Ft. Holabird and decided, figuring that I would soon be drafted into the Army, to join the U.S. Navy and seek “brother duty” since Ed was stationed at Norfolk Naval Station. I went to boot camp on March 11, 1973, at Great Lakes, Illinois.

After completing Boot Camp I moved across the road to attend Basic Electronics School and then I shifted to Electronics Technician “A” School after completing Basic Electronics. I was indeed stationed at Fleet Training Center at Norfolk Naval Base.

In Oct 1973 I married. Tom Jr. was born on Oct. 20, 1975, at Portsmouth Naval Hospital. After leaving the Navy I interviewed for an was hired as a computer programmer trainee at J. Schoeneman Company in Owings Mill, Maryland. We relocated to an apartment in Brooklyn, Maryland, moved from there to a house at 3925 Brooklyn Avenue in Brooklyn, and eventually bought a house at 2213 Wilkens Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland. After one year I accepted a computer programmer position with the Supreme Bench of Baltimore City, shifted to the payroll of the Maryland State Judiciary and remained there until 1981. David was born on Jan. 31, 1979, at South Baltimore General Hospital at 9:30am.

After Dave was born we built a new house at 703 Winton Avenue in Ferndale. I left the State Judiciary in 1981 and took a programmer job at Westinghouse Electric which was located close to where we lived at the time. After one year I moved to the Federal Reserve in Washington, D.C. and became Section Chief of the Banking Statistics Section, developing an automated system to collect and aggregate national banking statistics. After four years I was burned out and shifted to the Office of Inspector General at the Fed. In 1996 I took a full time teaching position as an Assistant Professor at Central Michigan University, resigned from the Fed, and started a consulting company with a partner, Dr. Tom McWeeney, named Center for Strategic Management (CSM). By 2000 we had developed a reasonable clientele but were not profitable. Dr. McWeeney had a high salary requirement, and I felt that it was necessary to “go my own way” for the business to be profitable. Patricia Kelley and I broke off from CSM, started a new business named Denali Associates, taking our clientele and in March 2004 we sold the business to SiloSmashers, Inc. of Arlington, Virginia. We remained with the new company for two years and then retired and moved from Maryland to Florida.

During my adult life I attended night school and earned associate, bachelor, Master of Business Administration and Doctor of Administration degrees. I used Veteran’s benefits to pay for the bachelor’s and master’s degree. The Federal Reserve paid the tuition for my doctorate. I was an avid runner from 1985-1990, completing 25 marathons, two 50-mile ultra-marathons and many other events like a 24-hour relay, 100-mile century bike ride, and many other events. I traveled extensively, visiting New Zealand, Australia, London, Hawaii and all over the United States and Canada. I was also an avid hiker, hiking mountains in New Hampshire, Southern Utah, Glacier National Park in Montana, and the Canadian Rockies. I purchased a sailboat in the early 2000s. Patty and I also sailed for three weeks in the South Pacific, visiting Tahiti, Bora Bora, Moorea, and many other Society and Cook Islands.

Patty and I still teach online classes, so we are not entirely retired, but most days are free to spend our time as we wish. We started playing golf, which we do multiple times per week. I learned how to paint in oils. We also play tennis a couple of times per week. And, of course, I ventured into genealogy, tracing the Kessler, Fairchild and many other family histories. I created two ancestry blogs – kesslerfamilyhistory.wordpress.com and fairchildfamilyhistory,wordpress.com.

Terry Lee Kessler Dougherty – Short Biography

Terry is the third child and first daughter of the immediate family. In many ways she was born at a difficult time. As Dad’s drinking escalated during the late 1960s and early 1970s Terry was entering her teen years. She was drawn to the “hippie” culture of the late 1960s and had a rebellious, independent nature. This conflicted with Dad’s post-Depression values and Terry and Dad had a difficult and strained relationship.

Terry attended Samuel F. B. Morse Elementary (PS #98) and Rock Glen Junior High School (I believe). She attended Southern High School in South Baltimore but quit before finishing. She later earned her General Equivalency Diploma. She married Stanley Shelton but later divorced him. She married Arthur ‘Terry’ Patton and they had four children: Amanda, Arthur Jr., Amber and Zachary.

