Handbook N-P - Fulton County Public Library

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silly idea that if I did it too soon or too late when he was expected home from town, he would be
in bad shape, but if I would wait until the sun was just the same place in the west, he would be in a
good mood. So, I would sit and look out of the west window until my sun was at that right place
and then I would go fill up the woodbox.
Mother knew that I would wait until a certain time but never why."
Children, to be sure, often find contentment in the illogical.
Dad's mother was his love and refuge, as he reveals in another recollection. "I remember
she was very sick and I was certain she was going to die. The world stood still for me and then
she was converted on her sickbed. This was the work of a God who is always with us and was not
by any influence of man .... I still can remember her saying she was going to get well and that she
was going to be a better woman and go to church if possible, which she did every chance she had
until her death. I often thought that if there is a heaven my mother will surely be there. I think I
loved her more because of her and dad quarreling so much and I thought that she was all I had. I
suppose that I did care for my dad when he wasn't mean, but mostly I feared him." (As an adult
and after his mother's death, Dad created an amicable relationship with his father. He purchased
from him the family farm, enabling his father to buy a house and move into Rochester for his final
years.)
It wasn't long before Dad began to visit Rochester himself and there he met the woman
who would be my mother. That story's next.
[Rochester Sentinel, Tuesday, August 17, 1999]
__________
GOING COURTING WITH BILL, THEN MARRIAGE AND WORK
Considered Comment
Jack K. Overmyer
My father, the late Charles S. Overmyer, found that being the youngest of four boys in
Richland Township farm family could be benneficial. As his memoirs reveal, “having three older
brothers to do the farm work let me off the hook and I was mostly a chore boy.”
When his father, Frank, “started feeling his prosperity (about 1912) he got the automobile
fever and those pals of his in Rochester sold him a brand new E.M.F. automobile. This was made
by Studebaker. Dad, of course, was afraid to learn to drive so I was elected to be the chauffeur ....
This is the reason I had the opportunity to meet Edyth." (My mother, Edyth Kingery.)
Dad would take his father to town each Saturday and wait until he was ready to go home.
“So I got to do a lot of girl watching. Edyth lived on Madison Street (623) near the firehouse, so I
would see her and Bernice Bussert later Mrs. Harry Louderback) go home from uptown. During
the (1913) Peru-Rochester celebration of Rochester's help to Peru during their flood, Aubra
Emmons (father of Mrs. Jean Brown) and I got dates with Edyth and Bernice. I found out that
Edyth was engaged to a Kewanna boy by the name of Clifford Spangler but he had gone out to
Iowa and gotten a job with some of his relatives. He was going to get rich and send for her, I
guess. This took several months to convince her that I was here and he was there.”
(His entreaties finally were accepted, as you already have guessed. They were married
October 31, 1914. My mother's parents were Percy and Minnie Hawkins. Her father, blacksmith
Hiram Kingery, died in 1904 when she was eight years old.)
To go courting Dad's father gave him Bill, "the quiet, intelligent old driving horse" and a
rubber-tired buggy. And so the pattern became that Dad would drive his father to Rochester
Saturdays, make a date with Edyth for Saturday nights, return home, hitch up Bill and return to
town. “Gee, that was a long drive back (10 miles) after driving a car to and fro, but he would
never have let me drive that car alone. I wouldn't have had any money to buy gas with anyway, as
if I had 50 cents I was lucky."
Buggy horses like Bill must have been a treasure to have. “This old Bill driving horse
was a smart old fellow. He was a light bay and he could really travel. He had a large intelligent
head and was very quiet and docile. He wouid take a nice easy trot after night and when he was