A black Irishman

My dad was black Irish, undoubtedly through the Ulster ancestors on his father’s side. His mother’s ancestors were County Cork, the source of all the enviable red hair of his many cousins. Both sides left the old country in the first potato famine.

They tended to marry more Irish of their own persuasion, until his not strictly Methodist father married into his devoutly Catholic mother’s family.

I cannot imagine why George Marion Lytle married Mary Emma Hogue, almost two decades younger.  I believe she wanted to leave the chaos of a large family where she was the oldest sibling. George Marion took her back to his hometown in Pennsylvania.

Marriage did not suit Mamie; fatherhood did not suit George Marion. He deserted the family when Mamie was pregnant with the fifth child in seven years, and Mamie took them back home to Ohio, to her large family.

My dad’s childhood may have been little different than any other poor child of his generation. He was born in 1907, not a prosperous time for most, and certainly not the unskilled Mamie. Her domestic service wages bought little. My dad fed his little band of siblings from the pot of cold oatmeal his grandmother provided most mornings, and coffee soaked bread for supper. Coffee-sop, according to my aunt. He was ten years old.

Many things angered my father, probably as a child as well as thinking back as an adult.  The foremost was that his mother’s Catholic relatives and church did not care for the children. When the family did intervene, the children were sent to the Children’s Home and his sisters educated by Catholic charities. Aunt Laura was deemed secretarial material, Aunt Ruth convent material. Uncle Bill went to a state school for retarded boys. Dad was helpless against all. In fact, he and mother could not reclaim Uncle Bill from the State of Ohio until 1975.

Education was the ticket out, and dad started where many poor young men began. At the end of his sixteenth year he joined the Army. Stomach ulcers sidelined him; he was medically mustered out after six years, a non commissioned officer with a background in radio communication. He spent his mustering out pay on a year of college, where he packed in two years of physics and mathematics.

Money at an end, Dad took to the Great Lakes as a radio operator on freighter. A cable snapped in a storm, caught and broke his ankle, throwing him overboard in the process.  He was rescued, put off at the next port, made his way back to Cleveland, Ohio, where he met and married my mother and I wound up with the father I've written about from time to time.

A tall man, my dad came from the time when few young men carried extra pounds. The ulcer surgeries reduced his probably 160 pounds to 140, not much for a 6’2” frame. And so life went on, until my late teens, when dad developed a chronic cough eventually diagnosed as histoplasmosis, a deadly fungal infection contracted when he tore down the backyard chicken coop to build a patio. 

Two surgeries eventually removed all of one lung and part of the other. At the second surgery he refused to have the suspension sling that would allow his ribs to reform, again.  He likened it to rowing the Atlantic in a gale. With a set of ribs removed, his spine curved, his shoulders dropped. He left another twenty pounds behind at those surgeries.

Dad retired from Goodyear Aerospace at sixty five; he and mom vacationed and camped with children and grandchildren, but not for long. To add insult to injury, as it were, dad developed something called adult onset seizure syndrome. He called it falling asleep in his chair and waking up in the hospital. He hated it. His body was frail and his spirit gave up, too.  He did liken the process of dying, that subzero winter of 1978, to riding a train to Siberia, naked.

We used to remark when a parent became twice as old as a child. When mom was fifty I was twenty five. It came to me that dad and I surely had such an anniversary. Then I realized he died in a February, at seventy, and I wasn't thirty five until March.

This isn't a sad story. The parts my dad didn't like happened in a childhood he couldn't control.  He fulfilled his adult plan; he married and had a family. He remodeled our house, built a garage, took us on vacation, had a workshop for puttering about, enjoyed his grandchildren. He absorbed illness, until the end.  

He didn't talk about his childhood. He never admitted being Irish; I had to dig through the archives to learn it. That is too bad; he would have enjoyed knowing he was a black Irishman.

Dad and  brother Bill, 1910

On the patio that once housed a chicken coop, about 1956

First five grandchildren, early seventies

March 17th

Growing up I had only one grandparent, for all practical purposes, my Grandma Rolf.  My father’s mother died before I was five; I never knew, and scarcely knew of his father.  It took the great folk revival of the sixties to learn I was Irish.

I pressed my father once about nationality.  “I’m American.” I pressed my luck a little further. “What about your parents?” “They were Americans, too.”  He went back to his Scientific American. I asked my mother, and learned my dad was Irish.  Her grandmother called him shanty Irish, and he did not go back into that house until after her grandmother’s death.

