As promised in my earlier blog post about Dr. Gilbert Ratcliff Jr.’s funeral that I attended in Huntington, West Virginia, in the coming days I plan to share photos and details about some of the wonderful people and places I visited during my five-day trip to WV, Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky. My journey started Thursday, December 28 when I boarded a 5 a.m. flight to Columbus, Ohio and ended the night of Monday, January 1 when I flew back to Dallas-Fort Worth Airport from Indianapolis.
I rented a Nissan Rogue SUV in Columbus and did a ton of driving over those next five days – and although I didn’t check the odometer like I should’ve when I started out, I’m certain I didn’t drive 2,988 miles like my Budget receipt showed. I’d estimate more like 800 miles.
In true Frank fashion, I’m going to start my string of posts at the end of my trip and work backward.
I began Day 5, New Year’s Day, in Louisville, Kentucky, after staying overnight in a downtown hotel. It had been my first time away from home on New Year’s Eve (with the exception of being at work at the newspaper) since Kay and I married in 1994 – and boy, did it feel strange and lonely.
As I’d done with the whole trip, which I had painstakingly scheduled – overscheduled, most folks would say – to visit several friends and relatives I’ve come to know along my birth family journey, I woke up early Monday with a plan. I hoped to go to Waterfront Park a few blocks away and take some photos of the mighty Ohio River and its majestic bridges before making the nearly three-hour drive to Muncie, Indiana, to visit 91-year-old Jeanne Rowe Arthur, my birth mother Betty’s first cousin – although they didn’t know each other well because Betty lived in Huntington and was 11 years older.
So I braved temperatures in the 30s – pretty much what I experienced throughout my trip, but thankfully with no precipitation to make for treacherous driving – and visited the riverfront, staring in wonder and taking photos (see below) of the five nearby bridges spanning the Ohio between Kentucky and Indiana. One is for pedestrians, and I would’ve walked across and back if I’d had the time. All I can say is that after several visits to Huntington and seeing the Ohio River from various other vantage points, it’s an awesome sight. You hear an awful lot about the Mississippi River, but the Ohio gets my vote as our nation’s most impressive, most breathtakingly vast.
I made it to the nursing home where Jeanne has been living the past few months in Parker City, a suburb of Muncie, about 3 p.m. I had talked to her daughter Sherry about my plans to visit, and neither she nor her brother Tony spoiled the surprise. I’d met Jeanne a couple of times before, including the first when my birth sister Terry and I visited our hometown of Huntington and drove six hours to Muncie, where Jeanne hosted a houseful of relatives and friends at a memorable party to meet us.
When the male aide took me to Jeanne’s room and announced she had a guest, she was sitting in her wheelchair by the bed with her back to us. When she turned around and I greeted her and told her it was her cousin Frank from Texas, she smiled with delight at seeing me. It had been eight years since we’d seen each other, so the realization of who I was took her a moment.
Although we had only an hour or so to visit because I had to drive about 90 minutes to Indianapolis to catch my flight home, we spent a very special time together. She had a collage of family photos on the wall and she told me about some of them, including one from her wedding to her late husband Norval in August 1951 (see photo below) at the home of her parents, Lloyd and Gladys, my great-uncle and great-aunt. Lloyd worked for decades for the famed Ball Corp. (think Mason Jars) and from whom Ball State University draws its name.
She mentioned Betty, asking if I’d met her, and I told her that I had not been able to meet her before she died of lung cancer in 1992. Jeanne had told me previously that she had vivid memories from decades ago of Betty’s beautiful singing on display at Rowe family reunions in Huntington, which were held at an amusement park called Camden Park that still stands. (Betty’s mother, my grandmother and Jeanne’s aunt whom she never knew, was Olive Helen Rowe, who died in 1934 of complications after a hysterectomy when Betty was only 12 years old.)
Jeanne and I talked about her cousins Bill and Bob Rowe, who spent much of their childhood in an orphanage after their parents died and whom I met at the gathering she hosted for my sister and me in 2012 and who have since passed away. She’s such a sweetheart, something I’ve known since I first found her about 11 years ago when I was searching for birth family relatives and we spoke by phone. She lost Norval, an Army veteran who served in the Korean War as part of the last Pack Mule Battalion, in 2008 at age 77.
After we said goodbye, I headed to the Indy airport, where I enjoyed seeing exhibits of Indianapolis Colts and Indy 500 memorabilia. But it was time to go home, and after driving so far and squeezing so much quality time with so many remarkable people into just five days, it seemed like I’d been gone much longer.
A Life of Words 