In the late 1990s Terry spent time in North Carolina with the Fairchild relatives. She eventually settled in Greenville, South Carolina and brought her family to that region. Although her marriage to Terry Patton did not survive, she met and married Canadian Michael Doherty and moved to Quesnel, British Columbia, Canada.

Bonnie Jean Kessler Nielson – Short Biography

Bonnie is the youngest child and second daughter. She was a “surprise” baby, being born to Mom at the late age of 43. Bonnie started school attending Samuel F.B. Morse (PS #98) but because of the Civil Rights movement and desegregation initiatives she was reassigned to a school in a predominantly African American section of Baltimore. Given the commute distance and other issues Mom was able to have Bonnie enrolled at St. Mark Catholic School in Catonsville. Fortunately, the School was willing to provide Bonnie scholarship assistance or the family would never have been able to afford the tuition.

Bonnie went on to study at and graduate from Archbishop Keogh High School. She attended college for a couple of semesters and then began her working career. After Dad died in 1978 Bonnie continued to live with Mom until Mom’s death. At the time of Dad’s death, the family was living on Lemmon Street. Mom was able to rent a house in the 2200 block of Wilkens Avenue, across the street from where I lived. When I moved to Anne Arundel County, I was able to assist Mom (using my VA Home Loan Guarantee) in purchasing my house at 2213 Wilkens Avenue. Bonnie and Mom lived there until Mom’s death in 1986. Bonnie continued living there for another 10 years.

Bonnie had a number of babysitters over the years since Mom had to work to sustain the family. One sitter in particular was Ms. Paine, who lived on McHenry Street. Over the years Ms. Paine came to love Bonnie like her own daughter. She would bake pies, and she made it clear that the pies were for Bonnie and not the rest of us. Ms. Paine was elderly and as she got older, she lost use of her legs which eventually led to her death.

From her earliest years Bonnie was interested in religion. We grew up as members of St. Thomas Lutheran Church, but Bonnie eventually became a member of a Baptist Church not far from home (a “foot washing” Baptist church as we called it). She would dress up for church and evening meetings, and be escorted to church by one of us, carrying her bible. This interest never left Bonnie. Eventually she converted to the Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon) religion where she still practices her faith.

In the 1980s I was able to assist Bonnie with getting a job at the Federal Reserve In Washington, D.C. She married Joseph Sprinkel and they had a son, Jordan Sprinkel, born March 18, 1986. Tragically, Jordan was killed along with his grandmother, Beth Sprinkel, in a vehicular homicide incident on Ritchie Highway in Glen Burnie on July 10, 1990. This event threw the entire family into a sustained period of grief. By this time Bonnie had converted to the Latter Day Saint (Mormon) religion and she found solace in the support of her Mormon community. Months after Jordan’s death Bonnie packed her Toyota mini-van and headed to Salt Lake City, Utah, where she settled and still resides.

Before departing for Salt Lake City Bonnie had met Moises LaPlata. He was a Peruvian immigrant living in Northern Virginia. Later, Moises traveled to Salt Lake City and he and Bonnie were married. Shortly after Spencer LaPlata was born, on April 18, 1994. Bonnie’s marriage to Moises did not succeed and he returned to Northern Virginia. Bonnie later moved with Spencer to Northern Virginia, living in Manassas for several years. She then returned to Salt Lake City and married Kevin Bell. This was another marriage that did not last long. Later Bonnie met and married Merrill Nielson and they reside together in West Bountiful, Utah.

Epilogue

There is much more that can be written about our lives. Unlike the ancestors discussed here and in the FairchildFamilyHistory.WordPress.Com blog, we have first-hand knowledge of or experiences and do not have to rely on Census data, historical events and extrapolation to make sense of the lives of our forbearers.

This is not the final chapter, however. A new generation of descendants has and will continue to arrive in the coming months. The final chapter that I plan to add will focus on the information that I know about my children, nieces and nephews. Beyond that it will be someone else’s roll to carry on the documentation of our family history.