In fact my father’s mother was all Irish, his father all Scots-Irish.

My great grandfather, John William Lytle, was born in 1832, in Pennsylvania.  He worked as a tailor, then a clerk, then took up teaching.  That career was interrupted by the Civil War.  He fought and was wounded at second Bull Run; his brother was killed at Spotsylvania.  He soldiered on, and was wounded so severely at Antietam he was discharged.  A short biography I found of him said his wounds hindered him all his life.  He resumed teaching, married Annie Crum, was the town clerk of Coalmont, Pennsylvania.  He held lodge and G.A.R. offices.  In short, a solid citizen, excepting, as the biography said, he had renounced religious affiliation.  “He believes that religion does not consist in form or mode of baptism, but in character and act.”

John William and Annie had several children; all became school teachers except George Marion, my father’s father.  George was a coal mining engineer.  He brought Mary Emma Hogue, his bride, back to Coalmont to live.  She did live there for seven years, through the birth of my father, John Lindsey, his brother and two of his sisters.  Mamie Hogue Lytle left Coalmont for her childhood home, Akron, Ohio, pregnant with her fifth child in seven years.  George Marion posted bond to assure his appearance in court, presumably on a child support charge.  He skipped, went west, lived under an assumed name, and died fifteen years later.  He abandoned his children.

Mamie Lytle, my grandmother, was the daughter of a stereotypical hard drinking Irishman, James Lindsey Hogue, and devoutly Catholic wife, Mary Cecelia Maley.  James was in the building trade, and together with his business partner, Frank Bisson, built the homes on Bisson Avenue, a steep hill in Akron. Grandma Lytle and her five small children lived first in the attic of the Hogue home on Bisson Avenue.  Mamie’s eight living siblings, her parents, her children burst its seams.  Mamie and the five children lived in a series of rented homes in the area, leaving when the rent was due.  The children lived on and off with relatives and in the Akron Children’s Home.

Alcoholism and Catholicism were the genes predominately infused in the Hogue line. My father was bitter about each.  His grandfather Hogue was a mean drunk, his grandmother a strict Catholic.  His mother being the oldest sibling, he grew up with some of his aunts and uncles as contemporaries.  As adults he saw some fall to alcohol. He was equally bitter about, as he considered it, the sacrifice of a cousin and his sister Ruth, to the church as priest and  nun.  When I asked her, Aunt Ruth never believed she was forced to be a nun; I have no idea what his cousin thought.

My father left the church at age twelve.  His lot was miserable.  He was generally in charge of his band of siblings; his mother absent.  There was not enough food.  Housing was iffy.  His Catholic education was supervised by his grandmother, until his epiphany: his mother was devout but the institution that led to five children in seven years was not housing the children or feeding them, no matter what the reason his mother had left his father. The Hogue clan never forgave him.

 

I grew up on the North Hill of Akron, Ohio, with a large contingent of red headed Hogue descendents living on the other end of the parish that was St. Martha’s.  The rift was so complete, in spite of my mother’s best effort, we never knew them.  My cousins, children of my father’s sisters, do not know them.  Apparently there is no grudge like an Irish grudge.

My father was aptly named for his grandfather, the Scots Irish who soldiered on.  The father who abandoned the children was brought home by his brother to be buried, but apparently in an unmarked grave.  There is no stone marking George Marion in the line of Lytle’s beginning with John William and Annie Crum Lytle.

My own Grandma Lytle lay in an unmarked grave for fifty years, until my mother said enough is enough.  Her children did not mark her grave, I will.  And so my Grandma Lytle has a stone, in All Soul’s, where her non Catholic children chose to bury her.

Considering my heritage on this St. Patrick’s Day, although I like to consider myself Irish, I pull up Grandma Rolf’s corset strings and follow Mom’s conscience when there’s work to be done.

And since I’m still Irish, Erin go bragh. 

LAURA NEILLIE, MY CHRONICLE. MARCH 18, 1981

My mother’s parents were James Lindsey Hogue and Mary Cecelia Maley.  Grandfather Hogue was born in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, Nov. 8, 1866 and Grandmother Hogue in Swanton, Maryland, December 25, 1864.  His parents were Solomon and Emmaline Yoder Hogue.  Her Parents were Elizabeth Mulholland and John Malie (Melia), from County Cork, Ireland.

Grandfather Hogue was a carpenter and house builder with his brother-in-law, Frank Bisson.  Later he went to work for the Hawkins Lumber Company in Akron, Ohio.

My personal memories of my mother’s parents were that they were very dour and stern.  My grandmother would exhibit great pleasure when her daughter came home to help her do the canning and jelly making, or wall-papering projects.  Grandpa always seemed glum and sour.  They never showed any affection for us kids and rarely did they appear happy or jolly.  They had ten living children, five of whom were still young and living at home when I knew my grandparents.  My Mother Mamie, their first-born, brought her four children and one unborn, to her parents when I was about five years old, so my grandparents really had a lot to worry them, trying to feed their own five and an additional five when my mother moved in with her brood.

My father’s parents were John William and Elizabeth Annie Crumm Lytle.  They lived in Coalmont, Pennsylvania, where I was born.  I’ve only the vaguest memory of my grandma Lytle, a wisp of a gentle lady with white hair in a bun on top of her head.  I don’t remember ever seeing my Grandfather Lytle.  My father had at least two brothers and a sister, Grace.  Horace and Blanchard, (whom we called Uncle “Pete”) and the sister were all school teachers.  I remember only Uncle Pete who came to visit us twice while my mother lived with me in Cleveland.  My father was a mining engineer as well as a very gifted fiddler.  Dad was moved around often by the coal companies he worked for.  It was my impression while I was growing up that my mother got disgusted with the constant moving by train and re-settling in wherever her husband was working at the time.  She gave me the impression, the very few times we talked about it, that with her growing family, she just couldn’t take the moving about any more and left my Dad to shift for himself, while she took us kids and went home to her parents to stay.  I can remember seeing my father only once after we went to live with my Hogue grandparents.  He came to grandma’s when I was around six years old, and afterwards overhearing some of the talk about it among the elders, I thought he had come to ask my mother to come back to him with the children.  She didn’t agree and that was the last we ever saw of him.  After we had been sent to the Summit County Children’s Home in Akron, I’d written a letter to my Dad, promising him that if he would bring me and my two sisters each a gold wristwatch, my mother would take him back.   Dad died when I was seventeen; he had changed his name to Lyons, and died of heart trouble in a Salvation Army Camp in Pueblo, Colorado.  The only way the authorities learned who he was and where his family and home were, was through that letter he had preserved and carried on his person for the ten to twelve years.

My grandmother Hogue’s mother was Elizabeth Mulholland Maley, her father was John Maile, born in County Cork, Ireland.  When the name was Americanized after their arrival in this country, it was spelled Maley.  I know nothing about them except that great grandmother Mulholland was an accomplished mid-wife and doctored with herbs after she came to this country.  Supposedly, her husband was an accredited doctor of medicine.

Up until I was four years old, I lived with my father’s mother, grandmother Lytle.  She lived in a small white house across from a fenced-in school yard.  I can barely remember hanging on the fence and watching the children play.  Other than that one recollection of grandma Lytle’s place, I only remember living in my mother’s parent’s home in Akron.  They had a three story house with basement.  Their three boys and my mother and her five children, all slept in two rooms in the attic.  They also had two daughters still at home.  My mother and one unmarried daughter, (Aunt Gen) were working at the Goodrich Tire and Rubber Co. in Akron.  The other unmarried daughter Helen, and the boys, John, Albert and Clarence (called Taps) were still in school.  We lived with our grandparents off and on, for several years.  Then the burden must have become just too much for my grandparents, as I can remember moving several times with my mother and two brothers, to various parts of Akron.  It seemed we moved as often as the rent came due.  My mother worked nights and brother John, who was only about 11 or 12 years old, looked after Billie and me.  The two younger girls apparently lived mostly with the grandparents.  I do know that the Hogue grandparents assumed the complete care of our youngest sister, Helen Rita, having kept her since her birth.  John would fix our supper, when we got home from school.  Supper consisted of sugared coffee with bread mushed into it.  We called it “coffee-sop”.  Rarely did we have meat or vegetables unless Mom took a day off from work to cook for us.  She would leave a pot of oatmeal on the back of the stove, which was usually our breakfast.

There were no other buildings except the house, on Grandpa Hogue’s property at first.  He gardened, raised vegetables, and grandma was very proud of her dahlias.  They looked big as dinner plates, to my young eyes.  We had no rooms of our own, at the grandparents, eight of us were crowded into the two attic rooms.  There was no play equipment, just dirt and grass to play in.  We mostly played “house” or “church”.  When there was company, the adults all ate at the first table.  When they had all left the table, the aunts served us kids what was left.  There was a parlor which was used as a sitting room by adults and children alike.  Or we played in the wide hallway that ran from the front door, past the living and dining rooms, through the kitchen.  I can just barely remember my great grandmother Hogue’s coffin standing cater-cornered between the two front living room windows.

The house was heated by a coal furnace.  I can remember one Christmas I received a set of celluloid toy dishes.  My brother John and Uncle Taps threw my new toy dishes into the furnace.  That celluloid went up in the most putrid stink and smoke.  Grandpa was furious at the boys for their prank and I cried for hours over the loss of my toy dishes.  There was a piano in the living room.  Aunt Gen bought the piano but couldn’t play.  Aunt Helen learned to play it, and her girlfriends would gather around and sing the war songs while Aunt Helen played.  Aunt Helen’s brother James was in the Army and her brother John was in the Navy.  Aunt Gen’s husband Lloyd Paul Graffius was also in the Army.  There was a bathroom on the second, (the bedroom) floor.  When we left the grandparent’s home for the various places we lived, there was usually only an outhouse, and the baths were taken in a round zinc laundry tub set in the kitchen and filled by buckets heated on the stove.  Grandfather also had gas lights, then electric lights installed.  All the rented places I can remember, also had electric lights.  I can’t remember my grandparents having refrigeration.  I think they put their edibles in crocks or cans on the back porch, or in a kitchen window box.

I was middle in the family, having two older brothers and two younger sisters.  My duties as a small child were to look after my younger sister Ruth.  I can remember when she was about four and I was five and a half years old.  She came down with poison ivy, and also had boils all round her middle.  She also developed an earache at the same time.  My job was to keep her amused, and in bed, and to apply heated salt-bags to her infected ear.

Brother John was usually our cook when there was anything to cook.  My mother was irresponsible.  Sometimes grandma sent Aunt Gen to our living quarters with food and a whole meal prepared for us kids.  Mostly, we ate our “coffee-sop.”

I didn’t learn to cook until I got married, then it was a long time before I could serve a meal that was not either un-done or over-done.  I learned to sew of necessity, when our girls were small.   Their Grandma Neillie always bought them dresses they “could grow into”, to make them fit at the time, I  had to learn to take them in at shoulders and waists, and how to turn up hems.  Later on, I could make the girls clothes from scratch, through my own daughters’ sewing was more hand tailored than my own “home-made” articles.  There sure was a big difference between their work and mine.

I had about all the childhood diseases there were!  Chicken pox, mumps, measles and scarlet fever, even diphtheria.  In those days, they hung a big red or orange sign on the house, indicating the disease inside.  Those afflicted could go nowhere nor could anyone visit there.  When I had diphtheria, I was about five years old.  I was taken to old City Hospital Infectious House, which was a big wooden house separate from the Hospital.  I’ll never forget Mrs. Featherstone, the nurse there.  She was an older motherly type person.  Sometime during the night, they brought my baby sister in and put her into the double bed I was asleep in.  Mrs. Featherstone came in to do the bed and gave me a licking.  I tearfully asked “How come?” and she told me because I had let my sister mess in the bed.  I couldn’t convince her I hadn’t even known baby sister was placed beside me!!

Saturdays meant a day off from school. We walked about three miles to school, one way.  The bigger boys, (three uncles and two brothers) were supposed to look after me and see that I got to and from school safely.  Being as I was only five or six years old, they would very often run away from me on the way home and I would get thoroughly LOST.  Very often, I would wind up at the home of one of Aunt Helen’s girlfriends, where Mrs. Smead would cuddle me on her lap in her old kitchen rocker, and feed me milk and cookies.  Looking back on it from my now 70 years, I believe a psychiatrist would say I deliberately lost myself at Smead’s house because I received the affection and attention there that I never received at home.  Mrs. Smead would send one of her own boys to take me home to my grandparents, where I was inevitably punished for “running away from the boys.”

My Aunt Laura, in her '80's